Mariah Tang: Did I say that out loud? Welcome to “Did I Say that Out Loud?”, a podcast where Stu Eddins and Mariah Tang reflect on agency life and answer questions from our higher ed and healthcare clients about the latest in digital marketing, content and SEO.  

 

Mariah: Doing right now is, your website’s dead, your blog’s dead, your this that the other thing is dead, everything’s dead. And this is the same conversation that happens literally every time something changes in search, yeah, like since the dawn of time, yeah. And I mean, I’ve been doing this type of work for 12 years, and I think I’ve had the same conversation at least every other year in the entire time. This time it’s back to SEO. Like, what does SEO mean? What? How are we going to do this if there’s no clicks? Blah, blah, blah, in my in my opinion, clicks are important, obviously, because that’s how people are coming to your website, or whatever. But that it’s not the click isn’t everything. Click isn’t everything like it’s this whole narrative around your content, just like it always has been. It’s just that now the click is deemphasized, right? And it’s been going that way for several years, ever since social came up. 

 

Stu Eddins: Look at me. I get to drag out statistics again, yay. Okay, so I read a study that was recently published, Spark Toro, Datos partnered up and did it. Did a study what they call click Lists, or zero click search. Now this is not a new concept, as you just pointed out, I was able to find data up to nine years ago. Nine years ago, the the data points were suggesting 40% of all search back in that time was clickless, and this was a reaction to Google putting all sorts of stuff in the search results. The people also asked the the Featured Snippets, the everything else, they were enriching a lot of the search results pages, and it was depriving websites of clicks from search results to their websites. Well, let’s fast forward nine years, and the most recent study suggests that 83% of all search is now clickless. Now if we when the study also cranked in AI presence, the number went to 92% clickless.  

 

So one thing to keep in mind is that appearing in an AI result from a search or from some sort of prompt or query is nine times out of 10 not going to result in a visit to your website, that’s the first thing. So my mind kind of went to a different place, and I’ve started thinking, Okay, people are still looking for information that has never changed, and it won’t. People want to understand something about the subject that’s important to them. At the moment, we’ve had a search model for over 20 years. And you’ve heard me say this before, and I’m quoting somebody else, so I forget who it was. The search engine today is simply pre search. You type something in, and it gives you 10 options, and you get to search those 10 options to find the answer you were looking for. Well, we’re condensing that. There’s now one answer with multiple citations, now to the point we’re going to talk about today is how to be part of those citations. We’re not going to really get into what that does for you, because that’s still kind of undecided. You may have to decide it one case at a time, but I really think participating in that result that’s going to get generated that one answer, result has to be beneficial for us. And I think that’s, that’s the whole point of what we’ve kind of learned the last week from the article that we read. Yeah. So yeah, the article is basically saying you only get found in in AI responses. Think about a blog. 

 

Mariah: Yep, it’s another set of data that Neil Patel published or he analyzed. And talked about 500,000 search results from ChatGPT, that was the engine that he looked at and the two top ranking sources for answers for those questions that that ranked highest, or that came up the most often, or whatever, were Wikipedia followed by blogs. So why is that? The same reason that we’ve been saying since the dawn of time is because it answers people’s questions. Blogs are answer machines. Wikipedia is an answer machine. 

 

Stu: Yeah, and if you think about it, the the correlation. Even drew a further correlation. If you really want to be found in search structure your blogs like Wikipedia, yep, okay, that can be problematic for some if they have a particular voice they need to go with or something, but, but think about what Wikipedia does. It starts off with the the statement of what the topic is, and it starts getting into segmented and purposeful sections. If you look up a person, it’s always the same thing. It’s who they are today, their milieu, what they exist in, then their early life, then their early career, then their later career, and on and on and on. The structure is important. And I think that me. Be why AI cites it so often. It is structured. Information is right there. 

  

Mariah: It’s constantly being refreshed, right? It’s constantly being cited by or it’s citing other sources, interlinking in that capacity. 

  

Stu: Yeah, yeah. You know, for a dozen years or more, we’ve always told people that the the one best place to develop SEO participation is in blog content. And today, when I go out and I start looking up things about, how do I optimize for getting found in AI, what I’m finding is the exact same information I’ve always gotten I’ve always received on SEO, but now they said, now they add for AI and SEO do this, yep. There are some things that are separate and unique to AI and getting found, but the foundation still appears to be good content, well reasoned, laid out in an understandable manner, yep, 

  

Mariah: Yep. When I think about healthcare or higher ed, which are the two primary industries that we serve, I always think about it like this. People go to social to either stumble upon something because they’re Doom scrolling, or to get an answer to a specific thing they’re thinking about. That’s the same reason that people go to blog content. They have a question. Blogs are built to answer questions. That’s what they do. Or tell stories. So like, I want to see a patient story about this strange disease that I have, or, you know, unusual disease I’m going to find that I want to know what’s the best way to treat a sunburn? Do I use aloe? Or what? There’s a blog for that. I go to a webpage when I’m ready to make a decision, right? Or if I really need deep tech tactical information, like, how many credit hours will this course provide me? You’re not going to write a blog about that. That’s going to be on a web page. So like thinking about the different reason for wanting that information, the intent, and that’s where you go to blog, and that’s why blog equals SEO. It’s the things that bring people to your site. 

  

Stu: Yeah. And I would add that blogs equal SEO with blogs equal credibility too. Yeah, and that’s what the citation is. Doubling down on your credibility is an expert to answer that question. If all of search is already 80% clickless, you’re already experiencing this AI is going to compound it. It’s going to go from eight out of 10 to nine out of 10 are clickless. But the benefit you’ve been enjoying for the past 90 years. As that clickless rate has doubled, I’m betting your organic traffic has gone up in the same time too. It appears that what’s happening, and I have not dissected this as just an off-the-cuff analysis. Yes, there’s more clickless search today than there ever was, and there will be more in the near future, but what’s happened is the entire volume of what’s being searched for has increased, and people are instead turning to these, these digital tools to ask questions before they thought they couldn’t phrase well, they couldn’t summarize into it into a succinct, two and three word query to enter into Google and get back an answer. They were vague. AI is inviting more of those conversations into the mix. That’s where we’re seeing the spike in just cheer search volume or information gathering volume online. But at the same time, you know, I’m seeing this, this difference, where everything is telling me that the number of clicks coming from search coming from AI is decreasing, and yet our site organic traffic has been on the increase. 

  

Mariah: And I feel like that’s in part because people are embracing content marketing, finally, after all of these years, they’re understanding how all of the conversations around the brand affect the conversion to the brand. And I would say now with how Google, for example, has expanded to pull in content from social media, like videos, short videos, TikTok videos, from all of these channels, like YouTube, Instagram, most lately, Tiktok, Snapchat, they’re all bringing in all this content where all of these people are originating their queries, right, especially younger audiences. So they’re starting there. They’re perhaps stumbling upon it in Google as well. They’re perhaps stumbling upon your brand elsewhere, and that all of those extra stories all around your brand are the things that are informing them. So if you’re sharing those blogs out in a short video format, if you’re sharing them out on social media, if. You’re sending them through email or text, those are still touch points that won’t necessarily give you a click to your website, but it will give you that mind share for the prospective learner or patient or whomever, and they’ll eventually, when they’re ready to make that decision, come to you directly. 

 

Stu: Right. And I agree with you with that assessment. I think the thing that may be scaring people off a little bit is a lot of this benefit isn’t measurable. You just can’t go out and say, We posted these five blog articles and our conversions, or whatever, our goals are, increased 20% we’ve enjoyed a direct line of connection between clicking an ad and getting a result for like, two decades now we’ve been able to say we did SEO work in this part of the website, and look what happened over time. As the traffic has developed, as we’ve had happier clients, as we’ve had higher conversion rates, that’s all well and fine for the model we have today. The next to the next iteration of what we work in as website owners, as people with messages that we want to have found, as marketers helping promote those two things. It’s not going to be the same thing. We don’t know what it’s going to be, but really, it’s been that same, that same situation forever. We’ve never known what’s going to come next. Now, there just happens to be a specific chunk of it, AI, whatever it is, large language models like ChatGPT or agentic AI, which is also coming I understand from ChatGPT here in a week or two, but it feels like it’s one more black box being added into the mix we don’t see and see it, and that’s true. So going back to being not measurable, what we have to do is start looking at the signals on our own site, not a direct link back, not something else. Are we seeing the stuff that we write about in our blogs and so on, we can get indications of of traction in AI because some of it’s going to come back to you directly from that AI experience. Click back to your website. The citations it gives are clickable; won’t be anywhere near as much as what you get from either a paid ad or an organic search result, but it is measurable, but we need to look at it instead of a transactional I did this online. I got that online, therefore I can make a correlation. We need to look at it as is my, is my? Are my organizational goals be met?   

 

Mariah: Yeah, yeah. I think we’re gonna see a swing back to, like the the old ways of marketing, the old school marketing. Instead of launching a campaign, we’re directing a narrative, right? So, like the, I always go back to this example, like Heart Month in February, we got to do all the cardiology content, right? Well, instead, maybe we have a specific thing like bypass surgery. We’re going to write a blog about bypass surgery. We’re going to write three sub blogs about this, about specific questions that people would have around the whole experience. We’re going to do a video with a patient. We’re going to do a video with a doctor. We’re going to do a video with a nurse. We’re going to have those long form videos broken down into smaller, shorter videos. We’re going to release all these pieces of content into this kind of narrative about this topic, and from there, we can see why action happens instead of just like let’s launch these five ads and see how many clicks we get to our campaign landing page, which is still important and still has a role, but it’s no longer, like you said. It’s no longer that transactional opportunity. It’s how does this fit in with what we’re all talking about?  

 

Stu: Yeah, and there’s another part of the transaction too, and let’s talk about it from the point of view of the website owner. Up until now, the the relationship with Google, Bing, Yahoo, search engines has been transactional. Yes, you can scrape our content and use it for search results, because in return, I’ll get clicks that come back to my website and get traffic. The transaction is the search engine gets to use your content to create its results, and in return, it will send you traffic if you know the consumer thinks that you’re worth the click, that’s going to go away. That’s why we’re seeing things like Cloudflare. Cloudflare has recently announced that they’re blocking all AI learning crawlers. They’ll have to pay if they want to participate. We’re seeing things like websites that block them too. The New York Times, I believe, is the most recent one where they made a deal with Amazon to crawl their website. But it’s been one off deals like that. So the web really was free to begin with, became more transactional, even though money may not have exchanged hands necessarily for those organic clicks or click backs from references and so on. But now we may start seeing more monetization of access, and if that happens, yeah, we get back cleaner data. We can see exactly we made this deal. We got much more of whatever we wanted.  

 

But I also think that there’s a part of this that can be easily overlooked. Today’s state, the way things are set up, current state with Google search, you can open up Google Search Console and feel really, really good that last month, we had 50 million impressions in organic search. How many of those 50 million were relevant to you at all? The other part about that is those impressions may have been on page 42 what I think may happen, and I don’t have anything to back this up, other than some gut feeling, because, you know, these, these AI providers need to do something that makes them valuable. I think what this may do is eliminate all that noise of the page 42 impressions. It may cause us to focus in on the most movable audience in front of us, most impressable or influence, influenceable audience in front of us. And I think that it’s been easy to look and think in a very, very large footprint of geography, and our influence is far beyond our physicality than never was before. And that’s nice, provided you’re trying to sell something, you can package up and ship. If you can’t do that, if it’s not deliverable to my home. Now, let’s also remember that healthcare is now deliverable to home, and so is education. But a large part of the internet is e-commerce. It is that I pay something, I get something. And, you know, the internet expanded the footprint of that. I had a retail store when the Internet became a really big deal, and suddenly I was no longer selling within 25-30 miles, a comfortable driving distance to my store. I was selling stuff from the Midwest to California regularly. Now that felt good. It was wonderful. It amounted to maybe 3% of my total sales. And I wonder if currently organic search presence and everything feels like that. It feels good to be seen all over the place, to have this tremendous amount of reach. We have never really been able to quantify that as being beneficial in a useful way. There are ways Brand Lift studies. There’s all sorts of ways to do that, but I can assure you that if you’re not a national or statewide brand to begin with, the impact of all those thousands and millions of impressions is probably minimal. 

 

Mariah: Yeah, yeah. And I think the same thing when I see these reports that come out, like, the back to the everything is dead conversation, like, we don’t know necessarily whether some of this data is B2C companies, B2B companies, a combination of both. And so when you look at generally less transactional industries like higher ed, like healthcare, it makes you wonder, are people satisfied with that single answer, or are they ultimately deferring back to well, I’m going to scan through these citations, I’m going to go to the the groups that I know, I’m going to go back to Google and say, what other options are out there if this answer is unsatisfactory, and my, my takeaway from that is yes they are. Because Google Search isn’t is not declining. Social Search is growing. People are continuing to look for answers beyond the pale. You know. 

 

Stu: Yeah, and, and it’s kind of interesting. We’ve always looked at what we do as lead generation. There was some transactional in healthcare where it was, sign up, get it, get a telehealth visit, make sure you have an insurance card so we can bill you. It’s close to transactional. For a lot of our colleges, they may have, may have had a certificate or something that was online that people could sign up for and pay for, like through a shopping cart right then and there. That’s definitely part of it. But so much of what we do with lead generation is trying to get people who are ready to make a decision, to decide on us, and that decision is simply a lead. They have not put any money in. There’s no skin in the game. The objective of that is to get their name, phone number, address, contact them, have a conversation, persuade them, if necessary, to come to our school, to our hospital, to whatever it is, but it’s never assumed to be a completely done deal, from behavior online, and really what’s happening in where AI is showing up most often in people’s journey from discovering they have a problem to a solution for that problem, most of that’s in the exploration and evaluation stage they spend. Have a lot of time asking questions, taking in the answers, shaping in the next question as they make their decision. The chart I use draws that as an infinity sign, a sideways eight, where they just keep looping back and forth. The next answer prompts the next question and so on.  

 

At some point they ask the final question, the last question they need to have an answer to is done at that point. What tends to happen is they ask far more specific, quantitative questions, what is best? Who is closest? What is the cost? They start asking those questions, and that’s where we start getting into the more direct action behavior on the website. I believe, if we do our Well, our job well, in that, that kind of mid funnel, that that evaluation and exploration stage, and we’re, if people are familiar enough with us, from the citations, from whatever, that when it comes time to actually asking the questions that are, that are important before a decision. I think we’ve increased brain recall. I think we’ve increased our perception, excuse me, the perception of us being reliable.  

 

Now, how do you answer those questions? How do you get involved with that exploration in the evaluation part. Blogs, that’s, that’s, that’s been the answer for a very long time. Now, some people are allergic to the term blog, okay, call it news, called public information, whatever you want, articles, stories, but, but it is your, your, your way to find a topic and surround it completely with information so that there’s multiple paths, because there’s multiple ways to ask the question to arrive at the same endpoint. This is a classic setup for a blog. Our topic is X, now here’s all the ways people lead into talking about it. And if we don’t talk to them there, somebody else is, yep, that’s the that’s the fear of loss, for the for the website owner. If I’m not in this space, somebody else is, they’re making the impression, they’re gaining the attention, they’re getting the reputation enhancement. And I’m down here waiting for them to ask the money question, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And that does work, so long as there’s more people doing searches for that than there are providers for it, yeah, but we’re kind of running out of that math. It’s not working quite as well. It started ages ago, when we looked at our websites and said, you know, 3% of the people who come to my website convert. They give me what I want, and nobody worked to make that 3.5% they just said, add more people. Let’s take that 3% out and make it work for us. More, more, more. Now we’re looking at years later. It’s not really the case. We want to incrementally increase that 3% but we got to get their attention first before we can do that in the way we increase that percent is by being relevant and by getting quality people to show up, and quality people are found by connecting with us through all that other content that led to that final question. 

  

Mariah: Yep, absolutely.  

 

Stu: I don’t think I could with a straight face tell anybody the blog is required. I do think that I could, I could say that a blog is probably one of the most helpful tools you can have for discovery. We have clients that do not have blogs on their websites, healthcare and higher ed, and they are doing a wonderful job. But I think the path forward to increasing it, to earning more of the diminishing attention, is to be talking to people before they make a decision, get engaged with them so they think of you.  

 

Okay, how’s that work with AI, I’ve written this wonderful blog. Now let’s be real. You’ve written a wonderful blog. Blog. If I write it, you spend three hours editing. You’ve written this wonderful blog. It goes up. It gets found, and, let’s say, perplexity comes along and says, Wow, this is useful. It scrapes your content up. It doesn’t use it directly. It combines it with three other articles, possibly to come up with a three to five paragraph response and there’s a citation.  

 

What’s that do for you? Well, perhaps what happens is, just like any other ad that is a visual getting seen more often, is supplying the answer is where the connection is. Some people will still click on those little symbols that say, oh, you know, click this to open up the citation. Some people do that. But if 92% aren’t, because that’s the clickless rate of AI enhanced search, yeah, we’ve got to find a way to make sure our message is out there more often so that should they search for what we’ve guided them to, we are the response to it, yeah, most generally, the organization’s name.  

 

Mariah: So it’s just like, in my brain, it’s like appearing in the blue links in Google, like they you may not be the one they click on, but they’re going to scan through and say, oh, you know, University of Iowa Hospitals right there, whatever, you know, and move on with their day. Yeah. So someday when they’re thinking, down the line, boy, my dad is going to be getting this bypass surgery. I remember I read a thing about that and, like, nobody says these words out loud, but it’s the brain registering. Why is that familiar to me? I should go look at them, and it’s how marketing and brand marketing and storytelling has worked since the dawn of time. 

 

Stu: Right. That’s the exposure part. That’s being exposed to a brand in context of what it does, and that exposure develops over time. It’s a it’s multiple, if not a full multitude of impressions that happen. We live in a town that has a community college. I’ve never gone there. I moved into town far older than I would want to go to community college. I was never there in their market. Yet I know a lot about them because they have a fourth of July celebration, they have festivals that go on, they have public events and education and lectures that go on.  

Mariah: And a beautiful website that Stamats did, Kirkwood Community College. 

 

Stu: Yes, they have all these touch points, and I’m fully aware of them. That’s that feeds into my exposure to their brand right now, as soon as somebody comes up to me and says, I need a community, I need to get a class in a business class, I’d like to graduate in two years, I pulled together everything. My exposures are Kirkwood, University of Iowa, University of Nebraska, wherever I’ve been, those are all my exposures. And then what happens next is that exploration and evaluation stage starts weeding through these things. So yeah, AI search can help you start weeding through and you’re getting information, but the citations can help you say, okay, you know, I’ve been aware of these people for a while too. I’m developing trust in these people to I believe what they’re saying.  

 

And it may be gradual, and it may take months, it could be quick and happen in a day and a half. The other part about it is we just don’t know. We don’t know if this is going to change the complexity or complexion, rather, of the internet overnight. If there’s not the transaction of I’m allowing you to use my content in return for the potential of a click. If that’s gone, we’re seeing things like the nationally recognized newspapers putting themselves behind a paywall. We’re seeing limitations on where information can be gathered, because it takes, if nothing else it takes, electricity. Somebody’s gonna pay the bill. 

  

Mariah: One of the things that I’m challenged by with some of these platforms is that you’re limited to a certain number of searches daily, whereas you could go out to Google and search till your freaking heart’s content, right? But if you get chat, GPT, or some of these other things you get, I don’t know, I’m just gonna throw a number out 10 searches and then no more information for you, right? It seems like a very, kind of close-off of information. It’s not, it’s not very equitable, in my opinion. 

 

Stu: But here’s the thing, the place, the tools that do that were never search engines in the first place. They do not make their money off of search. So their challenge to the search engines that are out there, Bing, Google, Yahoo and so on. The challenge that they’re posing is they don’t monetize through search, therefore they monetized your membership. 

  

Mariah: Yeah, and they monetize through scraping off the search engine system, right? You guys do the dirty work and we’ll get paid. 

  

Stu: Right? Oh yeah, yeah. Chat GPT is now being well, it works both ways. Chat GPT is now assumed you’re using Google’s index, and Google, by the way, is now potentially surfacing chat GBT prompts and answers as results in search.  

 

Mariah: Y’all made it public. That’s what happens. Yeah, yeah. 

  

Stu: So you know, if I, if I go out there and I say, What’s the best retirement investment vehicle for somebody who’s 63 years old, and I have a little box tick that says, share the answer, and share the response, or whatever to my wife. Yeah. Then what happens is that comes up with with a with a statement, and that is given permission to somebody like Google to crawl this and perhaps feature in the search. The next thing I say is, okay, my parents passed away. Left me $156,000.32 and. What would you suggest I do with it? That is now part of what can be searchable and in the public record too. Yep. And now somebody knows that that Stu has 150-some $1,000 that he’s working with. 

 

Mariah: What are we doing after work, Stu? going to Vegas! 

  

Stu: McDonald’s. It’s on me. But that’s the that’s the part about it. Yeah, there can be these reciprocal agreements, and chat GPT and Google are not doing this for free, so there’s some reciprocal agreement out there. We’re going to find a lot of strange bedfellows. That’s one that, because chat GPT has been largely funded by Microsoft and Bing for the longest time, I believe chat GPT is crawling of the web. Was Bing bot doing the crawling weird, or at least powered by software that was the same as it had to identify itself as chat GPT bot, or, you know, it would be fraudulent. But yeah, we’re seeing all sorts of partnerships dissolving and new ones being formed. So saying too much about AI, in a definitive way, is chancy, yeah, yeah, I was talking to somebody yesterday, and we’re wondering if there’s such a thing as a website in five years. 

  

Mariah: We’ve been saying that for 10 years.  

 

Stu: I know, yeah, but, or excuse me, a website as we know it, yeah, you know, fully coded out so it looks pretty and responsive and so on. So, well, maybe the next thing is responsive only to your device. It may be a screenless device, which means responsive, means it reads it to you, as opposed to simply scaling down to fit your smartphone. Don’t know, it’s fun to speculate and, you know, cause worry and stuff like that.   

 

Mariah: I need more gray hair, yeah. 

 

Stu: What was it? I have something around here that says chaos, confusion and dissent. My work here is done  

 

Mariah: Yeah, something like that,  

 

Stu: Yeah, but chop out that chunk, at any rate. The the things we do know is that blogs will really help your AI presence. You notice how I brought blogs back in after about 510 minutes of not talking about them, they pay me the big bucks. But all this does tie back in, really, to content. No matter how you look at it, whether it’s an AI chat bot or a search engine, Google or not, the commodity is content. They have to have it. Yeah, they can create their own, and one day they may create all of it. I don’t know. That’s not the point. The point is, right now, people have the need for information, and they need to have it organized and presented in a way that they can use it. We’ve had search engines for a long time. Now. We’re having chat bots, which is a technology that favors an answer, maybe a long one, but it’s an answer. And along the way, people got a little ticked off about it and made them provide citations. I don’t think that was ever there, you know, hey, let’s build something that has citations in a moment. I don’t think that existed,. But, yeah, I think we’re coming up on a on a watershed. That’s the right word, watershed really? Okay, we’ll go with that. I think we’re coming up on a turning point about that. That works too, between what we’ve where we’ve been, and an unknown future. And that makes conversations like this, like I said, fun to have, a little scary. And five years from now, you look back and think, did I say that out loud? Got the title worked in too? Yeah, Mic drop. But the the things we do know every time I look up how to get found in AI, even though the term AI and large language models are scattered throughout the description, every description reads SEO, do it well. 

  

SEO is fed by static content and variable content. The static content is the description of your class, your procedure, your service, whatever it is. The variable content is like the blogs that talk about it in different ways to connect with different people at different moments. It’s still the same. You’ve got to be able to make your content talk to people in a way that they understand it in their moment of need.  

 

There’s nothing really better that does content for that than blogs. I would stretch that to also say that some people are experimenting with a blog in the form of video. It doesn’t have to be written content. It could be a series of podcasts. It. Be anything else. But the point is, it’s not cut, dried informational about the service, product class or whatever the heck it is. 

  

Mariah: It’s about the questions that people have and the answers to those questions. 

  

Stu: There we go. I think that’s a great point to end on. 

 

Mariah: The watershed moment of our podcast.  

 

Stu: No, I think we passed that at some point, about 10 minutes.   

 

Mariah Tang: Thanks for listening to “Did I Say That Out Loud?” with Stu Eddins and Mariah Tang. Check out the show notes for more information about today’s episode. And if you have any questions, concerns or comments, hit us up anytime at stamats.com.