Jono Alderson with Jason Barnard at YoastCon 2019

Jono Alderson talks with Jason Barnard about SEO and AEO in a world without websites.

With the SERP increasingly offering solutions to queries, we are facing world where websites are increasingly less important (as it were). Jono Alderson talks extensively about on-SERP SEO, a great continuation of Rand Fishkin’s approach in this episode – communicating across channels, all along the user journey.

SEO is the puppeteering of all the channels.Jono Alderson

Not a volume game any more, it’s a right-fit and quality game.Jono Alderson

Market to everybody and bring them gracefully down the funnelJono Alderson

Plus we talk about WordPress, Jono tells me the interview was a Treat (great phrase !)… and right at the end, we discover that SEOisAEO rhymes with Jono !

Jason:SEO is AEO, welcome to the show, Jono: Anderson.Jono:Wow. Amazing, amazing.Jason:It's losing some of its shine.Jono:No, no, it was great.Jason:Lovely to meet you, Jono:. Thank you for being here.Jono:Yeah, thanks.Jason:Bit about you, you're a futurologist.Jono:An amateur one I think, but I don't know if you can be a professional one, so-Jason:I don't even know what one is.Jono:I think I have a lot of opinions about what might happen next, and needed a way of describing that, and it was a handy word.Jason:Oh, it's not a thing then?Jono:Oh, it is. It has connotations of pretentiousness. I know there are in large organizations...Jason:I didn't say that :)Jono:No, but everyone else will. I spent a lot of time in agencies and SEO trying to build strategies for clients, and a lot of that depended on understanding where everything was going and what the world might look like in five years from now, if you're building a big strategy, committing a lot of resources. So I had to build an understanding and some estimated guesses on whether we'd have flying cars and what Amazon were up to and all these things, and yeah, that turned into futurology, so that's quite fun.Jason:Brilliant. You basically say, "Where will we be in 2024," if it's five years?Jono:Yeah, or maybe even a bit further, but obviously it gets harder the further out you go.Jason:Last night, I saw we were gonna be with Global Corporation.Jono:Yeah, the evil overlords.Jason:That was brilliant by the way, last night. A great piece of acting.Jono:Yeah, well maybe, maybe. I spoke to the guys from Google afterwards and they were like, "This feels like a really accurate description," of where they are and how everything works, so it might not have been theater at all.Jason:Oh, right. Oh no. Everybody can be very afraid.Jono:Yeah, always.Jason:You said ... "what the Walking Dead taught me about the future of consumer loyalty"... what the ... is that?Jono:Oh God, that was a while ago. That was really fun. That was the precursor to a whole bunch of stuff I've been thinking about around where digital marketing goes, and the core of the premise was that we are as consumers saturated with choice. Everything is becoming commodified. Products get cheaper to manufacture, they get cheaper to distribute. It's cheaper to enter most markets. Increasingly everything is service-orientated, and consumer choice becomes the differentiator. In a world where I'm empowered to do my own research and make decisions on what I want, then what makes the difference is quality, and I can choose which brands I do or don't want to engage with, and the only thing that really sets them apart is the quality of the experience they deliver.Jono:As you start to change what it means to be a brand, to focus on that rather than I'm cheaper, I'm faster, I'm closer, because none of those things make sense to compete on, we need to really reinvent how we think about marketing and consumer research and SEO in particular. It's not about trying to sell things about the bottom of the funnel, it's about trying to build awareness and preference.Jason:Rand was talking about that.Jono:Yeah, yeah, very much, the fly wheels and all of that stuff, yeah.Jason:Oh, so you and Rand are on incredibly well.Jono:Yeah. I think all of SEO is starting to converge on this. It is the same kind of thing-Jason:Yeah. It's becoming digital marketing much more. I mean Rand has brilliantly moved from just SEO in inverted commas to this digital marketing thing, and I ... Hats off to him. Hats off to you as well. Brilliant stuff. But I didn't hear the Walking Dead in there.Jono:No, so that was-Jason:I mean that was fine and sensible-Jono:The rationale was I got bored of the Walking Dead as it kept ... I really wanted to like it, and it had promised a lot of really good stuff. I liked the dystopian future stuff. And what I found was there was increasingly more television and more media available to me than I could or would ever consume, and it got to the point where I thought, "You know what? I will sacrifice never watching this. Just tell me the interesting bits. Give the nugget of value and interest." I'll never watch Lost, but give me the ending. I'm not losing out on anything. You can give me the spoilers.Jono:And then that's where this whole thinking started, like what if we just applied that to brands? What's the interesting nugget? And don't make me all of the commodified noise to get to it.Jason:Brilliant, that makes so much sense now, now that you've actually put it into context with the Walking Dead. That was brilliant. Now we're onto the serious subject, if that wasn't serious enough. SEO and AEO in a world without websites.Jono:Yeah, that's big, isn't it?Jason:Aaron Bradley said don't invest in websites or don't put your money in websites. Would you agree?Jono:I really sit on the fence with this and I flip flop. I definitely see two possible futures. One is that everything becomes more distributed and fragmented, and Wolfgang yesterday talked a lot about search engines and ecosystems in other countries, and things like WeChat is very popular in China, which we all know. But I don't think we are really seeing the extent to which people aren't interacting with websites. If I'm gonna buy a washing machine or a phone or a car or even a pizza, we're increasingly living in a world where I don't need to and probably don't want to visit that vendor's website as part of that process. That raises some really interesting questions about what is that website for, why does it exist, why isn't it just an app? Or why aren't those services available in a marketplace like Amazon? What is the role?Jono:I think in that world we very much need to be thinking outward and about how do I engage with the consumers in a very broad distributed marketplace? And that gets very complicated, and the role of websites maybe becomes more about brand storytelling and immersion.Jono:That's certainly one way it could go. The other is the role of the website becomes all the more important. Rand was talking about some of this yesterday, that as a business you need somewhere where your equity lives, and you need something that's owned. Maybe you need that, maybe you don't, but his angle was definitely you should have control ... Control's the word. Control of your property and content and your email list, and that has to live somewhere, and it makes sense that that's your website.Jason:So you need to go and find people on all these other platforms ...Jono:And bring them in.Jason:And bring them in. Make sure they're visiting your website, and then you can start dealing with them through cookies, through remarketing -Jono:Absolutely. But I think you could go either way. I don't know which way we go. Either we have a world where you bring people into this website, or your website becomes a hub where you try and push content out to find the people where they are.Jason:Ooh, I like that idea. Well I like the idea of the different ... . Andrea Volpini also talks a lot ... He's a big knowledge graph fan, talks a lot about taking control of your own data, and being the go-to source for information about yourself, which implies having some sort of hub, which would be the website. So you're saying we need to go out and find people, bring them to the website a la Rand as it were, then marketing through email and remarketing to make sure that we are the source of information, so that when we do push the information out it's being represented in the way we want because we are the source. Would you agree?Jono:Yes, absolutely. I think one of the reasons the world isn't like that at the moment is because that's quite technically difficult, and if you've built a website three, five, 10 years ago, to achieve that world, you have to re-architect entirely, you have to design all of your database structure and your content and your systems to work in that particular mechanism. If you don't already have that, it's very hard to create. Only now are people starting to build that kind of structure and system, and conveniently, this is the way that WordPress works.Jason:Oh, that's lucky.Jono:Isn't it just? So you have all of your content in a database, and the architecture is designed to think let's output this content in this context, so that if I want my website to push content to WeChat that's just as easy as showing a page on a screen or sending a notification to a smartwatch. Suddenly you go, "Actually, yes, I have a CMS and a website, but my content can be sent out elsewhere," and the system is designed to work that way. So we're now seeing businesses start to enable this. "Yes, my website is a hub where my stuff lives, but it's not tied to it." It's pretty cool.Jason:I wish I was videoing this, because you're getting all really excited here.Jono:Yeah, this is exciting. This is the next wave of what the internet is.Jason:But you've got really into WordPress. I mean you've been at Yoast for what, six months?Jono:A year now. Just over a year.Jason:And you're incredibly excited about WordPress, you're getting right into it.Jono:Oh,