Duane Forrester: Evolving SEO Strategy for the Generative-AI World – Episode 32

Duane Forrester SEO has always been difficult, but generative AI takes things to an entirely new level. Duane Forrester has been immersed in the search world for more than 20 years, including stints as the Product Manager for the Bing Webmaster Program and Vice President of Industry Insights at Yext, where he developed company AI strategy. He also helped launch the schema.org structured-data standard. Duane offers plenty of AI-specific advice about how to navigate the new search landscape. But he also says that the foundations of good SEO are still grounded in timeless digital best practices: understanding your customers' needs and intentions and consistently giving them good content and helpful user experiences. We talked about: his long history as a search-industry expert and leader his high-level take on the current state of AI the true benefits of AI for content and how they relate to SEO the title of his content-and-genAI cookbook: "Common Sense" the importance of understanding the kinds of content that are resonating with your customers an interesting AI-driven SEO-localization case study that was presented at PubCon last year that demonstrates the power of understanding user intent an overview of the knowledge graph tech that underpins the search infrastructure at tech companies and big enterprises his predication that the future of search will be knowledge graph to knowledge graph conversations between companies and search engines the rapidly evolving new world of SEO and the imperative for businesses to leverage AI to keep up with the increasing need to scale SEO operations the enduring importance of providing a good user experience at the end of a search flow the importance of delivering content in video format into a search landscape increasingly driven by social media new search behaviors created by Google's Circle Search and AR tech like Meta's Ray-Ban glasses his observation that search is infinitely more complex than most SEOs can imagine the secret to search success: attracting attention from consumers, by deeply understanding their behaviors and intentions his prediction that Apple will launch an AI-powered Siri in September that will thrust ChatGPT into the mainstream Duane's bio Duane Forrester is a distinguished figure in the search industry, with a career that spans digital marketing, authorship, and leadership roles at prominent companies such as Microsoft Bing, Bruce Clay Inc. and Yext. His expertise in digital marketing is complemented by a strong understanding of AI/ML, consumer behavior and customer experience, making him a well-rounded and sought-after professional in the field. During his tenure at Microsoft, Duane was instrumental in the development and launch of Bing Webmaster Tools and Schema.org, focusing on the needs of webmasters and digital marketers. His deep knowledge of search engines and user behavior contributed to Bing's growth and success. Beyond his work at Microsoft and Bing, Duane has showcased his knowledge as a prolific author in the digital marketing sphere. He has written for most industry publications and his two books, "How to Make Money with Your Blog" and "Turn Clicks into Customers," have provided invaluable insights and guidance to numerous businesses navigating the competitive online landscape. Today, he, continues to share his extensive knowledge of digital marketing, AI, and customer experience, shaping the future of the search industry and empowering businesses to thrive in the digital era. Connect with Duane online LinkedIn Facebook Threads Twitter Duane's books How to Make Money with Your Blog: The Ultimate Reference Guide for Building, Optimizing, and Monetizing Your Blog Turn Clicks into Customers - How to deliver conversions across all online marketing activities Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/OjCH0b3isrs Podcast intro transcript This is the Content and AI podcast, episode number 32. For almost as long as people have been building websites, SEO practitioners have tried to get their content to the top of the search results. Search has always been a rapidly evolving field, but generative AI takes change to a whole new level. Duane Forrester has been immersed in the search world for more than 20 years. He offers this timeless advice for coping with the new AI and search landscape: understand your customer's intentions, and serve them with good content and helpful experiences. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 32 of the Content and AI podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Duane Forrester. If you work in anything adjacent to search, you know Duane. Years ago, he was the Bing Webmaster tools, I guess advocate or program manager. He helps launch Schema.org, that ontology that schema that you're all working towards when you try to promote your content online. He worked with Bruce Clay for a while, the search legend, and for the last seven or eight years he's been a VP of industry insights at Yext. So welcome Duane. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Duane: Well, Larry, I think right now I'm hanging out with you, going to create content. I'm not an AI, this is really me. I am obviously continuing my career, moving in a new direction, excited about the opportunities that AI is bringing, looking at different areas, seeing areas that probably need investment by the leading companies, but also we don't know what they're actually working towards. So maybe they have a plan, maybe they don't. I don't know. I'm going to knock on some doors and see if I can open some eyes. Larry: Nice. So you're excited about AI and you are as well-informed as anybody. In search, I think if you're going to publish content online or share content online, you want it to be discovered and therefore a lot of people in the content world follow search. But tell me why you're so excited about AI. What do you see, especially for content practitioners, what are some of the opportunities you're seeing now? Duane: Okay, this is going to be a two-parter, Larry, because I don't think we can talk about this without touching on the topics that are negatively related to this. The idea of content theft and things like that, I think it's important to address those. I can't say that that's wrong or right. I will say that I understand where that perspective comes from. I believe that we have to be diligent, watch for it, manage it, that kind of idea. I do believe, however, that this technology... Look, you've seen this, everyone's seen this over the last say, two to three years. Every product and service has had the letters A and I appended to it. And it was a way to attract investment, to attract attention, to get PR and all of that. Whether the product or service actually did anything with AI was trivial. It didn't matter. Duane: It was just like putting the recycling symbol on something. "Oh look, we're earth conscious. Look at us". And it's like, well, okay. But practically speaking, I'm a big fan. I love the efficiencies that these systems... You and I were talking in our prep and I said, "Hey, I have an idea for a business". And so what did I do? I turned to ChatGPT and I said, "Hey, can you create an outline for what a business like this would look like in the state of California and what you have to do to start that business?" And then I made all kinds of noises like, wow, that's a lot of work and whatever else, because the amount of information that it gives you is extraordinary. It is in many ways, and I'm thinking ChatGPT as I talk through this stuff, but you could be thinking Claude, you could be thinking Mistral, you could be thinking Copilot, you could be thinking AI Overview from Google. Duane: All of these different things are capable of this in their own way. Perplexity and so on, Claude, all of these systems are capable of being that support person, that support mechanism that you wish you had. The person you can ask the dumb question of and they won't say, "Wow, what an idiot", they'll just go get you all the information and they tailor it to the level of the question. So the dumber your question, the more detailed the information, the more intelligent, more developed. And I mean, think about it, we're talking the concept of prompt engineering here. You give it more, it gets crisper, you give it less, it's a little fuzzier and it covers more ground. So I think there's a lot to that. When it comes to content, this is a force multiplier. This is muscle that you don't have. If you think this is a silver bullet, however, you are going to be sadly mistaken. Duane: And the answer to why am I not doing better in search is because your approach to using AI is flawed. And the bottom line is, it's great for ideation, it's great for rough drafts, but you still need a human with subject matter expertise to go through that content to make certain that content is accurate, factual, on point, has the right tone of voice. All of that matters. And that's huge. Duane: I think AI, the current systems that we have, the generative AI systems that we're all familiar with, I think they do a really good job of taking a lot of the heavy lifting out of a number of things. And if you can access tools that will look at large volumes of data, so they will take a look at your log files and they will pull out things that are related that you would never see, that can be very insightful and very useful. Duane: And if people are building tools that do those things for you, those can be very useful tools and a wise investment of a monthly subscription cost. I think we're at the very beginning of this, the very early stages of it, but I want everybody to think back to where we were, I don't know, I'll put a number of 25, 27 years ago.