Today in Digital Marketing - In an AI World, Is SEO Dead?

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Wednesday, May 15th. Today, search in the AI age. How Google's plans might change the SEO industry forever. Why you might be overthinking brand safety. The surprising advice Instagram has for your reels. And Reddit gets sued by one of its advertisers. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital marketing. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches,

Starting point is 00:00:41 and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today, starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. There was a time when SEO was simple. You just decide on a keyword you wanted to rank for, say personal injury lawyer, and you'd spam that on all your webpages. But Google caught on. So then we started putting our keywords in the footer of our web pages in tiny print with the font color the same as the background. There was the keywords in the headers trick, the keyword in the meta description trick, which actually never worked,

Starting point is 00:01:16 and on and on. Google had some tricks up its sleeves too. Perhaps the one that shook up the SEO industry the most was its pivot to the so-called zero-click strategy. You'd search for, how old is Vin Diesel? And it would give you the answer at the top of the search results page. He's 56, by the way. No clicking required, although at least there were some search results pages below if you wanted to dive deeper. Now, the SEO industry may be facing its most challenging period ever, being simply cut out of the loop and replaced by AI. Think of it like those zero-click summaries,

Starting point is 00:01:55 but smarter, more personalized to the searcher, and more detailed. This has been in testing under the name Search Generative Experience for a year. It's rolling out in full in the U.S. this week. Wired Magazine tested this new version of Google. Here's what they found. Quote,

Starting point is 00:02:12 In response to the query, where is the best place for me to see the Northern Lights? Google will, instead of listing web pages, tell you in authoritative text that the best places to see the Northern Lights, aka the Aurora Borealis, are in the Arctic Circle in places with minimal light pollution. It will also offer a link to nordicvisitor.com. But then the AI continues yapping on below that, saying, other places to see the Northern Lights include Russia and Canada's Northwest Territories, unquote. Not to mention, AI sometimes just makes things up. Last year, a writer for The Atlantic asked Google to name an

Starting point is 00:02:52 African country beginning with the letter K. Google's AI, which to be fair was using ChatGPT at the time, couldn't even come up with Kenya. While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, it said, none of them begin with the letter K. The closest is Kenya, which starts with a K sound, but is actually spelled with a K sound. It's always interesting to learn new trivia facts like this. Unquote. So how do brands get their content in front of people if Google is simply copying what you have on your site and showing that to people? Is SEO as we know it today, dead? No, absolutely not. Tom Capper leads the search science team at Moz, one of the oldest and most respected SEO platforms. I spoke with them earlier today.

Starting point is 00:03:45 People have been predicting the death of SEO. It's kind of a joke within the industry, like SEO is dead for a long, long time. Some people might remember when featured snippets came out. And again, you had this sort of suddenly this thing at the top of search results, it was pushing the organic down. There's a lot of doom saying, I would see this moment as quite similar to that one, where it's going to change SEO, but it's not going to kill it. Ultimately, people are still looking to Google and similar platforms to find businesses, to find services. And there are still ways to win at that game or not. When Google returns these AI generated results, they do come with source links. Is there anything that marketers can do to optimize their web pages so that we get into these AI generated answers and become a source link? It's kind of like,

Starting point is 00:04:29 you know, it's not perfect, but at least we can get something. Can we do anything to optimize our pages for that? I almost want to say don't try to optimize for it as it is now, because this is going to change too rapidly. And I'm not sure, like I say, because of the kinds of places where these appear, Google says they're driving clicks. I want to wait and see on that. I'm really not convinced that these results are driving that much traffic to websites. So I don't think it's a great use of your time right now to be trying to appear in these results. AI, of course, hallucinates and makes things up. What can we do if Google's AI results at the top of the SERP pages get something about our brand wrong? Right now, there's not a

Starting point is 00:05:11 lot you can do about it. Obviously, you can robots.txt block the AI. Google has a Google extended user agent, which you can block, which means that their model can't ingest information from your site. But that doesn't mean that they can't hallucinate about your brand because your brand is mentioned in all kinds of places. Right now, I would say there is nothing you can do. And that is a problem. I wish there were a tag that said no hallucinate we could put in our in our meta tags. Yeah, don't mention me or something like this. But even then, would you take that? Probably not, right? Like you'd rather you don't want to completely exclude yourself from being listed in like a list of products or something like this. So yeah, it's tricky. Long term, was this the right play for Google? I'm surprised. I think this is a misstep under investor pressure. Basically, there's a lot

Starting point is 00:05:56 of pressure on Google right now to be appearing to match and compete with what OpenAI and Microsoft are doing. But I don't think this is an improvement either for Google or for their users. My main worry for SEO is not that SEO becomes an irrelevant tactic or something like this. It's that Google may destroy their own moat here. There is a danger here to the ecosystem as a whole if Google is making big misstepssteps and this looks like it, it might be one. Tom Clapper is the senior search scientist at Moz.com. Our whole conversation was about 15 minutes. You can watch the whole thing unedited in our newsletter today,

Starting point is 00:06:37 which is at todayindigital.com slash newsletter. I'm going to give the last word to Wired Magazine, who today wrote, quote, It's as though Google took the index cards for the screenplay it's been writing for the past 25 years and tossed them in the air to see where the cards might fall. Also, the screenplay was written by AI. Brand safety on social media platforms has largely been an effort in keeping bad things away from your brand. You don't want a neo-Nazi post above your Facebook ad, of course, but some brand safety tools even let you keep some space between your content and whole swaths of topic. War, politics, crime, and so on.

Starting point is 00:07:23 How much does this actually matter? A new report from the Stagwell agency called the Future of News Ad Adjacency Study finds that maybe we've been worrying too much. Stagwell, in collaboration with major media publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, tested this with 50,000 American adults. The research focused on whether ads appearing alongside news topics considered unsafe, like crime, inflation, conflict in the Middle East, and political stories about Donald Trump and Joe Biden, influenced consumer behavior differently compared to ads placed next to so-called safe topics, like entertainment and sports. Study participants were exposed to real news stories

Starting point is 00:08:07 from these publishers, accompanied by ads from well-known brands. Participants were then asked to rate their likelihood of purchasing from the featured brands and their overall perception of these companies. Contrary to what we marketers have believed for generations, the findings reveal that the nature of the news content, whether deemed unsafe or safe, had no noticeable effect on participants' willingness to buy or even their favorable views towards the brands. Even the cohorts that some people believe to be particularly sensitive to hot topics, Gen Z and mothers, had minimal difference. Quoting Business Insider, quote, The report has encouraging potential for advertisers.

Starting point is 00:08:51 Ad rates run much higher on sports and entertainment stories. And so, if it is indeed the case that hard news doesn't actually hurt brands, then ads on news would be a cost-effective addition to a portfolio. Unquote. is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Instagram says you might be working too hard on your brand's reels, making them longer than you should. The company says reels longer than 90 Thank you. authentic engagement, considering when your audience is online, uploading the highest resolution, and posting your content at the same time as other platforms. We'll come back to that. What hurts? Engagement bait, reels longer than 90 seconds, videos with third-party watermarks, low-quality videos, and content that you didn't make. Most of these, of course, are evergreen

Starting point is 00:10:23 advice points, but that one that stood out for me was the one about posting at the same time as when you post your updates on other platforms. Andrew Hutchinson at Social Media Today speculates this might be due to broader branding and generating all the discussion at one time. The one about the 90 seconds is also a surprise. Quoting Andrew's piece, quote,

Starting point is 00:10:43 it begs the question, why would Instagram even let you post reels longer than 90 seconds is also a surprise. Quoting Andrews Peace, quote, it begs the question, why would Instagram even let you post Reels longer than 90 seconds if people don't want to watch them? To clarify, the current maximum posting length for Reels created within the app is 90 seconds, but you can upload longer clips.

Starting point is 00:11:01 Instagram has been experimenting with three minute and 10 minute reels uploads, though evidently those experiments haven't been going great given that it's advising people not to do so. Either way, it's a relevant note which could impact your posting approach, unquote. A Reddit advertiser is taking the company to court claiming Reddit sold ads without being able to show that real people were clicking on them. Quoting the register, quote, The complaint was filed this week in a U.S. federal court in Northern California on behalf of Level Fields, a Virginia-based investment research platform. It says the business booked pay-per-click ads on the discussion site starting September 2022. As the name suggests,

Starting point is 00:11:51 the advertiser pays a little bit for every click on one of its ads. That arrangement called for Reddit to use reasonable means to ensure that Levelfeel's ads were delivered to and clicked on by actual people rather than bots and the likes. But according to the complaint, Reddit broke that contract, unquote. Specifically, this company asked Reddit for the IP addresses of everyone who clicked on the ads. Reddit did provide a click log, but it didn't have any IP addresses. Level Field says either Reddit has them and isn't giving it to them for some nefarious purposes, or they don't even have the IP addresses, which would be even worse from a security standpoint. In a financial disclosure filing, Reddit said, quote,

Starting point is 00:12:31 to help advertisers understand if their reach was effective, we offer solutions such as Oracle moat verified viewability, audience verification through NC solutions, and double verify for fraud. While we invest in efforts to detect and prevent inauthentic content or invalid traffic, including investments in proprietary technologies to detect and address content and vote manipulation, we may be unable to adequately detect and prevent such abuses, unquote. Levelfield is asking a judge to certify its claim as a class action. According to a recent Juniper research study,

Starting point is 00:13:06 more than one in five dollars spent on ads last year was lost to click fraud. And that will bring us to another episode of Who's Copying Who? And today, TikTok is copying Instagram again, and Instagram is copying Be Real again. First, TikTok is getting ready to release a new collaboration function in the app, if the backend code is anything to go by. It'll let you tag collaborators on a post, which will then show their profiles on your post in a little pop-up window. So far, the code reveals that creators will be able to invite up to five other accounts to make a collaboration post. You will be able to approve collaborator

Starting point is 00:13:51 listings. You can also decline invitations from posts that you don't want to be a part of. And you can remove yourself even if the post with your brand name has already gone live. You'll be able to invite other accounts to collab up to four times each month. So yeah, it's basically a photocopy of Instagram's collaborative posts function with a couple of small tweaks. It's not out yet, but looks like it'll be coming pretty soon. Also, Instagram is turning to an app that's sort of dormant for inspiration. And it's not the first time. They're working on something called Peak, which will let users share a quick, unedited, unfiltered picture of themselves. This is right out of the Be Real app playbook, of course.

Starting point is 00:14:31 The photo then shows up in their friends' inboxes, and those friends will be able to view it only once before it disappears. And finally, Google is launching a new feature that will show you search results from the World Wide Web. Here's how this groundbreaking feature works. You type in something you're searching for, and Google will show you a list of web pages I know, right? With those search terms in it. And if you're thinking right now, come on, that's how Google works right now. Is it? Because nowadays, when you search Google, you get all sorts of crap at the top.

Starting point is 00:15:16 Videos, knowledge panels, images, Reddit posts from 2009, sponsored carousels, map locations, soon AI summaries, and maybe somewhere at the bottom, web pages. Maybe. So Google is bringing back the web search, a clean, simple list of web pages with a lot of junk removed. Specifically, knowledge panels, featured snippets, shopping modules, and these new AI summaries. You might have to go hunting for it. Sometimes it's a filter along the top. More often than that, it's buried under the more link. I will say this, the grumpy old man in me is pleased.

Starting point is 00:16:02 So some interesting family news. We have a new addition to our family, a puppy. A puppy that, well, listen, I have never had a puppy before. I've never had a dog before. I met my wife and she came with our previous miniature schnauzer who died last October. And I missed all of the puppy stuff. We never had dogs when I was growing up. We were a cat family.

Starting point is 00:16:24 Let me tell you something. Puppies are another thing entirely. People who own dogs, who own puppies and train them from the beginning will, I guess, understand this. I had no idea. The big fight right now, and we have a cat, is to prevent the puppy from eating the cat's poop out of the litter box. It's just, it's gross. It's gross. She's also, she's a Dachshund and Miniature Schnauzer cross. So she has a lot of like terrier kind of in her.

Starting point is 00:16:55 She's really good at finding things. I didn't expect this. Christmas ornaments from behind the sofa. This morning she walked up to me. I could see something white in her mouth. She dropped it on the floor. It was an ear pod. Air pod? What do they call those? Air pods. It was an air pod that she'd

Starting point is 00:17:12 picked up. I'll be honest. I actually lost that like a month ago. She found it. I'm so glad she didn't swallow it. She seems to just want to bring it to us. So it's kind of... And my wife is the expert in all of these things. We just got the new puppy two days ago. And this morning my wife left for a business trip for three days. So it's me,

Starting point is 00:17:31 the cat, and this new puppy. Please send thoughts and prayers. I'll see you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - In an AI World, Is SEO Dead?

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