The Google Search Document Leak: What You Need to Know!

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In today’s episode of The Blogger Genius Podcast, I’m talking to Rand Fishkin, the founder of SparkToro and a leading expert in digital marketing and SEO.

In May 2024 there was a significant Google search documentation leak, and the documents were actually leaked to Rand. The documents provide a rare glimpse into how Google ranks content and what the challenges are that smaller blogs and businesses face in gaining visibility. If you are trying to understand how SEO works today, this is a must-listen to episode.

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Understanding Google’s Algorithm: Key Takeaways

The Complexity of Google’s Ranking System

Rand reveals that the leaked documents are not SEO guidelines but rather API documentation detailing the engineering behind Google’s ranking system. This documentation includes around 14,000 unique features that contribute to how Google ranks content across its platforms, including search and YouTube. While the leak provides insights into what factors Google considers, it does not reveal the weight or importance of each factor in the ranking process.

Actionable Advice:

• Focus on Quality Content: Given the complexity of Google’s ranking system, it’s crucial to prioritize high-quality, relevant content that meets the needs of your audience.
• Diversify Your Content: Consider creating content across various formats, such as blog posts, videos, and infographics, to increase your chances of ranking well on different platforms.

Brand Mentions and YouTube Transcripts

One surprising finding from the leak is Google’s use of brand mentions in YouTube transcripts as a ranking factor. Frequent mentions of a brand in relevant videos can positively influence rankings.

Actionable Advice:

• Leverage Video Content: Create YouTube videos that mention your brand and relevant keywords. Ensure your videos are well-optimized with accurate transcripts.
• Collaborate with Influencers: Partner with YouTube influencers to mention your brand in their videos, increasing your brand’s visibility and potential ranking.

Discounting Low-Quality Links

Google’s method of discounting low-quality links based on Chrome traffic is another interesting point. If users do not click on a link, it is deemed less valuable, effectively reducing the impact of spammy links.

Actionable Advice:

• Build High-Quality Backlinks: Focus on acquiring backlinks from reputable websites that drive genuine traffic to your site.
• Monitor Your Link Profile: Regularly audit your backlink profile to identify and disavow low-quality or spammy links.

The Role of Social Media Links

While Google has historically downplayed the importance of social signals, the documentation suggests that links from platforms like Instagram can be valuable if they drive traffic to a website.

Actionable Advice:

• Optimize Social Media Profiles: Ensure your social media profiles are optimized with links to your website and relevant content.
• Engage on Social Media: Actively engage with your audience on social media platforms to drive traffic to your website.

Strategies for Smaller Blogs and Businesses

Finding Untapped Channels

Rand suggests that smaller businesses should seek out channels and sources of influence that their competitors are not targeting. These avenues are often harder to measure, which is why larger companies tend to overlook them.

Actionable Advice:

• Public Relations: Focus on PR efforts, such as getting featured in local media, niche podcasts, and industry blogs.
• Collaborations: Partner with smaller brands and influencers to reach new audiences.

Building Brand Recognition

Rand shares his experience with SparkToro, explaining that they have built their brand by participating in podcasts, webinars, and conferences, rather than relying heavily on SEO or traditional advertising.

Actionable Advice:

• Participate in Industry Events: Attend and speak at industry conferences, webinars, and podcasts to build your brand’s recognition.
• Content Collaborations: Collaborate with other brands and influencers to create co-branded content that reaches a wider audience.

Embracing Zero-Click Content

The concept of “zero-click content” focuses on being present on social media platforms without necessarily driving traffic back to a website. Building brand loyalty and trust is crucial, especially in an age where AI-generated content is becoming more prevalent.

Actionable Advice:

• Engage on Social Media: Create engaging content for social media platforms that builds brand loyalty and trust.
• Focus on Value: Provide valuable content that resonates with your audience, even if it doesn’t drive immediate traffic to your website.

The Importance of Personal Branding and Audience Research

Aligning Your Personal Brand

Rand emphasizes the importance of aligning your personal brand with your audience’s interests. Visualize a Venn diagram where one circle represents your passions and beliefs, while the other represents your audience. The overlap is where you should focus your content creation, product development, and messaging.

Actionable Advice:

• Define Your Brand: Clearly define your brand’s values, mission, and unique selling points.
• Know Your Audience: Conduct audience research to understand their interests, needs, and pain points.

Conducting Audience Research

Rand advocates for deep audience research, including surveys and interviews, to uncover common themes and challenges your audience faces.

Actionable Advice:

• Surveys and Interviews: Conduct regular surveys and interviews with your audience to gather insights and feedback.
• Analyze Data: Use tools like SparkToro to analyze audience behaviors and demographics.

Conclusion

By focusing on high-quality content, leveraging video and social media, and conducting thorough audience research, bloggers and small businesses can navigate the ever-evolving world of SEO and digital marketing. Embrace your unique voice, build genuine connections with your audience, and explore new strategies to carve out your space in the digital world.

Other Related Blogger Genius Podcast episodes You’ll Enjoy:

• #334: This Content Strategy Will Help You Rise Above the Noise with Amanda Natividad
• #330: 2024 SEO Shifts: Strategies for Success Today with Lily Ray
• #324: How to Make Money Blogging in 2024 (New Trends) with Jillian Leslie​

MiloTreeCart, the Best Tool for Non-Techies to Sell Digital Products

I also want to introduce you to the MiloTreeCart, a tool designed for non-techies to sell digital products easily. It comes with features like fill-in-the-blank sales pages, check-out pages, a sales dashboard, upsells, and customer support. MiloTreeCart is currently available for a lifetime deal of $349 or three easy installments of $116.33.

#345: Transcription: The Google Search Document Leak: What You Need to Know!

Jillian Leslie 00:00:07 Welcome back to the Blogger Genius podcast. I am your host, Jillian Leslie, and I am thrilled to introduce today’s guest, Rand Fishkin. He is the founder of a tool many of you use called Spark Toro, which figures out where different audiences hang out online. And Rand is a leading expert in the world of digital marketing. He’s here to share some Eye-Opening insights about Google’s algorithm. These are insights that have sparked a lot of controversy in the world of SEO. In today’s episode, we dive deep into the recent Google Algorithm League, which, by the way, was leaked directly to Rand. So this document sheds light on how Google ranks various factors. And while SEO still works, Rand offers a crucial piece of advice. The game has changed, so Google increasingly favors big, established brands, making it harder for smaller blogs and businesses to stand out. But here’s the thing this doesn’t mean you’re out of options. In fact, it’s an opportunity to get creative, to think outside the box and to find those unique spaces where your business can shine.

Jillian Leslie 00:01:29 And this is exactly where MiloTree comes in, with tools like MiloTreeCart for selling unlimited digital products in under five minutes, MiloTreeLeads for growing your email list with unlimited freebies, and our social media pop up app MiloTree for boosting your followers, you can take control of your growth strategy so you don’t have to wait for Google’s blessing for your traffic to come back. With MiloTree, you can forge your own path. Grow your audience and increase your income in ways you never thought possible. Ready to take this leap? If so, head over to milotree.com to learn more. And if you’re serious about growing your business, book a free 20 minute strategy. Call with me at milotree.com. Army. It’s time to break free from the old rules and build something extraordinary. And I’d love to help you. Now, for today’s episode, you are going to learn so much about Google, about the algorithm, about SEO, and about where to point your business. So without further delay, here is my interview with Rand Fishkin.

Jillian Leslie 00:02:43 Rand, welcome to the Blogger Genius podcast.

Rand Fishkin 00:02:48 Oh, Jillian, thank you for having me. Good to be here.

Jillian Leslie 00:02:50 What I’m going to do is I am going to link to My recent interview with Amanda Natividad, who is your head of Marketing at Spark? Toro? Just because I feel like I am interviewing everybody from your company, so.

Rand Fishkin 00:03:08 You only have one more to go after me, because there’s only three of us.

Jillian Leslie 00:03:10 Oh, okay. Perfect. You’ll have to hook me up. So, Rand, for the people who do not know you or know what you do. Because I feel like you are a legend in this kind of online startup SEO kind of space. Would you just give a brief description of your background and how you are where you are now?

Rand Fishkin 00:03:32 Sure, absolutely. Yeah. So I let’s see, I dropped out of college in 2003 and started a company called Mas, which became quite well known in the SEO space, originally as a consulting business and then later as a software company, raised lots of rounds of venture capital.

Rand Fishkin 00:03:50 grew very quickly and then sort of Plateaued and experienced lots of challenges. I stepped down as CEO and left the company in 2018 and published a book, Lost in Founder A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World, and then started a new company called Spark Toro in 2018, which is focused on audience research, so helping people understand the behaviours and demographics of any describable online group of people. So if you wanted to know which podcasts are popular with interior designers in Los Angeles, or what a chemical engineers in New York, which which YouTube channels they subscribe to, what keywords do food bloggers search for? All that kind of stuff. Spark Toro can tell you I’ve got this passion around sort of building indie non venture style, non hypergrowth businesses that can remain profitable for a long period of time and produce dividends for their founders and investors.

Jillian Leslie 00:04:53 And that’s what we’re doing with MiloTree, is we are all about bootstrapping and not raising money and really investing in our community, in our customers and growing that way, like growing sustainably but without, you know, like just being able so that we can still control our own company.

Jillian Leslie 00:05:17 Yeah, yeah. All right. So the reason I reached out to you was because what I saw in the news was that there was a Google leak of their SEO documents, and it was like this enormous kind of data dump. Is that like. And that somebody leaked these documents to you?

Rand Fishkin 00:05:40 Yeah. so so not not not actually SEO documents. It’s a, API documentation. So, so documents that essentially describe their, their engineering team, all of the calls, the API calls that you could make programmatically, to get data that, that you would use in, in building the ranking system for both Google search, but and YouTube search and, Android search and all the search properties inside of Google. Almost all I, I didn’t see Gmail in there, oddly enough. I don’t know, maybe this is why Gmail search doesn’t work so well. but, this documentation shared, I believe it was around 14,000 different features. You know, it’s thousands of pages of documents. And then there’s there’s 14,000, unique elements that can be called.

Rand Fishkin 00:06:35 And so those are the elements that compose Google’s ranking system, right? Everything is based on those 14,000 features. Granted, that’s a lot to look through. I have been through several hundred of the most interesting looking ones to me, but, a lot of people in the SEO community have been able to use this to basically understand, does Google use this thing? Oh no, that’s not in there. They don’t use that thing. Does Google use this thing? Oh yes they do. How do they use it? What’s it used for? The only thing the API documentation doesn’t tell you. Which of course would be very interesting is how much weight any given factor has in the system. So it doesn’t say, oh, you know, whatever it is that that titles of web pages are 50% more important than body text or, you know, something like that, that the system is more complex than that. But just to give an example that’s not in there. So you you don’t you don’t know exactly how much they use any given factor.

Rand Fishkin 00:07:37 You just know whether they use it or don’t.

Jillian Leslie 00:07:40 Okay. And what were your biggest Surprises.

Rand Fishkin 00:07:47 Yeah. so I’m coming.

Speaker 3 00:07:50 To.

Jillian Leslie 00:07:51 You talking about this, but, you know, what would you say where you went, Didn’t know this was in there or thought this would be a bigger thing. And we’re not seeing that.

Rand Fishkin 00:08:00 Yeah. Let’s see, I think probably a few things that were extremely interesting to me. I’m surprising. Might be the wrong word. Okay, there’s there’s one that was very surprising. Like, in all my years doing SEO, I stopped doing SEO in 2018, but obviously for for many years before that had been, in that field. I never thought to myself that Google would use, mentions of a brand name or a website in YouTube transcripts. and that was in there. And I thought to myself, oh, of course, what a good idea. Of course, it’s a great idea because YouTube, you know, is a is such a popular platform as basically the the most popular content platform on the web.

Rand Fishkin 00:08:45 If you know, if you include it in the list of social networks, it’s the most used social network to. I don’t think of it as social. But, you know, the Pew Internet research folks do, and, you know, it’s always number one. So of course, if your brand gets mentioned frequently in YouTube, especially around particular topics or around particular keywords, that that makes a lot of sense as a ranking factor. I’ve never seen a professional SEO in all my career, never seen a professional SEO who said, oh, we can help get you and your brand name mentioned in more YouTube videos. So Google probably had a really good ranking factor there in terms of nobody ever tried to spam it. You know, that’s a that’s a great, great piece of input. Another one, that I thought was quite interesting. Again, this is it’s a simple way to discount low quality links. so just very simplistic. One of those ones that I never thought to do but makes total sense when you read it, which is, Google has a weighting system for how much they count to link, and it’s based on Chrome traffic.

Rand Fishkin 00:09:56 do people using the Chrome browser click on the link? If nobody ever does, well then just don’t count it. And of course, almost all spam links never get clicked on. So very easy way to discount spam, right? If you if you’re thinking to yourself, oh, I’m a I’m a blogger and I need to get 10,000 more links and, you know, raise my da and whatever it is. Well, do you or do you need ten links that lots of people are actually going to click on from places that are going to send you traffic? That that seems like it’s actually what matters. gosh, another surprising one that wasn’t in there. I didn’t see anything discounting social links.

Jillian Leslie 00:10:39 Right. That was one that I saw you talk about. So initially Google has come out. Wasn’t it kind of common knowledge? Google is not going to look at how many Instagram followers you have because you could gain Instagram followers. But can you.

Rand Fishkin 00:10:56 Game can you game people clicking on Instagram links, right.

Rand Fishkin 00:11:01 If people if lots of people go to your profile page on Instagram and click that link and follow it over to your website, that’s a pretty good signal that you are interesting to a lot of people on Instagram. So you know, for, for whatever a recipe blogger or a travel writer, or someone in the, you know, design field, if you’re posting pictures of your incredible interior that your architectural design firm made and lots of people click your profile and then they go over to your website to, you know, book an appointment or whatever it is. Well, that’s a pretty positive signal that you are interesting and useful and maybe should be higher in the rankings. and Google seems to be treating those normally. so anyway, the I think the other, you know, the other big takeaway that a lot of folks talked about was, just a lot of things proving theories from the SEO world, especially like old theories that that I had written about or done, old Whiteboard Friday videos, the video series I used to do for Mars when I was there.

Rand Fishkin 00:12:09 There were a lot of those, theories that were confirmed in the in the leak. as an example, Jillian, one that was incredibly popular in the SEO world was the idea that Google used, clicks and click through rate and and dwell time. Right. The, the time.

Jillian Leslie 00:12:28 When you’re on the site.

Rand Fishkin 00:12:29 And. Yeah, people, for example, you know, if let’s say I do a search for

Speaker 4 00:12:36 You know, risotto alla amarone.

Rand Fishkin 00:12:39 And, when I click on the first result from, I don’t know, Italian food com, I look at the recipe and I go, wait, that that that doesn’t look right. You know, that’s they’re using the, I don’t know, arborio rice. Like I’m out of here. This this is clearly wrong. I click the back button and I go down.

Speaker 4 00:12:59 To La Cucina.

Rand Fishkin 00:13:00 Italiana and I click that. And now I find.

Speaker 4 00:13:03 A risotto alla morrone.

Rand Fishkin 00:13:05 Recipe that looks perfect. And so I stay there. I save that recipe. Whatever.

Rand Fishkin 00:13:11 I spend time on that side, I don’t go back to the search results and click something else that tells Google, well.

Speaker 4 00:13:17 Lakukan Italiana.

Rand Fishkin 00:13:19 Probably a very good result, especially if lots of people engage in that behavior consistently. Google for years, I mean like a decade. They denied that this worked, right. They swore up and down, no way. We don’t use clicks. We don’t use Traffic. they some of their representatives made nasty comments about me in particular, in relation to this. And I think when these leaked documents came out, it was fun to see people on like LinkedIn and threads and stuff saying like, oh, look at that. Rand was right all those years ago.

Speaker 3 00:13:50 Okay. So this goes that.

Rand Fishkin 00:13:52 Was somewhat.

Speaker 3 00:13:52 This goes to my.

Jillian Leslie 00:13:53 Question that we talked about before I pressed record, which is. So I think the thing that was so shocking for people like me, people reading about this was for so long, Google would say, oh no, no, social doesn’t matter or this doesn’t matter.

Jillian Leslie 00:14:10 Then you get these documents and it goes, well, actually it does. So what’s happening there? And do you trust Google? Like what I understand Google is an enormous organization. So is Google actively lying or or what. Like what are what is their perspective on this. Like, why did this? How is this happened?

Rand Fishkin 00:14:35 I, I don’t think it’s a conspiracy. I think I think it’s just a directive right from from Google, which is people inside Google have for a long time believed that if their ranking system were made public and that if, if people understood, you know, essentially how to how all the inputs worked, that they would game that system and Google’s results would fall in quality because, you know, spammers and people who manipulate things, would take advantage. My argument has long been that Google’s ranking system, at least for the last ten years, has been so sophisticated, secure, and well put together that no spammer could game the system better than a brand or or a, you know, an authentic website.

Rand Fishkin 00:15:26 And so this security through obscurity was pointless. and in fact detracted from their their quality of results. and internally at Google you can you can certainly see that their representatives have been told to message things in a certain way to to deny certain things that are true, to confirm things that are, that are clearly not true. and this leak, I think, was only one in a series of examples, but but certainly the big one was, was that last year’s, congressional or DOJ case testimony. So when the Department of Justice released the transcripts of, you know, Google’s executives on the stand in court, of course, can be held liable and potentially get fined and go to jail if they lie. then you saw a lot of, you know, all sorts of things coming out that that clearly Google’s representatives had denied for years, in some cases, continue to deny. Oddly enough. Right. Just kind of, I think sort of like, a lot of politicians, they think that by repeating a thing, you know, you go to a conference, you repeat a thing, you go on, they go on their Twitter accounts or their threads, accounts or whatever, and they repeat a thing and they sort of hope, well, maybe it’ll misdirect enough people and there’s, there’s no, you know, there’s nothing, illegal about that, that they’re allowed to message whatever they’d like to message, true or not.

Rand Fishkin 00:16:53 But it’s nice to have this leak, to be able to go to the source and say, hey, here’s the real deal.

Jillian Leslie 00:16:59 Now, do you think that Google search continues to improve, or do you feel like over the last 510 years, Google search has not gotten better? And in fact, this is where all of us, like my husband for the longest time, would search for something and type Reddit next to the search to get some Reddit results. But now you will see that people are gaming that system. So Reddit is is showing up as a top search, but it could be because somebody figured out how to put stuff on Reddit so that it ends up at the top of search. So personally, in my house, I would say there’s more frustration with Google. And also from my audience’s perspective, many have gotten hit by Google updates. I think there’s some bad blood around Google. What is your take on this?

Rand Fishkin 00:18:00 let’s see. So from a data perspective, I always like to put my personal opinion to one side and instead look at look at sort of the numbers.

Rand Fishkin 00:18:09 And if Google were getting worse and people believe that Google is getting worse, two things would almost certainly be true. Number one, their their ad revenue would fall, right? Because people would be searching less on Google or they and they would be, clicking on fewer results in Google, those kinds of things. And the second is that you would see that the number of searches performed each month and the number of active searchers on Google was falling. Right? People would switch to.

Speaker 3 00:18:39 Tick tock.

Rand Fishkin 00:18:40 Or Bing or.

Jillian Leslie 00:18:41 Chat now, but now it’s like tick tock.

Rand Fishkin 00:18:44 Sure. Tick tock. Yeah. go directly to Reddit, like, whatever, whatever you want. Neither of those things are true, right? Google has more searchers per month than they’ve ever had, more searches per searcher per month than they’ve ever had. this is as of as of May data. We. I just published a report, actually, on Spark Toro that that, looked at some of the data numbers that this is our stream provider, for spark, Toro.

Rand Fishkin 00:19:09 And, they also their ad revenue is at an all time high. So, look, I think every year that I was in SEO, obviously it’s been a little while now. So I can’t speak to the last five years, but every year I was in SEO, someone came out with a, you know, the New York Times would publish a thing. Google is getting worse in 2005. You know, Google used to be amazing in 2003, but now it’s 2005, Google’s terrible 2010. Google’s the worst. You know, they used to be so good in the early 2000, but now they’ve gotten much. 2015 Google in 2010 was truly a juggernaut and innovative, but now they’re terrible. I just ignore all of those. I think it’s just how it is when there’s a dominant monopoly player in a space, everyone’s trying to look for the story or angle. That kind of kind of takes them down. And I don’t. I don’t have a lot of love for Google anymore. I mean, I think they they’ve done some wonderful things for the world.

Rand Fishkin 00:20:02 They’ve also done some things that really frustrate me. They haven’t been many of their representatives, as I mentioned, have not been particularly kind to me. but on the whole that they’re good, right? Like, I don’t I would not short Google stock if I were you. I would, I would be very careful about doing that. I don’t think they’re going anywhere for a long time. It doesn’t look like the rise of AI is taking any.

Speaker 3 00:20:27 Kind of being.

Rand Fishkin 00:20:28 Or being or DuckDuckGo or TikTok. none of them. So I think a lot of these anecdotal stories resonate with people because they capture a feeling that we have. I feel like I don’t I used to have a more magical experience with Google, and I have been frustrated recently. My guess is you were probably just as frustrated in that magical feeling time. you don’t remember it as well. And so, you know, the recency bias and all the psychological biases that we have around negativity come to the surface. Those stories resonate. We click those.

Rand Fishkin 00:21:04 So publishers keep publishing those stories because they know they can get clicks.

Jillian Leslie 00:21:15 I want to take a short break to share that I’ve got something special for you. If you’re looking to grow your email list quickly. I’ve put together a free resource that you won’t want to miss. It is called the three AI prompts. You need to create an easy cheat sheet with just these three prompts, you can easily create a high value opt in that your audience will love. Ready to take your email list to the next level? Get your freebie! Just head over to Milotree.com/freebieprompts. That’s Milotree.com/freebieprompts and start growing your list like a pro. Do you think that search still works? For example, keywords still work. Traditional blog posts still work. As we move into this world where it’s short form video or TikTok or whatever, like that traditional model, because a lot of my audience will say they’re food bloggers and they’re discouraged. Does that model still work? I create a recipe. Maybe I do some keyword research and I create, like the best, I don’t know, vegan.

Jillian Leslie 00:22:43 A banana muffin recipe.

Rand Fishkin 00:22:46 Yeah. so here’s what I’d say about any given marketing practice, including very classic blog post style SEO, which is, in some sectors for some keywords with, some degree of, you know, the right combination of sort of website and brand. Yes, it still works. and on the whole, if you look at what has happened in, not only Google but also the social media world, you can see that bigger brands and fewer brands total are dominating the spaces. Right? So we we’ve moved from the internet of 25 years ago, which was all weird independent little sites. Even 10 or 15 years ago. There was a tremendous amount of opportunity for for new players and small players and indie players and people who kind of didn’t know what they were doing, but they were getting their feet wet, and they read a few blog posts about how to do some SEO, how to do some content marketing, how to do some social media marketing, and they manage to have success.

Rand Fishkin 00:23:53 And now we are seeing what we saw, you know, in the 20th century, with any sector of the economy, which is a few big players get very good at it. They dominate those spaces. And consumers unfortunately trust names that they know. And so if your brand name is new is unfamiliar, you are unlikely to get as many clicks as many followers, as many email subscribers, so it’s very tough to break into a sector far more so. You know, the last five years than it was the ten years before that or the 15 years before that. So, Julian, I often give advice to people that if you are a new player or a small player in a space, or you’re a local small business or a local recipe blogger, you are starting up your architectural design business. My advice is to try and find channels and sources of influence that your competitors are not going after, that are that are wide or open, and those tend to be the ones that are the hardest to measure, because big companies don’t like to invest dollars or time and energy into sources that are hard to measure.

Jillian Leslie 00:25:06 So can you give me some examples? Yeah.

Rand Fishkin 00:25:08 Sure, sure. PR is a great example, right? Not a lot of companies trying to go get featured in local media, small media, niche media. get on your favorite podcast, right? Pitch yourself as an interesting guest. do some interesting webinars. Be be present in a few conferences, contribute to some nonprofits, do some co-marketing research with a with a small brand in your space, get mentioned in somebody else’s email newsletter, get talked about on somebody else’s blog, that kind of stuff. Very hard to measure, very tough to do at scale, especially when we’re talking about small and midsize, you know, sites and opportunities and conferences and events and, you know, press and media, the big brands are they ignore it, right? They just pour their dollars and energy into the big platforms. I’m going to put a bunch of energy into Facebook or Reddit or YouTube or Google. Everything else can sit by the wayside. That’s where it tends to be the best places to to build that opportunity.

Rand Fishkin 00:26:13 So for sure, when I left Mars, I knew this was true. And we essentially have built you know, Amanda and I have done almost no SEO and we don’t do a lot of big channel participation. We do next to zero advertising. The only advertisement we have ever purchased is we sponsored a friend of mine’s, like Charity run. We got our logo placed on his butt for the run because he he emailed us and was like, I can’t get anybody to sponsor my. But I was like, yeah, yeah, we’ll take the the back side of your shorts as the sponsor spot. no problem. So that’s the only advertising money we’ve ever spent. Almost all the marketing that we do for Spark Turo is we go on other people’s podcasts, we find other webinars, we go speak at other people’s conferences and events. We find email newsletters in the in the space, right in the audience research or marketing space. We go and do co-marketing with folks like dados, right? For example, the clickstream provider that does a lot of the research with us.

Rand Fishkin 00:27:21 we we built up a content brand on Spark Toro that gets no SEO. We get literally next to zero visits from Google search. The only visits we get are for our own brand name. We don’t rank for anything. Even the research, the unique research that we publish. We don’t rank for it because Google prefers, you know, stuff that’s higher up. For example, when we published research recently about zero click searches or, the zero click search problem and the zero click platform problem in social media. That research got tons of coverage from big media outlets and small ones and niche ones, and they all outrank us. So if you search for zero click searches 2024. You won’t find Spark Turbo. You’ll find Search Engine Land or The Verge or NPR or, you know, whoever’s written about it, they point back to us. We got our brand mentioned, so we’re happy with that. But it’s very hard to measure. A big brand would never invest this way. That’s what I urge. That’s what I urge.

Rand Fishkin 00:28:25 Small and.

Jillian Leslie 00:28:26 So interesting. And in fact, Amanda on my episode talked about zero click content, which is where you’re putting your content on Instagram, let’s say on LinkedIn, on Facebook, wherever, without the anticipation of there’s that link and people are going to click. It’s like be where people are, be where people want to consume content. And if they click like meaning if every so often you put a link that’s very valuable, they might click. But really it’s about, I would say, mindshare getting into people’s brains so that oh, there’s another post from spark tomorrow or from my low tree. Oh, I should pay attention to this. And then if I want to, let’s say, get some audience research software, I’m going to go find you guys. If I want to sell digital products, you’re going to go find MiloTree because you’ve heard about it. And so it’s again harder to measure. But you’re building up that loyalty, that sense of, you know, you deliver and I trust you.

Jillian Leslie 00:29:34 Going back to our conversation about can we trust Google? Who do you trust? And so if you can win that trust award, even without the link back, you know, that is more what you’re saying, especially if you’re a smaller player that’s more valuable or can be very valuable.

Rand Fishkin 00:29:53 Yeah, exactly. You know, if I were coaching a recipe or a food blogger, I would tell them, try and build brand resonance in your one particular space. So rather than I’m going to do a bunch of keyword research and look, these 5000 keywords look really good, I’m going to make a recipe for each one. I wouldn’t do that. I would not do that at all. I would instead say, you know, I am really good at polished visual food photography, and I really love vegan baking. Marry those two things. Put those two things together. That’s your unique value proposition. That’s the the space that you want to be known in. And so now when anybody on whatever YouTube or TikTok or Reddit or Instagram, all these places where visual content shines threads is actually good to I think.

Rand Fishkin 00:30:44 I think threads does a nicer job with visual content than Twitter did. That’s where I would start to build my audience and I would include the full recipe, the full, you know, detail, the full video that shows the whole thing. Or at least you know the short, you know, the 92nd version that can live on those platforms really nicely. And then, yeah, if people want to come check out more from you, they will. But after the 10th vegan baking recipe that they think looks amazing, chances are good next time they want some vegan baking, they’re going to you.

Speaker 3 00:31:17 They’re going to search for you. Right.

Rand Fishkin 00:31:19 And this this was also in the Google leak in case you missed it, if people search for your brand. You mentioned your husband, right? Jillian searching for keywords plus Reddit, right. If people search for, you know, vegan banana muffin plus your brand, you will rank higher for just vegan banana muffin, right? Google has this this sense that when people append a brand name to an unbranded search, it means that you are more relevant and should be ranked higher for the unbranded version as well.

Jillian Leslie 00:31:56 What’s interesting and what you’re saying is, especially in this world of AI, where content in and of itself becomes less valuable, Rand, you become more valuable because I trust you. So whatever you’re saying next, I go, oh, Rand said that I’m going to pay attention to that. And this also speaks to what I talk about selling your expertise. You don’t need a million customers for your book, for your course, for your membership, but you need those people to be evangelists, to feel like, wow, you’re really selling something of value and that and want to buy from you because they feel connected to you. So it kind of turns this. It flips it on its head of, oh my God, I need millions of pages from Google to know I’m going to be a little bit more, stealth or targeted or kind of put more of me into my own marketing and not just necessarily just buy ads on Facebook and think, I’m going to just flip this switch and my business is going to just show up for me.

Rand Fishkin 00:33:08 Yeah, I have a friend, friend in the UK who ran a travel website very popular. She she was doing extraordinarily well in Google, specifically getting 80, 90% plus of her traffic from Google ranked for all sorts of keywords. And then I don’t remember which update hit her, but one of the updates hitter and, you know, she she sort of lost all her traffic. And she had some conversations because she was well connected. She had some conversations with like people at Google and lots of professional SEOs. And and the consensus, unfortunately, was like, well, your content is great. The website is good. Like there’s nothing technically wrong, but there’s no brand here. Right. There’s no personal brand. And so that you’re not getting the signals that Google cares about more than they used to. Which are. Who is the the person or brand associated with this thing? Is it getting mentioned a lot? Is it getting specifically searched for? No, you’re just creating good, unique, useful content that answers the searchers query.

Rand Fishkin 00:34:10 That’s not enough. That’s not what we think people want anymore. And so that’s not what Google is surfacing anymore. They’re surfacing brands that people already know, like and trust. You can see in Google if, if part of your complaint, right is, oh, I don’t think the results are as good anymore. Well, part of that could be because you preferred good, unique, useful content that answered your search query over brands that you were familiar with. And now Google is much more brands you are familiar with.

Jillian Leslie 00:34:40 Interesting, interesting.

Rand Fishkin 00:34:42 So the content doesn’t need to be nearly as good.

Jillian Leslie 00:34:45 That’s so interesting. Well, it kind of speaks to you. I have a 17 year old daughter and it’s so fascinating because she’s in all these like micro communities that are very large. She’ll know of like K-pop artists that I don’t know will look on YouTube and that video will be seen by 10 million people, but I’ve never heard of them. Like it’s no longer just these people that everybody’s heard of. So there are the and I can’t call those micro communities.

Jillian Leslie 00:35:12 They’re still enormous. But now we have different communities that we’re in. So is there a way that you can be a bigger player in the vegan baking world?

Rand Fishkin 00:35:24 Exactly, exactly. I think about, you know, I think about this a lot from a. Product entrepreneurship and product design perspective rather than exclusively a marketing channel perspective. I think I think the days of exclusively marketing channel perspective are sort of ending where it’s going to be extremely hard to say. I have a generic product, that generically solves the customer’s problem. Now go execute really well on marketing channels. I don’t I don’t think that’s the way. I think the way forward is I have a very unique brandable product that turns off a lot of people. Ton of people hate it. This little segment loves it. Now now we’re talking. Right I think it is. I think it’s so smart to make enemies and also build a, you know, a community, a small community of people who super resonate with you versus where bland and generic, where for everyone sort of doesn’t doesn’t matter who or what we are, it’s just about the product is good that that does not work as well in, in modern sales and marketing.

Jillian Leslie 00:36:38 It’s funny, because we were I was just going over our FAQ on our MiloTree site, and I have an FAQ of who is this product not for. And I go tech bros, because we create very simple, simple, simple tools. If you’re a tech bro and you want to be in there customizing stuff, we are not for you. Yeah.

Rand Fishkin 00:37:02 Yeah, yeah. And there’s there’s other products. I can’t remember their names now, but, you know, I have a friend who runs something that’s like, there’s other products for those kinds of people. Perfect. And you’re for your kind of person. And so the beautiful thing about that is you can create content that resonates, create messaging and, and brand and and colors and logo and style and events and a podcast and you know, all the things, right. All the things around a brand that resonate with your audience and don’t match up with another one. And that is perfect, right? It it really works.

Jillian Leslie 00:37:38 And I think coming up with a unique perspective that you might not even know is so unique.

Jillian Leslie 00:37:47 And this is where I say, go ask your friends what your vibe is, because a lot of times you don’t see your vibe because you live inside you. And I was just talking to an online entrepreneur and she does decluttering, right? She goes in and make spaces less cluttered. And what I said is, because this impacts you like you can’t handle clutter and it makes your brain explode. So start talking about that, because I’m assuming there are other people whose brains explode with clutter. And if you can touch on those people and be like, hey, I’m that person, I relate to you, rather than, let’s just declutter our playroom, or let’s just declutter, like get, you know, clear out our refrigerator. But it’s like, sell those feelings of, oh my God, clutter makes me anxious. Clutter makes me, you know, feel stuck. So here are my solutions. Are you that person? Do you feel that way? Come along on this journey with me?

Rand Fishkin 00:38:56 Yeah, I, I mean, it’s really interesting because I don’t think marketers have been trained or taught.

Rand Fishkin 00:39:04 I don’t think if you do searches in Google for how to do digital marketing or you know, how to become great at web marketing, I don’t think you’ll find any of this advice which which is sad and frustrating and maybe something that, you know, people like me need to change. But also, I think it does give you the competitive advantage that straight up SEO no longer does.

Jillian Leslie 00:39:25 So if you are a, let’s say, a blogger and you got hit by Google and you’re salty, right? Do you go, would you go, okay, what I need to do is I need to do more blog posts and I need to do more keyword research and get kind of back in the good graces of Google. Or would you say, no, no, no, I’m going to pivot and kind of do more of these strategies, like you talking about spark, spark, Turo and how you guys don’t rely on SEO at all and you’re not running any ads? Nope. So and you’ve built a successful business.

Jillian Leslie 00:40:07 Yeah. So what would you say to me? I’ve got hit, I feel depressed, I hate Google.

Rand Fishkin 00:40:13 Use that. Use that. Right. Like, I think I think one of the wonderful things that you can do once you are outside of a keyword research driven, Google SEO driven, rules based marketing set, is you get to be you. You get to do the creative things that you’re passionate about and build the audience that you want to build. Instead of trying to be for everyone. And when you’re trading B for everyone, you’re going to be bland. You’re going to be without purpose. You’re going to be, politically neutral. You have to be emotionally neutral. You have to be psychologically neutral. Boring. Which is, you know, get me out of here. I’m not looking for better Homes and Gardens magazine of 1985. Right. I want someone with a perspective that I resonate with. I want someone who tells me exactly which butter and flour to buy. Because, you know, those those ones are whatever the, the, the right ethical sourcing or the right amount of fat content, or they’re made in a certain way or, you know, whatever it is, I want that perspective that I’m much more passionate and interested in that than I am.

Rand Fishkin 00:41:31 just the product. And I think you can feel this throughout every kind of world, right? Whether we’re talking about People who sell cookbooks, which are much more personality and perspective and story driven than, oh, here’s a quite good cookbook about vegan baking. It’s no, no, no, it belongs to this person who runs this bakery, who has this TikTok channel, who you know that that’s what you got to build.

Speaker 3 00:41:59 So it’s.

Jillian Leslie 00:41:59 Interesting. So you’re saying have a point of view, be willing. This is hard, especially for women to not befriend everybody to to define yourself through who you don’t befriend, who doesn’t like you. That’s hard.

Rand Fishkin 00:42:16 I mean, I will say, I think, Jillian, your, your and my generation women probably found that more challenging than than women of upcoming generations, I think. I think that there is a sort of a beautiful thing that that girls and women do on, on social media and have found through the internet, and have found through the openness of the, you know, of the world of the last 20 years, which is, which is to to be themselves and to express who they are.

Rand Fishkin 00:42:46 Without, you know, without sort of some of the, the hang ups and the gosh, I’ve got a reign that in, in order to be professional. I think the rain it in to be professional age is is largely adding, especially in personal brand and entrepreneurship fields. You know, if we’re talking about, hey, I’m applying for a big corporate job okay.

Speaker 3 00:43:05 Different story. You know different your.

Jillian Leslie 00:43:07 Whole self there.

Speaker 3 00:43:07 Yes. Yeah.

Rand Fishkin 00:43:08 Yeah I think it’s not not always reasonable to do that. And men probably are still given a lot more flexibility there. But in personal branding, you know, the, the, the people that I see resonating with especially younger folks. But but even even older demographics too, are those that, bring themselves and their perspectives, even the ones I strongly disagree with right to to the table and they build audiences through that.

Jillian Leslie 00:43:35 That’s interesting. That’s super helpful. I feel like when you were talking about really the Pareto principle, which is this idea that it and it shows up in so many things, which is the whole idea is the 8020 rule that 80% of your traffic will come from 20% of your posts, 80% of your sales income will come from 20% of your products.

Jillian Leslie 00:44:03 It’s like how Taylor Swift and maybe three other artists are taking up all of the music sales, but it used to be that there was room in the middle, and now that’s kind of cut out. However, and so when you were saying this, like the big players, you know, Coke is always going to be Coke kind of thing or Google will always be Google. that kind of bummed me out when you just said it. I was like, oh, because what if I want to be a new brand? And then though the rest of our conversation has really lifted me up and made me feel much more hopeful, because I’m going to bet like I bet on me, that hopefully by me putting my truth out there, my beliefs about business building, meeting like minded people like you, that I can create a community of like minded people. So in a weird way, you’re leaving me with a, like with much more hope and optimism, especially in a world with AI coming down the pike.

Jillian Leslie 00:45:10 And you can’t trust, you know, what’s created by machines and what is real. But what you’re saying is real is real and be more real.

Rand Fishkin 00:45:20 Yeah. And I you know, I think that there’s a a slight corollary or an addition to this advice, which is there’s sort of the world of things that you personally care deeply about, and you’re going to bring to your personal brand. And then I would just look for the, you know, if this circle in the diagram is you and your personal brand and all the things you believe and deeply care about, and this is your audience, I would look for the overlap of those. And that’s where I would go and create your, your your content, your product, your unique value proposition, your emotional branding, your messaging. I would look for that intersect. I think it is. It is still true that not everything that you do is going to resonate with all of the people that you want to reach, but when you find that intersect, that’s where you can focus your efforts.

Rand Fishkin 00:46:13 And and this is why, you know, I, I’m so passionate about audience research, which is essentially surveys, interviews and data at scale. Obviously, spark is the data at scale portion, but we’re talking more about what you can learn from surveys and interviews here. Right. But we’re talking about surveying your audience, having deep, resonant conversations with a bunch of individual people in your audience about what they consume and why and what they care about. And then finding the oh my gosh, you know, ten out of the 15 people I talked to about vegan baking all said the same thing about, I don’t know, some problem with the the texture of vegan baking or their their opinions about how good the sweets could be or their, thoughts on, I don’t know, the ethics of it or, you know, whatever it is. Right. And they’re associations and I care about that same solving that same problem. So that’s where I’m going to focus. and that that works.

Jillian Leslie 00:47:10 Well, Rand, I have to say that you’ve given me so much to think about and hopefully inspired my audience, who I feel has taken some hard knocks recently.

Speaker 3 00:47:24 Yeah. And my heart.

Rand Fishkin 00:47:26 Goes out to them.

Speaker 3 00:47:26 I mean, kind of like.

Jillian Leslie 00:47:27 At the whim of these large companies that don’t care about them.

Speaker 3 00:47:32 Right?

Rand Fishkin 00:47:33 Right. Yeah. And I think one of the beautiful things about doing marketing in this fashion, right, essentially doing the audience research to find your audience’s sources of influence and inspiration and their emotional resonance, the things that resonate with them that frees you. It frees you from the demands of these big platforms, and it lets you do creative and exciting things that you never would have been able to do inside the constraints of Google’s or YouTube’s or TikTok’s or Instagram’s ecosystem. And you can play with all of those channels with the things that you do create.

Jillian Leslie 00:48:08 I think that’s great. All right. Rant if people want to learn more about spark Toro, I love your content that you share and I and as I had said, you’re sharing much more on threads now. And LinkedIn, it seems, is that are those your main platforms?

Rand Fishkin 00:48:23 Those are.

Rand Fishkin 00:48:24 Those are the big two for us. Yeah.

Jillian Leslie 00:48:25 Okay. Because I feel like you do come up with interesting insights just about marketing in the industry and what’s happening. So I always I recommend you guys find Rand and follow him. But where are the best places for people to reach out to you or ask you questions or see what you’re up to?

Rand Fishkin 00:48:43 Yeah, yeah. So on on threads I’m ran to Reutter which my wife’s last name, and on LinkedIn, Rand Fishkin. And if you want to try out spark Toro it’s some it’s free. There’s no, you don’t need a credit card to sign up or anything. It’s it’s just spark toro. Com. Our blog has lots of the information and research reports that you and I have been talking about today. And of course, Amanda’s great blog posts are there too.

Jillian Leslie 00:49:07 Awesome. Well, I just have to say thank you so much for coming on the show.

Rand Fishkin 00:49:12 Oh, it’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me, Jillian.

Jillian Leslie 00:49:14 I hope you guys like this episode.

Jillian Leslie 00:49:16 I had multiple takeaways. The first is that Google is still Google, it is still a powerhouse. It is worth working on SEO, even if Google isn’t always so upfront with how the algorithm works. They are really trying to build a useful product. However, because Google does favour big brands, it is in your best interest in my best interest to find a way to compete in those spaces, in those cracks where big brands don’t live, and that it is much more about being a personal brand with a point of view. So get used to expressing that. Keep leaning into what makes you different, what makes people fall in love with you and people not like you. Get on podcasts. If you think you’d be a good guest for my show, reach out to me. I’d love to hear from you. But now it’s about getting super creative. I have been getting on so many calls with bloggers who say to me, they no longer want to just play the Google traffic game. If this is you, definitely get on a free 20 minute strategy.

Jillian Leslie 00:50:36 Call with me where I will show you the beauty of building digital products and selling them to your audience. With this strategy, the sky is the limit. To book a call, go to milotree.com/meet because I would love to meet you. I’d love to help you. If you’ve liked this episode, please share it with a friend. If you are enjoying the podcast, please go to iTunes and give it five stars. I’d be so appreciative and I will see you here again next week.