Episode 1: “Are Keywords Dead?”

First Broadcast: July 2020

Dixon Jones and David Bain joined forces to bring a new angle to online marketing questions.

Cindy Krum from MobileMoxie

Cindy wrote about “Entity First” mobile indexing in this series of articles.

Deepak Shukla from Pearl Lemon

Deepak has 55 reviews about his talks on Truspilot!

Maret Reutelingsperger from Mobe Digital

Maret talks about Topic Clusters over at WeRoast.

Want to Read Instead? Here is the Transcript.

Dixon: Hello, everybody to the very first Knowledge Panel, which I think we are trying to make this a super-duper, you know, high tech thing that will eventually go live, stream on Facebook and YouTube and LinkedIn and Zoom, and goodness know what, all at the same time and stuff. But we’re just using a few technologies at once this time round. So, we’re on Facebook and Zoom. So, if you are on one of those systems, then great, put a message or a question in a panel. I can only see the Zoom ones. I don’t know David if the other ones come in, if the Facebook ones come in, you can see.

David: I can see the Facebook ones as well. So, if there’s comments on Facebook, I’ll try and bring them into the conversation. We’ve got William Rock, we’ve got Vanny, we’ve got Ryan, Luke, Chris, Izzy, Anna…

Dixon: William, how are you?

David: …all watching live on Zoom. So, welcome.

Dixon: Excellent. Okay. And I’m sure we’re gonna have some more come in as well. So, fantastic. Welcome to the Knowledge Panel brought you by inlinks.net, of which I am the CEO. The Knowledge Panel is gonna be a monthly panel of experts, diving into a key question on my marketing. And this month’s question is, are keyword’s dead? With me, well, obviously, I’ve got David, who is is my co co-producer and partner in crime for this. So, David, is there anything that I need to know before I introduce Maret, Cindy, and Deepak?

David: I think everything’s going smoothly. I think we’ve got people watching this live from Zoom.

Dixon: If anything goes wrong with the technology guys, it’s all David’s fault. If anything goes wrong with the part here, it’s probably me, which most like to go wrong. So, I got some fantastic guests here. Cindy, why don’t you start by introducing yourself and we’ll just go through the three of you.

Cindy: Sure. Hi everybody. My name’s Cindy Krum and I’m the CEO of MobileMoxie, and we specialize in mobile first indexing things. So, yeah. Yay.

Dixon: Okay. Maret.

Maret: Hello. My name is Maret.

Dixon: Ah, go for the surname and then we can do a, you know, pronounce this right on YouTube.

Maret: Or, you know, that’s the webinar finished, but okay, let’s do it. My name is Maret Reutelingsperger.

Deepak: Oh, wow.

Maret: I’m very jealous of Cindy’s surname, which is a lovely four letters. I am the founder of Moble Digital, so I’m self-employed and we do inbound marketing in the fullest. So, we help brands tell their story by getting the foundation of their website right through technical SEO, and then using inbound marketing tactics, like email marketing and automation, to continue the conversation.

Dixon: Amazing. Okay. And Deepak.

Deepak: Hello everybody. My name is, Dixon has said is Deepak and I run…

Dixon: I’ve got it right, right?

Deepak: Absolutely. There’s been many an instance like my hat where I’ve got a funny comment or two, and I’ve like work with a Deepak, work with a Deepak. So, I’m excited to be here. I run a company called Pearl Lemon. I don’t have a lemon with me, unfortunately, but that is what we’re called and what we do is plain, well, I say plain Jane, we like to try and keep it exciting, plain Jane, search engine optimization for our clients. And yeah, just excited to shoot the good stuff with you today.

Dixon: Yes. Fantastic. And thank you everyone so much for coming on. Really appreciate it guys. So, key question of the day, are keywords dead, right? Who wants to go first, on this one? Are keywords dead? Maret, why don’t you go first and just shoot your opinion open. If anyone wants to disagree, I’m all for that. I don’t want…

Dixon: We’re the buzzer.

David: Twenty-five minutes of agreement.

Maret: Maybe just wave something like, no. So, are keywords dead? I don’t think they’re dead. I just think they’ve evolved. So, you could say like either like a phoenix or like a zombie. And I think rather than focusing on specific keywords, we should be looking at topics and creating topic clusters where that’s useful to the visitors of your website.

Dixon: So, why?

Maret: Why?

Dixon: Why?

Maret: For the visitors. To be honest, I feel like actually SEO, and of course, the technical side is really important. Absolutely because you need the foundation there to be able to be found, but SEO is actually about user experience and making sure that you are answering your visitors questions or fulfill their needs. Besides that, as you are answering questions on your website, you become more known as an authority and where Google and other search engines are getting better at NLP and understanding, and linking topics and articles together, they will also understand that you are an authority in your topic.

Dixon: Cindy, what’s your thoughts?

Cindy: Yeah. I wanna add onto it and maybe put a slightly more positive spin than zombie.

David: I like that.

Cindy: I think keywords more like a butterfly, like we’ve gone from being a caterpillar to a butterfly because they’ve gotten more rich. Because the way, at least in my conception of mobile first indexing and entity first indexing, now keywords and well, entities at least, are language agnostic, which means that you have one concept that can be described in any language or many languages. And it’s so much richer. And I think that this is important from a machine learning perspective from Google because when you had everything divided by language, you had very small hoses of information where Google could machine learn in this language, and then this language, and they were learning independently.

And when you take it up to the higher entity level, they can learn in all the languages at once, and cross-apply what they know. Because for instance, you know, Eskimos write more about ice, so they have more words in that language, and let’s take that to a broader perspective. There are countries and languages that focus more on certain topics, certain ideas, certain concepts, and maybe there’s scientific research or whatever in this one language that we’re being locked out of until our utilities where we find information are entity-based, rather than language-based.

Dixon: So, I read your whole series of articles on entity first indexing and stuff. And that concept just really hit me, because I think, you know, if I can take that concept, InLinks, InLinks is currently in English and French, and we’ve been sitting there thinking, right, it’s gonna take me this much time to get into each other language, but that’s not necessarily how I need to do it. I could potentially end up with, you know, all of the other languages at the same time if I think about it right. So, it’s given me some good thoughts and stuff. But Deepak, you know, the problem is I bet you can go off on your own, whatever you were gonna say beforehand, but I bet the problem for you is your clients are sitting there saying, yeah, but I just wanna be number one for insert keyword word here. I bet that’s still happening, right?

Deepak: Ah, absolutely. I’m gonna, just for argument’s sake, take the other side of the fence and say, yes. I do think even as an SEO agency owner, keywords are dead and just because it makes it more exciting, right, or not, maybe I actually believe it, we’ll see. So, I think, in the way the question was intended, much like my marathon running of yesteryear, 10 years ago, I was able to just by brute force run without necessarily tracking the effectiveness of my runs, run without following a program or a plan, go out and run a half decent marathon. And I got accolades from all of my friends around me, and therefore I just kept doing the same thing because it just was highly effective. Now, as I continued with the same strategy, I suddenly started to notice the introduction of things like Fitbit and Strava, and there was tracking. And even ordinary Joe, would show me his personal best run times just outside the high street where I run. So, all of a sudden my running game became rubbish effectively.

Now, I’d love to say that I have then consequently improved my strategy. Well, what actually happened was that I just began running marathons in nations, such as Brazil, one of my more recent marathons was in Rio, where they’ve not cottoned on yet to this Fitbit and Strava thing.

Dixon: Oh really?

Deepak: Well, at least at the marathon that I turned up at, it was definitely different from running London, I’ll tell you that much. And there, I was met with a little bit more success. So, I think that the challenge that we have is that keywords in some markets are dead, in other markets, it’s actually quite effective. So, really it depends who you’re talking to. And I would argue that there’s a significant amount of the population, i.e., some of our Arab nation clients who don’t need to bother with nuance and context and entities, because out there, they just throw links up. They don’t do anything else. And you know what I tell you, it works, it works. So, for those reasons, I would say that there’s a bigger and growing proportion of the actual continent, you know, or the world rather where keywords are alive and kicking, and that’s all you need. So, they’re dead only in the sense that it depends which race you’re running. And I think that that’s a key thing that we need to consider context.

Dixon: So, I think…

Cindy: That full circle, which race you’re running. I’m so impressed.

Dixon: It’s so cool, isn’t he? You know, he just thought that up before he started. So, I mean, for me, the move to entities, so the argument for keywords is dead or an argument for keywords is dead, is that as you say, Cindy, I mean, Google has moved towards trying to get this almost encyclopedia of information, rather than trying to rely on individual webpages for every little bit of information. It said, right, you know, there are several ways to tie a bow tie. I’ll just record them all in one place, and then, you know, refer to each individual ones or whatever I’m gonna do. So, it becomes the entity that Google is really indexing and trying to enrich with information. But on the other side of that, of course, the user arguably does still type in keywords. So, it’s then getting that stepping stone between somebody trying to describe a query in words, and then it coming back as a representation of entities and ideas.

But we’ve got a challenge then, because people then moved over to sort of asking questions on search engines rather than putting in keywords. And when I sent out the email for these, Grant Simmons came back and pointed out that he’d written an article on search engine watch back in 2013 with exactly that point, that’s seven years ago saying keywords are dead. So, it’s like, SEO is dead. This story is coming around and around and around and around. So, my question to any of you, is there anything different between the argument of keywords is dead now compared to seven years ago? Seven years ago, we were moving over to needs, answer the question, but is there anything fundamentally different now, or is it the same thing to another side of the coin?

Deepak: I’ll try.

Dixon: Go on.

Deepak: Okay. So, I mean, the recent update in May, some people popularly called it the pandemic update, SEOs considered to be the Google E update. It depends who you’re asking. And I can personally say also that from the sites that we manage, as well as personal sites that I own, there was a direct correlation that relates to this question, you know, is it more relevant now that we saw from, you know, our own sites. Broadly speaking, businesses or affiliate websites that I own, or we own as a company, were all punished because they don’t have anything that really pertains to expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, because they don’t fulfill anything that relates to entities or the knowledge graph. They are sites that are set up for a singular purpose to throw links to referral traffic, to a third party website. Okay. Of course, and this is a established business that has been working very, very well. On the other side of it, because I turn up to webinars and wear dorky hats like this, Pearl Lemon’s actual SEO was rewarded. And our traffic doubled over the course of COVID, which was really, really interesting to see, because it’s not to tell you that I did anything different, I’ve just keep turning up to [crosstalk 00:13:53]

Dixon: No, but you are the authority behind Pearl Lemon.

Deepak: Absolutely.

Dixon: And I think that’s probably why we do turn up to these things and do these. I mean, all four of us have been regular speakers on the circuit and we are building up on knowledge expertise, but it makes it harder for us to practice that for our clients, doesn’t it?

Cindy: Well, let me just throw this idea out there, to bring back in the history component. In the early days of my speaking career, I did it for two reasons. Number one, I wanted people to hear what I was doing, because it seemed like it was good for my career, but number two, it seemed cheaper than regular link building.

Dixon: I did it because I didn’t have to pay for a ticket.

Cindy: Yeah, that as well.

Deepak: We all have our reasons. They’re always as good as [inaudible 00:14:49].

Maret: Go on.

Deepak: Well, what’s interesting to your point is that, you know, when I look at the client side, clients don’t care about knowledge entities. And I do think rightly so, the standard thing that most clients will ask is say, “Hey, Deepak, I’m gonna rank for design agency Bristol. And, you know, I have an outdated LinkedIn profile. I have nothing that pertains to anyone about the business or stakeholders.” And the truth is that it’s extremely nuanced because I always liken it to, you know, the base of the pyramid concept that when we discuss anything that pertains to this, the reality is, and you see it when you distinguish it from the SEO conversations as to where SEO’s moving versus everybody else, right, as in the local plumber, who’s trying to rank in Kilmarnock. Does he need the knowledge entity? Probably doesn’t because his competitors are shocking, therefore, Google places less investment in that area. And then when you scale that out and think about all of the economies that are just coming online, so to speak, we’ve got probably a lot of the African subcontinent who probably are now getting Wi-Fi regularly throughout.

You know, we’ve got all of these spaces, and the reason I bring this up because I just look at our international clients. The guys that want to rank in Korea or in Portugal, or well in Portuguese or in Spanish, what works for them, particularly based upon not even just the language, but also the segment, doesn’t necessarily work for…so, for example, you know, we all are in some space, we’re all in the marketing field. Our competition is hell of a lot more sophisticated than anybody else. And that means there’s that concept of the bar. I always think that what’s fantastic is that we get to discuss this, but the reality is that on the client side, for the most part, depending upon who your client is, everything else is probably, you know, 10 years behind, because a lot of the more forward thinking clients, I find, they tend to have their own in-house SEOs, anyway. They tend to understand the power of it.

Dixon: Maret, I feel you haven’t talked for ages, sorry.

Deepak: Sorry.

Dixon: Yeah, I feel like all Deepak.

Maret: I was actually gonna jump into what Deepak said there, because yeah, I get what you’re saying, but actually, do not think that it’s also in part education of the clients. So, I completely get that different markets work in different ways. But, for example, when I often talk to other companies, they’re like, I just wanna rank by headphones, for example. Yeah. They want to rank for the high intent, of whether they have consciously said that’s in high intent keyword, they know that’s the buying keyword. And actually, as Google gets smarter, and I suppose kind of referring back to sort of topic clusters and stuff like that, it goes way broader because search engines do get better at understanding intent just from simple user and data. And so I find that educating my clients a little bit about the buyer’s journey and painting a broader picture for them does really help.

Dixon: So, I’ve got something in there. What I’ve seen on, now that, you know, InLinks is kind of analyzing things by entities and stuff and using NLP, one thing that’s really annoying for me is that the readability index is kind of an open source, Flesch-Kincaid readability index and stuff, which basically is an index saying what grade of school can a person read this at? So, can you read it at grades 2, 3, 10, whatever it may be? So, basically, the higher it is, the easier it is to read. But the problem I’ve got with that, is it’s great for machine learning, because it means that the easier it is to read, the easier it is for machine to read. And then the machine turns it into entities and ideas, and as Maret says, we got clusters of topics and ideas that are conceptually close to each other.

So, therefore write some content that has contextually cluster ideas and you are winning and you’re on a winner. But what it’s doing is, it’s dumbing down the bloody internet for all of us, isn’t it? Is it not? I mean, you just get there and see, you know, 10 best reasons for, you know, this or this and other, and it’s written in, you know, not quite pigeon English, but in trying to drive the theory of we want to be the best content on the web, we are losing that ability to use flowery language that humans get, that enriches the whole feeling. Is that a danger of where Google’s going with entity search?

Cindy: It’s a democratization of the internet, not a dumbing down, Dixon.

Dixon: Ah, okay. All right. Okay. Well, democratization to the lowest common denominator.

Deepak: I like that. Tends to your asking, I presume. They’re both good deeds.

David: Just in relation to that.

Dixon: Yeah, David go on.

David: Let’s jump in and have a couple of questions or thoughts from the audience here. We’ve got Christine Shashinger [SP] is actually saying, I have to watch, but entities are just nouns, still a keyword. Though I use query term now. Sherry Thurow [SP] that said in Facebook as well, keywords will die when people stop writing, texting, and speaking them into search engines. I see Dixon nodding there as well. I’m sure lots of you got thoughts on that.

Dixon: No, no. I’m loving it because of the two people that ask the questions really, that are trying to make a point. But I have to say that I think an entity is much more than a noun. I think an entity now can be a process, an entity can be a concept, and not necessarily a noun. Maybe my grammar’s wrong, and I just dunno what a noun is. But I think that entities now are getting much, much broader in concept. Google’s very good at understanding brands and places, and anything starting with the capital letter, rubbish at understanding, it would seem things like, you know, concepts of horse riding and things like that. Sorry.

Cindy: Let me back you up on that, Dixon, because if it were just a noun, then Google wouldn’t be able to associate pictures and audio to the entity. So, I generally agree with Sherry, but I do think that it’s a bit richer than that because they are doing visual search and audio search to link back. So, people are searching without words, without keywords, and still getting to the entity. So, I don’t know if that flows over to keywords are dead or keywords are not dead. But keywords are still part of the mix, they’re just not the only things in the mix.

David: A quick question from Chris Labard [SP]. Chris is saying is there any tool online to measure the weight of entity relationships? Example, what words are heavily related to another keyword? Maret, sorry, I know you were struggling to get in there. Would you like to give any thoughts on that one?

Maret: What I was going to say was actually just backing up Cindy on, and she must see this particularly around mobile searches and stuff. How actually on some devices, people are searching more conversationally rather than just the keywords, but I appreciate that’s not what Chris said, so we can come back to that.

David: Okay.

Dixon: And on Chris’ question, I’ll read it again, I can see it on the screen. Is there any tool out online to measure the weight of entity relationships? For example, what words are heavily related to another keyword? So, I’d say that it’s what concepts are heavily related to other concepts. And I think there are tools and obviously, InLinks is one of them, but not the only one. But I think that the interesting thing is that it is connecting concepts together, and that allows you to give context to a word. So, a really good example is the word engine. So, engine if it’s connected to things like tires and petrol then, or gas depending on where you come from, then it’s almost certainly a combustion engine, where if it’s connected to SAPS and listings and internet, then it’s almost certainly a search engine context. And that’s where Google likes to take these words and then fit them into boxes so that it can get context. And I think that really makes a natural language processing algorithm tie down what the underlying meaning is of content much better, than when they were just doing pagerank and anchor text.

Deepak: And to come back to Maret your original mention of both topic clusters and how we service clients. What I’ve found depending upon, and it depends, of course, who you’re talking to, there’s many a commercial director I’ve met who’s just goes blank when we talk about some of this stuff. The work around, from our perspective, is, okay, here’s a series of content that we would love for you to produce, which is contextually relevant to the keyword, but they’re not directly talking about a design agency in Bradford because there’s lots of other things that contextually relate to it, talking about SVGs, talking about fonts, talking about graphics and totalization. And that is what I found is a good way in terms of communicating it in a language again, the contextual language that my client understands that practically, this is what I think you should do.

But what’s also interesting about it is, for many a person who’s commercially driven, the process doesn’t change, and that’s what’s difficult for people to conceptually understand, that they’re still gonna be typing in keywords into Google, and then keywords are still going to appear. So, it’s often quite counterintuitive for somebody to understand that, well, it’s not just keywords, but equally it is keywords I’m typing in, to kind of drive a result. So, that is how we actually use the topic cluster part in a way that sometimes my clients will understand.

Maret: Yeah. And again, then you’re building a broader authority, aren’t you? Because you’re not just saying we do design, we do design, but actually you are literally showcasing your authority.

Deepak: Exactly. Yeah.

Dixon: Of course, it’s not always keywords though, is it? I mean, Cindy, you must know a lot more about Google discover than most people, and you don’t have to type in a keyword for traffic to come from Google Discover.

Cindy: Yes. And Google Discover or iterations of it with different names has been around for a very long time. And in one of the iterations when they announced it, what they were talking about was keyword free search, predictive search, understanding what results you want before you even type a question or a query in. So, it is, to some degree, what they’re going for, at least as part of the mix. It’s not gonna fully replace…I don’t think it’s ever gonna fully replace keyword search. Keyword search has existed long before Google and before the internet, you know, we were looking for keywords in the Dewey Decimal System. So, I don’t think keyword search is gonna go away. But it’s just gonna have more competitors, right, other ways of finding information.

Maret: Yeah. It’s almost like actually, when you think about it, it’s like the index of a book, it’s literally keyword search.

Deepak: Yeah. Yeah.

Dixon: Okay. I’m gonna go, move slightly sideways then and say, okay, I seem to remember John Muller pointing out that there may be some unhad SEO traffic to be had in image search, recently. Now, obviously an image doesn’t have any words connected, you know, it doesn’t have words at all. So, if you are putting up images and you are trying to get more traffic because you I’ve got images, how might that work? I mean, certainly keywords are dead in that context really, what does John mean, I guess, by saying we’re not doing the right things with images? Why are we all falling short? Anyone?

Cindy: I don’t know why we’re all falling short because they don’t have keywords.

Dixon: Okay.

Cindy: But I have interesting stuff to add to the idea, which is that for a while in Google shopping, and I haven’t tested this in a while, but I wrote about it many years ago, there was this thing that was like find similar in Google shopping. And so that was their first attempt at visual search algorithms. And I wrote about this in the context of a blue dress. So I think if you search for Cindy Krum and blue dress, you’ll get the result. But it was that when I was searching for a blue dress and clicked see similar, if the blue dress that I was looking at right then was on a human, then all of the similar ones would also be on human models. But if it was on a mannequin, all of the similar ones would be on mannequins.

Dixon: Amazing.

Deepak: I think that what’s interesting about it, this is a really good example of it, that the human and the mannequin side, I think that with the way that the visual search is going, what’s interesting about it, you know, we’ve got this whole concept of, for example, you know, shop on Instagram. You can take pictures and have contextually related, ultimately images appear if you’re trying to shop for something. The part that’s always difficult for me to even get my head around is what’s interesting is, at the backend of it, we talk about AI and algorithms. But fundamentally, it’s contextually related keywords that Google keeps that then determine, I think, to a degree what images correlate with related images. So, whilst from a actual search perspective, we’re using images and it generates perhaps related images, at the backend it’s still keywords I think that are driving it based upon data that they’re able to excavate based upon, you know, the millions of images that do have data, that they do have stored because we still, I think to a degree, need to rely upon actual linguistics to then build out visual-based search. So, at its core, what’s interesting is for me, it will always be keyword, even if from a search perspective, there’s no keywords involved whatsoever.

Dixon: I dunno if that’s true because I bet you and Cindy put in, when search for the blue dresses, you know, the mannequin pictures were coming from websites who were in different languages. And so unless all the keywords are all translated into 200 different languages, which probably they are, but I think that it probably ties it back to an entity first, just for the saving of processing powers, storing, you know, it’s just easier to store a concept.

Cindy: Exactly. Well, and there was a major update that happened with images where Google started translating the title tags when they were putting the images in image search, and that showed that they were using the entities first to surface. Because if, let’s say, I search for a picture of the Eiffel Tower, do I care what language the webpage is in, or am I just looking for the best picture of the Eiffel tower? And so I also did blue chairs in a later article, about this image search change and found when I searched for blue chairs in English, the results were coming from websites written in all different languages, exactly like you said, Dixon.

Dixon: Maret, do you wanna add anything in there or…?

Maret: Well, actually I just thought that that’s really interesting what you said, because again there I guess for search engines, John Mueller, pay attention, there something…

Dixon: Oh yeah. Like we’re gonna tell him what to do, you know.

Maret: There’s actually like a bit of intent that you can still learn there because I think what Cindy said, absolutely, if you’re searching for the Eiffel Tower, you just want the best picture of the Eiffel tower, but if you’re searching for a blue chair, it’s actually quite likely that you’re looking to buy a blue chair. So, it would be more relevant for Google or other search engines to, even in image results, show you the results from either local chair shops or at least in your language, so that it’s easier for you to purchase.

Dixon: Fair point. That’s a very fair point. That’s true. Okay. Well, I’m gonna go onto one other thing where I think that…oh, sorry, David, is there a question sitting there that I should be…

David: There’s one other question. And that’s from Chris again saying, can someone talk about how they could create a topic cluster for an SEO silo for better rankings?

Dixon: Chris is just giving me an opportunity to plug InLinks on that. So, let’s just leave that one there. Thank you. Chris Labard, everybody. So, I’m not gonna answer that one. Oh, no. I could, but I’ll try and move on. Otherwise, it becomes a sales pitch for me, so. Right. Okay. So, I wanna move away from that a little bit and then say, okay, well, here’s another reason why keywords become completely pointless. Do you think it’s valid really for SEOs to call Twitter and Facebook’s algorithms to be part of their SEO realm now? Because if I’m searching, for example, for a restaurant locally, I’m gonna do that amongst my friends. I’m gonna ask on Facebook or I’m gonna ask on Twitter, because I’m gonna trust the opinion of the people that are answering me more than an algorithm, really. So, does that not mean that the SEO should now not really be, you know, concentrating on keywords, but should be concentrating on people? And I’m not saying necessary the context of the searcher, but the Twitter algorithm or Facebook algorithm to say, how does it get the influencer to respond in the right way to the right question? Or is this in the realm of the social media person, and we can’t possibly learn it all?

Cindy: Like Reddit?

Dixon: You like Reddit. Okay. Yeah. I’m scared of Reddit. I figure if I go on to Reddit too long, they’re gonna kill me, you know. So, I…

Maret: I heard you can get lost in Reddit and never come out.

Dixon: Yeah, well, that’s happening now. I mean, Facebook’s got a thing on the phone that’s a bit like TikToky kind of thing that she seems to find herself in. And she’s just going through this video, after video, after video, it’s sort of like a discover kind of thing for videos. And all she was trying to do was, you know, message somebody and she’s in this thing. So, again, isn’t it important for SEOs to start thinking about how those algorithms work and how we get into those streams and then how we turn that into an opportunity for our customers, you know?

Deepak: Interestingly, to refer back to Chris, who’s commented my question was easier, last out loud. I like that. So, what for me is interesting and you made reference to it Chris was, SEO silos, right? So, if we think about a social media platform as a silo, and we just literally take the example that I had with the marathon, you know, there’s established social media platforms that, you know, a lot of them were born during the subprime credit crunch crisis in 2008, Instagram came out of there, and a couple of others have come out of there. And they’ll probably be more that come out now, still in this time. There’s definitely, I think an argument for those being considered. It might be a little bit early, but then you think about for example, spaces. And again, I know this just from our commercial experience, we get companies who specifically wanna talk to us about Airbnb SEO ranking, they wanna talk to us specifically about Facebook marketplace ranking, they wanna talk to us about Etsy, Walmart, Amazon ranking, and they’re not interested in it as being a social conversation. They’re like we wanna build links or we wanna rank, and they see it as being an SEO field. So, I mean, just from the commercial experience, that we are being forced to consider some of these platforms have created industries within themselves. So, I guess my simple answer is that yes, just from my personal experience, I do think that it’s a space that we’re beginning to invest more aggressively in now.

Dixon: I can actually say, I mean, booking.com. So, I’ve got a holiday let in Wales, if anybody wants to go to Snowdonia, you know, that’s great as well, I’ll sell that. I mean, there’s no point in me trying to optimize for, you know, holiday let in Balla because booking.com’s there. And all of my bookings come through booking.com. Marie doesn’t want to answer the queries from Airbnb’s, just so you know, but booking.com has been the whole thing for this thing, and that’s where all the money comes from. So, it’s a very important skill. And of course, you’d ask an SEO to do it surely because we know the ins and outs, you know, we can pick it up pretty quickly, hopefully.

Deepak: Sorry, go ahead.

Maret: The only thing I was gonna say is sort of additionally to that, even if it’s not technically SEO, they’re trust signals, aren’t they? It is making sure that if we’re talking social profiles in particular, but also Google my business, for example, it’s about having that consistency throughout and not be called, you know, marketing agency on Google My Business, and then inbound agency on LinkedIn, and just actually generally just email on Twitter, for example, it creates confusion, not just with Google but also with your users. And it just goes back again to actually SEO is becoming more of a user experience and making sure that you become a trusted authority.

Cindy: Well, and we call it multifaceted SEO or multifaceted marketing, which is to say that if you’re only ranking in Google, or you only have a presence in one place, that’s not what real companies do. Real companies like Wil Reynolds talks about real company shit. Real company shit, pardon my language.

Dixon: His language as well.

Deepak: His language

Cindy: He says that on Facebook live, I dunno how that works. So, they would be in YouTube and they would be in Twitter and they would be in Facebook, and they would have a knowledge graph, and they would do all of the things that makes them look more legitimate that affiliates, especially like one dude with many affiliate sites for the same vertical doesn’t have time to do. Dude or lady, I shouldn’t pick on dudes.

Dixon: Excellent. Okay, guys we are nearly at time. David, are there any questions or anything up there that I need to need to cover before I…

David: A few positive comments, a few likes, but no specific questions at the moment. I think it’s been a wonderful panel.

Dixon: A few positive comments and loads and loads of disparaging comments about my COVID haircut, no doubt. But anyway, guys, I really do appreciate you guys coming down and being on the first Knowledge Panel. I hope it’s the first of many. We’ll turn it into podcasts eventually as well. Where can people find out more about you, if they want to find out more about you? Maret.

Maret: So, I tend to really share my thoughts on Twitter. They could be shower thoughts, they could be SEO related, but in any case…

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Dixon: What’s your handle on Twitter? It’s surely not at me @maretreutelingsperger.

Maret: That doesn’t fit in a tweet. So, it’s just, it’smaret.

Dixon: It’smaret, that’s easier. Cindy.

Cindy: Let’s see. You can find out all about MobileMoxie and our SEO, mobile SEO tools @mobilemoxi.com or I’m all over Twitter @suzzicks, S-U-Z-Z-I-C-K-S.

Dixon: Okay. And Deepak, how do we find out about you?

Deepak: Guys, if you want to see me spouting nonsense, you’ll find it most easily available on Facebook. Follow me on Facebook and…

Maret: Oh, that’s a great idea. I’m gonna do that too quickly.

Deepak: I do live there and feel free to come on and poke fun at my hat. You you’ll find me talking about it there. So, Facebook is fantastic. You can find me there.

Dixon: Okay. And David, Casting Cred is great. If you need somebody to help you set up these things. I can recommend David, thank you very much for getting me and making sure that I don’t fall out the holes…

David: That’s been a great panel.

Dixon: …fall through the holes. Guys if people want to like the Facebook page for InLinks as well, then we’ll let you know when the other ones are on. I think we’ve figured out how to live stream on Facebook now. So, that’s great. YouTube, there is a YouTube channel for InLinks as well. And there’s one on LinkedIn and eventually, I’ll get to all of them, but I’m just trying to add one stream at a time. So, everyone, thank you so much for coming in. I really do appreciate it and see you next month or see some of you guests next month, and maybe you guys on here as well.

Maret: Thanks so much for having us.

Deepak: Thanks. Thanks, Dixon.

Dixon: Bye-bye. See you guys.

Deepak: Bye.

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