The Exchanges

Q people. Like I actually do search TikTok a lot now. Or like, how do I, how do I solve this problem? How do I cut a watermelon? How do I? Uh, I don't know. Find a cup for my baby. Like it's really good. Uh, what's your take on TikTok and Instagram videos, basically replacing a lot of searching for, for Gen Z, especially in, in, you know, younger kids.

A So in the Google verdict, I think Google's said this before, 63% of Gen Z uses TikTok to search. Oh, wow. But I think that's, yeah, I think that's just a headline number because it comes down to, I've said it over and over in the podcast, user journeys. So there's going to be things that are more appropriate For TikTok or Instagram. And they're going to be things that are more appropriate for search. So I think if you're doing top of funnel discovery, you're going to maybe watch TikTok videos to learn more about the topic. But as you go into the mid funnel, so say you want to, you know, a popular TikTok search is around travel. So you want to go on a trip. You want to go on a trip. You want to go to Southeast Asia. You don't know where exactly you want to go. So you might want to watch a bunch of videos and see influencers and see experiences. But now you're ready to book and you want to book a hotel. You want to book it, you know, your, your flights. All of that is not going to happen on TikTok. All of that's going to happen on Google search. So that's the mid funnel again. So I, a lot of search will move different places, but ultimately Google is still the right place to do those searches, to do those, those bid funnel searches. So maybe it was more inappropriate that Google ever, that there ever wasn't a TikTok for you to get those better experiences for those top of funnel …

AI assessment note: “there's going to be things that are more appropriate For TikTok or Instagram.”

Q kind of the advice you're sharing is there's less opportunity in just generating tons of blog posts that just Have a bunch of content and the opportunities more things like Zapier and Canva with templates and Notion and Quora was just like, here's the answer. It's just like actually help them solve the problem. And with that, here's how our product can help you solve that problem further. Is that?

A It's really building a product around what the company is attempting to monetize. So Canva is building templates. Because then they're going on to monetize that templates by having other people build off those templates with upgrades and subscriptions. But if a company was like, let's say there was an enterprise version of Canva and they didn't monetize those templates. So putting out a bunch of free content on the internet that just looked good wouldn't benefit. So it always comes down to what is it? What is the product that you want to use? So going to mention the templates, we did SurveyMonkey. So survey product. If someone looked for a template of a survey, they wanted to make a survey. So we were not a survey product and we just monetized off the survey templates that would not have done anything for us. So copying someone else's version of programmatic doesn't do anything and generally doing programmatic for the sake of programmatic. So just to have content wouldn't do anything unless that programmatic fed you into exactly what your product did. So Zapier, they did programmatic. It feeds you into making other Zaps between different products. Tinder, we did programmatic. It fed you into, oh, you would like to solve your lonely. We showed you that your loneliness problem is solvable in the city you're in. You have to solve that problem by downloading the Tinder app. And I'v…

AI assessment note: “It's really building a product around what the company is attempting to monetize.”

Q and cover some of the other stuff I wanted to extract from your Deep experience in the space. One is you've mentioned this idea of pragmatic, pragmatic SEO a couple times and versus editorial. What's your, maybe first just clarify what those two directions are just for people that don't exactly know what you mean. And then two, what's your general advice for which direction to go? Programmatic or editorial?

A It might be obvious at this point, but I'm going to say it's dependent on the user, but Essentially what programmatic is, is it's taking a bunch of data sources and building out a page that is a combination of all these data sources. So in my, my book, I talk about two of my favorite programmatic SEO companies. One of them was created by a past, or it's not created, the strategy was created by a past guest of yours, Luke Levesque, who introduced us, and that was TripAdvisor. So TripAdvisor took in all these data sources of, this is the hotel, these are the cities, and then it allowed UGC to combine into one comprehensive page about each property. So TripAdvisor did not write a piece of content on every single hotel. They didn't write a piece of content on, here's this long form blog post as an influencer on the Waldorf Astoria in New York, and here's a long form blog post about the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco. They built it all from a programmatic standpoint. They took all these data sets. They took all the countries in the world. They took all the properties and they merged into one comprehensive page, which has dominated the top of search results since the beginning of the time. Right. And they still own it. And that team has cycled through many, many leaders, many different, you know, a lot of, a lot of different things. And they're still number ones. It's the strategy…

AI assessment note: “Essentially what programmatic is, is it's taking a bunch of data sources”

Q significant shift in how SEO works with the rise of LLMs, with the rise of AI answers being integrated into search results. And so I thought it'd be awesome just to spend an entire episode talking about what people need to know about what's changing in SEO and how to be successful in this new paradigm of SEO with LMS and AI being prevalent. How does that sound to you?

A That's an awesome idea. I, I really like what's happening with AI in general for SEO because it's causing everyone that cares about SEO traffic, whether that's a PM or that's a CMO, whether it's a CEO to really Be forced into pivoting their thinking about what SEO traffic means because the tactics around SEO haven't really changed. It's always been the exact same thing. Like I was, um, when I was, my last full-time job was I would survey monkey and I was, I was moonlighting on the side and I was introduced to a CEO of a big company and they were asking me about my approach to SEO and I wanted to close it. I wanted to get this consulting engagement. And the CEO says to me, So essentially what you're telling me is I need to find my keywords, put that into content and then build some links. Is there anything else you're going to do for me? Why should I pay you? And it's, it's done me into silence because essentially that is and was SEO. And then that forced me to really pivot my thinking around what SEO might be. And I pivoted my thinking and I, you know, I've talked to, worked with many companies around how they should think about SEO and what SEO traffic should mean. But others have not because those tactics did work and LLMs and AI in general is forcing people to think again, how should SEO work? How should I be driving business from a search channel?

AI assessment note: “That's an awesome idea. I, I really like what's happening with AI”

Q them to do all these, like the messaging and things like that. That was really fascinating, because I didn't realize they basically, like, reverse engineered the way the cell networks worked, did a lot of what they allowed. Yeah, awesome movie and crazy story. Next question. Do you have a favorite, favorite recent product that you've recently discovered that you really love? Could be an app, could be some physical.

A You know, so it's not a recent product and it's, it's like the kind of thing I fall in love with over and over again, and it's might be cliche, but it's my phone. So I recently traveled in Southeast Asia. I lived there for a little bit, so I hadn't been back in eight years and the things I was able to do with my phone, like traveling, like Google maps and, and ways and ordering Food. Like I went from multiple countries and I was able to use like the same app to like book rides and like make payments. And like, it was so useful, like eight years ago when I was there and I had to like buy a SIM card and my phone didn't really work and I couldn't make payments and it changed my entire experience. I almost didn't like need a computer. So like falling in love with my phone again. And then another one that it's not necessarily recent, but I absolutely love, which is Grammarly. So it, I like writing. I write all my own stuff. I don't write with AI. Grammarly helps me to be a better writer.

AI assessment note: “it's not a recent product... but it's my phone”

Q to the, I don't know, 64,000 dollar question, million dollar question. What should people do? What should people do to be successful in this new paradigm? That as you're describing is like in motion, like it's just starting to now happen. And it may be catching people off guard because they've thought it's already been out and things are okay. And you're saying it's actually starting to actually move quicker.

A I think it's fascinating. I'm honored to be one of the few marketers on your product podcast, but I think of, I think of SEO as a product. And I think the product managers are the people that should be thinking about this SEO question. Because it's a product question. It's, there are users that are coming in from the search channel. What is the product that I need to create for them? What is the experience that I need to create for them? So typically was thought of as a marketing challenge of the product. People have created this thing for me. And now I expect the marketers to go and do the SEO thing for it, but there's a mismatch. So for example, I find very often when I talk to SaaS companies, I don't think SaaS in general should do SEO, but very often when I talk to SaaS companies, they have created a product for whatever user, and then the marketers are expect to make that product fit into the thing that the search results are around. And it doesn't work because that's not what they're looking for. No one asked the question of what it is that they're looking for. So now that SEO is changing and you really need to think about this mid funnel and you need to think about it. A user experience and a buyer experience when they're doing the search. I think it all comes together. And this is where the product people now need to think about how do we position this to the user that …

AI assessment note: “I think the product managers are the people that should be thinking about this SEO question.”