The New Rules of Search in the AI Era

Intro - Outro [00:00:00] Welcome to Contrary to Popular Opinion, a podcast hosted by Bougie Day Digital. In each episode, we bring you provocative topics and novel perspectives around leadership, business, and marketing that defy the norms because exponential growth demands unconventional thinking and visionary action. So open your mind and let's get into this week's episode.

Kelly Hey, everyone, Kellen McGuire with Bougie Day Digital. Excited to get into today's topic and talk to today's guest

Todd Hey, everybody. It's Todd, Kelly's partner. It's Monday, August 10th. I can't believe school goes back, I think tomorrow, in session, which is weird because if you're a kid and you have to go back to school on August 11th, I would be furious.

Todd I don't know what happened to the school, world. But anyway, that's happening tomorrow, so for those of you who have kids, good luck sending your kid back to school in the middle of summer. I would be not happy. but, today I'm excited because we got episode [00:01:00] three of this three-part series wrapping up.

Todd We got Tanner Zoromski here again, senior director of all things organic coming to us live from Santa Monica, California. and special guest today, who is going to debate Tanner on the world of paid, not organic, the world of paid, is our senior director of all things Google and Google search on the paid side, Fernanda Ford.

Todd Welcome, Fernanda.

Fernada Hello. Thank you. Happy to be here.

Todd And Fernanda joins us... Well, I don't know, where are you? You back home, or are you in Idaho for the summer still?

Fernada I'm still in Idaho.

Todd Okay. good luck there. I know it's hot and smoky, or at least it has been. Hopefully it's gotten a little better.

Fernada It is.

Todd all right, so today this is the third and final episode in this series, winning in the AI area, SEO, LLM optimization, and now today we're adding the third layer to this, and that is the paid side of things. So we spent the [00:02:00] first two episodes with Tanner talking about the evolution of search, the evolution of SEO.

Todd Now we have a whole nother acronym we all get to use called GEO or AEO or, I don't know if Tanner's gonna invent anything else we can, EO, whatever it is. but for this last episode, I wanna talk a little future forward thinking again and talk about, how do businesses win in this space, and then we're gonna plug in again that, that sort of third piece, which is the paid side of it.

Todd So all right, let's talk about the new ecosystem, big picture. We've talked about SEO, we've talked about AI, and now we have paid. And so Tanner, for you and Fernanda, or maybe Fernanda, you chime in first, are these... How do you see these things? Do you see them as separate disciplines, or do you see them as all holistically integrated?

Todd I know as a company, just for the record, we tend to try and treat it all

[00:03:00] holistically integrated, but oftentimes we run into a client where we're doing the paid search and they've got a different agency doing SEO, AEO, and it makes it really, really difficult. I don't really ever- I don't think that's necessarily the right way to do it.

Todd I think the way we're doing it where we control it all and have line of sight, transparency, and visibility into the optimization of both organic and paid is the right way to do it. What do you think, Fern?

Fernada Yeah. I think, we look at paid search and organic as a holistic approach. We are two different people that manage EVOD sites of Google Search, but one doesn't mean we, we don't need to have the other one.

Fernada We're not competing for clicks right here. we're completing... competing for that search demand. so making sure we have coverage on the paid search side of things. It's also important that we also have it on the organic. That way we can give Google, [00:04:00] better signals and then understand better what incrementalities are, what the customer journey is within Google Ads.

Fernada So I don't think one- offsets the other one. They both work in tandem. That's how I see

Todd it. T- Tanner, why do you, you- so you were at an SE- well, you were at a search agency before, and you were in charge of organic like you are now. But why do you think organic and paid get bifurcated by brands? Is it, why, what do you think the reason behind that is?

Tanner Yeah, that does seem to be the trend, Todd. I will say, you know, in my career, at, at my first agency, you know, coming out of school, I was put in charge of a holistic search project where essentially we were trying to coordinate insights across teams. the bifurcation of the two channels is, is something that's very interesting to dig into.

Tanner I would imagine it's just because of the inputs that are needed to win in each of those channels, right? So on the paid search side, you're dealing more with budgets, [00:05:00] ROAS, targets, rights, ad building, whereas on the search side you're dealing with, you know, technical configuration, content development, right?

Tanner It's, it's a different set of inputs, which I think leads people to believe they're different channels, when I think fundamentally both require, you know, the same type of principles to be successful.

Kelly Yeah, I think that's really interesting when I see two sides of that coin, right? I see definitely how they work hand in hand and there has to be a closeness to them to be able to share those insights and those understandings and where one stops and the other begins and how they work together.

Kelly But I think one of the challenges in bifurcating them is one of the, one of them is really how you bill for them and, and pay for them in the way that it's being worked upon, right? Because it is such different disciplines and types of work, I think even we find ourselves having to explain to clients why you wouldn't typically charge for SEO services the way that you would charge for maybe paid media management, given that it's can often be [00:06:00] hours based or time-based or effort-based instead of management-based.

Kelly you, can you talk a little bit about, again, the types of work and maybe from a billing perspective the way clients should expect to need to pay? 'Cause one of the things we talk about a lot, Tanner, is, you know, SEO has traditionally been sort of a, a byproduct of time and money, right? the more you spend, the faster you can do it.

Kelly If you wanna spend less, that's fine, it's just gonna take longer. Maybe you can dive into that a little bit and how that's very different.

Tanner Yeah, absolutely. As far as, you know, how do you structure an SEO engagement, you know, we always try to work backwards from whatever goal you're trying to drive, whether it's revenue, leads, calls, whatever KPI, you know, that the business is predicated on, we always start there, right?

Tanner From there, it's, it's all a question of scale. How big is your websites? You know, what is your keyword profile looking like? How many daily visitors do you have, right? And we really try to build engagements that are commensurate with, you know, the size of the project, and that is typically what is the fundamental difference between SEO and paid search when you think about just the [00:07:00] pricing model that goes into it.

Tanner and of course, hours are needed. The bigger the site, the more hours it will take to get everything done. there's also a number of tools and tech that do go into SEO that, you know, paid search is a little bit more independent of. So there are a lot of ways that the channels kind of stack out differently.

Tanner But, you know, what I try to encourage clients to think about when investing in SEO is, you know, what is the brand's footprint you're looking to convey within digital, right? It's not so much, okay, what keywords are we changing here? What kind of content are we deploying there? How do we wanna show up organically when people are searching for us?

Tanner And are we a business that only relies on advertising to drive value to our website? Or is there some other differentiator that makes people want to show up?

Kelly So one follow-up question, then I know you want to move on to that, Todd. So, and maybe Bern, you can weigh in. Tanner, you may have a, a- an option here.

Kelly So Todd and I often debate the concept between kind of generalists versus specialists in certain fields and channels, and I [00:08:00] often tend to very much gravitate towards the absolute specialist, being s- very, very good in a singular lane at scale. But generally, that argument comes search versus social versus programmatic versus analytics, those types of things.

Kelly I'm curious as to how each of you would think about would the typical person who is great at paid search also likely gravitate towards SEO work, or would that typically be a different skill set and personality type? Bern, maybe you can start. Yeah.

Todd Are you trying to get them to fight, Kelly? A little

Kelly bit.

Kelly A little bit, yeah. No.

Fernada We don't fight. We don't fight. so definitely both have a different, set of skill sets that are needed. but I think all the foundational pillars of what we're trying to do are the same. so we're going after that search demand. It's just the way, how we're going after, those clicks are differently.

Fernada on the SEO side, it's more about what [00:09:00] content I have up, on the website. Am I covering the pain points from, those people? On the paid search side, it's more about are my ads ready to convert that person? so how do I structure the campaigns, the keyword structure? Am I giving Google the right signals for Google to look after those, people?

Fernada So it's really more about how we building this environment for Google on the paid s- search side, and then how SEO is doing it on the organic side,

Todd Tanner, you got, you got anything you wanna add to that, or I'll move us into the next one.

Tanner You know, I, I just, just thinking about the scale differences between paid search and SEO, paid search should be more of a scalpel.

Tanner I feel like it should be very tactical, targeted. We should look at what the keywords are that are driving ROAS and try to build campaigns around those. on Google, there are about 15 billion searches a day, which is a pretty remarkable scale. about [00:10:00] 50% of those end up on a zero-click search with an AI overview answering it, 35 end up on a organic results, and the remaining percentage falls into paid search.

Tanner So if we just think about the differences in the size of searches and total addressable markets that are out there, organic and paid, it both drive similar functions, but the overall ecosystem that they exist in is a little bit different.

Kelly So for the listeners, the way I would summarize this is broad strokes, obviously there's exceptions to every rule.

Kelly It sounds like the people that do paid search are best served to s- to focus on paid search, and there's a unique set of skill set that would be to SEO, where both ha- it benefit from having a shared knowledge of each other, a functional knowledge, but the actual work specialty is generally gonna be bifurcated in specialties as your best bet.

Tanner Yep.

Todd Yeah.

Tanner Absolutely.

Todd all right, so let's, let's go right into just the paid search side, Fernanda, Fern. I'm gonna [00:11:00] call you Fern in the podcast. People are gonna see Fernanda, but I'm gonna call you Fern, 'cause that's how you like to go by. let's go to paid search in an AI, this new AI landscape. So now we're starting to see Google using a whole lot more of their AI, answers.

Todd So where ads used to appear, right, like we used to in the old days, it'd be like, man, if we could bid for position one, two, or three, or the very first thing someone sees, and I always lobbied for, well, you should have a two horses in the race, so the very first organic result should be right below the very first paid result, that way you have the greatest domination of those 10 results on a search page.

Todd So now we have the AI answer sitting on top of sponsored ads or organic. what is that doing so far in what you've seen to paid ads? And I know there's gonna be, I think at some point in time there's gonna be a paid ad component to the AI answer [00:12:00] or some version of that they're unveiling. So what are you seeing so far in how the AI summaries are impacting just good old-fashioned sponsored paid search ads?

Fernada Yeah. So Google also released on the AI experience, which comes to- came to, compete with ChatGPT, Claude, that is taking off slowly. we've seen the ads starting to show up there as well. this is very recent. so how things are changing for us as paid search managers, we're no longer looking at things so granularly.

Fernada we used to look at keywords, bidding strategy. if we can set, bids for ads during the day, we could do that. so that's been evolving, especially this year. so now we're shifting things towards audiences. Do we have the right audiences? W- do we have the right campaign structure? Are we giving

[00:13:00] Google the right, differences between branded and non-branded campaigns?

Fernada Are we integrating, our Google Ads platforms to the CRM systems that the client may have? So are we setting up Google for success in the AI world? So that's really what, we're shifting towards. we are not longer controlling all the levers, that we used to do 10 years ago or even five years ago.

Fernada we're shifting more towards, implementing all the data that we have available from the business or the advertisers and making sure we're pa- passing that data to Google Ads. That way we don't ask Google to give us a blended outcome. so when we do incrementality tests, like we're gonna talk later, we have the accou- the accounts set up in a right way where we can leverage all the AI, experience coming up, so.

Todd so Tanner, is part of what you're doing on your side of the fence

[00:14:00] impacting the AI summary that Google is returning, and so now Fern's having to contend with it on the paid side and somehow they're gonna ... Google's not in the business of drawing people away from clicking on ads that advertisers are paying for, so they're not gonna, they're not gonna shoot themselves in the foot.

Todd I'm sure they're smarter than that. So are you now competing for sort of eyes and inventory through the AI summary with Fern on the paid side?

Tanner You know, working together, I feel like as opposed to competing is how I would frame it, you know? but it is funny just like historically looking back at the whole rollout of AI Overviews.

Tanner first when they were introduced, I don't know, Fern, if you noticed this, but AI Overviews were what appeared before anything else, even ads. it actually took a couple weeks, maybe months, for Google to sort out whether or not it wanted its ads to appear first or the AI Overview. It was, it was just a wild dance because Google had realized, oh, we'd actually launched a product that's too good [00:15:00] and now we have to rearrange things.

Tanner so now they're of course working on the integrated solution, which Fern referenced, and it's just been fascinating to kind of follow movement, the movements of Google in rolling out this new technology.

Kelly How have the two of you seen sort of the compression of opportunity with the introduction of sort of the AI summaries?

Kelly And by that I mean traditionally when someone conducted a search, we talked about this a little bit in the last session, Tanner. Traditionally when someone conducted a search, you would generally have the paid results that would show up, and then the organic where you were hoping to rank kind of left over.

Kelly And it was always someone was gonna conduct a search, and they were likely going to click on something, either the paid or they would scroll past the organic. And then I know Google certainly rearranged the SERPs, the, the search result page with, you know, you'd have your localized results, and then you'd have your Google My Business results or your listings.

Kelly And, and this real estate, particularly in a mobile environment, would get very noisy. But now you have the AI summaries, and so you have what I, what we've deemed [00:16:00] as zero-click searches. So how much are you guys fighting over what I would call the leftover activity, right? So some percentage of people now are gonna conduct their search, they're gonna get their AI summary, and they're never gonna click on anything, so neither of you guys can capture that click.

Kelly And the remaining people who are still willing to click on something, you have the real estate of paid and the real estate of organic, and I would imagine that's a shrinking pool. So I guess the first question is, is, Fern, when you're looking at search volumes of which you can bid in, are you seeing that compress and compact where there's a smaller pool to fight for of even traffic that could be captured?

Kelly And how does that balance with the real estate change?

Fernada Yeah, for the current structures that we have, we've seen, search volumes dropping for certain clients, so there is, difference there. But also we've seen, how, keywords are evolving, so no longer short keywords, are taking the lead.

Fernada We've seen how longer tail keywords,are [00:17:00] taking more kind of like the lead. It's a low percentage still, but more conversational type of keywords are, appearing in our search terms reports, which is kind of like something new. so that's where we're balancing things, the search volume from, short-term keywords and then the long tail, keywords as well.

Fernada And that's how we kind of like evolve our strategy, when it comes to with keywords specifically and show up for those ones on the se- on the search terms. I mean, on the, on the search results.

Kelly So Tanner, does that mean that if it, if you're not, if you're not capturing organically in the AI search and they're skipping past the paid, is, or is the true organic what used to be the SEO result?

Kelly Is that, is that just the sweeping up the leftovers now?

Tanner Yeah, a little bit, 50%, over 50% of searches are now zero click, but I would call that traffic that was unintentional anyway, right? So I wouldn't think about that as something that was out there, you know, for businesses just because the, the click-through rates [00:18:00] are so low and a lot of those are just top-of-funnel informational queries.

Tanner So not a huge concern. Organic still gets about 30% of click-through rates, right, overall. and it, making sure you show up for that, making sure you're there across all of the keywords you wanna rank for is still essential. especially if people are doing more long-tail searches like Fern had mentioned, and you wanna have that breadth of content that's out there to be more available for AI tools, results, and really just to demonstrate your expertise as a brand.

Kelly So both of you brought up something I think is worth digging into. I know I'm eating your time, Todd, but I think this is valuable. so Tanner, the question that you brought up that I think is really interesting is, so historically, again, with the old real estate layout, it was always said that the organic rankings had a huge drop-off rate from position one to position two to position three, and a massive drop-off rate once you got to page two and things like that.

Kelly So how has that shifted with the c- competition for the lower volume of intent-driven searches and the lower real [00:19:00] estate of organic? How important is it to rank in the top three, top five, page one versus what it historically was?

Tanner It's becoming more important than ever and on the subject of page two, there's of course an SEO joke.

Tanner Kelly, have, have, have you heard this one? Where do you, where do you hide a dead body, right? the second page of Google results. So, you know, forgive me and my digital marketing humor, but, yeah, you have to be in the top three, okay? Position one in this day and age gets about 15% of the click through rate.

Tanner Position two gets under five, right? and then it trails off from there. So, what we haven't really taken account of is the different result types that you can appear for organically, right? Map packs are becoming essential for businesses with localized queries. Product results. If you look at for, you know, some sort of e-commerce good, you can see a SERP that is, full of different, you know, types of product listings.

Tanner There are all sorts of different ways to show up organically that you have [00:20:00] to be creative and present in. and I think that offsets any sort of, you know, difference around AI.

Kelly Yeah, that's interesting. So Fern, the thing that you made me think about that to dive in is you talked about the shift into phrase and broad matching, and I'm curious how you are seeing kind of two parts of that shift, right?

Kelly is it still singular keyword focus or is it more of that phrase and broad matching? Has that fundamentally changed the approach to bidding types and strategies on that? And the 1B to that is, are you starting to see search intent change around more research type curiosities where it does show intent versus exploration and conversational searches, and are you able to start to differange- differentiate between this is more of an AI-driven phrase where someone is seeking out an AI response versus this is a true I'm looking for a search result that I'm gonna click on.

Kelly Has that started to become more and more clear in the human behavior?

Fernada Yeah, we're starting to seeing, more of that. It's not very prominent right [00:21:00] now, but we're start- we're starting to seeing how people are shifting from very short tail keywords like- I don't know, a product specifically, and then evolving to more like research-related keywords.

Fernada so that's something that we make sure we have that set up within our accounts. making sure we show up for all the AI experiences, within Google, and by that, we make sure we have broad match enabled and then the new product, AI Max. so that way we are showing up and we have visibility, on those experiences.

Fernada the difference between now and two years ago is not huge, but it's shifting, every month,

Kelly And is that something that just takes the experience to adapt to and to know what to do about that? Is that something that, again, if you were to have someone who was just starting out in their search career and just following the Google best practices or what you're told to do, [00:22:00] w- is that something that is being taught and uncovered, or do you have to have the nuance and the history to kinda understand what to do about that or how to adapt to that?

Todd Yeah, so that goes to how your structure is, set up. If you don't have a very strong structure and, you don't understand the pain points of your customers that you're looking ... of your customers, you won't be able to tell Google what type of, intent you want from those people. so r- it's more important than ever that your keyword list and structure can show Google what the intent is on the p- person, because otherwise we can't take the seed, seed keywords that we call and then expand them to the AI experience, Is- isn't, isn't it fun ... I think about this all the time. The me- Fern, do you remember the old like sort of phraseology, "Oh, that's long tail"? And long tail was a search that somebody had a much longer search string [00:23:00] query, right? They just typed a much longer search query into the Google search bar. And I was like, "Isn't that just what people are doing today and getting an AI summary?"

Todd Like, is long tail- is this just really the new era of the long tail search?

Fernada Yeah, I would call them conversational keywords. So that's the- But yeah ... that's

Todd the new label. Okay.

Fernada Yeah. Yeah, because it's different from long tail. You know, long tail, it would be, I don't know, four words. Now we're seeing full-blown questions on the search term reports, and we call them conversational, so yeah.

Kelly That'll be really interesting because I never thought about that as we talk about how they're gonna monetize, because now on search, once you give a, give a inquiry, if you're looking at the AI results, you can have a follow-up to that and kinda have a building effect on your search, and that's never existed in search before, right?

Kelly It's one phrase or you do a whole new search, but that building effect in the AI, I never really thought about how that'll ultimately play into the monetization. 'Cause what if [00:24:00] four inputs in you have something that can be sort of monetized or paid into? interesting.

Todd I would imagine that's what you would hope to have.

Todd all right, let's, let's move into, let's... Now, now we've debated the difference between Tanner and Fern. let's talk about Together, Better Together. So- We would all agree that organic and paid should be done together in,in a war room where we game everything out and we put the best strategy for both paid and organic to work for our clients so that they win, all around.

Todd So if you're working on the same brand, you guys can take this in both directions. If you're working on the same account, Tanner, what would you ideally be informing Fern about, the, and the paid search team about what you're doing, and vice versa, Fern, what would you want to be informing Tanner about?

Todd So if I'm a brand manager right now listening to this, I wanna know, like, how is my organic and search working together, and what are those two teams conversing about and sharing?

Kelly Or put another [00:25:00] way, if they're not working together, what's the biggest miss or biggest risk?

Todd Yeah. What am I missing if that conversation's not happening?

Kelly Fern, do you wanna

Tanner kick

Kelly us off?

Fernada Yeah. so the first thing I look is when I join the, the client calls with Tanner, is to see if there are any keywords that I'm missing. Are there any new keywords that, that a, that brand is ranking for that we didn't think about, that it's actually ranking on the organic side?

Fernada So that's the one thing. The first thing. Then we also have the opportunity to see landing page, performance, from organic. Are there any, landing pages that Google think they are very relevant to the business, and therefore is ranking that specific landing page? So in my brain, I start thinking, "Hey, I have a group of people that are in their research phase.

Fernada Can I actually use that, landing page to send them to that landing page instead?" so I'm [00:26:00] not asking them to do a harder conversion, would it be a lead or a purchase? that way I can align their intent of what they are looking for with the landing page, and therefore giving them a better experience.

Fernada So those are the things I look at when I look at, organic performance, so that way I can enhance the paid se- search of things, side of things. Yeah

Tanner Yeah, there have been a ton of ways, Fern and I have collaborated across both paid and organic search to approach it holistically. One that I've been most excited about recently is how, search is able, paid search is able to get traffic faster, able to get people on landing pages, converting, engaging with those landing pages, and it allows us to reach broader audience segments.

Tanner So if Fern has broad match keywords or we're going after a specific topic, those landing pages are able to, reach audiences more quickly, and then we're able to see what the quality of the engagement is on that landing page. So for [00:27:00] example, if an ad were to rank for a how-to keyword or a best type of qualifying search term, we can then work backwards from the, engagement rate on those pages to create SEO content, right?

Tanner So we already know that that traffic segment is qualified because of paid's ability to rank and drive KPIs with those. However, it now informs our organic roadmap as that is something that we wanna try to rank for in the future because we know once we get the traffic organically, it will convert and engage.

Todd Kelly, any thoughts on that?

Kelly Yeah, I mean, I, I think it just goes to show how important there are subtleties that can be missed, and it goes through a common theme that I've been talking about a lot which is so much of what is coming together is not captured in what we tend to see and measure and look in reports.

Kelly So much of it is in what I'd call missed opportunity. It's the not knowing what could be and missing out on it, and that often gets lost because so much of what we do tends to [00:28:00] operate on if it's not broke, don't fix it, and that is an interesting thing when we're performance-driven and it's always what could be.

Kelly And so you just heard a couple of things that maybe fundamentally wouldn't show up as broken, but what could be if you were to look at the user journey and a landing page that's being underutilized or a certain audience or a competitive set that's l- ranking organically that you need to be aware of in those types of things.

Kelly They inherently wouldn't show up as you absolutely need to do this, but if there's a disconnect between these things, it sounds like there's so many things that could be better that just simply would go lost and unaddressed until you're scrambled and forced to say, "I need to come up with solutions." And I do think that, that, the, there's such a delay in the work that gets done in the field we work on because no one's being pushed to do it until the sky is falling and leads are down and now you have to stress test and problem solve for.

Kelly but it becomes really interesting when you think out on what, what could be

Todd that's a lot, Kelly, for a [00:29:00] Monday. Gee. way to, way to just run- railroad our brains on a Monday afternoon at 3:37. I do wanna talk a little bit about measurement before we wrap up. that's, that's always the word of the day.

Todd you know, there's larger macro sort of business measurement, things that we do. There's very direct channel-specific measurement things that Fern contends with within the paid world, and Tanner contends with within the organic side. this is for a- all three of you. Kelly, maybe you kick it off.

Todd what actually matters in measurement when it comes to looking at organic and paid, specifically within the world of search? Kelly, if you were advising a CMO today who wanted to engage or was engaging in a really well done- Organic and paid machine, how would you advise them to look at measurement, incrementality, which one's influencing which at a [00:30:00] macro level?

Kelly Yeah, I'll be really curious to see kind of where Fern and Tanner go with this. I'll set up some of the challenges that I have and the thought processes as I go through. So search is so interesting in the sort of marketing ecosystem, right? Because it is generally the last thing someone does before they're ready to act, which is historically why it's been so valuable.

Kelly But when you take that into account, you look at it is generally going to be driven and downstream from all of your other marketing activities, right? If you're running se- social, if you're running programmatic, if you're running branding, if you're running events, anyone who's not acting right then and there, who's not clicking on an ad and acting, you're usually gonna make your way back via a search.

Kelly Not a lot of people are gonna bookmark, not a lot of people are gonna direct type into the URL bar. You're generally gonna come back via some kind of a search. It's just what we've all been trained to do. So that creates a massive incrementality problem and an offensive and defensive strategy problem, right?

Kelly Because you don't wanna lose out on the opportunity that [00:31:00] search is, right? If someone's bothering with a high-intent search, you don't wanna risk them being distracted on their path to you and going to a competitor or going somewhere else because that's your best chance to convert. But you also don't necessarily wanna pay for something that's gonna happen anyway, or is likely already well in there.

Kelly And so how do you judge, is it worth paying if this person's 90% likely to end up at me, 50% likely to end up at me? You know, it's a, it's a real highlight on that traditional sort of old-school marketing challenge of 50% of my marketing doesn't work. I, or I just don't know which 50%. Like search, I think, is a real microcosm of that challenge, where it's like, do I pay for it?

Kelly Do I risk not paying for it? Is it gonna happen organically? Is someone gonna steal it away? And just given where it lies in that, I think I'd love to hear Fern and Tanner how you guys think about it. Again, when I say offensive/defensive, defense, I mean kind of what I'm describing, which is someone's doing an intent and I wanna make sure I don't lose them, but they're

[00:32:00] likely in my vicinity.

Kelly They're, they're gonna come my way anyway, but how much do I wanna make sure I get them, even if it costs me a little extra, versus let it happen on its own and maybe I lose some of that percentage? And then offensive is out there where they have an intent, they haven't chosen o- me yet, and I'm fighting everyone else for they're gonna pick something, pick me.

Kelly And- So that's one point, and then the other point I'd love to hear from you guys is one of the things we hear the most from CMOs and, and marketers is, "Should I even be buying my brand terms? Is that a waste of money?" you know, should those dollars go out? And there's-- It's such a broad spectrum that we answer that.

Kelly I'm not gonna get into the different ones. I'll let you guys talk into it. But from those two perspectives, I'd love to hear what you guys say.

Fernada Yeah. On the branded, side, we make sure we separate our, campaigns to have control over, our branded budget. so that way if we feel like or if we see that organic really has an incrementality, when we turn off or on, Google Search, we try to understand that, and [00:33:00] therefore we can, take care of that really quickly.

Fernada on the flip side, if we are in a very competitive a- auction, it'll always be beneficial that you're present, because otherwise the, the other competitor is gonna take, that click from you. So it really depends where are, are you playing, what type of intent, where you're playing within Google Ads.

Fernada but, we look at how-- what the role is of paid search on the branded side for that specific business. I

Kelly think something you said there, before I let you go in, Tony, I just wanna do it, is I think people forget that the way search is paid for is by an active click, right? And so your competitors inherently have this advantage of being able to entice people to put that bait out there to steal them away 'cause you're not actually paying anything unless you're successful in that.

Kelly And oftentimes it's worth paying extra to kind of competitively conquest and to go out there. And so the fact that there's no risk in paying to be there and potentially take away unless you're [00:34:00] successful, I think creates an even more defensive, mentality and strategy that has to go in there.

Tanner Yeah, I'm typically aligned with a defend the hill paid search strategy. It's important to show up, you know, make sure that competitors aren't stealing your traffic. I will say, in my experience, there have been opportunities or specific businesses that have paused branded search, and I would say this is the minority of them, when there is enough scalable non-brand search volume.

Tanner So when you know there is a big enough market for you to go after, sometimes reaching out and finding those new customers is actually more important than defending some of those returning customers or people who are already aware of your brand. So I do encourage, you know, companies to at least consider, you know, how to distribute their branded search.

Tanner and, you know, when you frame up those tests, make sure that there are two, you know, experts to build those incrementality, views for you to make sure that your dollars are best spent.

Kelly Yeah. I think that's the key, right? Is the idea of incrementality, the idea of understanding what would happen anyway.

Kelly What am I... [00:35:00] It, it's a-- I look at it as a cost-benefit analysis and a risk analysis, right? How much am I willing to leave it up to chance and trust consumer behavior versus how much do I wanna pay to control my own destiny and make sure I capture what's in there? And that's gonna be different from every size of company, risk, you know, the, the outcomes, what the value of all those clicks are and everything.

Kelly So

Todd Kelly, you had one more thing you wanted to jump in before we close up?

Kelly I have one more. A- and Tanner, this comes off of something you said earlier where, you know, you kind of mentioned that you guys are playing nicely together and, and it should be together, and I agree with that, right? When it is- when we're talking about the same brand that you guys are both working on or that we're responsible for, an agency, we really wanna have that cohesiveness.

Kelly I am curious, though, when we look at it from a competitive set where it's not us internally and ourselves, but it's how do we fight the com- the competitive set, right? When do we wanna take that offensive strategy and we wanna steal away traffic or opportunity or capture it in there, [00:36:00] how should a client potentially be thinking about utilization of paid dollars to go capture and steal traffic versus SEO, AEO, take it away and kind of direct through?

Kelly or, are you measuring how do the ... I- if competitors are being hyped up in the AI search results, do you use a- SEO, AEO to go try and take that away, or can you ... Is paid a lot faster way to fight that fight? You know, what's the short-term, long-term in- when you're battling basically out there in the, in the market?

Fernada Yeah, for the short term on the paid search side, we have a way to track, how much, those competitors are a- are willing to pay for our branded term. so we have a way to push that by increasing our spending in the short term. that way we can push them away a little bit from our ad auction. so we have ways, of doing that.

Fernada and then Tanner, I don't know if you, you wanna add anything.

Tanner Yeah, I mean, it's [00:37:00] a fascinating concept, Kelly. because people are going to trust the AI overviews, right? a- and they're not necessarily looking for an ad in AI, at least yet. so short term, lead with paid search, right? And then long term, build a strategy organically to try to infiltrate those results.

Tanner that's probably how we would look at it.

Kelly So i- in its simplest example, right, i- if I'm a shoe company, and for whatever reason if- If you type into, to Google, "What is the best basketball shoe now?" And your competitor set is dominating that for whatever reason. They're way ahead of you from an SEO perspective.

Kelly What is the most immediate, reaction to that, right? 'Cause I would imagine being able to compete with them in the AI saying, "This is the best basketball shoe" and not even having visibility into you as a client, you don't even show up in its consideration set yet. You can't just in a week push in SEO AIO.

Kelly But Fern, are you able to see, hey, this other brand is, is what AI is really gravitating everyone towards. H- how can you show up and [00:38:00] actually compete with that? Does that show up as a consideration of we're not appearing here, and therefore, we have to make up for it over here?

Fernada Yes. That's usually what we take a- take into consideration when we're building strategies or keyword strategies.

Fernada So if we see that another competitor is not ranking for certain organic keywords that are very relevant, to that shoe company, for example, we make sure we're bidding on those keywords hi- higher, so that way we're kind of like the Band-Aid. the strategy for a short period of time while organic is building up their presence because it takes longer for organic to build up.

Fernada So paid search is kind of like an option, to cover those keywords that organic is not ranking in a very quick way, and we're able to see many metrics that tell us if that's gonna be easy or cheap or very expensive on the paid search side.

Kelly That sounds like one of those missed opportunities that did- wouldn't show up in a standard rinse [00:39:00] and repeat blueprint for running a search.

Tanner This is fascinating, ex- this example in particular. You know, best basketball shoe has over 100,000 monthly searches, no ads that I can see at the top of the SERP, and then the two sources of information that are informing the AI overview are Reddit and YouTube. The Reddit post has two up-votes and 40 comments, and the YouTube video was published a year ago and has some likes.

Todd In this example, it actually might be quick to go organic,

Tanner and, and try to work on your organic social platforms, your digital presence, and your just brand footprint, right? Because identifying those opportunities to have inbound marketing as opposed to outbound, I think does lend itself to quality. and, and it- you'll see better click-through rates.

Tanner So it- it's, it's such a rapidly changing environment and it's hard to stay on top of all the trends,

Kelly Apparently we need a basketball shoe company to reach out to us.

Tanner Yeah. This is- I

Todd mean, or you're a Nike's agency right now, and if somebody's listening, you just got in [00:40:00] trouble because- ... if Air Jordan's not dominating-

Tanner Yeah.

Todd that's pretty bad. all right, let's wrap up. Let's wrap up. Tanner, Fern, Fern, let's go with you first, 'cause my mom always told me ladies first, and she would jump out of her grave if I didn't put ladies first. Sorry, Tanner, but ladies first. dig into your crystal ball, one prediction.

Todd what would that be if you had to give a CMO today a, a gut instinct prediction about what you think's gonna happen in the world of paid search in the next six to 12 months?

Fernada I would tell them if you don't unders- really understand your customer journey, you're gonna be dead 'cause we're not gonna be able to structure your campaigns in the right way.

Fernada Tanner is not gonna be able to, structure his content in the right way, and you're gonna be lost in the AI world. So make sure you understand your customer journey. Yep.

Todd All right, Tanner, your crystal ball says what? [00:41:00]

Tanner Build something that's attractive without paying for every visitor. answer questions, provide quality content, make sure that you can service the intent of your customers.

Tanner a- and if you do those things in a good way, people will, just naturally show up on your website, which, I tend to prefer, although no shade to paid search.

Todd There's a lot to unpack there on that one, and we could probably go 10 more episodes on this topic. So, we'll keep it going. Thank you, Fern, for joining us from Idaho, outside of your normal home workspace.

Todd Tanner, hope it's nice and sunny in Santa Monica and the palm trees are lining the roads and it looks like every Hollywood movie that Santa Monica's ever predicted in, 'cause I know that's why you love it there. Kelly, I- all I can say is I bet it's super hot where you're at. and it's pretty warm where I'm at.

Todd thanks everybody for talking about organic and paid. We've been talking about this topic... I've been talking about this topic since Google came out, and launched, and I [00:42:00] still don't know if we have it totally figured out thanks to Google keeping everything in secrecy and a, and a veil of, updates that nobody knows is coming and what it means.

Todd But we'll keep fighting the good fight on the world of organic and search.

Kelly Job security for us, right?

Todd and if anybody's listening and they wanna know more or they want, some brain time with a Tanner or a Fern or a Kelly, you can find us on our website. You can send me an email. thanks very much for listening.

Todd Talk to you soon.

Kelly Thanks, everyone.

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