Drive and Convert

Announcer:
You're listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Jon:
Ryan, welcome home. I am told you recently went on a 100-mile hike in Northern England along Hadrian's Wall. Since we're talking, I assume you made it home, which is good.

Ryan:
Yes, we made it home safe. My body may not agree that it's all fine and good, but it was a great trip.

Jon:
I have to ask, what would cause one to go for almost a 100-mile hike in ancient ruins?

Ryan:
Your dad is turning 70 and he decides that's what he wants to do for his 70th birthday.

Jon:
I hope when I turn 70, I want to walk 100 miles too.

Ryan:
Yeah. I think part of it may have been he knew my mom wasn't going to do it, so he'd have a chance with his kids just to himself. Me and my siblings took him off on the Wall and hiked for... We were off there in England for 10 days, hiking for six. It was good.

Jon:
All right. Well, that sounds fun. Well, to bring that back home to why we're here today, with all that thinking, did you develop any new traffic driving strategies, anything on that drive portion of the Drive and Convert? Heck, maybe you figured out conversion optimization as well.

Ryan:
I wish. It was actually pretty good to be over in England, and I learned this about myself. If I go enough time zones away and I have everything turned off, I can't work if I wanted to because nobody else is working at that time, and so that was actually really good for me. It was a good mental break, fully unplugged, which rarely happens because I'll go away for a long weekend with the family and that's never fully unplugged unfortunately.

Jon:
I hear that.

Ryan:
Yeah, it didn't solve any of the world's problems unfortunately when it comes to driving in a CRO. Good luck. But it was interesting because you're hiking this wall that it's 100 miles long and so somehow the Romans figured out the narrowest point on this island of Britain and built a wall across it. It took them six years to build it and I'm sure a tremendous amount of resources. I mean, it would take a lot of resources now, but I mean, you're talking thousands of men in six years and you're thinking, "Okay. Why keep the Scots out? What was the purpose behind this? Why not just go up? You have the Roman Empire behind you, just go up and destroy them."
When you read the history, it came down to the complexity of conquering Scotland because it wasn't like a single country. It's a bunch of little fiefdoms and a bunch of little tribes essentially 2,000 years ago, and there weren't enough resources up there to justify it. You weren't going to get anything by taking it over really, and there weren't enough resources because weren't concentrated enough. You couldn't support an army up there. You'd have to constantly be bringing supplies and everything up in there because you couldn't go take over town and take all their food. You had to be like bring it all with you.
So Hadrian's like, "All right. Fine. We're just going to build a wall, keep the Scots there, and that's the edge of the Roman Empire. Done, set, move on." So fascinating, but it also got me really thinking along around where do I need to do that personally? Where in business do we need to be doing that? Because it's most of us in business and in life don't have unlimited resources and have to make determinations of what makes sense now versus later or just never. You're talking the Roman Empire, arguably one of the most dominant empires the planet's ever seen, decided that this little area of Britannia at the time, Scotland now, wasn't even worth deploying enough of their army to go take it over and just be done with it.

Jon:
Obviously, Scotch had not been invented yet.

Ryan:
Good point. Yeah. If Scotch had been there, it would've made more sense probably.

Jon:
Well, okay, so you didn't solve the world's problems, but I actually thought that conversation was going to go a different way. I assumed you were going to say that Google is the Roman Empire because they own everything and wall off whatever they want. So that's not the case. It sounds-

Ryan:
It's true. Yeah. So coming back and processing all of this, I started to do some research on all of this around how can I advise some of our clients to be putting up walls when it makes sense in their business? I came across this cool study that had some very interesting patterns on what Google's doing and how are they directing traffic once the search happens because it's ever-evolving that Google's... We know it's constantly testing service and traffic is going many different places and there's a lot going on constantly. So I was like, "Okay." Well, just fascinating seeing what the data is telling us at the end of the day because all we do is look at numbers and data and make decisions based on that.

Jon:
Well, to start with, what report are we talking about then?

Ryan:
With many of you listening... I mean, I'm making assumptions here. So there's a gentleman named Rand Fishkin.

Jon:
Oh, yes.

Ryan:
If you haven't heard of this gentleman, you probably should. You should see what else he's done. He was the founder and CEO of Moz, which there's always debate, but I would say one of the top SEO tools created. Years ago, it was the best, and it's still easily one of the best. Every couple of years he does this study about where the clicks on Google go and analyzes the trends and offers some of his insights on how that's changed and where it needs to go and what you as a branch should just be aware of.

Jon:
What stood out to you that you felt like it was worth talking about today?

Ryan:
Well, there's a couple of things. Probably the most fascinating to me was as he analyzed the data, just was it last month, I think, AI did not have the impact I thought it would. So I thought that AI was going to be like, "Okay. That's going to answer so many questions that there's going to be less clicks going to paid search and AI is going to kind of take over all of this. So Google controls everything."

Jon:
I foresee a end of year where we were wrong episode again going straight here because I do recall you saying AI is taking over search and it's going to keep all the results on the page there.

Ryan:
Yes. It wasn't even that long ago that I said that, and I guess I probably should have gone and polled Rand more or sooner to find out what he thought because he's done more of the research. But AI, there's many different numbers around studies around how many searches AI is showing on. It's anywhere from 15 to I think somebody said 50%, and I'm like, I still haven't seen close to 50%, but it also has to do with certain searches. You can see there's voice searches that are being done that they can't analyze in Rand's model. So there's a lot of things they just don't know or they don't have transparency in.

Jon:
So what did you think the AI results were going to do?

Ryan:
I thought that AI results were going to trump a lot of organic clicks because if you're getting the answer right there on Google, I don't need to go anywhere else. Like I said before when we talked about AI, I'm one of the paranoid people that needs to know where they're pulling their answer from. So I'm going to click on that result to understand, okay, do I trust this site or is this some clickbait site that's designed to get me to click and waste time chasing... Medium, for example, great clickbait site, questionable articles, but again, that's where I went with it.
On the AI side in particular, what they're seeing is that it probably hurt Google more than it helped them. So important metrics to Google are searches per searcher and clicks per search because the more clicks that happen and the more searches that happen, the more chances Google has to make money because if nobody clicks, Google makes no money. If you look at separating mobile and desktop out, on mobile devices, when AI is being the changing differentiating factor, the searchers per searcher dropped dramatically with the rollout of this AI.
So there's no real reason given yet because we're still analyzing data, but the hypothesis moving forward is it's causing people to stop searches and not have to search again because they found the answer they needed and then they're done and they move on. In fact, for a while it's been about 60% of searches done on Google don't end up in a click. So we have something like 8 billion, 8.5 billion searches a month done on Google, and 60% of them don't even end up in a click, which is fascinating to me that Google would not be trying to figure out, "How do I take that 60% and move that to 58%?"

Jon:
Yeah. Yeah. It seems like a lot of money left on the table with ads. But also, I mean, how many times have you used Google to just verify a word is spelled correctly? You know what I mean?

Ryan:
More often than I'd like to admit.

Jon:
Right. So I think I look at that and I'm like, "Man, that might make up at least 20% of my searches on Google." So with that in mind, I'm skewing that average already.

Ryan:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. When I've got kids that they all have a Google Home in their rooms, they get to ask Google stupid questions and they get to hear dad jokes on Google if I'm not around and then play music.

Jon:
Yeah, the worst is my wife's car has Google in it and my son continually asks it to tell jokes, and the jokes are dad jokes, but they're funny like, "Yay, whatever." But yeah, after a while it's like, "Oh, I'm sorry. My wife's Google search is going to... History is just totally jacked up."

Ryan:
Yeah. I pay for my family Kindle Unlimited for all the kids so they can all read books because they do love reading. I would say at least 25% of my four kids and the hundreds of books read per month by them, 25% are joke books.

Jon:
Okay. Fair enough. I bet. Hey, sounds funny. Nothing else. I bet it's entertaining.

Ryan:
Hey, we laugh a lot, but not bad.

Announcer:
You're listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers, and Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Jon:
So, do companies need to be Hadrian and start building walls around AI here? What do you recommending?

Ryan:
Transparently, I'm not even sure if AI would stay in the wall.

Jon:
Fair enough.

Ryan:
That may be a problem there, but I do think some brands need to be thinking about beyond this AI thing, putting walls up around certain areas that they've been investing in for a while on Google based on where these trends are going. Specifically, I think SEO was going to be the one that gets impacted the most. It's not because of the AI taking all the clicks, which is where my hypothesis would've been two months ago. It's really around Google directing those organic clicks to other areas.

Jon:
Are you saying don't do SEO? I mean, coming from a traffic person, that seems like really weird and odd advice.

Ryan:
Which I would agree with if I'm actually saying... I can't say that, that not do SEO. The second most interesting point I found in this article, interesting for me is being proven wrong, and so that's why the AI one comes in there, but from a practical standpoint for clients I work with and companies listening to this, it's the sheer amount of traffic. Google is driving to Google properties instead of organic results. So we've seen this for a while, but I guess I just hadn't seen the numbers around what volume of these. So the numbers that Rand came up with in this study, almost 30% of all clicks on Google go to a Google property, and so that's YouTube, Google Maps, Google Hotels, Google Flights, Google App Store. I mean, I'm guilty of that, flight checking for business trips and personal trips. I get Google alerts on flights and I'm there. I'm in the Google Flights because it's so much easier than going into Delta and then going into Alaska separately.
So the share of clicks being given to organic or going to go, I wouldn't say given, I guess Google can't technically just give them, but they impact it a lot, is at an all time low, and so only... It's around 70% of the clicks that happen go to organic now, and that's decreasing in the US pretty aggressively. It caused me to start thinking about how you might be investing in this. So if you know that the share of clicks to organic listings is decreasing and you've got some significant competitors already ranking above you and that would be like Amazon, Walmart, target, GNC, if you're in the supplement world, if you're behind them on important non-brand searches, is it going to make sense to be pushing into that to try to rank higher and outrank somebody that's so far ahead from an SEO standpoint? That's where I think maybe we need to start digging a little deeper into the minutiae and decide what does or does not make sense around that.
So, don't hear this to say don't invest in SEO anymore. That can't be what's heard. So if you're cutting me up to blast me on LinkedIn, I'm going to get you because I'm recording the full thing here. But I think there could be potential for a lot of brands on focusing on Google properties and where Google is wanting to push traffic. So I've said this many times and I think most people understand, it's Google's world. We're living in it, and you've got to make your brand fit Google's world not make Google fit your brand because that's an uphill battle you're going to lose every time.
In fact, in that study, Rand quotes a guy, won't remember who it is, but a few years ago he put a tweet out that said, "Google has the most phenomenal SEO team in the world. They have never been hit by at a Google update ever and lost SEO traffic." Good point. I mean, even though the EU antitrust thing came out recently and penalized Google and cost them I don't know how many hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, they are still going this direction within the US and knowing full well they'll probably get something similar to what happened in the U, but it's far enough down the road in the legal world that there are still billions upon billions of dollars to make in the meantime.

Jon:
Well, and data to collect in the meantime, which will only help fuel them moving forward. You have to think about eventually. I believe I saw this report when it came out too or overview it. One of the major ways they've collected data has been Chrome. I thought that was really, really interesting. Everybody knows it, but it came out and I guess there was some leak around the algorithm for Google. It came out a while back.

Ryan:
That was an interesting one. If you haven't looked at the Google leak docs or a summary of it, you can find a good one on search engine land.

Jon:
I'll have to check that out. I think I saw something around an overview of that for the short one, and it wasn't surprising to me, but it's like, oh yeah, Google's watching everything you do at every single step. There are a lot of places across the world now where they're being slapped on the wrist for doing that, but the US hasn't so far not been one of them.

Ryan:
It's hard you have... When you look at Chrome... I use Chrome and I like it because it syncs everything across all my devices. It makes it easy to store my passwords. It makes it easy to autofill. I mean, they've created a phenomenal ecosystem that it's painful for me to find. If somebody forced me and says, "You have to migrate and use Firefox," I'd be like, "I put my whole life on all my devices is on Chrome. Now I got to redo things." So yes, all that, it's Google's world Live in that and understand that and start placing some bets, I would say, in the Google realm and where they want clicks to be going.
So still, yes, SEO. Most companies out there don't need to wall off SEO entirely and throw it over into Scotland and say, "No, we'll do that later." It's probably putting a wall down the middle of SEO in reality and separating that and saying, "Okay. There are different pieces to SEO. If I can, I'd like to be able to potentially split that budget and split the focus of my team from SEO and say the things that I know work well long-term are going to be backlinks, quality content linking back to me to increase my domain authority." That hasn't really changed in the last 20 years. Put some good content out there, but the line would be keep doing that.
Instead of focusing a lot of on-site content, I might say, "Let's get that content team maybe to start doing some things on YouTube." Maybe put some question and answer things that I would've maybe written in a blog, but instead of that, maybe put it on YouTube. But if you're writing it from doing everything on YouTube, it may not be that hard to have a transcription put on your website. I mean, you are king of reusing a single piece of content in multiple areas. I mean, if you want a case study and doing something once and using it 20 times, Jon MacDonald is the guy for that, for sure.

Jon:
I will say two things on that. One is I would defer to Ross Simmonds. He runs a great training or has in the past called DREAM: Distribution Rules Everything Around Me. Yes, he's a Wu-Tang rap fan, the song CREAM: Cash Rules Everything Around Me. But he was saying here so many businesses have a glutton of content, but they don't use it, right? They get it out there and then they let it die. So I learned a lot from him. I would redirect people to go check that out. But also my team at The Good, they've done an amazing job of helping reuse content. So I can't take all the credit for that, but I do appreciate it. We do put out a ton of content. I have so many lists of things I've yet to promote that I'm supposed to get out there, so I'm the backlog when it comes to that.

Ryan:
Yeah. I mean, if you see the content your team's put out, I would guess if I didn't know already, I would've said, "Man, you have a large team, five, six, seven people helping you put content out." In fact, you have a very lean team that does a phenomenal job of hitting out of their weight class based on [inaudible 00:19:05] they have.

Jon:
Thank you. I'll pass that along.

Ryan:
Yeah, great job there. So take a cue from Jon and his team as you're looking at your investment in SEO. SEO and helping things onsite can help your paid search. So you've got to do some to get your paid search to work better, get the now traffic. Start doing some analysis on YouTube at your competitors. Do some searches on YouTube that say, "All right. If somebody's trying to solve this problem on YouTube, what does it look like?" There's a lot of YouTube, Pinterest DIY things. I go there to figure out how to fix a home project before I go to Home Depot to figure out what I got to buy to make things work. If you're in that space, answering those questions can be of benefit and can rank higher where Google wants to send that traffic and then come back. Just found out today that Google is really excited about feeds going into YouTube. So they want to make YouTube more of a shopping destination.

Jon:
Interesting. Okay.

Ryan:
It's been a challenging integration in shopping into YouTube. They've done some shoppable videos that have just never gotten anywhere.

Jon:
Well, and are those still available? Because I remember when those came out a decade ago and people were super excited about that.

Ryan:
They were excited because Google told us we were supposed to be excited about it and nobody did anything. I don't know if there was one purchase that it was done through those. There's probably was. I don't know how many we tracked, but it probably wasn't nearly what we expected. Google is going to test and measure enough things that they're going to get people to shop because they're using YouTube more and more. The TikToks, the vertical videos are being a big thing we talk about. Instagram, that type of interaction where you're scrolling a feed, they're really trying to get YouTube to operate that way. People that are scrolling it, therefore you'll see a lot more easy ways shop and convert inside the ecosystem. Similar to Facebook or Instagram Shop is what I expect to have come out fairly soon, maybe holiday.

Jon:
Oh, okay.

Ryan:
Be prepared, but they're hot and excited about feeds going into YouTube. So knowing that's Google's goal and where they're going, if you don't have content there, it's going to be much more difficult for you to just pop up your product in an unrelated video because you're remarketing to them. But if you have native videos that are yours and you have a page on there, much easier to fit that in there. I would assume influencers are going to be heavily incentivized as they talk about products to have those shoppable. It'll be easy to track the conversion. Again, there's so many things Google can do to incentivize influential people and brands to start participating, and I'm seeing that happen. There's a lot of cash flying around from Google to make that happen.
I would be focusing more on YouTube and leverage that as somewhat of an SEO standpoint and understanding those clicks are going to come organically. But again, it's difficult to bucket that under SEO if I'm a CFO because that's not an owned click of yours. They still have to come to the site for that to be considered, I guess, SEO optimizing for search engines. So YouTube, if they can convert there and send sales, it's going to be much easier to see it as a channel, more of a social channel, but be there and be aware of it.
I think that's also going to play into some of this AI consideration and how you're looking at AI. So if we take this back to AI and SEO, AI is not taking SEO clicks as we can see. But a good example would be a client of ours, Dynojet. Think about this, if somebody is searching for, "Does fuel tuning make my motorcycle go faster?" If I just bought a motorcycle and I want to go faster, I need to know how to do that and I'm like, "Okay. I heard about fuel tuning." If you ask that question, you'll get an AI answer. Dynojet who we did the SEO for actually shows an article answering that question that they reference. It took time. Their domain authority is high enough. I don't have to click as a searcher on that, I already know fuel tuning does do that.
Okay. So I need a fuel tuner. I just got the bike. I'm not going to do that now. Maybe a month down the road I save money and decide I need to see how much a fuel tuner costs. I go search Yamaha R7 fuel tuner. Oh, great, I've got... Here it is. Oh yeah, Dynojet, I remember that name from the search I did and the AI popped it up. I may not remember it was AI. I may not remember how it showed, but Dynojet resonates. Think of it as a branding play, high up the funnel. So that part is SEO. That may be something you need to focus on more. If you can't build the backlinks to overtake your competitors, maybe you get really good at designing blog content that's schema markups so that AI picks it up.

Jon:
Yeah. Or answering very specific questions like that.

Ryan:
Yes. Another company I invest in has done a great job of that scaling article creation to answer very specific questions because you can figure out the search volume if you go to... Semrush is great resource for that because they have an API access into the Google keyword planners. They know the search volume. You can say, "Okay. I know there's this many searches for how to make the best cookies." Great. I sell flour for baking and I know that there's 300 searches for that a month, great, I might be able to use AI by writing this article and get the answer to 200 of them. They're not going to click, so you can't see the click traffic, but if 200 people out of 300 don't click anywhere, which is about the average on Google and they just see your answer, well, they need to go buy flour next time, maybe they see that and remember the name. "Oh yeah, that name sticks in my head for some reason. I don't know why, but since I remember it, they must be a good product."

Jon:
Interesting. So what's your overall punch line here?

Ryan:
So I guess the punch line is going to be... Unfortunately, it's like most of my answers, it's going to be an, it depends answer for the vast majority of you out there. There's not one answer for everyone, but each brand needs to start re-looking at how they're investing and their time and money and be willing to put up a wall to focus on something more effectively, more strategically. As I look at the rest of this year, we're doing our holiday planning now for a lot of our clients and gearing up to our holiday event in a couple of weeks, in a down economy, there's going to be a smaller pie, less searches happening for that particular product, less people are going to buy it. The more you focus on something that is working, the further you're going to be ahead of your competitors in that specific area, and I think that's going to give you the ability to win more often in a smaller arena because you have more expertise in this particular area.
So whether that's going to be paid search and you really want to focus on the shopping campaigns or performance max and you're really going to get into the feed and make that work really well and test to measure what your feed is talking about or how you're talking about images and all of that, great, do that. If you're going to focus on SEO, maybe you put a wall around all of your social content. You're not going to invest in social content very aggressively right now because you're going to invest everything in SEO because that's where you think you have the best opportunity to win based on where you can see your competitors investing. Or maybe you're going to the opposite of that. You're going to throw SEO over into Scotland and it's going to be social content, social ads, and you're going to go all in with influencers and affiliates and make that work first.
I think a lot of small brands get bogged down with all of the things you can be doing across the internet to market your brand and drive traffic to get it to your site. You could do a little bit in 10 different areas and you're going to get nowhere. I see that probably more often like, "Oh, I'm going to spend $100 in paid search. I'm going to spend $100 in paid social. I'm going to do one article a month on SEO and I'm going to record one video every two months." No, that's a terrible idea. You'd be better off putting all of the resources into one area that you think you can win best at right now and make that your core. Once you win that, it's going to make it much easier to like, "Okay. I've got enough resources to expand. I'm going to land and expand one other area." Maybe it's paid search first and you're going to go into paid social and then you're going to go into SEO.

Jon:
I love that approach. I just had a conversation this morning with somebody where I was talking about how NBA players have one solid move they're known for, right? You could be a really great three-point shooter and nobody talks about anything else that you do or a great-

Ryan:
Play horrible defense.

Jon:
Exactly. Or you're just a defensive specialist, or you really only have to succeed in sports and/or business. You have to have one thing that you know gets the job done. If you have that one lead gen source that works for you, stop messing around in 20 different things. Take most of that budget, 80% of that budget and put it under that one item that works and run with it and watch it grow. But you really only need that one thing and you have to figure out what that one thing is that works for you. For us at The Good, it's been content for all these years, sharing our expertise as you talked about. So I love your approach here. Wall everything else off and throw it over to Scotland and handle what you're good at. That's great advice.

Ryan:
Yeah, looking forward to seeing it work for a lot of you.

Jon:
Well, I appreciate you sharing. I'm glad you came back in one piece and with 100 extra miles on your feet if nothing else, but time to come home and sleep.

Ryan:
Lots of that. Well, I wish more. Four kids have decided that that's not what's happening. It's summertime. They need to play.

Jon:
There you go. All right, Ryan. Well, I'll let you go. Enjoy and thank you for sharing.

Ryan:
Thanks, Jon.

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Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.