Entity SEO In The Age Of AI

Welcome And Why Shift From AI

0:01Howdy, welcome back to another funfold episode of Well, the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, but it's really the best SEO podcast, and that's what a lot of people know us as. And it you can check out more about this show and the I think 16 years we've been running it at bestseopodcast.com. Um I hope everybody is joining enjoying all of these podcasts. We've gone really deep with AI. I have some special guests coming up uh for you. And I wanted to kind of pull it back from AI. I wanted to pull it back a little bit and go back to the root of this show and really understand L invisibility, what's happening online, how buyers are buying, but how AI plays into that. And so I wanted to bring on Carl, uh Carl, ah, my Carol, my brain, guys. I I'm sorry, there's it's Friday. Carol Larson to the show. Thank you, Carol, so much for coming on.

1:05Oh, you're welcome. I'm excited to be here.

1:07So you have a great sub stack, you're doing a lot with AI. Um, we were talking even uh before the show. There's a lot that we have a similar viewpoint on. And I thought um bringing you on to hear it from somebody else than me of like what's happening in the space uh as it relates to like entity SEO, like the buyer funnel, that sort of thing. So maybe you could just set the table for some of the things that you're seeing changing in marketing day, and we can just start there.

Ditch Last Click And Watch Signals

1:36Yeah, so I think the biggest thing that has to change in marketing is we have to start really paying attention. And if you go back and you look at, well, I'm a big fan of Think with Google, and um we were kind of mirroring that with our Substack. It's called Think with Market Storm. Um little different topics, but in Think with Google, back in 2015, they started talking about ditch the last click, that the marketing funnel was changing, that there are so many touch points, and none of us really paid attention. I mean, how many of us back in 2015 said, oh, well, we need to think about attribution differently? We really didn't. We just kept plotting along and, you know, doing what we did, and and that was all great. We're at a point now where we can't just say, I've done this for 10 years and I know how it works. We really have to watch the environment very closely. One of the things that has changed with AI is every single piece of content around you, about you, is part of a single entity in AI's view. So your website, your business profile, what they're saying on um Crunch Base, what they're saying uh in any of the aggregators, um what's happening on Reddit, all of that is part of a single entity, and you need to pay attention to that.

2:49It's go ahead. Oh, I was just gonna say there's also a lot of fragmentation out there, and you think that it understands that it's just you. Um, and an unless your name is very unique, as well as you haven't changed your name over time, you haven't changed your position, like there's uh like clarity that this is you, and there's a trust layer for all that stuff to come together and compound.

3:14Well, and that's really a good point because the one of the easiest ways to get AI to start hallucinating about you is to not have the same story told across every entity. So you need to go back and really look at those things, the things that you haven't looked at in years. Make sure that everything says the same thing about who you are, says the same thing about the services, has the same kind of voice. Because AI will pull things together, it will look at the core of what's similar, it will decide that's the core of who you are, and then it will make up connections to all of this other stuff because it's trying to make sense of it. You have to make sense of it before it tries to.

3:54Yeah. Um, one of the things that I know we're gonna talk about, and I want to throw it out here before like I forget, so I want to add it to the conversation. Um, I brought on some people from Google, like the web spam master teams, right? Um to right after Mac cuts, right? Like after he left. And um what they talked about, and this was years ago, every website needs to start thinking about having a shopping cart on their site. Okay. And they were predicting, kind of like you're saying, what was coming, where the trends were going. They were trying to kind of get it out there, let everybody know that the customer journey stack is collapsing.

4:42Yeah, yeah. And so that's one of those really interesting things that Google does is they'll drop just little things. And if you're not paying attention, you're gonna miss it all. What has happened with the customer journey is that it's no longer I see this on social and I have this in um video, and I have this over here in my programmatic or whatever that is. And we used to be able to look at all of those things as separate journeys, and we can't anymore. Streaming, scrolling, searching, and shopping are the elements that Google is looking at, and they happen all at once. Google's got some great research that we've really leaned into around what they call the messy middle. Everything after that first intent, and then it's all over the place. You start looking at something, then you got to take your kids to soccer, and then you go back and it's late and you're looking at it again, and you're on a completely different platform, and then you got to make dinner. You know, whatever that is, our

The Messy Middle Gets Harder

5:40lives are so different, but we're also so entwined with the technology itself that we start and stop and start and stop in ways we didn't pre-pandemic. That's changed the journey significantly.

5:51Yeah, I and people are looking at multiple devices at the same time on the same network. There, there's so much. Well, and then there was, you know, a couple years ago it was a big buzzword, but like people are still talking about attribution and like the dark social component of yeah, where people are finding information, was it forwarded from somebody else? Was it shared on social in the chat? And then someone pulled it up, and then they looked at it on this device to that, like and and a lot of the conversations when we talk about SEO with executives is attribution, and that's becoming even more difficult because when you're talking about uh, oh, we got you to the first position on Google or position zero, and then your traffic falls off, right? And so if you don't have access through the CRM and to the leads and understand like where the revenue's going, it's very hard to have that conversation of we should keep spending on this to show up in these places. Is that even working? And then they default back to okay, well, if we spend on these paid ads, right, and then it's like last click attribution, this converts, right? And maybe it's even you're bidding on your name, but but it's like this curve, this converts, so we're gonna keep dumping money into it. And so I feel like there's a lot more complexity that that's happening. Um, there are some great tools out there, but it's fanned out to the point that um you have to really articulate and understand how to string this together to capture the mix messy metal to understand where what is actually producing that conversion? Like one of the things that we were actually working on for a client is uh building a script uh in like gravity forms that will track the entire session of like when the lead comes in, right? Because is this a paid ad lead that they leave that page and then they convert later? Was that coming from paid ads? Was it coming from organic? Like, we need to separate out these channels. 20, 30 percent of traffic's coming from GMP. So we need to have UTM codes on that. So all this goes back to like the cleanliness of your data and and analytics to be able to figure out what you're doing and what channels are actually working, what's compounding, what's not.

8:20Well, and there's another piece of it too that we don't really talk about, and that is influence happens often without a click to the website, more and more often. And so what we're seeing is that the instead of the funnel that we're used to, the internet is dividing or the the customer journey is dividing into two layers. There's an intent, first intent, and there's an influence layer that drives that intent. And that may never produce a click to the website, it might, but then there's also the demand capture layer. The demand capture layer is going to be Google, it's gonna be the last click, it's gonna be those things that you can see, but there's this whole layer above that is driving people down into that demand capture layer. It's interesting too, if you look at the research of Google, Google is saying you should spend 50 to 60 percent in that intent layer and the remainder in your demand capture layer. That demand capture layer actually feeds uh from that intent layer. So if people haven't made that decision that they're gonna buy from your brand or buy your product or whatever that is, before they get to that demand capture layer, chances are they're going somewhere else.

9:28And that that's that's the conversation, right? Is like what is feeding the conversion layer? Because everybody wants that CTA, we want that that new lead, we want to capture those buyers that immediately want to buy. And and when we're talking to companies or we're talking to executives, it's it's a battle, it's a it's a conversation around, hey, we need to do this stuff to feed the funnel, right?

Influence Versus Demand Capture

10:00Right, right. Well, and so I when I'm talking to um our clients, the analogy I use is that Google's like the the cashier. You're in it, you've got this big store, right? Um, you can get anything you want in this store, and people are wandering around picking out whatever they want. That last click is the cashier, and you have to have the cashier because otherwise people walk away with stuff, right? So that's in a very important role, but it's not the role that helps people choose what they want from the shelves. So as you're walking through, and it's placement, it's color, it's um messaging, it's all of those things as they're wandering through this big warehouse store and think of like a Costco or a Home Depot or something like that. The cashier is that last click, it's the thing that brings it in. But you can't say, um, this cashier here is the one that is responsible, right, is the one that converted, is responsible for this ROI, and then ignore the rest of the store and the placement and all those things.

11:01I I I love that analogy. I I I might have to borrow that from you for a few seconds. Please do. Um, I think that that's great. Um, you know what it makes me think about? I was just reading this article, I think yesterday, the day before, about new technology that Target has, where they are mapping in the lighting into the device you pick up uh or the basket that you have. They know what you're putting in the basket, what you're taking out of the basket, where your steps are. I mean, they're monitoring everything to figure out product placement. And and I mean, that also is that same behavior, like you're saying, is happening online. Maybe when they do a click, they go there, they're putting something in the basket, they click the back button, they put it back on the shelf, maybe look at something else. And how people are buying is trying to be tracked, and it's it, it's it's just all over the place about how people are buying. And and I think one of the most important things is trying to capture them when they're in that state, when they're ready to buy, because if you don't get them as far through the process as possible, and then you're following up with them, if they're not in that mental state, they're not actually a buyer, they're not a buyer until they get back in that state later. And so understanding where that is, what's triggering that, their behaviors, how they might buy, when they're in that process of making that selection is is critically important. And um, if you have e-commerce, right, and you're doing e-commerce, that you can capture a lot more of that stuff. I think that a lot of the B2B buyers or or professional services have a very hard time kind of understanding that and and mapping that. And you know, even if you're tracking, like, oh well, our our open rates, right? Our open rates of our emails are not doing really well. Well, if you're sending something about plumbing or car repair and they're not interested in it, they might not the the the tail on when they're going to click on that could could be really far out. And so if you look at that initial campaign, that might just get skipped over in their inbox or flagged, but they haven't done anything with it. It doesn't mean they didn't see it. That was the thing that I I realized more than anything else is if you're sending messages online or something like that, they usually see them. They might not respond, they might not click on them, but they usually see them. It's they see them. Yeah.

13:33Yeah. So, and what you're talking about really is the sweet spot for what we do at Marketstorm. We um create custom algorithms for our clients and we find those people in the very beginning of intent. We ignore everybody else. It doesn't matter if it's the right demographic, um, just using home services as an example. Um, it doesn't matter if they are in that same neighborhood or right next door to somebody who has a need. If they're not the one that has the need, they're not going to see our ad. And we follow them around through all of those places. And I have enough data that I can track from the first impression all the way through the multiple platforms, display, CTV, streaming audio, all of those, and show the entire journey. We're able to look at the number of days and the number of ads it takes to bring somebody down into that demand capture, and we can link it all together. Having that kind of insight is the game changer. And when you can paint that picture and say, here's how somebody's walking around your store, here's your cashier, here's how they're walking around your store, here's what they're looking at, here's how many days, and then they drop off for five days, and then they come back again. That paints a completely different picture.

14:40No, absolutely. Can you share some of the like useful insights as well as some of the interesting insights that you're finding in kind of the metadata or the like consistently what you're seeing across the board that that might be useful for people or interesting?

14:59Yeah. So um, I'm gonna pick on a couple of um different types of businesses. So our specialty is the things that cost a lot of money that you have to think about. So we don't do a lot of e-commerce. We will if a client really wants us to, but what we're really interested in is those long tail decisions. How do people get to those decisions? The first thing I would say is none of these journeys are as quick as you want them to be. So just thinking about home services, for years people were saying it's 72 hours from the time they do their first search. No, it's 72 hours from the time they get to the demand layer. It's 45 to 54 days on average for heating and air conditioning. It is 38 to 42 days on average for plumbing. It is almost six months for roofing from the time they first start showing interest. And we follow them around through that whole process. The other thing that's really interesting is that there's breaks. People will stop for a week and then they'll start up again. And as marketers, we tend to think, well, there's this 30-day look back window. Our experience is if you don't set a 90-day look back window in these long tail decisions, you're never gonna know what really brought somebody in because those decisions take so much time.

16:20Yeah, and and also if you're clean breaking it, like you got to do the quarterly rolling, you got to look at um maybe seasonally, you got to look at what happened last year. Like, there's all these kind of comparisons of uh variables that you're not taking into consideration. And you know, I I even think it's kind of like a cruel accounting versus like a cash basis accounting that like what happened this month, what happened, what happened this month? It's like right, well, what happened this month is what we did a quarter ago, you know, like yes, and yes, and so so that that trailing data is is really quite important, but and it's not as clean as as some executives or business owners would like to see.

17:05No, it's not, and I think as um the marketing industry in general, we really want it to be easy, and so we report on what's easy instead of reporting back on what really matters, because what matters is hard data to get to. What's easy is here's the last clicks, here's how many clicks we got this month. We spent this much money, we got this many clicks, our cost per click is this. That's not really true because some of that was brought in previously. And and there's some interesting research again by Google is that you're missing your true ROI if you're not looking at about 24 months. Then that's even on retail. So, some of retail is that very quick decision, but once somebody makes a quick decision for your store and they buy something, it could be a number of months, 10, 12, 30, before they come back again. And so, what does that journey look like to keep them to be a continuing customer? It's not as easy as we think. So we do ourselves a huge disservice by trying to look at things weekly and look at things monthly. We do have to do some of that. I'm not saying don't ever look. What I am saying is figure out what the journey looks like for your customers.

Long Journeys Need Longer Lookbacks

18:20How long is that really? And then start working with a moving average with that length. Moving average that shows average number of days, average number of ads, what the revenue looks like over a moving average period of time, what the clicks on the website look like over a moving average period of time. Once you start being able to really see that and get a real good sense about what that looks like, then you can start using that for predictives. Then you can say, here, two months ago, we changed this in our advertising budget. We shifted more to streaming. Now, a month out, what we're seeing is this behavior and being able to tie it back. But it all comes with creating the right kind of view over the right kind of timeline. And I loved that you talked about the accounting, cash and accrual, because it makes me think about how people look at the stock market. They use moving averages all the time. In some ways, this is our stock market, right? So the outcome we want, we want the purchase. Um, but that that path to value, that looks different. It looks different over time than it does if you try to look at at it week by week.

19:34I love that. So I would have loved to come back to the kind of messy middle, which I know you you really specialize in it, and maybe we can go through some different ideas and insights on how people can attack that more. Because you're right, I think that there's a lot of people that maybe put things in a bucket of branding, or you know, I'm gonna advertise, I'm gonna like let people know that my shingles out there, this is what I offer, and then they spend a lot of time on those three percent of people or whatever it is that are looking to convert, and all the things in the middle they just skip. It's just like advertising conversion. And we had a client, I don't want to mention who we're actually currently running a campaign for him right now, that they want to do all the demand generation and demand capture in like a two-month window. And and it has not worked very well historically, so we keep stretching it out, and we've been trying to get a budget year round to like help generate the demand, and then we can we can push and get the capture in kind of this you know, sales window right here going into Black Friday and that sort of thing, but you can't just turn it on and create a bunch of demand and then get them to buy in in a 45-day window.

20:56So you can't, and the the conversation I have with people is how do you use the internet? How do you shop for things? When you see an ad, do you click through the ad and buy it right away? Is that what you do with every ad? Sometimes you see something over and over and over again, and you didn't know you needed it or wanted it until you've seen it for a month. Yeah, and then there becomes a curiosity, right? Also, we're all human. Think about how you feel when you're with your devices. Sometimes you're in the mood to read news, sometimes you're in the mood just to scroll, sometimes you're streaming. All of those times have got different brain spaces, right? So you will be taking in information differently depending upon the mood you have, the mood you're in, the device you have, um, the the time frame you have. So when you're working with um the way AI serves ads, and I'm thinking of the programmatic space in general, if you're working with a platform that is AI first, then that platform will look Learn those behaviors and serve the ad at the time that someone is most receptive. If you're not working with that kind of a platform, but you still want to have that same outcome, don't just focus on one type of ad. Don't just say, well, I'm going to do display or I'm going to do streaming. Make sure that you spread it out across those different um avenues, those different ad avenues, because you don't know what road somebody's going to be on.

22:29Totally true. Okay. So you opened up AI. I want to finish kind of the thought here around the messy metal. Can we dig down even a little bit deeper for like best practices or I've seen quizzes work really well today? Um, you know, like what are the things that are working today in that middle of the funnel component? Because right now, to trade like a downloadable for something, which I'm seeing those ads still all over the place, people are a little bit more cautious to give their email address for a piece of content that they could ask AI for an answer and it produced. And so getting more engagement, I think, has been um a trend that I've seen. And I would just like to hear from you around that messy middle. What should companies be doing that they're not doing that data would support?

23:28So everybody likes to lean into their brand and you love your logo, and you know, you love all that, and you think everybody else loves it like you do. They don't. They want to know how you're gonna meet a need. So we have evergreen ads. Those ads never change. They're the branding piece, they run all the time, they introduce the company, but then after that, you have to introduce the why. So, why should I use this company? Is it because of their values? Is it because they've got special offers? Is it because of whatever it might be because of? Is it because they're um promoting the local little league team? And in some of the small towns that matters. The big cities, maybe not. But what you have to do is you have to have enough voice that as these ads get in front of people at different times, that things will start resonating with them and become memorable. The same voice and the same message isn't going to do that. The danger is people want to change these up every 30 days. Please don't do that. Please don't. I mean, run it at least for a quarter. Have multiple things running. We like to have three different things running at the same time. So that could be streaming and that could be a message on streaming. We always run the evergreen, and then it could be what we focus on with mid-funnel, which could be some kind of special thing about the company, the offers

Creative That Builds Memory Over Time

24:50or the you know, the um whatever deal you have, or whatever that happens to be that is unique to that company.

24:57Man, I I have had this happen to me more than once. We have a great campaign running, the AI understands what's going on, it's been running for a long time, it's working, and like, don't touch it, don't touch it. And then client wants to do something different, start a new ad, and it's really like I think more of a personal preference. And so then you turn off the ads, or they turn off the ads, it resets the the the learning. Uh, you're running a different offer, you're starting from scratch, and now you you like a light switch, turn something off that was working. Now you didn't gradually switch it over, but you turn it off like a light switch, and now you're starting from scratch, and then it's like a scramble to to get back to where you were. I don't know how many times I've seen that happen over the years. We we've tried to build gates in internally to prevent clients from uh doing that and and kind of driving that that recommendation through their account managers and then having that happen because every time that that happens, it's like a relearning internally. Like, guys, I know the clients telling you to do that. You got to tell the client this is not a good idea and have a better approach to doing it. Um, and so that that that's actually something that I I feel like you've spoken to in a different way, and I'm trying to provide a real world example of these platforms learn, they they know what you're looking for over time, and they start to bring your ad cost down, like trying to squeeze more juice out of the lemon, do it with a different campaign in a different area on a different platform. That's a good rule. Have maybe three different campaigns running, maybe a couple different channels. I mean, that the 711-4 rule uh that Google uh put out as far as um you know, they need to see your message seven times, uh 11 times. What is it? 11 ads, seven times on four different platforms or something like that. And it just comes down to like that that brand equity or that kind of the the memory recall is is really, really quite important uh when you're when you're trying to reach people, and and it's surprising to me how many people don't run ads, but it's like they're so effective. Like I'm just shocked how many people don't want to run ads, but it's so helpful if you do it in the right way. Maybe I think there's just collective bad experience of like turning on ads, running them nationally with no targeting or broad match. Like I still see that today. I see clients that are like insane, you know, it's really insane.

27:50Yeah, so one of the things that that we like to do is we understand how long it takes our machine learning to mature. And so you're looking at four to six weeks. And so when somebody wants to do a new campaign, that's great. Here's the curve you're gonna see as far as results.

28:09So one of the things that that we we tell clients, and I it sounds like I need to extend that. I'm like, don't plan on anything from these ads for two weeks. Like, don't plan on anything from these ads because they turn them on and they think it's like a faucet. Like, we're gonna turn it on, ads are gonna come immediately, and and and usually they wait to run ads till the last minute. And and you it's like, oh, I need demand generation increased. Let's turn it on. It's it's more of a a process, it's a it's a wind up. Um and uh I don't know. I I feel like it's just uh education. We keep saying educating the clients.

28:52So that goes back to the data that we have, and so we'll talk to the clients and show the clients the data how long the journey really is. So when the journey is 45 days, then that means at about 22, 23 days, you're gonna start see it ramp seeing it ramp up. So we'll overlay that over. All right, so we'll start this ad and now let's look at the calendar. Here's where the dates that you can start seeing, or we expect to start seeing these ads start delivering. Here's about when we expect to see them mature and get into a nice rhythm. And so, what are you gonna do? What should be your financial expectation between here and there? What's your revenue expectation between here and when these ads start delivering? And then how are we gonna mitigate the downward curve of turning off the other ads? And sometimes that is we scale back the other ads while the new ones are scaling up. But if they can see it in a picture and not just in conversation, I find it makes a difference. If I can show them how it's mapped, if I can show them the number of days and the number of ads over time, if I can take a look at that and use it like predictives and say, so if we make this change, here's what's going to happen. And if your revenue is generally this much when we're running this, then your revenue is gonna be this much when we make a change and we don't have that kind of outcomes from the ads yet.

30:14And and I know we kind of touched on this earlier, but I would love to hear you speak to it directly. How are you looking at brand refresh for clients? Um I know there's a lot of considerations of the campaign, but is there any kinds of rules of thumb? I know Facebook sometimes will say, hey, these these ads are stale, um, you you need to turn them over, but it but sometimes at the beginning of a campaign, before you launch a campaign, it's something to consider, but it's not something that unless you have data on that that type of campaign previously, do you know what it is? So I didn't know if there's any kind of rule of thumb when you're running X amount of campaigns or you're gonna show it to somebody, you know, six, seven times. Like when you hit a threshold, you know that hey, maybe we should change this up. Because also, I think everybody thinks back to like if you're running uh things on TV or something like that, you you see that commercial on that channel like five or seven times, and you're like, I already got it. Is that what they're going for? Or is that

Ad Fatigue Is A Targeting Problem

31:20an over-served like campaign and it could be improved or optimized?

31:26So what most people don't realize is you're actually asking a targeting question. You're not asking a question about the ads themselves. So if you're targeting just those people who are showing intent, and you're not, if you don't have the broad reach targeting, if you're not trying to reach everybody in a demographic, if you're targeting toward intent and behavior, then we've had the same ads run for clients for several years. That sounds bizarre, but the reason why is because people show intent, they do whatever they're gonna do, they get moved into the data lake, we're serving them the ads. They stop showing intent, they get washed out. We don't care. They don't see those ads anymore. New people are always being washed in, right? So you have to look at the targeting capabilities that you have before you can make that decision. There's no hard rule of thumb. It's all about who you're serving the ads to and how. If we're doing a broad reach and we're just serving ads to every household, well, then you've got about six months before people get tired of you.

32:30Well, when you say six months, that means they're seeing the ads once a day, once a week, once a month. Like, how are because I look at it from a pacing standpoint, and maybe there's a better way to look at it of in a two-week period or a week period, how many times are is this ad popping up to them? And and I think to your point of intent-based is well, are they in the window or not in the window? If they're in the window, you know, hit them hard. If they're not in the window, they they should algorithmically phase out of that window. And so so I think you're doing okay, but also sometimes people get too narrow of what they're targeting. And I've seen when you like expand out like the partner networks and stuff like that, it it doesn't serve as well. And so if you're if you're too narrow, um you could overspend or or over-serve that category potentially. Um, and so then it becomes an optimization issue of maybe we need to get a different target persona and we can keep type marketing, but we don't have to hit them as much. Maybe we hit them with multiple messages, uh, with with different kind of buckets of uh ad spend.

33:47Yeah, so so we're talking about a couple of different things, right? And I'm gonna kind of break down what I'm hearing. Um in our world, uh a frequency could be 13 times a month. So it's just leading people along. And when you're talking about persona marketing and um behavioral marketing, there's two different things with the targeting. It's not just marketing, it's the actual targeting. So if your targeting algorithms are looking, and everything is algorithm now. Um, if they're looking at a persona, if they're trying to find the whatever age group, um, whatever neighborhood, you have a lot of people that aren't interested. You have about 96% waste. If you're looking at behavioral indicators that are that people are actually showing the behaviors that they're interested in your product, which is hard to do. Um, it is something that we do and we specialize in and have since 2018 at our inception, then you don't have to worry so much about swapping out the ads. What we're doing is we're optimizing the algorithms. So we're always in front of people whose behaviors are showing that they're interested. And if they're not interested, they don't get an ad. An example would be say you're watching the final four and your neighbor's watching the final four, and you need, I'm just gonna say, a new roof, and they don't, you're gonna see the ad for our roofer. The guy next door, same neighborhood, same demographic, same income level, same age of house, who doesn't need a new roof, who isn't showing those behaviors, is not in persona marketing. Right. Persona marketing, they both would see the ad. And that's why there's about 96% waste in persona marketing, persona targeting.

35:38Interesting. Is there anything you could go into more depth about about kind of those signals or those triggers that that show that someone is interested versus not interested?

35:50So it depends upon um the company and the product. You could have, um, I'm just gonna pick on roofers because that's where I started. You could have two roofers in town, and one company is gonna resonate with somebody and another company is not. So um it's not just about well, in roofing, we do just this. There in the way that we construct our algorithms is very specific to who's gonna respond to the company itself, who's exhibiting the behaviors that show that they're looking for whatever our client is providing. Um, it gets down sometimes to colors that people will respond to. If there's two companies that are significantly similar and one uses a lot of red and one uses a lot of blue, um, then if it if it's our client that uses a lot of red, we don't want people who hate red because they'll have a visceral response to it. So there there are little details that are very important, and and we have the ability to target down to those details, and it's enormously effective. Because of that, we don't have to worry quite as much about we have to turn these ads every six months.

36:58Yeah, well, you you broke into something that I'm not gonna touch right now, but uh super interesting. The last kind of area that I wanted to touch before we we get out of here is how have you seen the rise of AI overviews, like position zero, people utilizing uh chatbots. We're running a campaign right now, don't have enough data to like really speak to it, but like in chat GBT, we're running those ads, like the the landscape has changed, right? And there's uh the rise of uh AI assistance, um, you know, the token economy, um, uh AI overviews. I know everybody's like, oh, I use AI because I saw AI overview, uh, or at least that's what people are saying about six months. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And uh they're like, no, I use AI. Um I was like, okay. Um, and I was curious

AI Overviews Change How SEO Works

37:56how has that impacted? So you have a long tenure of of running these um uh you know this like signal-based decision making uh ads. What have you seen as the rise of that's happened? I I feel like there's been certainly a fan out of the different platforms and the things that people use, but beyond that, and like like pressure testing the data telling you like how is that impacted and how does that kind of make you respond or act differently in in what you're doing, or does it?

38:32Well, it does actually. So um it gets back to the entity. Uh, none of our work means anything if the entity itself isn't strong, and the entity, as we were talking about, is not just your website, it's all of those multiple platforms that you're on. So we strongly suggest that our clients go through and get a single voice across all of those entities. And in that single voice across all those entities, start thinking about SEO differently. So it used to be we would pack keywords. That's what we had to do to get people to the pages. That doesn't work anymore. Number one, the um the search, you're not gonna get those 10 little blue links because of your keywords anymore. It doesn't work that way. What you're gonna get is thoughts. People are searching for things using sentences rather than just words. AI is looking for thoughts on your web page and not keywords. So if the thoughts on your web page don't align with the sentences that people are using to ask the question, you're not gonna show up. It doesn't matter if you're ranked one, you're still not gonna show up. It doesn't matter if you if you're ranked, you know, 552. If you the thoughts on your site are clear and concisely answer the question, you've got a good chance of showing up. So we need to think about how we communicate much differently. We need to understand that it's conversational now, it's not just plumber near me or you know, whatever it used to be. Um uh best deal on cars. I mean, it's there's it's not that. What it is, is we're interacting with our technology as humans, like it's a friend, like it's a companion. And so we have to be ready to ask those questions. And if you think about how you use your technology now, it's much different than it was even three years ago, certainly five years ago, much different, ten years ago, completely different. So as we're preparing ourselves for this and we're looking at all of our entities, prepare those with that in mind.

40:39See, so we've talked about a lot of things. I thought that was a great place to end because you're talking about like if we talk about different disciplines, we're talking about like digital marketing, then we're talking about SEO, and then there's certainly some debate around different components or strategies or layers, if you will. But I hear kind of entity SEO with some GEO, with some signal-based targeting, and then leveraging AI kind of all the way around to pull it together and and to drive ads. And and then we're talking about this intent layer, and then we're talking about the the decision layer kind of like okay, the the the the like demand generation and then the demand harvesting component of of what's happening. And and even going back to um what you talked about that I I love about the click is the cash register or the person at the register, that is not necessarily what created the demand, it's just the person checking out essentially.

41:50I and I think that those kind of visuals really help. Um, and then I also in talking about that will tell my clients be aware of how you're shopping. When you go to the grocery store, when you go to Target. Um, so I mentioned you know, Home Depot and stuff before, whatever that happens to be, wherever you are, pay attention to how you shop. The same thing is happening in the virtual world. People are shopping that same kind of way. So we need to build for that and account for that.

42:19Wonderful. So as we kind of sum up, I want you to give you an opportunity, Carol, to kind of share um more uh about kind of your your substack. I know you shared it at the beginning, and more about marketstorm.ai, um, how they can find out more. And if there's anything else in this discussion that you feel like we haven't touched on that you

Where To Find Carol And Marketstorm

42:40want to add to, I want to just kind of open the floor up to to talk about it. And even if there's kind of some some things that are not uh connected together, but you think would be valuable, I would love to uh have you share.

42:52Well, well, thank you. So um Marketstorm is our company. You find us at marketstorm.ai and you can read all about what we do. I try to publish um blogs around the changes that I'm seeing in the marketplace for us marketers, and and hopefully it helps the clients as well so they get kind of an overview. Um you can contact us through the website, we've got a form. Um we're also on LinkedIn, we'll respond through LinkedIn, find me on LinkedIn. I love having conversations with people, so I'm opening that up. The Substack is called Think with Market Storm, and that's really where I publish more of my deeper research. So um I encourage you to subscribe. It there's no cost. We don't, you know, it's not a um a way to extract money from people. It's just we want to get these conversations going. And I would love for people to dig into what I'm saying and um validate it or not validate it or challenge it or you know, reinforce it, or whatever it is that you feel about it. I'd love to get the conversation going within all of us as marketers. No one person is gonna be able to see all these changes, and that's why what you do is so valuable because you're bringing all these people on that are talking about all these little facets. Nobody's gonna get all that all at once. So we need to have these open conversations. So thank you for having me. I'm really excited. This has been fun.

44:15Love it. Okay, so everybody, that is uh Carol with Larson with

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44:20Market Storm. Please go check it out. Uh, follow her. She's got some really interesting research out there. Uh, if you want to stay current uh and you like listening to podcasts, please uh subscribe to this one. Please leave a review. That is my big ask right now. We're at 4.3 stars with 316 reviews. We need to get over 4.5. So I just really ask you to leave a review if you like this. So other people, when they're searching, will be like, oh, like I don't want to listen to that podcast because they got 4.3 stars. So so like if you've been a longtime listener and you're enjoying this, I ask you, please, if you just go to iTunes, you scroll all the like down to the middle of the page, it'll say write a review, you know, leaving the stars, leaving a quick comment of your thoughts would be super helpful. Appreciate all the feedback. If you want to grow your brand with the largest, most powerful tool on the planet, the internet, keep listening to this podcast for more uh up to date news of what's happening and talk about AI, how the world's changing, and a brighter tomorrow. So until next time, my name is Matt Bertram, everyone. Bye bye for now.