Why Context is More Important Than Ever

Stu Eddins: The web is expanding underneath us, and what we have to be aware of is that expansion is away from very little literal interpretation of keyword relationships to contextual relationships.  

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.  

Stu: Okay, so this is the next did I say that out loud? And this time we’re going to be talking about something that’s going to be really affecting us over the next probably 18 months to three years, and that is our understanding of context as we move forward into a AI empowered web. We’ve had a lot of controls that we’ve had keywords, for example; search terms are going to outgrow keywords any day. Now, the concept of keywords and how we would use them in SEO, to say that these are the words that people search for, we need to make sure they’re on our page the way we would use that in advertising, where we might target keywords in search ads. Now we still do those things. They’re still out there, but what’s happening is the web is expanding underneath us, and what we have to be aware of is that expansion is away from very little literal interpretation of keyword relationships to contextual relationships.  

Now, honestly, Google hasn’t been a keyword-driven search engine for several years. It has been about context. It has been about intent, more than anything else, easily, for the past five to seven years. It’s just that now the shift has happened enough that it’s really brought it into focus that we need to change how we think about extending our influence onto the web. I think that may be a good way to put it. So, yeah, that could work. So context, context is everything. Here’s something I found. I went out looking for some quotes on context. And I found this one in common use. Almost every word has many shades of meaning and therefore needs to be interpreted by the context. That may be kind of a captain obvious thing. You know, we’ve always said that words can have two meanings. We even write songs about it.  

Mariah: Anybody that’s married can tell you that. 

Stu: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That quote was from Alfred Marshall, and he published that quote in 1891 – 35 years ago. And it’s really relevant today when we think about search terms in the in the angle of keywords, if we think about it from that point of view, we’re limiting ourselves. Here’s something interesting that I learned over the last year or so. There’s an ad product out there called performance Max, P max, and it does a lot of different things in a campaign, but one of the things it does is search ads. Now, for ages, I’ve been assigning keywords to search campaigns. So if I’m advertising accounting program, I’ll make sure it’s accounting. Degree accounting, AAS, I’ll have all sorts of words in my campaign that if the search person uses them, send them my ad. That’s the idea. Well, performance Max. They have this place for keywords, but they call them keyword hints. It’s not the real thing. It’s not we’re not targeting these specific words. Pardon me, what Google is saying is, give us a list of stuff that people might search around. Give us ideas. In other words, give us the context of the search you want to serve an ad to. And I think that’s kind of a powerful shift that’s going on right now.  

Mariah: More than just like, tell us what you want, it’s let us help you find what you want. 

Stu: Yeah, it is, and nothing in the world is as little in most people’s interpretation as a keyword. In fact, in my world of advertising, we had ways of qualifying that keyword. It could be a broad match. So lawn mower could lawn mowing service. Could be lawn cutting service, lawn care service. That’s kind of a broad interpretation, and really that’s kind of what we’re going toward, if you think about the context. Then there was phrase match, which was local long cutting service would match to it because, you know, it still had the same concept, but included other words. And then exact match was, if I put in lawn cutting service, that’s really. Really all it wouldn’t match to is when somebody put in long cutting service until three to five years ago, an exact match became exact-ish. Google is forcing us into context. Whether we like it or not, we’re going to be there. I venture to say we’re already there. We just need to have our practices catch up with reality.  

Mariah: Yeah, I’m curious. What would be the hesitation for people? Why would they not want that? Like it’s a better way to find the information that you want and maybe don’t know that you want. 

Stu: Control. Here’s the deal. When it’s in advertising, I pay for every click, whether it’s pennies or dollars, I’m paying for the click, and the risk is, if I don’t understand the context of what I’m trying to target, I’ll be paying for my clicks that are not relevant to what I want to accomplish. Now we can have faith in the ad platforms, because Google says, oh, we’ll learn that for you over time. During that time, Google’s spending my money to learn, and that’s where the friction comes in. We’ve used AI in a lot of ways inside of our campaigns to test to feel our way around. We’ve been very responsible with it. We’re not just saying, gee, that’s cool. Let’s try it. We make sure we have as many safeguards in place as possible. And my observation is that, yeah, it does learn. Google does lean into the context of what I’m trying to do. But context isn’t just the search term, the keyword we try to target. And I think the same thing applies to things like SEO. When we’re trying to write content, we write content around the concept of what somebody is looking for, or the information somebody needs, and that’s the more powerful thing, because we’re not trying to stuff certain words into paragraphs, we’re trying to answer a question fully and efficiently.  

Mariah: Yeah. Like with blog, or with a webpage, or any type of writing or video, for that matter, we’re looking for that, who, what, when, where, why, like the what’s in it, for me, all of that. So like, I feel like most people who excuse me, most people who write understand that concept, and most people who read are looking to answer one of those questions. But like with ads or search ads, or any type of ads, how do you get to that, like, what’s in it? For me, how do you, how do you include the context in articulating what that ad should be, where it should be served? 

Stu: And that’s going to be really something that changes as we go forward. I’m going to continue to use Performance Max as an example. Google, just this last month, in May of 25, they’ve released a new product. They’ve called it a couple of things over a couple of weeks, but basically, AI Max is a search campaign, and what they appear to have done is taken that performance Max campaign and broken off the chunk that was searched and now made it a standalone product. With this product it’s keywordless. We don’t give it keywords. We simply say, here’s our ad copy, and the ad copy talks to who we want to who we want to address out in the wild. And here’s our landing page that has all the information necessary for that person to make a decision and make the decision in our favor, quite frankly. So the context is the landing page. The filter for that context is the is the ad where we make that bridge between what somebody’s searching for? Here’s our ad. Is it talking about the right thing? Yes. Click here. Learn more on the landing page.  

And Google is assessing all of this. It’s not just looking for keyword inclusion on the landing page, it’s looking for the context of the content. It does actually understand the context of what you’re saying and the content on a landing page. Now, if I’ve got a landing page that’s very general, it talks about, we have a Health Sciences College at our university, and we are one of the best we have some of the best staff. Our enrollment is easy. You know, money back, whatever you want to get in there. And then I list 53 different programs underneath that page. I got a very general page, but if my ad talks about a nursing program specifically and points someone to that page, the person who’s out here doing a search for nursing may get served my ad, but because it’s not terribly relevant to that landing page, the context is off.  

My ads can be lower than somebody who does a better job of answering that nursing search query with an ad that leads to a page that talks more specifically. Think about what the person was searching for, context all the way through what they were looking for, what the ad says, what the landing page answers. That’s the kind of scope that we’re expanding into. And I used search advertising because it’s a very controlled environment, but it is not one bit different when it comes to just content in the organic part of your website, there’s not really a a styled and written search ad for a specific situation, but if you think about the description you write for your page, the HTML description tag serves that need. To some extent, the headline you choose serves that need. This is styling that blue link and that that that slug that goes beneath that, that is the description, and that is the SEO rough equivalent of what I write for an ad. It is the the it is the invitation to come read what I’ve got, because it answers the question you just asked. 

Mariah: Yeah, and that’s what’s showing up right now, too. When you use the AI mode on Google or any of those other platforms, it shows your list of sources to the one side. It shows that blue link and it shows that same description. So it’s not like with AI changing the way we search. It’s not like that part has gone away yet. 

Stu: Well, you know what, Mariah, I don’t think it’s going to go away anytime soon, because our websites are built that way. The resource that AI is turning to gather its information is built the way you’ve just described. Now, will there be different ways to structure that information? Might there be a, I heard one person suggest, you’ll have a parallel web presence. You’ll have a web presence designed and styled and marked for AI, and you’ll have a web presence design, designed and styled for the human who looks at it. And they may be interconnected, so editing one edits the other. But there’s gonna be different types of technology underlying both. The person doesn’t need to have such thing as schema markup to appreciate the page, but the AI tool does need it different topic for different day. I don’t know that that’s terribly efficient. If you remember, we used to have M mobile websites. We in the big deal about 12 years ago was responsive websites. Yay, one place to go.  

Mariah: Well, we’re aging ourselves now. 

Stu: Yeah, but, yeah, you’re right. By the way, a significant percentage of the people we’re trying to reach in higher education have never had to struggle with a difference between a desktop and a mobile view. It’s just been the same thing. 10 years from now, people will be it’ll be the same situation as my bet with an AI versus a view the website experience. It’s just how it’s managed. But back to the point, the citations in AI are based on that blue link and and description slug, just as organic is, because that’s what they have to work with. That’s that is the context of the website.  

So where is this all leading to? Advertising is moving away from targeting specific search queries and moving on toward marketing, to contextual signals display, by the way, has been here forever. I don’t tend to target a display ad to a web page that has a specific phrase on it. I can, but it’s not really one of the the the ways that I tend to use it instead with the display campaign, we target the person’s context, and the context is the person who they are and what they’re reading. And if I have a higher education ad and I’m serving it on a platform like Twitch, which is a gaming platform, how is it going to look when I show up and say, Come apply in the middle of a gaming experience that’s going to either get ignored or marked as spam or something? It’s not; you’ve missed the context of the person in their moment.  

So display behaves better and always has when the context is complete. The offer I’m seeing the artwork I’m seeing in my host website, the site I’m actually visiting is complementary to the experience I’m trying to have on the website. The message attracts me and sends me to your website, and it should have similar context to where I came from. We did this. We did this test where we had Tiktok ads that were out there, and the Tiktok ads were getting clicked a lot, and the Tiktok ads looked like they belonged on that platform. They’re colorful, they’re almost kaleidoscopic. They were punchy. They weren’t trying to look too corporate. And the message was valid. It was, hey, we’re the place to be. It’s a fun place. We it. People love coming to school here, click here and go to a web page that is just classic institutional web page. This is our university. We have classes, we have teachers. It is the complete wrong experience for where they came from, and they stayed away in droves. We had an average like from that three to five second time spent on the page. Well, we kind of inherited this situation.  

So our first thought was, let’s create a separate page that looks like the experience they were having on Tiktok, at least the bridge is that that’s on the ad. They see the ad, they were clicking it all the time. We got hundreds and 1000s of clicks, except now those clicks were leading to a point where you’re getting 30/42, on average engagement on the web page, not on the landing page, because we answered context with context. So it’s not just words, it’s experience, it’s the person know who you’re talking to. The other part about this, I think that’s going to be scary, is the opportunities that opens up are vast, but then the combinations are as well.  

Now you write articles from time to time in healthcare where your job is to translate or reword what a highly educated person talks about, about a specific topic, synthesize that into words on a page that a a non healthcare person understands, because that’s the audience we need to reach. We need to talk to those people. We need to have them understand that, hey, we’re doing research here. It’s important research, and here’s how it affects your life. You’ve changed the context of what you heard into something that is the context of the person you want to address. And you know you and your team are great at that. That may describe the interview to Article process too, I don’t know. Is that close? Yeah, pretty darn close, yeah. So context is also a flexible thing. The interview with that doctor or that research person was in the context of that person in their world, and it was there. I mean, they were not being false. That’s who they are. You are the translator one context into another.  

And as marketers, we’re gonna be that same thing, except in this case, the context is the institution, the organization we service and the population we want to reach, and we’ve got to they each have something. The institution has something the population needs. The population has a need the institution can solve. But in between is a gap of context. We’ve got to get those things aligned. That assumes need, that assumes a lot of other things. You know, I could go out and write a book report on a knee, on a knee replacement, and not have any need of the School of the hospital services, but the hospital had information I needed. So need plays into it as well. But really, context is going to be a is going to be a thorny subject for a lot of people I mentioned earlier, control. You have to, you have to either learn your way through it, which means giving up a little bit of control. But if your objective is to have control, you’re going to learn fast, aren’t you? You’re not going to be given any choice.  

It’s not that Google says it’s not that Google is responding to their client and their client is the person doing a search, and that person, if they don’t like what they’ve got going on, is going to go to ChatGPT Perplexity, they’re going to go to some other place and have the experience they want. Or Google can do that and more, Google will probably be able to do what ChatGPT does or Perplexity, and add more meat to the bone, if you will. Only because Google’s been doing this for over 25 years and has a heck of a lot more data than the other people. It could answer questions more thoroughly. It’s pretty much scanned the entire internet. They’re catching up on that. But Google’s been in this context business for going on 30 years now, so they have a head start, if they choose to preserve it, there’s that, and we can have investors dumping money into chat GPT, but money doesn’t solve a knowledge problem in this in this case. So yeah, I think that when what we’re looking at is some very large shifts, some of it fueled by AI, but not the fault of AI. AI is a cause, not the only cause. Okay, look at this way. This is why it can’t be just AI. We were having the same conversation, the voice search started. Started, oh yeah, yeah. I mean, you remember when we were trying to figure out how we could get ranked for Voice Search? Oh 

Mariah: Yeah. And like, thinking about the length of paragraphs, thinking about how often you put a call to action on a page, all, all of that stuff is like, not everybody’s on desktop, not everybody’s on a laptop, not everybody’s on, you know, tablet, mobile, whatever it is, and now it’s just second nature, because we know the behavior of people across devices is different. We didn’t know that 10 years ago. It was brand new. So it’s the same, same story, same song and dance. 

Stu: Yeah, well, and 10 years ago, mobile devices hadn’t penetrated the market anywhere near to the extent they have now. So 2008, 2009, iPhones became the big deal, but it was still an $800, $700 big deal. So it was not the population, the masses, that have it. You know, there were others out there who were making flip phones that had a few more features and so on for a few years before competition really kicked in. But the point being that transition, though, there was a definite moment when it came along and Steve Jobs stood up there with his with his first iPhone on the stage that may have been the tee off. There have been other smartphones before that, by the way, the BlackBerry people be very upset we didn’t pay attention to them. 

Mariah: But everybody wanted one of those when I was younger. The BlackBerry. 

Stu: The Crackberry, yeah. It didn’t help that we had, we had a presidential candidate who couldn’t let go of his but still, that watershed moment of iPhone coming out and being the a tipping point of sorts. Still have long tail before it came about, before market penetration was there. That was the time when we were doing mobile sites versus regular sites. That was the time when we responsive was just coming in, that there was a development cycle, and it was longer than what we’re going to face with AI and the compounding voice search on top of it, I kind of look at AI and voice search as the meaning of what we thought was going to happen with voice search. Google says that right now, even without AI, search terms are now two to three times longer than what they were even just two to three years ago.  

People, voice search this. This device over here from Amazon, I have, if I say its name, it’ll talk to me. These things have taught us to talk to our technology. We don’t even spend a beat thinking, how am I going to search for this? We just do it, yep. And as a result, our search terms are longer and longer and longer. In fact, the thing that I think it came from, again, from Google, from Gemini, they’re finding that a common search is five times longer than a regular search in Google Search, a search that goes through Gemini, their AI tool, is up to five times longer than an equivalent search that people have to manually type in to the Google interface. That’s so wild, and they’re still manually typing it into Gemini. They’re not, they’re not doing it through voice interesting, but the technology is encouraging a conversation. 

And this is, this is something interesting. It was a little bit of a mind shift for me from how I think about it, when I when I go to Google, I’m trying to find something, and it’s very specific. It may be transactional. Rarely is it navigational. I’m not trying to have Google remember, for me, a website I can’t remember, or something like it’s transactional. Help me find this I need to. I need this product, this thing, this information, and off it goes. And it comes back. In that regard, Google search was a pre-search. You put something in and it gives you 10 choices in blue links, plus some ads, plus some other stuff. But it was pre search. Now you have to search through all this stuff to find what you really want. AI is an answer engine, which is a little different. It still goes out and finds all these sites and searches, searches them, but it amasses them into a single, vetted response and says, Here it is. Now you wonder where it came from. It’s over there on the right hand side. You can go click on it if you want. But this is what they say.  

This is interesting, because what that does is the next thing is you say, thank you. That’s about 53 pages of information. How about you just do this and you give it a qualification that it gives you. It takes the information finds more refines it comes down. Okay, that’s cool. Yes, I was looking for golf golf clubs. And here’s all the golf clubs you can find. Okay, by the way, just left handed golf clubs. Oh, okay, that’s different. So here’s this great. Is there anything here that is more women’s style than men as far as far as weight and length? Yes. Here’s that, and people are having conversations with the tool. We did this, but it was briefer. Briefer? Is that a good word? Good enough. We did it. We did it with fewer words and fewer searches in just regular Google search. Show me, golf clubs, women’s clubs. No, no. You know it was, it was, it was brief things. But for some reason, we will type in full sentences, paragraphs into an AI interface.  

Mariah: I wonder if that has something to do with the the context of the answer it provides. It’s not just like answer, it’s Yeah, I heard your question. Here’s this thing that we pulled together for you. Let me know if you need anything else, it feels more like humanoid-ish. That’s a word, you know. 

Stu: Well, there is a different validation that comes from getting a specific answer, versus Well, here’s a bunch of stuff. You can find it yourself, yeah, if you are, if you ask a good question, and you’re rewarded within three or four seconds with a good long explanation says, Hey, good question. Here’s some answers. It even says it right up at the top, sometimes they are starting to try to program personality into these things which could come back to bite them in the end. ChatGPT, I think it was giving too many affirmations, even when the search was improperly formed. 

Mariah: Can’t wait till they go the route of Garmin and like, Hey, you idiot. Why are you so slow?  

Stu: Yeah, you know. And what we’re experiencing today is still nowhere near the final experience. So how does this relate to context? The context is what we’ve described, the human we’re trying to reach is in the context of using AI and having a discussion instead of a one off search, search query, they will still have those they know generally what they want. They just need to find the one that but somebody who’s in that exploration and evaluation stage, they’re going to thrive in this space, and that’s the place where we change hearts and minds. That’s where we intersect and say, here’s our brand to consider too. If we wait down to the bottom of that decision path, they probably have already come up with, okay, if they’re looking for something, 357, different brands they’re interested in, if we’re one of those brands, great. Otherwise, our job is interruption, and that’s tough, and that’s expensive, but up here, if we’re able to get ourselves injected into the context of their exploration and their evaluation, if we can be helpful in that space, whether it’s in regular search or AI enabled tools of some sort, whether it’s because they were browsing a web page about a popular one I was looking at is somebody was looking up for looking up information about the town that the college was in. Well, when they click on some websites, be a great place to have another ad for that college, because there’s five of them in that town.  
Context always, mastering context is not going to be easy, and it may always feel like there’s just one more thing to do, and that would be appropriate, but every single one of these things, every single one of these instances, is in itself, context I recently heard, and I wish I could attribute it back to who said it. Your audience is everywhere. There the people you want to talk to right this moment. Are in 1000 different places, but they’re still the people you want to talk to. Yeah, you need to find the context that they are in if you want to lead them to the solutions you may have to offer them well. 

Mariah: And I think we’ve talked about this before too. That’s why in the content side of things. That’s why blog often surfaces higher than, say, a program page or a service line page, because you’re answering a specific need. It’s both sets of content are important. You have that general overview for the Hey, acquainting myself with you, and then you have those deeper pieces, those deeper pages, those stories that provide the answer that you’re looking for in a specific context. 

Stu: Yeah, I think that on the content side of the internet, we really have kind of a cool way of going about this, because if we have a blog out there that answers one question, it invariably leads to the next question. Now people don’t have an endless supply of questions. At some point, the last answer is given, and they make a decision. But when you go to work and you’re taking it, you surround a topic with blog articles from different perspectives, from different contexts, and they interconnect where appropriate, but they all tend to be pointing to that, that that look, that central point where the ask, where the action takes place. We know that people are going to take their time for some things. They don’t have a sense of urgency, perhaps.  

And okay, here’s one you. My parents were getting older. We knew we were going to need some help because not the same. We knew that we were going to need help soon, but not tomorrow. So going out and researching that we had all sorts of blogs that we were reading about this, and yeah, some of the blogs put a particular spin, hard spin, on how the blog owner was the best solution for the problem, and you choose to read them or pass them whatever it is. But we amassed a whole bunch of information in that exploration and evaluation stage, and when we had to make a decision, we had already developed familiarity with the brands who we thought were the most helpful. Now we had about an eight month window in this that’s really kind of long for most decision paths that we try to solve online. You can go longer, but it doesn’t tend to be a it tends to be something where you need to be more face to face, or at least one to one engagement. But eight months is kind of long for digital so we had this information. So when we had to make the decision, because it had come down to the point where both parents were saying, Okay, we got I’m afraid that if your dad falls, I’m not gonna be able to help. Yeah, that type of thing.  

We already had three or four brands in mind from our research so that we could we had narrowed our decision path down to that and my sisters and I are in completely different states, which is why my parents were gonna need the help. But we had that common knowledge because we cheered back and forth, and that’s how that blog content helped the provider we settled on when that job? Yeah, it’s exactly how it happened. Because in our discussion on, oh no, wait a second, I read this over here and he talked about something that that mom’s really going to like, because not only will they help her at home, they’ll actually go out and shop with her at the grocery store, whatever it is, whatever it is, but surrounding the topic with helpful content in the blog, answers the context of the moment, and we were able to draw it in and put it to work, and we chose a provider.  

Mariah: Eight months is a long time. I mean, it’s about the same like with higher ed I mean, you’ve got sophomores in high school thinking about where they want to go to college, or their parents, or, you know, whomever. So it’s two years.  

Stu: It is, but at the same time, there’s a lot of space between the sophomore and the decision moment. Now a lot of people at that age, no, I don’t know you can say a lot. Many people at that age, in their heart know where they’re going to go. Several reasons. Mom and Dad said that’s where I’m going to go. So that’s one or two they’ve always wanted to go that that’s the place that for a sophomore to say, this is where I need to be, my path to career is best through this place. There’s a good number of them that know that, and know that they would probably have a very good chance of being accepted, and and that helps. But there’s also the people who really have no have not made up their mind, and very often they’re seniors. They’ve turned in their cap and gown after graduation, and they still haven’t made up their mind. That’s the pointy end of that, of that path. That’s the bottom end of that funnel. This is they’ve been exposed to all this stuff up here, through blogs and everything else, and through this brand and everything else, they’re down here. They know that they have some choices, but their context is now. I got four months before I got to be sitting in a school desk somewhere. I got to make a decision. Different context, different speed. You will have content for that sophomore, you will have content for that soon to graduate. Senior, you will have content for the 11th Hour. Oh, my God. Class starts in three weeks. What do I have to do? Mom and Dad are going to kill me if I’m not taken. Yeah.  

Now, let’s also face it that if it comes down to that timeframe. You’re really looking at a local college of some sort. You’re not going to uproot and go, go five states away on a fight, on a three or four week decision path, unlikely. I’m sure as soon as I say that five people are going to say, Yeah, that’s what my kid I did that. Yeah, yeah. It was great. Had no idea. But at any rate, the point of all this rambling is that every person has context. Every person’s context is different. To be efficient, we find the ones that are the common paths that you might go through that I’m even though we’re different points and different points of view, we’re going to go through the same contextual point here. We need to find out where we’re going to live and how we’re going to do it. We’re going to need to find out how we afford it. We need to find out all these things that are common, no matter what are, the rest of our context is, and slowly build out from there, we may find that there’s a special context of people who are local to the college and still want to live in the dorms and to have a college experience. Okay? Is that something you want to tackle right off the bat? Probably not, but it’s a group about the you know, this big, about 150 people, as opposed to the 1000s of others that you might ignore to focus on that.  

So anyway, yeah, hopefully our conversation about context has had enough context of its own. But the the idea, if I can sum it up a little bit, or sum it up here at the end, we are moving away from a literal interpretation of the web to a context based interpretation of the web. Context is something that is being put pushed forward by most of the agents we work with online, such as Google, such as as Bing. The browsers themselves are helping in this too, because they’re part of the play that says, here’s all the places this person’s been. This is their context. That’s That’s how you’re known on the web, your browser, not anything else. So at the end of the day, we are being brought into a world of context instead of literal interpretation. The fun part is going to be, if you start now, you have some room to explore. If you start thinking about your campaigning, if you start thinking about your content and your web structure based on the context of the user, the context that includes their need, what device they’re on, what time of day it is, all these things, you’ll have a lot you’ll be a lot more successful in achieving the objectives you want, and the sooner you make that switch, you’ll probably have a good head start on the people who aren’t going to make it any time soon. 

Mariah: 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.