Wikipedia's SEO Strategy and 2024 Marketing Predictions (Marketing 101 Dec 2023 Week 3)

All right, so this week's Marketing 101, Neil's going to kick this one off. Hook us, Neil, give us a hook.

Sure, so the first hook I have for you, and I'm pulling up my screen.

Why Wikipedia always ranks at the top of Google.

Yes, thank you very much. I was trying to find out the tab. Why do we always see Wikipedia ranking at the top of Google? And, you know, a lot of people assume it's backlinks, but when I compared Twitter with Wikipedia, It's not things like domain authority or anything like that because Twitter generates roughly 676 million organic visitors versus 2.1 billion for Wikipedia. But Twitter has a higher domain authority than Wikipedia. And when you think about it, we all know that you don't have, you know, to have a lot of content to get traffic. You have to go after the right keywords, but creating content just in and of itself Twitter has a lot of content that's been created on a daily basis. It's not enough. What it really is, is Twitter is continually pushing out new content. Wikipedia is pushing out new content, but most of their new content is updating their old content. Even Forbes, they're spending more time updating their old content. So when we looked at a chart and the chart ended up breaking down top performing websites and what they're doing, As you can see, they spend more time, 68.9% of the time updating their— they spent 68.9% of the time updating their content versus 31.1% of the time. And when I say top performing organic ranking sites, these are sites that have grown their traffic, SEO traffic by at least 50% a year consistently over the 4 years. So 50%, another 50%, another 50%, another 50%, So it's compounding. On top of that, these sites had a minimum traffic level of at least 10,000 visitors a month, right? Going 50% a year and starting at 1,000 isn't really much. A lot of these sites actually had well into the hundreds of thousands, some even millions. But updating your content is where it's at. That's what we're seeing continually generates more traffic. And all you have to do is ask yourself, when you do a Google search result, do you want to read something that's 3 years old or 3 days old? You're probably going to pick 3 days old.

Yeah. And when you think about it too, when you look at Forbes, 50 to 60% of their content output comes from updating. You can even just go look at Ahrefs or whatever tool that you want to use. And HubSpot focuses, or not focuses, but they hire a lot of people that are just content refreshers, right? And I believe we're going to see more and more of this. And Neil, my take is I think we're going to see a rise in the hiring of editors and probably decrease in the hiring of writers. Just because editors are, especially with the power of AI, they're going to be able to update more at scale and you need less pure writers in that sense. So that's where we can end it on that one. Now, next one is eventually we're going to get to marketing predictions. So you have to stay until the end of this video or the end of this section. But Iman Gadzhi, do you know who that is, Neil?

I do not.

Okay. So he's like probably 22, 23 years old and he gets like 150 million views or so a month off I think combined with TikTok, YouTube, and everything, right? That's a crap ton of views.

I'm assuming he's consumer-based.

Yeah. I mean, he's make money online-based. That's what I would say. Yeah.

So he's appealing to the mass audience.

Yeah. He sells the lifestyle, right? It's like, hey, look, I'm in Dubai. I bought this new home, blah, blah, blah. But I think what's interesting to me is I was watching a podcast interview and this guy, Logan Forsythe, And he basically, he works with Iman Gadzhi and I was watching some of the videos that he does. So basically what his agency does is he will create, for example, he'll make 5 social accounts, okay? So like Eric Siu Clips, Eric Siu Motivation, all these things and all the main social channels. It could be on Facebook, Snap, TikTok, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts, whatever, right? And then you'll have one unique video and you'll post it to all those, right? And then you'll do the same thing. You make 5 more accounts and then maybe it's called like Eric Siu Motivational or something like that. And then you'll make one, maybe it's a little similar, but you're editing it and you take that video and post it to all those, right? And you just basically keep doing all that. And the whole system here is he's posting 5,000 pieces of content per month and that is a lot, right? And the whole idea here is that all these channels, are helping each other out. And eventually, like, he's just saying the facial recognition is so good that if they know that you like watching like Iman Gadzhi videos, for example, and they show you another channel, maybe they show you the main channel, these channels all help each other cross-pollinate and, and grow each other. And then the view count just starts to stack and stack. And, um, that's not something that I've seen before. And so I think it's really interesting that, that people are able to do this. And I'm actually going to be talking to the guy on Thursday or so just to figure out maybe how he might be able to help us out as well. So Neil, I know you're busy talking to someone special, but what do you think about that?

You know, every time you see people with getting that many views and they're doing well, it's often categories that appeal to the masses and in many cases are hard to monetize, or if you monetize, it's not going to do as well as you want because Look, the make money online niche, people are going to get a lot of— you're going to get a lot of views and a lot of people are going to be disappointed. I'm not saying the content he's putting out is a scam. I've never seen it. I'm not saying what he's offering isn't good. I've never seen it. But what I'm saying is your buyer is looking to get rich quick and almost all of them are going to be disappointed. Even if you're telling them you're going to get rich slowly, they're still going to expect to get rich quick if your content is on making money online. I just know too many people in that space. And I've seen it.

You know what's interesting, Neil, before we move it over to you, this guy looked at our content and he's like, I think you guys have a lot of potential. I was like, okay, we'll see. So I'm going to talk to him on Thursday and we're going to see what the potential is. Because, you know, we're always down to experiment because then we can share these experiments with you guys if you continue to listen and make sure you share this episode with more people. But Neil, what's your next one?

My next one is how effective are Google paid ads? So we wanted to end up looking at the data and just breaking it down because a lot of people are like, well, Google ads just cost A lot more, you know. Through our tools, we track $2.1 billion in yearly ad spend. Average click-through rate on Google is 3.22%. Average cost per click is $2.81. I mean, $2.81. This is all USD, by the way. The average conversion rate is 3.49%. On the flip side, organic visitors convert at less than 1%. But then again, you don't really have to buy the organic traffic, although you're paying for time or energy or you know, whatever you want to call it, if you have in-house employees or consultants. 68.39% of users know that they're clicking on a paid ad. Shockingly, I can't believe that roughly 32% don't know it, but they click on it because they believe it'll provide the answer to their search query. And the average advertiser is generating $6.26 in revenue for every dollar they spend on ads. To sum it all up, Google generates $224 billion a year in ad revenue. If paid ads didn't work well, well, they wouldn't be generating that much revenue. It's worth testing. It's worth doing paid ads. It's worth doing SEO. It's not one is better than the other. Gobble up all the traffic. The big thing that you got to know with paid ads, if you're not able to make it work, the chances are it's your funnel. It's not just the ad because people keep focusing on optimizing the ad, but they don't optimize the landing page. They don't add in upsells. They don't add in downsells. You go to McDonald's, you order a drink. They say, you want to supersize that? I order a burger for my kids. They say, do you want a Happy Meal with that? Although technically I ordered them chicken nuggets. And then they asked, do you want a Happy Meal with that? The upsells are constant. That is how you get more revenue from your visitor base. That is how you make paid ads more profitable.

Great. Next one. So this might take some time. So Neil, I can kick off the next one and then you can start to, we can work off each other. You decide how you want to do this because this might take a little prep, but maybe you've thought about this. 2024 marketing predictions. So what we're going to do for this one is we're going to give our predictions. Next year, we're going to come back to this and see how many we got right and how many we got wrong. And I think these are always fun. So I'm going to kick it off first. So these are some of my predictions and Neil's going to say some stuff I don't agree with. I'm going to say some stuff he doesn't agree with, but these are why predictions are fun. So I'm going to say that I believe that We're going to see identity layering. What I mean by this is we're going to see people start to try to take back their data. And so, for example, you can deanonymize your IP addresses if you're B2B or even B2C right now, and you can basically retarget those people or add these people into like a sequence and message them. And these are like warmer leads that you can go after, right? And we even do this for recruiting as well. And so, I think, you know, Whether it's identity layering, using something like retention.com or customers.ai or even Warmly, there's a lot of different tools that you can use there. And I think that's going to be a growing trend.

Trend number 2, I think people will turn to podcasts over blogs. Ideally, you should do both, but there's over a billion blogs, 7.8 billion people in the world, one blog for every 7.8 people. Flip side, 4.2 million podcasts, one podcast for every 1,857 people. So if you just do the basic math, podcasting isn't that competitive. Salesforce did a study, the average household income for, I forgot which percentage, it was a high percentage, I think it was over 50%. It was something large, it was over $75,000. It just shows podcasting is worth tapping into.

Yep. The other one is I believe that, so this is 3, and by the way, these are, each of these are independent to ourselves. But what I would say is I think there's going to be a continued pushback on management of ad spend. I think the agencies that want to charge a percentage of ad spend, they're going to have to add more to it. So it can't just be on the management of the paid. I believe they're going to have to add in creative or data or something else that's tied with it to be able to command that percentage. So I don't think the percentage is going to go away, but you know, I'm continuing to see people try to chip away at it and people complain about it. So we'll see what happens. That's my prediction. Go ahead, Neil.

Trend number 4, I think people are going to start spending way more time on the less popular social networks. So I'm going to break down in the last 30 days what's the ROAS on some of the most popular social networks, and I'm going to do it top to bottom. So the first one I'm going to give you is going to have the highest ROAS from what we've seen in the last 30 days. X, 6.8. Pinterest, 5.2. Snap, 4.9. TikTok, 4.1. YouTube, 3.9. Instagram, 3.3. Facebook, 3.2. LinkedIn, 2.6. Now it doesn't mean X, because it's number one, is also going to drive you the most revenue. I said return on ad spend. So you're going to find your X ads, your Pinterest ads, your Snap ads more profitable than let's say Facebook, but Facebook can scale more because they have many more users, right? It's Facebook, it's Instagram, WhatsApp, their network is massive. But when you look at return on ad spend, yeah, Elon's having some issues because of maybe some things that he puts out or maybe some people's interpretations of his tweets or posts. So some people may boycott X, but that's causing X to have a much higher ROI. Assuming what he puts out there or what a network stands for aligns with what you have or what you, you know, your business philosophies and ethics, then you may not have an issue advertising on there, right? If it doesn't align, you may not want to advertise there even if you're getting a high ROAS. It's up for you to decide. But some of these less popular social networks, if you just look at it, they're just not as competitive. They don't drive as much volume, but if you get a lot of them, it really does add up.

Cool. My last prediction, number 5, and we're going to move back to, I guess, Neil, you're able to cover your topic in there within a prediction. That's awesome. So number 5 here is, so Neil talked about podcasts are going to continue to grow. I think that's going to continue to happen. But I think YouTube in the next decade is still going to be, I think it's going to be the platform, right? And it's the number 2 search engine in the world right now. I don't know about you, Neil, but when I go watch things, I go to YouTube to watch things. I go to YouTube to learn things as well. I go to YouTube to listen to things. And I just think if you combine YouTube plus podcast, that's why we're putting a lot of effort into video right now. We're trying to figure out other ways to grow with it because we think it's the best way. Like we know, we just restarted our Marketing School channel a couple months ago, but I just know it's going to compound. Like I have no doubts. We're just going to keep doing this. We've been doing this for 7 and a half years now. And I know the only reason it stopped growing is because we got disconnected from that channel for 4 years, right? But now we're back stronger than ever and just wait and see what happens with it. You're going to see it compound. And the cool thing about YouTube and a lot of these channels, it's like, dude, if you just put out a good video now, it doesn't even matter how many subs you have. It's just a good video is just going to crush it. Yep.

And then the next trend, even though we talked about podcasting, I think people are going to double down on blogging in 2024. Check out these stats, right? So we looked at search traffic data and just data in general, traffic stats, how much content people are putting out, et cetera. From over 1 million websites to answer the question if blogging is still worth it. A website with a blog has 75.29% more organic search traffic. A website with a blog has 11.41% more repeat visitors. A website with a blog generates 48.43% more backlinks. A website with a blog receives 194.58% more organic social traffic. A website with a blog has a higher time on site by 39 seconds, and a website with a blog has 292.79% more brand queries. And last but not least, a website with a blog has a higher conversion rate by 8.16%. Now granted, blogging is going to be time-consuming. It's a lot of work, but we're seeing the data's still worth it. And even though there's a billion blogs, a lot of people have given up and they don't really keep blogging and their content's crap, or they just keep using ChatGPT or AI just to create more regurgitated content. So if you end up going out there and creating more unique stuff, you'll do better.

Number 7, last but not least here. So I believe, sure, I talk about programmatic SEO, I talk about AI-assisted content, all these bells and whistles, right? I believe a lot of that's going to get blunted in 2024 because there's just so much crap that's being created right now. I believe a lot of it's going to be filtered or blunted, or you're going to see like a less of an effect of like the success that we've seen. For example, we saw the Twitter post on someone talking about the SEO heist where I believe it was the founder Byword saying they stole 3.6 million visits by doing this. I just think, you know, this is like the modern-day way of article spinning. And, you know, Google usually finds a way around these things. And I think this just goes back to, hey, like if you're going to do something that's black hat, do black hat in a white hat way. So you never get, you never, you know, do anything wrong. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to check out this next video over here. Rate, review, and subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow. Bye.