Word to Your MUM Featuring Cindy Krum

Garrett: All right, welcome back to The Next Chapter of Search produced by SEO week and iPullRank – if you haven’t bought your tickets: New York City, April 28, we are going to have 35+ of the like most brilliant expert speakers in the world talking about everything from data, SEO, AI, content, digital marketing, you name it. And today I am so excited because I am joined by one of my favorite people, Miss Cindy Krum. Cindy is the founder and CEO of mobile Moxie. How you doing Cindy? What’s going on?

Cindy: I’m fantastic. How are you? It’s good to see you.

Garrett: It’s great to see you. I’m so excited to check because like we have so many discussions about the future of search and we’ll get to that. But to dive in before we jump into the future, I want to ask you what you’ve been seeing. Where are we in the state of SEO from your perspective right now?

Cindy: Oh my gosh. So I think like the state of SEO is mirroring the state of other things as well because it’s feels chaotic and a bit unpredictable and a bit dirty, honestly, like it feels a bit corrupt. And I’ve been saying that for a while, but it feels like now that’s not going to get better. Now that’s probably going to get worse. People are going to double down on making the most money that they can. And that’s not necessarily good for SEOs. And I don’t want to-I know I’m not probably supposed to get political, so I’ll stop there. But even keeping anything like that out of it, like when a company has been proven to be a monopoly and they double down and don’t stop being a monopoly, like you have to wonder why. And some of the things that Google’s been testing with AI overviews, and I don’t know if you saw, but the test with the AI overview with 30 links and like a full-page AI overview, I think that’s where it’s going. And I think that makes SEO so much harder.

Garrett: Yeah. Oh my goodness. There’s so much to unpack there. And I can’t wait to have more of these conversations, like the whole idea of AI mode. That’s what we thought in the first place was like, it was going to be Gemini. And it seems like that is what we’re seeing to some extent. So you look at all of the algorithms, the updates, the LLMs, MUM is your jam. Can you give us a little bit of a preview on what you’re talking about in SEO week and why should people come and learn from you?

Cindy: Yeah. So MUM is super powerful. If you remember kind of the AI and language processing models, BERT came before MUM and MUM was a thousand times stronger than BERT. And BERT was about bi-directional transformers, right? This word can modify this word and means different things before and after and stuff like that. MUM is a thousand times stronger and MUM stands for multitask unified model, which is basically a meaningless series of words, unless you’re an AI developer. But what it breaks down to mean, and what we first saw it mean was like, I was constantly misspeaking and saying like, instead of multitask, I would say multimedia or I would say them both together because it seemed like MUM was related to multimedia. And a lot of multimedia algorithmic search capabilities came out right after the launch of MUM. But now with the benefit of seeing and experiencing Gemini and AI overviews, you can see the power of MUM because the multitaskness is potentially like for users, like, or potentially maybe they just meant that it was on the processing side, but either way, what we’re seeing is more comprehensive search results that are more tailored to a specific search context.

So, let’s think about it on the search side. Multitask might be not just understanding the words but understanding the words in the context of a journey, and that’s what the MUM announcement talked about. And, so, if you take the step to one, understand the words and then two, understand the journey, that’s already multitask. But then when you understand like the nature of a journey, a journey is multitask. You don’t finish a journey in one step, right? And, so, it’s this idea of they’re doing multiple steps because they know you’re going to be doing multiple steps. And, so, they want to give you the steps that are the most meaningful in your particular search context. And, so, you know, understanding journeys and not just keywords is kind of the evolution. So, we had keywords, then we had entities, and now we have journeys. And so, think about like one keyword can represent multiple entities perhaps, and one entity can represent multiple journeys. And, so, think of this as like a blossoming thing where Google’s just getting smarter and smarter, right?

Garrett: Yeah. And I think in terms of like all of the data they have to that point, Google, it’s scary to think how much they can predict that journey and that to some extent, that’s what they’re trying to do. But not to go too down the rabbit hole, there’s always the following the money and their limitations in terms of, like, resources and what’s cost prohibitive of going down the journey, which I know we can talk about when I want to ask you about what’s next in search. But first, do you have like a practical takeaway, a practical something that listeners can do right now to SEO to kind of either future proof or optimize their websites and content?

Cindy: Yeah. So, the actionable thing to do is similar to what we’ve always done in SEO, which is to see what’s working and what’s showing up at the top of a search result. So, we used to just see what websites were there and then we would see what featured snippets were there and kind of try and mirror that or do something like that, have the same search signals as those things. Now what we do is we look at those also and we look at what’s in AI overviews and stuff like that. But if there are filter pills at the top of your search result, that’s how I really kind of understand what Google is understanding about a journey.

So, when Google launched MUM, they talked about Mount Fuji and you can do searches about Mount Fuji in a number of contexts. It might be artistic painting and something like that. It might be for a hike. It might be for weather or for historical context or anything like that. But if you search for Mount Fuji, Google is going to start kind of front running assumptions about what you’re going to want next. And knowing what those assumptions are, the easiest way to do that is to do the search and see what shows up in those filter pills because it’ll start to kind of add modifiers to your search for you so that it can say Mount Fuji and hiking or Mount Fuji and weather. And, so, you don’t even have to type; you can just click the filter bubble. And that’s great for users, but it’s also like it’s giving you the mind map of what Google knows on that entity.

Garrett: I love that. I’ve also been thinking about that a lot. I’m sure you could speak a lot to the idea of like as we’re seeing more AI organized search results. So, like those carousels where they have the subtopics and that’s like another clue like the filters.

CIndy: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Like how? So we have to think about like how is Google trying to meet the needs of the user and why? And so not just looking at what’s ranking, but looking at like the specific websites or whatever, but classifying those and saying, you know, is this informative? Is this, um, you know, yeah. Helpful? Is Google presenting it in one context or another? And believe it or not, in my talk, I’m going to go back to some, uh, something way back in SEO.

Like someone told me that this is a trigger word for them, but the micro-moments of search is something that Google started talking about, uh, years and years ago. And what I figured out is that Google stopped talking about it. And I think it was, they stopped talking about it because it was showing their hand too much, right? It was too clear because when you go back and you look at the micro-moments of, uh, search, it’s, I want to know, I want to go, I want to do, I want to buy. And that breaks down into the four ways that Google is monetizing search results right now. So, I want to know is the regular Google search result. I want to go is a map search result, which is newly monetized and, you know, integrated with merchant center and whatever, whatever with ads and all these things. Um, I want to, I want to know, I want to go, I want to buy. Obviously we’ve seen crazy merchant center and shopping search results and then Google product knowledge graph. And then, uh, the other one is I want to do, that’s the tough one because that is, it’s not as intuitive until you figure out until you reverse it. And you’re like, well, what else is Google showing a lot of in the search result? And it’s like, Oh, duh. YouTube, right? YouTube is where people do things. They learn things, they watch videos, they research things like they’re researching products, they’re watching influencers and Google’s monetized the crap out of YouTube and Google sucks you into like you’re the Google or the YouTube hole where you never get out. If you let the videos auto-play, like, you know, you’re stuck there forever and they’re monetizing forever and they love that.

Garrett: It makes a lot of sense and I think about that a lot in just the multimodal, it comes back to, you know, video in general, but what’s, what’s next? What is, what are you thinking is going to happen with Google, with the general like search ecosystem? How are you thinking about things?

Cindy: I think Google is going to hone their monetization of each of those micro-moments into something better. So YouTube, I think we’re seeing a lot of things rolled into YouTube. Maps were rolled into YouTube, music is now like semi-YouTube. And so they’re, they’ve kind of messed up the YouTube ecosystem by adding all these things and it’s kind of messy over there. Maybe they’ll sort that out, but they kind of don’t care as long as they’re monetizing.

I think maps is a big opportunity for Google to do better. Those search results, you know, there’s room for improvement and there’s room for more monetization there. I think from Google’s perspective.

And I think we may see Google try and do a move where they’re getting deeper into small business pockets of like, how can they make more money there and, and act like they’re helping small businesses. And, and, you know, I’m so jaded at this point, I should probably put a better spin on it. Maybe I’ll reverse it and I’ll say, listen, Google’s going to try and help small businesses a lot more and it’s not going to be free, but it’s going to be helpful probably, you know?

Garrett: Yeah, yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s existential. I mean, and like, you know, you, like you, it’s hard to think about how it ultimately plays out. Like at one point, does it actually hurt Google to do things this way versus ultimately continue to feed their pockets and, and, and continue to get them more revenue? I feel like they’re riding a fine line with their product.

Cindy: They really are. And maybe it’s less obvious in countries outside of the US because remember, we still get things first a lot of the time. And so maybe it just feels more pernicious here. Or like I said, maybe I’m just jaded. That’s fair too. Cause I’ve been in this industry for a long time. And I remember when it was like the, the young, you know, free love hippie days of SEO where like we just got 10 blue links and you got the traffic and you’re, you know.

Garrett: No, I mean, back in the, back in the hippie days is also when you were, had people putting like the white text on a white background and doing all sorts of hacks they could to manipulate the system, which still possible.

I, if you guys want to have a conversation with Cindy, you got to come to SEO week. We are going to have so many fun, like deep dives into what we think is happening. Every time is fantastic. Cindy, thank you so much for those of you SEO week, end of April, April 28th in New York City. Come join us four days of just nonstop SEO amazingness. We’ll see you there. Bye bye.