Let's Talk About SERPs
[00:00:00.560] - Mariah Black-Overholt
All right, here we go. I think we're live. Awesome. Welcome, everyone. We are excited to talk about CERP's baby today. I know Austin, you're like, that's.
[00:00:16.330] - Austin Weaver
That was such a throwback. Man. It really was. Yeah, almost fitting of history of search. It felt fitting.
[00:00:25.940] - Mariah Black-Overholt
It is. We're going to talk about that a little bit today. So very I'm excited to see everybody. I know there's a lot of folks just popping in here. Okay, maybe we aren't live yet on LinkedIn, but that looks like it's getting worked on. Oh, there it is. Awesome. All right, so as you're popping in, If you can tell us where you're from, where you're viewing from in the comments, that would be super. We are actually going to do a live audit today of a company while we're talking about what SERPs are and how you show up. So if you'd like to have your company be that company that we look at, this is a little freebie here, just drop your company name in the comments and we will pick one. So feel free to do that right now. I'm waiting on everybody to jump in here. But before we dive in, I do have a few... It's really your job description for the next 40 minutes. So at Chatter Kick, we like to have everyone be active participants in our webinars. We are very human. We like to have conversations. We don't like to just talk at people.
[00:01:35.240] - Mariah Black-Overholt
So let's try to make this as interactive as possible. So make sure you're saying hi. Drop who you are in the comments. If you have any questions at any point, feel free to also throw those in there. You don't have to wait to the question and answer section. We definitely want to weave them in as they make sense in the webinar. And like I mentioned, if you have If you would like us to review your company, we are definitely looking for some in there. We have a backup if nobody says anything, but we'd love to have a volunteer to take a peek at one live. So we're going to take just another minute or two. Make sure you type in your business name, type in who you are, where you're from, maybe what you know about SERPs or why you're excited to be here today. We're excited to talk to you all. Austin, are Are you excited?
[00:02:31.320] - Austin Weaver
Absolutely. Yeah, and a little bit terrified because always having an audience is a little nerve-wracking. But I was looking through the list of people who signed up and look like a friendly crowd.
[00:02:47.760] - Mariah Black-Overholt
We did. Yeah, definitely. Lots of familiar names, too. So excited to see you all today. But we'll get started here. I think we're ready to get going. I'm going to introduce myself and a little bit about Chatter Kick, and then I'll turn it over to to get going. We are Chatter Kick. We are a social first digital agency, and we are obsessed with building human connection online. And today we're going to talk about one of the biggest misconceptions in marketing right now, and that is how people actually find you. There's a lot of historical data on how people have found us in the past, but that is very much changing, and it's not always very comfy to talk about. So some of this is not rooted necessarily in cold, hard fact, which is It's really, really hard for Austin and I, because that is what we deal in every day is the numbers. And a lot of this is intuition, and following past data and trends, and seeing how that plays out right now. So a lot of this is going to be strategy and philosophy around search and social and how people find you.
[00:03:51.440] - Mariah Black-Overholt
But this is definitely the thing we do every day. So my name is Mariah. I am an ad strategist here at Tata K. My role actually lives at the intersection direction of creativity and accountability. So I build and manage most of our paid advertising strategies for a lot of our clients. But I also spend a lot of time digging into the data and the metrics and looking at the trends and looking at where we are with strategy going forward. So I'm not looking at just how ads run inside of platforms, but how brands actually show up across the landscape, because that all plays into it. When I'm reviewing analytics, I'm always asking, are people finding you? Are they trusting what they see? And is your brand visible in the places that matter? Whether that's on Google, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, or even AI, which is my favorite topic right at the moment. My day to day work actually gives me a front row seat to see how visibility connects directly to growth. So I'm super excited for today's conversation because the way that people search is changing super fast. And the performance data that we look at and work with every day really just proves how important it is to understand Search going forward.
[00:05:01.600] - Mariah Black-Overholt
So Austin, over to you.
[00:05:04.480] - Austin Weaver
Thanks, Raya. Yeah, and I'm another Ad Strategist here at ChatterKick. I will just echo what she said, Search is changing so quickly. Before coming to ChatterKick, I was a local SEO specialist at another agency, and things moved quickly then. But with things like AI and how social media has integrated with search, it has just It created so many things for us to watch, so many ways for people to make those human connections that are so important for growing your business and providing great service. So that's a lot of, I think, where our angle comes in here, why we're talking today about SERPs.
[00:05:51.120] - Mariah Black-Overholt
Yeah, so let's talk about SERPs. What the heck is a SERP?
[00:05:59.140] - Austin Weaver
Yeah, That's a good question. Let me just grab something here. The first thing that I think about when people talk about SERPs, search in general. A little bit of history. We're going to start with a sound. Some of you might know this sound, but I'm dating myself because this was a sound that I knew very well about 25 years ago.
[00:06:22.100] - Mariah Black-Overholt
So It's honestly a little triggering. I'm not going to lie.
[00:06:36.320] - Austin Weaver
I know. It's almost spooky now. What were we listening to? We were channeling the Internet, and we were hearing- You had to connect to it.
[00:06:45.440] - Mariah Black-Overholt
It was so funny. But I also am just expecting the, you've got mail to pop in there.
[00:06:51.460] - Austin Weaver
Yeah, that all comes to mind. I think that was one of the biggest, I I think things that came to my mind just thinking about search and the history of search, because it's very different now. But 25 years ago, if you were to try and find a company online, you probably went to something like yahu. Com or Altavista, these older search engines. Altavista? Yeah. And the structure and the way that they used to do things was a bit different. If you were to go to Yahoo, they basically treated search like a card catalog. If you go to the library and they would categorize things by the website. But as Google came into the mix, what they got really good at was crawling the individual pages of a site and seeing what other websites are cross-referencing the information that is published on the site. And they use a lot of those signals to show the value of the content. Because if this website over here and all these other websites are linking back to your website, clearly you're doing something that people are interested in, and that's something that Google is going to want to pay attention to.
[00:08:15.220] - Austin Weaver
So it's changed a lot, obviously, but that's basically how we came from the older search engines to what we have as Google.
[00:08:27.180] - Mariah Black-Overholt
And what does What does SERPs actually mean? I know that's an acronym. We have so many acronyms in marketing that in some ways, I think SERPs, you looked it up one time, it looks like it's like some retirement planning for the UK. But what does it actually mean in marketing terms?
[00:08:43.700] - Austin Weaver
Yeah. So And what a CERP is just the results. S-e-r-p stands for Search Engine Results Pages. So the signals that I was just talking about, those translate on the screen when you search to things like links, those blue headlines that you're seeing and you click on, snippets of information that are pulled into different parts of the search. You've got panels that are pulled off to the side. And in those panels, a lot of times you have a mix of maps for local services and then reviews of the services or companies as they show up.
[00:09:22.640] - Mariah Black-Overholt
And how does Google determine what's best there? How is it tagging and cataloging all this?
[00:09:30.300] - Austin Weaver
So they use a lot of signals. There are over 200 signals. And to list those all out, I mean, everyone would go to sleep here. But they base all of that on four letters. It's EEAT. And they're looking at They're looking at your experience. They're looking at your authority. They're looking at the things like site speed and interactions on your page. How do those go for people? So If they go to your website, is it loading properly? And as far as information on your site, do you answer a lot of the questions that people have, or are you just throwing up a website so you have a place for people to land? So looking for quality- You mentioned over quality.
[00:10:21.840] - Mariah Black-Overholt
Well, you also mentioned interaction, and that makes me think of social right there. We're talking about engagement frequently with our social platforms in our posts, and that's a big metric that we measure. And I have to imagine that Google is also taking that into account nowadays, right?
[00:10:42.320] - Austin Weaver
Absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, if Let me just go and look at a search engine, right? Google, the biggest one. I'm going to try and make this bigger. But if you look up, I'm just going to look up SERP. What is a SERP? Is a SERP. Okay, So Google right now is trying to find relevant answers that are quality. They have come from an authoritative source. The user experience is good, and the context matches my question here for what is a SERP? Okay, so you can see here the different features. You've got an AI overview, which pulls from a bunch of different sources and puts together an answer based on all of those. Over here, you've got the information panel. And this, if you open this up, they try to make sure that they're linking to all the different sources that they use for that information, right?
[00:11:39.920] - Mariah Black-Overholt
So this is all AI?
[00:11:42.640] - Austin Weaver
Yes, all of this part right here is AI. And you can dive deeper into the AI mode there. But then you get into the actual website now.
[00:11:55.080] - Mariah Black-Overholt
All right. That looks like Google.
[00:11:58.940] - Austin Weaver
Yeah.
[00:12:00.440] - Mariah Black-Overholt
Nothing crazy there. But what happens? I know that the the visibility for a brand is a lot different than the visibility for a random search term. So we thought it'd be really cool today to take you guys through a live review of a company, which I think we have Amelia. She offered up Resolute REHQ in Austin. So I think that's the one we're going to take a peek at today. So this is all live Just to preface, so we don't even know exactly what we're going to see, but we're excited to dig in. And this is what the public sees. So when someone is googling you or finding you organically on a search engine, we often think of metrics and performance is very controlled and doing testing and that thing. But organically, things sometimes don't always happen exactly the same way twice. And so when we look at this, we don't know what we're going to pull up. And it probably won't be exactly the same the second time either. So Austin is just going to walk us through what he's noticing.
[00:13:09.600] - Austin Weaver
Okay, so Resolute RE right here, we just search for Resolute RE HQ, and this is what I'm seeing. It shows that we maintain regional offices in Texas, Louisiana, and Mexico, serves clients in all 50 states and up to 130 countries. That is It's interesting.
[00:13:32.240] - Mariah Black-Overholt
It looks like they hold the first three there, the first three slots.
[00:13:38.040] - Austin Weaver
Yeah. And it looks like it says, backslash offices there, backslash offices there as well. But you'll notice here, there are different keywords that are showing up in the headlines for these. So this is a location page, helps it to show up more relevantly for people in that region. But look at this. You've got the LinkedIn page there as well.
[00:14:01.340] - Mariah Black-Overholt
So that's the fourth result?
[00:14:05.520] - Austin Weaver
Yeah.
[00:14:06.380] - Mariah Black-Overholt
Before you even get in more of the website. That's interesting.
[00:14:10.280] - Austin Weaver
Yeah. What I'm not seeing is a lot of social.
[00:14:17.500] - Mariah Black-Overholt
I'm curious if you put in Austin, Texas in the search term as well. There you go.
[00:14:29.160] - Austin Weaver
So here So you start down midway, bottom half of the page, you start seeing social pages. Got some stuff.
[00:14:37.840] - Mariah Black-Overholt
That's a backlink, right? A couple of backlinks in there.
[00:14:42.660] - Austin Weaver
Yeah, and then some questions about what people ask on that same topic. And I like that we're seeing here on the side, the actual Google business profile. We zoom in there, which is a huge, huge factor for ranking in local searches. It's a product from Google where you enter all the information about your business. And it's a place where people can leave reviews. They can go to your website and reach out to you and answer any questions that they might have about your business there.
[00:15:17.680] - Mariah Black-Overholt
Awesome. I'm noticing that there isn't an AI results for these. Does it happen every single time you search, or is Google still figuring that out?
[00:15:32.480] - Austin Weaver
I think that for specific business names, if you're looking for a specific business, it can be hit or miss. But if we were looking for something like commercial real estate in Austin, Texas.
[00:15:49.700] - Mariah Black-Overholt
Oh, I bet it would pop up. Well, maybe not.
[00:15:52.940] - Austin Weaver
Yeah, we're seeing some different things here. If we go down to one of the features here, the map Perhaps you can see different businesses there. But Resolute isn't showing up in these top ones. I am searching from outside of the state, so it may show up differently if I was in the Austin area.
[00:16:14.300] - Mariah Black-Overholt
Do you think you could zoom in a little bit for me? It's actually really small on my side. There we go. There we go. Okay. All right, let's go back to the last search you did, because I think that was an interesting one with the Google My Business profile. So I think it'd be fun to count the number of times that your business name is listed in this first page, which that's another fun point. So in the past, it used to be like, oh, I'm listed on the fifth or sixth page of Google. We don't really have pages anymore because it just keeps scrolling. So you want to, I think, look at it as what's on your screen currently and how much of that real estate do you own at the top? Which in this case, I can see Resolute, Resolute, that's two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. Okay, go over. And then go over to the other side to the panel. Plus, you've got 11. Keep going.
[00:17:23.220] - Austin Weaver
Well, this is actually the business listing.
[00:17:25.540] - Mariah Black-Overholt
Yeah, so there's at least... Your business is actually listed at least what, 12 or 13 times in that very top of the Google listing, which a lot of times businesses focus pretty heavily on the website, right? We put a lot of effort into making sure that our So it looks really good, which is incredibly important. There's no discounting that it isn't. But I think it's important to remember that there are so many other factors that impact visibility. You put 90 % of your effort into the website, but 90 % of your first impression probably comes from somewhere else, whether that's your Google over here, where you've got your name listed 15 to 20 times on your social different platforms, and increasing that visibility and that likelihood that someone's going to find you in that first page of Google is incredibly important.
[00:18:18.680] - Austin Weaver
Yeah, I think the likelihood of anyone finding you after the first page just dropped so significantly. I think you may have said, but 90 % of people do not go past that And I think we're going to get a little spicy here because this is really exciting.
[00:18:36.040] - Mariah Black-Overholt
But I don't know about you, but I don't spend a lot of time on Google anymore, actually. I am usually in another platform. And whether that's... What are my socials? Whether it's going to be Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest. I love Pinterest. It's a little bit of a visual search.
[00:18:57.970] - Austin Weaver
But all of those And the platforms now have their own search engines as well.
[00:19:03.240] - Mariah Black-Overholt
And people are actually utilizing those, not more than Google currently, but it's trending north. There is a lot of social search usage at the moment. Even Reddit It used to be, Reddit was a... We've talked about Reddit a lot. We love Reddit chatter kick. But Reddit is becoming an almost invaluable source for just so So much information. It's a place to go for trust, which is weird because it's incredibly anonymous. But Google is also using Reddit, and AI is using Reddit as a place to grab that information from. And so we are seeing it come more to the forefront. But when people are searching on social, what does it matter for a company if that's what's happening? And how do we improve our social search visibility?
[00:19:59.080] - Austin Weaver
Yeah. So We did that. This here shows that search is actually on social like you're talking about. If you consider that people are spending on average two and a half hours, between two and a half hours and four hours a day on social media, it really highlights the importance of showing up on those platforms. And it can be hard to do with your organic content, but for discovery, right? You are needing to find a way for people to find who you are if they're not thinking about roofing right now. But you have content that comes across their feed that's compelling at the right time. Suddenly you've put yourself in there and you can be recalled later when they do need your service.
[00:20:50.400] - Mariah Black-Overholt
Building up that brand awareness consistently.
[00:20:53.500] - Austin Weaver
Exactly. Yes.
[00:20:56.860] - Mariah Black-Overholt
I think that's always super interesting And we see that some studies have actually shown that between 61 to 83 % of people find or research brands on Instagram. So not only are people going to Google now, but they're actually trying to find that more trustworthy, authentic connection on Instagram, I think, is the best way to describe it. I feel like Google is very clinical still. It doesn't feel very human. It feels very like It's very keyword focus, which is the history of SEO. In a nutshell, you said it yourself, it had to be hard catalog, so it had to be keyword focus. But nowadays, we are really looking for conversation. We're looking for education in our content, and people trust social platforms more for that, which explains why 83 % of people are using Fritz for that or social.
[00:21:52.920] - Austin Weaver
Yeah. And for just a Another data point, 90 % of users on Instagram, specifically, follow at least one brand that they use, right? And so we can tell from some of the data that if somebody is following you on social, they're bought into what you're doing, right? And they'll be more likely to be repeat customers if you're coming up in their feed somewhat frequently.
[00:22:26.760] - Mariah Black-Overholt
Okay, very interesting. Court on YouTube also said that social search is super convenient for her. She loves that she can receive search answers and reviews all in one place. So agreed. I think that is... Again, it just all speaks to the value of having that trustworthy content. I also saw another comment that just said, give me all the short form video tutorials. Oh, awesome. Glad you asked. We are going to do that today. I think we can get maybe the content strategist to come in here and give a nice webinar on that. But we are going to save that for sure. But I think that that's a good segue because as we talk about, it'd be really easy to talk about SEO, and like I said, keyword strategy and how that works on Google. But really, what is the strategy on social, and how do we maintain a human connection in a space that it could be very easy to also feel very clinical if that's how we're trying to show up. So Austin, when we're talking about content, when we're talking about how to build that strategy for visibility and trust, what does that mean?
[00:23:32.760] - Austin Weaver
So on social media, a lot of what people are experiencing are these cultural moments. And if there are cultural moments that make sense for your business to tie into, even if it's a light connection, what you are doing is building your relevance to people in the social space. And so, I mean, if, for example, you are just starting your business and there's no traffic coming to your website through organic search, you can be on social media, joining the conversation, even with a bit of paid spend, boosting some posts You can reach a much larger audience than the maybe five followers who started your page as followers on your page because you invite them to personally as you're just starting. But those signals, those are categorized in all these different sources online. And we have seen for even new companies that you can influence the amount of organic traffic coming to your site just by getting your content in front of them.
[00:24:45.620] - Mariah Black-Overholt
Right. I think that what would you do if you were a brand, didn't have a lot of visibility, were fairly new, but you had maybe some trusted influencers in your space. How would you connect with them to maybe help build your own visibility?
[00:25:03.960] - Austin Weaver
That's a good question, because we know that influencers boost trust by quite a lot, right? How many of us- That's what I call influencers, right? Yeah. And they're almost these proxy friends online, where you don't really talk to them. You might comment on their content. But if they're using something, for example, like skin care products, and you follow you've followed them on social, you've seen them use different products, the response that they have or the review that they have of that product is going to be taken very seriously by their followers. So if you have a connection, you are able to get someone who has a following to use your product and give even just some honest feedback about it, the awareness is going to be expanded to as much of their audience as sees that piece of content, right? They may not know who you are at all, but they're now associating your product with that person who they do trust.
[00:26:12.820] - Mariah Black-Overholt
It almost makes me think of old school PR or even some of those backlink strategy, because really what it is, is it's having your name referenced more frequently on networks that you're not currently a part of, right?
[00:26:25.640] - Austin Weaver
Yeah, yeah. And if you think about, I mean, ads on TV have done this so much, where they've got a celebrity just using their product, right? And because people are tuned into that celebrity, they want to be like that celebrity maybe, or whatever other attraction they have to and interest they have in the celebrity, suddenly they know your product name.
[00:26:50.640] - Mariah Black-Overholt
And this is certainly not an influencer webinar. I think we're going to actually maybe do those in a future one. But I did think that that is an interesting call out. If you don't have a A lot of content currently, that can be a really good way to get some really trustworthy content onto your platform. We had a comment here. A lot of small businesses don't necessarily have a website, but they do often have a Facebook page. And I have noticed this. And honestly, sometimes this can be a little bit of a frustration because I think websites serve a very important purpose. They tell you the who, the what, the where, the why, and the when, and they do it all in one place pretty quickly. What Facebook pages are not as great at is maybe that, but they are where I can see what's happening now. And I can see the deals you have going on, the promos you have going on, the culture, what you did yesterday, that thing, the behind the scenes. That's where I'm going to learn about the brand But I still do want the website sometimes. And I find that that can be a little frustrating with small businesses.
[00:27:50.690] - Mariah Black-Overholt
But I think it's an important call out that Facebook is a huge driver of local website and local brands traffic for sure.
[00:28:04.660] - Austin Weaver
Yeah, and the reach that you have on that platform is massive. I mean, over two billion people are on the platform, and that's where they're spending time. They're not necessarily spending their time in search. And even if they were just hanging out in search all day. What's going to get them in your company in front of them? They have to have the idea given to them somehow, or you have to be creating content answering questions that they actually have.
[00:28:30.220] - Mariah Black-Overholt
Yeah, which I think leads us to our next section, which is the elephant in the room a little bit, where people really are hanging out right now, because I don't know about you, but I am hanging out in ChatGPT pretty frequently these days. Sometimes it's my therapist. I'm a little bit ashamed to admit. Sometimes it's my researcher. Sometimes it is my daily planner. It's my administrative assistant. I like to use ChatGPT for a lot of different things in AI in general. So I know that a lot of people are doing this and that it's also impacting... I mean, we talked about the AI overview at the very beginning there. This is impacting search in a big way. Austin, what does it mean to shift from traditional search to AI at this point?
[00:29:19.600] - Austin Weaver
So a lot of what AI is doing shifts from the SEO approach, which you're focusing on the keywords, to an AEO approach, which focuses on the answers that people are looking for. So as we look at previous strategies that people had for a website, a lot of people have thought, you can just build your website and then you're done. But based on the questions that people are having today and tomorrow, those conversations are going to change. So if you can anticipate the questions that people have that apply to your company or to your products, and you can answer those on your website clearly, it makes it a lot easier for your company to show up when they're asking those questions on something like ChatGPT.
[00:30:09.800] - Mariah Black-Overholt
That makes sense. So let's go back to the AI summaries a little bit, because I think that that's a really interesting space. We looked at that. And a lot of times you can probably get the answer that you're looking for without even going to the website these days, because between the AI summary, you've got the Google My Business listing on the that has your phone number or your address, whatever the case might be, there's not necessarily as much that you have to do to go to the actual website, right?
[00:30:40.780] - Austin Weaver
Yeah, and that can be scary for marketers today because Google is taking your information and answering people's questions with it, but they're not highlighting it in a way that makes it easy for people to get to your website.
[00:30:57.320] - Mariah Black-Overholt
You can't control the narrative there, right? It is You are stuck with what Google determines, right?
[00:31:03.880] - Austin Weaver
Yeah. You can answer the questions and just make sure that you're answering relevant questions. Because that stuff will show up here, right? And the people also ask, if I open this, for example, What does AI summary mean? I just did a search for that. Here's another AI overview. And it just keeps going? Yeah. And it will put a couple of links here, right? But honestly, not many people are going down to these links in the answer and finding your website. But that doesn't mean it's not helpful, right? If you can answer these in places where Google will take note of it, you can look at which ones are picking up speed. And I hope in the future that they will do as good a job at linking people to websites as we're starting to see ChatGPT do. I think they got nailed pretty hard for not sighting their sources and just straight up making URLs up when people were asking for sources. And so they've made some great efforts to link people back to the websites where they're gaining that information.
[00:32:18.800] - Mariah Black-Overholt
Yeah. So when we talk about that, people are finding you on ChatGPT or people are not clicking from Google, what do we call it? That's zero click attribution, right? And that's what's really scary.
[00:32:32.720] - Austin Weaver
Yeah, because it's invisible. It doesn't show up in your Google Analytics that Google crawled your site and pulled your information. They index it and use it to populate the answers that are displayed there.
[00:32:46.020] - Mariah Black-Overholt
Yeah, Google gets to keep all the data, but I don't get any of it. Is there any way for me to see anything that's showing up in AI in analytics right now?
[00:32:55.980] - Austin Weaver
So there are some breadcrumbs, I'll call them, because you do see referral traffic on your website. If you're looking in Google Analytics, for example, you can go down and see the sources in the referral channel and OpenAI will show up there and a couple of these other ones that people are finding you through. But I think a way that you can just see volume of the snippets or the features that Google is taking from your website, And Semrush has a tool that will show you how much of your content or how many keywords are triggering information from your site in those features. So it's not Super helpful. I think there's a long way to go for those tools to help you to see which information is answering those questions. But it's a start.
[00:33:55.440] - Mariah Black-Overholt
Yeah, I definitely think that I think we're going to see some big shifts in analytics over the next couple of years. It's been a minute since we've had a brand new primary channel in analytics, and I have a feeling that AI is going to be one, or maybe some version of that this year or next year. That's where I see things going. I do see, we've noticed a lot of referral traffic that does come in, specifically in our ChatGPT for clients. And interestingly, and I know, Austin, we've talked about this in the past, but the quality of that is a globally high. When we look at benchmarks for how long people spend on a site, it's like 30 seconds to a minute would be high quality, honestly. That's not a bad user. And some of these referral sources that we're seeing from GPT are spending upwards of 10 minutes per session. And I've got a theory around this, but I think that that's really speaking to the trust that people have in this AI for better or worse. You You're speaking to a proxy human. You're having a conversation back and forth as opposed to Google, where you're looking for specific keywords that may or may not actually answer your question, as opposed to actually being in a conversation with someone.
[00:35:14.620] - Mariah Black-Overholt
And it's I was like, okay, oh, yeah, my buddy told me about this site. I'm going to go check it out, and I probably will spend some more time on that. And that's what people are doing with ChatGPT as well. And so I think there's also, you and I have talked about chat AI sources, that referral traffic removes the bots. You're losing some of that as well. But I think it's an interesting signal that this is that high quality traffic, and I'm sure it'll probably drop off as use increases. But for now, I think we actually may be looking at another part of marketing that we've never had to worry about before. And that's just this AI space.
[00:35:58.680] - Austin Weaver
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, the information that's coming out about how these tools are pulling the information, people are scrambling to try to figure out how to show up in these. But there are a few things that we know are helpful if you're trying to show up in something like ChatGPT.
[00:36:24.700] - Mariah Black-Overholt
So how do you do that?
[00:36:27.000] - Austin Weaver
Thank you for asking. I mean, a lot of times the information is already on your website or some other listing. But making some shifts in how it is listed on your site can flag the different AI tools that are looking for answers to questions that people are entering. So one word you might hear if you're looking into all this stuff is schemas. And that's basically a structure of the metadata on your site that says, Hey, AI, this is the location of this company, or, Hey, AI, this is the person who's published this, so that it boosts the experience and authority of that content in some of the AI returns for Google, for example. But just shifting and structuring the information on your site in that way makes it more and more likely that these tools are going to pull the information from your site, especially if you are planning out and answering questions that people have, putting those in blocks that they can just rip right from your website.
[00:37:45.320] - Mariah Black-Overholt
Staying very human, right? That's the whole idea. Stay conversational.
[00:37:50.960] - Austin Weaver
Absolutely. Yeah. Quality. Again, you don't want to just keyword stuff, put a bunch of the same idea, but just different wording for it, right? That doesn't work very well because it's seen as gaming the system. And the rate at which Google changes its algorithm just to avoid that gaming the system is so frequent. They're really looking for quality engagement, actually answering people's questions in a way that's actionable so that they keep coming back to that tool for those Awesome.
[00:38:32.160] - Mariah Black-Overholt
So if I was a marketer today, and I'm trying to protect my brand in the face of all of this uncertainty that we can't even point true data to yet, what is something practical that I can do to take care of my brand?
[00:38:49.720] - Austin Weaver
Don't look at your website like a one and done thing. You've got to treat your website like a living document. Watch the keyword volumes. What are people actually searching for? And align that with the products and services that you offer and make tweaks. If you say something or use a certain keyword, but the volume is lower for that, you can replace it with a higher volume keyword and help people to find you in that way. But beyond that, we know from looking at those search engine result pages earlier that social content and pages show up in the search as well. It's pulling relevant information or companies into the search. So if you are being consistent in posting on a channel where your audience is, then that's going to be a boosted signal for you, and you're going to expand your footprint when people are trying to find what you do.
[00:39:50.600] - Mariah Black-Overholt
Yeah, I think that makes total sense. So when we're talking about this, we want to make sure we have good foundational strategy there. So we're looking at our website frequently, keeping that updated. The Google My Business profile. So we talked about that for a hot second. Is that something that people should also keep updated frequently? Should we be checking that or do we set it and forget it?
[00:40:12.920] - Austin Weaver
There are things that you should be doing to keep that optimized. And I think if you dig into someone's Google business profile, you want to make sure that across the web, the name of the company, the address and the phone number are consistent, across all the listings. That'll be one of the biggest things that helps you. But if you are also listing out your services and going the extra step of describing those services with summaries, those are areas that are going to boost your signals as well. I think we looked at an example earlier where people were actually publishing content through their business profile, and that stuff displays there and helps the signals as well.
[00:40:57.720] - Mariah Black-Overholt
All right, beyond Google, I know we talk about Google a lot, and it's definitely still the main driver of search, and it's in everybody's lives. But there's still some folks that are using Apple Maps, and I'm sure there's still some folks that rely on Yelp. And I suppose there's even a few Bing people out there. But what do we do to show up appropriately across those different channels? Is it all about Google or should I be focusing on these other secondary platforms as well?
[00:41:27.280] - Austin Weaver
So Google does have 89 % of search there, globally. So like you're saying, it is a massive reach that they have. But you can have accounts on each of those different platforms. You can have an account on Apple Maps, basically, and update your listing there. You can have an account with Yelp. You can make sure that you are responding to different reviews or things that come through each of those channels. And honestly, what works in Al Alabama here is probably going to be slightly different to what works in New York or if you go overseas.
[00:42:08.120] - Mariah Black-Overholt
That makes sense. All right, and then we're going to do... I'm going to ask one more question about social, because that's the heart and soul of everything that we do. So if you were today, if I was a company and I wanted to boost my social search presence, what would you have me do? Where would I be? What platform?
[00:42:28.780] - Austin Weaver
What should I So caveat, you've got to pay attention to the audience you're trying to reach, right? What's your ideal client look like? What age? What other information do you have on them? And then you can zoom into the different platforms that you want to be on. But for things like TikTok, you can be tagging locations of your content and boost signals in the area that you're trying to target. Instagram Instagram also has some of that, so you can be tagging your content there. But I think the biggest thing is to consistently provide value and show up on whatever platform it is and provide answers to people's questions or even just connect in those human ways that would help people to feel comfortable showing up at your business or interacting with your company online. All right.
[00:43:30.780] - Mariah Black-Overholt
I think that all makes sense of sense. I think as we're wrapping things up today, some big takeaways, at least what I heard Austin that we talked about, is that we can't just say
[00:44:21.740] - Mariah Black-Overholt
Looks like we may be having some technical difficulties.
[00:44:28.640] - Austin Weaver
Well, I And I think I from here will try to give just a summary of how can you show up in search engines? There are so many signals that people are Able to find through search engines on things like Google, across things like TikTok. They are building out their own search engines as well. You've got AI that is populating answers and and focussing on specific So that's basically the answer side of things. But if you can structure information on your website to be easy for those platforms to pull from. If just wherever you are publishing content, you are creating value that will answer questions that people have, show them where they can get the product or the help that you provide in as many places and ways that you can do that that make it easy for these tools to index you, you're going to expand your footprint. And really, search isn't anymore. It's not about being found on Google anymore as much as it is about just being found and building relationships wherever you are, showing up credibly wherever you are. And then if you look at all the different places that can help you to boost your signals, social is a major lever that helps with discoverability.
[00:46:05.460] - Austin Weaver
It feeds into all these different places that are indexing and producing SERPs. That's the whole focus of today was SERPs. But people are engaging, and the biggest thing that the SERPs are looking at right now is engagement. So engage credibly, provide value.
[00:46:28.760] - Mariah Black-Overholt
That makes sense. So Apologize for dropping out there. I did not check my headphones batteries, and apparently I had a low battery. So I am back, though. Before we wrap up, I know if you have any questions, I'd love for you to drop them in the comment. We've got a few more minutes that we'd love to... If there's anything specific you'd like to talk about, we'd love to hear it. But before we wrap up, I think we have something super special. We're excited for everyone that's joined us today to have. We don't often do this, but I think for webinar attendees today, we're offering a free audit of your company's search presence. We did a little snippet of one here on here, but we've been doing this for clients this summer, and we'd love to offer it for you as well. So what that means is our team will dig into your brand, how your brand is showing up across Google, social, other platforms, and break it down to what that visibility actually means for your business. And then we'll give you some quick practical strategies that you can use to improve that digital footprint right away, because that's what we're about here, is that those quick wins.
[00:47:32.810] - Mariah Black-Overholt
We want you to see success quickly. All you have to do, we're going to put Molly's email here at the bottom in a banner. Just email Molly. Just tell her that you're interested in this audit. And that's it. That's all you have to do. We will take it from there and connect with you. This is your chance to see your company through the same lens that your customers do. I know it's very easy if you were auditing this yourself to be biased. I know we even do that with Chatter Kick. It's incredibly difficult not to be, but we're here to help you take some of that bias out and see how your customers see you. And we'll give you some expert insights to help guide your next move. So if you're interested in that, just shoot Molly an email and she will get back to you. I'm excited to have a few of you join us for that. But do we have any comments or any questions as we wrap things up here today? All right I think one I always hear from clients is, what's a mistake that we often see companies making often with search and social?
[00:48:43.260] - Mariah Black-Overholt
And how can we help with that?
[00:48:48.100] - Austin Weaver
I think a lot of times people are just unaware just at all of how they show up. I think we are often assuming that we show up more than we do. And so if you're not looking to see what traffic is coming to your analytics, to your website, what kinds of engagement or impressions you're getting on social media content, you could be doing your company a pretty big disservice. So dig into the analytics. They're very helpful.
[00:49:21.260] - Mariah Black-Overholt
Yeah, that makes sense. Here's a really good question, actually. How does short form video play into search? So keywords, videos. Should I be putting my captions in there? Are they pulling from that, or is it from the caption itself? Or how do I show up with short form video, which obviously everybody's using right now?
[00:49:42.020] - Austin Weaver
Let me just show ChatterKick search right now. I just typed in ChatterKick. That was it. You've got their website here, all those links. And then Instagram shows up as the second link there. But scrolling over here, videos from ChatterKick populate just right right below our company in this knowledge panel. And it is one of the most promoted assets across the Internet because it gets engagement. People get immersed in video content. Anyway, so just publishing your content, it can make it into the feed there. Awesome.
[00:50:27.580] - Mariah Black-Overholt
All right. How should we decide which platforms to prioritize when resources are limited, which is budget season.
[00:50:41.120] - Austin Weaver
That is tough. I think if you have limited resources, dig again into your ideal clients, look at what their demographics are and what platforms they're likely to be on, and then just test content there. If you start to see a boost there, then you can keep going. But you don't have to be on every platform. I think maybe it sounded like, you got to be everywhere to make your footprint as big as possible. But if you're on a platform, if it's working for you, then lean into it.
[00:51:24.820] - Mariah Black-Overholt
Is there also any value? This is a little bit jumping off from where we are, but what's the value you in just repurposing content across platforms? Say, I don't have time to have a separate strategy for Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram, or I don't have the resources for that. Is it okay if I post the same things to those channels, or is that going to totally screw me up?
[00:51:46.900] - Austin Weaver
It is absolutely okay to repurpose content for different platforms, but you need to make sure that you are posting it in a way that makes sense for the platform. One of the mistakes that we see clients make somewhat frequently is they will take content from a platform like Instagram, and they will publish it exactly the same way that they did on Instagram on LinkedIn. But on LinkedIn, you'll end up seeing linkinbio, #linkinbio, something like that, which does not make any sense for LinkedIn, and people can see those signals and read between the lines on that. So it's not the greatest experience. If you're just copy pasting, you got to pay attention to the platform. Yeah.
[00:52:31.120] - Mariah Black-Overholt
Yeah. But you don't have to have a completely separate strategy. You just have to optimize for the platform that you're on and make sure that it still makes sense for those viewers there.
[00:52:40.460] - Austin Weaver
Yeah. I mean, to an extent, there is going to be content that fits some platforms better than others. And if you're on LinkedIn, you might be leaning into different types of conversations. But don't discount. If you're doing B2B targeting, and you're focusing on LinkedIn, there's still people. So at night, when they're not at work, they are on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.
[00:53:09.140] - Mariah Black-Overholt
All right. I think maybe one more good question today is how often should companies revisit their search visibility strategy? How often should be looking at this?
[00:53:22.840] - Austin Weaver
So I know that we tend to look at it with each strategy report monthly, just to see What movement? I don't think that's how frequently you should be changing your strategy, but you can always see opportunities at those check-ins for things to improve. You can look at the pages on your site, for example. They got traffic that month and see different ways that you can optimize that page to serve people better, using an answer block or something like that.
[00:53:52.780] - Mariah Black-Overholt
So it doesn't have to be big change all the time.
[00:53:54.600] - Mariah Black-Overholt
It's just little practical improvements, really, that help build this strategy over time.
[00:54:05.400] - Austin Weaver
Depending on how aggressive you want to be. Yes, yes. There are some companies who are going to be leaning into just like, convert, convert, convert, convert, which keywords are converting for us and leaning super hard into those. But for most companies, you're going to pay a lot to do that, unless you're making huge amounts of money, right? Unless your margins are growing and pretty big, you might end up losing money on paying to do all of that work. It might not be worth it. Yeah.
[00:54:41.380] - Mariah Black-Overholt
Awesome. Well, Austin, this has been an awesome conversation. It always is with you. I always feel like I learn so much, and you're just so good at getting the details that I stay up here often. So I really appreciate your insight. And if you could leave everybody with one key takeaway today, what do you think that would be?
[00:55:03.380] - Austin Weaver
I think my key takeaway is just that search is changing, and you can't just set it and forget it. You've got to continue to adjust the content, the keywords you're targeting, to make sure that you're answering the questions that people have today, because the things that they were asking yesterday, they're probably not asking today. And the questions that they're asking tomorrow, they may not have thought about today or the tools that we have have made it so they don't have to even think about those things today. So don't ignore it. I think a lot of people They don't even think about updating what keywords they're using or what questions they're answering. They just want to have fun with social content, which can work for a shoe company maybe or a local restaurant. But for most businesses, you need to be paying attention to the conversations that people are having today and plan to answer those questions.
[00:56:12.620] - Mariah Black-Overholt
Great.
[00:56:13.900] - Mariah Black-Overholt
Awesome. All right, well, we will have this recording available for everyone. This lives live on LinkedIn for, I think, in perpetuity. But we'll make sure we send it out to everybody as an email with some of our key takeaways and a summary of the conversation as well. So you have that to refer back to. Don't forget, if you want us to take a peek at your brand on search, just email Molly, and we're offering that audit free for you guys today as a special webinar perk for hanging out with us for an hour, and we appreciate you. So make sure you do that, and come back and see us next month. I think we're actually going to be talking about trust and visibility again. So we're going to continue this conversation and how that shows up in content-specific content, specifically. So excited to see you all.
[00:57:03.010] - Austin Weaver
Thank you.