Transcription

• Speaker #0

  Good SEO strategy is very easy to smell because it sounds like good marketing strategy.

• Speaker #1

  There's debate right now about is SEO dead? Does it still matter?

• Speaker #0

  The thing that's changed now, I think, that does mean that AEO or GEO is a slightly separate thing that builds on top of that is the idea that all of these systems, whether it's Google or ChatGPT, et cetera, aren't just evaluating your website when somebody searches and building an index, they are evaluating the whole web. Is there a way to see if Google's penalizing you? A lot of people will have, for example, a blog. and that blog will have 483 articles that no human has ever read because they are boring and cookie cutter and they're written by admin, whoever this person is. They have a stock photo. They're not interesting. Nobody has commented on them. And you look at that and you go, okay, 10 years ago, an agency said that you needed to produce four blog posts a week and you just kept going.

• Speaker #1

  How many cigars have you had today, Norm, so far?

• Speaker #2

  Well, I haven't.

• Speaker #1

  I know it's early in the day, but I just...

• Speaker #2

  I haven't today. I've been a good boy, and it's raining outside.

• Speaker #1

  That's all the reason you need to move houses so you can build that cigar little hideaway in your house.

• Speaker #2

  I can't wait. It's gonna happen, you know. It's gonna happen.

• Speaker #1

  I'm all excited today. You just sent me an email. And I have to send some money to this guy to get these special cigars that come from this special place. Ex-nay. That are really, really good. This special place. That's what we does. So, but, you know, when it comes to cigars, you know, when you're searching on the Internet, or like, I know you have your cigar thing, and you do this, you know, you're like a sommelier of cigars, so you like write reviews and everything, but... Sometimes, you know, we're talking and you're like, hey, we got to look up this or find this one thing. And you're looking that up and search has changed, hasn't it? SEO is completely different than it used to be. I mean, now you get a little bit. You don't get the blue links, you get the little AI overview.

• Speaker #2

  And you know what, Kev? This whole SEO thing started, like I was doing SEO back before the first Panda release. That's what kind of a fossil I am.

• Speaker #1

  What year was Panda?

• Speaker #2

  Oh, gosh, I'm not sure. It was in the 90s. I'm not sure, 95,

• Speaker #1

  96, 97. Well, that's when SEO was, all you did was to rank on Lycos or AltaVista, and you just put the words over and over and over in your meta tags, or you put them at the bottom and you changed the color to white so nobody could see them, but you had everything in there and you instantly ranked to the top. Now, you were a black hat guy even back then. It was so easy to just be number one on everything, but it was. With Panda and all the future releases, that changed. And then SEO became a major industry. I think I saw somewhere $91 billion industry for SEO marketing. But then there's debate right now about, is SEO dead? Is SEO, does it still matter? Does it still play a part? Or is it now everything's AEO, GEO, AEIO, whatever it is now. And that's what we're going to be chatting about today. Our guest is someone who loves to talk about this and has been an expert in this for quite some time. So I think this is going to be pretty fascinating and probably enlightening for a lot of the audience.

• Speaker #2

  Oh, yeah, I think so. And he's probably backstage, probably steaming a little bit going, it's not dead. All right. So our guest today is Jono Alderson. Can't wait to talk to him. Here he is.

• Speaker #1

  Sounds like a Viking name.

• Speaker #0

  Ah, hello. I wish.

• Speaker #1

  That sounds like a...

• Speaker #0

  I am not cool enough to be a Viking. And the outdoors is scary and horrible. Like I'm bred for a laptop in the basement.

• Speaker #1

  Jono, so what... You speak on a lot of stages. What's your story? Who the heck are you? People listen... Oh, I wish I knew. I wish I knew.

• Speaker #2

  This is so cool, by the way.

• Speaker #1

  Who's this non-Viking guy that you guys have on the podcast?

• Speaker #0

  So I'm a bit of a soupy mess. I started out as a web developer 100 years ago, building websites for like small local bakeries and fishmongers and like for peanuts. And then I stumbled into the world of agencies and digital marketing and learned about SEO, analytics, clients, politics, budgets, all of that sort of stuff. And then, yeah, just kind of grew through that space and eventually ended up in a whole series of agencies doing consulting stuff. And then more recently, we were just checked beforehand, spent five years at Yoast, which people may have come across if they've dabbled with... website management and WordPress and SEO. And when I was running, what is SEO for Yoast? So we had 13 million websites, I think running our software by the time I left. And you're trying to go, we want to have a product that anticipates everything that they'll need to get SEO right out of the box, that helps them technically, that helps them strategically, but also anticipates that we don't know what combination of hosting hardware, software platform that they're running across every conceivable combination. So how do you define perfect best practice for everyone, for every conceivable scenario, and get that right? Because if you get it wrong, you've shipped code to 10% of the internet, and there's no undo button. So it was a really fascinating challenge to be responsible for defining what does SEO look like five years from now, because you're building ahead and getting that right, at least sometimes. So yeah, really interesting stuff.

• Speaker #1

  What is SEO?

• Speaker #0

  That's a great question. I will answer if my headphones hadn't just cut out. This is really unprofessional. Too many Bluetooth things. Okay, what is SEO? I love that question because, yeah, is it dead? Has it changed? Is it just spamming? I think search as a behavior is a fundamental part of how we make considered decisions. Whether you're buying a new washing machine or deciding where to go on holiday or opening a bank account, you're going to go through a series of stages where you evaluate the options. You roll some in, you roll some out, you read some reviews, you look at a website, you read some stuff on Reddit, you think, my friend told me this one was good. All these steps and stages that are a big meandering journey. Every step of that journey, what you see and what you read influences what happens next and where you ultimately end up. So if you see one website versus another, maybe that influences three weeks down the line, which bank account you open or which company you open it with or which washing machine you open it with. by. I think SEO is probably then best described as the process of actively optimizing, managing, influencing those journeys that people are going on. And yeah, there's historically, and even nowadays, some of that has a bad rap. Some of it is very misunderstood, but I think the good version and the meaningful version is making sure that when people are going on those considered journeys, that you're nudging them in the right direction. You're putting your best foot forward. You're making sure that Google and ChatGPT, et cetera. can understand your website and your messaging and put it in front of the right people at the right time. And then you're differentiated to the market. Your website isn't falling over when you get the visits. And ultimately, you're winning that business and then growing and you get that flywheel effect where people then talk about you and how good the experience was and more people link to you and more people visit your website, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All that stuff happens. Yeah, I think the good version is management of journeys.

• Speaker #2

  You know, I can't believe this. It still happens today. And this happened yesterday on a call that I had. Kevin, you weren't on the call, but this was a Dragonfish call. And we were just going through a few of our services. And then we got on the topic of website. Went to their website. They have a beautiful designed website that is totally unfunctional. You'll never find them. They are a house in the middle of a desert without an address. Yeah,

• Speaker #0

  there's no access.

• Speaker #2

  It's crazy. Even today. People won't create or they'll spend all the time on the design side, but nothing on the back end or on the SEO side. And that's even the A-E-O-G-E-O-E-I-E-I-O side now.

• Speaker #0

  Yep. Yep, for sure. It's still very common for people to think, I know I'm really good at baking cupcakes. So I will open a cupcake store and bake lots of cupcakes and I will stand at the door and shout, I have cupcakes for sale. where they don't really think. How do I reach an audience? How do I recognize that I'm competing with other people who sell cupcakes? How do I stand out? How do I do all of those things? And all of that marketing stuff of which SEO is increasingly important part. And I think 20 years ago, SEO was very tactical. It was about putting keywords on pages. But now it's about product market fit and market alignment. And it's the kind of hard thinking that a sophisticated, mature business needs to do if they want to not be that house in the desert. You have to consider. How do people research and what does this audience look like and what are their pain points? And how well positioned am I to address those best of my competitors? And how well do I communicate that? And is that one service or two services? And am I aligned well? How does that change over time? All of those things. Yeah, it's super hard and lots of businesses don't think about it or they do a bad job because I think the instinctive reaction is just to say, buy my cupcakes. And there's a whole learning and maturity journey you've got to go on to get from there to saying, okay, what does the market want and how do I align to that? It's very, very difficult.

• Speaker #1

  Hey, Norm, I've got a quick question for you. I'm trying to manage all my affiliate and creator programs from Amazon, from Shopify, from Walmart. But it's just a freaking mess. I mean, I've got reporting coming from here and there. There's all these different Slack messages. Do you know if there's like a unified dashboard where I can do this all in one place?

• Speaker #2

  Yeah, absolutely. And you're right. It is a mess. A lot of brands are complaining about that. But there is a place that has a solution. It's called Levanta. And they let brands recruit partners, track performance, manage payouts, send product samples, and even run creator. programs across every major marketplace, all in one place. And guess what? Brands can spend less time on tools and more time making profit.

• Speaker #1

  Is that the one that you sent me a link for, like a 10% off coupon, a gold or enterprise plan a few days ago?

• Speaker #2

  You got it.

• Speaker #1

  Oh, cool, man. I think I've got that link here. Was it levanta.io slash misfits?

• Speaker #2

  Yep, you got it.

• Speaker #1

  L-E-V-A-N-T-A dot I-O forward slash misfits. Awesome. I'm going to go hit them up right now and get that 10% off. Perfect. Me too. A lot of people just want pretty. I mean, they think a website's a brochure. And the same thing happens in email. Everybody wants HTML email, pretty graphics. And sometimes it makes sense to actually do that. But nine times out of 10, it doesn't. Straight text and email formatted properly. is way more effective and actually gets in the inbox and gets places that HTML email never will go. And I think the same thing happens on websites. So why is it that people are using all these tools and stuff that, you know, I remember I used, I think, Dreamweaver in the old days.

• Speaker #2

  Oh, yeah.

• Speaker #1

  Dreamweaver, and then Adobe came out with InDesign or whatever it was called. And, you know, these things would make these really pretty websites, but technically under the hood. There's stringing stuff together and it makes it really hard to be spidered and to be read. And that's even more important now in the world of AI where it can't read some of the JavaScript or the JSON or some of the stuff. It's formatted wrong. It's just a dead end.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, absolutely. And I'm a bit of a pariah on this. I'm quite bullish on it. I think around 2011, 2012, we kind of forgot what the internet was meant to be. I think there was a whole technical revolution in the JavaScript world, which... we won't go into the boring detail of, but it meant that a whole kind of wave of application and software developers came into the web, where previously there were web developers and web designers who understood the medium and they understood they were publishing pages. All these software people turn up and they start writing different types of code, different outputting websites, which are hard to call and full of JavaScript and built in ways that aren't easy, aren't accessible and aren't fast, et cetera. And a lot of that was driven by the mobile ecosystem at the time where apps were... much sleeker and much nicer than websites. Think circa 2011, you're using an app, you're swishing, you're swiping, you're popping it in ways that weren't native to the web. And yet still a lot of that ideology persists because there's a lot of money in it, because developers like to chase the shiny thing, because CMOs still say, make it feel like an app, even though that's the wrong modality. So you end up with a lot of what we broadly refer to as the modern web being cumbersome and bloated and sluggish and built. by the wrong people with the wrong tools in the wrong way. And as you say, more than ever now, in an age where AI things need to crawl and digest and understand, actually a kind of a flashback to the earlier days of the web where we say semantic HTML is really important. Clean, sleek, easy, simple stuff is really important. And you can put design layers on top of that and can make it pretty. But actually the underlying architecture has to be fit for purpose. I think that becomes more important than ever. So hopefully we see over the next year or two, a bit of a pullback. to sleeker, thinner, more considered website development, which would be nice. We end up with a better web as a result.

• Speaker #1

  Was that HTML5 that kind of switched that?

• Speaker #0

  It was about the same time, yeah.

• Speaker #1

  Or CSS and then a lot more CSS stuff and a lot more HTML5 type of stuff started evolving. I think that's around that 2011, 2012 period you're talking about, right?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, all that kind of same point. And along comes Angular and then along comes React and Facebook. and the whole kind of single-page application modality. Yeah, and we end up with websites that are built like apps, but they're built badly.

• Speaker #1

  What about today? I mean, people are building websites now. You don't need some of these tools. You can whip up a website in three minutes with a clogged clog. And those are more basic. And, you know, me and you and Norm can spot those a lot of times, like, oh, that one was bad.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, we built a muscle clarify.

• Speaker #1

  But there's, there's rappers you can put over the top of it, you know, incredible. And there's some of these other things that'll, that'll spice it up. But what about, uh, do you still need to have all these fundamental principles to, to tell? Claude to actually do it the right way? Or is it kind of baked in and it just knows?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, you've really stumbled onto something here. So the problem is all of Claude and all these other systems are trained on and are kind of echoing those bad patterns, because there's so much of it out there. And it's been the normal way of doing it for so long, and there's so much documentation. If you just say to Claude, spin me up a simple website, chances are it's going to use a whole bunch of JavaScript packages that it doesn't need to. It's going to do a whole bunch of stuff. client side on your user's browser than it should do server side because it's faster, it's more environmentally friendly, et cetera. So you have to be quite strict when you say, actually, make sure it's server side, make sure it's not using a JavaScript app because it's not an app, it's a website. And you have to kind of train it out of that. Hopefully some of that starts to fix itself over the next few years. People like the Mozilla Foundation who run Firefox and Google and others are doing great work in documenting what does good practice look like for the future. And that's very much that kind of simpler, flatter, easier, simpler modality. And these systems are picking up on that gradually. But yeah, if you just say make me a three-page sign, chances are it's going to make something that looks pretty. Although, as you say, we'll recognize very quickly that it looks like all the rest. But it's going to be a JavaScript mess more likely than not.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah, I agree 100%. As soon as you look at these, oh, okay, yeah, that's Claude, that's whatever. And we talk about, I've talked to Kevin about this before. And we have a buddy who's a photographer. And we asked them, oh, are you ever going to feel like you're going to be out of business? Absolutely not. I'm going to use, you know, I'm going to use Claude, but I'm going to be able to define the lens, the depth of field, and just to make, extract that better photo. And that's the same thing with you. You're a web developer. You know, we have some web, we have a web team as well. And because they know those little things that will bring out the best in a website, it will. But I got a question for you. You were talking about 13 million websites. Now they were, I guess, WordPress websites. So you had to be on the ball with what was going on or you'd pretty much be dead.

• Speaker #0

  Oh, yeah.

• Speaker #2

  Well, the reason, like the question is, do people just think because you have a plugin, that's all you have to do? Like just plug it in, get the freemium version.

• Speaker #0

  the freemium version because you had to and then it just runs itself yeah and this was a huge challenge at yoast um and an interesting ideological one so we designed the product in a way that did mean that if all you did was literally installed it and turned it on you got most of the benefits like it would automatically integrate with wordpress and go and make sure your sitemaps work and fix a bunch of stupid stuff wordpress does in the background invisibly in ways that you you shouldn't ever need to care about or probably even know about. And there were, by design, no checkboxes or toggles and stuff that you managed. It just went away and did its thing in the background. But then if we go back to what we were saying earlier about this kind of people just build houses in the middle of nowhere in the desert and they don't signpost it, the real work to rank in Google, to get more visibility than your competitors, to outperform people, et cetera, does require active participation. You have to think about your audience. You have to create. resources and content and information that answers their questions. You have to look at what your competitors in the market are doing and react to that in a reasonable time frame, et cetera. So yeah, if all you do is plug in the thing and think, job done, you probably have a far better website than the average website out there that everyone else has, but that will only get you to 75% of the way. And if your competitors are actively doing stuff, you've got to be doing stuff that's better and faster than them. So yeah, there's a huge swathes of people and millions and millions of websites who've just turned the thing on and think, I've done SEO. I'm done. But they're just kind of languishing.

• Speaker #2

  It's very sad. What about the difference between your, I say your, when you were working there, the premium and then the premium version? Was there a huge difference? Was it?

• Speaker #0

  Not a huge one. It was very much about kind of empowering the power user. By the way, enabling the power user to do more stuff. So everything that you needed for like. day-to-day, I want to run my business website and tell stories, do marketing within the free. But if you wanted to then go, I want to systemize and automate stuff, I want shortcuts, I want workflows, I want to do more technically advanced things that the average user shouldn't need to care about, a bunch of that was gated behind premium as well as a whole kind of support infrastructure as well. So if you needed hands-on help or had questions, et cetera, that weren't covered in the documentation, then you could go and talk to a real human, which was nice.

• Speaker #2

  I felt that I was probably one of your biggest clients at one point.

• Speaker #1

  lovely excellent was that to host all those uh 50 000 domains that you own norm kind of and that's no joke he owns like 50 000 or some crazy number of domains but uh what a Is it better to have, from an SEO perspective, is it better to have one website that's got everything on it or to have individual websites that are fully optimized as a landing page? Like one of the things that we do, we have at Norm and I, here's by shameless plug, we have an agency called Dragonfish and we do email marketing. And one of the things that we do is we use a lot of AI and it's not your traditional email marketing, it's much more advanced. But we tell our clients, like, we're not going to send the traffic to your Amazon. storefront or to your Shopify page because there's too many buttons and too many paths and too many things to go down. So we set it to a dedicated landing page and we create initially five per client. And each of these landing pages is geared towards a very specific topic. So the example I gave is magnesium cream. So if we have a magnesium cream that can be used for runners to put on their ankles after they're sore. And so everything on that page is all geared, every word, every topic, all the psychology, all the pictures are. a runner and geared towards his problems and nothing else. And there's no other links except to buy the product. And then that same product can be used for menopausal women that are having headaches. So everything on that page is 100% geared towards that pain point and that issue. And all the pictures are that demographic and so on. And it's to buy the product. Is that a good approach or is that the right approach to isolate things rather than have them all together from an SEO, a EO.

• Speaker #0

  point of view or is it this is one of the hardest challenges sorry uh yeah no this is this is a great question it's one of the hardest challenges and i'm desperately trying to avoid saying it depends um there is definitely a trap which you should avoid regardless which is having i don't know 100 100 versions of that page about magnesium cream that are slightly different but are fundamentally the same thing it's going to be an absolute killer in seo google's going to see right through that they're going to say this is manipulative it's lazy You've not put the effort in to differentiate to our value, et cetera, and it's not going to achieve anything. So that kind of large scale factory line production of we can just spin different versions of this definitely is unlikely to work and might be actively harmful. But then the bigger question is super interesting of, okay, what if I do have, I don't know, two different products? Is that one website with two pages or is it two different websites? And what if I have 20 or what if I have 200? And what if they're in related but slightly separate niches and verticals? Which way do I split all of this? And there isn't really a good answer, but it's going to come down to two things. One is, what does the market look like? And if the market sees these as two distinct things that are truly separate in use case and audience, then that's two things and reflect that. But then the other half of the question makes that even harder, which is, what's your resource and strategy? And if you've got infinite amounts of web developers and designers and content writers and marches and pials and essios. then yeah, make all of your things separate websites and give them all a strategy. Give them all a thousand pages and incredible resources and get on Netflix and on billboards and whatever. But that's not the reality most people are in. So you've got to decide where does the intersect sit between what is the market opportunity and how much genuinely awesome targeted on-point stuff can I create for each of these and find where that line sits. And more often than not in the real world, I find that that is better if you do less, but better. So I would have one website that sells 10 closely related things that's incredible rather than 10 kind of average websites that are more differentiated, but fragmented and split out. Just so it's a really hard question.

• Speaker #1

  Just to clarify on that, it's one domain with five different landing pages. So it's the same domain. It's not like different domains to game. It's one domain with different landing pages on it.

• Speaker #0

  Sure, but they're about essentially the same product, just kind of... cut and different reframed in different ways yes that's each page is completely different um but yeah yeah just cut to for that specific pain point yeah interesting yeah so you could definitely do that you could as long as those pages were legitimately useful resources for the problem that they're talking about rather than just to kind of shill to frame that product in a different way then yeah great no problem with that they are they are they have the faq they have i sound like I'm not.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. Yeah. I just, it's, it's. It's good. So how does AEO affect SEO or vice versa? This is the question everyone's asking me. Instead, you need to do AEO now. Other people say SEO ain't gone anywhere. It's just not as sexy anymore because AEO is new. You're still doing this.

• Speaker #0

  Well, the budget's going over here. Yeah.

• Speaker #1

  But tell me, do they go together? Do they both go to the prom or is one of them now stuck at home?

• Speaker #0

  I think they go together. And we're stuck in this problem where as the web and marketing evolves, SEO kind of gets dragged along with it and changes. So 10 years ago, I would never have imagined that... Being an SEO expert would also require me to be a web performance expert. But I know more about the nuances of how CSS rendering works for GPUs than is healthy for anyone to know, because I know that page speed is tied to SEO. And it's the same for security. It's now the same for accessibility. It's now the same for all sorts of these corners of marketing that SEO has had to evolve to encapsulate because Google and users are evaluating websites based on those things. So it matters and influences outcomes. That said. The thing that's changed now, I think, that does mean that AEO or GEO is a slightly separate thing that builds on top of that is the idea that all of these systems, whether it's Google or ChatGPT, et cetera, aren't just evaluating your website when somebody searches and building an index, they are evaluating the whole web. And suddenly it becomes extremely important what people are saying about you on Reddit or what the teenagers are saying about you on TikTok or what... The journalist is not saying about you, but is saying about your competitor on YouTube. And there is definitely a resourcing gap and an ownership gap. And this remains a big question of who owns this, where you go, if we want Google to rank us and ChatGPT to recommend us, we have to be actively managing all of those surfaces and how we're perceived and checking that what we said in 2013 on our campaign microsite is still accurate and running billboards in order to influence how people... perceive us and react to people on Reddit. All of this suddenly becomes part of the machine as well. Is that SEO? Not really, but a lot of SEO wasn't really SEO in the same way that site speed and security aren't really SEO. So yeah, I think it's a new hat on top of a lot of other hats.

• Speaker #2

  So can we go back to SEO for a second? There's probably a lot of people that are going to be listening and saying, and you're going to roll your eyes at this probably, but what are outdated tactics. and what do we need to do now to rank?

• Speaker #0

  Great question. I would avoid anything that sounds tactical, anything that sounds scalable, and anything that sounds technically complex beyond just building a good website. So good SEO strategy is very easy to smell because it sounds like good marketing strategy. It is about, do I have... a website that is well-built, that understands my audience, communicates them with a way that understands and solves their problems. And you spot very quickly a whole bunch of legacy SEO tactics that don't fit that brief. So you'll find that a lot of people will have, for example, a blog. And that blog will have 483 articles that no human has ever read because they are boring and cookie cutter. And they're written by admin, whoever this person is. They have a stock photo They don't have an opinion. They're not funny. They're not interesting. Nobody has commented on them. And you look at that and you go, okay, 10 years ago, an agency said that you needed to produce four blog posts a week and you just kept going. But if you look at it through the lens of, is this interesting? Is it differentiated? Does it help my audience? Does it solve people's problems genuinely in a way that is useful and interesting and a bit different from what else is in the market? And suddenly, yeah, that smells and it looks like old school tactics. So yeah, I would avoid all of that, build a good website, help an audience, do something differently to Thank you. and better than your competitors, and then promote the heck out of it.

• Speaker #2

  Ghost, guest blogging still right up there?

• Speaker #0

  Guest blogging is an interesting one. It got massively manipulated and abused because if links are currency, and so much the other sites linking to your site could help you rank better because it's something Google counts, then everybody went, oh, one of the ways we can do this is saying, let's go and write a blog post on somebody else's site and link back to ours. So then all the shady SEO industry kind of bottom layer. went and did that, a scale you can't possibly imagine. And Google went, nope, none of that now, thank you. And it killed it as a tactic. That said, I think there is definitely a place for co-branding and endorsement is a really big deal if we're talking about how ChatGPT and other lands and AIs didn't understand your brand and your positioning and products, right? So if you can negotiate a relationship and a partnership with a reputable site to say, can we have an editorial slot here? That could be great. I don't think it's an SEO tactic in so much as that you don't really care about the link and it's not necessarily going to affect your rankings, but it almost certainly affects how do users perceive me? How does chat GPT perceive me? Does that alter how people behave when they search? And can Google detect that more engaged behavior? And then that'd be better as a result, probably. But yeah, I would avoid anything that sounds like an SEO tactic.

• Speaker #1

  I think a lot of people, you mentioned page speed earlier. I think a lot of people don't realize importance of how fast your page loads on rank. And so I see this all the time. People send me stuff to put on websites or in emails, whatever. It's a two megabyte image file.

• Speaker #0

  Uh, they're attaching that in there. And I'm like, no, number one, resize this from 380. It's from chat GPT or something. It's 380 pixels by 2000 or whatever the default is. And that's what they give you. I'm like, no, if it's an email, maximum should be 800 across maximum.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah.

• Speaker #0

  And then you need to put, make it a web P or at least a PNG, throw it through tiny PNG or something, make it a knock this thing down from two megabytes to 47 K. Uh, and.

• Speaker #2

  a lot of people don't understand that and don't do that and they just they're just hurting themselves right yeah this is i'm obsessed with this for a few reasons um one is all the research says that this stuff is so close to the money it's unreal and then i dig out all the like research there was some last year from deloitte an updated version saying that 200 milliseconds costs like up to 10 conversion rate 200 milliseconds is about the same time it takes a human to blink and in that difference somebody is subconsciously making a decision whether or not to add a premium product to their cart. And the numbers change. You're deciding what not to write. The numbers change depending on which company. Oh, sorry.

• Speaker #1

  Go ahead. Go ahead.

• Speaker #2

  No, sorry. Go,

• Speaker #1

  No, I was just going to say, now I'm counting every time you blink. How much money have I cost? That's definitely not a universal law.

• Speaker #2

  But there are studies after studies after studies in sectors and B2B and B2C. And is it e-commerce? And is it lead gen? Are we talking about filling out form? All of the studies say. that infinitesimally small delays do have a measurable material compounding impact on bounce rate, on conversion rate, etc. And I think this is super interesting because it's not that somebody is sat here going, oh, that page took 400 milliseconds to load and I'm bored of blinking and now I'm not going to buy. But it's the accumulation of those delays mean that they're more likely to look out the window or think what's for dinner tonight or get distracted or tab to somewhere else. And then all of those add up and you get this disengagement at scale. So there's a huge thing there. And yeah, people massively gloss over, I'm shipping six megabytes of JavaScript and 30 megabyte images on my homepage and the auto playing video melts older mobile phones. And there's a few interesting things going on with that. If you have a fast website, Google boosts your SEO. Not significantly, and they refer to it as like a tiebreaker amount. But if your site is fast, you do get an explicit benefit, aside from the fact that you're fixing your conversion rate and stuff. But then also, if your site is slow, it reveals some really, really interesting things. Because if we're saying that having a fast site is this close to the money, if your site is slow, no one's doing that deliberately. So it starts to reveal some interesting stuff around, is it because you're on the wrong tech stack? Is it because you've got the wrong people involved? Is it because your priorities are wrong? If this is the easiest way to make money currently on your table and you've not fixed those things, it reveals some really interesting things about organizational dysfunction. and resourcing and staffing and those kinds of things. Yeah, site speed fascinates me. I think it's one of the most developed opportunities sites have. Even small sites, big sites. I work with some of the world's biggest companies, and they still upload 30 megabyte images to their homepage, and they have to go, ah, that's like you're on a fast desktop Wi-Fi connection. But your current Q4 strategy is to grow market share in India, where most of those people have relatively poor connectivity. The mobile networks themselves are flaky. They're on an older generation of mobile phone devices. And it takes 38 seconds to load. I'm like, that's an inordinate amount of money. So yeah,

• Speaker #1

  it's super interesting.

• Speaker #0

  I remember with the old progressive JPEGs, they would slowly come back. Or the Flash, when you hit a Flash, back when Flash was a thing, you hit a site that had Flash. You're like, all right, I'm going to go get some coffee and cut it back while it's playing.

• Speaker #1

  The old beach ball. But there's a site, if anybody wanted to go, and just check out their PageSpeed. Google has that optimization or PageSpeed site. I forget the URL.

• Speaker #2

  PageSpeed.web.dev, I think.

• Speaker #1

  Is it? Yeah,

• Speaker #2

  I think that's what it is. Yeah.

• Speaker #1

  And so if you want to get freaked out, just go there. And if you're not in the green, if you're in the orange, you suck. If you're in the red, you suck. So you got to be, yeah, suck more, but you got to be in that green. Nothing less. I don't know if you'd agree with me. But you have to be in the green on both mobile and desktop and they're gonna be they are gonna be different

• Speaker #2

  Yeah, they are and one of the interesting things that people overlook with this is Where that green threshold is is normalized against the whole internet So as your competitors are speeding their sights up your scores are gonna get worse So it's not even like I'm gonna go and fix it It's you've got to build and have a culture of building fast things. The good news is this gets easier and easier because Modern best practices around HTML, around CSS and stuff, a lot of the stuff that can come out of Cloud now are inherently fast. As long as you say, use the modern stuff and don't go build a nasty JavaScript application. Yeah, it's super easy to speed things up now.

• Speaker #0

  Hey, Norm, do you know any sellers out there that are just burned out doing this e-com game?

• Speaker #1

  You know, I know a lot of people that have talked to us, you know, when we go to events. And it's not only that, they don't know where to start.

• Speaker #0

  And who would you recommend they talk to?

• Speaker #1

  The first one that comes to mind is Quietlight Brokerage. And here's why. They're going to build you up. They're going to understand your company. And at the end of the day, you're going to know how to maximize your valuation. So the very first thing you need to do is go and get your free confidential evaluation at QuietLight.com. They're going to ask a couple of questions. You're going to meet up. It's one-on-one with somebody over there. And then, you know, let the games begin.

• Speaker #0

  Awesome. What was that website again?

• Speaker #1

  It's QuietLight.com.

• Speaker #0

  Awesome. I'm going to head over there.

• Speaker #1

  But the next thing after this, this is the next, okay, I'm out of here, is the user experience. Like if people don't understand that or if your graphic designer doesn't understand that, you can get to the point where your website is fast and clean. But, all right, now I get there. I don't know where to click. I don't know where to go.

• Speaker #0

  And we're not even going to reach out to SaaS companies. Don't even put a login on their main page. Or contact.

• Speaker #1

  Or contact.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah.

• Speaker #1

  Nothing. So anyways, that's just a bit of a pet peeve of mine. That's another conversation, but I thought I'd just throw it in there.

• Speaker #2

  It's an interesting one because there's a misconception that comes up time and time again that design and conversion optimization and user experience quite often disagree with SEO. And I've been in meetings where people have been very defensive and hostile expecting this. I don't think it's a thing in the real world. I think the... Good user experience and good design and good SEO can all be the same thing. If the objective is create a great resource that helps answer people's problems and helps them solve that meet their needs, then you can make it flash blue and pink. You can make it scroll left to right. You can make it spin round and round. There are ways to mitigate the SEO risks of doing weird non-standard stuff. But all of that can work together in a way that produces something that Google can see and find and understand. And then humans have a great experience with. I don't think there's ever... ever a point that I found where you've got to make a hard decision of, do we want this to look good and convert, or do we want to do SEO? And if that does feel like a compromise you're making, it's probably because you're doing it wrong. And actually that 300 word crappy article isn't the right medium, isn't the right performance. And the problem is the tactics you're using not inherently SEO. So yeah, interesting, I think.

• Speaker #0

  So some people are saying that SEO is moving in the direction, there's going to be two SEOs or two AEOs, one for humans and one for machines with schema and everything underneath. And even Google now and the web developer tools, they have a thing where you can actually check your schema for free. You can see what you need to change. They'll tell you this is hurting or this is good. Where do you see that going? Is it going to split or is it going to be like you just said, kind of all it can be all wrapped in one? What do you think that's going with that?

• Speaker #1

  Before we get there, Kevin, I think there's a lot of people that are nodding and waving right now and they don't understand what schema is. Can we get into that for a sec?

• Speaker #2

  Yeah, let's start there. And then we're going to the second bit. That makes sense. So webpages are made of HTML and CSS and JavaScript and other bits and pieces. HTML is a language which describes the layout and structure of the page so that your browser can paint the right pixels in the right colors in the right places and then humans can look at it. Part of that HTML might be metadata. And if we are putting an SEO hat on, that might be things like the page's title, its description, things like its canonical URL, its language, other bits and pieces, which aren't designed for humans to see, but sit in that code and convey information to search engines and other systems. That information is quite basic. If you want to convey more complex information, like here is the photo of the person who wrote this review about this product that this page is about, you need Schemador. You need structured data. And it's a different type of metadata that sits in the code but lets you describe entities, things, and the relationships between them. So you can describe in a few lines of code, this is a webinar about this topic featuring these people and these are the URLs of their personal websites, in ways that might be quite hard to do in normal HTML or in normal meta tags. Google, other systems, read some of that schema and structured data and then they use it to understand the world better. And that might influence how do my search results look. So I might have star ratings on a product and a price, and that might unlock a certain type of rich result format in Google where it shows that star rating and things. There are dozens of types of these. Different systems consume different amounts, et cetera. But yeah, structured data is like a layer of information under your content. Schema.org is a type of structured data. Now, that indeed brings up the interesting conversation about... If Google is reading this stuff separately to or in addition to my page, why does it need my page? If this is a blog post and I say, here is the author, here is the title, here is the image, here is the content, why would they also parse and render and index and faff with all the human facing stuff if they could just have the raw data? And that's been an interesting conversation for about a decade now. And Google occasionally go, yeah, interesting conceptually, but we built this world model based on pages and it'd be a big deal to change it. And now AI arrives and AI starts saying. ChatGPT, LMs, Claudette's extra starts saying, well, maybe the idea of a stripped back, simplified version of a page is quite interesting. And we don't need your pictures. We don't need to know what color that text is. We don't need the adverts in the sidebar. We don't need the navigation. We don't need the contact form. What if we just had the stuff? And there's an interesting movement for, yeah, saying, so what if we have two versions of our website? What if we have two versions of every page? The human facing one, which is nice and pretty, and then a real stripped back on. And this is about as far as this conversation's got. There's some interesting exploration. Some systems like Claude are consuming some of that. But the bigger question of, are we entering an age where you need two versions of a thing? I don't think we're quite resolved yet. I think my view is probably that we stick with one version because you look at the journey Google's been on and one of the biggest challenges they have is to trust the web. Like if we say SEO has historically been quite tactical and manipulative. If you just write on your page a lot, I sell the best cupcakes, Google can't believe that. They have to evaluate everything about you. They have to reconcile that and they have to look at the rest of the web. If we're now saying you have two versions of the truth, oh, this one's for machines. It's definitely trustworthy. I sell the best cupcakes. They're not just going to gobble that up. And not only are they just going to not believe you, they're also going to have to reconcile that against what's on your normal webpage. Because if your normal webpage says, I'm a dentist and your AI facing website says I'm a casino, because you're going to make a whole bunch of money from cheating and tricking people, they're going to have to check that. So you've now not only doubled their work, because I've got to go look at two things, they've also got to expend all the resources to assess and reconcile them, which is 10 times the work. And ChatGPT and other systems are going to have to do the same. And I don't think they're budgeted or resourced to do that. I think the idea that these systems will somehow magically trust this separate message that we pass to them, and they believe that we're honest and continue, I don't think any of that's going to happen. Google and ChatGPTS will continue to look at the same things that humans look at because they can't trust a separate version.

• Speaker #1

  Is there a way to see if Google's penalizing you?

• Speaker #2

  Penalties are very rare nowadays. If you get a manual penalty handed to you by a Googler, it might show up in your Google Search Console account. I find it's incredibly rare to hear of penalties in the last few years. I don't think it's a thing. Probably a thing they're trying to phase out because a lot of it has to be manual. and they get led. They want to mechanize everything. That said, it's worth keeping an eye on their, one of their many blogs, I forget which one it is, where they announce kind of policy level changes. So for example, there was a change the other day to how they handle when websites like rent out subdomains and portions of their site for, you would have a big newspaper brand and they would go, we can make a bit of money if we had a slash casino section, which we just let some third party casino run. They've clamped down on that a little bit. It's not a penalty, but. They've sent out warnings and updated their documentation and stuff. But if you're doing normal good stuff, you shouldn't have to worry about penalties.

• Speaker #1

  You know, I miss, I don't know if you've ever watched this, but he used to come on all the time, Matt Cutts.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah, I miss Matt. Matt was great.

• Speaker #1

  He was fantastic. And I don't know why they cut that off. He would bring you up to date with whatever's happening in Google all the time. He would just have regular. broadcast. He was fantastic.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah, you should check out there's a podcast called Search Off the Record with Gary, John, and Martin, who are like John's successors. It's really good. It's a little bit about how does Google work behind the scenes and what are the types of decisions they have to make. It's quite interesting. It's quite funny. What's it called? Search Off the Record. Okay.

• Speaker #0

  So what does Google think of all this SEO stuff? I mean, how do they view it as like, yeah, You're helping us in one way and make our answers better. But in another way, you're manipulating the heck out of us. Yeah. And how do they balance it? How do they look at this? I know they bought what Danny, was it Danny Sullivan or whatever? Did SEO watch or SEO, whatever. He had some big SEO thing. I was independent. Now he's, or his company is part of that. So what's their approach to all this?

• Speaker #2

  Yeah. Great question. It's always been a tense and slightly weird relationship. I think if you go back a decade, there were moments when it was actively hostile and the Google teams were very much perceiving SEO as manipulators. And they were trying to, it was a cat and mouse game of can we get one step ahead of a big old S, etc. And it's again, very, very tactical. I think nowadays, the more mature parts of the SEO ecosystem, we have really good working relationships with Google. There's obviously still quite a lot of secrecy involved and not everything is perfect and there's some frustration, but communication is generally reasonably good. That said, I think there have been some interesting scenarios over the last few years where it has turned out that they've been deceiving us with things that they've said and that things that have come out of recent... Legal trials in the US have revealed that they've maybe worded things in a very careful way that implied they weren't doing one way. So there's some trust that's been eroded. I think they recognize, at least I think some of them at Google's side recognize that actually a lot of the work that SEO does as an industry is acts as their communication strategy. If we're saying that in order to be successful in Google, you need to, for example, have great site architecture and understand audience messaging and positioning and marketing. have the right kind of content positioning, et cetera. They are terrible at articulating that and connecting to end users and website owners and helping to educate and support those. SEO kind of sits as a bridge in the middle between what Google wants and real businesses. And we do a huge amount of heavy lifting on saying, don't upload a 30 megabyte image to your homepage. Your blog posts are awful. Your website is inaccessible, et cetera. And gradually managing their index for them. But yeah, I think there's still quite a lot of Googles equally internally who see it as manipulative and they'd rather live in a perfect world where the machine just runs the machine. I think if you work at Google in the engineering side, I think you're probably a special type of creature. And there's some strange perceptions over there, yeah, for sure.

• Speaker #1

  So Kev and I, and Kev, how many websites have we looked at when we've been on phones with people? Like hundreds?

• Speaker #2

  Oh, sheesh. Thousands.

• Speaker #1

  Tons.

• Speaker #2

  A lot.

• Speaker #1

  And so I'm just curious. Ah How many, let's say out of 100, how many would you rate that are even okay good?

• Speaker #2

  Oh, 10%.

• Speaker #1

  Oh, yeah, I was going to say about that. So my question was, out of those e-commerce sites, so we deal mostly with e-commerce, how many do you think is technically broken and 10% comes up? And what do they do to fix it?

• Speaker #0

  Well, you look at just what Perfect Labs, you know, the guys that were at Market Masters a couple weeks ago, they're auditing all these e-commerce websites for, you know, for AEO optimization to check, you know, their links and everything. And I think it was 86% of them had a robots.txt file blocking crawlers.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah, yeah. Like, what's your strategy for showing up and getting recommended?

• Speaker #0

  Just a basic thing like that. Most people, they just have no clue. Yeah,

• Speaker #2

  and this is the problem. The no clue is the issue. I think if these were physical retail stores on a high street, and you walked in and there were trailing electrical cables everywhere and the shelves had all fallen over and there's There's a big table over the door. Do not enter. Please. Do not enter my store. Do not enter my store. Then the manager can go, okay, I understand this is a problem. I understand this is a bad user experience. I understand it's harming sales. But then if you go, okay, it's a website, and what we're saying is actually, oh, you've got an infinite call issue with your pagination or you're blocking this particular type of user agent. I don't think most businesses and their employees are technically mature enough yet for that to become common knowledge and well understood. So you don't get any of that visceral, oh, this is, yes, I can understand as a human that this is broken and wrong, even though it's just the same thing.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. And I think one of the things that these guys that do this technology, it's called Perfectus Labs, they actually monitor your website, audit your website, and they say, all these things are wrong. And it's a laundry list of stuff, you know, and, and they say, here, they, here's the, here's how you fix it. And they tell you, you know, go change this, uh, header, uh, heading tag to an H1 to an H2, or then change this to whatever. Or we have a tool that does it for you. Or don't bother with this. It's going to take you weeks to do this. Um, we can do it for you. And some people say, well, I can do this myself because they don't want to spend a thousand bucks. So other people like, do it and one of the things that they're saying is like look there's been 11 or 12 google updates in the last 15 years or i may have that number slightly but i had you know basically one a year where it wipes out some seo people and wipes out some some stuff and but with aeo now they're what they say there's like 340 updates a month or some crazy or like that of the way that aeo is actually i think it was well right yeah some crazy number that way they're actually reading stuff so just to keep up with that now is cumbersome if you're trying to be fully optimized for what they're looking for.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah, in e-commerce especially, you look at the pace at which Google Merchant Center evolves. And this feed now needs this attribute and this thing, the image rules have changed. I try and keep up with some of that. But yeah, it's chaos over there. And that's powering a lot. If you look at Universal Commerce Protocol, which is the how do I allow agents to buy without having to log in. All of that ecosystem ties to Google Merchant Center, which ties to schema. And this will change here on Tuesday and that will change here on Wednesday. Yeah. Very, very kind of micromanagement team.

• Speaker #0

  So what do you do from an SEO point? Now, you have all the newspaper publishers crying foul, like you just put us out of business because all our links went away because now Google is doing AI overviews.

• Speaker #2

  Yep.

• Speaker #0

  And they're not getting all that. So what's the adjustment that people need to make from an SEO perspective in this new world where you don't have all the blue links anymore and you don't have all that depth? I know there's still options to get to it, but most people aren't. They're just taking it, whatever's in that summary, at face value. So what do you do to actually, and that doesn't mean there's a click. So what do you do now to counter some of that or to play that game?

• Speaker #2

  Yeah, if we can answer that, we'll all be millionaires. I think the hard answer that nobody wants to hear is change your business model and change your traffic mix. your channel makes. So let me zoom out a second. We've had about a decade of clicks generally reducing. And it starts out with Google showing which results in the search engine, which pushes stuff down. It evolves into Google answering all sorts of types of queries. Like if you Google, how tall is the Eiffel Tower? And you do that in 2015, 2016, it just tells you. So if you previously had a website that was about facts about how high buildings were, you've never got challenges. like you're not getting that click even if you went first You're halfway down the page under a thing that has solved your problem already. So this is already an issue. And we're already seeing half of searches be solved in the city, which is great for users, absolutely great for consumers, but decimates business models that were built on solving that particular type of problem. And then we start to see that particular type of problem quite expand. And now it turns out that recipes are a solved problem space and that all possible combinations of food and ingredients are already known and modern and understood that Google can just synthesize it on the fly. And then AI happens. And now again, not only do we have all of this, where it was already difficult to compete, but now all content is being consumed, souped, and re-spurged, and possibly synthesized together with other stuff to create new types of things that's super interesting, except now as a publisher, and not just as a newspaper, but as a blogger, as a dentist, as a baker, as a whatever, what is my incentive? to produce the content that helps to solve people's problems that I was hoping would lead to visibility and clicks and search engines and search results for. And not only that, but if my business is predicated on the idea that people look for me, find my website, click me, and then maybe 2% of those people, I can say, hey, look, also, I've been super helpful, but we sell a thing. Can you come click this call to action? And then maybe a few of those go, yeah, that makes money, that breaks as well. So, and then on top of that... The entire advertising ecosystem around that of sites showing banners to try and do retargeting, to try and make some money from visitors, all of that breaks. Nobody really has an answer to what happens next. And the short-term hack seems to be that the big publishers and the newspapers and similar are either digging their heels in and saying, you know what, we will join together and we'll not play. We'll block you and we've got enough force between us that we will try and force regulation or legislation. or extract some kind of money out of you. But that's no good for the average blogger or the average dentist. And governments and regulators are way behind on this. And all of the content has already been extracted. So even if there's a fix for this tomorrow, you will never ever again be able to attract traffic by writing a novel recipe for a lasagna. It's a solved problem. Lasagna is done, right? You cannot build a business there anymore. So the web has fundamentally changed and the genie's out the bottle and nobody has a good idea for... at iBuilder Business. There are some interesting experiments, Cloudflare in particular doing some interesting stuff around can we have micropayments that agents have to pay when they extract or train on information and how does all of that work and which bitcoin goes where and what format etc. It's been tried three or four times over the last couple of decades this sort of can the web handle micropayments thing that's failed time and time and time again for different reasons. maybe this is it. But even if you can say, okay, we're going to charge per... training or extraction. It doesn't solve the problem that once that content has been extracted, it's now valueless because it's been consumed into the model. Don't know what the answer is other than find ways to make money that don't rely on getting people to your website and converting a subset via Google. So build an owned audience. Email, you've mentioned email is great. Email is still yours. Maybe for now, maybe. We're not far off agents just orchestrating people's inboxes and seeing the same problem there. So we'll see. Maybe you try and do some kind of subscription service where you have far fewer. viewers and far fewer users, but you make more money out of them individually. None of these are great answers. And I know that Microsoft and Bing are working very hard with a group of publishers to try and work out what does an amicable relationship look like, and they can't solve it. Google is saying nothing. Danny Sullivan is saying nothing. They occasionally host like brunches with a select number of bloggers and tell them everything's fine, and then send them away with dead businesses. I don't know. It's really super scary because... The implications are not small, right the way up to capitalism and the open web and democracy as a whole. All of these things require a web that works. So, yeah, we shall. Either this is the best time humanity has ever had or it's the end of the world.

• Speaker #0

  You talk about the email side there. I think you're right on email. It's very powerful, owning that distribution channel. And if something does go the way of agentic where agents are just coordinating most of the email and you don't have that human touch anymore. You're going to go back to the old way. It's a direct mail. So if you have the email address and you own that email address, you can convert that about 80% of those. You can convert it into actually physical email, physical mail. And that's going to be, I think, going to see a comeback. And so you can leverage that. But also people are speaking of owning the distribution, you have all these, there's two things I see going on right now on the information and distribution side is you have all these retail networks, your gas pump, at least here in the States. I don't I don't know if it's in the UK as well, but in the... They have their own distribution, their own advertising network for the gas pump. And you have your own target. It has their own internal distribution network. And then you have people like Amazon who are sending out order confirmation emails and say, hey, your spatula, your garlic is on its way. Now they don't say that because it's getting mined by Google. They're mining the data out of the emails. And so now it says your household items are on the way. It doesn't say what it is. They're masking everything now in the e-mails. And so it's becoming who owns the distribution and who owns the data is going to win. And isn't that Google right now? They own the distribution and the data.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah, my bet's on Google, definitely. I think, yeah, and if you're a publisher, you're definitely at the sharp edge of this because what you sell is, what you monetize is eyeballs and they're no longer available. I think if you're a baker or a dentist, you've maybe got a slightly less dystopian outcome but i do think that this shift forces you to double down on being the best best in a niche like if you are the third best dentist in the city you're invisible now because neither google nor tractor bt are going to cite or recommend you as the one you should go to but if you are under the best vegan lemon cupcake baker you have absolutely won so if i would double down on speciality and niche but then you end up in a different problem that can Can you sustain that business? Are there enough people who want vegan lemon cupcakes as opposed to other... Weird example, but you get it. The nicher you go down, the smaller your target audience is, and you can win the hell out of that, but then is that enough to make it work? Super tricky. Or be huge, right? Be Amazon, own the distribution network, be frictionless and enormous, and then you get all those economies of scale and other surfaces. But I think anything in between those, absolutely dead. I don't think you can compete. as an average business in an average market anymore, because you're not going to get anyone. No one's going to ask about you. No one's going to find you. You'll get no incidental footfall traffic on the web. Super hard.

• Speaker #0

  Hey, Kevin King and Norm Farrar here. If you've been enjoying this episode of Marketing Misfits, thanks for listening this far. Continue listening. We've got some more valuable stuff coming up. Be sure to hit that subscribe button if you're listening to this on your favorite podcast player, or if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify. Make sure you subscribe to our channel because you don't want to miss a single episode of The Marketing Misfits. Have you subscribed yet, Norm?

• Speaker #1

  Well, this is an old guy alert. Should I subscribe to my own podcast?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, but what if you forget to show up one time? It's just me on here. You're not going to know what I say.

• Speaker #1

  I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair too. And we'll just, you can go back and forth with one another. Yikes

• Speaker #0

  That being said, don't forget to subscribe, share it. Oh, and if you really like this content, somewhere up there, there's a banner. Click on it and you'll go to another episode of the Marketing Misfits.

• Speaker #1

  Make sure you don't miss a single episode because you don't want to be like Norm.

• Speaker #0

  Oh. You are in the middle. We don't know what's going to happen next. It's a. crazy time because you almost have to review your business strategy, your business model ongoing. And you should be doing that anyways. But a lot of business models and a huge, I don't know if it's majority, but it's a huge number that are going to tank and they won't know what hit them. It's just going to happen so quickly. This is changing so rapidly that I think So a lot of businesses are going to be out. Very quickly.

• Speaker #2

  Even looking at what you mentioned earlier, you've got to be recommended. You've got to be people the kids have got to be talking about you or whatever on social media. Reddit at one point was like 13% or 17% of all chat GPT reference or information. And now it's like next to nothing. They've cut it because people started manipulating it and started gaming.

• Speaker #3

  Yeah, surprise, surprise.

• Speaker #2

  That's one reason. That's not the only reason, but it's one reason. So it's an...

• Speaker #3

  constantly evolving field and it's like nobody has the answer the exact answer um but there's just best practices and just things that you can do but there is no like one cure or one one path really is there no and i think going back to earlier i think there are fewer and fewer tactics i think all that's left is strategy i think anything that sounds like oh if we just install this thing or click this button or add this page we'll get what i know i don't there are so few of those so if we just go do ready if we just go do you individually these things won't move the needle and it's going to get harder and harder to win unless you deserve the win, which most businesses aren't designed to do, right? You say loads of businesses are going to fail. I think they are because who starts a business and says, you know what, we are going to be the authentically best problem solver for people with this problem in an altruistic way that's designed to help people. It's not generally the main motivation. Even if it is, there's complexities, right? But most businesses aren't designed to be helpful, but the most helpful businesses are the ones that are going to win. And then you've got to go, okay, how do you redesign business models around that? And most incumbents and established organizations are going to struggle.

• Speaker #0

  Well, if something ever happens to our business, Kev, we can always go to York and be the Viking. I can be Vikings.

• Speaker #3

  I can go to

• Speaker #2

  York and get some cupcakes.

• Speaker #0

  All I want is vegan.

• Speaker #2

  Vegan lemon cupcakes.

• Speaker #0

  Absolutely.

• Speaker #2

  That might pair well with your cigars, Norm. I really regret that, John.

• Speaker #0

  Every time we think of you now, it's your vegan lemon. I'm not even a vegan.

• Speaker #2

  Dumb it. Well, John, if people want to reach out to you, how would they do that? If they were like, hey, this guy sounds pretty cool. I want to reach out or follow him or whatever. What's the best way for people to do that?

• Speaker #3

  That'd be nice. You could go to johnoalderson.com, which I think... is a technically perfect website. And if it's not, find a book, let me know and I'll buy you a drink. All right.

• Speaker #0

  So at the end of every podcast, we always ask our misfit if they know a misfit.

• Speaker #3

  Yeah, definitely. I've got a really good suggestion, which is Arnout Helmans. He's a Dutch SEO marketing business techie hybrid nerd who has lent into his ADHD as a superpower. And he's an absolute incredible whirlwind. He's a delight. He's hilarious. And he's very, very, very clever.

• Speaker #0

  Fantastic. All right. Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast today.

• Speaker #2

  Thanks for having me. It's been a delight. It's been fun. Thanks. Appreciate it. All right, I'm gonna remove ya. Oh, dear. All right, how was that? That was great, man. That's good stuff. Mix of the old, plus a mix of the new, and something that, you know, it's not the sexiest thing that a lot of people like to think about, but it's one of the most important things. Yeah, not having buttons sexy. You know, sometimes it's the blood in the system, not the heartbeat. actually makes the difference. And that's good stuff from Jono there.

• Speaker #0

  I just wish people putting up a website, just don't go out to Fiverr, hire the cheapest designer and think you're getting a technically sound website. All you're doing is you're getting a pretty, an aesthetically nice website. But guess what? You're not gonna get any sales. So it's really important that we have this balance between the quality of the design, user experience, and then the back end on the SEO side, AEO side, EIEIO side.

• Speaker #2

  Exactly. And especially if you want to have a balance of experience and balance of knowledge, how do they do that? It's Marketing Misfits somewhere. How do they do that?

• Speaker #0

  Let me ponder. Oh, yes. It's Marketing Misfits Podcast on YouTube. Or if you That's for the full podcast, but if you want the three-minute clips or less, you can go to Marketing Misfits Clips. And what else do we have?

• Speaker #2

  We have a newsletter too, marketingmisfits.news. No, no, misfits.news. Misfits.news is the newsletter that comes out every Wednesday, brand new podcast every single Tuesday. And look for us on the socials. Sometimes you might see us playing on... On the socials? Is that like being on the Googles? On the Googles, on the socials. Maybe playing some Misfits Mayhem, a little game that we do with prizes. So watch for that as well. Other than that, I guess I'll have to see you again next week, right, Norm?

• Speaker #0

  Yes, you will. All right, everybody. Well, thanks for joining us today, and we will see you next time.

• Speaker #2

  Ciao.

• Speaker #0

  See ya. Thank you.