SEO and the Evolution of Google with Jaimie Clark | builders podcast

0:00Focus on creating valuable content and experiences for people that are your target audiences. if you're satisfying people and they're like happy with the recommendation you gave them just like it is in real life they will come back to you for more advice

0:23today i speak with jamie clark about the evolution of google as a consumer product as you know google's the dominant way that consumers discover most brands and so we talk about what is most important for websites today and having them show up in Google and the search engine optimization game. In my weekly chat with Marty Beckerman, which is our first segment, he's the editor-in-chief of the B Newsletter. We discuss how Old Spice moved from grandpa's brand to a cool brand, the importance of physical fitness in business performance, and personal loyalty with a shout out to Jerry Maguire.

1:04Today, as always, our first segment is with the editor-in-chief of the Bee newsletter, Marty Beckerman. And you can find the Bee newsletter for free at business.com. Marty, I love it when your team covers brands that have reinvented themselves. And there's a brand that you cover in this week's newsletter that I really identify with now. I love the commercials, but I think back 20 years ago, it was a way different brand. Who are we talking about? We're talking about Old Spice, which has been around since 1937, and that was kind of part of its marketing problem in the early 2000s. It was grandpa's scent.

1:40They weren't modern. Their marketing was very old school, and they were getting killed by Axe Body Spray. At the time, Axe Body Spray had all these kind of sexy commercials, and young men were... I was a young man at the time. I will confess, I might have worn a little bit of Axe Body Spray to my eternal shame. Over or under the Drakkar Noir? I wasn't wearing cologne then because I was already dousing myself in a cloud of Axe body spray that reeked for miles in omnidirectional. Anyway, around this time, Old Spice was like, well, let's lean into our history instead of running away from it. Let's re-embrace the kind of classic masculinity thing.

2:25And they debuted their smell like a man man, smell like a man man campaign with ex-footballer Isaiah Mustafa on the horse, sales immediately doubled, like immediately doubled. They had the biggest, the most watched video on the internet that day. Social media traffic spiked 2 ,700%. And they brought back the classic slogan, if your grandfather hadn't worn it, you wouldn't exist. Which is funny. And I love Old Spice's current campaign. At least, I think it's its current campaign, which is Men Have Skin Too, which I think is really funny. And they're doing a great job. Speaking of great jobs, I also love the segment you do called Hollywood B-School, where you take lessons from a Hollywood movie and apply them based on a recent study.

3:19The one that you're doing is currently on Jerry Maguire, a beloved Tom Cruise, Renee Zelliger classic. Sure. In addition to probably being the most quoted movie of the 90s, I mean, just endless catchphrases from that movie, it has a business lesson, which is, in words from the movie, the key to this business is personal relationships, when Tom Cruise basically gets fired in the very beginning writing a manifesto about why do we need to make so much money? Why is this business? And he's kicked out. None of his clients follow him out the door except for Cuba Gooding Jr. because he has that relationship.

3:57Rod Tidwell. They've been a difficult client, but because Tom Cruise goes the extra mile for him and builds up that trust, it pays off for both of them. And when we look at actual data, a recent Salesforce study shows that 95 % of consumers are more likely to be loyal to a company that they trust. And tons of other statistics on that same theme. When people trust you, they stick with you through thick and thin. Well, there's also one that about people care above and beyond the products and services. They want a positive experience with the company. And that's what really drives loyalty. They just want the company to complete them.

4:38They just want to say, you complete me, company. They actually didn't just have them at hello. You've got to do more than that. You have to show them the money. Yes, that's where you're barely going with it. I was trying to tee you up for that. So do you work out, Marty? Never. Never? Really? A little. Casually. Casually. Well, that might explain your business performance. In our segment, The Organizational Psychologist Couch, our expert is talking about a new study that tracked 200 employees over 10 workdays and found that after working out, could be cardio, could be weights, just some physical activity.

5:18The next day, it showed cognitive benefits. They felt more creative. They were more in the zone. So it's not just the day you work out. It's the next day you're still feeling the effects. So our organizational psychologist is giving people tips to get into a routine and is stressing that you don't want to give up right away. It's a marathon, not a sprint. A lot of people try to see results the first week. That's not going to happen, but you just have to do a little bit at a time and stick with it. And before long, you'll be doing 30 pull-ups at a time like me. Right on.

6:03All right, we're talking about Google today with Jamie Clark. Jamie, how are you? I'm doing great. How are you? Good. Thanks for being on. So we're talking, I guess, at a higher level, the evolution of how people get information and then the evolution of how Google has evolved as a product. And we're talking mostly today about the organic part of Google, organic defined as non-paid advertisements. So the quote-unquote free listings that you see when you search for something on Google. And the reason why I wanted to talk today is about the subject of search engine optimization or SEO. So if it's true that for most businesses that a primary or really important source of new customers will be through discovery through Google, then where you rank like where your website shows up when someone's searching for your service could be worth millions of dollars to you to your business so super important and that's really what seo is designed to do designed to help websites rank better um so we're gonna talk about that today and i wanted to start out by asking you jamie do you remember the first time you used Google as opposed to like a different, um, a different search engine or the yellow pages?

7:27So this is a great question. And embarrassingly, I don't remember the first instance, but I do remember the timing in my life when I started to use it more and more. Um, it was definitely in college. I was living in California, primarily directions, maps. I remember Googling that, printing them out and doing some initial research online related to anything that I was doing for school. So whether it was writing a paper, instead of going to the library solely or the encyclopedia, that was the way that I would start to play around was finding information on the internet. Yeah, I'm a little older than you.

8:21And I remember the first time I used Google, it was an alternative to what I had been using, which was I think was Yahoo. And I was amazed at how good the results were. At that time, the other search engines like Yahoo were incredibly spammy. Like if you search for something online like auto parts, the website that showed up, number one, would be whatever website had the keyword auto parts in it more than any other page. It was all kind of based on who used the keyword the most. That was really the first time that people tried to like, quote unquote, game a search engine that I can remember. And what Google did was really interesting, which is it looked at the website websites linking to each page about a topic and ranking it based on how other websites voted, which was really, really interesting at the time.

9:21Yeah, I think the part where they built their algorithm or the backbone on links and authority or votes by way of links is just how it started and definitely has gotten stronger and stronger is not necessarily going away, but maybe a little bit has gotten us into the mess we see today. Yeah, yeah, you're right. Because once a business understands if votes for my website are important, you might shift your thinking into how do I get more votes? How do I get more sites to link to me rather than rather than thinking through how can I convey how can my website convey my products or services better because you might start focusing on on just how do I kind of game that system and so in the in the early days I guess once once people figured out that's how Google worked and Google became the the dominant way that people search for information a whole industry developed around, around how do I get more links to my website, whether or not they're truly earned or not.

10:32Do you remember some of those early, early ways where, where people would try to spam Google and remember any tactics? And fun fact, my first SEO job was at an agency and I was a link builder. So literally spent more than 40 hours a week doing things like scanning directory websites, submitting directory submissions, all of these aggregators, bookmarking tools. Remember Dig? There was literally a strategy for companies that we would employ to just get more bookmark points. So it was definitely looking back, it was so easy. You just had to employ those tactics and you could be on top of search results and put your keywords in your title tag and you were good to go.

11:28Yeah. And so, so there was this formula, you know, whether it's 15 years ago, 10 years ago, whatever, that would enable you to get more traffic from Google. And so Google responded. One way that they responded was to try to see if there was a pattern of building links that was unnatural or links that appeared fake or things like that to sort of penalize websites for trying to violate the spirit of what Google was trying to solve for. Yeah, I think over time, the job of SEOs at the core has always been to reverse engineer what's working for Google and pass that information either to a site they're consulting for, like the agency side or a site you're working on.

12:29Again, with the intention of just helping people be findable on the new Internet, if you will. But I think Google has had to accelerate the way the algorithm is formulated, evolves all against the machine learning tactics that they always have been using. But they need to go faster than the people who are figuring out how to game it. And that's, I think, where some of this has gotten messy more recently. That's true. It's really hard. I mean, oftentimes, criticism is pointed at Google. We'll talk a little bit about that. But it's also the industry that's trying to, I guess, gamify Google's algorithm.

13:20That's maybe the bigger problem. And let me segue that into Google's come under fire recently for its traditional listings, its organic listings as being unhelpful or spammy. And what do you think is is fair about this criticism? And what do you think is unfair? And maybe at a higher level, what are what are people actually complaining about? Yeah, so I think if I could put it in a nutshell, people are really complaining about the quality and relevance of Google search results. I think like particularly the point of contention, if you will, is the mismatch in what Google says they will reward and what is actually ranking.

14:04So I think if I had to step back and look at, honestly, like what's fair about the criticism, probably the predominance of this SEO optimized content. The prevalence of the spammy content as well is a very real thing. And third, I would say the increase in ads and the sponsored listings that are showing as well. Um, I think the good example that, you know, everyone in the industry has passed around is that House Fresh website that published the article earlier this month, which is, for those who don't know, a very small website dedicated to testing, reviewing air purifiers and dehumidifiers. um so again it's like the promise of the internet is that someone who's obsessed with air purifiers should be able to start a website build a business around their obsession for air purifiers but it's simply just like not how it's playing out because these small passionate outlets are getting somewhat steamrolled by the larger, more spammy operations out there.

15:23We definitely have questionable experience and expertise in these very niche topics. But by way of the algorithms design today, or pre-March update, if you will, allowed them to ride on domain authority to get a foot in the game ahead of these smaller websites that may not have by the numbers as much domain authority. Yeah, and let's define a couple of these terms. So when we talk about domain authority, this isn't a Google metric. It's kind of an industry metric that attempts to say how important or influential a website is based on the number of other websites that link to it. And so the number one website's probably Facebook, and number two is Google, and number three is Microsoft and whatever.

16:22And things are ranked all from like one to 10 million. And the idea is that, let's say the New York Times, the New York Times publishes an article about, about dehumidifiers and reviews a couple of dehumidifiers because the New York Times is an important website. It's seeming to rank higher and more quickly than a website that might have devoted 10 or 20 years only on the subject of dehumidifiers and has the most maybe comprehensive information on it. By virtue of that domain authority sort of outranking the other factors that might contribute to where someone shows up on the site. Yeah, so it's a really interesting thing.

17:14And I think Google, for those that don't know, Google is changing how it ranks things every day, presumably. But every three or four months, they announce that that they've dramatically changed their algorithm in some way and they say why they've done it and they um they say what they're trying to solve for so it's like it almost advice for webmasters i guess that's an old term right but advice for people that run run websites about what to do so they've had several major updates in the last year including one that's being rolled out right now while we're talking. What's Google trying to solve for?

17:59What's the spirit behind their latest update? So I think it's important to say what might be unfair about the criticism is probably the complex nature of algorithms. So I think the company is getting criticized for not always getting this right and not evolving fast enough, but these core updates generally are meant to course correct and better solve for that. Because again, they have to index and rank all of the information on the internet, which is billions and billions of pages. So what are they trying to do with this specific core update that rolled out earlier this month? I would bring it down to their trying to better live up to their promise to deliver the most relevant and reliable results.

19:01More logistically, the difference between this core update and previous ones or within this world of the helpful content updates that they've had over the past year and a half, roughly. This helpful content system was operating as a separate system alongside Google's algorithms, and it was producing this site-wide signal to identify content value. But this update no longer keeps that as a separate entity. Um, so this is a more like multifaceted and nuanced approach where the variety of signals and systems come together, um, at the page level versus site level to determine how helpful a page is or is not.

19:52Um, and this apparently will allow Google to more accurately assess the quality and relevance of one web page across the web against other web pages, independent of the heavy weight of the domain ranking. That makes sense. Yeah, so that does make sense. So if previously, Google's main focus was how important the website is, or how important a page is, based on how many links come to it, is trying to use other factors to determine a website's importance and relevance and those those things might be having a comprehensive um library of information about a subject so in the dehumidifier example instead of just having one page about it you might have 20 or 30 or 40 pages about it covering all aspects of that topic um it you you might prove to readers in some way that you've tested these things, you know, like there's proof that you've run these things in your house.

21:02You've tested the humidity before and after you have pictures of it. You have videos of it. You know, when you, when you let, let's say site statistics, are you showing where these stats come from at, et cetera. So those are the types of things that that Google saying, hey like those are important to us and now website publishers are saying okay um i've i've heard that and so what do i what do i do how do i prove that and that's sort of where the where the industry is going google also um has been really proactive about a deadline they say is happening on may 5th which pertains to a certain type of quote-unquote spam that they call domain ranking abuse.

21:51Can you describe what that is? Yes. So while Google's calling it domain ranking abuse, or I think they worded it as like site reputation abuse, SEOs in the industry for years have been calling it parasite SEO. Literally what it means is having these like third party websites partner or a relationship with a more authoritative domain to host their content, usually in the form of sponsored content or advertising, but they will write that in very, very small letters that is hard to detect on the more authoritative domain to piggyback on the ranking power of those larger domains. From the large publisher perspective, what's in it for them?

22:44Usually these really relationships are forged because they're looking to diversify revenue streams. They maybe don't want to invest in creating the sponsored content themselves. So it's almost like a domain leasing type of concept where it seems to be a win-win for both sides because more visibility was gained for the third party. And the first party, if you will, gets a rev share, you know, some degree without having to do much, but publish someone else's content on their website. Yeah. So let's say there's a bit, there's a big website, Wall Street Journal, Yahoo, doesn't matter what Microsoft doesn't matter which one it is.

23:33And, and, and they might say, okay, we don't have any content about coupons, but coupons can be a lucrative space why don't we just lease out this domain to a coupon site or to a coupon section and uh and that now we'll have yahoo coupons or wall street journal coupons and and just start ranking really high in the in the space or in in the results for coupon searches and i guess the big question that the that google's grappling with is is that is that fair or not

24:09do you know like how important is it the fact that it's yahoo how important should that mean when i'm deciding where where my coupon content should rank in light of the the fact they might not have the experience or the comprehensive content or whatever about coupons so it's a really really hard it's really hard problem and i'm kind of fascinated to see how google thinks about dealing with that on May 5th. It's also kind of weird that they've given a deadline. Like I kind of remember in the past, you know, there were that sites were generally like manually penalized for things. But that does, I don't think, does that happen anymore?

24:50I don't even know. So you can get manual action alerts for this spam update as well pre-May 5th. I think this is Google's way of trying to like play nice and give, give these larger sites a chance to course correct in some way. Probably some relationship quality control going on in the background because they've never really said we're going to have this huge spam update start to roll out. And the deadline to get your act together is a couple months from now. So yes, they do still send manual action alerts from what I've been reading across mostly X previously Twitter. Some sites are just like declining overnight and then get the alert and search console.

25:51So I think it's going to be really hard to recover. and it'll be interesting to see how many of these, I hate to say it's just the larger publishers that are doing it, how many of them do decide to take this seriously and to be transparent. They can keep the coupon section and just not allow it to be indexed by search and they have other ways of driving audience to it. That's just like one example. You don't literally have to remove it from your site. but I think it's going to be interesting to see how many people like take this seriously and get scared of it that they close off and remove versus see what happens and analyze who's who's fallen off the face of the earth come May 6th.

26:43And I think I think Google's has always said and they've tried to solve for like we want to show what's best for the user and that's just really, really hard to figure out. And it feels like the best sites out there, the ones that are doing the best, for the most part, are trying to help the users the most. And maybe we can shift to advice for publishers. Like if a publisher wants to improve their rankings, what would you recommend? I mean, I know you could go on for two hours about this, but what are some of the high level things that you'd recommend? Well, I think so. If you, you know, ask an SEO, how are these larger brands dominating in search results?

27:29They would say two things, domain authority and engagement. Generally, my recommendation would be focus on creating these valuable content and experiences for people that are your target audiences. Again, like the purpose is for you to be doing the legwork and making people's lives easier. Much of the strategy for New York Times was, you know, or like the long-term play with standalone products was to make ourselves indispensable to people to where like you wake up in the morning and you're like, I'm I'm going to cook something or I'm looking for that thing to buy or what to watch on TV, I have to go to the cooking section of the site.

28:19I have to go to Wirecutter because I depend on it for advice. So how do you differentiate yourself to make yourself really a value add in someone's life? Discoverability through search is one huge thing. And as this ranking algorithm becomes more complicated, you'll have to do the bare minimum to be findable. But I don't think that's what keeps the site up there necessarily. You have to have some value add. And I think saving people time in some shape or form is a big piece of that. And I think building relationships with people is another thing to keep in mind that if you're focusing on interaction, positive activity, both onsite and offsite, if you're satisfying people and they're like happy with the recommendation you gave them, just like it is in real life, they will come back to you for more advice.

29:23So I know it seems simpler than it actually is, but I think sometimes people forget at being as simple as like, I'm here to try to help people accomplish this goal, whether it's shopping, a product in their lives that actually makes things easier for whatever situation they're in and being transparent and highlighting these like real world differences to build trust is key in this like bigger picture of winning long term. I think that is such great advice. and such important advice and some of the stuff that was like, that was like labeled, um, SEO in, in the past, you know, where do we put our keywords?

30:11We're that, that, that kind of thing, like that can't be the primary focus of a website in order to win. It's, um, it, it might be, there might be certain things that you can screw up. Like, like, uh, like if you expect, you know if you expect a page to be found for a certain term or topic you need to talk about the topic on the page like that there's there's stuff like that and then there's certain technical aspects of the site like how fast does it load etc that you need to pay attention to but um but the sites that i see that are are winning are being voted by users they're coming back to the site or they're searching for the site specifically um or they're staying on the site longer and accomplishing their task.

30:56And it appears that Google is recognizing that and rewarding it in their algorithm. Absolutely. And I think going back to the pre-Google days, thinking about that, that like, would you recommend something to a close friend or family member? Like that concept still stands just because the internet is here to surface things higher or lower. I think the real winners in search overall will always be the thing that someone is like, oh, my God, this is so amazing. It helped me so much. I have to tell you about it if you're looking for insight on that topic. Totally. And we started out this conversation saying we're going to talk about the evolution of how people get information.

31:47but we've sort of been talking about the present, not necessarily the future, as you and I have used ChatGPT, BARD, other tools a ton. And time will tell to be whether or not consumers adopt this as the primary source of looking for information, but it's certainly going to change things. What's your take on how it's going to change consumer behavior? And then is there anything different that you'd recommend to publishers when they're thinking about being found through AI? Yeah, so I think it's interesting how fast everything with AI has evolved in such a short amount of time. I mean, I know everything has been working in the background for a long time, but just everything that's been happening in the past year has been really surprising given how long it took in comparison for other new technologies to pick up.

32:51I think, you know, while the medium by which people get information or their questions get answered may change, like the need for finding relevant information generally is not going to go anywhere. I don't think we're at a place yet where overnight society is just going to like trust robots. but you know it's a very real thing that we need to pay attention to and I don't doubt that if someone created a new technology tomorrow to port information directly into your brain that there wouldn't be like a subset of people who would be like we'll get on board what do we have to do to get in there so in my mind this is like a variation of just a new way to find information that isn't, it's too early to tell if, you know, our generation, older generation is going to like adopt this overnight.

33:56And I don't think it's going to pick up as fast as we perceive it to be for the younger generation. I could be wrong. But as far as Google's perspective specifically on their AI piece, it's in, you know, it's been encouraging to read things about how they're using the machine learning aspect to make their algorithm smarter. So I think you need to kind of like balance both of those things without jumping the gun thinking AI is going to take over tomorrow. I agree. I think the thing that I'm really fixated on is what's going to be the incentive for a publisher or website to produce good and interesting information.