Episode 225 – Rand Fishkin

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Marketing Guides for Small Business podcast. I'm Paul from Changescape Web and I'm joined by Ken Tucker from Changescape Web, Jeff Steck from Telerica Systems, and Ian Cantle from Outsource Marketing. And we have an awesome guest today, Rand Fishkin. He's the CEO and co founder of Spark Toro. Is that how you pronounce it? Former co founder and CEO of Moz and co founder of Inbound.org and author of the book Lost and Founder. So we're going to be talking to him. He's an SEO expert, a heavyweight in the SEO world. So we're going to be talking to him about, like, what's coming up. So, Ken, start with you. And Ryan, thank you for being on our podcast. Appreciate it.

Yeah, my pleasure, My pleasure. I just want to. I just want to confirm so that everyone knows I haven't done SEO in seven years. I really have no idea what's going on in that field and I don't want to present myself as something that I'm not. So lots of marketing experience, obviously, SEO for a long time, but not since 2018.

Yeah. Okay. All right, Rand, anything else you want to say to introduce yourself real quick?

Oh, gosh. Well, you know, in addition to running SparkToro, I also run another company called Snackbar Studio. So for those of you who are in the world of indie video games, we should have our first title, the Snack Bar at the End of the World, out at the end of 2026, which is quite exciting.

Very cool.

All right, awesome. So, Rand, one of the things that I've seen from you recently is your focus on zero click search and zero click marketing. You wrote a paper or an article recently that talked about only about 36, 37% of Google searches in the US and UK result in a click to the open web. Can you explain what zero click search is and what does it mean for small businesses who rely on organic traffic?

Yeah, yeah. So essentially, I'm sure you have all had this experience. You're at the grocery store, shopping, maybe you got friends with you. It's very hectic. You pull up your phone, you search Google for Moroccan spices, for chicken marinade, and then you got to scroll down and you click on one of the results that you think is right. And then the recipe website loads and a little video is over on top of all the information you're trying to get to. And it's extremely annoying. And so you click the back button. This is 2015 Google. Well, fast forward 10 years and Google has realized how frustrating that experience is. And so instead of forcing you to click, they have kindly summarized from the top 10, 20, 50, 100, few hundred sites. They've summarized the most common spices that appear on those pages around chicken marinades, similar to how a large language model would, and then give you those ingredients right at the top of the webpage so you don't have to click anything. The results are instantly there. And anyone who's done this knows that Google Weather does this. They do it for maps and addresses, they do it for flights, they do it for hotels, they do it for sports scores, they do it for where can I watch this show? They'll instantly give results. How old is Paul Ruddy? Anyone want to guess? He's shockingly old. It is, yeah, yeah, he's. Well, I think he's 50. Yeah, 54, 55. He's 10 years older than me. He looks like he's 20 years younger. It's flipping annoying. Anyway, Google can give you these answers instantly, preventing or preventing the need for a click. And that is what is called zero click searches. It's a term coined by actually DuckDuckGo's Gabriel Weinberg in 2011. And in 2019 when we did the first study, Ken, first study around zero click searches, we found that 50%, it was like 49.6, 50% of all Google searches ended without a click. Today that number is 60%. And as you pointed out, there's another 5, 6% that's going to Google's own properties. And so the open web is receiving about a third of all the search traffic that Google conceivably might send, which, which really disrupts a lot of things for publishers of all kinds, but certainly small businesses too.

Yeah, absolutely. Are there more industries that have been more impacted than others that you've seen? Yeah, I know you have several.

Yeah, yeah. So the, the biggest one in our recent study was arts and entertainment. So I mentioned the Paul Rudd search. Right. If you're searching for things around movies and television or art galleries or concerts, all that type of information, Google is doing a really great job of summarizing and answering that right up front. And then there's industries that are barely affected, things like heavy machinery and engineering. Google's not providing a ton of answers of, you know, what type of pipe fitting can I use for this particular heavy water distillation process? They tend not to answer those types of searches. And so look, this is a, you know, if I were in search, if I were in SEO, I would be thinking about, are my queries affected and how much? And I think the bigger question, which I'm sure all of you folks have been thinking about a lot, is, is traffic still the right KPI? Do we really care about traffic? Like, you know, if I run a plumbing business or a landscaping business or a real estate, you know, I'm a real estate broker, or I'm an attorney, an estate planner, do I care if people get my contact information directly on Google versus on my website? Do I care if they're calling me because they saw my number on Google Maps instead of on my website? Why is traffic the thing that I'm worried about? Right. Web traffic is just a, in many ways, a vanity metric. Right, right. It's sort of like social media followers. It doesn't turn into dollars, you know, it turns into dollars. Phone calls and emails and requests to do business.

Yeah, absolutely. Do you see local search being affected in the same way? You know, like if I type in Plumber near me.

Okay. This is a frustrating reality of how clickstream data is provided. So in order to do these studies, sparktoro, we work with a company called. Well, previously we worked with a company called Jumpshot. Unfortunately, they're no longer around. Now we work with a company called Dados, which I like very much. They have an excellent clickstream panel. Clickstream panel means you basically have millions of devices. So, you know, phones, desktops, laptops, where every URL that the user visits in a browser, Firefox, Chrome, Edge, whatever you want is recorded and then and timestamped so you can see sort of how long is being spent on each page. You can see how many visits go to various websites and individual URLs, then that data is sent to a broker, you know, a system that essentially anonymizes it. And then they will provide sort of anonymized, aggregated information to folks like me. SparkToro pays a healthy amount, but certainly not as much as many. And from that we're able to tell things like, hey, this website is growing, this website shrinking. People who land on these URLs tend to also go to these URLs or tend to not go anywhere afterwards. And that's how we get the data we get. What it doesn't provide is mobile app data. So if you are on your mobile device and you perform a search in Chrome or the Google search bar for Plumber near me, and you click on something that opens up Google Maps, that unfortunately the clickstream data provider cannot see that. And so we don't Know what's going on there. Those are removed from the sort of zero click numbers. But yeah, frustrating and unfortunately I don't have a great answer to that particular.

Okay, all right.

And, and Rand, just a quick question along these lines. Does, does the data also provide search intent? Like I can see informational stuff being very relevant for zero click, but of course once you get into commercial and transactional, that's the scary stuff for businesses. Is there any correlation to that or even an ability to see that at this point?

Yeah, we did a study, so great question. What I did is I took all of the searches. I think this is in Q4. I took all the searches. I can tell you guys this is a, it's a royal pain in the butt. Took 320 million searches which turned into some, you know, 60 million odd keywords or something like that and ran them through. Well, first I took a thousand random ones and I hand classified their search intent. So informational, transactional, navigational, informational and then which. That's a real pain. And then I tried to get a large language models API, so I tried, you know, ChatGPT and Gemini, a bunch of other ones to classify those searches correctly. And after lots of prompting and some help from, I don't know if you folks know Brittany Muller, she used to work with me at Moz and then sort of became an AI expert over the last decade and she actually helped me figure out how to classify using. I think we used GPT4O mini, which thank God because the costs were not too high, and then classified all the keywords. We got 96% accuracy versus hand classification. So I think pretty solid. And then looked at those terms and phrases and how, you know, how that sort of changed the equation. Not a tremendous amount of Delta, to be honest. Informational keywords are definitely where you see the most instant answers and zero click behavior, navigational is where you see the least. So if somebody types in your brand name or your website, they tend to just go to your website, which is good news. But commercial and transactional, a lot of people a staying inside Google's ecosystem for those types of searches. Going to Google shopping, going to YouTube. YouTube is a huge destination for commercial and transactional searches, which is one of the reasons why if, if I was thinking about, you know, what I might do in marketing, I, I might be on YouTube because I think a lot of people go there to get their, their questions answered and then the click through is generally higher than informational but not massively, I want to say maybe 10, 15% okay. Yep.

Awesome. Thank you.

So you kind of answered this a little bit when you talked about the AI overviews, when it just gives you the answers. And that's, that's one factor of AI powered search. Are there other search factors that are being influenced by AI?

Yeah. Oh, my gosh. I mean, you know, my, my understanding today is that first off, if you're, if you're doing searches, obviously inside of LLMs, right, I go to chat GPT to get answers about these particular things, which it looks like according to the, the latest Semrush study. I don't know if you guys saw that. I just, I was just able to read it day before yesterday and filmed a video about it. I thought they did an absolutely outstanding job. I credit a little bit of that too. I think Mike King was involved in that for my pole rank. He's obviously sort of a genius on this stuff. And their analysis looked at 80 million click streams that visited ChatGPT. And then what they did in there, 30% of those had essentially overlap with the things you would do at Google. They were informational, navigational, transactional, commercial types of searches. 70% were come up with a clever character for my Dungeons and Dragons campaign. You know, like stuff that you, you wouldn't do in Google. Or hey, you know, create Python code to crawl this webpage, right. You, again, not do it in Google. The. So those searches, if you consider that search, those are absolutely being dominated by AIs, what we call AIs, large language models. But even inside of Google, my understanding is that a lot of how Google is evolving from the old link graph and how they're layering things on top of user signals and user and usage signals, which obviously, according to their Department of Justice testimony was, was the, the biggest ranking signal, right, that they use is essentially similar to what LLMs do. So they, they look across the web for trusted sources and if lots of trusted sources mention, you know, the thing you're searching for, plus several brand names, those brand names are associated with entities, those entities are associated with websites. That's what they're going to return first. And so you're getting this world that is less based on the type of SEO that I used to do right back at Moz, which was essentially build lots of links, build lots of content, try and get lots of clicks and more to the world that I think local search has been doing for forever. My friend David Mim, when I was at Moz, we acquired his company and he built out the Moz Local product and things like Citation consistency and getting mentioned all over the web, especially in places that were locally relevant to the geographic area that was hugely important in local search back in those days. I don't know if it still is. You guys would know. But that is kind of what's powering large language models. Right? It's words that frequently come after and around other words. I, Amanda, and I Amanda, my VP Marketing here at SparkToro and I have taken to calling it Spicy Autocomplete, which I think is a good sort of moniker to remember what, what ChatGPT is really doing.

Yeah.

So following up a little bit on the zero click searches, how far do you think Google's gonna go with this? And if they keep going down this path, would it be more important for businesses to be found in LLM searches? Because I mean, you could see if they really go down this path. You could almost make an argument that at some point do you need a website?

Yeah. Right? Yeah, I mean, I think. Do you guys remember back in 2007, 2008, where Facebook was trying to convince every small business that instead of building a website, they should just have a Facebook page because that's how everything was going to be found. And lots of businesses kind of fell for it at the time.

Yeah, they did.

And so, you know, it would not completely surprise me if a long term future iteration of Google is sort of like, why do you have a website? Your Google Maps or local or whatever they're going to call it in 10 years presence is all you need. That, that would not shock me one bit. I think, I think it's completely plausible to imagine a future like that. What I would say though is don't do that today. Like your website is still hugely important. Lots of people, myself included, very often double check information that we find around the web.

Right.

And go to a website. You know, I think one of the worst culprits of this was Google had that restaurant program where they would call and make reservations automatically for you. You guys familiar with that one? Yeah, I can't remember what the program was called. I think it might still sort of exist, but I have, I have never trusted it. Because if you go to a lot of restaurant websites, they'll say, don't use the Google reservation system. We don't answer those, we ignore those calls. And so yeah, tons of people, you know, show up at restaurants thinking Google made a reservation for them and it didn't work. Right. Like they don't want the Google computer calling them and making auto reservations. They're like, yeah, go to OpenTable, go to Resi, go to Talk, go to, you know, our website and make that yourself. I find the same thing with hotels. I had one experience years ago where I booked with a third party platform, showed up at the hotel, they were like, no, we have no record of this. And ever since then I have booked all my hotels through the hotel website because I trust nobody else and it's just not worth it, you know.

And you know what's interesting about what you said earlier is that about the whole website thing is Google Business profile used to have that feature where you could create a simple basic website that's gone.

Huh.

So interesting. So having said all this, how can small businesses and local, you know, local service businesses benefit from these AI search results? How can they leverage that and use it to their advantage?

Yeah, I think, to be honest, this, I, I've said this a couple of times recently. I've only just come around to thinking this is where the future is headed. Weirdly, I think it's PR. I, I think the, you know, if we've rewind 50 years, right, it's you know, 1975, 1980, whatever, and you are thinking about, hey, how am I going to promote my local small business? Doing things like, you know, sponsoring the local girls soccer team and getting your name in the paper and you know, fixing the whatever problems in your city and getting local folks to cover you as a result of that, that was huge, right? You know, running TV ads and billboards, radio, all that kind of stuff. Being on the local radio show, being the person that the, you know, journalist called when there was an issue around this thing because you were notable, that's what got you into people's minds as the sort of local leader in your space. And LLMs work this way. They work this same way, right? Where essentially they're looking for, hey, what is the estate planning person or business that gets mentioned the most when we see estate planners, Seattle, Washington being talked about on the Internet, you know, what's in the Seattle Times, what's in the Capitol Hill blog, what's in the Stranger, what's in the, you know, COMO4 news website, what's on the local NPR station, all of those things. And you know, now of course with the distribution of media, we're talking about 5,000 other small local influencers and social media accounts and YouTube channels and podcasts, blah, blah, blah, blah. So there's way more opportunities. But Google, all the large language models, Bing for sure, they're all looking at who is being mentioned the most around this topic and the way to change that, the way to get yourself into those results is, is not classic SEO stuff. It's, it's pr. Right. How do I do things that are worthy of being talked about in the news by the press, by influencers, and then have them actually mention me, my brand that. I don't know? I actually think that's way more fun than doing SEO personally. It's. Right. It's a lot more creative practice and sort of like, okay, how do I, you know, come up with something people are going to talk about? Yeah, but it, it's, it's working too. There was a. I can, I can point you to it later, but Stephen Lord, I think is his name, put up a LinkedIn post where he showed how he basically did just a little bit of this stuff and changed the results almost overnight. I think it took like a week or something in Google for how they referred to him and his business and what he came up for at the top. And he was like, holy crap. Just changing the language around what I'm associated with has this almost instant effect.

Wow, that would be really interesting to see that it comes back to that after 50 years.

You know, look, I think, do you, you know, my, my early days in SEO, there were all these people who were like, all this manipulation stuff that Rand, Fishkin and Moz are talking about, like that's gonna, you know, that's just while Google is trying to figure out their algorithm, eventually they're gonna get to a place where it goes back to the basics of, you know, is your business liked and trusted and the most relevant and the, you know, most well known for this, for whatever you do. And it's a little funny to be, you know, I, I sort of poo pooed that for 20 years and now here we are, I'm kind of like, ah, I think they finally figured it out. Look at that.

You know, one of the things that I do when I give talks a lot is I use the old grumpy man in the chair ad and you know, you can Google it. Look up grumpy man in the chair ad. It was from the 50s. It was to sell print media. And it was the fundamentals. It's the, I don't know your business, I don't know what you stand for, I don't know who your customers are now. What are you trying to sell me? And yeah, that's what you're talking about. We're not gaming the system with keywords anymore and just writing content for keywords to draw Traffic, because we'll talk about that in a minute. But like you said, that's a vanity metric now. It's the business. It's what do you stand for, what are you saying and what are you doing and how are you solving people's problems? And we're kind of going back to that. You're absolutely right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think a lot of those, it's a ton of those fundamentals and the only. Really, it's not new, but I want to say the only thing that is become much more powerful than years past is how notable are you? That notoriety, that sort of association from sources of influence in my field or my local area when they talk about the problem I solve, I am frequently or most frequently mentioned that tends to have outsized impact in all sorts of modern discovery systems, social media platforms, content platforms like YouTube and, and certainly now, you know, Google and large language models. Yeah, it's not always the greatest thing. Right. I think like a lot of people point to the abuse of these systems through there's sort of this way that you can game the algorithm by being very extreme. Right. And so, for example, in, in political discourse, many people point out that, you know, 2024 has far more extreme left and right views than 1984 or 1994 or something like that, 1992. And I generally agree with that. And I think most of that is because, you know, algorithms push the stuff that is most extreme. But you can take advantage of that from a, a marketing perspective, not necessarily by going political, but by doing things that are unusual, doing things that make you stand out from the crowd. I mean, it's been, gosh, has it been 20 years since Seth Godin wrote Purple Cow but seems to be more relevant now than when it was written.

Yeah. And you know, a lot of it goes back to trusting credibility and that's why Google reviews are so important.

Yeah, people.

That's a good point, Paul.

Yeah. I think one of the things that, one of the things that I do see language models getting smarter about, that I don't see social algorithms getting smarter about is a, a degree of. They look for trustworthiness. So, you know, your social algorithms look for engagement and things that predict return engagement. And so extremism and you know, what are outrage and anger, you know, emotions that, that kind of trigger those types of things tend to garner a lot of engagement. Hence you can game a lot of social systems with them. That does not work well with large language models, doesn't work well with Google. If you outrage and anger, lots of your customers, for example, or potential customers. You will not perform well in Google. You won't perform well in large language models. Oh, you guys are going to love this one. I got an email yesterday. Oh no, it was a LinkedIn message from a guy who was pointing out and he'd written about this publicly. So I can, I can send you the link. He was pointing out how Chachi bt I think this is for an Australian company. Chachi BT was giving an answer anytime you asked about this particular company or this field giving an answer that this particular business was too expensive and shouldn't be in your consideration set. And you know, the, the business owner and the, the guy who's doing the marketing were very upset about this because it's super inaccurate. Like they're one of the less expensive providers in this particular field. Turns out they. So they, you can do this in chat GPT where you say, hey, can you provide the source for why. Why this business is too expensive? And, and search GPT? I think if you have that turned on, will, will cite one Reddit post from seven years ago where someone with like three upvotes where someone had written that the business was too expensive. That's it. That's the only citation that was in the language model for that particular thing. And so changing that can change the outcome. Right. Getting a bunch of Reddit posts saying they're not too expensive, they're affordable, those kinds of things can change the outcome of what the large language model returns. So this, it's influenceable and can be relatively fast if you know what to look for and know what to change.

So just like we used to say Google yourself or Google your business once in a while just to see what people say. Now it's like go into chat GPT or cloud or and you know, have a conversation with the AI about your business and yourself just to see what it says. Yeah, good tip.

Yeah.

And ask it how to rank better.

Right.

It'll tell you.

I want to say there's a. Oh man. There's a new tool that is. Some folks are working on like around this type of stuff where you can figure out all the sort of prompts that people might give an AI around your particular business.

And I want to AI for AI prompts.

It's getting so meta people. Yeah, I'll see if I can find one of those. It's fascinating what people are building around this, which no surprise, this is obviously a needed service. Cool.

Hey Rand, one of the things we saw in your study was it talks about how Google has a preference and it's no surprise actually, but it has a preference for sending traffic to its own properties. And I, I think the stat that's in your study is that 30% of search clicks are sent to Google properties like YouTube, Google Flights, Google Maps. You talked a little bit about that. But how does this impact competition especially for small businesses? Yeah, well, and what can they do about it?

So the good news for small businesses is a lot of that traffic that is self preferencing behavior is going to Google Maps.

Yeah.

Which I would generally argue is very similar to going to your website. Right. If someone goes to your Google Maps listing or they're whatever, searching for hotels in Milan and they, you know, you are coming up highly because you're very well rated by guests and you fit all these criteria, whatever, that's, that's probably a good thing. I don't know that Google is really stealing traffic from you, to be honest. I think that much more affects the publishing world and especially the ad revenue driven platforms. Right. So if, if you were a content hub who monetized through display advertising. Yeah, man, it, it is brutal. Like you can see all these businesses in that sector just getting destroyed by you know, Google Update after Google Update and I, I don't, I don't know that I would really invest in those types of businesses today. I think that that's a, it's a little bit of a losing proposition unless you can find a way to be subscriber and subscriber funded. But for a small business, especially a local small business, Google stealing your traffic to Google Maps is not a bad thing. I, I think again I go back to traffic might have been a vanity metric all along. And, and what your KPI should be with the thing that you really care about is sort of sales growing people's, you know, searches for your particular brand being notable in the media and sources of influence that your audience pays attention to, those things really matter because that's what's going to drive business and keep you in business versus your competition. Google stealing your traffic. I don't know if I care.

Yeah, I mean it's essentially when, you know, back in the day of Yellow Pages, you know, people going to Google Maps or getting pushed to Google Maps is essentially Google saying, you know, here's the business in the yellow Pages, to take an old metaphor or yeah, you know, yeah, awesome, right?

Like, yeah, I don't, I don't totally care if someone finds my phone number or my email address or my, you know, whatever sign up form via These places versus via my own site. And I, I know a lot of small business owners who, you know, they measure their marketing success by how many calls did we get, how many walk ins did we get, how many sales did we get?

Right.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, there was a long time. There's a long time where like in SEO world we'd poo poo those guys and we'd be like, hey, you got to pay attention to your website traffic and your rankings and maybe not. Right?

Yeah, you know, marketers.

But, but you as the business have your North Star metrics.

Right, Right.

It was interesting. You know, you said talk about, we talk about credibility and trust and Google uses backlinks for that. You know, it's like, are the backlinks to this website coming from a credible source?

Yeah, I, to be honest, I don't, I don't have a good sense anymore, like I did back in my mods days of how, how important links from important places are versus, for example, a brand mention. Right. So if, I don't know if the Seattle NPR station mentions Geraldine's, my wife's, you know, new book that came out, is that not as good as if they link to her website with the page where you go to buy the book?

Oh, I think it, I think it is. Yeah. I mean, I think brain mentions are very important.

Yeah.

Yeah. So it's one, it's one of these tough things where I, I don't want to say links are dying because I don't, I don't have the data to show that. But my, my suspicion is that links, the value of links are on the downswing and the value of mentions and brand notoriety is on the upswing. That's certainly true for a large language model. LLMs don't give two craps about whether someone links to you or not. And to be honest, you know, if I think back to my SEO days, that is such a freeing concept. It is so delightful to think, you know what, I just need to be mentioned here. I don't need to care about a link because, man, I don't know about you guys, But I spent 12 years, like, begging people to link to me.

Right?

And it was the worst, just the worst. You know, going all these like, whatever, journalists or blogs or websites and being like, hey, I saw you said something nice about us. Would you please put the link in? It makes a big difference.

Yeah, Google has alluded to that. They say links are still important, but they've basically, they haven't come right out and say it, but they've kind of hinted around that moving forward, links are going to slowly become less important. And I think it's what you just said, it's brand mentions are gonna become more important.

Yeah, I mean, thank God. The era of begging for links just sucked.

Yeah, absolutely.

So we've kind of talked around the zero click marketing and you know, you, you said, I think in one of your blogs, zero click marketing is the way things have to go. And in your study where you Talked about the 332 million, I think, wow, that's a lot, a lot of data points. But you said, and I'm looking at your article now, from 1997 to 2017, search was an excellent place to start marketing. Today, search is largely a reward for doing marketing right everywhere else. Can you kind of dig into that in the zero click era and how it's driving things? What marketing success or what places businesses should be putting their marketing? We've hit on some of it a little bit. I just kind of want to wrap it up in one. One nice question here for you.

Yeah, so I think about sort of all the, all the elements of. Yeah, like you said, Jeff, you know, the 1950s model of marketing or the Ogilvy era of good marketing, which is do people know you? Do they like you, do they trust you and do you stand out from the crowd in a unique way where the value proposition that you provide is substantially better than all your competitors, at least for a subset of your market? And my sense is that from all the studies we've done over the last seven years at SparkToro, this is the direction that the Internet is moving in, the discoverability Internet is moving in. There are absolutely, don't get me wrong, there are tactics that are unique to each platform, unique to each form of marketing, each channel that can make you stand out in bigger ways? I don't want to poo poo those, you know, whether it's, hey, links are still working in Google and you know, if you have a great way to get lots of links from lots of sources, sure, whatever outrageous content or emotionally driven engagement bait on social media can still drive, you know, clicks and engagement there. I agree. But long term, I think that a lot of these fundamentals are what all the algorithmic based discovery systems, from the classic ones to the social ones, to what YouTube is trying to do, what Facebook's trying to do, what Reddit's trying to do, what LinkedIn is trying to do, and what Google is trying to do, all of these are moving in this direction of are you A credible business that people know like and trust. Are you right for the type of person who's looking for this particular business? Right. There's a lot of customization that goes into Google Search. There's a lot of customization that goes into large language models and AI tools that these platforms know a lot about you or whomever is doing the searching and those that that bias will be introduced into the results that they serve. And so if you are the right choice on, along all these vectors for these searching customers, you're going to be the one that shows up. When I say SEO or search is a channel that rewards people who've already done marketing. Well, what I mean is you get your business to be known like trusted notable, have that unique value proposition and have those associations talked about across the web that's going to get you to the top of the results whether you're doing classic kinds of search marketing or not.

And then that body of work, that reputation, like you said, that's raising your chances of appearing in the zero click results being taken. If you're on the Google Maps, use the example a minute ago of one of the zero clicks or Google stop referencing is going to Maps. So you win the maps, right. There's work to be done there. And the reputation, the reviews, the content you put out there. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, yeah. I think this future is, you know, if I sort of think about it at the core level, it's really what's the value you're providing to your field and your customers and are you able to build some notoriety because of that? What's going to make you, what's going to make you stand out in that field. And I don't, you know, I don't think a lot of the tricks and tips that often powered, you know, how I'd help people in search 10 years ago, 15, 20 years ago, most of those are slowly or have or quickly disappearing, right. The hey, I can use a bunch of, I'm sure you guys remember this, like a bunch of anchor text links and if I get people to use the right anchor text and point to me, I can, you know, what do we call that like Google bowling, right. Or for example, I can do negative things to my competitors, right. Point bad links from bad places and get them removed from the results or downranked in the systems. I, I hope, I don't think that works anymore. Keyword stuffing, you know, that's, that's going away. Yeah, yeah.

Google has figured a lot of this stuff out. But you know, and given Google's propensity to send traffic to their own properties. I can see where having like a YouTube channel would be even more important. I mean it's important now, but I can see where that would almost become a requirement.

Yeah, yeah, that wouldn't, that wouldn't surprise me in the least that you know, a lot of the future is play toward these platforms self preferencing behavior. It's all, it's already true. Like can you really have a successful local business with no Google Maps listing or presence? Like that's, that's really hard to do. Yeah. At least in, in you know, sort of developed economies. I think in developing economies is a different story because there's a lot more kind of local just geographic behavior.

Right.

That happens around that. But man, I, I don't know if you can reasonably have a hotel that functions in developed country with no Google Hotels presence or you know, if your airline refuses to participate in Google flights, like. Yeah, yeah, doesn't go so well.

Yeah. We had Mari Smith on a couple of weeks ago, maybe a month ago or so and she was talking about how Facebook's algorithm now is less follower driven. As a matter of fact, followers are really falling out of favor very quickly and there's a new opportunity for businesses when they create content, for that content to be, to be shown to people who've demonstrated similar likes or interests. So it's much more interest based. Therefore there's more virality potentially available again on that platform than there has been in a very long time. Kind of leads to my next question which is content marketing in the age of zero click searches. You know, you've, you've got to find that, that content that's going to resonate. It's different than what, it's not a, it's not a 2500 word blog post. Could be, but it's, it, it's not necessarily that anymore. We've talked about video. How do you see that kind of taking shape? And you know, one of, one of the things that I immediately think about is you know the, the plumbers out there who own their own businesses, they, they are not going to be comfortable getting in front of the camera doing YouTube shorts or Instagram reels. So how do they, how are they going to be able to survive this and, and, and adapt or will they?

Well, yeah, let's, so I'll answer the latter part of your question first Ken, and then, and then come back to the former which this has always been true if you are good at promotion and marketing and you know, sort of Being charismatic in front of a camera or on, on the written page. For the last 200 years, you've had a competitive advantage over all the other players in your field. Right. So, you know, go back to, I don't know, 1800s Old west, and if you were really good at sort of, you know, writing up flyers and making them compelling and you're a great illustrator. Yeah, you could make your tavern, like more notable than the other guy's tavern down the street. That that's the same kind of advantage that you have today if you are very personable and good at explaining things and, you know, good at making connections in your, you know, local plumbing field. Right. That, that it's just fair or not fair that that's how a free market economy works. Right. Especially one that has media, free and open media. I think, I think that's far preferable to a model where the only people who can show up are the ones who pay. So, you know, right. You take the good with the bad. Going back to what Mari said, I 100 agree with her that so TikTok years ago, and I, I actually kind of hate this about TikTok, but I also recognize the ingenuity of their invention, which was essentially that TikTok said even when they first came out, we don't care how many followers you have. We don't really care that much about engagement streaks. Meaning like every post that you put up does really, really well, or every, in their case, every video that you put up does well. Instead, what they looked at was how do we addict the most people to watching a, you know, a short video and staying on the platform? And all they looked at really was the consumers amount of consumption, amount of hours spent and whether a video predicted that someone would go away or would stay. And that innovation in sort of, you know, algorithmic bias meant that followers lost their value inside of TikTok. I think there was a notable study a few years ago that pointed out that of all the, all the social media platforms, a TikTok follower was worth the least. Because essentially, you know, if you have a YouTube channel and you have followers there, you have a Facebook page and you had followers there, you know, go, go back in time five years, or a Twitter account. Like I had a Twitter account with half a million followers, and this is pre Elon, right. So that the platform is still sort of functional. And the number of people who would see each post that I made on Twitter was extremely high because so many people followed me. And so Twitter would show my posts to a large Number of people. Now, they would bring that down if I included a link in that post. They would bring that down if my last few posts didn't do well on Twitter. But TikTok is sort of agnostic to whether an account has lots of followers. That doesn't mean that they're going to show those followers that account and the posts that they put up unless they believe that those posts will addict those people more to the platform, keep them on the platform. And so the same thing Mari was talking about, that interest based rather than follower based thing meant that you could be a totally new account. Your very first time on TikTok, post a video. And if the algorithm liked it, because it kept people on TikTok, kept them scrolling, kept them watching, that could be shown to millions or tens of millions of people. Kind of a, you know, very, very big change. And now all the social platforms are copying TikTok because they see how successful that model has been. Yeah, arguably from a societal standpoint, you know, you can see lots of researchers saying, like, guys, this is bad. This is really, really bad. You don't want to incentivize addiction to short form videos. You know, we could, we could get into the side effects of that, which I, you know, the Internet has kind of termed brain rot. Right. Where you, you know, have no attention span and, you know, you sort of believe everything is, that's in your feed is like what's going on in the real world versus using your own experiences to determine that, but contributing to idiocracy. Yeah, yeah, right. Like, I think it's, it's quite, it's interesting to me that, and I think this is, you know, I'll tell you guys personally, I was in favor of, I know, you know, Trump initially proposed this, but I was in favor of the Tick Tock ban. I thought it was one of the things that was actually very wise from his, his first presidential term. I was glad to see the Biden administration continue on that process and, and start to make Tick Tock illegal in the US And I was frustrated when, you know, Trump sort of changed his mind about Tick Tock when he came in the second time. I, I recognize that, you know, Tick Tock was helpful to him in his second, in his, I guess, third presidential run, but I think, I think he should have stuck to his guns. I wish he had because I, I think the, you know, the Chinese version of TikTok, the, the one that's popular over there, different algorithmic system and it is the, the Chinese government sort of recognized that they had an addiction problem and so they like controlled on this and yeah, I, I get, I get nervous friends. Like I think the direction that these, these social media systems go around engagement, addiction focused engagement is. Yeah, I feel bad for the kids, man.

Yeah, absolutely.

So ran paid search. Lance, I think you have some research that said click through rates are going down and like 1%, only 1% of Google searches result in a click on a, on a Google Ad. How's that going to play out from an effectiveness standpoint? I mean it. Can't imagine was happy about that but.

So I, I actually think Paul, one, one notable point on that. So 1% of all Google searches result in a click on a paid ad. But Google came out with a statistic, I want to say it was last year, it was in one of their earnings reports where they said that paid ads show up on about 20% of all searches. So essentially if you, if you take those two numbers together, that means that when paid ads are showing, they garner about 5% of the total click through rate, which is very similar to what people say in Google Ads is the average click through rate on a paid ad around 5%. So I would, I would keep that 5% number in mind for when a paid ad is present on a Google search results page, they're getting 5% click through. If you include the 80% of searches where there are no paid ads showing, it's 1%. The, that percent has actually stayed remarkably consistent for the last, I don't know what it is, five, six years, like it was going up for a long time now it's been remarkably consistent and essentially Google has been growing their advertising revenue two ways. One, more searches, more searches per searcher and more total searches globally, which you know, our data or data says data bears that out. And two, higher ad prices per, you know, advertising unit. So the, the average cost per click.

Yeah, higher cost per clicks.

Yeah. Right, right. And so the, you know, that's what the Google earnings report suggests and that's what the DDoS data backs up. So I paid search, it's kind of a frustrating thing for me. You know, I think that a ton of the paid search, especially in local small business is like, yeah, there's, there's the local small business ads. Those can help you somewhat. I don't, I don't feel too bad about those but I know for a lot of small business owners it's sort of a, it's like the new mafia, right? It's like Tony Soprano comes to your house, he's like oh, what a nice brand you got over here. It would be a shame if one of your competitors was to rank above you for that. You know, like, and, and that's exactly what Google's doing.

Right.

They're basically saying, like, oh, people are searching for your brand, but we're going to let your competitor be on top of the results and get a bunch of those clicks. If you don't pay us protection money, it sucks. You know, like, it is best analogy I've heard.

I love it.

Yeah, a lot of small businesses just, they don't have the budget to spend enough to get results and show a return. And that 8020, that must, I'm assuming that's a, a global stat because about 100% of the searches I do have have Google Ads, so.

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, if you think about all the searches for like Moroccan chicken spices, you know, chicken marinade spices, or.

How old is Paul Rudd?

Yeah, exactly. There's, there's lots of searches for, you know, celebrities who are wearing swimsuits or, you know, whatever it is, like that there's no ads for those. And that, that is a tremendous amount of activity in Google.

Yeah. And I was gonna ask you how small businesses should adjust their ads in response to the increased costs. And it's like the only answer was spend more money or don't. Don't pay for ads. I don't know what other answer there is.

The, the. I think the other answer is you have to be able to improve your conversion rate.

Right. Right.

So if, if you can, you know, figure out what your potential customers want that you don't provide or objections that they have to using your service that could be overcome in some way. Pricing the type of product or service you provide. The, the, the way the person answers your phone at your business, the credibility that your website seems to have, whatever it is, like, oh, I'm in this neighborhood and I wasn't sure whether you covered this neighborhood because I couldn't find my neighborhood on your list. And it's like, well, I have your zip code. Well, how could you think, okay, you know what, include neighborhood names on your, on your, where we Service page. Like, you know, whatever, whatever little thing it is that you have to overcome, if you can do that, then your ads become essentially a higher return on investment because more people who click on them are going to buy from you. And so you can afford these higher advertising prices because you're getting the higher conversion rate. I can't tell if Paul agrees with me or if he's Very upset.

Yeah, no, I, I, I agree with you.

Okay.

I was thinking if we could have. We got a lot more questions, maybe we could do this. Do this again. But, you know, we're coming up on an hour. We could do one more question and come back to another time, because we've got, like, what?

Yeah, we got lots.

Yeah.

Rand, don't feel bad. We can never read Paul.

It's the body language.

I live in the same city, and I've only seen him maybe a handful of times in the last five years.

So he's a mysterious enigma. It's part of his charm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Let me throw out the last question. Or maybe, maybe the last. We'll see if we can squeeze one more in after that. Jump to audience research. You know, you had a great article. The biggest mistake we make when asking, where are my customers? So you talk about misidentifying their behavior, your audience's behavior. What are the biggest errors that small businesses make when they're researching their audience? And what are some better methods they should follow?

Yeah, I bet you guys have seen this. I see it on a lot of. Not just small business websites, but a lot of people ask, how did you hear about us? Right. And, and then, unfortunately, I think, unfortunately take away the wrong lesson from those answers. So I. This will be extremely obvious to everyone, but for some reason, business owners still do it. If you ask people, how did you hear about us? And you get, let's say, five or six, you know, general places where lots of people hear about you. Maybe, okay, this, like, local radio station where we're running ads and where we have a presence and, oh, I heard about you through a friend. Oh, I heard about you through Google. I heard about you through Facebook, you know, whatever it was. If you invest your marketing based on those responses, you will never reach the people you didn't reach. What if there are lots of people on channels 6, 7, and 8, but you don't get any of them because the people who already come to you, of course, don't come to you from 6, 7, and 8 because you've never invested in 6, 7, and 8 and have no presence there. This is the biggest problem. So rather than asking your customers how they heard about you, what you really want to do is find out where your audience goes when they have the problem that you solve, when they have an interest in the category that you're in. Let's say, I don't know, you do landscaping, right? And it turns out, gosh, a lot of people are discovering landscaping options on Pinterest. And you have never thought about investing in Pinterest at all. So I, you know, I go to my local, like Seattle Pinterest. I go to Pinterest and I look up Seattle landscaping ideas and I see like moss gardens and what you can do around the trees in our neighborhood and stuff. And Pacific Northwest, it rains all the time. Right. We have this like, you know, very temperate rainforest climate. And so our backyard options are very unique to our unique climate. They're if you just search for landscaping stuff ideas and see Palm Springs landscaping ideas, like, that's not going to work no matter how cool it looks. And so, yeah, like that's where I find my landscaping stuff. If you have no presence there, you can't get customers from it. This is why I think audience research, Jeff, is so crucial. Right? And there's three ways to do it. One is interviews. So finding people who are potentially interested in landscaping or are homeowners or whatever, and then talking to them, one, on one phone call, video call, in person, coffee shop, whatever. Two is surveys. So you can run surveys with a variety of research firms. You could design one yourself and send it to your email list. Those tend to have a lot of bias in them too, especially if you don't get all the survey methodology stuff right. Again, problem with sending it to your email list is you will only find out things about your existing customers instead of the broader group. And the third one is to do data that's passively collected at scale. So clickstream data is a form of that. A lot of social media data is a form of that. Search data. Right. Keyword research is technically a form of audience research, is one kind of audience research. How many people search for this versus that? My, you know, my strong bias is to do that audience research with passively collected data. SparkToro is obviously one of those places. But doing your keyword research in your, in your Google search tools, whatever tools those are using, place like similar web, they have a nice free version that you can use that'll show you people who visited this website also did these things, right? Visited these things, which is similar to what SparkToro offers. You can get social media research through platforms like Audience with an S. But it, it might be a little expensive for, for small businesses, but those kinds of things can really help passively observe data at scale. I am a huge proponent of this so that you don't make these biased mistakes based on just the people you already reach.

That's a great point. I mean, one of the things that we do we all come from duct tape marketing background and, and John Janch has been a huge advocate for a very long time of interviewing your customers, you know, to find out, know what, what, what do they say about your unique value proposition? But that's great. You're reaching those customers. That may help you infer who additional ideal customers are. But again, you're still not talking to that huge potential universe out there because you're not, you're not tapping into where they're actually spending time online. So can you talk a little bit about what SparkToro does and, and what it offers and you know, how, how, you know, like marketing firms could, you know, or small businesses directly could leverage the platform?

Sure, yeah. So I like to present sparktoro as you know. Here's the best way to do audience research, which is get your a list of all the people who are interested in your field and might become customers. Get a list of their home addresses, learn how to lock pick, go break into their house, steal their phone, get the unlock code, and then look at everything and record everything that they listen to, watch, subscribe to all their email newsletters, you know, their search history, all that kind of stuff. Now that is illegal. It is super unethical. I recommend that no one does it, but it is technically the best way you could possibly do audience research. The next best thing is taking a sample cohort of people who match the criteria we're going after, looking at their behavior and then extrapolating out, okay, the broader group of all the people in the world who do this probably have similar behaviors to this. That's what SparkToro is. So you could go to SparkToro and say, I want to research what interior designers in California are paying attention to. And SparkToro could tell you which podcasts are most popular with them and what subreddits they Visit and which LinkedIn accounts are they're paying attention to and which platforms they use most and least, and whether ChatGPT is bigger with them or smaller with them than it is with the average American web user. Keywords that they might search for in Google, not all of those will be relevant to whatever you're doing, but that information and the specific parts that are relevant to your business can be huge. Right. It can tell you things like, should we be participating in this social platform or that one, do we need to worry about LLMs with our audience or not? Which, which words and phrases might we take and put into our Google search tools and do some SEO for what are content topics of interest that this audience cares about. That type of stuff I think is invaluable. You know about, I want to say about 1500 folks subscribe to SparkToro today to get that type of, of information and another 150,000 use the free version. So we have a robust forever free version that anyone can try easy to sign up for and play around, see if it's valuable for you.

Okay. Awesome. Thank you.

Yeah, my pleasure. And guys. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me on this was, this is a fun discussion. Lots of, lots of interesting topics here.

Yeah, absolutely awesome.

I think it was really good. Ian, you want to take us out?

Sure. Thanks Rand, for being on the the podcast, for joining us today and sharing your great wisdom and thank you to our listeners and viewers for being with us today. Remember to share, remember to check out Rand's business, Spark Toro. And yeah, until next week folks, keep calm and mark it on. Ciao for now.

Goodbye.