S2 - Ep 2 | The Future of Search: Google vs. AI

Speaker A: All right, welcome to Live Bites. George, thanks for, thanks for joining me and entertaining us for a little bit. I'm here with my friend. George is Latin. George owns and operates, um, Digital Third coast, which is a digital marketing company. And George, you want to introduce yourself for our audience and tell everyone what you do?

Speaker B: Sure. Well, I'm currently the, uh, director of marketing and product development at Digital Third Coast. I'm also a co owner and we've been around since 2007 and so about 16 years now. I, I think I'm not good at math and just doing primarily search engine marketing. And we've been located in the Chicago area the whole time, although now we've gone remote. Um, we have 22 employees currently. And yeah, I think that's most of the background on the agency and the stock.

Speaker A: People find you in case they want to find you@digitalthirdcoast.com.

Speaker B: yeah, our website, digital third coast.com also on, um, you know, LinkedIn and Twitter and all those social platforms.

Speaker A: So. All right, so we got some housekeeping out of the way. You're, um, known you for a while now. Fellow entrepreneur, Chicago area. What made you decide to become an entrepreneur?

Speaker B: I think it was kind of like I backed into it a little bit. I think I was, you know, I was really trying to promote my own business and trying to get my own e commerce business off the ground and trying to make that work. And I really got into the marketing side of it. And that's, that's kind of like when it all started for me, to be fair, like, just to back up a little. I think it started when I was younger. Like my dad was an entrepreneur and tried to start like multiple businesses and unfortunately they didn't really do that well. Like, he had many different businesses that just kind of never got off the ground. So I think I, I had a little bug in me to, to want to do that at some point myself. And I was working at another agency and I didn't really like the way that they were doing things and I just decided, like, I want to do things the right way, which, you know, they weren't letting me do. And I just thought it was better to just go off on our own at that point. So that's kind of how I got into the entrepreneur thing. I didn't really like, I didn't have like a business plan per se. I think we just started the business at the right time with the right service and onwards from there.

Speaker A: Very good. What do you think is, uh, probably the most challenging part of running a business.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean I would say it's dealing with people. I think, you know, that's usually for me has been, I mean it's the best part, but also can be the hardest part. Uh, and especially in an agency, our product is our people. So, you know, we just um, I think we put a lot into that, into our people and I think that ends up making our service better.

Speaker A: Yeah, um, it's a, I think that's fair. So you're, I mean you're digital marketing, right? So you're helping companies, any kind of company with their search engine visibility, with their pay per click, with their advertising. Yeah, that, that landscape, I, uh, feel more than ever, more than any other landscape or it's certainly up there, is changing incredibly rapidly. Probably changes generationally regardless of what technology is introduced over time. But we were all hit a couple years ago with AI immediately and there's a million different AI tools now. How is that, how do you see that impacting the, the usage of uh, Google, the, you know, what you guys are doing and search in general?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's interesting. I mean you'll hear like certain things that, like Google's losing market share to OpenAI and things like that. However, you know, I think there, there's been, so I think there's been a drop for certain keywords. Right now we're seeing with clients where certain keywords are below, like the AI overview now and I guess further down the page. So they're not just, you know, keywords that were getting a certain amount of clicks before OpenAI came around are getting less clicks now. Sorry, it's not really before OpenAI came around, it's when Google introduced the AI overviews that started like pushing results down. So now a lot of people, it's

Speaker A: like the, in other words, Google was stealing the, the, the content from all these websites. Right. And then when someone.

Speaker B: That's. Yeah, that's kind of the big argument now. It's like now they're just taking all. Instead of like showing you the results, now they're just summing them up at the top and.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: People don't have giving you what you,

Speaker A: what you want, they're giving you what they think you want to see. And that's really interesting too because I guess that's a whole separate conversation. But it's an interesting one because I think there was a lawsuit around that. There has been or maybe not, but.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, I know New York Times sued Google already, but Yeah, I don't know if there were smaller companies Doing it as well because.

Speaker A: So you would Google something in the old days, how the money worked and how the money flowed I guess is, you know, you get good search engine results, someone clicks on your website, you get traffic to your website that you can monetize. That typically um, in companies like yours, obviously that would show that things are working. But then it, Google was, what is that called when they show you the results? The AI overview is it, that's an AI overview. So you know, if, if you ask it why is the sky blue? It just gives you a couple drop down answers, it'll sum it up for you and then you never end up clicking through to a website which is a huge loss of revenue for a lot of people.

Speaker B: Um, it depends on the search term though. Google isn't showing AI stuff for commerce or commercial searches. They're showing it for more long tail stuff and for stuff like health searches and coding things. They're showing it for a lot now. But you know, it seems like certain keywords are being affected by it and certain keywords are not. And right uh, now we're not seeing like a huge drop in traffic overall like for, for websites. We're just seeing some traffic drops for certain keywords.

Speaker A: Got it. So it's slowly starting to affect certain industries. So how do you, I mean Google it seems to me is like I don't use it nearly as much as I used to. If, you know, I, I'm using sites like Perplexity or chatgpt to get information to qu. To get, you know, quick answers to a direct question that I want. I do notice that Google's AI response is also pretty decent. You know, when I'm using that just straight from my phone or something like that. But um, how many people are even using Google these days? I see my kids, you know, they got a, the social platforms to, to do their searches. You know, people, I think newer generations, they're not even using Google. They're just going to TikTok to do a search or they're going to, you know, Instagram or YouTube. I mean that's where they're searching. And uh, they don't want to read.

Speaker B: They just, that's what I, you know, I keep hearing stuff like that from people. But the reality is like the amount of times people search Google, I just saw a stat about this was like 200 times a month. And that amount has not dropped, you know, considerably or you know, at all since, since the uh, AI overviews have taken over.

Speaker A: What, what was the stat?

Speaker B: It's like 200. 200, um, you know, people do on average 200 searches a month. Whereas like tools like TikTok, I think their stat was like 13 searches a month, something like that. So it's like m, you know, much less.

Speaker A: Okay, that's interesting.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: 200 searches a month.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I mean, uh, you know, traffic wise, Google doesn't seem to be hurting and you know, just like, in terms of like they're, you know, people coming to the site and searching for things doesn't seem to be going down. So.

Speaker A: And I know their stock is still strong obviously, and Google's a behemoth. I'm not suggesting they're going anywhere, but, um, I imagine that there's, you know. You think they're still on top 10, 20 years from now?

Speaker B: I mean, no, I don't. That's, that's like impossible to predict. I mean, actually I was surprised that actually Amazon is like the number two place where people go to like search for things and you know, that's like all counted in the statistics for, you know, like total searches and know how many searches people are doing. So like Google was number one by, you know, a lot and then Amazon was number two.

Speaker A: Like searching Amazon for products, right? Yeah, yeah, I guess the Alexa, you got to say her name softly. But, you know, maybe they're counting a lot of stuff in that device because people are always talking to that, hey, Alexa, what's the weather today? Alexa?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. I don't know. I don't know what they're counting. Yeah, Amazon was number two. Forgot who was number three. But number three was like way further down.

Speaker A: Interesting. Uh, which was TikTok.

Speaker B: You were saying TikTok was like, like way like low on the list. It wasn't even number three.

Speaker A: So in your company, how are you budgeting or adapting to the change? Right. So the, you know, disruptions are going to come. They. What do you, uh, what do you do to budget for that and, or just plan for that adjust?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's just, you know, I mean, I think when I first came around, everybody thought it was just going to change everything so quickly, which I don't think it has, which is I think a good thing. But you know, I think things are going to just start lining up pretty soon and all those things they've been talking about are, I still believe are going to happen. It's just a matter of when. Such as what? Well, just, you know, like, I mean, it's just getting more intelligent almost. It seems like Every day there's like, new features that they're releasing, and it's just getting. It's getting way better at, uh. Like if you, in the beginning used to like, ask for pictures and it would give you kind of what you were talking about, you know, which was cool. But now, like, it's gotten way better and it gives you exactly what you're talking about. And if you say something like put the words, you know, levintis into the picture, it'll put those words. Whereas before I used to put up some kind of, like, weird mashup.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So it's really getting advanced. I mean, that's just one little thing. I mean, there's more features that have been getting released with like, you know, data processing and, you know, large, large data type stuff. And. Yeah, it's just, you know, I believe it's still progressing pretty quickly. We're not seeing the effects of it quite yet. Like, you know, people had predicted at first. I mean, for us, like, I think we see it coming and we're just trying to keep up with the changes and just keep up with, like, I think it's enough work to just even keep up with what are the newest things coming out. Because it seems like every week there's like, oh, now we can do this, now we can do that. And it's like, okay, I was just getting m. Into this other new feature you released, and now there's new things. So.

Speaker A: Well, you guys would always kind of have to adapt to the algorithm changes, remember? And that was the biggest thing. Right. Google, uh, made an algorithm change and it changed, you know, just like, kind of wiped out everything you've worked out for the past two years and perfected, um, you know, how do you. How do you. How do you stay sane in that regard? Not, uh, to get the constant whiplash of, uh.

Speaker B: It's a little different from update changes, though. Um, you know, like, updates were. We. We didn't have to, like, our clients wouldn't like, lose complete rankings. Like, if anything, they would drop a little bit for something, you know, so it was just kind of adjusting to that. Whereas this is like, you know, there's just like. It's like new stuff every few weeks and there's just a lot of, you know, reading and like, testing that you want to do with the new information, with the new tools. And it's just kind of like figuring out it's more product development. I would say it's kind of figuring out, okay, how can we save money as an agency using these new resources, these New tools. And I guess that's what we're doing. Like, we're trying to apply it to our stuff and to our clients stuff, um, where it makes sense and that we're learning by doing that and, you know, just continuing to like, try to get better at it.

Speaker A: How else are you using AI? Just inefficiency, trying to.

Speaker B: I think one thing it's really good at is like writing headlines and giving you ideas for headlines and things like titles, meta descriptions, which, you know, I don't really are an SEO factor. But you want to have a good meta description because that's what people see in the search results. But the keywords don't matter in there. So, you know, Google's perfect. Uh, not Google. AI is perfect for writing stuff like that because it, you know, I mean, at the end of the day it's really there. It's a great writer. You know, it has so much information. You could hire great writers, but for something like meta descriptions, you'd be wasting money to hire a great writer to do, you know, it's better to, you know, have something like AI do it.

Speaker A: Got it. All right, fair enough. Um, so let's, uh, let's jump really quickly. Ah, you know, I'm gonna, we can go back and forth. You're a avid guitar player much better than I am. Um, what are you playing these days?

Speaker B: Actually, I've been learning this song, um, Running on Faith by Eric Clapton. Do you know that song?

Speaker A: I don't, no.

Speaker B: He, uh, he played it in his, um, MTV Unplug show is like the acoustic version of it. It's really good. You gotta check it out.

Speaker A: How are you using your guitar playing to using it? I use it as almost like a meditation form of meditation just to escape, you know, just the daily grind or the daily, uh, stressors. Usually. Um, it does a pretty good job. How do you use it? You know, because you're, you're a little bit more involved than I am. I believe. Believe you've been playing longer for sure. But you play every day to eliminate stress or are you playing to, uh.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, it's a little bit of like. I mean, I just, I mean obviously I love music. Um, and I think, um, yeah, it's a stress relief thing, but it's also just kind of, I don't know. So I think I started taking lessons recently and I think that's been really good for me because I've, it's helped keep me on track with like learning certain things that maybe I avoided in the past. Or you know, just, you know, wouldn't necessarily stick with. Or like I would get stuck on something and then just forget about it. So the lessons have been good for breaking through some of that stuff and just kind of getting to the next, you know, the next thing and um, progress. If as long as you feel progression, it feels good. And I think that's why I like it now. It's like I'm, um, I feel like I'm progressing and I can look back six months ago and say, wow, like I'm actually getting better. Yeah, it's kind of cool.

Speaker A: What do you think is the biggest. There's so many people that I meet, you know, that want to play guitar. Oh, I wish I play guitar.

Speaker B: Uh.

Speaker A: Oh, I can't play guitar. It's too hard. Whatever. I have an answer that I typically give. But what would you say, what do you say to those people? Because I imagine you get a lot of that too.

Speaker B: I mean, it's not an overnight process, like even, I mean, I've been playing for. Since I was 12, so like, I don't even know like that's.

Speaker A: You've been playing every day since you were 12?

Speaker B: No, no, no, no. Definitely not. But you know, I think, well, hell,

Speaker A: you're not that me if you've been playing since you were 12.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Uh, you know, like, you just build on top of, you know, what you had existing and you know, I took breaks throughout college or whatever. I didn't play at all for a while. But yeah, like, I just, when I started again, I built on top of what I already knew and you know, been able to progress that way. I, you know, I just think it's something that takes a lot of practice and you have to like, practice. I think every day is the best way to do it. But you know, as long as you practice and like keep going and sticking with things, like you just get better, it just happens. I don't, I don't know why, but like, it just happens. Like if you.

Speaker A: Something typical.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker A: I think, um, I mean, so the one thing I say or I say a few different things. I think there's like a three month marker, right? Because the first few months it's, it's actually quite painful, right? Your fingers just feel like. I don't even know how to describe it. It's just, it's kind of torturous pain. Um, and once you get through that, you gotta play through it and you gotta play like every day through it. And once you get through that, this like, uh, Endless amounts of opportunity kind of open up, and that's when you can really start to play. I would say you have to really like music. You said it. I love music. I think you have to have a certain love for music because that's the driver that's sitting in your brain saying, I'm going to stay here for the next four hours and torture myself until I figure out the song. You don't really do that unless you really have a certain love for the music. And, uh, if it's your, your mom or your brother, your friend saying, hey, I want you to learn guitar, that's not enough motivation to, uh, put you through that.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: But to your point also, I think it, you know, there's a, there's a certain reward. I think the perseverance of working really hard at that gives you that reward at the end of that hard work of, uh, just something tangible almost that, you know, you, you've accomplished.

Speaker B: Yeah. I love the feeling of like, you know, I didn't know how to play a song at all. And then, you know, it's a challenge when you first start a new song or learning something. It's like, it's just like completely new and different. And you can't even like, how, how am I ever going to play this? And especially at, uh, this speed, like, I can never play this. But then you just start to, you absorb it and play it over and over and over. And then all of a sudden, you know, if you play with a metronome and, and you know, play to a certain beat, you can like, see where you're at. If you're at 68, uh, bpms start slowly going up to 70, 72, 74, and you start getting faster at it. And you couldn't even play this thing before, and now you're like playing it as fast as you know it's supposed to be played. And it just, yeah, it's, it's amazing. Feels great.

Speaker A: You think it's, you think it's a confidence builder.

Speaker B: Yeah. And the more you do it, like, the better you feel about it and you just, you kind of, you get more momentum behind it. It feels good.

Speaker A: So turning back to business really quick. So, you know, that thought, you know, that was my hair goes to squirrel moment. Um,

Speaker B: uh,

Speaker A: when I think when businesses or anybody looks to search engine optimization or search engine marketing kind of pay per click, they're really looking for a quick hit, they're looking for a quick fix. They're expecting things to happen overnight. Right. What's your approach to Balancing the, um, I guess, expectation versus the reality.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, so with paid media like, you know, Google Ads or TikTok ads or whatever, usually things can happen overnight. Obviously there's some work to getting the campaign together and the ads together and that stuff, but we can usually get results pretty quickly. With SEO, it takes longer, but it's not like you don't see any of the sort of fruits of your labor before. Like you're, you know, number one for everything. You can see some results. Like, you know, I mean, our approaches, we usually start by going after keywords you can rank for and, and keywords that can actually drive business. So if we can get you to rank for those, you can slowly start to see, you know, business increasing and rankings increasing for like, important keywords. And then it's a slow build from there. If you keep going as, as we build links to your site and as we build more pages, your site starts to get more authority and ranks better for things in general. And then when you, you know, eventually you start adding more and more content and things just start ranking better. Because once Google sees you as an authority, uh, on a topic, pretty much anything you put up is going to rank automatically.

Speaker A: It's just, it's, uh, exponential benefits once you get to a certain.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Point. Right.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So what's a really tremendous success story that comes to mind when you think about some of your clients in the past or, you know, startup company comes to you now they're a public company or something like that? You know, obviously, you know, that's, obviously.

Speaker B: I mean, that, that's a pretty big transformation. I mean, but we do have some, like, companies that are public, you know, big companies that work with us that, you know, they had like their number one competitor, you know, like, they compete with them on everything. And, you know, they wanted to outrank them for, you know, their target keyword, which was like their big, you know, this is what they do. And you know, we were able to get them to outrank that competitor, which, you know, was huge for them. And it's just one keyword. And we never, we never want to focus just on one keyword because that's really not what it's about. It's more about increasing all the keywords your site ranks for and just getting more traffic to your website and conversions. Some people focus too much on I need to rank for this one keyword. It's really, it's really hard to do that these days.

Speaker A: Um, so is that a common mistake you see people making?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, Especially if you're going after a competitive niche. If you're, if you're trying to go after like super competitive keyword in a competitive niche, like, good luck, you know, it's going to, it's going to take you a while, you know, or it's

Speaker A: just going to cost you a fortune.

Speaker B: It's got. Well, yeah, um, time equals money, you know, however you want to put that. But like, or you have to be, you have to put a lot of time into your content. You have to be like a great writer and put a lot of time into it and then you can rank. But like, yeah, it, it does require good content and it requires some, something substantial of value that you're giving the audience.

Speaker A: So as an entrepreneur, then what, what do you think? Um, I guess what, what's one thing you might do differently? If you're looking back 15 years ago, something maybe you're willing to share, obviously. What do you think you would have

Speaker B: done differently if, like 15 years ago? Like when we started.

Speaker A: Yeah, when you started 17. I think it was 17 years.

Speaker B: Yeah. Uh, I don't know. I mean, I guess I would put in the. Be it like earlier on, I would put more energy into like systems and processes and documenting all the processes we have. Time tracking. We didn't start time tracking until like a few years in, but yeah, I guess I would start that right away. Just realizing how valuable that is. Yeah, I think just more of like that kind of stuff.

Speaker A: Operations kind of jump on those quicker. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: Ah, you know, I think also. I don't know. Yeah, I think I would. It probably invests more into content. Looking in hindsight, you know, if we had great content earlier on, like, we would have been killing it. But now, like, great content is just like, you know, you can just whip it up with. Well, you can't whip it up with AI. You know, you can, you can whip up content with AI. It won't be great content. So now great content is, you know, written by, I would say written by a human, not written by AI. And it's written by somebody that knows the industry or whatever the topic is and, you know, can write a good article that has good insights and that kind of stuff.

Speaker A: So you're, you know, you've got a couple children, um, let's say they want to be entrepreneurs. What advice are you giving them?

Speaker B: It's funny, my son sent me a text today about, uh, he said, I love ChatGPT. And it was like some kind of like picture of a Minecraft, like a pregnant Minecraft character. And I was like, what? This is not even. I don't get it. I'm sure it made sense to him.

Speaker A: But, um.

Speaker B: Yeah, sorry, what was the question? What, what would I.

Speaker A: Let's say instead of a pregnant, uh, Minecraft character, he says, dad, I want to be an entrepreneur like you. What. What's the advice?

Speaker B: I would, I mean, I would, I would definitely tell him to, uh, get, you know, just start getting into AI stuff because obviously there's a lot of opportunity there and if you're knowledgeable in that space. I think if you want to be an entrepreneur and getting into AI is your, I mean, the world's your oyster right now, I think is.

Speaker A: AI is, is vast though. Right? I mean, you think about the hype cycle and there's, there's compartments and, and different areas of AI that probably are getting a lot of hype. Um, it'll be really interesting to see three, four years from now. What. So AI isn't obviously going anywhere, but what parts of AI are going to die off and what parts of AI are going to take off.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: I think that's going to be super interesting to, um. Right. To see.

Speaker B: Yeah. But if you're in that industry and you know it, you're gonna, you know, gravitate towards the things that aren't. Are doing well, you know, ideally, hopefully, if you know what you're doing. Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, well, the only way to really know what you're doing is to, to work hard at it.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Right. Is to do it.

Speaker B: Start making pregnant people.

Speaker A: That's my parallel to guitar. I mean, you work at it, you just kind of pound through it. You got to love it, you got to get through the pain of it. But at the other side, it's. It could be a lot of fun, it could be rewarding, it could be fulfilling, it could give you everything you kind of want. Yeah. Um, the, the early days, of course, you know.

Speaker B: Yeah. Getting that rock up the hill in the beginning is super tough.

Speaker A: Yeah. Um, well, so remind, uh, everyone again where they can go to Digital Third coast, uh, if people want to get started with, with you or anyone else. I guess one more piece of advice from you. If, if there's a company out there that wants to get started with you or any other marketing company, you know, what should they be doing?

Speaker B: Well, I mean, I think so. You, uh, know, I think I would look at what is your product or service and does it have search volume? Like in other words, do people search for what you do or what you sell? If there is search volume, then you're probably a good candidate for search marketing. And I would probably start with a paid search marketing campaign so that you can see what keywords work for your business. And then I would expand that to organic so you can create that content, which takes longer time and more money and more resources, but at the end of the day has a bigger payoff. If you know there's good traffic there and you know it's worth going after, then it's worth doing. So that's, that's kind of what I recommend.

Speaker A: And are, is companies like yours help companies like mine or any other determine where they should be searching or where they should be spending their, their dollars. For instance, I mean, are certain companies better off advertising on um, LinkedIn or TikTok versus Google AdWords?

Speaker B: Yeah, potentially. I mean, I think the thing with Google Ads is, you know, most people go to Google when they have a problem and they're searching for a solution, whereas LinkedIn, if you're on LinkedIn, you're just, you're browsing, you're doing something else and you're getting hit with an ad. So it's a slightly different, you know,

Speaker A: Google, Google AdWords, a little more targeted. You get the benefit of, yeah.

Speaker B: Somebody like in the buying, decision making mode kind of thing.

Speaker A: Right. LinkedIn's great.

Speaker B: Yeah. So I would, you know, I would definitely do both, but I, I find that Google is still like bread, uh, and butter for a lot of businesses. LinkedIn is a good supplement, you know, or some of these other social platforms. But, but if you really want to see a lot of volume and potentially good revenue, um, I think you, you still want to target Google.

Speaker A: Got it. Okay. So, uh, I think earlier you said Google's not going to be uh, as big as they are in like 10 or 20 years from now. So you, you, you heard it here first, George. Prediction.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: All right, so look them up on LinkedIn. Uh, Z L. Z L A T I N. Right.

Speaker B: Correct. Yep.

Speaker A: Digital Third coast dot com. Well, I appreciate you, uh, jumping on George. Um, this is ah, a lot of valuable stuff and, and super interesting. I love talking about AI and the different directions that it's going and it's definitely having an impact on, on search. Um, yeah, it's kind of crazy. And, and we're in the beginning, the beginning of this huge technology shift. Um, we really, you know, don't know where it's taken us. So it's, it's interesting to kind of be in the weeds of it.

Speaker B: So it'll be interesting to watch this, uh, a year from now and see. See where we're at.

Speaker A: See if Google's still number one. Yeah. All right. Well, I appreciate you taking time out of your day to talk to us. It's always great catching up and. Talk to you later.

Speaker B: Thank you.

Speaker A: Thank you.