320 | Why Website Traffic No Longer Defines Brand Success with Rand Fishkin

0:00Troy Dean: Search has not changed nearly as much as you think it has because of AI. Google is still more than 100 times more used than any of the AI tools.

0:11Rand Fishkin: Rand Fishkin spent 17 years building one of the biggest names in SEO, Moz. Then he left it behind and started SparkToro, doing the audience research that tells you how people actually search and buy. His new book, Zero Click Marketing, tells you what happens to your brand when AI steals all of the clicks.

0:30Troy Dean: AI overviews are on almost half of all Google searches now. 59 % of searches were ending without a click. Now it is at 68%. But in a zero click world, where do we get traffic from organically?

0:45Rand Fishkin: Why do we need traffic? Today, traffic is a vanity metric.

0:54Rand Fishkin: Thank you for joining us today. I know you're a very, very busy man, very sought after. And I've been following your work for probably over 10 years now. So yeah, it's a privilege and an honor again to have a chat with you. Before we kind of get into the nitty gritty stuff, a lot of people sitting on the sidelines or listening in will look at seo and kind of think well um you know a lot has changed you know the the uh the zero click um numbers are are going up uh people are are kind of searching we're not getting the same traffic that we used to from uh the work that we used to put into our blog posts and and all of that um so so to those who are kind of just tippy-toeing around it or who used to be from the old school who you know put the hard yards in with their blog posts and just expect the traffic to come in give us your kind of 360 view on what has changed in the past uh three to four years and uh where things are heading now through through your lens sure yeah

2:09Troy Dean: um i will say just as a caveat uh i am not an seo professional and i haven't done seo since 2018 but I am obviously with, with our audience research data and clickstream panel data, um, a keen observer and, and researcher of lots of things around what I would call the universe of, you know, internet usage. And that of course includes search. So I think, uh, one thing that is very weird, perhaps that has misled a lot of people is that search has not changed nearly as much as you think it has because of AI. So there's a myth out there that ChatGPT and Claude and Perplexity and DeepSeek and Copilot mean that Google's market position is weakened and that more and more people are using these products instead of Google to get answers.

3:11Troy Dean: And very frankly, all the data at the macro level shows us that all the AI tool searches combined are not even close to Bing's market share of search. Nevermind Google. Google is still, you know, more than a hundred times more used than any of the AI tools, all of the AI tools combined. Wow. What has changed, what has absolutely changed is what, how Google answers questions. that is where AI has had a huge impact over the last three years. They've adopted these AI overviews and to a lesser extent, less impactful so far, AI mode. But AI overviews are on almost half of all Google searches now, Google search results.

4:00Troy Dean: And because of that, we have seen the fastest ever acceleration of the zero click phenomenon. So essentially, you know, when we looked at it in 2024, we saw that 59 % of searches were ending without a click. Now it is at 68%. That growth is much faster than, you know, any two-year period since Google started. so then uh and what's that trend suggesting to us then where where where are we really going if it's

4:35Rand Fishkin: if it's accelerating so fast yeah you know the the the idea of getting clicks and getting people to your website and getting them to your opt-in pages and getting them onto your email list um has changed and and it begs the question yeah where where in a zero click world where do we get traffic from organically through search why why do we need traffic this okay so if you're if you're a publisher and you monetize your business through cpm ads

5:14Troy Dean: you are up a creek. You basically have two options. Stephen, I don't know if you saw, I recently did a piece with Bloomberg in New York. And one of the other guests on the show that they did was the CEO of People, Inc. And the host did a really wonderful job of sort of letting that guest hoist himself on his own petard. Because essentially what the CEO of PeopleLink was asked about is like, hey, where's your revenue coming from? Like clicks are dying, sort of the end of search, the end of traffic referrals from social. Obviously AI tools are not sending any traffic out comparatively. Google is way down.

5:59Troy Dean: How is PeopleSurviving, right? People Inc. owns 400 popular media brands, right? Everything from like Good Housekeeping to Vogue to not Vogue, but a bunch of these, you know, traditional publications, you know, get hundreds of millions of visitors a year or used to. Yeah. And what he basically said after being like asked again and again was, yes, traffic is down. We're not able to monetize through advertising. The way we make our money and we've had record breaking quarters is we sell our content to AI tools to train their data on. And we make content that AI tools need for training data. Wow.

6:43Rand Fishkin: Okay.

6:44Troy Dean: If you think about it, it's not that dissimilar to what TikTok does with their creator fund. Okay. It's sort of like saying, hey, we make billions of dollars. We'll take a tiny little slice of that and we'll give it to you for creating the content. And it's sort of a, you know, it's a war of like who can bid the lowest for that, for that amount. So look, if you look at every other publisher, nearly every other publisher, they are all struggling. The New York times is a fantastic example here. The New York times is traffic has cratered. It is collapsed, but, but they are making more money than they've ever made.

7:23Troy Dean: And they do it with digital subscriptions to their games platform. 60 % of New York Times visitors and app users never visit anything except the games. The New York Times is a game subscription service with a vestigial archaic news arm. Wow.

7:44Rand Fishkin: I did not know that.

7:46Troy Dean: Yeah. So I think the way to think about traffic in the future is how do I build my business where traffic is not a KPI? It can be something you measure. Traffic can be helpful. But what you really care about are sales. You want to sell your B2B software. You want to sell your, you know, neckties. You want to sell your service, your consulting services. Like whatever product or service you've got, sales should be the ultimate goal, not traffic. And these two things in the zero click era are disconnected. It's like what we used to talk about. Like, Stephen, do you remember 10 years ago, you know, we'd all stand on stages and be like, you're whatever, your Facebook likes, that's a vanity metric.

8:27Troy Dean: you need to ignore that and focus on what really matters i remember that from a whiteboard session that you did yeah yeah totally right but today traffic is a vanity metric yeah like it's nice you know if you if you look at your traffic and you're like oh look traffic is going up how nice is that who cares like when when i look at dashboards across the industry millions of them right like all aggregated together you see something called that that marketers have started calling the alligator graph where traffic is going down, but impressions are going up and sales are going up. Essentially, your brand is getting more visibility than it ever has before on platforms you don't own or control, right?

9:13Troy Dean: Like those Google AI overviews are being seen by millions of people. Your brand is having an impact there. People aren't clicking anymore because they're getting the answer they want right from Google, right from Instagram, right from LinkedIn, right from Reddit, right from the YouTube video, right from the podcast, right from the webinar. If people are watching this and they're like, oh, you know, I like what Rand is saying, like I want to go check out SparkToro, whatever. Okay, that's fantastic. It's going to be a tiny little percentage of people who do that. Most people are going to be like, huh, I wonder what SparkToro does.

9:44Troy Dean: And then they're going to Google what is SparkToro. And then they're going to learn from Google's AI overview, what we do. our homepage is essentially what google says about us or depending on your market what instagram or reddit or facebook or linkedin or twitter or youtube says about you so that was that was a

10:03Rand Fishkin: long-winded answer but just trying to give you like full context no it's it's it's great and it really shifts the perspective and it's look it's hard for someone like me and and others listening to go from a world where your traffic was measurable because you could reverse engineer how many sales you made, how many people converted, how many people were in your funnel, etc. Now, it takes that tangibility away. Because if we think about impressions, which, of course, we're going to get more impressions, and impressions are easier, but it's a softer, slower burn. And if what you're saying is correct, then people will come to your site eventually, but these people will be more ready to buy.

10:54Rand Fishkin: Is that what you're saying?

10:55Troy Dean: Yeah, this is why conversion rates, right? If you look at some of the SaaS tools that, for example, ProfitWell, right, that track average conversion rates, all of those conversion rates are way higher. They're like double what they used to be, even more. is because people are learning about your brand and they're answering all their questions long before they get to your website. They're only on your website to transact and use the product. They don't need to go through your help section and read your blog and check out your FAQs. Here's the horrible thing about that statement though, Stephen, is just because they're not visiting those pages doesn't mean they don't need to exist.

11:41Troy Dean: the faq that you write is more important than ever because more people than ever will see and experience it they'll just experience it through an ai overview or an ai tool answer right it's like all of that all of that learning and process is compressed into different things like when when someone says hey what's the best um whatever calendar management tool for a small dental office calendly better have a page on their website about how they work for dental offices, even if no one ever visits it, because ChatGPT and Claude and Google and Gemini are all going to be crawling and needing that information to serve it up.

12:22Troy Dean: Otherwise, you know, somebody else is going to win.

12:25Rand Fishkin: So if we kind of step back a little bit, and I like to use analogies, Let's say that our website was this little farm that we had, and we had a little signpost outside directing people to our farm. And we owned the land, and we owned the ability to create the soil and help to germinate and to grow this up. Now, if we think of it, people aren't coming to our little farm anymore, but they are going to other farms. And we have the ability to go out there and to pot little plants to collect all of that traffic and kind of germinate them out there so that they're kind of when they're ready to pick the fruit, they come back to our little farm.

13:14Rand Fishkin: That was probably way too much agriculture. But do you? I see where you're going. I think, yeah, I think if I were making the analogy, I might modify it slightly and say like, if you were running a farm stand and it was off a highway, and so there's, you know,

13:35Troy Dean: millions of cars passing you by all the time. And they're like basically seeing your farm stand and whatever. And a small number, you know, a small percentage of those like pull in and some of them buy something from you. Great. then they build a new interstate the interstate freeway you know 10 miles away man the traffic is a lot lower but there's still a sign that says hey do you want to come to steven and rand's farm you know we've got whatever the best apples in the state

14:05Rand Fishkin: that's a much better analogy and now they're they're having to get off the highway right

14:10Troy Dean: they're having to get off the interstate and take the exit to come to us so they're more motivated Way down, but way more motivated. Exactly. We've got exactly the right buyers coming to us, but only if the messaging is in the right place at the right time with the message that resonates. That sign on the freeway is our marketing now.

14:33Rand Fishkin: So that's really helped me to understand search optimization through a different lens. And it does require that shift in mindset, especially if you've been in the trenches doing backlinks and all of that stuff for so long. So if we look at it through that lens and we accept the idea that search is happening everywhere now, you know, not just on us tinkering on our website, what can we do now to, you know, to help the algorithms? I don't even know if that's the right lens to help the market to see our brand and to form an opinion of our brand through concerted efforts that we don't own.

15:26Troy Dean: Yeah. Yeah, I think. So if you sort of think about this in the search context, and then let's talk about social as well, because I think these two are still the primary ones that we can talk about AI. Um, in the search context, your old goal was how do I create the most compelling snippet in Google and rank for all the right keywords so that someone who is searching for those keywords is likely to kick, click on my link. Like I want to, I want to be high up in the, you know, rank order, but I also need to have a compelling message that's going to drive that click. And now on 50 % of searches, your goal should not be how high can I rank and how can I draw the click?

16:11Your goal is how do I get into that overview?

16:14Troy Dean: How do I make sure the overview, the AI behind Google says the right things about my brand that are compelling that make people want to buy from me, right? How do I answer that question inside Google's snippet format to create demand or to drive preference. It's a different way of thinking about optimization. This is the same thing is true on social. If you think about the kind of social media marketing that like we did 12 years ago, 10 years ago, even as little as like five or six years ago, a lot of what I did was try to build a big following, then put a lot of links and like in my posts to, you know, hey, I'm gonna write a compelling blog post on our website, film a cool video, have a webinar series.

17:02Troy Dean: I'm going to have a free tool and I'm going to promote that on social with a link back to my site. So I'm essentially using the property of social to like get people to be aware of and come to my site where all the rest of the, you know, funnel process is happening. Now you bet you better tell that whole story, all of the story right on the social platform natively. When we do these tests all the time, right now for me, over the last six months, when I put up a post on LinkedIn with a link back to our website, like my blog usually, and then the same content that was in the blog post or the same video or whatever, natively on LinkedIn, I am getting 12 times the reach and engagement.

17:55Troy Dean: so do you want 12 times the people to see and engage with the content or do you want one 12th but the ability to get some traffic and and that that traffic share is not great right because linkedin god they hate links and this is true for threads it's true for twitter um it's true for facebook right the yeah the analogy is kind of the same right like instead of how do i get the link in the click it's how do i get the engagement and drive the awareness and get people to know about the brand and this is true in ai as well like ai is happy to cite links chat gpt has actually grown the share of answers that contain a citation but nobody's clicking like the

18:38Rand Fishkin: clicks are yeah and that's it like the the amount of work that needs to be done up front for for for all of that and hearing you talk then again about uh you know bringing people back and you have the same video it it just kind of reminds me of the level of detail that you used to go to but you're you're talking now uh through a different lens and and i i'm i'm a very practical thinker so i'm always so i'm always thinking in terms of okay so what's the activity now what's the, what's the, what's the 2020, what's the 2026 version of the blog post? Um, because yeah,

19:20Troy Dean: we're, I mean, to me, to me, the 2026 version of the blog post is probably still a blog post. Okay. But the distribution work is different. So if, for example, if I write a blog post, That blog post, the reasoning exists initially on our website is for the few hundred people who are going to click on it from their email because they're subscribed to get our blog updates. We have like maybe 20 ,000 people who are subscribed and a few hundred of them each time will click on the link. That blog post is then also used as the basis for a content piece, right? Like, hey, I have new research. Hey, we launched a new feature.

20:03Troy Dean: Uh, Hey, here's this, uh, important idea that you need to understand about, you know, audience research or the marketing world or, you know, whatever it is. And that content needs to be shrunk down to 300 characters for threads in Twitter. And it needs to be shrunk down to a video or an image or a series of a few slides that can go onto LinkedIn, right? A few slides actually works really well for me right now on LinkedIn. or sort of a viral image that like, oh man, this totally explains this whole concept. People love those. But it is completely different for one of my other companies, right? For Snack Bar Studio, Snack Bar Studio is making a video game, right?

20:49Troy Dean: It's an indie video game about cooking in a magical version of 1960s Italy. You know what no one does? Visit the website. Nobody gives two shits about the website, right? The only place they're ever going to end up is like the Steam page to get on the wish list. And so all of the marketing work that we're doing is like, hey, how do we create the most compelling announcement trailer? How do we take the iteration of the character in the game and the physics and show off the engine in 20 seconds on Instagram with a cool voiceover? Essentially, what we're doing is like marketing the product in the place people already pay attention.

21:28Troy Dean: and the format of this marketing is totally dependent on the type of business you are and where your audience where your audience goes like you know we're not creating linkedin slides for snack bar studio but yeah we sure are for spark toro right yeah so i mean it there's a lot

21:47Rand Fishkin: more groundwork now um you know if we think about the blog post as the home base um you know of the pillar content that used to exist? Because we used to do the same. We used to repurpose, but repurposing was, it's more important now because the repurposing is - Oh my God, it's everything. Yeah. It's absolutely -

22:12Troy Dean: I have a great example for you, Stephen. So like, this is a couple of months ago, three months ago, we published some research about the zero click search thing. I did a big study with similar web. This was in June. Oh, so only two months ago. And that research one is published on our blog. It doesn't rank in Google. Basically, a bunch of media and press that covered the research outranks us because they're on more powerful domains or whatever, you know, whatever it is. And that piece of research, I think, was visited maybe eight or 10 ,000 times on our website in the last couple of months. But I took three of the graphs that I made for that research, and I put them on Reddit's rdataisbeautiful, the subreddit, which is subscribed to by millions of people.

23:11Troy Dean: And it's in a lot of people's default home feeds. And there, It only got a couple hundred upvotes maybe, but it was seen 1.8 million times. Wow. So our research reached thousands of times more people because it was distributed in the right place. And those people, some of them ended up being journalists and reporters. One of them invited me to the Bloomberg show, right? Like, you know, all of this stuff happens because you do the right marketing in the right place at the right time with the right message. And then you reach the right people and you're essentially, you need to count on this amplification that comes from sources you don't own and control.

23:58Troy Dean: That's really the game now. It's very much like doing PR and marketing in the 20th century.

24:04Rand Fishkin: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And like that's, that's, it has complicated it massively. I mean, if we, if we, if we think about a, a simplified funnel, um, you know, uh, the blog posts and the website was the cornerstone of that. And if you put all your focus there, then distribution was kind of an afterthought. Um, you know, you would hope that Google just found you and brought you, served you up the traffic now we have to do the legwork we have to get out there we have to distribute um and the the people who do come back to our to our site we're hoping that they are a bit more qualified and and we're getting that exposure we're getting that awareness out there and people are looking without necessarily taking taking action so so um so yeah the the brand awareness is having an impact so what does what does this do to the likes of opt-ins and emails because email we've heard for so long is the core of your business you own the list nobody can take that list from you but what does this do to email lists in terms of the that being the the pillar of of what you aim to build yeah i

25:18Troy Dean: i still think of email as one of the core pillars of the business uh one of the most important channels that we've got for essentially anything we want to announce or promote. That email list is a superpower and I absolutely focus on continuing to build it. We basically have two, this is true for all my companies, we have like two things that we're always trying to do. One is revenue and the other is more people on the email list. And so some of our content, our content that really promotes the product is focused on the revenue side and our content that is thought leadership or, or, you know, descriptive or more creative or, um, more fun.

26:07Troy Dean: Um, all of that is to build the email list. And essentially that email list is like, Hey, if you're someone who really likes all the stuff you see from us, whether that's on LinkedIn or on Instagram or Facebook or Reddit or Twitter or YouTube. I think that's most of the channels that we distribute on. We haven't done TikTok yet, although I've started to see some B2B make their way to TikTok. Well, we'll do a ton of TikTok, obviously, for the video game. Then if you like that stuff, the next step is subscribe. yeah right it's like yeah the email list is the natural place to come if you if you're interested in this stuff and so that's how we you know that's what we do our webinars for our webinars focused on getting email signups amanda's podcast focused on getting emails right it's essentially like a it's that layer just before conversion at the bottom of the funnel right yeah and and look i

27:02Rand Fishkin: I mean, for anybody who is still kind of attached to blogs, Substack is probably the most translatable channel to the old school blog. Would you agree?

27:16Troy Dean: Yeah, I'm very disappointed that Substack has been successful. They're terrible, terrible people who unfortunately run a successful company. Oh, wow.

27:26Rand Fishkin: Okay.

27:27Troy Dean: um i mean yeah you don't have to look far to figure out they're like exterminate uh you know people of different colors that sounds reasonable let's have that content like anyway okay okay okay but uh they they have something that's quite unique which is which is uh a social network like power on top of an email layer. Yes. That being said, if you are someone who is worried that you're already building your home on rented land too much, I would be very cautious with Substack and I would think carefully. We host our own email for all of my businesses. I don't use Substack. I would consider using it as a distribution channel, but not as a home base.

28:15Troy Dean: I think it's quite dangerous.

28:15Rand Fishkin: So would that be kind of, you know, you post maybe half of the post and then relink or something like that. Or you post a snippet, like you have a snippet or a teaser of it.

28:30Troy Dean: Or you post the whole thing, but you have a like, hey, this came out a month ago on SparkToro. If you want to get it early, go to SparkToro. I do that with Medium, by the way, right? I republish on Medium. Yes, yes. Yeah, 100%.

28:45Rand Fishkin: said so so look if traffic isn't the goal now and we're speaking strategists uh listening in speaking with clients and and we use traffic as a metric to say okay well you know this if our traffic is going up then uh you know we're all headed in the right direction what should a brand report to the leadership now instead of traffic or what would be your go-to great great question

29:13Troy Dean: Yeah. So measurement is a huge problem. I am, I'm not telling people to no longer report on traffic. I think it is a fine sort of vanity metric among many in the funnel, right? It sits in the, probably in the mid tier layer. But if you think about what you're trying to do now, it's no longer attribution, it's measurement, right? And it's, and it's really test and measure like, hey, we've had a lot of success with a longer form video on YouTube. that has produced a bunch of subscribers there. It's driven spikes in sales that we can see whenever we post new videos. We get more visitors to the site.

29:53Troy Dean: We get more signups to our product. YouTube has been great for us. Next, should we invest in short form like YouTube Reels and Instagram? Should we do TikTok? Should we try and do the longer form content, video content and post that natively to LinkedIn? Let's do a bunch of tests, right? So we're going to like test all these new channels, or maybe you're going to test new content formats, whatever you're testing. I don't care what it is. Messaging, that's fine too. And then we're going to see how these metrics perform throughout the funnel. So at the top of the funnel, right, it's things like impressions and views across whatever social or, or sub stack or, or, um, you know, LinkedIn or whatever it is.

30:37Uh, it could be impressions on Google, like how many people, how many people saw our,

30:41Troy Dean: uh, you know, brand link to our website. And then the next layer down is sort of like that engagement layer. So how many, whatever on social, it might be follows for your website. It might be traffic and clicks right from, from Google. Uh, it might be things like, um, email subscribers. And then the next layer down might be things like branded search volume or searches for specifically our product. Or once they hopefully someday release the data about this, like how many people prompted AI tools and asked about us, you know, that kind of thing. And then at the very bottom is sales. And what you're doing is you're essentially saying, hey, when these other things went up, did we see a spike in a correlating spike in sales, a lift?

31:31Troy Dean: Did it take time? Was it like, hey, after three months of our new Instagram program, you can see that sales are slowly rising and it kind of sits behind this, which makes sense, right? Because it's like a long, if you have a long product cycle, long sales cycle. But this measurement, this world of building these correlation architectures to try and measure sort of top, middle, bottom of funnel, that is very different from attribution saying like, okay, how many people watch this Instagram video and then bought this product.

32:03Rand Fishkin: Yeah. Nope. Can't do that. It's pretty much thrown a grenade into the whole attribution for those building businesses and complex models on attribution and stuff like that. It's just that it's really kind of broken the whole wheel. And then when we think about AI as well, you know, we can't really trace an ai mentioned to a sale uh to to attribute it there and and if we kind of if we kind of stick on on the client now and and you know the the the brand leader asking questions in and around ai and ai's impact because you know they're asking for something that they don't understand themselves what are we seeing with with ai that we can actually influence when it comes to the the

32:57Troy Dean: activities and the actions that we do yeah i mean the the most influenceable thing or the most measurably influenceable thing right now is google right so the ai overviews which are also the biggest so that's nice but yeah i think it's very frustrating that you know there must be 700 VC backed, um, AI prompt tracking tools out there that are designed to tell you how you're doing in chat GPT. Um, I, I have some friends who run a company that I really like. We've done some research with them and published it. Um, I think they do as good a job as anyone out there. They're called gumshoe, gumshoe AI, and they track our brand like spark Toro, which, which is cool.

33:45Troy Dean: Like You can see we made ours public. So if you want to see what their product looks like, you can look for the SparkToro instance of Gumshoe. You can see all the stuff they track and how they do it and blah, blah, blah. And they've got a bunch of math behind it. It's pretty solid. Here's the problem. What if, Stephen, what if 90 % of responses that AI prompts give you, that AI tools give you, are personalized based on the history of everything you've said to them before? How the F are you going to track that? You know, I don't care if it's Gumshoe or SEMrush or HubSpot or anybody else. How in the world will they be able to get the same personalized response that a real human user would through their tracking?

34:35Troy Dean: Like it just, I don't think that's a possible thing to do in our current universe. Maybe there's some clickstream panel-like way, but it would be incredibly invasive, you know, to be able to capture sort of every response. In my mind, the only people who can do that are OpenAI and Claude themselves.

34:56Rand Fishkin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's it. Like it's becoming a black box. And like to really kind of step back a little, us as brand strategists, purist brand strategists, you know, we've been dealing with clients for many, many years now who challenge us on the ROI of branding. How can you prove to me that the work that you're doing will return and will give me a return on investment? And what is that return on investment?

35:26Troy Dean: And it's so difficult. Yeah. Can I flip the interview on you and ask you a question about this? Go ahead. Okay. So you're a brand strategist. You're working with all these brands. They challenge you. They force you to, as you said, attribute and prove to them that this marketing is working. Are they doing the same thing with visibility and AI? Or are they just like, make me number one in chat GPT?

35:50Rand Fishkin: That's it. They don't understand it. And that's really the, when somebody doesn't understand something, they want a metric that they can get clarity on to give them a sense of where am I in the scheme of things. Because when we use words and terminology and positioning and messaging, they don't want to know about it. They really don't. I have a problem. I want it solved. i'm going to choose your mechanism even though i don't really care about your mechanism to get me to where i'm going but really give me something that i can hang my hat on so that i know i'm moving forward and i think the whole seo world and the marketing world um you know in general has been dragged in to what we have known for quite a while the whole metrics roi conversation you know what I mean?

36:50Rand Fishkin: They've been dragged into it.

36:52Troy Dean: It's absolutely true. I think marketing today demands way more investment in services like yours than it does in classic SEO or classic social media marketing or classic content marketing. Like you look at the brands, you look at the companies who've been successful in the first quarter century of the internet. And there are this many that won because they rank number one in Google, or they had the biggest following on Facebook, or they, you know, had the most threads about them on Reddit. The brands that won, unfortunately or fortunately, they're the ones who do a lot of advertising. They're the ones who were at the Superbowl, you know, had the Superbowl ad.

37:42Troy Dean: They're the ones who do the big sponsorships. They're the ones who have great messaging. They're the ones who have great positioning, brand strategy and brand building, these soft skills that get derided and sort of treated as the redheaded stepchildren of the

38:00Rand Fishkin: boardroom. That's us. We're the redheaded stepchildren.

38:03Troy Dean: Yes. And that's the thing that won. In the first quarter century of this thing that supposedly is measurable and attributable, you're the ones who won and i it boggles my mind that like the the business world can't see that for what it is i look i was in seo the first 17 years of my career i built this company moz right all i did was stand on stage and be like look at these idiots buying super bowl ads well they're throwing their money away for one one hundredth the cost of that i can make you number one in google for all these different terms and you'll get so many clicks and you'll be able to prove the track and man it's embarrassing it is embarrassing to say that those super bowl advertisers those brands are still with us they're crushing it right like you can see their revenue in their public company data every quarter they're doing great that kind of marketing works it works the way it did in 1955 or 1925 or 2025.

39:05Like it hasn't stopped.

39:07Rand Fishkin: Yeah. Yeah. And that's it. And look, you know, it's, it's, um, there is a bit of blind faith, uh, that needs to, uh, be accepted now in the wider community. And it really, uh, like if, if you think about it, when we, because we're used to this as, as brand strategy purists to use analogies in understanding where we can so that our clients can understand it because ultimately that's what they're searching for they're searching for a way to understand it and i think as people we we go about our day i think karma is a very good way to kind of measure the the uh the the impact of brand because you you you go about your day and you do the right thing and you know if there there's no kind of reward on a daily basis to say well done you're you're doing good you're doing good but then over time it comes back to you and i think uh you know for for those building brand you know there is this this uh understanding that has to be had now of of look know who your audience is know where they are know where they're going know what is important to them in terms of their pain points and then find the best way to

40:28Troy Dean: speak to them about that um you are literally that is literally what is in the final chapter of of our new book like oh wow it's almost a quote that's incredible incredibly so we're 100 aligned on this i i will say you know you you sort of asked like what what is this metric like how do you even possibly measure that? And here's my only answer. Like the only reasonable way that you can at least have some measurement of that is brand can be measured by the number of people who go to Google and search for your brand. Generally speaking, if seasonally adjusted, that number is rising year over year.

41:09Troy Dean: Guess what? Like you are probably having success building the brand's awareness, building brand preference, building demand generation. That is one very reasonable way to measure it. And the second is conversion rate. So not traffic and not total conversions, but the conversion rate. Because in a world of shrinking traffic, if the rate of conversions is going up, it means that people who do land on your site have stronger preference they want to buy more than they previously did than previous visitors did and that means you're having brand success like telling the message and the story out in all these other places where your audience pays attention so those are like the only two ways i think you could reasonably say how do we measure the impact of brand marketing yeah yeah absolutely

42:00Rand Fishkin: i'm gonna throw it across to uh to the audience um to see if they have any questions at the moment But before I do, I'm going to ask the guys to put their hands up if they have a question. But just while they might be thinking about something, if you walked into a business now, and I know that you said you haven't done SEO for a good eight years now. But if you were to walk into a new business as you would have back then, what would be different about how you would approach it now? And what would be the first two, three things that you would do inside that brand new business to really set them on their way?

42:48Yeah.

42:49Troy Dean: So I really like before someone makes a marketing investment, especially small and medium businesses, a big part of my focus is asking them like, where does your audience pay attention in this space that you're trying to sell them something? And what are you great at? Like what's your, what's your, not just unique value proposition of your product, but what is unique and valuable about your marketing? Are you an absolutely great visual storyteller? Are you fantastic on camera and you really grasp the like, how to hook the algorithm with short form video? Are you amazing at one-to-one conversations?

43:31Troy Dean: Are you great on stages? Are you good at, you know, sort of shaking hands and making friends at events? You know, like, what is the thing? And then I look for the overlaps. Like, really, I'm trying to find the overlaps and say, oh, hey, you guys are, and this is still possible too. You're great at writing classic SEO style content like that. That really works for you. We're just going to transition that so that that content is what needs to appear in the AI overviews. And we're going to look for the keywords that you need to rank for that are producing those. and we're going to aim for that type of visibility as a way to generate brand interest.

44:11Troy Dean: There's a ton of zero-click marketing and other forms of search too. If you're a local business, Google Maps has been zero-click marketing for a decade and a half, right? Like nobody clicks on the website link from Google Maps.

44:25Rand Fishkin: They just go to the maps listing

44:26Troy Dean: and then they're like, okay, great. This dentist, the reviews look good. The office looks nice. The person has a friendly smile. I'm going there, you know? like yeah and so you're optimizing you're just optimizing for this this these different things right that the path along the path that you know your users are going to follow yeah yeah and it's

44:45Rand Fishkin: look at the end of the day that you know i suppose that is the compass really when you have a question related to brand and marketing it's where are your customers what are they doing what do they like how are they behaving what are they going to respond to um you know it's not complicated but we do like to complicate things don't we but um but but yeah that that is that definitely is the compass i'm not going to keep you any longer what can you tell us about what you're doing in 2027

45:17Troy Dean: um before we let you go yeah well let's see 2077 the the game is not too far away yeah that's going to be that's gonna be a big one um this october the book comes out zero click marketing so that will be okay beautiful yeah um big deal for amanda and i and yeah i think like a thousand people have already pre-ordered so that's quite exciting and we'll put that where where can we uh put the the link for anybody listening uh yeah there's a if you go to i think it's zero click marketing.co uh.co that's amanda's website that she's got set up for for the book and the podcast and all that kind of stuff.

45:55Troy Dean: And there's a book link right on the homepage. Um, yeah. And then next year, alert mouse is very likely to hire our first marketer. So Tyler, I will, uh, I'll be, I'll be thinking of you in that question. I think, I think it's probably going to be a demand gen generation person rather than a preference sort of focus person, but I suspect we'll do some combination of paid social content search uh those kinds of things we just need to we just need to get as well known as google alerts is and then be like hey we're also free and we're way better um and then uh yeah next year spark toro is uh doing a big launch this year and then we're going to be trying a bunch of pricing experiments over the next year so that's what well that that

46:48Rand Fishkin: that goes to show just how lucky we were to steal an hour of your time, Rand. We, we very much appreciate it. You are a very, very busy man. I'll definitely send out the link for zero click marketing and looking forward to everything that you're doing. And, and we will most definitely see you in the LinkedIn feed and pick up the

47:09Troy Dean: conversation with you there. Wonderful.

47:12Rand Fishkin: We really hope you enjoyed today's episode. Thanks so much for listening. if you want to learn more brand strategy techniques to level up your skills make sure you check out brandmasteracademy.com there's plenty of free resources and premium content for you to download and get you going if you enjoyed this content please be sure to give us an honest review on itunes stitcher or wherever you listened and make sure you tune in for the next episode of the brand master podcast