Why Your Competitor Research Is Completely Wrong

Hi, this is Beers and SEO with Barry and Steve. I'm Barry, and I'm Steve. And on this edition of the pod, we're going to be looking at recent changes in Google Search, especially in Search Console, as well as how to do competitor research and how to do it properly. But this is Beers and SEO, so let's get started with the beers. Steve, what are you drinking?

Well, today I've got to be very careful because I've had one already, and this one is called, um, well, it's called the Big Day Pale Ale. And, uh, anytime we record, Barry, it's always a big day. Um, and it's a big day in my household cuz it gives me an excuse to drink cuz we're recording. It's like, like 4:00 PM, uh, on the Friday. So let's get the weekend started. Uh, and this one's by, um, uh, the Jiddler's Tipple, which is, um, something you can probably struggle to, uh, pronounce after 3 beers, but. They're a brewery in North London, and yeah, it's again pale ales. It's like 5.2, which obviously a lot of pale ales are on that. So I kind of like would have just like a couple of these. It's probably not a session ale, but yeah, it's kind of like sort of nice and quaffable. What about you, Barry?

I decided for one of my favourite Irish red ales, Smithwick's, which is just quite light and delicious and just has a lot of flavour. My wife and I actually went to their brewery in Kilkenny a couple of years ago on a weekend trip to that part of Ireland and already liked Smithwick's before that, and I liked it even more after that. And it's just very drinkable, very easy, and generally when a pub that I am visiting has this on tap, I tend to have at least one or two pints of this stuff because it's just very easy to drink, lots of flavor and, and not particularly hoppy or anything like that. Just a very nice smooth red ale. And also because it's Friday, I went for the bigger size as well. So this is a proper pint rather than the, the 330ml I usually do. So we'll see how, how well we fare.

Going in hard. Nice. Nice. Yeah. So, you know, I thought we'll talk before we go head into like Google. There's been like 2 announcements over the last 7 days and they're all themed. It's kind of like the anti-AI slot functionality, which is now available in the form of buttons in LinkedIn and Substack. So, you know, I noticed a couple of, like, I think it was about 6 days ago on Substack when it was released. Initially, my reaction was, you know, this is, you know, this is really, really good. But I might have to be, you know, a bit careful as a writer because I use, I have like a hybrid approach To writing. Sometimes I'll just write without the use of AI, but sometimes I'll use it, you know, to check my arguments, which I'll you know we'll come come come on to. But I think what the I think what we've all seen is quite a lot of AI driven nonsense on LinkedIn and Substack and many many other platforms. So what do you think, Barry? Is a good thing for these kind of precautions or these kind of Flagging systems to be put into place.

Yeah, I'm a bit in two minds about this. I sort of understand it. I think it's primarily intended to help the platforms identify AI slop a bit more accurately. But I also am afraid that if platforms start to flag content as likely AI generated, people will very quickly skip over it. I do have. A bit of a nuanced opinion on the use of AI when it comes to generating content, especially the written word, where AI by its very nature, the LLMs, they are mediocrity machines. They don't produce anything particularly useful or insightful or novel on their own. However, in the hands of a capable user like yourself or other people that I know that use AI quite heavily, like Jonah Walderson, you can generate really good content with that. It enhances your thinking. It allows you to produce content faster, based on your own thoughts and your own creative processes without having to put the effort in to write every single word yourself. And that sort of hybrid creative approach, like you just said, Steve, is very powerful and I think is a good use case for AI. However, these tools will still flag the content as AI-generated and that then, you know, makes it very easy for people to just skip over it, scroll past it, or just ignore it, filter it from their feeds entirely. I don't really have an easy answer for this because I do think AI is used too often in the first case where people don't put any creative process into it. They just generate a simple prompt and let the AI do its thing. And the output is terrible, just mediocre crap that nobody should be wasting any energy on. And LinkedIn especially is, you know, rife with that sort of use. And I think LinkedIn especially wants to filter that out and make sure that their feed is better curated, and this is one of the ways in which they want to do that. But I think we as users still have to have a certain responsibility so that we need to not necessarily engage with the content because it's AI-generated, but we need to engage with the ideas that the content is presenting. And if those ideas have merit, no matter if the content is generated with or without the use of AI, we should still engage with that content and engage with those ideas. And try and create that conversation around it. I do think that these sorts of tools will make it harder for spammers basically to, you know, flood the feed with AI slop and generate false engagement off the back of that. And that's a good thing, I suppose. But genuine creators like yourself, like others who use that hybrid approach might feel a little bit of a negative backlash off the back of these sorts of programs.

Yeah, I think, I think as writers you've got to be careful when using it because if you're using it to try to improve your argument or your copy, it will identify things that can be sharpened up. And so it's almost like that Greek philosophical myth with the boat where you start replacing parts of the boat and eventually, is it the boat? You know, is it the original boat?

The Ship of Theseus.

That's it. That's it.

If you replace every single piece of timber, is it still the original ship?

You strike me as a man that's already seen the Odyssey film.

I have seen the Odyssey, yeah, in IMAX, obviously. I'm a fan of the source material. I read the Odyssey and the Iliad when I was in my early 20s in a very good translation. So I was Yeah, eager to see that cinematic expedition and was not disappointed.

Yeah, well, yeah, I'm gonna have to book that in. But yeah, I just think, you know, writers have to be careful because it starts to sharpen up your argument, and before you realize it, you're replacing paragraphs and it becomes less yourself. And, you know, I mean, I've done it myself where you then publish after it's been edited too much by AI, and in the end you kind of like think you actually, you actually forget precisely, um, everything that's been written. I think there's a great, um, the more that you, that you're writing it, the more you, you memorize what's been written. I think this is part of the problem is that people are producing the, this information, and they're not actually remembering what they've published. And it's just a cycle of coming out all the time. So yeah, I think, I think it's a good thing, but not necessarily, but, but I think the use of AI is not a bad thing. So it's not like a value judgment. But yeah, it should hopefully definitely sort of like filter out the kind of like non-thinking users of it.

Yeah.

Who are just sort of creating this noise in the information.

Yeah, I should also say, to expand on my own thoughts on that a little bit, I think for me, the act of writing is also an act of thinking. When I write, not just emails, but for example, my own newsletters or detailed posts, the process of writing clarifies my thinking about what I'm trying to say. 'Cause it's in my head, it has a vague shape in my head, and then the process of writing it crystallizes it. And that's a thought process. That's a creative process. If I outsource that to an AI, I'm not entirely sure I'll be confident in what the AI is saying because I haven't written it. I haven't gone through that crystallization process in my own head to end up with the message that I can stand behind. And that's something I want to be very wary of, which is why so far I have not used AI in my writing. I actually did do one experiment where I had a detailed proposal I sent out to a client, which was AI-generated. And I didn't get the gig. In fact, the client ghosted me after that, which was also a learning experience for me. And yeah, let's just go back to writing my own proposal documents myself from scratch.

I think you actually—

I do think if people might, they might not always consciously detect it, but subconsciously.

Yeah.

There was an interesting, actually an interesting study that was published not too long ago that you can use detection methods with a very high degree of confidence to detect AI-generated content that aren't exactly about the words being used, but of sort of mapping the shape of the output in a 2-dimensional, 3-dimensional space. It gives a very high degree of confidence about what is AI-generated, what isn't AI-generated. And I think we as people do that subconsciously when we consume written words. It sort of takes a shape in our minds. It filters down to our neurological processes and we get a feeling associated with that. And we sort of know when we read something that is very heavily AI-generated, that it doesn't feel right. It doesn't have that shape that human-written content has. And, you know, we need to be a little bit wary of that. And that, you know, it's necessarily not necessarily seen as a quality mark when people see AI-generated content. In fact, it might have the exact opposite effect where people think, oh, this is AI-generated, therefore it doesn't have a lot of effort associated with it. Therefore, I'm not gonna take it seriously in whatever context that document is being presented.

Yeah.

Yeah, you have to be a bit wary about that. And I do think that human-generated content will have a perceived added value that AI-generated content does not have.

Yeah. I mean, you know, we've already spoken about this before in the, with regards to what should news publishers be publishing, right? And a lot of that is original first-party content. We, we don't need to go down that route now, but that's what we've been communicating for several years now. And, uh, yeah, this is just the— this is just one kind of like reflection with the— with Substack and LinkedIn of, of like everyone is becoming sick of reading this language which is stereotypical and clichéd. Um, yeah, and you skip, you skip, and it— and you as the publisher or the individual is losing credibility on the back of that. So you proceed with extreme caution. Um, but yeah, so, um, Moving on to Google now. So obviously everyone, I think it was either in the last 24 hours, the now social media accounts can now be added into Google Search Console. There were some gifted few who were able to get early access to that. So obviously as SEO and audience growth specialists, we've like been connecting with people who have had access to that for 3 or 4 weeks now, but now we've all got it. And yeah, there's just— We've got a number of questions about that, but for those that may not have connected their accounts at the moment, the kind of things that you are now able to see into the account is you've got your performance report. So you can view the total clicks, impressions, and filter and sort by the data to see specific posts and queries that are driving the most traffic in there with your social accounts in Google.

Google.

And I mean, in itself, that seems quite straightforward. So how visible are my social accounts in Google? We'll come to that because even that has a little tripped up a few people. But anyway, you also have your Insights report where you can view a high-level overview of your recent traffic trends, your top-performing posts, and how people discover your account on Google. And then you have this Achievements. I mean, these achievements things that are in Google Search Console. I don't really sort of like look at that area at all, but it's there anyway. So I guess, look, Barry, why do you think Google is doing this?

That's a very good question. I should also note at the moment it's only search results, which I think is a little bit disappointing because of the high Persistence of social content in the Discover feed. I had expected also to have a Discover report in this, but that may come later down the line. Where we see, you know, metrics on how often our YouTube videos and Instagram posts are being shown in the Discover feed. At the moment, it's just search results, which means it's going to be fairly limited. I quite like it in a way, because in Search Console, I think it's a logical extension. We've had website data in Search Console, and that also comes with other data beyond performance, how many pages indexed, all that sort of stuff. And now Google is saying, you know what, your property, your presence on the web is not just your website, which we've known for a very long time. So we're also going to give you data on other properties that we can verify are part of you. And therefore you can show how often it can show in the search results, what kind of queries it shows up for, what kind of results it has. And there are separate properties in Search Console, which I think was also an interesting move. So they're not directly associated with your website. They're just verifiable as separate properties in Search Console, as if they were a separate website. Which sort of is what they are. Instagram page is a separate entity from your own website or from your YouTube channel. Why Google is doing this? I think Google is trying to position itself as more than just a driver of traffic to your website, but as a visibility channel for your entire presence on the web. And this is one way that they can demonstrate that to you. Like we sort of seem to have this subconscious notion that presence on Instagram or presence on YouTube is primarily driven by their internal algorithms, which is true. But Google also sends an awful lot of traffic to these social channels. In fact, I'd say that probably the bulk of referral traffic to these social channels comes from Google and not from anybody else. So Google has been perceived in the last 2 years as sort of squeezing traffic to websites, which is a valid concern. But at the same time, you know, Google is also trying to maintain that position as the gateway to the web. And this is one way that they can do that. They can show people, hey, you know what, when not just sending clicks to your website, we're also sending clicks to your Instagram posts, we're sending clicks to your YouTube videos, we're sending clicks to your TikToks, all of those things. And I think that will continue to build business cases for companies to invest in Google optimization, not just for their website. SEO is a very powerful industry for website optimization, but also to look at how you can optimize your content on Instagram, how you can optimize your content on YouTube to increase discoverability not just for their internal algorithms, but also for Google Search as a viable secondary channel to drive traffic to those posts on those social channels. And that also helps Google because it allows Google to better understand what these posts and videos are about, allows them to rank them in the right context, and allows them to give better, more relevant search results to people who engage Google to find that sort of content.

Right. Yeah. Because it, I mean, Google is funny, right? Because Google Search Console, has always been, um, I mean, obviously you and I would happily acknowledge that we are nerds, uh, Barry, but you know, Google Search Console has always been sort of like the, you know, the, the owner owned by SEOs and website owners, right? And it's been this analytical tool that many people don't know about really. But this, it seems like this integration now opens it up to creators, right? So creators can now see that visibility and especially As I mean, we already know that Google Discover gives lots and lots of visibility to social accounts, but, you know, and YouTube visibility in, uh, in Google has always been absolutely massive. Um, so, but it just opens up the audience, right? And obviously creators are a massive exploding, um, part of, of the potential users that you can have. So more people can't be a bad thing for Google, right?

Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's interesting that, you know, this also allows businesses to share this data with their social teams and maybe do a bit more cross-pollination that way to encourage collaboration between social teams and web teams, which is never a bad thing. I think they often treat it as separate silos too often, and by unifying the reporting or allowing Search Console to feed into social reporting, you're creating a bit more internal dialogue that way as well. Yeah. So that's, I think, probably one of the added benefits.

And, um, well, do you think there's also a little bit of social engineering going on here? Because obviously all, all this helps the, the Google product, in particular the Google AI product, right? Because once you start adding this information, uh, it's gonna help Google sort of, uh, understand who created that piece of content, what, uh, which accounts belong to the same entity, which subject the content addresses. And whether users find it useful for particular queries, right? This is all really, really useful information for Google in its, well, to become the AI and search overlord that it already is. But right, this is extremely valuable for Google, right?

Probably an added benefit for Google there. Yes, absolutely. And Google does have a history of, you know, using its power as a search engine to encourage certain behaviors on the web. They basically forced the entire web to go to HTTPS, For example, they forced the entire web to take performance seriously with Core Web Vitals. Even some things that basically only benefit Google have been widely adopted, like XML sitemaps. Why are we implementing XML sitemaps? Oh, because it makes Google crawling a little bit smoother. There's no benefit for the user whatsoever. So yeah, there's probably some benefit there for Google to make their product better, to make their product richer, to connect dots behind the scenes in their knowledge graph and entity graphs, which, you know, they already do to a certain extent. This just makes it a little bit more explicit. So yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if that is an ulterior motive. I don't actually believe it is their prime motivation though. I think the prime motivation, like, like we talked about, is more about showing the value of Google beyond just traffic generator for websites, that they have a bigger footprint and a bigger utility on the web than just driving clicks to websites.

Right. And particularly in the space where people used to ask like, how much traffic are we getting from Google? Right. It's important to, for Google to demonstrate, uh, to publishers and brands, um, how valuable that traffic is. Right. So, so publishers shouldn't be asking how much traffic are we getting from Google? Is it going up, you know, or is it going down? It's more, what is the value of this audience? So hopefully this data should illustrate that, right?

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think the interesting part is because, you know, you go to these social channels and they will give you some data on how people engage with your content, how they find your content, but they won't give you the query data that Google is now giving you. Google will tell you, oh, this query surfaces your YouTube videos. This query surfaces your Instagram posts. And that is very valuable data as well, because it tells you a lot about your audience. It tells you a lot what your audience is looking for and whether or not you can deliver what that audience is looking for. And that can feed into your marketing strategy on all kinds of different levels, not just on that one channel that Google is reporting on. So it's just, I don't see any downsides to this at the moment. And I'm, almost a bit saddened that it took Google so long to launch this. Although we've never, I suppose we've never really openly asked Google for this sort of stuff. But now that we have it, it seems a bit like, oh, well, of course we should have this data. This is really bloody useful data. Why didn't we ask for this sooner than this?

But it's here. And speaking of data, obviously we've also had the kind of like AI visibility data. So all the more, more, more and more data. So obviously, people have been looking at this for a bit longer. So it's been a few, few months now that we've had the kind of AI visibility data in Google Search Console, where we can see, you know, the kind of AI overviews, AI mode, and AI features in Discover. And it currently reports on impressions, pages, countries, devices, and dates, but we don't get any, uh, click data or, uh, specific queries, um, the specific citations or positions. Um, so we can calculate any kind of like revenue impact on that. Um, so what's been your feeling about this to date, Barry? And then we can go through some, some, uh, recommendations for editors. Yeah.

I think this is something Google doesn't want to do just yet, but they were forced to because certain legislators, especially in the UK, have said, right, we need this data or we're going to start fining you. So this is basically a beta product. I think they have until the start of next year to make it a full product. The full requirement from the UK Competition and Markets Authority requires Google to also deliver click data. So it's not in there yet, but I suspect it will come because Google is legally required to supply that data. I think right now the interesting thing is primarily that we have the impression data and we can compare it to search impressions. However, the search impression data also includes the AI data already. So this is basically a filter. And I'm a little bit surprised they created a separate report for it rather than just a filter report. But the reason that it's a separate report is because with the filter report, we still get the query data, for example. Whereas with a separate report, Google can just leave out the query data, which is why it's a separate report at the moment. But I think the query data is probably the most interesting part of this, which is, you know, missing the query and the clicks. So it's sort of an olive branch, I suppose, to the web saying, hey, yeah, we're giving you data on AI citations, but it's not particularly useful. We can't really do much. It's not really actionable in any meaningful way. And I find that, again, this is why I think Google has been forced to do this. And they're sort of building the infrastructure to build better reports off of this in the background because they have to, not because they want to.

Yeah.

So it's sort of playing a little bit of catch-up and we'll probably see a more mature version of this report probably towards the end of the year.

Right. So what, uh, can sort of editors and audience growth specialists do now? It's kind of like just indicative data at the moment, right? Because you're kind of, you can see, um, or you should be sort of like looking at what kind of subjects are getting visibility, what formats, which particular authors on your team seem to be getting visibility in there. Um, is it breaking news? Is it evergreen? Um, You know, what the age of the articles, because AI is going to pull in all sorts of funny things, right, as we know. So I think speaking to a lot of newsroom leaders, I think they've been spending quite a bit of time on this, and they will be really grateful when the full fat version lands, because I think they're really trying to understand the, you know, like we're all trying to understand, is the patterns in the data, and what can they do now to get more, more and more visibility. But I think ultimately, you know, it kind of brings us back to the question of, you know, what does this AI visibility— what is the business outcome? What is the value of this, which we know is quite restricted when it comes to news publishers? But you know that, you know, it's kind of like just making sure that you're using this information along with many other different sort of AI visibility tools that you can use out there to see what's, what's got visible and kind of look at those pages which are more valuable to you, i.e., pages which are— that you know lead to high conversions, are more likely to push subscriptions, for instance. It's those kind of like hero pages that you want to try and start looking in this data to see if it's getting visibility. Would you recommend any other in addition to that, Barry?

Yeah, I think we have to keep in mind that if and when we get query data and click data, it'll not match up to your own web analytics, as Search Console data historically has never really perfectly matched up with analytics, because Search Console does a lot of neat tricks in the background to make the reports faster, and they take a lot of shortcuts and do statistical sampling. So the numbers are never accurate. The queries are always filtered and anonymized. So what we see in Search Console for search performance for example, isn't really what people are searching for, but it's indicative. It's a trend. It gives you a snapshot and a rough overview. And I think the AI reports will have that same limitation. They'll not be perfect. They'll just be indicative of certain trends, trend lines, query topics, those sorts of things, which is why, for example, SEO-wise, rank trackers have never really gone out of fashion. Even though Search Console theoretically supplies that data, in practice, rank trackers give you more granular data and more competitive analysis as well, which is what Search Console of course can't do. And the same with AI, we'll still need sort of prompt tracking or smart use of AI monitoring to give us an indication of where we sit in the competitive landscape and what the real data or approximations of the real data will give us. At the moment, I don't see the data as particularly useful because it's just impressions yet and there's no queries associated with it and no clicks. I think, you know, you need to be a little bit careful in trying to distill actions from those very vague metrics. But, you know, it's more like an FYI at the moment. Let's keep an eye on it and see what this is doing. And if you start spotting trends that certain types of articles get much more AI citations than others, then you can make a decision on whether you want to create more of those or not, what the value is in creating those sorts of articles. But again, it's because it's so early days and the data is so superficial, I wouldn't put too much stock in it just yet.

And somewhat a little bit related, again, in the last couple of months with the kind of like the search profiles that have been released. So I wanted to ask, is there— what is the impact of not doing anything about optimizing that? So obviously you have the profiles that are now—

Yeah, but can we optimize those search profiles? They exist at the moment and they're just basically automatically generated by Google and we can point people towards them as we do with, for example, preferred sources on top stories. A lot of publishers have now implemented call to actions for those as well. The uptake is fairly low, which I think is expected. Same with following Google in the search profiles. I'm sort of more interested in what the long-term trend is, what Google is trying to accomplish with search profiles as well as with preferred sources. I suspect there will be more of a unified interface later down the line where people might just have one page for a specific entity, a specific brand that Google recognizes, which allows them to set them as preferred source, follow them on Google, maybe even follow the social media accounts from that particular page because Google will have connected those dots behind the scenes. And that then positions Google in a very interesting way, a sort of a hub of your web presence, all channels, not just your website. And I think that might be the game that Google is playing in the long run.

Yeah. And also, I guess, I mean, because I've seen it through a few client accounts, is, you know, these profile pages or wherever you are surfaced in wherever you are, if it doesn't look right, that's a signal, right? If the wrong website's been pulled in, for instance, it's not uncommon for corporate accounts to be pulled in instead of the actual editorial website, for instance. So that's like an indication of like, oh, okay, which do we want to rank? You know, it's all like working out what, you know, the knowledge graph, what does Google know about you? And are you sending the strong enough signals? But before we move this topic, one tiny thing about the AI visibility in Google Search Console, just for those that might be hitting their head against the wall, is the AI visibility data is— that's now visible. You have the— it's broken. They're supposed to be— it's separate. So you have the total AI search impressions, and you have your total impressions. So the AI visibility is, is hoovered up into your total search impressions, right? But if you were to split them out mathematically, they don't appear to make sense. And that's down to the kind of like the way that Google, you know, generates or calculates URL performance, basically. So I know that's tripped up a lot of people because they're thinking, because the sums don't make sense. Total search impressions, you've got your AI search impressions, and as a percentage or as a number from that, but the numbers just don't make sense. So I think that's got a lot of people thinking and worried about that. But I think the message now is just kind of like go with the flow. Google, you know, has got very precise ways of calculating, you know, doing its URL counts. There are some very clever other people out there that can tell you specifically how it does that, but just go along with it. It's directional. If your key pages are not in, not being displayed, do something about it. You know, hire a consultant.

Right. The Search Console data has never made sense though. It never really matched up to actual click data. So it's just one of the quirks of Search Console. It's always sampled reporting basically.

Yeah. we do love Google and the information that it does allow us to have. So hopefully one day we'll get the— we'll get the more— like I said, the full-fat version of that. Um, I think we will, um, we'll move to the, the segment of, um, competitor research. Um, and you know, this is, this is Google and, and many other different sort of tools, uh, and that's available out there. Um, so I wrote a piece, um, on my Substack about competitor research and I think I did this, I wrote this for a number of different reasons, but I think one of them is the fact that it's an area of SEO and just sort of editorial assessment of different websites that I really enjoy. And I wanted to ask Barry, do you also get compelled by competitor research? I find it's a really fun thing to do.

I'll be honest, I very rarely do any of this. occasionally engaged by clients to look at competitor research and then trend mapping in that space. But generally, most of my work is focused on their own particular website and particular position. I don't do an awful lot of it, which is why I found your post very interesting because I'm learning all kinds of new things.

Well, I think I've spoken about this before, that kind of my interest in competitor research came about primarily because I used to manage editorial news desks. And we'd always constantly be looking at the competition all the time. And then particularly when it came to launching new digital products, it kind of widened your appreciation of what the competitors were doing. Up to a certain stage, I was just doing that from an editorial point of view, but I then started to work for an agency, which was pretty much my introduction to SEO, where I had a fantastic SEO manager who showed me Screaming Frog for the first time, and we did some competitive research together, and it blew my mind. And I've been, uh, competitive research ever since has been just like a very interesting focus for me. And, um, uh, one of the, one of the reasons I, I wrote this piece was, um, just by seeing, um, obviously with tools like Claude Code and, um, the many other AI, um, tools that are out there, you know, people are using that to do competitive research, but I don't think you're gonna the full picture that you need. So there's a couple of things that I do when I'm doing competitive research, which I spoke about in the article. And one of them is really, it's— the main thing is that you can't really do competitive research unless you really understand your own product. Sometimes I've seen people asked to do competitive research, They'll go away, they'll come back, and they present, but they are not doing it with anything firm to compare with. And I think it's really, really important that you know your product inside out before you do the competitive research, which might sound like a really, really basic thing, but I think it's really important to have that established because Anytime that you then spend doing competitive research, you've got a benchmark to, to put it against, right? The other thing is I've always believed is like first impressions, um, of a product or newspaper or whatever it is. I think they're really interesting, interesting, intrinsically very, very important. Um, now they could be wrong because you might misunderstand things, but I will often if I am— could do my competitor research, I will often jot down my impressions of it. So one of those things would be just the proposition, right? So the positioning and the proposition of a website. So how does that news brand— let's take a look at a news brand— how does it talk about itself? What's the language that it uses? And how does it demonstrate to me the value of what it's doing? And you could apply that to any kind of like product. And I think that's like really, really essential, particularly in the environment that we're in now, where it's not just— it's no longer just good enough to do a good job. You've got to demonstrate to the audience why it's good and take them along on that journey. Which kind of like brings you into, you know, how easy is it to move into the story that you want to tell the audience? How easy is it? Are you nurtured along onto the subscription path without annoying anyone? So it all feels completely natural. How easy is it as you approach the time that you might need to renew your subscription? How easy is— have you been messaged sensitively with lots of value-add kind of communication? So by the time it comes to renew your subscription, you're kind of— it's like a natural thing, and you're fully, um, aware of that, of what you— of the value that you receive for it, basically. So, like, the, the proposition and the positioning, I think it's like really, really, really key. And I, I often kind of will do that by visiting, uh, these websites, okay? I think it's really, really crucial to go and actually look at the competitive product rather than doing it within the safety of your AI tool. Because like search results, you need to go and see what's on the page itself, right? I know you agree with this, Barry.

Yeah.

Absolutely. If you're analyzing, you know, if time is short and you'll have to do something at scale, These tools are really, really brilliant, particularly if you need to produce a report on scale. And, but you need to go and experience what it's like as a user, right? And, uh, that's another thing that I fear with some of AI, the ease of asking an AI tool to produce a competitive, uh, set and who knows, produce a listicle of, um, top 10 in this area with your own brand at the top. It's just, it's, it's just completely wrong. You need to go in and experience what those brands are doing and take the mindset of the user. The other thing on the article, which I didn't mention actually, but the other thing when you're doing your competitive analysis is that you really should be looking at how can you do better at that competitor, right? And that's something that you're not going to get from a, from an, um, from an AI tool, it's going to tell you a number of different things, but only you can work out, oh, they're doing a brilliant job at executing, for instance, um, let's say behind-the-scenes videos talking to the editorial team, which the goal of that is obviously to give more transparency to the editorial team, right? But only by going in and watching it are you going to be able to figure out actually I like what they do in these— the— this area, but I think we can improve, uh, in this area. Just not going to get that from a tool. So, um, also a lot of, um, a lot of, um, to do with kind of like creating a great editorial product is to take the risks. And some of that risk might be, okay, I believe as a team and as a brand we need to write about this, this particular subject. Now, we might not get much traffic for the next month or so on it, but I think— I passionately believe that over time our audiences will, and future audiences will, will become aware of us in this space, and we will accrue an audience. And again, I think that's really, really difficult, that kind of risk-taking, and It's difficult for an AI tool to deliver you on. Sometimes creating a successful initiative product is taking that risk, and sometimes there's no immediate revenue or traffic. You know, it's a gut feel. But again, yes, it's a gut feel based on some form of data.

Yeah, that reminds me of the famous saying from Henry Ford, you know, why he built the car, and he's— because nobody asked for it. He said if he asked people what they wanted, they would have just said a faster horse. Yeah, it's a famous thing, you know, you got to sometimes break the mold a little bit and an AI tool is never going to tell you that. They're just going to tell you to create faster horses rather than just reinvent the entire concept of transportation.

Brilliant. Yes, I'm going to get that stamped on my studio here. Barry, I know you've said you've not done much by way of competitive research, but have you looked at keyword gap analysis?

Yeah. Yeah, this is an often— I find this interesting though in the context of news websites, because the keyword gap analysis is very powerful if you have e-commerce websites or static content websites where you sort of understand where you perform well and where don't we perform well and what are our competitors ranking, where we are not ranking, do we have pages that can match those search intents, that sort of stuff. But I also find it quite reductive in that, you know, we need to write an article about this because the competitors have an article about this and want to compete with them. And it reduces the concept of SEO to chasing after rankings and chasing after keywords. And there is value in doing keyword gap analysis, but you need to have that broader context, that strategic overview, which you just talked about, what your value proposition is, what you are to your customers and what you can potentially be and not get seduced by, oh, the traffic chase. Because, oh, they rank for keywords that we want to rank for. And that's a bit of a, approach that might've been a perfectly valid thing to do 5, 6, 7 years ago. But now in an era where, you know, traffic isn't really the North Star KPI anymore, and it shouldn't be, you need to have a different perspective on how you treat SEO, how you treat search traffic as a whole. And it becomes more about your value as a business rather than, you know, the amount of clicks you can get on specific keywords and specific rankings. So yeah, keyword gap analysis is still useful. But treat it as a data point, not as a core tactic to distill actions from.

I think you're absolutely right there because it's another example of a tool that is interesting. It's always interesting to see that kind of information. Definitely don't use it, as you say, as a, okay, right, I'm now going to tell the team to do these 10, write about these 10 things, because that might not be relevant to your brand.

But again, it's another—

because there are many different tools that offer keyword gap analysis. And it's again, it's another instance where a tool has created a convenient way of looking at data. And it can lead you down a misguided route, right? Often, keyword gap analysis is a Venn diagram, right? Of these are the keywords that you rank for, These are the keywords that your competitor ranks for. This is what you both rank for. It, you know, is a very powerful visual look at your data. But yeah, treat with caution.

Yeah. I also think you mentioned it before when you talk about tools and how that is never a substitute for just performing searches yourself and seeing what it looks like. There's a very strong risk in looking at your presence on the web, regardless of what channel you're using, through the lens of tools and only through the lens of tools, rather than how your users actually see you when they do a search or when they search on Instagram or whatever it is that it is. And I feel that because some of the SEO suites like Ahrefs and Semrush, they're very powerful and people treat their output as the foundation of the SEO strategy. And I think that's a huge mistake. The data can be very, very useful, but you should already have a strategy that is based around your value proposition as a business that is independent of the data that these tools contain. The tools are very useful for tactical execution, but they are not a strategy tool. They're not strategic partners. They're tactical partners. And you need to use them for tactical implementation, technical execution, not to redefine your SEO strategy. Because I think that leads you down a path where you're just going to be doing the same things and confusing tactics for strategy, which is something we have a huge problem with anyway in the SEO industry. So you need to have a step back and understand, right, what are we good at as a business? How do people perceive us? What is our real value? And then you use that to guide all your marketing strategy, not just the SEO strategy. And the tools can help you with the execution of it, but they can't help you with the definition of your strategy.

Right. Big up the humans. Again, use your eyeballs, spend time looking at the products, assessing your own products as well. Go out there and yeah, first impressions count. I really do believe that, which is why often in previous roles I've worked in, often the apprentice or the person that's just joined the team, I'll often ask them, them to do some competitive research or assess our own websites. And yeah, often the insights that they give are absolutely valuable. And it's funny, the more you work sometimes in an organization, the less ability that you have to critique your own product. So you have to keep that kind of outsider focus basically. Right. I think we'll wrap up there, Barry. It's been another good conversation. I mean, it's just goes to demonstrate that Google's always changing. And even though that we are getting all this new data, particularly from Google, again, I think we've sort of like talked about some good things about just using that in the context of your own skills and experience and going out and for instance, in competitive research to go out and look at the products and use your trained expertise.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, AI is a helpful tool, but it doesn't replace human thinking. In fact, it might even undermine human thinking. So put the human first and foremost in whatever you do, and I think you're going to be fine in the long run.

Right. Okay. So take care, everybody. We'll see you at the next pod.

Absolutely. Cheers, everyone.

Adios.