Future of SEO with AI: Rank #1 in Google (2024)

Taylor Wells (00:01.52)
Hey everyone, welcome to the GTM News Show. I got Greg here today. Hey, Greg.

Greg Brooks (00:06.57)
Hey, what's going on, Taylor? How are you?

Taylor Wells (00:08.7)
doing well, doing well, looking forward to our conversation. So a little context for the audience. Greg is actually a client of mine and he runs Search Tides, which is an SEO agency and a big topic that my client, other clients, and just in the world of go-to-market, B2B go-to-market is SEO, AI, and what's the future of it? And so I wanted to bring Greg on to kind of run us through what he's seen working today, what he anticipates working tomorrow.

and all the nitty gritty in between. So Greg, let's just jump right in. I'd love to hear from your perspective. A lot of people are like, with Google's recent updates and whatnot, they're saying things are changing rapidly. What do you see that's working right now and maybe over the next couple months? What do you see that's still working? What are some fundamentals that haven't changed?

Greg Brooks (01:00.758)
Yeah, it's a great question. I think like the best way to think about SEO and organic and all that stuff is to kind of look at where things have evolved from, and then you can get a better understanding of where search is going to move towards. And then we can kind of talk about what it looks like in the middle and in an ongoing capacity. So I think when the internet started out, it was all about how do you generate trust and authority?

in this sea of web pages and what Google determined was we can do it with links. So if you have one website virtually endorsing another one, that's going to be good. And so that led to this era of authority and trust and power really, where it's just like, hey, the more of this we have, the better. And over time, Google basically said what our main concern is, is making sure someone comes to a search results page and they get the answer that they're actually looking for.

because if they don't, then they won't come back. They'll go someplace else. And then the $100 billion of revenue that we make every year from Google Ads will go away. So that's a big problem. And so Google evolved and changed and basically said, how do we create a system that has the most certainty that the top results deserve to be there? And so it became more and more complex over time. And it went from that ability to kind of manipulate rankings to this era where you kind of just have to be

realistic and authentic with your approach. That kind of evolved us into the area of quote, writing for humans as opposed to writing for search engines. And I think the challenge that a lot of people have with that mentality is it's actually no longer about writing for humans. It's about writing for time constrained humans. So how can you say the things that you wanna say?

and do so in an efficient manner? How can you talk about the things that you can talk about and do so in a way that showcases your own expertise and your own experiences? Because with all the stuff happening with GPT models coming out and basically content creation being a button click away, our thesis is that the cost of creating good content is going to go to zero. And so if you look at it from Google's perspective,

Greg Brooks (03:24.874)
you have this sea of material that's about to exist on the internet, you still have to decide what is going to make one deserve to be at the top compared to another. And it's two things. The first thing is it's the same fundamentals that SEO has always been. It's about, yes, you need to have that authority and power and trust. You need to have links. You need to have good technicals on your website. You need to have the page of content. It needs to exist.

Your page needs to load in a reasonable time period. All of those foundational things that we think about SEO. You want your titles and meta descriptions, the very basic stuff. You need to have all of those things. In addition, you need to be speaking from a pathway that an AI can't. So an AI can't talk about its experiences because it doesn't have any. An AI is not an expert on a topic, it's just an aggregator. And there's a couple examples that we love to use, which I think translate pretty well.

If I go to the doctor, I get a prescription for something and I go to the pharmacy to pick it up, the pharmacist might say, hey, I know you got this prescription for this medicine, but there's this generic version. It's one-tenth of the cost. It does the same thing. You should get that. In that instance, the pharmacist is using their expertise to pull you, to basically dictate, hey, we have this recommendation for you. You might also go to the pharmacist and they might say, hey, I know you have this prescription.

Greg Brooks (04:51.65)
But every single time somebody comes through here and I fill them with this order, it doesn't work for them. And then I switched them to this other version and it works perfectly for them. You should get that. And in that instance, the pharmacist is using their experience and neither of those things exist inside the construct of an AI. And that is the pathway forward for people. So in terms of what's working now, are you a credible source?

Do you deserve, should you, are you qualified to be speaking on the topic? And it's not just about your credentials. Do you have a doctor or PhD next to your name? Yeah, that matters now, but it's gonna matter less in the coming months. If I was creating content today, and what we recommend to all of our clients is, how do you insert experience? How do you insert expertise into what you're doing? And how do you insert efficiency?

So I think the pathway to content in the past was really a lot about like, there's a certain amount of words we wanna get, there's a certain amount of keywords we wanna use, and all that stuff's totally fine. But now, like, if I read your article, your webpage, whatever it is, and it takes me two minutes to read it, that's not as valuable as the ability to get the same amount of information and result in 15 seconds. So we use this metric called value per word.

And that's kind of the ethos in terms of what's working today. There's a challenge because you still need to get that overall page length. You just need to do it through being valuable with every word that you say, with every sentence that you write, as opposed to repeating things, speaking verbosely and just getting to your word count.

Taylor Wells (06:38.164)
I love it. Thanks, Greg. A bunch of great takeaways there. And I'd love to dive a little bit deeper into, well, first, what I'm hearing is, and I see this on so many different forums I'm on LinkedIn where backlinks are dead, you know? And I'd just love to hear from your perspective, obviously, for now, you're saying that, you know, getting that credibility, getting that authority from other websites is super important. Is that what I'm hearing?

Greg Brooks (07:01.614)
Yeah, it's a good question. So we basically are part of various groups that do tons of crawling on the internet, crawling tens of millions of search results pages. And what that has enabled us to do is to deconstruct what an algorithm is actually consisting of. And all it actually consists of are these things called ranking factors. And there might be really, really basic ones, such as how many words are on a page, how many times certain keywords are being used.

And there might be really complex ones, like how frequently things are appearing in the source code, but they're not appearing in human readable format. And so you have this whole span of things. And then you have basically every search query that exists on the internet. And if you run enough of them, you scrape enough search results and you catalog enough web pages, you can get a hierarchy of ranking factors and you can kind of get an idea of what's important.

And sometimes some things are more important than another thing. So like in a local search, physical location is going to be way more important because it's way more likely that I'm looking for something that is relevant to my geographical location. Whereas in a national search, trust is going to be way more important and power is going to be way more important because there's a much wider pool of resources that can provide an answer or service or whatever it is. So links.

to this day are the number one ranking factor that we see in the data itself. And I would caveat that and say, it doesn't actually matter that we happen to see it number one or that others have it higher or lower. SEO is still the exact same component of factors that it's always been, which is, if you are not on page one of Google for a search term,

you're not getting any traffic. Google has no way to say this is a valuable page because it can't be like, oh yeah, this page gets clicked on all the time and nobody comes back to the search results after we click on it, so it must be good. Or this page gets clicked on and then everybody comes back afterwards and then clicks on something else, it must be bad. If you're not receiving traffic, how do you actually measure that? And the answer to that is the third party endorsements, what we would call links.

Greg Brooks (09:28.47)
The idea that links are dead, I think is, like everything else hyperbolic in terms of anything being alive or dead other than Schrodinger's cat. But ultimately, it's a piece of the puzzle that every search engine needs to be able to determine who gets to play. If you have good content and your website doesn't load slowly, how do you determine who to put higher?

You know, that's with links, that's with trust and authority. On the flip side, if everybody has a good link profile, how do you determine what to put first? Well, who's got the best content? Who's got the best technicals? And so all components of all SEO always will be intertwined like that. In the future, links will probably be even stronger than they are today because it'll be way easier to have good content.

When we're on GPT-7, you press a button, you actually get a good article. You trim a couple of things. Google already said, hey, we don't care if it's AI written or not. We just care about effectiveness. We just care about helpfulness, which is the right way to do it. If you're just trying to get the result. So all of these components of SEO will continue to be intertwined with each other. And, um, I think the idea that links are dead is something that's celebrated by a group of people and it's probably a large group of people.

who have a lot of difficulty acquiring links. And so it's easy to be like, hey, this is unimportant because I'm actually not very good at it. So sweet, I'll just pretend that it doesn't exist anymore. Whether it's the number one ranking factor that we're still seeing, whether it's important in a basket of how these concepts kind of work together, doesn't really make too big of a difference one way or the other. It's just how a search engine is structured to gather signals from the internet about what is important.

Taylor Wells (11:26.556)
Thanks for sharing. That's super interesting. I can see how in the future with, like you said at the beginning of our conversation, the cost of creating good content is going to go to zero. What are the other factors they're going to use? And also, I really appreciate what you said. I was even thinking about this. You know the hashtag TLDR, too long didn't read.

I was just thinking about that, especially in the world of TikTok, right? And short form content and how there is so much, like we're inundated with content, number one, how creating great content and creating effective content and I think perspective too. And I think about content creation in general, it's like what you said about the pharmacist, right? Having that perspective, sharing your perspective. And I think I was talking to my brother-in-law who's an engineer the other day about this idea

AI, at least now, doesn't have that perspective, number one. And then also doesn't have necessarily human emotion to play on, to pull on. And so how do we pull on our human experiences, human emotion, because as of right now, it definitely doesn't have anything close to that. And yeah, once again, bringing the humanity to it, like you mentioned earlier, and then our unique perspectives, because...

Uh, that is also, you know, how do you apply con, you know, con, uh, content to a context is really what differentiates anyone that's a thought leader or knowledgeable, right? Is it, they can apply context, excuse me, content to a context. Any other thoughts on content in general and like, um, how folks can, can either stand out or, you know, as they think about creating content, um, for blogs, obviously it has to be effective. It has to work.

even when they get to the page, right, when you think about like driving business decisions, like cool, you generated the traffic, but if the content doesn't serve the audience, then they're gonna click out and go somewhere else, right? But any other thoughts you have on generating and creating great content, how you guys all see it moving forward?

Greg Brooks (13:31.03)
Yeah, I do have some thoughts. I don't think any of my thoughts come with a TLDR version of them, so sorry about that. But like, if you wanna know, I look at virality. So what went viral on TikTok lately, and I know because it shows up on YouTube for me, because I guess I'm closer to a boomer that I watch videos on YouTube instead of TikTok, but.

Like everybody that one flight attendant who is like, here's seven ways to make sure that there's no cameras in your hotel rooms. And like that is both experience and it's both expertise and it is both coming from a genuine place of authority without this conventional badge that would indicate you're the authority. But actually the authority is coming because

you've been there, you've done that, you know everything about it, and you know, okay, well, I could go online and I could probably find 50 places to look for hidden cameras in a hotel room, but here's somebody who's probably being trained and they're, you know, by people who are incentivized to make sure that they're not being recorded, and they've, turns out flight attendants stay at hotels more than pretty much everybody else, unless somebody's just constantly on the road, and so they do know these things.

And so my, my general advice that exists quali qualitatively that exists outside of metrics, cause I have a lot of advice within metrics itself too, is basically to like write from the heart. You can't fake it. You can't pretend to be a subject matter expert and expect to get results. Um, because that is exactly what a GPT model is. A GPT model is, hi, I'm an aggregator of.

of information and like my processing is telling me that this stuff is appearing more frequently than these other things. And so predictively that's the next word that I should use. That's not expertise. That's not like being authentic. We think that we're in the age right now, what we're calling the influence era of SEO. And so you kind of had the conventional traditional era, which still exists. It's kind of like a triangle. So the basis of the triangle, you have.

Greg Brooks (15:52.078)
The traditional, you have the conventional, everything that everybody thinks about when they think about the foundations of SEO. It's the base of the triangle, because it's not going away. It's only getting more important over time. But it's just not the only thing that matters anymore. The influence era within the SEO realm, we would call it EAT, we would call it experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. I'm talking a lot about experience and expertise, because I see that as the bridge

to the future, which is like, ironically, we're gonna call it the human or the humanizing era of search where it's like so much comes from this AI realm that for certain purposes, that's exactly what we want as humans. Like sometimes I'm not here for a twist or an interpretation or an opinion or a viewpoint or a lens. I'm actually here for data and I'm here for facts.

And that's something that AI is fantastic at. And so over time, if you're creating content, number one, expect this trend to take place where like over time, yeah, AI dominated content for data-driven statistics, for informational queries should happen more and more. Human desire, therefore as a foil, will be much more meaningful and significant for kind of that human component of it.

So I think like who you are online in terms of an author, what's your body of work look like, what's your past look like? Are you active on social media? It sounds silly to say this, but like that, to me, stuff like that will absolutely become a ranking factor as Google. And I think it's probably time to stop seeing search engines just as Google and really start looking at them as this broader lens of ways that people turn to the internet.

to generate information and to get answers to questions or to get data. And when you think about it like that, there's an AI component to that and there's a human component to that. And where we go and what we do when we're looking for one or the other will be completely different and all part of the whole.

Taylor Wells (18:10.652)
So interesting, two things that came to mind. Number one was, I keep thinking of the left and right brain. Whereas AI is really good at the left brain stuff, right facts, logic, et cetera. Whereas the right brain, kind of what we're talking about as far as creativity, storytelling, all that fun stuff is something maybe we can tap into more and ultimately get better results, not only in the content, serving up the content and actually driving results on the page.

but also help feeding the algorithm content that stands out more. Any thoughts on, you mentioned just your footprint across the internet. Any ideas you have on or thoughts? It sounds like the authority piece, obviously, like backlinks are still important and they will be important in the future. What other places can people invest to make sure like, for me, right, like Taylor Wells, when somebody searches Taylor Wells, is it?

make sure like my LinkedIn is built out and I have a Wikipedia page and I have people referencing me on different websites. Like how do you see Google analyzing that and then increasing my ranking factors because of that?

Greg Brooks (19:22.946)
Yeah, it's a great question. I think it's gonna be split into a couple of different categories. So let's just talk right now about websites that will exist in their current form. And let's just talk about, I am looking for an answer from a website or from an interface that's gonna tell me information about a website, whatever it is. So.

So to me and to us at Search Tides, we look at this in one of two lenses. You can either have that authority or that expertise at a person level, or you can either have it at a website level. So if you are a really well-known publication in a certain area, like NerdWallet, NerdWallet or any other similar website has built up enough.

goodwill with the quality of their information over a high enough period of time where there's a signal to Google that says if something comes from NerdWallet, it's good quality. It doesn't mean that the person who's writing it needs to be the pinnacle of a finance writer of our times. Now if you have a finance website that's not NerdWallet, and that's what we would call an authorship.

Profile, it's not the right word, but it's a fine word to use. That's what we would basically call the totality of an authorship on a website. If you don't have that, now what's happening on an individual author level matters a lot more. And as you're writing, you want to be writing through that experience, you wanna be writing through that expertise and through that lens. That's why I say, just write from the heart. Don't try to fake it, don't try to be something that you're not. And I would discourage.

people from writing about things that they don't know about because, I mean, look, do whatever you want, you know? But I doubt that's gonna have results in the future because that's what's competing against AI content. And so it's like, okay, if you can't add anything additional to the table, now you're competing against a better directory and aggregator of information than you will ever be. Because how are you gonna learn about what you're gonna write about? You're gonna go do research. That's what GPT models are.

Greg Brooks (21:41.878)
But if you're talking from your own experience and your own expertise, you're adding that in. So all of that is just like qualitative. Now we can talk quantitatively as well because there's two things that really kind of come together. And this goes back to ranking factors, which is just like how well optimized is your page. And there's different levels to what this means.

A company like search sides is going to have proprietary tools that we use. That's like, Hey, we're using correlation modeling. We're going to get a level of precision across thousands and thousands of different factors, and it's going to be custom to the search query or the search topic. And then on the other side of it, you might use a tool like SEMrush and you might be like, Hey, SEMrush says I need to optimize this stuff on my website.

Or you might use a tool like if you go a little bit further along the curve, you might use like an onsite optimization tool like Surfer SEO or On-Page AI. And then you might be looking at more quantitative factors, which is stuff like keyword density, frequencies. Basically there's three different core elements. There's keywords and matchwords. So keywords are basically anything that you put into Google, that's the keyword. And then also anything that appears in bold.

in the description of the search results pages, those are called matchwords. So if I search for New York City lawyer, attorney is gonna show up in bold on the description, NYC is gonna show up in bold on the description, so that's called a matchword. So those are kinda like your exact, your exact things that you're talking about. And then there's this thing called LSIs, which stands for latent semantic indexing, and all that is is, hey, we grabbed the first 100 search results for a given query.

and we scanned all the language that they're using, and then we removed all the common language to, above, from, in order to, whatever it is, and then in theory what we have left is essentially vernacular that's relevant to this industry or to the sub-industry, and then how often are those types of words being used on the page by the top search results, and then you have the last concept called entities, which if you're using it on a page, an entity is just an officially recognized subtopic.

Greg Brooks (24:03.35)
within Google. So for example, if sports is an entity, then NFL would be an entity, or Premier League would be an entity, or the name of an athlete would be an entity inside of that league and so on and so forth. It usually has a Wikipedia page, it's usually got like a fancy search result or something like that. So those are your three kind of buckets that you can optimize from. And so there's tools online, you can just go look them up.

Greg Brooks (24:29.846)
Keywords are pretty obvious, LSI is pretty easy. You can go look at free tools for entities. So those are your three buckets of like, okay, this is what I need to optimize within. And then where, where do you do that on a page? And the way that you do that on a page is you do it everywhere. And so one of the biggest misconceptions is that a word is a word on a page because it appears on a page. But what we found with ranking factor analysis is that

There's a concept called content zones, which means that a navigation is a different zone than a sidebar is, which is a different zone than headers on the page, which are different zones than paragraphs, which are different zones than ordered lists, which are different zones than links. And so if you just think generally about those things, you're like, okay, now I have an understanding of the type of language that I wanna be using.

Greg Brooks (25:26.878)
And now I have an understanding of where I want to be using that type of language from. And then I want to have an understanding on top of that, of what I'm writing about from an expertise and from an experience perspective. Now you have a pretty good system. I'm going to add one more thing to the system, which is helpfulness.

Greg Brooks (25:48.17)
And helpfulness is kind of like all the rage these days. The last three major algorithm updates were a helpfulness base. So they were very content heavy. A lot of times Google puts out algorithm updates, which are like, this is a link based one, this is a content based one. And then we kind of just go, you know, uh, back and forth between those two. But in this instance, the last real three algorithm updates have all been around content helpfulness. And those basically are subcategories of topics.

you can go into chat GPT and you can paste your article in there and then say, Hey, what, like, what are the subtopics of this article? Like, what are the questions inside this article that are being answered? And if you can do that with yours, then you can do it with the top search results. Also, you could do it with the top three, the top five, the top 10. And all of a sudden you have an understanding of, from a helpfulness perspective.

what are the areas that these articles or pieces of content are writing about, and now you can get a rough outline. So you can now make a rough outline. You can add in your experience and your expertise to fill it in. You understand the types of quantifiable language that you wanna be using, and you understand where it's going to be. So that's like a pretty good model for creating a piece of content.

And then there's a level above that, which is like, okay, well, why am I writing about this topic versus another topic? Why am I writing about this, uh, article blog post, whatever it is. And so there's a couple of different answers. One of them might be, Hey, this is commercial. This is a page that I want people to go to, and I want them to take a specific action. It could be anything from I'm an e-commerce website. This is a product page. It could be all the way to, I have a service offering. I want somebody to sign up for kind of like bottom of funnel stuff. Um,

Other than that, I would typically recommend looking at things from a user journey perspective. So the better you know your personas, the better you know the pathway that they take, the more effectively you can say, what are the three or five aha moments that people have during this journey of deciding to purchase our product or engage with our service offerings. And that's kind of like the top of funnel and middle of funnel content that I would be making.

Greg Brooks (28:13.374)
And I would also be making it in that capacity because you can utilize it also as, you know, sales collateral, and you're basically enabling your sales force and your sales team to do that. So I think that's kind of a framework for how I would think about content currently and then keep in mind, like, it's all about the expertise. So you do need to have authorship signals. You do need to say, Hey, this is who I am. I exist. Here's my little round bubble with my face in it.

here's my link to my socials and stuff like that. But to answer your question that I'm now realizing you actually did ask 10 minutes ago, the answer is do more, just keep doing it. To us, the future of the internet is at the individual level. I think that like influencers are on the rise in terms of quality, in terms of stuff like e-learning, in terms of stuff like value-driven and thought leadership.

Greg Brooks (29:12.126)
I think influencers are on the fall in terms of like, here's this lavish life that I live. I think like those folks are on the out, the other folks are on the in. I think that celebrities are on the out. I think that influencers are on the in terms of replacing celebrities. And so if you think about those things, okay, now you're a search engine. How do you organize all this stuff? And so a lot of factors are going to be, well, if I'm...

Greg Brooks (29:40.406)
the most famous person in the world and I have a website that I put out there and I make this amazing piece of content, am I gonna get any traffic from Google? The answer is no, you're not, because you don't have any links. You don't have any endorsements from other websites. But if you do that blocking and tackling and you do those basics, will you see a faster result? Will you see a better result? Will future algorithm updates put you in a better position than where you were?

And also, will you overtake the other websites when all things are equal? Yeah, absolutely. And that's the future. Ultimately, SEO is zero sum. For you to win, everybody else has to lose and everybody else has to notice and then everybody else has to come after you and then you have to still beat them. So the only way to win in that scenario is to have a better understanding of what the future is gonna look like and then combine.

Greg Brooks (30:37.366)
this idea of what are the short-term things that we can do today, which in SEO look identical to what they did three years ago. They looked identical to what they did two years ago. There's a little bit in terms of authorship that's different. There's a little bit in terms of helpfulness that's different. So how you're executing things are different, but the fundamentals are the same. In the future, you know, I just kind of laid out what we think the case for everything is going is. But again, that will be on top of everything else. There is, there is.

Greg Brooks (31:07.19)
There is no line cutting and corner cutting in a search engine's algorithm because the worst possible thing that a search engine can give you, whether it's Chat GPT, whether it's Google, is an answer that is wrong or an answer that you are not satisfied with. And so then flip that on its head, these programs, these algorithms, they should be as certain as possible that this is the best.

answer to give. And that's why the winners, the top ranking factor individually is links. The next four ranking factors are number of factors used, which basically means like the more good stuff you're doing, the better your overall result will be because you'll have a much more complete body of work. And so in SEO, the real

The real way to win is to number one, understand that. Number two, be able to actually create strategy around each bucket. And then number three, always have a data-driven approach that allows you to see as far out into the future as you can, because otherwise you're just reactive. And you're dead if you're reactive.

Taylor Wells (32:22.26)
Hmm. Thanks for sharing Greg, that's awesome. I think a couple takeaways. First, obviously the data driven, really appreciate that and even looking at all the different factors and I think that's what's really unique with what I've seen. I'm not an SEO expert but I've seen working with you all and seeing the results you've gotten for your clients is pretty cool looking at what's actually working and not working and how are folks getting ranked, et cetera. And then another thing too I think about like the age of the influencer or

or whatnot is really the, it's like switching in my mind, even on this podcast, I'm trying to do differently, is like practitioners, it's like the age of the practitioner, right, in some ways, where people are tired of like this, even like you listen to a podcast, and it's always like the people that are famous that have the most followers, they're so disconnected from the day to day. And so like with even with this like show, like everyone I bring on, I'm like they, if they're talking about something, they did it yesterday.

Taylor Wells (33:19.132)
or they're doing it tomorrow and they're in the trenches. And I think from a content standpoint, and what people want is there's plenty of people out there that have really generic, they were successful 10 years ago or whatever. And, but the people that stand out are the folks that are actually, I think in the trenches, our practitioners have that perspective, not from 10 years ago, but from like yesterday, right? And, or today, right? And so,

really powerful. We have like two more questions before we wrap up here. I wanted to talk about first any thoughts on the, I forget what it's called, but how Google presents AI-generated content inside the search. Any thoughts on that? And I forget what that's called. S-E-G. Yep, thank you.

Greg Brooks (34:03.126)
Yeah, SGE basically. And so, okay, so Google over time has always tried to keep the searcher remaining on Google. And so a bunch of years ago, it was just search results. And it was just organic results. And then local results started to come out.

And now you could click in to Google My Business. You can learn more about all these businesses. By the way, you're still on Google. And then these things called Rich Snippets came out. It used to be called Position Zero. It was basically an organic result that was in a box. And most of the time it was a paragraph. Sometimes it was a table. Sometimes it was a list. And that was like the result to the query without going to another page and actually just being on there. And then...

The next iteration of that was a thing called people also ask, which was I type in a query, I'd see a result for it. And then all of a sudden I'd see these five questions. I'd said, hey, by the way, other people ask these sorts of questions too. And I could click into each one of them. And if I fell into the trap of clicking on one of them, then like 13 other ones would pop up and it'd be like, ha ha, now you can only see questions with answers right here on Google. So Google's always taken this perspective of how do we...

get someone to stay on our site and to get more impressions on our site. And I think with SGE, it's the same thing. It's basically like, hey, we are looking to figure out a way to get responses in here so that the person who's looking for them can just stay on here. There's a change now. Like each of those has been, each of those has had.

Unforeseen results. So the local stuff like Google My Business became more important than the organic search results. Position zero, the rich snippet, you got more traffic than the number one search result did. People also ask questions. If you're the answer, you're getting clicks on like 0.83% of all queries. So people also ask is crazy because for one query, you could be the number one search result for that.

Greg Brooks (36:24.914)
And therefore you can show up as a question in thousands of other search queries and some of them might have an amazing amount of traffic. So if you could imagine you're getting from that one search term, you're getting, let's just pretend a hundred visitors a month with all the other queries in there. You might be getting 50,000 visitors a month. And so that's like a really disproportionate thing. So in terms of the theme.

of Google's changes over time to get people to stay on google.com. It's all been the same thing, which is best guess for Google to accomplish that goal and then huge readjustment in a different direction with something becoming way more valuable than other, whether it's a Google My Business, whether it's a People Also Ask, whether it's like making tables on a page, because that's going to get you into position zero more likely. And so you have these disproportionate things that, uh, will effectively. Generate.

a huge result and do so in a way that all capitalistic markets do, which is over time, there's fewer winners who win more and there's more losers who collectively lose more. So that's basically the same thing that's going to happen with SGE. I think in version one, I think there's going to be some twists to this one, but in version one, Google is going to put top organic rankings.

or top paid ads there. So for e-comm, I can see Google, basically, like I searched for a black t-shirt that looks good on podcasts. And here we are, thanks. I thought that was okay. And it's like, hey, here's five black t-shirts that look good on podcasts. And I haven't gone to any search results pages. And all of them are coming from Google Shopping, which is a paid ad.

Greg Brooks (38:19.254)
So I could see that happening tomorrow because that's a really easy win-win for Google to kind of incorporate that stuff. On the flip side, hey, I'm looking for an attorney in this area, Google would be silly to do anything other than pull the attorneys who are in the top for Google My Business, who are on the top for the organic search results, because they're already making an endorsement that they deserve to receive these impressions and this traffic and these eyeballs.

And just because the search results presented a different way, it doesn't change what is deserved essentially. So I think that one of the challenges that come with all these sorts of, uh, changes that get made is it's kind of like how adaptable, how adaptable is an SEO at a company, how adaptable is a, is a digital person at a company.

Greg Brooks (39:10.786)
How adaptable is the dev team at a company to kind of make changes in ways that are more well received by Google, which is ultimately what Google's goal is. Who does Google want to give a good search result to? Someone who's shown that they can be adaptive and flexible or somebody who is basically like this page is what it is, what it is. Obviously they want the former. It's the same thing with Search Console errors.

If you go into Google Search Console, you go into this thing and it's like, you have 50,000 errors on your site. The number of errors don't matter. It really, it doesn't actually matter. It could be five, it could be 50, it could be 5,000, whatever. What Google is looking for is, is that number going down over time? Because if it goes down over time, then that's more likely that there's somebody doing something to make those go down, and that makes it more likely that there's somebody on this website that cares.

about the user experience and that cares about the search result. And Google's like, well, that's probably a good indicator that they're going to try harder on their content and they're going to provide a better overall experience. And if their website's broken or slow, they're going to fix it. And so it's SEO to a lot of people. Like when you get to a high level and it's complex and it's super competitive, it is a game of inches and you need that quantitative component to it.

But I think one of the things that we've done a good job understanding and coming to terms with is like, I can give you a fantastic SEO strategy and, and talk in the general sense. And at the end of it, you should have a complete understanding what to do. And that should be able to get you pretty far. Then yeah, when you're going up against, when everybody else has also done that. Well, okay. Now it's like, well, now you need to beat a nine out of a 10. So now you need to be a 10 out of 10.

Greg Brooks (41:04.298)
But it's worth it because if you do that for this search term, you make millions extra a year. So it's just like, that's the nature of, that's the nature of, I think, this industry.

Taylor Wells (41:14.248)
Thanks for sharing, really cool. And I think it actually ties into my last question, which is, you know, folks are listening right now. First, maybe one audience would be folks that have not invested in SEO, right? It's not a business driver, but they want to, or they have aspirational, you know, to do that and to leverage Google and search in general. What advice do you have for them? And then the other audience would be folks that are like going from good to great. What advice would you have for them and really taking everything we talked about

once again trying to provide some context, right, to the folks going from zero to something and then going from good to great. What are your thoughts there?

Greg Brooks (41:51.906)
Good question. If you're at zero, there's probably a better marketing channel for you. There's probably, you probably have a different, you probably have a different type of area or channel that you can play in that's gonna get you a better short-term result, that's gonna allow you to tolerate the...

journey that's required to go from zero to great in SEO. And so typically, like if we're working with people and they're like, I know SEO is important, and then we take a look at their website, they don't really have any links to it, and their competitors have a ton of really good links, and they have 100 pages, and their competitors have 100,000 pages, that's not a great, like that's not how I would compete in that situation, so I try to figure out like.

There's another way that's gonna put more money in the bank in the shorter term. Um, if you're going from good to great, everything that we talked about. Should be able to take you from good to great because you have an understanding of a lot of this stuff and probably one of two things has happened. Number one, you've maybe done the same old for a little bit too long. Or number two, you've kind of reached.

the plateau of one's experience. So let's just say that you can take, I can win for a difficulty of a seven out of 10. Well, maybe you've won out of all of those. And now everything that's in front of you is an eight, nine or 10. And like we were just talking about, that's when you typically benefit from like expertise of people who just play in those trenches all day.

Um, so yeah, I, I think it's probably atypical to tell people, consider whether or not it makes sense for you to start if you're at the beginning of your journey, just because it's a slow velocity of money at the beginning of the journey, but it's the exact opposite at the end. You're like, I'm number five for everything. And if I can get to number three, I've just doubled my business. And so that's like,

Greg Brooks (44:15.926)
that therefore it's the exact opposite. That's the perfect opportunity. And if you haven't been able to get there, but you can get that close, then typically it's like, well, you don't have the same link profile. Well, do you have a link building program? Probably not. Well, maybe you don't have the precision that you need on your onsite with your correlation modeling. Well, are you doing that? Maybe you are, maybe you're not. Maybe you haven't cracked the code to helpfulness in terms of like...

value per word, maybe it's like good value per word, but maybe everybody else is doing a greater job. Well, like you need to look at that quantitatively and showcase the differences there. So those are typically the two areas.

Taylor Wells (44:54.772)
Super cool, Greg. Wow, awesome takeaways. I learned a lot. A couple things that stood out for me, obviously, be more human, use data, be adaptable. We're in this new age of influencers or slash practitioners and leveraging that authority across not only links, but also your overall footprint on the internet. And I think you ended it really great with just talking about, yeah, going from zero to something versus going from good to great.

That's really sound, I think, business wisdom in general, and especially marketing in general too, I think I see for like, especially the clients I work with, most folks are under 10 million in revenue, and doing SEO is like just a real uphill battle, whereas maybe doing other forms of demand gen, other forms of content marketing, other forms of go-to-market strategies can produce better results a lot faster.

So super great, Greg, awesome. Thanks so much for coming on. Any, how can folks connect with you online?

Greg Brooks (45:55.79)
I guess you could hit me up on LinkedIn. Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. You can connect with me there. Searchtides.com, you can go check out the website. You can get in touch with me there, Greg at Searchtides. Yeah, it was a pleasure coming on and chatting chat it up with you.

Taylor Wells (46:10.452)
Thanks, Greg. Super great for coming on. Really great ideas and excited to see where you're all gonna go and this whole crazy world of AI. So thanks again for coming on, everyone. Thanks for listening and we'll see you all next week.