Why e-commerce & UGC thrive in SEO as affiliate sites decline, and MEI vs. DEI

Lily Rae shared an interesting article. So she did it with her intern over here. And basically this article, they look at a few examples of SERPs or many examples of SERPs shifting from displaying more affiliate product review content in 2023 to more e-commerce and UGC. And you know what? One of our mutual friends just told me yesterday or 2 days ago that he spoke with Danny Sullivan who now works at Google. He used to be the editor or the lead editor or what do we call that? Editor-in-chief. at Search Engine Land. And so Danny, I think Danny, I'm paraphrasing here, but basically it was like, yeah, I don't know why we weren't favoring more UGC in the past. Like it seems to make a lot more sense. And I'll tell you, when I do, when I evaluate things, I tend to trust communities like Reddit more because those people are in those communities and they're typically, there's more buy-in, I should say, more incentive for them to share the truth there versus like someone that's gained their site from like an affiliate standpoint. So check this out. So let's not use bird feeders, but let's use the keyword laptop. So laptops is another keyword that experienced a major shift in search results year over year. As seen in the image below, all affiliate and review websites in positions 4, 7, 9, and 10 in May 2023 were entirely replaced by e-commerce websites in May 2024. The top 10 results now consist exclusively of e-commerce websites, with some sites even listed twice. So let's take a look at this, make it a little bigger. So you can see here in the past you had New York Times, The Wirecutter, right? Which is affiliate website. CNET, which is affiliate too. The Verge, they get their affiliate kick as well. PCMag affiliate. Those have basically moved out. And you can see everything now is basically e-commerce, which makes a lot more sense to me. Like why would you go to New York Times to read about laptops?

They're just leveraging their domain, Also, if you think about it from a user perspective, think of it this way. You searched on Google for an answer, then they're taking you to, let's say, a New York Times Wirecutter page, which is not really a search result, but kind of a search result because it's displaying, here are the top 10 best laptops. And then you have to read through and search all over again. Ideally, as a user, if you're searching for like a laptop, You just want someone to show you the best laptops and you can see the reviews and ratings on that website and click the buy button or add to cart right then and there. So for me, you know, like showcasing Amazon or Costco if they have really affordable laptops or Walmart or whoever it may be, it's just more practical. Even showcasing some of the laptop manufacturers like Lenovo is better off than just sending me to an article that just regurgitates a lot of information and then I got to keep clicking again. It's like those old school directory sites that used to rank on Google and it's like, cool, so you're sending me from a search engine to a directory results page. So I got to go search more and hunt for what I'm looking for instead of just showing me the end result.

Yeah, and by the way, Google has said this before themselves. They said that they don't typically like ranking search results because you're, again, you're clicking a search results page to go to another search results page. And so it's actually another layer of clicks that you have to go through. And so here, look, look at this one. This one was for, I believe this one's for towel warmer, right? Towel warmer. Look, 2023, Amazon was number 1. HGTV was basically affiliate in this case, was number 2. And then the 5th position was bhg.com and then wired.com. And then so basically you had 4 affiliate websites in the top 10. And then now you look at it, it's all e-commerce again. makes a lot more sense. Like, look at this, onlytowelwarmers.com. Clearly that's geared for SEO, but still, that's still an e-commerce website. So you got to think about not necessarily optimize. And this is the thing, like Neil and I both started in SEO. At least for my mistake in the beginning was optimizing for SEO. But when you think about optimizing for the user, that includes creating great content, that includes having a great user experience, that matters a lot more than whatever rankings you're trying to game at the end of the day.

Go to the next one, leather cleaner.

Oh, hold on, let me share again.

So, um, similar thing.

You want to buy a leather cleaner?

Here. No. All right, here we go. I usually just get my leather shoes cleaned at the airport, although they're just white sneakers, so I tend not to do it.

You see it?

Uh, yeah, same thing. So there was 3 results that pretty much left. Forbes was one of them, but number one, number one was affiliate. Architectural Digest? What the heck are they doing creating a page about leather cleaners?

They're trying to make their affiliate cut, man. Show me an incentive and I'll show you the outcome.

I know, but that site's supposed to be about homes and architecture and not necessarily leather cleaning products.

Yep. Yep. There's still Reddit. I mean, look, oh, this is a new one here. They highlighted this in yellow. Reddit shows up in the top 10 here. So I do think there's going to be a Reddit strategy moving forward, but I just, I don't want people to jump the gun and abandon ship on everything. So I think that's our feedback. That's our thinking here. You got something on your end?

I also don't think Reddit is going to end up ranking like how it is right now in the long run. I don't think it's the most logical ranking site. Like for example, if you're searching for leather cleaners, going on a discussion board on Reddit doesn't really solve the problem. Someone's looking to buy a leather cleaner. That one page could sell the product. Educate them how to use it, tell them about it, the pros, the cons. It can pretty much break all that down versus a Reddit page that just sends traffic to somewhere else.

I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie, and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Aliyan, he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need and the group responds. Great experienced members. Getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members. Getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric. Getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created, and our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you inside. We're going to talk about this one. So did you hear about Scale AI that they announced their commitment to hiring for MEI? So merit, excellence, and intelligence instead of DEI?

Yeah, I think you posted about that on social.

I did. Oh wow, you actually read the stuff I post on social. So here.

And you said something like, It's good and bad or something like that, or it takes.

Oh no no, I definitely just said it's just good.

No no no, I know you're saying like the overall concept.

It's it's good and bad.

I don't know something you put on.

I think it's. I just think it's good. But the reason I thought it was funny was because Neil typically doesn't read stuff on social. Neil just gets on the phone and calls people. That's his his preferred way of learning. But okay, so or or he watches CNBC. But so Alexander Wang, Scale AI, and I think they're valued at a couple billion. They're like an AI company.

Couple billion? They're valued way more than that.

Scale AI valuation, you're probably right. $40 billion maybe?

No.

$14 billion valuation.

That sounds about right. I know it's over $10.

Okay. So in the wake of our fundraise, I've been getting a lot of questions about, I'm not going to read the whole thing here, about talent. All of our external successes. And by the way, this guy Alexander Wang, he's an Asian guy. Okay. Please don't blame his skin color. All of our external success, powering breakthroughs in L4 autonomy, partnering with OpenAI on RLHF, going back to GPT-2, supporting the Department of Defense and every major AI lab, and the recent $1 billion financing transaction, all of it is downstream from us hiring the best people for the job. Talent is our number one input metric. Because of this, I spend a lot of time on recruiting. I either personally interview every hire or sign off on every candidate packet. It's the thing I spend the plurality of my time on easily. But everyone can and should contribute to this effort. There are almost 1,000 of us now and it takes a lot to hire quickly while maintaining and continuing to raise our bar for quality. That's why this is the time to codify a hiring principle that I consider crucial to our success. SCaLE is a meritocracy and we must always remain one. Hiring on merit will be a permanent policy at scale. So I'm going to finish out with this paragraph. It's a big deal whenever we invite someone to join our mission. And those decisions have never been swayed by orthodoxy or virtue signaling or whatever the current thing is. I think of our guiding principle as MEI, merit, excellence, and intelligence. So the reason I'm even bringing this up, Neil, we can discuss this for a second, but I wanted to show you the difference between people responding to this this on X versus how they responded on LinkedIn. Who do you think had a more business-friendly response? X. You're right. So let's look at this over here. So these are the X. So Elon responds, great, right? Tobi from Shopify says, based. Good work making it clear, Alex. Palmer Luckey from Enduro. Also, he founded Oculus. Powerful and persuasive. Bravo. Gary Tan, Y Combinator, right? Thank you for becoming a shining beacon, for being a shining beacon to our delight here. And then all these other people and John Lonsdale. So these are all like the kind of the who's who in tech. So you get good responses here, right?

Yeah, Sean Maguire, I think is Sequoia. Okay, there you go. Joe Lonsdale, another venture capitalist.

Yep.

I think he came from Thiel or Palantir, one or the other.

Maybe both. Here, okay. Now I'm going to read some of these over here because you're on your iPad and it's late for you. So Dan Couch, okay. This is the most Silicon Valley thing I've ever seen. You're disrupting current hard-fought standards you don't like by reverting to a system rooted in bias and inequality that asks less of you as a hiring manager and as a leader. And then over here, okay. There is a mistaken belief that meritocracy somehow conflicts with diversity. I strongly disagree. And yet you're setting them up as a dichotomy here by co-opting and riffing on a DEI acronym, notably displacing the D, which stands for diversity. Okay, I'm not going to read all of this. I like— and we're not going to go too deep into this, but I just find it very interesting, the different levels of responses. Um, and Neil, what is your take on this? Because we're both, we're both Asian people, we're diverse, right? So what's your thoughts on this MEI thing?

Sure. So When we hire, we always look for the best candidate based on performance, skills, etc. At the same time, we do tell our recruiting staff to look for diversity, people of different skin colors, gender, etc. So that way we are diverse as well. But at the end of the day, we have people who work for us. that are trans, which we have nothing, no problems with, or else we wouldn't hire them. We have quite a few of them. And then we also have people who are part of the LGBTQ, I believe is the correct acronym.

Correct.

And on both of them, I believe we're a higher percentage than the population percentage of the United States, at least. And the way we look at it is, When we hire, we look to hire the best, you know? The people who work for us that are LGBTQ or trans, they're amazing at what they do. It's up to people however they want to live their lives. We support them. We want to hire the best though, and we believe there's best in every kind of race, color, ethnicity, preference, and you can find them. You just got to search hard for them.

All right, quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain, and Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. I want to talk about a couple of new strategies. And if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. So it's building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint. And we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint, and our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more, and we'll see you inside. So here's what I'll say. We've had LGBTQ on our teams, and some of the LGBTQ members have been amazing, right? I remember there's an operations guy I used to work with, and we had an incredible relationship. Really funny guy too. But there's one line that sticks out to me over here. So I would say, look, when we think about hiring at Single Grain, it's one, the main thing I'm looking at is how good are you at your job? That's what ultimately matters at the end of the day. It doesn't matter what your skin color is. I don't care what your preferences are. That's none of my concern at the end of the day, right? I just care about how good you are. And I think we've kind of gone too far to the other side. And this tweet over here, by the way—

And to clarify, Eric's not saying he doesn't care in a negative way. He's saying he doesn't mind what someone's preferences are. He's looking for talent and he's okay with whatever preference someone may have.

Yep. Thank you for that, Neil. All right, everyone. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate. Go ahead. Yes.

Make sure they go to marketingschool.io/agency.

I was going to do that. So please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe first. And then if you're an agency owner and you want to grow faster, go to marketingschool.io/agency. That's where we help agency owners grow faster. A lot of people have been saying the community has been great, that they've actually got a lot of resources, templates, and a lot of coaching that's helped them sidestep mistakes. So that's the group Neil and I have. Please join it if it seems like it's fit, and there's no long-term commitment. That's the cool thing about it. So that being said, we will see you next See time. you tomorrow.