TWIO 38: What are Google’s Plans Where the Right Hand Ads Used to Be

What are Google's plans for the white space in the SERPs to the right-hand side where the ads used to be? Do you practice second-tier link building? And how does social customer service impact content marketing? All that and more in This Week in Organic, episode number 38.

This Week in Organic, live from London on thisweekinorganic.com.

Broadcasting live on authoritas.com/tweel. You're watching This Week in Organic, the weekly show that debates the ramifications of the latest SEO and content marketing news. Sign up to watch the next show live at thisweekinorganic.com. Hello and welcome. I'm David Bain, and each week I'll be joined by some knowledgeable, opinionated folks to discuss the latest happenings and anything that impacts organic traffic. And as for you in the live audience, get involved. Tweet about the show to your own followers. and tell us what you think of what's being discussed in the comments section to the right-hand side. Now, try and read out as many thoughts as I can, but let's find out more about today's guests, where they're from, and what's caught their attention this week. So starting off with Lisa.

Great. Okay. I'm Lisa Meyers. I'm the CEO of Verbsearch. I specialize in SEO and content marketing. And this week, it's been a very, very busy week in the office. So we have just launched a lot of new campaigns. So it is a lot of the same. In terms of what has really caught my eye, I think it's— I haven't really actually even had time to read up on anything this week. But I think I would be delighted to talk about whatever you guys want to talk about.

Yeah, whatever's happened, I'm sure you can apply it to everyday business and how they can— take advantage of it.

I'm sure.

And also with us today is Erica.

Hi, I'm Erica McGilvery and I'm with Moz. And as far as my week this week, we are just wrapping up one of our conferences and kicking off MozCon, our big conference. So I've been really diving in to find great experts in our industry to help us out there. But what I've seen a lot of is, so I do a lot of social media or Moz. And there's been a lot of crazy things happening on social media, especially around the US elections and Yelp's tweet about their employees' performance over Twitter. And yeah, just a mess, a hot mess.

I think I missed Yelp's tweet actually. So I'll look forward to hearing more about that from you certainly as well. And also I'm sure your opinion in terms of what's going on in the election. We're certainly hearing quite a bit over here, but I'm sure you're here.

I apologize.

It's interesting. It's an interesting show. And then finally, last but not least, also with us today is Barry.

Hello, I'm Barry Adams. I am the founder of Prellama Digital, um, SEO consultancy based right here in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Um, I specialize in, well, technical SEO, SEO audits, and ongoing SEO as well. What's caught my eye this week? Well, I have been neck deep in a rather substantial SEO audit So a bit like Lisa, I haven't really had much time to poke my head up and see what's out and about. Just, you know, the usual firefighting. Never a dull moment in SEO. I saw the topics for today. I think the tiered link building is an interesting one where I definitely have a few opinions on. So looking forward to discuss that. And then after that, digging into this particular beauty because it is weekend after all.

Can you not share it virtually as well, Barry?

Oh, that would be cool. Next generation. That's a startup idea right there. Who can build that?

Well, first topic is, what are Google's plans for the white space in the SERPs? That's the right-hand side where the ads used to be. So a couple of weeks ago, of course, Google completely revamped its desktop SERP, removing ads to the right, adding 4 ads to the top for many competitive queries. But for most queries now, we're seeing a big white space to the right-hand side. And to many people that maybe seems a bit, well, okay, what are their plans for this? So, um, I hear you go, hmm, Erica. So, um, have you any initial thoughts there in terms of, um, what they might, what they might be planning?

I really think it has to do with mobile. Google's been showing that they want mobile first and those ads on that right-hand side are useless. I mean, they just, disappear in mobile, which makes sense because it doesn't make sense for the mobile format. So I think that it has to mostly do with their dedication towards mobile. Now, when does that executive who gets that report on how much money they've lost because those ads aren't there freaks out and wants them back in? Maybe another conversation or another day.

I, I've got a feeling that me and Barry are going to be more conspiracy-like on this.

Never.

So, um, I, I suppose slowly Google have been doing this already, that they've been making the blur between, uh, the paid and organic, uh, gradually over time to such a degree that, that a lot of people, uh, didn't even know that the, the paid search at the top were the paid search and what was the organic. Um, And so I suppose what I find really interesting with this trend and what they're doing, which totally makes sense from a profit point of view and them being a business, but then from the other point of view of them needing to, they almost have a duty to be the ones that gives the information that is relevant to the user as well. It kind of has changed things a bit. What I find is really interesting with this though, is that how all this new kind of structure of what is displayed on the first page of the results has changed click-through rates. And I have seen— I've done a lot of research, a lot of details within this, and, and I'm really delighted to see that more and more people will go to page 2 because they would like to see the organic. And being a true SEO, it's important to me that this doesn't become just a Google platform, a Google homepage, and then on the second page you get the actual results.

Interesting. Can you actually see in the future Google perhaps moving into continual scroll and not having a second page, or is that going to be too problematic when it comes to revenue generation and display of ads?

Interesting. So I don't know whether there's much difference. So I suppose in scroll and second page, it's, it, It still will have the same difference of dropouts of click-through rates to a degree, but yes, it probably makes sense for them to go over not having the page and to have a continuous scroll, but I still think you would have the same relevant issue of CTR at the top and probably likely to be at the same, because that won't change, our fingers won't go faster or less. Unless they will develop some actual product of mouses and stuff that will have some intuition of how you're wanting to search or use that.

I don't know.

Maybe it'll be eye tracking. Maybe it's eye tracking that when you look downstairs, the thing would scroll up. That'd be an interesting technology.

That'd be very cool.

I don't think— if I can stay on the topic for a second, I don't think the ads on the side ever got that many clicks to begin with. I mean, I don't know about you, but you develop banner blindness to an extent. Um, you can very— you can't really ignore the ones at the top because they're like, they're in your face. But the one on the sidebar, I just, you know, when you're there, you might as well not be visible at all.

Right.

So I think commercially it would have had a huge impact for Google to move the sidebar apps, but sidebar ads, but to throw an extra 4th ad in the Main block at the top, I think, is actually a commercially smart move. You have less ads to bid on, so the bids go up and more people will click on them because now instead of 3, you've got 4 slots there.

I'm just wondering actually if—

How long will it just be 4 though?

Yes.

But 5 or 10 or 15 or 100, you know? Why draw the limit at 4?

Let's make it paid paid search.

You talk about blindness there, Barry. Perhaps it's blindness to text links and text results, but perhaps Google are actually preparing the way for more of a visual experience towards the right-hand side there. I did a random search for tires earlier on today, and they had 6 shopping results to the right-hand side for tires on Google Shopping, and then 4 ads to the top. the local ads underneath that. And of course, the first real organic result was, you know, way down the page. But I thought it was quite interesting that it was just graphics, just images to the right-hand side. And I thought, well, does this mean that Google are actually going to maybe reintroduce ads to the right as well, but maybe make them graphic-based? And perhaps they're trying to do it step by step so that no one's going to complain that actually Um, suddenly there are so many ads being introduced. They're just doing it step by step.

That would make sense. That totally would make sense. And, and that, that would, it does have a, like a, it would lend itself to have a, a visual part of a search and a, and a, and a textual part of search.

I, I've gone very hesitant to try and guess what Google is going to do next, because invariably what I think they're going to do ends up being the exact opposite of what they're actually going to do. So I'm sort of in a hold mode. Like, I'm just waiting to see what's going to happen and I'll react after that. I'm not particularly proactive in that regard. I'll be honest here.

So do you feel that there are big changes coming then, if that's the case?

There have been big changes for the last 15 years in SEO. I mean, you know, this is one of the beauties of our industry. It's never a boring moment. And some of the biggest changes we've experienced these last decade and a half have been the ones we have just had no signals at all about. They just been landed on us overnight. They moved to 4 main ads with no sidebar ads. We saw that coming because they had a few early tests that showed that sort of thing. But at that stage, when you see a test like that, you can never be sure that it's going to be rolled out as a default search page behavior. In this case, it did. But we've seen some other fairly outrageous tests over the years, like pages with 7 ads and 3 organic results, for example. I remember seeing screenshots of that not too long ago. I hope that would actually come to pass, but you never know with Google. I mean, they do have an ongoing pressure from their shareholders to increase profits. They're just a business like any other business.

Yeah.

The only hope I really have in that regard is that they realize the quality of their organic results is the main driver that people keep using Google and keep coming back. But if they can find that magic formula, if they can find that magic formula to make sure that the ads are at least as good as the organic results, then the users won't necessarily mind. Which is, I think, one of the things that's slowly heading towards. And if the users don't mind, then they're going to start.

I mean, one other thing that we might see is an increased use of the knowledge graph, maybe expanded even more to the right-hand side, because you don't see that with all queries. But I guess the challenge with that is, by and large, it's not very commercially worthwhile for Google to do that. And the kind of queries that Knowledge Graph displays for isn't going to make Google much money. Can anyone see Knowledge Graph type queries expanding into more of a commercial revenue stream for Google? Probably.

Yeah. They could sell that at a really high premium.

Yeah.

I think I'm going to put my conspiracy theorist hat on here for a second because it's my favorite hat.

I was waiting for this one.

If you look at how Google have changed how they show ads in search results, they used to have different color background and the horizontal bar and all that sort of stuff. And then at some stage they started showing review stars in normal search results with a light yellowish-orange color. Now those have been slowly decreasing rather than increasing. And now the ads have become almost identical to normal text results, but there is an ad icon which has the exact same color as the review stars.

Yeah.

And the conspiracy theorist in me thinks that Google has been training its users to an extent to accept that sort of color icon as part of the ad text— now ad text, previously just normal text results— so that they often click on them without realizing they're doing that. Extrapolate that to the right-hand side of a search result. The Knowledge Graph are being trained to look at that, to take that seriously because it's a good source of information for what we're looking for. So it makes sense for Google to populate that more and more over time and then to start commercializing it when we're already used to clicking on it and not necessarily realizing we might be clicking on an ad.

I think that's more of a logical progression rather than a conspiracy theory.

I think the ad icon and the review stars is definitely a conspiracy theory. I'm skeptical about it myself, even though I think that's actually what they did. But I'm not thinking about schizophrenia.

Well, no, great thoughts there. I appreciate that. But let's move on to the second topic actually. And that's Julie Joyce recently published an article in Search Engine Land on the importance of second-tier links. And this subject matter isn't something I've seen massively talked about in mainstream SEO publications. Barry, I think you indicated that this is a topic that was quite of interest to you. Is that something that you think the majority of SEOs should be using? more often than they actually are?

Who are you asking? Are you asking Barry?

Yeah.

Well, Lisa, go ahead if you want to.

Yeah, I have quite big thoughts about— I think everyone should consider this that does content marketing and specifically link development. It's quite a logic kind of structure that you, you need to have as much authority as possible from the page that you have that you get links from. And if you are doing content marketing and link development where you— your strategy is to use a piece of content or a creative campaign that gets a whole new page on some— on, on a big authority website, that's obviously great that it's a big authority domain, but But the real value is if this page also generates links, because that's when that becomes a real valuable link to get. So for example, this is the exact reason why our main link development strategy is targeting high authority domains that are also likely to pick up secondary links to those pages. So for example, Mashable or a lot of newspapers, etc., they are more likely to pick up those secondary links going to that page. And if you didn't get those, I think it would be very wise to try to do secondary link development, not rubbish links though, to go to those pages where you have been featured.

And would you go down the route of actually trying to get bloggers to produce those links, or is there any particular link strategy that works more effectively for secondary links like that?

So I'm not a big fan of targeting bloggers really at all, mostly because I think there's such— like, that's a whole Pandora's box right there. Bloggers literally are the riskiest link development now, I think, because what happens with bloggers, and this I would really like to say, is that Um, we— you target a blogger and they might not charge you anything, they might not want anything, but if they at any point in the future charge anything, uh, gets kind of ratted out for trying to negotiate to get something for a link or for coverage, then that is a very risky link. So I, I don't— I completely avoid bloggers, uh, in general unless there's a kind actual authority blog within a huge site. So we target only high authority sites that are specifically through creative campaigns actually, but I would stay away from bloggers.

Okay. And high authority sites relevant to that niche as well?

Yeah. So I think, well, specifically for on topic for the secondary, to get the secondary links. And I think there are more, there are sites that are more likely to get organically get secondary links to the page that you, you got links from. So, so lifestyle sites like Mashable, or even lifestyle business like Business Insider, or even BuzzFeed and Huffington Post and all of those, they have a huge audience, a huge social audience as well, which could, which could really benefit. In fact, last year we won, we had a campaign where we won I think we won 5 awards last year for this one campaign where our main target was targeting a big site like Mashable and then getting secondary links to that page as well as getting other links, of course. But that— it would be great if it's within that niche that you're working within, so within that content silo. So some are kind of easier to do that within silos, like if travel, I think there's loads of papers that have travel sections. But it might be harder to do if you're doing something very specific. But lifestyle will always be relevant for all, I think, even B2B.

Erica, from a social perspective, have you actually focused on campaigns to try and drive visits to and sharing of pages which are secondary links into a main client site?

So I haven't done anything necessarily on purpose, um, though I would say if, you know, anytime someone— if someone writes a great article about the brand that you're working with, you're going to want to share it out. So you do want to, you know, drive traffic to those sources, um, and it also can be a great way to get back and kind of give back in the ecosystem, especially if you're promoting You know, give them some love that they wrote this article about you. Give them some love that they mentioned you. And social sharing can be really great for that. I haven't, like I said, I haven't done it purposefully to get secondary links or to get, you know, necessarily more attention, but more in that we're trying to build those relationships and, you know, make them even stronger.

Barry, um, Is secondary link building something that most SEOs aren't really thinking of actively and they should be thinking more of?

Yes. I think because of its historical connotations with spammy link building practices that SEOs are nowadays more focused on getting links directly to their target websites and getting them to be as high authority and quality as possible. And I think everybody who's been in SEO for long enough You have to admit, yes, we used to do crap like that. We used to just spam the hell out of websites. Not even secondary links, but tertiary links. I mean, I used to have 3 pyramids of link schemes going on. Who didn't? I mean, you build masses of spam links to the third tier. They then point to the second tier. And then hopefully you get some value out of it by pointing it all to your money website. That is not necessarily something I'd advise to do anymore. Let's be honest there. They get found out and burnt. Um, unless you start spreading the link value to other websites in such a way that makes it look natural, in which case you're putting in an awful lot of effort to help other websites rank rather than your own website. So, you know, it becomes self-defeating. The, the secondary link building that I think Lisa is very good at describing is exactly what we already do whenever we blog for another blog, do a guest blog somewhere, or when I write for State of Digital or whatever it is. We want those articles to become as popular as possible. So that, you know, they build up a bit of link value and then a link in the author bio, like Julie Joyce's article, adds a little bit of value back to us. When it comes to reaching out to bloggers for that sort of secondary link building, I share some of Lisa's skepticism. I'll be honest with you. But I do think it has value if you have a small network of bloggers you have really good relationships with and who you can rely on to talk about a certain topic if you give them some material to work with, if it's sufficiently high quality. You know, if one of my clients gets a great link placement on a high authority website, I would let my favorite bloggers that work with that client know about that. And some of them will at the very least do some social sharing about it, if not actually pre-blog it or give it some promotion. Because it reflects well on them if they are seen to be collaborating with a brand that gets that sort of high exposure. It reflects well on them as bloggers that, you know, oh yeah, we work with that brand as well and they're awesome, as is seen here on Mashable today. But it is something that a lot of SEOs ignore a bit too much because they only look at that last link in the chain and not necessarily building that value up over several tiers of links.

One thing I was thinking that secondary link building can also help with is reputation management and trying to make sure that it's obviously at least the first page of results for your brand name are either positive results or relevant results. Is that something, Lisa, that you work on, reputation management, and does secondary link building help with that?

We don't particularly specialize in that, but we have done loads before specifically using that strategy. In fact, I think it's quite a classic strategy to link develop to other sites. Like, we had a client about a couple of years ago which had a big reputation management problem. Obviously can't tell you who that was. And they had about 3 results on the first page that mentioned the brand that was like reviews, etc. And one of the things that we did to, to, to get— push that down was build links and authority to other sites that didn't mention them in more positive light. Is that called manipulative SEO?

Yeah.

Strategic.

We have Google's right to be forgotten now. We don't really need reputation management anymore, do we? We just get the stuff.

Well, it doesn't mean it can't be used though. That the, like, companies can't really get to that bit. People can.

So does the need to build links to third-party directory sites that feature user brand not not exist anymore because of reviews and other things like that?

I think social media platforms should be your target for reputation management rather than directory listings. I mean, if you search for a person name or a brand name, the whole first page of Google should only be that person's footprint or that brand's footprint on the web in terms of their own website or websites and their social media presence. And if there is some negative material in there, a blog post or a news article or whatever it is, You need to capitalize on the inherent strength of social media platforms to try and get them in there instead.

And Erica, is the ranking of social profiles something that you've been thinking about or involved with at all?

A little bit. Yeah, it can be definitely really powerful for brands who are trying to get their voice out there and may not have as powerful domains who, you know, if they have a reputation problem, definitely like trying to clean it up. But I do always caution that if you're going to, you know, invest in trying to get, trying to get those links to your social profiles, make sure you're actually active in those social profiles.

Good points.

I go to, go to so many brands, especially on Facebook, I feel, and you go to like the wall, it's just covered with like customer servicey inquiries, or I was there, you know, I went to your store, I loved it. that's good. You should be responding to those people too. And they're just dead, completely dead. You're like, why do you, why do you even have this? I mean, I understand why they have it from, you know, local perspective and all those sorts of things. But, you know, if you're going to put that as an authoritative or, you know, in the SERP, if you want it in your SERP, you should be dealing with it and you should actually be active on that page. Don't just be a dead page.

It's sad.

And I guess it depends on what social platform Google wants to rank as well, because obviously with a partnership with Twitter, it's more likely whether or not you want your Twitter profile ranked for it to bring up the results in relation to your brand fairly highly at the moment. But if something happens to that partnership, perhaps that might not happen in the future.

Yeah, a lot of people are very much capitalizing on the whole Twitter-Google partnership. And if you are, you know, if your brand is involved in those conversations, like, or your brand's trending on Twitter or something about it is trending, you really need to make sure that you're on top of that. I thought that the Star Wars people did a great job with this when the new movie came out. They were all over it. And when you searched for Star Wars, it wasn't just the conversation and the trending hashtag that came up on Google. But it was the actual Star Wars— Star Wars's official Twitter account, which they've— I mean, historically, they've been doing a great job at running that Twitter account for a long time, long before the movie came out. So it wasn't just something they were doing because they had now a new product.

What was this tweet you were telling us about beforehand again, Erica?

Uh, so Yelp had some disgruntled employees write some, uh, blog posts on Medium and just talking about kind of how the customer service aspect of Yelp, they don't pay very well. And, you know, it's in San Francisco, so it's very hard for people to live. And there's lots of controversy, you know, whether or not— there was lots of talk about like entitled millennials and like kind of the things you would like kind of expect to see. And they— so they had 2 employees who tweeted about that or who wrote blog posts on Medium. And then of course they went viral on social media. And the second woman in particular, she didn't write a post until she had actually been let go. And Yelp tweeted out this image of a statement about her performance and that she had been let go because she had missed too many days of work, which that's like bad social media and that's just bad HR. And possibly illegal.

So how can a company recover from something like that? What would be the steps to try and backtrack a little bit?

I mean, first of all, delete your tweet, which last time I looked, I screenshot it just in case because I'm like, I'm going to use this in a presentation one of these days. But last I looked, it was Still up. I'm like, wow. And obviously, like, this is the kind of tweet you can't say, like, oh, an employee did that. Yeah, that was their fault. They, like, went rogue and did it. Like, we saw that with some of the other— like, the whole airline thing with the inappropriate picture of the airline or the airplane. Um, you guys can all Google that if you're at work. Maybe not at work, do it later. But anyway, Um, you know, issuing— they definitely should issue an apology if nothing else. Um, it would be great to see them try to reconcile some of the labor complaints and actually address what's going on. Um, you know, Yelp is a big— is a big company down in Silicon Valley and in San Francisco, and there's a whole bunch of conversations going on around housing prices and, you know, are workers actually making enough money, how minority communities have been driven out of San Francisco because they can't afford the rent, all those types of conversations that Yelp could really dive into. And they could dive in from a proactive perspective, and they could get a lot of love from that community if they dedicated themselves, whether it's, you know, raising the wages of their employees or helping out in many other ways with a big homeless problem there, and they could really dive into the community. And I think that for this particular problem, that's what they need to do if they, if they really care enough. I mean, on the other hand, they just may have so many users that, and people that need their product for, you know, listing their business, that they don't care, that it's not that big hit to their reputation because they are a giant in the space.

Do you think there's a danger that certain senior executives in big blue-chip companies may look at this and think, look, it's too dangerous interacting on Twitter or maybe even other social networks like this, and actually take away the ability for employees to post fairly freely on these networks, and we may even go back a step a little bit with regards to how we can communicate on the social sphere?

I do think that there are companies out there that do that now. Like, I definitely think a lot of employees are blocked from social media or monitored to make sure they're not on social media while at work, especially the more corporate they are and the more worried people are about their brands. I mean, the first time— so the first time I actually built a social media account for a brand, an executive ran over to my cubicle and told me to turn it off because I was going to ruin their brand. And then that executive left, and then I started up social media, and now they have successful social media presence. So, but I, you know, it's kind of that give and take. I think a lot of people— for social media has become so normal. I mean, think about how many people use Facebook. You know, everyone's grandparents are on Facebook, it seems like, these days. So it's become more—

it's become more of a normal thing than it was perhaps when that executive came over to my cubicle and was like, I mean, it is absolutely terrifying for businesses that have been around for so long that the customers suddenly start talking back at them. This is something that, especially in businesses where the upper management is still of a bit of an older generation, they're just so not accustomed to that sort of direct interaction with their customers in such a public sphere. Yeah, I mean, I think that's the thing. They would feel very comfortable talking to a customer in a store, for example, a customer that has a complaint, having a one-on-one with them on their stores. But to do that on social media, on Facebook, on Twitter, where the whole world can see them, I think there's an inherent fright in there that they want to, you know, protect their brand and don't want to expose themselves to that sort of possible negative feedback, not realizing that the conversations are going to happen anyway, whether or not they're part of it.

Sure. We've had Erica jump out of there, actually. I'm not sure if you're having technical problems there as well. There was someone else trying to get in. I'm not sure if that was Erica using another profile name or Erica itself. So, but maybe if we don't see Erica coming back in the next few minutes, maybe someone else can join. But we'll certainly leave it open for a while for Erica to hopefully come back in. But we might as well actually continue with the last topic that I was going to cover. And that was the fact that Apple have introduced their own Twitter account, Apple Support. And maybe it seems like they're a little bit late with this, but maybe Apple are late but best with most things. So we'll see how they go about it. Barry, do you think Twitter in general— Erica's back. Barry, do you think Twitter in general is a medium for individuals to network, or is there still an opportunity for brands to be successful on Twitter with things like customer service as well?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, I'm a rather ranty person on Twitter, as anybody who follows me will Sorry, I didn't mean to laugh there. Open door right there. But I do like it when I can rant on Twitter and tag in the company's customer support account and get a response straight away. I mean, for example, my broadband subscription is with Virgin Media. If I didn't have that immediate contact channel with them on Twitter, I probably would have, you know, Swiss providers years ago.

Hmm.

But every time something goes wrong, which granted is not very often, I can rant a little on Twitter and they will get in touch with me within minutes. Whereas if I have to phone them up, I mean, you have to go through these auto menus and it's an excruciating experience. It's much easier to just vent on Twitter, throw a few swear words at that, and then some panicked person somewhere in some, some big office building managing their Twitter account is like, oh, let's get this person offline as soon as possible. That's, you know, that's what those support channels are for. So yeah, by all means, I think Apple is doing a good job doing that. I think they will get inundated with it and they might not realize what they're getting themselves in for. It's gonna be quite an overwhelming experience for them. But if they manage it properly, it's a benefit for them because every time a company does it right, and you do need to do it right, but if you do it right, you turn your customers into your fans. And it's not just Twitter that allows you to do that. Facebook has the same effect. If you take your customers seriously on Facebook or Twitter or on any social channel where they choose to engage with you, you can turn a negative experience into a positive experience very, very quickly.

So what's an example of doing it right? Is it just getting back to them very, very quickly, maybe apologizing, empathizing with them, and then taking it offline in general? Or are there other kind of positive lessons that you would add to that?

Give you an example from my own personal experience where a relative of mine had private health insurance, but for some reason a certain treatment wasn't going to be covered because the health insurance company said it was a prior condition, which it wasn't. I got so angry with that— this happened a few years ago— that I ranted on Twitter, as I do, and tagged that insurance company in my tweets, of course. They got in touch with me within minutes, and a few hours later they changed that evaluation and Suddenly the treatment was covered. And as a result, we've stuck with that private health insurance company ever since.

It's about building relationship, right? Is that— that was what it was supposed to be for, for being able to communicate. But there's, like, like Erica was saying, there, there's still so many that are just like broadcasting and shouting crap and then are all confused that they're not getting anything from it. That's because you're behaving like an asshole shouting. Can I say asshole? That's not swearing, is it?

That's—

well, we'll leave it for the Blab crowd to give reviews. So, I mean, Twitter in regards to customer service, so that's a good way to do it. In terms of a bad way to do it, I suppose it's ignore people completely. Perhaps belittle, you know, anything that I think—

Never argue with your customers online.

But there are examples, there are examples all the time of that happening, and perhaps employees trying to be funny or smart or right.

So it's risky, but if you could pull it off, if you have, for example, have a customer that is obviously being outrageous in whatever they demand or is in the wrong, they can give it a bit of a funny angle. But even then, you have to tread carefully that you don't end up insulting them too much or, you know, painting them in too much of a bad light. You have to be able to make light of the situation rather than the person. So it is a risky one.

I also think it's really important to have your employees trained. You know, anyone doing your customer service should know how to do escalation. They should know how to, you know, first empathize with the problem, apologize, and then— and have some training on how to actually take care of it. Um, so with Moz, we are very, very active on our social channels. We have a whole big team. We're all trained. But there are certain things that we have to escalate and we have to take offline, or in email, I should say, in a personal conversation. I mean, things like— billing problems. So if someone has a billing problem and they come to us, our team actually doesn't have access to the billing information because, you know, businesses, we want to make sure people's billing information stays private, that, you know, credit card numbers aren't floating around out there or anything like that for the privacy and protection of our customers. So we actually have to, we have to take it into email and we have to involve our support team. Because they're the ones that can actually deal with this billing issue. So it's good too to have boundaries. And I do wonder about Apple, like, is there a boundary there or can they do everything? Do they have to at some point escalate it to another team? So it really— but you have to be— you have to be prepared. You have to have people trained and you have to figure out what you're going to be doing on there and make sure you're ready. Because, you know, like Barry already mentioned, Apple may have bitten off more than they can chew, but they may also be ready for it and, you know, have seen what other brands similarly have done. So it can work.

It's good to see the active guests also participating in the chat, probably mainly between themselves, but that's always good.

Barry, sorry.

It's because Lisa and I both have a reputation for using a lot of profanity in our conference talks, so it's a nice excuse.

That would be an interesting conversation. Like, I have a multilingual agency, so we speak like 12 different languages. What I have really realized in the 7 years running Verve is how the cultural differences on people that you think is closer within the cultural realm of what, like Norwegians and English, how actually far away they are, and what is socially acceptable, and how people perceive people as speakers, for example, by where they're from, and whether swearing is really meant as much from a Northern Norwegian as it would be from an English or a Like, that's one of my issues. And obviously Barry is Dutch, and so we have— I definitely have— I think people conceive me as being a little bit swearing, a little bit too brash, but for any northern Norwegian, they wouldn't even notice.

Well, let's be honest, Elisa, I've done a tally on your F-bombs in a recent talk you gave in Dublin, and you put me to shame. I'll be honest with you, that was impressive.

But that was in Dublin. You can get away with it in Dublin, surely. Yeah, that's true.

Know your audience.

Yeah, I wouldn't do— I couldn't do it in the US. Like, I think US is just slightly stricter with— or they see it very differently. So you have to really watch out, right?

We get conference feedback all the time in the US if we have a speaker who swears. Oh yeah, people get very, very offended. I mean, it's a very certain specific segment of the conference attendees. But if, if a speaker goes up there and swears, you know, if you drop more than 1 or 2 F-bombs, we're gonna hear about it.

Yeah, yeah, right, right.

Well, you can also put a disclaimer at the start, which I tend to do. I tend to say to start, sorry, you know, I've been doing this for so long, I'm halfway mad, there will be swear words. I think that helps a little bit, you know, build a bit of an expectation.

We've got Garrett saying in the chat, really, even in the Trump era? Okay.

We won't talk about that guy.

Let's not even go there. I mean, it just gives me a headache thinking about it.

Oh yeah, don't get me started.

Let's move on to the last actual topic, which is Facebook looks as if they're going to open up its Messenger chat service to outside businesses. potentially as early as April, and this could significantly impact customer service, social sharing, and ultimately content marketing. So it looks as if it's going to be difficult to work in customer service in the future without embracing social media. Is that fair? You're nodding slightly, Erica. Is it going to be possible to work in customer service without being comfortable with Facebook and Twitter.

It's definitely something that's going to become more standard. Now, you can structure your team lots of ways. Your social media team doesn't have to live in your customer service, but they definitely have to be closely aligned and talk with each other all the time to make sure things work out. So Facebook already does, you can already message people who are fans of your face, your Facebook, or like it, or whatever they're calling it now. They always change it like every week. And they can send you, they can already send you messages. Um, so like at Moz, we get a ton of messages already from our fans of people, you know, asking everything for help on their SEO to questions about our product or services or customer service type complaints. Um, so I, you know, I kind of see this like whole messaging thing as kind of the final frontier where Facebook currently has no ads. So it's like the one more place where they could put an ad or, you know, pay to promote your messages. And they've been, you know, they've been doing a lot of things to change their algo over the recent year, the last couple, like 2 years, the algo has changed about every 4 months pretty dramatically. And for brands who rely for a long time, Facebook was a huge driver of traffic. And then it dropped off when they started discounting brands. Saying, you know, those— that content wasn't interesting enough for audiences. And Facebook's now changed their newsfeed even more to try to be more of a content server, you know, serving you content. So you, you know, you don't need to go anywhere for your news except Facebook. And now, um, at least for those of us who are publishing lots of high-authority content, we're seeing more traffic again from Facebook. So the traffic's gone back up. And I think that the whole opening Messenger is gonna be for ads or it's going to be another place where you can promote your content in a paid way. So, you know, broadcast this to your fans. Maybe you have to segment out who your fans are that you're sending these messages to, but it's definitely more money-making, I think, for Facebook in the long run.

Can you see it at some point in the future being the mainstay for customer service for certain brands? Or do you think there's always going to be a place for independent specialist customer service type software?

I think it really depends on the kind of trust that goes out in the future. I think there's still a lot of people who would never want to send any personal information over Facebook because they don't trust it at the end of the day. Right. If you're trying to deal with an issue, yep. I wouldn't send my personal information over. A Facebook message. Like, who knows? And then they store it and keep it. And so it depends. It really depends how much you trust it. And, you know, email is still really trustworthy. But we even, you know, at Moz for a while, we tried not to do phone support at all. And even though we deal with internet marketers who are very used to doing things over the internet, it's very serve yourself is kind of our style.

Mm-hmm.

And our customer service is really prompt with email, which is the primary communication way with our customers that they use. People still want those phone calls and people will still call and be like, okay, I need your extra help, but I don't want to give you this personal information. Can we do it over the phone?

But it's partly a trust thing having a number on there as well. I mean, some people might not even necessarily use the phone number, but the fact that you've got a phone number up there makes you seem more legitimate and acceptable and like a real company. So they're more likely to purchase from you.

Definitely.

Have you tried to measure conversion rates based on having phone numbers or not having phone numbers on the website?

We haven't done anything like that. I mean, we always had a phone number you could find somewhere because we of course have an office number because we have our local listings in places. So you You could find something if you dug around. It was just not prominently on the customer support page.

One kind of slant that I was looking to take on this is also kind of content marketing and that you're having one-on-one communication with customers like this perhaps gives you an opportunity to build up relationships with them a bit more and perhaps actually get them more active on their social media and perhaps even kind of producing content on your behalf. Lisa, so I was going to ask you, did you think there's an opportunity with this?

Can I do one thing first? Can we please define what we think content marketing is? Because I have a big bugbear with this, and in fact, I nearly changed again how we define what we do at Verve Search because I think most people, what most people think content marketing is might not be what I think it is. And I think content marketing for me isn't about written content or communicating with people. And content marketing for me is about ideas. In fact, when I started Verve, it was about SEO and social media because back then social media was about coming up with ideas and communicating things and then using social media as a tool to kind of spread that. And I think for me, I would just like to say that content marketing for me is very much about concepts and ideas, and we use specifically content marketing to benefit SEO. So I don't do publishing of content. I like— in fact, I closed my content team last year. I didn't like— that's boring to me. Yeah, like, I I do SEO and I create campaigns that generate really big, good authority links, but I do that from a conceptual point of view. So I don't really do content marketing, which I think now unfortunately 80% of people call content marketing, which could be publishing, just random publishing.

No, my point is that That was a rant, sorry. I agree with you. I think that a lot of agencies, businesses still think that content marketing is publishing 500-word posts and then trying to promote them, and they're not leveraging quality one-on-one relationships with people, and that by building one-on-one relationships with people and through your customer service team, you have an opportunity to drive raving fans who are more likely to share what you do in a meaningful way, in a passionate way. So by having your customer service team active on these social networks and interacting with people using things like Facebook Messenger, perhaps because they're already interacting with them on the Messenger, then it's just that one little step further to getting the customer sharing what you do a little bit more on Facebook and getting that real believable content from your customers shared online. So it's an opportunity to market surely from that.

Sure. Like, I suppose I just don't see it from that point of view. Maybe I'm too one-track. I see and measure things from an SEO point of view. Which is related to the, the, uh, the, the traffic and the engagement, but it's quite likely not really on our client's website. It's very likely on someone else's website. Like, a lot of the stuff that I've done in the last 6 months is, is collaborative work, which is content marketing that's about the idea. And I don't give a shit about the, the target audience and the brand and whatever that is doing. It's about creating something truly valuable that is shareable and interesting for people online, but it's not necessarily related or trying to sell anything. So it's not brand or PR, and it's not trying to get 50,000 people to socialize it, but what it's trying to do is it's trying to get enough of that to also generate the, uh, authority from a link point of view.

I, if I can add a little bit, I think Lisa is way ahead of where everybody else is when it comes to content marketing and absolutely leading the way in what she does with web search for her clients.

I love you.

I'm your biggest fan, Lisa. But for most SEOs in the day-to-day context, content marketing is still just churning out 500-word blog posts to a week, off you go. And I am allergic to the term now to a degree where I almost come out in a brain rash whenever someone says it. Talks about content marketing. That's where the swear words start coming out. And I think you need to be very careful when you start casting your interactions with your customers in the light of that latest hype word, content marketing, you know, and that's going to change to something else 2 years down the line. What has never changed when it comes to success in business, online and offline, is doing right by your customers. And as long as you keep doing that, be it in the online context of social media and Twitter and using the right tools to give your customers support, or doing it offline in the old-fashioned way with phone support, or just having great products. Don't try to over-commercialize everything that you do. I think we as digital marketers are always trying to find that little angle that we can use, that little, you know, something we can exploit to an extent. It's something that I really dislike about our industry, that we are so focused on those sorts of edges and those sorts of gains that we lose track of the bigger picture. And in part, this is in response to what our clients demand of us. Our clients demand of us to deliver results, and we're always trying to find out if we can sneak our way through there to exploit something that the client has done to make them look good and make them stand out. But you know this as well as I, you see this coming a mile away when someone writes a self-promotional blog post about how awesome their customer support is. Nobody wants to read that crap. Nobody cares. You know, it's just a pat on your shoulder. Hey, we're awesome. Great. Yes. No, move on from that. Do something worth bragging about. Do that next level thing that Lisa is so good at doing, you know, and just, yeah, sorry. That was my rant. Keep the marketers away from content marketing is what I'm saying.

Hear, hear.

I totally agree.

Erica, anything to add to that as well?

I mean, Barry said it pretty well. I, every time I think about content, like we have a lot of conversations at, in Moz, I have a lot of conversations with other marketers about the whole phenomenon of content marketing and what it means. It's like everything you do on the internet is content, whether, you know, it's a tweet or a big content, you know, a big content project that you're doing like interactive design for. It's all content. And when someone comes in and says, you know, how does your brand do content? You're like, it's everything we do. Like that's what we put on the internet. And so for me, it's more important to, you know, do it well, make it impactful for that customer. That's what you gotta do.

Yeah, exactly. Anyone can do content, but it has to be good content to have any impact on social, SEO, on anything else. If not, it's just words.

Absolutely, just words. I think that's a great point to finish up on. You know, a lot of wonderful thoughts today, so thank you all for that. So I reckon just about time for a single takeaway and some sharing of find-out details. So, is that some strange noises coming in the background there?

Never mind, David, never mind. Okay.

Starting off with Lisa then. Lisa, what's your contact details and single takeaway to leave people with from our discussion?

Contact details is LisaDMeyers on Twitter and lisa@berbssearch.com email. My single main takeaway kind of takeaway will be, uh, if you want to do well in SEO, you have to think, you have to be creative. If whatever is called content or social or whatever it is, you have to do something differently. If everyone's drawing crosses, draw a fucking circle.

And also with us today was Erica.

I'm Erica McGilvery again, and you can find me on Twitter @EMcGilvery. You can also email me. I'm just erica@moz.com. And I would say the big thing for me is if you are going to do customer support on your social media, or if you're going to, you know, promote social media in your SERPs or whatever, make sure you're actually doing it. Make sure you're actually responding to people in a genuine way and make sure that the people who are working those channels for you are fully trained in your brand voice and how to deal with your customers.

Great advice. And also with us today was Barry.

Yes, Barry Adams, @badams on Twitter, barry@polemicdigital.com if you want to send an email, but I'm very likely to ignore it anyway, so Twitter is probably your best channel. I think my key takeaway is if your business sucks, no matter what you do online, you're gonna suck there too. You know, have a business worth bragging about, a business worth shouting about before you start doing anything online, because if your business is bad, then you're gonna be bad online. you want to or not, people are going to say bad things about you. So be awesome and then the rest will hopefully follow.

Great advice. Good marketing will probably kill a bad product quicker than anything. And I'm David Bain, Head of Growth at Authoritas.com, actionable big data for enterprise content marketing. And you can also find me interviewing online marketing gurus over at digitalmarketingradio.com. Now, if you're watching the show as a recording, remember to watch the next show live. Head over to thisweekinorganic.com and be part of the live audience for the next show. So, uh, for those of you watching live, we're also, um, having an audio podcast, of course, of previous shows. So check that out at thisweekinorganic.com as well. But until we see it again, have a fantabulous weekend and thank you all for joining us. Cheers, everyone. Thanks for being a part of it.

Bye.