Despite the buzz around AI search engines, Google isn’t going away anytime soon. Joe Alder, Head of SEO at Rocket Agency, joins Host James Lawrence to discuss how SEO is likely to change over the next few years, why Google remains relevant today and how in-house marketers can stay ahead of the curve.
Joe Alder is the Head of SEO at Rocket, where he leads all SEO services and projects. He has over 8 years of experience in implementing complex SEO campaigns and driving tangible results for B2C, B2B and government organisations. Over the course of his career, he has worked for notable brands such as Amazon, Qudos, P&O Cruises, PE Nation, Fujitsu, and Coates, among others. You can follow Joe on LinkedIn.
James Lawrence: Welcome back to the Smarter Marketer podcast. I'm here today with Joe Alder. Joe, welcome to the pod.
Joe Alder: Thanks. Good to be here.
James Lawrence: It's good to have you here, mate. So Joe is currently head of SEO at rocket, which means that he essentially owns the SEO product in the agency.
So that means our approach to SEO our philosophy on it. He manages our team and he also manages SEO strategy on certain key rocket accounts throughout his career. Joe has worked on SEO for brands like Amazon, Kudos, P& O, Cruises, PE Nation, Fujitsu, Coates, and many, many more, both big and small.
So I thought, um, a really good opportunity to catch up with Joe and just talk SEO as he's seeing it, as we're seeing it. What is working? What's not working? And we thought a really a good place to start would be just a discussion on why SEO. I think a lot of listeners to the pod will have varying, I guess, varying degrees of importance that they place on SEO for their businesses.
So Joe, We're chatting prior to recording, but just , the why of SEO as we get to, , the end of 24, beginning of 25, in terms of, , being a traffic lever. , what are you seeing out there in terms of how the, the, um, the industry and the market's changing?
Joe Alder: Yeah, so I actually think SEO is growing if anything.
Um, I think one of the big ways you can see that is in recruitment like if you look in australia alone at the moment There's 2 000 jobs that have seo as part of the description I think yeah recruiting seo is one of the always been a biggest challenge but it's getting increasingly harder. I think if you look at the data as well, although some of Google's traffic share has declined slightly because of AI search engines like chat, GPT, et cetera, the actual overall searches are only increasing and more and more people that are coming to search engines to look for those terms, I think on the kind of data and trust side as well, , Google or SEO has a highest trust factor.
So if you look at conversion rates between channels, such as PPC, SEO in general has about two times of the conversion rate. So double, but then in some more competitive niches such as finance or in SEO, what we would call your money, your life, it can be as high as seven times a conversion rate. So I think, yeah, people are trusting SEO a lot more than they would trust some other channels and it is a big driver for these competitive businesses.
James Lawrence: Yeah, it's totally true.
I think because I probably speak to more prospective clients, I think, and just being out and about in the industry and they're not everyone. And I think often non marketers, there is this kind of eyes SEO is important as it once was and the data that we see. Says that it is like I was preparing for the pod.
Um, it's kind of a few big data points. There's a bright edge study, which is English speaking world. So I think it's heavily like America, Australia, Canada, UK, Ireland and on average, 53 percent of traffic driven to sites each day comes from organic search. , and I think direct is like 20. So it gets up to like three quarters of traffic is coming from organic.
Or direct, and then you look at Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, industry websites, et cetera, still kind of just falling into that little 25 percent gap and then. There's a really interesting spot tourist study from January this year, which I'm looking at now, and this is heavily North American skewed, but it looked at the 150 biggest referring sites online and Google 63 percent being, which has a slightly higher market share in the States was 7 percent to 70 percent of traffic.
Was being driven by those two channels and then you look at YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, all the, all the next 150 biggest are still only making up about 25%. So if you want traffic to your website, in Australia, Google has about, 95 percent of market share that Google in Australia is the way to get traffic to your sites.
And I think there's so much, um, noise is the wrong word. Word, because, Facebook, LinkedIn still have huge roles to play in a buyer journey, but if you actually want traffic to your site, kind of Google, and as an extension of that SEO is the way to do it, right?
Joe Alder: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I also think it really benefits some of the other services.
So if you are doing organic social, or if you are doing PayPal. Per click then seo is a really good thing to do on top of that to benefit those areas and that's seo Being the kind of foundation and you build on it with the other services So an example of that is if you're ranking very well on seo It means you can spend less bidding on those terms But you still have the benefit of ppc where you can get those quick wins and see immediate traffic growth by investing immediately Where seo does have a bit of a longer time to market to see those conversions
James Lawrence: Yeah, for sure.
, I think it'd be good to talk, , the impact of the generative AI platforms and search because it's, we hear conflicting things. I think 12 months ago, if we were doing this pod. Listening to what certain people on LinkedIn was saying, it'd be very much that chat. JBT will kill Google. We will turn to Ai bots to get the answers to things that we once turned to.
I can see Joe smiling here. We've got more data now, which I think is interesting to make better decisions on that. Look, I guess what if what have you seen out there more macro? I think it'd be good to talk about the, um, the data study, which came out. I've got in front of me now that came out recently.
Joe Alder: Yeah, yeah, I think first off. Yeah, I still have a job. So I haven't taken that away yet. Um, I think a lot of what is happening in the kind of AI space is very similar to how you would optimize the SEO anyway. I think at the moment it's also a very slow process. small percent of traffic. So it obviously launched in the U.
S. Um, what's called S. G. E. And now it's renamed to A. I. Overviews. At the moment, it's only appearing for around 12 percent of searches and the searches that bring in an A. I. Overview, um, around five words. So it's really more the longer tail question terms and less of the commercial intent. So, for example, What is the difference between SEO and PPC?
You would get an answer for that, but if you were searching for SEO services in Sydney, you're still seeing the standard SEO results that you would usually.
James Lawrence: Yeah, that's it. I think like the first part is traffic to google. com google. com today. You has increased over the past 12 months, not decreased.
, there has been. And a big increase in traffic to places like Chachapiti and Perplexity. The comparison is just wild, like Google is just still the absolute behemoth. , and then it was quite interesting, the study, and it's worth looking up if this is something you're interested in your business, but essentially, I think perplexity was the second biggest chatbot in terms of AI type queries in, in the study that they looked at, and Google had more than 290 times the number of search users perplexity in the month of May 2024, , and compared to Google's 200 events searches per search per month.
So it's kind of perplexity is looking at 15. So even like the number of people, the number of searches in those AI platforms is so diminished and so small compared to the number of searches that people are still doing in Google.
Joe Alder: , yeah, definitely. And I feel like if anything, just more and more people are going to search engines.
Once this information becomes more accessible questions, you wouldn't usually look into a search engine for people are doing it and more on the fly, which is increasing those searches. I think going back to the SEO kind of part of the AI overviews are really interesting stuff. Study was released recently, and the correlation between what appears in AI overviews and what appears in the top 10 positions of Google has about 99 percent correlation.
I think about what that means to your business, right? Is if you're ranking well on Google anyway, you're going to appear in those AI overviews much more frequently.
James Lawrence: And that's what we've seen. Like I was playing around with a client. , clients returns who ranked really well in a particular, , vertical and I was doing searches in chat to BT and Gemini, very similar to commercial and that will kind of dominant there and same thing as rocket.
I was preparing a webinar and I was playing around with what's the best digital agency in Sydney. That's one of war, blah, blah, blah. And as we're ranking. It will coming up 1st or 2nd or 3rd and they're very similar mix of agencies to the ones that would normally rank organically. We're coming up in the chat bot.
So yeah, my feeling on that is, is that if you're trying to bet on the fact that Google's going to lose its position as the Behemoth of the industry, you're probably going to be wrong, but even if you're right, we're years away from that taking place and that present Google is the place that moves traffic around the web every day in Australia.
So I think the importance of the channel for anything that us as marketers can control in the foreseeable future is not going to change.
Joe Alder: Yeah, yeah, I definitely agree and i'd also say even if google did become less like a dominant player So search gpt launched last month and we have some initial data on that.
It's very much in beta testing So only 10 000 people have access but that is returning results 73 similar to bing which in turn is very similar to google. So even the result in search gpt Um, yeah a returning very similar data. I think as well. It's a lot less advanced of google like especially for e commerce It doesn't have shopping.
It has no kind of user flow on so you can't go into there and look at people Also search is really just like one result that you get with the listings.
James Lawrence: Yeah, that's it. Google has spent The best part of 25 years creating the most phenomenal search engine. We could imagine right and billions of users worldwide becoming accustomed to using it.
Um, they've got more AI smarts, more AI engineers than chat. Your Bt do have, um, and they've. They've sat on the technology, not being able to roll it out because of kind of safety and, , other issues that big companies , have to take seriously and smaller startups can roll out. So, yeah, I think , the idea that, , Google's demise anytime soon will take place.
I think so, , a long way away from being. Being fair. So , let's jump into like, what are the big trends? And I think it's good for us. I think to narrow the conversation down to Google Australia, because I think if you're still listening, then you would probably agree that, , that is the place, the, the area of importance.
Um, , what are the big trends?
Joe Alder: I would say the trends are kind of stayed the same year on year. In fact, I would say, if anything, it just kind of seems to focus in in more of the areas that Google has been pushing for the last period. So there was actually a Google leak. So we have had the most information we ever had from that leak.
There was a few things that Google has been denying such a site authority. They said there's no metric like that. Came out in the AI leak that there is site authority. One of the other big things that I took away from it is something called nav boost, where Google is not only looking at the number of links, your content on the site, but it's also looking at user engagement metrics.
So click through rate and bounce rate were two of the biggest ones there. So if you are appearing in the search results, your method descriptions, your page titles, or the kind of intent does not match and people are not clicking on it, that is a negative impact on your overall site rankings. Same as if they go onto your page and it doesn't match what they're looking for Your site is very slow and they immediately bounce off that will then have an impact Um, I think the other big thing what google has always said is content is key and that really came out in that leak So there was some items in there such as content freshness So how frequently are you uploading content and also your overall authority in the site?
So if you take rocket, for example, are we uploading blog posts regularly on SEO and digital marketing topics? Are we being an expert in the space that we releasing podcasts and sharing them on our blog is all of our content really supporting those service pages. So instead of Google looking for your, you know, taking a page as one, it's kind of looking at the site overall and how relevant you are to those topics.
Do you think it's fair to say that when you, as an expert, when you went through that leak, that it basically just validated all the stuff you knew anyway?
Joe Alder: Yeah, there was almost nothing that was a surprise to me. There was a few like got you to Google where they have denied the existence of a lot of things and they came out.
But I always thought there's no way when Google has this much click data that they're not using that as some part of their ranking algorithm. If you take a user, for example, if a position one. Everyone is clicking on and jumping off. It's obviously going to be in a relevant result, right?
James Lawrence: Yeah. Yeah, I felt the same thing.
We've been saying that, , for years that, , UX and the quality of content and bounce rates and all those things play a massive role. Um, but I think, yeah, that's right. It's the stuff that Google has repeatedly denied. But I also feel that, From my perspective, it also validates, and I think the whole direction of SEO in the last seven to ten years has in some ways moved to where Google has been saying for years, you should be where you should be headed, which is, don't generate links for the purpose of generating links, generate links that kind of come to you naturally, create awesome content that people want to engage with, , give your site users great experience in terms of.
Page speed, , good UX, et cetera, and you will be rewarded in search. And I feel that Google's big enough and smart enough that it , you can gain the system, but over time it will kind of steer you towards doing best practice.
Joe Alder: Yeah, for sure. I think the days of like really manipulating search engines are gone.
You do still see it sometimes, like there's some stuff even to claim out in the leak, such as domain SEO. So if you had a domain that's SEO services in sydney. com. au, Google says that you're not going to rank well there, but you often see that in the search results. There is a few things that you can't always kind of assume and again It's just always going back to the data and those terms you want to rank for and seeing how that compares Um, but I definitely agree that google has been saying for ages about content freshness being authority in the site Um eeat is one of the big things and it really if you follow those guidelines as long as you have the basics Right, you can't go wrong
James Lawrence: Can we talk, um, EEAT just to maybe explain what it is, um, and then just what works and how to approach it?
Joe Alder: Sure. So it used to be just E and then they added an additional E. So it stands for expertise, um, experience, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. So if we take an example of that experience would be if you're, A vacuum cleaner blog and you're comparing vacuum cleaners Google wants to know that you've actually tested these vacuum cleaners you're working on Um instead of just you know, there was a lot of affiliate sites that used to compare these products It was very poor.
They want to know you have hands on experience. You've taken photos yourself You've done the comparison. So you really have that experience with the product then expertise So you want to be seen as a kind of vacuum cleaner expert if they exist. I'm sure they do And showing that showing an author profile giving you that social proof I've compared X number of vacuum cleaners.
This is why you should listen to me. Then authoritativeness is are you seen as a reputable source? If you look on the social media of people always linking back to you, do you have a number of backlink from cleaning blog saying we really recommend this based on the test? Done to these vacuum cleaners here.
And then the last one is trustworthiness. So is your website spammy? Do you have a security certificate? Is your website fast? Is it accessible? And are users having a clean and good experience once they actually get onto your site?
James Lawrence: Yeah. And how would you, um, because in this day and age, right, where the vacuum cleaner one's a good example, we could get a, um, you know, an e commerce export of every single product imaginable.
You could then pump it into chat chip at or Gemini and say, compare these products and write me a description. You could kind of have that content at your disposal within an hour. I suspect for thousands of skews comparing them all. Like, how does Google go about looking at? That artificially created content with no real deep analysis or study behind it, versus, , you've got someone in a vacuum cleaner store that is genuinely comparing Model X and Model A and what customers like and what they don't.
Joe Alder: Yeah, great question. , so there's actually been a few updates. So one of the updates in March, for example, Google's been goal was to have a 40 percent reduction in low content quality. And I think it really goes back to what we were discussing earlier. So in your example there, if someone is just posting one or two blog posts on vacuum cleaners, Google is looking at that site as a whole and seeing how authoritative you are in that space.
So it's unlikely that someone is chat GPT 50 60 articles with original photos, original descriptions. They have reviews, they're listed. Like it definitely can be manipulated, but if you have a website where you are setting vacuum cleaners and your focus on that, Google could see you have the products. It can see you have content pillars on.
This is the best vacuum cleaners following on from that. This is the best vacuum cleaner. So people with pets. This is the best mobile vacuum cleaners that you are really interested in. Producing a lot of content. Once new models are released, you are then doing a blog post and keeping that content fresh and very relevant to your service.
James Lawrence: Yeah, and you got a lot of, um, independent SEOs that just have game things for their own benefit and blog sites and review sites, affiliate sites, whatever you can always. Keep ahead of Google for a little while, but then you see a lot of the penalties and punishments that they've been rolling out over recent years.
If you push the system too hard, you will get caught and they are smart enough to work out ways to identify the types of things that you're talking about. There's a good study. Um, we got a lot of questions from our clients. When Chacha BT and Gemini kind of rose in popularity early part of last year, and it was very much.
Well, you know, you guys create content for us. We want to have it at 10 cents on the dollar now, because we know you can click a button and have it generated automatically. And we took a pretty pragmatic approach, which is we want to. Create content that's truly excellent for our clients and creating content that is literally average because it is the some parts of all the content that's already been created through generative AI.
We don't believe serves the user and all the studies are now showing that let Neil Patel did a really good study showing the performance of human generated content versus AI generated content in the SERPs over a six month period back end of last year into this year, and the human generated content just outperformed the AI content Massively.
And whether that's because Google's really good at identifying a I content or whether to your first point, right, which is Google's looking at how humans are interacting with that content and starting to realize that it's actually not good content, and then you get penalized as a result. But either way.
Creating great content that users actually care about will be rewarded, right?
Joe Alder: Yeah, 100 percent and I think there is room for AI in content Like it definitely is more of a supported role to help you do that research But it really does need that human to go in and actually understand what the person that's going to click on this page Actually wants going back to those ranking signals previously and AI doesn't Understand that it can create the content.
It doesn't understand exactly what the searches are that are bringing people there. It doesn't understand what the competitors are doing in that space. You can feed it this data, but in my experience it is nowhere near what you would get from human written content. I've also tested AI content with a lot of these tools.
So I tested about 10 of these kind of AI testing tools and I was unable to gain it really, um, not recently with these new tools. So if they're able to identify. Google definitely is. And one of the other updates this year was to really tackle on that poor quality AI content.
Yeah. And Google came out, correct me if I'm wrong in terms of whether they've changed their position, but they came out pretty early and said, we don't care how content is created as long as it's created for the benefit of the customer.
So no problem ideating, creating a draft with AI using a tool, but then actually. Work with that content to make sure it's genuinely valuable and useful. Is that still the case? Yeah,
yeah, very much still the case. Like, you want to make sure it is actually what the users want, right? Um, yeah, as we spoke
James Lawrence: about before.
Nice one. Um, anything else on EAT? I guess like for if you're not selling vacuum cleaners, of which I suspect that 99. 9 percent of our listeners are not. Um, but if you're running professional services or if you're running e commerce, just generally speaking, how do you approach EEAT?
Joe Alder: Yeah, I think there's a few basic things that you can do.
So one is ensuring you are publishing blogs that your readers and your potential customers would actually want to see. Um, really showing you are an expert in that space, including author profiles is another really basic one that you can do to show that. And then internally linking to all of the other pages.
So Google can see your site as a whole is very focused. And then just making sure you get authoritative backlinks and all of your basic SEO, like page speed, technical SEO, the foundation is laid so that you're not getting any points marked away for that.
James Lawrence: And say, if you have a thought leader or leaders in the business of pumping out content, Google is smart enough to connect a LinkedIn profile to a person smart enough to look at the credit, like accreditations in the area.
Or how do you show? Show. Say like for my profile, for instance, do I need to link to my LinkedIn profile from the Rocket blog, or is Google making that connection? Like how do we build up authority?
Joe Alder: Yeah, I would say it, it's not that advanced where it's really looking at like your LinkedIn to see that you are actually the person who says, I think it just really wants to know that you are a person in the industry.
You have a couple of posts that they can see across there. That kind of network and you were saying why you are the expert. And I think the article almost speaks for itself. Like it's very clear to see when it's coming from someone who actually knows the subject versus someone who's just pumped into chat GPT and done a bit of edits to, to make it SEO friendly.
Um, the depth that you go, the data you reference, et cetera.
James Lawrence: Yeah. We've talked a bit about, , AI. As it relates to, like, our users going to chat jeopardy instead of places like Google, like, are those engines, the new search engines and we've parked that conversation for now, , and you've touched on Google overseas, usually kind of returning more AI or large language model driven content.
Can we just talk a little bit more about that? So the rise of AI in search, um, We've had things rolled out in Australia, probably things have been rolled back a little bit. Like , what is Google doing by way of integrating AI into its search engine?
Joe Alder: Yeah. So at the moment, like you said, there's no release date for Australia to get, um, search generative experience or AI overviews.
So at the moment that's not changing. Uh, where we are seeing Google is that continually testing. What they are a ping for ai overviews. So number of words are changing there. There was a update I think even yesterday where they're starting to test bringing in products into that So I think what we're going to continue to see is that getting more and more advanced similar to A few years ago when featured snippets became a thing it started off with one or two searches giving you a snippet Now you have calculators embedded and they really are trying to see Exactly what the user wants.
So I can see it going more and more in that direction and Google really understanding what users want to see. If you are searching for econ products, there's going to be comparisons, they're going to start pulling in those listings, etc.
James Lawrence: Yeah, and they've stated that Gemini, which is its equivalent to Chatship ET, will over time become the search engine, right?
Joe Alder: Yeah, yeah, and I think also just embedding that into Google a bit more, like whether it becomes people are only using Gemini, or that gets integrated a bit better into Google as it currently states. I think for Google to So it uses to completely move away from search engines. We're quite a long way off of that.
I think it's so embedded in how everyone uses the Internet. And even now, chat GPT is going out for a few years. We haven't really seen the fall in the search engines as everyone expected. So I think that time frame is going to be a bit longer than people expected.
James Lawrence: Yeah, I reckon that's right. It is like on the mobile app.
For instance, I have a Google. Mobile app on my iPhone and you can toggle between Gemini and Google search within that app Kind of getting the best of both. Um often we'll get particularly if you're dealing with non marketers or people that are less technical Kind of like what is seo and you explain it and so well, how do you do it?
We've always broken it down into kind of that classic on site off site You And content. That's still fundamentally how you would view it. And then you'd kind of look at those three pillars separately.
Joe Alder: Yeah, I would say the only one missing there is also technical. So really, like the first thing I would ever do with a client is we want to make sure the website is in a technically sound place if you're building a house, right?
You want to make sure the foundations are set. If not, the house might still be built. But it might fall apart in a few years. So that is still the number one step. I also think of the technical point. Page speed plays a huge importance. So Google is now using it as part of its ranking factor. But I think more importantly, if you have a slow site, the bounce rate increase, , expands Massively.
If you go from 2 to 3 seconds, I think it's around 32 percent increase that people are going to bounce. And then once you get to a 5 second load time, that goes all the way up to 90 percent chance of people bouncing. And then if you look even further into mobile users, which is increasingly becoming where people are searching.
the, yeah, the patients that they have is even lower. Um, but going back to your question. So, so technical is very much first, then you want to start building on content, then start looking at offsite to build up that authority. I would say the thing that is changing is offsite is veering into digital PR.
It's almost being treated as separate part, um, depending on the business anyway.
James Lawrence: Let's come back to digital PR. I think it's a good, a really good area for us to talk. Maybe an impossible question to answer, but what's the most important technical off site content?
Joe Alder: Assuming that technical is not inhibiting you appearing on search results, I think that is number one.
If you don't show, it's not going to work. I would say content is still number one. Um, if you do any search on Google, if you look at the page title, if you look at the content on the screen, it very much matches what the people are searching for. So yeah, I think I've had experience moving sites with zero links at all.
I'm just focusing on content and what people want. It is very niche dependent, but if I was to say one, I think content really is key.
James Lawrence: Yeah, so in Europe was one of the big car brands and it was basically a site that had launched that morning. Um, and then they got a lot of traction to it.
There was no links coming into it and it was ranking 1st within the day. Um, and kind of not to dismiss offsite because offsite is huge in terms of Google. Joe's kind of touched on it, I guess, in terms of all the different testing that Google does, but Google runs user groups, runs panels where they'll.
Take certain things out of, , an algorithm to see how the results perform and how people like those results. And whenever they try to take links out, the whole quality of the SERPs just fades away. But yeah, I think you're right. I think the Google leak confirming that how users interact with a particular page is such a big lever now in terms of rankings that I think it is believable that you can have a site with pretty, , modest offsite.
If the content itself is so clearly working. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Can we, um, I'd like to talk about digital PR. So your English and I , everyone that I speak to says that digital PR was was born in the UK. Is that true? First of all,
Joe Alder: yeah, that's that's why here. I think in the UK, it's true.
seems to be a bit ahead in terms of search, like it's normally a couple of years ahead, at least in Australia. I actually had a previous role where I did a lot of digital PR, um, and as an area that I've seen grow massively over the past few years, and I really think it kind of goes down to the, what the internet is focusing, like how we have these viral trends.
It's very much the same for businesses. If you do get an article or content that goes viral. Google is seeing you as a kind of authoritative figure in that space and then is more likely to rank you higher. I think it also gives you the ability, like traditional link building, you might get a couple of links.
With digital PR, I've seen some campaigns from one article, depending on how you spin it, can generate two, three hundred links. And then that in turn is boosting your site authority, increasing your ranking through the really competitive terms.
James Lawrence: Can we just talk, um, take a back step just quickly, like what, what is it for those that haven't heard of the term before?
Joe Alder: Yes, I'd say it's very similar to normal PR and there's so many different forms that you could do it But some practical examples of that would be as rocket agency We could create an amazing piece of content like we do so we have the digital marketing guide in australia 2024 edition This is a piece of content that the marketing team spend hours on we look through data We look at trends we really build this up and then from that that's one part of it But using that as an asset We would then want to reach out to publications relevant to the space.
So SEO publications, paid search, publications, marketing publications, and amplify that content, building relationships with journalists to actually get them to link back to this and seeing it as a piece of content they actually want to write about. But there's so many other forms as well. Like people do infographics.
They do kind of more viral campaigns. Um, I don't know if you remember the. The card game cards against humanity. They did a lot of kind of viral tactics and I think not intentionally, but that was a great link driver for them. So they had one where it was like, we're going to buy a piece of the wall. So Donald Trump can't build his wall there.
And that piece of content got 400 links. So I think it could come in all sizes. It's how creative you can be and how relevant you can make it to your business.
James Lawrence: Yeah, that's it. And I I've got friends that own PR agencies and it's kind of having seen how things have converged over the last 15 years where the And I think when we're talking about PR here, we're talking very much about the element of PR that relates to getting articles published with publishers and news outlets, as opposed to other elements, but you see kind of PR as mainstream press has digitalized and um, Newspaper doesn't matter as much anymore.
Online reputation management, the role of PR to kind of shape how a brand is perceived online is such, it's such a bigger part of that industry now. And then if you look at SEO where everything we've just talked about in the first part of the pod is all about how you can build up your perception of your brand within Google, who's got such an incredible ability of understanding what online looks like.
It's just natural that those two factors are coming together. Um, And I guess I'm not like we're talking in the office recently about the insurer where you've got just access to so many different data points, right? And you can actually start to put together content ideas of the least insurable suburbs, the most insurable suburbs, car crash information, burglaries, whatever else.
And you can see how there'd be so many publishers out there if you can create interesting content that is actually interesting to readers and just work your back links back into that to get. Um references back through
Joe Alder: yeah, and I think again it all starts with the user right like out of that data What does the user actually want to see and then being creative with how you spin it?
So if you're using a car insurance, for example, you could target drivers You could then do a bit more of a kind of social media viral campaign where it's like these are the worst drivers in What suburb has the worst drivers in australia and that kind of gets that more general appeal kicks up by the bigger news Publications like sydney morning herald and some of the bigger news ones are all more viral websites.
James Lawrence: Yeah, what's your perspective on unlinked brand mentions Help for SEO like does Google is Google smart enough to know that references to rocket agency on industry news sites that don't link back to us Is a positive thing Um, or are they and are they smart enough to know that if we do get a link But it's a nofollow link does it actually still benefit our seo?
Joe Alder: Yeah, so there's been a few things that come out about that nofollow and sponsored links still have some carry through I haven't really seen any compelling that convinced me one way or the other. I think I would assume that is some flow on effect. If you are mentioned everywhere, like Tesla, for example, always in the news, Google is calling these pages and seeing it and the kind of contextual relevance and building up that authority there.
But then there are some brands that have such a general name, like even taking rocket as example, how do they know? They're talking about rocket agency versus a rocket spaceship. So I think that there's a great task you can do, which is unlinked brand mentions, which I think still has, where you actually reach out and get the link.
I would say that's a sure way of knowing that Google is going to register that and push it back to your brand.
James Lawrence: Yeah. , fair comment. , I now wanna steer the conversation into, the interaction of SEO with PPC. We kind of talked before, before recording about it. , I guess like what is the interplay now?
Joe Alder: Yeah, so I think I often see, and, and uc as well, like coming into rocket. SEO is very much an after fort. So brands will come to us and they want us to help with the PPC strategy and they're like, oh, you guys offer SEO, can you help us with this? Well, I see SEO as kind of being that first step that you do.
There's a lot of quick. Quinn's that we can have an SEO, even if it is a longer driver and paid search often has quick wins across even more competitive terms. So bringing them together, you get the best of both worlds. You're building up your overall site authority to start ranking for these competitive terms, but then you have paid search to really drive and get instant results.
I granular details as well, If we're bidding on the term seo agency in sydney, that's going to be a very expensive term as we know The conversion rate is higher through seo. So we're spending more to get the the paid listing there Once we get that to position one in google We get double the conversion if they come through bar seo And we're saving a lot of money on people clicking on that and then we can put the money Into times where we don't perform as well.
James Lawrence: Has the SEO guy and I'm sure you've been in lots of meetings where the PPC guy comes in and starts bidding on brand and siphoning off, uh, conversions that you otherwise would have had. Like what, um, I think at rocket for us, we've got a very much. It depends perspective on brand bidding within our paid media teams.
But I guess from the SEO viewpoint, like, how would you be for listeners out there that like, we just don't know if we should be bidding on our brand in PPC. Are we just stealing leads that would otherwise have come to us organically? , how do you make decisions on that?
Joe Alder: Yeah, well, first off, it sucks when we report to clients and people start bidding on brand because you see a huge drop in SEO traffic.
But I think aside from that, the best way is to just test it. Brand bidding is normally much cheaper than these terms. And if competitors are bidding, you probably do want your brand. there. But if you test your brand, you see your SEO results for branded terms of your clicks for these branded terms reduce, you can then compare how much of these branded terms increase those clicks.
So if we are bidding on rocket agency and SEO has dropped 1000 clicks, have we received 1500 clicks to that brand? Like I think that is the ideal scenario to just test and see if it is worth that cost of investment.
James Lawrence: Yeah, I agree. And I've got a strong feeling that there's very few businesses in Australia that have such complex SEO or paid search requirements that they shouldn't have.
If they are using agency partners, I think they should use an agency partner for both. I really feel strongly that otherwise not having Those 2 channels being overseen at the top level from someone with the same interest is often very detrimental. And if you do have a different set of hands looking up to your paid versus your organic, you're often just in complete conflict.
I think you do need to have something that sits in between to make sure that strategically you're making the right call. As to how the channels relate, um, and in house and simply again, right? As long as you've got someone in your organization that knows deeply how those channels do integrate together.
I think often you will find you're running. It's just this inherent conflict of interest. If you've got separate organizations running each of those.
Joe Alder: Yeah, 100 percent agree. I think having the person to oversee all of it. So rocket, we obviously have an account manager that would look at the paid search and SEO channels and figure out how they can work best to reach that user's goals.
I think the other benefit as well is like I will often see in the office where a paid specialist and an SEO specialist who work on the same account will go over to each other's desk and kind of share ideas and data points. So if we are suddenly ranking really well for a term, we want to try and turn that off.
The paid search can obviously test things a lot better than we can. So if they know certain things are driving users more, we can then try and integrate that into our SEO strategy as well.
James Lawrence: Yeah, couldn't agree more. In terms of where, um, where SEO is going, and I don't like to go too far into the future, because I do feel that for most listeners, and even for ourselves, like winning the quarter is more important than guessing where things go in five years time.
But I think you do want to forward plan and have, You know, where are we going in the next year or so? What are you seeing with things like voice search and video search? Just so that I guess marketers can start thinking of where those pieces of technology are going.
Joe Alder: Yeah. So, so voice search is definitely increasing.
I think I saw a study and it's 30 percent of users use voice search of some degree. I think once AI really uplifts, like if you tried the GPT app on your phone, you tried the voice mode, like it's excellent. So I can only see that increasing more. But again, once we look at the data of what's actually performing in voice search, a lot of it correlates directly with what's appearing in the search results, especially what appears on kind of the structure data, the knowledge graph, the featured snippet type thing and AI overview.
So if you're appearing there, That's likely to be what Google is pulling from those search results. And we saw the correlation between chat, GPT, Google and being earlier. So I think that will be similar. There's other things now, like image search. So there's Google lens on your phone where you can kind of highlight in the image and search for that.
I think image. SEO optimization is a thing that is one of the last things you do because it's quite a lot of effort and little gain, but I would say with image search increasing, that is something that business owners want to be more diligent on. So making sure you have very high quality images, the original, , Making sure the file names and alt tags are optimized to that image, I think will become more and more important and in the kind of a future of SEO.
I think we're just going to continue seeing where it's going. So content is going to play more of an important role. Looking at sites, authority and expertise is going to be more and more important and ensuring you are AI ready so that your content is more and more important. Written well that anyone can understand you're matching the searches query and people landing on the page actually getting what they want There's a few other things as well So when I was testing the ai overviews people when you are searching for a direct question I saw a good correlation between that and the content on the page.
So using that example I said earlier seo How does seo compare to paid search if you have that as part of your content? Then you're more likely to appear in those AI overview. So really looking at the search volume data before you build out those articles and what people actually want.
James Lawrence: Yeah, great. It does feel that the direction that search is likely going you look at well Is it chatubity instead of google or is it voice search instead of um text based search?
The outcome is still the same where we're just all the things that matter for one of those is still the things that are likely to matter for the other so just if you're focusing on those principles and doing all the things that You A good SEO would have done for the last 10 years. Then you, you are kind of future proofing yourself as well.
And , always think back to before Apple popularized the smartphone was always going to be, you know, the year of the smartphone will break through whatever else. And then eventually it happened and we never looked back. And I don't know, for the last five years, it's probably gone quiet in the last couple, but it was always voice search, voice search, the year of voice search You know, search put into them, et cetera, et cetera, and never really took off, but it does feel that the way that we interact with chatbots, whether it's Gemini or chatGBT, it feels that it lends itself so nicely to voice search.
Joe Alder: , yeah, I definitely agree. And like you said, right, we haven't really seen the pickup, which I think shows how slow people are to change their habits. Like, I think it's quite unnatural to be on a bus and using voice search, and there's going to be a high barrier before So whenever people say this is going to be in the next year, I would usually extend that to say the next five years, especially in SEO.
James Lawrence: Yeah, it's what the past has taught us, right? Awesome conversation. I think before we end it just any Pools or resources that you recommend to marketers just to kind of, because it is a hard space, right? I think it's a particularly difficult space because unlike a lot of other things, there's no certainty around it.
Or I think with a lot of the areas we play in, we just know that, you know, this is what Facebook wants in terms of an ad size, or this is what will work in terms of the algorithm because the publishers or platforms tell us that. But with SEO, it always has been this kind of gray box. I think it is really challenging for the marketers where it's not your job.
Exclusively to manage SEO to kind of know where to lean. So like any places you'd recommend for people that need more information?
Joe Alder: Yeah, I would say , there's a lot of good beginner stuff out there. So one thing I really like is the AH refs have a great YouTube series where they publish a lot of content regularly.
I think it's very digestible. That's a great place to learn. I would say like, if you're a smaller business owner as well, one of the best places you can look on forums such as Reddit. So like the SEO subreddit, I think a lot of things in SEO comes from experience. When you see a traffic drop, you now have to fix it.
I think when you go to Reddit, you're seeing business owners experience the exact same issues you are. And usually people coming up with solutions. So I think that's an area where I learned a lot about SEO. And then there's also the standard kind of search engine journal, search engine man, they will frequently publish on exactly what's happening and keeping you up to date.
Um, but I would say for the standard business user, like those beginner guides are probably enough and then leaning on experts when there are these really challenging things that are happening.
James Lawrence: Yeah, nice one. Um, Joe, ask of every guest on the pod, what's your best piece of advice for an in house marketer?
So, Phil, it could be broader, it could be career driven, or it could be more specific to SEO, but yeah, what's your piece of advice?
Joe Alder: I would say the single biggest advice I would give is stick to the data. Like, I don't think the data ever lies, whether that be comparing to competitors. If the top three competitors all have a certain keyword, it's likely to mean that having that keyword is going to help you rank.
As well as following the other stuff using that as an example, right? And again, is if you're actually looking at how you're performing or where you can better perform, looking back to the data will usually give you those answers and following that chain. If you see a traffic drop, where is that data coming from?
And then kind of going through the analysis of why. Um, yeah, that would be my single biggest advice.
James Lawrence: Nice one, mate. Thanks so much for your time on the pod today. I think anyone that has listened would surely have one or two things that, or probably more that they can take away and implement into their SEO strategy for the year to come.
And I think if you're, um, if you're listening and want a second opinion on your approach to SEO, feel free to reach out to us and Joe and the team can take a look.
Joe Alder: Awesome. Thanks, James.