Rich Missey (00:02)
The systems are making search much simpler. They're helping you figure out what your intent is before you even know what your intent is. And then they're guiding you to the answer that you need all without ever having to leave the search ecosystem. And that as a marketer is terrifying, but there's also some new unique opportunities that are popping up.
Benjamin Ard (00:47)
Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Rich. Rich, welcome to the show.
Rich Missey (00:53)
Thank you, happy to be here.
Benjamin Ard (00:54)
Yeah, Rich. I'm excited. This is a subject that I'm really pumped to dive into. It's changing at a million miles an hour. And I'm excited to hear from your expertise, but Rich, before we dive into that, let's get to know you and your background.
Rich Missey (01:03)
Absolutely, thank you very much. So I'm Rich Missey. I have been working in the SEO space for exactly 20 years now. It was 20 years ago this year. And I've had the opportunity to work with some truly amazing brands across a number of verticals. And one of the things that has always fascinated me is exactly how much of the work or the tactics or the strategies that impact one vertical can be so easily tweaked and applied to another.
So I am incredibly interested anytime I start a new role in saying, how can I apply the learnings from something as complicated as the hospitality industry with Hyatt to the two-sided marketplaces of Cars.com and Groupon, major global manufacturers like Whirlpool. Each have unique challenges, but they also have very similar strategies that you can deploy and almost everybody has the same basic foundations that need to be reviewed. No matter we're talking traditional SEO, the emergence of generative AI, merging SEO in with other digital marketing channels — there's all these foundations that get skipped so easily. And I love finding opportunities to bring them together and just make people realize we're not all operating in silos. We can't operate in silos anymore. We have to work together. And when we work together, results just explode.
Benjamin Ard (02:37)
I love that. Rich, 20 years of experience — you've seen where search and everything has been. And I think that you're going to be the perfect person to lead us into where you think it's going as well. But to kick things off, when you think about search and discovery and where that has gone, even from a couple years ago to today, what's changing? What does search and discovery actually look like today from your experience and what you're seeing?
Rich Missey (03:08)
The main difference that I see is that even two years ago, the onus was on the searcher to know what it is that you were trying to find. And most of our career has been educating people how to search in Google in order to find the things that you want. It's how to refine a query. It's understanding as marketers the difference between those short tail and long tail queries.
These are concepts that very shortly we are not gonna be talking about as much or to the same extent or in the same ways. Because now these generative systems, as soon as you ask a basic question, it expands on it. It already knows what your follow-up questions are gonna be. One of our new favorite terms is query fan out. That's basically what it is. It's looking to see, "Oh, people search for this basic thing, well, what else do they look for?" And pulling all of it together.
The systems are making search much simpler. They're helping you figure out what your intent is before you even know what your intent is. And then they're guiding you to the answer that you need all without ever having to leave the search ecosystem. And that as a marketer is terrifying, but there's also some new unique opportunities that are popping up.
Benjamin Ard (04:21)
Well, let's dive right into that. When I hear that as a marketer who's been in this game for a long time with a given playbook of "if we do our job right, we'll get eyeballs on the website," now it feels like, shoot, people are going to find their answers about us and never leave that experience and never click on our link and never get to do what we want them to do. What opportunities does that present? What should we really be focused on with that whole different landscape?
Rich Missey (04:54)
Well, the first thing we need to focus on is what is it exactly that we're trying to achieve with these efforts. We have told ourselves as marketers over the years that the content that we created was meant to attract and convert users. But if we're honest, the vast majority of that content that we were creating was intended to rank. It was intended to get visibility in search engines just to have the opportunity to play and get that user to the site. And then, fingers crossed, even if they didn't see what they wanted on that experience that they landed on, you had your main menu navigation, you had pop-ups, you had modals, you had all these other ways of keeping that eyeball on the page. So there was kind of a handoff that would happen between an SEO team and a site experience team or an A/B testing team, a conversion team.
That handoff doesn't happen anymore. We have to really take a strong look at what exactly is that we're trying to achieve. How are our users going to get there and then fill in that gap? We don't get to control how we fill in that gap anymore. The standards that we used for years of "you build a web page, you create an excellent JavaScript bundle, you make sure that everything can be rendered by a search engine" — we're rapidly moving in a direction where they're not going to need your web page anymore. These systems are going to automatically go out, grab what the user needs. If there is a lower level intent, like a purchase, then yep, we'll send them over to the site. If it's informational, you better have another revenue stream available because Google has swallowed that stream whole.
Benjamin Ard (06:30)
So when it comes to that, you're talking about the awareness level searches are now no longer on your website. They've moved and stay in the search engine or the AI experience. And for the most part, we were writing for Google. We always talked to ourselves, we were writing for people. Now we were writing for Google to get eyeballs, and then hopefully we could get people to change pages and stuff like that. Are we writing for people now or are we writing for Gen AI? Are we writing for ChatGPT and Gemini? How do you approach that? And then how do you look at the idea of awareness level content? Where are you storing it? How are you managing that so that it's still productive in some way, shape, or form?
Rich Missey (07:15)
Absolutely. So I am a very technically minded person. So I have always chased the structure of content. It's one of those areas that I always feel is severely neglected or has been severely neglected for years. The writing piece is absolutely crucial and has been one of the most challenging pieces historically because let's be honest, most of us are not writers. Major props to copywriters because they have been the heart and soul of everything that we have published for 20 years or more. And my heart aches at how fast generative AI is attacking that industry.
But it really was, that structure was not there, it was all a matter of just make sure you get the words there and make it look like somebody can read it. Today, we are writing, I believe, more for users, and I will attribute a good portion of that to Google. Google has been hammering on that message for over a decade now. "Don't write for search engines, write for users." And as their algorithms and their ranking systems and their rendering systems and their indexing systems have continued to evolve, that type of quality and view has helped people rank better. So they've been leading us on this journey a bit over time so that we are pivoting more towards writing content for the user. But that structure piece hasn't been there.
And it can sometimes be difficult. We've all had experiences where we see a result in Google search. It looks like exactly what you're looking for. You click on it, you get to the page, and then it is a mess of ads, of modals, there's no table of contents. You don't know where the specific thing is that you're looking for. If that's how your content is created today, it is not going to succeed in the slightest. Google is still the huge number one traffic generator for websites. There's absolutely no doubting that. But it is changing rapidly.
And the systems that we need to prepare this content for are structured the same way that our brains think. So we have to get back to a time of, what is our heading structure? What is our internal linking structure? One of my favorite challenges when anytime I come into a new website, I'll get a question of, "We don't understand why this page isn't ranking or why this isn't performing." And I take a look and realize and scratch my head and go, "You realize we've only linked to this thing twice in the entire website. If we don't care enough about it to link more to it, third party systems aren't going to think it's worth anything."
So internal linking structures, basic formatting structures, take a look at what you see in an AI overview. You don't see a paragraph. You see the very specific pieces of information that are related to what the user needed. That's what's being pulled in. So if we have two different pieces of content, one that has properly formatted heading outlines, that is well internally linked, that has links in context and in navigation going in and out, a generative system is going to be able to make those contextual relationships much easier than if you've got a War and Peace novel that just has chapter headings and there's no bullets, there's no tables, there's none of the things that help us as people rapidly consume and understand information.
So having that mindset change of what is it that you want someone to learn or understand and what's the best format for that is a challenge that most businesses have not yet completely attacked. There's actually been an example that's been in my brain now for a couple of weeks. Randomly thought back to junior high. And this is going to make some English folks either cringe or laugh hysterically. But if you ever remember sentence diagramming, where you've got a regular sentence and all of a sudden you're branching off of "here's the adjective, here's what it connects to, here's your verb, here's what the verb is acting on" — that's what generative systems are doing today.
It's almost like going back to junior high, taking a look at the content that you've created and making sure that there's no ambiguity, that you know exactly if you've got a long running sentence and you're using "this, that, it" — what's this? What's the that? What's the it? How do all of these pieces connect? String all of your content together in a way that these systems can understand. That's how we've got to start thinking about content at the moment. But then we've also got to start thinking into the future. I'm not convinced that HTML experiences are the web of the future anymore. Especially seeing the power behind these generative capabilities.
Right now we have to create different agents or different things that have specific tasks, different things that they go out and do. How long do you think it's going to be until it can do it on its own? To where we don't even have to tell it — we need to create these activities where you just say, "I need this." And the system's going to look and say, "Okay, in order to give this answer, I have to create this subtask that goes out and does this, this one that goes out and does this." That's a huge focus of a lot of engineering teams that are developing generative systems today. Within a year or two, I'm willing to bet that the systems are going to do it on their own. And we won't even have to do that anymore.
So it's really all about: whatever format you're using, get your content there in a way that those generative systems can understand if you're doing an informational side. And once you start acting on the transactional side, then you've got to make sure that you've got the proper technical infrastructure in place, APIs and that sort of thing, database access, so that the systems can reach in and do it for you. Good example being things like Uber. How long until you don't even have to open the Uber app? You just say, "Hey Uber, I need a ride to here." And without any other action, it's saying, "Okay, your car is gonna be outside in five minutes."
Benjamin Ard (13:15)
Yep, 100%. AI will have access to everything and it makes sense that you have to have that all connected. It used to be APIs, now it's MCP. There's all sorts of crazy stuff inside of that. Now, one question — anytime you shift the strategy, the technique, the tactics, there is a lagging indicator of measurements where people are struggling to figure out how do I prove if it is or isn't working? What are you looking at on the measurement side of things with the shift in discovery and search?
Rich Missey (13:50)
Conversion points — and the conversion point is not a sale. That is the ultimate conversion, but it is definitely not the only conversion. You have to understand things like if you're creating an in-depth piece of content. Getting a view is great. How far have they scrolled to read? If they're only reading what shows up on the screen initially, has it really given you any value? Micro interactions — where do people click on the page? Are they sharing it?
We have to take a look at what our conversion points are and establish more comprehensive conversion funnels to understand the full view of what's happening with anything that we're publishing. Because until we get to that point, we're still stuck in an old mentality of "I published it on this date and I've got this many views and this many newsletter signups, purchases, whatever the case may be." We have got to expand beyond that to get a better understanding of the user journey and find the holes in that journey, where we think we've got good coverage, but in reality, people just aren't interacting. If you've got an amazing table, you're putting out a comparison page, you've got an amazing table that just knocks everybody else out of the water, but it's scrolled down — how many people scroll down to see that comparison table? Those are the types of questions that I really try to get people to focus in on.
Connected to that, just making sure that all of the channels that you're publishing this content on are showing the same experience. We've got to get our teams out of silos. We've got to get our social media teams working with our SEO teams, working with our editorial teams, working with our press teams. Anytime someone encounters something about your brand, the same feeling of your brand should convey whether they click in from a social media ad and they come into a paid SEM landing page, they come into an organic page. Make sure that what the user thinks they're going to get is what they actually get.
Benjamin Ard (15:46)
I love that. Rich, we could go on for hours. Thank you so much for the insights. If anyone listening wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?
Rich Missey (15:54)
LinkedIn is definitely the best place.
Benjamin Ard (16:04)
For anyone listening, we will link to Rich's LinkedIn profile directly in the show notes. Rich, again, thank you so much for the time and insights and all the expertise that you shared with us today.
Rich Missey (16:16)
Thank you, Benjamin. Greatly appreciate the time.
