Search Everywhere Optimization

Stu Eddins: If you’re optimizing for everywhere, at some point somebody’s going to ask the last question for which they need an answer. And that comes back to, “our content has to close the deal.” 

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: There’s been a lot of talk going on, of course, about AI. It’s everywhere around us. It seems to be invading everything from my shopping list to my Google ads and everything else. There’s been some recent conversation and a lot of back and forth about how you go about influencing AI? How do you get found in this stuff? And there have been a lot of suggestions for what to do, but there’s been a lot of conversation about what to call it. There have been suggestions all over the place, and some more recent ones even resulted in a a posting on LinkedIn by Rand Fishkin, who, interestingly, suggests we already have a name for this stuff, and it’s Seo. Now here’s something. And Mariah, you’ve been dealing with content forever, so SEO is really deep into the language you’re probably using a lot with clients. Have you heard any clients ask what this next step is going to be called?  

Mariah: Not really. I mean, they just want to know, how do I get found? How do I break through the noise? You know, the same things that we’ve always been hearing forever.  

Stu: Yeah, and I think that’s really the big deal. Nobody cares what you call it; the objective is still the same. How do I get found? How does my voice get heard? And how do I make sure that I’m reaching out to people who actually need to connect with me, or I need to connect with them, either way, however you care to look at it.  

So Rand Fishkin suggested that it’s still called SEO, but then he said somebody coined the term search everywhere optimization, which is why the acronym stays the same as it was. There’s a lot of pushback. And a lot of that pushback, I think, comes from the fact that for ages, in the very early days of internet, SEO was pretty much considered to be snake oil. There were a lot of people out there who said they were SEO practitioners who were more interested in selling you a service than helping you get anything done. And you know, I at the time, when I was working on different websites, or, you know, in house, on the brands website itself, we were concerned about these things, and we actually bit on some of those offers that today would be considered Black Hat link farming or spinning out articles to put everywhere else so that we had more links coming into us. Yeah, that was SEO back when there were very few rules and there were white hats and black hats. But today, SEO evolved into a different space. There’s still people who try to game the system more than they should, but this next step has people concerned. You write a lot of content, particularly in healthcare. Let’s talk about that for just a second. I don’t feel your objective has changed one bit. Do you? 

Mariah: Not really, if anything, it’s gotten a little bit more niche. It’s gotten a little bit more specific. So from everything that we’re seeing, groups are still being asked the same questions. From this, many of the same platforms, patients or prospective students are just using a different tool with maybe longer form questions to ask or just search for information. And that’s a that’s a problem that we’re seeing too out there in the whole SEO AIO, you know, Farm Animal Song, alphabet soup situation that we were looking at right now. It’s like, well, people aren’t searching, they’re asking. But at the end of the day, when you’re searching for something, you’re looking for an answer. When you’re asking a question, you’re looking for an answer. It’s just, you know, pedantic, to try to break it down further. So whether it’s a simple near me request, whether it’s a long form request, it’s still people looking for answers, and they’re still looking at you as the institution to give them the answer they they’re looking for. 

Stu: You know? And I think that what this, what this moment, may be doing, is pulling something into focus that’s always been there. It’s just that for many of us, the focus has been easier. It’s been easier to keep focused on a narrow spectrum of services to get a job done. They seem to be the biggest levers to pull advertising SEO, other forms of content marketing, but I think that what we’re leaning into now may be what’s been an underlying truth of all of that. And that underlying truth is kind of explained by the fact that your audience is everywhere. We’ve always been everywhere. We’ve just been able to get our biggest bang by saying, Okay, we’re going to make Google send more traffic to be paid or organic. We’ve been able to have backlinks from blogs, which helps SEO, but also sends traffic from referrals all to our website. But I think this moment actually does bring into focus something else. If our audience is everywhere and search everywhere, optimization, I think we’ve got some high correlation between these two thoughts. I would suspect that as we back out from our narrow view into a broader view, we realize we’ve always had an opportunity to answer those questions outside of search. On Reddit, we’ve had the opportunity to answer it on Snapchat. We’ve had ways to connect with people where they are in a meaningful way. And maybe that’s, that’s the argument for search everywhere optimization. Does that make sense? 

Mariah: Yeah. I mean, we used to just say, create once, publish everywhere. And I think that’s still an appropriate methodology for distribution. But it’s, it’s basically saying the same thing. It’s get your, get your arms around the problem that people have create the content or the, you know, whatever it is, the video, the blog, the ad, the landing page that brings those answers together. Put it out where people are, and they will find that information. I mean, with, with AI tools, with, you know, the “everybody’s a writer” kind of thing that we’re seeing right now and probably going forward, it’s going to be harder to break through the noise as as people say or as people request. But I think at the end of the day, it’s the brands that really take the time to understand the audience, that really take the time to understand the way that people are asking and where they’re asking, and tailor their responses to those queries or to those individual moments of intent that are going to continue to break through the noise, just like every single other iteration of this that we’ve ever seen.  

Stu: Yeah, and I think there’s a couple of things at work here. We’ve always had these other channels we could use to reach people to do, as I said, meet them where they’re at. But it’s less satisfying from measurement point of view. We’re not able to say that well, you know, we went out here and said this thing, and look what it did for our benefit on the website, either through engagement or conversions or something else. It’s not been, I don’t want to call it a gray area, but an easy area, measuring that follow on benefit from some activity you do outside of your domain, outside of your website. And I think that there’s a resistance to that lack of satisfaction, the scorecard mentality, if you will, is gonna take a hit.  

Mariah: Yeah, it’s like the dark ages of content marketing, when we were all out there just with our boots on the ground, like, trust us, it’ll work. And then it did, and then the ways to measure it followed. I mean, I imagine something similar will happen. I can’t I can’t fathom that by this time next year, there won’t be some way to track your AI footprint, or, you know how chat GPT or perplexity is sending people to your whatever, whether it’s your social or your website, or some, some way to connect the dots. 

Stu: Yeah, and I also think that we have to work toward getting away from that single channel mentality of measurement. I don’t think it benefits us to switch from we’ve been tracking how well search works for us to tracking how well AI works for us. I think that that we have an opportunity to not be so narrow. And this may be it. Search everywhere. Optimization, your audience is everywhere, confining ourselves to what Perplexity does, or what ChatGPT does, though it is one of the bigger levers out there we can pull. It’s just part of the whole story.  

I was watching some videos over the weekend, and one of them was a conversation more about. Branding and video and so on. But there’s some correlation here, and I think I can substitute what we’re going to get into what these people were saying. A lot of this stuff is not going to generate a conversion directly. If you go out and answer questions on Reddit, it’s not going to generate a conversion directly. Let’s look at the higher education side of our house. If I go out there and answer questions about how our housing takes care of your need while you’re on campus, somebody who reads that, it’s not gonna go, Oh, great. Click, let’s go to that website. Click, I’m applying today. It doesn’t happen that way. And as a result, I think, and SEO has been regular. SEO has been this way. To a large extent, we have to have a broader view measurement going on. You notice I keep bringing it back to measurement? Then there’s a reason for this, but we have to look at it from a rising tide floats all boats. And in this case, the rising tide is going to be our presence online, and the boats are gonna be the different things that we want to have happen on our website. So we may be looking at is, did branded searches increase? We’re getting back to search as a measuring tool, but it’s talking about the or trying or attempting to measure the impact of everything we’re doing, and using several discrete points to say, okay, when we do this, we see these three things increase. When we stop doing this, they eventually come down, and that takes time to develop that correlation.  

So yeah, really it’s gonna be about things like seeing a lift in brand search totals, or conversions from those branded searches going up. To be more specific, perhaps it’s gonna be incrementality testing, which kind of what that is. So in we do all these things and we say, Okay, we’ve got, we’ve got eight platforms. We’re constantly responding to stuff. What if we stop doing it in two Do we still get the same amount of lift, or does it take all eight and start asking those questions about our presence, rather than getting down to the very last nth degree of precision on click detail? And I think post purchase or posting gift surveys are going to become more important, too. 

Mariah: Oh, yeah. Like the How did, how did you hear about us? What made you make your decision? You know, do you remember seeing us, here, there and everywhere? I mean, this is this whole like, our conversions is more, I think on your side of the table, Stu then mine, because, like, content marketing, storytelling, all of that stuff, whatever you want to call it, has never, has never, in theory, been a conversion, driving channel. It’s never really been like a our sole goal here is to make conversions like on a landing page or an ad. It’s the brand awareness. It’s like what you were saying. It’s the lift. It’s the tying all the pieces together to move the needle, and then at the end of the day, that last point is the conversion point. Sometimes it is a blog, sometimes it is a podcast that you hear just at that right time and say, Now I’m going to make the move. But most of the time, it’s the buildup of those things that lead to seeing a really great ad or a really great landing page and saying, Ah, now I’m going to do it. 

Stu: And to build on what you’re saying, the way I usually look at this is the ad click is the final moment in a conversation that’s been going on for a long time before an engagement that’s been that’s been going on for a while, it’s the decision moment, and the ad only intersects with the decision moment, and we’re only part of that decision moment if we’ve earned our place in that I can put out ads all day long about a counseling associate’s degree, and people may click those ads, but the number of people who are going to act on what they what they see on landing page is quite low. If they’ve never had any contact with our brand beforehand, if they if they are not familiar with us as being a viable alternative to what they may have already had in mind. And I got to tell you, I also kind of look forward to this search everywhere optimization concept, really, because it does tend to describe the full engagement, the full journey somebody takes.  

And we don’t, we don’t invest every single bit of effort, every single dollar we have in being interruptive at the last moment. You know a lot of advertising is you’re talking to a group of people who know the brands that they know, have the experiences that they’ve had, and that colors their thought. And we’re here to interrupt that train chain of thought and interject our. Themselves as an option. It’s just interruptive type advertising. Advertising does that well, it is a tool for that purpose, but I also think it can be the part where it is the culmination of that developed brand presence and knowledge that goes out there. The content marketing that you do, no, it doesn’t drive directly toward a conversion, but the website exists largely for brand awareness and where it can to develop those conversions. And I think if we don’t look at them as joined at the hip, we’re never going to get to a satisfying explanation of our effort versus outcome. 

Mariah: Yeah, yeah. 100% 

Stu: Yeah. Okay. And the outcome is not the same for everybody. You know, yeah. Some people just want to, just want to be known as, hey, we’re just as present as brand XYZ two counties over. That’s good enough that right now, that’s our objective. We’ll come up with another objective after that. So, yeah, I think that search everywhere optimization may be a clue about what we have to think about next.  

Mariah: Yeah, it comes back to what we talked about right at the start is, that’s why with the content part or the brand story part, you might have a big, general piece about a topic, and then each specific step in that user progression towards the conversion would have a different, more specific story or piece or video or whatever. And it gets more and more granular down the pike. So that way you have a piece of content that covers every, every common angle, or every possible step that somebody might stumble upon your brand, and whatever journey point they’re at, you can get them that little incremental cobble towards that that final conversion. That’s the ultimate goal. 

Stu: Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I wonder if it changes our paradigm, if it changes how we think about what we’re doing, because a lot of what we’re doing now and again, more on the advertising side of things is we’re trying to define our activity by actions. And if we’re thinking about, if we’re thinking about the full journey, we’re not trying to influence actions. We’re trying to influence people. And if you’re, if you’re doing that, I think you may be more successful. You know, think about the Cold Wars. There are people who drink Pepsi, who would never touch a coke if you gave them $1 to do it. There are people who think that McDonald’s fries are the best in the world. Burger King, they would just hand it off to their friend and let them eat them because they wouldn’t touch it. Okay, we’re not going to get that level of loyalty, probably the community colleges.  

But think about what the influence you could have if you set yourself up to be the preferred brand, the preferred delivery of service, class, product, whatever it is early on. And you don’t quite have that McDonald’s cache to the to the brand, okay, you don’t, but right now you’re, or you’re strongly in consideration it. And here’s the thing, if you’re optimizing for everywhere, at some point somebody’s going to ask the last question for which they need an answer. And that comes back to, “our content has to close the deal.”  

So I don’t see anything as having changed with all that, except now our focus may be not on the action, the experience of the action, but the experience of the person. And I think that can be a useful change of point of view. I can talk to people and influence them. I have a hard time walking up to them on the street, pushing on the shoulder, and say, Hey, do this. Some people will do it because maybe they’re intimidated by me. Others may do it just to humor me. Some were thinking about doing it anyway, but if I’ve been walking along beside them and talking to them about this stuff in a helpful way all along, well, guess what? We’ve just come up with another definition for SEO in the first place, we’re actually content marketing more likely. So maybe things don’t change so much. We just expand our scope. We do it in more places. When it comes to content marketing, how sensitive are have your clients been toward measuring the outcome of it? Do you think they look at that conversion, or do you think that they’re looking at something different? Something different?  

Mariah: I think we see kind of a split camp. We have a few clients that really care about “this story performed this well because this doctor or this faculty member really cares about their brand,” and they want to know these numbers. And a lot of the groups that we work with still are more on the “this feels good. We’ve gotten good responses to this on social media,” and they kind of stop there. So I think, I think we’re fortunate in that a lot of our clients really understand that hard conversion numbers don’t necessarily come out of content marketing, but they’re a part of a bigger campaign, and I think they understand that the sentiment that comes in through those pieces, either individually or at the campaign level, is really what counts. It’s the shareability, it’s the relatability, it’s the Well, I have a similar story. Here’s what happened to me, or this doctor, you know, took care of my child when they were sick, and I can’t recommend them more, you know, or I had a great experience in this program, and, you know, Professor so and so really changed my life. And just those little anecdotes that don’t necessarily result in a in an enrollment or in an appointment, but definitely lift the brand.  

Stu: Yeah, oh brand, we had a recent experience with that. We helped, we helped a client launch a new website. There was a lot of change that happened. A lot of a lot of work they did to make sure that their visitor journey was smoother, fewer speed bumps in the way that there was more complete information on pages. So it wasn’t just replatforming, where we took content from A and put it on site B, and here we go. They did a lot of work on it, so they had a lot to talk about, and they were out there talking on multiple platforms, our new website, our new experience, our new everything else.  

And the thing we found, because it was more of an informational website, there was not an application moment, necessarily, there was not a registration moment. But what we found, and we were quite happy to share with them, is branded searches surged 30% on the same search terms, branded search terms after launch, about two, three months later, compared to any moment before that relaunch, and it’s been sustained.  

So using that type of a metric, again, back to measurement, we could say that we launched a new website that didn’t do it. Somebody had to talk about it. Somebody had to put the word out there, the invitation to come experience that the content they had to visit, all of this stuff, caused, particularly the outreach, an increase in branded searches specific to the website. And it wasn’t just the brand name. It was they do, they do talk about a certification, though it’s not one of their main goals. And it was the brand name certification was, was the search terms, those really kind of went up. They saw increases in downloads of some key PDFs that they offered. And again, there was no advertising behind this. This was all achieved through, word of not word of mouth, but content marketing tactics, either by guest blogging, their own blogging, PR, everything else that was out there, getting the community talking about it and they saw a lift. Yeah, we’re using one source to prove it, to prove a point, which is search. But the effort was across everything. And I think that’s the search everywhere optimization effect right there. 

Mariah: I agree. I mean, it’s the it’s the old dog, new tricks, but not really kind of thing like teaching it, just to do it a little bit differently, right?  

Stu: Yeah, and we’re not going to answer the question anytime soon about, how do I get myself into an AI result on Perplexity or anything else? I mean, these, these answer engines are changing every week. So anything, anything I would tell a client, do this, so you turn up in a in a Gemini response. It may have some legs and work for a while, but we’re not looking at final Gemini here. It’s going to be something different in a year. And I think that that’s why we have to continue with our original, traditional SEO tactics, but then take that idea and expand it across other platforms, beyond Google, Bing, Yahoo-type search. 

Mariah: Yeah. And I think it’s interesting how many groups and how many agencies are jumping on the this is how you optimize for this, that and the other thing, because at the end of the day, we don’t, we don’t get to see behind the curtain. We don’t know what those algorithms look like. We don’t know what those formulas look like, how they’re scraping things. We have a general idea of how it works, but we don’t. We have more information about Google, the the king of hiding how they do things, than we do about these new platforms. And you know, many of them, most of them, operate by yanking information off of Google and other sites. And, you know, using their data so like we can extrapolate how they work, but at the end of the day, just like every single other thing, and it comes back to tell, tell good stories, give the information your audience wants at every step of the journey and put it someplace where they can find it. 

Stu: Yeah, exactly. And I think that’s a very succinct way to put it. Other things that kind of play into this for me, an article, and I can’t remember the citation, I believe I mentioned it in another, another one of our episodes here, there was an article that said, in their research of AI results, a significant percentage of the content came from pages that didn’t even rank in the top 100 for organic search. So I think we’re looking at two different things that we’re doing here with you know what happens in organic search, what happens in AI answers? They’re two different things altogether, so I think that’s part of that search everywhere optimization. And another person I was listening to this last week had an interesting idea a little more toward the transactional side of things. AI engines AI engines like ChatGPT, that’s where you go to find out what you need. Here’s the quote, here’s my problem. What do I need to solve this problem? But those answer engines, at this point in time, really suck at telling you who can fix your problem. They’re really great at going out and finding a wealth of information to present to you and say, you know, Stu, you got more problems we can solve. But here’s an answer for the one you asked about. And they’re really good at doing that. But the these people that I was listening to, it was, it was a panel discussion. They said, chat GPT helps you find the things you need, but search engines are still where you turn to to find out who has those things for you, and it, to me, is similar to that. Reddit example of content. Reddit is where the answers were given. Was the where the engagement happened. It was based on what we know, which is our content offering, if you will. And that person is not going to click on that and make an appointment, register, apply anything else, but they’re going to come back later on through search, perhaps, you know, Mariah answered my question in the best possible way. Look up where she works, and I want to go explore that, and that’s the transactional side. And I think that this is going to force us not just to look at different places, to engage with people, but to start breaking up these engagements into informational, transactional exploration, you know, evaluation. We’re going to have to broaden our scope in that way too, in how we think of it, absolutely, yeah, and I think content is going to be key to this. Any search ad I write absolutely does nothing for your ranking, findability or anything else, unless somebody searches for the exact thing I’m looking for and clicks on the app. It is a limited discovery tool. A broad discovery tool is everything else you say, all the content you have out there, and again, even the answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini double down on that very thought. You have something to say. Say it in a unique way and be helpful. 

Mariah: I think that about some sums it up.  

Stu: Yeah. Do you remember 10-15, years 10-12, years ago, we were working with healthcare websites, and most of them were using the same health library? 

Mariah: Yea, ADAM, or whatever it was called. Yeah. 

Stu: That was a contracted service. And if somebody said, you know, “what is a knee replacement?”, you clicked on it. It went to the health library. It had the content and the pictures and everything. 

Mariah: But you can put your own logo on it, right? That’s how they marketed it. 

Stu: Every hospital had the exact same content, even if they had it on their domain, it was the exact same content. Then they figured out they have to describe it in a unique way. That was not easy. I think going forward, we have to be even more unique, if that’s a possibility. But our uniqueness has to be in our serviceability of the content we’re offering. That it has to be maybe, that we have a greater array of answers on a content page, and we have to think logically about the progression of what’s the next question somebody may ask. 

Mariah: Yeah, the rise of the FAQ page. They always come back. Everybody hated FAQs for the last five years for some reason, and now they’re back. They’re back, baby! 

Stu: Mariah, there’s a group of people out there who suggest that we are going to have websites for search engines for all the people out there in the world to come visit us and see what we have. And we’re going to have something else altogether, which has that same information, but strictly categorized for the AI answer engines that are out there. And I’m thinking, Okay, we worked really hard to get rid of the m-dot-mobile domains we used to have to have and have a responsive website. Same thing’s going to happen here. 

Mariah: Yeah, yeah. The smart groups will just continue to put it all together.  

Stu: So again, just another indication that we already have most of the tools we need. There will be some new stuff. But I think the search everywhere optimization, the your audience is everywhere. Thought, I think that that content continues to be the reason to have a web page or a website in the first place, and paying attention to that is perhaps more important than how you promote the fact you have it. The reason for that is paying attention to the content you have earns attention from search engines and answering engines.  

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.