I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at the first-ever SEO Week a few weeks ago, and as always, I took my camera to chat with speakers and experts. I collected some pretty amazing tips for digital marketing, and I’m sharing them with you on today’s episode.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Wil Reynolds:
My one tip is simple. Every time you get a lead that says, "They use ChatGPT," you better ask them what their prompts were so you can figure out how people are actually searching.
Garrett Sussman:
Okay, you've gotta learn the conversational search platforms. I know Google is the behemoth, and it's not going anywhere, and everyone uses Google search. But if it was up to me, AI mode's coming, it's gonna replace everything. People are using ChatGPT. So learn these platforms. Figure out whether you're ranking, whether you're not ranking, what are the tips and tricks. You've gotta get in there and experiment. Put that scientific hat on and learn before anyone else does. Yeah, it's probabilistic. Yeah, nothing is gonna stick. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't learn why. Get it, SEOs.
Dale Bertrand:
SEO is not dying, it's just changing. So your customers are still looking for your products or services. So you need to figure out where they're looking for your products or services. It might not be on Google anymore, but they're still looking.
Jeff Coyle:
Fi- Figure out ways to use artificial intelligence to predict and estimate levels of effort so you can get your projects approved every time. When you go into a discussion and you know that you need to create seven articles and update six, and you can tell the story of why, those budgets get approved. Thanks.
Ruth Burr Reedy:
Execution is a success metric. You can track implementation and execution and report on them in the same way that you would track and report on and metric that you don't have control over. Now you are able to connect inputs, that is the things that you're working on now, with outputs, that is the results that they get in the future. You don't only have to talk about the effects now of stuff you did in the past. You can report on in-flight projects in ways that get people interested, teaches them, because that's what reporting does, what to care about, and gets them more invested in the things you're doing now to affect what happens next.
Jori Ford:
Marketers should always align themselves to the main KPI of every business, which is revenue. Even non-profits have to make money to spend the money that they make. If you're not aligned to revenue, you're not doing your job right.
Grant Simmons:
This might sound obvious, but it is very, very important for your brand to be the expert on (laughs) your brand. There's a lot of time that people have spent mik- making content that is, you know, top of the funnel on all these extra topics that isn't necessarily related to, directly to their brand, but creating content that is explicitly about what your brand does, what your brand offers for consumers, what your brand offers for your users, how people can use it, what they can use it for, all of those different things can give you much, much, much more value in a divested search, where there's like lots of different kinds of ways that people are finding content, because people are going to be comparing you to other brands. They're going to be comparing you to, you know, lots of different offerings.
And if you have content that's s- explicitly on your brand, nobody can compete with that because you will always outrank other folks by creating, uh, content directly about your brand. And if you are able to get that information from your users, from the questions that they ask you, the questions they ask your sales team, the comments they ask in the, in the reviews, the comments they ask in forums, things like that, then you will never go wrong. It will always add value. And it is an evergreen, a tactic that can make marketers better at their jobs.
Crystal Carter:
All right. So if you want start Creating content that converts, whether it's landing pages, emails, or a website, you need to start thinking about your customers' emotions. It turns out that without emotion, we lack the ability to make any kind of decision. Whether you're in B2C or B2B, that is still a big issue. You need to understand why people buy from you. What are the emotions behind that? If you're wondering, "Okay, Talia, great, but what are those emotions?" Let me tell you about two critical clusters of emotions you should care about. Number one, self-image. These are people that are asking themselves, "How am I going to feel about myself after I find a solution?" And social image, social image is people that are asking themselves, "How am I go- How are other people going to feel about me after I buy this solution?" So if you're thinking about optimizing a landing page, ask yourself, "Are you making it about that? Are you concerning yourself? Are you creating content about their self-image or their social image?" And if you aren't, try and test it.
Talia Wolf:
All right. My advice for digital marketers is that since, uh, informational content is being hit so hard with AI overviews, your middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel content is your bread and butter. And it's really important for you to figure out how to convey that to leadership, how to manage their expectations on what the ROI for SEO looks like. And one way you can do that is to check out my slides of the talk I just did on, um, the heavy hitter framework, which is a framework I used at HubSpot, one that I'm currently using at, uh, Hims and Hers. And it is a way to at scale identify those middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel content pieces that are really impacting your bottom line. And so, shameless plug, but check out my slides and you'll get some nice formulas and frameworks to do just that.
Bianca Anderson:
All right, one of the great things we've been talking about here, yesterday especially, was around meaning and whether LLMs and search engines actually understand what your content is about. I think that's the main challenge most people have, is they use marketing speak as opposed to actually describing the product, or service, or the issue they're solving. So be meaningful, show your meaning. Be simple for search engines and LLMs to understand what you are about.
Max Prin:
If you use the NLP API from Google, and use that to classify your content, so that's one of the end points of the API, classify the content, you'll find out that those, the taxonomy, the exact categories that is the output of the API, are the exact same categories in Google Trends. I'll let you do whatever you want with that, but that's really cool if you're looking for topics trending stuff and match your performance with what you're actually really good at based on your categories, uh, uh, from the NLP API.
John Shehata:
Okay, so I have uh, three cool ideas to share with you guys. The first one is Google Discover. It's huge. Okay? Most of the publishers are getting 70% of their traffic from Google, it's mainly in Google Discover. So the most important thing about Google Discover is understanding how Google understands your content in terms of entities and content categories, and then matching this to users' interests. So if you read uh, or go to Taylor Swift concerts all the time, and publishers write about Taylor Swift s- and music, and entertainment, and so on, Google matches these, too. So you better understand how Google understand your content.
The second one is a quick one, is like, "Okay, we need better metrics." Clicks are no longer good, right? Yes, I understand if you're in commerce, conversion, revenue, and all the stuff that's amazing, and your local business, uh, you know, leads and so on. But for publishers and other content providers, clicks are no longer good. So is it impressions, is it mentions, is it citations? We need to come up with a better metric. And the last one, which is very obvious, right, for the past 20 plus years as SEOs, we have been always able to adapt. So don't panic. AI or whatever they throw at us, we will figure out a way, we will come out of this. But be flexible and don't panic. That's it.
Zach Chahalis:
Um, I would say one of the biggest things is still focusing on the basics of technical SEO. Think a lot of folks are getting too hung up in, you know, focusing on the LLM side, which is great, but people are still not looking at those basics on the technical side, and the amount of instances I'm still seeing where JavaScript is being extensively used on a website, it's not only hurting your organic performance, but it's gonna hurt your LLM performance, too. Uh, most of these a- LLM bots will not process anything behind JavaScript. So if you're continuing to kind of focus on that, and you're operating your website from a technical standpoint like it's 10 years ago, you're not gonna make any progress.
Robert Hansen:
All right. What you really should be doing Is going and meeting your security team in your company. You probably don't even know these, the ... these people exist at all, but they also don't know you exist. And one of the cools parts is these guys have tons of technical expertise. All you need to do is say, "Here's my business problem. Here's how we're getting screwed. Here's what the bad guys are doing. Can you, can you lend a hand?" And they basically a tiger team, ready need to go, they just don't even know you exist.
Phil Nottingham:
So for certain YouTube queries, only a kind of video of a certain length is gonna rank. So what you want to do is go and get the data for every single video that you can find on a given query. So scrape the top 500 results, find the average length of a video, and then the variance of that length. And what that will tell you is roughly how long the video that you should create should be in order for you to be able to rank for that query.
