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.“
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Episode Transcript
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.