How will email marketing impact Search in 2025?

Mordy Oberstein:

It's the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP’s Up. Aloha, Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm Mordy, overseeing the head of SEO brand here at Wix, joined by the very open, rateable, clickable, never spammed, never spamming head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Hello, everyone. I would like to talk to you in your email, and I'm definitely who I say I am. I'm not some pretend email address at the top or some pretend subject name and then a really weird email address underneath.

Mordy Oberstein:

Unsubscribe, unsubscribe, unsubscribe.

Crystal Carter:

I know. I'm definitely just me, I promise. Welcome to our podcast. Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, you mean you didn't get into my email from some random conference that I happened to attend, and I didn't realize I was actually signing up permission to have the sponsor send out.

Crystal Carter:

Forever, forever, forever, and ever and ever. No, no, no. Not particularly.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, okay. Unsubscribe.

Crystal Carter:

I am the queen of unsubscribe. As soon as somebody's like, "Hi." I'm like, "Uh-huh. Nope."

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm your best friend then because I'll take a long time to, I'll just open the email and move on.

Crystal Carter:

No.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm an email marketer's best friend.

Crystal Carter:

Email people, I open it and then I just delete. I just bulk delete.

Mordy Oberstein:

You're a better person.

Crystal Carter:

If I get a cold call email, I literally just block them immediately.

Mordy Oberstein:

Phone calls I don't answer. If I don't know the number, or I'm not expecting, okay, I have a virtual doctor appointment, and I know it's a weird number, that's where they're calling from, I don't answer.

Crystal Carter:

My friend Scam Lightly calls me all the time. She's so nice. It's just so sweet.

Mordy Oberstein:

I wouldn't know because I don't answer.

Crystal Carter:

I don't answer.

Mordy Oberstein:

We should trade strategies. I'll take your email strategy, you take my phone call strategy, and together we'll live in a spamless world.

Crystal Carter:

There we go. There we go.

Mordy Oberstein:

With our powers combined, the SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Wix and Wix Studio, where you can not only subscribe to our SEO newsletter, Searchlight over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also directly connect your Wix and Wix Studio account and your efforts to MailChimp with our native integration with MailChimp. Look for it in the Wix Studio App Market. Links in the show. This is part of Wix's ongoing partnership efforts to provide best-in-class online presence and marketing tools to business customers worldwide.

As this, as we talk, the impact email marketing will have on SEO in 2025, why owned audiences are more in focus for more and more SEOs, how email marketing and search equals deeper engagement and, check this out, more revenue, and what you need to be doing in order to let email and search form a powerful combination in 2025.

There's no better person to help the open rate of our minds hear these powerful lessons than Intuit Mailchimp's own Senior Manager of Content Marketing Strategy, Jillian Ryan, who will join us in just a jiffy. And don't forget, we have who you should be following on social media for more SEO or perhaps more email marketing awesomeness, so put on your satin robe and put on your hood and step into the ring despite the fact that you're a 58-year-old man who hasn't thrown a punch in 20 years as you don't need a Netflix special to tell you that email marketing and search are a powerful one two punch in 2025 on this, the 118th episode of the SERP's Up Podcast.

In case you didn't get the reference, I was making fun of the whole Mike Tyson Netflix special thing. One two punch.

Crystal Carter:

I haven't seen that one, but there's been some great Netflix stuff on recently, and maybe I should sign up for their newsletter.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, yes.

Crystal Carter:

Then maybe I would know more about it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Maybe you'd know about the Mike Tyson, Jake Paul thing. Mike Tyson was an old boxer.

Crystal Carter:

Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

Fought a dude and didn't win because he's, despite being an incredible all time grade, he's 58 years old.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's a hard age to box in the ring.

Crystal Carter:

This is true. This is true. This is true, but you know what's a knockout?

Mordy Oberstein:

What's that?

Crystal Carter:

A good email newsletter?

Mordy Oberstein:

A good email newsletter. You know what's a real knockout combination? If you combine search and email marketing.

Crystal Carter:

Absolutely. We try to do this ourselves with our search light newsletter. We got an LP, we've set it up, it's ranking for email newsletters, things like that. These are things we got to combine.

Mordy Oberstein:

Most definitely, and certainly in 2025, which is why we sat down with Jillian Ryan from Intuit Mailchimp. Here's our conversation with Jillian.

Okay, so before Jillian actually joins us, one of the big themes that I feel has gone under the radar for a long time is this strong connection between your audience and deeply resonating with them, so building that audience and then making that strong connection with them. I often come at this from a brand marketing point of view where people are looking for something authentic or more authentic than they have been, and that is actually catching up with us. We're kind of caught up in generating a lot of AI, which can often be very good, very helpful, don't want to mess with the AI overlords, but it can make a little bit of problem for you in terms of resonating and connecting with your actual audience because AI, at the end of the day, is not an actual person.

There is another facet of this conversation. It's what we started a few weeks ago with the episode we did with Jake Hunley, where we talked about moving past the ever unreliable algorithms, whether it be search, whether it be social, and that facet is the relationship between having a deeper connection with your audience and being able to pull in more revenue. There is a direct connection with that, which I feel, and I'm going on a limb here saying that that's an important connection between SEO and email marketing heading to the crux of 2025, that needs to be explored. And as I mentioned before, there's no one better than Intuit Mailchimp's own Senior Manager of Content Marketing Strategy, Jillian Ryan, to do that with us. Welcome to the show.

Jillian Ryan:

I'm so happy to be here, and I have to say your feeling is based and grounded in research. I have the data to back up your feeling and excited to talk about it with you and the audience.

Mordy Oberstein:

The audience can't see, but I said, "Yes." Hands up in the air.

Jillian Ryan:

Mordy was celebrating.

Mordy Oberstein:

I was celebrating.

Jillian Ryan:

So he's excited. I'm excited, and I think everybody here is also excited.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm excited. I'm also excited that, hey, this is awesome we have this integration between Mailchimp and Wix. Super excited about that. Before we get started into the actual crux of it all, marketers going to market, what do you do over at Mailchimp? I would love to learn more about that.

Jillian Ryan:

Yeah, so it's kind of a dream job. I lead our thought leadership practice. So essentially what that means is Mailchimp is super invested into creating really rich, insight-driven pieces of research and insights that help educate, help inspire, not just our customers, but all marketers and especially mid-market marketers that can often be underserved in the marketing space. And so I get to lead that strategy, and that means I get to create really robust and super interesting pieces of research that talk about the problems that marketers are facing, how the consumer landscape is changing, and also give practical tidbits and best practices that marketers can actually go and do after they read the report or watch the webinar. And so I get to be at the helm of that, and it's a really exciting space to be in, and I've been in the space for a while and doing that for such a legacy brand that is so beloved is awesome, so that's my day job, and then I moonlight on podcasts like this.

Mordy Oberstein:

Nice. Well, clearly. First off, I'm really excited. One is I love as a marketing strategy, as a brand marketing strategy, thought leadership is sometimes overused, sometimes generic, but when it's done really well, it's so powerful and so effective in creating engagement, actually being helpful to your actual audience, but I'm also super excited because it means you probably have, like you mentioned before, a lot of data and access to a lot of data.

Jillian Ryan:

Yes. I always try to come packing with the data, and our biggest thing is that we don't want to add any more noise. The marketing landscape is oversaturated with everybody talking about the same thing and so many marketers are using AI created "thought leadership" that's not thought leadership. And so it's-

Mordy Oberstein:

It's literally regurgitated across the, literally.

Jillian Ryan:

Exactly. Exactly. But we take a lot of pride in making sure that anything that we put out is differentiated and that it adds value, and if it doesn't pass tests, we wouldn't publish it. So yeah, I am packing with insights and now I hope I haven't set the bar too high when I share them.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, no, no. I feel like we're only going to exceed those expectations. Where do you want to start with? You want to start on the data side with this? Tell me where you want to start because there's so much to talk about. If you're listening to this podcast on a regular basis, and you're from the SEO space, you know there's been so much tumult, and there's been so much, I don't want to say chaos. I don't want to say chaos. I would say chaos. I don't want to say chaos. There's been a lot of uncertainty, and one of the things that a lot of SEOs have been advocating for, I just did an episode of Crawling Mondays with the Ellie DeSolis who's a contributor to our wonderful SEO course pitch that you should take over at the Wix Studio Learning Hub. And one of the things people were talking about were other channels, SEOs pivoting out, or not pivoting out, or expanding out into other channels, and email marketing is such an important channel because you own that audience.

Jillian Ryan:

Yep, yep.

Mordy Oberstein:

What do you feel like, where do you want to start between the connection between search marketing and email marketing?

Jillian Ryan:

So I've come prepared, like I said, with a few data points, and maybe I talk through that, and I think that can open up a wide range of things that we can dig into from there. So I'm going to start off with the least sexy part of research, but something that I also very much enjoy, which is our methodology. It has to be statistically significant.

Mordy Oberstein:

You're speaking my language because-

Jillian Ryan:

We love a methodology.

Mordy Oberstein:

We do, and we don't. The real people do. Right? And it's such a good on your brand for doing this because when you read, I don't know, a research paper, like a PhD paper, the first thing they do is talk about the limitations and the methodology, right?

Jillian Ryan:

Oh, yeah.

Mordy Oberstein:

When you read a marketing study, it's usually not there at all, but it needs to be there. So big clap and big kudos, methodology all the way.

Jillian Ryan:

Mordy is clapping.

Okay.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm going to clap for so many things today.

Jillian Ryan:

I'll jump into methodology and then I'll cruise through some data points, and we can see where the road takes us.

So part of what I'll be talking about today is this report that we just produced in conjunction with Ipsos. So we partnered with a super reputable market insights market research firm because we care. We want to make sure that the insights are sound and that they're rooted in data backed and trusted sources. And so we surveyed 2000 plus mid-market marketers, eCommerce marketers specifically, and we define mid-market as 10 to 500 employees in terms of company size, and it's a super global survey, which we were really intentional about. So we surveyed US marketers, UK marketers, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Nordics, and Benelux as well. That was all part of our sample.

And what we were really hoping to understand from this survey was actually what you were just talking about, Mordy, what was the channel mix? How is it evolving? Which channels are helping marketers grow? Which are helping them drive revenue? And so what we did was, first of all, understand the performance of each of these marketers, and we came up with three different cohorts from this sample of 2000 plus. And so we have what are called baseline marketers. That's like 52% of marketers, so just over half, and they're marketers that are doing a decent job. They're not failing. They achieve steady, consistent results. They're using standard marketing practices that are widely accepted, but they're not seeing any outsized gains either.

So those that are seeing outsized gains are performance obsessed marketers, that's what we call them, 48% of the sample. And basically what that means is on at least one of four metrics, so that's revenue, channel engagement, lifetime value, and their list health, their list size, they grew by 16% or more year over year.

And then a super, super special group within the performance obsessed are our revenue leaders, so 25% of the total sample, and they grew their revenue by 16% or more annually, which is we could all aspire, right? It's a really good North Star to look towards. And what we tried to do is really understand what are revenue leaders doing that the baseline isn't doing? What are they doing that's different from the total to really provide hello, a blueprint, pun intended, for driving revenue?

And then we came up with four revenue pillars, and one of those revenue pillars was email. But also in our evaluation of email, that's where we tried to dig deeper into what is the channel mix and what are the channels that work alongside email. Email, obviously we're Mailchimp, we know email works, it performs. When we look at channels used to generate revenue from the total sample, 85% of all marketers, 84% of all marketers are using email to generate awareness and drive purchases, so email is a tried and true tool, but it doesn't work on its own. It needs other channels to support it, to help drive people in your audience into your ecosystem. And so we also looked at social media websites, digital ads, and of course search here as well. And I do have some interesting stacks on search, but I'll pause there because I've talked a lot.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, after the commercial break.

Jillian Ryan:

After the commercial break, yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

Digital commercial break for the record.

Jillian Ryan:

No, I know, I know. But I wanted to know if there was anything in there you wanted to dig into, or I can keep rattling. You let me know.

Mordy Oberstein:

First off, that's really interesting to see. First off, I want to tell the audience, that amount of growth is few and far between as the data you just said says, so make sure you have adequate expectations and do what Jillian's telling you to do, which basically is like take what they're looking, at what they're doing, look at that as a North Star, as a blueprint, but the fact that you haven't achieved that does not make you a failure.

Jillian Ryan:

A hundred percent. Yeah. Revenue leaders are what you should aspire to be, but a baseline marketer is not, they're not underperforming. They're still growing. They're just not growing at that same velocity and that same trajectory.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. I mean, look, not everybody's Michael Jordan throwing sports ball for a quick second. Patrick Ewing, that's also fine. I'm going nineties sports ball because I'm an old person. Okay, now we can get into the search data because I am, color me intrigued, to hear what happened.

Jillian Ryan:

Yeah, well, there's a lot here. And I'll start off with, we did ask total marketers, so as search becomes less utilized because of a lot of the headwinds that I know that you guys talk about on the show all the time. We know that search is changing and evolving, and as search becomes less utilized what does that mean for email? And 59% of total marketers, so everybody in the survey, said that as that happens with search, email is still remaining a necessary channel for customer engagement, and it was slightly higher for those revenue leaders. So the revenue leaders that are crushing it on revenue, we even had a higher response rate at 61.2%.

Mordy Oberstein:

Wow.

Jillian Ryan:

We also asked some questions about how AI is changing the search landscape too, and there were a few interesting things here. So one of the things we asked was what marketers thought about the impact of AI being used as an alternative to search? So consumers basically going to a ChatGPT, a bar, what have you, to search rather than traditional Google. And then of course Google's new search features where the AI-

Mordy Oberstein:

AIOs.

Jillian Ryan:

... responses are at the top. And basically what are all these changes in search mean for your SEO strategy, for your search strategy? Is there still value there? And it was really interesting, the results were actually split. So 46% said that AI search would make their SEO less valuable, so a little less than half, whereas 54% said that actually it would have no impact. And I think that's really interesting to see. I mean, again, it's not exactly 50/50 but roughly half. It's kind of a divided issue right now and a little bit of a wait and see as we continue to see the rippling impacts of this.

And then one other piece about AI, 41% of marketers said that changes in search usage will have no impact in how they use email to engage with customers. So again, less than half, that still means that 59% are saying that changes in search usage will change how they use email. So I think it just shows that there's a strong interconnection between how these two channels work in concert, how they orchestrate together, and as there are changes in that search landscape, really not just thinking about search and how you optimize that channel, but how you look at your larger mix to make sure that if search is diminishing or search is changing, that you still have a strategy in place with your other channels to insulate that, right?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Okay. There's so many points.

Jillian Ryan:

I know. There's a lot here.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm going to SEO nerd for a quick second. So one is the numbers that you said, but that's split. Let's call it like a 50/50 split. Makes so much sense to me. One, it's kind of what I feel I hear going on out there. It's kind of what I've seen. I have certain websites where they have a lot of AI overviews, their links are showing in a lot of AI overviews, and there's been no change. On that, I recently did a study with Semrush showing how inconsistent the URL placement can be inside of an AI overview. So you might have the link, but the data in aggregated all depends on the keyword and of course on the domain, that URL gets swapped out really often. Google's changing those URLs, so they're not very consistent.

We don't know, by the way, what the CTR is on the AI overview. So the user sees the AI generated answer, it sees the summary, it sees a bunch of links, and Google is doing a better job of showing those links, but no one's put out, it was so interesting, no one's put out data in on the CTR in the SEO space. Are users actually clicking? Are they reading? Are they bypassing going to their organic results? And I think that's where that 50/50 split comes in because I see sites where they have the AI overviews, nothing's changed, meaning in those cases, most likely what's happening is the user is either before there was a direct answer or a feature snippet and the behavior's not changing. Just like before, they're either reading the answer and being satisfied with that direct answer and moving on, or they're still going for the click, despite there being a direct answer of some sort, in this case, an AI overview, on the results page, fine.

The next point is the chicken and the egg point which I really want to hash out with you because SEOs will be like, "Oh, okay, yeah, you need an email." A conversation again, I've seen so many times recently. "You need an email marketing list. You need to own your audience. You can't rely on the algorithms." But the problem is, and this is where here's the rub, you can't magically generate an email list. You need to somehow pull the users in, user, people, in to wherever they can sign up for that email. Let's say it's a newsletter.

Jillian Ryan:

Yep.

Mordy Oberstein:

That has to happen somewhere. And that's where I wonder where search just changed the landscape because if you were getting X number of visitors coming in from search, and you were able to funnel them to sign up for, say, your newsletter, if that's not happening anymore to the same extent, that does impact your ability to email market, and it might mean you need to do other activities to supplement that.

Jillian Ryan:

Yeah. First of all, love everything that you just shared and the fact that there is no click-through rate on those AIO reviews is startling, and it probably is why we're seeing such a split with the uncertainty. So love that you mentioned that.

As for your other point, search is still important. It is that primary channel. It's designed to capture that audience intention. It's when there's that interest. Intent is at a peak in that moment. You have someone that's coming to find out information that you have, but there are other channels that can also do that.

And so in our survey we did find that actually, more so than search, that social media, websites, and digital ads are being used to both generate awareness and drive purchases, so those are other channels in the mix that well, your website is where you're trying to drive them of course, but your organic social and your paid ads in conjunction with organic search and paid search are all these, and people can't see my hands, but I'm showing how all these channels are coming back to the center. Yeah, they're coming back to the center, which is right, your website, you're owned and operated. And then of course on your website, that's where it needs to be optimized, and you need to have that opt-in form. What is the offer, what is the value add, what is the incentive, and how are you getting folks to sign up for that permission? Email is so important because it's permission based. You have your hand up. What are your thoughts?

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, okay. I wanted to get your thought on something that I have always been in the opinion of, but I'm not an email marketing guru. Search is interesting, or I'm not an email marketing ninja, I'm not either or of those things, not on my LinkedIn bio.

Jillian Ryan:

Neither am I.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh. You're not an email marketing ninja and or guru on your email on your LinkedIn?

Jillian Ryan:

Not my LinkedIn. No, I mean, but I am a thought leader, so there you have it.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay, I'll take that. I'll take that over ninja any day of the week.

So one of the things that's interesting about search is that it's random to a certain extent. I'm Googling, how do I stay updated on the New York Yankees? Always go to sports. And someone's website shows up, and I click on the website, and they happen to have a newsletter. I never, in a lot of cases, I'm not talking about where you purposely click because you know that brand, you're familiar with that brand, and that's why you clicked on them maybe even because if they rank lower than some of the other results because that is a thing. I'm talking about it's a discovery search.

It's the first time you've seen that website. You never intended to find them. I feel like the chances of you signing up for, let's say, their newsletter are very slim as opposed to social or as opposed to, let's say, display where you're on a certain publication, you've seen their ads a gazillion times, you know who they are, they're a player in this space. You click, you show up, you get what you want. Oh, they have an email, a list, or a newsletter or whatever it is. I'm signing up. Or they're running a webinar that requires a sign up. I would like to do their webinar. Whatever it is. I feel those other channels are way better than search and getting email signups.

Jillian Ryan:

Okay, I love this. There's a lot there. I think first of all, you are spot on, but not every search is like surging with intent. Some of them are, some of are people that are ready to buy, but search is also a mechanism to drive people to your site, to build brand awareness, build brand affinity, start a relationship, try to capitalize on really creating that lasting bond. And so while of course you want to provide an opportunity with a pop-up form or with that offer, it should also be fair value. You can't just gate everything in hopes to getting an email address, right? It's like you need to be providing something that offers incentive and that builds trust. And that could be, I mean there's a lot of different things. It could be a coupon code, it could be a really, really meaty piece of content that's going to add value and opportunity to attend an event that has some sort of appeal that will help your audience.

So there are ways to do that, but in some cases it's okay, and I feel like the marketing gods are not going to like this, but it's okay if they came, they learned, they now kind of know you, and they didn't know you before, and then they leave, and you can't track that. And that's also what's really complicated. But now you're creating mental availability. Now you're in their head, and there's, in another piece of thought leadership that we produce, which is called How to Grow Your brand, and it's a report that features chapters authored by some of the leading minds in marketing, people way smarter than me.

But one of the things we talk about is the 95/5 rule, which is essentially that 95% of your target market at any given moment is not in market, is not ready to buy. 5% is, but that 5% isn't static, it's dynamic. People come in and out of that 5% when they're super ready to buy. And so you need to be building that mental availability, building your brand, creating resonance with that 95% because when they move to that 5%, when they're ready to buy, you're on their short list, which is when they'll come back to search and be like, "Oh, I remember that skin care brand." And they'll search it into the search bar. Hopefully you're in the top of the search results or the AI overview if you've done your job. And then that is when you'll get that opt-in, and I see you reacting, which I love. So what do you think?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yes, this is great. I love everything you're saying. One of the things that's super interesting is maybe they'll do a search, and they'll actually search with your brand, which by the way, full SEO geek, Mark Williams Cook, former guest of the show recently did a talk where he actually found a vulnerability or an exploitation in Google, and they actually paid him for the exploitation. Oh, yeah, he got paid $13,000 to report this to them because it's an actual real thing. And one of the things he was saying is one of the things he found within this whole vulnerability that he discovered because he runs Also Asked, which is a people also ask data pull tool, which is a great tool by the way, I'm not even pitching it, I literally use it all the time, is that Google, part of their quality scoring is doing branded searches. So are people searching for your brand? Are they searching Nike shoes, or Nike sneakers, whatever it is.

That doesn't happen. I want to go, I'm talking to the SEOs now, and I'm talking about you trying to get that. That doesn't happen in a vacuum. That happens after a long time of building up that brand. So let's just run it through for a second. You have a nice big social account, you have a lot of engagement. Maybe they follow you, maybe they didn't follow you, but they saw you, whatever it is, and they discovered your website, they discovered your content, and now they sign up for your newsletter, or they sign up for your emails to come to your monthly webinar, whatever it's that you're doing, and they get that email in that whatever it is in that inbox, once a month, weekly, whatever it may be, and you build up that connection over time, over a month, over whatever it is, that's when, when they come into market, because they've seen your newsletter or your webinars, and you've been in their inbox time and time again, and you've provided value each time you're in the inbox, that's when they search your brand plus your service or your product.

And that's why I feel email marketing is so powerful for search right now going forward because it's going to drive those overall brand signals that Google's going to look at to rank you higher, which in this case, by the way, they're doing a branded search, so hopefully you rank, but then hopefully it'll help you rank when they're not doing a branded search, they're just searching for sneakers, and you show up.

Jillian Ryan:

I mean, once they do the branded search, I feel like that's a critical win for marketers. It means that your brand awareness is working, right? There's something that you said too about once you get that opt in, and I think from the research that I've done just being in the space I think, I mentioned permission before, and I think permission is super important because email and SMS honestly are permission based channels, which means you've gotten that opt in, someone has put their hand up and said, "I want you to send me stuff." That's wild. As a channel, that's, I think, a superpower, right? It also allows you to then own that audience. And owning the audience means that you can be an architect, right, for how your customer data gets applied, how you understand your customer and how that delivers value and how you can optimize that over time.

It's access, right? It's not just access to the inbox to send a well-timed, a personalized and automated, I mean, we could dive into all that stuff, but might be another episode, right? Email that adds value, and you get your open, you get your click, and hopefully you get your cart complete, right? You want all those things, but email is so powerful because you also get to learn every time they didn't open. Who didn't open? Why didn't they open? They didn't click, or the click-through rate was really high, it was really low. There's the ability to just have this window into your different audience segments in a way that no channel can do because it's not a wall garden. You're not looking at your social media metrics and limited to what you can see. You could really dig deep into the data.

And what that does is it really allows you to then tailor and personalize your marketing over time based on that performance, and it helps you AB test, it helps you multi-variant test in order to continue to learn down the line what is going to convert and what isn't, and I think that is super powerful when it comes to email marketing.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's super powerful. I mean, you're basically learning what resonates and what doesn't resonate. And that should impact, by the way, your SEO strategy of what keywords you do and you don't target because you should target keywords that resonate and not keywords that don't resonate just because they have a high search volume. I want to pivot a little bit as time rolls away from us quickly, but I feel like we're talking about looking ahead at 2025, and we barely talked about 2025. What do you think comes into focus, if I'm an SEO, and I'm trying to leverage other channels, I'm trying to leverage email marketing, what comes for you? What comes into focus heading into the crux or the core of 2025?

Jillian Ryan:

That's a great question. I will actually, I think, push back a little bit on what you just said. I think everything we just talked about, even though it's current state, is incredibly applicable to '25. And something that I like to think about with our thought leadership is that we're talking about, there's a different maturity level of marketers, and I think everything that we just said, as you are looking, and by your, I mean our audience right now, as you're looking ahead to '25, if there's anything that we just talked about that you're like, "Oh, wow, we're not doing that." Tune up time. New year, new me. This is your time to assess, "Okay, what are the things that we're missing?" So I feel like a lot of what we talked about can be future look, future thinking.

And I think the other thing is just when we think about AI on a whole, right, making sure that you're staying ahead of the curve on what AI can do for you. And we dive deep into this in the revenue blueprint report. We have a whole section on AI. And to me, I think gen AI is the hype. Everybody's talking about it. It's the "newer" piece of it, but analytical AI, predictive AI, the other side of it is also very, very important, and that could help you as you measure your email performance, as you measure your search performance. It helps you across all channels. And what we're seeing is that revenue leaders on a whole, the ones that are most successful, are using both of those types of AI in tandem with each other. And I think assessing across your marketing value chain and your channel mix, what the opportunity is to implement AI into your workflows, into how you analyze customer data and search performance data is very, very important.

And the final piece of that is that I think sometimes as marketers, it's easy to get lured and like, "Oh, AI can do it for me." And yes, AI can be done for you, but human intervention cannot be like I cannot state how important that is. You need to be working with AI as your assistant and think about the ways that it can help you for efficiency's sake, to better understand your customers. And the other piece of this is that if you're not doing that, there is a marketer that is, and you are behind them, and that should be the real impetus to embrace it, so those are my thoughts.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's a great, first off, you could have said IBID, right? Oh, I already covered that. By the way, I do in Google Docs, which is a horrible habit, I'll put in if my comment is the same comment as before, no one knows what this word means. I just write IBID. It just means I see the previous note, whatever. I just do that because I know no one knows what it actually is, and I get a kick out of it.

But the other point about using AI in the data is such a great imagine, okay, you're running your email marketing campaigns, you're overwhelmed with this data. You have spreadsheets of data, endless number of tag, ask the AI to help you with that. Ask the AI to pull out what are the data points I should be focused on here? What are the biggest discrepancies? Where are the biggest trends? Etc., etc., etc. And that's a great way outside of using AI to generate content, using AI to help you understand data, pull out data, make the data more translatable, make it more digestible for you, is a great way to leverage the power of AI in 2025.

Jillian Ryan:

And even further than that, yes, really, really great point. But the other piece of it too is we alluded at the lightest level to segmentation and personalization, which is baked into our platform, and that's where we see the marketers that are using those more personalized and targeted emails, see higher click-through rates, higher open rates, and so AI can also help you, I want to send campaigns to predicted segments, right? I want to send campaigns to lookalikes that look like this. And so AI can also be used as a tool to help you figure out who you're sending emails to and the days of blast messages, I know some marketers are still doing it. That is not going to serve your list health over time. It's going to impact your deliverability, and making sure that you're targeted and tailored is very important, and it's no longer something that needs to be purely manual. And so I think that's where AI can come in to help you do it more efficiently, help you do it in a more tailored fashion, and that's something that we're really excited about.

Mordy Oberstein:

That is super exciting, and this is a little by the way, for an SEO, what you're doing with your actual SEO strategy. And with that, I'm not going to ask where people could email you because that's just stupid, but if people are looking for some more help from you and want to pick your brain a little bit, where maybe on social could they find you?

Jillian Ryan:

Oh my gosh. First of all, love that. I am on LinkedIn. Come and find me. Jillian Ryan. As Mordy mentioned, Senior Manager of Content Marketing Strategy Intuit Mailchimp, and the other piece is that I'm very proud of this work, and so I am constantly touting it. I want to make sure that I'm unpacking these insights from the report and putting it into bite-sized pieces for social, so I do tend to share this research because I want it to get out there. I think there's so much that we're producing that adds value, and so always making sure to have those derivative little pieces out there on LinkedIn. Give me a follow.

Mordy Oberstein:

Absolutely. Make sure link in the show notes. Also link to the Wix Studio, Wix MailChimp integration in the show notes as well. Jillian, thank you so much for coming on our show. One of my favorite conversations because I feel like it's so important for SEOs to understand how to leverage channels beyond search, and then also not just build up that list because it's a little bit more complicated than that.

Jillian Ryan:

Yeah, no, an absolute pleasure. And for us on the MailChimp side, email is an important part of the mix, but you need to be thinking about your website visitors and how you're going to capture them, and you need to be thinking about all the channels that drive that owned and operated. So always good to come out of the email world and think about how we're interconnected because siloed channels are not going to work. It's an integrated ecosystem, right? And so excited to just scratch the surface, let's be honest, on all of the potential there.

Mordy Oberstein:

Email and search, digital BFFs forever.

Jillian Ryan:

Totally.

Mordy Oberstein:

Thanks so much, Jillian.

Jillian Ryan:

Pleasure.

Mordy Oberstein:

Bye.

Thanks again, Jillian. Make sure you follow Jillian on social media and check out all the amazing studies that she's doing.

Now, did you know something, Crystal?

Crystal Carter:

What?

Mordy Oberstein:

Bet you didn't know this. Barry has a newsletter.

Crystal Carter:

Does he?

Mordy Oberstein:

He does, and it gets into my inbox every day, but I've already read everything he puts out before I get the newsletter.

Crystal Carter:

Right, because you also get a news digest from him before we do. It's new.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's right. I do get an email from Barry with what's coming on SE Roundtable that day, so we can do our daily news series. It's new with him. So wow, the power of email right there.

Crystal Carter:

Super useful for disseminating information and making sure that everyone knows about your content just as it's ready to go out.

Mordy Oberstein:

Just as useful as Barry Schwartz himself as we transition into The Snappy News, most likely from Barry Schwartz.

Snappy News, Snappy News, Snappy News. I'm covering one article, or one story rather, from multiple sources. This has been a bonkers news story, and I'm going to say the outset, a little bit of a hot take. I think y'all SEOs are getting this whole story wrong. Not the people covering the story. I think you're kind of okay. Anywho, let's start off with Barry Schwartz over our Search Engine Roundtable, who I believe, as usual was the first one to break this news.

Is Google blocking SEO rank checking tools as search volatility continues? I don't know why I read the title that way. This, what happened was Barry saw a tweet, I believe, from Ziptie's CEO and Founder, Ziptie tracks AI overview saying, "Oh boy, something broke." In a nutshell. Gun Gabe chimed in on it. There was a whole conversation. Then Barry says, "This seems to be a wider issue with other tracking tools too." Uh-oh, and there's all board of chatter. What's going on? Yada, yada, yada, yada, yada as Barry would like to say.

Then over on Search Engine Journal, Roger Mangiro confirmed Google is requiring JavaScript to block SEO tools. So what happened was this came out through an email, I believe, from a Google person, either to someone at TechCrunch, yeah, an email to TechCrunch, where they basically said, "Enabling JavaScript allows us to better protect our services and users from bots and evolving forms of abuse and spam." The spokesperson told TechCrunch, "And to provide the most relevant and up-to-date information."

Then on Search Engine Land, Denny Goodwin covered Google versus SEO tools, why your SEO data might be missing. You can find it on a milk carton. No, just kidding. You can find this probably back already in most cases. He goes through the various tools, a similar way I've issued a statement saying, "Oh my gosh, there was a major change that happened, bigger than the disruption of 2018." I will talk about 2018 in a second because I was working for Rank Ranger in 2018 when that happened, so I know exactly what they're talking about, and it goes through all the various tools. HREFs and Semrush say nothing on their side. Systrix says nothing on their side and so forth.

Let me decipher this a little bit. And what I'm saying here is a little bit my opinion, a lot of bit really good opinion, some of it anecdotal and speculative, but hey, it's my show, so I'm going to say what I think. I'm going to say something a little bit controversial first. Not all SEO tools are created equal, and I'm saying this having worked at multiple SEO tools for multiple SEO providers, partnering with multiple SEO tools in the past. They're not all created equal, and I'm not saying that based on, "Oh, this tool is better than that tool. They have this feature. That tool doesn't have that feature. The UI and UX is way better in this tool than that." I'm talking about the infra, the infrastructure used to pull and then disseminate the data, not all tools are equal.

It is a simple fact. I'm not putting anyone down. It's a very complicated, hard and expensive thing to do, and certain tools have a certain infrastructure, certain tools have a different infrastructure. Certain tools are more vulnerable for X, certain tools are more vulnerable for Y. What I think happened was is that there was a whoops, shift, certain tools, and I'll say this goes on, I was at Rank Ranger in 2018 when the CCTLD wreaked havoc on the SEO tools because it changed the way that the SEO tools were able to access data centers, local data centers. Okay? We made a quick shift at the time, within a day or two even, I think even less, a couple of hours, data for the most part in most geos was fine in a few hours. It took other tools days to figure that out.

I think what happened here, if I'm reading the room, and I'm reading what the tools are saying, and I'm reading what I'm seeing happening is certain tools had really strong infrastructure. They saw the, oops, something shifted, press the button, fixed. Other tools had to, and are still at the time of this recording, having to make real infrastructure changes that are not so easy and that are really complicated. Other tools, this is me being speculative, have figured out a quick patch, but I think realize, "Oh no, we're going to need to significantly change our processes going forward in order to keep that working for the long term." That's one issue I want to address that I don't think the SEO community fully understands.

The second one is that I think this has nothing to do with SEO tools whatsoever. So back in the day, SEO tools were very worried about scraping because it's technically against Google's guidelines. Google over the years, through various statements from various Googlers, something we pay very careful attention to at an SEO tool, is there stance tremendously. I think Google, this is my personal take, is completely fine with SEO tool scraping. They get it. It is what it is. This is the world that we live in. This is fine. This, this change, this change is about LLMs. To me, this change is about Google saying, "Hey, perplexity or hey, open AI, we do not want to let your AI bots know what's on our pages, be able to pull big data. We want to keep a competitive advantage. We want to keep you and your bots out of our ecosystem."

I can make a joke, a Will Smith joke, but I won't. So again, I think there's a misconception about the tools themselves, and I think there's a bigger misconception about what Google is doing here. I very much believe, and I could be completely wrong, because again, it's my opinion, this has nothing to do with SEO tools and everything to do with Google's AI advantage or trying to maintain or keep or even find an AI advantage, and that's this week's not so snappy, I took a long time doing this, SEO news.

Again, make sure you sign up for our newsletter and also get Barry's newsletter.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, I mean newsletters can be really, really good. There was one I used to subscribe to the Inhabitat newsletter, which was one of my favorite ones. It was all environmental stuff and things like that, and I remember when the Highline opened years ago, this is how long ago that was, when the Highline opened, my friend was like, "Oh, we're going to go check out this thing called the Highline." I was like, "I know all about that because I've been following it on this newsletter and the whole development of the whole thing." And I was so excited, and let me tell you something, Mordy, I walked on the grass on the Highline when it opened, and I remember being there and being like, "This grass is going to be cordoned off in no matter of about six months, so I'm going to walk on the grass while I still can, while it's still legal." So I did. I put my feet on that grass. It was delightful.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, by the way, there's nothing like having your feet on a good set of grass just like there's nothing like following some great folks across social media to get some more information. Yeah?

Crystal Carter:

Yes, yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

Love that pivot, right? Yeah. Patting back for the pivot. This week, a very special set of follow weeks for you. This comes from Jillian herself. These are some folks over at the MailChimp Intuit team that you should be following across social media. First up for you is Jim Ruddle, who's the Regional Director at Intuit MailChimp of their EMEA audience. Link in the show notes. Then Anthony Capano, who's their Regional Director in Australia and New Zealand over Intuit MailChimp, and last but not least, it's a three-fer on this episode of SERP's Up, Michelle Tate, who is the Global Chief Marketing Officer over Intuit MailChimp. Make sure you follow all of them across social media for more information about how to build up that marketing strategy, particularly in your email side. Links of course in the show notes.

Crystal Carter:

Yes, and I met a few folks from the MailChimp team now, the Intuit MailChimp team, and they're so awesome. I also met Zelinka Phillips for the UK team, and she's great as well. So yeah, shout out to the folks over at Mailchimp to keep you updated with all the cool stuff that they're doing.

Mordy Oberstein:

There's a lot of great folks over on their team. Crystal, I'll email you later with some other people.

Crystal Carter:

Looking forward to it. I will subscribe.

Mordy Oberstein:

Look in your spam folder, where sometimes I belong.

Crystal Carter:

But only with ketchup.

Mordy Oberstein:

I don't eat spam, but I get the joke. Is it good with ketchup?

Crystal Carter:

I don't know. I don't eat it anymore, but I used to eat spam musubis when I lived in Hawaii. They're delicacies. Spam musubis are delicious. It's like a salty deliciousness.

Mordy Oberstein:

The more you know on the SERP's Up Podcast, which will do it for us this week. Thanks for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? Not to worry. We're back next week in the new episode as we dive into, "Hey, SEO and digital marketers, here's how you can negotiate your next salary." Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix studio SEO Learning Hub over at wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO, check out all the great content of webinars and our SEO course over on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, say it again, Wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or a rating on Spotify. Until next time, peace, love, and SEO.