Transcription – [Fully Managed] Johnathan Bentz Ep. 101 – Podcast Highlights and Transcript

Rapid Fire Q&A

Daniella: Okay, so we’re playing a rapid fire. I’m gonna ask you some questions and then just tell me what you prefer, you know, really fast, what comes to mind.

Jonathan: Yep, absolutely.

Daniella: Okay. Coffee or tea?

Jonathan: Coffee.

Daniella: Beach vacation or city adventure.

Jonathan: Beach.

Daniella: Early bird or night owl.

Jonathan: Whew. Is both an acceptable answer for that?

Daniella: I guess so. I don’t know how you can be both. You just get no sleep.

Jonathan:  I’ve become an early bird over the years, but as I mentioned earlier, I like coffee. So coffee helps me do be both of those things.

Daniella: Netflix binging or reading a book?

Jonathan: I would say reading a book, and I think my wife and daughter would agree because I binge watch shows really slow.

Daniella: Pizza or tacos.

Jonathan: Toughest one yet. Pizza.

Daniella: Dogs or cats?

Jonathan: Dogs. A hundred percent. I have two of them. A hundred percent dogs.

Daniella: Texting or phone calls?

Jonathan: Texting.

Daniella: Karaoke, or a game night.

Jonathan: Oh, okay. Karaoke. I’ve got a great story about that if we get to it.

Daniella: Summer or winter.

Jonathan: Summer.

Daniella: Okay. And dream City that you wanna explore right now?

Jonathan: Let’s say Charleston, South Carolina.

Daniella: That’s so specific. What’s in Charleston, South Carolina?

Jonathan: So we have some friends who live there, but I like those kind of charming old south US cities. That one in particular has a lot of that, and the beach is there, so.

Daniella: It’s a double bonus.

Jonathan: It’s a double bonus.

Small Town America Discussion

Daniella: I’m not American. So I’m kind of lost on a lot of these things. So I’m curious, I’ve always wanted to go to an American small town, you know, the vibe, like the ones I see in movies. Because I feel like I see them in movies all the time. Like, I don’t know if you watch Twilight like Forks. That’s giving like, you know, that thing of like, they’re eating at this diner and I’m always like, I am always curious if that truly is the American experience. Do they have yellow school buses?

Jonathan: As someone who lives in a small town in the state of West Virginia, yes, I can say there’s some similarities to it. Is it as wonderful as the movies make it seem? Probably not. Maybe not, but it absolutely is like that. You go to a store or the grocery store or whatever and you’re going to run into people – it is gonna take you twice as long as you want because you’re gonna be running into people you know, and you have to stop and talk to them.

Daniella: That’s so sweet though. I like that.

Introduction to the Show

Daniella: Guys, welcome to Fully Managed. You guys have already kind of got to know our guest for today. His name is Jonathan Bens. He works for Direct Online Marketing, right?

Jonathan: Yeah, absolutely. You nailed it.

Daniella: Good. And you guys know the drill, we talk about marketing, talk about business tips. We assist you guys with your business journeys, and you know me the host, I’m Benji’s partnership coordinator, Daniella, and we have a great, great, great show plan for you today. So, hi, how are you Ben, how are you doing?

Jonathan: Hey, I’m doing awesome. And like I said, I’m glad we talked about this just briefly before the show started, but I’m glad we moved to a last name, first basis so fast. That’s one of my favorite things to do with clients or with just people that I come across in business in general.

Daniella: You know, like I’m Latina. We’re really big on nicknames, so it’s really easy for me to just go into that. Yeah, absolutely. We usually like, we’ll call people by really strange nicknames or last names, especially if their last name is like kind of weird. People will go just into that. I don’t know why. It’s like a cultural thing, I think.

Company Culture and Names

Jonathan: There’s definitely one of the interesting things inside Direct Online Marketing, which we also call DOM for short. So you’re welcome to call it that for short, just to make things easier. What is weird is when I come across family members and other lines of business, and we’re having meetings with our team and they hear my teammates at DOM just constantly call me by my last name. They don’t – it’s jarring for them, right? Because their last name is the same as well, but people in their company, everybody’s on a first name basis. So yeah, I can relate to that and it’s something inside of our culture at DOM where there is a lot of last name first with our teammates.

Daniella: That’s really cool. I think names are very particular to cultural backgrounds. Also just in general relationships, outside of the cultural stuff, I think it more has like, like you said, like company culture, relationships with people. I lived in Asia for a while in Taiwan and they speak Chinese there for context, for people listening that don’t know. They usually say your entire name. So like for example, your name is Jonathan Bens. So they’ll call you Jonathan Bens all the time, like, hello, Jonathan Bens, how are you doing? Jonathan Bens, how was your day? Because in Chinese, your name is only three characters and they’ll usually pronounce like your last name and your first name. And then they’ll move to like your first name, like the two characters that actually make the name if there’s a lot of trust. But unless they do that, it’s like they’ll just say the full name. So I got used to that when I went to Taiwan. They changed my name to like, they gave me a Chinese version of my name because it was impossible for people to pronounce something in Spanish. And they would just always call me like the whole thing.

Jonathan: That’s interesting. Usually the only time I’ve ever had to do that or even something close to that is like when we were in school, or even in the case of Inside DOM as well, where you have multiple people with the same first name. So we have three Matts on our staff at Direct Online Marketing, right? And so now each one of them has a nickname or has a last name that we call them, but for a while, you may have to call one of them Matt H or Matt P or Matt K instead of just Matt.

Daniella: Especially with common names, that happens. It happens a lot too in Spanish ’cause we have like a lot of similar names.

Introduction to Main Topic

Daniella: I’m so excited for today’s episode. We were not gonna talk about names, but the conversation just really got interesting. The topic today is actually on keyword intent and SEO. And Bens here is a professional. He knows a lot about it. So you can give us actually a lot of great tips. A lot of our viewers are business owners who are kind of trying to learn about marketing. So I think it would be really great. But to get the ball rolling, for people listening who might actually not know or be familiar with this, can you explain what keyword intent actually means in that context of SEO?

Explaining Keyword Intent

Jonathan: Yeah, absolutely. So with keyword intent, what we’re actually talking about isn’t necessarily the words that you’re typing into the search box. Instead, what we’re talking about is how Google understands the behavior of searchers – what they wanna do when they type in a certain keyword term.

So you could, an example of this would be if you looked up pizza just in general. There’s going to be recipes. There’s going to be information for restaurants. There’s gonna be a list of restaurants, but it’s going to be a keyword – there’s going to be different results based on what Google knows about you and how you use the search engine. That keyword result will look different for you, Daniella, then it may look for me, then it may look for somebody else that we don’t know because of our own tendencies.

But over time, as a default, Google then starts to learn, “okay, the majority of users, when they’re searching for pizza or whatever the topic is, we predict that they’re going to want to see restaurants, they’re gonna wanna see recipes. They’re may be less likely to want to see a Wikipedia article about the history of pizza being created.”

Daniella: That’s so interesting. I just Googled pizza because I was curious and I got like the nearest Pizza Hut to me. And then just other restaurants in my area that sell pizza. That’s like my search. My Google search was just pizza restaurants.

Jonathan: I mean, making a strong, making a bold assumption here. You must use Google to help make decisions for where you’re going to, you know, like a lot of us do. You must use that with a much higher frequency. You must use that for making decisions of where to go to eat, not necessarily how to make something yourself in your kitchen.

Daniella: Yeah, I’ll usually Google something like where I can have a pizza. Like if I wanted to have pizza, it’s probably what my knee jerk reaction would be to Google pizza places. So that makes sense.

AI and Search Evolution

Daniella: The other question that I have for you is about SEO. I think what you just explained is really interesting because it’s changing so much with the introduction of AI and specifically I think things like Chat GPT, and even like Gemini, that’s Google’s AI bot, right? But I just feel like the other day my sister told me like, can you search this on Chat GPT? I was kind of like, that’s so weird because I’m used to people asking me, can you Google this? And then now it’s become, search for it on Chat GPT.

And I think a lot of people are moving to asking Chat GPT more than Google. And even if they’re using Google, I think the idea of using like a bot and then asking the bot and then having the bot collect the information and give it to you in that form is kind of the way that things are changing towards. Is that affecting SEO? Because now it’s not the same putting it into a question on Chat GPT than googling the word pizza on Google. I kinda wanna know if that prediction is correct or if I’m completely off the mark.

Jonathan: Yeah, so there’s a lot to unpack. That’s an onion.

Daniella: It’s a complicated question. I’m sorry.

Jonathan: So if we can take one step back there on that topic around users searching with alternatives to Google. Yes, that is happening now. Business owners need to know that while that is happening, it’s not happening at such a high frequency that you should be focusing on a different place than Google.

So Google is still the lion’s share of search activity that’s happening. People are using Chat GPT, people are using Gemini to understand things and get recommendations before they then go to Google or directly go to a website. So there is some of that behavioral stuff that’s changing, but it’s not disrupting Google to the point where they’re not going to be the number one search engine. So we’re still pretty far off from being in that type of digital environment.

Daniella: Yeah, where you have to change it completely, I guess.

Jonathan: Yeah. Where SEO agencies aren’t going to be Google first, SEO agencies and they’re gonna be looking at something else. No, we’re still in a market where Google is the driving force.

Now saying all of that, the way people are using Google today is different, and for a lot of your listeners viewers, their traffic trends in Google or their traffic trends in analytics for their websites may look a lot different today than they did last year. For years, maybe even decades now, Google’s been around that long, SEOs have been telling companies things like “content is king.”

Daniella: Yeah.

Jonathan: Or things like “he who has the most links, wins.” There have been statements like that out in the market where even giving recommendations, like if you answer every single question that your clients have, then ultimately your site is going to win because you’re gonna be getting more traffic coming in.

And what we’re seeing today, and this plays into that keyword intent conversation as well, is for companies who, for years, have relied on having the most content, the most articles about topics, maybe losing traffic. And maybe losing traffic in a way that likely may never come back. Because if Google can get your information and somebody’s just looking up general knowledge or general information about something, they’re going to pull your content outta your website and just give it as an AI answer.

Daniella: Yeah.

Jonathan: As opposed to sending somebody a link to your website and telling them to go to your website.

Google’s Evolution and User Behavior

Daniella: I think that’s what I was gonna say – I feel like Google has become so much more optimized for that, where I will ask a direct question and then it will literally put that question in the Google search the answer. And it pulls it from somewhere, which is what Chat GPT does too. So now you don’t have to go and scroll, go into articles and read and figure out where that answer was. It took more time and now it’s been a lot more just kind of there.

Jonathan: And so what we’re seeing is two behaviors changing. One is people are doing searches and they’re getting answers, and they’re trusting Google.

So you may remember a story from last year. We’re talking a lot about pizza today. But there was a result where Google was telling people to use glue to make cheese stick to pizza.

Daniella: Okay. That’s so bad.

Jonathan: That’s so bad, right? And so there were some journalists who took it too far and literally put glue on their pizza and tried it. Why did you do that? It’s obvious that it’s like a bad idea. People like to have fun with search results or with AI, when AI says crazy things.

But it’s now evolved. It’s gotten smarter, it’s evolved and it’s more nuanced and sophisticated now to where it’s not gonna recommend to you that you put glue on pizza. But a lot of people – that broader point of whatever the chat bot tells them is what they’re now going to assume as facts or as the truth.

And so it takes away whether they – to think back to your grade school or university teacher – where you had to show your sources.

Daniella: Yeah, even if-

Jonathan: Even if they don’t show their sources, people are still going to receive that information and just take that information like it was provided at an expert level and move on.

So we’re seeing that behavior trend, which there’s opportunity there, but we’re also seeing a behavior trend with users taking that information from the search engine. And when they can see sources or when companies are recommended, when they’re getting that information, then they’re behaving differently. They’re going directly to a website or they’re doing a search.

So if you ask for companies and it gives you a list of three to five companies, what’s the next action you’re gonna take? You’re not then going to search for “Best pizza restaurants” again. No. You’re gonna get three options and you’re gonna get, you know, Pizza Hut, Papa John’s and Domino’s. And then you’re going to Google the ones that the chat bot or the AI overview said are the best, and then go find that in your area instead of doing a more generic search and then coming in.

User Search Experience Example

Daniella: That makes sense. Although I feel like – I’m thinking of this purely from the user as me on Google – I do feel like a lot of times I have to go in and look for sources, even if Google will just like pop the answer right on top.

It happened to me the other day. This is kind of like an embarrassing thing to admit, but I watch a lot of anime. I was watching this one show and I didn’t understand if these two characters got together or not. Like I’m towards the end of the show and I’m like, did they become a couple or not? I’m confused.

So I go in Google and I ask like, “did so and so and so and so get together at the end of the show? Is this canon couple?” That’s my Google search. And Google said immediately the answer on top and it says yes, but I was like, that doesn’t make sense because I was Googling ’cause I wasn’t sure. It didn’t seem like it. So I was like, “how?” I wanted to know why. Like, what did I miss that I didn’t understand? And so that answer was not enough. And so I keep reading and I’m like, “okay, where did this thing pull the yes from?”

Jonathan: Sure.

Daniella: And then I go into the article and it was an opinion, you know? It was someone who wrote this article and they were writing a review of the show and their opinion was that they got together, but it wasn’t a definitive yes or no, which was what I was looking for, or like an actual answer from the author. It was more just like what this person interpreted.

So I had to continue to look for more stuff to figure out whether or not they were a canon couple. They were not, by the way, it was kind of like open-ended and it was up to interpretation, I guess. But you know, like you said, I did have to go in a little bit more in search for the sources. I couldn’t take that as an absolute truth ’cause I was like, this clearly just pulled the information from whatever article had more clicks and then put it on top of my search.

Business Applications for Content Strategy

Jonathan: Well, and you’re leaning in a little bit. There’s a business application to the situation that you just described, right? So for you it was, “I was binge watching a show and I wanted to know the end.” By the way, offline, I wanna know which show that is because my daughter watches a lot of shows like that.

But related to that common user situation – what we’re seeing, and this also goes back to keyword intent for companies who have lived and died by SEO and they’re seeing that decline in traffic – where they’re most likely seeing the decline in traffic is with blog articles. It could be old blog articles or glossaries – information that people no longer need to come to your website to get. Google’s just gonna give it to them. Now, you may get that additional benefit of credibility, but you’re not going to get the traffic directly from Google.

So what options do you have? We’ve been encouraging our clients to lean into certain content types or certain pages on their website where we’re seeing better engagement or we’re seeing Google showcase pages that drive engagement, drive conversion, where people have to go deeper than just getting the answer from Google.

So you talked about it in the case of wanting to know the truth about a TV show. That’s just one use case. The business use case would be that you still need to have the most information and the most relevant recent information about your products, services, locations on your website so that you give people a reason to come in and click, as opposed to just taking whatever the AI machines give them and moving on.

Daniella: That makes sense. ‘Cause then if you just get the AI, that’s it, that’s when the experience ends. But like what I described, I mean, I had to do a lot of research and I ended up reading the whole article where they pulled it from. So whoever wrote this, they got like the traction from me. And I’m assuming other people who had the same question also did it too.

Jonathan: Probably. And related to that – your content strategy. So for viewers of this podcast, if they have content calendars or they’re working with companies that provide them content calendars, the type of content that you put in there may need to change as you’re finishing up your plans for the rest of the year, because it was not uncommon even two years ago, three years ago for a great SEO strategy to be a 5,000 word piece of content on “what is” something.

I wouldn’t do “what is pizza”, but I might do “what is graphic design”, and then go through and talk about each one of the unique elements of graphic design and spin off to a page. We’ve all seen these pillar pages or power pages, right? Like WebMD when you Google an illness. WebMD, just because of the credibility and the authority that they have online, their pages are still gonna rank and people are still gonna go into those pages.

But those core “what is” pages were very common. Whether it was healthcare, software and technology, B2B services – every industry had pages like that. Instead of recommending pages like that today, because like we said earlier, Google’s just gonna process all that content and feed it to somebody and they don’t necessarily need to go to your website.

What we’re encouraging with content strategy and if content marketing is still gonna be a core pillar of what you do to attract new business opportunities – we’re suggesting a lot more that you provide research, that you provide trend data, that you provide more detailed comparisons, more detailed ratings and reviews of products to try to address those use cases where people need to go deeper and really are in the middle of that decision making stage, not at the very beginning where they’re just going to get a basic understanding from your piece of content.

Adapting SEO Strategies

Daniella: I think that totally makes sense. I’m guessing keyword intent has always been important in SEO strategies, but I’m guessing now it’s kind of more important and I am assuming businesses have to adapt to that, which is kind of what we’ve talked about the whole time.

But for a business owner, especially if what they’ve been doing is traditional forms of SEO for their whole life or just in general not the most technologically savvy person, whatever the case may be – how can a person actually introduce all of this into their own SEO strategies, into their own marketing, and make it kind of successful?

Jonathan: So the first way I would recommend that you do that is by answering questions that your clients have and not questions that you’re – if a client is coming to you asking what something is at the very beginning stages, maybe if you are on the cutting edge of technology, maybe that’s happening for you or there’s jargon in your industry that people are hearing a lot but don’t understand, that’s emerging, right? Maybe there is a situation where you would still want to generate that content.

But the actual topics that I’m thinking about and that I’m talking about are some of those really specific pain points where you can build trust with your prospects. And so it may not be an example from our industry like “what is marketing” or “what is SEO”, but in contrast to that, the piece of content may be “what can I do when I see a competitor bidding on my brand name in Google Ads? How do I stop that?” Most businesses don’t like that, right? When they see somebody else running ads on their brand name. So what options do they have?

And conveniently, we have content like that on DirectOAM.com. So if you’re interested in that, hate to say it, but you should go check it out. But in that case, content like that where people really need to understand a more nuanced problem and you’re giving them their options or giving them a solution is gonna be more valuable and probably something that’s gonna drive somebody to click instead of just going and getting the answer straight from Chat GPT or Google itself.

Daniella: I think especially if the answer is very straightforward, like you said, like “what is SEO?” It’s just gonna say search engine optimization, and then that’s it and that’s enough because that was the question. So like you said, it totally makes sense having to go in.

I recall experiences of me having to do that with troubleshooting stuff. That happens a lot where I feel like that’s where you really have to go in. There’s this one time I was trying to get my Instagram password fixed. I was having issues. I had to read so many articles from Instagram and Instagram users to figure it out, ’cause like nobody was answering this question. Nobody had my problem. And I was like, is there nobody in the world that has had the same password problem that I’m having right now? I had to really dig. I ended up going into this really old 4-year-old Reddit post to see someone talking about it.

The Power of Online Communities

Jonathan: It’s interesting that you mentioned you ended up on Reddit.

Host Daniella: Oh yeah, Reddit is like one of the best.

Jonathan: So Reddit, I saw a ranking recently that Reddit is now like one of the top three most trafficked websites on the internet right now. So for inspiration for companies that are like, “okay, well if I’m not writing this top of the highest, most searched for keyword term, giving a really long article about just everything that there is to know about the topic. If I’m not doing that, where do I go to get inspiration? Where do I go to get ideas?” Reddit certainly is a great place to do that.

Daniella: You are asking a lot of questions there too, right?

Jonathan: It is. And there’s Quora, there’s other platforms like that that are question centric. But if you can get a sense of not just what the questions are, but questions that you have the ability to provide a solution to the problem, then that would be a good piece of content for you to go into depth about in your content calendar, in your content strategy as opposed to, “alright, here’s my keyword checklist for the month and I don’t have an article about this topic, or this topic, or this topic. So I’ve gotta write these three.”

Daniella: Yeah, that totally makes sense. I still feel like on Reddit, you can see a lot of public opinion on how people feel about certain things. I mean, definitely got a lot of negative things too – a lot of trolls and stuff like that. But I feel like in general, on Reddit I can really get a sense of how people are feeling about things, especially with technology, like, “I don’t like this update on this thing,” or “I’m having trouble using it.” And then a lot of people are commenting like, “me too,” and it’s like a whole thing.

And then I feel like what you described is like, that’s where I would come in if I had knowledge on it to be like, “oh, this is what to do with the new update.”

Jonathan: Right. Yeah. And you can certainly go into Reddit and be an engaged user on Reddit. But I think there’s untapped opportunity in almost any line of business, whether it’s unanswered threads on Reddit. I’ve posted threads on Reddit before that got no answers or got very few. And I’ve also, we’ve all seen questions and answers on Reddit that have nothing, to your point, nothing but snark and troll. Snark threads are huge right now.

So if you can take inspiration from that and provide a more helpful answer or debunk myths that you’re seeing there, then that’s an opportunity for your brand to stand out. And if your brand is standing out and your brand is also building trust along the way, then it’s a lot easier to then convert that traffic.

The content’s harder to generate. It’s not something that you can just give to an article generator and get back, but when you create it, it’s going to work harder for you over time instead of providing you short term gain, but long term little to no return.

Conclusion

Daniella: I think that’s great. And unfortunately we are running out of time, so that’s a great note to end the podcast on. I’ve actually personally learned a lot. I think you’ve taught me a lot about SEO and I’m just telling you all these random stories with me being on the internet, so it’s been so great to have you.

But I do want to give you a space right now before we finish the podcast to tell everybody where they can go find you. You’ve mentioned a little bit that there was a lot of articles that we could read, but you wanna plug anything you wanna say anything, floor’s yours right now.

Jonathan: Appreciate that. So absolutely would love anyone checking out this episode to find me on LinkedIn. I’m Jonathan Bens on LinkedIn. Not difficult to find there, so you see this face, you type my name in. You see this face? That’s me. The real deal.

Additionally, I do create content on occasion on DirectOM.com. So happy to have everybody go check that out. And then if you are in the PR space, coming up in May, myself and the founder of Direct Online Marketing are going to be doing some seminars through an organization called The Event Nexus. So I’m sure you’ll see that if you go to DirectOM.com. There’s information about that on our website. You’ll also, if you connect with me on LinkedIn, I’m happy to give you those details or you’ll see it in my feed. So check me out there and let’s connect and keep the conversations going for sure.

Daniella: Awesome. Yeah. I will be adding the links to your LinkedIn to the website on description of this video so that people can easily access them.

Jonathan: Appreciate that.

Daniella: Guys, I will see you all on the next episode. And Bens, thank you so much for being here.

Jonathan: Daniela, thanks so much for having me. Take care.