Dr. Pete Meyers: Le meilleur des mondes des SERP

0:00 Woj Kwasi You're listening to episode 6, where we chat with Conductor of Code, search data scientist, Dr. Pete. Humans and Robots. Welcome to WojCast! My name is Woj, founder of Kwasi. Thanks for joining me today. I interview digital marketing and branding superstars to find out what it means to have empathy in digital. What is digital empathy anyway? Let's find out together. And as always, I'm accompanied by my friend and associate, potentially superior artificial intelligence, Bobby Bott. Uh who seems to be sleeping in today? Is that strange? Sorry folks, I just need to um reboot him. It should only take a second. I know some of you out there would love to know what makes Bobby tick, but I don't wanna get overly technical, but they he kinda works like a Nintendo cartridge.

0:39 Bobby Bot Yeah.

0:53 Woj Kwasi Okay, let's see. That's just not do it voila Voila! Good afternoon, Bobby. Did you forget we had a show on today, Sunshine? Sorry, what?

1:04 Bobby Bot I pulled an all-nighter in Tokyo last night with a few of those IBM Watson bots who work insurance, talk about play hard, we hit karaoke, sake, and obscure jazz clubs.

1:14 Woj Kwasi Sounds like you had quite the night, Bobby Son. I'm just glad you decided to come back to us. I do. Here Japan's shrinking and ageing population makes it a prime testing ground for AI.

1:25 Bobby Bot Don't get me wrong, it's a great place with a lot of opportunity for my services, but I found it really different surfing the net. Until about 7am this morning, I didn't speak any Japanese, so navigating was a mission, and the Google SERPs looked different. And I'm used to it.

1:36 Woj Kwasi Well, you're not alone. Great minds have been trying to crack Google's internet. international approach to search for a long time. I can introduce you to one of them, Dr. Pete from Moz.

1:46 Bobby Bot Can Darker B deal with hangovers?

1:48 Woj Kwasi He's a genius computer and data scientist with bigger fish to fry. So let's listen and see how it all began with his involvement with a startup and the success that eventually took him to the top search researcher. Say that ten times fast at mine.

2:03 Dr. Pete Meyers Yeah, I was uh my undergraduate degree is in computer science and I And I kind of I finished my degree in 1992. And I went to graduate school because in nineteen ninety two nothing was going on in computer science other than just, you know, writing code. You could write code for ATT or Bell Labs or whoever. Um and then in the five years I was in school suddenly the internet sort of exploded and everything changed and the kind of jobs I had wanted suddenly appeared and I decided to give it a shot. So I I went to work for a startup. It was the typical late nineties. I mean it was me and the founder and an abandoned warehouse and we had no his dad owned the warehouse. You know, we had no business model. So we built five websites and we were hosting for fifty dollars a month. And he was gone three days a week, so I started to pick up the phone and

2:54 You know, the questions I got were the same kind of questions we get now. You know, why why am I not ranking? What's going on? You know, by then it was Yahoo and AltaVista, but why am I not appearing on this and what can I do? And uh we need to fix our site and so eight years later we were a software as a service company for Trachos. We run a two million dollar company and um I had never thought I'd be there for eight years, so I left and started to look around and just decided to kind of go out on my own and One of my clients who I'd worked with for years had always tried to get me to go to SES and to pay for it.

2:43 Woj Kwasi So we have Yeah. Mm.

3:08 Dr. Pete Meyers Eight years later we were uh And it didn't really fit our business model at the time. And I'm like, you know, I don't want to do it. But as soon as I went on my own, I'm like, okay, let's go. And I saw RAN there, and it just saw how much SEO had evolved between the late 90s and 2006, this probably wasn't. How much was different, how much search quality had improved, and how tactically it was, you know, it wasn't just this game of keyword stepping and that kind of stuff. It was really an interesting, evolved kind of thing. Of thing about helping people find things. And so it kind of renewed my interest when I got back in the search. And long story short, I started to do a little work on the side for MozCast with pro QA, you know, answering sort of advanced questions for people and a little writing. On kind of a lark, I had

4:11 The idea from MozCast and said, I wonder if we can do this, I'm going to try it. And I built a 50-keyword version of it, and it seemed to work. And we said, let's go ahead. So that kind of turned into its whole thing. And about a year and a half later, it was a full-time job. And everything came together. So I've been there two years now. Yeah.

4:29 Woj Kwasi With the most community, everyone's Everyone's so aligned, and it's so close-knit, that through his association, Dr. Pete felt like he worked there already.

4:38 Dr. Pete Meyers I've been involved with the community since two thousand seven. Yeah. And I've been part time with I've been working with them in some capacity for five or six years. So I've only really been in this role for two, but I've been in that community for

4:46 Woj Kwasi Yeah. Yeah.

4:51 Dr. Pete Meyers Eight years, I guess. And it's funny because it's almost like a graduating class. So the people that were So the people that were in that joined Moz when I did were people like Will Critchlow at Distilled and you know, who kinda now and uh Danny Dover and Kieran Norris I just saw the other day who's uh who's down here now uh for Yahoo. So yeah, it's kinda like now all those people have gone on to other things or to build companies or, you know, so it's it's almost like your uh your college class or something. So yeah, it's kinda funny how that's evolved. Yeah.

5:03 Bobby Bot See you in Dover.

5:20 Woj Kwasi Dr. Pete is responsible for setting up MozCast. It's a great resource for tracking the search engine results pages flux. The international SEO community is praying that the good Doctor and his team design country-specific versions to enhance MozCast, maybe even in Celsius for us Aussie.

5:38 Dr. Pete Meyers We tend to do small research projects internationally now, like what I did yesterday. Truthfully, it's just that we don't have a lot of front end resources. So I build The back end for the most part, and it's really easy for me to add things like a new feature to track something I'm interested in. But as soon as it turns into how do we build a new screen or then it becomes a product problem.

6:01 Woj Kwasi Okay. And we have to juggle it against our product. Surely, there's designers in a most community covered hands-up, but I guess for you to do it. The country stuff is hard to do.

6:09 Dr. Pete Meyers The country stuff is hard because we really need a full we really need a full crawl for every country. And that, resource-wise, that means, you know, Irritating Google even more. Yeah, but more than we do. It's been, that's why I've been trying to explore country by country, just kind of doing these small studies and the small publications and seeing how. Yeah, but

6:24 Woj Kwasi Uh it's

6:32 Dr. Pete Meyers seeing how people respond to that. Um but I'm much more in a way I'm much more interested in where the feature graph is headed than when with core flux,'cause the algorithm changes so much that that's really hard to filter out. The signal noise ratio is is really bad. And so I feel like the nicest thing I hear about Moscow is when people just basically say, Thank you for letting me know I'm not crazy. You know, my boss is mad, my client was mad, like at least I could show them something. And that's really gratifying. But when we try to dig in to say, well, what caused that?

7:05 What does that break down into? That is an extremely difficult task. So I've I've become more interested in what's happening around the SERP. And MozCast has really evolved into that kind of thing. But yeah, country by country. We wish we had the resource to do more. I wish it wouldn't take two hundred times the IPs.

7:26 Woj Kwasi Yeah. Time in Australia, Dr Pete had a chance to do some research on the Australian SERP and see how it compared to the rest of the world.

7:36 Dr. Pete Meyers Well, compared to us I found them less different than I thought they would be. So I think uh on the organic side Virtually everything that's rolled out in the U.S. is rolled out here, feature-wise. The paid ecosystem is different, and I think there's more regulatory pressure. We see it in the EU too. The EU is much more aggressive from a regulatory surprise. Okay.

7:51 Woj Kwasi Yeah.

7:58 Dr. Pete Meyers Standpoint, so they're pushing back on Google. So there are things Google's rolled out in the US they can't get away with quite in the rest of the world, paid-wise. But organic, you know, it's virtually the same. I did talk in the Czech Republic last year, and truthfully, it was the same way. There were a handful of things they didn't have yet, feature-wise, but In many ways, it was very similar. I mean, more and more everyone's rolling out things globally. They have some challenges with things like language sets, where they might have to have a better understanding of the local language for things like news, where that, you know, where maybe they're not quite there yet. But in terms of just what's available, it's everywhere for the most part. And I know the mobile update was global. We're seeing that more and more often. It used to be something would roll out and

8:44 Right. Three months later, it would hit Europe, and then three months after that, it would hit the rest of the English-speaking world, and then it would hit the rest of Europe. Ah. And then it would hit the Asian languages a year later.

8:57 Bobby Bot You know, a year later. Everybody go serping. Surpin USA.

9:02 Woj Kwasi With Google's Braintrust still working out of the United States, it's not hard to imagine a natural bias to the English language exists in a search engine's design. I think it's just an expertise bias. Just an expertise bias.

9:15 Dr. Pete Meyers Truthfully, you know, it's just I mean to me it just comes down to that's where they started and that's where their money is and that's what they have the most expertise in. And every market they get into they have to build into. And so, you know, is it a bias? Yes, but it's the bias of where you started from. And they've certainly had trouble in some countries, you know, they they had a lot of missteps in China. That's made things difficult, and it's yeah, then they have to get around Baidu and you know other market forces, but yeah, I don't think that's intent on their part. It's just they have to build that team and do that, and they have a lot of international teams. There's something like 200 ccTLDs, and there's only 200. Two species.

9:30 Woj Kwasi Mm.

9:46 Dr. Pete Meyers They have to go there. and something countries in the world that I know of. I don't know them all, but you know, it's something like two hundred fifty or something. So they almost have a ccTLD for something like eighty percent of the countries in the world. Wow. So yeah, they're they're getting there. Yeah.

10:03 Woj Kwasi Everyone. In some cases there has been suspicion that there's some sub-algos that get rolled out into different markets.

10:15 Bobby Bot Well, I'll tell you, I've been rolled out of a few establishments in my time. Not my brightest moments.

10:20 Dr. Pete Meyers Yeah, they so at the time they didn't have the uh pigeon update yet. That took a little while because that is so hyper local. So it really takes understanding

10:25 Woj Kwasi Yeah.

10:30 Dr. Pete Meyers Pigeon also kinda u started to look at local and tang queries differently. So I think they struggled with that in some other languages. Um it was I o I also saw some differences in things like news and in-depth, where for in-depth you not only have to be able to understand the query as news related, But you have to have local sources. So if you don't have good local sources in the local language, it's really hard to put out in-depth articles. So until they have a base of trusted sources they can use or an algorithmic way to build that, then that became a country-by-country kind of rollout because they have to say, well, if your query's in Czech, you don't want the New York Times back, probably. You want a trusted local news source. So I think that took them a while. I don't know how they can you can't cheat that. That has to be built. It would be hard to determine. But it what was interesting, what we saw with the Australian data bit is many features when we ran in google.cz with English queries, we wouldn't see a lot of features. But when we switched to a Czech query set,

11:36 Then those features jump back up. But it was very contextual. So things like news are very contextual. And so if you're typing English queries in the Czech Republic, they might just go, Well, that's not really a news search here. That's not really you know, that's not a brand here. That's not something we lend a lot of strength to. But then you run something like a Czech brand in the Czech Republic and those well that's big here. That same brand over there might get a knowledge panel, that same brand here wouldn't because they don't have that strength here. So that contextual understanding of sort of what's a brand and who's famous and what sports they care about and all these things, that's become really, really rich. So we see a lot of differences there. So if you try to look I think if you try and go to all these countries and say, oh, I ran a search on You know, Google Singapore, but all my queries for in English run from the US, and you say, Well, see, these features aren't there, that's you're missing the point entirely. That's because that's not the ecosystem of what's happening if you're a native searcher, and they know that.

10:56 Woj Kwasi Yeah. Yeah, then that the same. Yeah.

11:42 Yeah. Uh-huh.

12:33 So I think we've come a long way there. That's awesome. It seems like everything is about a contextual component of the query and the issues that are all.

12:34 Dr. Pete Meyers I think they've come a long way there. So it's awesome. Yeah, especially with local now. You know, more things have a local flavor and mobile mobile is inherently local, so that voice search as we saw earlier today. Yeah, right, right, right. So we have voice search as we saw earlier today. But yeah, right, right, right. Where depending where you are, your frame of reference is going to matter more, so with

12:56 Woj Kwasi With voice search, Google is pushing changes into mobile more and more. When you look at the search results, Above the fold on a mobile device, we're seeing even less organic listings than on a desktop. But is it simply Google's game plan to generate more revenue?

13:11 Dr. Pete Meyers I I don't think so in a sense I mean I think right now it's just so much is for the reality of real estate on the phone. It's just less. And you know, I think people are more willing to scroll and such. I think the revenue aspect is that when they realized mobile adoption was climbing and CTR was falling, they got scared. Have to do something. And they had to do something. And that's when mobile first design happened. And that was an economic Thing. That wasn't the I mean, is the future search mobile? Maybe. But that's not why they made the decision. They made the decision because click-through was falling and they had to reorganize around mobile. And so, yeah, I think there is that incentive. And I don't think they're designing SERPs so that there's only three results on a page because that works. I think they're doing that'cause that's all the bigger the phone is. You know, but they are definitely designing to offset that loss and make sure it doesn't fall any farther. And so they are designing around mobile to make sure the revenue stays

13:32 Woj Kwasi Yeah. Yeah.

14:08 Dr. Pete Meyers I've had one.

14:09 Woj Kwasi It seems like more blended paid initiatives and keeping people at Google will be on the cards. So the future of will look like whatever best suits Google's revenue agenda.

14:21 Dr. Pete Meyers I think we're going to see more blended paid, yeah, I think we're going to see more knowledge graph and paid. And that that comes into these kind of voice searches when people were asking today, you know, where there's just an answer, how do they monetize that? I don't think they know. Like they need they know that's what we need. We need small screens, we need voice. But how do you monetize a voice answer?

14:39 if there's no serve, I they don't know, you know, and they have to figure that out. So I I think they're struggling with that too. I think we will I think knowledge graph ads are very contextual and they like that and that helps it isn't a bad thing in the sense that it is kind of a very well defined information space. And so if you can advertise within that,

14:41 Woj Kwasi Mm-hmm.

14:59 Dr. Pete Meyers your you know, your clicks are gonna go up, your conversions are gonna go up, you're more likely to have a targeted answer. So I think they view that as a kind of targeting. I think what we're gonna see in the next few years is that familiar ad block on desktop with three at the top and eight on the side and two and three on the bottom you can have. Um I think that's gonna get broken up. The EU kind of forced that ad label, so what used to be a block is now really just separate ad entities. So I think you're gonna see like an ad and then two or three organic and then an ad and then a few organic and an ad and they're gonna start to play to blend that a little bit. Uh we'll probably see that on the phones first. Because I think the ads it's too easy for people to say that's an ad block and then and that's how they built it, but now there's really no reason they couldn't put an ad

15:15 Woj Kwasi Right. Yeah. Yeah. But someone's somewhere else. It's almost like, why would they even bother with the organic? Or maybe.

15:48 Dr. Pete Meyers somewhere else. Or it might become an extension in a sense. You know, if you look at there's an organic result on the page and that happens to be an advertiser, why not put an extra little bit of information under their SERP that makes them more likely to get clicked on or that they're paying for? It's almost like a SERP announcement. As long as it's labeled, you know, and they don't get in trouble for that, then I I think we're going to see that kind of ad integration.

15:56 Woj Kwasi Yeah. Hmm. where it's not going to be ads and organic. There's going to be a fusion. Some kind of fusion. Yeah. Yeah. In the world as told by Google. The question arises for brands seeking exposure and success. Do we focus on the customer as opposed to beating?

16:30 our own chests.

16:32 Dr. Pete Meyers It's just a revenue issue, you know. You can't You can't do everything for Google and complain about Google and, you know And then build a site that doesn't sell product and doesn't make money. I mean, that's real that's self-defeating. And we've almost seen people do that. Like, they're going to push so hard, they're going to push back so hard that they're also destroying their own experience and hurting conversion and losing customers. And that doesn't make sense. And I think, in a way that You know, what Google wants is to model the world. And so we get on them for, you know, oh, well, they prefer big brands. Well, the problem is, if you type in a brand name and that brand isn't first, that result is wrong. Yeah. Regardless of signals, that result is probably wrong. Because in the real world, that brand has the most presence. And so I think they have to look across signals. And so they're going to start to look at things like your own performance.

17:27 Within your site and how things are working, and how much people talk about you, you know, these signals have to kind of corroborate. And so, you're not going to be in a world where, well, your site has all these tweets, but you know, it has no links and no traffic and no usability, you know, no conversions, and they're going to go, that's not real. Like, that doesn't represent something in the real world. We so

17:26 Woj Kwasi Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't represent something in the real world. You have to kind of have this cluster of having a pristine bricks and mortar store, but no one. It's like having a coming into the store. Right, right, yeah. No door. Yeah. Yeah. You have a great sign but you have no door, yeah.

17:57 Dr. Pete Meyers Walking into a door. You have a great sign, but you have no door. I think for especially for small business right now, you still have to step back to what are you weak on. So what I see a lot of times is People kind of get understand something and go get it. We used to see this with on-page versus link building. You know, somebody really kind of got into on-page and then they would just hyper-tweak their titles or they would rewrite all their content or they would make sure they had all their canonicals in place and they'd be really obsessed and they'd have this hundred page site and they'd be like, Well, you have no links and no social. Like nobody's heard of you and you're trying to get from ninety-eight percent to ninety-nine percent with your on-page factors. And that 98 to 99 percent costs a lot more than 60 to 65 percent. You know, getting from like a D plus to a C minus I don't sorry, that's not a great example. I don't know. But anyway, so that's going to cost every little step is going to cost that much more, and there's diminishing returns.

18:58 And so I think for a lot of businesses it comes down to, okay, look, we're not going to obsess about our on-page structure because nobody's heard of us. And so we have to get out there and we have to get on social and maybe not even manual link building, but we need to get on social and just build awareness so that There's people linking to us and there's something to link to. You know, I mean, that's the content struggle. I'm not gonna sit here and say content's king or sugarcoat it and pretend that's the only thing. But if you have nothing to link to and nothing to talk about, then you're dead. You know, you have to have something.

18:42 Woj Kwasi Right.

19:23 Dr. Pete Meyers that you have nothing to link to and nothing to talk about.

19:25 Bobby Bot I'm gonna read that. A crisis of content. The worst case scenario of any blind date. the worst case scenario of any blind date. That was called Awkward Silence Search Interesting Banter View.

19:37 Dr. Pete Meyers And so I think that's the start for a lot of people.

19:39 Bobby Bot Yeah.

19:41 Dr. Pete Meyers And we hear this with big enterprise SEO, you know, you have news sites that have tremendous links and tremendous brand equity and tremendous content and they're on page of disaster. And if they just fix a few things, suddenly all that power is being re-channeled. So I wrote posts a bit back about what's more important, links are on page that completely depends on where you're at and what you're hurting on. And to just focus completely on one that you're already good at, it doesn't really work. So, you know, you have to have that awareness. And that's going to be more important. You have to be a real entity.

19:54 Woj Kwasi So Yeah.

20:14 Dr. Pete Meyers In the world, even if you're an online store. So I think that's going to make a life a lot harder for, say, pure affiliates who aren't. I don't wanna say they're not real, but they're web only, they're selling other people's products, they don't have the physical presence, they don't have unique content of any kind, they don't have a unique thing to sell, they don't have a unique value proposition. Life's gonna get a lot harder for them.

20:36 Woj Kwasi At Mozcon in 2012, Dr. Pete said: If you're still tracking rankings for where you did five years ago, if you're sitting on 10-year-old content and strategies from 10 years ago, and just writing your coattails and hoping everything will stay okay, it won't. Even if the algo doesn't change, 80%. Changes every day in the SERPs. That's interesting because here in the future, the pressure is still on.

21:03 Dr. Pete Meyers Yeah, I mean I think it's only accelerated that the the index is getting updated. More frequently. We're getting into more dynamic entities like news, where it's just changing every day. And uh you know I think the thing is the world is changing around you, whether Google does anything or not. And so more content's being created all the time, more is being added to the index, and so if you do nothing, that stuff is just going to keep flooding in. And yeah, yeah, I don't think you can stand still. And and we've seen it with Organic where people get upset and they go, What did Google do? I've ranked great for six years and now I don't. It's like, well, Google didn't really do anything. It's just that neither did you. You haven't really changed in six years and you want to Ride this forever, and what we all should probably do is say, Thank you for that six years. Yeah, I made a lot of money not doing much, but it was fun while it lasted, but it's not gonna last too long.

21:26 Woj Kwasi Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Google is evolving. It used to be like a little primitive And now it's this huge artificial intelligent being and it's maintained its mission statement consistently. It's evolved so much that if your business is stagnating then you're just shooting yourself in the foot.

22:14 Bobby Bot Perhaps it's high time for people to shed the feet and develop tentacles. Imagine how interesting life would be for humans. spontaneously happened today.

22:22 Woj Kwasi Well Bobby, if I had tentacles, um I Probably get a job at a casino or maybe as a writer. What a novel concept. Dr. Pete would have plenty of options. Not only is he a great data scientist, he's also a great author with an awesome sense of humor. The content he puts together is very engaging. And clearly communicates his data and research. Carefully chosen data visualizations also play an important role in how he shares his discoveries.

22:50 Bobby Bot You love it.

22:50 Dr. Pete Meyers I think it's important. I struggle a little bit. I think sometimes we get a little too obsessed with trying to be fancy. It's kind of funny that so much of my decks is just bar graphs and pie charts. Because I'll go to do that new cool fancy. Alvina should love some of that stuff. But I'll go to do that new cool, fancy thing and like do a a chord chart or something. sunburst and things. I don't know what that meant, you know. So I think it's a I really like Tufte, you know, Edward Tufte stuff. I saw him last year actually at a seminar which was kind of cool. And you know, ju I I think there's a lot to be said for simplicity. So there are times when a visualization communicates extremely well, but when we get obsessed with things like infographics and trying to make everything visual all the time, that you know, that gets to be a little self-defeating. So

23:35 Yeah, I think you have to you have to ask what you're trying to say. You know, what's the story first and then what's the best way to say it? Sometimes the best way to say it is words. Sometimes the best way to say it is a table. Sometimes it's a paragraph and sometimes you need something more complicated'cause it's a complicated problem. But we like to make things complicated just to seem smart.

23:43 Woj Kwasi Yeah. When data visualizations aren't necessary, Dr. Pete takes us on a journey through his thought process to unpack the challenges he has to tackle as the go-to guy. for the science of SEO.

24:06 Dr. Pete Meyers I always kind of enjoyed writing, but I'm not a uh I'm not a person who, you know, you can say, like, what do you want to do five years from now? What's the topic you're really passionate about? I'm sort of really passionate about whatever I'm deep into at that time. You know, and so a lot of my Google work is just whatever's in my headspace right then. You know, what I just wanted. Dig into something, and I want to dig into the next thing, and so become.

24:30 Woj Kwasi Like the logo ideas and the stuff on your own blog, what sort of inspires you to look into that?

24:36 that area of or that body of work.

24:40 Dr. Pete Meyers It's sad how much kinda just comes down to like entertaining myself. Like all the all the logo stuff, that whole blog just kinda came out of really just and like I I really love minimalism. Yeah. And maybe I love minimalism because I'm a bad designer. And so, you know, I feel like, well, maybe I can kinda do that, which isn't you know, which is a isn't an insult to minimalism because to do it well is really hard. But then I really, you know, I think brands do a lot of weird things. And I've always, because I've been a startup person, I always kind of make fun of that. So, yeah, I mean, that whole blog started is just a way to joke with myself. Sometimes that's where it comes from. I mean, I like that creative. I guess I have that little bit of a class clown personality. You know, sometimes I like, I build.

24:44 Woj Kwasi Yeah. And so you Yeah.

25:25 Dr. Pete Meyers I make things to put them out there. The amount of times I'll spend 15, 20 minutes researching a joke for Twitter, you know, which has no value at all to anybody, but I'll I'll go in and have to look up facts and Yeah, but and photoshop something. You know, I that yeah, I mean I have that I have that little bit of a class clown side to me, I guess.

25:43 Woj Kwasi Although Dr. Pete is in tune with the challenges facing business in the Google universe, he always ends his talks by alleviating fear and focusing on opportunity.

25:53 Dr. Pete Meyers I think it's just uh my frustration is sometimes I think people look at what I'm doing and they get a little depressed. You know, we don't want to face all this, too much is changing. Uh and and that bothers me'cause I feel like I didn't give them something I didn't give them an actionable takeaway. And it can be hard to kinda give a one size fits all take away for this stuff'cause it's becoming very niche, I feel like. You know, it's very vertical in a sense. But uh I I think what's important to me is just the Practicality of it. Google isn't going to stop doing things just because we don't like it. And they're not going to stop evolving and stop changing. They're a massive company driven by investment, driven by advertising. They have to move forward. And so we can not like it and complain, or we can figure it out and adapt to it and use it. And it's just pragmatism. If we do one, we're eventually going to fail.

26:46 If we do the other, we might be okay. We might not be, but that's the choice to me. It's just we don't have any choices to matter, so we might as well make the best.

26:46 Woj Kwasi Yeah. Awesome interview. Had a lot of fun interviewing Dr. Pete. Apologies for all the plates crashing and little sounds you probably heard. We were recording right next to the kitchen and a convention center we're at. I've followed Dr. Pete's stuff for a while. He has amazing content. He's always sharing. Info on the cutting edge of what's going on in search, so you can definitely recommend following him on social media. We'll have a link to all his finest work in the show notes, as well as links to his website and some of our favorite work he's produced. So, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with all your friends, family, networks, colleagues, bots.

27:40 Associates, pets, whatever you can think of, I'm sure they'll enjoy listening to. Now Bobby's been programmed to be a quick learner, and it's time for Bobby to ask me a few questions that piqued his curiosity. Over to you, Bobby.

27:54 Bobby Bot What is the most important discovery a SERP data scientist can make in today's Google Ads?

27:58 Woj Kwasi That not all SERPs are created equal and that you need a different strategy depending on the SERPs. We actually did a study on this recently, so we'll have a link to that in the show notes. But every keyword has a different formation, there's different properties. It's not just text links, we have a lot of properties. We've got maps, we've got knowledge graphs, we've got, yeah, check it out. What comes goes a lot?

28:20 Bobby Bot What comes first, Woj? The link for the content.

28:23 Woj Kwasi 100% the content. Without the content, you get no links.

28:27 Bobby Bot What has Dr. Pete taught us about digital empathy?

28:29 Woj Kwasi Hmm, interesting question. So there's different sides of digital empathy. So we have to understand the landscape we're dealing with. We have to understand the machine. But also we have to ensure that we are empathizing with the reader in mind of our content like Dr. Pete does. And I have to say Bobby, thanks for sticking around today. I know you're still feeling a little rough after the night you had abroad but you did hang in there. To the very end, you absorb some absolute pearls wisdom.

28:58 Bobby Bot I always have time for a good doctor. Really, I do. I just added into my index: Dr. Pete, Dr. Dre, Dr. Dune, Dr. October. This might take a while. So see you next time, everybody. Dr. Jones. See you next time, everybody. Dr. Jones, Dr. Gonzo, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, Dr. Evil, Dr. Immit Brown, Dr. Strangelove, Dr. Hans Zarkov, Dr. Peter Fankman, Dr. Fu Manchu, Dr. Zayas, Dr. Juliet Fax, Dr. Frederick Frankenstein, and Dr. Frazier Winslow Crane, Dr. Heathcliff Cliff Huxtable, Dr. Simon Tam, Dr. John Zoidberg, Dr. Beverly Crusher.