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The Science of SEO and GenAI with Mike King
381 Plays1 year ago
Our first guest of season two is the inimitable Mike King. As one of the world's foremost authorities on all things SEO and generative AI, Mike came to school us on:
- The disconnect between Google and SEO tools [00:04:10]
- The importance of focusing on user needs and creating content that aligns with different stages of the customer journey, rather than solely targeting specific keywords [00:10:31]
- 3 powerful pieces of low-hanging SEO fruit marketers should pay attention to, but don't [00:16:39]
- 2 simple ways to construct better prompts (plus the outsized impact of a MEGA PROMPT) [21:07]
Mike King on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelkingphilly/
AIPRM: https://www.aiprm.com/
iPullRank: https://ipullrank.com/
The Science of SEO on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Science-SEO-Decoding-Search-Algorithms/dp/1119844835
That's Marketing, Baby is sponsored by the incredible people at ércule (ercule.co) and Teal (tealhq.com).
Can't get enough? Subscribe to Rants & Raves, the official That's Marketing, Baby newsletter: https://bit.ly/rants-and-raves-sign-up
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Transcript
Introduction to 'That's Marketing, Baby'
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to That's Marketing, Baby, the weekly show where two marketing besties talk all things marketing in the world of B2B and B2C. I'm your co-host, Susan Wenegrad, and I've spent over 20 years in marketing focusing on paid media and email marketing. And I'm Jess Cook, copywriter and creative director turned content marketer. Every week, we'll tackle a topic that's on our minds and hopefully yours too. Ready? Let's go.
Air Cule Sponsorship
00:00:32
Speaker
Before we get started, I want to give a shout out to our sponsor, Air Cule. Air Cule is an agency focused solely on organic growth for B2B SaaS brands. I've worked with them before and I can tell you I've never felt so confident and in control of my content strategy, SEO, and analytics.
00:00:48
Speaker
They also have this great free tool, Automo, that translates Google Analytics into actual usable data. Which pages are killing it, which ones are declining, and what you can do about it. Check them out and give Automo a whirl at ercule.co. And now, on with the show.
Guest Appearance: Mike King
00:01:11
Speaker
Hello everybody. You are tuning into That's Marketing, baby. And this is our first episode with an external guest. So we are very excited about it. I am like super stoked about it because our first guest is one of my closest friends. This is Mike King. He is very, very well known in the SEO world. And I never get tired of hearing what he has to say on the subject of SEO and kind of like what Google's doing. And he just published a book that he's going to tell us about. And I'm sure that he'll reference
00:01:39
Speaker
so there's all kinds of interesting things going on in his world.
Importance of SEO in B2B Marketing
00:01:43
Speaker
But we wanted to have him on as part of our guest series because I don't feel like there's a lot of topical discussion about SEO in B2B and especially how it makes for good marketing. It always kind of feels like it's, oh, write these things with these keywords and then we'll go pay someone to get us backlinks and crappy stuff like that. And one of the things that I enjoy most about Mike is that he's a really good marketer and it's hard to find SEOs that are, you know, they kind of
00:02:06
Speaker
really lean into the technical, not that Mike doesn't, but he's good about understanding that users have to use this stuff. So Mike, if you want to just kind of give everybody a rundown of what you're up to these days, which is a bit of everything, but if you'd like to take everybody through that, let's do that first before we start peppering you with questions.
00:02:22
Speaker
I'm doing so much, like you said. Just came back from getting my kids passports. He's a dad too, so yeah. Yeah, I've got two little girls. So yeah, you know, obviously doing the things with IPO rank, which is my agency. So we work with a lot of enterprise brands for search, content strategy, and genitive AI. I've got the book. And I also am the CMO of a genitive AI startup called AIPRM. So no shortage of things to do. And I also make music and all this other stuff. So it's just like, I'm living too much life for one person.
00:02:51
Speaker
One of the things that I think is really super cool, I was thinking about this the other day, is I find it fascinating that you've been a rapper and you are a songwriter and lyricist, and you also work in language, really, in your, quote, unquote, day job, too. Like, it's interesting how pretty much your whole life revolves around the use of language. It's somewhat fascinating. I mean, doesn't all of our lives revolve around language? I know, as much as yours. I mean, we're not out there writing rap songs like you are. I don't sit there and write that all day.
00:03:19
Speaker
When you think about why chat GPT is so threatening to people, all it does is generate language. And we keep saying how it's going to kill all these different types of jobs. So I've been thinking about this a lot. It seems like so much of what we do as human beings is generate language. And it's the fundamental component of everything that we do.
00:03:39
Speaker
Yeah, and you did a presentation on it in Minnesota about you got into the patents that Google has and all this really crazy stuff. I think when you look at it from the lens of Google, and you covered this in your book, but what do you think is one of the most interesting things that you found? Because most of us normal humans, we don't go digging around in Google's patents.
00:03:57
Speaker
to see what they've done. I was wondering when I was seeing you speak about it, was there anything that you found when you were going through that to write this book that was surprising or that you were like, holy crap, that's creepy or anything like
Google's Semantic Search vs. SEO Tools
00:04:10
Speaker
that? What I was most surprised about was just the huge disconnect between what Google is able to do and what the SEO community and its software is able to do.
00:04:20
Speaker
There's two different models of search. One is called lexical, which is just like counting words in the positions of words. And then there's semantic where it's like you understand the meaning. And Google has been really good at the semantic stuff like the last 10 years using language models, like the less sophisticated versions of what we have now.
00:04:37
Speaker
for the last 10 years, and no SEO tools use any of that at all. Even today with all the chat GPT stuff, most SEO tools are like, hey, you use your keyword in your H1, it's in the title tag, you use it this many times in your copy. And it's like, Google is just way better than that. And it's been that way for so long. So like, what are we doing as SEOs? Like, it's such a disconnect. It doesn't even make sense.
00:05:01
Speaker
Do you think that we're able to solve for that if we're not Google? My question there is like, what's a marketer to do, right? If Google really prioritizes, there was the semantics and then the, they prioritize that and our tools do not, how do we get it right? Yeah. And I think that's where a lot of the SEO engineers, like the people that have been building their own stuff with Python over the last five, 10 years, that's where they have the leg up because they understood or understand
00:05:26
Speaker
Google's doing something different. And my tools can't do this. So let me close the gap by just using like the open source stuff that's available. Because the thing is, Google's not magic, right? Like there's a whole world of computer science where people are coming up with the building blocks of this stuff. And there's open source versions of everything. So people are just being like, Oh, Google's doing this. Cool. Let me use this thing off the shelf that I can plug in and then get the analysis that I need to be able to do it. So it's my hope.
00:05:52
Speaker
that someone in the SEO software industry is going to be like, Hey, we need to start incorporating this stuff. In the meantime, we've got our own internal stuff here at iPod rank to help us get to those insights. Yeah. I was going to ask, can you, can you give some examples of how you tackle that? Because like I said, you are a really good marketer. So you guys do go beyond just the SEO piece, which I think well positioned you as Google keeps changing. So what are some of the ways that like you guys tackle that? Obviously, I mean, if it's like proprietary, you know,
00:06:17
Speaker
I mean, if there's anything that you've found has been able to help bridge that gap since there isn't a tool that does that very well yet. First of all, thank you for saying I'm a great marketer. I really appreciate it.
00:06:28
Speaker
Yeah. So as an example, right? Like when we talk about the concept of relevance in SEO, people think of it as like a qualitative idea. It's like, okay, I look at my page for a keyword and I look at someone else's and every time you're like, my page is better. We have more whatever on there, but that's not how Google looks at it. Like relevance is effectively a math equation. It's really like,
00:06:48
Speaker
What they do is they take your query and then they plot it in multi-dimensional space and then they compare different pages by plotting those in multi-dimensional space and they look to see what the angle is between the two. And so they do that for your pages and everyone else's pages and whatever one is closest to the query is the most relevant one. So it's like a new miracle thing that can be figured out. So we made a tool for that and it's a free tool that anyone can play with. It's called OrbitWise. You put your keyword in,
00:07:16
Speaker
It pulls the top 10. It calculates that for all the top 10. If your page is not in the top 10, you just put in your URL. It calculates yours too. So you have the numbers to look at side by side like, oh, I'm not ranking because I'm not as relevant. Like it's that simple. So having that sort of understanding is like a good feedback loop because then you can adjust your page and then you can say, okay, well, my score is like a 60 before and the ones that are performing well are all 80s. Cool. Let me get mine up to an 80 and see if that makes a difference. If ultimately it doesn't, then that's probably just a linking problem.
00:07:46
Speaker
Okay, so I think I think an SEO we like overcomplicate a lot of things because we don't know enough Yeah, but that's why it was so important to me that like I got tired of saying it depends for every What is it for paid that would be great
00:08:03
Speaker
Yeah, maybe that'll be my next book, The Science of PVC. Yeah, seriously. Exactly. But yeah, so I was like, okay, well, what does it depend on?
Insights from Google's Patents
00:08:10
Speaker
That's why I did all that research, like patent diving, also looking at, just like generally speaking, if I was in information retrieval, if that was my job, what would I need to know to work at GOOC?
00:08:21
Speaker
And there's just so much stuff out there that like Google is pulling from. And then Google is also really good at like sharing their research. In fact, they're the reason why large language models have exploded so much in the last few years. They came up with something called the transformer and chat GPT, like the T in chat GPT is transformer. It's built on that technology. So Google is really good about sharing what they've come up with. And if you just like take the time to read it, you can have a pretty good understanding of how things actually work.
00:08:49
Speaker
I mean, I could take the time to read it, but I still wouldn't understand. Hard pass. I'm just like, what does this mean? I don't know what this acronym is. Given that everything's kind of evolved on the semantic side, is there something that companies, especially in B2B, which I feel like, at least on the paid side, Google Ads really struggles with?
00:09:10
Speaker
relational queries, but it doesn't understand nuance. So it won't necessarily understand if you are an email service provider. It just knows that that's what you are. It doesn't understand that you are really like for companies, your list is 5,000 or 50,000 or more. It doesn't have the nuance to understand what the subset that you service. It doesn't really know that very well for B2B. And that's kind of been a common complaint
00:09:34
Speaker
among these places, especially in ads will be like we're spending all this money and we're just getting like SMBs, they're not the customers we want. And there's not really any way to solve for that on the paid side very well. Are there things on the organic side that you think as you're watching all the change that has happened, are there things that companies should be focusing on to either
00:09:53
Speaker
capitalize on better or be able to rank better or things that they could be doing for their industry that they're not i mean i think one of the things that is right and be to be is the fact that a lot of times there sass they're solving problems that people don't even necessarily search for because no one knows that there's a solution
00:10:10
Speaker
So it's like you can't even bid on anything. The example I always gave was Uber. Like, rideshare was never a thing. It did not exist. No one searched for it. First time I took one was MozCon, I think, in 2014 or 15 or something. So are there things that companies could be doing and or focusing on in that realm, just kind of based on how you're seeing things evolve? Like, what should they be doing today that you don't see a lot of them doing?
00:10:31
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think this is necessarily just a search question. I think it's more of like a user journey and content strategy question, right? Because to your point, yeah, no one was searching for ride share, but they were searching for like, how do I get to downtown Seattle from the airport or whatever. So having like content that speaks to that and says like, Oh, yeah,
00:10:52
Speaker
This is the way you do it. Oh, plus we have this product that serves it. I think what people struggle with when they think about that from a search perspective, they're just like, I want to rank for the keyword that people are going to give me money for, right? It's a journey, as you obviously know. Where the disconnect is, people don't really think about the users behind the visits. They don't think about their needs states. So they're not thinking about it from a marketing perspective, basically, like you're saying.
00:11:15
Speaker
And I think when you build out your keyword strategy, you need to do it that way. You need to say, okay, these are, you know, awareness keywords or upper funnel keywords or whatever, and align that with the right content to get the people into that funnel. So again, if the idea is like, all right, well, I'm a rideshare company.
00:11:31
Speaker
And someone is going to obviously be looking for like, okay, here's how I get from the airport. But when they're doing their travel planning before they get to that quote unquote moment of truth, or whatever Google calls it zero moment of truth, they're going to look at like, what are travel options in Seattle or whatever it is. So really, it's like, how do I make sure that my content appears in those earlier stages so I can teach people how to think about this thing?
00:11:56
Speaker
Yeah, so many companies now are in this idea of like, there's no one out there like us. We're a content, we're a category creator, right? And so they come up with this term, supposedly only they are, and then they go after that in search, in their content. It's like, that might be fine if you actually, one, are a category creator, and two, once people actually know what the thing is that you do, but like, how are you getting them in now when they don't know what it is, when they aren't aware of this quote unquote new category? So I love that you brought that up.
00:12:25
Speaker
Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly. I've also had the opportunity to work with a few brands that did create categories, and I've been very wrong. So as an example, I used to work on American Express
Creating Search Demand with Marketing
00:12:36
Speaker
for their business card team or whatever. And they were like, yeah, we want to rank for charge cards. And I was like, no one searches for charge cards, like just put credit cards. That is what my mother calls it, by the way, it is a charge card. That is a generational thing. So I'm so excited to hear where this goes.
00:12:51
Speaker
But that's a very different thing. A charge card, you have to pay it off in full every month for your credit card to carry a balance. So what American Express did is they spent the money to build up the media and build up the awareness of the term. And if you look in Google Trends from this point where I was starting to work with them,
00:13:08
Speaker
Search buying for charge card goes up dramatically from then till now. And so I was wrong. I was like, you should go after the credit card. And they're like, no, no, no. Padded me on the head. Now we're going to create the demand. We got this, dude. Don't worry about it. Just give me something neat, but we got this.
00:13:22
Speaker
Yeah. So ultimately we optimized for charge card, which was really easy. And then they created that term. So if you are a business that can do that, go for it. But like you're saying, a lot of people will be like, Oh yeah, we create a category and they don't put anything into it and no one is searching for it. You're wasting everybody's time.
00:13:39
Speaker
But hey, they write number one for that thing. Yeah. Because they get no one searches. When did you start in search again? You started in SEO like around when? Oh, six. Okay, yeah. So beyond the obvious things, what do you feel like are some of the things you've seen change a lot? I think that there's a
00:13:54
Speaker
always the things that people know that they're like, Oh, it used to be so easy. No need to do his keyword stuff and this, this and this. Have there been more subtle things that have been kind of like, it wasn't a sea change where it was like, Google did this one algorithm update. So it changed, but just for something you've seen change or evolve a little more slowly, kind of almost like a market pattern that you've noticed that might not be something, like I said, that came out an algorithm change or anything.
00:14:16
Speaker
Yeah, I mean all the big ones like those are everyone talks about those but I think what we've been seeing that's like the undercurrent of change has been better understanding and usage of structured data. So we talk about things like schema.org or whatever like that's kind of like the overt understanding of structured data, but
00:14:34
Speaker
search engines extract content in this concept, which is called like a semantic triple. It's like a sentence. It's like a thing is a thing, right? Like Susan is great. So like if Google sees that across a hundred different pages, they understand that to be a fact and then they can extract that and then put that in their knowledge vault. So they've gotten progressively better at that. So their understanding of content on the web has just gotten dramatically better.
00:15:02
Speaker
And their understanding of queries has also gotten better as well, although I see a lot of instances as of late where it's like somebody turned this dial too far to the left. But generally speaking, their understanding of language across the web has just gotten so much better. Sononomy is so much better. It doesn't really require people just like shoving in keywords on the page as much anymore. And again, it just goes back to...
00:15:27
Speaker
I mean, it was so easy, right? No, because even like tactically, when you're trying to tell somebody like, hey, optimize this page, you still have to say like, hey, use these words. But when you can't give them a target to hit, you don't necessarily know what you're going to get. So that's why so many of our tools are still like, oh, yeah, use this word 10 times. You've used it eight times because they have to give you direction. But I feel like if you're a good writer and I'm like, hey, here's a subject, explain the subject and go in more depth on this part of the subject.
00:15:54
Speaker
I don't have to give you a list of words or a number of words to use. You'll just do it naturally. But yeah, I think their understanding of language has just gotten so much better. And we kind of take it for granted because we always expect it to be as good as it is, but now it is as good as you expect it to be basically.
00:16:10
Speaker
So that kind of leads me into the AI space. I don't know, Jess, did you have any other SEO specific questions that you want to ask? I have one more, like 101 level, because that's basically where I'm at. And I think a lot of our listeners are too, just like, hey, they're content marketers, they're media folks, they need kind of the 101 level info too. So what are like a couple of really common mistakes you see people make when it comes to like creating content and maybe overlooking something that could really help their SEO that's like low hanging fruit?
00:16:39
Speaker
Yeah, I would say linking between old and new pages, right? A lot of people, they just publish something and they don't go back to other pages that were relevant to that subject and linked to the new page. I've heard that a lot. I was wondering if that was true. Everyone's like, no one uses internal linking enough. And I was like... That's so easy. So valuable. Yeah. So easy. It doesn't really make that much of a difference. I don't know. I mean, I'm a... Huge difference. Huge difference.
00:17:01
Speaker
And the bigger the site gets, especially if you're like on an e-commerce site, the more internal linking you have, the better it's going to perform. So yeah, definitely the internal linking. I would say a lot of people don't know how valuable their metadata is. People are very lazy about metadata.
00:17:16
Speaker
I mean, it's the same as like ad copy, right? Like you write bad ad copy, you're not going to get the clicks. And that's why Google has gotten so aggressive about rewriting or preparing metadata because people are just so bad at it. But if you write good metadata and then it yields good clicks and Google isn't going to mess with your metadata.
00:17:34
Speaker
And the last thing I would say is the structured data stuff. So a lot of people, they're like, oh, well, if Google doesn't give me some sort of SERP feature from this structured data, I'm not going to use it. But there's so much value in just marking up your pages for anything in that vocabulary because Google can better understand what that page is about. So that's something that people just don't do because they're like, well, it's not FAQ, it's not how to, why should I do it? But if you want a computer to better understand the content, give it what it asks for.
00:18:04
Speaker
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00:18:27
Speaker
It even uses AI to rephrase your experience and achievements so they really pop. Even better, it's free to get started at tealhq.com. All right, back to the show. Like I didn't know a lot about structured data. There's a lot of options that Google has. I only know because I'll see them come through on like my Twitter streams. I'm going to be like, oh, they have structured data for that. It's really kind of crazy. And I'm over here Googling structured data and I'm going to go do something.
00:18:57
Speaker
Yeah, go to schema.org. Just has like the list of all the things that you can mark up. And it's really all like the nouns that can be discussed on your page, like any person, place, or thing. And you can basically put that in code so that Google can be very clear that you're talking about this thing on your page.
00:19:14
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like that's never used. It's like never brought up either. I mean, not that I do SEO or content heavily, but I feel like with a lot of the B2B companies that I work, that just never comes up. It's not discussed. If it's not done by many people, what a leg up if you actually take the time to understand it and do it. Exactly. Absolutely.
00:19:31
Speaker
Okay, so I know everyone's probably just salivating wanting to hear about it. So I'm like just a nascent user of chat GPT. I mean, I mostly use it on the candle side of my business because it writes really great fun product descriptions and it saves me a ton of time. So I've gotten my feet wet with that.
00:19:50
Speaker
learning how to train it on tone and things like that. And it is kind of funny to see, there are just certain adjectives that it'll use over and over and over. You kind of tell it picks up on something that it thinks fits what you want and it'll just use it a lot. But I think when it comes to AI, what's the big thing that you see most people get wrong when they try and use it? By people, I mean, companies or businesses, he's lighting up. He's got exams. He's ready. He's ready.
00:20:15
Speaker
Big thing for companies is that they leave their people to their own devices to just use it however they want. And you're not going to get any consistency that way. I keep trying to tell organizations because they come to me and they're like, what tools should we use? I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down. You need a content strategy for this first. Like you need to have the right set of prompts for everyone that they can use. You need to account for your brand voice and tone. You need to think about like, how are we going to integrate this stuff and what we're already doing?
00:20:44
Speaker
not just like, okay, let me get 500 tools and just let people play with them. So that's the biggest thing right there. And then for individuals, people don't understand it's like a garbage in, garbage out sort of thing. You put words in the chat GPT, it's going to respond to anything. So people are like, oh, this thing isn't good because you know, I gave it a sentence and it didn't write me a book, like doesn't make any sense, right? So have
00:21:08
Speaker
Having really structured prompts is so important. There's this concept called the mega prompt where you give it the context that you wanted to have, the role you wanted to play, constraints, examples, like the whole nine. And then that way you get precisely what you're asking for because chat GPT is just like having a smart intern, right? Like it knows a lot of things. It can't always make reasonable decisions unless you give it direction. So most people don't really understand that they just like expect it to read their mind, which doesn't make any sense.
00:21:38
Speaker
Yeah, that's all I got on the question. Yeah, no, I think that that's been kind of the most interesting part for me. And it's like, whether it's that or even with mid journey, like it's interesting to see, just figure out how is it interpreting what I'm telling it? It reminds me a lot of actually speaking sometimes because there's things that we just assume people know, you know, our brains just fill in gaps on stuff. And then you'll get a question. You're like, Oh, I didn't cover that. Like, I guess I should have, it didn't occur to me too. But it's like that with mid journey or chat GPT or any of them.
00:22:05
Speaker
you'll put in something that you feel like is crystal clear and then it gives you something back and you're like, that was the best you got? Like, really? That was, that was it. But then that was your interpretation of what I said. I didn't do a very good job explaining that. I think people too, like they think chat GPT is everything that's ever been on the internet has been summarized and understood by chat
Understanding Chat GPT Capabilities
00:22:26
Speaker
GPT. And it will give you a brand new answer depending on what you put in. Right. But really it doesn't know anything past 2021 at this point. It's just predicting the next
00:22:35
Speaker
most likely word, right? That's all it's doing. So that's why, you know, Susan, you say like it says the same word over and over and over sometimes for descriptions because it's like that's what it thinks is the next best thing. So it's not like scraping a ton of data and like turning up something new out of insights formulated from that data. It's literally predicting the next word. So I think right now, and this is the worst it's ever going to get, it's just going to get better.
00:22:59
Speaker
is the worst it'll ever be. Right. We have to remember that like it is literally just pulling from a pool of it's a lotto right of like what the next most likely word is. Yeah. Yeah. The one thing that I think we should probably think about more is just like how we talk about it because you know when we say like chat GPT thinks it's not thinking anything. It doesn't know anything. Right. Like sentient being it is not self aware.
00:23:24
Speaker
We're so programmed, for lack of a better word, to believe things that come out of computers. We're like, okay, yeah, we told it the thing and it thought and it concluded this, that we just believe it. And that's just like the wrong way to think about any of this technology. So there are ways that you can get more valuable outputs from it by like feeding it additional output. So that's the way that Google's search generative experience brings
00:23:51
Speaker
whatever you want to call it, the new Bing works. It's on this concept, it's called retrieval augmented generation, where basically what you're doing is you're performing your query and performs your standard search and then it pulls back all those results, feeds it to the language model and then generates a response. So that's how they're able to get answers that are more recent and things like that because you
00:24:11
Speaker
got to think about it like this. We've taught this thing how to talk, and now we just give it additional information. So it's like we gave it a bachelor's degree, so it knows how to talk about a lot of things, but now has to read additional books to be able to know new stuff. Are there ways that you
00:24:27
Speaker
Can help people construct their prompts better like i don't wanna say there's a template but based on how you see people typically do it would you say like hey if you just make sure to include these three things or the specificity and it might be the mega prompt you're talking about but i'm sure there's two or three very simple things that people just did the more consistently they would actually get better output what would those be.
00:24:49
Speaker
Yeah, the role that you wanted to play, is it writing as a lawyer? Oh, maybe not a lawyer, but is it writing as like, you know, but like, whatever your situation is, have it play that character. It's going to give you better responses based on that. And then again, the constraints and examples.
00:25:07
Speaker
And I know examples are a tall ask in a lot of cases, but let's say you're trying to get it to write ad copy and you've got like five examples or even three examples of what good ad copy looks like, it's going to learn from that pretty easily. And it's going to give you back something that looks like that. And any like voice and tone constraints, I think those are a big one as well. And it doesn't require a lot of like lengthy description, right? Like it can be as simple as like,
00:25:31
Speaker
I want a tone that is exuberant and not pessimistic or whatever. And that's enough for it to write more in the way that you like. And then you got to think of it again as a feedback loop. If you don't get what you want the first time, just say like, okay, based on what you gave me, you needed to know this. Let's just rerun this prompt again. Because what are you losing? Another two minutes? Like it's not that big a deal.
00:25:53
Speaker
Yeah. What are some of the use cases you've seen businesses use it for that you actually found interesting? I feel like everybody knows like, oh, I'll use it to generate a headline or I'll use it to generate an outline. But I've been on AIPRI a couple of times. There's some really interesting prompts in that library with things that I'm like, wow, I guess you could have that do that for you. Couldn't you?
00:26:13
Speaker
It wouldn't occur to me because like I said, I'm still baby stepping with this thing. So I'm still like, Hey, I did a product description. It turned out great. Woohoo. Like I feel like I want, I haven't even thought beyond that yet. But I see really interesting prompt libraries on there for like all these different use cases. And I was just curious, like if you've come across any that you thought were really original or just something you hadn't seen very frequently, because we tend to see the same stuff over and over.
00:26:35
Speaker
I didn't see anything that I was like, oh wow, this is crazy. But the idea that people use it to write prompts for other things was something that never crossed my mind. I was like, oh, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Like people use AIPRM to write prompts for Mid-Journey or for Bard or whatever. And I'm just like, you couldn't have just like went in there and did that yourself. But then I was like, you know, let me try this out. And the prompts are just so much better when I run it through there. So yeah.
00:27:01
Speaker
That's a very like, inception way to use it. Get a robot to tell another robot what to do. How would you do this if you were to talk to a fellow robot?
00:27:10
Speaker
I mean, I feel like that's our future, right? It's algorithms versus algorithms. You're gonna have an algorithm that represents you versus Google's algorithm, and they're gonna fight it out to give you the content that you want. I think that's our future. Yeah, I was gonna ask. There's been questions on the paid side where people are like, how will this affect paid search results? Where will they show up? And like, we don't have the answers to a lot of that. I don't even know that Google hasn't figured out yet. But I guess that was gonna be kind of my other question was like, how do you see these two things integrating, right? It's like, as AI keeps getting smarter, and especially because
00:27:39
Speaker
Google knows what it knows about language, and this is only trained up through 2021. Once it has a couple more years, ostensibly, you would think it's just going to get smarter. So what do you think that looks like five years from now? How are these two things working together to power answering the world's questions, basically?
00:27:56
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, there's just so much overlap in those technologies. It's going to be fused together very quickly. It's not going to be like, Oh, I did this in search and then I did this in my LLM or whatever. It's going to become one thing. And I think there's a bigger question that needs to be answered. Is this the best way to fulfill people's information needs? And I don't necessarily know if that's true in a lot of cases. Like I don't always want to have a chat about something. I just want to answer.
00:28:21
Speaker
Yeah. You and I are introverts too. We don't want to have to interact with anything. I don't want to talk to anything. I just want to be given what I need. But I think that's where they're trying to go. Like this hyper-personalization that's predictive in nature. And it's like less about you making queries. It's more about an understanding your context, even if it's implicit, basically
00:28:43
Speaker
give you what you want before you even ask for it.
Future of AI in Search Technology
00:28:46
Speaker
Yeah. And they've kind of been working towards that even pre AI. I mean, even things like when they started doing auto fill for your searches and it does creepy stuff with Google maps all the time where it's like, I start typing it in. I mean, we got in the car this weekend to go to the farmer's market and we literally got in and it's like, would you like to go to blah, blah, blah? And we're like, we didn't put it. It just knows that we go there on Saturdays.
00:29:05
Speaker
So if you want directions, I'm like, okay, that's creepy. So I feel like they've done those kind of nods. It'll be interesting to see what that means for something like generative AI though.
00:29:15
Speaker
Well, I think another kind of bigger picture, future looking thing is I think that our technology of the future is going to be more reductive. Like I think there's two visions of the world that we've been presented with in like science fiction. You've got the minority report vision where like there's all these interfaces all up in your face and all that. And then there's that movie, her Joaquin Phoenix, and technology was everywhere, but you didn't see it. It was more like Apple invented it and it was like just baked into normal objects.
00:29:41
Speaker
And I think that's what this is going to be, right? Kind of like the Star Trek computer where you have like an ambient computer that you can talk to and be like, Hey, I need this, this, and this to happen. I want you to do this. And it just happens, right? Like the interface is just the world that you live in. And I think
00:29:56
Speaker
that it's not going to require 10 results or whatever. It's going to require an answer that's based on your experiences and your behaviors and so on. And we're getting to the point where we're able to go through that level of data and then build these models for a very specific person for their needs. So I think that's where this is all ultimately heading. And all these interfaces where we've got to manage bids or we've got to massage content and do technical components of websites.
00:30:25
Speaker
I think a lot of that is going to go away five, 10 years from... You know, I've talked about this where I'm like, I feel like someday we have to write something about what happens on the organic side of Google, powers everything that happens on the paid side. Because we were having this discussion just when he and I were at a conference, it was like he had discussed all of this stuff in the Google patents. And for me, it was making so many connections in my brain. It was like, oh, that's why they changed that in Google ads. And that's why they do it that way.
00:30:50
Speaker
But a lot of that is never really explained or explored. It's kind of like it was like, we just know that this is best and media buyers are, we're kind of a jaded bunch and we're like, Oh, sure you do. You just want more of my money. So like, there's kind of this assumption. And of course, I mean, they'd have to make profit and everything, but there are scientific reasons that they have learned on the organic side as to why these things happen that way on the paid side. So that's, I think going to be the other interesting thing to your point is like with things like performance max, where it's just a great big black box and you're like, this is what I want you to do. Here's some stuff to go do it.
00:31:19
Speaker
This is the goal. You're not bidding on keywords. You're not doing anything. You're just saying, this is what I want to see happen. Go do your best, and here are some tools. Bye-bye. Then you just wait, and then you look to see if it accomplishes it or not. It's still working on that, I think, but it does what Mike describes feels very familiar. I feel like I already see, even on the paid side, I see pieces of that already taking place. They're very disjointed. They're not cohesive, like you said, but definitely feel that happening too.
00:31:47
Speaker
I don't know if you experience anything like that on the content side as much, Jess. Well, so Jasper has a product now called Campaigns, and you essentially put in the goal of the campaign and how many ads you need, and the one kind of... Mike's looking it up. I know that phrase. It's like, ooh, new toy.
00:32:06
Speaker
It will literally generate whatever it is you need, two emails and three ads and the content piece and the blog post. Now, again, early stages, worst it's ever going to be. So it's not great. And again, it's still kind of using a lot of that very repetitive language. It's easy to tell that it's coming from generative AI, but
00:32:26
Speaker
The power of that combined with the power of what you were just talking about, Susan, is you create the thing and then you push the thing out and robots are doing it all with a little bit of human intervention. It's pretty fascinating. That's going to be the reality at some point.
00:32:42
Speaker
It allows us to be marketers more. I mean, I guess that's been my, and I don't know if you've run into this mic on the SEO side, but I feel like on the paid side, I run into a lot of people that like they're very upset that they don't see everything in the search career reports now. They're very upset that there's more and more automation going on. And like a lot of stuff is just getting folded into performance max now because they want to have quote unquote, the control over it.
00:33:03
Speaker
And I don't know if you run into that on the SEO side where it's like they feel like they don't have as much control over it. I guess for me, it's like I've pretty much been okay with that because I'm like, I'd rather spend my time being a marketer than like adjusting a keyword bid or going through thousands of lines of search queries to find ones I should be excluding. Like if I don't have to do that stuff, I'm happy. It's interesting to see how people define their roles.
00:33:26
Speaker
what they see their role as in marketing versus what Google sees their role as. For example, I think it's going to be interesting to see how that continues to change. I'd say the past two years, Google probably has made the best strides in making paid search better. As far as like broad match and understanding, like being able to tie those language models together to understand that this word does mean this thing, even though they're two separate words, they're the two words for the same thing. Like it's really getting good at understanding that.
00:33:50
Speaker
So it's just kind of funny to see what our roles used to be and like what they're becoming and how people deal with that transition has been very interesting to watch. Yes, requiring more people to become strategic, which I think people still are unclear on the difference between strategy and tactics.
00:34:05
Speaker
But on the SEO side, we're not seeing as much of that yet because so much of our work is just in a CMS or on the technical side of a site build or whatever. And so until more of the CMSs are integrating more of the generative AI stuff, which they are all trying to do, it's going to be less of a thing for us to manage. I think what is going to be more of an issue is more of a Google rewriting thing.
00:34:31
Speaker
page titles, meta descriptions and just like the data that they're giving us and not giving us is going to continue to change. But I think because so much of the work is just like building a website in certain ways, whether that's the content or the site itself, we're not seeing as much of an impact on the work that we do. However,
00:34:51
Speaker
What is changing is what Google is actually surfacing. I'm seeing a trend of less indexing happening across a lot of sites. I'm seeing them seeming to look for generative AI content, not doing it well, but they're trying to look for it.
Adaptations in SEO for AI Content Detection
00:35:06
Speaker
And so it's changing what is breaking through to some degree, but it's not changing what people are doing in SEO yet. Interesting. Well, I guess, Jess, do you have any other questions?
00:35:16
Speaker
No, this was fascinating. Thank you so much for joining us. This was great. First of all, where can people find you, Mr. King? In Brooklyn. No. With the amazing view of Manhattan. Yeah, definitely. I'm looking at it right now. So yeah, iporink.com. I'm at iporink on all the social channels. Choose wisely though, because I talk trash on some and I talk professional on other ones. Check us out at A. There's about a tangle a week on Twitter with someone usually.
00:35:43
Speaker
It's always fun to watch. Not so much anymore. Not so much anymore. No, no, no. Yeah. We've all grown up, I think. We're getting older. We're like, I don't have the energy for this anymore. Yeah, I just want someone to run my Twitter for me, like I'm Neil Patel or something.
00:35:58
Speaker
Burn. You can check me out at aiprm.com. We do a weekly video series called Friday Eye, where I'm teaching you stuff on how to use it. It's great. I'm actually, I told you, I'm like, I saw one week. I'm like, guess what I did today? I learned it from you. I was so proud of myself. And then tell us about the book too, for people that really want to get deeper into understanding the science behind SEO itself. Where can they get it? Your publisher and all that good stuff.
00:36:26
Speaker
Yeah, Wiley Publishing, it's called the Science of SEO and it's on Amazon and wherever books are sold.
00:36:34
Speaker
You're a local book retailer. Well, thank you again. I know you have 8 million things going on, including dating hardcore. So we appreciate you taking the time to be with us today. And I guess we will see each other next week, Jess. Sounds good. That's marketing, baby. Bye. Bye. Thanks for listening to That's Marketing, Baby. If you dig what we're putting down, be sure to subscribe and share with your marketing besties. Because, you know, hot marketers don't gatekeep. And if you're like, this is not enough. I need more. We got you.
00:37:01
Speaker
Ranson Raves is the official newsletter of That's Marketing Baby. Every week, Susan and I share one thing we love and loathe in the world of marketing. Get on the list at That's Marketing Baby dot com. Okay, bye!