Duane Forrester: evolving SEO strategy for the generative-AI world

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | TuneIn | RSS

photo of Duane Forrester, expert on AI and SEO strategy and search industry veteran — Duane Forrester

SEO has always been difficult, but generative AI takes things to an entirely new level.

Duane Forrester has been immersed in the search world for more than 20 years, including stints as the Product Manager for the Bing Webmaster Program and Vice President of Industry Insights at Yext, where he developed company AI strategy. He also helped launch the schema.org structured-data standard.

Duane offers plenty of AI-specific advice about how to navigate the new search landscape. But he also says that the foundations of good SEO are still grounded in timeless digital best practices: understanding your customers’ needs and intentions and consistently giving them good content and helpful user experiences.

We talked about:

his long history as a search-industry expert and leader
his high-level take on the current state of AI
the true benefits of AI for content and how they relate to SEO
the title of his content-and-genAI cookbook: “Common Sense”
the importance of understanding the kinds of content that are resonating with your customers
an interesting AI-driven SEO-localization case study that was presented at PubCon last year that demonstrates the power of understanding user intent
an overview of the knowledge graph tech that underpins the search infrastructure at tech companies and big enterprises
his predication that the future of search will be knowledge graph to knowledge graph conversations between companies and search engines
the rapidly evolving new world of SEO and the imperative for businesses to leverage AI to keep up with the increasing need to scale SEO operations
the enduring importance of providing a good user experience at the end of a search flow
the importance of delivering content in video format into a search landscape increasingly driven by social media
new search behaviors created by Google’s Circle Search and AR tech like Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses
his observation that search is infinitely more complex than most SEOs can imagine
the secret to search success: attracting attention from consumers, by deeply understanding their behaviors and intentions
his prediction that Apple will launch an AI-powered Siri in September that will thrust ChatGPT into the mainstream

Duane’s bio

Duane Forrester is a distinguished figure in the search industry, with a career that spans digital marketing, authorship, and leadership roles at prominent companies such as Microsoft Bing, Bruce Clay Inc. and Yext. His expertise in digital marketing is complemented by a strong understanding of AI/ML, consumer behavior and customer experience, making him a well-rounded and sought-after professional in the field.

During his tenure at Microsoft, Duane was instrumental in the development and launch of Bing Webmaster Tools and Schema.org, focusing on the needs of webmasters and digital marketers. His deep knowledge of search engines and user behavior contributed to Bing’s growth and success.

Beyond his work at Microsoft and Bing, Duane has showcased his knowledge as a prolific author in the digital marketing sphere. He has written for most industry publications and his two books, “How to Make Money with Your Blog” and “Turn Clicks into Customers,” have provided invaluable insights and guidance to numerous businesses navigating the competitive online landscape.

Today, he, continues to share his extensive knowledge of digital marketing, AI, and customer experience, shaping the future of the search industry and empowering businesses to thrive in the digital era.

Connect with Duane online

Duane’s books

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast intro transcript

This is the Content and AI podcast, episode number 32. For almost as long as people have been building websites, SEO practitioners have tried to get their content to the top of the search results. Search has always been a rapidly evolving field, but generative AI takes change to a whole new level. Duane Forrester has been immersed in the search world for more than 20 years. He offers this timeless advice for coping with the new AI and search landscape: understand your customer’s intentions, and serve them with good content and helpful experiences.

Interview transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 32 of the Content and AI podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Duane Forrester. If you work in anything adjacent to search, you know Duane. Years ago, he was the Bing Webmaster tools, I guess advocate or program manager. He helps launch Schema.org, that ontology that schema that you’re all working towards when you try to promote your content online. He worked with Bruce Clay for a while, the search legend, and for the last seven or eight years he’s been a VP of industry insights at Yext. So welcome Duane. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re up to these days.

Duane:
Well, Larry, I think right now I’m hanging out with you, going to create content. I’m not an AI, this is really me. I am obviously continuing my career, moving in a new direction, excited about the opportunities that AI is bringing, looking at different areas, seeing areas that probably need investment by the leading companies, but also we don’t know what they’re actually working towards. So maybe they have a plan, maybe they don’t. I don’t know. I’m going to knock on some doors and see if I can open some eyes.

Larry:
Nice. So you’re excited about AI and you are as well-informed as anybody. In search, I think if you’re going to publish content online or share content online, you want it to be discovered and therefore a lot of people in the content world follow search. But tell me why you’re so excited about AI. What do you see, especially for content practitioners, what are some of the opportunities you’re seeing now?

Duane:
Okay, this is going to be a two-parter, Larry, because I don’t think we can talk about this without touching on the topics that are negatively related to this. The idea of content theft and things like that, I think it’s important to address those. I can’t say that that’s wrong or right. I will say that I understand where that perspective comes from. I believe that we have to be diligent, watch for it, manage it, that kind of idea. I do believe, however, that this technology… Look, you’ve seen this, everyone’s seen this over the last say, two to three years. Every product and service has had the letters A and I appended to it. And it was a way to attract investment, to attract attention, to get PR and all of that. Whether the product or service actually did anything with AI was trivial. It didn’t matter.

Duane:
It was just like putting the recycling symbol on something. “Oh look, we’re earth conscious. Look at us”. And it’s like, well, okay. But practically speaking, I’m a big fan. I love the efficiencies that these systems… You and I were talking in our prep and I said, “Hey, I have an idea for a business”. And so what did I do? I turned to ChatGPT and I said, “Hey, can you create an outline for what a business like this would look like in the state of California and what you have to do to start that business?” And then I made all kinds of noises like, wow, that’s a lot of work and whatever else, because the amount of information that it gives you is extraordinary. It is in many ways, and I’m thinking ChatGPT as I talk through this stuff, but you could be thinking Claude, you could be thinking Mistral, you could be thinking Copilot, you could be thinking AI Overview from Google.

Duane:
All of these different things are capable of this in their own way. Perplexity and so on, Claude, all of these systems are capable of being that support person, that support mechanism that you wish you had. The person you can ask the dumb question of and they won’t say, “Wow, what an idiot”, they’ll just go get you all the information and they tailor it to the level of the question. So the dumber your question, the more detailed the information, the more intelligent, more developed. And I mean, think about it, we’re talking the concept of prompt engineering here. You give it more, it gets crisper, you give it less, it’s a little fuzzier and it covers more ground. So I think there’s a lot to that. When it comes to content, this is a force multiplier. This is muscle that you don’t have. If you think this is a silver bullet, however, you are going to be sadly mistaken.

Duane:
And the answer to why am I not doing better in search is because your approach to using AI is flawed. And the bottom line is, it’s great for ideation, it’s great for rough drafts, but you still need a human with subject matter expertise to go through that content to make certain that content is accurate, factual, on point, has the right tone of voice. All of that matters. And that’s huge.

Duane:
I think AI, the current systems that we have, the generative AI systems that we’re all familiar with, I think they do a really good job of taking a lot of the heavy lifting out of a number of things. And if you can access tools that will look at large volumes of data, so they will take a look at your log files and they will pull out things that are related that you would never see, that can be very insightful and very useful.

Duane:
And if people are building tools that do those things for you, those can be very useful tools and a wise investment of a monthly subscription cost. I think we’re at the very beginning of this, the very early stages of it, but I want everybody to think back to where we were, I don’t know, I’ll put a number of 25, 27 years ago. Tell me that the industry was substantially different then. It wasn’t. It was all brand new. We were all trying to figure out things. There were a ton of single-use tools out there that did one thing and one thing only, and you were using all of these things and then you were cobbling something together and then you showed some friends and were impressed, and then your problem was resource constraints because you wanted to release it, but you couldn’t afford the bandwidth cost for all of the industry to be pinging this tool and doing things and yeah, all of that all over again but with AI, new technology.

Duane:
And look, there’s a lot of data out there. A lot of it’s competing. Everyone’s saying, “Oh, AI is going to take jobs, it’s going to crush these industry, and do that”. And if you look at the data so far, AI has crushed nothing, it has not taken any significant percentage of jobs. Not to minimize anyone who has been impacted by AI, but I would suggest that the reason they were impacted by AI was not because AI did it better, but because the company thought they could save money switching to AI. I’ve lost track over two years now how many businesses have contacted me and said, “Could I just get rid of all my writers and use AI to build all the content across my entire network?” And I’m like, “Well, you can, but you’ll never rank”. And it’s not because there’s systems running checks in the background going, “Oh, I can identify that as AI”.

Duane:
Those tools are as right as they are wrong, and for a variety of reasons. And if I use it as a base, as a start for something I write and then I go through and edit everything, should I be penalized? I put in my work. And no, the search engines aren’t going to penalize you for using that as a part of your process. Flip back to the earliest iterations of ChatGPT and then Google making announcements saying, “We don’t really care whether you use generative AI for your content”. And then a week later coming out and saying, “Don’t use generative AI for content, that’s a problem”. And then the following month coming back and saying, “Ah, we’re okay with it. We don’t mind”.

Larry:
Oh, interesting. I missed that switcheroo, but that’s interesting, because I think that was one of the things that as soon as GenAI came along and knowing enough about search, I was just horrified at the prospects for just massive amounts of McContent content trying to rank. But what do you think the current state of this, if you were advising the content manager for an SEO program, it sounds like you’ve mentioned several things now about kind of using GenAI to do the heavy lifting, like outlining and analysis and stuff. Is there sort of a cookbook to work from in terms of applying GenAI productively?

Duane:
Yeah, so the cookbook that I would pull off my shelf and open up for you would be titled Common Sense. And I’m not trying to make light of this Larry, but the reality here is if you’re prone to taking shortcuts, you will fail. But that’s the same as anything else, especially in the world of search. Search marketers who are prone to taking shortcuts, looking for the easy way to get the goal, the one thing that will change my program, they are going to struggle with this. The people that understand that it’s a holistic effort, content is one portion of it, and they’re willing to do their part of it, they will have much greater success. More to the point, this cookbook would actually tell you things like, “You better know your customer, you better be talking with your customer. You better be listening to your customer”.

Duane:
So you can’t have an SEO program that is divorced from your social program because your social team is going to see all of the conversations that people are having across social media about your product, services, and brand. They’re going to have an understanding of what the zeitgeist around your business is, and they can share that with you, which will then help you identify what content you need to create to bust myths, to correct misconceptions, to fight FUD – fear, uncertainty, and doubt. And without that direction, you’re doing what, keyword research? Trying to do a gap analysis and say, “Oh, we don’t talk about this blender enough”? No, no, no, no. I want people to think about what resonates and what goes viral on TikTok. There’s a reason the content went viral, and it’s not because the person’s cute, it’s not because they said something funny or there was a sound that was used.

Duane:
It was because they’re picking up on an emotional moment that resonates with a consumer, and the consumer is, “Oh, I’m rushed every morning. I don’t have time to do any of those things. I need this blender, this hand blender, it will change my life because I can load it up with everything. It’s wireless so I can use that battery while I’m driving to work to blend my drink. And then I can flip the top open”, and 50,000 sales later, someone on TikTok is laughing all the way to the bank going, “I pulled on your emotional heartstrings and I got you to buy a product”. It had nothing to do with anything other than finding the right way to attach to the moment emotionally. I’m going to suggest that your content and your focus as an SEO is no different. It’s the same human being that you’re trying to get in front of and actually engage with. So apply these concepts, and those aren’t typically and historically concepts that we worked from in SEO. We worked from keyword research, gap analysis, and then you filled in the blanks.

Larry:
You reminded me that one thing that more you would hope that all SEOs are doing this now, and most of them at least pay it lip service. But what you’re getting at kind of like is very closely related to that notion of user intent, the customer intent.

Duane:
Oh, absolutely.

Larry:
What they’re trying to do and how to help with that. In my work, I do a lot of customer journey mapping and persona development in service of omnichannel content delivery. And what you were just describing is very much in that… I mean, they’re probably not far apart at all. Anyhow, but that point of being inside your customer’s head it sounds like is the key element.

Duane:
Let me give you an example of this, and I’m going to put real-world stuff on this. Gentleman by the name of Michael Bonfils. He did a presentation at PubCon last year, I think. Anyhow, here’s the keywords you’re going to type in when you go looking for this, right? “Michael Bonfils”, “character.ai”, “international”, maybe toss “backpack” on there as a word. And the reason you want to do this is you want to find Michael’s presentation where he walks through how they launched an international branded product and they determined which countries to launch it to and the tone of voice that the advertising should take in each country and why.

Duane:
And what they did was created personas in Character.ai for the type of buyer in each region. Then they would take their marketing messages and they would run them past those AIs and get feedback from them. And it turns out that the number one place in the world to launch a new ski bag, a backpack for skiers and snowboarders, is Switzerland. I don’t think anyone’s shocked by that. Big, tall mountains, lots of skiing. There you go. Number two is Japan. And so that’s a little bit surprising because you might want to think it’s really popular in Mexico. It’s really popular in Canada, it’s really popular in the US. It’s really popular in a lot of places, but nope, those are the two. It turns out that if you, and I’m paraphrasing a lot of this, but it goes through the point of consumer intent and consumer behavior.

Duane:
If you take a message and you go to Japan and the message is balanced, so it appeals to men and women equally, you will do poorly. Most economic purchases are driven by men in Japan. So if you take a male-oriented advertising approach in that market, you’ll do much better. None of that would be obvious to people who don’t have direct market experience or cultural knowledge of the space. And Michael’s team was able to build this out using Character.ai with AIs that were representative personas from those areas, and then take those things and say, “What do you think of this? Does this match what you understand?” And because those AIs are plugged into the world’s knowledge, it was easily able to say, “Well, with the parameters I have to look at this and what I now know from the world’s knowledge, no, this does not resonate with me. Yes, this does resonate with me”.

Duane:
The result of it all was a very successful launch for the brand, and the brand is thriving today a few years later. So you want to talk about consumer intent. This stuff gets deep, and we should be using tools in these manners to figure out, how do I do market research in an area that I’ve never been to and I have a small team of three people? Well, it can be done, so you should probably do that.

Larry:
And a lot cheaper than three airplane tickets to Tokyo.

Duane:
Listen, I’ll tell you right now, you take three airplane tickets, you, me, and Michael go to Tokyo. We are not going to learn what we need to actually launch the brand successfully, because no one in that country is going to talk to us and say, “Oh, yeah, no, we prefer male-oriented advertising over female-oriented advertising”. So it’s just not the conversation, and culturally not something that people talk about. So you have to rely on all this other third-party data that’s largely neutralized, so you just get data. That’s it. So there’s a lot there.

Larry:
Yeah. Hey, and as you’re talking, you’re kind of reminding me too of something we talked about before we went on the air, kind of the relationship between the abilities of these AI tools to discern that kind of information and the graph technology that underlies the search engines, because they’re all based on some kind of knowledge graph or something like that. Can you talk a little bit about that relationship and how it can drive those kind of insights about consumer behavior?

Duane:
Yeah, so quick, very quick, and Larry, I know you understand this, but just quick for the audience – knowledge graph, so much more than a database, literally you put all your entities in there. The system will then draw the connections between all of the entities and it will point out connections that you as a human would never have seen or come across. There’s just too much data to manage. These are very powerful systems. This is what underpins Google and Bing and Amazon and Home Depot and a lot of these companies, right? In fact, there’s a trend. If you look at these homepages of these companies and you see a large search box at the top center of the page, there’s a very high probability that if they’re a large global brand, they’re built on a knowledge graph, because they understand the power of getting you to start with search, understanding your intent, driving you in the right directions, and then getting you into an area where they know you’re going to purchase. You’re more likely to purchase down this path versus that path.

Duane:
And so I have been for years encouraging businesses to build their websites on knowledge graphs to ensure that this is a part of what they’re going to do. In fact, I’ll go so far, I’ll put a bet out there. I’ve said this before, I’ll repeat myself again. I will say that we are going to face a future where the search engines are going to cut down their costs as much as possible. One of those costs is going to be crawling. We already see this with Bing. There’s, oh, the name is escaping me right now, but there is a protocol that you can be a part of that does instant indexing essentially, you sign up for it. If you make a change, it tells Bing you’ve changed instantly, and they immediately can go fetch that one thing instead of having to do a full crawl.

Duane:
It’s an awesome thing. All of the search engines are on board except for Google at this point. Perhaps in the future, they’ll become a part of that protocol. I really wish I could remember the name, it’s on the tip of my tongue. (I’ll double-check with Duane, but I’m pretty sure he was talking about the IndexNow open-source protocol) But I envision a future where it’s going to be knowledge graph to knowledge graph, where you will build everything in the knowledge graph, you will then hand access to a portable public version of your knowledge graph to the search engine who will then ingest that and say, “Well, if these are your entities and these are all your connections, then I have everything I need to know about you. Thanks for the handshake. That’s awesome. I’ll pull you forward as I need you in my answers”. Because what we’re starting to see in answers is if you go into AI Overview or you go into ChatGPT, Perplexity, all these places, they’re giving sources for their information, or you can ask for the source and then it’ll come back with a citation for something.

Duane:
Often the citations are like a quote mark that’s linked. It’s one character that has a hyperlink on it. So very clearly it’s like, “Well, I’m not going to give you the full anchor text. I don’t want to distract you with that, but since you ask, here’s a clickable thing that is the source from which I pulled”. The really important part behind that is there’s a company called onely.com O-N-E-L-Y.com. They’ve been doing some really great research on what’s going on with AI overviews, who’s ranking, who’s not ranking, the propensity of things based on a vertical to show up, all of these types of situations. One of the most amazing things that I saw on their early data was 50% of the source results, so when you got a result back, something that was linked as a source on OpenAI or on AI Overview at Google, 50% of the time, the source that was linked to was not on the first page of results.

Duane:
So this is important, and I’m going to dig into it. Okay, I’m going to pedantically pull this pineapple apart into a variety of pieces. So you’re on page one, you’re an SEO, you’re feeling pretty good about your life, yourself, and the things that you do because your goal, your job, very existence is about ranking and ranking highly. Now you understand the goat rodeo that the search results are. So you’re not so concerned if you’re number one or you’re number three because you know tomorrow morning number three will be number two, and number two will be number four, and number four will be number one, and you’ll be at number one a bunch of times, and over the course of a month, you’ll get a bunch of traffic. You understand all of that. Well, now you need to understand that you can be number one and somebody from the third page could be the only clickable result in the answer that is given by the AI at Google.

Duane:
So now you’re the person who’s doing SEO for that page that’s ranked on the fourth page of search results or the third page of search results or the second page of search results. You haven’t done anything different. You haven’t changed anything. You’ve done your best or you didn’t care about ranking, and that’s where you naturally ended up, but all of a sudden you’re getting a whole hit of traffic and you don’t understand why, and it’s because you’re being sourced as the answer and a percentage of people are clicking on that source and they’re going directly to you. And you can’t claim that’s from your optimization. I mean, objectively by any measure in the world of SEO, you did a crap job. You’re not on page one, so you got room to improve, and yet you’re the one being pulled forward and the person in first place – think about all the investment, salary, benefits, team of people, period of time using engineering resources, all of that, subscriptions to tools, everything, didn’t get you the traffic, even though you’re ranked number one.

Duane:
That’s our new world, and that world is changing rapidly. It’s changing very quickly. We saw a whole lot of answers from a AI Overview on Google that were powered this way and it shrunk down perceptibly. It is a fraction of what it was, and there’s a huge split between auto-generated, meaning you have no choice. It’s just there as the answer versus click-generated meaning if you want it, click here and there we are. We’re still way too early to say, “Here’s our path”. We’re not there yet. Google does not have a handle on how they are going to manage ad revenue yet, and that is, it has to objectively be the most important thing for the company is managing ad revenue. That’s got to be a requirement in it all.

Larry:
Actually, I’m binge listening to the Internet History Podcast and the one I listened to today was about the history of Google and the arrival of AdWords and just their forking of the GoTo ad model and Overture and how they just crushed it with that, and that’s how they’ve made bank for so many years. And now what you just described is it’s like Dada-esque chaos-land. What can you do in terms of both content… And so much of what we’re talking about with this kind of stuff is, how much of it is the metadata, the linked data that you provided with it, is that affecting how the AI assistant works in Google?

Duane:
So yeah, these systems want all of the data, and this is really important. It’s almost like when you admit you can’t keep up, you will be set free. It’s almost at that level. I did a study on this last year. It was real simple. Most of the people who responded, it wasn’t a huge response, but 200 people responded. They were mostly in-house practitioners, which is what I wanted, and they had three people working on average 80 hours a week. So if you do the math on that, that means two and a half people are doing work. So one half of one person is not doing anything to do with SEO during the week, because you don’t have a full run of three times 40 hours a week. Now, I want you to contrast that with, I’m going to pull a number out of the air here because I think the lowest number of open headcount for one of the five top tech companies for AI engineer was 615 open headcount for that job.

Duane:
Now, I know that not all those AI engineers are building the consumer-facing systems that we all interact with, but I know some of them are. So even if a couple dozen of them are responsible for it, or even 12 of them are responsible for it, is it possible for your two and a half person team working 80 hours to actually keep up with a team that’s capable of putting hundreds of hours a week into the consumer side of things and changing consumer behavior, which then impacts what you need to do to rank? I don’t know how businesses keep up without leaning into AI as a support for that, because it’s the only logical extension that I can think of. I do think that there is a lot that’s going to ride on the technical aspects of this. You still have to do all of that work.

Duane:
You still have to have good URLs, fast page load speeds, because ultimately, if a click comes to you, you can’t have a crap UX. You have to have a great UX. So you can’t skip any of that and go, “Oh, well, if nobody cares about it, then I’m not going to worry about that anymore and I’m just going to focus on writing content, so I’m going to get rid of all my devs, I’m going to move fully to WordPress and make this simple on myself. I don’t care about page load speeds. I’m just going to crank out content, and there we go”. No, because at some point there’s a click coming to you, and if you have a crap experience, it’s going to go to your competitor instead. That’s still very real. Everything we used to do now has another layer on top.

Duane:
What we realize now is we baked the cupcake. That’s the era that we are in. We are in the post-baked cupcake era of SEO and digital marketing and content on the internet. That’s where we’re at. So cupcakes out of the oven, they’re sitting on the counter, everything is cooling down. We are now living in the age of icing on the cupcake. And what do you do now to make your cupcake more appealing? Because if you took that cupcake with no icing on it and you put it out at the store, everyone would look at that and go, “That’s not ready. That’s not done. I don’t want that. I’m not spending my money on that. That’s not value”. And value in this equation is time and trust. So why would I time and trust your bald empty cupcake when the one next to it has a beautiful topping of icing and sprinkles and just looks so much more appealing to me?

Duane:
That’s what you need to be creating. So look, you want to talk about content? Okay. I will say everyone should start their content by talking into a video, creating a video of their content. They should have something on a board. They should use a teleprompter on their phone and they should make a video of their content. Keep that to two minutes or less, break it up into multiple parts. If you want to say more, you can go to five minutes for longer form. That’s fine. The reason you’re doing this though is you want to pull a transcription from it. Then you want to use AI to rewrite that transcription, and that’s going to become the basis for the content that you’ll post on your blog related to the topic, as well as the video that you are now going to post to your socials.

Duane:
More people are starting queries in places like TikTok than they are on Google, so you have to understand that as we are going to sit here, Larry, and we are going to talk about content, in your head you better not be thinking about typing into a document first.
You better be thinking of recording this and then extracting the text from it, because more people as we progress, are going to want more visual content. This is factual. We see it. Take a look at the growth of Google Lens. Came out of nowhere several years back and was this very niche thing. Now, Google Lens is doing like a billion queries a day. Yeah, because everybody’s pointing their camera at stuff and saying, “Tell me about this”. I have the Meta Ray-Ban glasses. I ordered the AI pin from Humane. I ordered the Rabbit R1. I canceled both of those. I kept my Meta Ray-Bans. I had prescription lenses put in them. They’re everyday wear for me, and I am constantly asking that system, “What am I looking at? What am I seeing? How far am I here to there?” All of this information talking out loud.

Duane:
I am training me through their system on how to do information retrieval in a new way. Circle Search from Google is another great example of this. What’s the query there? You take a photo of something, you circle it with your finger. Well, how the hell do you optimize for somebody’s hand gesture on a screen? Well, that might seem like it’s insanity, and you cannot, but you actually can. Now we’re talking about image search and we’re talking about the quality of imagery. We’re talking about the sizing of it, the contacts, the alt tagging, all of that. There are no shortcuts. Everything is a part of your success today.

Larry:
No, and as you’re saying that, you’re reminding me that it’s still, and everything you just described, it’s about that’s a customer preference, a user behavior that you’re addressing with that. Yeah, so keeping that, like some kind of communication field, most of the people in content come out of that. So just returning to that audience analysis as the foundation, what you do with…

Larry:
Hey, Duane, I can’t believe it. We’re coming up close to time already, but hey, before we wrap up, I mean I could always go forever with these, but before we wrap up, is there anything last, anything you want to revisit from the conversation or just make sure you share before we wrap up?

Duane:
So the one thing that I think is important for people to really understand, I touched on this a couple of times. I’m just going to double down on it now. The complexity of everything, we didn’t even touch on this topic, but the apparent Google leak, the document leak that happened. I don’t don’t know whether it was a leak or not a leak, whatever. Here’s what I want people to take away from it.

Duane:
This is complex. It is more complex than you thought it was. If you look into this, this is a matrix of onions, if you will, with all of the layers of those matrixed onions, very visible. That’s what it takes to be successful in search today. So if you’re going to sit down and you’re going to tell me that you believe your success comes from keyword research and then creating keywords or creating content that has this many words on the page, this many repetitions and variations of the keyword that you’re focusing on, I’m going to tell you “Good luck with that”, and I probably will not see you again because you are going to float off on a raft all on your own, wondering where your success lies.

Duane:
Your success lies with attracting attention from consumers. Straightforward, always has been, always will be. If you can get their attention, the engines have no choice whatsoever, but to pull you forward. So more focus on customer intention, customer behavior, on things that are shifting customer behavior. Here’s my pin in the ground on this one. September, we get a new Siri on iPhones. I think Siri is going to be a hybrid search engine. It will have the ability to tap into ChatGPT, which is plugged into Copilot on Bing. It will be able to be your first-level agent. And because of the popularity of the device, it is going to thrust ChatGPT into the mainstream, and we are going to see a pre and post moment that will happen. So then the question is going to be, “Oh, how do I optimize for Siri?” And this is the world we live in, so people should be thinking about these things. They will find you very quickly. I can tell you keyword research is not the path forward.

Larry:
Sorry, just a personal thing. It still drives me nuts when I hear people… Anyhow, well, thank you so much, Duane. Hey, one very, very last thing. If folks want to follow you or connect online, what’s the best way to find you?

Duane:
Look, I’m easy, right? Type my name into Google, type my name into Bing, hit me on LinkedIn and connect. Happy to connect with folks. You can follow me on X if you like. I share a lot of news stuff, but I share it all my socials. I don’t care if it’s Threads or Facebook, whatever, but folks can find me easily. I’m happy to connect and have conversations with folks.

Larry:
Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Duane. Really enjoyed the conversation.

Duane:
Absolutely. Thanks, Larry.