We are back with a brand new episode of Local Search Tuesdays, and this time, I assembled a group of fantastic digital marketers to share their best tips with you. Check out what everyone from Engage had to say about the future of digital marketing.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. This week I’ve got an awesome treat for you: I’m sharing tips from the speakers at Engage a few weeks ago in Portland!

I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at Engage last month, but you probably already know that since I shared a recording of my session last week. But as always, I grabbed some of the speakers and had them share tips that would help digital marketers, and this time, we got some really amazing tips – check them out:

Speaker 1:
All right, if I had one tip for every digital marketer moving into an AI-ish kind of world, it would be this. You should take a query about your company and run it every week in three to four or five different models, because that’s the only way you’re gonna truly understand when they’re getting smarter and when they’re getting better and when they’re getting more consistent at answering questions that you know to be true. So I’m telling you, it’s super easy, especially if you use Poe, P-O-E.com, you can put a query in, you can click multiple different LLMs and it’ll run it across all of them and then store those answers so then you can use AI to compare them against each other and see who’s getting things right and wrong.

Speaker 2:
All right, gang, look, I’ve got a couple of quick tips for you here. Um, not surprisingly, everything that we’re gonna touch on is related to AI. Um, first off, if you’re nervous about AI, you need to put that aside. You have to adapt and adopt AI in what you’re doing. Something that businesses are looking for, it helps make you more efficient, you will find ways to improve what you’re focusing on and there’s another very important reason. It’s because AI is coming whether you want it to or not. You don’t have to like change, but you do have to adapt to it.
You can’t be blocking AI bots on your website, you need to let them in. As we advance and we grow to an era of AI agents, we are literally going to be filtering all of our content through our AI agents personally, and if you won’t let those base crawlers in from an AI, there’s zero incentive for them to show you to a consumer. So you block the crawler, you block your future. Don’t be doing that. Adapt to this, get in there, best $20 a month that you’re gonna spend is ChatGPT Plus.

Speaker 3:
All right, so if you are going to create AI content or content with AI, here’s my tip. Please don’t forget about the humans behind the content and the humans we’re creating the content for. You have a lot of skill, expertise, experience and brilliance that you are bringing to the table when creating content through AI tools. Remember that, and remember that the tools are just that, they’re just tools. And remember that the content you’re creating is built for the people we’re trying to reach. Keep it human-centered, keep it human-focused, keep humans at the center of it and you will go far.

Speaker 4:
All right, so one of my newest ways to come up with sales enablement topic ideas is to take a transcript from a sales call, drop it into ChatGPT and ask ChatGPT to identify what’s the tone, what were the hesitations, what were the questions being asked and what kind of content can I create to address these hesitations, the questions to make the tone more of a positive sentiment if it was a negative sentiment at all, and ChatGPT will start to populate different ideas and then you can ask it, all right, what medium should this be? Should this be a blog post? Should this be a video? What would be the most helpful way to really address these questions, really change these negative sentiments and make them into positive sentiments? And you’re gonna generate tons of new topic ideas for sales enablement topics by doing this exercise on a monthly basis.

Speaker 5:
Never has there been a time that we have to be more diligent about constantly learning. Upskilling ourselves in really niche areas. Um, Schema Markup’s what I know and there’s some great free training at training.schemaapp.com. Why do you care about Schema Markup? Because it’s the language of search engines and AI.

Speaker 6:
Today I did a talk on Entity SEO and I think one of the key things that many people came up to me afterwards, was about SameAs Schema and how they use it. Well, the key thing is, SameAs Schema can work for almost any site where you connect the actual page topic to a known knowledge graft, generally Wikipedia or Wikidata. So look at entities in your page, look at the SameAs Schema, there’s, you can put in a page and make Google understand your site better.

Speaker 7:
Okay, so for my tip is for in-house search marketers. When you’re trying to get a project approved and you think there’s gonna be push back, look for low-hanging fruit. Look for a way to implement a smaller portion of that project so you can prove it ahead of time and that’ll make it easier for you to get approval for the whole project.

Speaker 8:
Embrace the culture of no dumb questions. When we ha- go ahead and say, “No dumb questions, how does X work? Or what does Y mean?” We get to drop assumptions that lead to gaps between great skills, good intentions and the outcome we desired.
And my second thing for you, just say, “Can I repeat that back?” And say what you heard. That’s gonna close the gap in communication to make sure you’re both on the same page going forward.

Speaker 9:
So the tip I want to talk to you about today is in GA4, everyone’s favorite tool, I know you hate it, but you have to use it. And what’s just been introduced in GA4 are saved segments. Segments, if you haven’t jum- ventured into the brave world of explorations in GA4, are kind of like how segments were in universal analytics. You can create segments based on characteristics of users or how they got to the website, or even time-based segments. So someone did this and then five days later they did this. They’re really cool, they’re great for remarketing, but they’re also great for segmenting your audiences in GA4, and that’s what you can do with your segments.
You can create audiences based on segments. If you’re in local SEO, create some audiences and segments based on the location that people are in. And I don’t mean their city, ’cause it’s, GA4 doesn’t always know where people are from, but the location page they might have viewed. Try creating a segment of everyone who visits the website, except for people who looked at your jobs page, and then you’re removing people from your website conversion rate, or pardon me, key event rate, um, from people who may not ever actually become a lead, because they want to work there, they don’t necessarily want to buy your products.
Think about different ways you can create audiences/segments based on personas or different characteristics. Did people who watched this video, are they more likely to end up converting down the road? Those are all sorts of interesting stuff you can do with segments. And if you haven’t gone to explorations and check out segments, you really should, it is probably the best part of GA4.

Speaker 10:
When diving into technical SEO issues, it’s tempting to say, or look at the issue at face value. So example, duplicative H1s and saying, “We just need to clean these up.” But realistically, you should be diving deeper into what is systemically causing those issues. Maybe it’s something with your CMS, maybe it’s somebody who’s just not doing the correct document outline best practices. And by doing that, you create a better and more efficient deliverable that you can give to your client and fix things more holistically and are less likely to run into those issues again.
And speaking of deliverables, while creating said deliverables, think about your actual audience themselves when doing so. Don’t just deliver a spreadsheet of all the issues that you export from whatever crawler that you’re using. Once you’re diving deeper and understand what’s causing the issues, create a separate deliverable that then explains things further. Maybe it’s a spreadsheet, maybe it’s a document, but by doing that, you have better opportunities to get executive buy-in to actually implement those recommendations that you’re making. They better understand them, but then you also have your supplemental data that you can give to your developers or whatever team is implementing, so they know exactly what’s going on.

Speaker 11:
So the one thing that I always try to remember is that Google is a business. Google makes money the better it’s able to capture the user intent. Therefore, if you also try to match with the words on your page, with how you market your company with the website, its design, if you’re also able to match the user’s intent, you’ll be essentially skating to where the puck is going to be because that’s what Google wants to do. So I worry less about the words, the keywords, things like that, I always focus on making sure that everything that I do is pointed towards understanding and delivering to the intent of the user.

Speaker 12:
My best tip in order to run a successful campaign in terms of paid search is to understand your audience and break everything apart. The best way to do that, especially with Performance Max is get granular, understand your clients, understand your users and that whole entire journey. So break it apart.

Speaker 13:
My tip is it’s, with the age of AI, it’s finally time to start, uh, paying attention to your Meta descriptions. Most of us have left them blank for years knowing Google will, uh, put a s- a snippet in there, but when we see AI overviews, they’re actually pulling that data, so it’s time to start paying attention to your Meta descriptions.
My other tip is it’s time to check out serprecon.com, brand new tool I just launched that lets you use real information retrieval science, like cosign similarity and vectors and all that other fancy stuff, to analyze your site against competitor sites using real method search engines use instead of made up metrics that the SE industry loves to use so much. So check out serprecon.com.

Great tips, right? That’s all the time we have left for this week’s episode, so you know what that means. Put your hand on the screen right here:
We totally just hig fived ‘cause you learned something awesome.
Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next week for another episode of Local Search Tuesdays.