How To Get Found in the Post-SEO Apocalypse [Endless Customers Podcast Ep. 47]

This transcript has been generated by AI and not checked for accuracy.

Marcus Sheridan
0:00:00
Alex, the simplest way that you can counteract this Google apocalypse right now is by embracing... Welcome back to Endless Customers. My name is Alex Winter and today we are joined

Alex Winter
0:00:14
by Marcus Sheridan, keynote speaker, author, bestselling author, partner here at Impact. Welcome back to the show.

Marcus Sheridan
0:00:27
Here we go.

Alex Winter
0:00:28
Here we go. And today we're talking about a good one, something that's pretty relevant because you're actually giving webinars and presentations on this. Currently, it's about search. It's about getting found post-apocalypse, meaning this

Alex Winter
0:00:41
AI revolution that's happening. How is it going to affect search? How is it going to affect Google and what we've traditionally been doing for the last decade?

Marcus Sheridan
0:00:48
Yeah, if you look at it, Google has had a monopoly on search, on the search experience for the better part of, you know, 20-ish, we'll call it 25 years, okay? And they've had quite a run, but as is always the case, they've now been disrupted. And the world's getting disrupted. disrupted? I mean Google was very very fat and happy because the whole search game for them is just it prints a few hundred billion dollars a year and so

Marcus Sheridan
0:01:22
like is generally the case for example like Kodak had digital print technology but they didn't use it because they were making too much money off of film. And Google had AI and development but didn't come out with it. Why? Because they didn't have to. And they were making so much money though.

Marcus Sheridan
0:01:52
They were protecting a business model. The moment you start choosing your existing business model over innovation, this is just a side note by the way. You start to experience problems. For the first time in decades, the board members of Google are meeting at like midnight, right? I mean, because they're trying to figure stuff out.

Alex Winter
0:02:11
I remember the scramble when OpenAI released Chachibiti. That was like scramble.

Marcus Sheridan
0:02:16
Oh yeah. So there's a lot of scrambling going on. And so, you know, of course, as soon as this came out and I could see where it was going, I mean, I've been saying for a while that the game of search is dramatically going to change. You cannot as a marketer, as a business, you cannot have your house built upon Google, otherwise you could be in very big trouble, very big trouble.

Marcus Sheridan
0:02:42
Because if we get to a world, and again this is all speculative, we're all speculating right now, nobody knows for certain, majority of people talking about this are probably going to be wrong if history is any indication of what the future will be like. More often than not we're wrong. But I don't typically go hardcore futurist, but when I do I have actually been right a lot. And there's good reasoning behind why. Yeah, I just look at things.

Marcus Sheridan
0:03:12
Let me give you one example. This is not to toot my own horn, but I remember like when Clubhouse came out during, I don't know if you remember that app, Clubhouse. It came out during COVID. Everybody was using it. I'm like, this app has got a shelf life

Marcus Sheridan
0:03:27
that is like a head of lettuce, okay? Why? Because it required too much time investment and not enough overall return to be something that you'd want to do every day for the rest of your life. It was fine for a very short period of time

Marcus Sheridan
0:03:43
where people were lonely and wanted to connect. It didn't have a life after that. I knew that and I told everybody, anytime you spend on Clubhouse, it's probably going to be a waste of time. And it was a total waste of time.

Marcus Sheridan
0:03:54
And so, you know, I saw early on that video was going to be a huge thing. But I'm also the type of person that I'm not going to sit here and protect things that I have espoused in the past. So whereas if you go back to 2009, I built this incredible company, this marketing machine of Riverpools, and I did it with They Ask You Answer, of addressing customers questions, concerns, etc. on our website.

Marcus Sheridan
0:04:31
That was essentially SEO, right? It was like the best form of SEO and it's been the best form of SEO for a long time. And that was just writing content, writing blogs, publishing content. Just writing articles and then I started doing it on YouTube at the time and that was all I did. I didn't do any social media, I didn't do anything else. And so what that led to was a tremendous amount of trust, traffic, leads, ultimately sales.

Marcus Sheridan
0:04:58
That's what made the company explode. It saved the business, made the company explode, the rest is history. Well, I couldn't do that today at Riverpools because that would mean I'm building my house on traditional search engine results. That's not what you can do that folks. Now, first let's say this.

Marcus Sheridan
0:05:18
How long is Google search going to be relevant? Well, it's still going to be relevant for a while. What is a while? I'd say three to 10 years. It's got a three to 10 year run.

Alex Winter
0:05:30
OK.

Marcus Sheridan
0:05:30
What's going to happen though, is AI is going to get to the point where people are able to say, I just enjoy using it so much more, and it's so much faster, it's more effective, it's more efficient than what would be traditional search. In other words, seeing a bunch of search results. And so this means that Google Search gets less love, and

Marcus Sheridan
0:05:58
Google Ads are also going to be less relevant as time goes on. But with anything in life, there's a pendulum. And so how do we respond to this? There's certain things that we can do, and it's important that we understand what they are. Let me say this too. You shouldn't stop, they ask you answer for a few different reasons. I was going to ask you about that. For as long as people are going to be using regular search engines like Google, let's say, and you're getting search

Marcus Sheridan
0:06:28
results and traditional SEO exists within, let's say, the search engine parameters, that matters, but it also matters in the context of today if AI, if somebody uses AI and they get a recommendation, which by the way, at first, most of AI was just a creation tool, but over time it's going to become much more of a recommendation tool. And so, and then it's going to become this like delivery tool.

Marcus Sheridan
0:06:58
So it's going to go from people saying, oh, I can produce articles and I can produce images and I can produce videos and can do these things for me to, oh, look at what it's recommending for me. I'm finding answers faster to, hey, it's going to allow me to buy that thing, maybe even without going to the website

Marcus Sheridan
0:07:18
at all, right? Which is, it's just going to eliminate so much of what marketers and businesses depend on. Now, whenever there's a trend, you got a couple of choices. You can freak out about it or you can say, well, how do we take advantage of this trend? Like what can we do?

Marcus Sheridan
0:07:36
Also, whenever something goes or leaves, something else fills the space. And so, in this context, I would say you still want your website to be solid because oftentimes they're going to vet your website before they buy from you. Not every time, but oftentimes that's absolutely going to be the case.

Alex Winter
0:07:56
And AI is going to pull from your website when it references it, so eventually it's

Marcus Sheridan
0:08:00
a good play to stay in. Yes, yes, yes. And so you want to give AI plenty of fodder, but you also want to do this because on your own website, you want to make sure they're satiated. You want to make sure they have a great UX, user experience.

Marcus Sheridan
0:08:15
You want to make sure you've got agents and digital humans that are going to be able to essentially act as present day chat bots, but in the future, that's going to be like these incredible interactive AI experiences that people have on your site.

Marcus Sheridan
0:08:28
So you don't want to stop building what is that information reservoir that your AI, that your LLM, that your agent is going to be using so as to provide that exceptional experience. Okay, so let's make sure that we continue to do that. That being said, we've got to say, all right, what's our response? Well, one major response is we gotta make sure

Marcus Sheridan
0:08:53
we win the game of search when it comes to AI recommendations. How do you win that game? Well, this is not easy. One thing that you have to do is that you have to give AI as many signals as possible

Marcus Sheridan
0:09:07
and as many reasons as possible to recommend you, to talk about you, to reference you. And the way you do that is by continuing to do, like we've talked about, they ask you answer with your content on your website and online. But it's also by you engaging on as many

Marcus Sheridan
0:09:25
other platforms as possible. And so you gotta look at it like this. As Google search goes down and AI goes up, what is also gonna go up with the seesaw effect is social and YouTube. If I had to make a prediction, it wouldn't surprise me at all if YouTube was the core

Marcus Sheridan
0:09:48
money driver for Google within five years. So like right now, YouTube makes a ton of money, but Google search is what brings in the few hundreds of billions a year to the company.

Alex Winter
0:10:02
Okay?

Marcus Sheridan
0:10:03
Whereas, it could reverse. What carries the company in the future is YouTube. So you need to become great with YouTube and you need to become great on social because all of those things that you do there, those are going to be signals. Signals to AI, but it also is going to grow your brand. As you get less recommendations,

Marcus Sheridan
0:10:28
as it becomes, let's say, potentially harder for people to find you, despite the fact that you're doing all these things that you're gonna be doing, brand becomes more important than ever. You must develop a known brand

Marcus Sheridan
0:10:43
that people can't help but to notice. How do you develop that known brand. Yeah, I got to play in these places like YouTube, like social. Now on a very specific search level though, there's still a really, really big opportunity right now which is YouTube Shorts. YouTube Shorts is wide open for the taking in many industries.

Marcus Sheridan
0:11:10
If you look at YouTube and if you do a regular search even in Google, they're now showing shorts results in search results, not just a video or traditional long form video or, you know, like horizontal video. They're now showing YouTube shorts as results. And so unlike, let's say, TikTok or Facebook Reels, Instagram Reels, which you do need to be there too and you need to be, you know, repurposing these vertical videos that you're making.

Marcus Sheridan
0:11:42
But on YouTube Shorts, you can get wins by twofold and this is like the strategic approach to Shorts that I take is generally I'm trying to create a video that's very viral and there's a whole like, you know, methodology to that or I'm trying to create a video that is going to do very well in search. That would be a traditional day ask you answer approach. You know, big five, addressing those fundamental questions,

Marcus Sheridan
0:12:10
things like cost, fears slash problems, comparisons, you know, best of questions, things like that, okay? And so those, you could rank tomorrow in YouTube results if you as a business were creating shorts. This is why it used to be like with impact. When we would, when somebody would say,

Marcus Sheridan
0:12:34
I wanna do they ask you answer, we would recommend that they hire a writer first.

Alex Winter
0:12:39
Yeah, the content person.

Marcus Sheridan
0:12:40
Sure, the content manager is what we called it, but primarily they were a writer. Today, I would say the primary skillset of that person is actually a creative that has a focus on YouTube, specifically shorts and vertical video, so short form video, that can use AI

Marcus Sheridan
0:12:57
to produce the written content. So let's just make sure I repeat that, because this is quite important here. Yeah, lay that out one more time. So again, if I'm starting today, and I know if you're listening to this,

Marcus Sheridan
0:13:08
you could have a really large company, a small company, but if you're hiring one marketer right now, the goal is to build your brand and to build your search results. I'm looking for someone that isn't just a writer anymore. Plus, I know that AI, if prompted correctly,

Marcus Sheridan
0:13:32
that's the caveat, if prompted and edited correctly, can be more human than anything we've ever seen. And I know that's hurtful. That's reality and we need to play there. Those that complain about AI content, garbage in, garbage out.

Marcus Sheridan
0:13:54
It's not the fault of AI. Now granted, at least with the written word. Visually, it's got more catching up to do, but when it comes to the written word, it is very, very much about your ability to prompt and to just be very explicit in your direction, right?

Alex Winter
0:14:12
And for business owners too, sorry to interrupt, but for business owners, if you're on a tight budget and you're trying to scale, and you need to be strategic about a hire that you can make and you can't hire out a whole team and this is like your one hire to make a difference,

Alex Winter
0:14:23
you need to find someone who's well-rounded and to your point can do these things.

Marcus Sheridan
0:14:26
Yeah, and the key to efficiency and money savings and multiplying your time and your output is finding someone that's willing to be in the AI sandbox and just be a high producer because of it. Because the reality is you can take a single marketer today using AI, and again, with the caveat always of using it the right way, and they can do what five to seven marketers were doing before. That's truth. And again, I know it hurts people's feelings,

Marcus Sheridan
0:14:55
but it doesn't help to complain about where we're headed. We have to say, well, what do we need to do about it? It's reality. It is where we are. And so the point is, if you've got somebody that's willing to use that AI, and they can prompt the right way,

Marcus Sheridan
0:15:12
and they can add the personal experiences the right way we can take care of the written word but when it comes to short form video the big key to that is a creative edge you Alex are a video person but you know I'm sure that there's a pretty significant difference between creating a long-form what's called normal educational video they ask you answer style video or somebody maybe is explaining how much something costs and why it costs that much right value okay

Marcus Sheridan
0:15:44
versus somebody creating a short form video and doing it in a way that has an incredible retention rate and that just holds the audience and is educational but it's entertaining and it's like all these different beasts yeah yeah and we've seen a lot of situations where a traditional videographer that is used to working in Premiere Pro all day long,

Marcus Sheridan
0:16:07
suddenly trying to pop something out that's awesome for a cell phone video, it's just not happening for them.

Alex Winter
0:16:15
Or it takes way too long, or whatever it takes. Or it takes too long.

Marcus Sheridan
0:16:17
So you've gotta have this visionary skill set to create high-powered, short-form, vertical style videos. But once you learn this skill, and it starts with that creativity, just the ability to think outside the box a little bit, now all of a sudden, it is really fun.

Marcus Sheridan
0:16:36
And it's amazing what you can create in 60 seconds and 90 seconds, and how you can show a story or answer a question or teach someone how to do something. Or again, just cover a myriad of topics that in the past you might have covered with long form.

Marcus Sheridan
0:16:52
Now you should still do both. And long form search opportunities on YouTube are still there. And so that's why a lot of the long form footage you might turn into short form footage. But the point is, if I was hiring one person today, going back to this, I'd get someone that can get, that can produce short form video, but also get in the AI sandbox

Marcus Sheridan
0:17:17
and produce that written word. So they've got to be at least a solid writer, a solid writer. And so I would expect their outputs today for that single person to be three long form articles a week and two short form videos per week.

Marcus Sheridan
0:17:32
That to me is where the bar is today. Whereas three years ago, I was saying that at least three pieces of long form content a week, that would be satisfactory, if you will, for a content manager. Today's content manager, the creative plus writer person, they need to do three plus to short form videos. That's where they need to be. And can you be there? Yes. Yes, you can be

Marcus Sheridan
0:17:58
there. A lot of things have to go right. You got to have this table stakes of buy-in from the team and, you know, availability of subject matter experts. But with that being said, it is absolutely feasible and this type of production and efficiency is only going to elevate over time. But the point is, you need to be taking advantage of immediate search opportunity where you can rank number one in YouTube tomorrow and also be shown in Google search results tomorrow

Marcus Sheridan
0:18:31
through YouTube shorts. That's the big one that most folks are not doing. You follow they ask you answer with that. Those fundamental big five, start there, lean into those hard. And so if you've done it with your articles in the past,

Marcus Sheridan
0:18:46
now do it with your videos, but keep in mind, try to make them retention worthy, try to do it in such a way that it's entertaining still educational It's like edutainment if you will and that's going to be you know that's going to be key

Alex Winter
0:18:58
Yeah, and that's a perfect segue to because I was in my head going like For people that have been practicing they ask you answer for a while that believe in it that their companies are working it I'm sure people are like well does this not work anymore, and that's definitely not the case the principles are still the same But what's happening is a shift with technology and a shift in the industry that we all have to be aware of. And you still apply these rules, but you just have to also apply them in a new way or learn

Alex Winter
0:19:22
how to apply them in a way. Is that right in saying that?

Marcus Sheridan
0:19:24
I mean, the thing that most people misunderstood about they ask you answer, I shouldn't say most people, a lot of people have misunderstood, partly because people tend to skim books instead of fully read them, is that they think it's a blogging strategy, which that breaks my heart when I hear that. Right.

Alex Winter
0:19:40
I've heard that too and that's why I'm asking.

Marcus Sheridan
0:19:42
It's so much more than that. It's a lot more than a content marketing strategy. What it is really rooted in is how has the buyer changed? How are they behaving and how do we meet them where they are? So sometimes we meet them where they are in the form of answering a question where they are, like on Google, let's say.

Marcus Sheridan
0:20:04
But it also means that if a buyer would really like to have a pricing calculator to get a sense for how much they're going to spend and get an estimate before they reach out to you and talk to a salesperson, well, then that means you put a pricing calculator on your website and you reap the benefits.

Marcus Sheridan
0:20:22
That's not an article. That's not a video. That's a tool. But that's what the marketplace is asking for. And everybody in your industry is going to have one of those pricing calculators or slash estimators on their website in the next three to five years. I mean, it's just going to be table stakes.

Marcus Sheridan
0:20:37
Everybody's going to have it. Totally. So that's what they ask you answer actually is. If suddenly everybody today stops and shifts towards some other platform or media or whatever thing is, they ask you to answer means they are changing. You answer by meeting them where they are. That is the key to this that you have to understand. That's the evolution. Yeah and that's

Alex Winter
0:20:58
something that like the first time I read the book when I was introduced to the Ask You Answer, that was the big takeaway for me was meeting people where they are openly and honestly, no BS, and giving them the opportunity to self-discover and the information that they need to make an informed decision. That's literally and then everything else becomes the tools in your tool belt that you use to help them get to that place.

Alex Winter
0:21:19
And those are gonna shift as technology shifts. So that's like the big piece here. So with the technology piece, how does that influence analytics and how do companies, as they make the shift, start to figure out new ways to track this stuff?

Alex Winter
0:21:31
Or how is that even gonna look as we move forward, I guess is the question.

Marcus Sheridan
0:21:36
I mean, this is gonna be difficult. You know, because you've got this thing called dark social. Right? What's dark social? It's that person that, you know, they saw your video on LinkedIn. They went to their company's Slack channel and they posted it there, you know,

Marcus Sheridan
0:21:59
or your post on some other social media. It's that person that, you know, it's your newsletter, and they posted that somewhere, but you couldn't track it, you didn't see it. It's like, there's going to be a lot of that in the future. And so, you're not always going to be able to track what you want to be able to track, but you have to be in the game, and you have to be putting a lot of signals out there,

Marcus Sheridan
0:22:23
because if you're not putting those signals out there, there's a pretty decent chance that you're just going to be losing market share. It is going to be a lot harder to be an effective marketer in the coming years. Now in some ways, it's going to be easier because people will be slow to move. So if you're a first mover, you're going to get that advantage. You're also going to get the advantage of AI if you use it.

Marcus Sheridan
0:22:49
You can be more productive than your peers and you can have greater outputs. But it's going to be harder for you to be seen. I mean, let's be honest, Google search was like the greatest tool for marketers for many for 20 years. It was the ticket. Now it progressively got more difficult as more and more industries got more saturated with content

Marcus Sheridan
0:23:15
I'm all that the CSI the content saturation index going up in these industries But it is going to be more difficult. You got to play more games. You got to be more cross-trained now than you've ever been before So I don't I don't I don't I don't believe I have a great answer for that Yeah, you know You just gotta be in the game, and I would say try at least to notice what is actually working.

Marcus Sheridan
0:23:44
But you're not always going to be able to put a definitive measurement on it, and that's why you gotta have enough conversations with leadership to make sure that they understand there's going to be certain things here we just can't necessarily tell. We've got to look at holistically what is happening with the brand overall and with conversations and what are people telling us? You know, one thing that I think marketers can do,

Marcus Sheridan
0:24:05
Alex, that they haven't done a great job of oftentimes in the past, is to really survey their people. Like, really survey them at different stages of the buyer's journey. You know, survey your customers and really find out, like, what was the initial contact?

Marcus Sheridan
0:24:17
Where did they follow you? Where did they hear about you? It's like all these things. Take the time to lean into that, which I know, that's not very automated. You can't scale that very easily,

Marcus Sheridan
0:24:29
but if you take the time to really survey your people, you start to learn so much about their behavior that fills in some gaps that you didn't necessarily see and allows you to make a lot more informed decisions. Excellent, yeah, very good points.

Alex Winter
0:24:44
And I agree that we don't know exactly where it's going. I think, for me, I'm circling back to the same thing that I said earlier, where we're trying to build trust, we're relationship building, and those are fundamental things that no matter what happens with technology, as human beings, we want and need that and are always going to be looking for that. The technology just becomes the tools that help us do so.

Marcus Sheridan
0:25:08
There's a lot of noise, man. There's a lot of noise. There's a lot of noise. We're trying to rise above the noise. I mean, one of the reasons why we're doing this podcast, for example, we do the podcast, but then we take certain elements from it and we turn that into that vertical style short form video. I'm gonna put it

Marcus Sheridan
0:25:25
on my individual accounts. Impact is gonna put it on their individual accounts. You know, and we're gonna, you know, we're gonna use, we're gonna draw as much from this turnip as we possibly can. Absolutely. So as to send as many signals out there as we possibly can, so that more and more people will say,

Marcus Sheridan
0:25:46
I wanna play, I'm interested. Right. I've heard you enough times that there's something here that to me is valuable or is I'm curious about or I want to be involved with this ecosystem that is either Marcus Sheridan, that's they ask you answer that's impact, whatever that whatever that thing is, they want to be a

Marcus Sheridan
0:26:09
part of that ecosystem. Yeah, absolutely. So closing thoughts for search and for the future for business owners for leaders. What should they be thinking about was what's the key takeaway here

Alex Winter
0:26:19
that they should, you know, they watch this episode and they go back to work thinking

Marcus Sheridan
0:26:22
You can't build your house on Google. We need to accept that. You still need to have a great user experience with your content on your website. That's going to affect AI and how you use AI on your site and how you use digital humans and interactions on your site in the years ahead. swing, because the pendulum is swinging, you need to make sure that you now do well on social, you do well on YouTube, produce those shorts, produce shorts that are great for virality, produce others that are great for search. Some might be a hybrid, but you'll find that it's probably one or the other.

Marcus Sheridan
0:27:07
Okay, get the person that is creative, that can use AI, that can do the short form video, but also can do that written word for you. None of it's going to be easy. But this is the only choice. Because being the ostrich and bearing our head in the sand and saying, wake me up when it goes back to 1995,

Marcus Sheridan
0:27:41
I promise it will not happen.

Alex Winter
0:27:43
It's not gonna happen.

Marcus Sheridan
0:27:44
It is not gonna happen. And so we have to look ahead with hope. We have to look ahead with curiosity. We should look ahead with enthusiasm as well. If the Terminator comes, I promise you're not gonna stop it.

Marcus Sheridan
0:28:02
You're not going to stop the matrix from happening yourself. It's outside of your circle of influence, it's outside of mine. I'm not saying that you're aloof. What I'm saying though is use it for good, have it improve your personal and your professional life, more optimize your time and your productivity. See around the turn.

Marcus Sheridan
0:28:28
Don't live in the past. Embrace the future. And I think good things will happen with those people.

Alex Winter
0:28:36
I couldn't agree with you more. Well said. So for people who have questions or want to follow up with you, how do they get in touch with you? What's the best way if they want to pick your brain?

Marcus Sheridan
0:28:43
You can find me on LinkedIn. A lot of people like me there. You can find me on stages. In fact, I can come to your stage if you want, your company, your event. This is what I do full time. I talk about this stuff.

Marcus Sheridan
0:28:56
You can also email me, marcus at marcussheridan.com.

Alex Winter
0:29:00
Marcus Sheridan, everyone.

Alex Winter
0:29:01
Thanks for being on the show. All right.

Alex Winter
0:29:03
For everyone out there listening and watching, this is Endless Customers. I'm Alex Winter. See you on the next episode. See you on the next episode.

Alex Winter
0:29:16
Bye!




Transcribed with Cockatoo