 I was trying, I've been trying for a while to figure out how to work nunchucks into a presentation and I think the thing about nunchucks is I told somebody like it's not that they're dangerous. It's that you don't want to mess with someone who's willing to beat the hell out of themselves. You know, you see somebody hit themselves for 15 minutes. You're like, I'm going to leave that guy alone. He's crazy. Thank you. Thank you for being here, for waking up on day three. Thank you for coming back to in person on behalf of myself and on Mars. It's been, you know, certainly a challenging three years. Thank you if you stuck with us through virtual. If you've been with us in the past, welcome if you're new. We really, really appreciate it. I keep, I keep trying to reflect on the past three years and I can't, you know, I can't summarize what we've all been through. But I was up here Sunday night. I don't know if you know the speakers come in for our walkthrough on Sunday and we all get up here and make sure everything works and the slides don't look weird and the videos run and all the PowerPoint things. And, you know, as many people said, like, it just, it's good to be back. This stupid square of metal and wood is home for me in a lot of ways. You know, I love you, little square. And it's good to be home and it's good to have you here and thank you for being with us. You know, as Rob said, I've worked on the Google Algo project. I followed the Algo. But I want to talk about a very specific story today about how I think Google is pushing searchers down the sales funnel with inserts and what that means for us. And hopefully what we can learn from that, I think we all get a little freaked out about it. I'm going to talk about some of that. It wouldn't be one of my talks if I didn't have those scary stuff first. But I think there's something we can learn about what Google is doing, why they're doing it and how we can be a better part of that funnel and move people towards action. But my job involves a lot of falling into rabbit holes and sometimes leaping into rabbit holes, sometimes dynamiting the bottom of rabbit holes. Following the paths between the rabbit holes, I took my 11-year-old out to do this ill-advised photo shoot. And she's a typical preteen. She's 11 going on 105 and I'm going to murder her soon. No, I love her. But she does like two photos. She's a pretty good photographer, so I brought her out. She does like two photos. She shakes her head and it's like, I'm out. Like, this is embarrassing. So I go in to get my nine-year-old. He's not a very good photographer, but he's in for anything. He's like, I'm here. Let's go. And what I don't realize is I'm out there for 30 minutes and he becomes like this director bully. And you know, he's adjusting my ears and he's like, no, you got to stand over there. And by the time I'm done, he's like, man, I think we're done and he's got like 60 shots. So I'm not that pretty. So sadly, this is about the best we ended up with. But this is my life, like falling into those rabbit holes, trying to figure out where they lead. But I think as SEOs, a lot of times when we look at SERPs, we look at them in isolation. We look at, here's where I'm ranking, and you know, we're getting smarter and we get into our click-through and we get into things like that. But we don't look at this journey that can happen across searches. And so that's what I really want to talk about today. So this slide and the next couple of slides, if you saw Andy speak on Monday, are going to be very familiar. And they are so familiar that in fact I emailed my deck to Andy and I said, oh, shit, Andy. Are we talking about exactly the same thing? He's like, no, no, no. It's okay. It's all good. We got this. I think actually what he said was, Dr. Pete, I'm in Spain and, you know, I'm having a good time. So I'm sure it's fine. But we got it covered. I love Andy. But as he said, you know, we've all seen this journey over time. This is a search for Tornado in, I believe, 2002 from the Wayback Machine. Thank you, Wayback Machine. And what do we see? Blue links, right? We know this. We see one indented result, which is interesting because those were with us years ago when the way it came back. Now the same search in 2022 and I'm in Chicago. I'm adjacent to Tornado Country. And what do we have? We have this huge top stories pack, right? We have this knowledge panel on the right. We scroll down. We have also in the news, which is the local extension of top stories. We have videos. So we have more knowledge panel. We have people also ask and then we have that organic result, right? And we know that we've seen this. I've talked about this for quite a while. We've seen this evolution. We've seen how things are being added to SERPs. But I want to scroll up and you may also have seen this in that knowledge panel. You see these sections like cities with most tornadoes. Hooray. We're in that list. And here's Chicago and you click on that. And it takes you to do a search for Chicago, right? And it takes you to do a search for Chicago with this context of cities with most tornadoes. So it has this awareness of your journey, but it's taking you to another SERP. Amanda was just up here. You may have read the study by Spark Toro in 2020. Two-thirds of Google search has ended without a click. So we started talking about these zero-click SERPs. I think this is a really important concept, but I think we see it in isolation and we go, oh, that's bad. That's not for us. And it is scary and it is evolving and it is something we need to be aware of. But I want to talk to you about what I think Google is trying to do with this and why it's important. And I'm going to focus on one feature and it's maybe something you overlooked because it's usually at the bottom of the SERP and it's this refinement feature. And so here's an example for loose leaf tea. I'm a tea drinker where you can go in and start to refine by type, by flavor, by brand, et cetera. And we're starting to see this for more and more things. I don't think this is something that's getting a ton of clicks right now, but this will tell us the story of where Google is headed. And I think this is really critical. So in a minute I'm going to talk about the messy middle. Jean-Lucas actually wrote a great paper recently about this topic. A paper Google wrote a couple of years ago. But first I want to talk about the classic funnel. Like we've probably all seen this. I simplified it here, the ADA funnel. I like to just simplify to awareness and dressed in action because that tends to map to informational searches, investigational and commercial. I did not know until creating the stack that this was created in 1898. The core ADA concept is almost 125 years old. I don't usually do this and I don't want to put anyone on the spot. But raise your hand if you are 125 years old. I'm guessing there's a couple of people. Thank you for being here. I'm guessing if I had a follow-up question, raise your hands if you're a smartass. It would be the same people. Yeah, thank you. I love you. I'm with you. I'm there. That's a long time. That's something that maybe needs to be rethought and reinvented somewhat. I think classically as SEOs originally, and we've all hopefully moved on a bit, we focused at that type of funnel. Those broad keywords, those head keywords, those vanity keywords, whatever you want to call them. And why? Because they got all the traffic, right? They're the high-volume keywords. Great, that's what I want. I want that traffic. And then over time we started to recognize that, well, on the other hand, those people don't know what they want and that doesn't convert very well. So we moved down the funnel. And great, high conversion. I know we've talked about that this week a bit. But on the flip side, there's not many people down there. And so our choices sometimes seem like a tiny percentage of a very big number or a big percentage of a very small number. And I want to be clear, you know, I reached cover this on Monday. That whole idea, and I think we'll run until we get into this, this is a big topic for Will usually, that whole idea of prioritization and knowing where people are taking action, where they're landing is critical, really, really important. But I think the other problem with this is because we simplify the funnel, we miss that this bottom and top, they're a very, very small segment of this whole process. And there's so much in between. And I think Google is seeing that too. And seeing that we're missing that journey along the way, and we're also kind of artificially what is top and bottom. When you draw a picture of a funnel, it's really concrete. In real life, it's messy. And that brings us to this. Google wrote a paper called Decoding Decisions, Making Sense of the Messy Middle. It's a good read. They did some experiments on how people do brand switching, how you build brand affinity, not a real long paper. But I'm going to focus on one aspect, and it's this model. This is Google's reimagining of the funnel. And I'm going to tell you the important pieces. And again, it's an abstraction, right? This isn't based on real data. This is based on how they think things are changing in search. So triggers can be anything. You know, I stub my toe and it hurts. I watch TV commercial for something. My friend has electronics that look cool. I'm hungry. Anything that sets you off on a decision process. And what Google is saying is essentially there's two sides of this process. One is exploration. And exploration is a process of widening my options. You know, I know I have a need, but I don't really know what I want. I don't know what's out there. I don't know what my options are. I'm going to explore. And then once I've explored, I need to narrow those options back down to a choice. Google is also recognizing, though, that we go back and forth through this loop. It is not a simple, straight down to a decision process. And so we do things like we read a bunch of Amazon reviews. You know, I remember shopping for strollers and they're so expensive and they're so complicated now. And I'd get this review and it's like two stars. This strollers great. It was, you know, it was a good price point. It comes in these great colors. It was durable. My kid loves it. It's safe. I'm like, what the hell? What's the two stars? The cup holder wasn't quite big enough for my super big golf, you know, Lightning Mountain Dew. I'm like, oh, shit, I'm out. You know, that's not going to go. And so, you know, you loop back, right? You're like, oh, and you start doubt creeps in. You start to make weird emotional decisions because we all do that. And so we go through this cycle and we go back and forth. We go through these marketers. We hate this because it's not, oh, that funnel is so nice. We just, you just go down, right? That's it. You buy the thing. But we know this, like we do this. We don't make these linear rational decisions. We loop through these things, and especially if it has any significant price point or we're going to have it for a few years. So how do we get through this? How do we cope with this? I shouldn't even say that because this next section is worse. This is the, we're not going to get to the coping yet. We're going to get to the wake-up scary part. I want to show you the journeys Google is creating. I'm going to start with a simple example, and I'm going to move on to a more weird one. So let's say I do a search for loose leaf teas. I'm kind of up near the top of the funnel. Like, I have some interest. First of all, Google's already kind of presenting us options, which is interesting. I'm a teacher here, so it's funny to me that the options are green tea, white tea, and Earl Grey. English breakfast, forget it. Tajiling. My hypothesis is that someone at Google was sitting around saying, you know what, it's good enough for Captain Picard. It's good enough for you. So the things, they're not out there. But we're going to skip past that. That's nothing to do with anything. And at the bottom of this, we have this refinement option. I'm like, okay, you know, I think I'm leaning towards green tea. I'm going to click on that. It takes me to loose leaf green tea. And we've had a SERP refinement. We're back on another SERP. Right away, I get into a giant local pack for tea stores. This is interesting. Google's been, like, categorizing the packs. I think Miriam's going to write about this soon. We're doing a little collaboration. And so immediately, I can go look for stores, but let's say, well, I'm not quite ready. So I go back down to that refinement. And now I can do more. And I'm like, oh, Jasmine green. That sounds nice. It takes me into another search. Jasmine loose leaf green tea. In this case, department stores, which is weird because two of these aren't department stores. I'm not a local SEO, so I'm not going to worry about that. And then I get to this popular carousel, which is a list of products. And I can navigate within that popular carousel. And NuMe is a brand. They do a lot of organic teas. And so I click on NuMe. And I'm like, oh, that's, you know, I just want a couple of boxes that I want to think crazy. That's a nice price point. That sounds good. I click on that. And I get this thing that kind of looks like a knowledge panel, but is products and is paid, except I said that the other day. And John Mueller got a little upset with me because now those aren't all paid listings. They're a mix of paid and free shopping listings. So Google costs that organic because it's not all paid, which in Google vernacular is correct. For us is a little weird because this feels paid to me. So it is not a knowledge panel in the typical sense. But the thing to reflect on here is that this entire journey down to the point of potentially making a purchase or almost making a purchase happened in the SERPs. I never left the SERP to take that entire journey through decision process. If that doesn't bother you, then let's amp it up a little bit and get into an even weirder one. So this query is interesting to me because by tablet, traditionally as a marketer, if you had a very strict view of the funnel, you would consider by tablet to be a bottom of the funnel phrase because it has the word buy in it. But you know what? No one piping by tablet knows what they want. This is a very broad, very unclear. They know they want to buy something, but they have no idea what it is. And I wrote in our recent, our professional guide SEO just came out. I was half joking about how we do search. If you walked into Best Buy and you just started saying, buy tablet. Hey, buy tablet. Look at you like a crazy person, right? Like nobody talks like that. This is how we search, but this is not how people do things. But Google's optimistic here. Google's like, hey, here's some products. They're shiny. They're nice. $2,000, $1,500. I'm like, no, no, no, Google. I'm not ready. And then they hit me with top 24 tablets and they're still like, you need a tablet son. I'm like, I'm not there yet. I keep scrolling down in store availability. So now we have a local pack, not only a local pack, but a local pack that's completely geared towards telling me which stores carry this right now and whether they have it, which became much more important during the pandemic. Interesting trend because no one had toilet paper and hand sanitizer and these things. So whether they had it in stock. And then I go down to this refinement. Like, okay, well, you know, my cousin has one of those iPads. I heard that's kind of cool. So I'm gonna click on Apple. This is a total aside, but that was interesting. Verizon in the shopping listing lists a $0 price. Okay, technically true. A little strange. And I go down also nicely refined by color. I'm like, wait, hold on. I'm not ready to pick a color. That's a big decision. I'm not ready for that. I'm gonna go back. That's not enough for me. And so I go back to buy tablet. Back to another shirt. I go down. I see network connectivity. Oh, okay. What's that all about? Click on that. Oh, 5G. I've heard that's good. I'm an important person. I gotta do stuff fast. 5G's fast, right? You know, I know Bill Gates is there's something going on there, but I'm not gonna worry about that. I don't believe that. But the 5G is good. So I click on that and I get 5G tablet. And again, Google is trying to sell me a tablet. I'm like, all right, Google, chill. And I see operating system. I'm like, okay, okay, let's see. Well, no IOS. That's weird. Don't know why. Oh, you know what? My dad's dog walker. They got Android. I heard that's good. Click on that. Google trying to sell me again. Notice in the shopping, though, we see these as ads. You click on that arrow and you get an entire shopping experience. So even that is a side journey Google could take me on. Popular 5G. I see something here. I see 12.4 inch screen. I think, ah, I'm over 50. I say it's not what it used to be. That big screen. I'm gonna need that. And so I add that to my query. Android tablet, 5G, 12.4 inch. Now still trying to sell me. I see videos. Well, I'm at a point now where I'm thinking, you know what? Actually seeing some reviews might be nice. And I look at this 10 key moments. What's that all about? I click that. Oh, processor. I need it to be fast, right? And so I'm gonna watch this video. And now Google, if you haven't seen this, it's been around for a little while now, is taking me to the exact point in the video where they talk about the processor. So now this is a very specific product review of a very specific product. I'm moving through the decision process and they're gonna tell me exactly about the processor. Well, it turns out the part about the processor in this video isn't that useful or interesting. But I see this pen. And I'm like, damn, I need that. I don't know what that is. The S Pen. That sounds awesome. So I type that. And so now I'm like Android Tablet 5G 12.4-inch S Pen. I see the shopping ads up here. Samsung Galaxy Tab. I'm like, oh, this S Pen, that's not something you can get with anything. I gotta get the Samsung. Well, I gotta have that now. I know that. So I change the Android Tablet to Samsung Galaxy Tab 5G 12.4-inch S Pen. Now the ads are relevant to me. Now I'm at a point where I might be ready to make a decision. I expand that. I look, I'm like, hey, 670. That sounds pretty good. 64 gig Mystic Black. Come on. That's sweet. I'm gonna need one of them. Again, this entire journey happened within Google. Now I want you to understand, I don't think people are doing this right now. I don't think in 2022, people are going down to refinement and taking an entire journey within Google. But I think Google understands a couple things. I think they understand that this journey is essential. And they understand that their bottom line is in what? Paid search. Their bottom line is in shopping and ads. And if they hit them with all these shopping and ads like they did to me at the very top of that decision process, I'm not gonna bite. And if they can move me through the process to a decision, their ads are going to be that much more effective. The other scary thing is, if you look at our missing middle diagram, all of those queries basically happened on the right. Half of it we haven't even gotten to. Now, this is a little gray. This is not a distinction that is as black and white as we might like. But if you look at what I did, I did a process of refinement. I did a process of contraction, like 5G tablet, Android tablet 5G, Android tablet 5G 12.4 inch, right? I'm refining what I want and I'm narrowing down my options. That's happening mostly on the right. So I want to talk about what happens on the left, because I think that's where we can shine the search marketers, and that's where we can really tap into a process and help to move people down the funnel. Not just be at the top or bottom, but be a part of the journey that takes them to a decision and why that's important. Google says a great thing in this paper. Sometimes all it takes to make a big impact is to show up at the right time. But the right time is not always when someone's finally there to make that final decision. The right time is when they don't know what they want. The right time is when they're confused about a feature. The right time is when they're trying to make a decision between two or three difficult things or a compromise or a trade-off. And if you can be there when they need you, this is critical as marketers. Alright, so let me give you another example. What's interesting is all the keywords I list on these next couple slides are ranked for by one single site in the home improvement space. And so these are real keywords that that site ranks well for. So over on the right in this evaluation, this narrowing process, we have things like kitchen designers, kitchen remodeler, kitchen and bathroom remodeling, Houston kitchen remodeling, mid-century custom kitchen cabinets Toronto, custom kitchen cabinet services in Manhattan, New York. We don't see the word buy there or anything like that, but we see these action words, remodeler, remodeling, right? These are actions. These are people I might hire. Houston, Toronto, Manhattan, location implies that I'm going to take action. I don't just type in mid-century custom kitchen cabinets Toronto because I'm curious about what's up with custom kitchen cabinets in Toronto from Chicago. I'm like, people in Toronto are nice. I got no beef with Toronto, but I don't just do this for fun. I'm looking to take an action. And just the fact that I said mid-century custom kitchen cabinets means I know something, right? I've gone through some of this other process. So what's over there on the left? Well, stuff like this, kitchen design ideas, modern kitchen ideas, kitchen inspiration, mid-century modern kitchen, mid-century kitchen cabinets, 75 modern pictures, kitchen pictures and ideas. People looking to explore and discover what's out there, all they really know is that they want to remodel their kitchen. They don't like how it looks. It's getting worn down. They're bored. They don't really know what this whole space of options is. And so I think this is often where we shine, is in helping people explore the space so that they can start to go through that evaluation phase and contract. But we're over there too, right? Like these queries. I'm not showing you the organic results, but there are organic results for kitchen designer, remodeler for all these locations or local results. We can move them along this journey. And I want to show you something interesting. I think we can start to plant the ideas. This is where I don't want you to get so focused on the bottom of the funnel that you miss the journey. So let's say I'm exploring what I want. I don't really know what the options are. I don't know the language of kitchen cabinets, you know, the complex language of kitchen cabinets. And so I finally am going through this process. And on this site, I see a page for mid-century kitchen cabinets. And on this particular site, they're showing photos. They're showing what that involves. They're showing what goes into that. But they also are a service provider site. They're helping you find service providers. So they're moving you from mid-century kitchen cabinets where they rank to mid-century custom kitchen cabinets, Toronto. Now they bypass Google completely. They've taken you on that journey themselves because they intercepted you at a time when you had a need. And the need was, I just know I want a new kitchen. I don't know exactly what I want. I don't know what it's called. I don't know. But once they serve that need, they've planted the idea of what I want. And they've moved me to the bottom. And Google understands that. And I think Google is trying to intercept that. I want to give you some ways to think about language and ways to think about the bottom of the funnel differently. Classically, we think of phrases like buy a refrigerator, compare refrigerators, refrigerators on sale. Well, two things. We've already talked about how buy a refrigerator isn't really a very actionable kind of phrase, right? We know we want to buy something, but we don't know what it is. But these are also highly competitive. These are highly commercial. These are expensive. But what about phrases like, should I replace my refrigerator? Why isn't my fridge getting cold? Why is my refrigerator so loud? We think of those as informational top of funnel queries. But you know what? A whole lot of these people are going to need a new refrigerator. A whole lot of these people are moving into the decision process. And I think as Lily Ray said this morning, the funnel itself isn't that clear, right? Like, if you serve them at this point, if you serve them that informational content, that authoritative content, that trust-building content, you don't have to push the hard sell. And Google may even be saying, hey, you know what? These people don't push that hard sell. These people are there when they're needed to show you what your options are. And you know what? If some of those people don't end up needing a new fridge, they can fix it themselves. If you give them good advice, that's fine. Because there's a whole lot of people starting this journey who will need you. And if you're there for them at that moment, that will mean something to them. I want to give you a way to kind of explore this a little bit and play with it in Mods Tools. If you use Keyword Explorer, there's a couple things that are a little hidden. And so I'm going to do a search for kitchen cabinets. And this is Keyword Suggestions, which just returns other keywords that might be related. But in that pull down on the left, buried down way too far, because I love it, is the are questions option that will just return questions. And we also have exclude and include filters. And I'm going to exclude the word buy. I'm going to try and get away from kind of the boring bottom of funnel kind of queries. And I get things back like, how much should I budget for cabinets? How many cabinets in the 10 by 10 kitchen? Is it worth to reface kitchen cabinets? Again, to what Lily Ray was saying, some of those people are going to reface their own kitchen cabinet. Maybe they're going to buy some stain. They're going to do that basic job. And that's fine. But other people here are going to see that you gave them good information and they are going to look for a service. And if you provide that, you're in the right place. But look at a phrase like, how many cabinets in the 10 by 10 kitchen? I don't type this because I love geometry. I don't type this because I want to know how much can fit. I would actually. I do love geometry. That's a bad example. But these are people who have a 10 by 10 kitchen, right? They're trying to put cabinets in it. They're looking to take action. And so what if we can intercept them at this point? Is this informational? No, I think this is a post trigger signal that they want to make a purchase. But they're just not that far along the way. So if we lose them and say, top of funnel, not interested, low conversion, we're missing that this is a person on the start of the journey that will take them to the bottom of the funnel where the conversion is. And so we can't ignore that process. This is very simplistic. But my other argument is that, let's imagine that you're there. You're there at the bottom when they search for that action keyword. And you're feeling good about yourself. And your competitors there, too. But you rank number one. They rank number six. You're crushing that. You feel good about yourself. What if they're everywhere along the way? And you're not. What happens to the person who went through that journey when they see you and them? What's your cook-through rate look like compared to them by position? What's your conversion rate look like compared to them? You've already built that trust in that relationship and been on that journey with them. And I think that's really important. So I want to give an example. I was, I had to thank Areege because there's something about conferences and she said something that just sparked I don't even know what she said. And I'm, I apologize because I'd love to remember what it was exactly. But sparked some idea with me because I was struggling with, I know this is a lot to process. And I know it's a lot to, it goes against some things we say. And again, I don't, I am not saying do not focus on where the money is. I am not saying do not prioritize. I am saying that the journey is more complex than we'd like. And that if we're not on it with the buyer, then when they go to take action it may already be too late. And so I want to give you an anecdote and we've all been through I think probably something like this I've multiple times. You're making a pretty big decision. So let's go back to that buy tablets. You want to buy a tablet. You don't know much. And you do a couple of hours of research on the internet and you're kind of feeling good. But for some reason you want to go to the store. Like you want to hold it. You want to kind of see what the options are. You still feel a little more comfortable with that. It's a decent price point. So you go to the electronic store. You go through this process again, right? Like you have to find the aisle. You have to kind of find the category. You have to see what the things are that they have. You have to compare that to your other research because they're not going to have everything. You're picking up the boxes. You're starting to make weird, you know, this antenna is sexier than the other antenna. This one has a racing stripe. You know, whatever they have. And you're going through all this and you finally kind of narrowed in. Okay, I think this is the one. The box is in your hand. And along you've been here like half an hour now and you've done two, three hours of research at home, right? And along comes the sales associate. Hey, can I help you? Like, bro, I've been here for half an hour. I'm a Midwestern guy, so we can't just say that. You've got to make conversation, right? So it's like, oh, yeah, you know, I'm looking for this and looking for this. I talked to my uncle and I don't know if you know him. He's up north a bit. And you go through this whole thing like, I think I've settled on this and five minutes later, he's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good one. That's got all the megabits, man. That's called the mega pickles. You know, he's just throwing out crap. I'm not even, I've totally tuned out at this point. I'm like, okay, cool, cool, cool, you know, have a good one, see you, man. Go through the 17 step Midwestern goodbye. And I'm walking away. He's like, hey, when you go up front, tell him Chad helped you. Chad. If your name's Chad, no offense. This is a completely fictional Chad. Hate him. Like Chad. You didn't do a damn thing, Chad. I was home for three hours working on this. I've been here for half an hour. You didn't do shit except show up at the end and want to cut of the deal. And I think sometimes we can make customers feel this way. And I don't think it's that extreme. You know, we're not a stupid Chad. We're not that bad. But when they get to that bottom and we're only there then, where do they go back? You know, we're no important, more important at that point than the credit card they used to make the transaction. I would actually say they're more loyal to that credit card, knowing how I feel about my own credit cards. And so what happens when they go to make another purchase? What happens when they go back? You know, I like tea. I shop at Adagio, for example. And I go back there. I skip Google completely because they have a good search engine. They have good in-store browsing. I can find new things. Now if you're sitting there at that bottom of the funnel, I never even got to you. You know, I've gone straight to them because they've been with me on that journey before. And so, again, I don't want to oversimplify this. I don't want to scare you. But what I want, the point I want to make, and I'm apparently running a minute over, is be there on that journey. Prioritize, focus absolutely. Know where your money comes from. Absolutely essential. And please listen to people like Ariesian Well, who talk about that. But don't oversimplify it so much that you're not there for the rest of the process because that funnel and that process is so much more complex. And it's essential to be part of that search journey. Google knows that. Google knows that there's billions of dollars for them in that. And we need to know that, too. That's what I got. Thank you.