 I'm obviously super excited to be here today. But before I get started, I would like to give back to Rand what he's given to me. This man has held my son on flights when I was working on slide decks. He's such a good man. And wherever you go from here, Rand, I follow you wherever you go, dude. You have made me build a better company. Yeah. There are women at Sear that have spoken on this stage because you've made that something that mattered to me when I didn't know it mattered to me. There are mothers' rooms for our new moms when they come back to Sear after maternity leave who have rooms where they can have private space that's built for them when they come back and when they're pumping. Like I'm a guy, like I'm going to show you some pictures of some man boobs later, but I don't pump. And I never had that understanding. And the minute you did that during the swap, it just made me better. It made me better. And whatever you do, from here going forward, I hope it's freaking huge. You know why? Because my company's better because I know you. And screw what you've done for SEO. That's just the tip of the iceberg. There are 140 people at Sear who are better off with me in that company because I've learned things from you that have made me a better me. When a man is willing to hold your crying son so you can finish a slide deck, I can at least drop a tear for that motherfucker. All right. So that's over with. I'm an emotional guy. Speaking of emotions, I look at our role in search. And I'm starting to realize that it's better to be thanked than ranked. And I'm going to share with you something that's a massive failure that I made. And it all came to me on a trip to Scotland with Ren and Geraldine. Cute picture, right? I took this myself. Check out my dimple game, right? But Geraldine said this. And I was like, ooh, I'm using that. And I'm going to open MozCon with you. Because she said, how about we did this? And I was like, you're fucking right. How about we become the content that we wish we found instead of the content that we're sometimes producing? So I'm going to share with you three things that I've seen that have made me make pretty strong pivots in my company. And I hope that I show you a reality that makes you maybe want to consider making some of these pivots, too, because I think it's dangerous. So the first thing I'm going to show you is a time when I ranked high for my own site. So I've spent three years trying to rank for words like SEO company and SEO agency and SEO consultant. And I stood on stage at MozCon 2011 and was like, pssh, got it. Top three globally for all these words. You should listen to me because I've outranked all of you. I didn't get a freaking dime from ranking for those words. You know how painful it is to work on something for three years and believe that once I ranked for the word SEO company, woo-hoo, leads in sales like crazy. Wrong. The money actually never came. I never closed a deal from ranking well on search engines for the word SEO company or SEO consultant, even though I was in the top three globally for it. Ooh, that hurts. Here's the reason why, because I stayed in a silo and looked at my SEO tools. And I didn't actually talk to real people who might actually search for this word. If you look at the business census, you would know that in the United States, for every 140 small businesses, there is one mid-market or large business. And of that 140, 78% are not employers. They don't employ anyone, which is fine. That's just not typically our demographic of clients that we typically target. 52% are home-based. We have a couple of clients who are distributed companies, but not home-based businesses. So what's interesting is all the searches were being done on SEO company because whether you have a huge business or a small business, you probably want to show up on Google for something. So think about what's happening there. I'm over-weighting, and most of the people searching for this word aren't my target. How would I know that? I probably should have taken some time to talk to some people who might search for it. And I went and wasted three years of my life going after a keyword that when I finally got it, did nothing for my business. See what happens when you get to our site and you see all these logos and you're a small business? You're like, not for me. I don't want to work with companies like that. So Google around 2012 after me working and having all these high rankings, not to sear out of the top results for the word SEO company, SEO consult, SEO agency. And when I saw that, I went, whoa, there is a new reality, what did they do? But my revenue never went down. So let's think about that. All of us who are chasing the holy grail of rankings, my rankings tanked and my business did that. Ooh, well, how does that happen? Maybe we're all at the wrong freaking conference. Now you're at the right conference. Let me introduce you to Helen Fang. Helen's been working with SEO on various projects and various companies for eight years. See, Helen brings us with her. And when we make mistakes, she kicks us in the butt, helps us to get better, right? We're not perfect, but she knows that we'll keep getting better so she keeps bringing us along with her. And then when people ask her, who would you use for SEO, which is much better than Googling it, she makes referrals. And over eight years of working together, I'd probably owe Helen five million bucks, which is five million more dollars than ranking for the word SEO company ever did. Ranking for SEO company actually lost me money. You know why? Because my BD team was trying to talk to every single person and help them out that called us, even though we could never work with them. So they went, can you hire some more BD people? Hire more people in BD? We need a bigger BD team. Well, for what? So we can all just say, no thank you, let me refer you, no thank you, let me refer you, no thank you, let me refer you. It actually almost cost me money, which is crazy. And the reason why this should be concerning to all of you is because the speed by which Google can get smart is insane. In 24 hours, Google's AI changed Google Translate in a way that improved it so much that it was better than anything they had done in 10 years. Let me show you. There's an article about this, it's really long, nobody here is gonna read it, so I'm just gonna give you the cliff notes. So we're gonna talk about Hemingway. Snow's of Kilimanjaro. A researcher had been dropping in the first paragraph of this short story into Google Translate for years. Every day puts it in, puts it in. The left-hand side, I'm gonna read the bottom one, no one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude. That is Hemingway. Now let's read what Google Translate had to say. Whether the leopard had what the demand at that altitude, there is that nobody explained. Ooh, Google Translate. Can't complain about it because it's free, so it's better than nothing. In 24 hours of enabling AI into Google Translate, look at how much better the second sentence got, or the last sentence got. 24 hours. What is your 24-hour moment? What is the thing you're doing right now that if Google got better in 24 hours and smacked you in the face tomorrow with a new set of results that you would be losing business on? Because you're not the right answer. That's how quickly the machines can learn and improve. Are you gonna bet against them? Or are you going in the direction that Google's ultimately going? You have to remember that there's so much more to people than the words they type into search engines. When I type in SEO company, there was a lot more to people than what they typed in, right? I'm a small business. Well, I never asked them that, so I wasted three years trying to beat people out for that keyword. And now with machine learning and all that great stuff at Google, they show local results. They show local results when you search for SEO company. They didn't do that in 2012, so my dumb ass spent three years going after that keyword. Today, you all know, don't do it. So what does the world look like when Google starts understanding how we feel about the results that we found? How does the world look when Google understands that behavior? Feels like this when you find great content, doesn't it? Oh, I found the thing that actually solves my problem. So that was the first thing that I saw, and I went, mm, okay. Then the second thing that I saw that I cannot disclose with a whole lot of detail and I apologize, it's not really my style, but the company I will be talking about could own me in two seconds if I mention their name. So let's just say this. They basically built the industry. They built the industry. They're the first people to come out with this word that everybody uses. It search for hundreds of thousands of times a month, and they were ranked number 20 for it, and they were pissed. 10 times the brand, 10 times the history, 10 times the content, 10 times the links. Ranked 20. Hired one search agency, fired. Hired second search agency, fired, and then we showed up like, oh, God, next. And then we fought them for eight months, and we said, look at what Google's showing. Google has learned something about the right answer for this query, and it's not selling people on what you do, it's educating them. We believe that Google is artificially suppressing your rankings algorithmically because the user signals are showing them that you are the wrong answer. There is no amount of links you can build or no amount of content you can produce that's gonna overcome the fact that you're a disappointment. I'm gonna skip through that. So speaking of disappointing things, I search for my name all the time, and when I search for my name, I end up seeing models show up one day in the suggested results. The freak, look at me, I'm a search guy, and search guys ain't models. So all of a sudden, people started looking for something different when they searched for my name, and when they clicked on the image results that Google started showing, this is what they got. That looked like a model's body to you. So think about it, if you were looking for Will Reynolds model, and you saw this guy with these freaking awesome man boobs, would you be like, yes, you have solved my problem? Or are you like, oh my God, we'll change the slide, I'm sick of seeing you with no shirt on. I'm still here. See, the thing is that I was a massive disappointment to most people searching for that word. So what that meant is Google started seeing that disappointment, and when they saw that disappointment, they said, well, ooh, why is it that people are more satisfied when they search for Will Reynolds model, and then click on images of this little skinny white dude? See, the computers were telling them, this is a better result, so then Google said, why should we make people have to modify their search three and four and five times when we actually can run machine learning on this and see where they ultimately end up where they have the best experience? So today, if you search for me, you will find that about half of the results are him because he's a better answer, and I expect to lose traffic from image search because of this, and that's okay because none of you have ever decided to work with Seer because of my lovely naked body. If you did, that's weird, and I'm married. So when the computers learn what disappointment is looking like, and Google can find that out, and in 24 hours, what are you currently doing that's open for that risk? Overall, you know what? The web is a disappointing place. I recently was doing some research for a client, searched for this word. The number one result said, well, the cost for this can be between $1,000 and $5,000 a month, all right? If you lived in Philadelphia in my zip code, and you had $5,000 a month to drop on a place to live, you could get a four bedroom in this building with a two-story gym overlooking the freaking bridge with a slide that drops you in front of your freaking fireplace for five grand. If you live in the same zip code, and you have $1,000, you get two brick walls and a bad freaking closet door. That's all you get. So when a piece of content says, even though it ranks number one, you could be between $5,000 and $1,000? That is not helpful. So maybe a better piece of content would ask, how much are you looking to spend? And then based on that, I might actually give you different recommendations. What about location? Five grand gets you that baller place in Philly. Five grand gets you this in New York. So that content isn't helping anybody. And I believe that content that does not guide the user to their ultimate destination is highly disruptible. And I wanna build as much of that content as possible. Let me show you more disappointment across the web. I was looking for Looker. I was looking for their pricing. I clicked on their paid search ad. If you can find pricing here, I'll give you $500. Didn't think so. They paid a disappointment. I clicked on the next result from Insight Squared. How about you give me pricing? Nah, we're gonna tell you that they have graphs and charts. Nah, really? Paid for that disappointment. The third result, so this time I read the description and I go, okay, pricing? Great, it's giving me all the stuff that I think that I need. Pricing, pricing, pricing, pricing, pricing, fucking hey, no pricing. People are paying to not give me what I'm asking for. That's disappointment. But if you're willing to pay for it, Google will let you do that all day because that's how they build self-driving cars is on bad PPC marketers money. And then they retarget the heck out of me, reminding me of my disappointment. Hey, remember we didn't give you that pricing? Still here trying to get you in the funnel. And then they set up ToutApp and then they scale talking to me like they actually care. And then I go out and I start talking about Tableau and I get engagement and I'm an influencer, remember? And they never ever responded. They could have just said good luck and given me a thumbs up. Nah, we didn't do that. We spent all our time in ToutApp trying to figure out how to scale 1,000 messages to actually sound like we give a fuck when we don't. This is the problem with scale in business. It's very often it leads us to starting with scale and then we automate acting like we actually give a fuck about these people when we don't. And we feel it. And this is why the web is a disappointing place. Hopefully this is the room that's gonna start fixing it cause I need some brave marketers in here. What's interesting though is when you're not willing to pay for it, Google makes you earn it by actually answering the freaking question. So then I looked at the Montclair SaaS 250 list and I looked at the, and we did some analysis on this list of the top 250 SaaS companies. Only 23% had pricing pages, disruptible. 52%, over half of them, ranked a demo or contact page when I searched for their brand and the word pricing. Disappointed. 27% of them showed answer boxes. So 27% of these 250 companies when I searched for their brand and the word pricing answer boxes showed up. One answer to that query. The sad part is over 83% of those one box answers were not the companies themselves. Let me show you what this actually looks like. I wanted to know what namely costs. I was doing some research in HR. Notice the top answer, somebody else. The top four results aren't even the brand. Google is not gonna let you rank when you consistently disappoint people and as the machines get more data they're gonna get smarter at knowing that you should not rank unless you change the way that you serve up your content to help people. Interesting example here, HubSpot. HubSpot ranks for the word best CRM software and what I've seen about best queries is people type in best because they want guidance, not because they want companies typically. So how did HubSpot rank? Because HubSpot built a page that compared them to their competitors and you know why we all love HubSpot and why HubSpot builds so much trust with us? Because they rated themselves second. How many of you work in a company right now or if you actually thought you were the second best answer to that customer, you're willing to freaking say it on your own website? We go, oh, HubSpot's so great, how are we ever gonna beat them? You're never gonna beat HubSpot because they're willing to do stuff like this while you're begging to do anything even close to this. And this is why HubSpot owns most marketers in the room like I own you, I own you, I own you, I own you. I see you, I own you too. HubSpot walks by marketers and are like, I own all of you because I've got the balls to actually try to answer my customer's question. I don't know where my brave marketers are in the house today, but man, we need a couple of you to help me and other folks try to lead the way on like how can we get better at helping our clients to see the reality that I'm showing you today? This is all, this is irrefutable. This is stuff I'm just saying, right? So when you think of disruptive change, it's never hidden from us. You've seen these things in front of you. The problem is, is we as people don't want to handle the conflict. We don't want to handle the reality that that provokes. When you go, well, what does that mean if all my content is crap and not solving people's problems? Let me just put my head in the sand. By the time the company finds out, I'll be at a new job. And then the new SEO can deal with all the crap that I've left behind. So what are we to do? Simple, start by listening, watching and learning from your customers. So what we do at Sierra, we're starting to do, we have very few clients letting us do it, but man, this is the bet that I'm making on the future. We watch people go through search results. When we ask them, hey, I want to see you solve this problem starting at Google, how would you do it? And then they start going through results and they click on things and we ask them questions and we understand their why. You might say, well, we do surveys. Surveys aren't good enough. I'm gonna tell you why. The woman who did this click behavior, when you listen to her, the first thing she said is, when I'm comparing apps, I want recent information. I heard that out of her mouth. So if you asked her in a survey, do you want recent information? She said, yes, that's my number one thing. But then I watched her skip over all the stuff that was more recent to click on something that was in position number five. And I'm going, why did you just skip over all the recent stuff when you told me you wanted recent content? She didn't even see the dates. We do, because we're marketing people who spend all day on Google. She looks where she clicks. And when you look at the title tag, 2016 is in there, where's the year and all the other ones? So she skipped them. Watching people go through the search results makes you a better marketer instantaneously. I don't have time to talk about this. Google Clay Christensen and selling milkshakes. You'll hear all about it, but I wanna make sure I've got time. I took up some of my time to shout out, ran and become a blubbery mess. But what he found out, Clay Christensen found out is that most milkshakes are bought between eight and eight 30 in the morning. And when McDonald's was asking people, well, how can we sell you more milkshakes? They adjusted pricing. They asked them, hey, do you want more thickness? Do you want different flavors? And people answered those questions. And McDonald's ran out and did those things and got no sales. The team at Clay Christensen worked with at McDonald's allowed them to observe behavior. And what they observed is that most people that bought milkshakes did them at eight to eight 30 in the morning. Why? You wanted something to drink in your car ride that lasted the entire commute. Almost everybody who bought a milkshake at eight to eight 30 in the morning was driving. What was the job that a milkshake was there to do? To take up your commute. Which meant that milkshakes at McDonald's didn't compete with milkshakes at Burger King. It competed with donuts. It competed with bagels. Really interesting. It's a four minute video. You watch it. Whoever's running the Twitter handle for seer, tweet that out. It's awesome. Watch it later. Or if you're bored, watch it now. Personas. I got personas' wills, so I'm people focused. Anybody here ever hang out with Sample Sally? Hey, Sample Sally, how you doing girl? Yeah, ooh girl, we had a good time at the club last night, Sample Sally. Anybody here skew female? The fuck. So the problem with personas is they're not people. I've never heard Sample Sally say, hey, I'm having a really hard time finding Namely's pricing. Here's a video that I'm gonna show you guys of what it sounds like when we're going through search results with people. It's a little low. So hopefully we can turn it up a little bit. This is another one that I usually look at. She skipped over the first four results and the switch snippet. Clicked on PC mag. Just because I like how it... Listen. I like how it lays out like your comparisons. It's easy to read at a glance and then if I wanna know more, I can go to do research on it. This is what we're missing. She goes, I like it for these reasons. Now think about it. If you started asking people that, might you be able to build the content that not only ranked well, but also solved their problem better, which would protect you from the 24 hour bug coming of Google throwing machine learning on your keyword and then you're not ranking because you're not solving people's problem. Have to listen to people. Here's another one that I wanna show you of another user looking to go through a moving process. This video? I know what it took for a four minute video. You see her frustration? You hear that? I don't have time for a four minute video. She's frustrated. When you're frustrated, what do you do? You hit the back button. You do that enough and do another search. I've already shown you the reality that Google will start to suppress your rankings in certain verticals. Just a matter of them getting enough data to feel confident to knock you out of the top results. I think this is a competitive advantage. Let me give you an example of how much of a competitive advantage it is. So we work with a client who is in the space of people by rent-to-own electronics. You look at this, you go okay. Typical tools we use, look for seasonality and blah, blah, blah. When we talked to people we found out two things. A woman who went through a divorce recently was like my husband managed all of my bills. So therefore I never built my credit. So I'm using this rent-to-own company to establish my credit. Instantaneous empathy. When my team is doing optimization or keyword strategy or content strategy they remember her voice. They remember her pain and her why. And now they have a mission to go help solve that. It's not sample Sally that I can just put away in my drawer. When you hear someone's pain you never forget it. Every time you see that keyword my team sees the why because we've asked them why. The grandmother who said to us I'm on a fixed income. I only get a certain amount of money every month so I need to spread those payments out over time so I can have an iPad for my grandson. Oh, I would have never come up with that. Sorry Maz, the tools are awesome. But they don't tell me that this is a grandmother who's looking for installment payments for her grandson's Christmas gift. And it's not really their job to show me that. It's our job as marketers to get to know people. All right, and it keeps skipping through. So you look at this beautiful deck. We have a decking client. And we're trying to figure out what makes people buy composite decking? Splinters! Splinters are why people buy composite decks. I would have never come up with that. Most tools that you use if you typed in composite decking are never gonna tell you. Related searches are splinters. But when we talk to actual people, almost all of them, seven out of 10 were like, I got a damn splinter. And that's what made me be like, I need a new deck. And we're like, okay, so then what's our client's role for this query that none of regular marketers would ever go after? This is the zero moment of truth. Oh, I'm walking across, getting ready to pick up my son. Oh, god damn splinter, oh my god, how do I get the splinter out of my foot? Hey, are you looking for a new deck? Maybe a little bit aggressive. But you search for that query. I know a little bit more about what you're likely to search for two or three weeks from now, unless you're just one of those sadomasochistic people that like getting freaking splinters in your foot. So we're ignoring the people that are searching. It's so simple, but so few of us are doing it, talking to the actual people. You have to get good at asking questions, questions like these. When you're watching somebody go through a set of search results, why did you click on this? Why didn't you? What can make this better? You start actually getting, it'd be like being able to log in to a heat mapping tool for your competitors. Because you watch people search, land on your competitor's site, and tell you everything they don't like about their content, or everything they love about their content. Which gives you a much stronger road map on how to actually solve people's problems. I'm a big believer in guidance over content. You ever had your dog run through your screen and break it? The minute your dog does that, right? Are you like, man, I really want some content today. I hope I got some content marketing done well. You're like, I gotta fix my screen door, man. My dog just busted through. Anybody ever go to like Home Depot, or Lowe's, or wherever you go to try to figure out what screen to buy? It is a nightmare trying to figure that out. And the reason why we were able to find that out is because our team members actually got the permission from our client to go to Home Depot and look at their product on the shelves. And to ask associates, what kind of things do people ask? And the associates are telling you all of those things that people get confused by when they're picking up the boxes and trying to read them. And they're going, well, what about this? And do I have a that? And do I have a this? So what we build for that client is this. A guide. Are you gonna use the screen? Oh, I needed to know that. Do you have pets? Well, yes, I do. Is visibility important to you? Do you need protection from the sun? Nah. And then it says, great, here you go. This is the path that so many people have to do eight or 12 different queries to ultimately find the right answer. Guidance is what people want. And I wanna say thank you to Christian Williams sitting right up here. It's a company that just does wire mesh in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. This isn't Nike, but they enable us and they allowed me to show this. So I wanna shout him out for thanking him for letting me show you some of the work that we're doing. Great clients enable great agencies. You need people who are like, yes, we wanna actually solve people's problems versus just keep getting them in the funnel, Will. Who cares? Get them in the funnel, get them in the funnel. I hate viral stuff. I'm sorry, some people might not like me for it, but I don't need to make new friends so I don't really care very much. I don't like spiky shit. Oh, we did this thing and whoop, and then wham, nothing. It's like doing drugs. Oh my God, it's amazing. Oh man, I need another hit. That content for that, how to pick the right wire. I think that has a chance to solve that problem for years because it is something that guides people to the right answer. I don't need to write a funny, let me just go to whatever the site is and make some really cool videos of dogs running through freaking the wire in the mesh, stop it. You look at that, you laugh, you're like whatever. I don't wanna be in that business. I wanna be in the business that when I go to bed at night and put my head on the pillow, I feel that we have worked so hard to try to help somebody who was lost find an answer to their freaking problem. Dogs have been running through screens for years, way before Buzzfeed came out. Fuck getting links for this. I wanna help people that are sitting in Home Depot like what do I do next? That's what gives me satisfaction in my job. I don't care if it gets one link or not. There's no excuses for this people. You got Facebook, you got some friends, they will answer your questions. How did I find out about the splinters? Rob Bucci, he's speaking next. Shawna Huber, anybody here know Shawn? Great Seattle SEO, works at Alaska. He's not able to make it. You can ask people and they're willing to sit on the phone with you and help you do better. All right, so now I've got to get you through some of the cool stuff I've been working on to do some of this at scale. I want you to start looking at the bottom of the search results through a different lens of intent. Use your brain. When I look at the bottom of that search result, best brand's basics. This is what people were looking for. That should influence the content that you build. I'm gonna skip through this because I wanna make sure I get to this stuff. So the first tool I love to use is stat because they're the only tool that I know that lets me kick out all the people also asks and all the related searches at scale. So I can put in 10,000 words and get all the people also asks for them. I get all the related searches for them and I'm gonna show you two things that I'm doing. So one of them is I'm just pivoting on which sites are showing up the most for all these queries that I care about as a one box answer. Those are the trusted sites. Those are the sites that your customer will end up on at some point in their journey. So until you can make that content yourself, go out to the AdWords planner, display planner, find out what sites are in the GDN, buy those ads, get in those websites' newsletters, maybe swap pixels with them, do native because you know that those are the one box answers which means people are gonna be clicking on them when they're searching for the words that you care about and you can't produce all this content overnight. So go to the places where they're naturally gonna already be. Another thing that I love to do, taking paid search search query reports. So if you're in this room and if I were to ask you if you could get a search query report out of your AdWords and you can't do it in less than five minutes because you don't know how to do it, you need to change the way you do your job and I'm gonna show you why. We go, oh, well, Google no longer gives us not provided. Screw that, it's called a search query report in Excel. Go get your keywords back instead of bitching about it. So if you take a search query report with conversions in it, now we can talk money instead of other BS metrics like traffic and links. Get the things that are making people money out of the search query report and then just do a word cloud. This is an actual client who runs an app. Biggest word, best. What is that? Guidance. Hey client, you're actually getting conversions off of the word best. Are we landing people on something that gives them guidance? Not really. Okay, well what that means is we're gonna have to pay for that keyword forever because we're not building the content that like HubSpot did to make sure that we can rank for best queries. But then when I show them how much money they're spending on it and how much money they're making on it in paid, they go, maybe we can build that content because you're making a case that I can take to my CEO. You take to the CEO, hey we're gonna build this thing, it's gonna give us a lot of links. They're going, what does that do for me? I don't report up to the board on that. Rand, do you report to the board on links? Of course he does. You know, don't you hate using your friends for examples and they don't freaking go along with the thing that you told them to go along with? Let's go back. People's why is all over your search query report. This is a photo editing app. Let me show you that by just word clouding it, what I saw, see the word skinny? Why are people searching for the word skinny when they're looking for photo editing apps? Oh, see the word wrinkle and airbrushing and slimming and eyes and tan and whiten? That's your why. Is my meta description saying, girl you don't look skinnier after you use this app? Or is it saying photo editing app for all your photo editing needs? We're the best. People's why is buried in search query reports. If you don't go looking for it, you're missing out on their why. The problem with best is I don't trust the business to ever tell me who's the best. I trust the business to say, we're the best. You ain't DJ Khaled, you're not the freaking best. Sorry, I don't know if DJ Khaled references go over well in Seattle. People want reviews and Google gets that which is why Google suppresses rankings. You search for photo editing app. Notice that Google's not willing to actually, through that bar at the top, most people don't click on them. We've actually talked to people and watched them go through the results. They usually skip over them. Even on the mobile, especially on the mobile, where it shows apps that you can just click and install right from the app store. People don't click on those. But notice that Google ranks nothing but best, best, best, best, best. But people don't have to write the word best. When I see best showing up in my search query report that much, I go, oh, a lot of people at some point are searching for best. That gives me part of their intent. With that intent, I go, oh, crap. These are the sites that I might need to advertise on or partner with until I can build the content to outrank them all. Another thing I love to do for my e-com SEOs, this has been fun. So pay attention. I'm using this tool FeedCheck, which is in the slides. It's not great, but it does the job on things on Amazon that have low numbers of reviews. And I exported all the reviews for this company, Lisa, in the mattress space and I took all of their one and two star reviews. I put them in the word cloud and saw the word firm. But the problem with the word firm is I have no context on that word. Is it too firm or not firm enough? You don't know that with the word cloud. So what do you do? You use an Ngram analyzer. Thank you, Ethan, your own vacation. But wherever you are, Ethan, in Paris, thank you for showing this to me because now I'm a little bit better of a marketer. So I dropped in all the low reviews, clicked on try grams or buy grams that show a certain amount of times and then it starts to give me this. So now I'm starting to understand what makes, when people review you lowly for your product, what kind of words are they using the most? And then I did this little sneaky thing called use log likelihood. I have no idea what that means. None, but let me show you what it did for me. Salvation Army, hmm. Why is the Salvation Army showing up in all these bad, only four bad reviews, but when it does, it's like a really bad review. All right, let's read this out loud. To return this product is a nightmare. They don't take it back. Instead, they want you to donate to a charity like Salvation Army. This person down here goes, you can schedule every day and take off of work and they just never come. So if I'm competing with this company and people are searching for my brand name versus their brand name, can you imagine the ad I'm gonna put up? Make sure you check the return policy. Hope you live near a Salvation Army question mark. You're like, what is that? Scraping reviews. Do better marketing, hit people's why. You can also take the five-star reviews and be a little more positive because I'm a devilish kind of guy. So you can be more positive and look at things like this. So now you can look at your meta descriptions and you know what? I am sitting here telling you today, I've already presented it to the death so I'm not presenting it today. I have gotten as high as a 307% increase on my click-through rate without my rankings ever going up for a piece of content by just altering the title and description to sound more like what people actually want. Three times the traffic, no increase in rankings people, it is possible. But you have to understand people's why. Now that was an anomaly but that is the highest improvement I've seen to date at Sear when we've tested that. 307% increase to a page because now I'm gonna talk about how you feel in the morning, right? Oh, I wasn't talking about that before. Before I was like, our mattress is great. I'm gonna talk about how you feel or your relationship with your husband. And wife's a little bit lower, right? So I can see maybe there's a little bit of a skew here more towards women buying or maybe women are more likely to review than men. How it compares to memory foam. Do you see how I'm taking all the five-star reviews and saying, this is what people love about us. And then you go through all your meta descriptions and start running small little tests. And I'm able to get more clicks from the same ranking by talking to people about how they'll feel in the morning or to the fact that their wife is gonna or their husband's gonna roll over and be like, oh my God, sweetie, I just had the best night of sleep ever. That's what we want. Something else that I found by extracting out a stat. Search, related searches. People search differently by region. A lot of people are like, yeah, I know that. All right, slow down. So we looked at senior living facilities in California. And you see three things that I've highlighted. Atria, Cyprus, and Oakmont. Those were the brands that Google saw as highly related to the phrase assisted living facility. In that zip code. So when my client says to me, these are my competitors in this zip code, I go, okay. But when Google, we looked at all these different keywords that you wanna rank for generically. In that zip code, Google showed me slightly different competitor names showing up. Might we wanna look at both of these? Because a lot of people searching for that, Google's saying they're likely to search for those brands. This also shows you where you're not in the brand consideration set. Oh, okay, maybe we gotta do some more offline? Maybe, let's try it in that city. And see if we can get our name to show up there more as a related search, which is a signal to Google that we're more correlated with the word that we ultimately wanna rank for. Make sense? Good, all right. It's Kate Morris here. I saw you sitting in the front yesterday, Kate. I'm not sure if you're still here. Kate, where you at? There you are, you're from Austin, right? Hook'em horns or whatever you guys do down there. All right, so I don't know shit about Austin, right? Nothing, I know nothing. But great keyword research can help you to minimize your bias. So when I took for my client who's in Austin and I dropped in these words in an Austin zip code and I looked at the related searches, two things showed up I wanna share with you. North and South. I'm like, why are the words North and South showing up so much in related searches? Kate, I guess that North and South Austin are pretty far apart? Yes. Do you see how I don't know squat about Austin? But by doing keyword research and looking at the related searches, I knew what she knows, cause she lives there? That's what great keyword research is about. And by looking at all the words that matter to them by zip code, I can start to tell what mattered most in those, to those people individually. Now if my client is in South Austin, maybe I go adjust your bids for the people searching for this in South Austin, but the people in North Austin adjust those down a little bit. Cause I don't think you're actually gonna have a chance to convert those people. Cause with the, and I can do this at scale. Because that is amazing. The other thing is Medicaid. When I get to learn the client's business, they go, Medicaid people aren't really good for us. It's not a good, we don't get a good conversion rate. And I go, well, Google says, for some reason in Austin, I'm getting a lot more Medicaid searches along with this core keyword. Maybe we should test something there to try to either find a way to better convert those people or to not bid as much for those people because there's a little bit of a difference in how they search than the others zip code I showed which doesn't show anything related to Medicaid. Once you get a high ranking, the job almost just starts in my opinion. So we have a client that we're working with, Laura Cain. Woohoo, thank you Laura. Thanks for getting this for me for my slides. Where we actually stopped. So the client already had all these great rankings for this keyword. We didn't do squat to really help them to rank better. But then we said, okay, well you already ranked for this keyword. That's great, you're number two for this word. But then we said, well that's even more important for us to talk to people about. Cause you already have valuable real estate that's driving you a ton of traffic. Let's actually interview people and ask them what they would do to improve this content. See the other thing that Perna was talking about the other day about like building your brand and what it allows you to do. When people like your brand, they're willing to get on the phone with you and tell you how to improve your content. So they said, yeah, we'll jump on the phone. And time and time again they said, hey, have you improved this and this and this and that? And all of a sudden our trajectory of traffic started increasing like crazy. And I've already checked the conversions. They follow the exact same trajectory. Actually a slightly higher trajectory because we incorporated things into the content that people told me, oh, I wish it had this because I always go to this other site to solve this problem. We go, well, if we added this here, you wouldn't need to go there. They're like, absolutely, because I really like this one better. This is where I go to first. Thank you. You can improve conversion rates as well when you talk to customers. That's also the holy grail. So not only do you do all your cool SEO crap and all your content stuff to get more rankings and more traffic, you then kick that SOB up even faster because you're also working on how to get more people to convert. So now you're saying, client, I don't just want you to invest in me talking to people so I can get you more traffic. If I hear how your content is and isn't solving problems, I can protect that ranking for the long haul so the machine learning someday doesn't kick you out. First of all, the other thing you can do is you can actually get the more conversions from the work they're putting in. Satisfied searchers leave a very, very, very strong fingerprint and Google is learning that fingerprint better than ever. Let me show you an example of what we're doing at Sears. So we ranked for some SEM Rush keywords and it's a long ass guide. So you don't have to wait. There I am. That's the right Will Reynolds right there. Maybe I should take my shirt off in the next one. Feeling this content? We are currently testing. How much stronger can we build trust in Google's eyes by helping the user? What we looked at was the related searches for SEM Rush guide keywords. A lot of people that are searching for SEM Rush and SEM Rush guide are comparing them to Moz. So we said, okay, well why don't we find the best SEM Rush to Moz comparison on the web and we're linking off of our own site? See, when I ask you to be brave, I'm asking you that if you're truly gonna be on this journey with me, you have to be willing to link somebody to another site that answers the question better than you do if you're truly about solving their problem. And if you work somewhere where you go, I'm not gonna do that. Why am I gonna send people off to my competitor's site? Well, because they answer the question better than you. Make the content or help the customer. Are you willing to do that? I don't have enough data on this just yet. It's so statistically insignificant, it's ridiculous. So once I get more data, I will share this with everybody in some kind of a blog post. But two of the three links here go to other websites. I can also track how people react to those if they come back to my site. Was it truly a good answer? I'm gonna start to figure out what kind of signals might I be sending to Google? All right, I'm gonna show you a few other things that are possible when you think of guidance over guides. This is a $200,000 house in Philadelphia. This is a $1.2 million house in that zip code in Philadelphia with its really nice kitchen and all that lovely crap. This is a Range Rover going through mud. Because this is what you do in a Range Rover. You drive out in the nature and you go through big mud piles. And the mirrors on your Range Rover actually tell you how deep the water is that you're going through. Why does Range Rover advertise this way when the average person is just at Whole Foods putting groceries in the back of their freaking Range Rover? Because they understand people. I wanna feel like my car can go through three feet of water but oh, my Jimmy Chews are gonna get wet. Nobody that owns a Range Rover does the crap that they actually put in their ads. I think it's absolutely hilarious. But it shows us the life we want to be, not the life we actually freaking live. Sorry for those of you that own Range Rovers, but you know you go to freaking Whole Foods and load it up in the back. When's the last time you took it through three feet of water? Never. When you decide to build guides or things that help people solve problems, I wanna show you how you can connect SEO and PPC. So Google's organically is always gonna, not always, but more than likely is gonna rank the helpful shit, right? Or they're trying to rank the helpful shit. So let's say that you have an office space calculator. I'm moving into a new office in San Diego. I end up on sites like these. Because I'm trying to figure out how much space do I need? God knows, anybody who's ever had to make a space decision for a company, it's a pain in the ass, and it's super risky. Because you're trying to project your growth, and if we don't hit it, we have all this extra space, it's a very stressful time. So when a company shows up to give me guidance and I can put in how many different things that I want, there's something that you can do where you can negative out audiences who are searching for office keywords later because, oh, you know what, you only have one executive office? If I know my customer well, I know a lot of them have five or more. So when I build a tool like this, I can negative out all the people searching for office keywords who don't fit my target demographic. But then I can juice my bids up for people who put in larger numbers. It's a great way to take organic content that truly helps users, and you want it to be interactive so you can trigger events out of all the different things they're clicking on out of GA. If somebody puts in 20 executive offices, they are a whale. I want to put them in a different audience. I want to market to them differently. I might want to have somebody jump on the phone with them really quickly. If you've invested in building amazing content already, now's a time for you to invest in ways to make it more guidance driven so you can aggregate all those little things about your customer. Oh, and then you can create lookalike audiences all for the people who constantly look like that so you can make your marketing better and make those organic assets help you in saving money on paid. Another example, this company, this website, this client of ours, they have a dropdown here that says, are you affiliated with the military? They have coded that dropdown to basically create two different events. If you say you are affiliated with the military, instead of me doing dumb retargeting, I'm now able to do smarter retargeting with ads that are more military based and speak to how the military buyer might be interested in online education, which is very different. Those ads can say, hey, continue your journey while you're deployed. Now, you would never say that to the average user, but if you already have a form and you can put event triggers on these and put people in separate audiences, your remarketing can become much smarter and then we do what we all do, which is, oh my God, they're talking to me. They understand me. This is freaking dope. I didn't even know people in my company were doing this until they showed it to me. They're like, we didn't realize it was a big deal. I'm like, oh, yeah it is. I did not know this. So in GA, you can build a custom set, you can build a custom dimension that is a secondary dimension. This is for a client of ours. So what we basically, their name's not here, good. So they have a commercial side of their business and the residential side of their business. The problem is a lot of their keywords are broad. So we don't know who's who, but what we've done is we've created a cookie that adds a factor of one to your score in this custom secondary dimension. So what happens is people who are, excuse me, people who are residential look totally different than commercial users. They never really visit the same pages. So when you have disambiguation with the query where you're not sure who that person is, you can actually score every other page that they visit, put it into a custom cookie, and then you can target people based on, okay, if somebody's residential and they've hit the residential pages or the pages I see high value more than three times and their score is over a five, I'm adjusting all my bids up by 20% for the next two weeks because I know that they're more likely to convert then. This is why you've got to take your current, all this hustle, all this building 10x content, you start putting event triggers on all this stuff, you will save your company so much money and wasted PPC spend, unless you really just enjoy giving it to Google so they can buy their employees free lunches. I love Google, but you know, I don't want to give you guys any more free lunches. Cut out the dumb retargeting. When you build amazing content, you have a chance to then use all those different things to remark it to people differently throughout their journey. Just be a little bit smart about it. All the things you can do that I've talked about, this is how you start to make the case for doing great organic content that truly solves people's problems. I think we can all agree to this. Google is not getting any dumber. I just showed you that in 24 hours, the machines did a better job than like 50 people working on something for 10 years, 24 hours, what is your 24 hour moment? Where Google makes a change and all of a sudden, you're like, oh snap, where are all my rankings? And are you gonna start trying to do this stuff when all your rankings are gone, when you're under pressure? I hope you're ready for this. I'm seeing it coming in drips and drabs and as the machines get more data, they get smarter about what recommendations to make. And I think when I look out at all of you, I think that we've got a chance as a group to say that we're not just, I don't even know what the word I want to use. I don't want to call myself an SEO anymore. I feel more like a concierge for the web. When you are lost as a customer looking for anything, we're gonna be the people to guide you to the best answer on the web, whether it's on my site or not. And I know that's very altruistic, so of course we have to be a little bit marketary about it. And then we'll retarget the shit out of you, smartly. Thank you so much, thank you, Rand. This has been an amazing six-year run for me up here. Thank you so much and thank you for your time. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.