Latest / The Marketing Brief / Zak and Brian Set Out Discussing SEO and Found Common Ground on Adaptability (S2 E8)
Transcript
- Brian: And welcome back to the Marketing Brief Podcast. I am your host, Brian Aquan, and this is the podcast where we talk about any and all aspects across the marketing landscape. Of course, we need a guest to do that. And we're very excited to be joined by Zach Alley today. Did I pronounce that correct, Zach? Thank you. ⁓ how would you like to introduce yourself to the listeners? Zak: Yep, yep, that works. Yeah, so yep, Zach Ali. ⁓ I'm the general manager for Finder US, we're a financial global financial comparison site and I run the US ⁓ branch. We compare everything from credit cards to home loans to brokerages to bank accounts, basically the full gamut of financial products. And really our mission is to help you win at money. So we want to make sure that you're getting great deals. ⁓ and we also even have something called Finder Rewards where we pay you for taking out accounts with us if it's a good fit. And ⁓ it's basically we're very user centric, very customer centric and yeah But we built our business on ⁓ on SEO and and paid marketing and there's just so much to go over there, yeah. Brian: Yeah, I'd love to talk about SEO. I first the the slogan help you win it money is fantastic. And as a marketer, I love something that just gets right to the promise. How can how can customers ⁓ understand you immediately? And that one definitely delivers. I love it. Zak: Yeah. Ye yeah, it's a great one. I wish I could take credit for it, but Brian: Yeah. Well, take credit for keeping keeping it going. ⁓ you've done a ton of work in the SEO space. We've seen a lot of change in the SEO space right now. ⁓ I guess what what are the biggest changes you're seeing over the last year and kind of how have you adapted your business and your and your teams? Zak: Right. Yeah, so I remember in twenty twenty two, like November, seeing this thing new thing called ChatGPT come out and playing with it for the first time and being like, ⁓ this is cool. And at first you think it's a gimmick, and then a few months pass and you say, Why am I starting to use this more than Google for information? sometimes the information's not great, but you you've just watched it evolve and you've and the experience is just so much better. And I think part of that ⁓ is because People started trying to game the system with Google, right? Whereas this thing, ⁓ instead of having to click into like ten different sites to get your answer, this thing could produce it for you in one go. ⁓ and so watching that sort of take over where Finder had built its traffic, at least in the US, largely on our content base from our editorially independent sort of financial experts would write good content ⁓ about comparing credit cards and best best lists, like, you know, the best ⁓ home loans in Arizona, for example. Like we really went deep and built out our site map of really credible content, but that no longer was enough to stand out with in the in the age of AI because this one thing just gives you everything you want at your fingertips. so I'm sure everyone has who works in SEO or in the internet sort of traffic visibility space generally has watched how their traffic numbers have just gone down, you know, and consistently gone down for like three years in a row. ⁓ Finder of course was no exception to that and we really Brian: Mm-hmm. Zak: We had to figure out our way out of it and we came up with some interesting ways to tackle it. Brian: Yeah. And we are we calling it generative engine optimization GEO. I I saw that pop up a couple of times. Zak: Yeah. Yeah, you know, we were talking about acronyms before the show started, and there's GEO and there's AEO and there's SEO and PPC. There's just so many different ways to to call marketing these days. ⁓ so GEO as I understand it is what the model was trained on before it does any web search. So it's what it can answer just immediately without having to use any of its tools. And then AEO is ⁓ based on web search. Yeah. Brian: Okay. Huh. Interesting. And so how how do you s yeah, I was gonna ask you how you see this going forward with your team? Because you had team dedicated to SEO. Is that still the case? Zak: Yeah. We'll see. So we did so again, our strongest marketing team at the in the business was always our SEO team because we had it's it's really, you know, it was pure margin, right? Organic traffic is the best because there's no cost associated with it. but we s first we thought, okay, we're just going to adapt to the to the market, right? We're gonna create Brian: Mm-hmm. Zak: more human elements to it and and add videos and do all ⁓ of these surveys and just add much more unique things that couldn't be commoditized by ai. And we while we did see some uplift and some traffic, ⁓ uplift and better user engagement, better traffic, it wasn't enough to stem the bleeding from people being able to just get their answer immediately. And so around March 2025, ⁓ we the leadership team in the US kind of just sat down and said, okay, we can see the way this is trending. And even though we're producing next level expert content, it's not enough to offset the declines we're seeing from AI. And so We had the thought of like, okay, well, you know, marketing principles are very much the same, ⁓ in terms of you gotta know your customer, you have to know your product and and how do you speak to ⁓ And we have this really strong ⁓ group of people in the business today that know how to do that. So what would happen if we shut down our SEO team and created a general marketing team? and that's so that's exactly what we did. It was a risky move to try and spring on people, hey, now you have to learn Facebook ads and Google ads and you know, this, that, and the other. But the team really adapted well to it because I think they could see the writing on the wall. that you that it's no longer about the ch mastering a channel, it's about mastering talking to your customer. And that means meeting them where they're at. Sometimes that's on social, sometimes that's on newsletters, sometimes that's on YouTube. ⁓ and really getting out of our head and out of our silos and really saying, allowing the mission to drive where we focus rather than saying, hey, I'm just a specialist in this one thing and that's all I can do. Brian: Right. Well two two things I love that you followed your your consumer, you followed your customer, right, and set up the right solution for them as you saw it happening. But you also retrained your your staff. That's awesome. Zak: Yeah. Yeah, it was a it was a crime, but you know, we at Finder we I know sometimes this can be perceived as toxic, but we really do love to just go into the deep end like throw yourself into the deep end. Like immersion is the best way to learn a new skill. That's that's why everyone has Duolingo and has streaks within the thousands, but still don't know the language, right? But you actually go live in one of these places and you'll pick it up. And so that's sort of been our mentality about all of this. And we have a really curious team. So I think it was a good it ended out working out, yeah. Brian: Yeah. ⁓ love to ask you, so in terms of of like building out your team, do you look more for a competency in the financial space or do you look for a competency in how these media tools like growth growth engine kind of people? Like what's more what do you weight more? Zak: I think naturally curious people are is what I constantly look for. And so I whether you bring it bring in Brian: Okay. Zak: You're heavier on the financial knowledge, but you're super naturally curious. ⁓ or you're heavier on the other side, but you're naturally curious. I think those people are always high potential. And so we we've had a mixture of both where we brought people in, we're just really wonky financial folks who were able to translate that into good marketing. ⁓ and and vice versa. We've had, you know, marketers who really fell in love with the products that we were pushing and figuring out ways to give people the best deal. Yeah. Brian: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I love I love hearing that. A lot of the listeners of this podcast or people who are out there looking for work. ⁓ I I tend to think the same way that, you know, we're in a time of change and ⁓ sometimes tumultuous change of our industry. And those that are curious, ⁓ those that figure it out, I've I've heard people talk about AI as like a tool for makers, right? People who are really gonna get their hands dirty, quote unquote, on a keyboard. ⁓ but people who are really gonna try things. Zak: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Brian: are the ones that are gonna figure it out. And that's that's who you'd wanna work with at a time right like this, right? Zak: ⁓ totally. I mean the people that are just yeah, like you said, they're just gonna try things because it's everything's scary until it isn't. ⁓ and the curious people rather rip the band-aid off now. ⁓ and we I mean we're also doing trainings at work and so the way people use a I I'm not sure if you use Cloud Code or any of the terminal related Brian: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Zak: Scary to use the terminal for the first time. And then before you know it, this we have people who have like weren't really the big tech folks, like prompt you know, you see Claude messaging in Slack on their behalf and you can just see that they've really taken it over. and but it does take that it does take a little bit of training sitting with the team, showing them how to set it up and and why you just gotta keep pressing yes and sometimes and you know that's sometimes ⁓ it's funny, I tell my wife sometimes have but after I come home, it's like, man, today was a hard day of just pressing yes, you know, because Brian: Nice. Zak: 'cause you're just in the terminal approving Claude's actions, yeah. Brian: Amazing. Yeah, there's a there's a steep learning curve, but there's totally a barrier that, you know, maybe you think you're gonna screw something up or break something, especially when you're working on behalf of a company. ⁓ I'm a consultant, so I can just break whatever I want. So I've just been trying everything and trying, you know, everything from every different angle. Zak: Right. ⁓ yeah. ⁓ another thing good thing finders, one of their values is go live. And it used to be par for the course that on your first day you would publish something to the internet and and yeah, it was really I remember when I did it, I was terrified. I was like, ⁓ my god, but that Brian: Mm-hmm. Wow. Zak: The reason they did that was to show you that the site's not made of glass and that things you can try things and it won't the world won't burn down. Like it's like really creating experimentation culture and Finder's been really good about that. That value is carrying us through this next era. Brian: Mm-hmm. What what's something you've seen from the team from this recent change in the last year of kind of retraining as marketing generalists? Like, are there any takeaways that the big takeaways you have from that? Zak: Yeah, I would say, where SEO's a bit art and science, ⁓ marketing falls a little bit more on the science f part. ⁓ you know, managing these campaigns, ⁓ Doing the negative keywords and doing setting up your ad groups and doing all that sort of structuring. I think they were able to scratch that itch of the brain. Whereas SEO, really, you can do the schema markup and all the sort of technical SEO, but really you have that. I'm just gonna make great content for a customer in mind, and that can usually get you to the finish line. Whereas marketing is a bit more, okay, I have to look at the data. It's a lot of data analysis, which thankfully c Claude has made a lot easier. But yeah, it's I I that was a ⁓ that's a part where you have to share. your brain a bit. It's like, okay, well, if I'm not focusing on ranking content, but rather winning ⁓ impression share, what's that look like? You know, how where where do how do I make that context shift in my brain? Yeah. Brian: Yeah, that's that's a shift we've seen over the last, I mean, ten, fifteen years as data has just become ever present, is that marketers have to be analysts. ⁓ they have to be able to digest data very quickly and then figure out the trend or figure out the story or the narrative and then convey that forward. ⁓ it's something I really I really enjoy doing. So it sounds like you found you found some people who really enjoy doing it as well. Zak: ⁓ yeah, I mean th this when you start first see that ROAS positive campaign and you're like, ⁓ my gosh, this is ⁓ this is working, like I'm gett getting the return on my investment. That's that's such a dopamine hit for for folks. And I think it makes you want to keep it and sustain it and scale it and all of that. What's interesting now though is Learning to not think so linearly about channels. So I think for a long time people say Google's not working because Google is not ROS positive or Meta's not working because Meta's not ROS positive without seeing the whole picture in that customer's journey. And sometimes you hit them on Meta and then then they go to Google and then they go direct and share the link with their friends. Like there's so many touch points ⁓ that should be factored in and it it's not always easy to do that when you're saying, ⁓ my gosh, I'm at point five. Yeah. Brian: Mm-hmm. Yeah, definitely familiar with that. We used to look at marketing as a funnel and search was usually right at the end of the funnel, right? It was like the last thing, and that's why I always did attribution against search. ⁓ but I I subscribe to the flywheel. I love the marketing flywheel. And you have to have messages ready for your customer at every stage now because you don't know when they're gonna hit you, what vehicle they're gonna come through. And like you just said, touch points are happening sometimes. Zak: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Brian: Not in a media vehicle. Sometimes it's just word of mouth or or peer to peer that someone's talking about something. ⁓ and you have to have a message ready for that for when they're coming to you. Zak: Okay. Hundred percent. Like you have it it's never been more important to be to know your customer. Yeah. Yeah. Brian: Yeah. ⁓ great great line. Great line. Well let me ask you ⁓ this season's question, which is ⁓ what is your superpower? Do you know what your superpower is, Zach? Zak: ⁓ man. I would say I would say b hopefully, my ability to connect the moving parts. ⁓ the fact that I've been naturally curious and Brian: Mm. Zak: I I do need to scratch both sides of the brain. I need the the art as much as I need the science and it's really opened me up to wanna explore new things all at all times. And you never know where inspiration might strike you. You know, you could be ⁓ I'm in New York so I write the subway a lot. You never know how a completely unrelated subway ad might trigger that idea that makes you think about this thing and yeah, so that's I think my ADHD might be my superpower. But Yeah. Brian: Just paying attention to everything at once. Well, New York's a good city for you then. Do you do you ride the subway? Do you do you have ⁓ music on? Do you listen to podcasts or or are you listening to everything as well? Zak: Yeah. So I listen to definitely some podcasts or some days while I'll music. ⁓ but yeah, it's it's a meditative time for me in the mornings just to get on the train and sort of yeah, be in my head and think and and be with pe be around people. Even if you're not like talking to ⁓ it's good to be around people. Yeah. Brian: Yeah. Yeah, that is I I lived in New York for almost ten years and that was the thing I loved was just stepping outside your door and then it's like you're on. It's it's going. And I would often think of those bus rides and subway rides as like live music videos. You know, I got music going and there's people moving and things are happening and I'm like, this is this is very stimulating. Zak: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. It's it was so good. And and you know, the stockbroker and the you know the unhoused person are are on the same train and you get to see everyone all at once. Yeah. Yeah. Brian: Yeah. Shoulder to shoulder. Yeah. That's awesome. Well, how do people get in touch with you if they're interested in talking about Finder or ⁓ or talk to you personally? Is there a good way to get through to you? Is LinkedIn the best way? Zak: I think LinkedIn, yeah, I'm trying to do more there. ⁓ share more of my insights on what I'm seeing in the market, ⁓ in marketing sp and and AI specifically. So if you're interested in that, put just connect and and follow and would love to talk. Brian: That's awesome. Well, thank you for being a guest on the Marketing Brief podcast, Zach. Zak: Thanks, Brian. It was great. Brian: And to the listeners, stay curious. Zak: Yeah.