In this episode, I interview George Nguyen from Wix about the importance of fresh and diverse voices in content. George shares his personal experience of feeling alone and not seeing enough representation in the industry, which inspired him to bring in diverse voices to the Wix blog.
As always, if you enjoyed this, and previous episodes, please like, rate, share, and subscribe to the podcast – it all helps!
*As a reminder, you can now also get this podcast in video form, on both Spotify video, or YouTube.*
Listen/watch now, right above the subscribe button, or pick your favourite listening platform from this list:
Azeem Ahmad (00:01.058) Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Azeem Digital Asks podcast. We’re flying through season six and I’ve got an amazing guest with me, George Nguyen from Wix. Just an absolute legend, someone I’m very pleased to call a friend. We’re talking all about the importance of fresh voices in your content. And if you can see the fact that we’re both smiling now, it’s because literally just before I hit record, we had a good little laugh. But yeah, George.
Welcome to the show, my friend.
George Nguyen (Wix) (00:32.504) Thank you, I feel like it’s an honor to be here. It’s just like hanging out with a friend, right? And I hope we get to bring our audience today into that conversation. I hope you learned something. Or at least I hope you laugh at us. But yeah, thank you for being so complimentary. I feel like some people are so complimentary of me, right? And what I have to say about you is like, I’m so glad you’re back doing this.
Azeem Ahmad (00:56.472) Thank you. Thank you very much.
George Nguyen (Wix) (00:57.556) I wish that everyone could see your MozCon session, because it was both entertaining and full of heart. Right? Yeah. Let’s do it!
Azeem Ahmad (01:08.056) I that man. Thank you. Thank you very much. Yeah, as you can see, George is a great guy and God, I feel bit emotional after that. Thanks very much. I typically like you won’t hear me talking a lot after this other than asking you questions like I’ve seen podcasts where the intro is like 15 minutes long. Nobody’s here for me. Everybody’s here to watch, learn and listen from you. So before we get into it, as always,
George Nguyen (Wix) (01:20.59) Hahaha!
Azeem Ahmad (01:37.784) Please like, rate, share and subscribe. You can get this on YouTube video and Spotify video, which is where most of you enjoy this stuff. But let’s get into the meat and bones of it. First question, George, 30 seconds quick fire round. Who are you and why should people know about you other than the fact that you’re a legend?
George Nguyen (Wix) (01:58.312) I’m not quite sure people should know about me. don’t ever think about myself that way, but unless I’m applying for a job. My name is George Nguyen. I am the director of SEO editorial at Wix. I am not currently applying for jobs anyway. I don’t know that Wix is like, what did he just drop? I run our SEO learning hubs, article based content. My mission is a very niche one within the industry. Essentially I’m an educator.
Azeem Ahmad (02:05.024) You
Azeem Ahmad (02:11.554) Ha ha ha ha!
George Nguyen (Wix) (02:23.088) and I work within marketing. work within SEO primarily, but other facets of digital marketing to bring the best tactics, what pros, professionals that get paid to do this with huge clients are using right now, and I want to bring that to everybody. I believe in that because I learn most of what I know for free, and I want other people too as well.
Azeem Ahmad (02:42.136) Love that, love that. And the first person to stick to the 30 second thing. So amazing. This is going to be a great episode. So yeah, look, let’s dive right in. What inspired you to, you know, focus on bringing in like fresh and diverse voices to the Wix blog?
George Nguyen (Wix) (03:00.836) Feeling alone, 100%, full stop. The last time I got laid off was like 2018. Actually, that was the only time I got laid off. But…
I remember I had moved to a new location in the United States. I had only been there for eight months. I didn’t know that many people. The area around me, there weren’t very many Asian people to connect to. And that feeling, once I resumed working, I was at Search Engine Land after that, that feeling kind of persisted, especially because I had transitioned from working in office to working completely remotely. And so it took me a long time to understand how much of myself I could be in front of very different people than I was used to. I grew up in a community of many Asian people.
many Hispanic people and working in a predominantly white space I didn’t always know if my sarcasm or my snarkiness would carry through or if people would be okay with that and so I never wanted people to feel like that.
I felt like I continued to feel like that for long time because I didn’t see other role models, other Asian people on the stages or participating at the upper echelons of conversations about our industry and where we’re headed. And so to bring that representation for the next generation of marketers, and it doesn’t even have to market, it’s just the next generation of website owners or…
Anywhere any vocation is a beautiful thing because you get to show them that they can be themselves and That this craft is for everyone if that’s what you choose. So that’s that’s in a nutshell why
Azeem Ahmad (04:34.284) Look, that’s amazing. Like I could literally just press stop there and we would have a fantastic episode. I think having such a powerful foundation to build from and like a ground to start from is just the only way is up really, which like I said, I’ve said this to you a million times before when we found out, but on a recording, gonna say, look, that is fantastic. Like the purest of intentions, which can only lead to good things, I think. So.
Let’s talk a little bit more about the people that you bring in to do this. How do you go about finding those people to contribute?
George Nguyen (Wix) (05:15.586) The SEO learning hub by policy is by referral only. And I don’t like actively go looking for contributors on a regular basis, but sometimes we have a content, whatever the situation may be.
we keep track of our diversity in various ways, people who self -identify on their social, things like that, so that we can understand where our gaps are. By no means are we ever gonna reach a perfect status of diversity, whether that’s BIPOC diversity, neurodiversity, so on and so forth, but at least understanding.
where there’s a deficit can help you attack that deficit. Right. And also because of studies like the FCDC’s BIPOC diversity study and Lydian Fonte’s gender gap in SEO publishing, we understand where in the spectrum of SEO publications, digital marketing publications, we stand. And so that’s, that’s important to us. But then also the human element of just giving people opportunities. Sometimes our existing contributors will tell me, Hey,
I really want to put this person in front of you. Can I make an introduction?” And when I have bandwidth, more often than not, I’ll take that meeting. I want to know what people are about. That having been said, I’m a person of color and I find that… this could be totally false, right? Like I find that people of color are pretty willing to talk to me. That could be false. They could be willing to talk to everybody. I don’t know, right? But that’s just…
Azeem Ahmad (06:44.086) Yeah.
George Nguyen (Wix) (06:45.292) I think that’s something that you have going for you if you’re somebody like me. Right? The values that you bring forth will attract people, like magnetism. And to broadcast that, being on podcasts like yours, Azim, letting people know like, hey, that’s what I’m about, that’s what I’m here for, that opens serious doors. So broadcasting that intent and then carrying it through is a big deal. But if you are, let’s say, somebody…
who doesn’t have that going for you, right? But you still wanna do the right thing with your brand diversity in publishing.
I always tell people to start with communities, because communities have leaders, distinct leaders, and those leaders will have their pulse on pretty much everything about their membership. usually you can find some sort of trade -based organization. Obviously Women in Tech SEO is, I think, the biggest one in the SEO space, right? There’s FCDC. There’s now our Asians in Search Slack community, which you’re a part of, Azim.
I’m by far the weakest leader of those three groups I mentioned here. Shout out to those people. And what I want to touch on there is like, I want to touch on something else but like to wrap up that thought.
Knowing who leads those communities can help you You can talk to them to get what you need. You need a writer to do XYZ. You need someone to Rework your content. There’s New contributions. There’s a lot of ways that you can work with them and the best part there is also the people in those networks are generally likely and Happy to reshare whatever it is you publish from one of their members because they’re proud of those things
George Nguyen (Wix) (08:24.332) Especially if those opportunities don’t come by very often so communities are the place to go in my opinion also It’s like getting it you’re you’re plucking a contributor an expert from your own target audience sometimes and that’s even better for the business overall, right? I also had another thought there, but I think it kind of kind of this was the thought
I mentioned that for a long time it felt like I didn’t really know who I could be or how I could approach what my goals. I always knew that diversity was something I felt strongly about, but in my early days in the industry I didn’t know how to project that. I didn’t know how to bring that into my work as much. I felt like, yeah, I felt like some jobs were just a little bit unnatural to me. Like even being on a podcast, I feel like one -on -one conversations.
are where I’m best at, which is why podcasts like works, but that’s why I don’t step on stage very often and things like that. Finding your medium and your way to approach diversity might be different than mine. Mine is to work behind the scenes with the contributors we select.
For you it might be something else and so my position has afforded me the opportunity to work within what I’m comfortable up with but also like it’s kind of forced me out because Wix likes to have me at Brighton SEO and things like that too which I also enjoy but it’s also I’m an anxious person so yeah yeah. Lots of context there. A little bit of advice for you though. A little bit of advice, tons of context.
Azeem Ahmad (09:42.092) Mm.
Azeem Ahmad (09:53.708) Yeah, no, I totally understand. For me, slightly similar. I just have a straightforward pitch form every so often. I’ll put it out and I can’t remember the exact wording that I use. I don’t explicitly say I don’t white men to pitch, but I’ll always say you’re welcome to. But the mission of the podcast is to typically give voice a voice to the marginalized.
people of color, from the LGBTQ plus community, et cetera. Those are the voices that I will prioritize. However, I’m mindful that not everybody is confident enough to go in and put themselves out there and fill out a pitch form. So I will try and do what you do on a probably a much, much smaller scale. And I’ll reach out to people. I’ve done it before in the past through the women in tech SEO, like speakers list. I’ll find someone who might be an expert in, I don’t know.
Digital PR or Technic Le Sion. I look for someone who, I don’t know, someone who’s, I can’t remember how they had it before, but like a new face in the industry, someone who I’ve known to be a new face. And I’ll say, look, I’d love to have you on the podcast talking about this, this this. Generally with those types of people, it’s much more back and forth. Like I don’t feel I’m ready, et cetera, et cetera. And I was like, look, we can just do one. We can keep it between me and you if you want. I can send you the recording, see how you feel.
just go from there but literally let’s do it see how you feel go from there and that’s how we do it pretty much
George Nguyen (Wix) (11:30.838) Let me give those people a piece of advice for anyone who has been approached to do something that’s a bit more public that’s out of their realm, especially if it’s as you know, if it’s like a podcast is podcast pretty low maintenance. Azim sent me a list of questions, I think like three months ago. And then we got on this call. He’s like, you ready? Like, the questions okay? And I was like, right. You sent that. And at the time, of course, like when I first got it, I reviewed the questions, right? But having not seen it at
Azeem Ahmad (11:55.03) Hahaha
George Nguyen (Wix) (12:01.114) all this quarter and he’s like nah just go into a cold and here we are so if you’re still listening this far into the episode maybe like don’t feel burdened by the amount you have to prepare also this is a Ziem’s podcast and if it sinks it’s totally on him I’m so good at passing off the buck man
Azeem Ahmad (12:18.488) Correct.
Now in one of my like previous episodes right at the very start I was unsure about swearing and I was like well this is all I do it all like nobody else does it so I’m only anxious about upsetting myself if I swear so fuck it. Anyway let’s move on. We’re talking about you know featuring diverse voices and the importance of that. You mentioned and we’re talking a lot about you know the Wix blog.
George Nguyen (Wix) (12:38.829) Fuck it.
Azeem Ahmad (12:51.528) Are there any particular standard articles or authors that you featured and some that have any, you know, particularly lasted or, you know, resonated with you, like sort of hit you?
George Nguyen (Wix) (13:05.09) So when we’re talking about here is the Wix SEO Learning Hub specifically Wix has three publications and the SEO Learning Hub is the one I manage. I wish that I could give my authors
more of an opportunity to expand on how they actually felt about something and grasp, kind of communicate their feelings about certain topics in a much more personal way. In that regard, I’m a little bit disappointed with myself because I haven’t steered things in that direction. Lately, I’ve been able to move things a little bit closer, like Petra, whose last name I’ve never been able to pronounce, so I’m just gonna spell it out, K -I -S -H -E -R -C -Z -E -G
I’ve committed it to memory because I can’t pronounce it. She did something on SEO career development that you’re featured in, right? That kind of stuff is stuff I want to do more often because it deals with people in their lives. That having been said, we have so many talented authors that it’s sort of really unfair.
But I am going to do the little bit unfair thing and give a huge shout out to our homeboy Ashwin because he’s a mutual connection here. And Ashwin does have an amazing way with words that… There’s some authors you can, by reading a paragraph, you’re like, I know who wrote this, right? The crispness and the flow. So I definitely have to shout out Ashwin at this point, but I don’t want to say that anyone is… Like everybody has their strengths, otherwise we wouldn’t continue to work with them. I want to say that…
Everybody’s trying to do their own little thing. A lot of them have their own websites, trying to start their own communities. And that’s what’s really, really beautiful. I wish I had a list of everybody who was doing something on the side, whether that was a consulting thing or something for it to actually drive a community. But I don’t off the top of my head.
Azeem Ahmad (15:01.93) No, no, that makes that makes total sense. I guess naturally, since we’re talking about things like this, I’m led to move on to in terms of how does this type of approach, how has it impacted reader engagement and reach? How many people are seeing this? What impact does this approach have?
George Nguyen (Wix) (15:28.804) well, let’s talk like a metric that most people understand. Time on page. Our time on page is really, really good. It is so good. I’m not going to say it again because I’m starting to sound like a certain politician that I don’t like, but yeah, just like overemphasizing how good it is, right? and you have every context is everything.
Azeem Ahmad (15:44.377) Hehehehehe
George Nguyen (Wix) (15:52.056) We do not, if you’re looking for raw numbers, traffic, right, what the other publications have, you some people think of them as competing publications. I don’t like to think of them that way because we all do something very, very different. But if you’re talking like a search engine land or search in general, we definitely don’t get that kind of traffic because we don’t publish news. We publish education, best practices, tactics, strategy, right? That having been said, the publications that we appear alongside in studies or when people talk about the industry, you know,
the Moz blog, SEMrush, Ahrefs, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, those types of websites, you have to contextualize that we’ve only been around since about May 2022.
So to be considered in that sphere with an editorial staff of essentially like two people, I used to say one, but now looking at it, Crystal Carter does so much that she is in essence an editor amongst the other things that she does, right? But you have two people here, you don’t have an entire staff, you don’t have a huge machine. Like as a team, we do more, we do the podcast, we do event sponsorships, we do our meetups, right?
marketing things, we try to help out with the product. There’s a lot going on there but I’m so proud of the ground that we’ve covered in just over two years and I would say that the contributors are the key to that success because you tap into them, you tap into their networks, getting them to believe in you is everything. That’s like yeah we compensate our writers.
But if you’re talking about somebody with a lot of followers who owns their own agencies, you cannot pay somebody to write when their job is to run an agency. Like you’re never gonna pay them enough. Like are you gonna pay a doctor to babysit? It’s not feasible, right? So you have to sell them on something else and sometimes that’s the WIC’s domain and getting featured there and that partnership looks good for them, right? I’ll take what I can get realistically.
George Nguyen (Wix) (17:55.544) But for me, in terms of the diversity, telling them that, look, this is the reason I talk to everybody in my onboardings and I ask them the same question. Why is it that you want to contribute with us? And I ask them to be honest. And sometimes they’re like, yeah, I really want that link on your domain, which isn’t the most inspired thing, but the truth is the truth. And I respect it. And for me, it is that, well, I constantly get career development through what I’m reading and what I’m editing, but also I get a medium to change the industry in the way that I
want to, which is through diversity, to highlight these people. And so when I tell contributors, potential contributors, that this is like one of the main things that keeps me in this role, they see that and they feel that and that helps drive the work. And then when it comes time to, you know, promote their content, share, talk about their experience collaborating with Wix.
Usually it’s all positive as long as I do a good job, which I always intend to do, right? So you’re getting somebody who works to improve how well you write. Like remember, my name’s not on the content. Yes, I’m the publisher, but my name’s not on the content. It’s still yours. So it’s gonna come out better. And you get to know that, hey, there is a…
Azeem Ahmad (19:01.75) Yeah. Yeah.
George Nguyen (Wix) (19:08.544) Deep -seated component of equity that goes into this whole thing and so you get to feel good from that perspective From someone is helping you improve your work from the compensation perspective. You didn’t just spend time Building your profile without like maybe offsetting it with some babysitting money
That’s the way we attack the situation with as many tools as we can to make it as easy to say yes and as easy to promote us and to tell your clients about our content as possible. And through the editorial experience, you see that, wow, if this is the way George will edit my content and this is way he does it across the board, I can look at this more seriously when I put it in front of my stakeholders or my clients.
Azeem Ahmad (19:27.009) Hmm.
Azeem Ahmad (19:53.612) Yeah, absolutely. I was just thinking as you were speaking, obviously the passion with which you speak. I’ve written for publications before and it’s just a very cold process. It’s just like, we want you to talk about X, nothing for ages. You send them a document, then you hear nothing back. And they’re like, yeah, it’s great. Knowing that it’s not been read and then it’s published and then you’re done. I could have written like, you know, something.
not controversial or rude or whatever but I could have written something factually incorrect and I know it hasn’t been checked and that would have been published and gone live and in comparison the passion and the care with which you take is just excuse me it’s just really really impressive and you should take some time to reflect on that because that shows really well for you. Again mindful that I’m talking a lot but I want to go back to one of the things that you said there in terms of
the size of the team and you mention that it’s just like maybe one or two people. Other than that, in terms of headcount resource, what sort of difficulties have you had in terms of the editorial process in the past and how did you get over them? In essence, it’s just a roundabout way of, or I’ll ask you separately, tell me about the difficulties first and then to give you a bit of a heads up, my next question will be what’s your biggest regret?
So don’t tell me you regret yet, but tell me some of the difficulties.
George Nguyen (Wix) (21:18.79) George Nguyen (Wix) (21:22.501) I would say that being too proud to formalize my workflows. Like, trusting myself too much to remember to do this before publishing, to remember to…
take it slow. Like during the first few months I thought that I could just read something and then edit it as I read it. Now the workflow is at least three full complete read -throughs before anything goes live. Before it was just like two. There’s a lot of things that I was overconfident in. I would definitely say that.
Yeah, and I would also say that the first year you run a publication, like on your own, is we’re using profanities here. Yeah? Yeah man, it’s a shit show dude, it’s so… If it’s a fresh publication, at first it’s really fun because you’re like, I can publish on anything! I’m not cannibalizing any content! Nothing has to be done with intention!
Azeem Ahmad (22:08.63) Yeah, go for it. Yeah.
Yeah
George Nguyen (Wix) (22:22.754) Which is how I felt for about three months. And then you start realizing the greater context of things. Especially if you’re at an enterprise, there’s other people working on the website, you really have to be diligent about things like that. And also seasonality. People like to go on vacation in the summer. So if you’re trying to plan out your editorial calendar and you don’t factor that in, you’re setting yourself up for a bad time later on. Which I definitely can’t remember. Yeah.
George Nguyen (Wix) (22:54.293) regret though.
George Nguyen (Wix) (23:00.504) You know, can’t say that I regretted anything about the content or the strategy or how things turned out. I only regret the level to which I’ve allowed the work situation to get the best of my emotions. And that’s kind of a personal thing.
George Nguyen (Wix) (23:21.442) It doesn’t matter what setting you’re in really in marketing because every setting is stressful to some extent. Being the person that is in charge of a publication means all those backlinks, well not all of them, but a ton of them point back to you. You are responsible for all of that and so I had to get something up initially and I don’t think that I have been the kindest to myself.
And if I saw my younger self from a decade ago saw the way that I have worked or I’ve learned to work, I’d be both impressed and scared. And I’d question whether or not it’s worth it. I question whether or not it’s worth it on a regular basis to give so much of yourself to make it like it’s kind of my identity. You don’t have to know who I am through the industry to know what I do for a living because I talk about it because I’m passionate about it. I think that
you people could handle their job with more balance with more work -life balance than I have. I’m fortunate enough to have people like you in my life that I consider true friends outside of all of this. But then I’m also that also ties us together in a work sense, right? I mean, here we are on this podcast and so everything is kind of linked, right? And so, yeah, you can’t have the best of both worlds, but you can manage better than I have. Learning to fight against.
stakeholders that would have you do whatever is a real thing. Learning how to present the conditions that you’re working in in a way that they can understand is a big deal. And I think initially I was very immature at that. It came off as very me, me, me.
And that is what I do regret. I see now that I should have been better at communicating those things. you, like pressure cracks everything. You gotta learn to deal with that as you go through your career. And I don’t think that I’ve always been the best at that by any means.
Azeem Ahmad (25:13.292) Yeah, absolutely. Like I always say in my conversations at club, pressure makes diamonds. the flips, excuse me, the flip side of that is it also bursts pipes. But the fact that you recognise those behaviours in yourself is like I said, it’s a massive step in the right direction. Speaking of directions, we’re rapidly heading towards the end of the show, but there’s definitely…
One last question I wanted to ask you before we wrap up and it would be really bad of me if I didn’t leave it with this question. So there’s probably going to be people listening to this and watching us who have a mind to start including more sort of diverse perspectives in their content strategies. What advice would you have for those people listening and watching? Where would that begin? What can they do?
George Nguyen (Wix) (26:10.254) I would say, first of all, don’t overthink what it takes. People are people, right? Just because they have a different cultural identity than you or they have different circumstances than you doesn’t mean you can’t appeal to what is common. You can see the differences. And when you’re talking about diversity, we are talking about differences that make us all beautiful and make life worth living, essentially.
But you can still focus on commonality here. Everybody is trying to build a career. Everybody is trying to, if you’re publication that pays or promotes content, everyone’s trying to build their profile. Everyone’s trying to get paid. Everyone is trying to be somebody, the hero of their own story. And finding a way to work with that.
Like yeah, of course the diversity component is what you’re talking about here, but that isn’t what you have to appeal to necessarily when you’re communicating with people. If that’s what makes you, you’re not a person of color, for example, right, and you’re scared about how this might go, take it slowly, one at a time, then ask for referrals, because hopefully those diverse people will know more diverse people and that will help get you through the door. Put your best foot forward through in the collaboration so that when they give you that referral, other people are already
excited to work with you. And also review all of your messaging. Like anything that you have templated that goes out to contributors, have it reviewed because you don’t know how that wording is going to come off to anybody and you don’t want to like, you don’t want to have your own internal communications with a potential contributor put on blast in front of the world on eggs or on LinkedIn because of an unfortunate oversight. So cover your bases.
scale slowly, get those referrals and appeal to the things that
George Nguyen (Wix) (28:00.129) like appeal to goals, appeal to dreams, hopes. For me, that looks different than for other people. I try to go for the middle of the Venn diagram between who I am and who like a contributor like you, Azim, might be. What is the middle of that Venn diagram? What can you offer? It’s simple marketing, really. But go back to your principles and speak their language. Everything that you say about a persona in your target audience is the same thing here, but it’s a potential contributor. And the best part is potential contributors often come from the target audience. So you can still
use that information you can figure out how to talk to them.
Azeem Ahmad (28:34.776) Yeah, absolutely. Solid gold and a literal perfect way to wind up this episode. thank you very much. Couldn’t agree with you more, in fact. The Venn diagram thing, absolutely stealing that 100%. Before you go though, George, it would be a crime if I didn’t give you the opportunity to let listeners and viewers know where they can find you, follow you.
George Nguyen (Wix) (29:06.733) Check out the SEO learning hub on Wix, wix .com slash SEO slash learn. And I say that first and foremost because how much of my advice is really all that good if I can’t produce good content? And you should be the judge. I put that in front of everyone, right? Check out the content and see whether I’m as good as I say I am, right? It’s up to you to decide.
And if you have feelings about it, want to chat about it, anything like that, I’m on X, my tag is G -E -O -C -H -I -N -G -U, or my handle or whatever. It’s just the first three letters of all of my names. And on LinkedIn, I’m just GeorgeWin, but if you send a request, please like say, hi, I heard you from this place. Otherwise, I’m just gonna think you’re spam.
Azeem Ahmad (29:50.968) Yes, absolutely. Yeah, 100%. Definitely swing me those links. I’ll put them in the show notes so they’ll go across all the platforms. And yeah, look, thanks very much for being a brilliant guest. I knew you would be. You’re a friend, great guy, and I knew this would be an awesome episode. So thanks for giving up some of your time. And as always, for the listeners and viewers, please like, write, share, subscribe.
George Nguyen (Wix) (29:51.831) Keep it real.
Azeem Ahmad (30:20.28) to tell a friend to tell a friend and then tell that friend to tell six more friends because like George says, the power of referrals. And yeah, look, that’s a great way to end the episode. And I was always like, ugh, I can’t even talk. As always, we’ll see you for the next one. Peace.
In this episode, I interview Kerry Campion, a copywriter and content marketer, about the power of the customer in marketing. Kerry shares her experience of conducting customer interviews and how they have helped her create effective marketing copy.
Kerry Campion is a copywriter who helps brands generate more inbound traffic and optimize their website for conversions. She does her best work at the intersections of SEO, conversion copywriting and brand strategy.
*As a reminder, you can now also get this podcast in video form, on both Spotify video, or YouTube.*
Listen/watch now, right above the subscribe button, or pick your favourite listening platform from this list:
Azeem Ahmad (00:01.048) Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Azeem Digital Asks All Round Digital Marketing Podcast. We are flying through season six now and I’m really excited for this episode. We’re going to be talking about basically the power of the customer and I’ve got an absolute legend, Kerry Campion, who’s going to join me on the show today. So Kerry, thank you very much for joining me and giving up some of your time.
Kerry Campion (00:28.811) Yeah, thanks for having me.
Azeem Ahmad (00:30.87) It is an absolute pleasure. We, our paths have crossed a few times, but most recently in Barcelona where you’re asking me stuff about podcasting and then fast forward, here we are. very glad that we’ve made this happen. Like I said, you’re a legend. I don’t want to talk too much because people are here to listen and see and learn from you and not from me. So for those people who shamefully don’t know about who you are, what you do,
Kerry Campion (00:46.645) Mm
Azeem Ahmad (00:59.416) Please would you mind sharing a little bit of an intro to yourself please.
Kerry Campion (01:05.79) Yeah, so I’m a copywriter and a content marketer and I’ve been running, doing that kind of freelance and then running my own agency for the past four years. And yeah, you kind of caught me at a transition moment because I am moving in -house in September, which was a big goal of mine last year. So yeah, I’ll be moving to the email marketing software, Mular Light, on the third of September, where I’ll be doing more content and copy there.
Azeem Ahmad (01:29.988) They are very very lucky to have you. So we are going to be talking all about… you’re frozen are you back?
Kerry Campion (01:43.666) Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you kind of froze there for a second as well.
Azeem Ahmad (01:44.738) You’re back. Right, one second.
Okay, I’ll cut that bit out. So amazing, they’re very, very lucky to have you at MailerLite and I wish you all the best in that role. We’re gonna be talking all about the power of the customer and in the sort of brief that we had before the show, you mentioned there.
Kerry Campion (01:50.79) Yeah.
Azeem Ahmad (02:07.535) something about getting a customer to attribute $100 ,000 in revenue due to working with your clients. So would you mind just sharing a little bit more about that because that is a huge, huge number.
Kerry Campion (02:13.566) Yeah.
Kerry Campion (02:20.221) Yeah, and was, I mean…
I was preparing for a website copywriting project to do a lot of those. And as part of that process, we always have customer interviews, right? We want to make sure that our messaging is really resonating with the people that it’s supposed to resonate with. And, you know, we can’t really do that without ever speaking to customers slash clients, right? So I was having an interview with with one of their clients and, we were just kind of talking about, yeah, how they discovered the client. What was the
like working with them and when they kind of mentioned the the campaigns that they had worked on this was this particular client worked out with real estate agents on their Facebook ads strategy to sell more houses and so he was explaining one of those campaigns and I just you know this is a question that I always ask which is just simply like what impact did that have on your business and then he just kind of like thought for a second did some quick you know back of a napkin math and he’s like yeah well I mean thanks to the leads that we closed
through those ads you know it was like roughly a hundred K and revenue it’s like wait wait what sorry sorry sorry back up it’s just so like yeah like a hundred K and revenue you know and it’s just incredible because you know it wasn’t like a super prying or complicated question of just what impact did that have on your business right and he was able to say like literally 100 K and he had sorry he said I think he said at least 100 K in revenue so I mean that
Azeem Ahmad (03:29.912) Hahaha
Kerry Campion (03:51.876) was just I was like okay well that’s going in the testimonial that we write up after this interview and that just would have gotten lost right if we just hadn’t have reached out and asked that question so yeah it’s always worth trying to have more of those conversations because sometimes customers and clients they’re not really you know necessarily keeping track of these types of things or they just don’t necessarily think to reach out because life happens you know so yeah.
Azeem Ahmad (04:20.631) No, that’s amazing and already, like what, handful of minutes in.
one immediate takeaway to write down. Sometimes you might see me leaning away because I’ll be writing stuff down. Literally, what impact did that have on your business? Absolutely solid. On the point of questions, that’s a great way to sort of lead me into my next one. So you mentioned there that you’ve got questions that you have. So what are some of those questions that you’ve kind of got in the bank when you’re talking to customers? And why do you think that those particular ones work so well?
Kerry Campion (04:31.271) Ha
Kerry Campion (04:51.697) Yeah, so actually with just sort of on the back of that question, you know, what impact did that have on your business? This is when I was, you know, it was a couple of years ago now and I was a little bit more experienced. What I always follow that question with is and what I.
what did that make possible for you? Cause that’s when you’re really kind of getting to the benefit beneath the benefit, right? Because yeah, a hundred K sounds amazing. mean, who doesn’t want an extra 100 K in revenue? But then what did you do with that? What did you go on to do? And that’s when you’re really getting insight as well into yeah, like the real goals that they actually have behind these types of figures and stuff. remember once a coach asked me that like, you know, what would make possible for you?
And I remember that question and I was like, I’m adding that to the bank. I’m adding that to the question bank. I guess so for some of the kind of go -to questions, it does depend a little bit, which is why you have to really think about why you’re speaking to these customers, what are you trying to achieve? Because that’s going to affect which customers you’re speaking to. It’s obviously very, very different. The questions you would ask, you know, a customer who you know, switch from a competitor compared to a customer who had sort of lower market awareness.
you know, before discovering you or a small medium business versus enterprise, et cetera. But in general, for let’s let’s take B2B. One of the great B2B questions that I love asking is how do you get measured? So I want to really understand kind of what’s at stake for them, how is success being measured for them? What kind of pressures are they under? And then that can help us think, well, how does our product or how does our service help them attain that?
Yes, that’s like one of my favorite ones for B2B. And then it just naturally leads on to other questions like, wow, so that sounds tough. know, how have you struggled with that in the past, et cetera? It kind of leads very naturally into a bigger conversation. Another one I love for B2B, because as we know, for anyone who works in B2B, there are multiple stakeholders. There’s a lot of decision makers there. It’s not just this nice, you know, DTC kind of, I like this, I’m going to
Kerry Campion (07:05.458) it so I also like to ask things like who else was involved in the decision -making process? Who did you need to get buy -in from? How did you achieve that? Because in marketing copy, yes we’re speaking to one person generally but we have to be aware as well that there are other people who you know are involved in that decision -making process and we want to help the people who are discovering the product or the service to be able to sell it to them, to those other people who are involved but might not necessarily be in the room.
that makes sense.
Azeem Ahmad (07:37.264) Absolutely, and I…
love the one you mentioned prior to that in terms of how you’re being measured because more often than not, certainly in my experience, different teams have different sort of KPIs and goals and not finding those out is almost like, you know, trying to run a race with like your legs tied together pretty much. So that’s really, really helpful. Thank you very much for that. The B2B one, yeah, it goes without saying there’s like seven million different decision makers. So that is gold.
Kerry Campion (07:52.884) Mm -hmm.
Kerry Campion (08:00.989) Yeah
Mm
Kerry Campion (08:08.542) Yeah.
Azeem Ahmad (08:09.412) But yeah, too much for me. Anyway, let’s carry on. When it comes to the end customer then, what do you think the dangers are of losing touch with them in the messaging?
Kerry Campion (08:23.944) Yeah, I mean, obviously the biggest thing is that you end up repelling the people that you want to attract. So I I don’t want to like name and shame, but there was a brand who did this very semi recently with the copywriting community where they had this sort of Instagram post that was very like, you know, if you want a six figure business, you need to hustle. You need to have a moment. It was like just very kind of it was a bit aggressive. Right. It was like, no excuses. You need to do this. Boom, boom. And I just felt like
When was the last time you spoke to these people? Because I mean, I’m very, I mean, it is my community, right? It’s copywriters, it’s content writers. I have a copywriting community, I have a newsletter for copywriters. I talk to these people constantly.
Azeem Ahmad (09:01.401) Mm.
Kerry Campion (09:09.235) You know, they’re not trying to build the six figure businesses. They’re not trying to be like the wolf of copywriting, like the wolf of Wall Street of copywriting. know, they’re they’re very often women, right? They’re very often like women. like, you know, need to work from home because they have children. They have other responsibilities. They want freedom. That’s really what they want. Very few of them are saying like, yeah, my biggest goal is to, you know, earn six figures, whatever that means. Right. Because.
that can also be a bit of a grey area but and they’re very community driven they’re very supportive of one another like
Yeah, so just sort of felt like this, like who are you speaking to? This would be great if your target was like Hustle Bros on Twitter, right? But like not for your, not for this audience, like on Instagram as well, because it was an Instagram post and I don’t know, for me at least, sort of, for me Instagram has a much more, I don’t know, kind of like a more communal vibe. It’s softer, it’s like kind of supportive, or it’s like I see much more of the hustle stuff on Twitter, right?
Azeem Ahmad (09:56.121) Hmm.
Kerry Campion (10:19.313) And you know, I had several people like send me the screenshot of it and like in our Slack channel like, my God, like what is wrong with these guys? Like I can’t, like what are they doing? This is horrible. Look how they replied to people in the comments and.
It was just like it was not a good look for the brand and I think it really did come from they’ve now moved they’ve become so big that I think they’re very disconnected with the people that they’re supposed to be talking to and so like yeah their messaging is now starting to repel the very people that they’re trying to attract.
Azeem Ahmad (10:51.332) I love that the whole point about becoming so big that you just forget about the people that you’re talking to because that sentence I would argue is probably true for quite a lot of brands.
Kerry Campion (10:57.37) Mm
Kerry Campion (11:04.081) Yeah.
Azeem Ahmad (11:04.65) More recently, the one that I can think of in terms of audio messaging was that was an I card about, know, how only number one counts and everyone else doesn’t matter, etc, etc. And paraphrasing that seemed to divide the marketing community into very much like, this is great versus this is the worst I’d ever written. How can someone like Mike do this? But anyway, I digress the point about, you know, talking to customers and and customer
Kerry Campion (11:17.777) Mm
Kerry Campion (11:29.05) Yeah, yeah,
Azeem Ahmad (11:34.533) conversations, I mean you kind of touched on it there, but how do you think specifically those conversations can impact like the effectiveness of marketing copy?
Kerry Campion (11:45.853) Yeah, I mean, I guess it really comes down to the fact that we are just bombarded by messages daily. You know, it’s worse than ever. time you open your phone, there’s like 500 ads in your face. you know, there’s I don’t think there’s any sort of blue ocean products or niches left. It’s like everything is competitive. There’s a thing for everything. Right. And we’re all, I think, trying to find the little, you know, our little niche, our little wedge where we can kind of differentiate ourselves from
competitors in particular and know the only really way that we’re going to do that is by understanding who we’re speaking to it’s just so basic but you know I still see companies who you know the hero section in their website is best -in -class tool for innovative solutions or all those kind of buzzwords that don’t mean anything to anyone and it just sort of feels like have you actually spoken to anyone that you know that you’re you know marketing to so I
think it’s just that and then obviously what I just mentioned there you can end up repelling the very people that you’re trying to attract. You know, I think we always have like people love quotes, right? Like I love quotes, I collect quotes, you know, like mad. And we always remember the ones that resonate the most with us that remind us most of our own experience. Like I have like poetry like tattooed on my body because it was so like, this is like, feels like it was just written about me.
I’m not saying people are going to get your copy tattooed on them, that would be a bit mad, but you know marketing comedy it is the equivalent of that.
Azeem Ahmad (13:18.478) Yeah
Kerry Campion (13:25.87) I’ve had clients who’ve sent me screenshots from people who have found them on Google or whatever, read their website and the amount of times this exact quote has come up, I felt like you just got me. I felt like you just understood exactly what we needed. Like those exact words because it’s like, yeah, well, because we spoke to people like you and we put those pain points and those benefits and stuff in the copy. It’s, know.
Yeah, so I guess it’s really just that. It’s the difference between someone going, this is, yeah, they do this thing that everyone else does. Okay, which one’s cheaper, right? Compared to, my God, like, I really think if I go with this guy, this solution, it’s really, really gonna help me because they actually know what I’m going through.
Azeem Ahmad (14:16.259) Absolutely, I’ve said it like a million times already in this episode. I love that. The whole point about I feel like you just got me resonates because as a consumer I’ve done exactly the same as well. That takes me very nicely on to…
My next question, which is about maybe using your customers own words in your corporate writing. Have you ever done that before? And if you have, I’d love to hear of, you know, some examples like headlines or testimonials or whatever, where this particular approach has like made a big difference for you.
Kerry Campion (14:47.694) Mm -hmm.
Yeah, so there was one that was super specific that really comes to mind. So I was working as like fractional head of content for a jam stack development agency. So I do headless CMS builds. And one of our pages was very much targeted at the very, very techy sort of heads of designs, maybe CTOs, those types of people, because they were the only people who were searching for jam stack development agencies. No, our other ICP was marketer.
But you know most marketers are not gonna know what jump stack is that’s very much the the CTO the head of designs and from speaking to them One thing that was very clear was like the reason they wanted to go for that type of build is because they really want to like get super granular About what they could control on the website and they just can’t really do that with most you know traditional sort of what they call monolithic CMS is like WordPress or Squarespace and stuff So those are the guys who are like we really want to get like technical we want to get like I really want to get
granular. So one of our subheads was a direct quote from a customer. It was during one of their, I don’t know if it was a, I think it was like a review call actually. So wasn’t even an interview. was, I was like on the call while they were kind of reviewing one of their.
one of their sprints for their website. And it was, need this animation to trigger on frame 57 when the scroll height reaches 35%. I was so, so ridiculously specific that I thought I’m going to use that as a subhead. So instead of just saying, you know, cause I could have just, I could have just done, I could have just said, we, we are, you know, we can really handle your requirements. Well, you know, it’s show don’t tell, right? That’s one of the, you know, the facets.
Azeem Ahmad (16:21.07) Heh.
Kerry Campion (16:34.318) of good writing so instead of just saying that it was like no that’s actually how granular we can get with your designs like really the only limit is your imagination and it’s you know and it is jargony and you know our we’re sort of told but I can avoid jargon but there’s some people who will really love seeing that jargon and because then they’re like okay yeah this is my people they’re speaking to me on the really techie nerdy stuff that I love so yeah that was an example of a very specific subhead that was taken straight
from a client’s mouth.
Azeem Ahmad (17:06.821) That is… I think I need to see this once we finish the recording. But yeah, no, that’s very, very specific. We are flying through this episode and I’m sure that by now there’s going to be people watching or listening who are thinking, you know what, I’ve already got a lot of gold so far from you by this point. there’s a couple that I thought like people might want to know by this point. The first one would be like
Kerry Campion (17:12.611) Yeah, I will stand it across to you.
Azeem Ahmad (17:37.017) What steps do you think that people can take? People who are listening and watching this or just marketers in general. What steps can people take to ensure that they’re like continuously engaging with their customers? Because for me, certainly it’s something you’ve got to actively think about. You can’t just think, you know, today I’m going to do ABC and talk to my customers. You have to actively go and do it. So what sort of steps do you think people listening and watching this can take to making sure that they’re constantly engaging?
Kerry Campion (18:06.16) Yeah. So I mean, jump to mind, would say improve cross team communication and collaboration. So like for instance, you know, obviously we’re talking to marketers, right? Collaborating with people on sales and customer success teams are absolute gold mines of this kind of voice of customer data because they are in the trenches every day, right? They are, you know, the sales team is like staring someone in the eye as they say, no, I don’t want this because XYZ or, know, customer success. They’re also dealing with like, you know, complaints,
etc. So because I’ve heard from a lot of people like but it’s difficult sometimes I’ll send a know slack message to someone on product and they don’t get back to me and stuff so I would say trying to improve that cross -team communication can be super helpful because that way you know maybe someone’s just off a sales call not too long ago with a certain ICP that you’re writing a landing page for right and you can you know quickly chat with them or check out their Gong calls. Gong is a great tool for
keeping a customer interview calls and sales calls and things like that. We’ve used that with clients in the past. Brilliant resource. You can filter it, add tags and everything. So yeah, and then thinking about as well, like, you know, marketing can help create sales enablement content. So if you’re kind of like helping to produce things for other teams, you’re going to naturally get that collaboration rather than just kind of pinging people on Slack and getting them to take time out of their day. And as well, doesn’t always have to be live interviews.
which you know because that’s that can be tricky people are busy people have lives it can be tricky to get people on a call that’s why you know I just mentioned there are things like gong recordings because usually sales teams will have those recorded for future reference etc emails surveys you know you can you can use that as well doesn’t always have to be live calls which can make it easier to to get a handle on it
Azeem Ahmad (20:01.072) Nice, nice. Yeah. You’ve gone in the past really, really good. A couple more then. Like I said, we’re flying through this episode and I want to extract as much gold from you as I can in terms of marketing knowledge and wisdom. How would you say that a brand can balance having like their specific brand tone of voice, but also
Kerry Campion (20:07.968) Love gone.
Azeem Ahmad (20:27.991) including direct feedback from customers. For example, B2B, it’s very often, you know, hard, firm, bland, let’s call it what it is. So how would brands like, how do they, you know, how do you include feedback from customers as well as holding up and maintaining your brand’s tone of voice?
Kerry Campion (20:39.469) Yeah.
Kerry Campion (20:50.509) Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing is that your tone of voice is kind of determined by your customers as well. You know, like if you are a law firm servicing like retirees who want to, you know, retire abroad, probably not going to swear in your marketing copy. You’re probably not going to use like emojis or memes, right? Like it’s really not going to work with them. Whereas, you know, for instance, like take Mailer Lite, it’s aimed at small media businesses, creators. It makes a lot more sense to have like a lighter, cheekier tone of voice, to use memes and things like that.
you’re talking to people in marketing in the creator space, et cetera. So in part, it’s not so much of an issue because it should kind of be based on what’s going to resonate with your customers anyway. And then I guess the second thing is don’t just rely on outliers either. You know, so sometimes you might get someone who says something that might be quite good in an interview, but then you kind of, you know, after maybe reviewing other, you know, customer calls, et cetera, you might think, actually, I think that was really cool, but I don’t think it’s actually
what the kind of majority of our customers actually want and resonate with. just, yeah, I guess just kind of being, you know, having good judgment about that really. But essentially you can, you can go too far the other way and use like, you know, not all VOCs should be used for Betum. So someone might have like a more of the essence of sort of what they’re saying that you might just have to kind of rework. But yeah, I think, I think that’s probably the best sort of overall advice is really just Betum.
your tone of voice on who you’re actually speaking to and what’s going to resonate most with them rather than you know which happens in a lot of smaller companies it just becomes like the founders tone of voice that happens a lot and sometimes you have to say well yeah I don’t think that’s actually going to really resonate with with these types of customers.
Azeem Ahmad (22:39.217) Yeah, no, absolutely. You just you reminded me of a situation where.
a brand had used like a customer’s negative experience and then turn that into a piece of content. So it’s not normally something that you would like traditionally see, but basically it was, I used it in my presentation at MilesCon and I’ll share the YouTube link in the show notes. So basically it’s a cinema and they have one rule. You’re not allowed to talk, text or use your phone basically. You’re not allowed to use your phone while you’re in the cinema.
Kerry Campion (22:52.348) Ugh.
Kerry Campion (23:04.29) Yeah.
Azeem Ahmad (23:14.395) What had happened was somebody had got kicked out for using her phone.
So she calls the brand leaves her like an aggressive voicemail saying stuff like, know, didn’t know that wasn’t supposed to use my phone. I was using a flashlight to get to my seat, etc, etc. And you crappy little cinema, blah, blah. The brand basically took that, used it, just the audio with subtitles on it, shoved it in negative customer experience, turned it into a positive saying, you know, thanks for not coming back. And it hits something like four or five million views on on YouTube. And all it is is just a black background, white text with the
Kerry Campion (23:42.808) Mm -hmm.
Kerry Campion (23:47.96) Yeah.
Azeem Ahmad (23:50.117) which is like wild and that’s a negative experience and if brands can do that with a negative experience and based on what you’ve just said there should be a hundred times easier with a positive experience. But I’ve talked your head off, I’ve got one more question for you, maybe two and then I’ll leave you to enjoy your day. When it comes to things like this,
Kerry Campion (23:56.077) Mm
Kerry Campion (24:03.927) Right.
Sure.
Azeem Ahmad (24:14.257) The one question that maybe we could have touched on earlier, but I deliberately wanted to leave it at the end was why? And that is why do you think marketers should start to implement customer interviews into their workflow? Why should people do this? Why is this important?
Kerry Campion (24:32.363) I mean, I guess it’s just what we’ve been hitting on throughout, which is if you actually want your mark, if you want people to remember your copy, if you want people to remember your marketing collateral, you need to be doing this. And it’s also it’s a great way as well to kind of.
to defend your ideas as a marketer as well. I’ve had situations where maybe a client has wanted to do one thing or emphasize a certain thing on their landing page, say. And I’ve had to say, but actually from speaking to your customers, like they don’t care about this. They actually, they care much more about this feature or this benefit. that can really empower marketers. So I came out my Belfast accent, empower.
marketers to get more buy -in because they’re actually saying, hey, no, we’ve actually spoken to customers. We’ve done surveys, we’ve done this. Here’s like the reason we should go forward with this. And because, you know, we all know what it’s like to have an idea and to kind of, you know, not really get it through or to get a lot of pushback. But when you have those conversations and your customers words actually backing you up, can be like, that’s so, so helpful and so powerful.
Azeem Ahmad (25:19.157) You
Kerry Campion (25:47.17) for helping you get your campaign ideas implemented and yeah, and just to create stronger marketing material.
Azeem Ahmad (25:55.672) Absolutely love it. This has been up to half an hour of just pure gold. I’ve really enjoyed this. So thank you very much. There’s just one thing left before we wrap up the episode and let you go. And that’s the most important one, arguably. Where can people find out more about you? Where can they follow you? How can people connect with you on the socials?
Kerry Campion (26:20.329) yeah so LinkedIn is the only one I’m really active on now because Instagram is taking up too much of my life so yeah LinkedIn if you just search Kerry Campion that is champion without the H
Yeah, Kerry Campion on LinkedIn. I’m always happy to connect with people there. And I also, you know, if there’s any copywriters who are listening, I do have a newsletter called the Copy Comrades Newsletter and Slack Community. Yeah, so we send out a new issue every Monday and yeah, love connecting with other copywriters and people and content. So would love to see some more people there as well.
Azeem Ahmad (26:57.669) Absolutely and by all means share with me the links and I’ll put them in the show notes so anyone on any platform can get them But yeah, if you’re watching listening, please do connect with Kerry even if it’s just to say thank you for sharing so much knowledge and wisdom Really really appreciated it. And that’s pretty much it for this episode as always Please do like write share subscribe Tell a friend to tell a friend and then tell that friends to go next door knock
Kerry Campion (27:05.107) Awesome.
Kerry Campion (27:24.78) Yeah.
Azeem Ahmad (27:27.585) on the door and say I’ve heard this great podcast I don’t even care if you’re into marketing you need to hear this right now and I’ll find out I don’t know how but I’ll talk to my customers and I think we should pretty much end it there thank you very much and we’ll see you for the next episode
In this episode, I interview Mike King about the recent Google leaks and their impact on SEO – and what’s changed since the leaks have come out. We discuss the importance of user experience and SEO working together, the need for quality over quantity in link building, and the role of related content in rankings – as well as MUCH more. This isn’t one to be missed.
Mike King is an acclaimed international speaker covering SEO, content strategy, and the impact of generative AI. Innovating and elevating, he’s the Founder & CEO of the performance marketing agency iPullRank. Mike consults with companies all over the world, including brands like SAP, American Express, and HSBC. He delivers cutting-edge strategies and deliverables to a laundry list of promising eCommerce, publisher, and financial services organizations. He’s about to shatter everything you thought you knew about how modern search engines work with the launch of his debut book, “The Science of SEO.“
*As a reminder, you can now also get this podcast in video form, on both Spotify video, or YouTube.*
Listen/watch now, right above the subscribe button, or pick your favourite listening platform from this list:
Azeem Ahmad (00:02.17) Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Azeem Digital Asks all round digital marketing podcast. We are flying through season six now and very much on the road to episode 100. And I’m super, super excited to have my guest on the show, King, an absolute legend in this industry. Someone who, although we’ve probably done…
two million conferences between us of which 1 .9 million, 1 .9 million Mike’s done. We’ve never actually met in person which we’ll fix later this year, but Mike, welcome to the show.
Mike King (@iPullRank) (00:31.342) Yep. Yep.
Mike King (@iPullRank) (00:39.694) Thanks for having me, Azeem. I’m excited to be here.
Azeem Ahmad (00:42.702) So full disclosure for the listeners and viewers. The episode is titled, you know, Google leaks since the dust has settled what has changed. But I did say to Mike before we started recording, we can talk about this stuff or we can just chop it up and talk about all the shit that he wants to talk about. I was worried about swearing then, but it’s my podcast. can say what the fuck I want. So, but yeah, look, I’m going to start off. We’ll start off talking about the leaks and then see where we go. But.
Mike King (@iPullRank) (00:58.147) Hahaha
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Azeem Ahmad (01:10.586) as a hook, right, because you’ve done like 40 billion podcasts. I’m to put you on the spot right now. What’s one thing, one thing about you that people don’t know that you’ve never shared on a podcast before?
Mike King (@iPullRank) (01:17.378) Okay.
Mike King (@iPullRank) (01:25.402) I got booed offstage at a Kriss Kross concert. You remember Kriss Kross, the rap group? Yeah, yeah. Nah, I was like 11 or 12 and I went to this concert and there’s a guy named Ed Lover. He’s like a famous host from New York radio from the 80s, early 90s. And he was the host of the concert. So it was Kriss Kross and Pharcyde open for them. And so Pharcyde rocks and then, know,
Azeem Ahmad (01:28.922) Yeah.
Mike King (@iPullRank) (01:55.378) cost doesn’t come on so Ed Lover’s like yo let’s have a talent contest and another thing people don’t know about me is as a child whenever I would go to like some event and they would pick out people from the crowd I would always get picked I don’t know why but I would always get picked like this happened when I went to like Nickelodeon and like you know Disney like I always get picked so in this case I got picked but if you don’t know I rap but this was before I rap like
Azeem Ahmad (02:11.773) Mmm.
Mike King (@iPullRank) (02:25.164) I didn’t start rhyming until I was like 14 and this was me at 11 and so This woman gets up and she dances and then they get to me and I’m like, I’m a rat but I didn’t have any reps and I didn’t know how to freestyle So I’m just like mumbling on the mic and then they’re just like
And then the guy after me actually could rap. And so because of how bad I was, he seemed even more awesome. And so he won the Italian contest. And I was so upset and embarrassed and crying. And yeah, I’ve never told that story before on a podcast.
Azeem Ahmad (02:54.328) Hahaha
Azeem Ahmad (03:03.386) Amazing now I can say I’ve got a Mike King exclusive so that will that will be the hook for the for the show But yeah, man. Look, it’s it’s a it’s a real pleasure to have you on and in that same vein Fast forward to to these leaks. I you’ve talked about them on like millions of podcasts What’s one thing about the leaks that you haven’t shared?
Mike King (@iPullRank) (03:12.74) Yeah.
Azeem Ahmad (03:29.806) with else that you think people should know about. Bear in mind, they’ve been out for a while now.
Mike King (@iPullRank) (03:36.814) Yeah, don’t know that there’s anything I can share that that I that because I feel like so many other people have minded in different ways and they’ve come up with things and so on. But I will say that for me, the most important thing that I’m taking away from this is that user experience and SEO needs to work hand in hand. And, you know, I think that we I think that’s smart SEOs were always like, hey, user experience matters.
Azeem Ahmad (03:43.768) Hmm.
Mike King (@iPullRank) (04:06.72) Bye.
It was always hard to get buy -in for that because it’s like, that’s not SEO. That’s a different discipline or whatever. And I think that you have to be focused on that because user experience is what encourages users to do the things that Google is ultimately measuring to determine whether or not a session was successful. So in SEO, we’re like, hey, let’s drown this page in text and write about your grandmother’s
life story and how she ultimately ended up making apple pies and the person just wants the recipe right and so like the more that we can structure these pages where yes we do got to get that text on there but it’s easier for users to get to what they want there’s going to be a higher likelihood that they’re going to have a more successful session and then Google is ultimately going to keep you in those positions and then I think that another thing that needs to change kind of industry
wide is our approach to link building. I think everyone looks at it from a value perspective, which makes sense for a business. Like the more links you build, the more money you make.
There’s so much information that indicates like, yo, they are not looking at the volume of links. Like the volume was the way that you got over the fact that your quality was so terrible. And so, you know, being that there’s the measures called source type, where they talk about where in the levels of the index that links live. And so it’s like, you know, the highest tier is the pages that get access the most. So the ones that get access the most
Mike King (@iPullRank) (05:50.438) are the ones that driving the most traffic, the ones that have the best rankings. And so historically we’ve all been like, what’s the DA, what’s the citation flow and whatever, but those things don’t necessarily align with where that piece of content will live in the index because it may be a page that no one ever looks at. So
Whole point here is that we really gotta focus on quality for real and quality is measurable through an understanding of how does this stuff perform in Google. So again, quality over quantity from a link building perspective. And then my last thing has to do with…
how related content is to other content on your sites. So we talk about EEAT in our space, but that’s always been kind of like ambiguous how you measure that. You get a lot of understanding of…
how Google might be looking at that by understanding vector embeddings. So vector embeddings are basically how they convert your content into representations in multi -dimensional space. And so what Google does is they create an embedding on the site level, and then they compare every new page to the site level embedding. And so if it’s too far from what the site is about, they’re gonna be like, well, this is just some random topic. This site isn’t an expert on this, so there’s no reason to rank it.
for this topic. So what that tells us is that you’ve got to be really strategic about how you expand your content. You can’t just like write about anything and expect to rank anymore.
Azeem Ahmad (07:27.195) No, I love that and already a couple of minutes in, head exploded. Let’s walk it back and just give me like a 30 second overview for the non -technical and broader marketing listeners. In short, what were these leaks? How do you think?
why do you think they’re important? And then I really want to pick your brains about following that like day one when you got that email. But for now, for the broader listeners, what exactly are they and why are they important? Because I’ve seen different conversations about the value of them and whether it’s worth it or not. But I’d love to hear it directly from you.
Mike King (@iPullRank) (08:05.026) Yeah, absolutely.
What happened was there was some documentation on the various features that Google measures as part of the ranking algorithm. And it’s not just the ranking algorithm. There’s also stuff in there for like YouTube and Google Assistant and a lot of the different things that make up Google’s products. And so the best way to say it is it’s the ingredients, not the recipe, right? Like we don’t know exactly how they’re weighted, how Google is using them, but
a lot of them have descriptions which indicate what they’re for, right? And so…
You’re right, there’s a lot of people who like, we knew all this, there’s nothing new in here. First of all, I don’t agree with that. Second of all, there is value and verification in or validation that we got from that because there’s a lot of things in the SEO space that we believed, but we only had anecdotal evidence of. And so was difficult to be like, okay, we always need to move this way as a result of it. And then the other thing is we get a lot more information about…
Azeem Ahmad (08:46.075) Hmm.
Mike King (@iPullRank) (09:11.288) the various ways that Google can…
can run their algorithm, right? So like when we think of the algorithm, we kind of think of it as one thing, like this giant equation that just runs to give us rankings. But there’s so many different components of it that can run differently. And just to clarify, it’s not a giant equation. It’s a series of microservices. And so those microservices then add up based on different factors. So like whether it’s local search versus
Azeem Ahmad (09:22.02) Mm.
Mike King (@iPullRank) (09:44.7) video search and image search and also the personalization aspects like where are you from? Where are you searching from? What have you looked at in the past? All of those things will impact how those microservices interact with each other to then ultimately produce a result. And so what we got in this documentation was a lot more detail on all of this as well. So I talked about how the index is like stratified in different ways, but again,
that was something that we thought of as though like this giant box that you just put content into. Really it’s a series of different boxes that are structured in these ways based on how valuable the content is and also how is that content positioned. So there’s just a lot of nuance that we have a better understanding of and it also helps us understand that like a lot of our best practices didn’t really make sense to begin with.
Right, so as an example.
Typical best practice for a page title is like what 60, 70 characters. There’s actually nothing in this documentation to indicate that there is a character limitation for the page title. you know, so that best practice that we all operated from actually cut us off from different opportunities. Because what we found is when we test page titles that are longer than that, Google weighs everything in that. And so a keyword in the page title that doesn’t
Azeem Ahmad (10:56.56) Hmm.
Mike King (@iPullRank) (11:16.564) display you can still rank for. And so when we extend these page titles we end up getting higher click -through rates, better rankings and so on because we’re going beyond that best practice. So I think that we’re getting a lot of opportunity to understand what are things that we can test to be better at what we do.
Azeem Ahmad (11:40.337) Love that, love that, that’s perfect and I will pick your brains about things we can be better at and things that we can stop doing. Feel free to disagree but I am absolutely of the opinion and before I say it, I’ll qualify with this that you’ve been in the industry much longer than me, you’ve seen much more stuff than me and I’ve still got all of your hair which I’m jealous about. I think…
Mike King (@iPullRank) (12:03.29) No, I don’t
Azeem Ahmad (12:09.296) Certainly when it comes to SEO that we could have something that could be presented as like an absolute truth and some SEOs would still find a way to say no that’s incorrect Just because people like to go against the grain. That’s my opinion like feel free to say no Azeem
Mike King (@iPullRank) (12:25.432) Now I agree with that, but I think the thing is there are not many absolute truths in SEO because it’s just such a dynamic environment, the way that Google operates. And again, we’re getting more color as it relates to that by seeing the different things that Google is using and also how they can be used. So yeah, I don’t think there are any absolute truths. There are absolutes in so far as the architecture
Azeem Ahmad (12:35.163) Hmm.
Azeem Ahmad (12:48.721) Mm.
Mike King (@iPullRank) (12:55.308) is a finite series of things but again because how it’s used is so dynamic it’s difficult to be like it is always this way.
Azeem Ahmad (13:07.601) Hmm. Okay. Fair. Let’s go back to the day that you get this email or the day that you’ve become aware of these leaks. They’ve arrived in your lap. What were your first thoughts? Were you skeptical? If so, how skeptical were you? Just take me through your process of this landing in your lap and be like,
Mike King (@iPullRank) (13:35.408) Yeah, I wasn’t skeptical because it was Rand that brought it to me. You know, he was skeptical, but the thing is that…
Azeem Ahmad (13:41.179) Mm.
Mike King (@iPullRank) (13:43.778) Over the last few years, I’ve been working on this book called The Science of SEO and I’ve been doing a ton of research, reading white papers, patents, watching videos from people like Jeff Dean, like engineers at Google and so on. And so when Rand showed it to me, I recognized a lot of language that isn’t like easily publicly available, right? And so I’m looking through it. I’m like, no, I think this is real, you know, and I was explaining to him why I thought it was real. And then
you
I just felt like I’ve been training my whole career for this moment. All the things that I’ve learned, all the conversations I had with Bill Slosky, all that stuff prepared me for this moment right here. So I was just eagerly going through everything. And I also kinda sub -tweeted about it. I was like, yeah, I’m about to set SEO internet on fire. And then my guy, Dan Petrovic, he was like, wait.
Did you find this thing too? Because he had already had it but he’s just like keeping it to himself So he had already had it for three weeks and he had already started like making sense of it because there’s a lot of documents to make sense of and So, you know, I was already like part way through it, but I’m just like
What’s the meme with the guy where he’s got like all the papers on the wall and he’s like the conspiracy like that’s how I felt at that moment But you know my friend here Dan he had already made sense of it and so He shared with me a lot of the notes that he had so I could like Ramp up on it a bit quicker. And so I was looking at all his stuff. I was reading through it was comparing it with all the stuff in my book and then I was like, alright cool I’m ready to synthesize this in a way where I think like the SEO community
Azeem Ahmad (15:08.355) yeah, yeah.
Mike King (@iPullRank) (15:34.054) can understand it. And so I basically did that over that weekend. It was a holiday weekend here in the States, Memorial Day. And so I was ready to publish by… I’d gotten the documents from Rand on Friday. I was ready to publish on Monday. And I had also been going back and forth with Rand because Rand was working on his post and I was like, yeah, here’s some insight that you can use for yours. I’ll use these insights for mine. And then we’ll just like set this shit on fire, basically.
And that’s what we did.
Azeem Ahmad (16:05.402) Amazing and you blew up SEO Internet as you basically described it. What was one, you don’t have to name names, of course you can if you want to, but what was one unexpected thing that happened after you pressed publish? You might have read everything and thought, you know what? Well, this is going to change the game. But what one thing from
Mike King (@iPullRank) (16:09.652) Hahaha
Azeem Ahmad (16:31.09) the day of or the day after however long after did you think you know what wasn’t ready for this if there was one
Mike King (@iPullRank) (16:38.926) I don’t think I expected as much of the skepticism that we got. There was a lot of people like, are these real? And I knew they were real because I knew Dan had already turned it in and gotten a bug bounty from Google over it. And also, I just knew they were real just from reading it. And so.
There’s a lot of people that were very loud and wrong during this, right? They’re just like, yeah, this can’t be this way because of this, this, and this. I’m having the experience that guess Googlers have every day, right? Where it’s like, hey, I’ve told you everything and you’re still trying to say this isn’t real. So that experience was not what I expected to have. And it’s interesting because it was really a certain type of SEO that was like, this doesn’t matter.
It was that same certain type of SEO that I typically don’t agree with on a day to day basis. And so yeah, it was very eye opening that it made it definitive that there are certain people in our space that I just never need to listen to again.
Azeem Ahmad (17:49.767) Yeah, so basically you just cut out the weeds pretty much.
Mike King (@iPullRank) (17:54.286) Yeah, yeah.
Azeem Ahmad (17:56.187) I like that, which is good, amazing. Based on what you’ve shared and what you’ve learned and given that it’s been a period of time since all this information has come out, what would you say is one thing that people doing SEO should stop doing immediately?
Mike King (@iPullRank) (18:15.96) Yeah, again the volume based link building.
you if you’re not building links from pages that drive traffic and rank themselves you’re wasting your time because those links are probably not being counted at all like there’s so many different measures in there that talk about how they discount links that you know when I pull people’s link profiles one of the things that I do is I pull the rankings of those pages I also pull the traffic to those pages and more often than not most people’s link profiles are like you know 60 plus percent of pages
that are not valuable.
You know, being that like we’ve always focused on trying to drive higher quality links. When we look at the links that we’ve built for sites, they’re all sites or all pages that have rankings and drive traffic. So it’s like, it’s pretty clear to me that there’s no reason to be going after the like DA 20 links that, you know, no one on the web is actually looking to see. So yeah, I think that.
It’s not realistic to expect that the industry will change because again, the volume is how everyone makes money. But I think that if you are serious about driving results, you should change what you’re doing strategically as it relates to that.
Azeem Ahmad (19:35.346) Yeah, absolutely. My next question is certainly going to be how do you think this has impacted say, sections of our industry like digital PR over in the States because…
Here in the UK, for example, there hasn’t been, to my knowledge, and I don’t work in digital PR every day, I haven’t seen a sort of step or direction change to that effect. Everything has kind of been business as usual. And I would have thought that with this level of information coming from like respected voices in the industry, I would have thought that the direction of that section of the industry certainly would have changed. Has it changed in the US? And if not, why do you think not?
Mike King (@iPullRank) (20:16.418) So there was a lot of calling that into question in the last couple of years. Like people saying like, digital PR doesn’t work or whatever. I think the docs actually proved that it does because digital PR typically yields links from, you know,
Azeem Ahmad (20:26.353) Hmm.
Mike King (@iPullRank) (20:36.888) new sites and new sites fall into a bucket that they call fresh docs. So pages that are like being updated quickly or coming out fast and like on sites that they’re crawling every second. And so
If you’re getting links from the fresh doc section, your links are typically more valued than even the higher tier in the core index. So I think that if anything, this has proven that digital PR is more valuable than we thought. But yeah, I haven’t really seen anything change about that side of our space. I feel like that’s the flashier side of our space. It’s the people that are like, we do PR.
when really you’re just doing like fancy link building but you know it is what it is right? So yeah I haven’t seen much change there.
Azeem Ahmad (21:31.142) Yeah, no, love that. I just wanted to get your opinion on that side of the industry. Let’s talk about something that you do know a lot about clicks, right? The documents, they talk about clicks at length. So for people watching this, what advice would you give them in terms of optimizing their websites or the client’s websites or whatever? How can they get people to stay longer?
Mike King (@iPullRank) (21:57.358) Yeah, one, you gotta make better metadata, right?
One of the problems is that you are presenting something that doesn’t align with the expectations of the user. So they click on it because they read your, you know, your meta description or the snippet being used and your page title. And so they have an expectation of what is on the other side of that click. If you don’t map to that expectation, you’ve already lost. And so I would recommend that people test their metadata a lot more than they probably are. And also try to get an understanding of like, what is the threshold of expectation
for click -through rate because if you
rank in let’s say position three and you’re getting a lower than average click through rate there, you’re probably gonna lose that position anyway. So again, that metadata needs to be improved. Then once you do actually drive that click, get a better understanding of like what are users doing once they get there? Like are they rage quitting your page? Are they scrolling up and down, can’t find what they’re looking for? Like these are all indications that you don’t have what they want.
And so that’s gonna yield a signal back to Google that.
Mike King (@iPullRank) (23:10.552) you this isn’t the right result for this query. And so again, though, you’ll end up getting demoted by that. But you’ve also got to get an understanding of like what a successful session might look like, right? So just because someone clicks your page comes to or clicks your result comes to your page and then bounces does not necessarily mean that’s an unsuccessful session. They may have found the information they were looking for. And then that’s that. And so if they go back to Google,
and then they don’t click on another result, that could be considered a successful session. But if they bounce from Google and then they click on another result and they stay there longer than they stayed on yours, that means yours wasn’t successful. Or if they come back to Google and then reformulate the query, and after only clicking on your result, that means it wasn’t a successful session. But it also could be where user
does the query, clicks on your result.
comes back, reformulates the query, you rank again, they click on your result again, then that can be two successful sessions. So it’s a complicated way of understanding what session success is, but what you control is putting the right message in front of that user, and then also making it so they can find what they’re looking for as fast as possible. So again, this is primarily making sure you have a strong UX that allows them to find the information they’re looking for.
Azeem Ahmad (24:41.426) Yeah, absolutely. mean, I was just thinking then while you were talking, surely that I don’t want to say it’s a better option, obviously, bound to your superior knowledge, but wouldn’t wouldn’t you want a user who’s already on your page?
rather than them going back to Google and reformulating the query. Wouldn’t you then want them to navigate through your website to maybe an adjacent or related page rather than going back? What is the better of the two options, going back and reformulating or staying on your website? What’s the better option in your opinion?
Mike King (@iPullRank) (25:09.154) Absolutely.
Mike King (@iPullRank) (25:16.28) the better option is to keep them on your website as long as possible because that’s considered was called a long click. If a user doesn’t go back to Google, that’s a long click. so Dan Petrovic, back in the day, he had done this test where he hijacked the back button.
and he made it so when you hit back it went to something that looked like Google but it wasn’t actually Google. So the user thought they were going back to the results but they weren’t. And Google actually de -indexed his site not just the test site that he had built because this is something that just completely would destroy their navboost signals if everyone did it. So I think this is why like they came down.
on him so hard because it’s such an important signal for them. So I’m not saying like hey hijack the back button and send people somewhere else when they do that even though I’m sure a bunch of black hat people will do exactly that but you know the best outcome is for them to just stay on your site and not go back to Google.
Azeem Ahmad (26:29.3) Yeah, I love that and I’ll move on to navboost in a second but there are news sites, typically news sites in the UK. I don’t know if it’s the same in the States but let’s say you arrive at an article and then you press back to go back to the SERP. Before you leave you get a sort of interstitial or a different page you’ve literally hit back but it says before you leave you might want to read this, this and this. Isn’t that the same thing? And if not, how is it not?
Mike King (@iPullRank) (26:58.136) So that, it depends how it’s implemented, right? Like it may not be.
you know them it may not be them like hijacking the back button it may just be like you know you click back and then they insert something but you can still go back to Google so I’ve seen situations where people just completely hijack the back button and you hit back and then you end up on you know a different site or something like that right like like there’s a lot of ways you can do it but what you’re describing may be an approach that is like
above board because you’re discouraging a user from going back to Google and they may decide like okay I’m not gonna go back to Google I’m gonna look at whatever else you got right like it’s just like any other situation where the exit intent pop -ups right where where you’re like hey give me your email address before you go or something like that like those are all considered fine like it’s not considered like a dark pattern or anything like that but
Azeem Ahmad (27:52.628) Hmm.
Mike King (@iPullRank) (28:03.638) It is a good approach to like discourage someone from not being that long click. I don’t think that.
It’s something that Google can’t even reliably catch either because they’re not going to render every single page and then hit back coming from Google to see if you’re hijacking the back button. So again, I think that’s another reason why they don’t want people knowing how effective that is.
Azeem Ahmad (28:27.497) Hmm.
Azeem Ahmad (28:34.259) Yeah, absolutely. It’s just sometimes I like to shit on news websites because the ones in the UK are just awful. Certainly if you…
Mike King (@iPullRank) (28:42.293) But yeah, to your point though or to your question, they definitely do that in the states.
Azeem Ahmad (28:46.747) Okay, yeah, no, I mean there are some in the UK if you’re ever in the UK during winter just load up a new site on your phone and the amount of stuff that pops up will just warm up your hands and you’ll be fine because it’s just ridiculous. But yeah, moving swiftly on. There’s a couple of bits that I wanted to touch on with you. You mentioned Navboost for people listening and watching who might not know what that is. Would you mind giving a short overview and then when you do that afterwards…
Mike King (@iPullRank) (28:57.55) Hahaha
Azeem Ahmad (29:13.061) share what people should do with that information once they know what it is.
Mike King (@iPullRank) (29:19.162) Yeah, so Navboost was called a Twiddler. Twiddler is something that can adjust your rankings after the original rankings happen. So it was an idea that was called re -ranking, right? So let’s say you get your 100 results and then you want to make adjustments based on different things about results. So, you know, as an example, Panda would be considered one of these. Or previously, like the early version of Panda would have been considered one of these. So Navboost is the Twiddler that
based on click behaviors. So basically what they’re doing is they’re collecting all click data for like the last 13 months and then using that to inform whether or not a page should continue to rank in the position that it ranks in. And so as far as what you do with it, I mean it’s everything that we’re talking about around clicks. This is the system that makes those adjustments based on those clicks.
Azeem Ahmad (30:17.439) Okay, love it. And what is something that people can like do tomorrow? Let’s say somebody who doesn’t know anything about the leaks has watched us and has heard you tonight. What’s something that they can do tomorrow that immediately they can start to look at?
Mike King (@iPullRank) (30:34.254) Yeah, I would say look at your GSE.
and then pull your click through rates, number of clicks and all that, and then line that up with what’s being shown on a keyword landing page level in the snippet. So what I mean by that is your page title. What are they showing for a meta description? Because that’s going to be different per keyword, right? Because in most cases, Google’s rewriting your meta description anyway. And so despite the fact that you may have one set for a given page,
different queries for that same page will have a different snippet. So you’re gonna wanna look at that side by side with the actual performance. And in cases where you’re seeing like performance is way lower, then you’re gonna wanna think about how do I adjust this copy so that it’s more conducive to people clicking on these pages. And then also align that with your analytics measures as well. So looking at your time on page, your time on site, your page depth.
So how many pages do they actually look at when they come to Google or come from Google to the site after they landed on this landing page? And also your bounce rate, things like that. Put all that together and then see where the outliers are. Like where are the ones that are performing really well and then where are the ones that are performing really bad? And then the ones that are performing really bad are going to be the ones that you’re going to want to test out and optimize around so you can make adjustments and make things perform better.
that the measures in NavBoost will go up and then you are reinforcing better rankings for those pages.
Azeem Ahmad (32:17.856) Thank you very much for sharing that I’m conscious that I’ve got you for like another 10 minutes and there’s a couple of the things that I want to touch base with you on and I hate myself for saying touch base because that’s a shitty marketing phrase I’ll try and edit that out but okay, let’s move on. God
Mike King (@iPullRank) (32:29.466) hahahaha
We’ll circle back.
Azeem Ahmad (32:39.028) I wasn’t blue sky thinking we’re not going to go down this route. But no, listen. OK, let’s talk about brand. OK, so the documents seem to indicate that, you know, brand, should be an emphasis on brand. If there’s somebody listening or watching us now who’s like very deep in the SEO weeds. What should they be doing about their brand?
Mike King (@iPullRank) (33:02.084) Yep.
Mike King (@iPullRank) (33:05.4) Yeah, I love this question. am actually writing a blog post right now talking about how search is a branding channel. because there is just like a big disconnect being that we’re performance marketers, technically, if you’re an SEO, as you may not understand what is meant by brand, right? Like brand is such a ambiguous term. If you ask, you know, five different brand marketers to define it for you, you get, you know, five different answers. So,
Yeah, it really does come down to if you build a brand, lot of these signals that Google is looking for will be automatically covered. And when you think about, you know, click behavior, links, content, relevance and so on, all of that is going to work better for a brand because people are naturally going to click on brands that they recognize. Brands are naturally going to get links. Brands can afford
to invest to make highly relevant content for search. so building a brand is incredibly valuable because you create more of those signals. You are doing things where your entity is mentioned more across the web. And so that is something that filters back into users as well. So when you think about what Navboost is doing,
One of the things that it can do is associate entities with keywords. And what I mean by that is like, let’s say I search for basketball sneakers and then I don’t like what I found for basketball sneakers, but my next query is Nike basketball sneakers. Well, now that brand is now associated with basketball sneakers inherently, even when someone doesn’t search for Nike basketball sneakers, because so many other people are doing
that same series of searches. And so within Google’s ecosystem, they’re able to associate your brand with a variety of things in the same way that they also look to localize every query, even if it’s not really local, right? Like when you search for like Plumber or whatever, it inherently is going to expand that query and do like New York Plumber or add entities that are typically related to Plumber for some
Mike King (@iPullRank) (35:31.788) someone in New York. And so your brand supports a lot of this because Google is ultimately collecting all this information across the web to see, what brands are most salient, prevalent, and so on, and then applying that to a variety of things in the background. And the way that you create this is doing things that people typically do for brand building, right? Like, you know, getting the PR.
doing things that aren’t necessarily about like driving performance, but associating your brand with something else, right? When you think about, excuse me, the Super Bowl as an example.
certain brands are associated with the Super Bowl because they always advertise the Super Bowl. And so to that end, Google is already making the connections between Budweiser and the Super Bowl or Doritos in the Super Bowl or Pepsi in the Super Bowl because those things are often mentioned together in content across the web. So I say all that to say that
In SEO, we think of brand as this amorphous thing, but Google is effectively quantifying brand by using a lot of these different signals. And it’s our job to populate our brands through those signals.
Azeem Ahmad (36:54.742) No, that’s fantastic. Thank you very much for sharing that. You were ticking a lot of things in my brain there. One of them certainly was, look, this is great if I’m an established brand with a presence and authority. This is all stuff that I can do. But one of my final questions for you is that, if I’m a new website owner or a small business, I’m not gonna be looking upon this information fondly, so to speak. So what could a new…
Mike King (@iPullRank) (37:19.842) Hm
Azeem Ahmad (37:22.709) website owner or a new or a small business. I class them as the same because they’re small in size. What can they do to, I was going to say get into the game, but how can they stay in the game if you’re or small?
Mike King (@iPullRank) (37:36.292) Yeah, I think it’s really leveraging the power of other websites and other brands. So doing a lot of co -branding efforts, getting the PR, getting the news coverage, things like that. That’s gonna associate you with the other brands in your space, right? So as an example, let’s say you’re a new shoe brand and you’re trying to get in the same space as Nike and Under Armour and Adidas and all that. Well, if you end up being mentioned with those entities, you then
get associated in those same…
you know, levels of understanding across Google. So if they see a hundred times that, you know, or they see 99 times that your brand is mentioned with these four other brands, that hundredth time, they’re gonna assume that you are inherently mentioned because you’re mentioned in all these other places. So it’s really just like, frankly, doing the marketing to,
get the brand presence that’s similar to other brands by leveraging existing brands.
Azeem Ahmad (38:45.058) I definitely wanted to shoehorn that in before the end. I’ve got two more for you then we can part ways. Let’s fast forward 12 months 14th of August 2025. What do you expect if anything to have changed in the industry?
Mike King (@iPullRank) (38:52.14) Okay, happy. Yeah.
Mike King (@iPullRank) (39:07.93) I mean, Genitive AI is going to take a much bigger foothold. think that the SEO space is just so far behind what Google is doing. Because there’s two distinct models of search at play. There’s what’s called the lexical model, which is basically counting words in their distributions. And then there’s semantic models, where it’s like understanding meaning. And so Genitive AI is built on the semantic model. But most of our SEO tools are
are still operating on the Lexical model.
Now that we have vector embeddings that are easy and cheap to generate, every tool should have the capabilities of semantic analysis. And I anticipate that the SEO space will start to catch up over this next year. But at the same time, the AI native tools are going to do a lot more to impact our space in the ability to generate content, in the ability to do analysis fast.
and things like that. So I think that there’s gonna be a lot of automation that comes into our space in the next 12 months. the day to day of what we’re doing is gonna change dramatically. And then also the capabilities of the search engines are gonna change dramatically. And the…
number of places where people are getting their information needs met is going to change as well. Because we’ve already got chat GBT, we’ve got perplexity, people are using TikTok as a search engine, Google’s under fire, they might get broken up, like all these things are at play. So I anticipate the landscape is just going to be different on all sides significantly over the next 12 months.
Azeem Ahmad (41:00.138) Yeah, absolutely. And I think our mutual friend Ross Simmons has been talking a lot about sort of distribution and everything else across multiple channels. I’m seeing.
Mike King (@iPullRank) (41:09.433) Yup.
Azeem Ahmad (41:10.359) that people are starting to take notice of that now. mean, he’s been talking about that stuff for years, but I’m starting to see it now more and more as a result. People are actually like, you know, this is all, most of it is rented land. And if we all in one space, we’re pretty much stuffed. But that’s a conversation for another day. Before you leave and you share your details for you, firstly, thank you very much. I’ve really enjoyed having this chat with you and exploring the more technical side of your brain, as well as some of the fun parts.
leave on a fun note okay so it’s no secret you’re a man of many talents rapper, marketer, father that’s the one thing that I wanted to sort of pick your brains on so I’m fairly certain you’ve never been asked this question on a podcast before but try and the answer funny please I need this to be funny in what way would you say that SEO and fatherhood are
Mike King (@iPullRank) (41:42.478) Okay.
Mike King (@iPullRank) (42:02.584) HAHAHAHA
Mike King (@iPullRank) (42:10.424) Nobody listens to me.
Hehehehehe
Azeem Ahmad (42:16.994) 10 points 10 points that’s fantastic that’s gonna be the trailer for the show now no I’ve really enjoyed this before you go please do I mean most people are connected with you anyway but for those that are not and want to reach out to you where can they find you follow you how can they reach out to you
Mike King (@iPullRank) (42:28.672) Hahaha
Mike King (@iPullRank) (42:43.192) Yeah, I’m iPollRank. You know, that’s where I write most of my stuff. I’m at iPollRank on all the social networks. And yeah, that’s pretty much it. Mike at iPollRank .com if you want to email me.
Azeem Ahmad (42:54.913) Yeah, amazing. You definitely should connect with him if you’re not already. Even if it’s just to say thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom. Really appreciate it. It’s been great to hang out. I always end the show and say something daft like please do like, rate, share and subscribe. Tell a friend to tell a friend. And my one silly thing to end today’s episode is the next time you’re out.
getting groceries before you pay, say, hey, I heard this great marketing podcast with Azeem and Mike King. The person that you’re talking to might not even be into marketing, but the fact that you’ve told one more person will make this podcast slightly better. So do that because a friend in need is a friend of Azeem. And that was awful.
Mike King (@iPullRank) (43:35.514) I loved it. I loved every second of it.
Azeem Ahmad (43:40.482) But yeah look we’ll catch you on the next episode as always please like, rate, and subscribe and we’ll see you soon.
In this episode, I interview Sukhjinder Singh about thriving as a minority in digital marketing. Sukhjinder shares his journey in the industry and the changes he has witnessed over the past 15 years. He also discusses the challenges faced by minorities and the progress that has been made in creating a more inclusive and diverse industry….and much more!
*As a reminder, you can now also get this podcast in video form, on both Spotify video, or YouTube.*
Listen/watch now, right above the subscribe button, or pick your favourite listening platform from this list:
Azeem Ahmad (00:00.856) Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Azeem Digital Asks All Round Digital Marketing Podcast. By now we are almost halfway through the current season, season six or season seven. I’ve actually lost count but yolo, we move. I’ve got the amazing Subjinder Singh with me today. We’re talking all about thriving as a minority in digital marketing. I’m really, really excited to watch, listen
learn from him. always, please do like, rate, share, subscribe, tell a friend to tell a friend. We’re also on YouTube. I know many of you enjoy the podcast on Spotify video, so feel free to check us out there. Right, that’s my boring intro over, so welcome to the show my friend.
Sukhjinder Singh (00:45.422) Hi, Azeem, thanks for having me. One of my favorite gym podcasts listens, so it’s nice to be on it for a change, so yeah, awesome.
Azeem Ahmad (00:52.256) Amazing look people are learning while they’re lifting. I love that What a legend? Thank you very much for I appreciate it So for those people who? Shamefully don’t know what a legend in this game you are would you mind giving like a little briefing show to yourself, please?
Sukhjinder Singh (00:56.281) Yes.
Sukhjinder Singh (01:07.194) Yeah, legend’s a bit a lot to live up to as you saw, best mate. Yeah, so SEO, I’m a freelance SEO now, have been for coming up to two years. Prior to that, was SEO mostly on the agency side for about, coming up to 15 years. So yeah, I worked on the agency side and prior to that, I was a web dev out of uni. So I kind of had a technical.
background and a foundation to start with. Naturally, I into technical SEO and then broadened it out a bit and headed up a couple of SEO departments. And now, yeah, I freelance with big and small clients and I’ve just gotten into a lot more speaking stuffs and podcasts which I really enjoy. And yeah, that’s kind of a summary. I’m quite a technical person.
And so, we were talking earlier off thing, I tend to ramble a little bit sometimes, so I try and of cut it short and make it as concise as possible. But yeah, that’s kind of me in a nutshell.
Azeem Ahmad (02:06.575) Love that. I’m very excited to get into this episode with you. we’re talking all about thriving as a minority. You mentioned you’ve been around for about 15 years or so. Still look 21, by the way. So off -cut recording, we’ll get some skincare tips. Absolutely. But yeah, tell me about your journey. Like what sort of changes have you seen in the last 15 years?
Sukhjinder Singh (02:19.29) Cheers mate.
filters.
Sukhjinder Singh (02:28.922) Yeah, this is quite broad. Yeah, it’s quite a lot. So when I was thinking back about this as well, I wrote down a couple of things because it’s just so much. So I started obviously when SEO was still quite mature. So 2009 time, I would say. And prior to that, I did a little bit of SEO whilst I was doing back then there was a distinction between web design, web development. So was more in the design phase and I included SEO stuff in that in agencies. And at that time, there weren’t that many
opportunities as they are now obviously to get into SEO, certainly nothing at uni and also know apprenticeships and there were very little courses that didn’t require you to have a degree first of some sort. So at that time it was quite hard to get into SEO I found so I ended up doing a couple of courses and basically just kind of started from the bottom in terms of the pay scale to get into an entry -level SEO job and just learnt on the job and so with the
actually been quite not as mature as it is now. It was before the major algorithm updates as well. So things like link building and stuff like that weren’t that mature as they are now in those kinds of strategies. So there was a massive learning curve from a technical SEO kind of standpoint of strategies and things, as well as the cultural aspects and how to progress within organizations and, know, and, know, kind of, you know, just hitting those
different targets and distinguishing yourself. So yeah, very, very kind of not as mature as it is now. so, yeah, so learning was very much, most people that I worked with and started off with were pretty much self -taught. There weren’t any opportunities and you know, you had Ron Fishkin and Moz at that time, which was pretty big. And he’s more of the to stand out people at that time.
But aside from that, you were kind of learning on the job. So yeah, you kind of had each other to kind of learn from and brainstorm with. So it was a different time to say the least.
Azeem Ahmad (04:36.854) Yeah, I can imagine. Thanks very much for sharing that. It’s amazing to see how much change you’ve seen and come across. But thinking specifically as a minority, are there any, what challenges do you think you faced, especially as a minority?
Sukhjinder Singh (04:56.152) yeah find this topic quite interesting as well because i was starting to see
at this stage now in the industry that there are a lot more representation and there’s a lot more consideration broadly speaking just in our culture and society in general but also in our industry and I think now our industry is probably one of the most kind of accepting and you know diverse industries I think you know you just go to events like Brighton SEO and stuff and it’s just all there for you to see and it’s very comfortable for minorities and people of any of different backgrounds.
So at that time that I kind of came up, yeah, I guess, and I’m quite from an old school, I’m 40, so I’m from an old school.
generation where I did a lot of, you know, attempt jobs, warehouse works, I’ve been working since I was 16. So getting into any kind of office job was kind of the dream. And so from my perspective, I initially didn’t notice any challenges and any roadblocks and gatekeepers and things like that. But as I kind of matured and learnt, you know, you know, from moving to different companies, oh, people act different ways and more people are more open in certain situations than others to progress you and coach you and things like that.
okay things could be a bit better but at that time you didn’t there weren’t any other opportunities so you just had to kind of deal with it so yeah there were in some cases overt kind of roadblocks for progression in companies but also subtle roadblocks where they were kind of cultural so people didn’t really notice that you are kind of excluded from
Sukhjinder Singh (06:36.602) conversations or opportunities for internal progression and things like that. And speaking to other minorities, know, other Asians and just broadly speaking, anyone colored background, we tend to share the same thing in that it’s expected that you work a little bit extra. So you kind of give 110 % whatever, and you’re a bit more, you integrate a bit more, you know, that you can.
pick any funny meme from Instagram where people’s driving to work and they’re listening to DMX and as soon as they get there, yeah, it’s all a different personality and then they come from work and then back to yourself. So that’s kind of an analogy I use with that.
And it’s as I’ve gotten older and I see the industry now and the younger people coming up, I think, this is actually, we’re in a much better position. And I get a lot of inspiration from this generation of marketers where they take it, not for granted, but it’s a bit easier and they’re representing a bit more and, you know.
and I take inspiration from that. yeah, those were some of the subtle and overt challenges of having to work extra hard to integrate a bit more, I guess. just kind of, yeah, and just kind of a path of the course kind of takes certain things for granted about, okay, maybe I didn’t get that because of X, Y, Z, or it might be because of this, but I’m just gonna proceed anyway and just work my arse off and then eventually these things will come, you know.
Azeem Ahmad (08:00.687) Yeah, you literally sound what you just said there sounds exactly like some of the circumstances that I face and I told myself exactly the same thing. Just that if you keep working harder, like you said, 110 percent eventually these chances will come good. But the episode is not about me, it’s about you. So I’m going to shut up. Thinking back to like when you sort of first started.
How, if any, have the demographics of digital marketing changed since when you started? I know you kind of gave a nod to it there, but how much change have you seen since when you began?
Sukhjinder Singh (08:36.002) Yeah, massively. if I am thinking about this as well, because, you know, because I obviously had a topic in mind and then I thought to myself, are you know, who are the people and what are the groups and things that I take inspiration from and that’s so, so many people. know, Anu and Chima, for example, in the industry, very popular speakers and, you know, and
overtly, I think they support minorities. think they did one in the last sprint in the Ratan SCO, think. They had a bunch of students come down for free to do some training on one of the days, which I thought was pretty awesome. so there are examples like that, know, obviously seeing people like yourself thriving and being visible as a speaker and stuff and groups like Women in Tech SCO.
from a reach that she’s put a lot of work in there over the years. And then I admit, I get a bit jealous sometimes when I see pictures of their meetups, like this one looks like a big laugh, but also like, you know, there’s so much support and love and it would be nice to, and it got me thinking about, yeah, so how about Asians and other minorities as well? And kind of, know, neurodivergence as well in SEO. So a lot of these groups and people have popped up and I think they,
as a baseline, them just doing their own thing and representing themselves and that is a big inspiration. And I think to newcomers and also to experience people and jaded people like myself, but people that overtly create opportunities as well, I think is pretty awesome. And so that’s kind of one thing. I don’t think I answered the question properly. was kind of a couple of areas where I think things have changed quite a bit on pushing things forward.
And on the kind of public speaking side of it as well and seeing people being visible, I oddly had a LinkedIn message a couple of months ago from someone in BC Canada, another Asian person, a Sikh person saying, I’ve seen you a couple of times speaking at Brighton SEO and LinkedIn and that, and you encouraged me to pitch for MozCon. And so here’s my pitch and all that, and I’m just to get some advice on that. And I was taking her back, and I was like.
Sukhjinder Singh (10:49.88) Well, someone messaged me about that and I was quite embarrassed about it and I thought, okay, well that’s pretty awesome. So I just tried back and forth chatting to the guy like, okay, because I don’t see a lot of Sikhs that look like you, a turban and a beard and stuff doing this stuff. And I also got quite conscious of it, like, okay, well, I think I’ve been true to myself and I represent myself properly, but there’s also that added bit of responsibility, I guess, of
If I was coming up, I would like to see someone look like me doing this. And there are a couple of people that are doing that now. You know, one person comes to mind, Harmeet Singh, who’s a Leicester based agency owner, who traditionally looks like a Sikh like me and does this stuff. And I thought that’s, and that got me started thinking about this topic when I mentioned it to you. And so things like that are quite powerful where they don’t necessarily have to overtly pay things forward.
But just from doing their own thing, I think that adds massive value just as a visual to people coming up and it kind of plants that seed of, yeah, I can do that. I can get on a stage and I can spell out my full name. I don’t have to shorten it as well for people to make it easier. And I think that’s great.
Azeem Ahmad (12:03.267) Yeah no absolutely, couldn’t agree with you more and then I had a very very similar experience a number of years ago. I was at Brighton SEL and I did a talk.
just came off the stage and there was a guy you normally get people who come and speak to you after giving a talk and this guy came over to me and he was like I’ve come all the way from India and I wanted to come and see you speak like I’ve seen you doing talks and stuff before and he’s like I made a point of going to my manager to try and secure a budget to try and get over here and come here and he showed me all the emails that he sent back and forth he was like I want to go and see this guy and I was just like I was almost crying I was like bloody hell this is like this is what it’s about you know what
Sukhjinder Singh (12:43.662) That’s big.
Azeem Ahmad (12:45.349) That’s that’s just massive and I just thought God someone’s made a conscious effort to come all the way from India That’s not a quick flight. It’s a good nine ten hours. Whatever. I was like God. This is This incredible the massive community out there and I I think
Azeem Ahmad (13:02.307) We should do, we collectively, not me and you, we collectively as an industry should probably do more to try and bridge that divide. But I’m conscious that I’m talking a lot, so again, I’m gonna shut up.
Sukhjinder Singh (13:15.128) No, no, it’s really valuable that, yeah.
Azeem Ahmad (13:16.675) You’ve answered one of the questions I was gonna ask you. So I’m just talking about, let’s move on to the theme of like empowerment. And I noticed that you earlier, you mentioned about different groups, for example, neurodivergence and what world team is doing with the FCDC and everything else. Do you think that, you know, traditionally marginalized groups are more empowered now than before? And if so, why?
Sukhjinder Singh (13:40.206) Yeah, just for my limited kind of perception, just speaking for myself,
So yeah, I’m constantly consuming content, going to conferences where I can and all that. Chatting to people, parts of different WhatsApp and Slack and things like that. And from all of that experience, I do see it be a lot more inclusive and people from diverse backgrounds being a lot more visual and comfortable talking and things like that. if they’re, I mean, I’m quite an introvert. So for me, public speaking and all that is an ongoing challenge.
because I’m an introvert that I do it, not also because it’s good lead gen opportunity, it’s freelance, all that stuff, whatever. It’s just a good thing to do, you know? seeing other people kind of doing that and knowing their stuff as well, yeah, I think it has changed massively. And just thinking about this as well.
I, so for example, the last brightness year I went to where we did speaker training and stuff. the group over there was massively diverse. And so going in there, I was quite nervous. It was like, okay, you know, obviously you’ve got to sit in a circle and all this stuff and everything and get up and talk and that was like, this is actually made a little bit easier kind of playing tricks with the head. I’m like, there’s a person there who’s brown, black, whatever. And then I can, and then, I thought, okay, fine. So there’s that box takes to where I don’t feel self -conscious on that side. And then there also people that,
recognised as neurodivergent and stuff and they’re quite open about that as well. And it’s just a very honest group and that kind of set the tone for the whole conference, talking to other speakers and delegates, very honest, very open, very accepting. And I felt that represented the current state of the industry as far as I can see it with all of these meetups and people that I speak to and stuff. I’m very honest and open and accepting. And if I go back even just five, let’s say 10 years, whatever, when I started it
Sukhjinder Singh (15:41.644) didn’t feel like that at all. And so I think that’s a massive leap. And I think there are areas where things can be improved as well. Just speaking from an agency, head of SEO experience as well, you there’s a lot more that we can do collectively as the we as well as broader society, think, prompted by us, I guess.
Azeem Ahmad (16:02.564) Yeah, absolutely. Well, look, let’s get into that. What can companies agencies, what can they do to create, you know, sort of more, you know, inclusive, diverse, sort of supportive environment for everybody?
Sukhjinder Singh (16:15.417) Yeah.
Well, I think just to preface it with, I think most people just want to do good by their colleagues and all that as well. And as a minority coming up, I’ve learnt over the years about people’s intentions from, it’s not as simple as, there’s a roadblock for me to progressing because of this or one person or a culture. There’s loads of different factors in that. it just comes sometimes, I think it comes down to being a minority where the majority people are naturally tribal and whatever. they might not naturally think to include you in certain things or whatever.
It can be as simple as the social culture in an agency where you might not feel as included to celebrate things like, know, Eid Diwali, Vizocchi, Hanukkah, whatever.
little subtle things might collect and might build a picture in your head of, well, maybe I’m not as included in these kinds of things and might be maybe even not a slight resentment, but like, I might not be open to pitch myself for certain things because I might not be championed to be a speaker or representative of a company or agency, for example. And so I think subtle things like inclusion, I know it sounds wishy washy, it’s been bastardized over the years, but
Genuine inclusion in earnest not just taking a box well, what do you guys celebrate and can we kind of build in the calendar? know different events and all that, know make have fun and get to know people at that level cultural level I think is a small but massively impacting thing just from seeing from a manager perspective and on the other side as well so that kind of social inclusion in agencies and companies as well as more more hot more hard things of like, okay Here’s an opportunity for speaking his opportunity to
Sukhjinder Singh (17:54.268) us, do some legion, whatever, I want to give all of you an equal opportunity because the other side of it is all of us want to be in a meritocracy where you’ve just got an equal opportunity, you’re not preferred over other people. So just making it equal and I think those kind of two simple things can help and the root of that is just keeping in mind empathy and other people’s perceptions, you know, if I’m a brown person.
and working with non -brown people, need to keep in mind their perception of me and maybe they’re not included in a lot of conversations I have with my other brown people, for example. And so it’s just having that perception and just keeping in mind, maybe I should include them and go out of myself to kind of think what else can I, how can I give them equal opportunities kind of thing. So it’s a mindset, yeah.
Azeem Ahmad (18:46.352) Do you think that varies based on seniority? So do you think it’s different for people who are very junior in the industry versus people who are long in the tooth and have been in the industry, let’s say 10, 15 years?
Sukhjinder Singh (19:01.45) Yeah, I guess so. In terms of their ability to be more inclusive or their experience of, you know, or both. Yeah.
Azeem Ahmad (19:12.707) their experience I’d say probably both. I would assume and feel free to disagree that if you’re in the industry for a long time, you are and can be more inclusive than others, I just meant like their experiences of feeling included.
Sukhjinder Singh (19:24.654) Yeah.
Yeah, I think so. think for myself, yeah, because I’ve seen a few different sides of that and different levels of inclusion and the impacts it can have, subtle and major. Major means people just leaving or whatever, just thinking, yeah, I don’t want to work, kind of thing. Yeah, I think I’m in a, I guess I could say I’m in a better position having seen a lot of that. But then, know, I’ve chatted to people who’ve given me massive perspectives where, I didn’t think of that. You know, I could probably do more of this and more of that. But I think the more experienced
definitely does lend itself to that more understanding and empathy. But also on the flip side, the younger generation, not to sound old, but they’re in a good position as well where I think society is a bit more accepting broadly speaking and people aren’t just ticking a box off including people. They’re in earnest want to know about you and your culture and that a bit more now. That’s how I feel like when I chat to lot of young marketers.
and I see people representing, know, like Chima, for example, where it’s not even a thought that, I’m a brown person in search. It’s as if I’m a person in search that’s kind of killing it. And that’s kind of the goal, isn’t it? Just to not even be able to recognize it. yeah, we’re just people in this industry killing it. It doesn’t matter what color we are kind of thing. I feel like they are, what’s the word? They have more,
Sukhjinder Singh (20:49.166) Yeah, on podcasts my vocabulary always just kind of gets thrown out of the window. But they’re just better positioned. I think younger people have more of that energy and more enthusiasm, I guess, to kind of do that. So I think you’ve got the older person perspective and the younger person just having a better being in a better position, societal wise. Yeah.
Azeem Ahmad (20:53.312) Hahaha
Azeem Ahmad (21:11.153) Yeah. And we’re rapidly approaching the end of episode, but I’ve just got a couple more questions for you. And I think one, it’s always pertinent when I get towards the end. And like I said to you after recording, I’m mindful that some of the audience are quite new and junior in the industry. If they’re listening to this episode and they want to progress, whether that be in their career or do more podcasts or do more speaking or just literally take the next step.
What sort of advice would you give to those people and how they can take that next step, whatever it may be.
Sukhjinder Singh (21:46.338) So for me with public speaking, I started with webinars and initially I didn’t really have a choice. just during lockdown, we just did weekly webinars and kind of cut my teeth with speaking in front of a camera. And, you know, it was quite comfortable. It was nice gateway because you’re in your house, whatever. And you get used to the mechanics of like speaking and stuff, although you can’t tell in this because I, but, so that was a nice little gateway doing small talks and small things. That’s how I started as well. And then just getting up and presenting
while you know doing a pitch.
to new clients and existing clients and stuff, it’s nice to get that. And the good managers will put you in that position where they know what you’re capable of and they just kind of throw you in that deep end. So you could be proactive and say, you know what, I’d like to take lead on this and present this portion of the presentation or whatever to start with. And just getting used to being in front of people, managing your body language, seeing their language and reading a room, that’s really quite valuable. And then from that, you can just, when you feel comfortable, or if you want to shock your system and just go straight in the deep
spend, why not, then pitch for a talk. And if you pitch for something like Brighton SEO, I can tell from first -hand experience, the support is, you know, the absolute best, like, you know, the speaker training, the support groups, a WhatsApp group, mentor, you know, you get all of that and you just watch other speakers as well. If you feel like, mean, or about pitching for speaking, just watch other speakers and assess their, you know, technical experience and their speaking skills, whatever you think.
and grade it on yourself and say okay I think I’ve got this I’ve got all these books ticked maybe I could if you pick a subject you’re super and also I get confidence with the subject as well if I’m spot on with the subject everything else takes a backseat am I saying and are too much yeah but fair enough at least I get the information out there so I reckon those baby steps and doing what you’re comfortable with but don’t be afraid to shit yourself and shock your system and pitch or something as well because that can also make you rise to the occasion
Sukhjinder Singh (23:47.906) and do some stuff that you didn’t know you were capable
Azeem Ahmad (23:48.154) Yeah.
Azeem Ahmad (23:51.492) Yeah, absolutely. I couldn’t agree with you more. I have an answer for the question I’m about to ask you. And I will let you go after this, sorry, but this is really good. I often hear from people who want to get into this space. I want to do this. I want to talk at conference X. I want to present here. want to do this.
Sukhjinder Singh (24:02.446) No.
Azeem Ahmad (24:14.724) But there’s already so much information about that topic. How do you stand out? So what advice would you give someone who wants to get into it and be like, well, I want to talk about, I don’t know, technical SEO, but there’s lots of people talking about it. How do you stand out?
Sukhjinder Singh (24:29.666) Yeah, that’s interesting, because I’m actually doing that for myself again right now with my content strategy as a freelancer. So what I’ve always done with the client content multi -strategy, for example, so I’m looking at the key topics that I have an authority in.
and then having a look at examples of talks and blogs and whatever out there. And then I’m going to see what my idea that I’m really set on. How can I, if there are other talks out there like this, watch it all through and see, okay, is that similar to what I was going to say? Or do I have a twist on that? You know, for example, my first Brighton SEO talk, I did something on a website, migrations, whatever best practices, whatever. It wasn’t super exciting. And then someone else did a counter to that. And I didn’t know it was a surprise at the day. I didn’t know the topic and it was literally opposite.
why you don’t need best practices to do a successful migration and that was straight before mine. was like shit but it benefited the audience because they are two different perspectives so even if you think I’ve got a really good idea but there are other talks put a spin on it if you’re still set on that idea if you don’t think you can differentiate it too much
Azeem Ahmad (25:20.738) Hahaha
Sukhjinder Singh (25:37.422) Then come up with something else and rely on your list of core topics that you’re comfortable and experienced in. Just keep repeating the thing like a content audit or keyword research thing.
Azeem Ahmad (25:47.248) Yeah, no, absolutely. Couldn’t agree with you more. And you literally took the words out of my mouth. The only other thing that I would say is that no topic will ever be complete. Like technical SEO will never be finished, 100 % finished. It’s done. So there’s always something unique that you can add to it. So perfect. This has been absolutely fantastic. I’ve really, really enjoyed having you on the show.
Sukhjinder Singh (26:07.812) Yeah.
Azeem Ahmad (26:13.496) And I can’t believe we didn’t do it sooner. So apologies for that. That’s my fault. Before I let you go, though, it would be wrong of me not to give you the opportunity to share your contact details. How can people find you, follow you, connect with you? Where are you at?
Sukhjinder Singh (26:16.27) Yeah, ditto. now thanks for having me, I really appreciate
Sukhjinder Singh (26:30.136) Yeah, I’m also doing SEO on LinkedIn and Twitter and idoseo .co .uk is my freelancer website. So yeah, check out my cheesy pictures on there.
Azeem Ahmad (26:39.184) Share them with me and I’ll put them in the show notes but I’ve really really enjoyed talking to you today. Thank you so much for
giving you time and like I say all the time please do connect with him say thank you even if it’s just for giving up some of his time to share his wisdom and knowledge with you today especially if you’ve learned something please do go out of your way to say thanks and connect with this awesome legend. That about wraps up another episode of the show like I said at the start please do like, rate, share, subscribe, tell a friend to tell a friend and then tell them to tell somebody else and we will see you for the next episode. Peace.
Sukhjinder Singh (27:16.27) We’ll catch you guys soon. Cheers guys.
In this episode, I interview Bernard Huang about the importance of creating engaging SEO content. We discuss the rise of AI-generated content and its impact on traditional SEO strategies. We also dive into what the future of search holds. This episode is not to be missed if you’re in the SEO industry!
*As a reminder, you can now also get this podcast in video form, on both Spotify video, or YouTube.*
Listen/watch now, right above the subscribe button, or pick your favourite listening platform from this list:
Azeem Ahmad (00:01.172) Hello and welcome back to the Azeem Digital Asks All round Digital Marketing Podcast. I am super, super excited today to bring you my guest, absolute legend in the SEO game. Someone I was very, very fortunate I was, me, to share the stage with him at MozCon in Seattle earlier this year, but you’ve come here to listen, watch and learn from him. So this is the bit where I am going to show up. The last thing I’ll say is our topic of the episode, which I stupidly missed. That’s how excited I am to talk to him today. The topic of this episode is we’re going to talk about why SEO content must be engaging in the future. My friend, Vinod, welcome to the show.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (00:46.694) Azeem, thank you so much for having me and the warm welcomes. Like Azeem mentioned, we had the honor of sharing the stage at MozCon earlier this year. And I was blown away by Azeem’s ability to wow and engage the crowd by doing all kinds of acrobatics on stage. And that is a good natural segue into why we need
Azeem Ahmad (01:09.651) Ha ha ha!
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (01:15.886) make sure our content as being read by readers and searchers is engaging in that particular manner, right? Content needs to have some kind of oomph to actually be relevant and stay relevant, especially as we enter this era of AI -generated commodity crap that we all have been seeing flooding the ecosystem.
Azeem Ahmad (01:43.206) Absolutely. And before we dive into that, just want to say on recordings, we just spoke about it now off the recording, a special thanks for doing this. So by the time this episode goes out, hopefully all of these tech and IT issues where Microsoft basically shut down the world for what it seemed like, it’s caused you to get stuck in Boston. So I do appreciate you taking the time to do this for me and the listeners and viewers. So thank you. Anyway.
You mentioned about AI perfect place to start. We’ve been seeing a lot of stuff about AI overviews even very recently it started to come out in in the UK I’m seeing them for certain healthcare queries Just for those members of the audience who don’t quite know yet. What AI overviews are what do they mean at the top of the serps? What are they? What do they mean at the top of the serps for brands and SEOs?
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (02:38.439) Yeah, so quick backstory if you’ve been interested or looking at search, we’ve had a very turbulent couple years since chat GPT really took the world by storm and chat GPT, know, that magical artificial intelligence bot that you chat with that provides surprisingly good outputs for
any sorts of questions or prompts that you end up giving it is causing Google to have existential risk in that if searchers instead go to artificial intelligence and chatbots to get their questions answered, then what is the world that, you know, Google search actually plays for the end user? So you see Google
I would say trying a lot of different things. First, they called it search generative experience, which was a search labs like feature that they added to their search engine results. And what it would do is that it would summarize or paraphrase the top ranking Google results for any given query and attempt to answer the question that the searcher is looking for.
for any given search. From there, they since renamed it to AI Overviews, and AI Overviews are designed to sit on top of the search engine results page and give the answer to the question that somebody is searching for so that they don’t necessarily need to click on another results or do perform an additional search.
Azeem Ahmad (04:31.285) Perfect, love that. That’s a perfect explanation. And thank you very much for sharing it. I have my own opinions, but I’ll keep them to one side for now because we’re here to listen and learn from you. So how do you think that this, let’s say not so new feature will have an impact on the traditional SEL strategies?
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (04:58.102) Yeah, so I’ve been thinking about this extensively and I think that AI overviews are designed to change the search engine results page in a variety of different ways. the main like piece of the main like way that I think that it’s going to influence how searchers really approach their search is
I think the AI overview is going to answer the question from a pure like definitional sense in a lot of different queries that somebody might be searching for. So to give a more practical example, let’s say that you are interested in learning more about artificial intelligence and your first step in your journey to understanding more about this topic of artificial intelligence is
definitely perform the search artificial intelligence. In the past, what you would see is 10 blue links that all more or less kind of say, what is artificial intelligence and why it matters and how artificial intelligence works and all these different things. And you’d click into those search results to understand or learn more about the particular topic. But I think with the advent of
intelligence overviews, what you’re seeing is that Google is providing this top level definition of, you know, what is AI, why it matters, how it works. And by the time the user is then looking at the rest of the search engine results, you can imagine their state of mind has been shifted away from wanting to know, you know, the basics of what this topic is about. And, you know,
basics of why it matters, they’re going to want to know, you know, you think it matters and how, you know, that technology can be, you know, used for the specific use cases that, you know, it’s performing well for. And so I think, you know, long story short, the AI overview is going to answer the definitional and like high consensus answers that we all used to get from, you know, reading.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (07:24.578) the top one, two or three results. And what we’re going to start to see is that people need like wanting to consume content that’s, you know, more engaging and more relevant to their specific needs and, their specific research as they’re investigating, you know, the topic that they care about.
Azeem Ahmad (07:50.912) Yeah, absolutely. And I just think if I sidestep temporarily, I have what started off as deliberately instead of change my search behavior, so instead of searching on Google for my requirements, I’ve been starting to use Gemini, for example, just to see and compare the type of answers I’m getting as opposed to very definitional.
versus things like I think you’re kind of nodding on to like experience type content. So that’s kind of where I wanted to get to now, by the way, I just deliberately, sorry, I don’t deliberately, just without even thinking, I just started to use Gemini much, much more. Just because I want to try and get into that mindset of what search is like and how to understand it from a searcher’s perspective, because personal opinion, I think sometimes
marketers talk to marketers a lot and maybe we market to marketers too much and we forget about the actual end user at the end. That’s a story for another day. Anyway, back to experiences. That’s something, excuse me, that’s something that, you know, I’ve heard you speak about before and I think the audience would benefit from your perspective on what do you think Google’s guidance is on experience rich content?
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (09:10.574) Yeah, so I think Google is preparing itself for this world where you get your quick answer that is the artificial intelligence output at the top of the SERP and they’re thinking, how do we as a search engine continue to stay relevant to searchers in a world where search behavior
is shifting as a result of this AI world that we all live in. And I think that Google actually has a quality content problem. And I think that Google is guilty of causing this quality content problem for itself because of the way that the algorithm has traditionally worked.
Right? The algorithm traditionally was built on top of backlinks to start. Then they started really thinking about this idea of quality content from a knowledge graph or topic comprehensiveness standpoint. And the SEO world rallied around building out longer and longer content that had a higher likelihood of covering all of the relevant entities or subtopics that
a topic should be about to the point where anytime you start reading anything about, you know, most of the common topics that people are searching for, you end up with this like overly optimized like SEO experience, right? You know this when you type in like diabetes or artificial intelligence or even, you know, like top things to do in X city and they all follow this very traditional template.
Azeem Ahmad (11:00.032) in Peck City and they all
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (11:06.193) if you will, where it’s like, well, what is artificial intelligence? Why artificial intelligence matters? And the reasoning as to why all of this works is because Google’s algorithm has prioritized and even emphasized, right? That longer content, more comprehensive content is just better for the end user. Then Google kind of gets slapped in the face.
Azeem Ahmad (11:12.833) Hmm
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (11:34.503) with artificial intelligence and they’re forced to have this like wake up moment where they’re realizing that actually, you know, a lot of the searches that people are performing, they’re actually getting, you know, like unsatisfactory content experience. instead, you know, because in the past there was no alternative. You just had to deal with kind of crappy Google search results and you were like, yeah, okay. But now right, there’s this like,
X Factor which is GPT or Claude or Perplexity or you you can choose whichever artificial intelligence technology you want you want to and all of a sudden there is an alternative and I think you know Google is looking at that and say well that’s that’s a big problem because you know in the past people just had to come to us and they just had to accept that you know the content that you know we have is is the best because that’s just how it is.
So now, right, because people can turn to these different ecosystems, Google says, wow, okay, we have a big quality content problem. And, you know, what that is, is that people aren’t really trusting, you know, the content that we’re surfacing to the end user, because, you know, we cannot verify that the person who wrote it actually knows what they’re talking about. You know, we can’t, you know, confirm that, you know, the person, you know, actually traveled.
to the location that they’re writing about. And so you see Google, I think, take its first scramble to fix a lot of these quality content issues by really boosting user -generated content, Like Reddit, Quora, and these different discussion boards, because they look at that and they say, okay, well, that’s engaging, that’s relatable. These are people who have the firsthand experience.
that matters for this particular topic and we want more of that. But you know, they basically also at the same time, I think are scrambling under the hood and saying like, well, how do we, how do we get more of that? And the problem is that, you know, a lot of the SEO content world has been trained to say that that type of content, that firsthand perspective led unique, engaging original content,
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (13:57.855) is actually not rewarded in the SERP. And it has not been, right? It’s been the SEO best practice, the SEO, you know, templatized content that has been rewarded. And so I think Google is now scrambling and they’re saying, okay, well, we don’t have actually that many sources where people are producing high quality and firsthand experience content. So we have to like rely on, you know, Reddit and these UGC sites.
And meanwhile, Google, I think, has a lot of propaganda, which they call EEAT, page quality ratings, and these kinds of things. And they’re saying, hey, we want content that looks more like this. But at the end of the day, Google propaganda, I think, is many years ahead of Google execution. And so I think that’s kind of left the content creation community kind of like.
Azeem Ahmad (14:28.021) And we won.
Azeem Ahmad (14:36.354) Hmm.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (14:55.244) like miffed and confused, right? Cause they’re like, well, you’re saying you want this, but when I produce that I’m not getting any results. So I ended up reverting to, you know, producing this cookie cutter SEO content because it works. And, and I think that, you know, where we’re straddling, you know, both, both ecosystems right now. And I think people are confused, right? Like what does Google want? What do searchers want? And I think that there’s just a very
Azeem Ahmad (15:20.204) Hmm.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (15:24.937) very big like you know deficit quality engaging content on the internet and Google doesn’t really have much to work
Azeem Ahmad (15:25.126) very big deficit.
Azeem Ahmad (15:36.3) Yeah, no, absolutely. And your point on perspectives has led me to to my next question perfectly. So you’ve described it perfectly. But why do you think it’s important for brands to focus on that perspective led content? Now, if you’re working with a brand or a company, you’re sort of, let’s say, selling this idea to them. Why would you tell what would you tell them? Why is it important?
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (16:04.399) Yeah, I so I’ve been I’ve been having this thesis and I think this thesis I’m trying to build more evidence to confirm or deny it but I think increasingly Google’s algorithm is becoming a two set algorithm. Now let me describe what I mean by this two set algorithm. I think that Gemini which is Google’s version of chat GPT and
Azeem Ahmad (16:33.515) Mm.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (16:34.308) is being leveraged, I think, to produce the AI overview is one model. And then you have the rest of the search engine results page, which is going to be this other model. So in the past, when you optimize for Google, you’re really only optimizing for the 10 blue links and the search engine results page. By doing that, you know, obviously you got
traffic and your rankings and you know that produced revenue and leads for your business. I think that moving forward, what Google is doing is that it’s saying that a huge set of like queries are essentially not worthwhile to send any traffic to. And you know these as you know queries where featured snippets currently show up. Right? If I’m Googling
Azeem Ahmad (17:31.458) Hmm.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (17:32.793) how many legs does a dog have or how many feet in a meter, Google is just going to give me that exact response. You’re going to say, you know, like a dog has four legs and here’s your answer. Those queries have stopped producing traffic for everybody, you know, like many years ago. We know this if we say like blah, blah, definition, right? Google just whips out it’s Google dictionary and it says, here’s the, you know, here’s synonyms
you know, terrific or here’s the definition to X. And so I think what you have to realize as a brand is that a lot of the informational, you know, definitional like type queries that you may have gotten traffic for in the past are at significant risk for producing traffic no more. And that’s because right, Google’s artificial intelligence is going to sit on top of the start.
Azeem Ahmad (18:04.662) Mm.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (18:29.985) and answer those kinds of queries in a way that satisfies tons of users. And I think there’s one set of people who say, well, how do I train or be part of that training data to be part of the answer that Google gives in the AI overview and be one of the citations that Google is going to
give to the user. And I think that that’s one of the algorithms that I’m seeing happen in this two split algorithm. I think my main question there is that, does it even make sense to try to optimize to become the AI overview when the whole goal of the AI overview is literally to answer the searcher’s question with them performing no additional
And right, if you really think about it in that lens, it’s almost kind of foolish, to try to influence that particular, like be a part of that answer box, because the whole goal of that answer box is that the user finds what they need and they don’t click into your site or do anything. Okay, so if that’s like one algorithm, then we have to ask ourselves, you know, what’s the other algorithm?
Azeem Ahmad (19:30.06) Hmm, yeah.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (19:57.605) really trying to prioritize and look for. And that’s where, you know, this concept of perspectives and user engagement and unique content and information gain come in play, right? Google is saying, okay, if we’re going to answer the question that the user has at a surface level as quickly as possible, then, you know, we have to ask ourselves, what is the content that lives below the fold
Google wants to give users and users actually want to click into and therefore when they click into it, they’re visiting your website and that’s value add. And I think that that content is going to look, you know, very closely to what we know as, you know, what’s showing up on Reddit and Quora, right? And it’s this unique firsthand experience that is engaging. And so I think
Azeem Ahmad (20:37.442) Hmm.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (20:53.768) you know, that’s essentially the future that Google is setting up and they’re saying, okay, the content below needs to actually be unique, interesting, engaging, and you know, value add. And, but currently, again, we don’t, we don’t actually have that much of it. And so we’re relying on Reddit to fill that gap. And we’re using our propaganda to influence how we as contributors to the internet produce our content.
Azeem Ahmad (21:13.986) Hmm.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (21:21.809) And so hopefully in like a year or two years, Google could have more unique original content that lives below the fold that is perspective rich and really gives searchers something that they want to click into.
Azeem Ahmad (21:38.061) Yeah, I love that and no notes. That’s perfectly explained. You made me think though, and I’m sure the listeners and viewers might naturally arrive at this question themselves at this point in the show. I won’t give any specific example because I don’t want to deliberately lead you down a path, but where brands are in a space that’s, let’s say, quite crowded, they all offer the same service or product.
How can these brands create content that would meet this sort of new criteria from Google, but then also stand out from their competitors?
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (22:18.731) Yeah, you know, I think this is where I would like the first answer that comes to mind is really just first principles, marketing, right? And what I mean by that is that, if you were to think about your marketing in terms of trying to put your product or service in front
your ideal customer profile with the messaging and positioning that resonates with them. That’s exactly how I think search engine optimization should be shifted into the approach, right? So let’s say you’re Nike as an example, and you know that running shoes is a important product category for you to serve to your end user.
Well, you know, if you’re thinking about running shoes, you have these different personas of, you know, customers that you believe are your ideal customer profile. And this can be, you know, your soccer mom who is too busy, you know, living their identity, you know, as a parent, a working, you know, parent, a parent who has small children, you know, a loving, significant other.
and how does this soccer mom, what are her needs and her desires? And it’s probably that she wants functional shoe wear that can be worn on and off the practice. so her lifestyle is athletic because she needs to be performant at every stage in every phase of her life. And so if that is the case,
then you can start to imagine content pieces that match, you know, what the soccer mom might want to be purchasing could be things like, you know, great looking shoes for everyday wear. And that just happens to be, you know, like a running shoe that can fit that model or, you know, how to care for your everyday wear knowing that, you know, your life is kind of all over the place. And, you
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (24:36.459) when you start to think about content creation to mirror, right, your ideal customer profiles and the jobs, you know, that they have that they need to be done and the questions and problems that they’re thinking about, then you start to create content that, you know, kind of has this, this flavor of like, I know you and I understand that these are your problems. And, you know, here’s a content piece that I’ve written to answer that particular problem.
And I think that the world of content is increasingly becoming this very fractured and disjointed experience, right? And somebody who is the soccer mom who’s looking for shoes isn’t going necessarily to want to just Google best running shoes, right? They’re gonna be like, I want active shoe wear for an active lifestyle. And then if there’s a content piece, it’s just
20 of the best, you know, like everyday footwear for busy parents. They’re going to click on that and they’re to say, well, that seems way more relevant and engaging to me than just like best running shoes. And, you know, Google already has all this psychodemographic data on us as users of Google. And they’re going to start to say, OK, well, you know, you know, Anne is searching, why we would just give her that rather than a
Azeem Ahmad (25:40.098) Hmm.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (26:04.239) best running shoes. So I think if you’re a brand, you know, I think it starts to become how do you create content that is unique to your ideal customer profiles, where, you know, you’re answering questions that they have that are actually meaningful to the way that they’re researching and evaluating, you know, their options and, and their products and services.
Azeem Ahmad (26:30.338) Yeah, no, absolutely. And that example was perfect because you didn’t even know I literally performed that same search earlier today and I was served content. It’s like they knew what I was looking for. So I have a concern, which I didn’t Google, which is about the durability and length of life of running shoes. So I just performed a couple of Google searches on that happened upon.
couple of brands and the one that stayed with led with the strap line was something like long lasting shoes designed to run X amount of miles and immediately I’ve got the proof
and underneath it was like an actual human, not an AI, but their own experience with it, their own photo, holding the train and saying, I’ve covered X amount of miles, I’m sold, I’m gonna stay. That’s exactly, as you described it, just perfect. So thank you very much for sharing that. We are absolutely flying through this episode. I’ve got a couple more for you and then can let you get on your way and enjoy the rest of your day.
I would be a fool if we didn’t get this far and I didn’t give you the opportunity to share some examples of some maybe some of your own work that’s had some success in leveraging perspective led content. have any examples of those that you could share with us?
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (27:59.016) Yeah, I think that perspective -led content varies in mileage. I’ll just start with that asterisk as we get into it. I think that when we’re talking about more of the consumer -related searches, you’re starting to see a lot more perspective content start to enter the fold, right? These are things where it’s like saying how Google and
is going to die or should be eliminated. I mean, this was years ago where Google AMP, which is short for Accelerated Mobile Pages, right, this was an experiment that Google had where they gave publishers the ability to publish content onto Google servers. And by publishing content on the Google servers, you basically got an almost instantaneous delivery of your content to be served
whoever might want to consume the content. A lot of SEOs subscribe to this idea even though they may not necessarily be publishers because the whole idea was that you would decrease your page load time to close to zero, right? Since Google is serving the content, it would almost be immediate. The significant downside to doing this was multi -fold, but number one is extraordinarily complicated to actually
syndicate the content correctly to Google. And number two, the content was hosted by Google, right? And so the way that you would track the content would become this really weird way because you wouldn’t get the event to fire on your own servers because they would fire on Google servers. Long story short, it was kind of a really bad execution across the board by everybody in Google.
AMP decided to shut down, I think like a year or two ago. But leading up to it, if you Googled Google AMP, you would actually see content pieces showing up that is like Google AMP is dying or like should you do Google AMP? Like the short answer is no. like these or Google AMP is dead. Like don’t do Google AMP. And these results would show up on Google AMP because
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (30:21.128) And I think it’s because of the user engagement signal that Google has become so heavily dependent on. Google says, OK, we’re going to try this. And if a lot of people are clicking on it and finding what they’re looking for by not going back to Google and performing an additional search, Google just has to believe that whatever was on that page is actually good and satisfying the user, regardless
again, whatever is on that page. And so when Google started to really depend highly on user engagement signal was when you started to see this like this disintermediation of traditional SEO backlinks, keywords, just get wiped away. Because right at the end of the day, if you were say, you know, WebMD and you produce a mega piece of content with high authority and Google tried it and
it was just ultimately a very crappy experience, then Google would demote that in favor of, you know, a more perspective led and engaging piece of content that didn’t follow the traditional like SEO playbook. So yeah, I’ve been on kind of a, like a path to calling this out for I think like the last five years. Back then, you know, I’ve been calling it ranch style SEO.
which is just a play on skyscraper technique where if the skyscraper was a 5 ,000, 10 ,000 word article on the ultimate guide on, you know, running or whatever, you know, ranch style SEO was kind of saying that you should be as broad and kind of like, you know, little, little dose doses because that’s actually a better fit for the user, right? Instead of like, what is running, why running is important.
and have that be in one piece, you should take that and turn it into, you know, like 20 different pieces on, you know, like what is running, how to run, how to run as somebody who has never ran, how to run, you know, how to like level up your running if you’ve already been running for a little bit, right? Basically slicing it all up and presenting the user on these, these little bits. I think to start it kind of then like,
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (32:45.242) people called it, okay, like, you know, the topic cluster or like pursuing long tail keywords, or you’ve probably heard of this idea of zero search volume keywords. And I think all of these are all nods towards this model that Google has really pushed us into, which is user engagement centric, right? And so I think Google’s algorithm is heavily dependent on user engagement signal.
Azeem Ahmad (32:54.529) Mmm. Yeah.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (33:14.893) which is why this whole idea of perspective led content even works to begin with, right? If you can actually just produce a piece of content that is on the right perspective and it’s just more forward thinking. Yeah, there’s no reason why, you you can’t, you can’t rank. I wish I had more like live practical examples I could share with you from my own experience. We’re about to, you know, conduct a lot of tests.
Azeem Ahmad (33:40.356) Mm.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (33:44.44) across the board on this. But I think that, you know, the long story short of it is that for consumer driven searches, you’re already seeing it happen. If you Google, you know, something diet or, you know, this, you know, consumer related search, you’re going to see all these things that are like seven things I wish I knew before starting the keto diet or, you know, like, don’t do the Atkins diet, you know, like, there’s all these things that are already happening.
And consumer related searches also have the added advantage of having way more testing data that Google can rely on to reinforce user engagement signal in a unique and interesting way that B2B searches typically do not have as much of, right? Because they’re more niche, they’re more long tail, and there’s just less.
testing data that Google has. So they have to rely more on the traditional domain authority, topical authority models that have been how they’ve been approaching
Azeem Ahmad (34:51.971) Yeah.
Azeem Ahmad (34:56.89) Perfect. Two things. All I was going to say was, me, if you’re running tests, we absolutely must get you back on the show to talk about the outcomes of them. You’ve answered my last question on the show perfectly. So I’ve literally got one more question for you, but you speaking about testing. So before I ask you the question, I’ve been doing like an unofficial test. And by the time this episode comes out, I’d love to like do a sort of semi live pre -recorded one with you.
For me, like we were talking about running a lot, my smartwatch says I need to get more sleep in order to recover better. Now for me, I have no problem falling asleep. I just have a problem with the duration of it. So I start to Google how to get more sleep. The serps that I see all have information about how to fall asleep, which are inherently two different things. And I have seen that across
all the arrows under the sun, even on the surf itself.
If you, after this recording now, wherever in the world you are or when this comes out, just search how to get more sleep and then just have a scan and see if the results tell you about how to get more sleep or how to actually fall asleep and like stay asleep. Nothing to do with the duration at all. So we’ll do an unofficial test and in two weeks time when this comes out, we’ll see if the serps have improved. I can tell you for a fact now Gemini is awful at it. It will tell you about reducing screen time, et cetera, et cetera.
fall asleep it won’t tell you how to get long asleep anyway that’s my boring boring bit over the last question I want to ask you just to round out the show is if you could just sort of don your hat your wizard’s hat that you had on for Marscon if you didn’t see images of Marlon said you absolutely must because he was amazing now that AI is becoming much more prominent it’s everywhere
Azeem Ahmad (36:59.448) What do you think the future of searches now, anyway, it’s prominent, it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. In your opinion, what’s the future for us?
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (37:09.63) I think the future is fractured that’s the best simple message that I can tell you it’s recognizing that search is just one channel amongst many channels that people will choose to…
do research and get get information right. I think at the start of the internet there was Google search and there was social media and you know now there’s YouTube now there’s TikTok you know now there’s artificial intelligence and you know there’s there’s going to be I would say plenty more and the disintermediation of search is happening.
But all of this is normal, right? Just in the same way that in the past we used to get our news through newspaper or radio or television. I mean, you know, does anyone actually really get their news through radio these days? It’s probably some people, but it’s very, very low. And so I think that, you know, my message is that
Azeem Ahmad (38:24.42) Hmm.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (38:35.71) Fracture is happening, right? And I think that with the advent of artificial intelligence, I think we are seeing the biggest cannibalization of Google searches, and that has happened since Google search has launched. I think we’ve seen many cannibalizations where people will no longer search for finance symbols as much. They’ll just go to their stocks application.
They won’t really Google weather as much because they’ll just go to their weather application. They won’t really Google as much, you know, like product related things. They’ll just go to Amazon. They won’t really Google as much, you know, like how to or leisure related stuff. They might just go to YouTube. And so recognizing that the form of consumption of content is rapidly changing.
and kind of setting yourself up for a like thinking of content more as an orchestration rather than a singular channel by channel. so when you produce content, I think it’s increasingly important to think about what is the distribution channel for this content. And also, how do you slice and dice it in a way that makes it easy?
least shareable on TikTok or YouTube or email newsletter or X or LinkedIn or all of these different things. also being scraped by artificial intelligence so that your content’s used to train AI models. All of this is happening at record scale. And I would say you have to be prepared for a multi
Azeem Ahmad (40:09.227) Mmm.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (40:31.174) a multi -channel future and recognize that content formats are continuing to evolve. And I think that, you you should likely be very pro AI because I think the technology is game changing. And I do think that, you know, future generations may no longer search in the way that
grew up searching, think that search could just be going to perplexity or Gemini and asking them to do the search for us. And so, right, if that is the world that we’re going into, instead of kind of being cautious or poo -pooing on the new stuff, I think you gotta embrace it. And that’s to say that if…
you didn’t embrace TV or radio or the internet. You when all of these things happened, you lost quite a bit. And so I think that the future is multi -channel and we gotta just stay on top of our need to experiment and test different channels and different content formats.
Azeem Ahmad (41:49.447) Love that perfect. No, no, the future is multi -channel. Perfect way to to round out the episode. Thank you so much for giving up your time.
sharing your knowledge, wisdom and experience with the listeners and viewers. Just before I let you go again, I’ll be a fool if I didn’t give you the opportunity to share your details in terms of where people can find you, follow you, how can people connect with you and say thank you for sharing some really cool stuff today with us.
Bernard Huang (Clearscope) (42:21.646) Yeah, well I would say these days it seems like LinkedIn is where the party is at so you can find me at slash Bernard J Huang on LinkedIn. We also have a newsletter for clear scope. It’s clear scope .io slash newsletter and that’s to say that fact the multi -channel thing. Yeah, you know Twitter or
I think, you know, is kind of going through its moments. But ultimately, I think, you know, owning your own audience through email subscription is still the tried and true. And so I highly recommend that if you have not been building your own list and your own audience that is owned by you, that getting that started as quickly as possible is by far the best thing that you can do. Realizing that if you spend
A decade building a following on Twitter, that could be all taken away from you in the blink of an eye. having that kind of dependency on a singular channel, I think is really quite a big risk, especially as your company grows into a bigger and bigger brand.
Azeem Ahmad (43:37.586) Yeah, absolutely.
Amazing. Thank you. Thank you so much. I honestly can’t thank you enough when I come back to edit this I’m literally gonna be nodding away again furiously as I as I have been That about wraps up another great episode again a massive thank you to but I’ve been giving up his his time to to share His knowledge and wisdom with us. Remember the future of searches multi channel. So don’t forget that As always, please do like rate share and subscribe and if at
very least you could just go and connect with Bernard and say thank you so much for sharing some really really cool stuff with us. I’ve learnt a lot today and I’m sure you will too. That about wraps it up. Please do join us for the next episode and if you enjoyed it please do say thank you to Bernard and share it with your friends. a friend to tell a friend and then tell that friend to tell somebody else and we will see you on the next episode. Thank you very much. Bye.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. While most people are OK with this, you can opt-out if you wish. Cookie settingsACCEPT
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
