Garrett Sussman: Inside SEO Week, we got a winner, we got a winner winner chicken dinner, Angela Skane. She is the winner of the first ever SEO Week pitch. Ten other people are throwing their best stuff at the wall, and Angela like, TikTok came out on top. And Angela, she is the Content Strategy and SEO Manager at Network Solutions, she’s been doing the agency thing for a minute, but now she’ s in house and touches, as she said right before this podcast, “all the words.” All the words. What’s up, Angela, how you doin’.

Angela Skane: I’m good, how are you?

Garrett: I’m fantastic, I am so excited; you are joining me on Day 2 of Psychology, I was so excited to see your pitch presentation at the competition and I just can’t wait to pick your brain about all things AI search and SEO. So, SEO Week’s gonna be amazing; tell me, let’s jump in, tell me top of mind for you, how are you feeling about, like, AI search right now? Like, where’s your head at with like what’s going on with our industry?

Angela: Yeah. I mean, obviously it’s changing very quickly every single day. And there’s so much left to the unknown, which is like the scariest part, because I feel like we’ve had a good grasp on a formula and a methodology as SEOs for the last five to seven years. And all of a sudden it’s like, oh, LLMs, AI, and it’s all changing. And I know I’m talking about this in my talk, but honestly, the aspect of personalization and knowing the consumer and who you’re targeting is top of mind for me. I mean, literally this week, Google announced that the personalization is rolling out in AI search mode. It is rolling out in Gemini and Chrome and the app, and it’s linked to your Google apps. It’s looking at your emails, so it knows what other companies are emailing you, what you’re clicking on, what you have photos of. This is absolutely insane, the way that Google’s moving to start personalizing things. And I do think that Google will come out on top in this AI race. Like everybody was a little worried about the LLMs there for a minute, but the strides that Google’s making and the teams behind it, like they will come out on top and it’s going to absolutely blow our minds when we see what it looks like when you type a question into Google in the future. 

Garrett: I don’t think people realize how this stuff is going to change. The creepiness factor versus the actual utility and making things better. You’re in the weeds when it comes to content, and there’s a lot of overlap between SEO and content. I’m going to open up a can of worms here, but do you think your content strategy has changed or will be changing over the next few months? Or do you think it’s one of those of like, this is what we should have been doing for the last 10 years and we’re still doing it and we’re doing it right. Like, keep it real. What do you think? 

Angela: Yeah, I mean, it is going to change. Like regardless of whether I’m doing what I was doing before and that’s knowing who I’m marketing to and who I’m communicating to. And like, yes, it is going to change because I was able, we all were able to get away with half-knowing who we’re talking to or who we’re selling to. But like, that’s no longer the case. And like, we’ve been able to optimize our content semantically for keywords and what, you know, that is looking for. But now it’s not just going to be semantically associating topics within each other. It’s going to be how do you use the right words that are semantically associated to your specific target audience to surface the information that they need at the right time at the right moment. And that just adds a whole nother layer of complexity and ambiguity that there isn’t a roadmap, right? Like you hear people say all the time, whatever’s ranking now is your roadmap. Like Google’s telling you what it’s favoring, but that visibility and that staticness is going away very quickly. 

Garrett: Yeah. It makes our job so much harder. And you kind of like indicated that you think Google will come out on top. They’ve obviously caught up despite that, that moment of, of what’s going to happen next, like future ball, future crystal ball next, like six months, 12 months. What do you think is actually going to happen with search? Like where, where do you think we’re going like for SEO in the immediate future? 

Angela: Tracking is going, I mean, we know it’s going, it’s going to be so difficult and it’s, It’s going to be impossible, I think, in the next year. It’s going to change. I’m already seeing it. I mean, I can Google something if I’m in that web search mode or that custom mode. That is already giving me curated, grouped results that I can look at. I think that’s just a small indication of what the SERPs are going to start looking like. And no two people are going to be seeing the same SERPs, just like no two people see the same social media algorithms. That is kind of where my head is at and what I’m thinking about over the next six months and 12 months is what are the gaps and what I know about my customers, my target audience, and what do I need to build out to be able to communicate them and start doing it in my content now? Because if I wait to when this happens, it’s going to be too late. 

Garrett: I feel, okay. So I feel like that kind of taps into some of these problems and questions that you’re really focused on right now. And I know you don’t want to give away what your presentation is. Like you, you teased us. You’re like, I’ve got frameworks. We’re going to show you the frameworks. But like, what are some of the problems and questions, like very specifically that you’re focused on in your work at your role? 

Angela: Yeah, I’m trying to figure out what is the environment around my target audience, right? Like I know that I’m targeting small business owners in my work at Network Solutions, and I know that they want to build online presences and all that jazz, but what is going on around them and in their lives that influences how they make a decision or how they want to buy something. Like the environmental aspect, I think is something that I’ve always thought about, but in practice, I don’t do it as well, right? Like that is something that I’m not necessarily thinking about. And all of this is signaling how important those environmental things are going to be. And like, we can already get a little bit of this data and start thinking about like, what are other websites that people who visit your website are, right? Tons of tools out there that can give you that information. And I think that’s just like a drop in the bucket to start to understand how our users are thinking. And I’m really trying to figure that out. It’s like, what is going on in your head? I ask that about a lot of things in my life, but really at work, that is what I am thinking about. What is going on in the consumer’s head and how do I get them to click and how do I get them to choose me and my product and our services.

Garrett: Okay. I’m putting you on the spot here, but I’ve been thinking about this a lot too, is like, what do you, what market research or audience research do you think is going to be the most important? Like, obviously you, like you mentioned all the tools that you can do surveys, you can look at SparkToro, you can look at the existing, like, rankings. What, what is the research that you think people should be focusing on? 

Angela: The U.S. Census! Like, census data, like that is such a wealth of knowledge. The questions that are asked in there, like they do micro surveys on different parts of things, like especially on like small business owners. There’s a whole segment that the census has that is on small business owners, their outlook on the future. What are they concerned with? What are they thinking about? It’s free data that we can access and is enabling any business, no matter whether you’re an SEO at a bootstrap agency without the budget to get these bigger tools or you’re an established company. It is there and it can tell you so much. And I think that’s where I’m looking beyond internal data because every company has their own levels of that and that can limit you. But looking at that stuff, like data is such a powerful piece of this puzzle because not everybody can survey their customers. You can’t sit down and have one-on-one conversations. It’s not realistic. And to be able to do this at scale, you’ve got to look at the numbers and figure out statistically speaking, where are my odds and where is the best likelihood of me capturing something? Or if I know that 90% of business owners are afraid of X, how do I leverage that in the way that I communicate to them? 

Garrett: Which kind of speaks to like, you know, part of your core wheelhouse is that psychology approach. Can you talk a little bit more about how that shows up in your thinking? Like what is that core wheelhouse for you? And how do you approach it when it comes to both market research, but also content strategy? Like where’s your head go? 

Angela: My head’s all over the place. It’s a loaded question. You know, again, it’s kind of coming back to if I can put myself in someone’s shoes, is word choice right? Is the timing right? Is the order right? Like, what can I do to best put myself in their shoes? I think for me personally, I’m very empathetic. So that is something where I am like, I can literally feel the anxiety of this hypothetical being that I’m writing for, right? That I’ve created this persona and I’m like, I know this person. And like, that’s what I’m thinking about. And I think that’s where our personas and our target audience research and to be able to do, Like you’ve got to be able to look at that information that you put together and sit there and be like, I know this person. This is somebody I had coffee with last week, or this is somebody I’m reading their LinkedIn posts and like, I know what’s going on in their head. So that’s what’s going on in my head is that I’m feeling and thinking what the people I’m talking to are feeling and thinking. At least I like to hope that I am. 

Garrett: I mean, it’s important, but hard, right? Because it’s like search is going through some weird changes with the behavior of AI search and people like relearning how to have conversational search. And, you know, there’s that technology component of like, do you have an old school person who’s just doing the old like keyword still versus people who are like, I know we all joke about voice search, but people who are like dictating to their phone and having actual conversations. And that’s changing all of this. I want to like give a peek. You’ve already kind of opened up the window a lot when it comes to your presentation, but like, give us like a little teaser about something else that people are going to get when they see you speak at SEO Week. 

Angela: Yeah. I think it’s the digging into like the psychological levers that are already being pulled in platforms like TikTok where people are using it for sales tactics. Like I’m not going to talk about TikTok or getting on TikTok, but it’s just such a great example of psychology and sales in play and thinking about how to apply that. And obviously written word is so much harder to make people feel those emotions. Like you’ve got to have some one raw talent in your writing and you know, that’s something you’re not going to get if you’re using AI generated content. And like, that is something where I think focusing on that human written content, leveraging those emotions and what those emotions look like and how to leverage it in written content. Like that’s what I’m really hoping to highlight and…data. I mean, the data aspect is there for telling that story. So I talked about using the census to get that research, but I think using data in the way that we communicate is not leveraged enough. That might be my roots as a data journalist coming out, but data can make people feel something on the other side of the page. And it’s all about figuring out like which data points are going to be those right data points for your specific target audience. 

Garrett: It’s funny. I can totally tell the data journalist because it’s like you’ve got this story, storytelling nature in the way that you talk about this stuff. but with the data intertwined as well. If you guys haven’t already seen Angela’s pitch from the competition, it is actually on the iPullRank YouTube video. It’s so good. It got me so hyped for the rest of your talk. Tell me, heading up to New York, what are you most excited about for SEO Week? 

Angela: I’m so excited to hear everybody’s talk because it is such a unique lineup and not the same things that you’re hearing about at other conferences. And I think people are giving a lot of great knowledge away and they’re not giving this stuff away on LinkedIn per se, or, you know, on their, their newsletters and stuff like that. So a lot of really great minds that I’ve never met that I’m very excited to meet. And I mean, obviously I’m excited to take the stage. I’ve never taken the stage at a conference before. So what a better place to do it than in New York, SEO Week, like, this is the real deal – go big or go home. 

Garrett: You’re gonna be great, you’re gonna crush it.

Angela: I can’t wait. 

Garrett: Thank you so much for joining me today, I really appreciate your time. Thank you you guys, if you have not already bought your tickets we’re talking April 27th to the 30th and in New York, it’s coming up, it’ll be here in a few weeks (depending on when we’re we’re publishing this episode, which you know maybe it’s tomorrow, no it’s in a few weeks). Excited to see y’all. Check us out. SEO Week. Garrett Sussman with Angela Skane signing off. Peace.