#seoisaeo Podcast - Expert Interviews At Major Digital Marketing Conferences

For once someone gets all over excited about brand SERPs. I manage to keep reasonably quiet and let him talk, despite the fact I am over excited about it too. He actually does proper audits on all terms that contain the brand name, and gives some super duper insights we should all be taking note of. So go out and manage your branded searches. Easy win, and vitally important.

Google don't look at author. They look at entities. Google don't look at accuracy of facts. Kristine uses Omegas as an example as to why. Then why linking out is so important. I expound my topic layer theory. They don't use NLP, they use NLU. Which is why we need Schema.org... and we end up with a sulky robot on crutches

Both findability and discoverability = matching user intent with information or content that they want. Quickly. On and offline. Grocery stores, for example. We end up trying (and succeed) to shoehorn the idea into punk music and Dada movement.

Google, Bing and Amazon have a user-centric design perspective, and we tend to forget that. We should pull and analyse the data to discover the real pain points of our potential clients rather than use our instincts since we are all biased, and our content will therefore be biased.

Fabrice us downloading the whole worldwide web every day (even my site). Bing have launched a crawling API, and that is putting Fabrice out of a job (and he wants to be out of a job) - simply ping Bing to have an URl crawled immediately. They also have solved Javascript.

I have to read her name tag to get through the difficult first moments of the podcast. Then we talk about the health industry and getting old (it is expensive). Plus the target audience is not necessarily the people themselves, but their children. And if the audience is the older people, Bing is a good marketing target. She goes on to say that if you do the right thing, Google updates are not a worry, and you sleep well.

Craig explains that I have got the strategy for my podcast all wrong. My plan is to not have a plan, which is not a good idea, it seems. So he tells me what I SHOULD be doing. Hint - have a plan.

Majestic don't keep Dixon informed about very much. Because he can't keep a secret. When they DID tell him what they have been doing for the last year and a half,., he got rather enthusiastic - context around links by analysing around chunks / blocks / segments / sections / fraggles of content… and so scoring content according the context of the segment it is in… text, semantics, link density, images, alt tags and so on. Cool! The fact that Majestic are doing this (and looking at how well they do it) gives us a good indication of how well Google will (probably) doing. Then onto the new link tags, the problems inherent in the UGC tag… And Dixon suggests that Google add a rel=important tag. Dixon digs his grave by suggesting that Google lack variety and are moving to echo chambers… and somehow uses Middle Ages Villages to demonstrate. I get excited about self-fulfilling prophecies and the problems of discoverability and trust for some authoritative content … The World's best content is the very stuff that is bu

We start with a discussion about horrid nicknames at school (that were secret until today) Then we move quickly onto local search and near-me information. There are more near me searches now than ever before - both explicitly expressed in words, and increasingly  by geo localisation. We are now expecting local results within 500 metres, down from 5km in just 6 years. Local search is all about the answers. And that is increasingly true of the wider world of search. Local search also brings to the fore that online / offline are intertwined.  And that is increasingly true of the wider world of search.  Google is now pulling in information from all sorts of sources. And that is increasingly true of the wider world of search. The parallels go on and on… Being in local search is the best place to be for digital marketing now. Getting that right is the starting point for any business - and most get it wrong. Then onto the other players in the near me field - we often forget that “near me” information comes from a va

Google formalised its reaction to the Link Tax on 23rd September. I was a bit confused. Luckily Within Andrea has already figured it out and gives me the rundown / lowdown on the EU copyright Directive, Google's reaction to it and the practicalities for publishers… Google News publishers are opted in by default, other publishers are opted out by default. Search Console gives publishers he means to control this. Schema markup is the solution if you want to opt-in and yet keep your rich results. Could this perhaps even be an opportunity to take control of our content? Brilliant !

Liz was at SMS Sydney to get some extra SEO knowledge - but she knows more than she lets on. She has a Norwegian name, is Australian... but is part Swiss (but she has never been to Switzerland). Liz and her husband (Matt) buy fully functional domains that they can monetise, or sell on - a bit like buying property, apparently. But the ROI on websites is incredibly high. MUCH higher than real estate. She suggests that the due diligence in their industry is simply an SEO audit - and it is mad that more SEOs aren't doing it (how stupid are you Jason?) She encourages me to dip a toe in the water - I could buy a $500 website and get my start - I call it pimping websites, Liz calls it renovating. A lot of the work that needs to be done is simple SEO cleaning up and UX. Liz insists it is easy money if you work at it from a business point of view. Quick discussion about international expansion for manufacturing SMBs (Sarah Carroll gets a mention there). Then back to buying websites to monetise them... she doesn't look

Starts with a yawn. Then he forgets one of his jobs. Jono's current job at Yoast and it is his double dream job - his role is to turn up at work and think of fun and interesting things to work on that are impactive. I have never had a real job, and spending a couple of days at Yoast HQ is the first time I have thought it might be nice. Jono could have chosen anything he wanted to work on, and he chose Schema.org (the most boring thing on the web). He is swimming in relationships, philosophy, ... and then he gets into the pure scale of what they are doing - 14% of the web uses Yoast... Um. Wow. And on top of that, they need to be backwards compatible and remain compatible with all the plugins that hook into Yoast and all the badly coded sites. One simple, genius idea has made all this possible (like all the best systems). Schema.org markup gives Google confirmation, confidence and precision. Jono wants a t-shirt! Google are rolling out a conveyor belt of carrots (in the form of embellishments and additions to

Three amazingly intelligent and eloquent people help me understand rather a lot of concepts. What is a commonsense Knowledge Graph? Using Schema.org structured data to manage your data layer. Ontologies are containers full of entities that have relationships (use triples !!!). Lots of philosophy around computer science - specifically ontologies. Entity management is the future (thanks, Greg Gifford). We are all becoming data architects. Three levels of knowledge. Databases expressing opinions. How semantics help sell t-shirt bras. Manage your brand for machines (not just search !). And rather a lot more... Amazing.

Paula had just given a talk at BrightonSEO in (April 2019 edition). This is a great follow-up to Dan Saunder's episode... Amazon is challenging both for PPC and SEO. PPC can become very expensive very quickly, especially as a side business. Reviews are the key, and the step to getting enough reviews is very big. And when you get enough, your competitors will spam you down, and then Amazon replicate successful products with Amazon Basics… double cut-throat. For SEO, brand is vital. Just like Google, Amazon want to get their users through to the best product / sale as fast as possible. So conversion rates are the single biggest thing to get right. Intent is vital for that, and an opportunity is to be found where your competitors are falling down - just check out their reviews :) Rank well on Amazon, you will probably rank well on Google - I get carried away and suggest you can forget Google-centric SEO, and perhaps dump your website. Paula brings me back to earth. We end with Google's problem of owning path to

Jef gets us started with a repeat of his groovy Elvis impersonation. Then gets serious and gives some amazing insights into what machine learning Google is using that affects SEO. Obviously Rankbrain, but also crawling and extracting unstructured and structured data for the web. I love the idea Jeff throws out - that Schema.org is the only thing we are doing ONLY for the search engines. We debate whether Schema.org is needed for understanding or is it really mostly for improving confidence. We move onto how many legs does a horse have (pretty funny) and how fast does an ostrich run. Jeff has a lovely line on cocky human beings. Onto ML in Google Ads, specifically DSA. Volume of data is incredibly important, and is a factor we (I) often overlook. Lastly Smart Display - Maybe machine learning will push some ugly ads because they work better… in which case we still need the human touch!

On the beach in Tel Aviv, Joel tells me he has Ukrainian roots. Joel has attention deficit disorder, meaning he has trouble achieving long term goals… unless under pressure, or the goals are incredibly short term task-driven or when it is fun. PPC is all three! He was unemployable, but PPC at Wix.com changed that. Learning PPC is easy - just 3 days if you read fast enough - so it is a great career for someone who could have been a lawyer but couldn't remember swathes of detailed information. I suggest PPC is simply functionality and common sense. Joel adds that I had forgotten to mention experience, which is vital. We agree that our jobs are like playing a game. PPC is a game that has fairly simple rules, and is fun to play (if you like that kind of thing, and Joel does :). Lastly, onto gamification and the similarities and differences between gambling and PPC. Professional slot machine players, Google Analytics and the one armed bandit technique, which is brill.

Ric is the first guest to ask specifically for the song. Apparently it haunts his dreams! Ric is really into local SEO, and so he is a big fan of reviews. I start on the obvious advantage - reducing Google Ads costs. Ric suggests takes it much further. He gets very excited about the amazing insights we can get from analysing the reviews data we have. Trustpilot have seen a 40% uptick in organic traffic due to the E-A-T updates … Three factors for local search - proximity, NAPS, credibility (and accuracy). Google are looking for trust in you as a brand, and trust in the information it has about you. Reviews help enormously with both. I mention inferred reviews back in June, two months before Bill's article about Quality Visit Scores Patent (Granted: July 30, 2019). Then we get into Android tracking - both direct and indirect, touching on probabilistic and deterministic wotsits for tracking (I get a bit confused). We debate whether Jim Carrey in Yes Man could be tracked by his behaviour. Then into the BIG (and

The first guest who is more overexcited and enthusiastic than I am. You can almost hear his arms waving. Very fun conversation, and Patrick is super-smart. The importance of Alexa is overestimated. There are so many devices that we will soon be talking to. All fun for us, but it is still too early to make it the focus of our strategy. Patrick sees a world where we no longer actively search as assistant devices like fridges, stoves, Bose glasses, necklaces, contact lenses become so much part of our environment that search and discovery are delivered to us as part of our everyday interactions. To get the biggest slice of this cake, Google is acquiring access through partnerships with Samsung et al. Google needs the manufacturers more than the manufacturers need Google and so it pays them, not the other way around, which surprised me. But Amazon are going to give Google a run for their money if only because of generational bias. We are soooo Google, but the youth of today are more Amazon.

Google Analytics doesn't clean the data and that makes it **** (expletive). That means in SEO and SEA, you are constantly being driven towards last-click terms. And that is saturated. If you can understand attribution, then you can show the value when you choose target terms earlier in the process of attribution. That makes attribution a critical part of the future of search - bringing the multiple sessions together to reflect how people engage with you before transaction. When I say "what all 5 channels?" and Chris sniggers - he is talking several dozen - both online and offline. He uses machine learning to calculate predictive probabilities about cross-channel actions that are as statistically accurate as those used to calculate the Higgs boson. The conclusion is that big corporations are underestimating the impact of organic search by more than 50%. Email too. And we can quote Chris on that :) And Direct is the "rubbish bucket where all hope goes", according to Chris. Conclusion is that we are going back t

Andrea describes a dance between machines and humans that means much of what we see is really a semi-automated approach to SEO. Absolutely brilliant insights. Brilliant enough to stop me talking too much, for once :) A cycle of a machine and humans correcting, stimulating and teaching each other. Never forget that everything comes down to two humans communicating and the machine is simply a go-between. Then we go onto agentive technology, so I now understand what the term means. And Andrea shares his research into having a machine finding new search terms and intent through an agentive dance. We both agree that machine learning applied to SEO is a fantastic area, and that Andrea knows a lot more than I do. Semantic text similarity, RNN networks… what is he talking about?