SEO, design and brand in the age of AI | Search With Candour

0:00Mark Salisbury: Hello and welcome to this very special episode of Search with Candor. I am your host Jack Chambers-Ward as always and I'm joined by two fellow Candorlorians this week. I'll start off by introducing our principal SEO consultant Mr. Brendan Bennett. He has worked in digital marketing, graphic design, digital PR, SEO and basically everything over the last 15 years, give or take. And he's our resident dungeon master and political expert. Welcome to Search with Candor, Brendan. That's very kind. That's a pretty comprehensive introduction. Thanks Jack. And our digital design lead, Mr. Mark Salisbury, welcome to the show.

0:35Mark Salisbury: I know you've worked in graphic design, branding for almost 20 years now. You've worked with brands like the BBC, like the UEA here in Norwich, like UGG and Nike as well. We're going to be talking about something very interesting. I know you guys have something very interesting to talk about. Welcome to the show, Mark.

0:51Brendan Bennett: Thank you. It's a delight to be here, Jack. It's nice to be on the Search with Candor podcast.

0:57Mark Salisbury: it's nice to i know been trying to get you both on for a very long time we finally made it happen and it's going to be an interesting decision because you might have noticed folks brendan i mentioned is our principal seo consultant mark is our design lead so we've got designers versus seo no no we're not doing that we promise we're not doing that we did specifically say we're not going to do a versus but i think it is an interesting conversation that's happening a lot in both of our industries at the moment how much overlap there is between development graphic design web design seo all this kind of stuff and i think the conversation over the last couple of years in seo and i wonder if you agree with this brendan is that it's been a lot of we need to get out of our silos we need to get a better sort of understanding of the other channels and i feel like we're now expanding that outside of just the other marketing channels as well yeah i mean that's actually fair to say although i suppose my perspective is that talk of silos and getting out of silos is something that kind of haunts the digital marketing sphere and agency team historically you know so there's always talk about breaking down those walls and making sure everyone is collaborating but yeah certainly now perhaps more than ever ever brand is a particular component as you've been a brand specialist to some degree I think that is definitely becoming a bigger part of the conversation and yeah actually you know as SEO develops as my sort of instincts develop I do often think of design as part of the challenge or at least a big component of what we're talking about when we're talking about page quality user experience all of which adds up kind of collective sense of SEO and optimization so yeah not sure if that quite answers your question but I um yeah certainly think it's emerging again and with agentic I think that's one thing to keep an eye on in terms of where maybe your best practices with design UX are actually coming back to the fore to some extent the way that SEO design can work together over you mentioned brand there Brendan I think we're going to kick off with a hot topic so I know this is something you are very passionate about and we've been working a lot internally on our brand recently I know you're the driving factor behind that right Mark yeah yeah a hundred percent it's

3:15Brendan Bennett: always uh internal stuff and internal agency brands are always the thing that we uh tend to leave till last right but we've we've been doing a lot of stuff on their candor brand and that's been a super interesting process for me as someone that tends to work externally on people's brands um to be able to really get to the nitty-gritty of not just all the big stuff but all the really small things about how we actually use things internally and uh and getting into all of that is it's been super interesting but um interesting what brendan was saying that the last time i think i went to search and stuff a couple of months or two ago and brands suddenly seem to have appeared in all the different talks uh so it's it's interesting to see how that's making its way into search but also to some degree i'm not always sure what people are talking about when they talk about brand are they talking about it in the way that i understand it are they how is it planning to be used are we talking about things where something is already in place and then search is just a way uh of getting into that stuff and amplifying all that stuff or are we actually going to start to get into the territory of this brand may not be correct for the customer and then who's in charge of that sort of process absolutely interesting when we're

4:40Mark Salisbury: talking about silos as to yeah who look well a hundred percent um i think i guess that is a trend you go to these conferences and things and sometimes one year you can sense that there's a step change and yeah suddenly one big topic a couple years ago is ai and brand is a component of that of course um yeah i think that is probably one of the more interesting conversations because yeah now SEOs are starting to mention oh actually traditional the stuff that used to be important is important again who actually owns that how teams collaborate on those things yeah the AI component really speaks directly to what you're talking about in terms of actually how you present your site present yourself across your entire digital footprint they actually have a massive influence how you are described to customers in an LLM platform for example so So yeah, actually having teams working together to present a kind of unified vision or a unified message around what a brand is, does, etc.

5:43Mark Salisbury: is increasingly important. SEOs need to kind of work together with the brand owners to do that. And so yeah, ownership I think is a big one. Because yeah, SEOs maybe are not the best placed always to sort of just step right in, start telling a brand what to do and how to do it.

6:02Brendan Bennett: I think it's also sometimes do you know how to have those comments? Because they are kind of separate from, they're very separate from the world of search. And they get a lot more into the sort of the emotive and the intangible with a lot of things. And yeah, they can't necessarily be done with measurement. Not to say that SEOs only do things with measurement, but you know what I mean. And so talking about that stuff and starting to understand it and get to the heart of it can require a slightly different skill set than you might already have. And I'm sure there's some people that have quite happily got overlap with those skills and then there's some people who may not overlap with those skills.

6:44Mark Salisbury: Absolutely, yeah. It's kind of what I'm getting, I suppose, in the sense that actually there's PR and digital PR and marketing teams as a whole and various configurations. There's lots of potential stakeholders in that conversation. and yeah I mean I think we can debate that brand was always important as a component of SEO and user behavior and expectations for results and that sort of thing but yes certainly now with the LLM sort of running rife towards the internet it seems pretty before it's interesting like

7:24Brendan Bennett: looking at the in terms of how brands been looked at over the past kind of 10 15 years or so that there was this big thing when social media first came out of how so suddenly you've got your brand and you've got your brand that you created and sorted out uh and you've traditionally been in control of it in control of what people say and now suddenly you've got this brand which other people can take and use and they're able to share things about it and they're able to remix things and how do you do how do you allow people to do that and not destroy what you've got and that was a big conversation for a long time and kind of continues to be because people have got ever-increasing abilities to do stuff but the idea that you've got a brand now and an agent or an AI may have an opinion on your brand or may present your brand and how is it going to do it Is it going to do it in the way you want?

8:23Brendan Bennett: How can you influence it to do it in the way you want to do it? That's quite fascinating that it's your brand but via a third party and running through another kind of system of filters. So, yeah, I'm really intrigued to see where that goes. And I know all the conversations around here have always been about how important it will now be to have a strong brand. So I'm really, really keen to see where that moves forward to.

8:50Mark Salisbury: potentially a good example i think of where like seo design brand you know this this marketing mythical cross-agency team collaboration that we're talking about is going to be more essential necessary component of going like um how you handle your reviews for example like one of those things where like there's an element of your brand that's now going to be kind of perceived and spoken about through third-party references and so forth. So, yeah, actually having sort of your SEOs, for example, working with a brand team to surface pain points, surface competitor insights, surface keyword research, the kinds of things that we need to solve or need to address as a brand.

9:36Mark Salisbury: There is actually potential for more collaboration. Again, this is an important thing. yeah i think that's been an interesting conversation again that's been happening and like you guys kind of started off there like how are you defining brand i think obviously so many people oversimplify that as like it's your color scheme and it's your logo and then it's the kind of vibe on that kind of thing but actually you touched on something there brendan i think a lot of us been talking about that reputation management so i think especially when it comes to llms and i hate to quote quote jeff bezos but i'm going to do it anyway his quote about your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room kind of applies to your brand is what people are searching for and what lms are giving you in a way like you can have a certain amount of control over that and obviously things like getting good reviews on things like trust pilot or industry review sites or google reviews or whatever it is is a certain way of that reputation management that brand management all that sort of thing mark do you think seos in general align with your definition of what a brand is or are we kind of does it feel like a lot of SEOs are kind of stumbling in the dark you mentioned you saw a couple of talks you've obviously heard us in the team mention it a few times does it feel like we're just sort of catching up to where you've been or do we have a misunderstanding there at all I think this the thing is it I guess it's

10:59Brendan Bennett: a word that is used a lot and is you know thrown around a lot in the media and I'm not sure people always get exactly what is it I think you're right it's easy to be quite reductive and be um yeah it's just a logo and some colors and and what that means and I think for me it's I've always thought of brand as a really interesting way of of kind of you know you really get into who who a company is and and what they stand for it's a really fascinating thing in terms of how you can use that to kind of uh to be to shape your own kind of your own work your own your own choices um and try and make sure you get the right staff and you're making the right decisions to fit in with that brand but also how you then communicate that to your customers and try and make sure they all understand all of that as well so there's a really big there's a really and it's it's affected by every kind of touch point as well so essentially kind of i always think of it that that there's almost like a little score going on in people's heads and every time that they interact with your brand that's kind of it's almost like a little sims thing that can be a plus or a minus right uh at any given point there's so many things that you're trying to control and trying to influence but i do believe that you can influence all of these things so that's really where I see it from a search point of view.

12:29Brendan Bennett: It's being able to actually, we're using this as a point of view where we can try and leverage the positives of the brand, but also influence both agents and potential users or potential customers about your brand and what it is and really try and educate people about stuff. And I think that's something that we've not, I've certainly not thought massively about before, but actually anywhere where we're interacting with people is fertile ground for doing that.

12:57Mark Salisbury: Absolutely. I think that is kind of one of the directions we're heading in, I suppose, is this idea of digital footprint. It's not just your website. Your social views, you mentioned all those review platforms, Jack, but it's like, they're a Reddit thread talking. Reddit has been a huge discussion in the industry recently, hasn't it? Yeah. Even viable for you to comment in that space. How do you combat that sort of?

13:20Brendan Bennett: yeah those are really interesting conversations that i thought was jump in but that i thought was really interesting that you've that actually those are the conversations that that brands should be having is actually yeah what spaces are we in how does this space go with our viewpoint of the world should we be in here should we be allowed to do this is this a thing are these people that we want to be interacting with and so that was the one thing that i took away from the talks of like yeah that's a real that's a real how you would think about that as a as a brand agency like actually is this a thing that we should even be involved in and that was a thing that I thought interesting about the SEO stuff is that I think often with brand if you're going to be really good at it I think it requires hard decisions sometimes and it's more it can be more about where you stop and you don't do things or you you aren't part of something than things you are because it's easy to be part of everything and do it all badly but actually to be like no you know what reddit is not the right platform for us it's not where we

14:22Mark Salisbury: want to be um and equally i suppose like when to take a risk and do something that's a bit more flavorful or yeah not quite as boxed in corporate like yeah what appeals most

14:35Brendan Bennett: and there's so many examples of kind of big corporates have done on things on social media and actually they've managed to take that and influence almost a new set of customers who they've never been able to speak to by taking a bit of a risk and doing something that they wouldn't have thought. So yeah, risk is an interesting thing, but that might be something that, again, is not always. I don't know how much you... I always feel like search is probably less risky. you're trying to mitigate against risks a lot of the time so sometimes so that might be an interesting new thing about having to take a bit of a leap and saying actually we can't be sure this is a thing but we think this might work as an option fair enough yeah um but yeah i just

15:28Mark Salisbury: something that's occurred to me just while hearing you talk i do think i'm going to play sort of devil's advocate against seos here which is like an odd position for me to take but i do think seos in this rush to talk about brand and bring it into everything typically for seos i think maybe it's a slightly more cynical like technical approach like i i doubt for example each amount of seos now talking about this are massively interested in kind of emotive side and like the uniformity of presenting an experience for example or like the kind of psychological aspects of brand that you're talking about which is actually like yeah positive feelings and stuff associated with a brand logo and like color scheme and all this stuff super fascinating about brand i think seos have maybe fallen into this trap of being like it's a shiny new concern and essentially they just want they just want people to be searching for their brand they're managing some kind of brand search volume concern that proves that you have authority and contributes to your site authority and yeah all of the element stuff as we've been discussing so just being a bit cynical there in the sense of like i do think seos will be looking at this kind of just as a kind of another metric another thing to optimize for which is how can we get people talking about and linking to and citing brand in a way that it becomes the new api and people just do it willy-nilly anything that we can do to increase brand search for anything that we can do this brand stickiness search results yeah i think we have that like but again i'm going to be cruel to the seos here so nobody's on your side this week seo sorry i i haven't like i haven't done that on purpose i promise but there is that i guess need for us to assign a metric like you were saying there brendan we want brand authorities score out of 100 like you're saying like we just want us the number to go up kind of thing and i think that is something a lot of people in marketing that crunching the numbers rely on a bit too much is there a sort of other sorts of data you mentioned brand search volume there brendan what would be the kind of metrics you would think about when it comes to you know you're looking at a client and you're thinking okay how do we understand the power of their brand the size of their brand the authority the how much how much are they conveying their message to the right audience do you have any sort of ways of measuring that and mark i'll kind of follow up and come with you for that question as well that's an interesting question i mean i suppose yeah i would think of it as more of a brand concern so you are managing a brand if that is your remit i've always had a kind of strange obsession with google's um heart framework i don't know if you're aware of that it's more of a user experience kind of paradigm i suppose for measuring satisfaction various degrees with with a tool or an interface but i've often thought of it as a useful framework for thinking about how you want to measure yeah just like customer experience in general i'm actually not going to be able to remember off the top of my head what heart stands for it's been a while since i've referenced it piece of work flagged it but um yeah i think it's potentially like one of those things you could look to where it's kind of measuring engagement and satisfaction things like that they're actually you could be running surveys as a brand to actually see get some qualitative and quantitative data what people think and how they respond that's where i would go in terms of brand measurement um just to take the seo point like there are clients that i'm working with now you know where we are reporting on search volume on a brand level is your brand volume increasing is that an indication that maybe the market is maturing people are looking more for the brands less for the generic uh products or less generic information is increasing search volume yet a sign an indicator that your organic performance is going to be quite robust um yeah i think i could ramble i've got the heart uh framework here so it's happiness engagement adoption retention and then a bit of a cheeky one task success like this is hearts really kind of but yeah yeah yes so you and within that framework you define like the metrics the indicators that you would use to measure those things take them so yeah the idea of retention for example would be a very good yardstick for how well your brand is doing or how satisfied people are with it are you able to keep them engaged are you able to keep them as part of your customer ecosystem if not is there a problem mark how about you what kind of when you're thinking about data and metrics and you're working on a brand strategy with a client what kind of things are you looking at or is it more thinking about the emotive side of things or is it a

20:25Brendan Bennett: combination of both really good question isn't it because how uh we are thinking about both i would say um because otherwise how do you know whether something has been successful or not the interesting thing is from a i guess from a brand point of view there's there's external success which is more what you're leaning into but then there's also kind of internal success as well actually whether that brand is being communicated to your workforce and are they all pulling in the same direction is that helping them with their with their work um so but traditionally a lot of that stuff has been qual and quant essentially it's just it's just can you like yeah qualitative stuff like can you how yeah do people recognize the brand and all of the things kind of surrounding that sort of stuff there are also kind of general brand rankings there's several companies that do kind of rankings but i mean let's be honest they tend to work with kind of you know your big companies so your your average company if they're not in a particularly sexy market you're not going to get ranked for something like that they tend to be kind of consumer focused brands but really interesting point that brenda was making you've also got you know you've got all these things like reviews are people engaged with your brand are people kind of um are they getting what they expect which might be a review might be an indicator that they've bought you or your service but they're not getting what they expected to get from it which might be that you've not explained what they're getting or they might not be the right customer for you so things like that whereas actually if your retention is good and your reviews are good that might be a good indication of the fact that you're selling you're selling what you claim to be selling a lot of the time so I think it's probably a combination of a lot of these things trying to come together and some poor marketing person has to try and pull these into stats but that you've got socials and now you will have things like ai as well like if we if we google the business what is ai saying about us is it saying the things that we want to say about it so it's it's going to be a

22:39Mark Salisbury: mix of all of these things yeah and as you're talking about that i'm reminded of the fact that you know we are already on the seo essentially running brand audits type when a client comes on board now a major component of what we're investigating is well how many people search for how many reviews do you address it competitors do you talk on those address those and that llm visibility is also a component of that um so yeah i think it tied up in that is this idea of sentiment that is something that seos are massively interested in it's like yeah the some summation of some of those things so yeah what does your review presence indicate actually the search results can be a massive mine for information are there people searching for things that indicate they don't understand your brand are they indicating you know that they don't trust the brand we've dealt with clients is this website legit for example there's a also asked data you know can also provide a huge amount of like brand level questions that can indicate a flaw as you say in like the communication of or a flaw in the understanding of the brand from either side so yeah it's actually becoming uh you know a critical part of our process is are there pain points you're not addressing are there yeah problems with the way your brand is communicating that can actually be addressed in a content stream

24:07Brendan Bennett: that's really fascinating i hadn't thought about reusing also asked as a potential kind of is do people understand or are they actively asking questions because i'm not explaining

24:19Mark Salisbury: yeah are they asking about your brand in relation to another brand so what is that brand doing or not doing that that's an opportunity for you the competitors that i think are my competitors are actually my competitors that's always a question i know we're on board clients i say like who do you think are like your top five competitors in the industry they're like blah blah blah blah I was like that might be true in your industry but the SERPs tell a different story the search engine result pages tell a different story I know you've encountered that a lot Brendan I've encountered that a lot as well and interestingly you're pointing there Mark there's that element of things like people also ask data like Reddit forums like all that kind of stuff and you get those I know we've had sort of like SaaS clients and I had an e-commerce client probably the example you're thinking of Brendan was like is this brand legit I remember having the conversation from the client of like, should we address that on our like FAQ page or about us page and stuff like that?

25:08Mark Salisbury: This was before AI search really became a thing. So it's four or five years ago at this point, but it was a genuine question of like, well, if you weren't legit, you would put it on your website and say, yeah, totally. We're totally legit. Don't worry about it. Trust me, bro. Everything's fine. So you're not a trustworthy source of that, I guess, but kind of a weird way of addressing it. So it comes around as you were saying, Brendan, that external third party off page seo type stuff it's the discussions on reddit it's the kind of questions are if enough people are asking is x brand legit that it is integrated into people or so what google has noticed enough people are searching that that's probably not a good sign something has gone wrong there and also like take some of our sas clients as well you get that kind of brand x versus brand y or alternatives to brand x cheaper alternatives to brand x all that kind of stuff i do that stuff all the time if i'm thinking about oh i need a new way to uh record the podcast the audio for it and i can't use this really i don't use adobe anymore i need to find an alternative to that blah blah i was gonna say apologies to adobe screw adobe i'm not gonna apologize into adobe but there's that real kind of you know comparative searches are huge on llms that is a pretty like definitive that style of conversational search brings a lot of hey i'm looking for this thing give me 10 examples and compare them in a table and blah blah blah it's a lot more of an interactive process and i know again in seo we've been having conversations about the listicles and uh i don't know if you heard this mark there was a word listicle makes me laugh it's good isn't it it almost sounds rude but it's it's not quite um and there's this self-promotional listicle thing that google cracked down on was if you're saying like best seo agencies in the uk okay, candor, we're number one.

26:50Mark Salisbury: Ha ha ha, we're the best. Actually, Google realizes you're just calling yourself number one. And sure, again, are you a trustworthy source, right? So I guess it kind of comes back around to that Jeff Bezos quote of what are other people saying about you? How are people talking about, how are people perceiving you as a company, as a brand? I don't know, we've worked with clients of various different sizes, some household names, some you've never heard of and never will unless you work in that industry kind of brand. is there a kind of I'm sorry a cutoff point but where's that that the tipping of the scales really where brand becomes more or less important or seo becomes more or less important I know to to clue you in viewers and listeners we had a conversation when we were prepping for this and I thought of something like coca-cola like have you ever been to the coca-cola website why would you ever go to the coca-cola website it's all through third-party sellers everyone basically in the English speaking world knows that brand whether you drink it or not it doesn't matter you see it on shelves you see ads everywhere all that kind of stuff so how much does their website actually matter how much seo does coca-calu probably not that much because their brand must be insane so is there that kind of cut off point or is it literally sort of like you know absolute household names do you think i think it depends ah you said the seo thing welcome welcome to the Welcome to the team.

28:14Mark Salisbury: I can't believe it was the non-SEO first to say it. I really thought it was. Yeah, we had bets on that, mate. Oh, well.

28:21Brendan Bennett: Disappointing. I can't think of a better way of saying it than that. So it's whether you're... It's dependent on... It's dependent on whether you're... where you get your customers from, right? I mean, there would be an argument that if you're, say, you're a small niche business and all of your work is going to be... all your customers are going to come from word of mouth. And there's rarely going to be any point in SEO or even sometimes in design. Or there are certain industries where actively kind of anti-design talks about, like often things within the cultural realm, that kind of you would do something deliberately a bit weird and provocative is more important.

29:05Brendan Bennett: And at that point, the search isn't important because the people who need to know already know and the people who want to know will find out, but it really doesn't matter about the search. And then equally, like you said, when a brand becomes a household name, how much can you optimize household name? Probably not. There's probably some poor SEO at Coca-Cola getting really upset with this company.

29:27Mark Salisbury: Sorry, Coca-Cola SEO too. I said you don't exist. I do tend to agree though. I mean, I think obviously as you get to be the household name, you get to Coca-Cola. I think brand naturally becomes more complex. it's probably got far more conversations and stakeholders to have to get anything changed or moved or more complicated in that regard and more important in terms of managing the brand, I guess. But inversely, get to a certain size, there's almost like no storm you can't weather, there's nothing you can't come back from. I do tend to think of it probably as being a more important consideration for the newer sites, newer brands, competitor brands and stuff in the sense that, yeah, these old hat institutions have such an ingrained advantage to a large extent.

30:15Mark Salisbury: And just in pure SEO terms, the fact that everybody knows those brands, links to those brands, searches those brands, there's almost nothing that you could do as a brand to blow it up. It will look after itself to a large degree. yeah a newer brand a newer website has to compete not just on the brand level but also on all the generic and the service product quality level as well that would be my gut reaction the yeah the bigger brands have it easier to a degree yeah i think there was i was looking at

30:53Brendan Bennett: example of i can't remember their name but there's this skateboard brand the other day and they do kind of skateboard stuff in clothes i think they also run a little they've got their own kind of like ramp set up and things and stuff and it's it's a very cool website but they have a really kind of like it's this really specific tone of voice where everything is done in these kind of irreverent bullet points and it's just it's really fun and they're obviously kind of quite a solid company they've been going a while they've got their audience but you can tell by kind of the copy there's obviously that's never been near an seo because it would never get past it it's been but it's been done purely because it's really fun and it really makes that brand interesting.

31:34Brendan Bennett: So can you organically, by getting something interesting and that message will trickle out in other forms rather than SEO? Are there going to be certain points where it kind of makes that redundant because actually the interesting linking and the interesting stuff will come from people naturally and it will feed its way out rather than you creating something and trying to get stuff to it, which will end up with something inherently slightly more generic.

32:00Mark Salisbury: Yeah, I think there's something in there. Just as we were talking before, just while Jack was asking that very good question, I do think there's something about that which is, yeah, not everything that you necessarily surface needs to be an SEO solution, I suppose. It's like taking that example of like, is brand legit? Presumably that's a startup brand. Been around long enough for people to know that they're legitimate. for example so that the solution to that is not necessary to add an faq on a page that says i'll be legitimate like pointed out maybe that's actually more of a a design thing so it's what are we not saying about how we're accredited what are we not saying about how people have enjoyed the service or accomplished things are we lacking case study is that yeah a whole content and design think, do we need accreditations on the homepage?

32:56Mark Salisbury: Do we need to have compliance flagged in a homepage?

33:01Brendan Bennett: It's interesting as well with looking at that stuff with the way that things are moving and the fact that someone can now use AI to knock out a website. Will we all start, I imagine we all will start to understand, okay, this is what an AI website looks like. So can I trust this? And then if you've got, so someone could knock that up super quick in a couple of hours and hammer some keywords at it, right? But then you've got a company who maybe have skimped a bit on their own design work and have got some AI stuff and it sort of looks in that direction. That's going to be the kind of thing where people are going, oh, is this actually a legit website?

33:38Brendan Bennett: Because it looks like someone's just cobbled it together using AI. So is that fine? So I think there's going to, there'll start to be questions like that, I think. I mean, you already get it now to some degree when you get like a sort of what's clearly a template-y website and uses stock and you're like oh there's no real people on this site it can have all the accreditations it wants but actually I'm just not sure I buy this as a living breathing business so and I think yeah that that could potentially only get worse with kind of stuff being chucked out all the time so will it will brand and design become really important and still remain really important in actually trying to establish you as a business that is legitimate and credible or will it all get so good that everyone looks good but then equally you know as a designer i think well then do you go left field do you do something weird because it's the weirdness that that then promotes you as a human and not as a an ai thing there's a very good argument for that

34:34Mark Salisbury: i think yeah there may well maybe not happened yet but there may well be a big pushback to the generic modernization of content and design the web in general this is very much tangential but I was reading something the other day that was like the idea that you know robots are now making up so much of the web almost any forum or discussion place is somewhat corrupted it wouldn't be surprising if you needed to prove your humanity at some point to use the internet or various websites and if you kind of fingerprint to prove your human origin so that it's not a robot getting past the capture. Which they can do now, yeah.

35:19Brendan Bennett: Yeah, like, yeah, human proven only. Yeah, so the idea of human differentiation in your branding, in your content.

35:29Mark Salisbury: I'll make mention of our director, Mark, doing his paint illustrations on LinkedIn. one way that he's distinguishing himself from all of the ai sloth images you see across the platform we've definitely seen backlash to the uh generic gig poster thing or the event poster thing where they all have almost the exact same layout with the bullet points of all the highlights and big floaty head images and all that kind of stuff i think a lot of us whether it's sort of our generation especially younger we've seen generation dead generation alpha kind of fighting back one way of phrase not being less accepting a lot of slop stuff and it's actually the older generations that are like yay all the facebook ones love all their ai slop and stuff like that but i've there was also a conversation i was i can't remember what podcast i was listening to the other day but it was talking about having human made assets so like actually filming a commercial with real people real products all that kind of stuff being more of a luxury thing So if you were a luxury brand, you lean into almost like you would do with a movie, right?

36:34Mark Salisbury: It's like, we're shooting this on 35 millimeter. We're shooting this on IMAX. Look at the size of these cameras. This is Christopher Nolan doing his big, like, this is filmmaking. This isn't just movies. This is cinema, you know? And then compare that to, again, using Coca-Cola as an example, they have fully AI generated ads that are on TV, on Instagram, on YouTube, all that kind of stuff. Because Coca-Cola don't give a shit. They don't care. they know their audience is anyone who will buy this drink and plenty of people buy soft drinks from all walks of life so it doesn't really matter whereas it was porsche that came back around and were like well we're quite an expensive car brand and they're german so they wanted to be very specific about it and be like the whole thing was just a porsche driving on a nice road probably in europe somewhere like a mountain or whatever it was like this is a real car this is a real place here is here it is here's the cameraman he's doing this that is a real stunt driver like it's all this is all human all in camera all shot no cgi no ai slot and they didn't push anything it was literally just real humans real cars real experiences full stop porsche that was the basically the whole ad and like driving for 30 seconds there wasn't like a testing pushing blah blah big voiceover anything like that do you think that might be where we see websites you mentioned brendan's sort of like the human verification side of it or would you see maybe more luxury websites higher i don't know higher budget in terms of our clients and things like that if you think about it in that perspective if you're a huge band with a big budget can you then afford to pay a brand team a design team an agency or whatever it is versus someone who just vibe codes their little startup in two hours or whatever it is do you think that could be a you mentioned like users but you think it could be from a perhaps a web design perspective as well it's a tricky one i think um because you know i wouldn't say i'm like a blanket defender of ai generative tools and stuff but there is an appeal and and this is why people are using these tools ultimately is it yeah maybe saves you some budget it saves you on having to employ a video team contractually or temporarily periodically or permanently if you can generate a productive video of passable quality you know if you can generate some copy with ai that would have taken you three hours to do um yeah you know i can sympathize with a small business owner owner of a small website who wants to do something meet some kind of quality standard in terms of what's expected of the page without having to employ an expensive complicated design process it's natural that's going to appeal to people but then yeah I think you get to this point where you run the risk that your content looks a lot like everybody else's content and yeah the example you gave there Coca-Cola is another example where maybe it's less important for them they can afford to lose a bit of sympathy from a tiny tiny portion of their massive global audience having produced some AI slot for their Christmas ads.

39:45Mark Salisbury: But yeah, potentially at the lower level, I think it's difficult at this stage to know what the kind of long-term risks are and whether that's a net positive or a net negative. Because yeah, I wouldn't want to say to anyone you can't use these. But as we always emphasize, I think it's about making sure it really passes some level of quality. and we are like consistently pushing clients to try and you know find some space in their budget for the real for real assets for photos videos that they've made themselves i don't even think they necessarily need to be super high budget high high production value stuff all of the time um yeah i guess it remains to be seen whether that does become like a major difference make for the smaller brands.

40:40Brendan Bennett: I think it's really the point you just made there about trying to, I think it's always trying to do something interesting and different. And I think that that doesn't have to be limiting your tools. That doesn't have to limit what tools you use, although it might do because you might want to use a specific thing. That's a really interesting thing about Porsche doing. But they've gone, all right, okay, we'll create this set of, kind of uh borders that we can't cross these are the things that we've got to do these are restraints on this advert and this is how we're going to do it and that those restraints are obviously where are often where you get really interesting creativity and that is to some degree the danger with ai stuff is that actually you can sort of do anything and therefore you do something bad because you don't have the restraint on you to do anything so i think it's it's not not letting people use the tools it's the fact you've still got to think about what you're using the tools for the tool is only a tool and if you don't give it direction it will do it will come back with something average because that's how it works right it's it's just averaging a load of stuff and going well this is this is the kind of aesthetic or the thing you want because this is what I see out there and actually it's having someone behind the tools creative enough to go actually we want to go in a different direction because that'll be what's interesting about this It's not what we use to make it.

42:02Brendan Bennett: It's that it will stand out. I think that then points to websites as experiences. And, you know, we've always kind of, again, that's been a thing that's been running around the industry for ages, the idea of experience. But is it, but yeah, how much does that still count? Will it just be kind of a luxury thing? Will it just be the brands that have got the money who can afford to do it? And how important will a website be?

42:34Mark Salisbury: Oh, yeah. I mean, that's a big question, I think, in terms of, yeah, how much of the website actually forms a part of your marketing strategy in a world where the search engines cannibalize all the traffic, get there, everything else. So, obviously, we talked about humans and bots and all that kind of stuff. Does that affect how you approach design now, Mark? are you kind of factoring in the agents and the user experience side of things for that or you still kind of sticking to really at the end of the day humans are the most important part of that because i think we're having a big discussion of it in seo whether you're building you know create content for humans versus building websites for robots and vice versa is that similar kind of conversation happening in design and how do you feel about the i guess the sort of future of the

43:25Brendan Bennett: agentic web as so many people are discussing at the moment i don't think i'm thinking massively about building for agents in the way that i expect that if we build a site nicely that's clear and obvious and logical to use the agent will be able to use it and that's what we're trying to do for a user anyway so that doesn't sound like a cop-out but i think that's kind of where we're going with it i think i was trying to think earlier about like the idea of what products and things we might where we might use agentic search versus where you wouldn't and will it who's going to be most effective will it just be kind of everyday products that you're like i know this product i know this brand and actually i just want the agent to go and find me whatever is the cheapest version of that but a website that you know has decent reviews and i don't feel like goes against my ethics and will does that cut out all of that traffic or and then possibly with searches that are maybe more complicated or something that you actually want to spend some money on like is there a is there a cutoff to the point where I would trust the agent is there a monetary amount where I'm like actually if it's over 100 quid you can give me three options I'm going to go and look at all those myself because I don't trust you past that point and and we will all have different levels of trust right those things but i was thinking about it in terms of like if if i'm booking a holiday now i might use you know one of the holiday sites to find a hotel and depending on the cost of that i might trust that but if it's an expensive place i'll probably go right i'm going to go and look at some reviews elsewhere i'll go and look at the the website because i want to check this thing is as it says it is and I'm not just going to trust your view that you've got it.

45:14Brendan Bennett: So I'm not sure where we will sit with it. Yeah, I guess it's kind of evolving, right? But in my head, I'm still thinking that I'm trying to create an experience for a user that's logical but also interesting. And I'll be intrigued to see how we go over the next couple of years, whether people are like, no, this just needs to be super, super basic logical because the agent needs to be able to crawl it but then if we've programmed the agents do they crawl in a way that we understand yeah we expect them i know you do

45:48Mark Salisbury: with a lot of technical seo stuff brendan thinking migrations rebuilds you know crawlability all that kind of stuff how are you feeling about the agentic side of things do you broadly agree with mark that sort of a good website should be functioning for both or yeah i do broadly um it is something I'm thinking about, you know, sort of on the technical side of our SEO team and implementation. It's clear it's something that Google is pushing and where Google pushes a lot of people will follow. So being aware of it, starting to think about WebMCP and the sort of things you might need to think about for Agentec, including like you said, Mark, like who's going to use that?

46:28Mark Salisbury: Which brands, clients, et cetera, legitimately have a case for that. I suppose a major point in your thread there is like i think adoption rate is a major thing to like think about uh it's something i'm saying to clients about ai search in general and agentic it implies even more so it's so new so infant in its in its journey to being a channel or whatever that i don't think anyone needs to break their neck right now trying to make everything work and get agent ready but I do agree with Mark in terms of at least you know from my understanding a lot of the agents that are going to be the ones that are going to be buying stuff off your website etc will be visual in the sense that they will render the page they will be looking for CTAs and buttons and navigation to click they will have a visual component but at the same time there are going to be some technical elements to that as well some code that needs throwing in and around those buttons and those things to say this is what this does and this is how you as an agent are going to use it that seems to be the direction that we're heading in um so yeah there may well come a point i suppose we're in the design phase we're thinking about how we're labeling certain things so an agent can see it and but yeah this is actually like a fascinating point in my mind about agentic because it feels like a full circle thing again to me people were they got to a point seos in particular like well you know google renders this and that and they can see the html and that will do but actually part of the emerging standards for agentic is like have you thought about semantic html have you thought about using proper classes and divs and and labeling things as buttons the right way so that your your code is intuitive to a machine um and i just think that's interesting and when you start out in technical sio i think you get attracted to these things these ideas of like proper heading hierarchy and yeah semantic you know labeling the body and the main parts of the articles and actually that's something that maybe is coming back into fashion where design and build and seo actually work together a bit more in terms of defining the page in a code sense uh and then so it's a bit of both i guess um you mentioned headings there and i think that's something i've come across with plenty of clients and thinking of how you balance that kind of search friendly you know including relevant search terms including keywords thinking about what people are searching for in your page titles your headings all that kind of stuff and you'll often have a battle with like oh but yeah that's our brand term i'm like nobody cares about your brand nobody knows who you are you've made that term up it's it's a jack computer it's like people don't know what a jack computer is so don't use that phrase but then there is i guess there's the argument of like you will never build that brand if you never talk about it right so mark how do you feel about that i guess that balance and where the compromises might happen between the tone of voice style and style guides and brand guidelines and that kind of thing compared to making something search friendly in terms of copying content

50:02Brendan Bennett: that's a really good point i think that's probably where we're most likely to have arguments i would say i think generally in design i find that we relative we don't generally have stuff because we're all in the same ballpark of trying to make things flow nicely um but copy because it's a motive anyway we're trying to as yeah as a designer and a brand person i'm definitely trying to get it to do stuff particularly headings i'm trying to get to do a job and set a tone for a page and I can really see how we would run into issues if you want to get a specific set of words into a title that I don't want in the title because quite often it might be that actually although a page is about x like the title I want to wander off a little bit and not talk about that I want to talk about something descriptive about something on the page but not to tell someone that this page contains x that's not what i want um yeah so that's really interesting i think that's where definitely where we could run into into some tricky issues

51:09Mark Salisbury: yeah i think i probably agree in terms of where the modern seo and designer are likely to rub heads about bump heads against each other i think is the expression i'm looking for um yeah um is yeah copy and targeting it's something that we're obsessed over to some degree on the seo side is yeah you know it's not that we're against emotive language almost certainly not i think there's a huge amount of space for that and a page should have room for the the aspirational the yeah the kind of fluffy um i think there's room for that but yeah it's when we start looking at the h1 of the page and we're selling software and the h1 is saying something like you know empowering superb wicked results but that doesn't describe the page you said and yeah i still think of google and search engines as fairly literal in the sense that we need to be talking about we need to be signaling some of what this document this page what is it fundamentally covering so yeah i mean i do think there are compromises there though i don't i think sometimes it's a case of you know keeping your aspirational messaging but in a in a tagline or a h2 as opposed to the the main h1 of the page we were talking page titles then certainly i want less aspirational more strict keyword targeting yeah i think this is where we where seo and design start to think about things a little bit differently is we're always thinking about the search engine how that's going to react even to a very human-centric lovely page you still have to think about it through this lens of will the search engine get that and also will the search engine user get that when they they land on the page from the search engine and that's a difference I think a critical difference is I think the designer tends to look at the page as a part of a broader structure of linked pages and journeying through the website.

53:16Mark Salisbury: The SEO is almost exclusively looking at pages as landing pages. It's your first entry point into the site. So it's absolutely clear that it says it's what they're looking for and all of that stuff. So yeah, that's where those conflicts arise, I think.

53:31Brendan Bennett: There's an interesting debate as well about, I guess it's that thing between search getting traffic to a page, but then there's also kind of the conversion of that page. Is it if we make, and this is where I come down to brands and having to make, sometimes having to not make compromises as a brand. Like if you're not using the correct wording, is that page actually going to convert the user so we can get as much traffic to it as we want for whatever search terms we want? but actually it's when they get there it's not going to be right so is it going to work and there's a real interest there about the balance and that's somewhere where it'd be super interesting to just test a lot of stuff and go actually can we up the rate we're going to lose a lot of traffic but actually if we convert two percent more people it's much better to have a lot less traffic and a

54:25Mark Salisbury: lot better converting page i guess that comes down a lot to you know what measurements you're using what metrics you're being measured by what are your kpis as part of your team and i can't remember who I was talking to um I think I was on the search for Sean podcast and uh Maudie from SE ranking brought up the idea of different teams being responsible for each other's KPIs so like the design team is responsible for they are measured on organic traffic and the SEOs are measured on conversions and it's like hold on a minute it's like you are forced to work together and have those conversations and like I found that I think it's a bit mad unless you have a very collaborative team but it's an interesting kind of discussion like you said where the lines stop with conversion rate optimization which some people say is a part of design some will say it's part of seo so they'll say oh you need to have that some people say it's a completely different skill you can have people who are cro consultants this is a completely separate thing and i think that's a really interesting thing you mentioned there brendan seeing each page as a landing page if you want a better phrase, right?

55:29Mark Salisbury: And I go back to like Stan Lee's thing of like every comic book has the chance to be someone's first comic book. So every one you start off with like, this is Spider-Man, he's Peter Parker, he's a young man living in New York and you reintroduce Spider-Man each time because it might be the first time they've ever read a Spider-Man comic. But there was a broader conversation in SEO, I know, because there was a discussion about LLM surfacing deeper pages. so it's really specific product pages and stuff like that that might not necessarily be ranking well compared to traditional search so you might end up a landing page is now two three four subfolders deep or literally through the navigation of a website rather than here are broad main half a dozen landing pages or whatever and should you treat each one as hello this is our brand these are our products and you go to the next page hello this is our brand and these are our products then you go another phrase hello he's like okay yeah we get it you could potentially get into the issue of cannibalization homogenization all that kind of stuff if i am a user i get kind of tired of just yeah i know who you are i've been on the third page i've been on piss off like i don't want to deal with this but there is that argument of yeah trying to balance what is a landing page what isn't a landing page and all that kind of stuff when you first look at a website mark if you're you know having a look at a client's website for the first time or you as a user at home you're looking to find something buy something what are your sort of initial handful of things you're looking for in terms of this is a good website i might like to use this or things i could improve on a client basis i was thinking about this earlier and i think there's

57:05Brendan Bennett: like a there's a small set of like layers that i go through i would say the first one is very much kind of like an emotive read so I instantly get on this site and how do I feel about it like is there something about this site that makes me happy that I'm here is there something about this site that fills me with dread because it's not going to be a nice experience like does it just look blah am I not really interested in it like yeah am I intrigued am I pulled in so there's like an initial kind of read there of stuff and then I think next layer there's kind of a bit of a probably a bit more of a brand and design layer of so actually what messages am I getting from this site this is the things that they're trying to tell me what can I actually understand from that what am I taking away about the brand yeah what is the design telling me about this company and what's important and then then you've got sort of content layer next on top of that so can I actually understand this page or this website do it does what they do is what they do clear to me why should I buy this why should I look at this thing is is all of that stuff coming through is is kind of text legible I think we were looking at on a website recently like you know This header has been, the font is lovely, but now each word is on a separate line.

58:28Brendan Bennett: So it's really pain in the bum to read. Those basic things like, is this working for me as someone that wants to read this website? Or are you putting kind of blockers in my way of doing things? Those are probably like the initial things that hit out of me as a designer of a website about whether this works. also I have a little thing as well about if I can tell someone's not paid a designer to do this personally, I'm like well I'm not sure if you get my business then because you know, Gilded Designers

58:59Mark Salisbury: How about you Brendan, is there an initial sort of handful of things you're looking at? I think it depends if I'm looking at it as a user you know, casual search and... Are you able to switch off your SEO brain? I think to some extent so I think there are certain things that I look at as an SEO that I probably wouldn't think about too much of just navigating mercenary style trying to find some information that I need. I do think there are things that I look at as an SEO that I look at because they're important to me. So, you know, we do update briefs quite a lot, client pages, what can we do better?

59:36Mark Salisbury: Like trust signals is one huge component of that, which is kind of an aspect of what you're describing. When I'm looking for a solution, a product, something that I'm searching for online, that question is the brand legit is one of the first questions i ask about a web page or a website in general where's the team with team photos where's the contact what's the end point do i have to call someone to get information about this well then i'm gone um similar to what you said like there are certain quality markers as well like i'm a real stickler for good copy there are spelling mistakes your copy that just disqualifies you for a huge amount of things and i think of that you know when i'm reviewing a client page for that purposeful a level of professionalism needs to come across um so yeah concerns almost entirely separate in a way from like optimization seo standpoint but yeah um quick routes to the thing that i'm trying to solve is a massive part of it am i at a dead end where can i find out more about this product there's not enough on the page explaining how it works it's the supporting content that I can get to I'm a big researcher when I'm making purchasing decisions so yeah trust signals is definitely a big one we talk about like views on the page for the testimony case studies is there a phone number is there a team that I can see are there accreditations are you qualified for anything that's yeah somewhere in between those two worlds i think as a user and an seo those are serious things to know like yeah who am i dealing with why should i buy from you opposed to somebody else yeah i think why should i buy from you is such a something i've been drilling into one of my clients though is like discuss your usps talk about your usps clarify identify how your products are different to insert generic product here and all that kind of stuff and it was less i felt like i'm less giving seo advice there because we're doing reviews of all of their commercial pages they have sort of very top level pages and they're very nuanced here is a specific bunch of products that make up this broadest kind of like service package and like how do you define your own different things because a lot of the products are similar ish and kind of cover similar things there's a sort of like grading of how different each product is but maybe not that's not clear so differentiating your own stuff versus competitor stuff is a whole other discussion there as well and i think for me to pull on both of your threads there i think it's a yeah spelling mistakes little bits like that and kind of what we talked about earlier like did you pay somebody to do this has this been made professionally can you tell this says, I recognize that WordPress template, you cheap bastards, like that kind of thing.

1:02:33Mark Salisbury: Like you're a multi-million, like I have a friend of mine who works for a software company and found out that they are vibe coding their whole website. I'm like, isn't your turnover like 50 million pounds a year? And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, my mate Dan is just doing some vibe coding for us because nobody knows what they're doing. We don't want to pay an agency. I'm like, pay someone to do this. What are you talking about? And the most horrifying sentence I'd heard in a while was you can't go in and change anything you have to basically re-prompt the whole thing oh you want to change a page title you have to re-prompt the whole thing what are you taught that's insane that you sound like you've you know sped up the process and made things in you but you're actually making yourself much harder in the long run in a lot of ways and I think yeah I'm kind of worried about a lot of the I was just saying a lot of the slop happening and the the increase of that sort of stuff and i guess in a way that will help us create unique experiences for users for our clients things like that you know if there's more crap on the on the web then hopefully hopefully the good stuff the cream rises to the top and all that kind of stuff but i guess we'll wrap things up before we get into our recommendations conversations with where do you think the i guess overlap of seo design ux and all that kind of stuff where do you think that's going to be in the next couple of years because we've seen so much change with ai we've seen so much you know the growth of agentic and all that kind of stuff we've been talking about how are you feeling about it now mark and how you how do you think we're going to be if we have this conversation again in two years time how do you think some of those

1:04:16Brendan Bennett: conversations some of these topics might change i guess my my instinct is is kind of what we've been saying all along that there's i still feel like there's like there's going to be a place for websites i think some traffic will get hoovered up by gentic stuff and i i think it's often kind of the low hanging fruit right stuff that's stuff that's quite easy to do or stuff where you really don't care so much about a brand like i mean i guess things like food delivery and stuff to people you know how much do people care about their food delivery brand or would they just are they just happy to get they want a pizza from somewhere and they don't really care who delivers it it's just going to come in via that so some of that stuff where people are essentially a commodity and they're not going to be able to differentiate themselves because they only only really comes down to price one way or another and I think some of that will go missing but that's always been the way of the world one way or another and I still think that where search and design and brand will come in will be products where you are still able to differentiate a service from someone else and part of that is people thinking about the products and services that they create themselves and actually really baking that in at a level of, well, what am I doing here that's different?

1:05:38Brendan Bennett: What am I doing that's interesting? And why is that important? And how can I communicate that to people? Whereas I think, yeah, if you're just creating something that anyone else can do and easily copy, then you're probably unlikely to have success. Anyway, so my hope is, my positivity and my hope is that we will all be employed in the next couple of years in a similar sort of field. But equally, technology-wise, it might be now that actually we're able to do increasingly interesting things with websites because the technology makes it easier to do those things that would have cost an awful lot of money and time before actually we can do some great stuff.

1:06:22Brendan Bennett: We can create some video. The clients can do things in-house which are still on brand, and it might be a bit more about us as agency folk helping people to curate those things and do things properly, but we still have that kind of interesting, kind of that's still our value, is in that ability to curate and ability to direct things as they need to be.

1:06:48Mark Salisbury: You're talking about that, incidentally, I have to remind you earlier. Yeah, I do think that's part of the issue now, essentially is that got teams using these tools not fully aware of what their limitations or the flaws in those so i do think there is something to say and this does seem to be the trend where companies are moving into using ai more and more is your role as a professional is to be a layer of curation qa above those things to say like these are the guidelines you provide and these are the yeah the limitations that you need to be aware of and so forth but maybe now like getting a brand compliant very good quality video it's just a matter of having devised the right prompts and guidelines and everything around those things so yeah that's a place hopefully for SEOs, agencies, brand owners and designers together.

1:07:48Mark Salisbury: I suppose my view is not of some massive revolution. Some of what we've talked about is essentially design and SEO are and should and always will be working together. And yeah, potentially just as this weird new robotic web emerges, it's just about reinforcing some of those standards and just tweaking some of those those guidelines best practices you already have in place um yeah certainly i can see you know a world where your content to be more compliant with a set of strict brand guidelines becoming more essential yeah it doesn't seem like much more than a kind of natural evolution what a strong you know web marketing digital webmaster team working together should be doing now it's just there's a fire lit under us speaking of light and fires under you let's get into some recommendations i like to finish every episode with some actionable tips some software recommendations and something fun at the end as well so mark i'll come to you first what is one actionable tip you think the viewers and listeners

1:09:05Brendan Bennett: should be trying out today okay so i yeah when we were talking about how you look at websites earlier i think that's i think it's interesting because brendan because he has some design background does a little bit of what i do but i think it's worth whenever you're looking at a website or web page is just trying to strip away the seo a little bit and just try to come at it as a new user and really get that sense of you know it's kind of coming at it from an emotional point of view how does this actually make me feel like am i getting the things that i would want to get as this type of user to be able to buy something from this site essentially not just content but everything that surrounds that what is the feeling that i'm getting and that's just a really good initial read on any sort of site to go is this doing the right job before we even start moving into any of the

1:09:55Mark Salisbury: complicated search stuff how about you brenda what's an actionable tip you'd recommend I suppose it's something that does overlap both design and SEO. Something I think we talked in the run-up to having this session. Like user testing or like measuring, actually watching users navigate your pages and websites. It's something that strikes me as like woefully underutilized across all kinds of webmastering, opening a website. and it's something I'm increasingly trying to look at what we have as part of our processes and look at pages. But yeah, gosh, it's just something I see as always kind of a casualty of budget or time is, actually, let's just test.

1:10:38Mark Salisbury: Let's just test how this page does before we launch it. Let's test how, yeah, this series of pages inspire certain reactions in uses before we commit. so yeah that's just something that I think if you're talking about quality and results and satisfaction like actually getting qualitative data how people respond to your navigation respond to your ctas respond to the copy page all of that is worth doing and I think it's to find more ways of ensuring we can do that affordably strikes me as a big pain point it's like Microsoft Clarity as an example I haven't got that installed, it's a free tool, you're not at least being a bit curious about how people actually engage with the page once they're on it, more dating.

1:11:35Mark Salisbury: Nice, yeah I think that's something again talking to a lot of clients about at the moment is that user experience, what are actual real people doing on your website Do people know how to navigate and all that kind of stuff? The classic thing, the rage clicks is one of my favorite things as well. It's like, do they think they can click on that thing and they can't? Or are they trying to exit a thing and they can't? That's always fun as well. You can get negative data as well as positive data. And it helps you better design your website, right? You mentioned Microsoft Clarity there, Brendan. Are there any other tools or piece of software you'd recommend people check out?

1:12:06Mark Salisbury: Something perhaps lesser known? Yeah, I was trying to think of a tool that doesn't need the promotion, really. I will give a shout out to Waike, what AI knows about you. It's a tool that since adopting it, it's been pretty instrumental in our kind of internal workflows. I think as you're trying to get an understanding of where your brand is understood versus another brand in the LLM world. And even just down to like the nuts and bolts of what content you have. I will say as any kind of AI driven platform, it is prone to some hallucinations, but kind of thought starters that you can get out of there in terms of what your brand needs to be saying, where others are or you're not.

1:12:49Mark Salisbury: Super interesting tool. Super interesting. Am I allowed to promote QueryFan? Absolutely, yeah. QueryFan's a new thing. It's one of what I hope is going to be many kind of built tools that we're going to leak out to the SEO community and allow people to play with. So yeah, if you're interested in LLM, optimization, those types of questions, Very fan. It's a great starting point. Yeah, SEO Innovation Lead, Tom's been working on a lot of very cool tools. And we're, again, having that kind of where so many cool tools come from. Taking also us as another example of what the team here have done. Like, oh, this is something we want to use internally.

1:13:28Mark Salisbury: This is something we're trying to, what is something I want to do that tools don't currently do? We end up kind of building itself or, you know, working internally. And then finally, actually, people might actually want to try this out for themselves externally as well. So good shout out there as well. More to come, more to come. Exactly. Mark, how about you? Piece of software, tool, anything like that you'd recommend people checking out?

1:13:47Brendan Bennett: Interesting to think of something that might be useful for more of a search audience. So I spend a lot of my time in Figma and love Figma because of that. But they have a tool called FigJam as part of Figma. And it's essentially like a big whiteboarding tool. and it's if you ask me for stuff you will quite often get my reply in fig jam these days because I really like to think visually and I like to chuck a load of stuff on there and you can put stuff you can put notes you can put videos there's all sorts of super clever things you can do with it it has that AI stuff it will work out flows and things like that for you as well so it's got lots of cool stuff but if you are someone that thinks in a visual way I think it's a really interesting tool to use and I find it super quick just for sharing things with clients like have we thought about this this and this and I can just send them a load of stuff and they can instantly get an idea of what it is that I'm looking for so that's something that if you haven't had a play with that there's quite a few things that do a similar thing but because that's part of Figma that's the thing that I use a lot.

1:14:53Mark Salisbury: Nice we're talking about being more collaborative right across teams so having something like a digital whiteboard to actually you know get the SEO team and to come and make their notes and then the brand team come and make their notes, the designers make their notes and all that kind of stuff. I like that. And a collaborative tool bringing everyone together. That sounds fun. And yeah, I've experienced a few of your fig jams over the years here at Canada because we've worked together on a few projects and stuff as well. So yeah, definitely a lot of fun. I like a little bit of a jam every now and then.

1:15:23Mark Salisbury: And last but not least, something fun. What have you been enjoying recently, Brendan? Have you been watching TV, watching movies, playing video games, reading books, whatever you like? I'll shout out to with Paralives, I guess, which is the new early access rival to The Sims franchise. So it's not feature complete. It has some jank and some issues, but I am having quite a lot of fun just awakening my interior designer, my architect, designing little quaint houses for my paras, not Sims. Does it have an equivalent of Simlish where it's all like... It does, yeah. They do have their own gobbledygook kind of language.

1:15:59Mark Salisbury: It sounds a bit like Simlish. So yeah, it's just an interesting franchise to watch if you've been burned by the DLC model of The Sims 4, let's say. Don't want to encourage EA's microtransactional habits. All about encouraging the underdog. So yes, on early access, when it comes out, I'm sure it will be a decent rival. From Paralives to, what have you been enjoying recently, Mark?

1:16:22Brendan Bennett: I had two things for this. I'm going to go with the second one. So a lot of my life, when I'm not designing things outside of work, I dance a lot. I do a dance called Lindy Hop, which is a 1930s African-American dance. But there's been quite a few studies generally over the course of years, and there's specifically been one recently about how good dance is for mental health, particularly for people who are kind of people who work at home, which can I imagine be a lot of SEOs and stuff. And it's an opportunity to get out and move, but also kind of interact. so you're part of a community of people.

1:17:01Brendan Bennett: I think there's something innately human about wanting to move to music anyway, so I think it's kind of a human thing to do. So that would be my recommendation, that if you're interested in something like that, there is generally a Lindy Hop community in most big cities, particularly London, Brighton, Cambridge, Oxford, Manchester, Leeds. If it's got a university, there's probably one around somewhere. And if you want something to do that's going to get you out of the house after work and meeting some new people and just moving and like i said i think it's a really good thing mental health you have to it's one of those things where you have to be present in what you're doing and sometimes we all need a little bit of that a little bit chance to switch off from everything else and concentrate on what we're doing and maybe just interact with humans when you're next to them rather than like seeing them through a screen so that would be my top

1:17:50Mark Salisbury: recommend so like a touch grass but touch a dance floor instead touch a dance floor just another

1:17:54Brendan Bennett: the human there you go with consent with consent there's a lot of yes i find the same thing i do a

1:18:00Mark Salisbury: lot of uh since my mma fight last year carried on doing a lot of martial arts training and jiu-jitsu and stuff like that and i know you have experience with that as well mark like that is definitely a thing of you really have to switch off because you have to change into your gi and you don't have your phone on you there's no like option to like oh i just put my phone in my pocket doesn't have pockets there's no option so you've got to leave everything in your locker get on the mats and just be there be present like you said be the only thing you stop for is to have a drink maybe towel off your face and then get back into it and i think that is yeah something a lot of us need right now yeah it's much healthier i like video games you know i like video games too don't worry the digital versus the real that was kind of the clash of this episode right exactly well thank you both so much for joining me uh mark where is the best place for people to follow you have conversation with you all that kind of stuff on the internet i'm notoriously bad at social media i think you said you had three instagram posts total the other day

1:18:59Brendan Bennett: instagram post total uh then i got bored um but i'm i am about on linkedin so uh if you want to find me on there that's probably the quickest easiest way to do it brendan how about you yeah

1:19:10Mark Salisbury: likewise uh abandoned my social media platforms a long time ago um tend to be too busy at the cold face but i think it's brendan bennett 89 or something like that on linkedin i am very welcoming of seo chit chat um but yeah no no cold link building off but yes linkedin yeah i will put both links for your linkedin and all the recommendations and all the tools you've recommended as well and brendan i know you're on our future of search and seo panel coming up at search knowledge excel next month as well which is very exciting that is accurate yeah i am excited about that does seem like interesting times in seo yeah best time to be talking about the future i suppose definitely yeah brendall will be joined by charlie marchant daniel foley carter and ej stockton i have eight other talks and lots of other cool stuff i know you've been doing a lot of the amazing design work so if you've seen any of the search knowledge branding and website design and stuff i know you mark you've been a huge part of that so uh yeah thank you both for joining me it's been a pleasure likewise thanks sir