Why e-commerce and UGC are crushing for SEO while affiliate sites are dying, and MEI (Merit, Excellence, Intelligence) vs DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion)

0:00Lily Ray shared a interesting article. So she did it with her intern over here. And basically this article, they look at a few examples of SERPs or many examples of SERPs shifting from displaying more affiliate product product product product product product. in 2023 to more e-commerce and UGC. And you know, one of our mutual friends just told me yesterday or two days ago that he spoke with Danny Sullivan, who now works at Google. He used to be the editor or the lead editor, or what do we call it? Editor-in-chief at Search Engine Land. And so Danny, I think Danny, I'm paraphrasing here, but basically it was like, yeah, I don't know why we weren't favoring more UGC in the past.

0:34Like it seems to make a lot more sense. And I'll tell you when I do, when I evaluate things, I tend to trust communities like Reddit more because those people are in those communities and they're typically, there's more buy-in, I should say, more incentive for them to share the truth there versus someone that's gamed their site from an affiliate standpoint. So check this out. So let's not use bird feeders, but let's use the keyword laptop. So laptops is another keyword that experienced a major shift in search results year over year. As seen in the image below, all affiliate and review websites in positions 4, 7, 9, and 10 in May 23, 2023 were entirely replaced by e-commerce websites in May, 2024.

1:14The top 10 results now consists exclusively of e-commerce websites with some sites even listed twice. So let's take a look at this, make it a little bigger. So you can see here in the past, you had New York Times, the Wirecutter, right? Which is affiliate website, CNET, which is affiliate too. The Verge, they get their affiliate kicked as well. PC Mac affiliate, those have basically moved out and you can see everything now is basically e-commerce, which makes a lot more sense to me. Like, why would you go to New York Times to read about laptops? They're just leveraging their domain authority here.

1:47Also, if you think about it from a user perspective, think of it this way. You searched on Google for an answer, then they're taking you to, let's say, a New York Times wire cutter page, which is not really a search result, but kind of a search result because it's displaying, here are the top 10 best laptops. And then you have to read through and search all over again. Ideally, as a user, if you're searching for like a laptop, you just want someone to show you the best laptops and you can see the reviews and ratings on that website and click the buy button or add to cart right then and there. So for me, you know, like showcasing Amazon or Costco, if they have really affordable laptops or Walmart or whoever it may be, it's just more practical.

2:31Even showcasing some of the laptop manufacturers like Lenovo is better off than just sending me to an article that just regurgitates a lot of information. And then I got to keep clicking again. It's like those old school directory sites that used to rank on Google and say, cool. So you're sending me from a search engine to a directory results page. So I got to go search more and hunt for what I'm looking for instead of just showing me the end result. Yeah. And by the way, Google has said this before themselves. they said that they don't typically like ranking search results. Cause you're, again, you're clicking a search results page to go to another search results page.

3:07And so it's actually another layer of clicks that you have to go through. And so here, look, look at this one. This one was for, I believe this one's for towel warmer, right? Towel warmer. Look, 2023, Amazon was number one. HGTV was basically affiliate. In this case, it was number two. And then the fifth position was bhg.com and then wired.com. And then, so basically you had four affiliate websites in the top 10. And then now you look at it, it's all e-commerce again. Makes a lot more sense. Like look at this only towel warmers.com. Clearly that's geared for SEO, but still that's an SEO, that's still an e-commerce website.

3:42So you got to think about not necessarily often. And this is the thing like Neil and I both started in SEO, at least for my mistake in the beginning was, was optimizing for SEO. But when you think about optimizing for the user, that includes creating great content that includes having a great user experience that matters a lot more than whatever rankings you're trying to to game at the end of the day go to the next one leather cleaner oh hold on let me share again so i'm similar you want to buy a letter cleaner here no all right here we go i usually just get my leather shoes cleaned at the airport although they're just white sneakers so i tend not to do it.

4:21You see it? Yeah, same thing. So there was three results that pretty much left. Forbes was one of them. But number one was the affiliate. Architectural Digest? What the heck are they doing creating a page about leather cleaners? They're trying to make their affiliate cut, man. Show me an incentive and I'll show you the outcome. I know, but that site's supposed to be about homes and architecture and not necessarily leather cleaning products. Yep. Yep. They're still red. I mean, look, Oh, this is a new one here. They, they highlighted this in yellow Reddit shows up to in a top 10 here. So I do think there's going to be a Reddit strategy moving forward.

4:57Um, but I just, I don't want people to jump the gun and abandon ship on everything. Um, so that, I think that's, that's our, that's our feedback. That's our thinking here. Um, you got something on your end. I also don't think Reddit is going to end up ranking like how it is right now in the long run. I don't think it's the most logical ranking site. Like for example, if you're searching for leather cleaners, going on a discussion board on Reddit doesn't really solve the problem. Someone's looking to buy a leather cleaner. That one page could sell the product, educate them how to use it, tell them about it, the pros, the cons.

5:30It can pretty much break all that down versus a Reddit page that just sends traffic to somewhere else. I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners think YPO or EO but for agency owners and I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials so this first one comes from Carrie and we asked her what do you like most about the group she said having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas the leads are great too yes we share leads in this group as well this one from Alian he says the ability to really post whatever I want and need and the group responds great experienced members getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric getting advice from others as well.

6:08And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io slash agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created. And our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io slash agency, and we'll see you inside. We're going to talk about this one. So did you hear about Scale AI that they announced their commitment to hiring for MEI. So merit, excellence, and intelligence instead of DEI. Yeah. I think you posted about that on social. I did. Oh, wow. You actually read the stuff I post on social.

6:43So here, and you said something like it's good and bad or something like that, or it takes. Oh, no, no. I definitely just said, it's just good. No, no, no. I know you're saying like the overall concept it's, it's good and bad. I don't know. Something you put on, I think. I just think it's good. But the reason I thought it was funny was because Neil typically doesn't read stuff on social. Neil just gets on the phone and calls people. That's his preferred way of learning. But okay. Or he watches CNBC. But so Alexander Wang, Scale AI. And I think they're valued at a couple billion. They're like an AI company.

7:18Couple billion? They're valued way more than that. Scale AI valuation. You're probably right. 40 billion maybe? No. 14 billion valuation. That sounds about right. I know it's over 10. Okay. So in the wake of our fundraise, I've been getting a lot of questions about, I'm not going to read the whole thing here, about talent. All of our external successes, and by the way, this guy, Alexander Wang, he's an Asian guy. Okay. So, you know, please don't blame the Hiskin color. All of our external success, powering breakthroughs in L4 autonomy, partnering with OpenAI on RLHF, going back to GPT-2, supporting the Department of Defense on every major AI lab, and the recent$1 billion financing transaction, all of it is downstream from us hiring the best people for the job.

8:03Talent is our number one input metric. Because of this, I spend a lot of time on recruiting. I either personally interview every hire or sign off on every candidate packet. It's the thing I spend the plurality of my time on easily. But everyone can and should contribute to this effort. There are almost 1 ,000 of us now, and it takes a lot to hire quickly while maintaining and continuing to raise our bar for quality. That's why this is a time to codify a hiring principle that I consider crucial to our success. Scale is a meritocracy, and we must always remain one. Hiring on merit will be a permanent policy at scale.

8:38So I'm going to finish out with this paragraph. It's a big deal whenever we invite someone to join our mission. And those decisions have never been swayed by orthodoxy or virtue signaling or whatever the current thing is. I think of our guiding principle as MEI, merit, excellence, and intelligence. So the reason I'm even bringing this up, Neil, we can discuss this for a second. But I wanted to show you the difference between people responding to this on X versus how they responded on LinkedIn. Who do you think had a more business-friendly response? X. You're right. So let's look at this over here.

9:16So these are the X. So Elon responds, great, right? Toby from Shopify says, based. Good work making it clear, Alex. Palmer Lucky from Enduro. Also, he founded Oculus. Powerful and persuasive, bravo. Gary Tan, Y Combinator, right? Thank you for becoming a shining beacon, for being a shining beacon toward the light here. And then all these other people. And John Lonsdale. So these are all like the kind of the who's who in tech. So you get good responses. Sean McGuire, I think it's Sequoia. Okay. There you go. Lonsdale, another venture capitalist. Yeah. I think he came from Thiel or Palantir, one of the other.

9:52Maybe both here. Okay. Now I'm going to read some of these over here because you're on your iPad and it's late for you. So Dan Couch. Okay. This is the most Silicon Valley thing I've ever seen. You're disrupting current hard fought standards. you don't like by reverting to a system rooted in bias and inequality that asks less of you as a hiring manager and as a leader. And then over here, okay, there is a mistaken belief that meritocracy somehow conflicts with diversity. I strongly disagree. And yet you're setting them up as a dichotomy here by co-opting and riffing on a DEI acronym, notably displacing the D, which stands for diversity.

10:25Okay. I'm not going to read all of this. And we're not going to go too deep into this, but I just find it very interesting, the different levels of responses. um and neil what is your take on this because we're both we're both asian people we're diverse right so what's your thoughts on this mei thing sure so when we hire we always look for the best candidate based on performance skills etc at the same time we do tell our recruiting staff to look for diversity, people of different skin colors, gender, etc. So that way we are diverse as well. But at the end of the day, we have people who work for us that are trans, which we have no problems with or else we wouldn't hire them.

11:17We have quite a few of them. and then we also have people who are part of the lgbtq i believe is the correct uh acronym and and on both of them i believe we're a higher percentage than the population percentage of the united states at least and the way we look at it is when we hire we look to hire the best you know the people who work for us that are lgbtq or trans they're amazing at what they do It's up to people however they want to live their lives. We support them. We want to hire the best though. And we believe there's best in every kind of race, color, ethnicity, preference, and you can find them.

11:58You just got to search hard for them. All right, quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain and Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. We'll talk about a couple of new strategies. And if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. So it's building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint.

12:24And we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint. And our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more and we'll see you inside. So here's what I'll say. We've had LGBTQ on our team and some of the LGBTQ members have been amazing, right? I remember there's an operations guy I used to work with and we had an incredible relationship, really funny guy too.

12:59But there's one line that sticks out to me over here. So I would say, look, when we think about hiring at single grain, it's one, the main thing I'm looking at is how good are you at your job? That's what ultimately matters at the end of the day. It doesn't matter what your skin color is. I don't care what your preferences are. That's none of my concern at the end of the day, right? I just care about how good you are. And I think we've kind of gone too far to the other side. And this tweet over here, by the way, and to clarify, Eric's not saying he doesn't care in a negative way. He's saying he doesn't mind what someone's preferences are.

13:34He's looking for talent and he's okay with whatever preference someone may have. Yep. Thank you for that, Neil. All right, everyone. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate. Go ahead. Yes. Make sure they go to marketing school dot IO slash agency. I was going to do that. So please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe first. And then if you're an agency owner and you want to grow faster, go to marketing school dot IO slash agency. That's where we help agency owners grow faster. A lot of people have been saying the community has been great. They've actually got a lot of resources, templates, and a lot of coaching that's help them sidestep mistakes.

14:07So that's the group Neil and I have. Please join it if it seems like it's fit and there's no long-term commitment. That's the cool thing about it. So that being said, we will see you tomorrow.