What’s Up THIS WEEK: AEO Is the New SEO 🔍 Best Time to Host a Webinar?

Full Transcript

Jay Schwedelson: Welcome to Do This, Not That, the podcast for marketers.

You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately. You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. We'll also dig into life, pop culture, culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that.

Jay Schwedelson: We are back for What's Up This Week from the Do This Not That podcast presented by Marigold. This is our super short episode where we break down what's going on this week in business and marketing and life. And then we saw all of our other episodes later in the week. So what's going on? Well, SEO is rapidly changing. Search engine optimization, how we all mess around with our websites. We try to show up higher in the rankings on Google. It's changing. Now the big thing that everybody's talking about is AEO, Answer Engine Optimization. And it's because of AI. You know, Search Engine Journal just released data saying that Google's AI generated summaries known as AI overviews. They appear now in approximately 47% of search results. That's when you go to Google, you search the thing, it shows up all that AI stuff at the top. An answer engine optimization, this AEO stuff is really based around this idea that your website's content needs to now directly answer user queries, especially in this new answer driven approach that we're so accustomed to doing now with ChatGPT and all the other tools. Unlike SEO, you know, which focuses just on ranking high and playing all the games on the results pages, AEO is trying to allow people to receive those concise and authoritative answers. Now here's the interesting stuff. As of this past week, ChatGPT announced that they have about 800,000,000 weekly active users. That is an increase from February when they had 400,000,000 active users. It is growing so fast. Now MP Digital shared this week, which is what we all need to be thinking about in terms of what we need to be doing as marketers, whether you're a business or consumer marketer, that ChatGPT is now weighing heavily on pulling from sites that have listicles on their site and are answering core questions. Like for example, you know, best dog breed or top CRM platform. Having this stuff on your website, forget about the keywords. Now having on your website, these listicles and core questions mentioned and answers, that is what's showing up in the AI overviews. That's what's showing up on ChatGPT. So for example, let's say you're a direct to consumer marketer. You're promoting some sort of skincare brand, right? You would have on your site, you would ask and answer a core question like what skincare routine should I follow for dry skin? And that may sound so basic, but that's what people are looking for. And then you have to answer it on your site. And that's what gets picked up by ChatucheBT and Perplexity and Claude and you name it. And then you also want to have listicles. Listicles are becoming more and more important. I know how ridiculous they feel, but this is how you're going to show up in the results. So for that same skincare brand, you might say seven must have ingredients in the skincare routine for dry skin. And on the B2B side, let's say you are an HR software platform. You would ask and answer a bunch of core questions like how can I automate onboarding for new employees? Or you may have listicles that say, you know, six onboarding workflows you can automate this quarter. The reason this is going to become a much bigger deal and the reason that you need to become an expert in creating these questions and answers on your site all throughout it and these listicles is one of the big things is what Apple said this past week. So Apple is reportedly planning to redesign Safari, that's their search engine to focus primarily on AI search engines. So this is directly from Apple, Eddie Q, which is this, he's the senior vice president of services at Apple. He testified. He testified this past week that Safari searches dropped for the first time last month. And he believes users are choosing AI tools over regular search engines. And this is what he said. He said AI, he believes that AI search providers like OpenAI, PerplexityAI, Anthropic will eventually replace traditional search engines like Google. So if you're not thinking about the content in your site and you're playing the same old SEO game, you're going to lose. All right, what else is going on? Well, in marketing news that is kind of, I don't want to say it's ridiculous, but it kind of is. Did you see this this week that Chuck E. Cheese, yes, the the place we go and play very expensive video games. They have launched a branded media network. Oh my god. Does everybody need to have a media network? Is this really happening? So Chuck E. Cheese has launched the CEC, the Chuck E. Cheese Media Network, which it touts as one of the largest family friendly digital out of home networks in The United States. The restaurant network spans more than 3,000 digital screens with more than 500 locations. Oh my God. Listen, I feel bad. Somewhere out there there's a marketing manager. And I don't know if you've been to I haven't been to Chuck and Cheese in years, thank God, because the place is a little bit rough if you ask me. But the mascot is a rat, like an actual rat. Now they've upgraded the rat. The rat used to be very scary. It would cause nightmares. That was the freakiest, wildest, ugliest mascot on earth. But now they have a newer rat and the rat is less ugly, but it's still a rat. So imagine you're the marketing manager for Chuck E. Cheese and you're like, go we need to compete with a Mickey Mouse. Okay. Which happens to be a mouse. I never really thought about that, but it's not a rat. Okay. You know, we need to go compete with all these friendly, nice things. We have a rat and the whole place is gross. It just is. And it was like, oh no, no, the pizza is really good there. If you think the pizza is good at Chuck E. Cheese, you have no idea what good pizza is. Now me saying this is probably going to ruin me ever getting Chuck E. Cheese as a client, but that's okay. Because I don't think it's in my wheelhouse to get people to go and give a lot of money to win tickets for some garbage prize. Anyway, sorry, Chuck E. Cheese. What else is going on? So new data out there about webinar marketing from contrast. This is actually really interesting and it actually matches up the data they're saying about what's working in webinars as a marketing vehicle. It lines up exactly with what my agency is seeing almost to a T. So contrast is saying that right now, Wednesdays and Fridays have the highest average registration rates. If your webinar is on a Wednesday or a Friday, it is getting the most registrations. And we are seeing that too. I think so many people are sleeping on Fridays for a webinar. It's like this day where you better yourself. You consume content. So if you're not testing Fridays for a webinar, I think you're missing that out big time. Also, and this is exactly what we see. 2PM has the highest average attendance rate over 50% attendance rate when your webinars are at 2PM from contrast. Now 50% is pretty high for a show up rate. I don't think people are averaging that. I think that's a little bit of garbage, but we do see that 2PM is the perfect time. Anytime from really eleven to 2PM. You can't do it earlier and you can't do it later. The other interesting thing coming out regarding the webinar data is that more than half of all webinar registrations happen in the week before the webinar goes live. Meaning that you're not going to get a lot of people to register for that webinar until that week of. You got to go crazy heavy that week of. And it says here 78.9% of registrations happened in the two weeks before the event goes live. So really you need to be thinking about your two week out strategy, send more emails than you should do aggressive retargeting. You got to go bananas. All right, let's get into some ridiculous news this week. So I always like checking in on Meghan Markle's new podcast. So Meghan Markle has a new podcast that started about a month ago. Okay. It's called Confessions of a Female Founder. And I don't know, I tried listening to it. It's got to be one of the worst things of all time. I don't care if you like it, you're wrong. It's terrible. And it came out of the gate. It was like the number one podcast when it came out of the gate. And usually the first few months of a podcast, I could tell you, because I have one, you do really well because everyone's like checking it out. She has been out for a month. Okay. And for the overall top list, she's already fallen out of Spotify's top 100 in both The U. S. And The UK. Nobody's listening to this thing. I'll give you a wild stat I just saw. So this ridiculous podcast, we are in two categories. We're in marketing. Okay. And we are in business. Now in the marketing category, I have no idea why on the Apple charts, we sit right now at number three at a 55,000 marketing podcast. That's pretty wild. But we also are on the business charts. The business charts is very, very hard to do well in. So right now we are sitting at number 67 on the business charts on Apple. Her show is at number 62. We're only five behind her show and she has so much marketing firepower. Do you realize how bad that is? Because this show is trash. And for us to only be a few spots behind her is ridiculous. We are going to pass her and I'm going to report back on that. And it's going to be amazing. All right. I don't know what we talked about. I never know what we talk about here on the show. Listen, I appreciate you. If you leave this thing a review, then maybe we'll beat Meghan Markle. We can do it. Because when you leave a review, it circulates the show. And imagine that you leave a review and you are the reason we beat Meghan Markle on the charts. That would be phenomenal. Alright. You're awesome. Have a great week. Later.

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