Google Perspectives with Garrett Sussman
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Show notes
In this week's episode, Jack Chambers-Ward is joined by Garrett Sussman, Demand Generation Manager at iPullRank and host of Rankable and The SEO Weekly.
Part one of this two-part podcast crossover spectacular:
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Transcript:
Jack: Welcome to Episode 76 of Season 2 of the Search With Candour podcast. I am your host for this week, Jack Chambers-Ward, and coming up on this episode is Part 2 of my conversation with Garrett Sussman from the Rankable podcast. That's right. We had a Part 1 on the Rankable podcast on Wednesday last week, and this is Part 2 of Garrett and I teaming up for a super mega podcast crossover. We're going to be talking all about Google Perspectives and I'm going to deep dive into Garrett's firsthand knowledge of Google Perspectives because it's only available in the US so I thought I'd recruit somebody based in the US so I could have a conversation with them and understand how a professional SEO feels about Perspectives. Stay tuned for that coming up in a couple of minutes.
SISTRIX - SectorWatch:
Search With Candour is of course supported by the wonderful SISTRIX. They're known as the SEO's Toolbox and you can go to sistrix.com/swc and check out some fantastic free tools such as an Hreflang validator, a Google Update Radar, and checking your site's visibility index. Like I said, go to sistrix.com/swc, you get all those fantastic free tools and you can also give the full premium service a free trial as well.
We've covered it a couple of times already on the show, but I really want to dive back into the most recent SectorWatch from the fantastic Charlie Williams, one of the data journalists over at SISTRIX and talk about TVs. We've talked about the due content, basically the transactional content stuff and why Curry's was doing so, so well. Now let's talk about the no content or the informational content. And for me, this is a surprise and Charlie brings this up as well actually. RTINGS is the site that comes up most prevalently and has the most visibility for informational content around TVs and types of TVs and all that kind of stuff. I'd never heard of RTINGS. I asked Mark as well. He'd also never heard of RTINGS. They're a Canadian company.
They have actually surged invisibility over the last few years and apparently a Canadian site is one of the definitive voices in organic search for TV knowledge and resources, essentially. It ranks for over 81% of the no intent keywords that have been analyzed and is on page one for over 59% of those keywords as well. In particular, it's their reviews directory, so /TV/reviews that Charlie really picked out and noticed. And if you're looking to do product reviews and you are really trying to think about how you can best answer a lot of the product review update things that have happened recently, thinking about being objective, doing pros and cons, all that kind of stuff, this is a brilliant example of this and this is why I wanted to highlight it so much.
It fulfills most of the criteria Google are looking for. They have they have named authors. They named the best overall TV, different types of TVs, home theater, best range for different price points, so comparing budget TVs to more expensive ones and what's the best budget, what's the best mid range, all that kind of stuff. There's loads of links. It's a hub of links, which I always like to say. You know how I am about internal linking, linking to alternative roundups, talking about smart TVs and gaming TVs and all kinds of stuff and essentially, it does it all. For a site I'd never heard of, they really seem to know their stuff and I'm very, very impressed by RTINGS and what they're creating here.
So rtings.com, that is rtings.com/tv/reviews is a fantastic content hub to go and check out one of the best sort of arrangement of project reviews and they have excellent schema across the board as well. All of the structured data for those products, for those reviews, is all marked up very, very well. The headings and titles are kept fresh and updated, so they do like “Spring 2023 update” because they've only just recently updated it as well. Building in that freshness, building in the expertise, the authoritativeness, and building up that trustworthiness overall as well. They're doing everything right. I think it's a really, really good example to go and check out if you're thinking of doing product and service reviews on your site. You could go much further wrong than checking out our rtings.com and checking out Charlie's breakdown on sistrix.com/blog.
Google Perspectives with Garrett Sussman
And my guest for this week on Search With Candour, he is the host of the Rankable podcast, which we'll be talking about in a moment because this is a Part 2 folks. He's also the host of the SEO Weekly video series and the Demand Generation Manager over at iPullRank. The one, the only, Garrett Sussman, welcome to Search With Candour.
Garrett: Jack, thank you so much for having me, sir. I can't wait. I love, love, love, love, love, love this show.
Jack: Thank you. We've just spent about half an hour already talking with each other, so we are fully warmed up. This is, in fact, part two of our conversation. You can hear me on last week's Rankable podcast and you can go and check it out on YouTube as well, right Garrett? You can get the video content, get the audio content, come and see our lovely faces talking all about biases in search and we're basically following up that topic this week by talking about Google Perspectives, which I teased a couple of times. I couldn't help myself just doing a little bit of a tease on the previous section, previous segment of this overall double podcast experience. So let's dive in, shall we? How have you found Google Perspectives? I heard you've been doing a bit of research, you've been poking around, you are based in the US so you can get away with experimenting and stuff. I have tried with a VPN a couple of times and managed to get it once, so I am very intrigued to really pick your brain and get an idea of the things you've experienced so far. So let's start with a really broad, how has your experiments and research been so far?
Garrett: So it's funny, to tie back into last episode we were talking about Google biases. Another privilege, we were talking about how the English language is a privilege. Being in the US with Google experiments, there are so many experiments that we get access to first, which isn't fair, but to your point, it is fun to be able to dive in. Same with the AI Snapshot and SGE First. Although, I think that's being rolled out across the world. Perspectives, so a little context for those who aren't familiar. When you are searching for something on Google, there's a range of different pills, filters that you can choose from. I think most people are familiar with this Images. Anytime you want just image results, you can click on the Images pill and see just images. There's one for news, there's one for finance. And so, Perspectives is a filter that you can click on for most of most queries that tries to source specific experiential content and it's mostly pulling from social media like TikTok, Tweets, it pulls from YouTube videos and then it pulls from community forums like Reddit and Quora. And the goal here is we know Google is obsessed with their whole E-E-A-T signals trying to establish experience, expertise, authoritative, and trustworthiness. The expertise and authoritative and trustworthiness doesn't always capture the actual personal experience. And so, I think that's the goal of Perspectives. It's a cool feature right now. I don't know if it's met my expectations as being a game changer. I feel like when I look into it, it's almost like Google Discover, it doesn't feel like there's a rhyme or reason.
Jack: For those people who don't know Discover exists, I explained the concept of Discover to my wife literally two months ago and she's like, "I have never heard of this in my life." Great, all this content, all these people are creating online. I'm optimizing for Discover to an audience of six people.
Garrett: Well that's the thing. I mean, dude, even SEOs are confused. I remember a couple years ago or a year or so ago, I was using Discover and I was like, "Oh, I've noticed this in the Google app that's different from Search." And people are like, "That's a completely different engine, a different environment." I was like, "Oh." But then you hear someone like Lily Ray talk about clients who have millions of organic visits from Discovery. You're like, "Okay, well maybe I should not completely ignore that." And I wonder to what extent Perspectives is like that. So Perspectives, I wonder if people are going to use it. Semrush actually did a 2022 study where they looked at the whole zero click phenomenon, zero click or click clicking on organics or clicking on ads or clicking on Google navigational features and they found that only 10% of clicks are navigational features and 9% of those are the Image filter that I was talking about. So I wonder to what extent Perspectives is actually going to be something that people search out unless it's thrown into their feed, which sometimes it does show up as a carousel, but it's not a passive feature at this point.
Jack: Yeah, I'm fascinated to see what Google do with Perspectives, literally in terms of how they lay it out on the SERP. You mentioned the pills at the top there. They vary from search to search, they vary from query to query, they vary from language to language and country to country as well. Something we were talking about on the episode of Rankable from Wednesday just gone was the fact that how much a search query can change the way you interact with a SERP and what Google is serving to you. I've just done a search for ‘best podcasts’ here just to see what comes up. News is one that comes up. Surprise, surprise. I think we're all familiar with News. You were totally right, the Images are the most common and then News. Videos, yeah, sure, I see Videos a lot. You want to see video content, the equivalent of images. The next four or five are ones I've never heard of and didn't know were an option and seemed very, very tailored to the podcast search. On Spotify, is the third pill along. Then Self-help, Comedy, All time. Then Images is number seven in that row. Then Informative and then Storytelling. What a weird mix of sub keyword filtering ability there of, "Oh yeah, I'm specifically looking for self-help podcasts because I want best podcasts." I didn't put any genre, I didn't put any caveats, anything extra. I find that fascinating that that's what that's come up with. Where do you think Perspectives will settle on the SERP? Do you think it will be the future of Search, as a lot of people are predicting where it's going to take over the SERP and it's going to be the main thing that people do, or do you think it's just going to be relegated on slot seven of 10 pills across the bottom of the search bar or somewhere in the middle? Does it hover in a Discovery way where some people really do use it and some people don't?
Garrett: I wanted it to be. I was as bullish as most folks where I wanted it to be a game because-
Jack: Burn the SERPs to the ground.
Garrett: So first off, it does seem like it's one of the standards. There are some exceptions where it doesn't show up, but at this point, to your point about the other pills, there's a great deck and a great article by Jean Luca Fiorelli talking about the messy middle and the way we navigate SERPs and how Google is always trying to try to direct us. I mean, you know this with People Also Ask where Google is trying to help you figure out what query you're actually asking because a lot of times people, you either don't know what you don't know or sometimes you're just not great at communicating it. So Google's trying to help you out, whether it's refine your search, expand your search or those pills. Perspectives is really much a staple there. But I think it's, in some ways, Google's attempt to compete with social networks because over the past couple of years you see this criticism that people put a query and then they'll put Reddit the end of it because Google's results aren't good enough and Perspectives, I feel like, is trying to solve that, but it doesn't because, like I said, right now, there's no rhyme or reason to which perspectives are surfaced at the top. It's not just a popularity contest, although through their documentation, Google implies that the amount of views or popularity of a given Reddit's read or of a given YouTube video will shoot to the top, which makes sense, but I feel like it's almost a problematic feature in the first place because algorithmically, how is Google going to decide which perspectives are most important?
Jack: Yeah. That's an interesting thing and there was an article, I think it was Search Engine Journal, might be Search Engine Land, can't remember which one it was, but the title was How to Optimize for Google Perspective and I was like, "What the?" How do we even begin to start thinking about that thing? You're totally right, is that going to be a separate thing? Are there new ranking factors, for want of a better phrase? Is that even a relevant term in that sense? Will it prioritize a Reddit thread over a Tweet or is it depending on freshness? We assume E-E-A-T ties in there, because that is such an integral part of Google's messaging over the last couple of years or so. And now, expanding with the experience specifically, you want that, as we were talking about on Rankable, that non-bias firsthand experience. You want somebody to come in with the pros and the cons, not just Jack's coffee is the best coffee and Garrett's coffee is crap. You want to have that full perspective and I wonder how much of that is going to relate to just the guidelines for product reviews and stuff like that, search rate of guidelines, all that kind of stuff that isn't necessarily directly ranking factors but affects building the trust of the user and things like that. Do you think that's where Perspectives is going? Do you think it leans even more heavily into the E-E-A-T side of things?
Garrett: I think it should and I hope it does, but I think right now what we were discussing in the beginning is I think it's similar to Discover. I think it's one of those things that it is very difficult to optimize for and I think it feels very luck of the draw. I think there's so many factors that could go into it. I know one of the people that you respect and admire, you mentioned on Rankable, Mordy Oberstein, was looking at different results and finding that you would find two YouTube videos from the same content creator in a Perspective and that there are different ages, like a Perspective that was five years ago versus something that's relevant. Now, you can actually use the tools to filter by time, which would be one of the use cases I'd use Perspectives for.
Jack: Yeah, I think a lot of people don't know you can just do that on the SERP. You have the little tools option in the top right, and I know I've done this a lot for link building and stuff to see what publications have mentioned this topic recently in the last 12 months. You can filter your SERP by what has been published over the last year. How many users actually do that is probably astronomically small because it's only going to be basically professional SEOs or those power user type people that, for whatever reason, love interacting with little SERP features and stuff like that. But yeah, I wonder, again, coming around to YouTube ranking factors and things like that, how long you've been around, how regularly you publish, the length of your videos and stuff like that. That ties into, and the examples I've seen is, for want of a better phrase, household names from YouTube, people with millions and millions of subscribers are featured. I have yet to see one where it's just like Jack's coffee reviews because I'm terrible. I don't particularly drink coffee, so you wouldn't want my reviews.
So how do we factor that into our content strategies? I mentioned on Rankable, one of the things I think people need to be doing more of is diversifying their content. Creating video versions of your blog posts and audio versions of your video and all this stuff and making sure you are appearing in multiple places, you're able to be shared in multiple places and also making it accessible for people. Do you think that also benefits you from a Perspectives point of view? So if I take my blog article and also replicate it as a thread on Twitter, now it's on the social media side of things or post it as a thing on Reddit or Quora or whatever, do you think that's going to become a relevant strategy when Perspectives properly rolls out?
Garrett: I hope so. Okay, so future thinking, Google has put a lot of work from, we're familiar with MUM, which is basically the ability to understand different types of modal content, so text, audio, images, video, the idea that Google could understand what's in your video and then use that information potentially to inform Perspectives, then you don't necessarily need to just have the focus of your video be exactly what that query is. Hopefully Google can surface. If you have a long form video, 40 minute webinar, but for just one section you're talking about, and maybe you don't document it well in the description notes, you're talking about what that query is about. That would surface in perspectives. But right now the way that I would approach the filter as an SEO and this is also the curse of being an SEO, we look at search results completely different to the average user.
Jack: Oh, definitely, yeah. You can't turn off that thing in your brain, right?
Garrett: You can't. It's like when you use a product every single day or software, you can't look at it as a product manager and step away. That's why you always need to do audience research. And to that point, I would use, as an SEO, Perspectives as an audience research tool right now. Basically, I would look for the queries that you're trying to target, put on Perspectives and start to look at what is being surfaced. What is Google determining as an important perspective? Yes, it's probably going to be, to some extent, a popularity contest, but you can get those clues of what's surfacing on TikTok, what's surfacing on YouTube. I would actually go to those other platforms and compare and contrast with the same query, which is something that's on my agenda to really test that out.
Jack: Yeah, that's really interesting. I'd love to see the difference. So like you said, take a particular search for Perspectives and then throw that exact same query into TikTok into YouTube, does the same video that is featured, is that also the same thing on the other platform? They have different algorithms. We know a lot about TikTok's algorithm. I know a lot of people have been diving into that. I dived into that in an episode last year with Annie Mae Hodge and we talked about how people are using it as a search engine and coming up fairly soon, I will have Annie Mae back on to talk more about TikTok, so stay tuned for that. But there's different things. There's a whole different strategy when you're coming to YouTube stuff. People do YouTube full time and they have entire teams of people, like I said, these big household names on YouTube, have entire teams of people that are just mapping out AB testing their thumbnails and worrying about page titles and descriptions and stuff like that. I'm sure you've encountered it Garrett, but you mentioned being able to timestamp particular queries and things. I've recently moved house and bought a house and have to do a load of DIY and I'm absolutely terrible at DIY, so like how to fix a leak in a toilet and stuff like that. This particular brand of toilet, this is a cry for help, I have a leak in my toilet. How do I fix this particular brand of leaky toilet flush system? And there were YouTube clips and it specifically, as you said, picks out the timestamp of we believe these 20 seconds of this four and a half minute video are the actual useful information. This will get you the fastest answer as quickly as possible. Granted, that requires things like schema that requires things like creating timestamps and properly bookmarking YouTube videos.
Again, those of you out there, I use YouTube all the time. It's my most used platform for podcasts, long form videos, short-term videos, all that kind of stuff. I'm pretty much always consuming YouTube stuff and I really noticed how many people are now doing that bookmarking system and timestamp system. I've started doing it in the podcast show notes. So if you're listening to this on your podcast app, you should notice in there there will be timestamps in the show description. People do the similar thing on YouTube and you're able to scan through. So there's that argument between do you create a longer form piece of content that answers multiple queries and then bookmark them correctly? Do you also then split it out into individual little clips and make them YouTube shorts and TikTok's and their own little posts and Tweets and stuff? I think it's really interesting you touching on the audience research there because that's another way to find out where your audience are to determine are they searching on TikTok? Are they searching on YouTube? Does that matter? Is it the same voices on both? Is there a whole community on Reddit? You had no idea that is incredibly specific to your entry? Like, "Oh my god, yeah, there's a whole how to fix a toilet flush community on Reddit. R/toiletflush, who knew?"
Garrett: It's such a good Reddit, such a good Reddit.
Jack: Yeah, my favorite is subreddit. But I know Mark has talked about this in content strategies and it's a big reason why we do so well with also, like you said, that People Also Ask data is so useful, you tend to be able to outrank Reddit posts and threads on forums and stuff because I think the generally accepted theory is that Google would rather rank a, for want of a better phrase, a proper website, an actual article written by somebody who knows what they're talking about than a forum thread from Quora or Reddit or any of these other community-based forums. Do you think the shift towards Perspective, and again this is all a big if, if Perspectives becomes a big thing, do you think that affects how that content strategy is being used by people in the classic query of, here is my question and add Reddit on the end of it to get the direct firsthand information? Do you think that shifts firstly, how people search, and then how us, as SEOs, react to that with our content strategy?
Garrett: So I don't think Perspectives will change the way people search. I do think eventually, and this episode isn't about a AI Snapshots in SGE, I do think that will potentially change the way people search, but tying this back to the last episode when we were talking about biases and the way people do search and that affecting the results, we gave the example of Anheuser-Busch with controversial trying to change audiences from a conservative audience to a more general or even, not progressive, but not only a conservative audience. And that the way that people search, the way that they talk will affect those results. That's how I would use Perspectives is think about these two different queries of, I made this example on the other episode too of, is coffee healthy for you versus is it unhealthy for you? And you'll see different results. You can use Perspectives to see these videos, to see these forums of how people are talking about this query and then include that type of language in your content because we do find that Google is continually using what's called the helpful content update to update the SERPs and put experience signals into, not as a ranking factor because I don't want to say any E-E-A-T is specifically a ranking factor, but it does influence whether your content comes off as helpful, which will help you as a topical authority and start to rank higher for a range of different queries that you're targeting. And so, I would say look at that language that's used in the Perspective videos and forums and content for your queries and have that inform the way you speak about what you want to be a topical authority about. Specifically for whatever audience you're targeting.
Jack: I think this is why a two-part podcast crossover works so well because I think Perspectives is almost the other side of the bias discussion because the literal definition of a perspective, I said the word perspective subconsciously on the previous episode because you want to get other people's perspectives about things. You want to get other opinions. You want to, as I was saying, diversify your audience, diversify the people. Me, as a British White guy will not have the same experience as a person of color from somewhere in Europe or a person of color even in the same room as me, will have a different experience. It's location based, it's language based, it's race, it's color, it's religion, it's so many different variables and variants. And getting different perspectives, maybe this is, as you said, this could be the new big audience research tool, basically. Rather than the examples I was giving of literally Tweet and say, "Hey, people who aren't British White guys, how would you feel if I used this language to describe this product or this service?" Going and using Perspectives can literally give us a glimpse into the things, but, and a very big but, it's all based on Google, so you're not guaranteed to get a necessarily diverse range of things. So do you think the responsibility is on Google there to make Perspectives even more diverse than the traditional SERP? Or do you think they're equivalent in that sense? Where does the balance lie, I guess, is the question there?
Garrett: I think it's an impossible question.
Jack: You're welcome, you're welcome. It'd why I'm such a great podcast host.
Garrett: I know, right? Let me think. No, I do think the question is, and we touched on this right at the end of last week's episode, which is the responsibility for social progress and representation and how important that is versus Google's perspective-
Jack: There we go.
Garrett: Is what they're considering-
Jack: We definitely don't need to make a drinking game out of every time you and I mentioned the word perspective over the last two episodes. People would be absolutely hammered.
Garrett: Do not. Do not play that game, but I think Google, they used to have that model of don't be evil, but their goal, the basic goal is to provide the best answer to the query and this leads to this issue of what is best and it's subjective and even if you're trying to provide different perspectives, you're still basically saying what is the best perspective? And that's messed up. So they've put themselves into a hole in the first place because when you're ranking something that's subjective and it's by default, a ranking of what's subjective, you are quantifying and qualifying what you consider as best. And so, I think what's best for society and best for the world is, here I am saying best, is providing different perspectives. I think you shouldn't have the same results every time, and I know that's impossible, but I think the most fair, best result for perspective-
Jack: Have you tried the thing called ChatGPT, Garrett? It gives different results every time you search a thing.
Garrett: I mean, that's fascinating. It is fascinating just how we don't understand large language models of why it's a probability thing. And I'm just having this on the spot, but my honest opinion for Perspectives, and I don't know if this is the case, I haven't seen the exact same answer each time I refresh a query, but by the definition of perspectives and the goal to avoid what's considered the best, it should be different results every time.
Jack: Yeah, because it directly relates to social media. That is something you see. The freshness is the phrase we use a lot when it comes to, as we're saying, the traditional content theory, but how quickly Tweets move and things change on things like TikTok compared to a typical SERP. A lot of SERPs are pretty volatile, don't get me wrong, but if a person of authority Tweets about a thing and you can't get that on your Perspective within a matter of minutes or hours, but that is actually the new definitive subject matter or whatever it is, I agree with you. I think maybe that's the big thing that will separate it from the typical 10 blue links on page one is Perspectives is a way more way up-to-date, way more regularly refreshed option to be like, "Oh, I need the latest updates." Instead of clicking news, you want it from all the different other places and various sources and all that kind of stuff.
If you click Perspectives, maybe you get the freshest content and maybe it's not the best because again, as we're saying, who knows what the best is? But it could be the most recent and the most up to date and maybe that's an argument for shifting that towards really topical searches, really incredibly, in the moment searches, maybe Perspectives could be the way forward for that. I think it's a really interesting idea and I wonder if that is a conscious thing because Google often talk about diversifying the SERPs and making sure the same site doesn't just rank for six out of the 10 slots on Page 1 or whatever, but you do get things like site links, and I think a lot of people, we don't often talk about the literal pixel density of a particular result where, you're on the local Map pack, you're on the Image that's also a image carousel there, and you've also got position one and site links.
You are taking up literal more screen space, more screen awareness for the user than anyone else, and I wonder how Perspectives will shift around that and will it feature Quora or Reddit or Twitter or YouTube or TikTok or any other number of things. Do you think there's an argument there for what I was saying on Rankable is diversifying your content and really focusing it down into let's do everything video content wise and make it as regular and fresh as possible to get it on things like Perspective? But then you also have the chance to rank on the traditional SERP, I guess. So it's two sides of the same coin, right?
Garrett: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, it's interesting in the sense of, I think Perspectives would always be a secondary consideration to the point of it's not something that's going to be easy to optimize for, and if you're creating content for YouTube and TikTok and even Reddit or whatever, you are going to specialize for that platform. I think showing up in Perspectives specifically is going to be a bonus. To your point, you should be diversifying your content regardless of whether you're showing up in Perspectives anyway, because these are completely different platforms with different audiences and search behavior. I really believe that you're still going to have 90% of whatever the number is at this point of people who do searches on Google, but different demographics are using these platforms as their go-to search engine. There are times when I'll go to a specific subreddit if I want to go learn for a niche and I'm not going to look anywhere else unless I just want more and more and more content and that's out done.
I'm a sports fan, so I've got my go-tos, which are sports Reddit or sports Twitter for specific teams or whatnot. I'm not going to Google for that. I'm honestly not even going to YouTube for that. Maybe a little bit, but I feel like you're always going to specialize for whatever platform the medium lives on. That's going back to your point about visibility in search. I think that is very much a active content strategy for SEOs and that's a big part of search engine optimization. I think that Google has evolved to continue to become more visual, to continue to surface different types of content from different platforms and it is your responsibility, if Google's giving up the visibility of the search by allowing you to show up three times in three different mediums, absolutely should be a content strategy. And beyond that, I think, you did the episode recently of your top 10 SEO podcasts-
Jack: One of which was Rankable by the way, for the record.
Garrett: I appreciate it. It's the warm gooey feeling and we were saying this, it's always support your community. We have such a great SEO podcast community.
Jack: Absolutely, absolutely.
Garrett: But I digress. It's too easy to go tangential with you, sir, because you and I, we play off each other. But showing up, and I've heard different terms for it, like Barnacle SEO or Surround Sound SEO, the idea of showing up on different lists or showing up in other people's content to just gain that much more visibility on the service because it's still a money game a lot of times. Whoever has the most resources or the biggest will typically win a lot of the higher volume search terms. So a long roundabout way of saying yes, diversify content, yes, get yourself... Wherever your audience is, is the key.
Jack: So you mentioned being a sports fan. I know Glenn Gabe talked about this a little while ago. I was talking to him on Twitter and he mentioned how when his son was looking for something baseball related, he went straight to TikTok and Glenn was like, "Oh my god, I wouldn't even think about doing that. That's such a weird concept to me." It would be, again, us being traditional SEOs, we would go to Google and do the whole thing, but kids don't do that these days for better and very often, for worse, in many cases, because TikTok content is questionable at times.
But what is the coolest thing you have seen on Perspectives that you think you wouldn't have seen otherwise? Like you said, searching for sports or searching for music or anything like that, is there anything in particular you think could be really interesting just from a user perspective, even trying to, again, very difficult trying to switch off our SEO brains and think as a user of this thing, is it a way to discover new music, new TV shows, new media across the board? What's the coolest thing you've seen that you think you maybe wouldn't have seen on a traditional SERP in the same way?
Garrett: I'd say I, first off, as I kind of said at the beginning of this, I'm not impressed with Perspectives yet. I don't find myself going to it for consumption as of yet any more than as an SEO. But what's most interesting to me is the fact that A, there are interesting queries that it does not show up for. As an SEO, that fascinates me. So I was curious, one of my initial research experiments was there's this question of does every perspective deserve to be heard? Which is another problem for Google to decide. We've talked about fake news and misinformation on Rankable's podcast. Is information that's flat out wrong, that's framed as a perspective... In America, we have our whole free speech, which has broken our country in a lot of ways, but I'm not against free speech. It's a really difficult philosophical and moral issue.
Jack: We have the same thing here in the UK where especially on things like political talk shows or TV shows or whatever, it's like, "Well, you need to hear both sides," and maybe sometimes you don't need to hear both sides because one side is trying to just exist and the other side is trying to kill those people and maybe don't highlight them in the same way. Maybe don't give those people the platform. But then again, coming back around to what we're talking about in terms of responsibility, where does the responsibility lie for coming out of fake news, but hate speech and stuff like that? A huge topic of the moment is trans rights and things like that. Obviously, by the way, trans rights matter, trans lives matter hugely, so we are-
Garrett: Can't see me. I just gave a big thumbs up on an audio podcast.
Jack: Big thumbs up. That is straight up. If you have a problem with that, tough shit. Welcome to Search with Candour.
Garrett: Yeah, get out of here.
Jack: That is such a hot topic at the moment. I'd be really interested to see how that shifts with, not just with SERPs but with Perspectives, especially the crazy stuff that goes on social media. The fact that Twitter, and again, we're not getting into a whole political discussion about Elon Musk, we could be here all day, but things like that cisgender, transgender discussion that's happening on Twitter, does that then shift the responsibility to the sites, whether that's a social media platform or a blog or a publisher or whatever it is, how much responsibility lies with Google to, as you said, give everybody the equal voice? The digital free speech isn't really a thing because that's not how laws work. But yeah, I also agree with you that we shouldn't be highlighting hate speech and objectively incorrect information despite what happened in the pandemic.
Garrett: Exactly, and to that point, so what I found with Perspectives so far is, in some situations they avoid the question altogether. So on the US side, I look up both Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Neither one has a Perspectives tab on it and a lot of politics, I actually did not see a Perspectives pill.
Jack: That's how you get away with no commenting is just not providing the option.
Garrett: Exactly, which probably has the most perspectives in our country at this point. So I was almost surprised about that, and almost disappointed, but I think that's probably the right move. It leads to these questions. The other one that caught my attention, I was looking up conspiracy theories, a harmless one and a less harmless one. Does Atlantis exist? Which if you read Carl Sagan, categorically, no, there's no evidence that it exists. There are Perspectives on the Google search query. However, is the Earth flat? Categorically is not flat. There was not a Perspectives on that. So it's interesting to see ultimately, to what extent it's manual from Google and they do their best to remove hate speech or spam or unsafe content or at least filter it out. And so, experimenting with Perspectives to see what is limited or not limited or how they handle it is going to be a fascinating thing as an SEO.
Jack: That's really interesting. I think this is going to be a topic we're going to be talking about for a long time as a community, as the SERPs change. We've very briefly touched on the search generative experience. That is a whole other topic for a whole other day. Maybe you and I can carry on on Twitter at some point, Garrett, but yeah, I think this is a really, really interesting thing that we're going to have to keep an eye on and how Google shifts, what they're serving for what queries and what we can expect as people who are helping our clients create content, who are creating content ourselves. You and I, whether we like to admit it or not, are content creators as we create podcasts and YouTube videos and all this kind of stuff. It seems like a dirty word in 2023 because of certain people that have been giving us a bad reputation. But it is a thing I think we need to worry about, and I agree with you. We're not having a whole Perspectives as taking over the SERP thing, but it's an interesting idea. I'm glad Google is trying things that are new and different and bringing some diversity to the SERP in new ways instead of just serving, as we said, the same 10 links every single time on Page 1. A bit of freshness maybe can give us new perspectives and give us new ways to access content.
Garrett: Drink.
Jack: Cool, so in these early stages then, we'll wrap up with what are your final thoughts? It's a top of the line review of Perspectives so far. I got the impression you're not hugely keen on it, but wrap us up with your final thoughts on Perspectives as they stand now in June, 2023.
Garrett: Yes, exactly. That's a good caveat because to your point, we didn't mention about the AI Snapshot and generative AI and whether they'll become more important if we start to see more generated text come out that's not from publishers and we need Perspectives. But I think it's something to pay attention to as mentioned because these are coming from other channels and other platforms where you're going to tailor your content for those platforms. The biggest thing is to produce content where your audience is. And if you're just purely an SEO, working with your content team to navigate that together. If you're a full service marketer, if you will, like lifestyle content, whatever, take into consideration how content you produce on other platforms could show up in your Perspectives. I don't think it's a game changer, but I think there's a lot of value in the feature that we can surface insights from.
Jack: Amazing, fantastic advice there. Thank you Garrett Sussman for joining me on Search With Candour. Thank you for doing this double team collab crossover podcast experience. If you haven't already, go and listen to Part 1 of this on the Rankable episode basically from the previous week. So that came out on Wednesday, this comes out on Monday. So go and subscribe to Rankable and go and check that out. If they haven't already subscribed to Rankable and found you on all the social media stuff, where can they find you around the internet, Mr. Garrett Sussman?
Garrett: Oh man. I am a Twitter guy and a begrudgingly LinkedIn guy and I'm on the YouTube, so-
Jack: Aren't we all?
Garrett: Oh man, LinkedIn is something. No, but I participate. I think it's getting better. So fortunately, I got a unique name. So Garrett Sussman on both, on the Twitters and LinkedIns. On the iPullRank, SEO channel on YouTube and just reach out to me, garrett at ipullrank.com, always down to have a chat and goof off. And who knows, maybe we'll do some Reddit channel or Discord channel where we can geek out.
Jack: R/garrettsussman coming soon.
Garrett: Dude. Super active. Super active.
Jack: Yeah, full of adoring fans.
Garrett: It's actually the five other Garrett Sussmans that exist in the universe.
Jack: Oh, okay, okay, yeah.
Garrett: Hey, Garrett. Hey, Garrett.
Jack: It's just a little club of Garrett's altogether.
Garrett: Yeah, exactly. You don't have one?
Jack: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me, Garrett. It's been an absolute pleasure to have a two-part conversation with you across both Rankable and Search With Candour. Little bit of a dream come true.
Garrett: Thank you so much for having me, Jack. I mean, y'all, go back, watch all the episodes of Search With Candour. Jack is... Follow him on Twitter, man. You are such a fun follow.
Jack: I don't talk that much about SEO, I feel. I feel like I should probably up my SEO Tweeting game at some point, but if you want to hear about a bunch of other stuff I'm interested in, come and follow me on Twitter.
Garrett: Thanks for having me, man. This has been so much fun.
Outro
Jack: Thank you so much. Well, that wraps up this two part podcast crossover spectacular. Thank you so much to Garrett Sussman. Like I said, one of my favorite podcasters in SEO. Hopefully you enjoyed Garrett being on the other side of the microphone and being interviewed on Search With Candour. And if you haven't already, I really, really do implore you to go and check out Part 1 of our conversation where the tables were turned and I was on Garrett's Rankable podcast last week. Of course, I will put a link for that in the show notes, so you can go and check out Part 1 as well. They do work as standalone episodes as well, so it doesn't massively matter which order you listen to them in. But I would recommend definitely going and checking it out. We're talking all about biases in organic search and “Is Google biased?”, basically was the big question we sought to answer. And in short, spoiler alert, yes, I think it is.
I'll be back next week and I'll be talking to the one and only Ryan Jones from seotesting.com, all about SEOTesting. What is SEO testing? What are types of SEO testing? What is best for you? Should we be doing it for a long time or a short time? Testing across the site or small pieces of the site at a time? I was full of questions and Ryan thankfully, was full of answers. So if you want to learn about AB testing, split testing, time-based testing, time sensitive testing, all this stuff around testing an SEO, tune in next week for my conversation with BrightonSEO speaker, Nottingham Digital Summit speaker, the fantastic Ryan Jones. Mark and I will be back at the end of July, so in about four weeks time or so, three and a half, four weeks time for another live stream.
If you haven't checked out the live streams already, please do go to the SISTRIX YouTube channel and check that out. Of course, links will be in the show notes, as always, to go and check that out. If you'd like to follow me on social media stuff, I am JLWChambers or Jack Chambers-Ward on LinkedIn if you want to come and follow me there. If you have any questions, if you'd like to come on the show, if you have something interesting to talk about. And yeah, I'm always open for conversation, basically about podcasting, about SEO, anything like that. So thank you so much for listening, and I will see you next week. Have a lovely week.