SEO’s New Rules: Relevance Over Rankings with Dale Bertrand

Dale Bertrand [00:00:00]:
There are folks out there who are really good at getting eyeballs onto video feeds. Like A right thumbnails, the right topics, all of that. But that’s very different from optimizing A a video channel to target an ICP and convert that ICP into taking A, into moving to the next stage of your funnel. And those can can be opposing forces. Right? If you’re a business owner, maybe a CMO, and you hire somebody who has has expertise around TikTok or YouTube channels or something like that, you’re actually hiring the wrong expertise because they’re A be really good at building A, but it’s gonna take you a while and you’re gonna spend a lot of money before you realize that those subscribers don’t convert into customers.

A. Lee Judge [00:00:46]:
Influential and thought provoking minds in marketing, sales, and business. The Business of Marketing podcast.

A. Lee Judge [00:00:55]:
Welcome again to the business of marketing. I’m A Judge. You know, the marketing world is getting rocked right now, as we try to understand how to get our brands and content noticed by our customers, specifically in the face of AI. Traditional SEO is changing in ways that are making yesterday’s tactics possibly obsolete, but luckily there are some people with the same people who are ex SEO experts are leading the way to figure out what’s next. After all, if SEO is their business, then it’s their pro top priority to understand where SEO is going next. So today I have one of the top SEO experts in the industry to give us guidance and hopefully clear up some of the mystery of what we need to do next. So joining me again today is Dale Bertrand. Hey Dale.

Dale Bertrand [00:01:42]:
Hey. Thanks for having me.

A. Lee Judge [00:01:44]:
Is I’ve been looking forward to this conversation because no matter where you are in marketing, the way things are changing, the speed at which things are changing, marketers really need some guidance on this. And I know you’re you’re my go to guy, so I wanted to talk to you about this stuff.

Dale Bertrand [00:01:59]:
Well, things are definitely changing quickly. I know my head is spinning, and I’m getting, questions. Like when I do workshops, I was I was at a conference, a marketing conference last week and getting a lot of questions about what’s changing, what’s next, what should what direction should my career be going, like, as a marketing. So there’s a lot to think about.

A. Lee Judge [00:02:17]:
Not just what I’m doing today, but what is my career gonna do with these changes? So let’s get into it then. You know, every day more consumers are turning to AI chats for search. I noticed that lately you’ve been kind of rebranding your area of expertise as future focused SEO. So what does that mean, and does it have anything to do with this speed of change?

Dale Bertrand [00:02:40]:
Yeah. Well, we’ve been doing future focused SEO for for a long time, but that’s really about looking at where, where SEO is going. Marketing to where the puck is going rather than just where it’s at. And we all know that is changing pretty quickly. And it’s been changing quickly for a while, but now it Judge feels like it’s just accelerated so quickly. People wanna know that when they’re investing in in their brand, their website, their content, or investing in your career as a marketer, that you’re investing in, something that’s gonna give you ROI, a year, two, three years out.

A. Lee Judge [00:03:20]:
So we’re doing this investing A, you know, when marketers have to go to the table and ask for budget, I think that my personal belief is that companies need to lean into multiple formats of content A those who do that will gain a competitive advantage. And I’ve heard you speak on content like video and podcasting and interactive content. So what do you think about going beyond text when it comes to this new era of search discoverability?

Dale Bertrand [00:03:47]:
Well, it’s really a must because, we’re we’re entering a a new era, like, driven by AI, where our customers have access to AI tools that they’re gonna use to get the answers that they need A to educate themselves around the products and services that we sell. The era that we’re exiting, that we’re leaving, I call it, like, the the inbound marketing era, where A we were all incentivized to do was to write top of funnel informational blog articles. So these are like educational blog posts that would in practice or in theory and in practice educate our customers, help them and give them an opportunity to get introduced to our brand, our A, our services A then we can move them farther down our funnel and hopefully convert them into a customer. But those days are really starting to wane and eventually will come to an end. Like there was this short period of time when it was easy to capture people’s attention with long form content. And now we’re seeing that if you’re creating long form content you’re really working for Google or OpenAI or some other AI platform because you’re basically creating their training content. Instead you A to be thinking about like what type of content could I be creating that is not just existing online to train these large models And A also, how are you building an audience around your brand and your content? Which is thinking like a publisher instead of thinking like an SEO or an SEO writer. Even worse.

Dale Bertrand [00:05:21]:
But that’s that’s, that’s really tough because you know, we’ve all been working for Google for a while, but we just A of didn’t admit it. We’ve A and we’ve all heard the the advice, you know, don’t write for Google write for your customer. But we ignored it. There’s a reason why we wrote, you know, we went from 500 word articles to a thousand to 2,000 to what? 5,000, 50 A. Like where does that where does that go? Right? Like that that never really made any sense. A now we need to get real about because stuff is getting real whether whether, you know, we like it or not. We need to get real about building content for our customer. And and what does that mean? And what does it mean to act like a publisher with a publisher’s mindset where we identify our audience, figure out what they want, figure out what content formats, what topics, so that when they wanna know what’s up in our content area, they come to us as opposed to going to Google as an intermediary A for our content.

A. Lee Judge [00:06:22]:
Yeah. I’ve only stepped into your lane A a speaking standpoint one time, and that was probably about five years ago at Content Marketing World where I did a presentation called Content for the Robots. And I had no idea what was coming at the time because to that time, robot meant, you know, for crawlers who were crawling content on your websites. I won’t claim to have A where we’re at now marketing content for the robots, but my theme then was, you know, A it, for the humans, but something that the robots like. And now I think we’ve, as you just kind of implied, we’ve kind of gone overboard with that to where maybe we’re at the tipping point where to focus on the humans because the robots are A to robot. They’re going to do what they’re going to do. We’ve been working for them for years. Maybe now is the time to focus on creating content for humans first.

A. Lee Judge [00:07:14]:
What do you think?

Dale Bertrand [00:07:15]:
Yeah. I agree with that. I mean, there’s some basics we wanna do to make sure that, the crawlers for the various search platforms, AI and traditional platforms, can see your content. But beyond that, the the way I think about it is that these AI systems are doing the best they can to find people the answers that that satisfy whatever they’re looking for. So we could skip ahead to the punchline and, figure out what information our customers need when they’re making a buying decision, make sure that we’re publishing that information in the right format, which is less likely to be written format going forward, and then let the search engines find our content when our customers are looking for it. Or, and this is the important part, a lot of times with AI platforms, it’s not, responding to a query or answering a customer question. It’s more along the lines of, like, we want our brand or our our products to come up in conversation. A quick quick example Lee, like if I got engaged yesterday, right? And I’m going to work today and I’m telling my friends, Hey, I just got engaged.

Dale Bertrand [00:08:20]:
I’m getting married A everybody’s happy for me. The first thing they’re gonna do is start giving me advice. They’re gonna tell me how to deal with my parents in Lee, where to get married, how to save some money on my wedding A. All this stuff. All this advice that’s unsolicited. It’s not an answer to any question that I ask them. It’s just relevant to the conversation. So if you think about our customers going to AI chatbots and asking questions about problems they have or maybe a destination that they’re going to or a product or service that they’re looking for, like all kinds of conversations.

Dale Bertrand [00:08:54]:
Maybe some personal issue they’re having. We want our A, our brands to get mentioned by AI in those conversations when relevant whether A those our customers are asking or not. And that’s really a different paradigm from search where we think of queries in traditional search engines like Google. We think of queries as questions and we think of our pages, our content as answers to those questions. And that still exists. We are doing that in, in AI platforms, but they’re also having conversations. And we wanna make sure that we come up in conversations A we’re able to educate the large language models in AI through their training, to mention our brands.

A. Lee Judge [00:09:34]:
Now, Dale, you just opened up a whole new thought channel for me there because when you mentioned that unsolicited advice, I remember not too long ago, past week or so, I was having a conversation with a chat and it actually said, have you A? And it gave me more options. And I realized from what you just said, in that case, no keyword that I would have said would have been entered into the chat. Like it didn’t come from me. I didn’t search a specific phrase or question. It actually thought about what I was saying, thought about our whole conversation and gave me suggestions of what I should look for or what I should consider. That’s that’s way different from what we’ve been doing.

Dale Bertrand [00:10:15]:
Yeah. Well, that’s about relevance more than it’s about the right answer to the question or or or delivering an answer to the question. So we wanna make sure that, our brand, our products appear online in the right content, and that’s Lee, online, adjacent to the topics that we want our brand, our our services to to come up for. And the more frequently they come up, then, then more likely we are to get mentioned when those topics are discussed. And that’s really what it comes down to.

A. Lee Judge [00:10:52]:
So, you know, as people are watching or listening to this, they’re gonna probably be side searching or side googling to get their clarity of what’s going on. And I’ll say that, you know, you’re the first person that I heard use the term Lee because you’re A be looking for different terms and trying to define, we’re all trying to define what’s happening right now. And so I heard you use the term geo for generative A optimization, A that was over a year ago. So since A, we’ve heard people try to redefine SEO as, you know, Lee or artificial intelligence optimization A AIO.

Dale Bertrand [00:11:24]:
The A one I like is search everywhere optimization.

A. Lee Judge [00:11:26]:
A what I was gonna say. That’s my favorite is search everywhere optimization. So I was was gonna ask you what’s your take,

Dale Bertrand [00:11:33]:
but that’s your take. Yeah. And and the reason why is because there was a while where we were thinking of generative engine optimization as something different from traditional SEO. That’s when you were optimizing for, like, traditional Google search over on one side and then ChatGPT on the other side. But they are merging. Like, we know that Google has introduced an AI mode. So you can when you’re searching with Google, you could basically ask follow-up questions or have a follow-up conversation in an AI mode that feels very much like ChatChiBT. And then on the other side of it ChatChiBT and all of the other, AI tools out there are adding search tools so that when the AI thinks that it should go to the web and find some resources, it does that.

Dale Bertrand [00:12:18]:
So so these these two tools are merging. So then what search everywhere optimization becomes about is it it’s it’s still Lee, but we’re adding a bunch more to it that that’s quite significant. In addition to making sure that you rank well with traditional search engines You also want to make sure that your brand or the messages that you want to get out there are relevant to the right A. And that’s all about relevance. So your brand is A, your products are A, but also the pages on your website A the content that you’re producing is relevant. So it’ll get mentioned and recommended by AI search engines. But that’s all about relevance at the end of the day. That’s the way to think about it.

A. Lee Judge [00:13:01]:
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A. Lee Judge [00:13:54]:
How does relevance play in in this? Because I’m about to go on a few weeks, months, maybe years’ rant about this debate of quality versus A. Because I believe that now with especially with AI tools, we can have both. We can have quality and quantity. And I’ve been preaching quantity since the beginning of Content Monster. That’s the reason why the company is called Content Monster, because we were creating a lot of content. And I think now, now we’re going to win because of that. Or now my personal brand, the company’s personal brand is rising because we’ve always believed in being everywhere while others were saying no, create one piece of beautiful content every now and then make sure it’s perfect. And that might A won for a while.

A. Lee Judge [00:14:36]:
But now I’m A lean further into, you can create quality content, but you still have to have quantity to be everywhere and to almost flood the zone to be recognized. And that can, I think, still be done with this intent that you’re talking about?

Dale Bertrand [00:14:53]:
Yeah. I mean, the way that I think about it is you’re gonna have an easier time if you choose a niche audience to go after. And I don’t know what audience you guys are going after, with the content that you’re creating. But if you identify a niche audience and you understand them, or learn enough about them that you can serve that audience, then then we have a definition for high quality content. Because because a lot of times what’s going on is everybody agrees and nods their head that we need high quality content. But what does that mean? Does it mean you got the spelling right? Does it mean that, like, it’s structured beautifully or, there beautiful graphics in it? And then I’m sorry.

A. Lee Judge [00:15:31]:
Opinions about that, but go ahead.

Dale Bertrand [00:15:34]:
What I’m gonna tell you about it, and I’m about to go up my rant, is that it’s content that’s suited for the purpose. Yes. Lee, you get the outcome that you want from your content. A there’s lots of different types of content. Lots of different outcomes you might expect. The outcome that I’m recommending folks shift from. Lee there was an outcome where we wanted to get as much organic traffic as possible and that’s still valuable. There’s still a lot of organic traffic out there to be had.

Dale Bertrand [00:15:59]:
So I A be careful. Even though it’s going down, it’s still valuable. There’s still a lot out there to be had. But you really wanna start thinking around Lee how am I building an audience around my brand. You could imagine Lee for me, I check the weather every now and then whenever I care A I go to the same website every time because that’s where I go when I wanna check the weather. So for your brand and the content channels that you’re curating that you’re building, is there an audience that goes to them when they want a certain type of information? Or are you still operating in the old content mindset that the way you get eyeballs on on your content A the way that you build visibility for your brand is to hopefully get some A from Google and that’s it. Right? Lee that sounds lazy and crazy now that we say it out loud. Now that it’s starting to go A.

Dale Bertrand [00:16:54]:
But it was so effective for so long that we’re all drunk on free effective organic traffic from Google and Google’s like doing the rug pull as we speak.

A. Lee Judge [00:17:04]:
Yeah. Yeah. And and my part of that rant is based on, you know, I’ve been hearing the word intent from A, it’s influenced us a lot in how we create content even, is, you know, Dale says A on the intent of your A. What A you do, what can you provide for that customer in your content? And when it comes to this discussion of quality, we’ve seen too many of our clients confuse production quality with informational quality. Like, they’d rather have a Hollywood produced commercial that they spent lots of money on to get a beautiful piece of content, but then it says nothing to their customer. It doesn’t solve A customer problem. It doesn’t answer their their intent when they’re looking for them. They call that quality.

A. Lee Judge [00:17:51]:
Meanwhile, we’ve seen their we’ve done A analysis with their competitors who are doing things like podcasts and shorts. They’re answering questions Lee, and they have this volume of content that’s showing up in search and in AI that’s just answering questions and being valuable to their A, and they’re putting out so much more content, and they’re winning against those who are still old school, perceiving quality as, you know, a Hollywood camera. And so I think as you and I both dig through this change, we’re gonna see those who are able to sustain that high intent, high customer centric content. Those folks are gonna win if they can do more of it.

Dale Bertrand [00:18:34]:
Yeah. A I would say is, like, the more you know about your customer, I’ll call it customer intimacy, the easier it will be for you to create the right content. And when we’re talking about intent, we’re talking about search content. That shift from the old SEO to search everywhere optimization, Lee, part of that shift is shifting from keyword targeting to intent targeting. So once you understand your customers and you understand the information that they need when they’re making a buying decision You’ll understand the search intents A things they’re looking for. They need to know A cost or the delivery time or how A the payback period is on whatever they’re buying. There are things that are unique to the type of product and service you sell that your customers need to know. And if you can build the right content that satisfies those intents A I always call them intents that begin with a A.

Dale Bertrand [00:19:31]:
So it’s something like A for a mortgage with a decent interest rate or compare airline travel cards. Those are the types of intents we’re talking A. But A those intents by talking to your customers figuring out what it is, what information they need and then satisfy those intents with the right format, the right topics, whatever it is. And that’s how you build an audience around your content and convert, enough of that audience to make it worthwhile for you.

A. Lee Judge [00:20:03]:
Well, SEO is a mature practice to where we have tons of information on what we should and shouldn’t do, what works. Most of those are decaying in front of our eyes. It’s almost like the SEO playbook is like some scene from from, from, Marvel where they’re just poof snap happens in A rules of fading away. So tell me now, as marketers, we’re left sitting here going, okay, what now? Like, where do Lee, what do we measure? We’ve been told we’ve got these beautiful dashboards measuring keywords A, you know, all these things, one, two, three, nice clean dashboards. Now they’re fading A, and you’re telling us new things we have to measure. So I have two questions for you here. One, how do we what’s your advice to marketers who now have to recreate their dashboards? And then two, the goalpost just moved, and We have to explain that to the c suite. Yeah.

A. Lee Judge [00:21:00]:
I’ve been giving you this report for years, but now we have to change. How does a marketer approach this?

Dale Bertrand [00:21:06]:
Well, so there’s a lot buried in that question. Right? So if we back up a little bit, A what we’ve always been doing is, like Lee capturing organic demand. Like that’s what SEO was about. There there are people who are in market who are signaling that they’re in market and they have intent to buy the types of products that you sell. And Lee easiest way to capture that organic demand was on Google and it’s still on A. Right? Like when we talk about organic traffic, declining. It’s declining down to like maybe 80% of what it was. So if you just take that 80% number which is a ballpark guesstimate.

Dale Bertrand [00:21:45]:
Right? But if you take that 80% number what that means is like the the the old rules of SEO still A. Like we’re still doing those things. The difference is you’re gonna get 80% of the return instead of A % of the return that you used to get. So that 80% is still significant. I A say that. But we expect that it’ll it’ll change Lee over time. Right? But back when it was a %, it was you you were able to do your organic demand capture very easily with like A by churning out A shitty SEO content, and and get just get a lot of people to land on your website. The other thing you were able to do was to show your leadership that numbers were up and to the right.

Dale Bertrand [00:22:28]:
Because the traffic was up and to the right. So part of what we need to do as marketers when it comes to educating our leadership on the numbers they’re going to see going forward and what they can expect from A marketing going forward is, I hate to say it, but it’s almost like the organic traffic numbers that we were all excited about weren’t as meaningful as we all thought they were. Mhmm. Because in a lot of cases, like when you dig into it, it was the wrong traffic. A lot of it was top of funnel for the wrong keywords which really boils down to the wrong search intents. So much of it didn’t convert at the end of the day. I’m working with so many clients who have organic traffic going down, but their sales are actually going up.

A. Lee Judge [00:23:11]:
Yes.

Dale Bertrand [00:23:12]:
A the reason why is because we’re working with them to target the right search intent. A here’s another piece that’s really A. Which is like when we talk about AI or or let’s say Google’s AI overviews stealing traffic. The type of traffic that Google’s AI overviews is stealing is that top of funnel informational traffic that didn’t convert in the first place. Right? Like we were happy to content. We were happy to A those people, grab their email address, you know, hit them up for when they’re ready to buy. Lee were also happy to, just get that brand visibility so that we’re in the consideration set, when those folks are in market eventually for the type of product or service that we sell. So there was value there.

Dale Bertrand [00:23:54]:
But but that wasn’t the traffic that was converting immediately. Because A was always a disconnect between the way marketers thought about SEO as a direct response channel Mhmm. And what it was actually doing, which was when the traffic was up to the right, the new traffic you were adding was not converting on the first visit or even that highly qualified. But I’ll but I’ll leave it there since it was a big question.

A. Lee Judge [00:24:22]:
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A. Lee Judge [00:25:20]:
So if I’m a marketer and I’m, and I have reports that are always up into the right, the the leadership structure has to give me the grace to be able to say, look, things are changing, things are down and to the right because we’re measuring the wrong thing. Now that’s where it gets difficult because people A have their jobs tied to these KPIs that no longer make sense. And they may even know that this isn’t driving A, it’s just driving my departmental or personal KPIs.

Dale Bertrand [00:25:52]:
Wow. That is such a good point because we think of so many of us think of our jobs as traffic up into the right. And that’s really what needs to change. And it’s gonna change whether we like it or not. Mhmm. And I wouldn’t say that your job is to optimize for a different metric because, really, your job has always been to optimize for, customer acquisition or revenue growth or business growth. Whatever it is that you need to be doing. Maybe you’re at a A and it’s all about doing experiments to get to product market fit.

Dale Bertrand [00:26:23]:
But that’s always been the real goal. But what I would say we should be focusing on just career wise is getting good at educating our leadership around the changes that you and I are talking about and seeing that as our job. And that’s hard, but it’s necessary. It’s necessary for us to, to demonstrate the value that we’re delivering and also to make sure that we get the resources we need as the landscape shifts, like as the technology shifts out from under us. Because we all know leadership wants what leadership wants A a lot of what they want is what we’ve trained them to want over the last decade. That’s on us. So we need to just refocus on our role of educating the folks in our organization and make sure that we’ve got those talking points. Make sure that we understand what’s changing, what’s known, what’s not known because there’s so many unknowns.

Dale Bertrand [00:27:22]:
Lee, when I say that to to people in my workshops, they’re like, get I get it. I need to educate my managers, educate my leadership, but I don’t know what’s next. But but nobody does. Right? Lee, there’s there’s so much that’s known and unknown, but that’s what you need to be honest about and make sure that they understand.

A. Lee Judge [00:27:41]:
You know, we have a luxury, I guess, in my company because I’m not only a marketing, operations expert, but I’m also the owner of this company. Whereas, sometimes we just totally stop doing things that we know don’t work and we watch some dashboard report just get decimated. Like, you know, we’ve done things that have taken our reports of website traffic and just cut it in half because we realized something was happening that shouldn’t have. Like there was some webpage getting lots of hits, but would never lead to a sale. So we removed the webpage, the traffic goes down, but the business goes up. Now as a small company, we can make those cuts. Nobody has to explain like, well, boss, here’s why the thing I’ve been tracking just got ruined because we know we did it on purpose. And I always feel for marketers who are in those positions who know they should make these changes, but also know it’s A to ruin this thing that they hung their hats on.

A. Lee Judge [00:28:41]:
And that’s a tough place I think for for any business to Lee, for any marketer to be in right now.

Dale Bertrand [00:28:45]:
Yeah. Well, a lot of times marketers feel like their job is to do the right thing.

A. Lee Judge [00:28:50]:
Mhmm.

Dale Bertrand [00:28:50]:
Well, I’ll just stop there for effect. Right? And and and in addition to doing the right thing, you need to be able to explain the right thing and persuade Lee deal. Your leadership, on the right thing. And that’s your real job. Mhmm. And sometimes you know the right thing to do, but you just can’t get past the the culture or whatever barriers are in place in your organization to do what you know is right. And that’s what you need to work. You need to see that as your skill set as a marketer, that communication, persuasion, education.

Dale Bertrand [00:29:25]:
And it’s not a one time thing. It’s not like Lee I walk into my boss’s A. Here’s how things are A to be going forward. A. Now I have free reign to A with this stuff and you know, moving forward. It’s Lee, no. Your job, is in every communication to make sure that you’re bringing them along with you as you figure out what’s next and what you need to be doing differently. And make sure that you you have the the leeway to experiment around the unknowns.

A. Lee Judge [00:29:55]:
That’s the key, the leeway to to not only A, but to get in in those meetings and learn. Because what I find is marketers often don’t have the Judge of sales or of the C suite to explain themselves. Like you said, they must explain these changes, but if their language is still what I call A y, like there’s talk talking likes and follows and things, but the C suite doesn’t understand the connection between their marketing tactic or campaign and how it moves the needle in business. Like I could say, for example, if I were a marketer in my company, I would say, Hey, Lee, we’re getting, we’re A to have to remove this page because it’s messing up our numbers. It’s driving up website traffic, but that doesn’t mean anything to business. We need to know who actually is converting. Who’s going through a path to our purchase page, and this web page is messing it up. So we’re gonna take this page down.

A. Lee Judge [00:30:52]:
Warning, you’re gonna lose about 30% traffic, but that didn’t matter because we’re looking at A, and our goal is not web traffic. Our goal is business. That A to a owner or a c suite makes sense. But too many marketers, their language stops at talking about analytics in a marketing sphere and not how it affects business.

Dale Bertrand [00:31:16]:
Well, yeah. Because they don’t have a understanding or or, like, appreciation of what the business leaders care about. So you and I Lee, you and I run businesses. Right? And you could imagine somebody coming to us and saying Hey, I spent all week on this project A you’re gonna love the outcome. It’s like Awesome. What did you do? Well, I posted this video and it got 50,000 likes. I’m going on vacation because this is awesome. High fives.

Dale Bertrand [00:31:41]:
A likes. And I’m and I’m thinking to myself, okay. Can I pay you in 50,000 likes? Is that how you’re gonna pay your rent? Is that how I’m gonna pay my mortgage? I do not understand why we’re excited about that. There there was a time at my business where we were generating a ton of leads, for every webinar we did, every event we went to. It was hundreds, sometimes thousands of Lee, and none of them were converting. Right? Mhmm. So, yeah, I turned to my team and I said, I don’t want you to ever mention a lead number to me ever again because I don’t care. Like, I wanna know how many qualified leads and how many new customers we acquired, and I wanna know how A, like, A recurring revenue we just we just added.

Dale Bertrand [00:32:26]:
Right? Like I want I want metrics that we actually care A. But but I I Lee, I totally get what you’re saying is because a lot of time marketers get excited about, about a metric like likes. Right? And that’s a vanity metric. I’m sorry. It’s an indicator that there’s some interest, maybe. Sometimes it is, sometimes it A, sometimes it’s fake. But traffic is the same thing where sometimes it’s the right traffic, sometimes it’s not.

A. Lee Judge [00:32:54]:
Mhmm.

Dale Bertrand [00:32:55]:
So traffic up into the A, what does that really mean? Not a lot. I’ve been saying this for years before AI. And now that traffic is going down A brands are seeing, well, if they’re doing the right thing, brands are seeing revenue actually go up. They’re like, hey. Wait a minute. Like, we thought traffic meant more revenue. What’s going on? It’s like, well, those things were never, as correlated as you thought.

A. Lee Judge [00:33:19]:
Yeah. I’m I have a video. We’re actually in A right now. It’s called Stop Measuring. And I don’t mean to exactly stop all measurement, but I’m encouraging them to understand the difference between a micro measurement, like A like or follow, maybe a micromanagement measurement of that piece of content, because you want to know if your content works or not, but that’s a micromanagement. But to get to what we talked about a moment ago, what management cares about, I always encourage marketers to get into the marketing, get into the sales meetings, get into the meetings with the c suite if possible, and A. Listen to what matters to them so you don’t make the mistake of reporting on likes to a c suite executive.

Dale Bertrand [00:33:59]:
So then, Lee, what do you say to a marketer who’s Lee, I don’t know how to do that. Like, that’s not even my job. My job is to create high quality content. Or my job is to optimize the website. It’s not my job to optimize the business.

A. Lee Judge [00:34:15]:
Then you’ll end up saying it’s not my job. Like, I don’t have a job. So here’s my answer to that. Because I’ve been in this that that job in that office is not my job because I got fired. So here’s my advice, because I’ve been in that position many times, and it was A, kind of the depth of why I wrote the book, Cash. As a marketer, whatever you have to do to get into those meetings, it’s almost like your company speaks a language and you don’t know the language is being spoken in that part of the company unless you’re immersed in it for a moment for, for meetings. So if I’m a content marketer and my job is to create content, but yet I don’t understand how I’m being measured, I may say something like, hey, boss. I’m working on a piece, about this new product.

A. Lee Judge [00:35:03]:
Can I sit in on a sales meeting, sit in and see what’s being talked about so I can understand the customer better? I can understand the objections that we’re getting from the customer so I can write better content. Meanwhile, my other ulterior motive is to be there and listen, to see what measurement matters to the executives. Because if I create the most amazing piece of content A it doesn’t affect any of those sales business figures, then my job Lee, shelf life is limited. So every marketer needs to do whatever they can to get their ear into a sales meeting, a leadership marketing. Otherwise they’re going to find themselves talking a language like likes and follows that doesn’t matter to the executive.

Dale Bertrand [00:35:48]:
Yeah. I I love that. So I agree with all of that. There’s also another scenario where there are marketers where the leadership is telling them what the leadership wants. Where they’ll say, you’re a content marketer and what we want out of our content is sales. So Lee want you to, sell, you know, A, however many units of this service or however many widgets by the end of the month. And the marketers are thinking well, but I don’t know how to do that. I know how to write content.

Dale Bertrand [00:36:17]:
I know how to get eyeballs on the content. I know how to make sure the content work is high quality by whatever definition they make up. Right? But I don’t know how to actually generate Lee, do customer acquisition with content. And and that’s that’s a really tough place to be because that means that you you I’m trying not to be too harsh, but you’re in a different profession than you think you’re in. Lee. Like you’re in you’re in the, wordsmithing profession in some cases, not the marketing A. Mhmm. Because marketing is about generating customers for a business.

Dale Bertrand [00:36:53]:
And and that that can be really A. And there are a lot of businesses that hire content marketers or other types of, like, technical creatives that think they’re aligned on the the purpose of the A. Lee, what the job is for. But but they’re not. Like, we’ve all seen this when you you work with a creative that acts more like an artist than a, let’s say A business oriented, you know, marketing creative. And and that that can be really tough.

A. Lee Judge [00:37:29]:
I was in a conversation on a a private thread community recently. Someone was looking through resumes of marketers and they were just like what you said. They weren’t really ready to be marketers. They came from a creative space. And my hypothesis is that A past ten years, especially over, over COVID, we had lots of people who became social media experts A because they were good on Instagram, they labeled themselves as marketers and now they’re applying for jobs as A. When in A, they may be social media creators and don’t understand the job of marketing. And I don’t know if they’re if they do get a marketing job, how long lived that job will be unless they learn more about the business. Yeah.

Dale Bertrand [00:38:14]:
I mean, one quick example of that, I mean, there are folks out there who are really good at getting eyeballs content, videos videos on video feeds, like the right thumbnails, the right the right topics, all of that, but that’s very different from optimizing a a video channel to target an ICP and convert that ICP into taking action, into basically moving moving to the next stage of your funnel. Like, those are A those can be opposing forces. Right? So if you’re A business owner, maybe a CMO and you hire somebody who has expertise around TikTok or YouTube channels or something like that, You’re actually hiring the wrong expertise because they’re A be really good at building A, but it’s gonna take you a while and you’re gonna spend a lot of money before you realize that those subscribers don’t convert into customers.

A. Lee Judge [00:39:12]:
Well, they’ll man, I gotta pause with that for a moment because A beware. A lot of your marketers are excellent at a tactic of getting eyeballs A not getting business. So that’s, that’s a strong point that I hope everybody takes home content. Cause I, I believe in it. So Dale, before we close out, can you give us our, like I said, you’re my go to SEO person. So give me for the marketers who are worried about, or trying to understand where to go next. What is Dale Bertrand’s State of the Union address for SEO today?

Dale Bertrand [00:39:47]:
Well, I got into SEO, like, fifteen years ago when it felt like the wild wild west. It felt like nobody really knew how to do technical optimization and link building and, building the right content. And then the social aspect of A, like how does it fit in the organization so that you can get all the resources that you need to actually make SEO happen. And the reason why it was fun was because we had to figure it out as we went A. And there was a lot of experimentation A the field was just wide open. Interestingly, that’s a lot of like what it feels like right now. So I feel like we had this period of time where people A themselves the delusion that SEO was all figured out. And then all of a A, it’s different.

Dale Bertrand [00:40:34]:
And I’m thinking to myself, A, like it’s fun again. We get to figure out this new technology. We get to figure out how to use the new technology. We get to figure out how the search platforms are using the technology. We get to brainstorm some new campaign ideas, some new content formats. We get to AB test a bunch of things. Try try out all those content formats and and, strategies that we came up with to see what works. And that’s what SEO has always been.

A. Lee Judge [00:41:02]:
Wonderful. Well, Dale, you’re a road warrior. Where can we find you? Where can we learn more from you? Because I I promise A who catches Dale at an event, that’s the session you wanna go to. That’s the workshop you wanna go to because you will come out learning tremendous amount of information and feeling better about where you’re heading your marketing career. So, Dale, where can we find you and connect with you?

Dale Bertrand [00:41:22]:
So I post a bunch on LinkedIn, Dale Bertrand, my feed on LinkedIn. And then I also have my website fireandspark.com. And if anybody wants to talk or you want me to take a look at your website, I’m dale, d a l e, at fire and spark dot com. So I’m happy to give away my email address too, and, happy to talk to folks.

A. Lee Judge [00:41:42]:
Excellent. Thanks again, Dale. And thanks to the listeners. If you’re listening to the podcast and want to see Dale and I, video of the podcast and others are available in the podcast section of contentmonster.com. Catch you next time.

A. Lee Judge [00:41:59]:
Thank you for listening to the Business of Marketing podcast, a show brought to you by contentmonster.com, the producer of b two b digital A