The Future Of SEO & The Impact of AI On SEO With Carl Hendy
Welcome to a sneak peek of the upcoming newsletter on Marketing Unfiltered.
Firstly, thank you! Actually, a huge thank you from me and Harry for your lovely feedback and kind words (on LinkedIn, on WhatsApp and replies to our email) on our first MU podcast together.
We had many great messages, and we will be back with more episodes, I’m sure 😉
This Week: I speak with the SEO professional whom I hugely respect, Carl Hendy from audits.com.
I wanted to speak to Carl as he is helping various businesses on (i) how to be successful in SEO and (ii) recovering from a number of poor decisions and were hit with big Google updates, (iii) Carl understands the business side, which many in search can struggle with.
Carl offers thousands of £/$’s of free advice in this podcast episode, and I know you will find tremendous value in it.
In our SEO conversation:
We explore the evolving landscape of SEO, going deeper into AI integration
Carl shares his extensive experience in SEO, discussing the challenges and opportunities that arise as search engines adapt to new technologies and AI search
We delve into the importance of long-term cross-team strategies, the significance of branded versus non-branded search, and the unique challenges luxury brands face in the digital space
Carl shares why share of search is an important metric most overlook, and it’s negatively impacting many Marketing departments
We call out the importance of understanding the customer journey to optimise search strategies effectively
We tackle why SEO is NOT dead and why the future of SEO might just be taking on more ownership of AI within the Marketing & Growth departments.
Enjoy and DM me to let me know what you think
The Important Chapters To Share With Your Team
Where are we really at with SEO 01:45
Is SEO dead? 10:54
How is luxury and Amazon going to fare in this AI-driven SEO world? 22:33
The different states of search - educate state, want state, need state, action state 29:55
Should SEO and LLMS search go together? 33:53
The opportunity for SEO to reset 38:00
Link building and the costs of link building 46:00
The opportunity to open up editing webpages - not going into a product effort vs reward matrix 51:46
Why share of search is underrated 53:15
The big difference between tinkering and testing 55:43
SEO helping the Marketing Department in appearing in search and applying SEO lessons across social platforms 55:48
The big opportunity and misunderstanding of branded search 56:39
Reporting Issues: The importance of data accuracy in measuring SEO performance is still not spoken about enough and it’s critically important to understand the role of direct in Google Analytics and ensuring associated revenues is attributed to search.
Here are the top 25 takeaways to apply to your business
Evolution of SEO Beyond Google: SEO traditionally meant Google traffic, but "search" has now diversified across multiple platforms, surfaces, and devices (e.g., Instagram for cafes, ChatGPT for product research) - learn how to improve search beyond traditional Google
AI's Broad Impact on All Channels: While AI overviews within Google are often linked to SEO, the impact of AI search (e.g., on clicks, visibility, revenue) will affect all marketing channels, not just SEO. This necessitates a holistic, cross-channel conversation and adoption in your Marketing plans.
Constant Change is the Norm in SEO: SEO has always been an evolving field (e.g., changes in ad layouts, "People Also Ask" features, keyword data loss). AI is the latest evolution, and Google is still determining its monetisation strategies and plays to Google’s internal Motto “Follow the user - all else will follow”
Measurement and Attribution Challenges Intensifying: Accurately attributing conversions and determining optimal channel investment will become increasingly difficult due to fragmented user journeys and data limitations in tools like Google Search Console. Direct traffic, for instance, is becoming a less distinct category - what seems hard often is but it can be unpicked and multi touch attribution will be critical
SEO is Not Dead, But Requires Maturity: For good SEO practitioners, the field remains viable. However, "traditional" SEO tactics are less effective for large brands. The industry needs to mature beyond manipulative approaches, especially with AI's ability to identify such practices.
AI as an Opportunity for SEO's Re-Maturation: AI search presents an opportunity for SEO to engage in more strategic, long-term conversations with clients, moving away from short-term expectations and focusing on foundational improvements while driving positive adoption internally by coaching and training their colleagues.
Long-Term View vs. Short-Termism: Brands are now willing to see AI as 2 2-year view on AI initiatives but expect immediate results from SEO. A consistent long-term perspective is crucial for sustainable SEO success and understanding how the two worlds come together will be vitally important.
The Compounding Effect of Small Changes: Significant SEO improvements on large sites rarely result from a single "silver bullet" but rather from the cumulative impact of many small, consistent changes over time.
Focus on "Money Pages" (Product/Conversion Pages): With AI potentially handling informational queries, SEO efforts should increasingly focus on optimising core transactional and product pages, which have often been neglected in favour of blog/editorial content - work through how you re-engineer slow processes and make editing available for the right teams
Customer-Centricity in SEO: A deep understanding of the customer journey and user intent is often missing in SEO discussions, which can be overly tool and data driven. This customer focus is key for effective optimisation and knowing where you cross collaborate will ensure you win over competitors.
Impact of AI on Luxury Brands: Luxury brands, often prioritising image-based content over transactional optimisation, may struggle for visibility in search results (e.g., ChatGPT, Google Shopping organic listings) if they don't adapt their strategies and integrate head terms and broader terms.
Amazon's Latent AI Potential: Amazon has been relatively quiet in the AI search "battle" but possesses significant AI capabilities. They will be developing a more advanced, specific voice search or AI-driven shopping experience - which others are going to influence away from Alexa which is in many homes especially kitchens.
Understanding User "States" in AI Search: Users interact with AI search in different states (educate, want, need, action). Content and optimisation strategies must align with these varying intents to be effective. People rarely if ever just to action state
Convergence of Search Features: The future of search will likely involve a single, blended interface amalgamating various Google features, making it harder for users to leave the ecosystem. Ads and product placements will likely be integrated into most searches.
Current Inaccuracies in AI Answers: Current AI search answers (e.g., from ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews) can be inaccurate. Trust and reliability are still developing - this is an opportunity if you become a home and hub for direct traffic.
AI as a Career Progression Opportunity for SEOs: SEO professionals can leverage the AI shift to expand their roles, take ownership of related areas (e.g., referral data, broader brand visibility), and lead cross-channel AI strategy conversations.
The Need for an AI "Captain" or "Champion": Organisations require a dedicated individual or team to advise, push, train, and unify efforts around the constantly evolving AI landscape - this would make a lot of sense to come from search teams
Applying SEO Learnings to LLMs: Decades of SEO best practices (e.g., establishing trust, authority, relevance) are applicable to optimising for Large Language Models and answer engines - they learnt from following Google guidelines and scraping content to rank and pull answers.
Foundational Site Health is Crucial for AI Crawlers: Before aggressive AI optimisation, ensure the website is navigable, efficient, high-intent, and free of technical debt. AI crawlers will prioritise sites that are easy and cost-effective to crawl.
Quick Win: Getting into "Best Lists": AI currently scrapes "best of" lists for many queries. A tactical win is to ensure brand presence in relevant, authoritative listicles, even if it requires proactive outreach or gifting.
Historical Relevance and Authority Matter for AI: AI relies on existing web data. Brands without historical relevance or established authority will struggle for visibility. PR and consistent online presence remain vital. AI thrives off data - understand how to feed your data in AI and learn how to be surfaced.
Empower Teams to Update Content Quickly: Bottlenecks in updating website content (e.g., long lead times for redirects or homepage edits) hinder agility. Low-risk, high-impact changes should be executable by relevant teams swiftly.
Overlooked Metric: Share of Search: This metric, which measures a brand's visibility for a defined set of important queries against competitors, is underutilised but crucial for strategic understanding.
The Pitfall of "Tinkering" vs. Strategic Testing: Constant, reactive changes to SEO strategy (tinkering) without a long-term plan erode trust and effectiveness. Patience and adherence to a long-term, compounding strategy are vital.
Untapped Potential of Branded Search Optimisation: Many established brands under-optimise for their own branded queries. This is often the highest converting and highest intent traffic and should be a priority across all platforms where the brand can be found.
The full podcast transcript
The Future Of SEO & The Impact Of AI With Carl Hendy
[00:00:00]
Danny Denhard: Hey everyone I'm gonna have a conversation with Carl. He is what I would consider the best of the best in SEO Carl. Welcome. And do you wanna give everyone like a 60 seconds overview of who you are and, and what you do?
Carl Hendy: Thanks Danny. And thanks for the opportunity. So I am founder of audits.com.
It's predominantly a SEO consultancy. And previous to that I was a co-owner of an agency, which was acquired back in 2021. I've been consulting for about 20 years. I mainly deal with large scale sites that have suffered from algorithmic issues over a period of time. The type of clients that I deal with are generally business owners.
I work for a lot of VCPE networks and kind of what most people would class as enterprise clients. Over the years I've worked with brands such as BlackRock Eventbrite, O2, Groupon, m and s, British Airways. So I've worked across quite [00:01:00] a lot of verticals and a lot of the most conver competitive search verticals.
I'm currently working with one of Australia's largest marketplaces, which is a, I guess an automotive auction site. I'm working with a couple of financial clients in the uk. One of them is one of the leading comparison sites and also one of the largest real estate platforms in the US and also taken on a couple of Shopify Plus clients as well over the last few weeks.
Pretty busy. Yeah, that's it.
Danny Denhard: And you, you are one of those people that loves being busy, so I'm sure there's a, sure, there's a couple, couple of spaces up coming for for some more work too. No problem. Should we, should we dive into the, the tricky questions?
Carl Hendy: Sure. Yeah. All good.
Danny Denhard: Perfect. So, what I think a lot of people don't understand is where we're really at with SEO.
Where'd you sort of land on this?
Carl Hendy: Okay. Search over the last few years. And I guess SEO can mean different things to different people, [00:02:00] and traditionally, SEO was Google traffic or Bing traffic, but pretty much just Google. So SEO meant Google traffic. SEO now has kind of.
Expanded or diversified in, into search. So if we include search as all things, wherever a search happens across the web, excluding, say, paid media or PPC what's happened is search has become diversified across different platforms, different surfaces, different devices. It's not the case that everyone would immediately, if they were researching a, a product or a business, they wouldn't necessarily do their search immediately in Google.
I suspect at some point in a journey Google will be used. But for example, if you're searching for a, a cafe, you might go and use Instagram or a restaurant. You might use Instagram. If you're searching for trainers, you would likely go to Google unless you are a chat GPT user. But even [00:03:00] within Google now, you would do a search, but you might not necessarily realize that you've been moved into another tab or surface of Google.
So you have Google shopping. So we've gone from, you know, eight, 10 blue links, lots of ads, lots of other UI within the Google search results, but we've kind of moved from that in that search has become fragmented and like everything else on the planet, AI has now been integrated into search. Kind of what's happened.
Iss EO, because the AI overviews are within Google, have been baked into search. Most people have immediately connected SEO. To AI search, whereas within AI search, that impacts all channels, right? So if I do a search that will impact direct, that'll impact paid search, traditional, organic. So it's not, it's not that [00:04:00] AI search has just become about SEO, it is all channels.
And a lot has been made about the impact of SEO on, sorry, AI, on SEO and to kind of cut that, that short is yes, AI will impact clicks, it will impact visibility, will impact traffic revenue, but that will happen for all channels. So I think whilst it will. Have an impact in SEO as a channel. I think it's important that businesses have that conversation about all channels, right?
And it is an opportunity now to bring the channels together to kind of find a way to how to deal and measure with the impact of AI in search across all platforms. Yet the, the results are changing daily. You know, I don't even think Google knows what they're doing right now. You know, every day someone will share something they've seen new in the search results.
You know, if we go back 20 years, SEO has always been changing. There's always been, like, I remember when we went from free [00:05:00] paid search results to four, I remember the introduction of also asked queries or people also asked we had a situation where we had our keyword understanding what keyword led to what que what conversion on a site.
We don't have that anymore. There's always been layout changes, there's always been impacts on SEO. And I think we'll just get to a point where. Google will finally have discovered how best to monetize and that's where we'll end up as soon as Google understands where the dollars are for both paid search and organic in ai.
That's kind of where we'll end up here.
Danny Denhard: it's really interesting hearing that and remembering there's been an evolution and it changes constantly. And if, you know, if you've been doing an in and around marketing or search for a long time, you always remember the, you know, the big Big Bang updates that people could probably tell you some more stories and some, you know, huge wins.
And I think one thing that is ever present in SEO specifically [00:06:00] is, is gonna change. Google's constantly working out what is important, what's unimportant, what's gonna make big, big dramatic changes, or what's gonna drive more ads. And what Google haven't worked at, in my opinion yet, is going from. An ad space company into an AI first based company, and we're seeing that play out all the time in search results, whether that's paid or organic, and we're, you know, we're gonna see similar across all the different platforms that people use.
So I definitely see that happening on social. We see it more and more, what used to happen on search is now happening on social as well. So I think there's this, it is evolving, but like you said, one thing that most really good SEOs are good at is understanding change. Dissecting it.
Carl Hendy: It is. It is like where if you watch, you know, I only started to get into YouTube a couple of years ago and I probably watch that more than TV now.
But having watched YouTube for a couple of years, there probably isn't a video that goes by where someone isn't moaning about the algorithm reducing [00:07:00] their visibility and their views and their revenue and how they now have to do brand sponsorship 'cause they don't get enough in AdSense and kind of we in SEO and paid search and kind of experienced that over the last 20 years and that's kind of filtering down into every product of Google.
So the challenge is gonna be is measurement. You've got all products, like you've got TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, you'll have chat, GPT in there, perplexity, they're all claiming, right, that they sent you that last click that converted and we don't know is the honest answer. So I think attribution and understanding where best to invest money into what channel.
That's gonna become harder and harder to be very accurate on.
Danny Denhard: Yeah. There's all, you know, the three M'S and all the different sort of frameworks and principles and mathematic equations that people are using. But I think we're gonna get to this other point where we're moving from something that's highly, highly, we used to be predictable [00:08:00] into something that's a little bit more experimental again, and actually understanding and being okay explaining to a CFO that it's multiple touch and it's, it's multiple screens.
And someone was definitely streaming something while shopping, while searching and then, and then subscribing to something else. And it probably took them way longer or way shorter than, than we ever used to imagine. So you're probably experiencing that a lot with, with a number of your clients, especially if they're a marketplace.
Carl Hendy: Yeah. The, the analytics, and given, if that's compounded by, you have Google Analytics, which nobody likes using anymore, understandably. Then you, for most SEOs, they bury their head in Google search console data. As soon as you apply a filter or segment the data at all, at any level in search console, the data that you get back is heavily anonymized and heavily aggregated.
So while search console can be a good [00:09:00] indicator of, I guess, trends within your traffic and kind of good ratios of what's in, what people are finding, what they're not finding, et cetera, it's not, you know, I'm having to explain that to CFOs, like, this is not the true number of how many people came into this page on this query.
This is just a snapshot. But you can't, it's very difficult to get that data. And if you look at like direct traffic, every client I look at, their direct traffic's going up month for month. Direct doesn't even exist anymore. Right. If you, if you type a web address into Chrome, it will do a search. So, 'cause most people won't complete it and so how often do you type in the full web address into a browser?
It doesn't, right? People don't do it yet Direct, everything is just getting lumped into that channel. So it is, it is just become very murky. We've gone from, I dunno how many years ago it was, say 10 years ago, we got promised like big data, like everyone up on stage, big data. You will know [00:10:00] exactly at what touchpoint converted and that's just all disappeared.
Danny Denhard: Yeah, I can only imagine that's gonna go up, you know, just being in the circles I'm in and talking to the people that I talk to, the, the reference point now. Where did the lead come from? It says chat CPT or that they, you know, screen got the perplexity you know, referrer. So I think we're gonna get into this world where there's gonna be so many different channels or so many different ways.
Voice is gonna be an interface. I know you and I used to joke around it a few years ago, but voice is definitely something that's coming back around. And if you speak to the smart people in ai, whether that's VC side or PE, they all think voice is, is gonna be a huge platform. So I think a lot of the things that people poo-pooed before might actually come back to fruition.
So it'd be interesting to see the future.
Carl Hendy: Yeah, I
Danny Denhard: agree. Should we, challenge ourselves to, is SEO dead?
Carl Hendy: Short answer is no. If you're a [00:11:00] good SEO, yes. If you are a bad SEO, if you are, if you are trying to do traditional SEO on large brands, large corporate sites. It's very unlikely that you'll make a dent in that performance if you are doing traditional SEO on a, a local site, which requires a bit of optimization because they're offering window designs in a London, oh, not London, say Essex.
You, you probably, it's probably still a chance that you could optimize using basic SEO and make a dent in their performance and, and drive them leads. Right. It has, in terms of how you rank, hasn't really changed. That hasn't changed for a long time. There is like, if you log into LinkedIn, you'll just see posts something along the lines of, we did this one thing and it 10 x star traffic, or still my idea, or this one thing is gonna change your SEO performance forever.
Like the reality is on a large site or [00:12:00] brand that's been around for a long time, that just isn't gonna work. Right. It is. On all sites, it is often a compounding effect of many small changes over a long period of time. Like it is very, very rare to ever find one issue that is the kind of silver bullet.
The only, the only thing I could think what would happen these days, and there's so many alerts and checkers in place to kind of prevent this, but would be if you robots st out your site or no indexed it and even then it would have to be no indexed or robots for such a long time for Google to remove it because they leave it in the SERPs anyway.
You know, optimization, if people are searching, you are always gonna be able to optimize for that search with whatever platform that is on. I mean SEO in its traditional format and the way that it is kind of envisaged by brands and companies, I think doesn't have much legs left in it. [00:13:00] I do feel like we are close to a.
And it will take a few years to happen, but we are getting to a point where the, the bad SEO will get weeded out very quickly. You know, it's like, especially if you are, if you are an an SEO that's working for legitimate brands and who don't have a high risk tolerance, who want a sustained growth over two, five years, then then, you know, that's kind of the, the SEOs that you see pop up on LinkedIn and they're often like, we are the first company to be able to manipulate AI overview results.
Or we've done the largest AI study on the internet and we know how to manipulate. As soon as you see the word manipulate for a start, you should be like, that's a red flag for me. And anything that has been manipulated, do you think, like it's taken Google almost 20 years to get to a point where they were able to kind of.
Borderline distinguish what was good content, bad content, what are the, what's the [00:14:00] brand, what isn't. And obviously AI will significantly accelerate that. So if someone's manipulating, that's gonna be wiped out very quickly. So yeah, it, it's not dead. It does need to mature again. We got, there was a stage when Panda started rolling out many years ago.
There was a, there was a period where SEO was starting to kind of mature and grow up and it started to be taken seriously within businesses 'cause Google was hitting sites pretty hard. But I feel like we've got to a point again where because of AI and lots of people kind of trying to sell something or offer you something, it's come, gone to that kind of like scammy manipulation, quick fix, hacky era again and.
I think we need to kind of come out of that and mature as mature as a channel. So yeah, it's, it's a way one and also like in AI overviews, if I had had a [00:15:00] client spend as much interest in AI overviews as they've done in the last couple of months as they would've done in their SEO the last five years, we probably wouldn't even need this conversation because everything that we would've done would be working in AI overviews and the brand would be there, it would be visible for all of the kind of list type stuff.
'cause at the moment the answers aren't particularly great. And just an another weird ob observation with kind of AI and SEO is that with AI overviews, brands and clients are kind of like taking the perspective of, okay, this might take 3, 2, 3, 5 years for the traffic to grow. Because at the moment it's literally like one 2% if that.
What is coming into the site. Probably not even that for most, but they're happy to take a 2, 3, 5 year view on ai, right, on this kind of big height. But in SEO then they won't even take a quarter, right? It's like, [00:16:00] if we implement something this month, what's gonna happen next month? And I'm like, that's not quite how it works.
So I, I actually see AI as another opportunity for, or AI search an opportunity for SEO to grow up again, to have those proper conversations, have those awkward conversations with clients, kind of take a longer term view, use it as an opportunity to kind of shoehorn in your backlog of two years of recommendations, right?
Get them in Now. I remember when voice search kicked off and page speed and core web vitals. It is amazing the amount of people, the amount of interest, again, in SEOs, every time something kind of is deemed negative towards the industry, becomes an op, it is an opportunity. That's the way I view it and I I'm trying to control those conversations and use them as an opportunity to make change.
Danny Denhard: Exactly. I I couldn't agree more. There's a couple of areas I think you, you really touched on that I think if you are A [00:17:00] CMO or A CGO or a CEO, what are really important is what a lot of businesses have had to do is, is become, have a short term window. And what that's really done and are overemphasized is results really quickly.
And I think where there has been a real lack of communication and that's led to a bit of mistrust in, in some disciplines is. But why should we have to wait that long? And what's really frustrating, I think from the insider's perspective, having been both sides of it, is you've probably had a ticket in for such a long time for product to be able and dev to be able to get onto it.
So there is this like disconnect. And I think what I believe what most companies should do, like you said, is now's the time to try and fuse a few of the worlds together, remove some of the silos and the specialisms, and try and connect people more holistically and understand actually there is the seismic change coming with ai.[00:18:00]
Whether it's in the way that we see it now, or definitely gonna evolve again, but how do we apply a lot of the previous learnings into all of our channels and how do we actually take a long-term view? So short, mid, and long-term view on the keywords on where the revenue comes from. And understand actually some of these phrases that we rank for now that used to drive traffic that could show an answer, then answer's gonna be shown because it isn't commercially viable for Google or for, for another search engine.
And then how do we start really reworking and remixing our content to play, to play the game? One thing we know with algorithms is they're gameable. And actually Google have made many, many billions from SEO who driving more, more paid keywords. So I think it's definitely, in my opinion, it's definitely not dead.
I think businesses, like you said, have to sort of understand it a little bit more. And it's on us to, to explain it and be comfortable and confident in explaining it to [00:19:00] A-CEO & CFO and investors and then say actually where some investment might be wiser, whether they go to paid or whether they go to social or they go to a very specific new use case that.
One thing that short termism does within most businesses is confuse people. So people rush for answers and there's no confidence in it. So actually what happens is the budget's chipped away. So I think that's something that people just have to understand and be very, have such a precise communication style that people understand it's gonna take time.
Carl Hendy: Yeah, it's just also like that point about losing traffic on answer based queries, which will happen or it is happening that really. Is another opportunity to kind of put the focus back on the, the money pages, on the, on the product pages. Right? Because what's happened in SEO and this is something that I have to clean up a lot of, is the blog or the editorial areas has become a dumping [00:20:00] ground or a catchall for search traffic.
Like, oh, our product pages are rubbish, therefore they don't drive any traffic. So let's go and shoehorn in a load of blog editorial to try and capture some traffic, which then at the very best we can try and send over to our money pages. So I, I'm kind of looking forward to almost cleaning up, you know, a lot of work.
What I do anyway is it's cleaning up websites and making them more efficient and lean. And that blog or editorial supporting editorial has been kind of. A bit of a, I'm, I'm glad the ax is coming down on it because then you can focus on the product pages, on the money pages and get the message across to your customers.
'cause that in SEO, that's something that's really just kind of missing a lot of is just customer. Like you never see anyone talk about customers. Like it's always head down in some tool that spits out loads of data because then you have to use it 'cause you've got the budget for [00:21:00] it. Like, it's really rare to ever go into very, really rare to go to a presentation or sit in a meeting or talk to other SEO teams and they're like genuinely know about the customer.
I, yeah, kind of controlling that customer's journey from an SE or search perspective is, is gonna be key both for branded and. You
Danny Denhard: know, the best people you tend to work with, truly understand the customer journey, understand where you are connecting into it, where you're disconnected from it, and then they go and if then they don't own it.
'cause you know, ownership is, is, is part of the battle in most business, is how do you go and collaborate with it. So you over own it, co-own it or collaborate on it. And if you don't work on those sort of levels and understand what part, what ownership or collaboration part you have, it's gonna be really difficult for, for someone in, in SEO to, to truly make positive impact on the customer.
And I do think there's a lot of [00:22:00] specialists that have, you know, let's call 'em search specialists that have forgotten actually that it's more than, it's more than traffic, it's more than, it's more than rankings, it's more than traffic. It's a lot of the time, it's conversions and, and making sure that the customer has and end to end journey.
Again, the CMO has to, or CGO has to take a lot of responsibility there because. Placed un unfair emphasis on, on SEO when it is the, you know, the, the, the sole, the soul channel that drives a lot of convertible traffic. You've something I really wanted to bring up with you, it's got some really interesting theories around Amazon and how luxury's gonna be impacted and let's call it an age of AI search.
Do you wanna, do you wanna explore them a little bit and, and help people understand where you, you think it's gonna change and where these big companies are gonna be impacted?
Carl Hendy: Yeah. On the, on the luxury front. So over the years, I've, I've worked with a lot of the luxury brands and a number of the kind of third party resellers and the [00:23:00] marketplaces as well that have popped up.
So I, and I do have a good understanding of like the internal politics on working with a high-end designer brand, you know, all of the kind of. Conversations that need to be had with merchandising teams, et cetera, how, how protective they are of their brands. But high-end, I'm gonna stick to maybe fashion here, but it does apply to even to travel and high, not so much watches, but like other high-end purchases or expensive purchases.
So traditionally luxury fashion sites have kind of always gone down the path of video or image-based content. And a lot of them for a long time didn't even have a, an e-commerce function. You know, a lot of 'em do now they have they've kind of bolted on various platforms and so they have like a, an e-commerce function, which can be recognized as a transactional function within the website.
But when you visit those [00:24:00] websites, even the products and the categories are still very much focused on, you know, video imagery and, and photographs and, you know, they look great. I'm sure. People that can afford that kind of stuff, that's what they're looking for. But when we, so from traditional search, those sites have never ranked that well.
And that's why you have these marketplaces, right? Because these marketplaces, which tend to be affiliate marketplaces, know that they can outrank the fashion, the official fashion sites that have an e-commerce function so that they can claim the affiliate click. Even in traditional search, it always has been fairly easy to outrank brands, high-end luxury brands.
It has got harder, right? You know, over the years Google has preferred to try and at least promote the official brand for branded queries, but it's not perfect. Now, if you look at moving into kind of let's we look at chat, BT here, so. Just today I went into chat, [00:25:00] GBT, and I put, I want to buy a luxury handbag.
And it returned me five non-luxury brands, brands I'd literally never heard of. I'm sure they're famous here because I got the Australia results, right? So chat, GBT gave me Australia results back, and I now got six lesser known stores. But at the bottom it said, and then it listed out five examples of luxury fashion items that you might wanna buy.
One was a Gucci bag, there was a Birken bag, and basically five, so five other high-end products. What it didn't list was any of the stores prior to that. So in Australia, we have all those stores here. They exist on the streets, right? There's, it is not like there's one store here. There's lots of Gucci stores, lots of Burberry, et cetera, across Australia.
But it was really interesting that it didn't provide any of the high-end retailers who sell their products directly. So then I went and did something similar for [00:26:00] luxury shoes and women's shoes, and I did a few other variations, very similar results. We had like marketplaces, like Howard's pop up, but again, no direct listings for brands.
Now, the cynical side of me could be like, this could be a long-term move, right? To force brands to pay to appear for these queries. But when you go back, then go back to Google search results. If I go into the Google Shopping tab, for example, and type in luxury handbags across the top. Where the paid ads are.
You will see the high-end luxury brands. They are bidding, they are paying to be there, but as soon as you go down to the organic listings, they're not there. Right. And it's, again, it's because they're not optimized. They're either not optimizing their feeds, they're not optimizing their site, they're not optimizing their knowledge graph across the web.
So they essentially what's happening is these really high-end luxury brands [00:27:00] aren't being seen as a transactional place that they can, people can go and shop. So that was just like snapshots, but it's always been the case in search and it was just interesting. The more I've looked into it in AI search, the more evidence, you know, is building around these really high ticket items.
It's the same for travel as well, but so you've kind of got that with luxury and they'll have to find a way to kind of. Integrate themselves into AI search or find a ways for them to become more referenced across the, the web. It, it's like they're known for, they're known for producing, but they're not known for selling or transactional.
So kind of, that was just an interesting thing and it, I was, I was curious to see if what was happening in Google and organic for the last 20 years had kind of moved into AI and then just on like Amazon, you know, they've been really quiet, right? I know they've got this kind of the import [00:28:00] duties and taxes and stuff like that to deal with at the moment.
But you've got, all of, you know, Amazon have got their own technology business. They've, they've got their own machine learning, their own ai. They've kind of just been really quiet on this front. And you've got like perplexity chat, GBT Google, even Bing, they've kind of been in this kind of AI battle.
Amazon as a platform UI and UX wise, whilst on the face of it, it doesn't look like much has changed the last 10 years. It's probably been thousands upon thousands of changes every year, but not very noticeable. They do use AI to summarize their reviews, and I believe they use AI to kind of help with some of the product and descriptions, but on a whole, like they haven't really built a product around AI yet, and I just wonder if they're sitting in the background quietly building something.
Very impressive. And I wonder if we'll get [00:29:00] to a stage where, well, I'm hoping we get to a stage where I can go onto Amazon and voice search, not type voice search, be like I'm looking for a mid-century corner desk at this high that is made in Australia and shipped from Australia. I. Pull up all those listings, right?
Like it can really go and like, I'm looking for a dark oak or something like that with two drawers. It can be really specific. I just wonder, I, I feel like that that's where something that Google probably wouldn't do, it wouldn't go to those lamps in their shopping, but Amazon should, because at the moment Google is doing its best to kind of really eat into that shopping search function.
Danny Denhard: There's, there's so many really interesting things I wanna unpack. Like, and so when you were given the chat GPT example, I think I refer to it as like different states that people are in. So it's like educate [00:30:00] state, which is, I need to educate myself about something. I wanna learn about something. And you, your search queries and where you search are all different.
And obviously with social you can discover it and it'll feed you it if you show any intent on it. Then there's like one state you want something, but you're nowhere near making that decision to go and purchase. But you're gonna go and find all the other different available options. And I think that's where chat GBT, Claude, and, and any other sort of, and prop complexity are gonna really have to like work hard is surface those really good alternatives or really good products to enable you to do that.
And then there's like need state, you really need to take, like, you really need something. Like it's, you're, you're going closer and closer to, to acquisition or buying a product, but then you, you have to work out the price in like whether it's gonna cost you more money once, you know, once you buy it. Like, is there value in the product?
And I think with luxury specifically, there's, [00:31:00] you know, I remember working with a really well known marketplace and it took 12 different visits and interactions for them to buy something. And that just shows that, the person who's buying on that is, is probably wealthy. They know all the fees, but they're doing so much more research, you know, and then that department is action state.
I'm as close to possible as buying something and I'm gonna go and take that action, but I need something to nudge me over the edge. Yeah. So is that a brand, is it a social signal? Is it a social status? What is it that nudges me across there. And I think with Google they've been very good at understanding people, taking multiple steps.
I think where AI is probably gonna be uniquely placed is over understanding that or being able to drive people into the right areas and influence them enough to hit that buy now button. And when you said around Amazon, I think they're definitely in this spot now with AI where they know so much and they understand what's what's going on.
[00:32:00] But what they're, what they're them. Apple, Google kind of unique place in is, they're so big, they get huge amounts of direct traffic. And, you know, it's defaults utility, so people use them over and over again, so they're actually competing against time. So what a lot of companies don't realize is they rush towards something, whereas these big incumbents can be slow and, and slower and more methodical in doing it.
And they realize if they change the experience too much. You know, from Amazon landing page perspective, they've got so much information. All the comparison sections on there that actually when it goes from being keywords and brand search to like really explicit search terms and to a point prompts, they have to be so manly focused on their best results and only serving you great results as opposed to sponsored similar and then the product that you want.
So I think that might be, I think that's something we're gonna see. But if, if you are, you know, [00:33:00] you a company leader or a marketing exec and you don't understand those different touch points. All you're gonna do is in chat, in any sort of chat interface, an AI interface is, you're probably just gonna copy and paste what you were doing.
And that's, no, that's not gonna work. There'll be parts of it at will, but I think it's really interesting for people to understand that it's definitely evolving and the way that the answers have been pulled are different. And there is always gonna be an ad opportunity or an ad unit that's gonna be added, but you really have to understand how it works, understand the prompts that people are searching for and what they're gonna wanna find.
So I think it's gonna be a really interesting future. And I think maybe that's what gives us the, the opportunity maybe to talk around. What do you think, do you think LLMs like, you know, let's call it chat search and SEO should go together? Or do you think they're two very different disciplines and shouldn't, shouldn't sort of meet in the middle?
Carl Hendy: Yeah, I just feel like [00:34:00] they're going to merge as one. I think the endpoint will be us. I'll just stick to Google here. But the endpoint will be all those tabs that we have across the top of Google. I think they'll all just go, I think we'll just have one screen where a search is done. It'll be an amalgamation of all different features within Google search, you know, aligned with kind of some of those states that you just talked about and that you are gonna find it even harder to leave the ecosystem.
I saw, I think it was Lily tweeted today about, sorry Lily. She is a US SEO, and she tweeted today about how Google was scraping affiliate content, taking the products off of someone else's affiliate content, and then funneling that back into Google shopping. I think that was kind of what was happening. So like Google's mining someone else's content they've created.
In fairness, they probably. In most cases copied it from someone else, but not, not all review sites or, or affiliates [00:35:00] do that. And yeah, so it'll be harder and harder to leave the ecosystem. So we will have this kind of blended approach where Google will provide a, and they've tried to do this over the year in the search results, but it, it's been a bit clumsy.
And you know, like for example, in the people also asked, you know, you click on one of those, it expands and you click on another one, it expands again. It's like you can't get out of the Google ecosystem until you hopefully for them go through an adver advert. And you mentioned it ago, second ago, every search will be ad driven.
So even if, I suspect also every search will have a product placed in it at some point. So even if Google doesn't have a direct product. They'll find similar products or similar brands or, or something like that. So yeah, it will be a amalgamated approach, I think for the better. Like I, I don't like the answers in that I don't trust them.
I don't trust chat. [00:36:00] GBTI don't trust Google answers or the ai. And so many of them are inaccurate even on like symbol stuff. Like I did one today, I was trying to find out if a a building was used in a particular TV series, the location of it. And he said, yes, it is. And I was like, I'm not so sure. I'm sure it's not.
And then, and then I did the same thing again. Same question. Oh no, it's not used. I'm like, you literally just told me it was used and now you're telling me. It's not like you can't be trusted. But I do believe that we will get there and it will, if we're taking Google's 20 years of search data, they've got the link graph, they've got all the browser behavior data, they've got web analytics data, like they've got device data, all of that.
Will be in the one search, right? It's not there at the moment. It's clear, like AI overview answers are very different to traditional search results. I, I've heard rumors that the teams aren't quite aligned at Google. They are just [00:37:00] rumors. But there are stuff that's happening in AI overviews that the traditional search team have no, no answer for no indication of what's happening.
So yeah, they're here to stay. Not in the format they're in. They will get better. I do also believe that in the long term, there will be a better balance between them sending traffic and where they are currently. I, I feel like there'll be too much pressure, legal pressure across different economies to kind of force 'em into sending more traffic.
I don't particularly believe that users love it. That is the word that's coming out of Google at the moment. They never share any data. They never prove that they never prove any of the statements they make, but. Yeah, so it's, I think, yeah, it will be blended. But again, I was on a panel the other, a few weeks ago, an SEO panel, and it was so, whilst all the experts, everyone was great.
The conversation was so doom and gloom. It was [00:38:00] so negative. And this is another opportunity, right? If you are taking this back to SEO, if you are an SEO in an agency, or you are an in-house SEO that wants to take that next step up, this is the best opportunity you are gonna get, right? You can lead the conversation, you can take ownership of other channels like referral data.
Really, nobody, in most businesses, nobody takes ownership of referral, right? It is usually. PR teams for clicks off links, or if you're running affiliate channels it becomes important. But in most cases, SEOs wouldn't have any involvement. You can now take that referral traffic. You can also start to take some ownership of brand visibility across the web.
So we now, rather than being like, I'm stuck in SEO in Google, you now have an opportunity to go way beyond that and get involved in something that's only gonna get bigger and bigger and more people are gonna want to invest in it. It also [00:39:00] takes us, if you're an agency or an in-house SEO, it gives you the opportunity to where you've losing traffic clicks in organic, you can say, look.
We're, we're passing in some of it, or reclaiming some of those clicks in referral data. It's just a, it's a really big opportunity to get so much done. It's an opportunity for career progression to control the narrative, to take ownership, to get teams to come together. Again, like, you know, as I said at the start, this impact of AI search is predominantly being pushed into SEO, but the reality is it's all channels.
Like you can lead that conversation. You can get, if you are an agency and you've, you are with a client that's got multiple agencies, everyone in there is thinking, how are we gonna get more money outta the client? How can we embed ourselves into this client longer term ai, you, you could, if no one in, if none of the competitor agencies or you know, other channel agencies are [00:40:00] talking about it, now's your chance to own it.
Lead it.
Danny Denhard: Exactly. Couldn't agree more. The things I'm saying when I'm coaching or, consulting at a moment or being pulled in to sort of advisory roles is there isn't a better team who should truly understand and be able to evolve into, into blending the worlds together. I would say this is where many smart search operators and professionals should look towards moving into like the growth world and actually truly understand and look into growth and understanding how they can influence the, the broader remit.
And as you exactly said, this isn't an opportunity for you to. Be at the forefront of changing how things are perceived, how they're understood, and, and how they move forward. One, one thing that I'm recommending at the moment is you really need the captain or a champion who's gonna advise, push and train people and bring people together around AI, because it, it's constantly changing and evolving.[00:41:00]
But what the LLMs and answer engines are doing is, is creating a new habit. And what that means is it's gonna be a slow shift, but as we know through chasing the chasm, early adopters are already using it. People are trying it out. They're having that moment. So now's the time to sort of understand it, test out, and it, and, and as you said.
If you're a brand and you're a good brand, you know, people are gonna search for brand and then, and then a question or a phrase or a prompt. So for me, it's a case of what you should be doing is pushing people together, working it, working out, and then saying to, to the search team, what can we apply that we've learned from 20 odd years from Google?
How can we, how can we apply that into all the different LLMs to make sure that we're there, you know, we're a trusted entity and people are gonna wanna use us and actively look for us, versus leaving it to the AI and algorithms to work out what's in and what's out, who's in, who's out, what's, what's [00:42:00] hot and what's not.
And I think that's something that we definitely should, should be controlling a little bit more. Do you, do you have like a do you have like an idea or a recommendation that you're making for marketing teams in the. In this AI race, do you, do you, when you talk to your customers, do you, do they ask you questions or is there something that you're saying, oh, hey, this is what, this is direction of travel.
I think you should go in, here's where you've got your, all of your data and your learnings, but here's what I would recommend to you, Mr. Or Mrs. Marketing leader.
Carl Hendy: Yeah. So unfortunately a lot of the brands that I work with put it politely, their sites often have been battered by Google, in particular, Google Core updates over, you know, five plus years, at least for many.
So I'm often in a position where we've got so much else going on and it goes way beyond what people would consider traditional SEO. It very much goes into product and [00:43:00] ux. I have advised and set up for all clients, like we are measuring the impact. We're looking at the data, you know, even again coming back to LinkedIn that places.
So noisy in that there's lots of platforms claiming to measure accurately the AI overview results, but the reality is they're all very different, lots of different, you know, multiple times a day. So it is hard to measure consistency, although some are trying, at least at this stage, I'm kind of like, we need to just get foundational levels correct because we could try and optimize now at best and spend a load of money on various activities, which I'll come onto.
But the reality is your site isn't efficient. Your site is expensive to crawl, your site is bloated, it's full of content that shouldn't be there. Your product pages don't match the intent of the user or customer behavior. Like there's so much else going on that as the AI crawlers [00:44:00] become more advanced.
They're gonna have their own algorithms where they're like, we can't crawl this site. It's too expensive for us. There is always a monetary value behind every crawl. And if you are producing lots of dead weight for the crawlers, or the crawlers end up in bot traps or stuff like that, you, you've gotta address those problem first.
You've gotta be very lean, very high intent, very precise for AI overviews and AI crawlers. There are, there are like quick wins. I, I hate that every client loves a quick win. You know, there's obvious stuff that again, right, this isn't new, this is stuff you should have been doing 10, 15 years ago. But one of the easiest ways at the moment is just to get into lists.
So it's the best list, like, I won't reveal who it is 'cause it'll be easy to work out who it's, but I used to work for a big e-commerce brand that delivered something in the Post during different parts of the year. And they were [00:45:00] never in any of the best lists. They had the most, they had the highest rated product by lots of verified independent experts.
They had the best, the most sustainable product you can buy are proven by many multiple third party. They had the highest reviews in Trustpilot for their products, which many other people sell variations of that product. But they never, ever appeared in the lists, right? So like if someone was doing a roundup on the mirror or doing a roundup on any of the, the home, home and garden type sites of this category, they were never there.
And the reason they were never there is. Traditionally it was a B2B business and they never really focused on B2C, so they didn't rank. So when journalists are doing their lists, they never appeared in the page one for a while. Therefore they never got into the, the list. 'cause editors, journalists were only looking at page one results.
So what we did was we worked out, we could have done [00:46:00] a link building activity, which if you look at the cost of an average cost of a link at the moment is extortionate. You're looking at anywhere between, to get in the newspapers a thousand pounds upwards easily for a link. And that's before you've had to pay for content campaign work.
There are ways around that. But so what we did was we just sent the, the item out. We collated all of the journalist editors. The cost per lead for us, or, or let's say cost per link was about 20 pounds. So we sent many, many of these items out. I think 90, I think we can in 97% or something like that, of the journalists we contacted and sent the, the gift to features us in the list.
Even if the article was old, they went and added us back in. Now, coming back to ai, those are the kind of lists that AI is scraping at the moment, and they're really crap. Like they're affiliate lists, they're, the [00:47:00] lists are driven on these third party websites. They're driven by affiliate commission, right?
If you don't have an affiliate program, they can't make money from it. Therefore, you don't really ever get included. But the easiest way is to get in those lists. So just look at where if you are searching for best trail shoes, waterproof trail shoes, and variations of that query, eventually you'll identify the articles where those reference websites are being pulled from.
You just need to get yourself in that list, right? You know, you can pay, you can gift. You can. Speak to the, the, the list owner. There's always a way, right? And, and everyone has their price. I'm a big believer, I've always said it, that you can get a link on absolutely any website. There is always a way, you know, and I've kind of proven that in the past.
But yeah, so I think that, that, my main tip at the moment would be to get your brand into those lists. 'cause that's the, the kind of easiest way to do it. But that doesn't mean [00:48:00] that in a few weeks time, that might all change. Like, that's why at this stage, I think I'm very much in a kind of monitor, let it tick over, let the, let the hype settle.
Let's focus on actually fixing your site that's been battered for the last five to 10 years. Then we can have an opportunity to be a bit more aggressive with content plays and offsite stuff.
Danny Denhard: Yeah. There's is that a couple of areas where I think. People should, you know, especially, you know, small and mid companies should really understand is you can only be as good as the, the historical view that the web, you know, that the, the web has been.
So what most companies are forgetting is if you don't have historical, historical relevance, you don't have sort of any sort of authority. AI just don't have a record of you. It can't understand your relevancy, doesn't understand how good you are. Obviously it can look at some of the reviews, but [00:49:00] contextually has to understand you.
If you are in a maturing business or a hyper growth business, one thing that you, you have to do is, is manage your pr. And I don't think that'd be much different. You'll be managing it for, for AI bot different types of scrapers, crawlers. So I think that's definitely like a really, I. Sort recommendation for people to, to understand your list idea is, is something that I think some of the me media people are, are looking into at the moment.
So I definitely think there are ways that you should definitely leverage it and find the ones that are are evergreen. The ones that are really high quality curated from someone that's written quite a lot on the web that people can understand. Do you remember when there's a lot of stuff made around authors and offer markup, but that is gonna be something that will probably filter back to the top is if something has, does someone have high relevance?
Do they have high authority? Should we give them more status and should we service them as a public figure [00:50:00] or an expert or, or thought leader within the AI answers? So I think all these things that have happened before will happen again 'cause they always do it circular. So.
Carl Hendy: That, that that's so like in Google we've gone full circle so many times, but like everything that I've seen, everything that I've seen on LinkedIn, the endless po, I could literally log into LinkedIn right now and I reckon within free post I will see someone saying, you need to become a brand to be in AI overviews.
And yeah, you need to become a brand, to have a, have a business, right? Like it, it's so obvious. And link building citations, getting people talking about you across the web. It has to happen. You know, it's always had to happen. So at the moment I've yet to see anything that isn't already being should be done in search.
There are some really smart people that understand [00:51:00] AI crawling and entity extraction way beyond anything that I understand and they are. Building some really great tools and doing some really smart stuff. But most brands just aren't anywhere close to being able to even try and adopt that kind of technology or that thinking is so far beyond them.
You know, you've, you've got brands that are still, you know, eight, 10 weeks to get a redirect put in or to update, you know, you've got some marketing teams that still can't edit content on the homepage. It's just, yeah, it would be nice to live in a, a world where we could constantly move with the shiny objects, but it's far from reality
Danny Denhard: One, having led product teams and, and functions.
One thing I would emphasize to almost everyone, whether you are marketing more specific SSEO or more from the business or operations function, one thing I would say to anyone is the quicker you can get, [00:52:00] trusted people to edit content or upload different media formats onto your website, the better it is.
And anything that is low risk, low impact, and you can control it, give it in the hands of the people who can make it happen fastest, because otherwise all you're gonna do is you're gonna backlog and you'll be effort versus reward or some sort of equivalent metric. Yeah. Always. And it'll never happen. So having, having lived both sides and hearing and seeing the pain through my, through my marketing teams and departments before, if there's one thing you can do to out your competitors in a quality over quantity effort, which is gonna be really important, 100%.
I try and open up as much as you can and make the most important changes as quickly as you can. And if they seem tedious and trivial, like give it, give them access and, and enable them to upload it because you are. You are actively hurting your and hindering your business, [00:53:00] whereas you're letting them loose on social networks where they could say and type and post anything they want.
So that's true. Yeah. There's two, there's two, two sides to that. One. Should we should we go through some quick fire rounds to, to wrap up? Do you think there's one metric that people overlook the importance of
Carl Hendy: in SEO? Yeah, definitely. It's, it's share of search. It's something that I've been doing for 20 odd years.
It was something that introduced to me at my, my very first London based agency. But what you're doing there is you are taking, you are a marketplace that are selling Ford cars. You would take the top five, 10,000 queries around Ford cars and create basically like a, a a league table of visibility queries.
Only recently have the platforms. The SEO platforms kind of introduced it. Now. It wasn't, it was only a couple years ago that they started to add it in, but. They don't really promote it. I don't really see from all the documents that I see and internal team presentations, I don't see it promoted and doesn't get used.
And the few times I have seen [00:54:00] it's used, it hasn't been set up like they put like 30, 30 queries in it or something like that. It's just not enough. So yeah, I share quite a lot of that on LinkedIn. Those kind of share of search. 'cause I've built my own, my own solution for that for clients. 'cause I, I just didn't really like the way that the, the third party tools were doing it.
Danny Denhard: Completely agree. What's the tactic that's most overlooked?
Carl Hendy: Probably not a tactic as such, but patience in SEO. Again, I, this is gonna be all SEO related, but the, my biggest, biggest pet hate in SEO is people tinkering with websites. And it happens more so in agency than I would say in-house. In that as an agency you have to send a client something every month and if something didn't work the following month.
And then you're like, oh, we just need to change it again a little bit this month. It's tinkering. And you can't, you can't tinker if you, if you are tinkering month to month and constantly moving stuff [00:55:00] around and saying, oh, now we should do this, or now we should do that. The reality is you don't trust your long-term plan or your long-term strategy.
You don't have trust that your implementation of recommendations is gonna have a long-term positive compounding effect. So if you don't trust it, how is your employer or how is your client gonna trust you? Like I see that all the time. It, it kind of has to stop because if you are, you are constantly moving the needle for Google and they can't catch up.
And yeah, see it needs to be measured long term compounding, small changes, compounding small changes. So yeah, patients would be the one.
Danny Denhard: There's a big difference between tinkering and testing. Yes. And unfortunately, people confuse the two quite often. Yeah. Is there, do you believe SEOs or search professionals in general can help brands optimize across all the different platforms?
So, you know, one thing that there's some data around people actually using Instagram, TikTok, et [00:56:00] cetera, as search engines. Do you think there's, do you think there's something that search professionals should, should be across in helping, helping their colleagues on
Carl Hendy: Yeah. Well, that, that, that headline of TikTok gonna kill Google or whatever it was, or Amazon, that that headline quickly disappeared.
But I do believe that anywhere where a search happens that it's algorithmically driven. It can be optimized one way. It may not be the same way that the you optimize for traditional Google search, but it will be able to optimize. And I again, feel that this is another opportunity for SEOs and teams to step up and say, look, we want to go beyond Google search.
We want to control your whole non-branded and branded search visibility across the web. It's like if I go on the Tesco's website coming back to my UK roots, if I come on the Tesco's website and search for Hank cre, I want to make sure that my client's brand is ranking in that [00:57:00] search right now. There may be things in play like merchandising agreements and product placements and that, but still that's just one platform.
Like if you have a product that's sold globally across a hundred different websites, you have an opportunity in all those places to optimize as to some level and not only just optimize on their platform, but if you. Optimize the third party platform to appear higher in search, right? You can kind of pick, you can do stuff to optimize and get them higher placed up in the search.
So there's so many opportunities within search. Don't just bury your head in Google search.
Danny Denhard: Yeah. There's something that our mutual friend Beth Gladstone's been saying for a while and completely agree with how the, it's like search has evolved for a long time and we're never gonna get to a point where there's a revolution.
Although people always think there is. And I think this is why there's a lot of the smart people within the marketing world or [00:58:00] growth world have really embraced what each different discipline can bring to the others. And although it's difficult 'cause of OKRs and goal setting and, and those types of activity, the smartest and.
Performing companies have the greatest cross-functional and cross team at work, you know, efficiencies and they understand what they've lived through and they can, they can help them through something. And I'm a huge advocate of bringing everyone together, regardless of how big or smaller team is. And talking through your, you know, your, your two wins a week and one challenge.
'cause I guarantee you, one of the challenges that someone might be facing in PR or social or even SEO, someone else would've seen something similar before or even in their discipline and say, Hey, this has actually worked, or we could work on this together. And yeah, there might be a code freeze for, for a month, but we can do, we use all these different tactics together to come together.
So, yeah, on the search front. [00:59:00] Is there a question that I should have asked you that I haven't and why?
Carl Hendy: The one area that we probably, I would've, I could have talked about for a long time is branded versus non-branded search and how that's underoptimized because again, SEO gets pretty much bucketed into the non-branded search queries, whereas most brands, especially established brands, don't optimize for branded queries.
And it is the easiest search traffic you'll ever drive. It's the highest converting. It's the highest intent. You shouldn't be leaching allowing other brands to leach off your traffic. Any branded query, it should be coming to your website. It should not be going anywhere else. You can't stop the ads, obviously, but in terms of organic placement or even across the web, you know, coming back to the last question, it could be.
Across the whole web, like in terms of owning your branded search, if someone searches your branding TikTok, you don't want some crazy social person spouting off about [01:00:00] how they went into your store and something bad happened or someone said something nasty to them. And because it's not even about your brand, but it's now about your brand.
So yeah, I think the branded versus non-branded is a hugely untapped source of traffic and revenue. More importantly, revenue. Yeah,
Danny Denhard: I say to a lot of people, especially from like a search performance background, the time that you know you are a brand or you are making it is where people search for your brand and then a brand name or the brand, and then the brand type or the, the product types, and this is what I think so many people are missing, is people will search for what they interpret you as, or they will search for you if they know you are the brand and trust you, and they want to see if you offer something they haven't found it or seen it through other advertising or.
Organic methods. I a hundred percent agree. And if you really wanna stress test it, have a look through the, the sell through, and you'll see that branded search is of most often the ones that convert highest and probably the ones [01:01:00] that will reoccur if you're not a one and done company. So, yeah, a hundred percent agree.
Thank you so much for, for your time. I think you are, you've given thousands of thousands of pounds of dollars worth of advice. Where's the best place or where would you want people to, to contact you on or follow you or engage with you?
Carl Hendy: Cool. So you more than welcome to email me at audits.com or LinkedIn.
Pretty much spend most of my time on, well, any social time on there now.
Danny Denhard: We'll have it all in the show notes and in the support and newsletters. So thanks again.
Carl Hendy: No thank you. Cheers, Danny.
