[00:00:00] Speaker A: What do Disney, ESPN and realtor.com have in common? Behind the scenes, they've all relied on smart SEO strategy to drive massive user growth. And Patrick Kajirian was right in the middle of it. In this episode, Patrick breaks down how SEO actually works at enterprise scale, where millions of users, complex site structures and executive stakeholders collide. You'll hear how he balances technical SEO, product strategy and user intent at companies like Disney and Walmart. This is going to be a great one, so stick around.
Hello everyone, I am Paxton Gray, CEO of 97th Floor. 97th Floor is a digital marketing agency built to deliver world class organic and paid channel strategies for mid level and enterprise organizations. Thank you so much for joining us today for another episode of the Campaign.
The Campaign is a marketing podcast about better knowing your audience, innovating beyond best practice, and converting visitors into customers. You can find past episodes of the campaign on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify,
[email protected].
Today's episode is a deep dive into SEO at scale with someone who's actually lived it. Our guest, Patrick Kajarian has led SEO and product strategy at Disney, ESPN, realtor.com and now Walmart. He's seen how organic search works inside some of the most complex ecosystems on the web and what it takes to drive real growth in those environments. In this episode, you're going to learn what most teams get wrong when it when trying to scale SEO, how to connect product SEO and user needs in massive orgs, and why building trust with engineers might be your biggest unlock. Let's get into it.
All right, Patrick, thank you so much for joining the show today. It's so great to have you on.
[00:01:59] Speaker B: Thanks, Paxton. Great to be here.
[00:02:02] Speaker A: All right, so to kick things off, you've got quite a resume working for some very large sites.
SEO at huge, huge sites, it means something different than it means at very small scale. So what exactly? Like how would you say SEO product management, like what does that mean? How does that differ for a site of such a large scale like Walmart?
[00:02:26] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, it's, you know, I'm lucky enough to have a kind of a storied background in enterprise SEO, first at Disney and then where it was more of a kind of a conventional marketing function as like an SEO manager reporting into marketing Org and with Realtor and even at Walmart, it's a product first function and I think that's really interesting for a couple of reasons. One, you treat the search engine as a customer in a way.
And so the search engine, it's a first class Citizen. So you're making sure that you're factoring all the kind of like the SEO compliance and governance best practices that's put forth by search engines, like understanding, here's how you build pages that can be adequately consumed and understood by the search engines. You can extract all the relevant signals. Here's, here are all the features, SEO features you could optimize towards like leveraging structured data so you can get the best experience for customers searching and getting the data, the most relevant data quickly, like that kind of stuff I think whereas you know, marketers know and understand that these are the things that we need to be doing. It's only when it's really fabric or it's like woven into the foundation of how you build stuff that it really gets executed correctly. And then the other aspect to that also is that when it's product led, the requirements are, they're clear, but also there's a direct channel into the engineering and design kind of functions of building.
And generally speaking you tend to have dedicated resources for that kind of stuff. Right. Same with data science. So I think one of the things that makes doing SEO at a big company like Walmart really interesting is that you know, you, you start, you, you're able to lean on, you know, individual like data science teams, really good designers, really brilliant engineers and you're able to kind of execute on things at a scale that's like a lot bigger than if you'd had to kind of relegate yourself to like a much smaller teams.
And, and you know, you build a roadmap is the other thing. Right. So it's not just like you build this and it's done. You can't get back to it until you can get approval or you can where it's back above the line. It's like you could really time to flush things out, take an iterative approach, test, test, test, like no, release something, look at it long and hard, see if it's worked, do something else, do something different, iterate. And then I think that's where product LED SEO really excels in the context of a large company.
[00:05:00] Speaker A: Oh, I love that that phrase of Google's a first class citizen is yeah, I think a unique kind of pov. And you know, for a long time the industry was shouting like we don't optimize for robots, we optimize for humans.
[00:05:16] Speaker B: Right.
[00:05:16] Speaker A: But the argument would be humans are the ones using Google. And so by optimizing for Google you're optimizing for them to find what you're looking for.
[00:05:25] Speaker B: Right, yes. And that's another, that's an excellent point.
You know, generally product like product development is customer focused. Right. Or user focused, but Google's user, very user focused. Right. You look at it in their guidelines around user experience. Primarily it's written black and white. And that's the other good thing about, you know, SEO in general is that, you know, we're, yes, there's, there's always some black box, like kind of reverse engineer the algorithm and figure out like what's the silver bullet? Like how do we cheat and game the system. But really the, you know, you know, 99% of my job is actually just. No, let's just. Google has these guidelines printed black on white and you know, you just need to follow them.
And so it's very engineering, almost like, you know, yeah, it's very technical in focus, but they're there. And a good example of this I have is in the context of E commerce is just about linking. Right.
So we, and one big challenge that we have is general, and it's not just Walmart. I'm just speaking in general for the, for the industry at large. Anyone that has a large E commerce site or a site that has, you know, a huge number of pages is indexation is proving to be more and more of a challenge. Right. So it's pretty clear that in the last, you know, decade, Google's actually been putting the brakes on kind of enveloping, consuming and like devouring the entire web. They're being very judicious and very selective about what gets qualified to get represented in the index.
And so we have very large catalog at Walmart. Just
[email protected], we, you know, try to have a page for every property in the United States indexed, you know, in hundreds of millions of pages. And you know, certainly Google won't crawl, they'll crawl hundreds of millions of pages, but they're not going to have every single one of those indexed. And so one of the strongest signals that we found, and Google's very explicit about this, is a link to your most important content.
Link to products, make sure that they're linked relevantly, make sure they're linked prominently, make sure that if it's important to you by virtue of linking to it, you're automatically providing a high relevance signal which directly influences their prioritization in terms of crawl and consideration and processing and indexing. And this is all written in their guidelines. You just have to spend the time reviewing it, looking at it. And so just knowing that, um, you know, so at Walmart. There are a number of product managers focused on SEO and each one has a different kind of jurisdiction, right. Or core competency or pillar as we call it. And mine is indexing and linking, navigation, discovery. And so it doesn't just involve building indexation systems like XML sitemaps or you know, think about feeds and things of that nature, but it's also about how do we leverage index linking as a tool for discovery, for funneling bot traffic, funneling relevant signals which ultimately also lead to indexation. So what we found was by virtue, and this is something we, I've done at Realtor as well, at scale, if you understand where the crawler is, where the highest amount of crawl activity is located, generally naturally it's on the homepage, because your homepage is the most crawled page of your site, generally speaking. Right. But you kind of follow through the browse path of the crawler. You know, you're looking at server logs and understanding like what's the, what's the pattern of discovery and what's the funnel look like for the search engine to ultimately arrive at your most important business, generating pages, right?
[00:08:54] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:08:56] Speaker B: Figure out like, thematically, if you know there are pages that are crawled more than others and those pages are high authority, very authoritative, have high relevant signaling, then it stands that if you were to generate link systems that can rotate through a number of links targeting pages that are highly relevant to that anchor, to that anchor system, the module, that link module, then you stand to funnel that valuable crawl bandwidth, that crawl activity, deeper into those related pages. And guess what? If you do that diligently and consistently, and you can do it in a way that's kind of smart like that scale, like, you understand, here's how frequently this googlebot is visiting the page here. How many pages I know are deemed good quality or valuable. Right. Transactable, lots of content that seems to match the intent of our customers, whatnot, then. And then if they're not, if you're not seeing crawl activity on those destination pages, high quality qualified destination pages, but you link to them and you link to them across a lot of pages that have high crawl activity, you'll find that those pages get crawled real quick, they get indexed real quick, and they tend to perform better in SERPs.
So that's something that I think everybody just kind of, you know, they don't take advantage of that. And yet Google said exactly that in its guidelines.
[00:10:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I love, I think that's so fascinating and like one of the things that we do sometimes in this industry is we get over our own skis where it's just like, hey, listen, the thing that you learned five years ago, it still is there and we'll, we'll forget about it. And so like internal linking is one of those, like you kind of learn that in the first little bit of, of learning SEO and then you kind of move on. But it's like, no, no, listen, it's super important. And I think that's fascinating. I've never heard of a strategy where you're intentionally rotating these internal links to direct it where you want it to go for indexation purposes. And I'm curious, I have two follow up questions on that. One is what do you notice from those pages that get this kind of direct beam of focus once you rotate off of them, do they stay within the index and is your index growing larger or have you noticed that you kind of have a certain maximum that Google is giving you and now you're treating that maximum depending on like the priorities of, of your company?
[00:11:22] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a good question.
And it's something that we also need, we test constantly. Right. Because what worked yesterday may not necessarily work tomorrow.
In my experience, especially when you're dealing with really large sites, is that it's ideally you'd want for every page that's discovered to get indexed, remain indexed and continue to perform and kind of like mature and improve in ranking over time, generate more referrals in time, convert better over time.
But that's not always going to be the case. And I feel like the pages that you're linking to also, they have a life cycle lifespan.
So unless they're like evergreen and they stay in place and they're static, in our case we're dealing with like a lot of ephemeral content, like products. They come and go, right?
[00:12:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:06] Speaker B: So therefore they, they come and go in the index as well.
So for us we use link systems as kind of like a churn system that kind of, you know, with, with rotational policies. Right. With policies that purposely we're just trying to rotate through as many pages to kind of get them indexed.
If they're still highly valuable, like usable and deemed that customers would look at that page and say, okay, this is helpful, thank you. This matched the query that I had. Or it's a product that's transactable and it's competitive from a pricing perspective and has really good reviews and all that stuff, those don't tend to get de indexed. Those will stay in the index. Right.
But for any reason, if the quality of the page declines over Time or gets irrelevant, right.
Or something happens to the page, they'll drop from the index. And that we do see like constantly. Like it's, it's very volatile. Like the index is volatile. Things, things will drop.
And yes, links help provide those valuable signals.
And in the absence of those links, it's possible that, you know, based on a combination, combination of factors. It's not just linking, right, that Google will look at to be able to gauge whether a page is valuable or not. But links play a big part of the removal of those links may potentially contribute to them eventually being de indexed. But if they're important to you, then you have to find other ways of making sure that those signals are flowing not just within links, but within external links. Not just internal links, external links conversationally make sure people are talking about it outside of your website.
Push and promote and display that content prominently in your site and the content will remain in indexed, I think.
[00:13:47] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's fascinating. Are there just really quickly, just because I'm curious, are there any stubborn pages that you've noticed in your career where it's like, it doesn't matter what kind of intense focus you send its way, the crawlers just refuse to index for whatever reason. Like, have you noticed any patterns or trends.
[00:14:10] Speaker B: Things that are like generally very difficult. I mean really anything that's duplicative in nature. And when you look at, when you look at, and in particular when you look at E commerce, you'll look at products that tend to have variants, right? And so you want to make sure that, you know, all the variants have, you know, very unique, very descriptive content towards that really differentiates the variant from one variant to another. And there's lots of different ways you can do that. Not just like on page content, but just structured data. And also that was released not too long ago that helps, you know, search engines understand what's the relationship, the graph between variants and whatnot. And that kind of helps. But we found that, you know, one of the areas that are the hardest to get indexed are going to be any pages or products that have high similarities, high duplication, and that's to be expected.
And I think a lot of ways to work around that is one, yes, certainly work to get all the factors on page to be unique and optimized for variants. But also when you're contending with similar pages with competitors, you know, you just have to make it compelling. You have to, you have to really make the value proposition stand out to the, to the searcher. Right. And so things like being competitive on pricing being competitive on features like next day shipping, you know, having better imagery, you know, showcasing the product, like things of the. All of that stuff combined will help ensure that your content gets picked over the competitions. And so that's, that's part of it really. Differentiating, making sure your stuff comes out on top of not just with how you're optimizing towards it, but also just by virtue of the page of the experience itself.
[00:15:50] Speaker A: Yep. I love that.
Yeah. I mean we talk all the time about like it's audience and then message and then channel and you know, like if you're saying like, you know, it's the same message as everyone else, there's nothing compelling here. The channel is going to have a very hard time performing unless you are actually showing them something compelling. That's right.
Okay. So in the past two weeks, the. The world has been thrown into this new agentic browser world and people are still in waiting lists for some of these. So it's like very, very fresh. But things like DIA Comet, Chrome's version or Google's version, I should say, and ChatGPT is like surprisingly, in my opinion, not doing the browser, but they're doing, you know, they're giving their agent power to act. So in a similar way, these AIs are now, you know, they're growing arms and legs to go out and actually act on behalf of the users, whether that through the browser. Similar way.
I'm kind of curious, you know, your thoughts on these and the impact in marketing.
You know, things that people in SEO or marketing in general should be thinking about as these start to become more widespread and use kind of commonly among people. General thoughts there.
[00:17:16] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's exciting. It's an exciting time to be a marketer because there's just way more tools at your disposal and then just the concept of just being able to automate your workflows using these tools, I think is, you know, very, very powerful.
So, yeah, I've got a lot to say on the subject. But let me start just briefly with like the advent of agentic powered browsers, particularly versus Agentic, I would say, like software features provided by, you know, large LLM companies and whatnot. But so let me start with actually just describing my experience with Google's Project Mariner.
I was at IO this year and I got the chance to actually demo privately, like the experience, what that would look like in the browser when you actively have Mariner go and execute a series of tasks for yourself. And we did this in the context of we pulled up Someone's webpage. And it was an E commerce, it was like an E learning site. They were offering courses tailored for a specific type of business person and you know, trying to get certified in something and, and what was really cool. And so it was cool in that you basically you, you pulled it up on the webpage and you, you asked Mariner like hey, can you find me the course that specializes in.
I think it's like certification for a very specific type of like nursing competency, like nursing practice and, and added to CART and checkout for me.
And it was the kind of thing you just watch it like, like an invisible human operating a browser. You just watch Mariner to kind of, you know, click through the site, putts through it until it found the right match for the right like product listing or in this case of course listing, click through to it and attempted to add to cart and it failed.
So it was just one. The.
They're these, these things are not baked. And I know like OpenAI, what's called not copilot, it's called.
The name escapes me, but I know like even OpenAI has been having difficulties, right? Like these things are not executing based on like the expectation I think of most, most customers.
But I will say the. With like Mariner in particular, they said like they would have the ability to generate 10 kind of like virtual task tasks at the same time. So you could definitely see like the power that they would be able to execute things in parallel. And even if it's slow today, it's going to get a lot faster, they'll get a lot more smarter. And so the ability to implement this is really, really.
But so Google and even OpenAI, they're doing this in the cloud, right? They're basically spinning up virtual instances and running those tasks there virtually. I think what perplexity and with specifically in the context of their new browser comment. I think it's really interesting because it's just, it's basically your browser. It's, you know, you're logged in with your credentials and you're executing tasks as if you were doing it. It's just, you're just doing it, you know, a lot of like parallel instances, like multiple tabs and executing on that. And I think that's really interesting because I remember I listened to Arvind Trinivas, right, the CEO of Perplexity. He was on Decoder last week, right? And he was talking about this and he was, he was telling a strategy, kind of explaining his strategy. And it's, it's cool, it's kind of like a hybrid approach, right? That they're pursuing one they, they're, you know, trying to be in the moment and trying to just kind of compete head on by releasing a browser today. Because the benefit of using browser is that you're already logged in. Like you're logged, you know, you have your Google account log in. And an example this is like as a marketer in SEO, like let's say you log into Search Console, you know, you're logging in your Google account, you have Search Console open, you can open up 7 tabs, 10 tabs each on a different property, right? Execute on this and then, and what comment will do is it will effectively just kind of emulate you going through, clicking through, going to like the page performance report, you know, putting, sending, sending all the filters to look at like last week compared to last year and across all your properties. And it's going to know to be able to go in and just hit the export button to Excel or to Google Sheets and do that across all ten tabs at once. And from there take the content of in Google Docs from all 10 tabs from all 10 sheets, aggregate them together and then from there you could execute a very specific like analytical query like, you know, sort, sort everything by like top winning queries for the past week compared to the prior period and from there do like a keyword clustering analysis of like, what are the key themes or key product categories in which we saw ranking gains versus ranking losses, for instance. And it'll be able to do that. You'll be able to do that. What would normally have taken me if I were to do this on my own? It would have taken me an hour to do it. It'll take you two minutes to do it. And I think that's what the power is of leveraging the browser specifically and bringing agentic workflows into the browser. That's very different from what like Google or even OpenAI are doing by doing this in the cloud. That assumes that, you know, you have to be able to provide all your credentials and authentication to be able to access all the software features and services that you know that these agents will need to be able to do this. Same thing with checking out and buying something on your behalf. You know, I can tell you like the biggest concerns that E tailers like big E tails like you know, Target, Walmart, Amazon have is they don't want agents being the middleman going in and buying things on behalf of people when it comes to just like protecting the privacy and the data Integrity and even the safety and security of their customers.
Because what happens when agents are buying things but not representing the customer in a way that's correct, right? Like not using the right return address for shipping, for instance, not using or contact information.
What if that customer wants to return something and if the agent isn't correctly representing the customer, that's a problem logistically and also in safety and whatnot. And so to be able to do things and handle stuff like this at scale, you want to make sure that the customer is properly represented in these transactions and that you don't have that problem. I think when it's, you know, the browser, it's you, it's just, you know, emulating you. It's just basically, you know, assuming you and doing things and you're authenticated, you're logged in and everything's accounted for in that way, I think that's really smart. So yeah, I'm excited for it. I can't wait to see it. I'll say on a personal level, network related I could really use it because like for instance, I'm a gamer, I'm a PC gamer and every week there's like games, free games that come out that are made available and like an Amazon prime frequently allows for like free games, like older PC games to get downloaded and added to your backlog to your library on Steam and stuff.
And so I read this great article that was like here like the 10 games now available for free that you can download through Amazon prime. And you know, and they had an, basically a table with for every game a link to go access it. And you have to kind of authenticate through GOG.com or through EPIC Games or through other different publishers, game publishers, right. But for all those you need to have logins, you need to have credentials, you have to be set up to be able to download it and all that stuff and accounts with all this, all this stuff is in my Chrome history. Like all these logins, everything is ready, pre authenticated, cached and it's all ready to go. But to spend the time, for instance, to go through, I didn't know half of these games. So I was like, hey, and I went to Gemini for this. I went to Gemini and I have the Pro account for that. And I was like, you know, can you review these 10 games and then just surface like the top two or three that are highly rated that, that work really well on the Steam deck? Because that's primarily where I'm gaming these days. And sure enough, Gemini did a bang up job of like, you know, sitting like the top three or four of these, that would be really great. And I was able to review and say, yeah, this looks good. I want to download them. But that's where kind of the power Gemini stopped. Gemini was like, I know where they are.
I see these links. They're in the table. I know exactly where to go, but I can't do that for you. Whereas I know with Comet, I have a sneaky. I'm going to try this. But I have a sneak suspicion that would have. That I would have been able to execute that task from start to finish with a single prompt and had that accomplished. And I think that's the power of that capability.
[00:25:39] Speaker A: Yeah, it's true.
I've played around with Comet and I did say, hey, look at my calendar. I want to see the Superman movie with my wife.
Find a time this weekend that works. And so it found. I said, give me tickets, actually. And so it found a time on my calendar where that would work for both of us. And then it actually found the theater that was near us, and then it selected the best seats, and then it filled in my credit card information. And it did bring me to the last part where I just had to click buy.
But I believe if I had given it permission, it would have just clicked by for me and I wouldn't have had to do anything.
It was wild. It was wild.
[00:26:26] Speaker B: Behind the scenes there.
[00:26:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
I mean, the way I think about it is previously, what you had to do with APIs, it kind of makes the APIs, there's other reasons to have them, but it's like where there are no APIs, there's no more problem. It's kind of like where we go, where we're going, we don't need roads.
It's just like, just log in and whatever's in the software you're in, you have access to anyway. So it's wild. And the implications are going to be just insane.
[00:26:56] Speaker B: Okay, can we just spend a minute just like riffing off of that? Because I think with the advent of mtp, right, we're basically building all the plumbing for agents to be able to talk about to each other or talk to systems and like brands and companies and their data sets, Right. Without having to kind of interface with like a web page that was created for humans that, you know, it's just really just there to slow. Slow us down. Right. I feel like, you know, there's this big contentious debate about, man, the web as we know it is going to die, right? It's just going to be agents talking to other agents. And humans are just not, you know, the web pages we know is going to die. I don't think that's true. Right. I feel like very much like in the automobile, right, you have classic cars and you have really efficient commuter cars or like super fast cars. I think there's going to be, you know, a person's going to want to drive a nice, you know, old classic car on the weekends and enjoy that experience versus have the Regentic bot, you know, kind of run their day to day stuff. And so I think, you know, people will be able to have the cake. You need it too. I feel like there will always be need for a conventional website because we're going to want to browse stuff ourselves, self serve that information because it's a passion or because, you know, it's, it's, it's a preference. Right.
And there's still, but there'll also be in tandem, there'll still be a need to have all this automation happen because it's so convenient. Right. And to be able to have the bots do so. So I'm a firm believer that the websites aren't going away.
There's still going to be a need for conventional, you know, SEO systems. Right. Like XML sitemaps or feeds still relevant even in the AI space. Right. Right now there isn't a standard like MCP exists. Right. And it's a great protocol for, for agents to get the context they need. Right. But, but it doesn't replace a website, it doesn't replace the importance of like, of feeds.
So I think, you know, until that gets released, that standard is set and then people start adopting it and businesses start adopting it. I don't think there's any danger that we're, the web as we know it's going to disappear. We could talk about the quality of the web, that's a different story. Right? Yeah, but, but as far as just the architecture, the infrastructure that, that exists. No, I think that's, I think we're, we're very much going to get to continue browsing the web.
[00:29:10] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's, it's going to be interesting and I'm only going to say this so that maybe five years I can look back and say, look, I said it was recorded where like most of what's dominated the web is essentially algorithms. You know, you've got Google's algorithm, you've got all the social algorithms serving you what it believes you want, but all of them fueled by ads. And so it's like it's not necessarily what you want, but what is going to get this person to stay a little bit longer, especially on social?
I could see a situation where it's like we all now have our own algorithm where it's looking at these posts for me and it knows what I want to see and it will show me my own curated social media posts and websites and articles.
So I'm not, I'm not looking anymore. It's just bringing it to me. And so in that sense, unless we start to see some massive monetization now of this own, in which case we're kind of back where we started, but I could see the web changing in that sense, you know, where people aren't browsing as much anymore, you know.
[00:30:13] Speaker B: Yeah. And, you know, so you're not, you're not paying for the benefit of an ad impression on a page seen by a human.
[00:30:19] Speaker A: Right.
[00:30:20] Speaker B: You're not going to get that. But maybe you pay for the benefit of the bot being fed a piece of content that is highly interesting to your. To the, to that user instead. And so we have to find ways to be able to, to honor that kind of contract, you know?
[00:30:35] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:30:36] Speaker B: So, yeah, yeah, it's, it's fascinating. It's fascinating. But I'm here for it. What a time to be alive.
[00:30:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:30:43] Speaker C: Recent data shows that brands are seeing a 30 to 50% decrease in traffic because of Google's AI overviews. That's an enormous traffic loss. If this is something you're thinking about, either because you need to recover traffic or stay ahead of all the changes in AI search, I want to offer you a completely free AI overview audit. I'm Brittany Dillard, a senior SEO strategist at 97th Floor, and our teams use this exact audit for our clients to discover where brands sit in AI overview results compared to competitors.
This AIO audit informs our strategy for how to drive more conversions as AI continues to develop in search of. And we've been able to help brands maintain conversions and therefore revenue, even while search traffic drops. If you're interested in getting this comprehensive AI overview audit done for your brand completely free, head on over to 97th floor.com AI audit and fill out the form on that page so our team can get started. A link to that page will also be in the show notes. And trust me, you want to take advantage of this one.
[00:31:40] Speaker A: Hey everyone, it's Paxton here and today I'm bringing you the latest in marketing, marketing and AI news. First up, Reddit just rolled out a new integration with Google Analytics and it could change the way you measure and optimize your campaigns.
Advertisers can now pull Reddit ads cost directly into Google Analytics. That means no more juggling spreadsheets or patching together platform reports. With this update, you can see Reddit performance alongside your other channels all in one place.
Google Analytics is also doubling down on lead generation. They've added two new default reports specifically built for Lead gen.
One tracks where lead first engages with your site or app, and the other helps pinpoint why leads fall off before converting. To top it off, they've launched eight new pre built audience templates for lead generation. These include retargeting for qualified leads, excluding converted customers, and nurturing new ones who just entered your pipeline. Of course, to use these new tools, you'll need to implement the recommended Lead Gen event setup in Google Analytics, either through Event Data Import or the Measurement protocol. This integration gives marketers a clearer, more complete view of how Reddit ads perform and how they fit in the broader funnel. And with better insights into lead and with better insights into lead behavior, drop offs and audience segments, you're better equipped to optimize spend, refine targeting and boost conversion efficiency across the board. So if Reddit ads are part of your mix or you're considering adding them, now is the time to connect the dots.
On Thursday, Google launched WebGuide, a search labs experiment that uses AI to intelligently organize a search results page, making it easier to find information and web pages.
Webguide groups web links in helpful ways, like pages related to specific aspects of your query.
Under the hood, webguide uses a custom version of Gemini to better understand both the query and the content on the web, creating more powerful search capabilities that better surface web pages you may not have previously discovered. Similar to AI mode, webguide uses a query fan out technique, concurrently issuing multiple related searches to identify the most relevant results.
For anyone who chooses to enable Webguide, it is currently available within the same web tab on Google Search that currently shows search results without including AI overviews.
Now back to the show.
So I think we would be.
[00:34:00] Speaker B: Miss.
[00:34:00] Speaker A: Mistaken if we didn't get to dive into your amazing experience.
You were on the team that migrated Disney.com and ESPN to some new redesign responsive design sites.
[00:34:15] Speaker B: That's right. Yeah.
[00:34:16] Speaker A: I'd imagine huge undertakings. What was that like? What was that like doing massive migrations of those. Those sizes?
[00:34:25] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Those were very formative years for me, especially like enterprise SEO in particular, but like really understanding from a technical SEO perspective what a site migration looks like, what a well executed site migration looks like and how to be able to bottle that and replicate that as a formula across hundreds of websites.
Let me take a couple steps back and kind of introduce and set the context to like the Disney experience. And then a little bit on ESPN too.
It was in, I think it was 2012 or 13, where formerly Disney was operated off of Flash. It was Flash as a platform was really when you went to disney.com, you were basically entering a shell of a Flash site and it would just swap out Flash applications and entirely SEO unfriendly, right? Leading up to that point.
And Even so, with Disney.go.com, there's several iterations that that kind of evolved away from Flash to a standard site. And then eventually with the advent of mobile first experiences and the mobile web really kind of emerging and advent of the iPhone gaining so much traction and smartphone and mobile websites being built. So it was eventual that they needed to decide do we continue with an M.site on Disney.go.com, or do we build a responsive experience? And it was pretty clear, like a question across the board. Everyone agreed that responsive was the way forward.
But everything needed to be factored into this experience, including the SEO experience.
So Disney, in addition to kind of moving to responsive site experience and also doing a full domain because they went from disney.go.com and m.disney.go.com to a single, no unified domain on a unified platform for disney.com they also revamped the entire backend system for that. The CMS systems that powered this and created a new platform. It was nicknamed or codenamed Matterhorn. Right. Matterhorn was the new kind of CMS experience and model for generating content managed responsive sites.
And then there was a whole design language and all that stuff. So the cool thing about. So Matterhorn was actually incubated.
I was in la, working in LA at the time and the Disney had enlisted the help of this agency, this web design agency, marketing agency at the. I think they were called Digison at the time to be able to basically do as a skunk project kind of build what this experience looked like, the platform, the CMS responsive and full on profile, so on and so forth. And they plucked throughout the I know this is Disney Interactive and they plucked different kind of key members, core contributors, like a couple of people from engineering, a couple of people from design, a couple of people from data science and so on and so forth.
And then certainly a couple people from SEO, right, to be able to help support this. It's like create this Think tank, right? Crack team of Disney Interactive mercenaries to kind of build this brand new platform.
And so I got to be a part of that. I got to kind of go in. They had a studio in the backlot, some backlot area in Burbank that was just kind of. Basically it was stealth, right?
You totally understand from the outside, it was basically like a defunct building made out of bricks. And the second you go inside, you're inside and you're kind of like in Disneyland. It was kind of wild. They went to the trouble of actually recreating Walt's office, you know, with the, with the desk and all the paraphernalia and the tchotchkes and whatnot. Just like you see one actually in the tower at Disneyland. That same thing completely recreated in this like crazy studio where there was just like a handful of like people that are just like working on the stealth project just, just for the sake of it.
[00:38:10] Speaker A: It was just kind of just for this project.
[00:38:12] Speaker B: Well, it was, yeah, just. Just for the company, for the division of teams that were building.
And then. So that was cool. They even had like a full size bar fully stocked with alcohol that was just there and anytime. So it's like, it was like, it was a very unique world, very different. Like, it wasn't like corporate kind of going into the office and sitting at a cubicle and doing that. No, you were in this really kind of stimulating, creative environment. People were like, really excited about what they're working on, doing it. So that, that part was really as like, just from a career perspective. That was awesome.
And it was neat, you know, so we got to kind of factor SEO into like the building of the CMS and making sure like you had the ability to do like SEO overrides for metadata. Open graph was a really big deal at the time. So be able to do all of that, to have some structured data baked in for like, you know, movies, music, games. Like all that just worked out of the box behind the scenes and operations teams, you know, and production teams were able to kind of go in and just create these things. And SEO teams and SEO managers were able to kind of go in and validate, vetted, approve it and do all that stuff at scale. And so that was really cool.
That experience was really eye opening. Now the challenge was, after building all of that and launching it, now you had to execute that across hundreds of websites, right? So disney.com was done. Now you have to work on moviesisney.com, gamesay.com, videos, disney.com, all of the Disney Junior, like there were hundreds of properties that we managed and they all slowly, one after another over the course of like two years, eventually got migrated over, but you're going from disney.go.com to disney.com and then there's a completely different hierarchy, different collection of pages. So it was a huge undertaking and there was only like, you know, three, four SEOs within Disney that was responsible for doing all that. So there was, you know, a lot of mapping of pages, a lot of redirects, a lot. I could tell you I single handedly brought down the Disney junior.com website because of a botched redirect execution.
[00:40:11] Speaker A: Really?
[00:40:12] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:40:12] Speaker A: How long did that did that last?
[00:40:14] Speaker B: You know what?
Because like when you execute a migration, like then you had to redirect. You know, you're there with engineers, you're sitting there, you've got screaming Fargo, you've got lists prepared. So like you're just running it. So it was probably lasted all of like an hour, an hour and a half until we, you know, figured it out, but yet till I can roll back and then kind of go back and test and check it out. But yeah, that, you know, I've got, I've got moments like that I'm not so proud of. Like, yeah, I actively broke, you know, you know, all these, all these like, you know, four year old girls, you know, want to get the Disney princess coloring books. You know, they couldn't, they couldn't get it for that period of time. That was my fault.
[00:40:49] Speaker A: Those are, I mean, those are the battle scars that, that teach us and that we learn from, you know. Yeah, I love that.
Man, that sounds like such a cool experience. And the, the team structure dynamic of that sounds really cool to just get in this team with a bunch of just people from different backgrounds and skill sets all working toward that common goal. That just must have been such a fun, fun project.
[00:41:18] Speaker B: Oh yeah, it's a privilege for sure.
Real quick, I do have a similar experience with ESPN as well because following the success of Disney.com, then you started seeing all the other kind of sister properties kind of looking, oh great. Matterhorn's proven experience. Let's replicate it. And so a couple years after that, I'd relocated to the east coast for a stint for family stuff.
And yeah, now it got assigned at ESPN and we did the same thing. It was very different. ESPN was a different experience because the, the reception to the redesign was very polarizing. So it was literally almost like 50, 50 where people either hated it, couldn't stand it because they're going from espn.go.com and that whole legacy experience to something very, very new. And that was very polarizing. But, but in there. And that experience was, was different in a key difference in that experience was with how we handled news.
Because when you're on the Google News program, especially if you're a big publisher like espn, you just had to make sure that that cut over from an old domain like disney.go.com to disney.com, all of that had to be orchestrated and we actually had to rely and work closely with Google to be able to do that in a way that didn't interrupt the flow of news being presented to customers in Google.
And so, but overall it went pretty well. You know, we had a couple minor issues, particularly with redirects, again, redirects, the bane of my existence. But eventually it carried forward.
[00:42:51] Speaker A: So you were working directly with people from Google through that to ensure the news unerrated.
[00:42:58] Speaker B: There were dedicated teams at Google specifically for news publishers at the time. And given that, you know, espn, cspn, that they, they definitely facilitated that experience. Like they were there as part of, like they're in the background, like helping as part of the release in the war room. They weren't there in person, but they were there. And I had to communicate and coordinate with them on the execution of these things so that we knew and validate and test and make sure everything was looking good on their systems in the back end.
[00:43:26] Speaker A: How nice to be so big that Google's Google needs you.
I mean, at that point, you know, it hurts Google if they're not delivering the ESPN news.
[00:43:37] Speaker B: You know, that was back in the day. I wonder if today that's, that won't be the case today. Clearly, like media, media doesn't have the same clout it did. I could tell you though, like sometimes it goes both ways, right? Because even talking about espn, you know, a big before, before the advent of the knowledge graph, right? And you go to universal search and you'd get answers to, you know, searches, queries, right? Like what time is the Super Bowl? Or where can I, you know, what are the standings from my favorite basketball team? Or all of those things, you know, you know, you take for granted because you'd go, just go to ESPN to be able to get all of that information, right? And then when Google started surfacing that information, answering it directly without honoring a link back to espn, I could tell you the, the, the, the brass at ESPN were not happy to see like, man, we, we own Super bowl, you know, the, the knowledge basis around Super Bowl. Why, why is Google taking this away from it and you know, the fact that it was just, it was facts weren't owned by any, you know, company and Google surfacing to our customers, you just, you couldn't contend with that. You just had to like, adapt. You just had to. Okay, well, let's build pages that go beyond just answering the single question. Let's add context and meaning and value behind it to be able to incentivize users to, to come to ESPN directly to be able to get that information. And we've, we learned that the hard way. So, yeah, Google wasn't always a nice partner, you know.
[00:45:04] Speaker A: Yeah. How's, what's your take in, in light of that in current circumstances around AIOs and them effectively? I mean, we've all, we've had this for a while in different formats, but.
[00:45:18] Speaker B: Like it's kind of zero click behavior. Yep.
[00:45:22] Speaker A: Yeah. So like, what's your take on, you know, is Google. I mean, ethically and then like what, what should brands be thinking about that?
[00:45:30] Speaker B: Look, I mean, I am channeling, you know, the user, the customer.
There's huge, just tremendous value in getting the answer immediately without having to, you know, get on a website, have to slog through a bunch of ads, you know, deal with poor experiences just to be able to arrive at a simple answer. So I understand, I see the value.
I know our customers wanted to, I don't know. So I, maybe I have a different perspective on this, but I also get the sense that, you know, a lot of the traffic we used to receive broadly was undeserved. Right. We got it because we played the game and we were being honored, you know, and it was making money for everybody involved. But was it really helpful for users, for searchers?
I think not today.
Again, I can't speak for Walmart. Right. But just looking at the industry at large, especially in the context of E commerce, talking to a lot of SEOs in E commerce and understanding that landscape will be better in the context of the AI post, AI mode world, AI overview world we're getting, there's less traffic, right. Referrals happening, there's less citations, less links happening within aios and AI mode. And we're seeing this obviously with all the AI search platforms too. Right.
But what we are seeing is the people who do eventually come, they're highly qualified, right? Yeah, people. People are, when they come to you, they're there to execute on their needs. Right. And in the case of an E commerce website, we're seeing more conversions, more purchases. Right. Even though traffic's going down, they're more qualified and, and that's across the board, the industry. Right. So there's value to that. So I guess maybe I'm too biased to E commerce because obviously Google's not gonna sell you the thing they can't sell you the thing you have the thing to sell. What Google will do is they'll probably make sure they'll keep the user in their journey, their discovery journey. They'll keep them on Google as much as possible and then they'll refer you to the product and maybe even get a cut of that, that referral through ads or whatnot, through sponsorships or arbitrage. But ultimately, you know, I think it's by design, right. It's intentional that these tools are doing a better job of helping customers understand what it is they want to buy. And as long as, again, going back to that thing, as long as you, you make sure that the product that you sell or the service that you offer, there's a very clear value and that you rise above the competition in terms of either the pricing of the service or the ability to deliver it faster, the convenience of being able to pick it up in store, things of that nature, if you differentiate yourself, you'll get rewarded with that conversion. And I think that's where we need to focus is optimizing for the conversion, not optimizing for the traffic.
Yeah, yeah, it's hard. I know a lot of industries are going to, are going to die by this change, but I think it's going to grow and hopefully new industries will be born, new tactics, new strategies will be born. It'll be a better experience for everyone.
[00:48:36] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I think it, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Those brands that are saying, like, hey, traffic's going down, let's pull back on investing and optimizing for search.
It's like, hey, searches are going up and purchases from searches are continuing to go up.
And so you're looking at the wrong metrics if you're deciding like, oh, now's the time to pull back on that. Like, I mean, power to you, because all you're doing is making more space for other people who are investing in it, you know, but it just doesn't make sense logically to me why you would pull back at this time.
On that note, maybe to wrap up what's, what's a piece of advice you'd offer somebody who is in the E commerce space or maybe just working on a large site as as we start to see some shifts in AI, new agentic browsers, or just in light of, you know, what, what, what's maybe one piece of advice you'd leave for them as, as we move forward.
[00:49:40] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll say one, this is a really great time to be thinking about SEO in general because like you, you look back at all the big paradigm shifts, right? Going to, you know, the advent of search engines, just period right on the desktop and then the introduction, the introduction of mobile, mobile devices and doing mobile search and then you know, the link graph and then, you know, free product listings, like all that stuff. There's been so many just changes that happen and here we are faced with another huge paradigm shift with agentic search or AI search, right?
It's, it's kind of nice. We're thrown back into the, the Wild west days, right, where you just had to like study and test and experiment and see what works, what doesn't keep your ears to the ground. Like there's so much conversation happening. You just have to like dip into LinkedIn for a minute and just like, and listen to what the, you know, people who experience in these, in these areas, like what they have to say. And you learn so much. And so, yeah, it's just like just take advantage of this time and just play around with some things and see, just be curious and experiment. The other thing I want to say is that even though there's these new paradigms emerging at the concept of SEO or GEO or aeo, whatever you want to call it these days, the fundamentals are still the same, right? You're still dealing with algorithms or agents or bots, still having to one, discover your content and then rank that content and serve it in the context of what the customer wants or their preferences and so on and so forth. But the approach doesn't change, right? You still have to think about indexation.
I find it was wild. Like maybe a month ago there was this big, I know, just a lot of attention on like, yeah, your pages need to be indexed in order for them to service in Agentix search results. Like yes, of course they have to be indexed, right? Yeah. So, you know, crawl budget still an issue, right?
Site performance still really important.
Content relevant, signaling, having structured data, you know, structured content, high quality content, all those things are constant. Those haven't changed in 10 years. You know, they're not going to change 10 years from now. It's just maybe the rules with which all those factors matter will change or the spaces where factors are being collected are changing, but the fundamentals are still there. So focus on the fundamentals. And then eventually, I think just like Google did, over time, they built up documentation and tools like GSC or built to download data in bulk so that you could do your own data science. All that stuff will eventually come. Whoever ends up winning the AI race will eventually adapt to the needs of the marketing community. Right.
And tools are going to be built. So just watch it because, I mean, yeah, there's a lot of noise out there and a lot of people are trying a lot of stuff and not all of them are succeeding, but some of them are. And I think it's good to listen to those voices and to emulate some of that success.
[00:52:48] Speaker A: I love that. Yeah, the chaos is sometimes uncomfortable, but it's in chaos that new winners are made. You know, it's a chance to kind of rebuild how we're going to measure, how are we going to do this now? And like we get, you get to be on the bleeding edge of something that is brand new and that's so exciting.
I love that perspective.
Patrick, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been an awesome discussion. I feel like we could go for a whole nother hour.
What's the. Yeah, let's have you back for sure. 100 anytime.
[00:53:21] Speaker B: My pleasure.
[00:53:22] Speaker A: What's the best way for people to connect with you?
[00:53:25] Speaker B: You know, Google me, find out, come find me. LinkedIn is a really great place to reach out to me and connect with me. So. Yeah, well, I love talking about this stuff. So yeah, don't hesitate. Just reach out.
[00:53:37] Speaker A: Okay. And let me. Yeah, let me. Patrick is somebody who is, is willing to share and, and is free with his knowledge and so please reach out. I can, I can vouch for that. Like he's a great person to connect with and talk with. So thank you so much for being on the show today. It's been a pleasure talking with you, Patrick.
[00:53:57] Speaker B: Thank you. Take care.
[00:54:00] Speaker A: That is all for today. If you've enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving us a five star rating and review and subscribing so that you don't miss future episodes.
Big thank you to Patrick Kajirian for joining us today.
You can find Patrick on LinkedIn if you want to talk more with him about his work in enterprise SEO. Some major takeaways from this episode are. Number one, Enterprise SEO is a product function and thinking like a product manager is what unlocks cross functional trust and buy in.
Two, internal linking is critical for indexation. Strategic internal linking that rotates and funnels crawl budget to important pages can be a super effective strategy for large sites.
Number three get creative. When solving problems, get people together with different backgrounds to work on one common goal. This really allows them to demonstrate their expertise and bring their best to that project.
You can find past episodes of the campaign and marketing tools
[email protected] Also, you can learn more about the agency and get in touch with a marketing specialist if you want support for your own marketing campaigns.
That's all for now. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you here next week. Until then, keep innovating, keep converting.
