Rand Fishkin on Marketing Culture

Howdy, y'. All. Great to see you. All sorts of things are going on. Many, many amazing, wonderful things. First off, I want to say a huge thank you to everyone from Inbound and HubSpot. I think Dharmesh and Brian and I have known each other for a decade now, and it's been just incredible to see how far this event and their company has come. I'm honored to be a part of it. I'm especially honored. So this year, for those of you who don't know, which I assume is, like, you know, one of the camera people that I didn't get to talk to earlier, my wife Geraldine is also speaking at Inbound this year, which is amazing. On that note, I have a small bone to pick. So we have only ever spoken at the same conference once before. It was at a conference in Australia. And most of you probably know I pride myself on having, like, very good speaker scores. You know, I work really hard to try and make sure that I give good, actionable information about marketing stuff. Well, Geraldine beat my score in Australia. Got a higher score than I did. And so today I really have to bring it, right? Because if she beats me twice, it's 2 0. And that just will not look good for the marriage. So. All right, let's kick things off. I have got the slides for you online. So even though I'm going to be. Oh, good, she's joining us right up front. Hi, honey. Let's see how I do. So I've got the slides for you, and I do move through a lot of them pretty quickly, but there's lots of links and references. So many of the screenshots will take you right to the piece that I'm referencing. So this. This is a photo of me when I'm five years old, six years old. And I. I was a strange kid. I'm kind of a. I guess I'm kind of a strange adult. I'm a very. I'm a man, right? And obviously a guy, but I'm a very feminine person, right. In a lot of. In a lot of sort of classic ways. And this was true as a kid, too. I. I had a large collection of Care Bears and my Little Ponies and other dolls. And this was years before my sister was born. I mean, I had Transformers, too, but oftentimes it was the Care Bears saving the Transformers. In my pretend world, this is just how it was. And I didn't know that that was weird, right? You don't know until you go to school and you meet other kids and you sort of get socialized. I found this on Twitter a few weeks ago. It's via a trans woman who posted it. This was at her shelter. It was posted up. For those of you who are in the back, I'll read just a couple lines from says, for every girl who is tired of acting weak when she is strong, there is a boy tired of appearing strong when he feels vulnerable. For every boy who is burdened with the constant expectation of knowing everything, there is a girl tired of people not trusting her intelligence. This so perfectly describes how I felt as a kid and how I feel today. I feel like we're living in this world where we don't all get to be ourselves because we have to pretend to be someone that we're not sometimes, not all the time. I mean, certainly as a white dude in the US you pretty much get to do what you want. I mean, apparently, especially right now. But, you know, like, when I play with our friends. Kids, right? And we have. I love kids. Like, I have close relationships with lots of children who are not mine. Right. Other family members and that kind of thing. And. And many people think that's weird. And they tell Geraldine, oh, he must really want kids. You're keeping kids from him. And I don't. I don't want kids. But that's weird. And I'm told that that's. That's not okay. And we get pressure from people, and I'm hoping just a few more years into our 40s and we'll stop getting that pressure. But we'll see. I like being very affectionate, right? I'm a very affectionate guy. You can see Tim Resnick in the middle here who's like, okay, okay, buddy. All right. Okay. It's weird because the gif is a single loop, but it looks like he's getting more frustrated with me over time, doesn't it? I don't know how that happens. I like to wear pink. I like fashion. Remember yesterday morning, Michelle Obama was complaining about how she, you know, gets judged for what she wears by the press and the media, but her husband never did. Well, except for the tan suit incident, but we'll ignore that. But I sort of had this, like, you know, I kind of wish we had a very sort, sartorially savvy president, like, male president that I could look up to and be like, oh, that is cool. I want to wear that. Where do I get that suit that he had? Where do I get that sport coat? Wouldn't that be cool? Like, the patriarchy doesn't just hurt women. It Keeps us from being as fashionable and as forward as some of us would like to be. Right? And I like to express myself with friends in ways that, I don't know, are a little different, a little weird, and I wish that the world were a little more welcoming of that. But there's these forces that keep us from being exactly what and who we want to be and that push us to make decisions about ourselves, about our lives, about our. Our goals, our families, and certainly our businesses that maybe are not well understood because we generally don't talk about them. I think this happens mostly because the conditioning that we undergo is so powerful and so silent, right? So quiet. We watch our parents growing up as kids. We see how they interact with each other. We mimic those behaviors. We don't even realize that that's affecting who we are. And I was reading a few months ago this interview with Terrence Real, who is the author of a book called I Don't Want to Talk About Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression. And for those of you who know and who've read my blog, you know that I've suffered with depression a few years ago and have been much better ever since. But that was a tough experience. And so, you know, again, I'll just quote one little piece he says. I have to say, after 50 years of feminism, the retaliation against tomboy girls has softened over the years. But the retaliation to mama's boys and sissy boys is just as violent now among peers as it always has been. I don't think that's true, actually. I think it has gotten better, especially in most major metropolitan areas. But I will say I got beat up a few times as a kid. And then I learned that you just eat the worms that the kids on the playground tell you to eat. Because Philly was a tough place to be. I was only there for a year, but, man, I got beat up there a lot. That was. That was no fun, I think. So this. What is this invisible giant? What is this invisible giant that's biasing us? That's mucking up our marketing? I think it's this cultural conditioning. And I think that while it's powerful and popular to talk about it in terms of social issues and personal issues, it affects our marketing, too. And that's what I want to talk with you about today and show you some examples of that. So this is. This is not just about, you know, gender norms. And so let's. Let's walk through a few of them. This is why, right? This, this. This water that we swim in, this Cultural conditioning. Water. This is why, despite all the data that we have, we, we have immense amounts of wonderful data. You can see here and get the links if you want that office work is generally less productive, statistically speaking, less productive for almost everyone and almost every company. Most of us still commute into an office almost every day because that's how it's done. Not because it's good and wise and the best use of our time. In fact, commuting makes us desperately unhappy. It's one of the highest correlated things with unhappiness, but because that's how it's always been. It's why, even though we know that and we have data to prove it, that virtually no one gets additional value from hours worked after about hour 50 in a week. Many of us take pride, take pride in saying, oh, I worked a 70 hour week, man, you know, it was real tough. I have a heart, but I gotta grind. And what we should say to that person is, you're bad at your job. You're worse at your job, right? You are worse, worse at your job than if you had put in 35 hours, right? It's kind of insane. And again, tons of data to back this up. This is not like, well, but I'm different. You're not different. You're part of the human race. And therefore the. Those 20 hours that you worked between 50 and 70 in a given week, those were net detracting hours from the rest of you. You made worse decisions, you made your work the following week worse. You put yourself at risk for anxiety and depression. You harmed your company. It's why, even though we know that the highest performing teams. Google's done actually some amazing research on this front. Even though we know that the highest performing teams at companies are ones where people feel psychologically safe, they feel comfortable with their co workers, they like the people that they work with. They feel like they can share openly with them personal and professional issues, right? Despite that, what happens? There's some like brilliant asshole who gets hired and paid a ton of money. It's almost always a guy, not always, but almost always a guy, right? And we're like, well, you know, yeah, he's terrible to work with, but oh man, genius, right? Like super productive. Nope. The data says in a team environment, that person is dragging everyone else down and making the performance worse. It's why, even though, even though the odds, I shouldn't do this. I do this all the time. I see that someone's raised money, right? They've raised funding, they've got venture Backing. What do I do? Oh, my gosh. Congratulations. So proud of you. So excited. Let me know what I can do to help when I should be saying, oh, shit, you just screwed yourself. Like, your odds of being alive as a company five years from now just went from about 60% to about 20%. And that's congratulations. I think that's the appropriate thing to say. So what, okay, what about marketing? What about marketing? Well, I have a bunch of SEO and content social stuff, but I thought we'd go from strategic to tactical on this front. So let's start with some big picture ones. Leah already cracked the top of this, but she said it's not roofied, so I should be fine. All right, so marketing culture, right? The marketing culture that we live in, business culture, especially here in the United States, maybe different in the different countries where many of you folks are from. But I found that we have this strong bias that leads us to believe that investments, the marketing investments, we do have to be measurable. And the more measurable they are, the more budget they're going to get, the more people they'll put on them and the more people will hire and retain you and, you know, consult with you. And you see this bias, you know, all all over the web, all all over these pieces. So I, I kind of, you know, let's look at some of the easiest to measure channels together. How about that? Right? So you know, PPC and social media ads and retargeted and, and remarketed ads, which, which are very effective but, but also expensive. Email marketing. I'm doing organic channels in blue, pa, paid channels in red, and direct mail advertising. Right. These are very measurable channels. For every piece of direct mail that you send out, they have the custom codes on them, you know, when they're redeemed, you know how many people received them and how many were undelivered. Same thing with pay per click. What about the hardest to measure channels? Like really, really tough ones? Well, yep. Word of mouth, sure. SEO, very hard to measure. Especially since Google took away the ability to see keywords in your referral data. Organic, social, tough to measure content marketing, tough to measure pr. Do you sense a weird pattern? Maybe the easy to measure channels are more measurable because there's these powerful corporations that get money from us when they make it easy to measure. There's still some Gen Xers in the audience, thank God. All right, so I don't actually think, by the way, I don't actually believe that this is true. It's not a conspiracy. It's Just if you want to make money from your advertisers, you make it super measurable. The easier it is to measure, the more people will invest in it. If you want people to not put too much specific effort against it, like Google does with right with SEO and like Facebook does with organic reach and like Twitter does, then you, you make it so that the advertising is more palatable to marketers than the organic stuff. And that's just how it is. It's not a conspiracy. They're not all getting together as a cabal, you know, around the table with the president and being like, well, we're going to screw them this week. Like, okay, maybe they are doing that, but rarely, rarely are they doing that. So what's the solution here? I think we should. So for years at Moz, When I was CEO, one of the things that we did was invest 20%, a fifth of our effort in hard to measure channels. Things where we said, hey, we don't know what the return is, we don't know what's gonna happen here. And you know what? I think that some of our best work, best ever work, I'll show you some examples came from that where we took a leap of faith. Another way, one of the ways that you can measure this is with lift geographically or time series based. And Google Trends has done a wonderful thing. They updated about six months ago with a bunch of powerful new features and filters and sorts and much more specific time scaling. So you can see here the Nest security system, the new Nest like alarm and all that came out last week. And there's the bump. That's the blue line, the bump right there. And Nest can see exactly how their PR campaign and their launch went around that in terms of search volume, right. What was the lift in search volume compared to the normal people who are searching for the Nest thermostat standard? And they can see that you can also use tools like mention.net or Talkwalker or Moz's Fresh Web Explorer. And you can see the brand mentions of these pieces over time so that you get an idea of, oh, what's the exposure? Right? I know how many people, because they have advertising rate cards. I can go to these media publications and gadget or what have you and see how many people were exposed on average, the pieces that I looked at. And so now I do have some idea of reach and I can compare that with my paid media. So it's not impossible to measure, just much more difficult. That's all right. There's also this bias, this bias that Channels have to be ROI positive, right? That, hey, if you're going to make a marketing investment, you're going to spend either money or your time, which we, the company, are paying you for. It has to be ROI positive. Hopefully ROI positive day one. Right? And so tons of pieces about how to measure roi, how to take budget away from non ROI measurable channels. But I'm going to tell you the story about Whiteboard Friday. So most of you are familiar, many of you familiar with Whiteboard Friday. Oh, okay. Well, thanks. Yeah. So for those of you who are not, it's a weekly video series that we do. We always take, as you can see, a ridiculous shot for the opening of the video. This we tested over time. These ridiculous shots do a great job of getting people to click through, particularly from social media to the video and start watching it. And so basically when Whiteboard Friday started out, it was the worst performing blog post we put out each week. This was 2008. Look at that guy. Dang. I think Geraldine likes to say you keep getting handsomer. More funny looking anyway, but, you know, so I can join. What's the club with like, Jon Stewart and who's the other guy who's in it? Ed Helms, right? Where it's like the Jewish guys who get better looking as they age. That's the. I'm in that group. Fingers crossed. Anyway, we'll see what happens next year when I show up all schlubby. So Whiteboard Friday used to be our worst performing. Why did we keep investing in it? Well, because we had this idea that hopefully over time it would become more powerfully ROI positive. And so even though it sucked for months, I think even for probably the first year to two years, it was not, it never performed as well as the rest of our written blog posts in terms of, you know, engagement and number of free trials driven, number of signups driven, all those kinds of things. But we stuck with it because we could see that we were improving and, and we were on a trajectory. But the problem is in marketing, this cultural bias, right, this conditioning that we have says, oh, no, there's no trajectory. It's either ROI positive today or it's not. And CMOs and executive teams, unfortunately look at the data, they see the report and they go, nope, shut down this channel. Put the dollars over here where it's ROI positive. And here's why that is insane. That is insane because if you focus on the trajectory and you measure your progress against sort of an estimated growth curve and you see how you're doing over the long term, you find that those investments where the trajectory is high, but the ROI initially is low are less competitive because nobody else is playing in those spaces. And once you get good at them, your cost to acquire a customer in those channels, super low. And your lifetime value from those channels is crazy high. So Whiteboard Friday now is like our most popular piece of content every week. It's the one that drives the most free trials, right? It's the one that people cite the most when they talk about Moz. If we had just looked at the numbers anytime in the first 18 months, we would have given up on it. So what I'm urging you to do is take a look. If you're here after a few weeks or months of work and you see that trajectory, that's how you pitch it. You pitch it. As we're on this trajectory, we can take it all the way there. All right? Marketing culture has this weird thing where it convinces us that we're non technical. Right? I think of myself as non technical because I haven't programmed, I haven't written a line of code in 11 years. 12 years, right? And so when I get together with engineers, I, you know, I can't evaluate what they're doing the way. The way a software engineer could. And so I think, oh, I'm non technical. But I think this bias might be hurting us, actually. I don't think so. I love this blog post from. I think I'm pronouncing his name right, Simo Ahava. And Simo wrote, like, there's this myth that you, because you don't actually write the backend code, you must not be technical. But let me ask, can you do things like scan HTML for basic functions, or pull data into Excel via APIs, or insert code snippets with Google Tag Manager or audit websites to find technical issues or what might be wrong? Can you use web crawl tools? If you can do these things and you're still non technical, then tell me, like, what, what exactly are the people who don't even know what HTML stands for, right? Like, are they. They're like super non technical. I think, I think we are technical. We. We have skill gaps. It's true. I think that's fine. Everyone has them. And it turns out in marketing, most, a lot of the skill gap is on the technical side. I think that's okay because we have options. We have options like we've never had before. We can go out and learn this stuff ourselves and apply it. We could just hack it together, right? We can copy and paste whatever code we need from, from GitHub from some other place. We can go search for it. If we today, if you don't Even know what GitHub is and how you could copy someone else's code from there, that's okay too. You can go learn about that online and figure it out, right? You can outsource it. It's cheaper and more available and more solid than it's ever been. You can recruit for it, you can substitute. If you find something that you can't do, you can figure out a workaround, right? So these options I think, make us so that so long as we understand the principles behind what we're doing, I'm not sure we should be calling ourselves non technical or unable to to do technical forms of marketing. Pro tip this NoExCouselist.com, this is a great resource. If you have anything in the marketing world that you're like, huh, I don't know how to do that. No excuse list will be like, oh, here's how to do that. You can go do it. All right. Little more tactical. So one of the marketing culture beliefs that I, that I really don't like, especially being a deep SEO guy, is that this concept that investments in search are either SEO or PPC. I'll show you what I mean. So here's SEO, right? These are the 10 blue links, organic results. And here's PPC. Notice how Google has made them look very, very similar. You know what's crazy though? Despite, even though they made this change, right where they got rid of the bars behind there and the color differentiation. So we monitor through a partner jump shot, we monitor relative click through rates across tens of millions of devices and billions of searches. And the rate of people clicking on PPC ads, even when they added the fourth ad above the fold. Yeah. So now it's four, Right. They didn't go up. They stayed about the same. It's like around 2.2.5% on desktop, maybe 3% on mobile. So this is the percent across all, well, the millions of Google search results that we monitor anyway, this is the percent of web results that only have what we just called PPC and SEO54. So there's almost half that have other stuff on them. And in fact that other stuff overall gets about 11%. A little more than 11% of all the clicks. Reminder, almost half of all Google searches get no clicks at all. Not one click, no one clicks. Like when you search for weather or sports scores or those kinds of things, Right? You just, you don't even click. So the rest is going to. Oh, this is my presentation challenge where my own slide deck challenges me on stage. That is, man. Weird. How does that happen? All right, can I find three queries on stage that show all nine of the most click earning types of results? Well, let's find out. All right, here's a search for NFL. That's got four of them. Four of them in there. Let's see. Oh, I've got Seattle photography with another three. That only leaves me with two more. Boom. Nailed it with how do flying squirrels Fly? I had to reach for that one. You could tell, right? Like, shit, I need a people also ask box, a featured snippet and a video result. Like, where am I gonna. All right, how to flying squirrels fly. So I'll show you Knowledge panels get a lot of clicks, related questions, or people also ask boxes, local packs, images, site links, featured snippets, top stories, which used to be the Google News results, right? Videos and of course, the tweets. Which tweets don't actually get a ton of clicks, but they show up in a ton of results. Because a lot of people apparently who search Google want to see what certain people and brands are tweeting. All right, did you notice that too? Did you see that? What the hell? That says, how do you get rid of flying squirrels? How do you get rid of flying squirrels? So Geraldine and I were in Japan earlier this year for the first vacation we'd taken a long time, and we went on a flying squirrel tour. They call them Musasabi. And so there's a guide, and he's like, you wait for the Musasabi. He's gonna come out of that. We were the only childless adults on the flying squirrel tour. But that's not actually important to the story. The issue is they are frickin adorable and amazing. I mean, they like. So what? They basically, they climb up the tree and then they like, they can't fly. They glide with the thing under their wings like this and they. Super cool, super cool. So I was like, wait, who would want to get rid of flying squirrels? Oh, demons, that's who. This is an undoctored Google search for who the heck wants to get rid of flying squirrels? Telling you, thank God for Photoshop. And it's not just types of results. This is a breakdown of where searches happen on the Internet. So this is as of May of 2017. We did this back in October, I think I showed some of that data here at Inbound last year. And look at that craziness so last year when I was here, what I said was, I think that the Google Images thing might be a Halloween thing. Like maybe people are just crazy for Halloween. Well, it turns out it was about 5% higher for Halloween. But Google Images is insane. So many people are searching in Google Images specifically. You know what I think it is? I think it's like when you go to a bar with your friends and you're like, oh, I think he kind of looks like a young Michael Keaton. No, man, he looks like a young Bruce Willis. Bruce Willis. What do you talk and then what do you do? You just like Google image search all night long. That's what I think that is. It turns out there are people who have hundreds of image searches in a single session. So that is definitely biasing it. If you want. This is the data, the full breakdown of what it looked like in October, what it looked like in May. You can see down at the bottom there, Amazon and Facebook, sorry, Amazon and YouTube both growing their share of search a little bit, but Google is dominant, crazy dominant, so really huge there. So if you're going to think about search Investments in 2017, don't be unconsciously biased by what you've heard and what you think about just SEO and ppc. I think we have to consider first off Google Images and I'll show you a little pro tip on that. But maps and local results, YouTube, which features, which SERP features, like I showed, those nine are showing up for your keywords. I think you gotta think about Amazon, Facebook, Reddit, Bing, especially if your content or your audience is heavy in those communities, e commerce or social media, and where the search demand is originating. Like how do people come to search for this stuff? How does anyone even know to search for the Nest security device? Well, it turns out they did a lot of PR around image search. Pro tip. I know, rare Chewbacca sightings. What is Rand looking for? Well, you know, I'm a weird searcher. So ranking well in image search often doesn't bring much value because why? Because when you click on the result, the image pops up right in Google Images. Now this has been true for a few years. So you're not getting a lot of the web traffic anymore that you used to. It used to be the case if you click that image, they'd come to your website. Right. So how can we take advantage of this? Well, if you're in a vertical where there's lots of e commerce activity like live edge dining tables, right, you're selling these Live edge dining tables that Are thousands of dollars a piece. Tons of people are interested in. This can be really, really powerful. Check out this tactic from one of these providers. Ooh, it's on the next slide. Text in the image. This is basically at the top of an article. They just have one of these pieces and it says. What does it say? We've got the whole story on Live Edge tables right here. Read on. For everything you need to know. I clicked it. Wouldn't you. You'd click that. You'd be like, oh, dang. Yeah, let me, Let me click that. And you can put that in the meta key. Sorry. In the alt attribute of the image too, so that Google can see the text and it's, you know, usable for, for blind. Accessible for blind users and all that kind of stuff. And then you, you drive the click. Oops. You, you can drive the click from, from here back to your site, right? People want to click View website, go visit. Pretty cool trick. All right, couple more. Content marketing. Content marketing is like you publish on your own website, right? Maybe. I don't know. What if you have a site and I know many of you do, New light on link authority. Doesn't have a usable content management system. Is subject to nasty legal or brand rules. Right. Lots of you operating in like restrictive industries, pharmaceuticals or finance or legal right. Or controlled by a team or client or a boss who won't let you do what needs doing. Oh my God. You don't need to raise your hands. I know that like 90% of the room is thinking, oh God. Right. So if this is the case, you don't necessarily need to fear. Lots and lots of websites out there offer guest posting and guest publishing opportunities and rank like a boss, right? So of these in this search query, only the New York Times is, you know, you can't easily become a guest contributor. The rest of them, pretty simple, pretty doable. And this. The nice folks over at Solve it have a list of like hundreds of websites where you can go do this. So I've linked to them. If you're looking for sort of my top six, the top ones that I would generally recommend because they rank, especially in the United States, extremely well in Google and kickbutt, broadly Quora LinkedIn, their publishing platform, which is now open to most contributors. YouTube, which ranks amazingly well and gets plenty of searches of its own. Great place to do SEO, Pinterest, especially for that image search stuff. If you are looking to rank your images and they don't rank on your site, Pinterest is an awesome place to post them. And Google does a solid job of indexing the content there and Reddit especially relevant subreddits to your particular field. And then SlideShare. SlideShare also ranks like a boss. It's owned by LinkedIn, now, has crazy amounts of links and you can put up pretty much any content you want in a slide format and then drive people back to your website. And all of these are free, right? So like free opportunity to rank, drive people to your site, collect whatever leads that you need to. You don't own the experience. But I think we've got to stop thinking of guest publishing as purely like a link building type of exercise or an SEO type of exercise. And rather this is a way that we can get our message to spread that we can leverage the open web to get our content out there. All right, so Google rankings only a few things, right? It's links, it's keywords, technical. Don't get me wrong, these fundamentals are still critically important. But let me show you something. So there's we got here, you know, value of a college degree. And look at that number one ranking site there, like that. Even the number two guy, man, they have got crap links compared to the rest. I'm using the Moz bar to show the link metrics. That's kind of crazy. What about no keywords? Like no keyword matching. I mean content and intent matching certainly, but no keyword matching, outranking. Very, very good keyword matching at the bottom of this page. That's kind of weird. What is Google ranking these types of queries with? Like, what are, what are they using? How are they figuring out if people aren't doing a good job of keyword targeting and they're not doing a good job of link building, how is Google like knowing that this is going to solve our query? Right? Like, okay, maybe that's the most click worthy. Interesting page because a lot of people who are searching for construction costs in Seattle want to compare it to other construction costs. But like how does Google know that? And I think that happens because of a ranking factor that is relatively new and we don't have a great word for it. So I've been calling it searcher task accomplishment. Like this page helps a searcher accomplish their task better than anything else on page one. And I'm going to pull in Jeff Dean from Google. He's one of their fellows. Google fellows. They're like super, super senior, promoted a million times engineers. And Jeff is pointing out to us here, he didn't actually say this. I want to be clear I stole this image from the Internet and then put words in his mouth. So don't be like, oh, Jeff Dean, I didn't know you talked about this stuff. He doesn't. This is just me and him. So foolproof carbonara, right? Like, really good search result. Why is a good search result? Because Kenji Lopez Alt from Serious Eats is ranking in the number one position with a superb recipe. If you follow any of the other ones, I don't care if it's like bon appetit or something, they're all crap. They are terrible. But Serious Eats, oh, my God, that carbonara is amazing. What you have to do, you have to take the eggs and with like, more yolk than normal. You didn't think you were going to get cooking tips? No. Okay, keep going. Yeah. So you take the eggs and you have them in a metal bowl over the pasta water and you're like stirring them rapidly until it kind of turns into the perfect sauce consistency. And then you pour it over the pasta that's in the bowl with the pancetta and it's like, amazing. It's 10 times better than any other carbonara. Okay, so good search result. Why is it a good search result? Because people are satisfied, right? Especially if they make the carbonara. This is a bad search result. Why is it a bad search result? Just yell it out. It's two words. First name, Bobby Flay. Yes. Go away. He's terrible. He's awful. Like, if you make this steak, you'll be like, oh, I should really go out for a steak. And that's what he wants. He wants you to go out for steak. Son of a. Searcher's not happy with this, right? They're bouncing, they're clicking to page two. They gotta scroll down to find the good article from Kenji Lopez Alt again about how to make a great grilled steak. I don't have time to tell you about it, but you should definitely check it out. If you think that this isn't a factor, check out what Google is now doing. If you do this a couple times on a mobile device, Google will actually say like, oh, you know, maybe you should try searching for this other thing because it seems like you're not getting satisfied by the results that we're, we're giving you. So I, I'm going to urge you to focus on signal to noise ratio here. Right? Like, go look at the pages that are performing well on your site. Right? And then go look at the ones that aren't performing well. I'll pull up a Google Analytics example Right, So here's a big, big chart. You don't have to be able to see it, but basically those two pages are performing very poorly for me, for Moz, right? They're basically people who hit them are bouncing away. They're not satisfied. They have a low browse rate, so they don't go further in the site. So three options, right? We can improve those pages. We could kick them off our site just 404 them, or we could redirect them to something better. And by doing that, we improve our site's reputation. We make sure that Google thinks we're a high quality website. And this is sort of that new, new ranking factor that I think is very powerful, becoming even more powerful. All right, last one here. When Google takes your search traffic, you can't earn it back. You can't shoot, I want to get that back. Like Google took our traffics. It's frustrating, frustrating when they do it. So look, all right, you didn't think you were going to see that today either. Carbonara recipes in south park and Flying Squirrel. This is a madhouse in here. So when Google gives you lemons, right, they basically. This is Google's results, right? They're scraping one of these lists and then putting this together at the top with this card format layout, taking a bunch of the search traffic from good citrus providers. And if Google gives you lemons, rank in Google's lemon knowledge panel. This is on the sidebar of that same search result. And look, you see down here. So, okay, wait, I gotta get this right, because I thought it was Finding lovers, but it's not. It is. Fine dining lovers. That's the one. Yep. So take that, you googly traffic thieves, right? Like you. You can rank in 90% of the features that are siphoning away clicks. 90%. You can rank here in the featured snippet. You can rank down here. And the people also ask boxes, which is super powerful on the right searches. You can rank here in these knowledge graphs. You can get into all these kinds of results, every single one. Even the mobile app results. If you put your, you know, do your SEO right in Google's Play store or the Apple, you know, the iPhone store. So I've got a list of features that you should consider. I'm not going to walk through all of them, but I have links to resources in the deck that you can, that you can check out if you want to learn more about, like, oh, shoot, you know, a bunch of tweets are showing up. How do I rank in those? Or search suggest is showing up. How do I rank for that? Basic strategy here is figure out which types of SERPs are showing up for the keywords you care about. This is keyword Explorer, but you could use ahrefs, you could use semrush. You could use. I think it's. It used to be keywordtool IO. I think it's now keyword IO. So lots of tools will show you this. The different queries and which types of results rank for them. Then you figure out which verticals and SERP types you want to optimize for. So in this case, aiming for these people. Also, ask boxes might be a way easier way to get a ton of traffic than just going organic because this is ranking above the rest of the results. So next time you have a strategic or tactical marketing decision that you're about to make, I want you to ask yourself, just figure out, like, how is cultural conditioning, the marketing culture, the business culture that we live in, how is that biasing my decision? Not if how. This is a powerful tool to be able to remove some of that bias and make a smarter decision than your competitors. Thank you very much.