 We've reached the last but most certainly not the least presentation for Moscon virtual 2021 Our next speaker is no stranger to Moscon and like this one is previously anchored many of the past Moscon's Will Reynolds is the founder and vice president of innovation at Sierra interactive Imagine having such a cool job like that vice president of innovation. That's so cool Will has been leading the charge to leverage big data in breaking down the silos between SEO PPC and traditional marketing pulling together data from various sources to see the big picture Today, it will show you how to win by using the three most important search marketing tools I'm just as excited as you are for this one. See you soon What's up, everybody will Reynolds here from Sierra interactive and I am back at my ninth Moscon next year is the 10th anniversary. Hope you have me back and today. I'm gonna talk about three search tools That we're probably not talking about enough and I'm sorry It is your heart your brain and your small ego. You're probably thinking will what kind of tools are those? Give me a tool where I can put my URLs in and get all the answers. Well, that's not gonna happen today. Sorry So let's start with our small egos. It's not all about us, right? How do you shrink your ego and recently I came across an article that talked about intellectual humility and you guys know me by now I like to drop stuff here that you probably haven't heard before and I've never been Anywhere heard somebody talk about the concept of intellectual humility. So what is it? It's simply the recognition that some of the things that you might believe That's it, but it takes a lot of humility to recognize that what you believe is right could be wrong And there's another piece of it around, you know, it's the human condition to not know the things you're ignorant of That's why it's called ignorance All right, so there's things about us that exist below the surface that we don't even really know about ourselves Let me give you an example So you go to buy some glasses at Warby Parker and Warby Parker said hey You know what you buy glasses? We're gonna give a pair of glasses to a child in Mexico or somewhere in the world So they can become programmers and work on computers and all that great stuff and that made us feel all warm and fuzzy But it actually never worked the customers really never cared and you're thinking well No, no, no like this we live in a world where people want to yeah They say they want to but when they came down to it they didn't I got a better example for you even later But let's just be open to the fact that there are things that you might be thinking Maybe we should start challenging ourselves about whether or not we're so right about them. So where do we start? I? Think you need to surround yourself with people who you listen to who might tell you there could be a better way And maybe that's the speakers here at Mozcon today But I'll tell you some of my best ideas have oftentimes come from my own Co-workers who said will I think there's a better way and you want to embrace these people not double down on your ego and say What do you know you've only been here for six months most of the things that I'm gonna show you today came from somebody who had only Graduated six months out of college showed me a new way to do things and changed everything that I do in my business So keep your ears open for everybody. Here's a great example somebody might believe something right and We don't know the scope of our own ignorance That's why we need people next to us that when we're talking about what we think or we're so sure about something that are a little bit Skeptical and correct us and hopefully we listen to them when they do because if not and your ego takes over well Let's not talk about politics Let's get back to what we're here for if I were to get up and say hey, well, I don't think links matter If you build links You're not liking that message Notice how you're shutting yourself off from being open And if I tell you that yeah, you know what when you rank at a certain level You should not be bidding on those paid keywords because you're gonna get enough of the traffic to make sense Well, if you're a paid search marketer, you don't want to hear that What if I tell you to not build as much content? Yeah, this is starting to happen a little bit more, but I'll tell you the way people are doing it It's not data-driven and I'll be showing you how to do it with Certainty and data not experiencing good Because if you make content, you're gonna be pretty skeptical aren't you and last but not least in a room of SEOs What if I told you I? Don't think you should try to rank any higher If you do SEO you are super skeptical of what I just said now remember this Okay, all right, and now think How many sites have you worked on in your career? Okay, think about that for me. It's probably about a thousand. I've been doing this since August of 1999. Whoo But then how many sites existed on the web since August of 1999? Billions and I only worked on a thousand There's a lot of ignorance out there on areas that I have not seen sites that I have not seen problems I have not run into because I've only worked on that much of the internet the hard thing to do is This it's hard to get someone to believe something when Their salary freaking depends on it So if you build links or write content or do paid and somebody comes in with a new approach There's a good chance. You're gonna double down on telling them they're wrong But I'm asking all of you to shrink that ego and listen Because maybe they'll give you a new way to look at the world and the other thing is I need go That's my that's my little boy We all start here You know We were all rookies when we started at these jobs and some of us still are and I'm gonna challenge all of you to stay in Rookie mode that is why I'm constantly on stage at Moscon. Why am I here so many years coming back over and over again? I don't know But maybe it's got something to do with the fact that I'm so willing to listen to my co-workers in the world and look For new ways to Challenge long-held beliefs that maybe that adds value somewhere. I hope so I hope that happens today So I think we all need to be Understanding of the fact that sometimes the things that got us to a certain place Aren't gonna get us to the next place and what can we abandon about the old way? We used to do things to adapt to the new one Look at this search result and the word the key word I think is joint checking account Look at all the results, but then look at the one that I highlighted What are you thinking if you're in content SEO or marketing you're probably thinking There's no keyword in the title tag. Well, like boy, what a bad idea like why would you not do that? Well That site actually ranked in the top 10 for that keyword without the word and its title tag for some amount of time Might we be able to learn something about an industry or a type of search or something to where we could stand out with a Different title tag and maybe increase our click-through rate Even if we don't get the maximum conversion or the maximum ranking Possibly shouldn't we be open to testing that and that's why you need intellectual humility to question and challenge Long-held beliefs about things that we say we gotta put the keyword in the title tag Well, actually I would love to talk to the team at Chase That built that title tag to see what did they learn because if they learn something that we all don't know a Imagine what happens to all the rest of their optimizations while we might be working on something that's outmoded That they learned that none of us have learned because we're all following best practices And this is my belief about best practices y'all. This is my belief It's not a bad place to start for those who lack the data to see more than they can see Or for those of you who have the data but not the ability to process it But I've been showing you all for years on this stage had a process large data So you don't have to rely on your gut So when we think about how many keywords can I rank for one page? Most of the times we do this we look for we either go off of our gut Or we look we Google something we find the best practice we read it and then we say hey That's what ran fishkin said I should do it Instead get the data Get the data. I am finding that page after page after page will rank for hundreds If not thousands of unique keywords on that my client is spending money on and is driving conversions for them So it's much stronger for me to come in and sit when a client says how many keywords do you think? How many pages do you think I need to build to go after these kinds of keywords when I go? Oh, here's a page that's able to rank for 1,400 keywords in this theme I think that's possible because it's actually currently happening That's a lot better than in my gut based on my experience on this thing I read from ran fishkin that I can do about 15 keywords or 20 or 30 or 10 Okay, use the data. It keeps you from relying on your gut and experience But I have to be willing to recognize That I might be wrong. I have to be willing to look at the scope or to understand that like I'm going to be ignorant about some of these things and once I started to believe that I started really believing in trying to find data To tell me where is my gut or the best practice wrong? And it's been working out pretty well for us How many pages should I build will? Let me show you what it looks like when you don't rely on best freaking practices So we are looking at 55,000 search terms. We're looking at 30 almost 34,000 Unique competitors across those search terms that are ranking in the top 20 and we're looking at 142,000 unique pages of content Yeah, you heard me right 142,000. So my client had to blur this out They give me a word and then the other word that is associated with their business is API. I Typed those two words in and I get this answer instantly I can look at all the different pages from all my different competitors and see how many keywords They're able to rank for with a unique page and what's interesting is the first competitor Is ranking for 129 keywords with 40 pages The second competitor is ranking for 124 of those same keywords with only eight pages Do you see how relying on best practices is freaking whack when you actually have the data to prove out your gut? All right This is why my friends I love building content roadmaps for clients because we've engineered the data in a way where we can look at more data than ever We can do it really fast and we can show people in no time Where they should be investing their money and what content they should or shouldn't be building And none of it is based on best practice It is rooted in what's actually happening on the internet right now And how much you're spending and how many conversions you're getting on words like those So when I talked about three tools I think we all are looking for those tools. Oh, give me that new tool and it's like it's never the it's never the end For too many of us tools are the end. Oh my god got that tool great drop my thing in great and it's like tools are just the start And I see every data set through the lens of Hmm if everybody else has the same tool what data could I add to this? Or how could I look at that content differently or that or that keyword set differently? So that I can find unique insights to help my clients to win Because otherwise what value are you going to create if you're using the exact same tools? Everyone else is using I remember early on one of the ways I avoided one of the things that crushed seos Was an algorithmic update called the florida update and the reason why I didn't get crushed by it As I said, how long are seos going to keep winning with crappy lists of directories as the way to rank on google There's too many smart people to be to there's too many smart people at google for that to happen in perpetuity And that's when we started pivoting super early and that's what got us through at a time where a lot of agencies went unfortunately under So I hope you can shrink your ego enough to start to question some of the things that you hear as best practice And start to ask yourself. How do I engineer my data to help me get those answers directly myself? all right The other thing you have to do with ego is it felt great when I was publishing content back in the day and Getting tens of thousands of views around seo best practices, but everything in that video sucked It won't work today. So I had to abandon the same thing that made my ego grow back then To find new ways to do things and that's why I'm here But if I kept just presenting and working the same way I did back in 2007 when I made that video I wouldn't be adding any value here to you all today Let's move on to the next one your heart Oh your heart Yeah, let's talk about our hearts But before we do let's talk a little about business I know you may not like this slide, but business is 100 years ago didn't need seo They didn't need paid. They didn't well. They needed content. Maybe maybe I know the horror But think about it businesses operated just fine 50 years ago 30 years ago without people like you and me existing That's a fact So we're not that important. Ah, we're important now But my point is is that we need to get back to what makes a business operate and run What did the business need 100 years ago? How did they connect to their customers years ago? And then how do we overlay on top of that all the data and the skills that we have today Businesses 100 years ago needed sales. They needed profits to stay in business And they needed customers And we're going to talk a little bit about the customer side But first we got to talk about sales Because I got some rules Here's one of them I want you to open up the last report you sent to a client The last powerpoint deck you put together The last recommendation you asked them to do hey do this thing with your technical seo and then hit control f And then type in the dollar sign The language of business hasn't always has been dollar signs and not rankings Not content So let's get back to those basics because all businesses run on those Now as we start to talk more about customers and understanding them. This is one of my other beliefs You're gonna part with your money, which is what businesses care about faster If You don't listen to your customer. It's just gonna cost you more to get them if you don't understand them So all right now let's talk about customers and this is where we're going to get into the heart side I don't know if anybody's been watching this show one show time, but I love it. It's people that are going into uh Therapy for their for their marriages and I guess it just makes me and my wife feel better when we watch it but Businesses want to listen to their customers and so often we hear oh, you're in seo. What do you I've already surveyed my customers Don't talk to me But you know what surveying your customers isn't enough Why because ask them this question and there's a study that was done and I'll make sure I put the link somewhere Where they asked people would you purchase the free reign the free trade organic apple? Or would you purchase the or the non-organic apple if the price difference was x? And 70 of people said I would buy the organic apple even though the price is let's just say twice as much Okay, 70 of people said that In front of a group When you ask the same question when they weren't in front of a group Only two percent This is that below the surface stuff. I'm talking about People are different And our job as search marketers and marketers broadly is to understand people at a deeper level But we've got to care about solving their problems Which is why I love search marketers being some of the people to drive this because it kind of makes me laugh a little bit When I when I hear I've already surveyed my customer and then I can come in and show them some stuff That i'm about to show you that changes their mind on things Because you know what your customer doesn't do They're not going to tell you that they have marriage problems They're not going to post that on facebook they're going to google that because it's private and no one knows Who they really are so who you really are shout out to stephen bhajaya for Inspiring me in some of these ways with some of these examples But like people don't go around telling you they got marriage problems But half of us won't be married to the people we're with today 10 years from now I plan on being one of those don't you the data says Anyway, but just it's keyword research. Look at this crazy stuff. Why does my husband use the bathroom so much? I don't know. Why don't you ask him you're asking google? Why is my husband used incognito mode? These are the people are not asking these questions to their friends They're asking these questions to google and we all work on google So if we can harvest those questions better might we be better at our jobs because we're listening to customers better As a therapist the people that our customers are people who are struggling in their marriage And could a little keyword research help here? Yeah, because she could then understand what the average person whoever that is is typing into google Things that they would never say to somebody to see if you might be able to get a little bit out of them And somebody you were thinking wait facebook knows who you are I'm not so sure Because see the only person that really gets to see all the data at facebook is facebook We're all blinded and mark zuckerberg is walking through our data learning all kinds of stuff about us and monetizing us And let's be honest facebook is freaking useless Because people put who they really are into google because we put in stuff. We don't want people to know about us And on facebook we put in things that we want you to think about who we are Look no further than the rapper bow wow who took a picture from another website and posted it saying he was traveling to new york And then somebody caught his ass on a plane flying in coach The same exact day going to new york This is who you want people to think you are this is who you really are That's what facebook is good for One of my favorite book recommendations is this one because it will help you to understand humans And how they make decisions and how they think they're one way and not the other And I think that always helps marketers because we needed to know these things about people Well before the internet or seo or content or paid even existed Let me just give you another few examples of how people talk about their marriages on facebook But let's keep it real instead My favorite examples are these two for sale best offer husband who couldn't be bothered to wish me happy mother's day Someone posted that on facebook Someone also posted this one too, and i'm happy to report they're actually still together But most of us don't post stuff like this about our significant others on facebook All right, so let me wrap up here and get through the last 10 minutes or so of my presentation Now i'm about telling you about how to get your brain right So we start off saying shrink your ego and be open to the fact you might be wrong on some things Then care enough in here to try to understand the customer well enough to solve their problems And I think the fact they type things into google and bing and these different search engines Help us to know the customer pretty damn well if we can use our brains To take that data we get and use it in different ways than just what the typical tools serve us up So let's go through the data One of the problems with looking at data the way that i've been looking at it lately Is that data is just too big i work sometimes on files that are a couple gigs large on my desktop That is way too big And my laptop is way too slow Because what i'm starting to do is not just look at search terms But i'm starting to look at each piece of every part of every word in the search phrase Because i'm learning things about the customer And you're gonna hear me talk about n grams and unigrams I want to show up this slide real quick so you can say okay when he says unigram He means every piece of a word by gram every two words together etc etc Because we we're coming out of We hope a pandemic in the united states and my heart goes out to everybody who has family in another country where um The the vaccination rates are low and things are still um are still dangerous Hang in there But the pandemic changes the way that we search in ways that we might not always talk about Or you may not have been able to survey instantly to understand your customer So what we did is we engrammed every search term for every client and got the unigrams and looked at which words We're growing and shrinking of six weeks before and six weeks after the pandemic We instantly were able to be better with our hearts To talk to a customer in their language And create an opportunity that nobody else was finding because i don't know a tool that can do this for you And we started finding different clients in different words that were growing after the pandemic hit And then we could say okay or our conversions growing with those are just the impressions growing with those What does that mean for us? Should we incorporate this into different places? I've been showing this example for years on this stage because it's still the best example We've ever had when we broke down all the individual pieces of words We found that when librarians are searching our ads were saying ms in library science But librarians were always typing and not always typing in but they were thinking how do I become a librarian? They weren't searching for the degree type. They were searching for their motivation When we found that and changed the ad copy We had over a doubling in our click-through rate and we doubled in conversions because we were speaking the customer's language And that's the power of Speaking the language of your customer and finding these little word pieces that can help you to better connect with them But you've got to be willing to think just a little bit differently about things Here's a hypothesis that I have And if I didn't have my data structured the way that I do I literally could have never done this analysis with the robustness that I did for all of our clients So I was like, hey, I want to catch some people slipping not updating their titles to say 2021 It was like, you know, I think uh, february I want to catch my competitors slipping So I want to be able to see all of them the old way would have had me doing Site colon searches until my fingers bled. Remember, I have 5 million keywords in my dad in my data warehouse at any given point at least Can you imagine looking through hundreds of title tags through that? No, I wouldn't be even be here today Just for this one client alone We're looking at uh, something like 219 000 unique URLs that are ranking in the top 20 I don't want to be dropping all those domains in with site colon searches for 69 000 domains I don't want to do it for 10 And remember this To try to break all those ingrams down the data is going to get really fat really quick It's going to be way too big and your laptop can't handle it So some of you might be thinking well, if you just shrink the data down to your top 20 percent If there's anything you take away Every time you shrink your data down you are missing out on certain opportunities that someone else can see Me So you want to instead invest in the tools and technology and the learning to process all of those clues at scale Not just the ones that your laptop can handle or that you can do with an excel sheet or a google or a google doc Now I spend my time in big query But what I want to show you here is all i'm doing is combining paid data and seo data together Why because I want dollar signs next to my stuff when I make a recommendation So I want to talk about how much did you spend how many conversions did you get on these words? And then I want to be able to get all my seo data along with it And then all I did is say also give me the organic title for million. It must have been 10 20 30 40 50 million URLs that are ranking in the top 20 across all my clients And yeah, it's a little bit of sequel right but I took classes at community college three years ago You can too if you learn it you can do things like this at scale But I also had to be okay saying huh before I would have had a recommendation for all of you on how to do this kind of analysis But maybe if I learned some new skills I could do it in a better or different way and I love Being back on the bike again and being a rookie all over again. So let me show you what we did On the left hand side what you can't see is I blurred out all my different customer IDs But these are all my different clients I did this too at scale because we did it in big query and then use power bi to um to visualize it So now I'm looking at all the titles where somebody is still using the word 2020 where they are ranking in the top 10 For every client And then I go great. I can find all those titles I can see where I rank for those words and then I can say great Now I know what kind of words are triggering these these titles and then I can go ahead and rewrite my titles But the other thing to think of here is because I do this against every client at scale I know which client it's the largest opportunity for and I can talk to them first Because I'm not relying on a best practice. That's how all my clients. We should update your 2021 content Well, maybe for some of them. It doesn't matter as much than someone else that it might All right, and the beauty is when you work on things at scale in a big query or AWS I don't care what you use But when you get out of the day-to-day tools You get to build things based on your hypotheses as you start thinking more and more differently than everyone else You start finding that the tools aren't good enough Because they're not keeping up with your hypotheses And then you need to be restless enough to say f that I'm going to figure out a way to do this myself because it will Create a competitive advantage for me over all my other competitors And for us whenever I want to update something like this I just got a hit refresh and I'm off to the races So let me show you this strategy in the real world We have a client that had these five keywords and it's all they wanted to talk about And I said, well, let me look at the other 9881 words that are kind of similar And what we found as you can see is that if I analyze the n-grams or the unigrams of those top five keywords There were seven of them. I didn't learn anything But when I looked at all those other words, I found 3560 different ways that our customers were communicating with us And I was processing those and you know what? It's almost the same amount of conversions on those 9881 keywords as there are on those top five And I started finding different pieces of words that our client never told us to look into And none of their competitors were thinking of because we were processing this data at scale So now what I was able to do is look at different pages and how many keywords were they able to rank for right? That number one page from Geico ranks for 857 different keywords in the top 10 no best practices And then I started putting in the word cheap next to auto when I go Oh, now I've got a bunch of different types of domains showing up. It's not just insurance companies now. I'm seeing Publishers showing up as well So now I understand that adding that extra word cheap changes the diversity of the SERP in my competitive set And I find that out in seconds seconds y'all And then I can put in different words and I can say well value penguins crushing everybody on toyota content And I can send my client that exact link that's winning that well and to be honest I think that's an amazing page and I understand why they're beating everybody out for toyota content in the space You might be wondering what's next will we're all about to show you I'm starting to look at what likelihood is there of an n-gram that our customers are using in their search phrases That's growing that none of our competitors or very few of our competitors are using in their ad copy Why because I want to be the company that processes this information in a way that helps my clients to speak the language of their customer And we're going to be doing this at scale and why does that matter because by processing those n-grams I can make my ppc ads better I can make my landing pages better. I can put better imagery in my page social ads There's so many different things that I can do When I process all these little clues that our customers are leaving and to care enough about solving their problem I can also find the opposite. We're not all the ads sounding the same and maybe by changing my ad I could stand out just enough to increase my click-through rate and get more clients All right, folks what i'm going to wrap up with here today is just to remind you to constantly shrink that ego Stop thinking you're so smart because that's how you build new things that make you actually smart and differentiated in the marketplace I want you all today to start being brave enough to suck at something new And stop doing the thing that makes you comfortable and feel good all the time Find something you believe in that you're willing to validate or test that you've always kind of believed Just run your own experiments And my friends I hope to see you on the other side because i'll tell you I've been on the other side of where tools have not been solving my problems And man, is it fun to walk into a room with the cmo and show them something that really nobody else has shown them That's attached to dollar signs and the value they create in understanding their customers I will tell you that's the side you want to be on. All right I hope you enjoy the rest of moscow. Thank you for having me and uh hit me up on twitter LinkedIn anywhere and let's continue the dialogue. See you on the other side