Noah: Hey Jess, how are you?

Jes Scholz: Hey Noah, I'm doing really well. Albeit a little bit morning tired. How are you?

Noah: I'm doing fantastic. So for me, it's 1230. And for you, it's like a very different time already. It's what? 6 in the morning. Time zones are legit. So for everybody at home, you sent me a message yesterday at 1220 in the afternoon yesterday. And I was like, no, she thinks that the show's today. no.

Jes Scholz: 6.30, 6.30 AM.

Noah: Did it happen? It did.

Jes Scholz: Yeah, yes, the time zone's messed up. course, date wise, I was on the right date. But it's just that you were in my yesterday. So it messed me up a little bit, but it's fine. I got a lot of work done that morning. It was a very smooth day getting the kids to school because I had so much time.

Noah: Wow.

Noah: my goodness, you're amazing. Okay, so for everybody at home, welcome to our fourth Campfire Chat. We have Jess Schultz, who's one of the smartest people working in our industry. I look up to you. You're like kind of my hero. Don't tell anybody.

Jes Scholz: You just told like how many hundred people.

Noah: And today we're going to go super deep into a lot of stuff. I want to get into talking about crawling, indexation. I think that you have made the jump from doing SEO stuff into growth and into a CMO role that I think a lot of SEOs are like, how the heck do I get there? So I'd love to explore a little bit of what that career journey's been like.

I trolled through a bunch of your LinkedIn to get ready for this, just so I could kind of see where your head's at these days. And I loved how you were talking a lot about rank tracking and the utility of it or the lack of utility. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?

Jes Scholz: very much lack of utility. So I'm of the opinion that if you're rank track, it's actually holding back your progress because it forces you into this mindset that organic is search and it's a very small part of search. And often when we're doing keyword tracking, you you're not going after the one big industry head match keyword you've been taught to.

segment you've been talked to to go long tail to go deep to niche the challenge with that is you can dominate your niche and that's fine, but you're talking about an addressable market audience at any point in time Maybe depending on the industry you've got between five and twenty five percent of people in market If I'm not in market, you can't reach me with search then you've got all of the people that well then use Google search

Then you've got within that you've gone down into a niche.

And so you're addressing a very, very small part of the market. And so you can ace that and that's fine. But if you're acing 1 % of the market, is it really going to be influencing your brand's brand salience?

Is it going to be something that your CMO cares about? Or are you just thinking you're killing it, but you're not having a correlation to brand metrics that matter?

But you're lulling yourself into the sense of security because you're ranking number one on your device or in the rank tracker that doesn't take into account personalization that may not take into account all of the stuff that's happening with AI overviews or new features of Google that certainly doesn't take into account the new AI tab that's coming out. But you're ranking number one, so it's okay. Or let's be realistic, you're ranking number three or four and you're trying to build up to number one.

And that's where all your efforts are going.

Jes Scholz: rather than thinking that if I got one really good quality article in Discover, that could have 10 times the brand salience impact than ranking number one on a long tail keyword for an entire year. Or the same applies for shopping. The same applies, not Gemini yet, the same applies into a really good area of prompting. Like you can't prompt optimize the same way you can't keyword optimize. But if you're, you're

working on your brand salience and that's coming into the myriad of surfaces that make up the world of search. That's where I think we should be focusing our attention, not on rank tracking.

Noah: Hmm. So you're taking me back to your search love deck from 2022, which was like, you need to be focused on all of these surfaces. Can you talk a little bit about the surfaces and then. Yeah, let's start there. Let's start there. That's a good start.

Jes Scholz: I think you'll be shocked when you look into it, just how many different surfaces Google has. And there's a lot that I'm, I didn't know even though exist and I've never interacted with before. And that's fine because they're for certain categories. Right? So for example, there's Google for jobs. If you're not a jobs website, it's never going to be particularly relevant for you as an SEO. Maybe if you're a SEO HR, but that's about it.

So you don't need to worry about I have to optimize for Google for job. It's not relevant for your category, your category of business. But if you are a jobs website, it's heavily relevant for your category.

You've got Google Arts and Culture. Not relevant for anything that I'm doing. But if you were a nonprofit, if you were working in that art space, you'd definitely want to be there because that's where your target audience is going to be.

Noah: Hmm?

Jes Scholz: Then there's your more common surfaces, the ones that we should all be thinking about. And yes, of course that includes Google search, but it definitely also includes Google discover. And for most of us, it should also include Google news because most of us should be keeping up with our industry trends and publishing about those and connecting with our customers through valuable article content, not AI generated spammy blah. That's optimized for keywords.

And if you're genuine content strategy, useful content strategy, then that will get picked up in discovery or that will be picked up in news if you've got the right technical backing for it. So it's just about acknowledging this, this myriad of different surfaces and understanding which are relevant for you, where your target audience is and what are the conditions that you need to do to be able to get in there and.

With that sort of approach, you open up a multitude of touch points. like to use the analogy of like a physical good. If I wanted to sell a water bottle, I wouldn't only sell it online.

I would go and put it into stores like boutique stores, mass stores. I would try getting in the supermarket aisle where they sell water bottles.

physical availability is possible to increase my chance of sales, we need to think about the same in the digital space. You want as much shelf space in the digital ecosystem as you can get for your brand, not because that's going to produce a direct conversion because it won't in the vast majority of cases, but because it keeps your brand top of mind or

I like this concept of Byron Shops mental availability. It keeps the mental availability for your brand high because you've got those salient touch points on a regular basis. So that six months down the track when I do want to buy a water bottle, well, I've seen you three, four times in that period and I'm going to have that mental connection to, I know brand excels water bottles.

see them all the time. They must be good. I'm going to go straight to their website and buy it. That's your job being an organic muck.

Noah: So we have a little bit of insight into where to look. So tell me a little bit about what we should be looking at. Like what actually matters, what metrics or like what kinds of metrics are you keenly focused on? And I'm sure it depends by vertical and stuff like that, but walk us through it a little bit.

Jes Scholz: Yeah, very much. depends. I think there's for our industry, there's one metric that we all need to be focused on because it doesn't matter what your strategy is. It's necessary for visibility and that is indexing. If your content is not indexed by Google and Bing, then you have zero chance of connecting to your audience. So that is one thing that I do pay a lot of attention to and

It's something when you're trying to assess the strength of your domain, the strength of your brand, the strength of your technical setup, it can help answer those questions. Because if you submitted a hundred pages and only 15 of them have been worthy of indexing, you've kind of got 50 % of product that's not sellable. So why have you produced that 50 %?

What's the commonality element there and stop?

essentially wasting your time producing something that is not ever going to give you a return on investment because it can't, because you can't distribute it without it being indexed.

Noah: This reminds me again of your talk at Searchlove where you talked about, where you talked about like people are super, super focused on the volume and not about what you actually care about and what's actually gonna convert and turn it into a business, know, something that's tied to business goals, whether it's, you know, leading indicators or actual conversions.

You had my attention at hello, by the way, when you gave that talk. I was in the front row and I was like, yes, yes, because do you remember? It was great.

Jes Scholz: I think there's on the video on the most convidier you can hear you in the background.

Noah: no. It happened.

Jes Scholz: love it, because I was so, like Moz is such a big and prestigious conference. I was so nervous going up on that stage and to have that one voice cheering me on. was like, okay, my friends are in the audience. It's all right. I can do this. Let's go.

Noah: And we might have schemed a little bit behind the scenes, right? Just a little? Yeah, that was funny. Okay, let's talk a little more about crawling and indexation, because I know you've done a ton of work here. There's one particular thing that we all hate in Search Console, which is crawled, crawled but not indexed. Do you want to go on about that and some of the lessons you've been learning recently that you want to share?

Jes Scholz: Don't Don't do it.

Jes Scholz: Mm-hmm.

Jes Scholz: Yeah, I think that there's two most hate this crawled not indexed and discovered not indexed. they're really confusing because their names are both true and not true at the same time. So we've crawled my index, for example, the logical thought of what that means is that it was crawled and Google determined not to index it. Right.

Noah: Hehehehehe

Jes Scholz: And you think very, we as humans think very linear. We think, okay, that's the end. That's end point. They've made a final decision. That is true in some cases. In most of the cases, crawled not indexed simply means processing that Google is currently crawling it and thinking about it. And this takes time. can take anywhere from a couple of minutes to a couple of weeks. And that doesn't mean that a final decision's been made. It just means

Google's going through that process of, example, doing second wave indexing and rendering the JavaScript before it takes a decision, like a final decision. So you have to think of this as it has been fully crawled, processed and chosen not to be high enough quality, or it's still in processing, which can take a various amount of time, or it was crawled and indexed, it made it into the index and Google or Bing have now kicked it back.

out of the index and they put that back in crawled and not indexed. So it's these weird groups of it's not exactly what you think it is. And particularly when it's a processing issue or it's it's being booted out of the index issue, there's technical solutions to those problems.

This isn't always a content problem. But when we see that exclusion, we think, the content wasn't good enough. Let me go and update the content.

That's not going to help you if you go and update the content on something that's currently being processed. You're just going to be resetting that back to stage one of processing and lengthening the time it's going to take to get that content into the index.

Noah: Mm.

Noah: Wow. You got me thinking tangentially about a couple things. One is, what's it like to go from a huge organization with massive budgets that can build all kinds of tools to solve these exact problems and then to become a solo consultant again and buying stuff potentially it's off the shelf, which leads me to the tool that I've discovered in the past year and have been using for this stuff, which is JetOctopus.

Like Jet octopus is super cool in how it helps you like walk through all those different stages to understand like crawling. And then it makes it really easy through a cloud flare worker. And they're not a sponsor of the show or anything like that.

This is just me giving feedback. Like they've got cloud flare workers that make it really easy to pull log data into their tools. So you can kind of get a sense of when Google's actually crawling your content.

And then you can sort of get a sense of indexation.

Like what, tell me about what kind of tooling you lean into to solve these types of insights problems.

Jes Scholz: I lean in mainly to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. It's just about the understanding of what those classifications mean that's most important. But as long as you have that, then they're the best source because they're the source of truth at the end of the day, right? To an extent, you can't trust their front-end reporting. They've always got quite a delay on their front-end reporting. You would have seen this, like, if you have something classified as discovered, not indexed.

Noah: Mm-hmm.

Jes Scholz: and then you go and explore that URL specifically, it might come back as indexed. It's because their front end isn't actually always up to date with their most recent database. So the best way of actually understanding indexing is pinging it to the Google APIs and pulling back down the current indexing and crawling status. Challenge with that is you have a limited quota a day. So if your website, that's a multi-million page site.

you're not going to be able to query the entire site. You have to choose which section I'm going to be pulling down today. What area do I want to be analyzing today?

And Bing's even more frustrating because they don't have an API for this. So Bing, if you're watching, can you please give us that API? Because it will just make it easier for us to do better by your index.

Noah: Mm.

Jes Scholz: then that's for me the best source of truth and it's free, which is always nice.

Noah: Okay, so what I'm hearing just to reframe is, is this content indexed? I'm gonna use the indexation API and with a limit of 2000 URLs per day to answer that question and just being smart about how I use that quota.

Jes Scholz: Yeah, can. You can even get the information that you need because when you're talking about a large website, you don't really care about an individual page. You care about a page type or a template. If you're a techie, right? Is it my product page template? Is it my courses template? Is it my article template? Is it my category template? Like where am I having the largest issues? Maybe one doesn't have strong enough core web vitals and that's

slowing down the crawler, it's timing out after the five seconds for rendering and not seeing all of the content. This is a technical issue, not a content issue. So solving it page by page, it's just going to slow you down.

All you need to do is identify the root, potential root problem. It's generally never just one thing. You're going to be working through a bunch of things.

But you can easily identify the template by the way you structure your sitemaps.

And then I can say, okay, I have 80 % indexing, but where's the missing 20 %? Then you have to use another tool to try to figure out what the 20 % is. If you say, here's my article sitemap index, here's my product sitemap index, here's my category sitemap index, and then in that sitemap index, you break it down by logical subcategories.

So maybe articles you group into evergreen, seasonal, and time limited.

And if you have evergreen articles that are not indexed, obviously that's something that's a big problem. If you have a seasonal article for Halloween, not indexed, and it is January, that's probably kind of natural from these platforms because they do not keep everything in the index. They pick it up and they drop it out much more regularly than you would think, because they're trying to keep their database, their costs, everything low and controlled.

particularly as they're pulling on that now more and more for rag systems, they don't want to be ragging on Halloween content in January. So the easiest way to ensure that doesn't happen is to drop a lot of that out of the index and lower its statistical significance out of the active index, right? Because there's multiple levels of index with these players.

So it's not necessarily then something that's wrong.

Jes Scholz: If you're three months before it or four months before it, and that content is not in the index, then do something about it. So this splitting of site maps into page types and then within those site map indexes, of sub areas allows you in Google search console and in Bing Webmaster Tools, it works in both, to drill down into what type of content am I having the issue with and what do they have in common?

and then you can fix the commonality.

Noah: One of my dogs is barking mercilessly. hope you guys can hear it. It was awful. It's like the time of day. You can probably see him like right there barking at a squirrel. Okay. We got some great questions in chat, but I want to just think a little bit more about site maps because I haven't had a lot of great site map discussions on, on campfire chats and just historically I haven't had a lot of great ones. So, what did most people get wrong about site maps?

Like what are you seeing just all the time that are easy to fix?

Jes Scholz: Last modified date. my God. Last modified date. So the most common is developers love to do site maps with a cron and they love to then run that cron once a day. So straight away you're putting a delay on any discovery. That's not, that's through site map discovery, right? There's other ways that bots discover content, but you're potentially putting a 24 hour delay on discovery, which is bad enough to start with.

And then on top of this, they think last modified date is of the site map, which is logical from a developer's perspective, not of the content. And so it updates every single day with the cron to say, this is when I've changed all the content in the site map. and essentially what you're doing when your last modified date doesn't reflect the last significant update of the content, you're wiping out that signal from a Google and Bing perspective. Because if I'm telling you every single day,

I have new content come and crawl it. And then I don't. And I repeat that for 365 days. Of course, when you tell them I have new content come and crawl it, they're going say, no, you fooled me 365 times.

It's crying wolf, right? It's a site like equivalent of crying wolf. So you need to ensure that your last modified date is last significant update, not I fixed a spelling mistake, not.

the copyright information at the bottom of the page change because it's the first of January and now it's all 2025. A significant update. So that's a big thing to do.

And then making sure that the sitemaps are actually like fully compliant, fully fledged. There's a lot of times when the sitemap index won't have any errors, but when you click into it, the sitemaps themselves are full of errors.

Noah: Hmm.

Jes Scholz: But you will not see that in Search Console unless you click into the sitemap index. So it looks like everything's fine, because the index successfully processed. That doesn't mean all of your sitemaps successfully processed. So these small technical details are often what dampens that signal for many websites, which are relatively easy to fix. But you have to know that they're there.

Noah: Hmm.

Noah: Do you ever remove the last change date from sitemaps just to make it easier for that signal? You always want it just you want it accurate.

Okay. And is that ever, do you think of that as a manual, something you're doing manually when actually implementing changes on that page? Because you, got granular about, it's not the spelling mistake.

It's major change. That feels like a manual check versus a non.

Jes Scholz: No, not at all. Cause you can't like, you can't manually check across the birth of your site. So it's very easy to say if it's a header change or a footer change or a sidebar change, something that's not the main content straight away from the technical perspective, you can wipe that out. If you're your, have an editorial team where they often have spelling mistakes, obviously that's a problem to fix with the editorial team in an ideal world, but you can put a technical backup on that.

Noah: Totally.

Jes Scholz: So you could say, for example, that if the main content has changed less than X percent, then it's not a significant change. Or you can say, OK, if it's ever an image change, it is significant. But if it is a text change that's less than 100 characters, it's not significant. So you can just put in rules which you will need to customize for your own setups and businesses.

but these are simple technical rules. The challenge that the developers are gonna give back is they'll say, this slows down the running. They're not very good at producing site maps, which is why tools like Yoast do site map features, right?

Because SEOs know how to make this stuff work smoothly. If you've got a front end developer who doesn't specialize in SEO, who doesn't have a strong backing on this, and they're trying to...

make an XML sitemap, they're just going to go and read Google's documentation and be like, well, it's technically correct. You've got to really partner with them and explain the whys behind it and get really into the specific details. Same way you would with an editorial team of the whys.

And then they're more willing to put in that extra effort and make it really work or use a sitemap generation tool. If your, your devs are not playing ball.

with you.

Noah: So I love that structuring your site maps based on page template type because that does make it way easier to do analysis and troubleshooting because you can then just have a list of pages that are easy to just segment and group and do research on. thought that was that was money or fire or pinched fingers or whatever. It super dope. Let's talk about visibility.

How do you track it? We got questions by the way in our chat that were like, so then what does a good rank tracking program look like? Which is another way of saying, how do we track?

Like what is smart? How do we track visibility?

Jes Scholz: So I do customize this based on the client's category and their goals. As SEOs, want to have SEO KPIs that we can share. Like as an industry, these are the things that we want to see. So you can boast when you do good, right? But the reality is there are no SEO KPIs. There are the business KPIs that you work for. What does your boss

What does your CMO, what does your CEO and importantly, what does your CFO because they give the budgets care about. Now, if you're talking about like a PPC team, PPC team are optimized for performance. Performance is defined by the business.

It's not always leads. can be sales. can be revenue. It can be marketing qualified leads, always defined by the business. Always. And then we got SEO being like, I'm going to do keyword rank tracking.

This is my KPI. No, your KPI is the business KPI. So what are those? That's your goal. That's what you have to influence.

Noah: Man, preach!

Jes Scholz: You

Noah: There have been so many times when I talk with younger or less experienced SEOs and they're talking about like, how do we even think about strategy? What actually matters? it's like, well, you first start by asking, what are the business goals? What does success look like? How are we going to be judged? You know, like people don't start there. They start with frank tracking so many times, you know, you'll jump into someone else's account and you'll see that stuff. it's shocking that that's still happening.

Jes Scholz: Yeah, and then we get in a situation where SEOs are complaining, well, we don't get any budget. Here's the tip. You don't get any budget because you're not moving the business goals. Move the business goals and budget is not an issue.

Noah: Okay, let's rewind. Take us through how you learned that and tell us what it's like to be a CMO after being an SEO and the tension between the two things that you picked up that you didn't know about until you got into that seat.

Jes Scholz: It's just an evolution of what you think matters. The biggest thing for me about becoming CMO, I always thought, the CEO is the decision maker, right? That's the big dog. That's the one you want to get in front of and get their attention and make sure that they know you exist. They're not the big dog. They are under the board of directors who are under the investment companies. I always work in big enterprise.

Obviously, if you're in the startup scene, then it's not the CEO still, it's the investors directly in the company. There's always someone else, there's always someone above. And having that in context helps me to really understand even what the CEO wants is sometimes not the most relevant thing because the CEO could be driving project X, but the board of directors actually cares about why.

I think there are some, there's truths in marketing because I actually have a marketing degree. I don't use it very often. I thought it was the most useless piece of paper that I paid a lot of money to get because I'm not European.

I didn't use it when I started working. I didn't use it as I was an SEO.

It clicked in my head that.

There are these universal marketing truths that apply to everybody. How a market works, the fact that there is in market and out of market audiences, this applies to everybody. And if you're targeting only in market audiences, you are small and you will stay small because of the nature of the branding that you're doing.

That there is no such...

Jes Scholz: that loyalty isn't a big driver of additional conversion, that people don't actually care about your brand as much as you do. And these are truths that are hard to face because they don't sit with what we want. We want people to love our brand and we never have to market to them again because they're always going to come back because they love our brand. But if you look at brands with that love level, you look at Apple, you look at Lulumelon,

They don't have significantly higher. It's a little bit, you know, we're talking about a couple of percentage points, but it's not significantly higher than the average loyalty in the market. It comes down to there's a book called How Brands Grow.

Excellent book, excellent book.

Noah: You're killing me. I've been waiting for you to stop talking to ask you. I was about to say like, I feel like I'm listening to how brands grow. Sorry, excuse the screen.

Jes Scholz: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Like read it. It's one of the best non-marketing marketing books that I've read in long time. and that's something with that perspective on SEO. I think we would do a much better job because we understand our real goals. We understand how it's not about ranking for a specific keyword. It's about growing the brand.

And what I found really interesting is Les Bennett did an analysis and he's not a traditional digital marketer, right? This is like, know, marketing guru guy, okay. He did an analysis of Sheriff search, not how rank tracking tools report on Sheriff search, but

a marketer's, a non-SEO's definition of share of search, which is how much your brand versus your actual competitors, not, I'm a travel deals website, so my competitors are other travel deals websites. No, if you're in a travel space, your competitor is booking.com, no matter where you are in the world.

So like, how do your brand compare against booking.com and Expedia, like other category choices?

Not you forcing yourself into a little niche to make yourself feel better. Where's your brand search versus your real competitive set. And if you're small and you're happy being small and you're happy doing that hyper targeting and you don't have, you don't want to be a big known brand.

You just want to dominate a niche and find do your keyword targeting. That's okay. But if you actually want to grow to a point where you're working for the booking.

com.

or you've got the budgets to do the fun things and build your own tools and have dedicated SEO developers and all of this stuff, you've got to grow the brand. You've got to grow the revenue. You've got to grow the market share.

And that can be measured with share of searches leading indicator in many, not all, but it's something you can look at. It's something you can get your own data. You can get out.

I don't use the Google trends data. I use the Google ads data.

Jes Scholz: because it's higher quality, right? You can get out your Google Ads data and you can look at the share of search act as a leading indicator for me and my brand.

Noah: Talk us through that. Just give us a, is it just comparing search volume for brand A versus brand B using as data? Like how do you set that up?

Jes Scholz: So when you bid on any term, included branded terms, you're going to be able to see the percentage of total impressions. You can also use Google Trends data and you could see the difference between the two, but essentially find a way that you're happy with to say this is the market share of people who are looking for brands.

then using that percentage, not of brand A versus brand B, it's got to be you versus all of the notable competitors in the market. Like who's position one, two, three, four, five, and put in you. And then you can see your, your essentially share of brands aliens.

When somebody thinks of that product category, how often do they directly just think of you?

and go and type you into Google because they're doing a navigational search. They're just using Google as I don't feel like typing in the website directly. I just type it into Google because it's there on my phone.

That's when you know your organic has worked because you have the brand savings.

Noah: That I can't believe we're talking about brands so much, but I love it. So that particular book, how brands grow, they talk a lot about, you you were touching on the loyalty piece about how unloyal people actually are. And I know you already said that, but I just want to underline it. And that level of loyalty was like 50 to 60 % for like companies that people were hyper loyal towards.

And that when people, when these large enterprises are doing advertising and branding, they're, really targeting the people that are very, very occasionally making purchases. And that when Coca-Cola is doing all their ads, it's all they're, they're really trying to get the people who buy Cokes once a year. Like that's the market is the people who barely buy that product.

That was one of the things that really stood out to me in that particular book.

Jes Scholz: And I think this is where a lot of SEOs go wrong because we're so focused on last click attribution conversions that often it's hard because of the metrics you've set yourself and because of the metrics you've been reporting on that when then you do like editorial content or you do video content and then you're like, but I can't show the conversions. can't show the ranking in YouTube.

this doesn't fit into my existing KPI set. I shouldn't be doing it because I can't report on it. Get rid of your existing KPI set. You need to be doing video.

You need to be doing video. Well, not just here's to some trashy thing. No one's going to watch that gets 50 views. That's not what we're talking about.

We need to be doing good video. You need to be writing good content. That's not just.

what everybody else has already written that's optimized for keyword search where you're trying to rank for a top of the funnel keyword. No, it's not about that. It's about reaching those light buyers, really reaching them in a way that they recognize the brand and they associate the brand in their mind with a category entry point.

Like with the, if I need to buy product X, I've got a stronger relationship in my brain to brand Y.

because I've seen your video, because I've read your content. This is where, this is organics role. This is SEO's role.

Noah: So we're on a podcast, right?

or whatever this is. And I'm thinking a ton about video too. And I've been doing video hangouts since 2018 or 2019. And I have found that there are some things in YouTube that like, no matter what, you're gonna just kill it if you're doing stuff on video that you can't have that same level of penetration or dominance if you're trying to do it.

with just SEO. Are you thinking about like I was looking for Jess Schultz? I wanted to see your videos. I wanted to see your video content and I was like, where's all the video content?

I found your amazing little 30 second promo for a conference. You're about to go talk at. You looked amazing by the way. You look so good. I was like, damn.

Jes Scholz: marketing festival. that's all them. Like they were in Sydney and they did the whole setup. Like it's nothing to do with my, my skills. If I could do that level of video skills, then I would probably have a lot more video. at this point, I, I'm not trying to dominate the market and be the biggest SEO agency in the world. Like that's not my goal. I'm not trying to reach all.

light buyers in the market. am a consultancy of one and I'm very selective on the clients that I take. So I have enough, more than enough to keep me busy.

So I don't do a lot of video because there is a lot of effort and time that needs to go into that to get it right. And it's a skill that you need to build up over time. It's not going.

Noah: Yeah, totally.

Jes Scholz: to be that you do the first video when it goes viral. Like you need to test and learn and understand what's going to be working for your brand. So I don't have the time to do that right now because I spend my time doing videos with my clients. That's where my focus goes, making sure that they're getting that right. So that's why I don't have a strong video presence.

Noah: Mmm.

Jes Scholz: Right now, my main thing is I am this year going to be launching my own newsletter. This is going to be the year of newsletter for me. And then next year, maybe we can talk about the year of video.

Noah: Mm.

Noah: Hmm. I saw that sign up on your website. I think I signed up. Okay, so I think we already got this, but we have more lot of questions courtesy of one user in particular, Ryan Mendenhall. He's amazing. Amy, who's our producers like Ryan's blowing me up on chat. So I don't know if this is his question because I can't, I don't see names, but I thought it was noteworthy and Ryan.

Jes Scholz: You

Noah: We see you, we hear you. And also, by the way, Jess, I gotta introduce you to my pal, Renee Bigelow, listening to you talk. I just feel like the two of you would get really excited talking with her. And I put my glasses on, because I can't read this stuff. How does brand visibility factor into business KPIs? We kinda covered that, but just directly, can you be more direct?

for that particular question.

Jes Scholz: It.

Think of Mad Men advertising from the 1960s, right? It was all about your ability to reach your audience. It's still exactly the same. It's all about your ability to reach your audience in a way that they notice the brand and associate it with the category.

So impressions is not enough.

Noah: Mm.

Jes Scholz: Clicked onto your website does not mean I know which website I am on. So you need to like there's another really good book by Jenny and I cannot pronounce her last name. She works for the Urban Bird Bass Institute. She has something called distinctive brand assets. That's what I'm reading right now. It's really good about how you take this this

image of the brand. Like you think Coca-Cola, you think red, you think Nike, you think a Swoosh. Those are distinctive brand assets that you can use on your website, you can use in your creative and you can use as an SEO.

This is something I'll be posting a lot more on in a couple of months once I've really processed my thinking around it.

this recognition of the brand, the brand salience matters a lot.

Noah: Are going to be sharing these at a particular conference coming up sometime soon? Okay.

Jes Scholz: Yes, there it is.

Noah: talk about AI. First thing that I want to talk about are your conference slides. I want to know how you're generating your amazing cartoons, your amazing images. I want the cheat code.

Jes Scholz: you

The cheat code is a special prompt that I've worked on for about a year that now just puts it out as I like it. I use Dali for it, but I could use others. I think I just used Dali out of habit, to be honest, because it was one of the first that did it at an acceptable level.

so just loyalty because of comfort, loyalty because of habit. There is probably much better ones out there, but because Dali is good enough.

Noah: Mmm.

Jes Scholz: I habitually go back, that is branding. Yeah, it's, and I just.

Noah: I feel like I'm looking at Alice in Wonderland illustrations. Is that part of the prompt? Do have Alice in

Jes Scholz: No, a lot of it is it's learned from itself. So it understands its history of what it's produced in the past. And I can feed it back the ones that I've taken. it's, yeah, it kind of the more it gets it right, the more it learns and the better it becomes. And the better it's becoming because the technology is getting better as well. But sometimes I know when they've done an update because I click the generate button all of sudden it's

wrong color. All my sketches are back in white. So if there's color in there, like I know that they've done an update and I'm damn it, have to retrain it.

Noah: That's historical. More on AI. You said something that caught my ear and got me thinking. How do we prepare for AI in ways that are not obvious?

Jes Scholz: Yes.

Noah: Like this setup.

Jes Scholz: This is how I got into indexing because at the end of the day, everyone's like, okay, I want to optimize for chat GPT. Great. How are you optimizing for chat GPT bots crawling, especially their search bot, which is different from their, you know, training data bot. How are you actually making sure that they've got your in your content in their index for them to rag on? And how have you got that content?

structured so that it is easy for them to chunk because rag doesn't work off URL indexing or page indexing. It works off the indexing of chunks of content. So if you've got the answer, but it's spread across seven paragraphs, you're never going to get AI visibility because it's too big a chunk for them to return in most cases. The exception to that is,

like media sites, sometimes they do return, you know, large, large chunks of the article because they don't have anything else and it's a high quality source, which obviously annoys the media companies. So if you're a media company and you do not want them doing that, then focus on how you're chunking your content. Um, so I think that's a part of the conversation that's not really being talked about because there is not a simple formula.

It's not.

Structured data, even though there's questions on that, I still believe that there's value in structured data despite the fact that yes, it's JavaScript and yes, it's not currently crawled. That doesn't mean that it won't be in the future and it's most certainly done by Google and their indexing. But putting that aside, it's.

We're not having these conversations of the technical ways that this works, how it's technically different from URL.

indexing or page indexing. And we've got the skills here. You've actually been focused on chunk-based indexing for a while because you've been optimizing for featured snippets.

You just need to adapt that thinking a little bit to, I can't track it on a prompt basis. You cannot. And I know that there's lots of now, yeah.

Jes Scholz: LLM visibility, prompt tracking, put in your prompts and put in your target audience and make sure that you can track it. They have a role to play in terms of, I would definitely do that for my brand and variations of my brand. so I can understand how my brand is represented there for sure. I would also do it for a feeling of my category coverage, but I will never.

report to my like CMO or client or CEO. This is our visibility in LLMs because you do not know because you thought Google was personalized. Like chat GPT is a whole different level of that personalization.

It's not personalizing on a query basis. It's personalizing on all of the history that you've ever asked and everything else it knows about you. Think about deep seek.

I'm sharing its information with tick tock. You think that information is not being shared back the other way.

Like imagine if every single TikTok video you've ever watched on your account is now information to be able to personalize your deep seek answer. How? No, I don't use deep seek myself because I yeah, security.

I know what's behind that looking glass. Well, we all know what's behind that looking glass better than most.

Noah: Wild.

Noah: I'm not using either of those tools ever again.

Jes Scholz: That level of personalization is not something that you can cater to with here is my prompt and here are my three target audiences. Now tell me my visibility. We have to get out of that thinking of we can track everything and put a number to everything with direct attribution, nice and clean. We need to accept there are things we don't know and we have to work off long-term trends or midterm trends rather than.

This is exactly what I did today and I can assess the result tomorrow. That's not the world that we work in. Well, not the world you should be working in because if you're working in that direct attribution, you are staying small.

Noah: So I'm gonna see if I can make something work here. Let me see if I can, I think we call that specific thing this, don't we? Let's see if I can type.

Is this what we call that?

Jes Scholz: It is like an addiction, isn't it? It's this serotonin hit of, I show up for this prompt. I rank number one. I got one Discover article to go viral and you get that serotonin hit. But if you're not getting regular coverage in Discover. One hit is not what you're going for. It should be.

Noah: Is that what we call that?

Jes Scholz: yeah, I'm getting my X thousand views reliably and discovered. That's when you have a good strategy. That's when you have a good brand.

Noah: Can you? So I think discover is something I haven't played in just because of the types of clients I've worked in, worked with. Talk us through a discover strategy. And by the way, what's your time like? Do you have a little extra time or you toast at another 10 minutes or how much time do you have? I want to respect your calendar because you have kids in school and.

Jes Scholz: It's not so much my calendar as if my children wake up. So it might be in 10 minutes or so there'll be too many humans sitting on my lap, but that's fine. Yeah, discovering 10 minutes, that's gonna be hard. I will give you my top three points of things that are stopping you getting into discover. Number one is you don't have...

Noah: Okay, okay, okay.

Noah: Okay, that's perfect.

Jes Scholz: Image preview large, large image preview. I forget the exact tag off the top of my head. That's embarrassing. Large image preview. No, image preview large. God, someone help me. There's a specific tag where you need to give them the permission to be able to display it big without that permission. If they have a choice between five articles and four of them give permission and one of them don't, know, who they going to take? So have that tag in place. Second,

Noah: Hmm. Easy separator. Yeah.

Jes Scholz: Make sure you have an image that meets their requirements. If your image is below 1200 pixels wide, again, if they have a choice of five and four of them meet the criteria and you do not, they will not pick you. So image being allowed to be large on their surface and image being large enough from a pixel perspective to allow them to do that at quality, that's your baseline. That's important.

Then the other thing I get a lot of clients saying, we're not getting into discover. And I go and look at a sample of their content. And it is very much here is a keyword.

Here's it structured as a list to call where it answers all of the sub keywords. And at the bottom, there's an FAQ. That's not that's perfectly optimized for search that will, I'm not going to say never because sometimes it does, but it's rare that that sort of content will get into discover.

You need to have the articles you've written for search if you wish to do that as a strategy. You need to have articles which are written for discover, which are more narrative in the way that they're written. It's more storytelling or it's weird and wonderful or it's tying into certain topics, tying into celebrities, tying into oddities, tying into, I don't want to say clickbait because then it's just going to go in the wrong direction.

More. Yeah.

Noah: I'm hearing emotional though, like getting people to really feel something.

Jes Scholz: Yeah. And it's not necessarily sadly about saying something new with discover. You can say the same thing that everybody else has said, which is not something that I currently like about the algorithm, but you need to be saying it in the right engaging format. People like repetition. People like hearing what they already know in a new and interesting way. Discover knows this. So it's about very much.

the packaging and if you're writing SEO optimized keyword stuff, listicle articles, try a few different formats and see what that does. Not only to discover, but see what that does to your social engagement. Cause actually we're going to give you four things.

social engagement matters, quick social engagement matters. So if you publish the article and immediately it starts getting picked up on social media, then you're going to have much more potential.

because you've got more signals for that to be picked up in Discover. So if you don't have the right social share buttons above the fold, like you have your title, you have your feature image, you have your deck, you have your author and your social share buttons, don't put them at the bottom of the page. Don't expect people are gonna scroll all the way down there and then be like, I love this so much, I'm going to share it.

People judge an article based on what's above the fold and they often will share it before they read it.

or share it without reading it. So I know that's sad state of humanity, but I used to work in a big media publisher. I had millions of visits a day. I know this is fact.

So social share buttons, the right ones, the ones that people click on, don't put them there and set and forget. You're constantly looking at which networks are they engaging with.

When's the last time you put your blue sky? Have you tested blue sky out there? Is that what people want to share on nowadays? I'm still calling it Twitter.

Swap them out. See what gets the engagement.

Noah: Me too.

Noah: What are you experimenting with right now?

Noah: that you can talk about.

Jes Scholz: that I can talk about. I can talk about it generally. I'm experimenting with that proving

targeting people who are not in market right now. So the light buyers we were talking about before produces a return on investment, which is obviously a long term or midterm project. It's going to take me still quite some time to see those correlated trends over time because I can't do direct attribution. But yeah, it's a lot of that reframing of SEO and

improving case studies that show if you invest in getting your content across more surfaces, getting the right content, content that builds that brand salience will end up increasing your market share. So that's with one client, a client that I've got on an ongoing contract. Outside of that, it's yeah, some topical authority stuff, which is fun.

So if you've been hit by a discover penalty or if you've been hit by a Google algorithm update and gone down, how do you reestablish real topical authority? That's something I'm playing with at the moment right now as well.

Noah: And then you shared something with me about the state of the industry. Did you want to share about that at all? Just like focusing on the things that matter versus the things that don't and how much work we need to really start putting in to improve the craft, anything like that?

Jes Scholz: I think I've had the opportunity to look at a lot of people's strategies in the last particularly year since I've started working as growth consultant.

I think we can do better as a collective. The number of times that people will come and say, okay, can you help me rank for this keyword? My answer will be no, not because I can't do it, but because I don't want to do it because I think our industry is bifurcating into you have.

You have these people who are recognizing this is the first time in 20 years.

Google has a legitimate challenge. And that does not mean that overnight, chat GPT is going to kill Google. No, of course not. But I think it's pretty undeniable at this point in time that they are a legitimate challenger, not to Google's dominating market share, but to taking some of that market share away to the point where we need to be aware of it.

It's another surface. It's another company now that we need to take into account. That doesn't work.

off the same core technology as all of the Google services does. And as long as we're still thinking in terms of keywords and in terms of link building, not digital PR, like real link building.

I think that we're going to end up emphasizing the bad name that we already have. Like we all remember the verge article, which came out and totally dist us. Right.

And for the vast majority, we don't earn that reputation, but there is certainly elements within our community where we are still reporting on ranking and we are still reporting on number of links as KPIs.

Noah: I didn't like it.

Jes Scholz: And that's setting us all back because then a developer who's worked in a team and interacted with an SEO that's got that thinking and they come into your team, that's how they're going to see you. They're going to see you as this very backwards. They just want links and ranking for keywords. They want to do this basic optimization of title tags or whatever it might be.

rather than a partner who truly understands how the technicalities of an XML site network, how indexing works, how crawling should be structured, whether we should allow these bots or not, when to limit them, when not to limit them. Or an editorial team is gonna see you as the guys who always tell us to do a structured data tag, the annoying people over on the side, rather than.

Hey, this is actually valuable colleagues who can really help me and my content get more visibility in Google Discover. So we need to decide who we are. Are we these guys who are going to be focused on these backward metrics?

Or are we going to finally grow up, stop being children, learn that not everything can be attributable? And that's okay, because in the real world, not everything is black and white.

Like we're behaving like little children where it's all simple and perfect and controlled, but that's not the real world. And if you want to live like that, you're not going to grow the brand. You're not going to get the budgets.

You're not going to get the attention of the CMO and CEO.

Noah: I love it. Last night we had a, so we do this SEO shooting the poop room on Clubhouse every Tuesday. And last night, one of the core topics that we talked about was one of our core members was having a challenge because he was interacting with multiple layers of an external large franchise company and that the franchise company had another partner that was providing

a specific developmental service and the SEO company was like, Hey, the website's not being rendered because of the way pre-rendering is working and all the meta descriptions are saying things like JavaScript needs to be turned on for this website to be. Yeah. Real problems.

Right. And the SEO teams like bringing this to the forefront and internal teams and the external provider that built the rendering solution.

They're all like firehosing at the SEO team that the SEO team is the problem. They're raising really important core issues that need to be addressed, but really at the end of the day, it's a people problem. And then that's where the breakdown's happening.

And at the, all at the expense of like business schools not being accomplished. And so it becomes like this match of wills and the company's losing.

You know, just wild how this happens over and over and over again. Any lessons you've learned along the way to help someone navigate that kind of stuff? Anything you can boil into two or three minutes?

Like how to be a better communicator that you did. Like you can be kind of blunt, like right? You're pretty blunt. So like, how did you get smooth around the edges?

How did you learn this? Cause I see a little bit of me and you in that.

Jes Scholz: Yeah. Yep.

Noah: I'm not saying you're a communicator, but I am. And it took me a long time to stop pissing people off. Right? So like, how'd you learn?

Jes Scholz: I think I'm still learning and I think I will always be learning. Yeah, because I am very pitbullish when I want something, I will stick to it. But I think the difference is, what makes the difference for me is tying into those shared goals. And if you don't have shared goals with the tech team, that's the problem.

Like I make sure when I'm working with clients that we have common elements in our roadmaps. have common KPIs and the same with an editorial team. And so you might be, if you're the like one SEO and you're responsible for full stack SEO, you might be split in two or split in three because you can have your brand KPIs with the traditional marketing team.

You can have your technical KPIs.

that are driven with your tech team. You can have your editorial KPIs, which are driven with your editorial content teams. And then all of that needs to tie into what does the CFO and the CEO care about?

And that's actually the biggest problem in many companies is that there's these silos and all the silos aren't working together towards a common goal. And you might be thinking, well, that's not my job. Like it's not my job to fix the fact that they don't have shared.

KPIs, OKRs, however you want to measure it. If you have that attitude, then you're always going to have conflict. So it's not your job to fix it, but I would always see it's my job to at least raise it, to try to address it, even if that's on a one by one team basis.

say, OK, we haven't had shared KPIs in the past. Can we sit down? Can we do a workshop?

Can we actually at the end of the workshop have a very clear goal that we have an aligned roadmap? We have aligned KPIs for this quarter. Like you don't have to fix it for the whole organization, but you can at least fix it for yourself.

And that's going to mean in many cases, you have to move first. You have to have a quarter where you don't achieve anything that you think you should achieve. Because you're going to be supporting their goals the best way that you can.

Jes Scholz: next quarter, they remember, actually, I put the time in to do this planning with the SEO team. And then they helped me achieve my goals. Okay, I'm going to want to do that planning with them again, I'm going to listen to them more. And then the more that relationship strengthens, then when you come out and say, I want to do this crazy SEO thing, I'm not sure exactly if it's going to work. But I want to try it, I think it's worthwhile. They'll be like, yeah.

Well, you've just helped me for a full year achieve my KPIs. I like you. So I'm going to do it. They might not like you as a person. A lot of people don't like me as a person.

It's what you can do to help them achieve their goals because like the reality is people are always out for themselves. Most people. So help them do what they want.

Noah: Mm. Yeah.

Jes Scholz: then they're more likely to help you get what you want. Basic human nature.

Noah: That aligns a lot with. Yeah, I love that. I mean that aligns a lot with how I try and roll. I always trying to help first and people I think remember you as the nice guy just cause you try and help someone you know. I got two great. There's like 15 questions here so I don't know what to do, but there's two that I think can be squished into one if you have time. So this is a great time for you to have an out OK.

Noah: I'm going to take these two questions and tack on a third and let's try and give you the freedom to like, one of my favorite things to learn about, learn from all of our guests is like, how do you actually think and whether or not you have a structured framework for making decisions? like that's number one, I always like to go there, but this is where questions from two other folks that kind of fit together. How do you go about a client campaign? How do you approach it and create a strategy?

which is kind of the same thing, like how do you make decisions? How do you come up with strategic thinking? And then how do you show growth to get additional funding?

That's kind of related, but not. you go wherever you want with that.

Jes Scholz: this.

So when I'm thinking of taking on a new client, I always start with what do you want to achieve and why? And this is the one benefit of being a consultant is

You, you can get very specific because you need to write. Like this is the deliverables that you have a SLA or you need to write down. This is what we're going to try to achieve.

You can do that as an in-house as well. You can say, okay, at the start of a project, let's all sit together and write down in black and white, not talk about it and agree on it. If it's not written down, it doesn't exist.

So write down this.

is what we want to achieve and why. Then once I start with the goal, then I break it down into the tactics. find a lot of SEOs start with the tactics.

They start by, I'm going to do a website audit. I'm going to find all of the problems. I'm going to list all of these problems and then I'm going to tell you what order to do the problems in.

If there is a technical SEO problem or an editorial problem and that's not hindering you from achieving that goal, then accept the imperfection for now and let it be. Focus on what the business needs at that point in time. Don't focus on fixing all the things. Sometimes it will just be that they need to fix all of the little things, but then that needs to be an aligned goal where everybody's saying,

Jes Scholz: Okay, we're going to have a quarter where we do tech debt. That's fine. That's actually healthy and good to do, but it needs to be aligned. You can't just be the guy always being like, can I please squeeze this one little thing into the sprint? Then you just the annoying guy off to the side who they always have to cater for rather than a core member of the team who's working towards the shed goals. So define upfront, ideally on a quarterly basis or on a project basis. This is what we want to achieve.

then define the how, then reassess that how of is this me just thinking or is there case studies that have proved this and like question yourself or have your AI agents like I have a little SEO basic AI prompt, it's not even an agent, where I say okay this is my issue, this is what I think I'm going to have as solution.

challenge me why it's right and challenge me why it's wrong. Not that the AI is correct because I do not believe that they are at that level. But because it's just going to potentially spit up something that'll make me go, yeah, okay, maybe I need to factor that in.

It's an idea, it's creative, it's just getting my brain thinking. It's not that I'm following its strategy. It's a trigger for my own brain as a jumping off point.

and then you know what your goals are. You know, the KPIs that you want to track for that specific thing, then actually track them, do the work and actually track them and report back on success and the reporting back on success and on failure, but giving context of the why to the failure and what is the plan from there is how you get buy in for your next projects. The worst thing you can do is.

If it was a success, you scream from the hills. And if it was a failure, say, well, no one will remember we were doing that project. They remember. So if it is a failure, you need to say, this didn't achieve the goals.

This is why we think it didn't achieve the goals. This is what we're doing next. Either we're putting the project to bed as we learned from the failure, we know not to do it again.

That's still valuable.

Jes Scholz: We know what we did wrong, we're going to do a phase two and fix it.

own those mistakes as learnings and work out how to phrase that well.

Noah: Amazing. This feels like a great spot. Don't you think? this, the kids must be awake. You must have school. Yeah. But, I just want everybody to see we're both wearing our Moz t-shirts rando today. I don't know if the world saw this, but Moz con is apparently happening two times August and in October.

Jes Scholz: Yes

Noah: And I want to call that out because I feel like MozCon has had an enormous impact on my personal career. And I think it's going to be pretty fun. They're going to be in London and the second one's in New York City, I think, in October. So should be pretty exciting. Anything you want to talk about to close this off? Any personal causes you want to share, shed some light on for our audience?

Jes Scholz: My personal cause will be please stop rank tracking.

Noah: I love it. Perfect. So how was it? Was this fun for you? This was, I had a good time. This was good for me. Yeah. Cool. I know, I know it's been too long by the way. I'm just throwing that in there. excellent. Well for everybody at home or at work in the office, thanks so much for sharing an hour and a quarter with us. tomorrow we're doing something that I hope has a really big impact.

Jes Scholz: Yeah, well I always have a good time when we hang out.

Noah: We're hosting something called The Hunt, which is going to be at 11 a.m. Mountain Standard Time. It's for a lot of our friends who are looking for work. They'll have three to five minutes to do an elevator pitch. And we'll have a group of folks who've done a ton of hiring to give feedback. All the people who do their elevator pitches will also have their segment recorded and edited down so that they can share that with folks to hopefully get a role.

That's going to be tomorrow at 11. We'll share the link inside the SAO community for everybody. Jess, you're amazing. And I'm really, really glad we had to head this time together.

So looking forward to catching up with you in real life soon at a conference somewhere sometime coming up, right? And hope you have, sorry, go.

Jes Scholz: I was just going say I'll be in the States for SMX advanced. Yep. Yes.

Noah: Ooh, ooh in Boston. Ooh, if there are tickets floating around to see a Red Sox Yankees game, take, do it. People will be talking about it. It's a big deal.

We get some minutes to come say hi.

Jes Scholz: Yeah, I've got a little one here.

Okay, I'll come in now, alrighty? Let me say bye to my friends. Okay, two minutes.

Noah: Amazing. Okay. Bye. For every... yeah. Keep your Riverside open for a second because it's got to upload your content. But for everybody else, ciao. This was amazing and catch up soon.

Jes Scholz: Yeah, I'm on duty now.

Bye, thanks for having me.