September 29, 2025 • 55 mins
The digital marketing landscape is transforming dramatically with Google's MUM (Multitask Unified Model) reshaping how search works and forcing marketers to adapt their strategies beyond traditional SEO approaches.
• MUM combines text, images, videos, maps and other data types to create a comprehensive understanding of topics
• Google's framework has evolved from "micro-moments" to the "four S's of discovery" – stream, scroll, search, and shop
• Customer journeys are no longer linear but resemble atoms or squiggly lines as users bounce between different touchpoints
• Small businesses can compete by focusing on building communities and engaging audiences across multiple platforms
• Traditional keyword tracking is becoming less valuable as search becomes more personalized and conversational
• Content strategy should shift from high-volume production to creating fewer, higher-quality pieces with extensive distribution
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Website: https://mobilemoxie.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cindykrum/
Twitter/X: https://x.com/Suzzicks/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing,
your insider guide to thestrategies top marketers use to
crush the competition.
Ready to unlock your businessfull potential, let's get
started.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Howdy.
Welcome back to anotherfun-filled episode of the
Unknown Secrets of InternetMarketing.
I'm your host, Matt Bertram.
We've been bringing on somefantastic guests.
I am remote, so if there areany glitches or sound issues,
please I apologize ahead of time, but I think you'll love what
we're going to be talking about.
It's not something we've talkedabout a lot on this podcast yet,
(00:39):
but we've indirectly talkedabout the buyer's journey and
what's happening with thebuyer's journey and how that's
changing and how to measurethings.
And there's a term called MUMMultitask, Unified Model.
The way search online ischanging.
Like I don't even know ifGoogle is really a search engine
(01:01):
.
The analogy I heard is it usedto be like the librarian that
you would go to and it wouldtell you, hey, go check this out
over there.
And now you go to the librarianand it just gives you the
answer, and so everybody'sstarting to optimize for the
answer.
Engine SEO's got a lot ofdifferent terms.
Things are changing and Iwanted to bring somebody that's
(01:25):
an expert on to really talkabout that.
Cindy Crum with Mobile MoxieWelcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Hi, thanks very much for having me.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
We met at SEO conference and you actually grew
up down the street from me andthat it's such a small world
You're now based out of Denver,but this world, as everybody
transverses I just even rememberand I know that this is not the
point of the podcast, but theworld's so much smaller today
(02:01):
Like I remember calling cards,like if someone lived near you
you would have to do a callingcard to talk to them and
schedule everything.
And mobile phones and how peopleare searching online is
absolutely changed and howpeople search online we used to
talk about like a standardizedfunnel, right, and it was very
linear, that you would go fromhere to there, to there to there
(02:22):
.
And you know, I rememberreading a Google study where
that said it.
It kind of looked like a atomor something, like people would
come out, come back to thecenter, come out, come back to
the center.
And then I've seen those imageswhere it's like a squirrely
line.
For those of you listening, Idon't have the image pulled up,
so don't worry, but it's likeyou know, they go back, they get
(02:42):
distracted, they come back andit's not a linear funnel.
And now, with you know LLMs andyou know mom, like everything's
changed and I would love tokind of get your perspective on
like.
Maybe you define for theaudience what mom is like and
like how it's changing stuff andwe can just start the
(03:04):
conversation there.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Sure.
So MUM is something that Googlestarted talking about back
around 2017, 2018, as I recall,and it was right around or just
after mobile first indexingstarted rolling out, and the
abbreviation or the acronymstands for multitaskified Model,
which doesn't really meananything.
(03:25):
Those are just a bunch of words, but a lot of people remember
it as Multimodal Unified.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Model.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
And that's kind of more representative because when
Google announced MUM, theannouncement talked about this
language model that didn't justuse text, it used images and
videos and maps and statisticsand facts and all of those other
things and it could combinethose into this unified model.
(03:56):
And so the multitask part isreally checking all of those
different kinds of assets to putthem together into a model
where the search engine canunderstand a topic in a more
multidimensional way andunderstand what is the right
kind of experience that the userwants when it's searching for
(04:19):
this topic.
So it kind of takes.
You know, we went from havingentities sorry keywords and then
we got into entities, whichwere kind of groups of keywords
and language agnostic keywords,and then we have journeys, and
journeys are kind of like all ofthe things you could do with an
(04:40):
entity and that's what Googlewas trying to map.
So that's that's kind of it.
But then they've taken it awhole lot further in terms of
the way Google is talking aboutsearch these days versus how
they used to, and a lot of itdoes seem to incorporate these
mum concepts.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
You talked about the different customer journeys.
That was one of the things thatreally got my ears to perk up
is based upon the journey, likethe bucket they fall into and
the typical like.
I mean they mapped out right,like how you used to buy a car
or a computer online and whatthat process would look like.
(05:22):
But now they have enough datato figure out what these typical
buckets are and when they dropyou in that bucket that's going
to be representative of thesearch, so it's not just all the
searches that are out therebased on that keyword or that
entity, but it kind of falls youinto that journey.
(05:49):
That journey how, cindy, doesthat affect?
Like, does that give smallbusinesses a stronger
opportunity to rank?
Because I'm concerned with thebifurcation of all the things
you have to do online to show upthat small companies can't
compete Like they have the GNBor the GDP.
But beyond that now to show up,I feel like it's a lot harder
(06:11):
to do and you've got to have alot more plate spinning and
things working to reach thesedifferent things unless you've
built a community and I thinkeverything we've we've talked
about on the podcast going kindof going back to a very laser
focused community centric modelfor small businesses.
I mean, how, how would theydeal with something like that
(06:33):
with these changes?
Speaker 3 (06:35):
Yeah, I think that you're right and I think that
there is um a lot of good reasonto um worry about smaller
businesses and how they're goingto compete, especially in
Google getting the traffic thatthey maybe used to get, because
it is true that bigger brandsare getting a larger share of
(06:55):
the traffic and for some kindsof businesses it is getting much
harder to show up in searchresults.
So, with journeys, what Googletalks about, or what they
originally talked about, waswhat they called micro moments,
and this was aligned with kindof Google's move towards mobile,
(07:17):
and they called the micro akalike small, and this was kind of
, I think, micro moments theystarted talking about before
mobile first indexing startedrolling out and what those were.
They said when people are ontheir phone they're more action
oriented and their actions fallinto one of these four things,
(07:37):
and it was I want to know, Iwant to go, I want to do, I want
to buy, and I think thatsomeone's told me that they
later added another micro moment.
I'm not sure about that, butwhat's interesting is that those
four micro moments fall neatlyinto Google properties that have
been well monetized or at leasthave been attempted to monetize
(07:59):
.
So I want to know is regularsearch.
I want to go is maps.
I want to do ends up beingYouTube and I want to buy is
Merchant Center.
And of course, we've seenmassive progression and
evolution of how Google hasmonetized those properties for
themselves to make them kind ofprofit centers where they can
(08:23):
make money by driving moresearches and selling PPC ads in
the searches, but then if theywant to keep making money, then
they can rank and send searchersto other properties that
they've also monetized, becauseobviously all of those
properties are owned by Alphabet, so they benefit either way.
(08:44):
And then the other thing toknow is that even when Google
isn't actually making money on atransaction or an ad or
something like that, they'remaking something monetizable,
which is they're collecting datathat they can monetize later.
And so all of the behavior thatthey're capturing through
Chrome about us as we search isallowing them to do things like
(09:10):
create the AI that now runs PMAXand all of the cohort modeling
and journey modeling that makesPPC much more profitable, like
they needed the data of whatpeople want to make that a
profitable solution foradvertisers.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
I love how they even have added, like the CAPTCHAs to
training labeling data for you,right.
So like they, like yeah, Ididn't know that until I don't
remember when someone sharedthat with me is that's what
they're doing, right, andthey're training their, their,
you know, before tesla, they'reself-driving cars and, like all
(09:47):
this data is super valuable.
I remember was it google thatbought?
It was like a uh, a temperaturecompany.
Did they buy the nest orsomething like that?
They, I think they bought I Icould have this wrong alphabet
buys a bunch of stuff.
I think they bought nest andthe reason they bought that is
it was all this digitizedtemperature data that they could
(10:07):
use.
They were buying for the data,not necessarily for the cool,
you know Apple looking tool.
That's probably a nice add on,but, but everything, data is the
new oil.
I know that that's been talkedabout.
I think it's starting to cometo the forefront with all these
LLMs and these models now, likeI think people had said that.
But there was a lot of manualeffort that had to be done to
(10:31):
label all this kind of data andGoogle's been capturing and
labeling data for so long andthat's why, on these ads, you
know you turn them on, you setup your parameters and over time
, it's just like a heat-seekingmissile and it finds your right
type of person.
I I also know that googlestarted moving like really
(10:53):
pushing in their lastannouncement um, you know,
e-commerce, like on the site,because they're not going to
drive them necessarily off thesite, they're going to do the
transaction there and thenthey're leaning into youtube
really big.
I'm not sure exactly how they'regoing to add additional ads to
youtube, because youtube, if youdon't pay for the subscription,
are already.
Uh, I, I can't even handle it.
(11:14):
I had to, I had to pay to thesubscription model to not get
ads every uh, 10 seconds.
Um, but I mean what?
What can you speak to of wherethe general market's going and
and maybe how companies need tobe thinking about this journey
and how to track it?
Speaker 3 (11:35):
Sure, so Google has updated how they're talking
about micro moments and theydon't use that phraseology
anymore.
Uh, most recently they'vepublished some articles about
the four S's of search, andthose are stream, scroll, search
and shop, or the four S's ofdiscovery, or something like
that, or brand awareness orwhatever.
(11:57):
So it's those four S's stream,scroll, search and shop and
those also fit with propertiesthat Google has right Stream is
YouTube, scroll is Discover,search is regular search and
shop is Merchant Center.
So again, google is tellingmarketers that this is how
journeys happen, that peoplebounce from these four S's while
(12:19):
they're on a brand discovery orproduct discovery or a search
and discovery process, and thatif you want to be seen, you need
to be potentially in all ofthese, or at least you need to
map out where people are doingthese activities in the
(12:40):
discovery process.
And they give even an example.
Um, I think they call it.
They don't call it journeymapping, but they call it some
other mapping, like awarenessmapping or something like that.
And they say figure out, youknow what percent of your
traffic is coming from each ofthe four S's in early discovery.
You know mid and then end offunnel and make a graph.
(13:00):
And they show you how to makethe graph.
So what that tells me aboutGoogle's vision of the world
digitally is that successfulbrands are not just banking on
one website to do all the work,and this is what you were
alluding to.
Is that you kind of.
(13:21):
You know, a lot of SEOs rightnow are saying you have to be
everywhere, and that soundsreally overwhelming to small
business owners, and so I thinkwhat Google is kind of trying to
subtly hint at is you don'thave to be everywhere like full
time 100%.
You have to be where your usersare and where they're looking
for you in their normal journeyand give them the kind of
(13:45):
content they want for thatparticular product or service at
the point when they want it.
So I think that's their yeah,that's their advice of like you
don't have to do everything 100%.
We want you to be amulti-faceted business that
isn't just, you know, pumpingout loads and loads of kind of
(14:06):
light, fluffy, boring contentevery week on your website, but
creating a community, like yousaid, and doing creating the
community and engaging with yourcommunity where they are
already.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
So, cindy, it's interesting If you look at the
major gold standard tools thatmeasure a lot of keyword
tracking, they typically brokecontent up into informational,
transactional, commercial andnavigational Is you name it?
(14:44):
It was all about the branddiscovery at the top of the
funnel, right.
So it was like really heavilyinformational searches, the
direction from Google that I sawin one of their I don't know
exactly where it was, but Ibelieve it came from Google.
They really want you to be 25,25, 25, 25.
(15:04):
And you know, if you have anonline business or other things,
maybe there's a carve out forthat navigational search.
And what we see with a lot ofclients is they don't have as
much transactional search at thebottom of the funnel.
And that transactional searchthe comparisons, the you know
you're trying to make a decisionis across the internet, and so
(15:28):
you know the traffic.
What Rand Fisken said you knowlike, based on a number of his
slides I saw him at a couple SEOconferences is like traffic's
been cut in half or more thanhalf, and so you know you need
to help the LLMs understand thebottom of the funnel
transactional content that youcan control on your website um
(15:49):
and listicles and there's otherthings and and what I'm seeing
from what you're saying whatGoogle's saying is no one's
really mapping that one for one,right?
It's like everybody's got theirown ranking factors that
they're using.
And then there's like this iswhat Google wants you to do, and
(16:10):
then you're trying to have toconnect the dots there.
I mean, what are your thoughtsaround that?
Just in the market in general?
Speaker 3 (16:17):
Yeah, I think at large, that is kind of what
we're trying to do is connectthe dots.
But I think that the way thatwe're all thinking about SEO and
search as a whole right now isprobably going to need to change
soon, because if you thinkabout what Google's been
(16:37):
investing in marketing towardsrecently, it's AI mode and then
all of the AI stuff in in thepaid side of the house AI mode,
and even, you know, recently Ithink it was a week and a half
or two weeks ago Google added AIsummaries to Google discover,
(17:02):
and this was something that Ikind of predicted at SEO week,
because I said, you know, atthat point Google had just
internationalized SEO or GoogleDiscover and made some changes
towards making it moreinternational and I said, you
know, this is not an accidentand they've just rolled out AI
mode.
(17:23):
Now they're making GoogleDiscover international AI mode
is rolling out're making GoogleDiscover international.
Ai mode is rolling outinternationally.
This seems like it goestogether.
And then, of course, they justadded the AI summaries to Google
Discover and they added AI modeas an option on the main page
of Google and I think we'regoing to see more convergence
(17:44):
where potentially, ai mode andGoogle Discover combine or at
least are going to test.
That is my guess, and thereason that's important is that
Google Discover has always beenpersonalized to not just a
cohort but a person right andtheir own individual interests.
(18:07):
And I think that AI mode, ifit's going to be successful,
they're probably going to tryand go really personalized and
that's why it's, you know, in AIoptions you're getting the chat
with Gemini stuff, because it'strying to understand you and
your decision-making process andwhat you, in particular, want
and are looking for.
(18:27):
So if I have a history ofconsistently, you know, shopping
for groceries on the internetand looking for the best price
on paper towels, it's going tostop showing me the most
expensive paper towels and it'sjust going to show me the best
deals potentially.
So the idea and the takeaway is, yes, we can't, we're not going
(18:50):
to be able to optimize for youor me, but we're going to have
to understand our customers on avery deeper level and
understand why our brand sticksout to them as opposed to the
other ones.
So if all I want is thecheapest paper towels out there
and it's showing me deluxe papertowels, I'm going to have a bad
(19:12):
experience.
So if you're trying to talk tothe LLMs and you sell cheap
paper towels, what you need tosay is our paper towels are
super cheap're.
We know you're just using halfof it and throwing the rest away
anyway.
You don't need the super heavybulky.
Whatever, buy these, save money.
It's better for the planet.
(19:33):
And then you're going to makeme feel good about my decision
to buy cheap paper towels.
Um, stuff like that, where it'sit's not just, it's not just
listing product like basic specs, but it's listing more deeper
benefits that will resonate witha buyer when they're making a
(19:53):
final decision.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
So I'm hearing and I've heard this in other
conversations is we have to goso much deeper on the ideal
target persona than what wethink and doing additional
research.
There's tools out there, likeRand Fishkin's tool that, like
it, really opens it up of likewhere your people are at, what
(20:19):
they might be looking at, whatare the associations, because
it's going to be so personalizedto you.
And I've seen some customerjourney maps where you know if
you're not speaking to thatperson's value structure or what
they've done historically, evenif you're ranking for that
keyword, you might not show upin that journey at all and so
(20:39):
it's again getting laser focused, like you said, on that target
persona.
So the question that I ask andI think we've been kind of
dancing around it's againgetting laser focused, like you
said, on that target persona.
So the question that I ask andI think we've been kind of
dancing around, it is okay, Iunderstand that it's changing, I
understand I need to know thisbetter, but how do I measure
this?
Like, how do I see how I'mdoing?
(21:01):
And I've heard a lot of peopledoing manual searches and that's
not a very unified way to seewhat an agnostic look of what
other people might be searchingfor Because, again, all your
searches are now customized toyou and I would even say, which.
I don't have complete clarity onthis.
(21:21):
This is my assumption, but whenyou go to incognito mode in
Google, when Google said, hey,you can do, do not follow links,
and we're still going to lookat them, I feel like the same
thing is is the case forincognito.
Because you're incognito, myincognito is going to be
(21:42):
different.
What is that based on?
Well, where we aregeographically, maybe, and our
user preferences, and so that'swhere I think everything starts
to unravel for people that aretrying to rank and search is how
do you measure all this stuff?
The current set of tools thatare available today are not what
(22:05):
we need for AI mode and and momand um.
I know that there's a couple ofpeople out there that are
trying to stand up tools, butthe majority of the industry
right now is still playing theold game.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
Yeah, and I I don't think there's a great answer to
the question, honestly, becauseyou're right, the industry is
still playing the old game,because the idea of summarizing
everything that's happening ineveryone's private AI chat
conversations is just somonumental and hard.
There's this oh, not allegory,but there's this um, what do you
(22:45):
call it?
Speaker 2 (22:45):
a story that tells analogy yeah, like a fable more
oh, fable, I love fables.
Speaker 3 (22:50):
All right, let's do it um, but there's this fable
and I'm not even I don't evenknow the name, but it's about um
, a map maker, and the king ofthe region.
Has a contest for the mapmakers to see who can make the
best map of the region.
And this one guy goes crazy andwants to make the best map, so
he makes the most detailed mapbecause he thinks detail is the
(23:12):
best.
And so he makes the mostdetailed map possible, and it
ends up that the map is the samesize as the territory and it
covers the territory and killseveryone.
So not helpful, right, like.
So you've got to know, like,when to summarize and when to
omit details, right.
But the problem is, when thingsget so detailed and so deep
(23:34):
down and individualized, it'sreally hard to summarize that
and know what's important.
And so I think we're going tobe ending.
I think for a while, and maybe,you know, for a long.
I think we're going to beending.
I think for a while, and maybe,you know, for a long time,
we're going to be leaning harderon basic query statistics
(23:55):
rather than success statisticsor visibility statistics, and we
might have generic visibility,share of voice kinds of
statistics, but not, like youshut up for these 8 billion
queries, because the queries areall going to be so different
and they're going to be stringsof queries in a conversation,
not a single keyword or not asingle keyword phrase.
You know they're going to be ina deep context that you're not
(24:17):
going to be able to tease out,and so that makes our job harder
.
But that's why Google needs thejourney modeling is because in
a conversational search theyneed to understand what the next
most likely question is goingto be.
And you can already see themusing search to train to further
(24:38):
train their journey models.
Right, like, think about, if youthink about, every time you see
a people also ask that's aprompt to say, hey, your
question was kind of vague, didyou really mean this?
And when they click on a peoplealso ask, you're saying, yeah,
when I searched for that, what Ireally meant was this Right,
and it's a bit of a deeperiteration on the question.
(24:58):
It's not the same level, it'sslightly deeper, right, and then
they'll keep going a little bitdeeper.
Ok, you have that.
Do you also need this?
Do you also need this?
And so they're trying to.
They're seeing what users clickto get a model of you know,
when someone searches for this,what they really where they
really want to end up is thereso.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
So it feels like we're going back to like old
school marketing, right, whereyou're measuring, like uplift
and you're, you're doingsomething and you're seeing,
okay, I, my impression countshigher.
Did that produce over x periodof time?
Uh, more leads, more revenue,right, and I mean you can
measure stuff that's happeningon a website.
(25:39):
But how?
How do people wrap around theirminds Because we've trained
them for so long, right?
Like you're at the top of therankings for X amount of these
things, like you need to trackthese keywords, like, how do you
follow the analytics?
Speaker 3 (25:56):
I guess I think, yeah , like I said, like I don't
think there's a great answer.
I think there are a lot ofpeople trying to solve this
problem.
I think we're going to need tochange KPIs.
What you said about communitybuilding is huge.
I think that's really kind ofthe sneak.
(26:17):
The sneaky way to get aroundhaving to not have data is when
you build a community, you canhave real engagement, data and
real interactions with yourcustomers, and that not only
helps your brand resonate betterin a more long-term way, but
gives you a lot of more dataabout them, more opportunities
(26:40):
to re-engage them and stuff likethat.
And then there are also, Ithink that we might see a shift
towards more active engagementmetrics, things like comments on
a post or a video, or and whenI say post, I mean like social
(27:00):
media posts, not a blog postnecessarily I think we're going
to see a decrease in I hopewe're going to see a decrease in
people just like pumping outthe same boring website content,
and it's going to shift tothese kind of multi-channel
distributions that represent thebrand as a whole across the
(27:21):
Internet, where your website isjust you know.
For a while, people have saidyour website should just be one
part of your marketing, but theother parts were like your
website and your emails andoffline.
But now I think it's like yourwebsite, your Instagram, your
TikTok, your LinkedIn and stufflike that, because the LLMs what
(27:46):
they are looking for is notjust on your website and if you
just have a website, even ifit's great, it's not enough To
convince the LLMs that you'regood.
You need to be the places wherethe LLMs are looking.
And what LLMs you know?
Seos keep saying that LLMs lovenovelty and they like novelty,
they like to learn new things,but what they love is
(28:07):
consistency.
And if they see a consistentmessage across your brand, from
you and other people that you'reengaged, that you're the best,
that you're the cheapest, thatyou're the whateverest, then
they believe it.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
So the thing that I think about when you shift from
like website content to socialmedia content is which I would
would.
If you have any data or canpoint me in the right direction,
it would be great because I Idon't know the answer.
The decay rate on social mediaposts, okay, like for a visual
user is, you know, four to sixhours maybe right, and so when I
(28:46):
hear you need to be on onsocial media like, I know people
that are very big on instagramor tick tock and they have to
continue to produce these videosbecause they they only, they
only have so much uh like, uhlife in them.
Um, there are some kind ofinformation architecture,
structures like reddit andthings like that.
(29:06):
You know gnb where you can grabsome of that stuff, but I
wonder how far and and the lms Idid see some data that said on
a blog post, on average, theyonly look back about 10 months,
um, so I'm wondering.
You know there's so much noiseon linkedin right now, but
there's a lot of great stuffthat people are posting.
(29:28):
I wonder if if you've seenanything about the decay rates
for LLMs going further andreading social media posts,
right, cause you're, if you'rebuilding out the hashtags and
you're, you know, you're, you're, you're setting that, that in
motion.
Do you know?
Is it just the life cycle ofthe post or or is there, you
(29:49):
know, more runway to, to, to, tospeak to the LMS, and again,
right, I do need to say it, theLMS are only, you know, one to
3% of search.
Still, right, so it's, it's notthat big of a deal, but we've
even shifted at our agency to uh, offering more of a social
(30:09):
media as an SEO company, becauseit's kind of like left arm,
right arm, like the full body ofyour, your brand, like building
your brand online.
You need to incorporate some ofthose things and I think,
historically, when I would talkto other SEOs, seo was a silo
and social media was a silo, butthere's a big merger happening.
(30:32):
I don't know if anything.
I said you can kind of speak toit, but I'm just talking out
loud now because I agree withyou that social media shouldn't
replace being search optimized.
But what is a search engine now?
And then, as people move overto AI mode, which I think AI
(30:57):
overviews for me was a way tokeep people in the old search
until they get everything elseset up you might have a
different perspective on that.
These other LLMs like when Istarted using LLMs pretty
aggressively, like I go toGoogle and a website to do a
final check on something, but alot of my research is done on
(31:19):
social media.
Or what are other people saying?
Reviews, yeah, and thatengagement rate.
I have seen data that 30% ofthe time that people spend on
social media is now readingcomments, you know.
And so I think that that'sreally really important.
But for a business, whether itbe a big brand or a little brand
(31:41):
because big brands you got togo through legal or maybe you
have some executive that peopleare ghostwriting for,
potentially because they can'tspend all day on social media.
And then the smaller brandswell, they're trying to run a
business and they don't haveenough people to do it.
You got to pump out a ton ofcontent to just keep up and it's
really quite noisy.
(32:02):
I like your idea of going backto really focusing on those new
micro moments, whatever they'recalled.
I remember micro moments.
I can't even say GDP withoutthinking about it.
I still say GMB.
It's ingrained in my brain,it's not GDP, it's GBP.
And I'm dyslexic.
(32:23):
I'll say that so sorry toeverybody.
Hopefully they know what I'mtalking about.
But this just looks to be,cindy, a monumental task for any
brand or any business to do.
Now I do think all of thesethings have been said over and
(32:43):
over again.
You should be doing all thesethings, but now it's kind of
like it's not like a bonus, it'slike a necessary thing that you
need to be doing to be able tocompete.
What is the world going to looklike, you know, in another 18
months?
Speaker 3 (32:58):
Yeah, I think this is now table stakes for SEO.
This is what you need to be.
A good SEO is to be doing thiskind of, you know, cross
platform optimization.
They used to call it barnacleSEO, and it does still have that
benefit where, if you'restruggling to rank your blog on
XYZ keyword, you might have aneasier time ranking a YouTube
(33:20):
video on that keyword or anInstagram post on that keyword,
and I think that has not goneaway.
That may even have doubled downnow that Google is ranking UGC,
forum content and whatever,with more preference and big
brands with more preference,right, like, so.
So it's a really, I think,solid strategy, but I think that
(33:45):
you know you're right that itit, it's this huge commitment.
But if you think about how manyblog posts people were pumping
out that were kind of like midquality whatever, um, I think
the idea is, um, and there'ssomeone who talks about this a
lot um, ross Simmons, thecoolest cool on Twitter.
Um, one of my favorites, and hetalks about like not creating
(34:10):
you know so many blog posts allthe time, but creating like
better ones and then getting thedistribution really right.
And if you spend, you know,five hours writing the blog post
, you need to spend, and I don'tremember his math.
But let's say if you spend fivehours writing it, you need to
spend.
And I don't remember his math.
But let's say if you spend fivehours writing it, you need to
spend 10 hours doing thedistribution.
(34:30):
And I think that is going to goeven further.
So let's say, if you're a smallcompany or even a big company,
let's say you're a big companyand you have to get a concept
approved by legal and that takesmonths, so you have to plan out
your content way in advance.
You do one 10x piece, but thenyou get the distribution of that
10x piece right.
Then you break it up into amillion different shorts and
(34:53):
videos and stills for Instagramand stories and reels and put it
everywhere where the wholemajor concept has been
pre-approved.
You're not actually creatingnew stuff.
You're creating one big thingand then breaking it out and
turn and allowing the smallerpieces.
So the the one, the one pieceyou know, gets you links, gets
(35:13):
you authority from people whoalready know who you are and are
aware of you.
The smaller pieces feed thejourney of people who are still
in the discovery phase to get toyou.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Right, I feel like you need to produce one like
pillar piece of content and thensplinter it out.
Um uh, ryan dice, uh, hissocial media marketing course,
which now all that stuff he'slike just giving it all away
because everything's changingreally explained to me
(35:48):
conceptually many years agoabout taking that piece of
content.
And I haven't heard the wordBarnacle SBO before.
I've got to look that up.
That's really cool.
It makes a lot of sense.
I haven't heard that one.
Speaker 3 (35:58):
Oh, it's a bigger site and then you rank by proxy.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
Yeah, we did that, but I never heard it called that
.
That's really cool.
That should be a name for acompany, um.
So what that makes me think islike people are just turning out
content Right, and you saidthat the the mid quality content
that you know.
People are just throwingsomething in chat GPT and
(36:24):
posting it Like you're like thebar is coming up, but it's still
like that's the bare minimumand it's really that really high
quality content.
The way I see this stuff, whereit's original research and um,
you know something different,that's that is novel, that that
people might not know about, butit's helpful.
So I mean, where's the balancebetween volume and and quality?
(36:48):
And I mean it's very hard toget both of those off the charts
for for for any business.
And going back to what you saidbefore, what are the things
that you've seen that?
Maybe because I think LLMs arejust modeling very intelligent
people of looking for stuffonline and getting a bunch of
different resources and comingup with um, you know a
(37:12):
conclusion, uh, like, how dopeople need to be thinking about
this in a framework like highquality sites or um?
You know certain types ofcontent that map to those
different decision points.
I mean, what would be a SEOplan for I don't know?
Pick any company and like,let's just do a walkthrough of
(37:33):
what that might look like.
I love the idea of getting thatconcept approved and
splintering it, but I I juststill think you know how many
times can you post about thatsame type of thing from a
different angle?
Right, if you got a four to sixhour window on social media why
do you say four to six hourwindow?
(37:55):
tell me more about that uh, sofrom what I've seen of how the
algorithms work, like if youpost on facebook or linkedin,
unless through the initialaudition period you get some
really high engagement, thosethose posts will, um, get kind
of down indexed and not to saythat if not a big influencer
(38:17):
reposted or comments on it, it'snever going to get the
trajectory or reach of anotherpost.
And so if we have that initialconcept that we broken apart
into all these different thingsand we post that, and maybe we
post it from a couple ofdifferent angles, tell that
story like, how many times canyou recycle that type of content
(38:38):
before you need something new?
Because, like you made me think, maybe we just do one really,
really good piece of contentthat goes viral versus a bunch
of mediocre content.
Speaker 3 (38:51):
Yeah, that's the idea .
Yeah, that's the idea.
And then, and then you'reposting.
When you're breaking it intothe smaller pieces and posting
it across the web, it's going toresonate and you'll learn this.
It'll resonate in somecommunities better than others.
This, it'll resonate in somecommunities better than others.
And so then you learn what thatcommunity likes and then you do
(39:11):
slightly different things.
If a different community likesdifferent stuff, right, and you
get to fine-tune your messagingand how you repurpose content
for the different audiences inthe different places.
Or you say, like this isn'tworking, this channel isn't
working.
We're going to de-emphasizethat.
Um.
But I think, like one of thereasons I like uh ross's model
(39:33):
is like how long did you spendon it?
Create a multiplier of that'show long you should be um
repurposing it or how mucheffort you should spend on on uh
distributing it.
Creating a model like that foryour own business, because it's
going to be different foreveryone and it's going to be
different with the level ofeffort you put in in the first
(39:53):
place.
Right, if you put in fiveminutes, then spending 10
minutes to distribute, it isfine.
Spending 30 minutes todistribute, it is fine.
But yeah, I think it'll bedifferent depending on the
content and depending on whatyour availability is and what
the depth you can go on the theinitial idea in the first place,
(40:13):
um, and then you've just got tomeasure the success and the roi
right, um, so I don't thinkthere's going to be one specific
answer for everyone, but the.
So I I've totally shifted how Ithink about digital marketing as
a whole and I am reallyinterested in the brands and
(40:38):
products that are succeedingwithout websites at all.
So things, products that havegotten TikTok famous, or maybe
they have a website, but it'sauxiliary compared, you know,
products that are just TikTokproducts basically, and yeah,
now they have a website thatthey didn't originally.
Or people who have mademillions of dollars doing
(40:59):
influencer marketing right, like, I think, influencers, digital
influencers and influencers eventhat are, I think, ai
influencers is an interestingfuture space Terrifying, but
also interesting, and so I thinkwe really need to shake off,
(41:20):
you know, the shackles ofhistory and of the way we've
thought about SEO before.
We've thought about SEO beforeBecause you know, when you
search for something that youknow, or if I were to search for
something that I know is onTikTok a lot, the likelihood of
the website ranking versus aTikTok video or a Reel or an
(41:43):
Instagram or whatever, becauseall of those things can usually
be cross posted across all theplaces.
I think the website might comein.
Eighth, you know, and what we'retracking, what we have great
tracking on is the website.
What we have less good trackingon is sometimes where people
are discovering us and like howmany times it takes them to see
(42:04):
the brand on a couple ofdifferent channels to actually
make a decision and seek us outand search for us by the brand
name and stuff like that.
So I think we have to kind ofget comfortable in this lack of
data and like I don't know howto convince people that that's
the reality, except to say thatlike you've been operating on
horrible data for years.
Like just don't.
Like it's always been bad data,it's been directionally
(42:28):
accurate at best.
Um so.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
so we got to grow as SEOs, we got to evolve as SEOs.
Is the message that that I'mgetting, and you know, being
more comfortable with otherverticals inside digital
marketing um, really looking atlike, how is your brand showing
up?
And, to your point, I'm aboutto bring somebody on that's
grown totally through influencer, markerships and partnerships.
(42:55):
He's grown his own brand.
It's a speaker brand andhundreds of thousands of visit,
valuable traffic, never done SEO, all brand searches, how?
How are these brands growing?
Because we got to be thinkingabout it differently and the
current set of skill sets that alot of seos have it's like,
well, now you're telling me Ineed to be social media and I
(43:17):
need to do this.
And it's like, yeah, you do.
I think everything's shiftingand and a lot of people I've
heard shedding off the seo uhtitle and maybe becoming more of
a digital marketing.
We talk about relevancyengineering, like kind of that
concept.
Speaker 3 (43:35):
Well, if you're not convinced by what I've already
said, think about, like, whatwould have happened if all of
the companies that were hit byhelpful content had a diverse
set of traffic sources and awell-established brand that
wasn't just getting traffic fromGoogle.
This is good business strategy,good marketing strategy.
(43:56):
It's not just good SEO strategyand it's not good.
What was it?
What does Mike call it?
What engineering Relevance,engineering Relevance,
engineering strategy.
It's just good businessstrategy as a whole to not put
all your eggs in the Googlebasket.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
Yeah, no, I think I think everything is changing and
broadening Awesome.
I would love to transition towhat you do over at mobile
moxiecom.
You know where, what, what youtypically talk about.
I think some of this stuff thiswas the podcast that I really
you really did it to to getpeople to shift gears right,
(44:34):
like everybody's talking aboutwhat's changing, but the reality
is you got to make the shift tosay there is, there is a whole
new way of looking at things,and I actually heard from a lot
of different sources SEO isgoing to kind of go away and get
integrated into everything elsethose concepts but it's just
(44:54):
that broader business strategyof what you talked about and you
really put a great, great pointon that.
I would love to talk about moreabout what you're doing over at
Mobile Moxie and how people canfind out more of what you're
talking about and your speakingtalks and all that.
Speaker 3 (45:10):
Yeah, sure, well, so I'm going to agree before I get
into my personal stuff.
Like I think SEO should havebeen integrated into all the
different things for years now,like that's how SEO is done
correctly, and I think it hasbeen true for years.
It needs to be at all of thedifferent aspects of a marketing
(45:33):
journey in a company need to beinformed by SEO, and so that's
kind of what I do is I'm aconsultant.
I help some of the biggestcompanies in the US and in the
world with their SEO strategy,and that's what I'm doing is
usually like cross-functionalmaking sure the different people
in the company are aware of SEO, understand how it works and
what they're doing right andwhat they're doing wrong and
(45:54):
what they can do to help, andstuff like that.
Educating internally to makesure everyone's singing from the
same lyrics, and yeah.
So I do a lot of consulting, Ido a lot of speaking and
training around the world.
I'm still you know, even thoughit sounds like what I'm saying,
people might interpret it as mesaying SEO is dead.
(46:15):
I don't think SEO is dead.
I think it's absolutelychanging and evolving and I'm
here for that.
I think it's exciting, I thinkit's also scary, but you know
we've got to evolve or die right.
So that's what I'm helping ishelping my clients evolve and
make sure that they're doing thebest job they can to still show
(46:37):
up in Google but also be readyas all the AI systems come on
board.
I'm talking to clients andtraining people about the four
S's, about how Google viewsjourneys and journey modeling
and how they're using that data.
And then, of course, I have atool set on mobilemoxiecom, and
the tools that people love thebest are called the Serperator
(46:59):
and the Pagescope.
The Serperator lets you seereal live search results from
anywhere in the world down to anaddress.
Most tools just work on apostcode or whatever, but we can
do it down to an address and weshow you the live search result
of what it looks like right nowand we can track that over time
and we parse it with differentmetrics.
So we do like if you set it up,we'll track the same search
(47:24):
result over time and give youthings like you know your
website's pixels from the toppercent of search.
We let you claim things thataren't just your website.
So we have a score called Moxiescore, so you can say this is
me, this is me, this is me, andyou can claim all the things in
the search result that areactually you or like benefit you
Like.
So if you're a restaurant andyou're in a top 10 list, claim
that, and that way, seo getscredit for everything SEO is
(47:48):
doing and not just for thewebsite, right?
So if you have a YouTube videoas social so this is kind of how
I'm looking at the future isthis Moxie score concept of like
how much Moxie is like, howmuch do you own that search
result, and then we also show AIoverviews and stuff like that.
So that's the Surferator, andthe long-term tracking is called
(48:10):
SurpDatalizer, and then thePagescope lets you track
competitors and it gives you avisual and then rendered and
unrendered source code forwhatever page on the internet
you want.
So it's like the Wayback Machine, but it's reliable and you can
say get this page and get itdaily, weekly or monthly,
whatever you want.
And it's a great way to trackyour competitors, because if all
(48:30):
of a sudden, you lose rankingsand your competitor gets above
you and you didn't changeanything and Google didn't
really have any big things, thenyou know that your competitor
changed something, but you mightnot know what, and so we have
all the code, all of the visuals, and we have a diff checker
that'll let you say, like, checkrendered code from this day
versus this day and, you know,show me what's changed, and that
(48:52):
way you can see oh, they addedschemer, oh they changed the
title tag, or oh, they addedthis piece of content and that's
why they're ranking right.
And so the the hard part aboutselling those tools is that it's
kind of like selling insuranceto healthy people.
People are like oh I, oh, Idon't need that, I'm doing fine,
but by the time you need itit's too late, cause we only
it's capturing.
Things live as they are, but wecan't go back in history, and
(49:14):
that's the problem with any SEOtroubleshooting.
Like your boss might come toyou and be like when did this
happen?
And they're showing you asearch result and you're like I
don't know, I wasn't, you knowso.
Speaker 2 (49:33):
So the competitor rank tracking and the share of
voice is, you know, in thesocial listening tools are now a
staple.
Like you, you need to havethose to to be able to
understand, because how thesealgorithms work is is how you're
doing versus what's going on inyour marketplace in that area.
So if you don't know where theweights are changing for the
competitor, those all thosethings impact you, Even if you
didn't do anything or got apenalty or whatever, and now you
(49:55):
tanked, it's not that youtanked, it's that other people
shot ahead of you, Right, and soyou.
So I think that those tools arereally powerful If you
understand that you need to becontracting competitor data of
what they're doing.
It's not you're, you're not ina vacuum, you got to it's all in
comparison, and so tools likethat are super valuable.
Speaker 3 (50:17):
Yeah, I think SEOs for years have been so focused
on just their own website andwhat did we do to make it better
or worse?
And like, maybe you didn't doanything, maybe someone else
just changed something and thathelped.
And they're all like, well,what are where's our website
ranking?
Well, where's the rep?
What else is ranking?
That's influencing a searcher'sjourney, right, like that's
kind of what we want to capture.
So, yeah, those are the tools.
(50:37):
They're really cheap.
Actually, I think our lowestprice is like 30 or 40 bucks a
month, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (50:43):
I would encourage people to go check it out.
I wanted to bring her on aswell to talk more about how to
use her tools and let her kindof walk me through it, so I got
a little free demo here.
So this is awesome.
I would encourage everybodyelse to go check it out.
You really should be looking atwhat competitors are doing.
That's what's going to give youthe insights, and some of these
(51:05):
tools are absolutely powerful.
So I would go check out mobileMoxie.
Cindy, I know you're active onLinkedIn.
Is that the best place forpeople to find you?
Speaker 3 (51:13):
No, actually LinkedIn is the worst place.
I get so much spam.
The best place is,unfortunately, twitter or email.
I need to get better atLinkedIn, but I get so much spam
there.
I need to get better atLinkedIn, but I get so much spam
there.
Speaker 2 (51:27):
They've reduced the amount of connections.
They've been really working onthat signal.
I do Twitter like if y'all arewanting to rank in Grok, like
that's why he bought Twitter.
If anybody wants to know, heneeded a data set.
And Twitter we were talkingabout the information
architecture is somewhere youneed to be.
That's a lot, cindy.
(51:48):
What we're talking about withclients is like why you need to
be all these different placesand like where you're showing up
and like you got to reallyunderstand that market and
understand what the competitorsare doing and how people are
searching for you.
Uh, Twitter, twitter's great.
My my account got banned twice,so I've started over.
Speaker 3 (52:07):
Um well and I know people have bad experiences on
Twitter, but I tweet like.
I tweet a lot of dog videos notmy own, sometimes my own dog
videos but mostly I retweet dogvideos and my algorithm is great
.
So you just have to likeretweet dog videos and you won't
get the bad people on theTwitter.
Speaker 2 (52:23):
Yeah, yeah, um.
So, cindy, definitely, give meyour Twitter and we'll, we'll,
we'll share, we'll share that inthe show notes.
So hopefully everybody got alot out of this podcast.
There's two big takeaways forme, and you need to know that
SEO is changing and if you'restruggling which you may be
because everything's new it'sbecause the game has changed.
(52:47):
Everything's new, um, it'sbecause the game has changed and
you need to think of yourselfas a digital marketer.
Uh, a Swiss army, nice,multifact, functional tool.
You need to be able to beeverywhere.
You got to be able to explainthat to your clients.
Uh, if you're listening, pleaseunderstand.
Like, it's not a one trick ponywith Google anymore.
That owns most of the marketfor people searching, so it's
getting harder.
There's, there's other services, uh, and, and areas that you
(53:10):
want to be optimizing for yourbrand.
And then the biggest thing thatthat Cindy said right there at
the end is you really need toknow what your competitors are
doing.
Uh, like, if, if you don't knowwhat your competitors are doing
, you're you're running blind.
Uh, cindy, I want to end thispodcast with asking you what is
the biggest unknown secret?
(53:31):
And you can repackage somethingwe've talked about, but what
would you say the biggesttakeaway is for somebody
listening that they need to bethinking about.
What's the one unknown secretof internet marketing in your
book?
Speaker 3 (53:46):
I think I'm thinking really hard.
So I think that I have beensuccessful because and I've
gotten a reputation for beingable to spot and understand
changes that Google is makingand explain them before their
(54:06):
public knowledge, before they'reannounced.
That's kind of my special skill, I think, and the reason I'm
able to do that is I spend a lotof time looking at what Google
is doing, what Google ispublishing, what they're
investing in and what they'rewriting about, and that helps me
(54:29):
connect the dots of going, oh,they're writing about this, but
in SEO, they're talking aboutthis, and how do those two
things go together?
And you think about it for aday or two and then you're like,
oh, that's how they go together, that makes sense.
And that has really helped mebe able to understand where
Google is going and I've gottenit right quite a number of times
.
So I would say, think like youwere Google and say, like what
(54:52):
would I be doing if I wereGoogle?
And then plan on them makingreasonably intelligent and I
used to just say reasonablyintelligent.
Now I'd say reasonablyintelligent and money making
decisions.
Like Google is really trying tomake a lot of money right now
and they're changing theirdecision models in favor of
making more money where it usedto be more on the don't be evil
(55:12):
side.
Now they're like make moremoney and that's cool, they're a
business, they're allowed to dothat.
But how is Google going tomonetize?
This is an important question.
Speaker 2 (55:23):
Absolutely Well, everyone.
Hopefully you enjoyed thispodcast.
Please shiko us, share like.
Follow us.
Please leave a comment.
If you've got any value.
Please tell us what you foundvaluable or what you want us to
talk about.
Thank you, cindy.
So much for coming on.
Until the next time, everybody,my name is Pat Bertram.
Bye-bye for now.
This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing,
your insider guide to thestrategies top marketers use to
crush the competition.
Ready to unlock your businessfull potential, let's get
started.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Howdy.
Welcome back to anotherfun-filled episode of the
Unknown Secrets of InternetMarketing.
I'm your host, Matt Bertram.
We've been bringing on somefantastic guests.
I am remote, so if there areany glitches or sound issues,
please I apologize ahead of time, but I think you'll love what
we're going to be talking about.
It's not something we've talkedabout a lot on this podcast yet,
(00:39):
but we've indirectly talkedabout the buyer's journey and
what's happening with thebuyer's journey and how that's
changing and how to measurethings.
And there's a term called MUMMultitask, Unified Model.
The way search online ischanging.
Like I don't even know ifGoogle is really a search engine
(01:01):
.
The analogy I heard is it usedto be like the librarian that
you would go to and it wouldtell you, hey, go check this out
over there.
And now you go to the librarianand it just gives you the
answer, and so everybody'sstarting to optimize for the
answer.
Engine SEO's got a lot ofdifferent terms.
Things are changing and Iwanted to bring somebody that's
(01:25):
an expert on to really talkabout that.
Cindy Crum with Mobile MoxieWelcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Hi, thanks very much for having me.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
We met at SEO conference and you actually grew
up down the street from me andthat it's such a small world
You're now based out of Denver,but this world, as everybody
transverses I just even rememberand I know that this is not the
point of the podcast, but theworld's so much smaller today
(02:01):
Like I remember calling cards,like if someone lived near you
you would have to do a callingcard to talk to them and
schedule everything.
And mobile phones and how peopleare searching online is
absolutely changed and howpeople search online we used to
talk about like a standardizedfunnel, right, and it was very
linear, that you would go fromhere to there, to there to there
(02:22):
.
And you know, I rememberreading a Google study where
that said it.
It kind of looked like a atomor something, like people would
come out, come back to thecenter, come out, come back to
the center.
And then I've seen those imageswhere it's like a squirrely
line.
For those of you listening, Idon't have the image pulled up,
so don't worry, but it's likeyou know, they go back, they get
(02:42):
distracted, they come back andit's not a linear funnel.
And now, with you know LLMs andyou know mom, like everything's
changed and I would love tokind of get your perspective on
like.
Maybe you define for theaudience what mom is like and
like how it's changing stuff andwe can just start the
(03:04):
conversation there.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Sure.
So MUM is something that Googlestarted talking about back
around 2017, 2018, as I recall,and it was right around or just
after mobile first indexingstarted rolling out, and the
abbreviation or the acronymstands for multitaskified Model,
which doesn't really meananything.
(03:25):
Those are just a bunch of words, but a lot of people remember
it as Multimodal Unified.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Model.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
And that's kind of more representative because when
Google announced MUM, theannouncement talked about this
language model that didn't justuse text, it used images and
videos and maps and statisticsand facts and all of those other
things and it could combinethose into this unified model.
(03:56):
And so the multitask part isreally checking all of those
different kinds of assets to putthem together into a model
where the search engine canunderstand a topic in a more
multidimensional way andunderstand what is the right
kind of experience that the userwants when it's searching for
(04:19):
this topic.
So it kind of takes.
You know, we went from havingentities sorry keywords and then
we got into entities, whichwere kind of groups of keywords
and language agnostic keywords,and then we have journeys, and
journeys are kind of like all ofthe things you could do with an
(04:40):
entity and that's what Googlewas trying to map.
So that's that's kind of it.
But then they've taken it awhole lot further in terms of
the way Google is talking aboutsearch these days versus how
they used to, and a lot of itdoes seem to incorporate these
mum concepts.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
You talked about the different customer journeys.
That was one of the things thatreally got my ears to perk up
is based upon the journey, likethe bucket they fall into and
the typical like.
I mean they mapped out right,like how you used to buy a car
or a computer online and whatthat process would look like.
(05:22):
But now they have enough datato figure out what these typical
buckets are and when they dropyou in that bucket that's going
to be representative of thesearch, so it's not just all the
searches that are out therebased on that keyword or that
entity, but it kind of falls youinto that journey.
(05:49):
That journey how, cindy, doesthat affect?
Like, does that give smallbusinesses a stronger
opportunity to rank?
Because I'm concerned with thebifurcation of all the things
you have to do online to show upthat small companies can't
compete Like they have the GNBor the GDP.
But beyond that now to show up,I feel like it's a lot harder
(06:11):
to do and you've got to have alot more plate spinning and
things working to reach thesedifferent things unless you've
built a community and I thinkeverything we've we've talked
about on the podcast going kindof going back to a very laser
focused community centric modelfor small businesses.
I mean, how, how would theydeal with something like that
(06:33):
with these changes?
Speaker 3 (06:35):
Yeah, I think that you're right and I think that
there is um a lot of good reasonto um worry about smaller
businesses and how they're goingto compete, especially in
Google getting the traffic thatthey maybe used to get, because
it is true that bigger brandsare getting a larger share of
(06:55):
the traffic and for some kindsof businesses it is getting much
harder to show up in searchresults.
So, with journeys, what Googletalks about, or what they
originally talked about, waswhat they called micro moments,
and this was aligned with kindof Google's move towards mobile,
(07:17):
and they called the micro akalike small, and this was kind of
, I think, micro moments theystarted talking about before
mobile first indexing startedrolling out and what those were.
They said when people are ontheir phone they're more action
oriented and their actions fallinto one of these four things,
(07:37):
and it was I want to know, Iwant to go, I want to do, I want
to buy, and I think thatsomeone's told me that they
later added another micro moment.
I'm not sure about that, butwhat's interesting is that those
four micro moments fall neatlyinto Google properties that have
been well monetized or at leasthave been attempted to monetize
(07:59):
.
So I want to know is regularsearch.
I want to go is maps.
I want to do ends up beingYouTube and I want to buy is
Merchant Center.
And of course, we've seenmassive progression and
evolution of how Google hasmonetized those properties for
themselves to make them kind ofprofit centers where they can
(08:23):
make money by driving moresearches and selling PPC ads in
the searches, but then if theywant to keep making money, then
they can rank and send searchersto other properties that
they've also monetized, becauseobviously all of those
properties are owned by Alphabet, so they benefit either way.
(08:44):
And then the other thing toknow is that even when Google
isn't actually making money on atransaction or an ad or
something like that, they'remaking something monetizable,
which is they're collecting datathat they can monetize later.
And so all of the behavior thatthey're capturing through
Chrome about us as we search isallowing them to do things like
(09:10):
create the AI that now runs PMAXand all of the cohort modeling
and journey modeling that makesPPC much more profitable, like
they needed the data of whatpeople want to make that a
profitable solution foradvertisers.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
I love how they even have added, like the CAPTCHAs to
training labeling data for you,right.
So like they, like yeah, Ididn't know that until I don't
remember when someone sharedthat with me is that's what
they're doing, right, andthey're training their, their,
you know, before tesla, they'reself-driving cars and, like all
(09:47):
this data is super valuable.
I remember was it google thatbought?
It was like a uh, a temperaturecompany.
Did they buy the nest orsomething like that?
They, I think they bought I Icould have this wrong alphabet
buys a bunch of stuff.
I think they bought nest andthe reason they bought that is
it was all this digitizedtemperature data that they could
(10:07):
use.
They were buying for the data,not necessarily for the cool,
you know Apple looking tool.
That's probably a nice add on,but, but everything, data is the
new oil.
I know that that's been talkedabout.
I think it's starting to cometo the forefront with all these
LLMs and these models now, likeI think people had said that.
But there was a lot of manualeffort that had to be done to
(10:31):
label all this kind of data andGoogle's been capturing and
labeling data for so long andthat's why, on these ads, you
know you turn them on, you setup your parameters and over time
, it's just like a heat-seekingmissile and it finds your right
type of person.
I I also know that googlestarted moving like really
(10:53):
pushing in their lastannouncement um, you know,
e-commerce, like on the site,because they're not going to
drive them necessarily off thesite, they're going to do the
transaction there and thenthey're leaning into youtube
really big.
I'm not sure exactly how they'regoing to add additional ads to
youtube, because youtube, if youdon't pay for the subscription,
are already.
Uh, I, I can't even handle it.
(11:14):
I had to, I had to pay to thesubscription model to not get
ads every uh, 10 seconds.
Um, but I mean what?
What can you speak to of wherethe general market's going and
and maybe how companies need tobe thinking about this journey
and how to track it?
Speaker 3 (11:35):
Sure, so Google has updated how they're talking
about micro moments and theydon't use that phraseology
anymore.
Uh, most recently they'vepublished some articles about
the four S's of search, andthose are stream, scroll, search
and shop, or the four S's ofdiscovery, or something like
that, or brand awareness orwhatever.
(11:57):
So it's those four S's stream,scroll, search and shop and
those also fit with propertiesthat Google has right Stream is
YouTube, scroll is Discover,search is regular search and
shop is Merchant Center.
So again, google is tellingmarketers that this is how
journeys happen, that peoplebounce from these four S's while
(12:19):
they're on a brand discovery orproduct discovery or a search
and discovery process, and thatif you want to be seen, you need
to be potentially in all ofthese, or at least you need to
map out where people are doingthese activities in the
(12:40):
discovery process.
And they give even an example.
Um, I think they call it.
They don't call it journeymapping, but they call it some
other mapping, like awarenessmapping or something like that.
And they say figure out, youknow what percent of your
traffic is coming from each ofthe four S's in early discovery.
You know mid and then end offunnel and make a graph.
(13:00):
And they show you how to makethe graph.
So what that tells me aboutGoogle's vision of the world
digitally is that successfulbrands are not just banking on
one website to do all the work,and this is what you were
alluding to.
Is that you kind of.
(13:21):
You know, a lot of SEOs rightnow are saying you have to be
everywhere, and that soundsreally overwhelming to small
business owners, and so I thinkwhat Google is kind of trying to
subtly hint at is you don'thave to be everywhere like full
time 100%.
You have to be where your usersare and where they're looking
for you in their normal journeyand give them the kind of
(13:45):
content they want for thatparticular product or service at
the point when they want it.
So I think that's their yeah,that's their advice of like you
don't have to do everything 100%.
We want you to be amulti-faceted business that
isn't just, you know, pumpingout loads and loads of kind of
(14:06):
light, fluffy, boring contentevery week on your website, but
creating a community, like yousaid, and doing creating the
community and engaging with yourcommunity where they are
already.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
So, cindy, it's interesting If you look at the
major gold standard tools thatmeasure a lot of keyword
tracking, they typically brokecontent up into informational,
transactional, commercial andnavigational Is you name it?
(14:44):
It was all about the branddiscovery at the top of the
funnel, right.
So it was like really heavilyinformational searches, the
direction from Google that I sawin one of their I don't know
exactly where it was, but Ibelieve it came from Google.
They really want you to be 25,25, 25, 25.
(15:04):
And you know, if you have anonline business or other things,
maybe there's a carve out forthat navigational search.
And what we see with a lot ofclients is they don't have as
much transactional search at thebottom of the funnel.
And that transactional searchthe comparisons, the you know
you're trying to make a decisionis across the internet, and so
(15:28):
you know the traffic.
What Rand Fisken said you knowlike, based on a number of his
slides I saw him at a couple SEOconferences is like traffic's
been cut in half or more thanhalf, and so you know you need
to help the LLMs understand thebottom of the funnel
transactional content that youcan control on your website um
(15:49):
and listicles and there's otherthings and and what I'm seeing
from what you're saying whatGoogle's saying is no one's
really mapping that one for one,right?
It's like everybody's got theirown ranking factors that
they're using.
And then there's like this iswhat Google wants you to do, and
(16:10):
then you're trying to have toconnect the dots there.
I mean, what are your thoughtsaround that?
Just in the market in general?
Speaker 3 (16:17):
Yeah, I think at large, that is kind of what
we're trying to do is connectthe dots.
But I think that the way thatwe're all thinking about SEO and
search as a whole right now isprobably going to need to change
soon, because if you thinkabout what Google's been
(16:37):
investing in marketing towardsrecently, it's AI mode and then
all of the AI stuff in in thepaid side of the house AI mode,
and even, you know, recently Ithink it was a week and a half
or two weeks ago Google added AIsummaries to Google discover,
(17:02):
and this was something that Ikind of predicted at SEO week,
because I said, you know, atthat point Google had just
internationalized SEO or GoogleDiscover and made some changes
towards making it moreinternational and I said, you
know, this is not an accidentand they've just rolled out AI
mode.
(17:23):
Now they're making GoogleDiscover international AI mode
is rolling out're making GoogleDiscover international.
Ai mode is rolling outinternationally.
This seems like it goestogether.
And then, of course, they justadded the AI summaries to Google
Discover and they added AI modeas an option on the main page
of Google and I think we'regoing to see more convergence
(17:44):
where potentially, ai mode andGoogle Discover combine or at
least are going to test.
That is my guess, and thereason that's important is that
Google Discover has always beenpersonalized to not just a
cohort but a person right andtheir own individual interests.
(18:07):
And I think that AI mode, ifit's going to be successful,
they're probably going to tryand go really personalized and
that's why it's, you know, in AIoptions you're getting the chat
with Gemini stuff, because it'strying to understand you and
your decision-making process andwhat you, in particular, want
and are looking for.
(18:27):
So if I have a history ofconsistently, you know, shopping
for groceries on the internetand looking for the best price
on paper towels, it's going tostop showing me the most
expensive paper towels and it'sjust going to show me the best
deals potentially.
So the idea and the takeaway is, yes, we can't, we're not going
(18:50):
to be able to optimize for youor me, but we're going to have
to understand our customers on avery deeper level and
understand why our brand sticksout to them as opposed to the
other ones.
So if all I want is thecheapest paper towels out there
and it's showing me deluxe papertowels, I'm going to have a bad
(19:12):
experience.
So if you're trying to talk tothe LLMs and you sell cheap
paper towels, what you need tosay is our paper towels are
super cheap're.
We know you're just using halfof it and throwing the rest away
anyway.
You don't need the super heavybulky.
Whatever, buy these, save money.
It's better for the planet.
(19:33):
And then you're going to makeme feel good about my decision
to buy cheap paper towels.
Um, stuff like that, where it'sit's not just, it's not just
listing product like basic specs, but it's listing more deeper
benefits that will resonate witha buyer when they're making a
(19:53):
final decision.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
So I'm hearing and I've heard this in other
conversations is we have to goso much deeper on the ideal
target persona than what wethink and doing additional
research.
There's tools out there, likeRand Fishkin's tool that, like
it, really opens it up of likewhere your people are at, what
(20:19):
they might be looking at, whatare the associations, because
it's going to be so personalizedto you.
And I've seen some customerjourney maps where you know if
you're not speaking to thatperson's value structure or what
they've done historically, evenif you're ranking for that
keyword, you might not show upin that journey at all and so
(20:39):
it's again getting laser focused, like you said, on that target
persona.
So the question that I ask andI think we've been kind of
dancing around it's againgetting laser focused, like you
said, on that target persona.
So the question that I ask andI think we've been kind of
dancing around, it is okay, Iunderstand that it's changing, I
understand I need to know thisbetter, but how do I measure
this?
Like, how do I see how I'mdoing?
(21:01):
And I've heard a lot of peopledoing manual searches and that's
not a very unified way to seewhat an agnostic look of what
other people might be searchingfor Because, again, all your
searches are now customized toyou and I would even say, which.
I don't have complete clarity onthis.
(21:21):
This is my assumption, but whenyou go to incognito mode in
Google, when Google said, hey,you can do, do not follow links,
and we're still going to lookat them, I feel like the same
thing is is the case forincognito.
Because you're incognito, myincognito is going to be
(21:42):
different.
What is that based on?
Well, where we aregeographically, maybe, and our
user preferences, and so that'swhere I think everything starts
to unravel for people that aretrying to rank and search is how
do you measure all this stuff?
The current set of tools thatare available today are not what
(22:05):
we need for AI mode and and momand um.
I know that there's a couple ofpeople out there that are
trying to stand up tools, butthe majority of the industry
right now is still playing theold game.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
Yeah, and I I don't think there's a great answer to
the question, honestly, becauseyou're right, the industry is
still playing the old game,because the idea of summarizing
everything that's happening ineveryone's private AI chat
conversations is just somonumental and hard.
There's this oh, not allegory,but there's this um, what do you
(22:45):
call it?
Speaker 2 (22:45):
a story that tells analogy yeah, like a fable more
oh, fable, I love fables.
Speaker 3 (22:50):
All right, let's do it um, but there's this fable
and I'm not even I don't evenknow the name, but it's about um
, a map maker, and the king ofthe region.
Has a contest for the mapmakers to see who can make the
best map of the region.
And this one guy goes crazy andwants to make the best map, so
he makes the most detailed mapbecause he thinks detail is the
(23:12):
best.
And so he makes the mostdetailed map possible, and it
ends up that the map is the samesize as the territory and it
covers the territory and killseveryone.
So not helpful, right, like.
So you've got to know, like,when to summarize and when to
omit details, right.
But the problem is, when thingsget so detailed and so deep
(23:34):
down and individualized, it'sreally hard to summarize that
and know what's important.
And so I think we're going tobe ending.
I think for a while, and maybe,you know, for a long.
I think we're going to beending.
I think for a while, and maybe,you know, for a long time,
we're going to be leaning harderon basic query statistics
(23:55):
rather than success statisticsor visibility statistics, and we
might have generic visibility,share of voice kinds of
statistics, but not, like youshut up for these 8 billion
queries, because the queries areall going to be so different
and they're going to be stringsof queries in a conversation,
not a single keyword or not asingle keyword phrase.
You know they're going to be ina deep context that you're not
(24:17):
going to be able to tease out,and so that makes our job harder
.
But that's why Google needs thejourney modeling is because in
a conversational search theyneed to understand what the next
most likely question is goingto be.
And you can already see themusing search to train to further
(24:38):
train their journey models.
Right, like, think about, if youthink about, every time you see
a people also ask that's aprompt to say, hey, your
question was kind of vague, didyou really mean this?
And when they click on a peoplealso ask, you're saying, yeah,
when I searched for that, what Ireally meant was this Right,
and it's a bit of a deeperiteration on the question.
(24:58):
It's not the same level, it'sslightly deeper, right, and then
they'll keep going a little bitdeeper.
Ok, you have that.
Do you also need this?
Do you also need this?
And so they're trying to.
They're seeing what users clickto get a model of you know,
when someone searches for this,what they really where they
really want to end up is thereso.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
So it feels like we're going back to like old
school marketing, right, whereyou're measuring, like uplift
and you're, you're doingsomething and you're seeing,
okay, I, my impression countshigher.
Did that produce over x periodof time?
Uh, more leads, more revenue,right, and I mean you can
measure stuff that's happeningon a website.
(25:39):
But how?
How do people wrap around theirminds Because we've trained
them for so long, right?
Like you're at the top of therankings for X amount of these
things, like you need to trackthese keywords, like, how do you
follow the analytics?
Speaker 3 (25:56):
I guess I think, yeah , like I said, like I don't
think there's a great answer.
I think there are a lot ofpeople trying to solve this
problem.
I think we're going to need tochange KPIs.
What you said about communitybuilding is huge.
I think that's really kind ofthe sneak.
(26:17):
The sneaky way to get aroundhaving to not have data is when
you build a community, you canhave real engagement, data and
real interactions with yourcustomers, and that not only
helps your brand resonate betterin a more long-term way, but
gives you a lot of more dataabout them, more opportunities
(26:40):
to re-engage them and stuff likethat.
And then there are also, Ithink that we might see a shift
towards more active engagementmetrics, things like comments on
a post or a video, or and whenI say post, I mean like social
(27:00):
media posts, not a blog postnecessarily I think we're going
to see a decrease in I hopewe're going to see a decrease in
people just like pumping outthe same boring website content,
and it's going to shift tothese kind of multi-channel
distributions that represent thebrand as a whole across the
(27:21):
Internet, where your website isjust you know.
For a while, people have saidyour website should just be one
part of your marketing, but theother parts were like your
website and your emails andoffline.
But now I think it's like yourwebsite, your Instagram, your
TikTok, your LinkedIn and stufflike that, because the LLMs what
(27:46):
they are looking for is notjust on your website and if you
just have a website, even ifit's great, it's not enough To
convince the LLMs that you'regood.
You need to be the places wherethe LLMs are looking.
And what LLMs you know?
Seos keep saying that LLMs lovenovelty and they like novelty,
they like to learn new things,but what they love is
(28:07):
consistency.
And if they see a consistentmessage across your brand, from
you and other people that you'reengaged, that you're the best,
that you're the cheapest, thatyou're the whateverest, then
they believe it.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
So the thing that I think about when you shift from
like website content to socialmedia content is which I would
would.
If you have any data or canpoint me in the right direction,
it would be great because I Idon't know the answer.
The decay rate on social mediaposts, okay, like for a visual
user is, you know, four to sixhours maybe right, and so when I
(28:46):
hear you need to be on onsocial media like, I know people
that are very big on instagramor tick tock and they have to
continue to produce these videosbecause they they only, they
only have so much uh like, uhlife in them.
Um, there are some kind ofinformation architecture,
structures like reddit andthings like that.
(29:06):
You know gnb where you can grabsome of that stuff, but I
wonder how far and and the lms Idid see some data that said on
a blog post, on average, theyonly look back about 10 months,
um, so I'm wondering.
You know there's so much noiseon linkedin right now, but
there's a lot of great stuffthat people are posting.
(29:28):
I wonder if if you've seenanything about the decay rates
for LLMs going further andreading social media posts,
right, cause you're, if you'rebuilding out the hashtags and
you're, you know, you're, you're, you're setting that, that in
motion.
Do you know?
Is it just the life cycle ofthe post or or is there, you
(29:49):
know, more runway to, to, to, tospeak to the LMS, and again,
right, I do need to say it, theLMS are only, you know, one to
3% of search.
Still, right, so it's, it's notthat big of a deal, but we've
even shifted at our agency to uh, offering more of a social
(30:09):
media as an SEO company, becauseit's kind of like left arm,
right arm, like the full body ofyour, your brand, like building
your brand online.
You need to incorporate some ofthose things and I think,
historically, when I would talkto other SEOs, seo was a silo
and social media was a silo, butthere's a big merger happening.
(30:32):
I don't know if anything.
I said you can kind of speak toit, but I'm just talking out
loud now because I agree withyou that social media shouldn't
replace being search optimized.
But what is a search engine now?
And then, as people move overto AI mode, which I think AI
(30:57):
overviews for me was a way tokeep people in the old search
until they get everything elseset up you might have a
different perspective on that.
These other LLMs like when Istarted using LLMs pretty
aggressively, like I go toGoogle and a website to do a
final check on something, but alot of my research is done on
(31:19):
social media.
Or what are other people saying?
Reviews, yeah, and thatengagement rate.
I have seen data that 30% ofthe time that people spend on
social media is now readingcomments, you know.
And so I think that that'sreally really important.
But for a business, whether itbe a big brand or a little brand
(31:41):
because big brands you got togo through legal or maybe you
have some executive that peopleare ghostwriting for,
potentially because they can'tspend all day on social media.
And then the smaller brandswell, they're trying to run a
business and they don't haveenough people to do it.
You got to pump out a ton ofcontent to just keep up and it's
really quite noisy.
(32:02):
I like your idea of going backto really focusing on those new
micro moments, whatever they'recalled.
I remember micro moments.
I can't even say GDP withoutthinking about it.
I still say GMB.
It's ingrained in my brain,it's not GDP, it's GBP.
And I'm dyslexic.
(32:23):
I'll say that so sorry toeverybody.
Hopefully they know what I'mtalking about.
But this just looks to be,cindy, a monumental task for any
brand or any business to do.
Now I do think all of thesethings have been said over and
(32:43):
over again.
You should be doing all thesethings, but now it's kind of
like it's not like a bonus, it'slike a necessary thing that you
need to be doing to be able tocompete.
What is the world going to looklike, you know, in another 18
months?
Speaker 3 (32:58):
Yeah, I think this is now table stakes for SEO.
This is what you need to be.
A good SEO is to be doing thiskind of, you know, cross
platform optimization.
They used to call it barnacleSEO, and it does still have that
benefit where, if you'restruggling to rank your blog on
XYZ keyword, you might have aneasier time ranking a YouTube
(33:20):
video on that keyword or anInstagram post on that keyword,
and I think that has not goneaway.
That may even have doubled downnow that Google is ranking UGC,
forum content and whatever,with more preference and big
brands with more preference,right, like, so.
So it's a really, I think,solid strategy, but I think that
(33:45):
you know you're right that itit, it's this huge commitment.
But if you think about how manyblog posts people were pumping
out that were kind of like midquality whatever, um, I think
the idea is, um, and there'ssomeone who talks about this a
lot um, ross Simmons, thecoolest cool on Twitter.
Um, one of my favorites, and hetalks about like not creating
(34:10):
you know so many blog posts allthe time, but creating like
better ones and then getting thedistribution really right.
And if you spend, you know,five hours writing the blog post
, you need to spend, and I don'tremember his math.
But let's say if you spend fivehours writing it, you need to
spend.
And I don't remember his math.
But let's say if you spend fivehours writing it, you need to
spend 10 hours doing thedistribution.
(34:30):
And I think that is going to goeven further.
So let's say, if you're a smallcompany or even a big company,
let's say you're a big companyand you have to get a concept
approved by legal and that takesmonths, so you have to plan out
your content way in advance.
You do one 10x piece, but thenyou get the distribution of that
10x piece right.
Then you break it up into amillion different shorts and
(34:53):
videos and stills for Instagramand stories and reels and put it
everywhere where the wholemajor concept has been
pre-approved.
You're not actually creatingnew stuff.
You're creating one big thingand then breaking it out and
turn and allowing the smallerpieces.
So the the one, the one pieceyou know, gets you links, gets
(35:13):
you authority from people whoalready know who you are and are
aware of you.
The smaller pieces feed thejourney of people who are still
in the discovery phase to get toyou.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Right, I feel like you need to produce one like
pillar piece of content and thensplinter it out.
Um uh, ryan dice, uh, hissocial media marketing course,
which now all that stuff he'slike just giving it all away
because everything's changingreally explained to me
(35:48):
conceptually many years agoabout taking that piece of
content.
And I haven't heard the wordBarnacle SBO before.
I've got to look that up.
That's really cool.
It makes a lot of sense.
I haven't heard that one.
Speaker 3 (35:58):
Oh, it's a bigger site and then you rank by proxy.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
Yeah, we did that, but I never heard it called that
.
That's really cool.
That should be a name for acompany, um.
So what that makes me think islike people are just turning out
content Right, and you saidthat the the mid quality content
that you know.
People are just throwingsomething in chat GPT and
(36:24):
posting it Like you're like thebar is coming up, but it's still
like that's the bare minimumand it's really that really high
quality content.
The way I see this stuff, whereit's original research and um,
you know something different,that's that is novel, that that
people might not know about, butit's helpful.
So I mean, where's the balancebetween volume and and quality?
(36:48):
And I mean it's very hard toget both of those off the charts
for for for any business.
And going back to what you saidbefore, what are the things
that you've seen that?
Maybe because I think LLMs arejust modeling very intelligent
people of looking for stuffonline and getting a bunch of
different resources and comingup with um, you know a
(37:12):
conclusion, uh, like, how dopeople need to be thinking about
this in a framework like highquality sites or um?
You know certain types ofcontent that map to those
different decision points.
I mean, what would be a SEOplan for I don't know?
Pick any company and like,let's just do a walkthrough of
(37:33):
what that might look like.
I love the idea of getting thatconcept approved and
splintering it, but I I juststill think you know how many
times can you post about thatsame type of thing from a
different angle?
Right, if you got a four to sixhour window on social media why
do you say four to six hourwindow?
(37:55):
tell me more about that uh, sofrom what I've seen of how the
algorithms work, like if youpost on facebook or linkedin,
unless through the initialaudition period you get some
really high engagement, thosethose posts will, um, get kind
of down indexed and not to saythat if not a big influencer
(38:17):
reposted or comments on it, it'snever going to get the
trajectory or reach of anotherpost.
And so if we have that initialconcept that we broken apart
into all these different thingsand we post that, and maybe we
post it from a couple ofdifferent angles, tell that
story like, how many times canyou recycle that type of content
(38:38):
before you need something new?
Because, like you made me think, maybe we just do one really,
really good piece of contentthat goes viral versus a bunch
of mediocre content.
Speaker 3 (38:51):
Yeah, that's the idea .
Yeah, that's the idea.
And then, and then you'reposting.
When you're breaking it intothe smaller pieces and posting
it across the web, it's going toresonate and you'll learn this.
It'll resonate in somecommunities better than others.
This, it'll resonate in somecommunities better than others.
And so then you learn what thatcommunity likes and then you do
(39:11):
slightly different things.
If a different community likesdifferent stuff, right, and you
get to fine-tune your messagingand how you repurpose content
for the different audiences inthe different places.
Or you say, like this isn'tworking, this channel isn't
working.
We're going to de-emphasizethat.
Um.
But I think, like one of thereasons I like uh ross's model
(39:33):
is like how long did you spendon it?
Create a multiplier of that'show long you should be um
repurposing it or how mucheffort you should spend on on uh
distributing it.
Creating a model like that foryour own business, because it's
going to be different foreveryone and it's going to be
different with the level ofeffort you put in in the first
(39:53):
place.
Right, if you put in fiveminutes, then spending 10
minutes to distribute, it isfine.
Spending 30 minutes todistribute, it is fine.
But yeah, I think it'll bedifferent depending on the
content and depending on whatyour availability is and what
the depth you can go on the theinitial idea in the first place,
(40:13):
um, and then you've just got tomeasure the success and the roi
right, um, so I don't thinkthere's going to be one specific
answer for everyone, but the.
So I I've totally shifted how Ithink about digital marketing as
a whole and I am reallyinterested in the brands and
(40:38):
products that are succeedingwithout websites at all.
So things, products that havegotten TikTok famous, or maybe
they have a website, but it'sauxiliary compared, you know,
products that are just TikTokproducts basically, and yeah,
now they have a website thatthey didn't originally.
Or people who have mademillions of dollars doing
(40:59):
influencer marketing right, like, I think, influencers, digital
influencers and influencers eventhat are, I think, ai
influencers is an interestingfuture space Terrifying, but
also interesting, and so I thinkwe really need to shake off,
(41:20):
you know, the shackles ofhistory and of the way we've
thought about SEO before.
We've thought about SEO beforeBecause you know, when you
search for something that youknow, or if I were to search for
something that I know is onTikTok a lot, the likelihood of
the website ranking versus aTikTok video or a Reel or an
(41:43):
Instagram or whatever, becauseall of those things can usually
be cross posted across all theplaces.
I think the website might comein.
Eighth, you know, and what we'retracking, what we have great
tracking on is the website.
What we have less good trackingon is sometimes where people
are discovering us and like howmany times it takes them to see
(42:04):
the brand on a couple ofdifferent channels to actually
make a decision and seek us outand search for us by the brand
name and stuff like that.
So I think we have to kind ofget comfortable in this lack of
data and like I don't know howto convince people that that's
the reality, except to say thatlike you've been operating on
horrible data for years.
Like just don't.
Like it's always been bad data,it's been directionally
(42:28):
accurate at best.
Um so.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
so we got to grow as SEOs, we got to evolve as SEOs.
Is the message that that I'mgetting, and you know, being
more comfortable with otherverticals inside digital
marketing um, really looking atlike, how is your brand showing
up?
And, to your point, I'm aboutto bring somebody on that's
grown totally through influencer, markerships and partnerships.
(42:55):
He's grown his own brand.
It's a speaker brand andhundreds of thousands of visit,
valuable traffic, never done SEO, all brand searches, how?
How are these brands growing?
Because we got to be thinkingabout it differently and the
current set of skill sets that alot of seos have it's like,
well, now you're telling me Ineed to be social media and I
(43:17):
need to do this.
And it's like, yeah, you do.
I think everything's shiftingand and a lot of people I've
heard shedding off the seo uhtitle and maybe becoming more of
a digital marketing.
We talk about relevancyengineering, like kind of that
concept.
Speaker 3 (43:35):
Well, if you're not convinced by what I've already
said, think about, like, whatwould have happened if all of
the companies that were hit byhelpful content had a diverse
set of traffic sources and awell-established brand that
wasn't just getting traffic fromGoogle.
This is good business strategy,good marketing strategy.
(43:56):
It's not just good SEO strategyand it's not good.
What was it?
What does Mike call it?
What engineering Relevance,engineering Relevance,
engineering strategy.
It's just good businessstrategy as a whole to not put
all your eggs in the Googlebasket.
Speaker 2 (44:13):
Yeah, no, I think I think everything is changing and
broadening Awesome.
I would love to transition towhat you do over at mobile
moxiecom.
You know where, what, what youtypically talk about.
I think some of this stuff thiswas the podcast that I really
you really did it to to getpeople to shift gears right,
(44:34):
like everybody's talking aboutwhat's changing, but the reality
is you got to make the shift tosay there is, there is a whole
new way of looking at things,and I actually heard from a lot
of different sources SEO isgoing to kind of go away and get
integrated into everything elsethose concepts but it's just
(44:54):
that broader business strategyof what you talked about and you
really put a great, great pointon that.
I would love to talk about moreabout what you're doing over at
Mobile Moxie and how people canfind out more of what you're
talking about and your speakingtalks and all that.
Speaker 3 (45:10):
Yeah, sure, well, so I'm going to agree before I get
into my personal stuff.
Like I think SEO should havebeen integrated into all the
different things for years now,like that's how SEO is done
correctly, and I think it hasbeen true for years.
It needs to be at all of thedifferent aspects of a marketing
(45:33):
journey in a company need to beinformed by SEO, and so that's
kind of what I do is I'm aconsultant.
I help some of the biggestcompanies in the US and in the
world with their SEO strategy,and that's what I'm doing is
usually like cross-functionalmaking sure the different people
in the company are aware of SEO, understand how it works and
what they're doing right andwhat they're doing wrong and
(45:54):
what they can do to help, andstuff like that.
Educating internally to makesure everyone's singing from the
same lyrics, and yeah.
So I do a lot of consulting, Ido a lot of speaking and
training around the world.
I'm still you know, even thoughit sounds like what I'm saying,
people might interpret it as mesaying SEO is dead.
(46:15):
I don't think SEO is dead.
I think it's absolutelychanging and evolving and I'm
here for that.
I think it's exciting, I thinkit's also scary, but you know
we've got to evolve or die right.
So that's what I'm helping ishelping my clients evolve and
make sure that they're doing thebest job they can to still show
(46:37):
up in Google but also be readyas all the AI systems come on
board.
I'm talking to clients andtraining people about the four
S's, about how Google viewsjourneys and journey modeling
and how they're using that data.
And then, of course, I have atool set on mobilemoxiecom, and
the tools that people love thebest are called the Serperator
(46:59):
and the Pagescope.
The Serperator lets you seereal live search results from
anywhere in the world down to anaddress.
Most tools just work on apostcode or whatever, but we can
do it down to an address and weshow you the live search result
of what it looks like right nowand we can track that over time
and we parse it with differentmetrics.
So we do like if you set it up,we'll track the same search
(47:24):
result over time and give youthings like you know your
website's pixels from the toppercent of search.
We let you claim things thataren't just your website.
So we have a score called Moxiescore, so you can say this is
me, this is me, this is me, andyou can claim all the things in
the search result that areactually you or like benefit you
Like.
So if you're a restaurant andyou're in a top 10 list, claim
that, and that way, seo getscredit for everything SEO is
(47:48):
doing and not just for thewebsite, right?
So if you have a YouTube videoas social so this is kind of how
I'm looking at the future isthis Moxie score concept of like
how much Moxie is like, howmuch do you own that search
result, and then we also show AIoverviews and stuff like that.
So that's the Surferator, andthe long-term tracking is called
(48:10):
SurpDatalizer, and then thePagescope lets you track
competitors and it gives you avisual and then rendered and
unrendered source code forwhatever page on the internet
you want.
So it's like the Wayback Machine, but it's reliable and you can
say get this page and get itdaily, weekly or monthly,
whatever you want.
And it's a great way to trackyour competitors, because if all
(48:30):
of a sudden, you lose rankingsand your competitor gets above
you and you didn't changeanything and Google didn't
really have any big things, thenyou know that your competitor
changed something, but you mightnot know what, and so we have
all the code, all of the visuals, and we have a diff checker
that'll let you say, like, checkrendered code from this day
versus this day and, you know,show me what's changed, and that
(48:52):
way you can see oh, they addedschemer, oh they changed the
title tag, or oh, they addedthis piece of content and that's
why they're ranking right.
And so the the hard part aboutselling those tools is that it's
kind of like selling insuranceto healthy people.
People are like oh I, oh, Idon't need that, I'm doing fine,
but by the time you need itit's too late, cause we only
it's capturing.
Things live as they are, but wecan't go back in history, and
(49:14):
that's the problem with any SEOtroubleshooting.
Like your boss might come toyou and be like when did this
happen?
And they're showing you asearch result and you're like I
don't know, I wasn't, you knowso.
Speaker 2 (49:33):
So the competitor rank tracking and the share of
voice is, you know, in thesocial listening tools are now a
staple.
Like you, you need to havethose to to be able to
understand, because how thesealgorithms work is is how you're
doing versus what's going on inyour marketplace in that area.
So if you don't know where theweights are changing for the
competitor, those all thosethings impact you, Even if you
didn't do anything or got apenalty or whatever, and now you
(49:55):
tanked, it's not that youtanked, it's that other people
shot ahead of you, Right, and soyou.
So I think that those tools arereally powerful If you
understand that you need to becontracting competitor data of
what they're doing.
It's not you're, you're not ina vacuum, you got to it's all in
comparison, and so tools likethat are super valuable.
Speaker 3 (50:17):
Yeah, I think SEOs for years have been so focused
on just their own website andwhat did we do to make it better
or worse?
And like, maybe you didn't doanything, maybe someone else
just changed something and thathelped.
And they're all like, well,what are where's our website
ranking?
Well, where's the rep?
What else is ranking?
That's influencing a searcher'sjourney, right, like that's
kind of what we want to capture.
So, yeah, those are the tools.
(50:37):
They're really cheap.
Actually, I think our lowestprice is like 30 or 40 bucks a
month, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (50:43):
I would encourage people to go check it out.
I wanted to bring her on aswell to talk more about how to
use her tools and let her kindof walk me through it, so I got
a little free demo here.
So this is awesome.
I would encourage everybodyelse to go check it out.
You really should be looking atwhat competitors are doing.
That's what's going to give youthe insights, and some of these
(51:05):
tools are absolutely powerful.
So I would go check out mobileMoxie.
Cindy, I know you're active onLinkedIn.
Is that the best place forpeople to find you?
Speaker 3 (51:13):
No, actually LinkedIn is the worst place.
I get so much spam.
The best place is,unfortunately, twitter or email.
I need to get better atLinkedIn, but I get so much spam
there.
I need to get better atLinkedIn, but I get so much spam
there.
Speaker 2 (51:27):
They've reduced the amount of connections.
They've been really working onthat signal.
I do Twitter like if y'all arewanting to rank in Grok, like
that's why he bought Twitter.
If anybody wants to know, heneeded a data set.
And Twitter we were talkingabout the information
architecture is somewhere youneed to be.
That's a lot, cindy.
(51:48):
What we're talking about withclients is like why you need to
be all these different placesand like where you're showing up
and like you got to reallyunderstand that market and
understand what the competitorsare doing and how people are
searching for you.
Uh, Twitter, twitter's great.
My my account got banned twice,so I've started over.
Speaker 3 (52:07):
Um well and I know people have bad experiences on
Twitter, but I tweet like.
I tweet a lot of dog videos notmy own, sometimes my own dog
videos but mostly I retweet dogvideos and my algorithm is great
.
So you just have to likeretweet dog videos and you won't
get the bad people on theTwitter.
Speaker 2 (52:23):
Yeah, yeah, um.
So, cindy, definitely, give meyour Twitter and we'll, we'll,
we'll share, we'll share that inthe show notes.
So hopefully everybody got alot out of this podcast.
There's two big takeaways forme, and you need to know that
SEO is changing and if you'restruggling which you may be
because everything's new it'sbecause the game has changed.
(52:47):
Everything's new, um, it'sbecause the game has changed and
you need to think of yourselfas a digital marketer.
Uh, a Swiss army, nice,multifact, functional tool.
You need to be able to beeverywhere.
You got to be able to explainthat to your clients.
Uh, if you're listening, pleaseunderstand.
Like, it's not a one trick ponywith Google anymore.
That owns most of the marketfor people searching, so it's
getting harder.
There's, there's other services, uh, and, and areas that you
(53:10):
want to be optimizing for yourbrand.
And then the biggest thing thatthat Cindy said right there at
the end is you really need toknow what your competitors are
doing.
Uh, like, if, if you don't knowwhat your competitors are doing
, you're you're running blind.
Uh, cindy, I want to end thispodcast with asking you what is
the biggest unknown secret?
(53:31):
And you can repackage somethingwe've talked about, but what
would you say the biggesttakeaway is for somebody
listening that they need to bethinking about.
What's the one unknown secretof internet marketing in your
book?
Speaker 3 (53:46):
I think I'm thinking really hard.
So I think that I have beensuccessful because and I've
gotten a reputation for beingable to spot and understand
changes that Google is makingand explain them before their
(54:06):
public knowledge, before they'reannounced.
That's kind of my special skill, I think, and the reason I'm
able to do that is I spend a lotof time looking at what Google
is doing, what Google ispublishing, what they're
investing in and what they'rewriting about, and that helps me
(54:29):
connect the dots of going, oh,they're writing about this, but
in SEO, they're talking aboutthis, and how do those two
things go together?
And you think about it for aday or two and then you're like,
oh, that's how they go together, that makes sense.
And that has really helped mebe able to understand where
Google is going and I've gottenit right quite a number of times
.
So I would say, think like youwere Google and say, like what
(54:52):
would I be doing if I wereGoogle?
And then plan on them makingreasonably intelligent and I
used to just say reasonablyintelligent.
Now I'd say reasonablyintelligent and money making
decisions.
Like Google is really trying tomake a lot of money right now
and they're changing theirdecision models in favor of
making more money where it usedto be more on the don't be evil
(55:12):
side.
Now they're like make moremoney and that's cool, they're a
business, they're allowed to dothat.
But how is Google going tomonetize?
This is an important question.
Speaker 2 (55:23):
Absolutely Well, everyone.
Hopefully you enjoyed thispodcast.
Please shiko us, share like.
Follow us.
Please leave a comment.
If you've got any value.
Please tell us what you foundvaluable or what you want us to
talk about.
Thank you, cindy.
So much for coming on.
Until the next time, everybody,my name is Pat Bertram.
Bye-bye for now.
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