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.

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:  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.