How To Optimize for Search Everywhere Optimization

0:00Well, let's talk about how to optimize for Search Everywhere Optimization. because it's been prevalent. It will continue to be prevalent. And what we mean by search everywhere optimization is 10 years ago, maybe you're just optimizing for the E stands for the engine, mostly Google, because Google had the majority of the market share. And Google, to be honest, a decade, maybe 15 years ago, Google had the best organic reach, right? But now organic reach is spread out through everywhere. We're talking about YouTube, which is the world's second largest search engine. Could be Amazon if we're talking about shopping, app store optimization.

0:33LLMs as well. So optimizing for LLMO, LLM optimization, right? And so we should talk about maybe a couple of ways to optimize for search everywhere optimization. And a quick stat for you guys wondering why we really think this is important other than it just being Eric and Neil's opinion. There's 45-ish billion searches, 45.1 to 46-ish billion searches a day. Google has 8.5 billion. So that makes up roughly 18%. Amazon has 3.5 billion a day. It's nowhere near the amount of Google, but when you get 3.5 billion searches a day on Amazon, those are people buying a product. Those are very valuable searches.

1:13Instagram has 6.5 billion a day. A lot of them may be looking for friends or content like a handbag. And if you're Louis Vuitton, you would want to show up there. The searches may not be as valuable as let's say Google, but nonetheless, they still have a lot of demand. Even like Eric mentioned, the App Store, the Apple App Store gets roughly 500 million daily searches for apps. That's a ridiculous amount. So if you're not optimizing for all these platforms, you're missing out. And although Google is known as the search engine, it doesn't control majority of the market. It's at 18%. And even though Google's growing in popularity, its percentage of ownership of the market has been decreasing, which means there's more opportunity for you elsewhere, including places like chat GPT, which is getting around a billion searches a day.

1:59Yeah, and so we'll just give you practical high level because we can't tell you how to optimize for every single thing in this one podcast. Maybe we'll try to go down the line later. But if you think about, okay, how do I start optimizing for search everywhere optimization? One, marketing on one-on-one, where are your people hanging out? You can't try to, if your people aren't hanging out on the app store and you're selling DTC, probably shouldn't optimize for the app store, right? You have to get an inventory of where your people are hanging out and then prioritize it that way. And what I would do, Neil was just talking about the numbers behind people searching, is in marketing, there's a framework called ICE, which is impact, confidence, and ease.

2:35And what you do here is, let's say you score each one, one through 10. So I think the impact of this test is going to be 10 out of 10, which is like high impact. How confident am I with this channel? Maybe 10 out of 10, right? And an ease, also 10 out of 10. So that's a 30 out of 30, which is great. But what's missing that we add in here is we add in the reach. So now it's rice. It's no longer just ice. It's rice, right? And then you take the R number, which is you might say Google is what? You said 18 billion a day? 8.5 billion a day, roughly 18 % of the market. Okay, so 8.5 billion searches a day on Google.

3:10So you might take that reach and just multiply it by the three that you added up, right? And it sounds a little complex. Maybe you need to rewind this, but that's how you prioritize the channels. and then from there you can figure out, okay, what do I need to do exactly? And don't try to optimize all of them at once, focus on one at a time and then you'll get better because if you try to do all of them at the same time, you're gonna do them all pretty mediocrely and you're not gonna get good results. Yeah, that's correct. Some general things that work for most platforms, they're looking for brand mentions.

3:40The more you're getting mentioned around the web, the better off you're gonna do for a lot of these platforms. They're looking at brand searches within their own platform. The more people that search for your brand, They know that you're more likely to be a quote unquote trustworthy source and less likely to create fake news. Another one that is really important is reviews. If you sell a product, the more reviews you have, the higher the rating, assuming it's 4.5 stars or higher. We've seen it help as well. Links help. A lot of these are SEO signals as well. Keywords help where not just the keywords that you're using within your content, but the keywords that mention you around the web and that in those articles, what are the keywords being used around the mention of you?

4:23We see that helping too. Another big one that we really see is H. People just expect to rank everywhere and they're not willing to be patient. You also got to be consistent. Consistency is huge. So how often are you posting and are you keeping up that velocity and getting engagement, or is the sentiment pretty good or negative? Is it positive or negative based on what people are saying online and on these platforms? All these things can really determine how well you're going to end up ranking on many of these platforms. Yeah. And look, I'll use one example here. Each of these platforms is a game to be played.

5:02YouTube is a game to be played. If you want YouTube to work out well, you also have to understand that the game changes quite a bit. The meta changes, right? It's the most optimal way of playing. And so the meta is, okay, how good is your thumbnail? How good is your title? How good is your first 30 second retention? And how good are you at keeping open loops to keep people hooked? Now, Neil and I, I wouldn't say we're the best at doing that stuff, but you have to be aware of that. Also understanding that formats come and go too. Right now, vlogs are in vogue again. They weren't in vogue maybe two years ago.

5:35They were cool and then they went out of vogue, right? So just understand that each one is there's a game to play and sometimes in in you can't try to be good at everything it's worth actually hiring consultants to learn from them maybe you pay them for an hour of their time or maybe for a month or so you pay them and learn their processes and then from there maybe you move on so i was with tim solo and doing a recording at the hrefs podcast studio in singapore this was many months ago uh i believe eric set that up right you mentioned uh i told I'm his unofficial podcast booker. Oh, cool. So yeah, and with that podcast episode, Tim mentioned, I believe YouTube was his second channel after Google for driving signups, right?

6:20We're excluding just the direct signups and the brand stuff. But google.com was number one or whatever version of Google that you're using around the world. Number two was YouTube. For you, I know you have an account-based marketing company. Carrot? Yeah. Did I get it right? Yeah. and it's been going for what, two, three months now? Two months, yeah. Two months. You've been doing quite a bit of calls. You even have here that you've done 100 calls and you've learned quite a bit, which we can cover right after this. What are the main channels for you? You know what's funny? So on these calls, and these are super qualified calls, sometimes I'll just ask, so how did you hear about this?

6:57And they're like, yeah, I was kind of like taking a dump and then watching YouTube. Wait, wait, seriously? I'm not joking. He's like, yeah, I'm just taking a dump and watching. So it was us two talking at This Is Marketing. And in that video, there's an ad for Carrot. So a lot of people are coming through that. Yeah. And so I would say LinkedIn, YouTube, and Referral. Those would be the primary channels. LinkedIn, obviously, because it's a LinkedIn product. And for your ad agency? For the ad, no, not as much. The product drives a lot of deletes. I know, but for your ad agency, what channels do you advise for?

7:32So ad agency, I would say number one, you're asking number one channel, right? Top three. Top three. Number one, I would say would be SEO. And then second would be referral. And then third, this changes a lot. Third would be through partnerships webinars. Got it. If I had to pick three platforms and I'll exclude referrals or RFPs, I would say number one for us is Google. Number two for us is LinkedIn. And you want to take a guess what number three would be? No, X. Really? Yeah. Wow. I believe it. I'm saying this for enterprise, by the way. I don't really track too much on the SMBN because we're more, when we look at us globally, we generate, I would probably say enterprise is the largest chunk of our revenue.

8:27and those three channels, excluding things like RFPs, word of mouth, or press, stuff that's just a platform that you would want to optimize for, most people wouldn't guess those and they look at X and like, oh, isn't that a place just where you just go to? LinkedIn and X make sense for you because the graphs that you share, the types of people that are interested in that are usually like they understand, a lot of them have some power, right? And I would say LinkedIn and X, I think you get pretty good reach on LinkedIn if I'm not mistaken, right? Not with the graphs. The graphs do not go viral.

8:59What drives the leads, you think, on LinkedIn? The graphs. There you go. But it does not, reach-wise, they don't do as well as... Conversion-wise, they do well. And same thing with X, right? Not direct conversions, but when we talk to some of the enterprise people, they talk about how it's a massive touch point. So I'm just attributing to it. You're not getting direct conversions, but literally they're saying, yes, our executive team is passing around a lot of the charts and the data. See, this is the tough thing. This is why I think it's important to use something like a hockey stack or to see the different channels, the touch points.

9:31Because you and I, we have a good feel for this stuff, but a feeling is still a feeling. It's not as good as looking at some dashboard. No, no, no. Our team asks every single customer, and then they mark it down so I can look at a spreadsheet and then see what's actually causing it. But when they ask, they usually give you last touch. Are you asking about the main channels? What are you asking? we'll ask specifically, how'd you first hear about us? All right. What made you contact us? How long have you been following us for? Or did you know about us before? If so, how long? And we'll even ask him, is there any specific piece?

10:10Like, let's say if they say, oh, it's like SEO or your blog or Twitter. We'll actually ask, is there like any specific piece of content that you like? And that gives us ideas. Your salespeople will push them. Not on the first call, over multiple calls. we asked a little bit on the first call but if you ask everything on the first call it's just too much that's good for everyone so on the first call you'll be like how did you hear about us and then next call I'm saying oh out of curiosity you said you've been following us on social he wants to know what was your favorite piece of content what's the type of content and we're all getting on the phone I'm like yeah out of curiosity Nick was telling me that you follow on Twitter I really appreciate it what's the content that resonates most with you guys?

10:56And then it just gives us feedback on what to produce. But we don't find that if you ask on the first call, it's like they're calling you because they want to work with you. You don't want to interview them on the first call. It should be about them and trying to close them because of revenue first and then get the feedback later on. That's actually a good way of free multi-touch attribution if you have multi-steps in the sales cycle. That's good. I like that. But we also find a good chunk of the leads, call it, and this is for enterprise again, 20 to 30%. It's usually a, I don't know. And they don't really say, I don't know.

11:33They'll be like, Oh, we're looking like at a Google directory or awards or asking internal people for a referral. And they'll give you like four or five things. And it's like, Oh, it was like one of those, which is not helpful. And then we're like, what Google directory? You get what I mean, right? And it's just like, oh yeah, maybe they knew someone on your team. Because a lot of our deals come from procurement-led processes where they're messaging out. Oh my God. And they're including you and you don't know why they're including you because someone's just told them to include you. Dude, they send procurement stuff for Carrot and it's so annoying.

12:1270, all these questionnaires and all these things. And I'm just like, dude, it's a pilot, man. Like, calm your ass. How big of an organization? Some of these. Tata. Okay, so you should have someone who just goes and fills it out. Because a lot of them you will not close unless you fill out all the books. There's another one that does. They're like, you can call them mid-sized, I guess. They do a couple hundred million a year. The reason we don't mind filling those out is you'll find after you do it a few times. I know it's a pain. You're planning on doing this business for a while. And you see a lot of potential.

12:46you'll find that a lot of it's cookie cutter and you can just copy and paste in the future so just paint you just paint through it and just deal with it anyway that's what procurement feels like guys so so yeah and sometimes you get hit up by procurement and they're just like you know you do all this work and you just have a feeling you're like man these guys are just using us to get their existing agency to either go down on price yours is rfp where you have to fill in strategies and stuff. That's even harder. Like I know you're not so painful. We did our field with Goldman a long time ago. I'm like everything.

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15:05Shopify lets you easily create email and social media campaigns to reach customers wherever they are, whether they're scrolling or strolling. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school, Shopify.com slash marketing school. Uh-huh. I remember we could have been in a different RFP for Goldman, but one of the RFPs we were in for Goldman, they made us go through quite a bit of hoops. And then towards the end, and this is pre-COVID, or yeah, pre-COVID, they're like, we expect the winning company to put X amount of people in our office on a monthly basis.

15:53Yes. And then we're like, yeah, we're okay with that. And then when they wanted to share the budgets from like, so you want me to put people in your office and you're going to pay me a fraction of what I'm actually paying these people. So I'm like, yeah, this isn't going to actually work. And I'm not saying we would have won the RFP even if we conceded on that, right? We just couldn't make the math work for what they were looking for and the quality that they were looking for. But props to them for asking for it. Props to them. Yeah. And I'm not saying if we did that, we would have won. I'm just saying that they put people to the wringer and they know what they're looking for.

16:27And that's great. If you're going to actually try to hire someone, the more strict you are with your criteria, the better off you are because the less likely you are to make a mistake. Yep. You know, this one's interesting. There's this post about how marketing funnels are dead. What do you think about that comment overall? Let's just talk about the comment and react to it. I don't think marketing funnels are dead. I think using the same old funnels that you're using for five years ago are not as effective. I think what's interesting is the argument these people make, this is from Jordan Mix, and there's this other guy, Cody Schneider, I believe.

16:59So the argument here is funnels are dead, orbits are in. I'm like, what are orbits? So the argument here is buyers don't march down a funnel. They might hit your site once and they might come back later and then they might proceed down the funnel a little bit and then back out and they might see like your Instagram post and like email or whatever. So they're saying it's like there's all these orbits, right? These different channels. and so they're saying funnels are dead I think that's a little overblown but the fact that it's omnichannel, it's just different verbiage and different vernacular but to me at the end of the day it's still largely the same thing.

17:32I agree. You still need to go through a path. Exactly. I agree with their Orbitz concept but if you don't have a funnel you're not going to get as high of a conversion rate and a basic website has a funnel homepage to a contact page. That's only two steps, but that's a basic funnel, right? You have to get someone to visit your site. Then they go to the contact page and they fill out their details. And the third step would be a thank you page where you can have a video explaining what they're going to get, or you can have, um, something letting them know you'll follow up shortly. But, um, yeah, you'd still need a funnel, but funnel combined with, you know, leveraging this marketing orbits philosophy.

18:11I think both combined will do well. Yep. We got a couple more, but the marketing orbits the way I looked at it because I googled it and I read it and I don't spend too much time but when you put it in the sheet earlier today I started uh I spent like 10 minutes researching oh wow I'm like dude this is just pretty much doing you know multi-touch attribution from what I can see and then leveraging uh omni-channel yeah right and just being everywhere out there on the web and giving a lot of goodwill yeah I mean by the way this is a marketing tactic too to try to rebrand something to say it's dead is kind of a hook and then to come up with a new concept is also hooky as well.

18:44So we get what's going on, but you know, come on, still same thing kind of. It's like Brian Dean back in the day being like skyscraper type of thing. It's just like writing in-depth content. By the way, speaking of SEO, speaking of skyscraper content. And by the way, Eric and I aren't trying to hate on rebranding and doing that. We think it's a smart marketing play. Skyscraper, like we still remember today. Yeah. So, you know what? Let's go down the AI path. You know what content does really well? The AI content. Because there's a dearth of AI content. And I did some research. I used MrBeast's ViewStats.

19:20And I was just looking. I was like, man, there's a lot of AI content out there, but a lot of it sucks. And there's actually not a lot of AI marketing and AI business content out there. So I was just like, oh, I'm just going to hit that. So I took all our recent talks, whatever, and I added AI to it. I saw the clickbait just go up. There's one where I changed it. There's a short that was flatlining, right? And I added AI to it. people love the word AI. So let's talk about the shocking revelation from Goldman Sachs CEO. You probably know about this one. But Solomon, who, by the way, he's a DJ. You know that?

19:53The CEO is also a DJ? The CEO is a DJ, yeah. I'm talking about the bald dude. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's a DJ. So he's been Goldman's chief since 2018. He spoke about the impact of AI. You sure on this? I'm not even sure. Okay, pay me$100 if he's a DJ. I'll buy you lunch. Okay, I'll take that. Neil's searching right now to see if he's a DJ and I'm going to read off this thing. Let's see.

20:19Yeah, he's a DJ. That's right. Neil owes me lunch now, guys. So here's what he says. David Sala in music. He's DJed for like legit like EDM stuff. I'm not even joking about that. So guys, you should be well-rounded even if you're going to be a leader of a giant company. But he said, look, the bank now has 11 ,000 engineers and 46 ,000 employees, and it's using AI to draft public filing documents. So the work of drafting an S1, the initial registration prospectus for an IPO, might have taken a six-person team two weeks to complete. But now it could be done 95 % by an AI in minutes. He said the last 5 % now matters because the rest is now a commodity, meaning that the best people, the most creative people, that the best of the best, those people will have a job.

21:03and they'll get paid a lot more money. Yep, yep. And so this hasn't changed what we've been saying about AI. We think it's going to be smaller team, big businesses. We're going to see 10 people teams doing 100 million revenue, maybe even a billion in revenue or so, maybe 100 person teams. It will be very commonplace. And Neil and I are both seeing with our friends, for example, a lot of them, they might see standard attrition with their teams every year. They're just not replacing those people or they're slowly cutting more and more. So I don't take any enjoyment out of this. The thing for me is I constantly tell my team, look, I'm trying to do my best to make you defensible against the future because I want you to leave single grain better off than when you first came in.

21:46That's what makes me happy, right? Obviously, it makes me happy if the company grows too. But that's part of what I enjoy about life, seeing people get better. But this is real, guys. We've been saying it for years now. Yes. on a side note did you end up watching the Avicii documentary on Netflix? I did. It was really good Do you even like Avicii? I watched it. Yeah, no it's really good but when you look at it, that whole industry is going to change because of AI. Yeah. You watch all the songs, autotunes and all that kind of stuff. Avicii's music, top tier Yes. On a random side note I've actually done a call with that guy Ash.

22:25I just didn't know who he was. Oh you did? What did he want? It was like a few months ago, no two months ago one month ago? What do you want? No comment. Oh. I was like, you want to make a music video? Nah, this is something random. Okay, got it. I don't need to know. All right. So that is it for today, guys. Go to markingschool.io slash agency to learn more about the Agency Owners Association. And that's the group where you're going to see our turn numbers get even better. Goodbye.

22:58You