BluShark Digital 0:00
Welcome to the SEO insider with your host, Seth Price, founder of BluShark, taking you inside the world of legal marketing and all things digital.
Seth Price 0:11
Welcome everybody. We’re so excited to have Brett here on another edition of the SEO Insider. Welcome Brett.
Brett Tabke 0:16
Hey, thanks for having me on. Seth, always an honor.
Seth Price 0:20
We’re excited with PubCon coming up. PubCon’s been one of those places since I was in the infancy of my practice and then, and then agency, where I sort of come to get my finger on the pulse of what’s going on. And I’d just love to start off with, you know, so many tracks, so much stuff going on at PubCon. Walk me through what you’re most excited about to see coming up in Vegas.
Brett Tabke 0:43
Well, you know, the last year has been kind of the most exciting time to be in search in about 20 years. You know, people are tuned in to what’s going on with AI, what’s going on with Bing and Google and OpenAI, especially with their new search engine they just launched. So the big push this year is, what’s everybody doing with AI? How are they using it? How are they applying it in their business from start to finish? You know, in years past, when we talked about SEO, it was all about categorizing it, link building content building, anything you can do to get your rankings up in Google. Now the whole conversation has changed. It’s now about generating new content, new ways of using AI to produce new content. And it’s really it’s almost changed into content marketing more than it is SEO anymore. People really understand they’re going to have to build an audience with what Google is doing on the SERPs, taking more share away from clicks to websites, keeping more traffic boxed onto Google. So people are really changing their whole mindset. So it’s an exciting time to be an SEO right now.
Seth Price 1:53
You know, look, you’ve been at the forefront. I know that when we went to Austin. You were like, hey, mantra, every speaker has to have AI laced throughout their presentation, and no doubt, right, it’s changing it, the jury’s out, but it looks like AI search is going to be affecting Google in some meaningful way, even though they’re including it themselves. My theory is that Google will figure out how to integrate it itself and get much of that market share that so many people are already using Google. I’m seeing their AI integration, where you get the best of both worlds. You get the AI answer, almost taking away the rich snippet, and then you’re seeing the traditional search results, which are, for many people, what you want for particular, that’s how we’ve been trained to search, right? But one of the things that I’m seeing, and just having a conversation on the SEO insider the other day was that, you know, while AI is great, there are also, you know, landmines to be found. You talk about, you know, search, it’s search marketing, it’s content marketing, it’s content marketing. And, like, content is still king, but that I am now seeing more than anecdotal, but people that go too heavy with AI content, where it’s essentially newfangled spinning of content that Google doesn’t want to see that. They weren’t first mover, they have an interest, and that, particularly, like in the affiliate space, people who have gone too heavy with AI are paying the price.
Brett Tabke 1 3:20
Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Interesting note just came out this morning that Google is going to link directly to archive.org pages. I think this is a bit in response to AI, actually. Now they’ve got this archive of content they can link to, and they don’t have to necessarily link to any of the new AI stuff that they’re seeing, because it really is becoming ubiquitous. You know, when I can sit here and press a button and register a domain, install WordPress, throw up one keyword, have 1000 associated keyword lists come up, then send those to ChatGPT to generate blog posts, and within an hour, I can have a 1000-5000 page, on target, on topic, quality website built. What’s Google going to do with that? What’s Google going to do with that? They got to fight back a little bit. And I think endorsing the old web this way by going with archive.org links, they’re kind of fighting back against it a little bit. So, yeah, Google is-
Seth Price 4:23
It’s also giving themselves a little bit of time to figure this out, right? Because they don’t want to bastardize their own search results, then they’re no better than the competitors.
Brett Tabke 1 4:33
Absolutely, absolutely. And it becomes a case of, sooner or later, you know, you’ve got AI content being generated that is being indexed by Google, which is being generated. So it becomes almost a race condition where, you know, the dog food is eating the dog, you know, eating itself. So they got to be aware of that, that sooner or later, you know, entropy comes in, and it just degrades the quality of their search. So yeah.
Seth Price 4:59
Just as you say that, you know, does the sandbox become more meaningful? You know, the idea that a new site, that they are, that they you know, as much as they want upfront content, but are, is there going to be a point where they want to see what, what does stand the test of time?
Brett Tabke 5:15
Exactly, exactly. And people have noticed that for about the last year that Google isn’t indexing quite as fast as they used to, but somehow people are crawling out, you know, a month later, two months later, three months later, they are crawling out of their quote sandbox, which they claim doesn’t exist. But we all know if we’ve launched a new site, we know it does. You know, there’s some age to a domain.
Seth Price 5:36
No, I put that in the same category as paid search doesn’t help. You know, it’s just like, and it, you know, it reminds me of just having this conversation. Love your thought, because you’ve had a couple years under your belt, like myself, that, you know, if you go back to the old, old days, you had newsrooms where there was, you know, the news, and there was advertising, and they would ring a bell if they came onto the same floor. And I feel like one of the things that Google lost credibility but raised their stock price on, was allowing paid search within their own platform to affect organic search. And again, it’s not talked about a lot. It’s sort of denied at top level. But to me, that’s always been one of those sort of like in a perfect world, if you trusted Google to be, do no evil that that would be one of those things that, look branded search certainly is making a difference. I’m seeing TV, radio advertisers, Billboard players in the B to C space having a significant advantage with branded search. It’s just ironic when it comes from a monetizable widget of Google itself.
Brett Tabke 6:38
And now that they’ve moved away from marking ads as ads and and changed it to sponsored. You know, the general public doesn’t associate sponsored with a paid advertisement. They think, oh, okay, somebody offered to be there. It’s a whole different branding, a whole different mindset. And I think a good portion of those clicks over the last year that go on those top sponsored links are accidental clicks, people not really understanding or clicking on advertising anymore, so they’ve kind of muddied the waters a bit there.
Seth Price 6:41
And look, so let me, you know, given that, do you see this is a bigger picture question. Where do you see, you’re talking about AI as one threat to upsetting the Google apple cart. Where do you see the antitrust play come in? Is this something that will at some point, like we saw with Mob Bell? Is there going to be a limitation or a breakup? Or do you think this is just sort of like posturing that you know, that they have enough, you know, AI and other things are coming that will equalize the playing field?
Brett Tabke 7:36
Well, you know, I was a poli sci major in college, and so I’ve been watching this real close, and I’m surprised it got this far. Actually, I thought Google had a bit stronger legal team. I thought they would have beat this back a little bit more, but I think it’s a toss up right now, my biggest concern is they’re looking at the wrong things. They’re looking at this agreement with Apple, and it’s got all the flags on it, and they they just love talking about this default on the iPhone. But I think if they go that route and break up that agreement, discontinue the default search agreement on the iPhone and iOS devices, if they go that route, I think within a week’s time, you have Google putting notices on their homepage. Hey, here’s how you make us the default search. Oh, you can’t use Safari to use Google anymore. You can’t watch YouTube on a Safari device. You can only watch Safari on Chrome. You can’t, and Android will get carte blanche to run as they want here, content is free. Here. Have YouTube premium for free on Android. And then that’ll bring over the iOS people. I don’t think Google loses an absolute dime if they in fact, they’ll get 20 billion.
Seth Price 8:44
Yeah, I agree with you. They’re going, it’s not that’s not really the antitrust issue at hand.
Brett Tabke 8:50
But that’s what all they’re talking about right now, all the government stuff, stop to finish, start to finish. That’s what they’re talking about doing is canceling that agreement between Apple and Google as the be all, end all. And I don’t think it is. I think it’s false flag. I think Google does it just to keep themselves involved in Apple’s ecosystem, to play nice, to be friends. Because when Google went, you know, they did two things. They went to HTTPS, they required everybody to go to secure, which everybody thinks that was about website security. It’s, it wasn’t to me. It was about the ISPs filtering YouTube and replacing ads. So they filtered it, throttled to YouTube, Time Warner tried to get Google to pay them billions of dollars a year to let YouTube run free. Then came in with the net neutrality, which I also think was about YouTube traffic, because, forcing the ISPs to carry YouTube traffic. And then the second thing they’d carry YouTube traffic first, indexing. And they went mobile first indexing, really, before they needed to go mobile first. And they tried to push everybody onto the phones. What did that do? It put them on Android phones. And then they went to Apple and said, here, here’s 20 billion to keep us front and center on your phones. So I think it was about getting Google front and center. Those are the two big monopolies, in my point of view, is Android and YouTube. So if they’re going to break them up, they got to break up YouTube, they got to break up Android, and they got to break this somehow with Chrome, which gives them, you know, that’s the platform. It’s no longer an operating system. The platform was Chrome. So so we’ll see.
Seth Price 9:13
Nobody’s gotten high ratings with antitrust talks. So let’s pivot.
Brett Tabke 10:23
Exactly, exactly.
Seth Price 10:24
It hurts your head. You know it has, it’s wrong. But what are you going to?
Brett Tabke 10:29
But, but one thing further, I’ll say, if you’re an SEO or a marketer, go read some of these antitrust documents. You know, that Google put in there, the emails they put out, we found out, yeah, they do use click data. Yeah, they have an entire nav boost program about click data. Yes, they count those clicks. Yes, they count user behavior on the SERPs, which we all knew they had to be, they had to be over the years. But there was some just fascinating little nuggets come out.
Seth Price 10:53
I almost feel like I learned more from some of that than I did from the data dump.
Brett Tabke 10:56
Oh, yeah, absolutely, absolutely, yep, agreed.
Seth Price 10:59
So look, I’m so excited for PubCon. It’s been a place that I’ve helped build my own career. What I was saying to you offline was some of the stuff that I learned is not what I expected, meaning, there’s, look you want local I love it. I love the local track, because that’s my passion. The link building sort of blows my mind. You know, when you when you look at some of that stuff, but I, you know, I’ve sat in on Traphagan’s LinkedIn sessions and been like, I just, like, found myself like, what the hell am I doing with my LinkedIn. talk to me a little because you see everything from 10,000 feet. What are some of the things that you think may be the sleeping gems that are sitting or that are gems that just the public may not know about, where there is great value, you know, to be able to come sit in the room and see some of these incredible thought leaders present.
Brett Tabke 11:45
You know, you brought up LinkedIn, absolutely right, man. There are people doing great things on LinkedIn. The standard byline for about the last decade was, it was overpriced. It took all kinds of time to build, and then when you’re done with it, your ads are sitting in a kind of a cesspool of spam out there from different people.
Seth Price 12:05
All which may be true.
Brett Tabke 12:07
Exactly, but it’s producing results.
Seth Price 12:09
Exactly.
Brett Tabke 12:09
People are getting traffic out of it, and it’s converting traffic. You know, sure you’re paying three times as much on LinkedIn as you are on Facebook, and probably 10 times as much as you’re paying on Twitter right now, but it’s producing results. There’s ROI there, there’s conversion rates there. It’s a targeted market. So, yeah, you’ll learn that at PubCon. Another thing, things like Amazon. We’ve got a woman, Robyn Johnson, that’s going to talk about Amazon ads. And it’s like, who’s playing Amazon? You think it’s just the big players, or the foreign players or the Chinese that are playing Amazon? Boy, there’s a lot of, lot of Americans that are making bank on on Amazon. So that’s, that’s one of the the sweet gems. And then there’s a couple others, like content knowledge graphs. Martha Van Burkel is going to talk about how to use AI and how to use content to build a long term content marketing program that just works. So, yeah, there’s going to be a lot of little gems, in house stuff. You know, the last decade we’ve seen this big push from independent SEOs to moving in house. So there’s a lot of people coming out there who now know an inside and out, if you work at all, inside an agency or inside of a corporate, there’s little gems in at least half a dozen sessions.
Seth Price 12:09
Well, that’s great, Brett. Um, anything you want to leave our audience with? I love these, sort of, like, quick ones. But this, whenever I speak to you, I’m sort of inspired. I gotta, like, okay, I got, I’m gonna get some of these content, uh, sessions, and make sure that even though that’s not in my normal track, I think with AI now it is, it is everything to sort of bring this conversation full circle that we have.
Brett Tabke 13:44
If, if you want to know where it’s all headed, get on ChatGPT, and then I think you still have to pay the premium, be a subscriber to get into search GPT, Their new search engine. Go check that out and understand that’s where Google is headed. Fewer links, fewer traffic, direct on the, on the SERPs, but they are there to be found. So that’s where it’s headed. I think it’d behoove you to go check it out.
Seth Price 14:15
And I think like everything else, it’s, you know, and we’ve seen, as somebody who started in local search, you know, without ads, then with ads, then without map pack, and the map pack, everything’s put, you know, I did a presentation 10 years ago. You’re starting at number seven. You know, it’s gonna get to the point where you’re starting at 13. And the question is, you know, how do you make sure that you are where it matters? Cause still, as you said, there’s stuff that you know. It may it may be further down the page. It still makes money.
Brett Tabke 14:42
And where Google is headed is, you know, we used to make the joke, the best place to hide a body is on page two of Google SERPs. Well, page two is going to be the new page one in the near future.
Seth Price 14:52
Well, Brett, can’t wait to see you out in Vegas. It should be great. And make sure we get a link in the in this. To for anybody who has not yet registered, uh, for me, it’s always been, not only can I focus on my core issues out there, but the idea that I can sort of bounce around and see what some amazing minds are working on that that’s been what I what I’ve loved most about PubCon is the idea that you have, there’s so many things going on at once, and if, if one session isn’t up your alley, you can you’re not wasting that time that there’s, there’s great content to be had.
Brett Tabke 15:27
Appreciate you coming out Seth, thanks for the time.
Seth Price 15:29
Thanks so much. See you soon.
Brett Tabke 15:31
Bye.
BluShark Digital 15:31
Thank you for tuning in to the SEO Insider with Seth Price. Be sure to check back next week for fresh insights into building your brand’s online presence. Episodes are available to stream directly on BluShark Digital’s website.
