Welcome to another edition of the Always Be Testing podcast with your
host, Ty De Grange. Get a guided tour of the world of growth, performance
marketing, customer acquisition, paid media, and affiliate marketing.
We talk with industry experts and discuss experiments and their learnings in growth,
marketing, and life. Time to nerd out, check your biases at the door, and
have some fun talking about data driven growth and lessons learned. W
Welcome to another episode of the Always Be Testing podcast.
I'm your host, Ty DeGrange, and I am pumped to have none other
than Jordan Cooney with us today. What's up, Jordan? Ty. Hey, man.
It's great to be here. Super pumped to be on the show and it's going to be a lot of fun to go through our
conversation today. Heck, yeah. Heck, yeah. We talked about a lot of good
stuff already. We're diving into more SEO topics. We're diving into more
learnings, the theories of testing and learning and experimentation and what comes out of
that. I think for most people, they realize you're one of the leading SEO experts in the
world. You're kind of looking at the landscape that Google's throwing at us.
Maybe start out with, like, what has Google done recently?
A lot of talk of them eating up the search engine results page, a lot of clicks going to Google.
You got Moz coming out and kinda challenging them and saying, like, hey, I'm gonna do a study
independently to see what the heck's going on. What's some of your view on
them kind of eating the SERP page and what's happening with how do people think
about that and what should we do about it? I I mean, it's still pretty early days, I'd like to say.
Although a lot of people would disagree with me. They they think, you know, like, AI is is has has
hastened the pace of innovation. But here's my perspective on it. The pace of
innovation is dictated by the consumer. Right? And the consumer is Google's users,
the people who are engaging with the SERP. And Google's constantly testing,
constantly changing things up, some for revenue and profitability.
Right? Things like, we call it the hotel finder or shopping
ads or other ways to incorporate advertising
and making it more sticky to searchers. But the
other component that's evolving here is the evolution of the SERP and
how AI is driving new experiences and how Google thinks
about new experiences. And from my perspective, the generalized SERP is
pretty much the same than it was just six months ago when the
AI door just got blown open. However, Google is testing and testing hard
and fast, and I wouldn't be surprised if we see, by the end
of this year, a strong set of introduction to AI
specific experiences that are hopefully designated as
AI, like, told the consumers that these are AI Yep. But that allow
consumers to find and refine their their searches in
a much more expedient and faster way. So this could be, more verticalization
in the SERPs, so more more vertical specific experiences that are powered by AI.
I think there's gonna be a huge disruption and a lot of disruption in local based searches and what we
see at a local level. Google has a lot of data already there through maps and ratings and
other other products that they've developed. And so I expect to see a lot more activity
around that. And then lastly, I would actually argue that we'll we'll see
some more evolution around media in our media consumption.
Today, Google allows consumers to see a lot of flexibility in media options and go
to different outlets or channels, but I wouldn't be surprised if Google starts to, let's just
say, give consumers the cliff notes in terms of what's happening. Interesting.
Interesting. So do you think it's more curation snippets
brought to media? How do you think that looks for for people in the
media side of it? A A hundred percent. I think it's either curation, It's
taking personalization, so users' behaviors and habits to then
surface more trustworthy, let's call it, media outlets or sources
and in synthesizing it, like, actually consolidating an entire article recording,
there's there's new news coming out all the time. Right?
And and sometimes that news is is really well documented and refined, and
sometimes that news isn't. This morning, Mitch McConnell had
this episode where he was addressing the public and for thirty seconds
just stood at the podium not saying anything and then was escorted off by his
staff. So right now, that's the news that we have right now today as we're
recording. I'm sure that that news story is gonna evolve six or seven times over the
next week as we unfold what exactly happened to him. Did he
just have, like, a heart attack? Did he just brain just stop working? Did,
like, his notes all of a sudden get infiltrated by a bunch of liberals, and it
said, you know, random support for Biden? I have no idea
what actually happened, but I can tell you that the news story is gonna change. And what I
can see Google doing is I can see them really creating a
narrative in their SERP that controls what is
really true or fact versus what is us here speculating.
Wow. Yeah. I mean, that could raises all all kinds of questions around
philosophy and feeding users what they maybe have already are leaning towards
versus maybe what would be beneficial, the contrarian view, the the
objective view of news, which is maybe not what we're going to solve for
today, but raises some philosophical questions about the power and influence
of Google in itself. More germane to kind of performance marketing and growth and what we can
actually control. It doesn't sound like it's materially changing from you view you, but
do you think it's a mostly concern and preparation than it is reality?
Like, brands are not necessarily massively altering their approach to SEO
or approaching the SERP. Those that are making changes, kind of what are maybe what are you seeing in
terms of what people can do and what people are doing? What are you advising clients to do? It's a
phenomenal question. And I think there's a lot that needs to be done by brands, especially
brands who are very comfortable with their positioning in the SERPs. Think
of a TripAdvisor in a lot of local and in hotel and
informational hotel and vacation type content. They've had
a a foothold on that type of content and that kind of search behavior
for the better part of a decade. But don't get comfortable because companies like
TripAdvisor are gonna have to use their AI technology
to better determine and decipher exactly
what Google's most interested in. If you have a page that's about vacationing
in Hawaii, what are the the touch points or what are the cliff notes within that vacationing
in Hawaii page that is going to be most useful in a SERP to get
consumers to to understand or process the information? Is it the summary of the different
islands? Is it the, vacation packages? Is it
the types of events or activities that these different islands have? I
chose Hawaii specifically because it's a complex vacation. It's not just like you're
going to one city that has just one thing to do. If you're going to Orlando,
I'm pretty sure you can guess what you're doing there. Like, there's not a ton of, like, legwork
in terms of, figuring out what you're gonna do in Orlando. But if you say you're gonna go on a vacation in Hawaii,
there are a variety of options. There are a variety of international airports you can go to. There's
a varying degree of quality, size of city,
outdoor activities that you can do based on where you go in Hawaii. And I'm sorry for all the
listeners who haven't been to Hawaii yet. I highly encourage you to go visit. It's quite a beautiful place. But I will say
this, it creates a unique scenario for the SERP in terms of what do I surface, what's the
most important relevant information for the user on the other end, and that's where TripAdvisor is gonna have
to get smart. How do I use AI to consolidate, better feature,
highlight content so that I can acquire what is going to
be a less cluttered SERP. It's gonna be a
more clarified SERP that Google uses features like
they've been using for the better part of the last decade, like people also ask or questions
frequently asked questions in SERPs. These are features that Google puts in there
because it helps users refine and identify what they actually want.
Yeah. The usage of the snippets has to be going up into the right. It just seems like
it's, I don't know how are you seeing data to support that there's just
more and more of that happening in the SERP? Or is it kind of a mixed, met
mixed result? I mean, right now, today, I don't think a ton of it is happening. I think that
Google is using what they've traditionally called SERP elements, which are
powered by or SERP features, which are powered by AI. Right? Things
like Answerbox, things like Knowledge Graph, things like the local pack.
These are all powered or levered by AI. But AI as a
journey in the search engine is a new way of us searching. It's introducing
a new level of engagement that allows a
searcher to utilize this great AI tool to help it
determine an outcome, hopefully, in in theory, faster, more efficiently,
and in a more scalable way. Yeah. I was just referring to regular old snippets.
I'm finding myself using the heck like, those a lot more than I have previously. So my
triangulating thinking, like, is that what others are doing as well? Is that where the data's
showing? I think that the snippet or the the answer box
element or some sort of summary of information is what a
lot of consumers are looking for. They're not looking to go to the recipe page
Yep. And scroll and scroll and scroll to find the ingredients. One hundred percent. Because
because all I wanted was the ingredients. Come on. Just give it to me. And so so, like, I think
that's that's where we're at as consumers is like Yeah. We're okay with
the SERP telling us that this is the best recipe, but we're not okay with
having to spend three to five minutes going through an entire recipe page to actually find
what we want because it's cluttered with ads, it's cluttered with additional information, it's cluttered with
this long narrative and story about grandma passing that recipe down
sixteen generations. Yeah. Eighteen ad blocker poppers and crazy things.
Exactly. And it's all great context if and only if the
user wants the context. Yeah. But if the user doesn't want the context, hopefully, they can use AI
or leverage technology like this to find what they actually need. Yeah. And back to the brands
that we're, you know, kind of working with closely to figure out growth and things for,
what are you there's a lot of talk about using AI to generate
content. What have been results there? Like, are brands actually doing that
effectively? Absolutely. Let's take a SERP experience that is very common
today, FAQs. So you have a ranking result, you rank number one,
you got a couple of frequently asked questions that are relevant to that page. This happens
in various categories, everything from ecommerce to travel to finance to just
about everything. FAQ is a very common SERP element that shows up.
One of the things you can use AI for is to help better map the intention
of a question to the purpose of the page, which then can, in theory,
improve the exposure or the click through rate because you have highly relevant ask ask
questions. Right? Many of these pages already have six, seven, eight questions on
it. But what are the ones that are most important because Google's only gonna give you a preference to two?
Those are the types of things that we're working with companies to help them better use
AI to, at scale, determine things like what are the best,
frequently asked questions to show on a page, or what are some of the best reviews to surface
on this page, or how can we better map images
or other media to these pages? These are the types of things that AI can help you
do at scale with the right prompts and logic and data inputs, to
support the brand and the mission of that particular page or content. That's awesome.
Let's say g two c e com brand. Let's say they're in health and wellness. Say they're
doing, I don't know, range of fifty to fifty million a year. Let's say
they've got kind of their paid machine running quite well and some good content out
there, blog, reviews, trying to kind of think of a case that might be
interesting for you and what similar to what you've seen and come across. What are
some of the core building blocks that they need to be thinking about now maybe
versus what been in the past? Like, what's kind of the checklist that they kinda need to
nail at a macro level to be successful with SEO with content? Yeah. That's a great question. I
mean, you mentioned health care right off the bat. So one of the big things that I think a lot about when I think
of health care or finances, what how are you gonna evolve the signals
you provide consumers to be a trusting website? And this is
unique to these types of categories because of the fact that they're
not just selling a a t shirt. Mhmm. They're a service
that has huge implications to our livelihood, right, finance and
health as two examples. And if you think about a health website, today, you know,
you might feature the doctors that are on the that wrote the article or that are part of the practice.
You might have an about us page that details how, how, you know, you've been won seventeen
awards that nobody knows the name of. You know, these are things that
hospitals and medical type websites often do. But we need to start
thinking about evolving that trust factors and trust as a website
as we move into an AI driven world. Right?
And one of those trust signals might be to share
with consumers when a particular page is
doctors or from one of our health professionals or if it's just an informational page that was built for
marketing purposes. Right? That would be interesting. Deciphering that. Right? Kind of
putting a a notice on these pages because we want our consumers to know
that doctor Sally over here put this lovely page together for
you. Or over here, some marketing guy named Jordan just happened to throw this page up
up there for you. Another thing that will be really interesting for health and medical to think about
around trust signals and how you create these trust signals is to develop
experiences that allow your consumer
to adequately control the information that's being provided.
So one of the things that I'm seeing a lot of health and medical sites do is instead
of there being just, like, a an inquiry form or a submission form
to use some of the technology that's already available to us. Right? Like, just instead of you
submitting a form, how about you submit this information through your Google account? How about you submit this information
through some other means that already can identify you, and now
we don't have to have this friction of storing your data or knowing this information
about you? These are really important trust signals that these types of institutions
need to think about because it changes the long term game as to how
Google analyzes and understands the importance of how you're protecting
consumers' data information. And that's becoming more and more important in an AI driven world.
That's when I think about when I think about health and medical is is how do you how do you evolve that. Right? And how
do you evolve that based on the type of content and experiences that you're serving
up? Yeah. Everything from your profiles to the services you provide to maybe
even more programmatic experiences, like, if you have, like, a whole directory
of of of content of of some kind. Yeah. You're addressing the personalization
demands and the trend that's become so massive. You're addressing the, you know, privacy
related concerns and changes that have come in cookie deprecation
to GDPR. So your counsel there is really interesting and I think really
valuable because it kind of hits on some of the biggest issues for the health and
wellness category. You have to develop that trust with the user and also address
all these things that have been, you know, thrown at us as marketers and folks working in digital.
Exactly. I love that. Topic near and dear to our heart, two of the most
disrespected, misunderstood performance marketing channels, SEO, and
affiliate. Here we are. Disrespected might be a little harsh. Misunderstood,
miscategorized, but valued still. Right? Right. Right.
Could bring a lot of money to your business, can work really well. There's certainly pockets of people that get
it. They understand it. And a lot of people are concerned about how do we get them to play
together? How do we get SEO and affiliate to kind of complement one another?
I'd love to hear your perspective on this. We've talked about it over the years from our days at
eBay to to various experiences with brands. But what are you seeing
as as ways that we can kind of make those things sing together right
now? I think that there's a lot that affiliate has always taught not
only SEO, but but web development in general. Right? Like,
many affiliate players really kind of chart the path
for where and how we can develop experiences for the core brand.
And I think that that's an important thing to always be mindful of is if you don't have a strong pulse
of what of what is happening with affiliate and affiliate partners, you're not gonna have a strong
pulse on how to develop and define your website's future. And at the end of the day, that's what we're always talking
about here is we're talking about digital demand, how you create digital demand, through
specific channels. So that that's one thing to just kind of catalog in the back of your mind is
that this is a group of innovators who typically identify ways to
leverage traffic to help brands grow, but that lever is
oftentimes what helps the brand itself grow in the future. So one thing to keep in mind. The
second thing here is I get a suspicious feeling because of the ability for
affiliates to be nimble and fast, they're going to use AI faster than most brands
can. Whether it's in content generation, whether it's in development
of experiences, whether it's in refining
or defining what is is is shown on a website or web page,
they're gonna use AI a lot faster than most brands can, which means that you have to
be attentive to where and how AI is being used and what could or
possibly be an AI experience. At least for the foreseeable future,
the AI is gonna be a wild west, and there's not gonna be a stamp on any of these website that says
built by AI. I mean, as much as I'd love for that to be the case, which probably should be,
and hopefully if any legislator of our country is listening, they'll take that to heart.
We are not gonna see from affiliate or from brands this designation
of AI creation. So we have to be smart marketers. We have to
be smart innovators to identify where and how
brands or affiliates are using these technologies to their advantages, to their
advantage, excuse me, and whether or not it is something that's applicable to our business. I
think that is probably the most, unique way that affiliate and
SEO are gonna merge together is is that as affiliates develop new
experiences using AI, the SEO landscape is gonna change. And who and
what shows up is gonna change, and SEO's ability to identify
that and utilize that to create points of scale, whether it is for the affiliate brand
or the affiliate itself or the brand, is gonna be a really kind of unique
territory that that we haven't seen before. Yeah. I love that. Your
team, you you do a lot with unlocking growth and helping brands with
SEO, with content. You also done a lot in the placement of
great talent, sourcing of great talent where there's demand and need there, which is high.
When you're looking on the talent side and you're thinking about candidates, like, what are
you looking for from an SEO perspective? What are some of the things that rise above? What are the some of the
things that really get you excited as someone who's able to kinda tap your network
and source and find folks? What are what are people looking for in that category as
well on the SEO and content side of growth? Specifically from
from a talent perspective, like, what's happening in the market and, like, who's out
there. I still believe that it is an incredibly challenging
market for most brands to navigate. And it's not to say that
there aren't great recruiting agencies and and talent organizations out there that can help with
it, but it it almost requires a level of expertise to
be able to decode, is this a good affiliate marketer? Is this a good content marketer?
Is this a good SEO for my team? And the reason is that I I like to call it it's like a Rubik's
cube. You're solving a Rubik's cube. It's three-dimensional. It's not just are you finding the,
if a person has the right skills, but you're actually trying to map those skills to what
the company's status is. Like, where are they in their development of this type of a
program? And then you're trying to combine that all
with the availability that's in the market. Like, who's out there that will fit into these roles?
Mhmm. I still think there's a huge mismatch. I still see a lot of SEOs that are hired into the
wrong roles. I still see a lot of content marketers who are ill equipped
to to serve the strategic needs of an organization. Ultimately, I think that
that's gonna change quickly because what I'm seeing, to answer your question, is a lot of organizations
are bringing on advisors like myself from an SEO standpoint. But they're bringing on advisors
to help with that journey of recruiting and finding the right fit, being part
of the interview process, and encouraging their HR teams, their
internal teams, that this isn't just a decision we can make alone within our
four walls. We need an outside party that can help us value and identify the right
skills and talent. It's really fascinating because it's almost like saying, hey, we almost need
this like fractional CMO type, fractional head of growth
type that's seen a ton of stuff because
you make a mistake on the hiring side. We've all been there. It can be extremely cost
costly. Even on the agency side, it can be extremely costly. We talk to a lot of clients that
have been burned. And having that voice of reason internally, even sometime
part time can be sounds like a great insurance policy. Interesting.
No doubt. And I think it gets interesting when you go from organizations who
are looking for a chief growth officer or they're looking for a CMO or they're
looking for a VP of demand gen or even a director depending on the size of the
organization. These highly leadership driven,
strategic driven type roles are great. But what I'm finding is that many of those
individuals, especially with affiliate and SEO, since we're talking a lot about those two, they
often lack the experience in hiring those roles to know how to hire the right
channel owner and the person who's, at the end of the day, directly responsible
for the channel itself. Yeah. No. It's awesome. I really like that.
What do you think people get wrong on the content creation side with something they often
don't do right? Oh, man. That's a tough one, Ty. You know? Content
creation is a really challenging topic, and I think that it's challenging
for content marketers, so the people who eat, live, and breathe content on a daily basis.
It's hard for SEOs, and it's hard for brands. I think that the the biggest
challenge on the content side is a lack of alignment. Usually,
when when I hear from my clients that volume isn't at the pace
that they want it to be at or the quality of the content isn't what they
were expecting, it's usually a misalignment problem. It's a
misalignment with what is being produced. It's a misalignment with how it's being
evaluated. It is a misalignment organizationally towards
the outcome of what is, in essence, content marketing. And I think that
it's really funny because what I'm seeing is the CMO, right, that function in these
organizations or the leaders that support that CMO, they're struggling mightily
to help shape and define the alignment to to get to points of scale.
But what I see with small brands is when small brands get on that cadence and they're able to move
quickly, they grow really fast. I've seen enterprises who can
align themselves with strong programmatic strategies, implement the utility of data and
scale to drive content and pages, and they grow really fast. But when there is no
alignment, you can bet that content marketing is the fastest channel to
fail. What percentage of companies that are kind of like in the game and really
like over a certain size, I don't know, like, a lot of the companies we talk to,
what percent do you think are actually tapping into content creation effectively?
Effectively is is a very small percent. I think I think it's definitely like that traditional,
like, bell curve. Right? It's like maybe ten percent are doing it really, really exceptionally
well. Eighty percent are just trying their hearts out.
And then there's the the bottom ten percent that are just a complete catastrophe and
can never get anything published and literally get in their own way. And those are
those political nightmares that everyone's wondering why seventeen people need to
review a piece of content before it gets published, and the piece of content that's being reviewed is
the, policy disclaimer in the footer. So, you know, that's like, you
know, it's like, what are we doing here? You know? I think seventeen people might read it for the
next ten years. Right. Exactly. That's the real challenge is how you move
yourself out of that eighty percent because that's where most of the businesses are Yep. Into a high performer.
And the crazy thing is because most businesses are in the eighty percent, a lot of companies see
success from content marketing because of that reason. You're seeing wins. You're seeing wins
happen. But in order for you to be in the top ten percent, in order for you to own a category, in
order for you to to dominate a topic, you you got to be in that top ten percent. I love it. That's
what we're striving for. Speaking of striving, some fun topics.
We need a, underrated red wine recommendation. What's your what's your go to right now, Jordan?
Oh my goodness, man. I did not see that one coming. Underrated
red wine. It is summertime, and it is hot everywhere. So maybe Yeah. I know.
Maybe broaden it to wine period. But I would say
that my underrated red wine right now
is likely gonna be you know what? I got I got I got it.
I got it perfectly. So my my brother bought a case of
South American, red wine, and there's a a great selection
of the nonconventional grapes,
wines coming out of Argentina, Uruguay, Chile that aren't your
normal, local wines from those regions. Right? You think Argentina. You think Malbec.
Right? You think Chile. You think Carmenere coming out of there. Right? Mhmm. But I'm
seeing amazing Cab Francs. I'm seeing amazing Cabernet Sauvignon,
amazing Tannas that are just coming out of these regions that most of the time you think United States
or you think, you know, Europe for those, but it's actually really fun. So next time you're at the grocery
store, you're looking at some South American wines, don't go for the conventional
grape. Go for the oftentimes, very well known grapes, but from those regions,
that's my recommendation right now. That's amazing. I don't think anyone would have guessed that and said that,
and I certainly wouldn't have. So I'm glad I asked. That's awesome. Good. A really, really
important part of the pod, what on earth are the Packers gonna
do without your friend, Aaron Rodgers? This is a good question. This is a good question.
So I was ready for Aaron Rodgers to depart. Understandably. Yeah. Understandably.
You know, I'm speaking of podcasts. I was getting sick and tired of seeing him on podcast. I was getting sick and
tired of seeing him go into dark rooms for long periods of time. You know? So, candidly, I was I
was ready I was ready for the drama to move on, you know, and we've had a lot of drama in Green
Bay. You loved it. Yeah. Yeah. I was I was ready for Hollywood to move on. So the
unfortunate news for the Packers is they're probably not gonna win as many games. The man
is talented. Right? And he he could sling a football. But, Jordan Love, which,
by the way, has a phenomenal name, just to be perfectly clear about I know. His his parents and how excellent
they were at naming choices. Amazing. The unfortunate thing is he can't sling a football
like like the old man Rogers. So No. Losses are in our future,
many of them likely. You know, if we're eight and nine, I'll be proud of our season,
but that that's my prediction right now for the greenbackers. I love it. And, hey, you know what? It's a team
game. You gotta rebuild and start somewhere. Agreed. It's gonna be fun to watch. Agreed. I'm
looking forward to next year's draft for a new quarterback.
Hey. You know, maybe something on the market you can pick up in a trade. Who knows? If the forty niners end up
with three good quarterbacks, we might have to. I'm willing to make a deal.
And I love it. I love it. Ladies and gentlemen, it's been a pleasure to have
Jordan Cooney, SEO content growth expert, as always, breaking down the
learnings of business, marketing, life, and in this case, wanting football. Love it. What
more do you want? Exactly. Great to be here. Thank you, Ty, for the opportunity. Always.