SERP 101: Why Branding Matters

SERP 101: Why Branding Matters

Sean: You’re talking about Google like it was a sentence and being, and I know that it has launched a couple of AI’s inside. We have Rank Brain just last week. There’s a broad algorithm update, which affected a lot of websites. A lot of our clients as well, mostly in a positive way I might add which I’m very happy about.

But a lot of people tuning in might not have the affinity with the fact that Google is, to a certain degree, sentient already. And we don’t understand how it works. Can you simplify that for us?

Jason: Yeah. I think how good Google is, what it’s trying to do is debatable. But what it’s trying to do is very clear. It’s trying to, firstly, it’s trying to bring the best solution to its users, because don’t ever forget the people who are searching on Google are its users, they might be partly your audience or the people who search for your brand name or who come to your site are your audience. But they’re actually Google’s users initially, in this context, it’s trying to bring the best results as effectively as possible to that user and the result is a solution to a problem.

Be it buying red shoes, be it going to a website, be it finding more about something. It’s bringing the answer to that question or the solution to that problem and it wants to do so effectively and efficiently. And if you bear that in mind, you’re already a big step ahead of probably most of the people in your industry.

And secondly, how does it do that? It used to just count words and count links and say, well, this has got the right number of words and it’s got lots of links. Coming into the site, it’s popular therefore it must be good. That seems incredibly naive and foolish today. Although 20 years ago it was incredibly cutting edge and brilliant and genius, and everyone has gone out and they’re amazing.

Now you think, oh, that’s pretty simplistic. Google, even then we’re saying we want the machine to understand the world much in the way humans do. It should be able to read texts, understand the meaning of that text, and understand the solution for the problem that that page, that content brings to the user.

So it’s doing two things. One of which is building what we call a knowledge graph, which is basically a machine-readable encyclopedia like Wikipedia, but billions of times bigger, And the way they build it, because Wikipedia with people typing all this stuff in, obviously they can’t understand the world as a machine.

If they get people to type it all in. And what they now have is the machine goes around the web and it finds information. It extracts these texts. It tries to understand it much in the way a human would try to understand it. And then it tries; and then it puts this information into its knowledge graph in its encyclopedia and its brain in its mind, whatever you want to call it.

And then it uses that to say, you mentioned RankBrain, RankBrain is aimed at saying this is the intent of the person, even if they weren’t clear. If I just type in red shoes, if Google thinks my intent is buying red shoes, it will show me purchasing options. On one side, it’s looking at what is the intent, on the other side it’s looking at what is the answer to that intent. And the knowledge graph and the content reading that I was talking about are all about figuring out what the answer is you are offering.

So from your perspective, the single most important thing for you to describe or explain to Google in your copy clearly explains to it, who you are, what you do, and who your audience is. What is the solution for what audience and why should you trust me? And copywriting becomes incredibly important in that context because obviously, you want to convince your audience, but you also want to explain to a machine.

I think it’s important to remember the machine will understand, but it only understands within the context of it doesn’t have any imagination. It doesn’t have any culture. It doesn’t have a sense of humor. It doesn’t have a sense of irony and it doesn’t like poetry. Other than that, you can say what you want.

Sean: That’s pretty tough when you put it that way.

Jason: Well, I think, sorry, it’s really important to say. Being clear with the machine doesn’t necessarily being boring for people. I’ve written some really great copywriting that actually is convincing. And you realize that when you’re writing clearly from a machine more often than not, it’s actually clear for the human being too.

Sean: Right. It didn’t use to be that way with the black hat era going on and they’re spinning articles and stuff. But now I get it like things have become so much smarter. Google has become so much smarter to that when you write really good stuff for people, it is able to understand it better as well. And that that’s evident with the work that we do. You and I both know it cause we’re SEO people.

One of the things that I’m wondering about, so whenever I pitched to clients about SEO, it’s going to be all about them and the ROI cause so a lot of business owners, that’s the bottom line that going to matter, you know. How much money can you give back to me if I invest in your company, in my SEO, what’s the search volume that I’m going to get every month, and how much of that am I going to be able to convert to leads or sales.

But I could see that in your case, your branding is more of protecting your brand, making sure that your brand is ranking for what it’s supposed to be. And you’re represented well by your search engine results page. And I wonder, how did you have that conclusion that, oh, this is going to sell well, compared to selling SEO and selling them ROI, which is a lot of business owners like hearing that stuff?

Jason: Yeah. I mean, if you look back at my career, which I’ve now walked you through, I didn’t do music because I thought I was going to make boatloads of money. I did it because I enjoy music and I wanted to play music and entertain people. I didn’t make cartoons because I thought I would make boatloads of money.

I’d made cartoons because I wanted to educate children. I wanted to create something positive for the world, and I wanted to be a blue dog in a cartoon singing silly songs, which is a brilliant job if you can get it. By the way, anybody who’s interested in getting it, it’s a great job. Those are two of the best jobs in the world.

I do things because I believe they’re fundamentally interesting, important, or helpful to people, whether those people know it or not. And I think brand SERPs is a great kind of follow-on, although, but it is saying, Hey, this is really important. It’s actually really interesting. And you will get an awful lot out of it, even though you’ve never thought about it before.

My job is to educate everybody. To say you don’t have to work with me, but think about it. Think about how important that is. Think about how important that business card on Google is for you, for your business, for your bottom of the funnel, for your post funnel clients. In terms of conversions for the prospects, but also keeping those clients on board and not, not having them jump ship because you’ve got a bad result pitching up.

And making sure they’ve got that consistent message all the time when they’re coming to your website. As I mentioned earlier, their journey with you starts when they search for your brand name every time. Most people or a lot of people will come through to your site through Google and that message, they can see it potentially multiple times a day if they’re using your services multiple times in the day.

And you know, that’s kind of message that sticks it’s as important as your home page on your website, I would argue. And from that perspective, I am now saying, well, if I can push forward the idea that this is phenomenally important, even though I can’t measure the ROI. From my perspective, personally, I’m doing something I’m really passionate about, and that is worth making less money as it were.

So if I could make a million dollars doing SEO for people, which I probably could, I would rather make 500,000 doing brand SERPs and enjoy myself.

Sean: And you own the sphere? Cause no one else is grinding himself or herself with that? So that’s brilliant.

Jason: Which puts me in the same situation as I had in Mauritius is I can’t employ people who have got a skill set that suits the job. Because the job didn’t exist before and this niche didn’t exist before. So if I offered and I say, I want brand SERP specialists. I won’t find any.

Sean: Yeah. That’s interesting how you’re going to be able to load up a team for that. I do

Jason: I have taken a team once again of people I enjoyed talking to, that I think I’m going to get on with. And then saying kind of what can we do together? How can we fit you into the team?

One guy was doing client support and he realized he didn’t like client support. He didn’t enjoy it. He felt uncomfortable and we’ve moved on to doing social media videos. And he’s happy a lot and he’s doing a great job.

Sean: That’s awesome. That’s pretty, so that’s some ways off, but yeah. You know where people are happy. I, again, going back to the 50%, if you’re happy with 50% of what you’re doing. Fantastic.