Stu Eddins: They’re trying everything they can to maintain the story that their customer is the search user, not the college that wants to advertise, not the doctor that wants to advertise.

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?

Stu Eddins: This week on Did I Say That Out Loud?

Mariah Tang: We’re telling the future!

Stu Eddins: Yes, yes, Google made some announcements that are directly impacting how we will use search in the future. One of those things is the Google’s search experience the the search generative experience that you can opt into at this time. It’s being tested in the wild to people who don’t opt in, of course, but I have opted into it. And when you do that, at the top of your search column, you will see what’s called a AI generated result. So if you type in, where’s the best pizza for lunch in my town, you’re probably not going to see much. But if you ask a question that might be more toward research beyond just the immediate need for a really great slice of pizza, you might get a good response at the top. And there’s two qualifiers there might and good. Right now it’s in beta. So the question of good is what they’re trying to answer. Might means that they’re deciding what questions they can and should answer along the way to the change that Google announced. Its AI overviews. That’s what that chunk of stuff is at the top of search. So when I search for something, and it comes up at the top, and I’ve been asking you about, let’s say, information on the best type of lighting for my office, with a north facing window, it’s going to give you a search generative experience at the top. And in the near future, soon as they enable it, it’s rolling out, I’ll be able to change the overview. I want detailed information. But I just want something simple. And that’s actually one of the options is simplify. I want a simplified result, we’re given more control over the response we get from Google because this this response is giving is coming from it’s knowledge. It’s gathered by indexing every page on the internet that it’s indexed. So it’s going out and finding answers based on that searching that index that it has and returning the top results. The extensive, detailed response you get, I’ve opened up some of these things there as long as your arm. There’s just a ton of information in it. And if all I’m really asking the question is to find out because I didn’t ask it to my question 20 halogen lighting or incandescent lighting, you know, or LED? What do I need? Maybe I just want a simplified answer. I don’t want to dig. In a way it’s kind of like the equivalent of using Google as a little more of a magic eight ball. It’s really simple. What is it? You got a possible responses on one of those, but you get the point, I believe this will be interesting. Chat GPT is also hinting at having a search replacement coming one day. That poses some interesting, some interesting questions. Also, Google has a vast, vastly larger array of information to pull from the chat GPT currently does. And Google has spent a lot more time segmenting and parsing out the information it has into what it considers to be its logical hierarchy of how to find stuff. Not more, I wouldn’t go out and argue for using those sort of Google search experience. At this point.

Mariah Tang: I am looking through the lens of being in a somewhat jaded millennial. I don’t just trust what was up there even though I just from Google. So I’ll scan it and say Okay, that looks like something accurate. I’ll look and see if there are any of the linked sources to say okay, this is where they got this information. But mostly I’m skimming down through the page and looking at the people also ask questions and things like that. Okay. I think that is not how young people use the internet. And I know this. However, I think to me, it’s really reminiscent of a lot of the other changes that they’ve made throughout my career, which is, you know, Featured Snippets, the local pack be highlighting in the meta descriptions for app pages where it’s pulling up this information. We think this is what you’re trying to find. So we were chatting offline before this and you mentioned it’s it’s really bringing In full circle, what we’ve been talking about for a few years, it’s search intent, not the keywords, not the specific. Do I spell it this way? Do I spell it that way? How exactly do I phrase this? It’s what are you trying to achieve? And we’re going to help you achieve that, even if you say it in 35 words.

Stu Eddins: Right, more complex, you know, in some way, and and I’ll close this again, for the end of this, of this episode. It says the rule is grooming us to use search differently. And I think that’s going to be a large part of their intent with how they release features. Now, the other question comes up has been going to do the same thing. Because being in chat GPT are joined at the hip portal, you Yahoo out there. I don’t know what they’re doing yet. Frankly, I haven’t kept tabs on them the last few months? How this all shakes out? And who comes out on top? I don’t know. I can tell you that when it comes to technology. The new entry tends to take a little time to gain traction, but then it will overtake the existing the existing hero, if you will. It may be chat GPT may be something we’ve not seen yet. I don’t know. But really, when it comes to this, this simplification or high detail feature, I think it’s going to be helpful. But I think it also is a way that brings us back more toward the concept of Voice Search, which has always been an ask a question, get one result. And I think that the the whole search experience that we’re seeing the search generative experience has GE is it’s called for Google, these barred and now it’s Gemini that thinks Okay, they’re naming their platforms as they go along. Think what it is, is we’re seeing that fusion of app based search, meaning going to the Google app on your phone or going to the Google website on the internet, then we’re seeing the fusion of that and voice search a little more each day. This kind of lends itself to it. At home, I am based more on Alexa enabled echo devices. If I ask a question as far as getting too long, they tell the darn thing to shut up. Okay? Is this a more polite way of saying Shut up, you know, just give me the simplified version, please, I don’t need all this. So I think it can be helpful in that regard. If you’re trusting or more trusting at least of the response you’re getting. And you still get the 10 blue links, and you still get the ads below and you still get all the other things you always have. This is just that gradually expanding feature at the very top of the page. Because it is a feature that is getting more and more research and development improvement in it. I think it’s more it’s more than just competition against the chat. GPT is of the world.

Google does an interesting thing, I think comparatively to some of these newer groups. And maybe they’ll do this down the line. But Google is extremely invested in user testing user groups, beta rollouts, and they’ve already scaled back some of their display on Ste because people were complaining that it was overtaking everything else. Advertisers were not happy users are not happy. So they said, Okay, you know, we’ll rein it back in, before it was even widely released. And so I feel like there’s a, Google always has a pulse on what’s the next thing for the rest of us do. And when you mentioned, you know, it’s teaching us how to use this differently. It’s teaching you it’s teaching me, but it’s already adapted to how younger people use it. And so I think all of us old fogies that are out here in the world are going to have to just suck it up and start using search differently if we’re going to want to reach these younger markets. It is in and as we’ve discussed, also, we have a cohort of people right now, higher education kind of focus on 18 to 24. Now, we’d like to go lower than 18. But you know, advertising and promotion practices don’t allow us to go below 18 readily. But that 18 to 24 demographic is more likely to use tick tock to find information than it is Google Search already. Our numbers are going up when it comes to organic search from Google on the websites that we associated with. So if the younger people are you are using other platforms, I have to say they’re still using Google, at least for the clients that we’re dealing with.

Mariah Tang: Isn’t Google indexing some of that kind of content anyway? Because we’re you know, when you Google something, sometimes you’ll get TikTok  results, you’ll get Facebook results, you know, yeah, so it all kind of works together.

Stu Eddins: Sometimes there’s still tension between those entities because it’s walled garden and Facebook, you know, you have to sign in to get there. Same with tick tock and Google was trying to answer by by bringing Reddit in at Google is trying to bring answers in by bringing YouTube shorts in instead, it’s trying to fill the gaps there. But that search generative experience is going to start taking over. And sometimes, as we get more used to the tool, getting a simplified answer is going to be important. Now, that actually brings us into the second thing Google announced what they’re talking about, there is multi step multi step reasoning. And that’s, that’s a, a fancy term for you don’t have to ask three questions to wind up where you want to be.

Mariah Tang: Yeah, it is. All at once that ultimate instant gratification, I went this, this, this and this.

Stu Eddins: Yeah. An example I use the other day was, what is the closest college with a business program that offers partially free tuition? Not too long ago, that was three separate searches. Finding colleges near me didn’t say, Okay, shall we the ones that have business degrees, we’re able to do that part right now readily when you add in the partially free tuition. And that’s a concept that that is actually probably the finest point of this. There’s a lot of colleges near me, most of them offer business, but the real qualifier is partially free. Now, what is partially free mean? That it has readily available scholarships, that there’s grant money available, that you know what, they are just, they just, you know, you sign up for this, you get the rest of it free, because they got to they gotta three months special going? That the point is that the concept of free tuition is varied. The thing is, what they’re saying is with the with the multi step reasoning, Google is going to be able to understand that has to be able to put it in context. And this goes back to what you said several minutes ago. Well, Google is about content, it understands the language understands how people speak, and can respond to it. No, it’s getting better at doing that. It’s still learning. That’s why this is all in beta. That’s why the, you know, you’re not forced into it. But let’s keep in mind two things. First off, Google has said Google executives have said that their vision for Google is one day to be like the computer on Star Trek. You simply say what you want me to give you the right answer. And that’s it, you’re done. The other thing to keep in mind, though, is that Google doesn’t get paid because it gives one answer. Google gets paid right now, because it provides 10 answers, and a handful of ads.

Mariah Tang: I wonder if one day, there will be a model where College, ABC college is paying Google to play like I would like you to use us as the subject matter expert for XYZ, and we’ll give you a million dollars or whatever that looks like. And maybe that replaces ad spent someday. And that’s probably like, way down the line.

Stu Eddins: But it is in the concept right now. It kind of flies in the face of a Google wants to be viewed as today. They want their results to be the organic results. They want that to be viewed as impartial, because they’re trying everything they can to maintain the story that their customer is the search user, not the college that wants to advertise, not the doctor that wants to advertise. They have two different business models. And the biggest one is we provide the best answers around for people’s questions. And that means that they’re beholden first to the people asking the questions. Along the way, they figured out how to monetize that through search ads and through everything else. And they allow that in now they allow that $219 billion worth of allowed last year. That’s their revenue from ads. I wouldn’t say they have incentive to preserve that. Because Google Search by itself getting links without ads, plus some money is the ads that pay their way. There’s no doubt. I don’t see too many Google self driving cars out there right now taking up the slack. They are getting into other things. But there has to be some way to monetize this because it costs money to have the servers running that answers. We’ve all seen the pictures of the Google data center datacenters. They take up acres of space they consume gigawatts of power, they have people there to serve them. There’s hardware that breaks down every you know, it has an expense structure they have to pay for that. They have stocked stakeholders that need to get money back further investment. There’s all sorts of reasons to have monetary reward for what they provide. That’s true. But I wonder if taking a direct payment to become the answer would be the undoing of their of their current ethos, which is the user’s art.

Mariah Tang: Yeah. Yeah. And the thing everybody knows already.

Stu Eddins: Yeah. And he and I also have to say that skepticism about not just Google, but we keep talking about them, but they aren’t. They are the 800 pound gorilla. The skepticism with search engines right now is running higher than it ever has. And with generative search results being the bright, shiny object, there’s a lot of people saying, Hey, this is the way to go. This is the next thing. But quite frankly, I’m more suspicious of that than I am about Google results. Yeah. Google’s motivation, I think I can figure out pretty clearly, then, yeah, if they game the system is their system. It’s not a public utility, right? Neither is Bing, or Yahoo, or Yandex or Facebook. Yeah. And, you know, if you’re not paying for something, then you’re the commodity you’re, you know, selling stuff to us what they make money off of. So anyway, that’s all that but AI is not cheap. It takes more power than non AI types of search. It takes more energy, more people, more research more everything else, they got to figure out a way to pay for it. Okay. All of this started out as a conversation about how they’re allowing you to have simplified results at the top and detailed results. And right now, they don’t know how to monetize that. But here’s the thing. We’ve talked about multi step reasoning. Right now, most of what they do for support revenue is based on keywords, search terms. But I argue it’s not anymore. And this is the next logical step after that. What I just said about what is the closest college or the business program offering partially free tuition, easily has three search terms in there that are not, that are not tightly coordinated to each other until they’re strung together in that sentence. That’s my keyword. What Google has been training us on for the last couple of years, at least, if not longer is we don’t pay attention to keywords anymore. We pay attention to we pay attention to intention. What is the context? And what is the intent of what somebody is searching for? That is what Google is uncovering with all this? That is what is driving Google search results right now? Yes, in a search campaign, I still put in keywords. But in that campaign, my keywords might be colleges near me. Business Programs, and low cost or free tuition.

Mariah Tang: Price, proximity, preference.

Stu Eddins: Yeah, it’s the emotion, it’s the feeling, it’s the thing you want that specific item that you that you’re looking for, and maybe the closest college to nice 500 miles away that has free tuition or near partially free tuition. So it needs to make those judgments to the point being that we need to make sure that even today to be ready for these things AI overviews for okay, how do you get involved with an AI overview? That we’ll talk about that in a minute? Let’s solve the keyword problem right now. We need to stop thinking about keywords as things that we must build upon. And start looking at them as the shorthand the Cliff’s Notes of content. The keywords that we choose to target need to be able to together represent the intention that we’re trying to market to the intention we’re trying to attract. So if we have colleges near me business programs and free tuition, and we get a sense that that is what a lot of people are searching for. We need to make sure our content supports that concept. Not necessarily those words, because free tuition, I bet that would raise the hairs on the back of the neck of every executive and most in most higher ed institutions. But low cost affordable.

Mariah Tang: They would we’d like to have that on their pages that was relevant, smart enough to know that those are all similar techniques.

Stu Eddins: Right? So context. People are going to be people they’re going to search for what they want. They want free, semantic search, semantic search. Yes. And semantic search was introduced many years ago in Google Search, and we keep riding the crest of that wave forward.

Mariah Tang: This is the adults. The adults. What is the word? I’m looking for evolution of content.

Stu Eddins: It’s a maturing. Yeah, it’s the maturing of it. In there’s still more to go. Because it’s, I don’t know. I have raised kids, you’ve raised kids, and when they tell me my dog has the intelligence of a three year old I really question them, or it makes me question to humans. Raisa three years old, I don’t know which maybe you guys were Google searches too. It has a limited vocabulary, it understands the intention, I may use great big words when I scold a three year old, but what they see is the intention of I’m angry, and they did something. Yep. So it may be that we’re at that stage with Google Search to or Bing search or whoever. But it’s going to get better. And I think part of this this discussion is, we think we understand from reading the tea leaves the direction things are going. And we know where we bet, we’ve been to a point where we’ve come from the exact match keyword targeting, we’ve come from a point of make sure we had these words showing up in content. So we can get found organically. We’ve come from a point of view, where if we’re talking about a business, business program, business class, business degree business, we got to use all the near match stuff. That was lexical search, that was matching word for word to make things happen, instead of contextual search, which we have now. And I think that this is just the next step in that we get the, we get the AI generated result at the top, and we have the control to say give it to us all or you know what, just give me the highlights, we have the ability to say, Okay, I, as a human, I’m going to search for everything I need in one statement. And it may be multiple sentences long. Now, by the way, that echo device with Alexa on it, I’ve already been doing that, I will ask it a question. And and it’s multi part. And I don’t stop talking until I’m done asking all the parts of it. And I would say about a third of the time, it gives me a useful answer. Two thirds of the time, you just want it to stop talking at you because it’s so stupid. You know, it’s just the level we’re at with these things. But I’m also trying to stress it out. I’m trying to push the edge with it.

Mariah Tang: We can’t record doing that to someone.

Stu Eddins: Says the lady sits next to me. The fact is that these things will get better. And they’re going to drag us kicking and screaming to get better at using them too.

Mariah Tang: I was, you know, at first when I was like no links, what are they even thinking but the six excites me as the contractors and the content strategists. Because while there is a camp of people hollering, like, why did why would we even make content now if Google’s not going to take people to our site? In my mind, it’s there is a there’s going to be increased and steeper need for new relevant fresh content all the time. Great, because those questions are going to change, we see that now. The questions that people ask are going to change, they’re going to become more complex, they’re going to bring in other emotions as these needs changes the audience ages as you know all the things. And the cool thing about blog, web pages, whatever media you’re using, you can get the content of those pages and refresh it with new with new questions for you answers. Keep your URL the same. I don’t see that changing in the future. But, you know, maybe it’s these three questions for the first quarter of the year, maybe those evolve to, we’re going to keep two of those questions and add a new one, we’re going to swap some of it out, you know, this is an ongoing optimization, and the need for that is only going to grow.

Stu Eddins: Yeah, and consider this pool search has been around for 20 some years. And even today, 20 some years later, one out of every five 20% of the searches they see they’ve never seen before, every single day. Can you imagine what it’d be like, you know, put pushing the tight out with a broom to stay ahead of that is constant work. If they were on lexical search, I have to match what you asked for in order to be successful. And 20% of the time every day I fail. The way they have to get around that is to go to context. They have to start understanding the meaning that the words convey. And that’s what they sold for some years ago and started progressing toward today. And it’s going to get better. And right now. It’s not being asked to learn me how I want my answers to come back. So I’m given control and said okay, you want simple answers, ask for that instead. The other part about this is a no, it’s not training me on how to ask a question or a complex question is training me on the fact that I now can do that with Google. It’s that connection. The third thing they announced last this last week, may have even deeper implication for certain verticals. And that’s search results categorization. Now, it’s not coming to higher education or probably to healthcare anytime soon. But recipes, it’s going to come to that travel is going to come to that. And what this is, is you ask a question shinned about I need recipes for healthy eating for overweight people who are middle aged. All right, right there. It’s a complex question being asked. But what it’s going to give you is a series of results that it’s going to say, I hear healthy recipes for anybody. Next category is healthy recipes for overweight, older people here. And then the third one is going to be eating out if you are a overweight, older person, so where do you rank? Number one? All categories? Probably not. What does what happens to the number one ranking in that type of a display?

Mariah Tang: Yeah, maybe you have the opportunity now to say, We rank. We rank high in this category. And this matters, because that’s what you take to your stakeholder. My question is, is there going to be a category to take out all the stupid backstory about the recipe foggers that nobody cares about?

Stu Eddins: Well, that could be that could be Yeah, that could be the simplify button for that. Yeah, yeah. References get rid of stupid. The the other part about this that that’s interesting is that keywords are no longer a thing. Okay, they are still to some extent, but our concept of keywords needs to change. themes. Themes are in fact, with in Google search, or to the Google advertising performance Max, we were asked to put in search themes, not keywords, 25 word descriptions that we have things we want searches we want to match to. It’s already here for those of us doing marketing in certain ways. But when it comes to the people that the vast majority of people who use surgeons that have paid beyond search, this is going to be a little more liberating, and at the same time, you have to give the public permission to do more, but not do so much more that you can’t keep up.

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.

Stu Eddins:  And right now? Don’t bet the farm. Because whatever you’re doing today is gonna be different in a week and a half.

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?

Stu Eddins:  Well, we’re going to talk a little bit about AI. Definitely not for the last time. There’s a whole lot going on with the topic. Most of what we’re going to give you his opinions right now. Because while there’s a lot of solid see a lot of procedure, and a lot of a lot of thinking going on right now about how to apply it and where people stand individually, or organizations is still pretty formative. And we get asked a lot of questions about AI. And for the most part, those questions come down to what the heck, everybody, it’s the thing everybody wants, but nobody knows what the heck to do with it right now.

Mariah Tang:  Yeah, I saw a really funny meme the other day that said, AI is kind of going backwards, I want it to do my laundry and my dishes and things so I can have time to work on my art instead of doing my art for me. Oh, yeah.

Stu Eddins:  Yeah. You know, I, I think that has a lot to do with it. What the expectations people have, are going to be as varied as there are people as it is right now. And this big amorphous thing that we see being applied in specific ways, but you know, search for right now in our, in our industry, where he we’re hearing about AI powered television sets coming out. So I wonder what that really means. I mean, does that mean that if I want to watch the old Magnum P I, it’s going to find it for me all the time and bring it up with the right one I’m touring? Money Mustache? Yeah, sure, everybody needs an 80s mustache. But the but the, the applications of AI are gonna be very, just to lead off with an opinion. I think AI right now is in the state that things like internet search was in the early 2000s. I think it’s at that point where everything is exciting. There’s so many different options out there. Nobody knows exactly what this can do for you, and how it’s going to work. Everybody wants a slice of it. But it’s very, very formative. It’s very early on.

Mariah Tang:  Yeah. You’ve said this before to sue that. Back in the 2000s. You know, when they were building up Google and it was this new shiny thing. And even then they were starting to build their their databases, they were starting to build their large language models and all those things. So how, I guess how, in your mind are the opinions you’ve heard from clients and and people out in the world? How does how is this different? Like, how is this new?

Stu Eddins:  One way it’s new? Well, first off, I think one thing we can expect is a growth trajectory. That’s going to be astounding. I mean, we look at that search from Bing, Yahoo, Google, whoever today. And we think we’re looking at a mature model. And we’re not, it can’t be a mature model AI is about to be added into it. There’s growth right there. But it took search engines a long time to get where they’re at now. But I believe that what’s going to happen is AI will also mature but the curve to maturity is gonna be much shorter. Every time we have a new technological thing come out. It’s ramp up time from from being a concept to reality to functional, keeps getting ever shorter. One thing that that may be contributing to this is, some degree AI can instruct itself on how to get better AI, the machine learning part of but I don’t know, we’ve been working with AI, quite frankly, since I think about 2007 When Google put quality score into Google ads, it AI is not new. When it comes to digital interfaces and how things function. It’s been around for quite a while. Really what’s happened is it’s just stepped into the forefront of conversation in the community, among consumers and so on. Because of things like chat GPT. And I think several things have been lost along the way. You notice how I have haven’t answered your question yet. Give me a few minutes. I’ll completely forget what it is and go on a different tangent, but I think that people have a hard time wrapping their arms around what exactly AI is at the moment what it’s doing, I mean, in search, well, everywhere.

Stu Eddins:  I was reading an ad from somebody who was suggesting that they were using chat GPT to help people forecast their purchases. For stocks, what? Well, the it’ll completely overlook the fact that at this moment in time, all the information that is in chat GPT, and most of those search engines is from 2021. Before the large language model was built at that time, the only reason that tool like chat GPT. And please understand where we’re at, at several watershed moments, and by the time this gets published was meant to be true. But at the moment, the only reason that the AI tool like chat GPT knows that one plus one equals two is because it read it somewhere, it doesn’t do math. The large language model is just that it’s about language, it’s about words, putting things together, your side of the world content. That’s right now where it has the potential for the greatest impact. But the question is, if I asked you to write an article on XYZ, and you ask it to write an article, using the exact same prompt the exact same everything? Will we get to uniquely unique and different articles out of it? Or will we just find that we have the same thoughts perhaps rearranged in different paragraphs and a different rhythm to the article. It’s all tapping into the same model. It’s massive model, huge model. Consider for one thing that Google has been digitizing both on a mission to digitize every book ever written as part of their length, large language model. If you go to books with Google, you can use it for research with interesting recent example that reading a book about generational differences and what they are now. They rely on the Google Book tool, find out when certain themes come into people’s consciousness, because it starts appearing in articles and in books and so on. SafePlace was really not a thing before the mid 2010s. Yeah, it didn’t appear much. And then since then, it just ramped up. Again, an example of how language helps create analysis, but it’s not doing the analysis, right. language helps create an article, but it’s not really writing the article in most respects. So it’s that expectation side of it. One plus one equals two. Yes, it does. I see it, Chet GPT, comes up with it. Well, my expectation that it’s gonna help you buy stocks. No, not now. And we’re starting to get some hybrid, going on hybridisation fill in the blank with that word. But what’s happening is, they know what they have chat. GPT is now using Bing to do the computation inside. But the thing is, you’re not getting an answer on AI. The AI says, I don’t know that lets us band come up with an answer. It’s just simply doing the search for you. Right. So that asks the question, when it comes to your stock portfolio, would you ask the question and being and do what it says? Right now, kind of the same thing. There are people out there building AI models who handle stock purchases, they’re doing that. But that’s not chat GPT. That’s not Google’s barred. That’s not those things. So really, kind of reeling this back in from this flight of fancy I’ve taken, but expectations are wildly all over the place. For myself, I think that looking at the state of AI right now, as it affects my working world and my clients, I think that we are at a moment where the expectation is that AI is going to make life simple. For advertising. I go into my campaign, I set up my account set up a new campaign, I click all the AI buttons. And that’s it. I don’t have to have the skills anymore for keyword research. I don’t have to have the the knowledge about how to write a good ad. AI is going to handle that for me. And there’s a great big goal, yes, but yes, AI can do those things for you. But they’re gonna give you the same results as everybody else. In that respect, AI just creates a new level playing field. That if you simply turn it on, everybody’s on the same level. So how are you going to stand out? Yes, you’re unique, just like everybody else.

Mariah Tang: That’s how I feel about not to knock on any of the programs out there. But that’s how I feel about things like Grammarly when I have clients that say, oh, I’ll just run it through Grammarly. It’s fine. And I’ve done editing for people who have self published books and things like that and I’ll just run it through Grammarly. I don’t need you to review it. And then I’ll just review it because I’m spiteful and find all kinds of errors it’s because Grammarly is trained on specific rules you know, it’s not necessarily colloquialisms and and you know Have analogies and little stories that people tell. So while yes, it may be exactly pointing out specific things, it doesn’t always generate content that a human would say, or a human would read. It feels like that’s the same point we’re at with AI, you type in your question or your or your prompt and search, it’s gonna still pull up that list of URLs and relevant sites, but it’s also right now, giving you this negative, here’s all the stuff we piled together into the summary. And just working with healthcare clients, I’m not a clinician, but boy, have I seen some crazy things in those summaries that are absolutely not correct. Same thing was just about anything, though. I mean, you have certain sources that you would use when you say go out to YouTube, and I needed to learn how to do the oil on my car change label my car, am I going to listen to somebody from AutoZone, or I’m going to listen to some guy on Tik Tok that’s like, Hey, dude, I’ll tell you how to do goes right. You have to still look at your sources, you have to still look at, where’s this information coming from? And I don’t know that we’re quite there yet. At some point, we will be, but it’ll still be up to you as the user to make those decisions. Yes.

Stu Eddins:  Okay. And I think that that is probably one of the key takeaways from what we’ve talked about over the last several weeks. AI is there, it can make life easier. It can do a lot of things, you know, it can it can make your hair shinier, and your teeth brighter, or whatever, we can do all these things for you, maybe. But the real, the real application of AI isn’t enabling it, it’s controlling it, you do have levers to pull in almost every situation. Or you can guide the response you’re going to get by applying the knowledge you have on the topic. The way we see this, again, relating it toward SEO or toward advertising. You can turn on AI and Google ads. Beautiful example. Performance Max is a campaign type lots of AI built in baked into this thing. And most advertisers will simply turn it on. And they’ll supply all the images they need, they’ll supply the short and long headlines at a body copy and let it go. That’s what most people will do. That’s the level playing field. It’s understanding what the tool can do that’s going to be beneficial. That’s gonna be the separator between the average and the not so average, the slightly higher low bar. Yes, yeah, well, but frankly, if AI sets the low bar, it’s up to the skilled advertiser to set the high bar, right. If you want to be a better promoter, through advertising, if you want to be a better writer, you have to apply yourself your knowledge, what you know. And the way you do that with the ads, you give it more information, but you give it the information, you know, is going to shape it in the correct direction. If I have this performance Max campaign out there that’s mixing and mashing together stuff to make the ads that it finds gets clicked more often that get converted more often on or on, great, but what if it’s good sending all those ads to people who are already science customers, or students or patients or whatever? Preaching to the choir. All I’m doing is I’ve just scavenged all my organic or brand equity, and paying for it. The better idea is to take that tool, and then give it the list of the people who’ve been successful. Give it your list of conversion events that happened, let it say, Okay, this is what success looks like. Let’s go find more people who look like that. Yeah, that is a first step in making AI work for you in that digital marketing space. That’s Google ads.

Mariah Tang:  Teach it what you want it to do, right, more of that thing, in

Stu Eddins: Teaching is a good word guidance is another good word. Eventually, AI may come around and bend itself to your will, if you just do the basics and set it up and let it go. But how much are you going to be willing to pay in time, effort, capital, whatever, until it finally catches on and does the right thing? Are you gonna shorten that? You could do that right up front. You could do all along by inputting your knowledge. AI is terrific at parsing things out, but sometimes in most cases, is not terrific at making connections. That’s where the human comes in and does that. It says, Thank you, Google, you give me this AI tool. But it needs to know this. It needs to know that it needs to not spend more money than this. You need to set the guardrails up and you need to feed the information in.

Mariah Tang:  Yeah, it starts with that really good data, which is the problem for a lot of organizations, I think, yeah, if you have messy data, you’re going to have a messy. Yeah, you’re gonna have a messy data set that comes out.

Stu Eddins:   Yeah, it will be ages ago, computers first came in garbage in garbage out, it goes back to that. We’re no different today, you’re only going to get out of it what you put out. And if you put in just enough effort to enable things, you’re going to get that level of output. Yeah. That I guess that was my Captain Obvious moment for this particular episode. But it, it’s something that’s easy to overlook. When you’re in the middle of a very busy day, when you’ve got nine different people chirping at you during the day about things they need right now. And you’re sitting down to do something that could be an AI enabled task, writing that blog article, whatever it is, it can be tempting to turn to a tool, like chat GPT and say, give me a blog article on patient acquisition in the Detroit area x y in printers, and go and get back what you get back. And then your effort goes into editing what it gave you, instead of applying what you know, to the suggestions that have reading the output as a suggestion, looking for gaps that you didn’t know existed, but still using that information, it to augment what you’re already planning to talk about, as opposed to say, Good luck getting published.

Mariah Tang:  That’s how all of the leaders in content right now are using the tools and are creating their own personas with their own data, not relying on the master data that’s out there and creating prompts that generate useful outlines, like you just said, shooting the gaps, finding the opportunities. It really, it makes me think that back when I was in college, because I’m an old lady now in my in my early 40s, here, when the internet really took off and you you were no longer going and poring over card catalogs and things at school did write your thesis paper. And how the librarians were a little I wouldn’t say off plate. But they were a little nervous, just like all of us are now what’s going to happen to my job am I going to be useful? It didn’t get rid of any librarians, it turned them into supercharged data scientist, right now, the librarians, as they always have been, are some of the smartest people on the planet. They know how to find everything, the tools, they use changed. And I feel like that’s where we’re going as an agency as colleges is healthcare systems. The tools are changing, the way we use them are changing, but it’s still that expertise. And that years of experience and the knowledge that goes into using those tools that will generate the outcomes.

Stu Eddins:   What is this library of which you speak? Anyway, with the cookies with the books and the smart? Yeah, the I don’t know, we could go on this tangent forever. And we have multiple episodes in our future that will extend this conversation. I think the thing that I would get across at this point, it’s young, it’s new, it’s fresh, there’s still a lot of growth ahead. Don’t expect? Because you can get a response back, don’t expect it expect it to be the best response to the question being asked. And I think the further extension of that is going to be not only we get, get out what you put in, but you need to do the research to find additional inputs that you need to supply. Find the ways that you can take the data you already know, the information, the style, the whatever it is you already know, and feed it into the system to get back the correct unique and somewhat personalized response that it may be able to give you. And right now? Don’t bet the farm. Because whatever you’re doing today is gonna be different in a week and a half. Yep, I referenced Google, Bing, Yahoo, Amazon, Bing and Yahoo. Search before. Let’s also add in dogpile Lycos crawler, think about all the search engines that were available in the early 2000s. They’re gone for they’re using Bing or Google algorithms to power their search and they’re just you know, also RANS. The same thing is going to happen with AI. We will probably see an expansion, huge explosion of AI tools and companies and there’s going to be consolidation around the best ideas. Yes, yes. Vote with your attention. If it’s a subscription vote with your with your money and your and your time. But understand that whatever you whatever you start off with today, will most likely not be the solution five years me.

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.

Stu Eddins: I once explained it to somebody saying take action or don’t take action, either way you’re doing SEO.

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.

Stu Eddins: Okay, hi, welcome again to the latest version of the Stamats podcast, “Did I Say That Out Loud?”

Mariah Tang: Fully caffeinated.

Stu Eddins: Yes, fully caffeinated. Yeah, it’s about 8:30 in the morning here at the world headquarters in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Caffeine is needful. The other thing that we found is that we’re really close to some train tracks, so if you hear a pause as a train whistle sounds in the background, yeah, we’re gonna not make you listen to that and we’ll come back in afterward. Today we really wanted to talk about SEO in a in a kind of a broad sense, not how to do it, but why and what it is. “Do you do SEO?” is my favorite question to get from from clients.

Mariah Tang: Yeah, yes, we do, and so should you, and it’s a way of life.

Stu Eddins: Well, well, and there there seems to be a lot of confusion about SEO because it’s it’s both a service and an action, it seems. Doing SEO is is something like, uh, there’s this this written profile or checklist that you go down step by step. There certainly is some of that, but like you said, it’s a way of life because it also has to go back to purpose and reason for writing content. It has to be something that answers questions. We we we said this before. So really, when someone asks if we offer SEO, what are they really asking for? What do you think?

Mariah Tang: Yeah, so I want to clarify right away, we’re not talking tech SEO, we’re not talking we’re not talking backlink firming, we’re not talking schema, we’re talking about ranking well for terms, for phrases, for questions, for intent. I think when somebody asks if we if we do SEO, what they’re asking is, can you get my pages to rank higher than my competitors? Yeah, which is yes, we can, but not today, not tomorrow, probably not even next week. It’s a concentrated effort that is page by page by page. Your your site doesn’t necessarily rank for SEO, pages rank for SEO, and they all work together, and if all your pages work together, that’s how you’re going to rise in the rankings. When you say, “Do you do SEO?” yes, you have to do SEO every day cyclically because SEO changes, you know, like we talked about last time, Google changes its algorithms, people change the way that they search, people are more demanding now, they want the answer to the thing right now, and they don’t want to read your whole page, they want to be able to go right to that answer, so if you’re giving that answer, you do an SEO.

Stu Eddins: Yeah, I I once explained it to somebody saying take action or don’t take action, either way you’re doing SEO.

Mariah Tang: Yeah, yeah.

Stu Eddins: Because the the decision to not act, to not do anything is directly impacting your rankings in in search.

Mariah Tang: Or if you’re spreading the same idea across 10 or 15 pages because you can’t, right? You can’t appease your maybe your internal politically, this group wants this page and this group wants to talk about it and blah, blah, blah. That’s fine, but you need to pull them all together into one cohesive message or you’re just, it’s like diluting soup with water, you know, you’re dumping in more water thinking it’s still going to taste good and it’s not.

Stu Eddins: Right. Mulligans too. Yeah. The the, the other part about this, and you just touched on internal stakeholders and demand, all too often the requests about SEO come after a noisy stakeholder shows up at your door and says, “Why are my competitors, uh, ahead of me in search? We don’t rank for this weird obscure term.”

Mariah Tang: That’s my favorite too.

Stu Eddins: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Looks, uh, I I I I can make you rank for that and all both of you that that search that way will find it. I guess the thing about SEO that that strikes me when it comes to internal conversations, just kind of going to the the management of of stakeholders, very often the stakeholders may know enough to be dangerous or what they know is from assumptions that they’ve pieced together over the years, uh, from, uh, going to conferences, from reading something, or from just being irritated because they never find them themselves in themselves in search. When we’re talking to our stakeholders about this, the one thing I would advise is it’s the the stakeholder may not be right, but it’s our job to help them be right.

Mariah Tang: Yeah, we need to help them, we need to drill down and find out what their actual concern is, what what their actual problem is and help them articulate that very, very well, or any work that we do will always miss the mark because it’s not that I’m not finding myself in search, it’s that it’s who they are finding very often.

Stu Eddins: I once helped helped a doctor and, he he came to with that same complaint, “I’m not finding myself in search.” When we drilled into this after a little discussion, a little more fact-finding, if you will, discovery, we found out that the problem was this doctor had been an instructor for years in a particular discipline, so he was at the university teaching this stuff, and his real complaint wasn’t that he wasn’t being found, is that his students were being found before him. So that actually gave us a little more focus. Now, you know, SEO is a tactic, well, maybe that’s what that’s coming down to, but that helps us help him understand the discipline of SEO and what he can expect. You said something magical, it’s not going to happen tomorrow.

Mariah Tang: Yeah.

Stu Eddins: The fact is Google will take its own dear sweet time to write, rewrite, rank things. B, Yahoo, I I’m I’m going to say Google a lot because they’re the largest player in the space. Yeah, but they they also have they also have a system that everybody else replicates. If you’re in the ad space, you’ll notice that Google does something in their Google ads and two months later Bing does it in their ad space, the exact same thing. There’s a lot of of follow the leader involved with this, so solving for Google tends to solve for everybody else. If you hate Google, sorry, but they right now are the ones who are setting the pace for most others.

Mariah Tang: Yeah, there’s one thing I want to throw at you here. Our offices are right next to each other, so Stu gets a lot of me coming in being like, “Hey, Stu, here’s the here’s the thing.” This is one thing that we talk about a lot is with with blog, which is my wheelhouse, my team’s wheelhouse, we will sometimes get a story that immediately goes to the top, it ranks for a very specific topic, whereas a web page on the same topic might take a month, two months, six months. Can we talk about that? Because I think our clients sometimes get the get the impression like, “Well, we did this story and it shot straight to the top, why doesn’t why doesn’t our page rank for this?” One reason, maybe your blog doesn’t doesn’t link to the page, but again,

Stu Eddins: Mile. Yeah, well, yeah, yeah, that that’s that’s that’s a little bit of a bunny, yeah, sure. The the the reason that can happen is because the blog tends to be fresh content, it’s something was just put out there. It may be more specific than that organic internal internal website page, is it may have a particular slant or or a particular bias toward a a search that’s happening in the moment.

Mariah Tang: Specific answer to a question.

Stu Eddins: Yeah, uh, we we had all sorts of content on a hospital website once upon a time about drug addiction, about addiction recovery, and on and on and on, but the one thing that tund it all was an article on Prince after his death. Even though every word that was in that article appeared inside, except for of course Prince’s name, inside the regular web page content, it was the article that took off.

Mariah Tang: The timely search.

Stu Eddins: Yeah, it’s the timely search. There is some degree of difference in how things rank, things that are newsworthy versus things that are are evergreen constant content. Very often we in fact use blogs for that reason, we address the thing that’s happening in the moment in the awareness of the population we’re trying to talk to, the audience we’re trying to talk to, and we do that with a blog article that that talks about those specifics, still trying to remain somewhat evergreen in the content, but we know that that’s going to percolate to the top in the results because it answers the question of the moment.

Mariah Tang: Yeah, exactly.

Stu Eddins: And and and that’s really what blog content is in my mind, and and I don’t think I’ve heard it referred to this recently, but in my mind, that’s what makes blog content variable content because you can cover the same the same topic multiple multiple times from different angles. So yeah, that’s really something that that’s important, and very often when that stakeholder comes in says, “I’m not ranking,” the first thing we’re going to do after assessing their content is consider how we can write the variable blog content that might bring this up to the top, that might, you know, that rising tide that might float all boats.

Mariah Tang: Yeah.

Stu Eddins: I think it’s changed a lot over the last as far as what what matters in SEO, like what are some of the things that you’ve seen, Stu, that that are really different now compared to, you know, 10 years ago?

Mariah Tang: Well, 10 years ago, it was keyword driven. We decided we needed to be found for XYZ and and we would use that and and how many times can we put this word?

Stu Eddins: Yeah, that’s that’s where the concept of of keyword stuffing came from, and that that concept still exists because you you don’t want to be doing that, but not for perhaps the the old-fashioned keyword stuffing reason, but because everybody would look at that as saying you’re writing for a search engine and not for a person. This is crappy content.

Mariah Tang: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Stu Eddins: Readability, all of this stuff goes into it, and having quality content on the web now is more closely related to having quality content in Time Magazine. The the assessment of the of what’s written, how it’s written, the authoritativeness of everything from the from the author to the content itself and onward is part of it. So really, if if there’s any change, it’s that again, Google looks at context, which means all search engines do.

Mariah Tang: Yeah, to one degree or another. Yeah, user intent.

Stu Eddins: Yeah, for sure. So it and it’s the the question posed in search, it’s the answer posed on the page, and then the surrounding support of the content around the answer.

Mariah Tang: Yeah, feels SEO and Google and Bing and everybody has grown up alongside of the digital the digital search community, I guess, for lack of a better word. Like we’ve all changed how we search, we’ve changed what we expect out of the results that we get. Like you just said, if I click on something and it’s clickbait and it’s crap, people are going to say something about that, and you’re gonna see fewer followers, you’re going to see less web traffic. They’re savvy and Google sees that, they want to keep feeding the people that make the clicks that pay the bills.

Stu Eddins: Right, right. And if nothing else, Google is the world’s largest focus group, and it pays attention to how they pay attention to pages. If more people come to the page and bounce, which means less than 10 seconds, by the way, Google’s going to downrank that page. It’s not engaging, it’s doing something wrong. So, you know, there there’s a lot of assessment that goes into it, but I would really say the main difference is we have to be more on our toes now than we ever did. It isn’t simply enough to have they’re going to ask this question, they’re going to use this term, we need to have this term on our page and we need to answer it by using that term a lot. In other words, I looked up a word and the definition included that same word multiple times, which isn’t helpful.

Mariah Tang: Right, right. Tell me what to do with this information. Here’s the information, here’s what I should do with it, here’s the step you have to take to do it.

Stu Eddins: Yeah, it’s all included in that intention, right? Why are they searching it unless they want to do something with that information? Interestingly, while links have always been important, a really big deal is internal links. You’ll hear say this many times across podcasts, blogs, everywhere else, internal links help anybody, the humans, not just the search engines, understand what goes together, how does this content get supported by something else? It also is a vote internally saying, you know what, you’ve read this, you really need to go over here and read this other thing. So make the links relevant, don’t just say, “Hey, you just finished reading a a, a blog on X, we got to read really popular blog over here, you don’t care if it’s relevant or not, but you got to go over here and see it and help support it.”

Mariah Tang: Yeah, no, don’t do that. Make your links relevant to the content on the page.

Stu Eddins: Yeah.

Mariah Tang: So three, we like to end these things with three things you can do right now because we can talk aspirationally all we want, but what are we going to do with this information? So I just heard you say include appropriate calls to action and interlinking, right?

Stu Eddins: Yeah, a couple of other things. Well, the other part about it is in on the calls to action, the reason that’s important is I asked a question, you said you had an answer, now do I what do I do with the answer? The call to action may not be come have an appointment, come do this. The call to action may be learn more, do the next thing, do the next thing. Let’s lead you by the hand, let’s show you our our authoritative answers on this topic and go on. Another thing you need to do is is keep in mind that, we we we deal with a lot of clients ourselves that that have a a learning expectation that they they have a scholarly approach to things, whether it’s a doctor, a teacher, or a lawyer, they have a level of of expertise they want to convey, and for them it’s difficult to understand that they need to write at a sixth grade level.

Mariah Tang: Yeah.

Stu Eddins: Don’t talk over the head of people, understand that the people who are reading your content are more likely standing in line in Starbucks waiting for coffee than having a contemplative moment sitting at their desk at at a quiet moment in their day. It’s not happening that way. It has to be digestible, not dumbed down, but digestible. You want to hold their attention and and help them understand that you have the answer to their questions.

Mariah Tang: Yep, absolutely.

Stu Eddins: I guess the third thing is, have a purpose, have a plan. I just said repeatedly that keywords aren’t the aren’t the, be all end all and SEO. Okay, kind of, you do tend to think by grouping your your pages and your content around thoughts, we can consider those to be search terms if you will. Yeah, but you will have some target, and in that to that state, you will be thinking in terms of keywords or search terms or queries that that you need to answer. But don’t look at it as that’s the only thing to consider.

Stu Eddins: If you step off that soapbox, that everybody says, oh my gosh, this is the best thing I’ve ever heard of. I can’t believe you thought of this and I didn’t. That doesn’t mean you have something successful, right? It just means that you have more assurance that you’re maybe on the right path.

Stu Eddins: Something occurred to us the other day, we were sitting around and just kind of tossing ideas back and forth. And I recalled something from earlier conference, it was a less formal setting than what I what I attend today. Yeah, there were keynotes. There was everything else going on. But they provided a soapbox space. It was kind of interesting. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen such a thing like that. Mariah said I don’t think so. But what was kind of cool about it was in this space, they would set up multiple platforms were moved enough one from another so that you wouldn’t get a lot of crosstalk. And people were allowed to just stand up there and pontificate here’s an idea I have, let’s talk about this, they are able to broadcast to a small group of people in front of them a concept they’re working on an idea something so that they could pitch their idea, think of Shark Tank. And then the other people that were out there would listen to the entire presentation not interjecting in the middle of it. But then at the end of it, the person would either usually just step down and walk into the 1015 people around them and start the conversation about what was just presented. Interesting. The thing I thought was cool about it was it gave immediate feedback from peers. You know, we we spent all of our time in an agency among the people we know. And it’s not that we eventually start sharing a brain or anything. But we tend to have the same perspective, because we’re all serving the same type of client. We have the same experiences with expectations that we’re currently working under. And the thing that kind of resonated with me, was this type of a process allow me to connect or whoever was given the presentation with like minded people who did not share the same background of experiences. That sounds like something you’d want to do.

Mariah Tang: 100%.

Stu Eddins: Really? I love that. Okay. Okay. You know, it takes a very brave heart or a large degree of hubris to decide to do it because you’re putting yourself out there.

Mariah Tang: Well, it’s like being on social media, especially in a not to get political. But in an election year, if you’re only listening to the opinions of people who sound like you, if you’re only getting information from sources that sound like you, then you’re in an echo chamber, like, what are you learning?

Stu Eddins: Yeah, I could see that. The other part about this is it was the people who present it may have had some tentative feedback on their process or their idea. They may have tested it once or twice. One objection I’ve heard in the past is, you know, I’ve got these great ideas. I don’t know that I want to release them to everybody in the world. Yeah. Secret Sauce. Yeah, that could be my competitive advantage or something. Yeah. Yeah, I can see that reservation. But I think you have to balance that against the potential of what you can learn from the feedback. Yeah.

Mariah Tang: And a lot of the times, I mean, we come across this all the time, like, your organic search query dashboard. As an example, you came up with this cool idea, not many people are doing it? Or if they do, they’re not talking about it. And you were very forthright with it. Like, we’ve got to share this with everyone. Just because you tell somebody about an idea doesn’t mean they have the skill, the know how the time to do it themselves?

Stu Eddins: Well, right, it actually that’s a good idea. Or excuse me a good example. I did give a couple of presentations on this, this tool, this this search query tool. And then within about a week, I had three comments back with yet additional ways to use the tool, the expansion benefit of everybody, because now the people who shared individual insights on what how they used it, I was able to take that and multiply it across all the clients that I talked to on the topic. And I think that that, in some ways, is some synergy, some, some, some back and forth that we may be lacking, particularly in a more diffused workspace that we have today. I don’t want to tap into the the entire conversation about remote working. But I do think that that some, some venue where I can where I could present my ideas. A podcast is one example where there’s no feedback. Yeah, I gotta wait for it to get published and then for somebody to type in a response or call me or email me. Tell me my gosh, I listened to That entire podcast and I have never heard such a stupid idea, whatever it might be, but getting that immediate feedback in, I wonder if having a little bit of fear of putting it up there putting your idea out there is what you want. Because if you don’t have that, maybe you’ve got too much certainty in your process. And all you’re doing is bragging. Oh, yeah,

Mariah Tang: I had an experience like that. Last week, two weeks ago, I have spoken at Content Marketing World seven times, okay, I’m not a I’m not a newbie to the speaking circuit. But I just published my first article with them on their blog two weeks ago, I have never felt more tiny and more afraid in my whole life than when I hit that send button. And the feedback was awesome. Like, if you don’t have that healthy, oh, my gosh, what am I doing? Feeling? Maybe you’re too comfortable in your role? Maybe you need to reach out and start learning more outside of your little bubble.

Stu Eddins: Yeah, I can see that being beneficial. And I think that they the risks that you take, sometimes it’s gonna blow up in your face, otherwise, it wouldn’t be called risk. You know? I think Google’s the one who keeps putting forward the concept that 90 Some percent of experimentation fails, otherwise, it wouldn’t be called an experiment. Yeah. I think a similar thing applies here. A significant percentage of the of the ideas and concepts you have probably won’t survive first contact with your peers. They’re going to have better ways they’re gonna see holes that you did not see. And honestly, I think that may be a better outcome than using our clients as guinea pigs.

Mariah Tang: Yeah, yeah. And I think it’s, I think it is gorgeous. I have clients too. It’s one thing to present to your peer group, you know, to, I’m going to bring this idea just do what just do think, okay, Stu validated this, I’m gonna take it to Sandra, okay, Sandra, had this idea, this idea, we’re going to take it to somebody else. And you know, walk through that process. When you bring it to a client, you’re talking about their experience, their goals, everything, and they bring you like, Well, what about this? Did you think about this? How does this work here? Love that. I mean, when you get that, that challenge that question that? How are you really going to use this with my work? It makes you stop and think either my idea has been validated, or there’s room to grow here.

Stu Eddins: Yeah. The other thing I think about presenting it at a setting like a conference in a from a soapbox, instead of from the from the main stage and podium. I have had that feedback at roundtable discussions. And we can have that there. In this case, the roundtable was not set up to be something about concepting and talking about the direction you want to go, we’ve got a completely different purpose. And like you, humans of our type did, we completely strayed from that topic is talking about things we wanted to try. But my goodness, we were so energized afterward, I frankly forgot what the purpose of the roundtable was, I had to look at my at my agenda to remember what why I was sitting there. Because what I took away was much more valuable in the moment than what I sat down to take away in the first place. I’m sure that the roundtable sponsor was was completely beside themselves, mad as hell at us all. But, you know, we weren’t having a round table that others were observing. It was a everybody had their own table that they were discussing things on. But I guess I guess my point is, I think, maybe conferences, we we tend to go to the looking for, I want to gain ideas from the people who I sign up for to go to their presentations. I want to see people at different booths or different installations, and see what they want me to, to learn and understand from their offerings. We have Hallway Conversations with that person. We met three conferences ago, hey, how you doing? What’s going on in your life, we eventually get down to that. But I think that that, a another facet of that could be putting your idea out there, offering it up and saying, I have an idea. I’d like for you to present it to everybody. Or not everybody but to a select group that wants to hear it. And then I’m asking for your feedback. This is not to be a passive exercise. It’s something where I’m expecting you to come back and challenge me on it. Constructive criticism is is often how things go from idea to actuality. Oh, yes, the step in the middle.

Mariah Tang: Yeah. And then you have that built in accountability of those people who are sitting there who are going to pester you later how that thing turned out. Did you use my idea? I want to you know, yeah,

Stu Eddins: in, you know, there’s an entire avenue of after the fact Hey, you know, folks, thank you so much for your feedback. Give me your names and email addresses and I’ll let you know where this goes. I, you may go that far, you may not. But if you’re not furiously taking notes during the feedback session, perhaps you haven’t given it your all here. The other part about this that occurs to me is, we really do want to talk to our peers. And I’ve said that like 93 times so far, but we shouldn’t consider this to be something as formal as a peer review. It’s not that type of a thing. If everybody if you step off that soapbox, that everybody says, oh, my gosh, this is the best thing I’ve ever heard of, I can’t believe you thought of this. And I didn’t. That doesn’t mean you have something successful. Right? It just means that you have more assurance that you’re maybe on the right path. It is some sort of a validation to keep going. If you step off the podium and eat and you take the critique that comes towards you and saying, you know, that’s a great idea. But I think you have a narrow application in front of you, it’s not going to have the scope of application, you think it will, then here’s why. That may be the most valuable part of the interaction. Because if you leave it at the at their statement, and you don’t ask the return question, okay. Why don’t you think it’s my Why do you think my scope is limited? Yep. You’re not going to get the most from your from your presence there. Oh, yeah. Anyway, it just something that you and I were talking about, it occurred to me that I had experienced something similar at that roundtable, I mentioned that at a less formal convention, in different industries, we’re not talking about marketing at the time, they had provided space for this type of soapbox communication. I don’t think they actually envisioned what it was going to turn out to, they just said, Hey, you want to talk about you want to have a conversation about an important topic to you? Let us know, we’ll tell you at 1015 Your time is is at zone B. Something as simple as that. You’re also leaving your stuff out there little exposed to be somebody standing at a podium with nobody to talk to ya. What if you gave a party and nobody came? But again, it’s risk? Yeah. And in our world agency world, our particular focus with this agency is in marketing. And if I were to, to present scheduled to present my idea, nobody showed up, man, what a bad job of marketing I did, right. Maybe the punishment is twice over the I don’t know, the the feedback I got from you on how you feel when you present, particularly in larger groups. Others around you like Sandra and so on, when she presents, they get warm reception. They get a lot of positive feedback. They get some questions afterward. But it kind of occurred to me to take that information and reach back to the experience I had before and say, Okay, let’s make it intentional. Yeah. So a smaller group, you do have a greater tendency for somebody to poke at you. Yeah, yeah. And you’re inviting it.

Mariah Tang: Like you said, those pokes are the growth opportunities. You’re not going to grow in your comfort zone if people telling you what a what a great job you did pat, pat, pat, right.

Stu Eddins:  Right. I will take all of those though, that I love it. But now

Mariah Tang: I gotta think of a topic for use do to have your soapbox conference?

Stu Eddins: Oh, geez. i Yes. i, i Yeah, I have so many. You know, let’s realize that the name of this podcast is did I say that out loud? Honestly, that may be my test for whether I have such a topic.

Mariah Tang: I love this idea. And I think I think people in an agency setting or people that are really hungry to make change in their organization would be interested in this, this small group idea is less intimidating in a lot of ways than being passed the mic in a great big auditorium full of people. And it gives the people that are quiet with good ideas and opportunity to raise their hand and beard. Yeah.

Stu Eddins: You know, I I’ve been living with this idea for a couple of weeks. And in my mind, inventing the worst case scenario, I envision myself standing on the soapbox and and issuing my ideas and my concepts on the best way to handle something for search marketing. And Frederick Falaise is standing right in front of me in the group. Kind of like the the person who was the original Evangelist for Google search and pointed out virtually every hole in my idea, but I tell you what, I almost paid for that to happen.

Mariah Tang: This is like the modern-day equivalent of showing up at school without your clothes on.

Stu Eddins: I think I would prefer to remain dressed at that podium, but yes, you’re right.

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.

Stu Eddins: The whole trend in SEO has always been how can I get Google’s attention? And how can I get Google to like me more?

Mariah Tang:  Did I say that out loud? Welcome to did I say that out loud a podcast or 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.

Stu Eddins:  Hi, welcome to the podcast. This is Stamats podcast, we’ve given it the name did i I say that out loud. Other than kind of a fun title. Our purpose here is to kind of capture some conversations and discussions we have internally about the things that impact digital marketing, digital websites, and, and pretty much anything else that falls within our daily chores and tasks and things we do for our clients. So yeah, did I say that out loud? That’s really a question I asked myself a lot. We do try to question what Google does, what Bing does, and so on, trying to find the best path forward. So loosely structured, but the premise of the whole thing is really kind of capturing a discussion. We’ve picked a topic, of course, we have some things that we want to talk about. But nothing more scripted than that. So today, we’re talking about what’s the deal with the latest Google content update? Well, actually, algorithm update. On March 5 of 2024, Google released a really, really big update, and how they rank pages in search. There’s a lot of implications that go along with it. And there’s a few that we kind of wanted to talk about a little bit. Probably one of the biggest changes was Google has had this assessment out there for a while called helpful content. It wants to find content that answers the questions that people put into search, the most helpful answer is its job. As much as we’d like to think that Google works with us, and we pay Google to do stuff. That’s our side of it. Google’s client is the person doing the search. It’s not the person really doing ads. It’s not the person doing SEO, Google lives to serve the person party putting a search query into their search, search engine. That’s the big deal to anything they put into that that search bar is a question. And helpful content is assessed on its ability to answer questions. That’s really what it comes down to

Mariah Tang:  Like music to my ears. Yeah, we’ve been saying for years. Yeah, very validating.

Stu Eddins:  Well, but the whole trend in SEO has always been how can we get Google’s attention? And how can I get Google to like me more? Yeah. Yeah. In, in a world that was focused on keywords and search terms and such. Yeah, Google at one point was something that that matched, okay, your page has this content. And the words match what somebody put in their search query, therefore, we’re going to, we’re going to serve your link to that person. Now, where it fit in ranking. In the order, it was served to the person. Yeah, that had a lot to do with your content and its quality. But Google stopped being a search engine based on on lexical search, it no longer really just matches words. It matches intent and content, it matches all sorts of things. Because it’s actually understanding the content of the page in front of it. When it looks like something you’ve written, right, it’s reading it. And it knows what people search for. And it tries to match these two things up, by intent by the quality of the answer you’re providing.

Mariah Tang:  When Google started doing the purple highlight to answer when you type in a question, when essentially to a page, Google Now highlights the answer to that question on the page. First, I was scraped out by this and now I think it’s awesome. Yeah, it’s, it’s so validating, I keep coming back to that word, because for so long and content, we didn’t really have a way to say yes, this is working. No, this isn’t working. Unless it was oh, look, you’re number one on Google, you got this featured snippet, whatever. Now we have direct from Google user generated information, saying this is a great answer to this question. And it serves it up. It’s really awesome.

Stu Eddins:  Yeah, in the thing that the thing that I think is helpful is Google is looking for helpful content, among many other things. Of course, there, there’s authoritativeness there, there’s a lot of things but helpful content is a good thing to talk about right now. And they do give you clues as to what to look for. There’s a link will share in the comments or the descriptive paragraph that accompanies the podcast that goes out to a page that Google has a series of questions you can use as a self assessment for what is considered helpful content right off the top. The easiest way to sum it up, and Google has been saying this for several years, but they may have put a finer point on it now. Your content should be written for people and not for search engines. That’s really kind of an important message, not the only message. But an important takeaway from this. What Google wants to surface for somebody who types of question into their search engine is a good well researched answer, something that provides a unique point of view. Something that really is a length that they would say, Yeah, you know what we recommend this thing?

Theory, not a fact. Yeah, well, and while you’re free to cite other people’s work, and whether it’s online or not, that’s good, because it substantiates what you put on the page, you really shouldn’t be regurgitating what you read elsewhere. That’s originality. There’s there’s many things that Google looks at. But think of that implication. That means Google is reading your content and can make the judgment about whether you’ve copied what somebody else said. And just rewarded it or not. Yeah, yeah.

Mariah Tang:  So thinking about that big bold statements do what does this mean for AI assisted content and under the lens of Google has its own generate, you know, Jedi, and all of those things.

Stu Eddins: Yeah, the thing that I, I have an opinion on, let’s be very clear, this is an opinion. The other part about this March update was a reduction in spam content in search results. Now, Google has always been anti spam, they want to deliver clean results to their to their customers, we can understand that. But one part of spam, just one part of Spam is AI. Now, because they have their own AI tools out there. And frankly, Google’s been using AI since far longer than it’s been in the headlines. I mean, I do a lot of Google Ads work. They’ve been using AI and Google ads, since about 2007. That’s what quality score is, is is is an AI powered tool. So this has been around for a while. It’s just now come up into the zeitgeist is just just what people are aware of at the moment. But Google looks at things in perhaps a gradation. And this is my opinion, they look at original content that appears to have come from somebody who has written on the topic before. Another important thing. They know that this byline perhaps, is linked to other content on similar topic, authority. That’s the authority part of the Eat equation that they have. We’ll link to that too, if necessary. But Google does look at that part of the equation saying, okay, this person writes often on this topic, they’re considered an authority because people link to it, people stay on the content, they don’t bounce off of it, they read it, they scroll it, they do all this stuff. All this stuff goes into it. But then there’s AI Assisted writing. And that can be where, okay, we’ve gone out and gotten and used an AI tool, to not develop the content, but perhaps develop the outline. And then we address the points by that because it’s a nebulous topic. And we could use some help in organizing how we put the put the information we want to relate into a meaningful article to get it published. There’s other ways where AI assisted content can come in where perhaps you’ve used AI to come up with your citations. Because right now, for the most part, what’s happening on the web with AI, is large language model. It knows the stuff that’s already been written and can rearrange it into hopeful sentences and paragraphs.

Mariah Tang:  It doesn’t really create original, no matter how wrong or how right, it is exactly to see is that a thing has been done, and it puts the thing in a new way. Exactly.

Stu Eddins:  And that’s the next step, which is AI generated content. ages ago, I was doing SEO work for a website, back in the wild west days of websites that by said the year that would date me too much. But the process we use was at the time and authentic process to improve your search ranking. It was called link farming. We would take an article we would write it we would put it into a program was called a spinner, which would rearrange the the thoughts in the paragraphs in such a way that it looked like original content over and over and over again. And then take all that content and plant it across dozens of websites, all pointing back to my website, backlink building Blackhat is what that is. I know, I hated it too, because quite frankly, the content sucked. The spun content really was not that good. But at the point Google didn’t care or if they did they let on today, and we’ll come forward the better part of 20 years. Google knows the content. It’s no longer about matching a link to your website and saying it’s good enough. All of this matters. So when you use AI to generate content and plop it on your website, Google can pretty much detect it because it has this this copy of the web, if you will, in its possession. And it can look at the content and assess its quality, its origin, all sorts of stuff. So the spam update to bring this all the way back to the beginning of the statement, the spam, part of the update that happened in March, also has to do with hat also has to do with AI generated or AI assisted content. My personal opinion, I don’t think Google is going to crack down too much on AI usage as an assist, if they themselves are pushing forward with AI tools. But I think that that also implies that there’s some nuanced understanding on their part about how much and how you use AI.

Mariah Tang:  Yeah. I’m glad that you brought up the backlinks thing. That’s one of the questions we get most often from our groups. And we always come back around to is your content helpful? Is it useful? Is it backlink worthy, and that’s what that’s what you’re talking about has to be worth that mention worth that person’s time to put your link on their site? You know, if you’re a good resource, if you’re a good Knowledge Hub, then that’s what that’s what makes you backlink worthy.

Stu Eddins:  Yeah. And that’s actually an important way to put it the way you’ve said, backlink worthy, you may not have the backlinks yet, but Google looks at this in can assess to some degree saying hey, you know what, somebody could link to this, they will be useful to somebody linked to this. So yet again, a another non keyword driven, quality signal built into the system. So yeah, I think there’s a lot to come from that. Really what it comes down to, though, is this last update, the two headlines that we’re talking about the most internally, is the spam update we’ve just finished discussing, that also overlaps into the current AI discussion. Plus the fact that helpful content is now rolled into the core algorithm instead of the standalone isolated thing that says, hey, you could do better? Well, now we haven’t sent them. It’s part of the ranking. I guess, if I were to sum it up, I think one way to put it is the March update, among many other things encourages, as stated content written for people that is very helpful in answering questions, and is not closely associated other content that already exists. And really, that’s the big takeaway, right? Stuff meaningful to the people you want to talk to? And you have an answer for. Think of it that way.

Mariah Tang: You hit the nail on the head.

Stu Eddins: Well, one last thing on AI. AI is built on a language model presently, I think it was like 2001 2002 to 2021 freshness date, if you will. If you ask AI to answer a question, it’s only going to answer that question. If it’s possible by constructing sentences and paragraphs based on content and knowledge from 2021. Before. It’s not going to be very current. It also doesn’t do math. So another topic me either. Yeah, it’s it’s, it says one plus one equals two because it read it somewhere, not because it does the math. Yeah. But anyway, that’ll be another topic some of the day. Stories. Yeah, tell me stories. And that’s just not blog content, right? You have to be able to do that. Also with your, well, I consider organic content. If you’re if you’re a higher in higher education, that is the description of a program page. If you’re in healthcare, it’s going to be the description of your orthopedic knee replacements. Do something unique? You’re answering the same question everybody is, but say why? Perhaps you’re different per se, address something. Instead of simply saying we do we do knee replacements, and you’re back to work in three days. Add in information about what life is like afterward? Yeah, with the recovery, add more apt to answer the question asked, and then go on a little deeper, ask the neck and answer the next few questions that would come up.

Mariah Tang:  Every page has a story, give him something to think about before, during and after given the next action step. keep that conversation going in.

Stu Eddins:  That’s a good step toward being helpful. So but if you have any comments, of course, don’t hesitate to reach out we’ll answer the generated content. Yeah. We love that. But yeah, go ahead, ask ask us any questions you have on the topic or better yet, if you have an opinion, share that to the best part about learning is hearing everybody else’s thoughts on the subject. All right. Thank you. See you next time.

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.