Season 2, Episode 6: Next-Level SEO

In this episode, we're joined by Trip Albagdadi, our SEO Specialist, who shares how he brings our clients' SEO and SEM campaigns to the next level.

Transcript

Tom Marguccio 0:00

Welcome to Coffee and Tea with SCG, a podcast from the industry experts at SCG Advertising and PR. We are a full-service woman-owned agency that offers advertising, public relations, recruitment marketing, and association and event management. In this season, we'll be chatting with some members of our team about innovation in their respective industries. So grab your coffee and your tea, and let's brew up a good conversation.

Maddie Trumino 0:31

Welcome back to another episode of Coffee and Tea with SCG. I'm your host, Maddie Trumino, and today I am joined by Trip Albagdadi, our SEO SEM specialist. Hi Trip, how are you?

Trip Albagdadi 0:44

Great. It's a pleasure to be here. That was really good. You did excellent with my name.

Maddie Trumino 0:48

Thank you.

Trip Albagdadi 0:49

It is a tough one.

Maddie Trumino 0:50

I was practicing before.

Trip Albagdadi 0:51

You don't have to say the whole name every time, you can just say Trip. This is this point forward. So thank you.

Maddie Trumino 0:56

Perfect. And a little uh tidbit about Trip is he's actually here for the first time. We're meeting him for the first time in person, me and the rest of our office and the rest of our team members, because he is actually from California.

Trip Albagdadi 1:08

Yes, San Diego. It is glorious to be here. Um I had a great flight out. Newark was uneventful. I was in the new terminal. Nice. I felt sorry for the Uber driver because it was some kind of traffic getting here. Yeah. Like I said, it wasn't LA level, but maybe one or two steps below LA getting here to the hotel.

Maddie Trumino 1:29

Well, that's amazing because Newark has not been easy lately. So I'm glad that you had an uneventful trip. That's a positive.

Trip Albagdadi 1:36

On time.

Maddie Trumino 1:36

That's great. Um, so we always start off the podcast with the same question, and that's do you prefer coffee or tea? And how do you take it?

Trip Albagdadi 1:45

Oh, uh, I am right now addicted to overpriced mochas.

Maddie Trumino 1:52

You have mentioned that, yes.

Trip Albagdadi 1:53

I get in regular arguments with my wife because she calculates how much a seven to eight dollar mocha is every day and reminds me that I could be making coffee for a few cents at home. We have a coffee maker, and uh she's willing to melt chocolate into the coffee for me.

Maddie Trumino 2:18

Wow.

Trip Albagdadi 2:19

But I really like wasting that money. Of course. Okay. Going to a pretentious coffee shop where they treat me badly and uh getting an ice mocha almost every day.

Maddie Trumino 2:31

I love that.

Trip Albagdadi 2:31

It's I have almost no other vices. So can I just have this? So true. You know? You deserve it.

Maddie Trumino 2:39

And honestly, it just tastes better when someone else makes it.

Trip Albagdadi 2:41

Oh my god, it's so much better. Yes.

Maddie Trumino 2:43

I'd have to agree. Well, thank you for that. That's that's very funny and true. It's it's expensive anywhere you go. It's always cheaper to make it yourself, but I agree. It's just it feels nice when someone else does it for you.

Trip Albagdadi 2:56

Oh, yeah. And San Diego has no shortage of overpriced coffee shops.

Maddie Trumino 3:01

Yeah, I could imagine. Yeah, it's here too.

Trip Albagdadi 3:03

Yeah, everywhere, I could say. Yeah.

Maddie Trumino 3:04

So true. Well, now to pivot, some shop talk aside from the mochas. We'll get into our first question, which what is the current state of SEO and how has it evolved beyond basic keyword and link building?

Trip Albagdadi 3:18

Okay, it's changed quite a bit. As you know, Google has been very aggressive about rolling out their AI tool. So SEO honestly is much harder to do than it's ever been because you used to be able to way back in the day do keyword stuffing and link stuffing. Then they put you know the kibosh on that because that wasn't best practices. Then you used to be able to put up a blog post, get some keyword-rich content there, do some link building, be active on social media. All those things are very important and still important, but now with AI, the search results have changed. So when you search for something, you now see the AI result, then you see the paid ads, which we are quite often involved with. Yes. Then below that, at the bottom third of the page, you see organic search results. Organic search results are results that you are not paying for. Those are the natural results that come up through Google's search algorithm. And in some cases, you can spend all this time doing SEO and becoming a thought leader or you know, prominent in your field. And AI will come now, take your answers, deliver them to whoever's searching for whatever they're searching for, and they'll never have a reason to go to your website. Right. So SEO has become more complicated and harder. And I I think that's Google's not to knock on the great and mighty Google, but I think that's Google's attempt to push people more towards AI and push people more towards paid advertising.

Maddie Trumino 4:51

Yeah, and I can see it. I mean, we talk about that a lot on this podcast. Plenty of our guests have spoken to AI and it really is taking over. So I could see how it it could become tricky to navigate SEO with the influence of AI now. How is SEO becoming more user-centric then? And if you could just discuss the importance of the user experience and page speed and you know, mobile first indexing, all of those. Like how can we how can we get into those topics?

Trip Albagdadi 5:17

Page authority is still important. Uh where your page domain rank, where your page ranks, based on links from other sites to your page, authoritative sites to your page, content on your page that relates to what someone is searching for, your social media presence is all still very important. I would say that things are changing so rapidly that in some cases, you know, having even a Reddit presence, even though Reddit frowns heavily upon any type of advertising or user, just having a presence in as many places and on as many platforms as possible, just in case you get that AI grabbing your answer. I now find that when I search Google, I end up somehow on Reddit, because Reddit has the answer to the really specific question I I have. And I know Reddit is clean and free of, you know, it's it's user-posted, user-generated content. So they'll answer questions. Side note, my neighbor had this weird plant, this bizarre-looking, like otherworldly alien-like bush with this succulent.

Maddie Trumino 6:22

Yeah.

Trip Albagdadi 6:22

And he we couldn't figure out what it was. I took a picture of it, I put it on Reddit, and within like an hour, someone posted the genus and species of that plant. It was like an African cotton bush or something like that. But that was incredible. Yeah. What a resource. But I got to Reddit through Google. One of my not concerns, but we took we're gonna talk a little bit more about the future of search and SEO and all that, but what's gonna happen when people just go right to Reddit? You know, right versus versus going to Google.

Maddie Trumino 6:55

True.

Trip Albagdadi 6:55

You know? Google's a had a monopoly for a a while, right?

Maddie Trumino 7:00

Yeah.

Trip Albagdadi 7:01

And I don't know how you would break it up. Like how would you break up a search engine that is the source for most of the information that people look up every day?

Maddie Trumino 7:09

Yeah. Yeah.

Trip Albagdadi 7:10

I mean, I can see how you could break up Amazon.

Maddie Trumino 7:12

Right.

Trip Albagdadi 7:12

That makes sense to me, but I don't know about Google, how you break that up. And I don't know that the current political system is even able to understand how to break something like that up.

Maddie Trumino 7:21

Yeah, I was just gonna say, and they might not, you know, Google is king, as we say here, so it it might stay like that forever for a very long time. Because, you know, it's just grown into something bigger than I think anyone could break down at this point.

Trip Albagdadi 7:35

Yeah, I think Google was the first trillion dollar value valued company. And then we talked about it earlier, it it's a monopoly, but that's good for us because we can reach, you know, a huge portion of the audience in one place. Definitely versus having to go to all these different platforms. I think Bing, we talked about it before, was about like 10%.

Maddie Trumino 7:55

Right.

Trip Albagdadi 7:56

But Google has anywhere depends on who you ask, anywhere from 85 to 95 percent of the search engine market.

Maddie Trumino 8:02

So yeah, which is huge. That's amazing. That's pretty dominating and great for us, like you said, in the marketing advertising world. Like that's that's a big component of what we do for our clients. So, you know, we're not complaining on our end.

Trip Albagdadi 8:15

No, it's yeah, it's kind of nice, convenient. Convenient, yeah.

Maddie Trumino 8:19

Absolutely. Well, this season has been all about innovation. So, what are some of the most innovative SEO techniques emerging today that you could think of?

Trip Albagdadi 8:27

Wow, that's a really good question. You can I'm not sure if I have a perfect answer for that.

Maddie Trumino 8:31

That's okay.

Trip Albagdadi 8:32

But I would say any place where you can find a differentiator or a platform that someone else isn't necessarily on, that is not just straight up Google or straight up working on your website itself. I think blog posts are still important, but they're mainly important for keyword-rich content. In terms of search engine, I think the most important thing right now would be authoritative link building back to your website from other platforms. And then social media is important because a lot of social media has backlinks built into when you post something, it's usually good practice, not every time, but to post a backlink back to your website. Yes. So the more links Google sees from other authoritative sites back to your website, the more value your um domain will have with uh Google itself. So all right.

Maddie Trumino 9:26

So we always want to take the good and the bad right. So we just talked about the innovative process of SEO. Now, pivot and tell me a little bit about some of the biggest challenges facing SEOs in the coming year.

Trip Albagdadi 9:37

Well, I can tell you that uh we talked about it before. If your organic search results are getting pushed further and further down the page, SEO is becoming harder and harder. AI is kind of taking over a lot of the space, and AI is becoming more intelligent, but I don't think it's where it needs to be to truly serve humanity at this time. Right now it makes a lot of odd decisions, and Google has pushed out a lot of AI technology into the campaigns that we run. And sometimes it doesn't make very good decisions. It needs better instructions or it needs more data for machine learning.

Maddie Trumino 10:15

Right.

Trip Albagdadi 10:15

You know, because uh right now it does some very odd things on occasion with ad copy and images.

Maddie Trumino 10:22

In a way, AI can be a negative, but do you think like what would be the ways that you think that it's revolutionizing SEO or ways that it's helping?

Trip Albagdadi 10:30

Okay, years ago they came up with something called a responsive search ad, which means you load in like 10 headlines, five descriptions, headlines are 30 characters about your product or service, descriptions are 90 characters about your product or service, and then let it go to town. It chooses the best combination of the headlines and descriptions over time.

Maddie Trumino 10:52

Right.

Trip Albagdadi 10:53

When that first began, it was terrible. It was terrible, yeah. But it has learned and the click-through rates now have improved dramatically. For almost every campaign we run, we're almost in the well, we are in the double-digit click-through rate. So for search, the average click-through rate is 3.17%, and a lot of our campaigns are in double digits, which means it's three or four times the average. And I would attribute that to you know, good keyword strategy, good copy, but also partially to AI taking over with those responsive ads and finding the best combination of them.

Maddie Trumino 11:27

Right.

Trip Albagdadi 11:27

I would say it's very good in that regard. It's gotten good there. There are some other campaign types that I'm not as enamored with. We talked about this a little bit earlier today. There's one called Performance Max that is almost exclusively AI. You load in images, copy YouTube videos, and it does whatever it thinks is going to be best for you. One disadvantage of it is it doesn't give you right now, it doesn't give you detailed metrics about where your ads showed up, where how many ads were on YouTube, how many were on display, how many were in search. So I've talked to a lot of Google reps and they say they're going to release another version of P Max that will tell us where the ads showed up because that is quite important to an advertiser to be able to tell their client where exactly this ad showed up versus Performance Max did a great job. We got you know 100 clicks, you know, etc. Where did they come from?

Maddie Trumino 12:25

Right, exactly. Yeah, no, clients love that specificity and they're always looking to see exactly where something's coming from so that they can further target and so on and so forth. So absolutely. And and just speaking of how AI has revolutionized SEO, how do you think SEO can continue to stay ahead of that curve and adapt to the ever-changing landscape?

Trip Albagdadi 12:44

Wow, I I think it has changed or is changing so rapidly that you're gonna have to have people get more in tune with answering questions in terms of people when they go to Google, they're asking a question.

Maddie Trumino 12:58

Right.

Trip Albagdadi 12:58

So you need to start answering the questions that you think people have, or go and figure out what the trending questions are and have those answers on your website.

Maddie Trumino 13:07

Right.

Trip Albagdadi 13:07

And then people are probably gonna start putting references instead of a domain or a link, AI scrapes the content on the page. You're probably gonna want to start putting your brand name in the answers that you give to things, you know?

Maddie Trumino 13:18

Yeah.

Trip Albagdadi 13:19

Which starts to make it an advertisement, you know, even though you're trying to be an auth authority on a topic, in order to get anyone to see your brand, you're probably gonna have to put it in the answer somewhere.

Maddie Trumino 13:29

Right.

Trip Albagdadi 13:30

Because AI will scrape that.

Maddie Trumino 13:31

Right. Okay, well, I'm gonna turn this back on you, put you in the hot seat for a little bit, and you've been doing such a wonderful job and been such a good guest. But I want you to think back of a time that you can share a story where you successfully implemented an innovative SEO strategy.

Trip Albagdadi 13:48

Okay, sure. Um, we recently did something that I'd I'd not done before. It's called a contextual audience.

Maddie Trumino 13:56

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Trip Albagdadi 13:57

And we loaded in competitor, I won't mention any client names.

Maddie Trumino 14:00

Yes.

Trip Albagdadi 14:01

But we loaded in competitor websites, and Google Ads created a list of individuals that visited those websites, and then we served ads to those people. That was pretty nice to be able to target directly competitors and find people searching competitor websites and then deliver ads directly to them. And that one was particularly successful. I th we had millions, I think like two million uh views and a pretty good click-through rate for display. Display, sorry for all the details, but display the average click-through rate is 0.46. And for that contextual audience campaign, I think it was 2%. So four times the average, which is really good for display, which meant that was good. Using that contextual audience worked because they were into it. They were looking for other similar services, and we hit them up.

Maddie Trumino 14:48

Yeah, that was definitely out of the box. That was really cool to see manifest itself, and yeah, the numbers were great, and that was definitely a very innovative SEO strategy that you implemented. So now let's look ahead to the future. What are some of your predictions for the future of search?

Trip Albagdadi 15:04

I think performance max in a year or two will be good enough to use more often. Right now it makes bad decisions. Not too many people are going to say that out loud. Right. But right now, performance max is not where it needs to be because you don't have control over where ads show, how the money is spent, what percentage is going to display. Are you gonna spend all of my budget on display or on YouTube? I would like 30% of it to go to search.

Maddie Trumino 15:30

Right.

Trip Albagdadi 15:30

Whereas when you run display, YouTube, and search, you can control how much money each of those, you know, how much money is dedicated to each of those. But I think Performance Max is gonna get good enough to reach a point where you can let AI take over a bit with some monitoring.

Maddie Trumino 15:47

Right.

Trip Albagdadi 15:48

What I found with AI and ChatGPT is they're great tools. We're all still trying to figure out how to use them.

Maddie Trumino 15:54

Right.

Trip Albagdadi 15:55

At this point, you still need a human being for judgment to make judgment calls. Because we've had a lot of, and now begins the complaining part.

Maddie Trumino 16:04

Right.

Trip Albagdadi 16:04

We've had a lot of ads flagged for ridiculous reasons.

Maddie Trumino 16:09

Yes.

Trip Albagdadi 16:10

By bots.

Maddie Trumino 16:11

Right.

Trip Albagdadi 16:12

May I give you one example? Yes. We were recruiting uh warehouse workers. Warehouse one of the the headlines said warehouse packers needed for a fulfillment center to ship stuff. Google bots flagged it as a violation of the Green Bay Packers copyright.

Maddie Trumino 16:30

Oh my god.

Trip Albagdadi 16:31

Because it said packers.

Maddie Trumino 16:32

Right.

Trip Albagdadi 16:33

So I have to explain to no human being, I have to appeal for two weeks and then finally get someone on the phone. And in some cases, they cannot overwrite what the the bot decided.

Maddie Trumino 16:44

Oh my god.

Trip Albagdadi 16:45

They had the bot make a rule or or enact something, they can't overturn it. So I have to change the act. Not a big deal. Right. Warehouse workers needed, you know, openings at the warehouse, stuff like that. We can change it, but that's a mistake.

Maddie Trumino 16:57

Yes.

Trip Albagdadi 16:58

Yes, robot. I told you you made a mistake.

Maddie Trumino 17:00

Yeah.

Trip Albagdadi 17:00

That it shouldn't do that. And there's like probably 10 or 15 more like that where it doesn't have judgment. Another one I was talking about earlier today, and this will be the last, the last complaining one about the bots, was we were running a recruiting uh campaign for nurses. There was a CPR dummy in the images. The bots flagged it as pornography because the the CPR dummy didn't have a shirt on.

Maddie Trumino 17:28

Right.

Trip Albagdadi 17:28

And it was a man's chest.

Maddie Trumino 17:30

Yeah.

Trip Albagdadi 17:30

And it I couldn't use the image.

Maddie Trumino 17:32

That's so funny.

Trip Albagdadi 17:33

And I could not I could not get that overturned. We had to use different images because it thought the CPR dummy was pornography.

Maddie Trumino 17:40

Right. Which is i it's kind of funny in a way, because it's almost like we like you said, we still really need humans to make those judgment calls. Like the AI and the bots, they could be so smart in one hand and so helpful, but at the same time, uh the human connection, and we talk about this a lot on the podcast. Like a bot is never going to outsmart what a human knows or what they can see. Like obviously, you knew in these campaigns what you were trying to achieve, and it was not aligned with what the bots were thinking. So that is definitely frustrating. And it'll be interesting to see if your predictions come true.

Trip Albagdadi 18:13

Yes, and if anyone at Google is listening, please just give the bots out. One or two more rules. Just give them some more instructions or better instructions. Thank you.

Maddie Trumino 18:23

Yeah. Hopefully they hear this. Well, we're gonna wrap this up with our last question, and that would be what advice would you give to aspiring SEO experts who want to be just like you, Trip?

Trip Albagdadi 18:38

Good luck. Uh Godspeed. Uh no. Uh learn chat GPT.

Maddie Trumino 18:44

Yep.

Trip Albagdadi 18:45

Learn all about AI, learn about prompting, learn how to use those tools to your advantage. Don't be afraid of them. Find ways to save time using them. I think you might have had me do some chat GPT stuff. There was one incidence where we used it to, and I won't ever stop talking about this, but this it just built this whole table for me in like a minute.

Maddie Trumino 19:07

Yeah.

Trip Albagdadi 19:07

Was all the school locations and all their websites and all their addresses. Yep. And instead of me doing that for like two hours, I asked it, it did it, table, done.

Maddie Trumino 19:17

Yep.

Trip Albagdadi 19:17

Very nice. I need to do more of that.

Maddie Trumino 19:20

Yes, I know. It can be helpful when it's when it's uh not being silly, it can definitely be helpful. When it behaves, it is useful. It is, for sure. Well, thank you so much, Trip. It's been so great to have you on the podcast. We really appreciate you coming and taking this uh vacation out to New Jersey. We're happy you're here. And uh yeah, another great episode in the book. So thank you.

Trip Albagdadi 19:40

Thanks a lot. It's been a delight.

Tom Marguccio 19:46

Don't forget to subscribe whenever you listen to your podcast so you never miss an episode. And leave us to review. Until next time, keep those mugs filled and those ideas flowing.