The Content Revolution: How SEO Emphasizes Quality Content

Wow, Matt. That was a wonderful obituary.

I remember Greg when he was, yeah, never mind.

I have university professors at the University of Michigan. Who would say, who is he? Mostly because in the lecture hall, they would be standing up in front of an auditorium full of students.

And that’s just the way lectures worked. On the other hand, I spent my junior year at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Oh yeah. And they would refer to me as the bloody yank because Bloody Yank. Yeah. Because for some reason I was the token non-British anomaly that didn’t quite fit in.

And I had all these strange ideas, like among other things I would say, Cookie instead of a biscuit or I’d say, yeah, sidewalk instead of pavement or, oh, it was bathroom. It’s just the bathroom or the Ws?

All I learned in Edinburgh was if they shouted gardy Lou Gar, it means somebody was gardy lou meant somebody was throwing slops out of an upstairs window and you didn’t wanna be underneath when it hits the street.

History. It’s one of those liberal arts subjects that teaches you that things change over time, which is pretty useful when it comes to talking about digital marketing. Ah, so how did I get into digital marketing?

Okay. By accident, I was the director of corporate communications at a company called Zif Davis Oh yeah. In 1995. And the company decided, you know what? We should probably invest in one of these things some people were calling them search engines, and other people were calling them portals. It wasn’t quite clear what they were gonna get called. Yeah. But I was on the due diligence team that took a look at a little startup called Yahoo. Oh, wow. And I got to meet Jerry Yang and David Philo, and I got to learn that Yahoo was a joke in terms of the name. It was yet another Hierarchically, officious Oracle. In other words, they didn’t want to call it Jerry and David’s website. So they came up with this funny name and amazing, we amazing decided that was the company to invest in. Okay. And, as a consequence of that investment, I was shipped off to Europe to launch Yahoo, France, Germany, and the UK because it was a joint venture with Yahoo and Ziff Davis. Ok. And how did I get in here? Random.

Yeah. It wasn’t like there were a whole lot of experts in front of me. Wow. Nobody knew what was happening there. And when it came to launching Yahoo Europe, it was like there was no precedent.

There was no model. It was just go-do stuff.

It was lovely. It was lovely. Yeah. The company was still headed up now by Bill Ziff Jr. Okay. Who, when I had initially been hired in the company, gave me half a job description and told me to spend the next six months figuring out what the other half probably should be.

Okay. Yeah. But then I went to work for the president of the company, Erica Poe who was trilingual. He was born in France, but then started a business in South America and then come to the United States so he could speak French, Spanish, and English better than most of us could fluently think thinking one language.

Yeah. And so the notion they, Z Davis had never published magazines outside of the United States. So the whole notion of let’s go to Europe was a departure. They had no experience in it. But one of the things that we learned, and this is probably worth sharing with your listeners.

Yeah. One of the models I was given to embrace in this, we’re gonna send you off on a mission, but we’re not quite sure how to describe what you’re gonna do. What was the Marine Corps in the United States? Okay. Believe it or not, at officers candidate school, young Marines who wanna be officers are trained that if you set your goals and objectives and meet 70% of them, yeah you’re doing well because we don’t know everything ahead of time.

You’re gonna get there. You’re gonna learn some things that, nobody knew and couldn’t have warned you about. And if you adjusted them, then guess what? 70% success rate they call it the 70% solution. If you hit 70% celebrate now. Yeah. That’s fascinating. Most of us grow up in organizations where, boy, you better be 95% or above.

Yeah. And unfortunately what that does is take all the risk out of any endeavor. There’s no risk-taking, there’s no learning, there’s no experimentation there’s no trial and error because there’s no room for it. You have to be perfect every time. And you know what, absolutely, in this world, if you’re doing 70%, man, you’re clocking it.

Let’s put it this way, the Netscape Navigator brought it all to our attention in 1994. So we were early into the internet, but we were not there at the gory beginning. But I remember in 1994 watching a fellow named John Dodge, who was our editor at PC Week launch a version of PC Week on a website. And his historic moment, I decided I had better be there to witness. Yeah. And John Dodge’s famous statement was it didn’t crash. Wow. And that was a success. We got a website up and it didn’t crash. Alright. Okay. We’re cooking here. Yeah.

Oh, sure. I was the vice president of marketing and a company called Web ct. They were headquartered both in Vancouver, up in Canada, and as well as Peabody in Massachusetts. Ok. And my job was to try to get courses online.

That was the mission. Oh, and faculty didn’t wanna put their courses online because you know what? I have tenure. I’ve done it this way forever. Yeah. Why would I wanna change? Yeah. And what we found was, is that there was an interesting way to work with either the adjuncts or the junior members of the faculty who wanted to become tenured.

Let’s put it this way. There was a group even within higher ed that wanted to do things better than the old guard. Okay. And so we started focusing on them, and we were able to triple our install base within two years. But because we were at.com, the way the business model worked was all of this was gonna get funded because sooner or later we would sell ads to college students.

Yeah. And all of a sudden in the middle of that brilliant campaign, we were tripling the install base. Our investors said, oh, we are not gonna be able to monetize this with ads. Okay. Lay off half of your marketing department.

And that’s when I took a hard look at what worked and what didn’t. And one of the things that had worked well was this funky little thing called search engine optimization. Yeah. They didn’t even call it SEO back then, cuz nobody would do what the acronym would stand for.

You had to spell it out. And I thought okay, if I’ve gotta update my resume and I did, I might as well go focus on this SEO stuff. Cause boy, even in a world where things were imploding faster than anyone could have predicted, it was the one thing that worked better than anything else.

Yeah. So in 2002, I ended up as the chief marketing officer at an SEO firm based in Waltham, Massachusetts.

I confess as the VP of marketing, I had enough budget to do market researcher tests or experiments, so I did a test and I found that if I put an ad in a campus newspaper If I spent about $200 on that ad, I would get one lead.

Oh, wow. And if I bought, and if I bought a spot on a campus radio station, it would cost me $20 to get a lead. Okay. And if I optimized the page on a website, it cost me less than $2 to get a lead. So did I wanna spend 220 or two?

I didn’t use call tracking. No. But it turns out you can use what are called tracking parameters on the end of a URL you use exams. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, they exist. They’ve been around for a while.

This is not new stuff. So the answer was, yeah, you could track. And I did. Okay. Wow. And I still have,

Oh I’m old. I’m old enough to remember when, in the very early days, of course, we’re talking, Ulta Vista was the leading search engine. Yeah. And there was Lycos and there was Excite, and there was Infoseek. And oh, by the way, there was this silly little startup called Google. But, whatever, who, whoever they are. And one of the things that you needed to be, was technically proficient. So successful SEO was I’m gonna say 80 to 90% technical. 10 to 20% was content. Okay? And the only thing you had to do with the content, frankly, was to put the keywords somewhere in your title, maybe in your lead paragraph, possibly in your title tag.

Everyone knew that the meta description tag didn’t matter, who knows? You threw it in there as well as the keyword metatags. Cause Ulta Vista still paid attention to keyword metatags. Yeah. Even though Google ignored it. But we were ignoring Google at the time. So there was a little bit of content there.

And, the success was all technical. Here we are in 2023. Yeah. Reversed. There is still 10 to 20% technical. Yeah. But you know what? 80 to 90% is content. Yeah. Now, for a liberal arts major that’s oh, thank God. I know that stuff.

For a lot of the technical people, I’ve got my schema markup here. What do I do? Content has now taken over. Content creators are now gonna determine whether you win or lose. And if you can’t create the content yourself, you better go find people who can.

Okay.

Oh. Bigger than that. They launched 90 days ago and they already have a hundred million downloads making them the fastest-downloaded app in history. Pardon me.

Didn’t know that. Not that I’m, not that I’m tracking this closely, but yeah, it’s huge. It’s, yeah, it’s probably a bigger game changer than anything we’ve seen since the launch of the iPhone.

November 30th, 2022. Not that I’m paying any attention to this. So do you think that it’s interesting, everybody’s been saying that Google will, you’ll get Google slapped? If you create AI-driven AI-assisted content, you’ll get d index de-ranked penalized here. Google has said ahead. No, Google had to clarify. We want quality content and how you create it as well. That’s to you. Exactly. But we want quality content.

And in the old days we used to create content with, a chisel on that stone tablet, on the wall. And then along came Gutenberg and I was like, oh, wow. We revolutionized how that content got created. And oh my lord, I learned how to type on a typewriter. So do I look it up in Yeah? Wikipedia nowadays. Yeah. What’s a typewriter? And by way of phone, they don’t even know what the typewriter, or keyboard was engineered to slow down typing so that the keys wouldn’t stick.

Yeah. But anyhow so the answer is yes. Whatever you wanna call it, a chat, GPT generational ai chatbots. Yeah. Whatever will change the world as we know it. Going forward now.Yeah. How will it change? It is probably still up in the air. Yeah. And I just had to write an article for a search engine journal trying to predict how long it will take before it changes the world. Oh, wow. What do you think about that? Four years? Yeah, four years. And do you know how I figured out Four years? No. Please tell me, when was Google launched?

98 is when it launched. When did it finally pass Alta Vista to become the number one search engine? I don’t remember. 2002, four years later. Wow.

So I’m sitting here thinking, yeah, okay, this could change the world. Yeah. How long did it take for the world to change? The last time we saw a world change, which was Google and I said four years. I said, okay, so how do we figure out where we go from here to the next four years?

Revolutionized but it was launched in 2007. Yeah. And it didn’t impact more than 7% of the traffic on the websites I was working on until 2011. Okay. And so 7%, you go 7%. That was it. Yeah. It took a little longer. And part of that was because Apple constricted things in such a way.

And it wasn’t really until Android came along that we began seeing the real impact of using your smartphone for web searches that had the profound impact that we now all take for granted.

The first how do I say this portable phone that I had looked like a brick. It looked like a walkie-talkie. Did you have that big Motorola?

Oh yeah. Yeah, it took a while. Yeah.

You think that’s even plausible? He’s being aggressive. I would say four years, but yeah, three to four. Okay. Yeah.

Was it a disaster? Sure. But pardon me? It was an iteration number. What one? Yeah. Okay. You don’t think they’re gonna, yeah. Some of the early versions of chat GPT produce some pretty funny stuff. Sure. But they keep learning. Yeah. And that’s the amazing thing, is how fast these things are learning and discovering, oh, that was wrong.

Then, here, let me come up with another iteration. The last time we saw this kind of horse race Yeah. And we’ve seen it before, was between Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Explorer. Explorer and what ended up winning the war and Microsoft ended up winning was they didn’t have the best browser initially and they didn’t have the best browser the second time around and they didn’t have the best browser, even the third time around, but they kept iterating.
Okay. And so again, that’s why I take this as a four-year horse race. At the end of four years, we will know who iterated faster. Google or Microsoft now. Yeah. Cuz that’s not who it’s now, isn’t it? Yeah. What will be the gating factor?

No, they both can hire that. Okay. They both have the money for the Wazu hardware. It turns out it takes Chat GPT 10 times more server capacity than Google, to answer a question. So if you do not have the world’s largest server farm, how the heck are you gonna process that?

Now, Google already has the world’s largest server farm. Microsoft has a big one, but it’s not the world’s second-largest. Turns out the people sitting on that are Amazon.

second largest, but that’s okay. But the point is, there is a player to be named here called Amazon that will pick sides in this war of the worlds. And the question then becomes, do they develop their own for Alexa, or do they partner with Google or Microsoft? Watch this space like a heart.

Oh, I have a history that probably biases me. Okay. Once upon a time, from 1986 to 1988, I was the director of corporate communications at Lotus Development Corporation. Ok. We made Lotus 1 23 a spreadsheet. Yeah. I remember.

Yeah. Our biggest competitor was Microsoft. Okay. Early in my formative years, I learned to hate Microsoft. So out of that, yeah. Okay. So I’m probably biased. I do not have the same kind of feelings for Google. I’m a little more neutral there. So yeah. Yeah. So don’t ask me to come, judge, because I probably am not the most objective person in the world.

Wouldn’t we all? Yeah. Yeah. I remember the days when the debate in 2002 among SEOs and I went to conferences, SEO conferences. In 2002, the big debate was whether you targeted five search engines or 15,

Yeah. And on panels, I got the assignment of arguing for 15. Yeah, but I, privately felt five was sufficient.

Not, what, 92% market share. Why would you? Yeah. Do you know what the second-largest search engine is?

Of course. Yes. Guess who owns them? Yeah, Google.

1.65 billion in October of 2006, not that I remember. Yeah.

It’s my son Brendan’s fault. Your son Brendan. Okay. So one of the things, when you’re the president and co-founder of your own company that you have the perk of doing, is hiring your kids during the summer.

Yeah. So Brendan was going to Bates College, Uhhuh but he came and worked for me in the summer of 2006 and it was like yeah, fine, whatever. We’ll find something useful for you to do. And that summer I got an emergency phone call from the Christian Science Monitor. Interesting. And they had a reporter named Jill Carroll, who’d been held hostage in Iraq for 82 days.

Okay. Who they thought was gonna be for sure killed because her translator and driver had been killed on the first day. So there was no hope that she would live. And then all of a sudden she was released and she went home to Ann Arbor, Michigan to spend a little time with her family, and then came back to work and wrote an 11-part series on what it was like to be a hostage.

And the editor in chief at the Christian Science Monitor said she finished writing the story and it’s August, but isn’t everyone on vacation in August? What happens if we break the story now? Is anyone gonna read it? And if we sit on the story until September when people come back, isn’t that wrong?

So in that very convoluted circumstance, I got called into, can you optimize a press release announcing that Jill Carroll’s gonna write her 11-part series? And it was like, oh, sure, we know how to optimize press releases. We’ve been doing that since 2003. I went to pitch the story to CN and MSNBC and Huffington Post, and the usual suspects. And I said, I’ve got a 150-word excerpt and a photo, an image which I can give you under embargo if you will break your story on the following Sunday evening, cuz I had six days warning to pull this project off. Okay. If you’ll hold your story until Sunday evening at seven o’clock then you can break your story and you can quote from the first article in the 11-part series if you link to us, that was the negotiation you link to us in your story.

I can give you an advance. Yeah. Okay. Alright. Yeah. Advanced PR five editors in a row said, do you have any video? Oh, wow. And I didn’t have any video uhhuh. And I thought you need a video. And my son Brendan says, Dad, I can put together a YouTube video this afternoon. Wow. And I said, with what he said he said we’ve got photos.

We can do the pan-and-scan thing that Ken Burns does in his civil war documentaries. Yeah. Add a little movement. All I need is a narrator’s voice. And we can put together, a 45-second clip this afternoon and that’s all they want. Yeah. I didn’t know that’s all they wanted, but I went back and I called each one of these editors at all these key media and I said I have a YouTube video, will that work?

In the first 24 hours, we generated 450,000 unique visitors to the Christian Science Monitor website, to the Jill Carroll landing page. Got lots of links and oh, by the way, that was seven times greater than their average daily visits. We had a million page views, which was eight times more than their average number of page views.

Wow. And I thought this video stuff, wow. It has legs. Yeah. I thank you, Brendan, for teaching your old man. Yeah. Wait a second. He was in college, he was 20 years old. Wow. What course are they teaching this in? And he said it’s not a course Dad.

It’s just what we do around the dorm, and it’s Oh, okay. What the heck? Wow. So how did I get into the video? My son showed me the way. And so by 2008 I was speaking at conferences on how to optimize a YouTube video for video search, it turns out YouTube’s algorithm is different than Google’s algorithm.

Okay. Fine. Whatever. And there I was speaking at a conference in, I think it was San Jose. One of the people in the audience was a book editor at Wiley who came up to me afterward and said would you write a book about this? Yeah. And that’s how YouTube and video marketing an Hour a Day, which was published in 2009 in August.

Yeah. Came about. And by the way, the title of the book was a compromise. I wanted to call it YouTube Marketing. Oh, and he said yeah. He said yeah. There are other places where video exists. So why don’t you include, Vimeo and some of the others?

And I went this reminded me, do you target five search engines or 15? And I said, yeah, okay. If you want me to, I will try to squeeze in the other places where you can find videos into my book but it’s YouTube dub, YouTube. That’s, but anyway, that’s how the book is up.

I would use YouTube. I would embed YouTube. Yeah. I’ve advised clients to use YouTube. Ok. But believe it or not, some people insist but there’s gotta be other ways. And so to a pure objective, After I’ve made up my mind.Yeah. Believe it or not, I said, fine. Then let’s take a look at what you can do with, oh, Instagram reels or what you can do with TikTok or what you can do with, video and other platforms. Yeah. And if you want, let’s do a horse race and see which one generates the best results. Okay. And by the way, nobody has taken me up on the horse race part. Yeah. Because everyone’s at 95%. No. Just tell me what the results of that’s gonna be. YouTube. Okay. Yes. And here’s why. Here’s why YouTube, a couple of years ago, passed Wikipedia as the most likely result in Google search results. So not only is YouTube the world’s second-largest search engine, it’s the most likely video to be found in the world’s largest search engine.

Is it they were at, yeah, they were there at a crucial, they weren’t the first to market the singing Phish.

It was owned by AOL and was the first to market. Oh if being first to market won you anything, we’d all be talking about singing Phish, wouldn’t we? But no. YouTube was late to market.

Yahoo video came before it. Google Video came before it.

Singing Phish. Yeah. Google came before it. Ok. I remember covering a conference in the December of 2005 and the panelists didn’t include YouTube. Yeah, it has. Wow. Amazing. And it was, again, it was again my middle son, Brendan, who said, Dad, how could you even write about this topic and not include YouTube?

And it was like they weren’t on the panel, son. Anyway, never mind. You gotta listen to your kids. But the bottom line is YouTube was late to market. But it did several things brilliantly and blew everybody else outta the water, including Google Video. And it, it was the only game in town until about, oh, about the time that Mark Zuckerberg had his video’s first epiphany.

Yeah. Which I think was about 2014 or 2015. Yeah. The answer is yes. There are other places where you can find videos, but Google dominated for a long time. And as a consequence, there are a lot of people creating a lot of content that they’re uploading to YouTube. And oh, by the way, the New War.

Since we’re talking about chat, GPT, and other things like that. Yeah. The New War is where your content creators are making the most money. If I can make more money creating TikTok than I can YouTube videos, I’m going to TikTok. Yeah. And all of a sudden the creator base shifts out from underneath it.

But it turns out billions of dollars are spent every year by YouTube on content creators. Yeah. They do a better job of monetizing their cash cow. And TikTok, I have got, oh we’ll take a look at you and we might give you a little, few pennies here and there. Yeah. We’ll let you starve until we figure out a business model here.

And as a consequence, the people who have experimented on multiple platforms, I’ve discovered at the end of the day, make more money on YouTube. So yeah, again, do your horse race, if you don’t believe me, YouTube is the right answer.

Yeah. So it’s oh, he’s now discovered video too. Yeah, good luck to him and the Red Sox. Yeah.

All I know is I’ve got friends in Boston that he hasn’t paid rent to.

Yeah it’s pay your bills.

Yeah.

Sorry. So yeah no. He doesn’t impress me. And by the way, if you look at his Twitter feed Yeah. And you use any of the tools out there that will tell you how many fake followers. Yeah. 70% of his followers are fake. Oh, wow. That’s interesting. Which is more than anyone else that I’ve ever seen. Yeah.

so is he in the old days they used to talk about George Hamilton, who was well known for being well known.

Yeah. I think just like the Kardashians. Yeah. He’s internet famous because he’s internet famous. Yeah. Yeah. Is he brilliant or is he just Yeah? Got gotten lucky a couple of times. Yeah.

No. I’ve seen some channels that have started, recently that have motored off into phenomenal success. So yeah. It’s still doable.

Counterintuitive, intuitive, counterintuitive. Everyone tries to shoot for a broad market. I need to reach billions and billions of people. Yeah. And as a result, they are creating How doing. Yeah. And that was mildly interesting. I’m not gonna subscribe to it or come back and watch your second video. And so the people who are doing it well are picking a niche.

Okay. Focusing on it. And having a rabid, not just an interesting audience, but a rabid audience that can’t wait until your next video is up. Now, let me tell you, big brands can play this game too, okay? And some of these brands have been in video for a while, so you would think, oh wow, this is, they’re just leveraging what they learned 10 years ago.

And the answer is no. We all have to relearn all the rules every three years. And why every three years, it turns out on YouTube, Every part of the algorithm that you can understand changes about 33% a year. So at the end of 18 months, 50% has changed. At the end of three years, a hundred percent has changed.

Wow. And you’re starting over again. Okay. So there is no such thing as a learning curve. Oh yeah. I learned this a long time ago. I’m just milking it now. It’s fascinating. Anybody in the business has to keep relearning and relearning, which is why there’s a lot of burnout in the industry.

But it turns out there are some brands who have learned to pivot and pivot again and pivot yet again. And one of those brands is Red Bull. Oh, yeah. And I’ve watched them not only become successful on YouTube. Okay, fine. Got it. Then become successful with a new set of strategies. Oh, that was interesting.

And I wrote about that. And lately, I went back for an article that hasn’t been published yet, and I took a new look at them and it’s damn, they are doing new things yet again. It’s working. It’s, yeah. Here’s a little energy drink company, hidden away there in Austria.

That has figured out how to learn the new rules and succeed at them. That’s amazing.

Some of its storytelling. Okay. So that, yeah. That is an element that hasn’t gone outta style, that’s still worth learning. That’s good stuff. Okay. But I will tell you that the vast majority of the videos that they’ve uploaded in the last 365 days are YouTube shorts. Okay. Less than 30 seconds. And no less than 60 seconds. Less than 60, okay. So there is a way to tell a story in less than 60 seconds, but boy, it’s a heck of a lot different story than I would’ve thought that they had mastered, oh, let’s say 3, 4, 5 years ago. But then shorts didn’t exist 3, 4, or 5 years ago.

No, they didn’t. Yeah. What they have done brilliantly. Yeah, it created this microfocus that I told you about. Yeah. Oh, with a microfocus on a gazillion different micro sports. So if you are really, which is bloody brilliant, which is if you are totally into cliff diving. Yeah. Where do you go for the latest cliff-diving videos? Red Bull. I have no idea.

They have an event that they made up called Flu tag, where you try to create a machine that will fly, it’s more like a glider, but the point is it’s gotta fly on the air and the more outrageous the machine, the better you score.

Wow.

personas they have created. And they’ve started scores of personas.

Yes. But they have micro-targeted people who are passionate about sports, but instead of generic sports, cause oh by the way, you can go see some of that on ESPN.

You can go see some of that. Yeah. Wherever they are giving you the sports, you can’t find anywhere else. Exactly.

Yeah. They found zillions of opportunities in the market.

The answer is they need imagination. And the good news from Red Bull’s point of view is they do not think like an energy drink marketer. No. They don’t. They think like a media company. Yeah, they,

They create different content for different audiences and they just realize that the audiences that are already taken are expensive to go fight for.

Yeah. So they look for all the underserved audiences.

It, the answer is, it depends. If you’re gonna create a music video, then you better have really good quality because every other music video has really good quality.

Okay? If you’re creating gaming videos, it can be rudimentary, but I’m more interested in your insight. You have a cheat that’ll get me to the next level. The answer is, it’s a variable. Okay? What is not a variable is you better give your viewer either insight or better entertain them or better enlighten them.

You better educate them. You better, okay, you, you better make this worth watching. So it’s the content that’s more important than content, the production value.

Let’s put it this way, the chocolate waterfall doesn’t quite fall. Okay. Okay. It needs work. It needs work, but brilliant. Yes. Watch by everybody and their cousin. Yes. Except for me.

You can certainly come up with the ideas now. Yeah. What you wanna do if you’re gonna use chat GPT and understand what it’s good for and what it’s bad at? Because it’s like anything else. If I hire a person and they come work for my firm, after a while you do the evaluation, you learn what they’re good at and what they’re not so good at. Ok. Yeah. So if you’re gonna use this tool, terrific. What is this blind spot? It has a couple of blind spots, one of which is any information after 2021. Why? Because it got trained on data that was available back in 2021. So if Chat GPT has to come up with anything that happened in 2022 or heaven forbid in early 2023, it doesn’t know that.

No, it doesn’t have imagination.

so it’s not good about stealing commonplace ideas. And weaving them together in sentences. Okay, fine. That was the conventional wisdom. All right.

Thank you very much for conventional wisdom, and if you think that your script can get by with conventional wisdom, God bless you, and good luck.

Yeah, so the answer is I often will use it as a Kickstarter. Yeah. And then by the time that I’m done, there’s nothing left in what I’ve done that got generated by a chatbot.

Yeah. I got a blank-page analogy staring me in the face. Yeah, I, I don’t know. What am I gonna say? I don’t know. Let’s try this. It’s good at iterating. Okay, that doesn’t light my fire. Let’s try that.

That doesn’t, oh, but that then gave me an idea that, oh, by the way, didn’t come from chat G P T, but it got me going. Yeah. And all of a sudden then I create something wholly original, that is the third time around because I threw out the first two, serious suggestions that, yeah.

Okay, fine. Cool. I like that a whole lot better than what you came up with, but you got me headed off in this weird direction. Yeah. Interesting.

It should. Too often people will use keyword research.

And so there, there’s no imagination. I’ve always tried to use keyword research, like market research. Okay, this is the language my prospective client or customer is using. What are they telling me? Because you really wanna get to what is called user intent or search intent, yeah. What were they thinking when they typed this into the search box? Yeah. And in a lot of cases, that’s not obvious from what they gave you. They only gave me two or three words. I can’t tell what they were thinking. Yeah, I gotta go until they give me four or five or six or seven words. Now I’ve got a better idea of what they were thinking. Yeah. That’s one of the reasons why I love using the tool called Answer the Public. Oh Yeah, you take a two-word term, you drop it into answer the public, and it will spit out 78 variations of what people are looking for, where that’s the route.

But it now tells you where, when, why, and how they went off in various directions. That gives me more insight as to what’s on their mind than the two or three-word term that I dropped into, to begin with. Yeah.

You can forget about three of them. Yeah. Yeah. One of them is navigation. It’s like I’m searching the keyword in boring.

Yeah. Who cares? Yeah. Yeah. Type Google commercial into Google. Yeah. Yeah.

it’s where the money is.

The money is. Yeah. Sorry, I didn’t mean to finish your sentence. No. You and I both know what Willie Sutton said, Willie, why do you want Rob Banks? Because that’s where the money is. Yeah,

let’s go back to, let’s go back to chat.

GPT is okay. Sure. Drop into it, what do you think people are looking for when they search for, fill in the phrase they think a phrase. Pick a phrase. I don’t care. Cars, since you’re into cars. Okay. Yeah. What’s the difference between looking for a new car versus a used car?

Oh. But it is, it’s just you have to figure out how to go after it.

So am I. Okay, so where’s their blind spot?

Great question. I don’t know. Guess what? Guess what they’re doing? They’re optimizing pages for web search. They’re trying to find a ranking in the old 10-blue links. Yeah. Guess what? They’re missing? They’re missing a video. Okay. Guess what turns up in a lot?

Again, it, I’ve worried about this for a long time, partly because I’m also an instructor and I teach in addition to doing Okay.

And it’s like how can people be so dense? And the answer is, ah, it’s because they were taught what to do in the last generation. And so guess what? You’re still doing what worked. Thank you very much in the 20th century. It’s not the 20th century anymore. That’s not, and it hasn’t been for 23 years.

Yeah. So guess what? You know what’s new Yeah. The new stuff is, what is working. And again, the good news is there are companies out there like Red Bull who realize, oh, I gotta think like a media company, not a soft drink company. Yeah, exactly.

When our washing machine broke down, what did my wife do?

She watched a YouTube video, figured out what the part was, and then went to the hardware store already knowing what the part to order was before she got there. Okay. Yeah. So again, behavior has shifted. It’s shifted big time during the pandemic lockdowns. Yeah. So if you don’t think your customers do this, guess what?

They learned to do it to survive over the last three years. Yes. And they are doing it now by habit. And so again, if you’re not dealing with the new world, then God bless you. Good luck. And when you update your resume, I hope you find work.

Hopefully this has some value. Yeah,

Believe it or not, I still have a Twitter account. Okay. Although I’m rethinking that, it’s at Greg Jarboe okay. But yeah, that still works. I have a LinkedIn account, so if you look for Okay. Okay. Greg Jarboe that’ll work. Okay. If you need to send me an email, believe it or not, I still have a Hotmail account.

Oh, wow. Does that tell you to tell you how long I’ve been at this? Yeah. So it’s g underscore jarboe@hotmail.com.

My kids say, Dad, you should get a Gmail account like everyone else.
And I said, then I’m like everyone else. Why would I wanna be like everyone else? Why would I do that?

I do too, but I keep my Gmail account secret, yeah, of course. Yeah, of course. We’ll go with the Hotmail account, whatever. Absolutely. Where else can you find me? LinkedIn,

if you wanna, if yeah, go to the website, which is SEO-PR.COM. And in the old days, the hyphen mattered. But whatever. Yeah. Yeah, I’m around.

No problem, Matt. No problem. And I hope that we’ve at least sold a car. Sure. Go ahead. Go ahead.

No, let me end on this personal note. Yeah. Okay. My father was the director of marketing at Os. Okay. And he launched an ad campaign in the late 1980s that proclaimed, this is not your father’s social bill

It was a brilliant campaign. Brilliant. Except every year sales went down. Oh, I did not know that. Oh yeah. When he started the campaign, they were selling a million automobiles a year. By the time they pulled the plug on the campaign, they were selling half a million per year, a percent drop, a 50% drop. So he went to his he retired. Okay. So this is a painful story. So he went to his ad agency and said how are we measuring success?

And they said, GRPs gross rating points. Yeah. And he’s, he said how many GRPs do we need to sell a car? So if in today’s, discussion that we’ve had, yeah, if this podcast sold a car, we may have done something his big ad agency couldn’t do way, way back.

Okay, Matt,