So much of the technology that we are immersed in today and taking for granted and thinking that this is, like this is how life is, will evaporate in the next five, 10 years.

Hi, I’m Jeremy Goldman, and this is Future Proof. So, the conversation you’ll hear today, and first off, apologies for the slight laryngitis I’m getting over, but that just shows you guys how much I love you. I really want to share this conversation I had with Stephan Spencer. He’s a three-time author, major blogger, international speaker, and consultant on all things related to SEO because he is one of the guys to speak to on the planet when it comes to SEO.

He now shares his wisdom and expertise with others, especially on his two weekly podcasts, Marketing Speak, which I was on recently, shameless plug, as well as the Get Yourself Optimized. We have a great, wide-ranging conversation, and some of the topics you’re gonna hear about are how full-blown AI will impact the future of search, why the future of search isn’t linear but is exponential, how voice is going to impact search and why ranking number two may not even matter anymore. 

Moon shots, how to incentivize people towards the long term and not the short term, why you can’t fool Google any longer as an SEO expert, and why featured snippets are important to the future of SEO. So it’s a wide-ranging conversation, very fascinating guy I think you’ll enjoy. And Stephan, let’s take it away. Yeah, so Stephan Spencer, thank you so much for joining us today.

Well, it’s great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Absolutely. And it, you know, I really wanted to talk to you because of your deep interest in futurism and also being a subject matter expert on where SEO is right now. I mean, first off, I heard this outlandish statement recently: Is SEO dead? And I think that’s ridiculous. But I mean, you tell me, is SEO dead in any way, shape or form?

No, but old guard of SEO practitioners who are focused on things that worked 10 years ago and not thinking about where the future is heading and machine learning or full-blown AI they’re going to be left behind, right? Because the future of SEO is all about AI. On Google’s side, they’re going to be relying more and more heavily on AI. They’re already relying heavily on machine learning, which is an aspect of AI, kind of more fundamental, foundational level. 

But when let’s say an AI can determine better than a human the quality of an article, how well written it is, how credible it is, how trustworthy it is, and how trustworthy and credible the source is and the source is that’s going to be a whole new ballgame. And you know that I said the only way to well, actually let me pose this as a question: what do you think the only way to beat an AI is in regards to or anything but let’s take just as SEO as an example here what’s the only way to be in AI as SEO like Google AI?

I mean, that’s a great question. I love it that you’re asking it. I mean, build a better AI.

Exactly. Have another AI. Because without AI on our end as SEOs, we’re going to have a very hard time keeping up with the Google algorithm. Even Google engineers won’t know what’s baked into the algorithm that they had originally coded because it’s self-learning. It figures out on its own what the signals are that matter and which ones no longer matter.

I mean, and I think it’s great that you talk about this from a position of a very long history with SEO because I mean, I remember when one of my first internships, I was dropping URLs of real estate listings directly into like 15 engines manually, and there was like 15 back then, you know, like InfoSeek, Excite, Lycos, whatever. I mean, and I feel like you’ve been- 

You’re really dating yourself, yes.

Right. And I feel like I seem to recall that you have that level of extensive experience. So what do you think? I mean, how valuable has it been for you to try to figure out what the future of SEO looks like, given that you’ve had this long history? How does that long history give you perspective in terms of where things are going? 

Well, it doesn’t operate inside of a vacuum, and if I only looked historically at where things have been to extrapolate where things are going, I’d be might be a dinosaur because our brains naturally gravitate towards linear thinking we’ve extrapolate linearly, which is a problem because of the law of accelerating returns and exponential technologies and so forth we need

to recognize that this is not a linear trajectory here. This is exponential. So, the speed at which we will be quickly coming to full-blown AI, that is, artificial general intelligence, is mind-blowing. 

So, in that kind of context, we need to think about where we are extrapolating our future. And so it does help that I have a long history with regard to SEO. But I think it’s unnecessary for somebody who’s getting into the game now. They don’t have any prior experience, but they are hungry to learn, and they have exponential thinking. They could surpass somebody who’s been in this space for 20 years if that person is not exponentially minded. So that’s, I think, an important distinction. A way to frame this is one that I found very profound and powerful; I learned this from Ray Kurzweil. 

He explained that today’s rate of rate of change is much faster than the rate of change 100 years ago. So if we look back 100 years ago, I think what happened to just in daily life. Imagine putting yourself back into that time period with all your gadgets and your behavior patterns and so forth. You’re walking down the street, you’ve got these earbuds sticking out of your ear, and you’re just talking like you’re talking to yourself like you’re crazy, but you’re actually talking to somebody halfway around the world on your iPhone, which is in your pocket. That’s pretty cool. But it’s pretty normal for us; it would look like science fiction, and it would look like you’re crazy or an alien if it was 100 years ago. 

Think now to where we are today and extrapolate forward, but we don’t have to extrapolate forward 100 years because things are increasing at an exponentially faster rate. So today’s rate of change versus 100 years ago is quite a difference there. At today’s rate of change, if we extrapolate that linearly outward, the last hundred years in technological evolution would fit into the next 20 years. But because it’s continuing to accelerate, it’s not going to fit in the next 20 years. It’s going to fit into the next 12.

Yeah, I hear what you’re saying because we kind of get used to what is the new normal with respect to any new technology, such as, you know, when we’re thinking about SEO, we start to get, I feel like, very comfortable about this is the way that we should be operating within a certain regime and then what happens is their voice shows up, and there are all these new interfaces. I’m thinking all the different Alexa-enabled devices that Amazon has now, and I feel like all of those impact the way that one has to think about SEO. If you are for some of these situations, if you’re not in the top result or top three results, it might not matter because the eighth result in certain interfaces might not exist anymore.

Even number two might not exist anymore. In fact, I don’t think it will. When you ask Google or, Alexa or Siri for an answer, you want the answer. You don’t want five options, right? So here’s listing number one, here’s listing number two, here’s listing number three. Okay, stop, Alexa, I’m done; that’s fine; I got my answer. No, I want the answer. And it’s not just for very factual things, how tall is the Eiffel Tower and so forth. I wanna know what is the best piece of technology to buy, and then I wanna get it to Amazon Prime, two-day shipping, right, with just a few words.

And that’s only scratching the surface. We’ve got to think of this in a larger context because if you think about the advent of the GUI, the graphical user interface, that revolutionized everything.

As far as computing, we were typing at the C prompts on DOS and on Unix and stuff. It’s funny when I hear people refer to backslash. And there you are, and they’re reading off a URL or something like, oh, that’s an old-school person who used to type stuff into the DOS prompt. So, the advent of the GUI revolutionized everything. The advent of the Lui, the linguistic user interface, is going to revolutionize everything yet again to an even greater extent. So, think about the advent of Windows and the Apple Macintosh. And how world-changing that was, I’d say at least double that. And that’s what’s coming very, very quickly down the pike. It’s so inefficient for us to be typing onto our computers and certainly typing onto devices, like little devices. 

Oh my God, you know, this is a thing that I’ve been telling people for a while, which is that keyboards were essentially a crutch because we, you know, what’s natural is talking to one another, and there wasn’t a way to talk and then get that information into a computer. So that’s why I think voice will dominate; keyboards were a necessary evil. 

And there are people who are our age who think of keyboards as this be all, end all, and they’re gonna be so sad when they go away. But the reality is it was this unnatural thing that we had to do because we had to interact with a computer, and that was the only way to do it.

Yeah, I think so. RSI, repetitive stress injury from typing too much. It’s going to be a thing of the past. It’s going to be as bizarre. The keyboards will be as bizarre as buggy whips. Like it’s a running joke, like, oh, that’s a buggy whip manufacturer. You know, they’re going to be obsolete. So much of the technology that we are immersed in today and taking for granted and thinking that this is like this is how life is will evaporate in the next five, 10 years.

And some of it for the better. I mean, I think it’s two steps forward, one step back, often. But yeah, let me ask you, so let me just jump into our very random lightning round very quickly. So everything that’s somewhat off-topic, and you got to answer in about eight seconds or so if you can. You ready?

Sure.

So as a fellow podcaster, I got to ask you, last podcast that you’ve listened to.

Well, I don’t know that I would call it a “podcast,” but it was the interview by Peter Diamandis of Rakers that Peter put out on Abundance Digital Thoughts. It had a video as well, and I think he called it a webinar, but I listened to it in the car just like it was a podcast.

I think that counts. 

I think so, too. 

You had to travel like me to speak often at a whole bunch of random places. I’m sure you had to find a random favorite fast-food joint for when you’re on the road. So what would that be? 

Well, I’m a vegetarian, so that’s always a tricky thing for me. 

I go to Arby’s and they have really good fries.

I avoid fast food because it’s really unhealthy. I’m a biohacker, so I won’t eat at fast food places.

I admire you. Well, in that case, what would be the next best thing? What would you gravitate to instead? I envy your discipline.

I’ll use Yelp, TripAdvisor, or whatever the local app is to find good vegetarian food.

Yeah, food call. How about this: one thing you’d want to do before you die?

Oh, my goodness. There’s so many things. I want to have a New York Times bestselling book on self-help.

Nice, I like that. You’ve already- 

Personal transformation specifically. That’s my focus for the self-help movement.

I will be one of the first to pick it up. Okay, cool. Then, dovetailing a little bit back toward SEO. What’s the SEO myth that annoys you the most? Because I’ve heard a lot of misinformation out there. What’s something you’ve heard that just drives you crazy?

I just don’t understand. People still talking about are things like keyword density and meta keywords tags and stuff that actually never counted in Google. Like meta keywords never counted in Google. And when I still hear those things, I cringe like this person was never a good SEO.

You know, why is that, though? Because I gotta say, one thing that’s kind of interesting to me is if you’re gonna apply to a college, generally speaking, they will tell you what the criteria are that they are looking for. And it seems that SEO is this interesting thing and that it’s kind of a black box and kind of people will tell you what’s important when you’re trying to develop quality content. But also, there are a lot of rumors out there, and there are a lot of myths. Sometimes, people overstate things that were important six years ago but aren’t important anymore. I mean, why do you think SEO has evolved into this murky thing that nobody quite 100% understands?

Well, I think it has to do with the fact it’s harder to predict. When you’re doing pay-per-click, for example, you get immediate really, feedback. Get real-time feedback. And with SEO, Google doesn’t want to reward spammers for getting too close to the line and then backing off right before they cross that line of what’s spam. So they don’t want to give immediate feedback. 

They make it take a lot longer for you to see the results of things that you’re doing. So you can’t do very fast tests. And so it kind of stymies our use of the scientific method to test things, have hypotheses, run tests, have control groups, all that. How do you run a test in parallel with SEO? You can’t. And when the feedback that you get takes so long, unnaturally long, because Google is drawing it out, it makes it very hard to be scientific about SEO.

Yeah, because I was thinking that’s probably why. I mean, I’m always surprised by the number of companies that don’t take SEO strategy seriously, despite the fact that it’s very clearly something that an organization is going to get outsized returns if they focus on.

I mean, I think ultimately you are selling something, you’re providing some type of service and getting the right people to see the right page or, you know, a portion of your app or whatever, just being exposed to your brand at the right time is critical. So I mean, why do you think and or are you surprised by the number of companies who still don’t take SEO as seriously as they should?

I’m not at all surprised. Companies, by design, are very short-term focused. They’re interested in making the numbers for the next quarter. So when you’re operating that kind of environment, you’ve got to be short-term focused and all about hitting the immediate numbers and if you don’t have that kind of a view screen into where things are heading from an SEO perspective that you get with pay-per-click and other paid media that’s very frustrating and you know the expression a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush in this case. 

It’s a bird in the hand is worth 10 in the bush. They much prefer the one bird in the hand and the 10 in the bush, which would be the SEO and the 10x improvements, and it’s an asset. It’s not just with pay-per-click, you stop spending money, and then you stop receiving the benefit it’s immediate, whereas with SEO, you stop doing link building or you stop doing uh technical SEO changes, and you have improved that asset, and it continues to pay dividends month after month, year after year, even if you’ve stopped doing anything, which is pretty exciting. And yet, these short-term focused companies, like, yeah, we’re not going to go there. We’re not going to invest, or we’re going to invest a fraction of what we invest in pay-per-click into SEO. It’s very short-term focused.

The fact that nobody’s incentivized towards thinking long-term, because everybody, I mean, and frankly, If I were and we’ve consulted with clients, I don’t mind saying that where there’s something less important, but more time constrained, it has to happen now. Then, there are these mission-critical long-term objectives for the organization. And it seems that every day when people are trying to build a better, brighter future for their company. They get stymied by, but this has to happen today. As a result, we all become very short-term focused instead of thinking about what’s going to generate the most benefit in the long run. 

Yeah, there’s more to it than that, though. I think people are too certainty-driven. I learned this from hearing a talk with the head of Moonshots; I forget his exact title, but he is the head of Moonshots at Google. And he was describing how CEOs wouldn’t, when given the choice between being one out of a hundred chance to hit a billion dollars in the next year or being a hundred percent guaranteed an extra million dollars this year, that bill by far choose the moonshot of like okay billion dollars let’s roll the dice lets you know let’s go for it, and then you ask executives the next level down from the CEO that report directly to the CEO the same question, and by far the answer I’ll just take the million bucks.

I mean, I would take the million. I don’t know. 

That’s what’s broken with the world because it’s all about certainty. I just think that if we can be more willing to shoot for the moon and be okay with the likelihood we will not succeed but we’re going to go big or go home, that’s going to make a whole new world for us. It’s going to be amazing. It’s how we’re going to solve all the big problems. Like carbon dioxide, climate change, and all that sort of stuff. It’s the moonshot.

That’s why I think often whenever we’re advising people, I’m talking to folks about how to structure these types of incentives in an organization if you have, like, let’s say, a long-term digital center of excellence, and you incentivize them in one way. Their goals are a certain thing, and then you have a group that’s responsible for short-term execution, and you incentivize them another way. 

But what you can’t do is have that same person in charge of kind of making a short-term move or a long-term move on any given day. You can’t basically lump those into the same role because then the incentives get kind of muddy, and everybody’s incentivized towards that short-term move because they’re not even sure if, frankly, they’re going to be able to keep their job long enough to see the benefits of the long-term move that they’re making simultaneously, if that makes any sense. 

Yeah, yeah. Makes sense.

So, we’re talking alot about the SEO landscape has changed since The Art of SEO came out and I guess it’s been a few additions now, right?

Yep, it’s on the third edition now.

Very nice.

We need to start work on the fourth.

Yeah, because it keeps on evolving.

So much work. Yeah. And it keeps growing. It’s a thousand pages now, 994 pages. But we’ve been advised by our publisher, O’Reilly, that we cannot make it bigger. It has to actually be a lot smaller. It’s a great textbook, and it is actually used in universities. But when I hand a copy of this 994-page book to somebody, they’re like, “Oh wow, can I just hire you?” And I’m like, of course. It’s a very effective big business card. But it’s daunting for somebody who wants to learn.

I mean, for sure.

We’ll probably come out with a 600, 700-page fourth edition, but we’re probably a year out from that. We haven’t started yet. 

Oh, nice. So I can’t wait until that does come out because I think that since it’s evolving so quickly, part of me thinks, and this is, you’re more of the expert in this area, but I just kind of think that there was a day where essentially your job was to try to fool Google as an SEO expert you could do that to some extent, and that was a while ago. I don’t think that it makes any sense to try to trick or hack things now. 

I think it makes a lot more sense to have a strong, effective, for instance content strategy. I’ve seen a lot of people who work on link building but don’t work on content quality, so nobody wants to link to what you’re putting up there. So I just feel that now we’re seeing more and more of a convergence of strong, solid content marketing fundamentals and SEO versus the gamesmanship that maybe a few years ago was more prevalent. But please tell me if I’m wrong. I’m totally open to that. 

Well, at least the people that I tried to sway and successfully did so years and years ago got away from gaming way back when because it’s never a sustainable strategy to try to out-game a very well-resourced business like Google. It’s just very short-term thinking. If you think about how back in the day you could get away with a ton of stuff. If you were to have projected into the future Google’s AI and all that, that could reverse engineer all your tactics and things that you had done over the years to ascertain your so what’s the best indicator of future behavior? 

I mean, that’s just looking at the past behavior and analyzing it. 

Past behavior, exactly. Best indicator of future behavior is past behavior. So if Google sees a tendency to spamming the search engines, then you are likely to get a penalty or to be looked at in a different way by the algorithms of the future, even if you’re getting away with it now.

And so I always took that long view, and I was squeaky clean, pearly white hat from the beginning because I knew that this was going to end this way. You’re providing a footprint to Google. You’re providing data for a rap sheet. 

And you better believe Google has a rap sheet on every one of us as content producers, not just our websites, but us as humans on different websites. The criminal gets followed around. It’s not studying the venues. There are certain bad neighborhoods that a lot of crime happens. It’s not about the neighborhood. It’s about the criminals and their choices. So some people, even in a bad neighborhood, they see broken windows and graffiti everywhere, and they’re not inclined to break into a store and steal a bunch of stuff.

But somebody who has that proclivity, we’re like, oh, yeah, this neighborhood’s not being looked after, and there’s something I can steal. So it’s the same sort of thing. If you build that kind of reputation for yourself, you better believe that if you think that you’re, well, let’s take a hypothetical. Let’s say somebody does negative SEO on your site, and this is a real thing. You could have your site’s reputation in Google sullied by a competitor, a spammer who wants to outrank you and just want to hurt you. 

So, like the sullies being framed, kind of? 

Yeah. Yeah, but if you’re being framed and you have a history of like you’re an ex-con or something, you’re going to have a hard time convincing the powers that be that you’re innocent. Whereas if you’ve kept your nose clean the whole time, it’s a lot easier. And you’re convincing, not humans; now you’re convincing algorithms.

So why, okay, I gotta say, I mean, why is it that the two shadiest industries or professions in the world are SEO and politics? It seems like that to me. You seem to have a consistent knack for trying to figure out, well, if thing A happens, then that will lead to thing B, which will result in thing C. And I think that that’s why you’re such a sharp voice in terms of where things are going with SEO. 

So what do you think this is probably my last nerdy SEO question, but where do you think the world of SEO how might it look different 36 months from now? Next time, let’s say you’re three years from now, and it’s going to look really different, but what will be the things that will feel and look the most different, given how rapidly things are evolving?

Yeah, I think featured snippets and voice searches will be a key part of the conversations. I talk about featured snippets a lot. I write articles for search engine land and so forth on this topic. And this is the gateway to voice search. If you’re the featured snippet, which is the instant answer to a query that’s preempting all the regular organic results, you’re going to be the voice answer. So that needs to be a key focus for people because we’re moving towards that world of the Lui (Linguistic User Interface) being more popular than typing. And that’s just a very small part of the whole picture. 

We’re gonna be utilizing machine learning algorithms a lot more to do things like map redirects, like, okay, we’re making huge changes in our site, and we wanna make sure everything, like we’re changing the whole platform, all the URLs are changing, we want to make sure everything is mapped correctly or let’s say that we are trying to figure out what content to write for our website based on keyword research and so forth. We’re going to use machine learning to find the best topics to write about, and we’re going to use machine learning to score how good the article is, not just readability and keyword usage and all that sort of stuff, but is this an insightful article? 

Does it have surprise and delight baked into the article? Does it have a story arc? Is there something counterintuitive about it that makes somebody do a double take, especially in the headline and so forth? We’re at such a baseline starting point right now. There are tools that give you a little indication of if you’re on the right track or not, like the co-schedule. Headline Analyzer is a fun little tool, but it’s not based on machine learning. 

Once we have tools that are based on machine learning, that are expert systems better than humans at ascertaining if we’ve had a good story arc to the article, whether the headline has got mystery, surprise, coun or some sort of you know, double take, that’s gonna be amazing. We’re gonna have a brave new world and so much more is gonna be possible in terms of quality and quantity, the ability to scale to semi-automate. It’s gonna be pretty interesting. And that’s just, I’d say 36. 

Yeah, and that’s why I always feel kind of blessed to live in this very interesting time where things are moving so quickly that it’s hard to keep up, but it’s fun to try to rise to the challenge. So I’m a big fan of that. So, last thing, what’s the most exciting thing that you’re working on now that people should know about? Besides, I know you talked about that fourth edition, but that’s a while off, so what’s something that’s a little bit more front and center right now?

Ah, well, I’m building out a library of online courses and a membership site. So I’m very excited about that. That’s all at Stephanspenser.com.

Stephan, thanks so much. Really appreciate you making the time for us today. 

Well, yeah, it’s been a real pleasure. Thank you for having me. 

And thank you so much, Stephan. I told you he was great, guys. Make sure to subscribe if you haven’t already and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher or wherever finer podcasts are sold. All of your support means a lot and that helps other people find this podcast. They will love you forever. Until next time, I’m Jeremy Goldman and you’ve been listening to Future Proof.