← Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
The Power Of Search Experience Optimization
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- [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 hello SEOs and marketers.
- [00:45]
My name is Jordan Cooney from Pre Visible. Joining me today is Eric Hoover who is the SEO Director at Jellyfish. Jellyfish specializes in digital marketing strategies providing innovative solutions for businesses worldwide. With a focus on creativity and data driven results. They help clients achieve their marketing goals effectively.
- [01:06]
Eric Hoover
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 linked 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.
- [02:23]
Jordan Cooney
AWT today, Eric and I are going to discuss the power of Search Experience Optimization. Okay, here's my conversation with Eric Hoover, the SEO Director at Jellyfish. Eric, welcome to the Voice of the Search Podcast.
- [02:38]
Eric Hoover
Hi, it's great to be back. Thanks for having me.
- [02:41]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, so you are a returning guest, which is always exciting. So thank you for coming back and joining us on the show. I know your last episodes were hit and I'M sure that these are going to be just as important, especially with the changing landscape that we have ahead. So thank you for coming back.
- [02:55]
Eric Hoover
Yeah. Excited to be here. Hopefully they will be interesting to others who have the same struggles I have with my brand's jellyfish.
- [03:05]
Jordan Cooney
Awesome. Well, I, I want to start off by just talking about like, you know, this first topic is a pretty broad topic in the sense of search experience optimization. So maybe just give our listeners some context, set the foundation on what, what do you mean by search experience optimization? What's your, what's your view of that? I think there's a lot of different meanings out in the market right now.
- [03:25]
Eric Hoover
Yeah.
- [03:26]
Jordan Cooney
But I'd love to get your perspective as we, as we unpack this topic.
- [03:30]
Eric Hoover
Yeah. So I know when you say experience optimization, there's a lot of different things that people mean. I've seen some definitions around, like actually optimizing for certain types of elements within the serp, which is definitely part of it. But when I talk about it, I mean more about the overall experience for the user from the search result page all the way down as they go into a website or some sort of funnel where they're following a conversion transaction, what have you. And in my experience, you know, it's really about search. Experience optimization is about merging traditional SEO and user experience. So making sure like the UX or CRO teams sometimes are the same team, sometimes they're separate, are working hand in hand with SEOs, I think, you know, for the longest time, and rightfully so, SEO, you can get users to the site, but once a user is on the site, technically SEO's job is sort of done. But working for like a lot of E retail clients over many years at agencies, it's always nice to really continue that journey and say, oh, this organic revenue that we got is actually, it did actually start from SEO and then continued throughout the site experience leading to a purchase or conversion, what have you. I think it's really, really pivotal, especially now when we look around the changing landscape of how results are appearing within the SERP and what's being taken into account. And I'm talking like traditional results, I'm talking about, you know, search elements. Again, like people also ask in more sort of interactive on the SERP appearances. And of course I'm talking about AI results because it's just so pivotal now, depending on your brand or your product or service, that you show up in many places aside from just those traditional 10 blue links. And I think that being a part of that experience is helping you Gain that full funnel result. And I say full funnel. I know that gets thrown around a lot, but it's the best term I could find to describe it.
- [05:39]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, well, let's dive into this a little bit further.
- [05:42]
Eric Hoover
Right.
- [05:42]
Jordan Cooney
Because if we're talking about kind of this, this marriage, let's call it SEO through UX or user experience and user expectations and in that direction towards the funnel and the business impacts that come from that. Right. I think that there's a big kind of lofty question here I have for you, which is as the search has changed in the last three to six months, have we seen a, a slight, you know, maybe retreat from Google on looking at these types of KPIs as a driver for rankings or as a driver for traffic or in your, your point of funnel as a driver to conversions? Have we kind of lost it a little bit with the introduction of say, AI overviews? With the kind of lost nature of what's happening in LLM search? I want to start with this big broad kind of existential question of like, is UX still important based on some of the experiences you've seen?
- [06:50]
Eric Hoover
Yeah, I mean I'm speaking, you know, anecdotally from, from the clients I work on, but I think that one. Yes. I mean when we talk about what we've quote unquote, lost in SEO in the age of AI, I think, and it's not just AI, it's the shopping element, it's pmax. It's more reliance on brand and non Brand paid search CTRs are down across the board. Like people are not clicking on the template links anymore. It's, it's, I've seen it across multiple industries and that in a sense is to me what makes the importance of connecting more off site and on site experience even more important. Because once you get someone onto the site, whether that's through a shopping result, if they happen to click on an AI citation, in the rare instance that they do, though it is growing or they're clicking on an organic result. You want to ensure that you're keeping the user on the site or moving in the direction that they want to be moved in again towards a conversion or whatever the KPI might be, that is more pivotal than ever and that is going to continue to grow the authority of your site along with all the other factors that grow authority, traditional and more newer ones. But that altogether is really going to help your site rank well in organic. But again, because the landscape has changed so much, I don't want to say ranking in position one isn't important. It is, but that first position is further down the page now. So you want to be taken more seriously, seen as more authoritative, to own some more of these other elements and matching your organic strategy, driving users to a result, or even showing up even as an awareness play to give people put your name or your brand out there as a bit of awareness to come back to, that will continue to drive those other newer elements like an AI overview, grow your authority in there and in theory help you drive more users to the site. Again, I've been seeing fluctuations around people going into the site from an AI result. It is increasing monthly for my brands. They are getting referred to by the citations going into the site. It is growing. It's still a small percentage, but it's, it's. We don't want to ignore it right now.
- [09:12]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, and I mean, I think you're bringing up a really good point here, which is as the SERP landscape shifts, so do maybe some of the, the levers that we conventionally think about in SEO. So SEO becomes more of an awareness play, SEO becomes more of a brand play. SEO becomes pivotal in those places. And arguably that means that your ux, your experience, your ability to draw that user once they do land on your page becomes even more important. Because if you have a smaller group of people landing there, you probably need a better resulting engagement and outcome in order to hit your goals. So I'm kind of curious to understand from your perspective this concept of keeping users on your site, this concept of having a really strong ux, what are, what's the discovery process that you're using to better understand this, to better unpack this with your clients and help define what change could be.
- [10:14]
Eric Hoover
So it's honestly a lot of traditional kind of SEO discovery tactics mapped with a lot of traditional UX and conversion tactics, but it's just about bringing them together. So it's your competitive analysis, your keyword analysis, finding those gaps, seeing what those competitors are doing, but not just seeing what the competitors are doing in terms of ranking on the serp. It's also diving into their content deeper, diving into their strategy from what you can glean without actually literally knowing their strategy and understanding what elements they're doing on the site. Everything from navigation to content types, you know, whether that's text content, more interactive content, what types of engagement, CTAs, all that sort of stuff, strategies and tactics that they are doing on their sites to also marry to that keyword data you have and current rankings and see how they all kind of work together because at the end of the day it's I've been in SEO I'm and with a focus on content strategy for many, many years and you always see that similarities of what users are searching for. And then if you go into like a user survey or something that the UX team some research or discovery they've put together, you see so many parallels between what a user is looking for in a survey, what they want to achieve on the site, what UX wants to achieve versus what content keywords are ranking or maybe in striking distance for a brand you see a lot of similarities with that data. So marrying that together again is really just, it's a no brainer to me. And again maybe it's because I've worked in also content strategy on top of SEO for so many years that it seems obvious to me that to combine those those two strategies and bring in a sort of SEO lens around oh we should have. You know, you know, for years it was like making sure you had infographics and then if the infographic did well or if it was a blog post and it was doing well organically, you could turn it into, you could repurpose that content and make it an infographic and then you've got another area that you're or another element that you're using within the site to engage with users. You also have something you can additionally rank for on top of, you know, your more text type piece of content within the SERP.
- [12:34]
Jordan Cooney
Time for a 1 minute break to hear from our sponsor, Pre Visible. So you're looking for SEO help and you got a couple of options. You could start replying to spam from agencies that claim they can get you to rank number one on Google. You could pay an hourly rate for a consultant who will inevitably nickel and dime you with hourly charges. Or you could work with a cookie cutter agency to quickly launch a strategyless project with low success rate. None of those sound very good now do they? Well, that's where Pre Visible's integrated consulting model comes in. Pre Visible draws From a collective 40 years of SEO and digital marketing experience to unlock your organic growth opportunities. They build custom solutions that combine strategy, technical expertise, content and reporting to effectively operationalize SEO for your business. Pre Visible's four stage approach ensures that your SEO programs thrive by starting off with a strategy first approach. Then they support you in your efforts to create quality content, help you identify technical issues, and most importantly, they'll work with your cross functional teams to integrate your SEO strategies to make sure that your SEO budget actually drives results, not just your agency's bottom line. So join brands like Yelp, eBay, Canva, Atlassian Square, all who rely on the SEO consultants at Pre Visible. For more information go to Pre Visible IO. That's Pre visible P R E V I S I B L E IO.
- [14:02]
Right. This is an interesting concept that I think is critical for our listeners to take away on, which is as you re reimagine what your UX and your content strategies become, you end up creating more opportunities to own real estate in the circ. I'm curious Eric, to unpack that because we have a crises in my opinion, in terms of understanding what real estate is because everything that exists today is built around a hierarchical structure. It's built around this almost 20 year old click demand curve model that fundamentally is not at all an awareness play. It is not at all a real estate play. These types of KPIs, whether it be ranked position, click through rate visibility of a position, those things don't actually tell us a lot about awareness. They don't tell us a lot about how our brand is doing in search. They don't tell us a lot about how much of the SERP we control. How should we be thinking about the measurement and the construct of our efforts if these kind of dated models don't necessarily answer the questions of these investments?
- [15:17]
Eric Hoover
I think it's a lot around really understanding the data in terms of, I think first off, I think you still need some of those traditional metrics and KPIs. I think they're highly important.
- [15:30]
Jordan Cooney
Agreed. Yes.
- [15:31]
Eric Hoover
But I do think that when you talk about awareness and SEO, I do think you need to look at what is your impression share, what is your share of the actual total searches for any given month? So one thing we might look at is, you know, taking a look at X amount of total keywords in a category. There's X amount of search volume for these 500 keywords in this specific category a month. How has that fluctuated over the course of the year? Is the total search volume less than it was before? So maybe we're still showing up for a strong number of impressions or a strong number of clicks and there's just less of that overall search volume amount of searches to actually own. So if we're, you know, maybe it'll look like we're down 10% versus last year, but if the percentage of actual monthly searches has gone down, we're still owning a good chunk of that overall real estate. It is really about that full ownership of understanding how much Visually, we're taking up on that page. And, you know, I think that one of the things, you know, my team at Jellyfish and a lot of other agencies and a lot of other tools have started not to get away from, but adding on to the ranking position is like pixel depth. So the main. One of the main things we report on now, partially because of AI, is we do a lot of pixel depth reporting. So we'll still include like, oh, this is position one, blah, blah, blah, but we'll include how far down the page that is visually appearing within the search result. And that is really what drives the point home a lot for clients is that showing like a visual appearance and even actually taking like a. Getting, you know, a lot of tools like Semrush and all that we'll do. You can grab a screenshot of the serp, stuff like that, or even just doing like a quick, like a blank mockup just. Just to visually show them where we are. So it's sort of that mix of really understanding how much there is to actually own from a keyword standpoint and the percentage that we are actually owning and then that actual depth on the page, you know, that layered in with, you know, I'm always back and forth personally on impressions. I used to say that impressions don't matter in SEO. Now I do think it's definitely now we have to. Right now we have to look at it.
- [17:52]
Jordan Cooney
We have to look at it. Right.
- [17:53]
Eric Hoover
But it's all about context. I guess the short. I could give the short version of this answer, which is it's just context. It's providing the context of what a ranking actually means, what it means visually, how many. How much search volume for a keyword there actually is to own. That kind of stuff. It's all about education. And context is really sort of the short answer to all that.
- [18:15]
Jordan Cooney
It really is. And I think just to add to your piece there, because I think it's important because you mentioned this earlier in the episode, it also matters to find ways to connect that back to the business's goals. Right. And I think that's. That's the piece where I think we're still really struggling not only as an SEO community, but. But in all the different channels, content, marketing, UI design, all these groups are really trying to unpack how we get to that. That narrative of how search is changing and then these efforts to impact the business.
- [18:46]
Eric Hoover
Right.
- [18:46]
Jordan Cooney
And connecting all those dots.
- [18:49]
Eric Hoover
Yeah. And even. It's gotten so crazy now that even I've seen my paid search counterparts struggling to explain it sometimes but you get the client's attention once paid starts getting impacted.
- [19:03]
Jordan Cooney
Exactly. So shifting gears a little bit, I want to talk about this concept that I've been throwing around in a few episodes and it's becoming really important, which is relevance targeting. And in this world where search is changing into all what I believe are fundamentally critical points around the search experience and the page experience that we're building, but understanding what the business's focus and relevance is. How have you experienced this in your work, Eric? Right, which is how do you have conversations with stakeholders that our core mission now is to be as hyper relevant, targeted, deliberate about who we want to reach. How are you having those conversations? How can you help our listeners become better about this concept of relevance targeting?
- [19:59]
Eric Hoover
Well, it's funny, I'll go back to the funnel example again, but in a lot of the strategy work we're doing, you know, going into the new year and kind of re upping with clients is about focusing more on that mid to lower funnel search, not forgetting the upper funnel which is traditionally more non brand because that's very important for owning more of the landscape overall and competing in like highly searched keywords. But yeah, really focusing more on, for lack of a better term, conversion driven transactional keywords that are, you know, like brand or brand adjacent stuff that traditionally brands will rank very well for. And again they might rank in position one, but position one is halfway down the page so it doesn't drive the conversion that they, that they used to have. So just really ensuring that the brand messaging and the content within the site is really focused around the brand messaging around the product and service, whatever it might be or whatever industry it might be on relevant landing pages on more sort of mid to lower funnel transactional pages is really, really key. You know, we used to, I feel like again this is based on a lot of the kind of e commerce clients I've had or like your money, your life kind of clients where oh, we're going to focus, make sure the blog is really flashy and up to date and really great informational content, long form pieces. You know, again depends on your industry whether or not that stuff works anymore. But sometimes you need to really switch it up and say hey, we should also make sure we have a good organic strategy focused around specific products and services, specifically around what the brand message is, what the brand stands for and that will in theory convert. Well, I think a great example of that is one that I don't know when this will end up airing, but recently we saw HubSpot dumped all their random blog posts around how to make smiley emojis and everyone was like, oh my God, look at their traffic's gone. Yeah. But then I think after that happened, I think their, I don't remember if it was their, their conversions or their revenue, some business focused metrics started increasing. And that right there, that's, you know, why they did it. Also their HubSpot and they could afford to dump a bunch of organic traffic and still do. Okay, you know, if I'm some startup trying to do that, I'm probably going to get fired. But you know, that's what you do when you're a big brand with a lot of authority behind you. You can test and play around and see what works. And I think that what they did in the long run is beneficial to them. It's, it's focusing on what their core business is and, and some adjacent stuff, but not ranking number one after month for how to make a smiley emoji or whatever their top result was. It's useful. That's useful information to know. But you know what, AI overview is going to tell me how to do that now if I can't figure out my emoji shortcuts. So.
- [22:44]
Jordan Cooney
Correct, correct.
- [22:45]
Eric Hoover
I don't need to rank number one for that anymore.
- [22:47]
Jordan Cooney
A lot of CRM buyers in that space, let me tell you.
- [22:50]
Eric Hoover
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love, and I love HubSpot. We use it on one of our, on one of our clients, one of my favorite clients. It's fantastic. But when I saw that and everyone was panicking and even I saw it at first, I was like, oh boy, what a, what a mistake. But once I started reading again, it goes back to context. Once I started reading what they did, I was like, oh, okay, I see what they're going for now.
- [23:11]
Jordan Cooney
100%. No, I love that Eric and I think this is a great place for us to wrap up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Huge thank you to Eric Hoover from Jellyfish for joining us. In part two of this interview, which we'll publish tomorrow, Eric and I are going to discuss tactics to compete with an e commerce retail competition. If you can't wait until our next episode and would like to learn more about Eric, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or visit his personal and company websites erichooverdigital.com and jellyfish.com okay, thanks to.
- [23:44]
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 and a special.
- [24:04]
Eric Hoover
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.
- [24:36]
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.
- [25:02]
Eric Hoover
My handle is Ben Jschab B E.
- [25:03]
Jordan Cooney
N J S H A P 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.
- [25:21]
Eric Hoover
Always in the data.
- [25:22]
Jordan Cooney
It.