Bryson Meunier

Listen to “SEO Song” by Google Bard AI

Bryson Meunier — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 14:49:32 +0000

Generative AI can help with hard problems like SEO and Songwriting, but is not yet ready to replace experts in each

Like many of you I’ve been watching Generative AI like ChatGPT, Bard and Bing Chat with great interest. On the one hand, challenges with the SEO expertise of generative AI have been well documented. On the other hand, I think it’s amazing that these large language models can help SEOs with tasks like article creation, keyword research, title tag and meta description creation and templates for outreach. These once time consuming and menial tasks can be more efficient now and SEOs should have more time for the creativity and strategic thinking necessary to beat well optimized competitors and get to the top of the search results.

Because how I think of SEO is not necessarily who can create the most keyword-relevant, technically sound piece of content and get authoritative links to it, but rather who can see that piece of content in the first position and then still think, “I am going to make my piece so good that people will fight each other to link to it first and Google search engineers would be embarrassed not to rank it ahead of what’s currently there.”

This is a hard problem that AI isn’t ready for yet. Maybe at some point as the technology evolves we’ll be able to tell ChatGPT, Bing Chat or Google Bard to do something really hard like “write a Pulitzer prize winning poem” and it will understand what that means and do it, but it is far from that today:

This is the actual Pullitzer prize winner this year for context:

How are you going to create that with generative AI? You don’t have to teach poetry to know the difference between the two poems in terms of quality.

A similar hard problem is songwriting. Sure, a lot of hit songs are formulaic and generative AI should be able to train on a dataset of the top 40 songs in the last 50 years and come up with something but will it be good?

You be the judge of that. I asked chatGPT, Bing Chat and Google Bard to write a hit song, and only Google Bard attempted it. All three language models gave me lyrics, but only Google Bard gave me lyrics, chords and a suggested tempo.

Initially the prompt was simply “Write a hit song,” which it gave to me as though that were the easiest thing in the world:

After seeing what it gave me I decided to make the problem a little harder, saying instead “Write a hit song about search engine optimization.”

My songwriting teacher at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago would probably have responded differently, asking wisely if such a task is even possible given that hit songs are usually about relatable topics like love or fun or honor and not the arcane process of optimizing content to appear high up in organic search results. Google had no such qualms, but instead simply provided what I asked it for. First the lyrics:

Then the chords and the tempo:

If you ask ChatGPT or Bing Chat to give you chords or tempo for the songs they write, in my experience they push back and send you to a professional:

But because Google gave me those three components I could use them to actually perform the song, which you can find here:

As a song, is it a hit? Probably not, but it’s catchy and easy to play given that it’s four simple chords throughout the entire song with no guitar solos or key changes.

I’m an amateur musician who just plays local gigs so maybe Bono or Lizzo could turn it into a hit, but that kind of proves the point.

Generative AI technology on its own isn’t yet good at solving hard problems like songwriting or good SEO without humans helping. Use the technology to make the article that you want ranked first better and do it in less time, but don’t expect to have it write articles in competitive niches and rank sustainably. For that it still needs the help of a good SEO. And likely will for a while.

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Transcript of Scott Huffman Presentation on Mobile Search at Google Searchology 2009

Bryson Meunier — Sun, 12 Mar 2023 19:05:02 +0000

I wanted to make sure that everyone interested in mobile search and mobile SEO had a chance to see this presentation from last month’s Searchology 2009, or at least to review the transcript. It’s important for marketers who are interested in mobile because it confirms that Google is returning optimized mobile web sites ahead of desktop results for certain mobile queries. They have hinted at this before, but now there should be no question. For marketers who want to become more visible to mobile users, this means having mobile-optimized content is not optional, and that mobile content should present a value to the user beyond being simply smaller versions of your pages. It’s also valuable because it gives an inside view into the type of results that Google tends to rank higher for mobile users, which can give product developers and marketers ideas about what types of content they might create if they want to do well in Google mobile search.

Transcript of Scott Huffman on Mobile Search at Google Searchology 2009

Mountain View, California, May 12, 2009

Transcribed by Bryson Meunier from live video

Hi everyone, I’m Scott Huffman I’m an engineering director here in Search Quality in Google and today I’m going to be talking about mobile search quality.

So we’ve heard some things about all the things that you’ve come to expect from search from Google. All the great things like it’s fast it’s relevant it’s comprehensive it’s fresh it knows what you really mean when you type in the search box so of course the starting point for us in mobile search is that you should expect all those same great things on your mobile device.

And so that’s what we’re trying to accomplish. So… great. Big deal, right?

So what’s so interesting about mobile besides that it’s kind of got a smaller screen? So as I thought about that a few things came to mind.

One that you’re probably all aware of is that mobile search is growing incredibly quickly, and we see it growing faster than search from PCs in fact. So it’s really quickly becoming kind of a primary way that people access the internet and access search in some parts of the world growing incredibly fast so that by itself makes it interesting.

Second thing that makes it interesting for my team in particular is we think of as kind of the challenge of devices .so the reality is that I think the desktop guys actually kind of have it easy, right? I mean, okay there’s some different browsers. I get that. They’re different, ok. But like, you’ve got a screen this big [motions with arms to indicate larger screen] those browsers all at least do kind of the main things pretty well. On the mobile world it’s not like that. So we have hundreds of devices literally that we support with Google mobile search and in fact those devices have radically different capabilities all the way from kind of high end devices that have webkit browsers, full javascript capabilities, css, all that good stuff all the way down to the low end where you’ve got devices that don’t really have full browsers, don’t support any of those good things, and in some cases even have hard limits on the number of bytes that they can download on a page so maybe kind of a side effect of that and just another general property of mobile search is that in fact we think search on the mobile device is kind of harder to use than it is on the desktop, right? The keys are really small, sometimes there aren’t keys at all. It’s hard to enter queries and so we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about ‘how can we optimize search to make it easier on the mobile device?”

And then the third thing that’s kind of inherently interesting about mobile is that it’s local, right? It’s in my pocket, it’s in my hand, it’s wherever I am, and obviously we think Google should be able to use that to get me more relevant results when it makes sense. So the way to kind of roll it up for us is our dream that we kind of talk about all the time in the mobile search team at Google is that we’d like to get mobile search to the point where it’s really a daily engagement kind of activity, right? That rather than going to find their laptop, find their desktop in order to do a search that people will feel very comfortable and natural pulling a mobile device out of their pocket and using it. We’re not quite there today and we think there are really three key elements that will get us there.

One is that we think mobile search needs to be complete, right? It’s got to have all the great things of Google but really optimized and beautifully working for my device. Secondly it’s got to be easy. I talked a second ago that it’s hard and we’ve got to get to the place where it’s really effortless and natural to do a search and to get the results I need. And the third that it’s local, right? That it knows where I am, that it does the right thing.

So I want to talk about those three areas and I’m going to start with complete to describe some of the things that we’ve been doing recently in the mobile search world.

So one thing that we spend a lot of time on is really trying to optimize the search experience for the different kinds of devices that there are. Here you see a series of kind of the most recent Android devices and you see a bunch of different elements of Google search. Sort of looks like what you see on the desktop but in fact there are a lot of subtle differences if you look closely. So starting from the Google suggest screen here naturally we want to use suggest to make it easier to type on the mobile device so as you start typing those suggestions pop up. And in fact one thing that happens on a mobile device is that as soon as you start typing the search box slides itself slants itself up against the top of the screen to give you enough room to show as many suggestions as possible and really try to kind of increase the hit rate on getting you the suggestions that you need.

The next screenshot over shows Google universal search, and here you see some… again it looks kind of like the desktop but you see a bunch of differences. For example you see a big button with the phone number, right? So we’re really trying to just make the use case which we see a lot of, of click to call a business very easy very effortless on a mobile device. You see a big button for get directions which actually pops you straight into the Google mobile maps application. And if you look closely there’s actually a lot of other differences between this screen that you get in mobile versus the desktop screen.

The third one you see here is Google image search. This is a version of image search that we launched about two months ago. And here we’ve really tried to optimize for kind of the touch screen nature of some of the devices, right? So you see kind of a tight grid of images when you tap on an image you drill through and get kind of a larger view, some details about the image. And then in fact you can use the swipe mechanism to kind of scroll through the images—something you can’t do on desktop, but something that’s very natural from users of these devices in terms of the typical way that they interact with images and photos and that kind of thing.

And then the fourth screenshot is Google’s product search. This is something we released about two weeks ago, and a really nice rendering of product search if I do say so. And here we’ve used a UI paradigm that’s almost a little more like an application feel. So once you get your search results and you tap through to get the details of a product in fact you can go layers in and get to the details that you need deeper and deeper as you can go in and get the technical specs of their camera let’s say or the detailed reviews and that type of thing.

So that’s one element of complete. Another element of complete that of course is one of Google’s tenets is that we want to let you search the whole web, and in the mobile world the whole web is more than just the whole web that we normally think of. There’s another web, if you like, that we call the mobile web. And all I mean by the mobile web is sites and pages that are really optimized and made for mobile devices, right? Things you probably don’t want to return very prominently on the desktop but they’re very important results in mobile search. In the US you get things like CNN and other prominent sites where what they’ve done is taken their, typically taken their desktop site and made a nice mobile rendering of it for mobile users. In places like Japan and China, in fact, you have a very large mobile Web of sites like mixi and a lot of others that are either primarily used in a mobile paradigm or use case or are, in some cases, only available on mobile devices, and so of course it’s very important for us to use those to return those results properly when people are searching for mobile.

So here’s a picture of that. I’m not going to try to read all of these queries to you or anything but in these screenshots the red results are mobile optimized results from the mobile web and the blue are web, kind of normal web results that typically users on most devices in Japan would see through a transcoded view when they click on it. And my only point with this slide is just to say that you see all the way arranged from at one side queries where there are a lot of good mobile results and so of course our bias in some sense is to kind of return those when they’re available and give you the good easy to use mobile things when they’re there but of course because the desktop web is much bigger a lot of times there aren’t as many good results in the mobile web and so in those cases we’ll return almost all or in some cases all desktop web results to you.

So I had two more areas, easy and local, and for these I want to go ahead and give demos, so if you could switch to the laptop and let me just set this demo up.

So I recently got to take a trip to London– it was a very nice trip. So I hope I get to go back, and if I get to go back I’ll do what I always do, which is I’ll pull out my ticket and I’ll look at my flight number, let’s pretend it’s this one. And then I’ll check it out and I’ll see with the box at the top that, lucky me, my flight is actually on time, which is great. Then I’ll do probably what I always do, which is I’ll take my ticket and I’ll stuff it deep inside some bag somewhere, and then I’ll kind of forget where it is. And then as I drive up or take the taxi up to the airport I’ll be thinking I wonder if my flight’s still on time or if I have time to get some coffee at the airport and unfortunately my ticket will be pretty far away from me. Let’s go ahead and bring up the demo here.

[trying to make the mobile device screen as visible as possible on the projector].

Ok great. So here I’ve got Google search up, and I tap on the search box, and lo and behold, magically, there’s my query, ba 284. This is a feature that isn’t quite released yet. We’re going to have it out in the next few weeks. Very simple idea, right? So then I can tap on this and see that presumably my flight is still on time. There it is. Very simple idea, sharing the queries between my desktop environment, search environment and my mobile environment. We think it’s just one simple example of kind of the power we can get when we’re going across the desktop and across mobile search. So that’s a feature we’re very excited about.

The last demo I want to show you here (let’s just see if I can get this to come up here… alright. See how this one looks.)… So for the last demo here I want to show you an example of kind of local and easy together. What I have here is the Google mobile App, this is on the Blackberry device. So this is our search application that we provide for this device. And you can see at the bottom here that it’s picked up my location being in Mountain View, California, and in fact, from the device’s GPS it’s actually picked up my location basically sort of around here. And so as I start typing, right? [begins typing sushi] of course we get Google Suggest coming up (where’s the Google suggest, there it is) but in fact when I get to something that looks inherently local like sushi what we’re suggesting back isn’t just some queries but in fact is the closest sushi place to campus here. So we’ve taken location, passed it down through the search stack and actually brought that straight back as a suggestion for me. And then if I click on this, you see I get some options to go ahead and call these guys and make a reservation, to see some more information about them on the web, or to pop the maps application and see a map, and again just an example of trying to make it easy to use a mobile device and integrate my location in it.

That’s it for me. I think next Marissa’s going to come up and talk about some more new things in search. Thanks. [applause]

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About Bryson Meunier

Bryson Meunier — Mon, 16 Jun 2014 23:32:35 +0000

How to Pronounce Meunier

High Resolution Headshot Photo of Bryson Meunier

Selected Articles and Presentations

Bio

Bryson Meunier is the SEO Director at CouponCabin, an SEO veteran with more than 20 years experience both agency and in-house, and a thought leader in permission marketing as a columnist for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and .Net Magazine and a frequent speaker on SEO and mobile marketing.

As a marketer, Bryson focuses on creating relevant content that compels digital audiences to share it organically. Search, social and mobile marketing have a unique ability to qualify prospects with queries, interests and context, and marketers should be taking advantage in order to improve the user experience while increasing traffic and revenue for the brand.

He currently does this in-house for CouponCabin, a top coupon site headquartered in Chicago.

Prior to joining CouponCabin in May 2020, Bryson worked as the SEO Director at Vivid Seats for almost 6 years. Prior to that, Bryson worked for almost 9 years in a large digital agency, Resolution Media, where he created the SEO product, was the SEO strategy lead for Resolutionâ€™s largest clients, and created a bleeding edge digital audience segmentation product.

Bryson is a pioneer in understanding how mobility changes SEO and a recognized expert in mobile SEO. His thoughts on mobile SEO have been published by Forrester Research, eMarketer, .Net Magazine, Mobile Marketer, CIO Magazine, B2B Magazine, Mediapost, DM News, Search Engine Land and others. He currently writes a monthly mobile marketing column for Marketing Land.

Bryson has been a featured speaker at both search (SMX, SES, SIS) and mobile marketing (Mobile Insider, Mobile First Look, Digiday Mobile, CTIA, Mobile Monday, etc.) conferences and in various webinars for MarketingProfs University, SEMPO, Mobile Marketer etc.

Prior to joining Resolution Media in 2005, Meunier did enterprise SEO and paid search for Walgreens.com. Meunier holds a BA in English from The Ohio State University, where he graduated summa cum laude with distinction in English. He lives in Park Ridge, IL with his wife and three kids.

Bryson Meunier Elsewhere on the Web

Tweets by @brysonmeunier

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Video Interview on Why Local Businesses Need Dedicated Mobile Sites at MobileMixed

Bryson Meunier — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 14:57:33 +0000

Thanks to Greg Hickman of MobileMixed for having me on his Mobile Marketing talk show. Had a great time talking about mobile SEO topics that are near and dear. We talked about a number of things, including doing a deep dive on the Search Engine Land article I wrote about why local businesses need dedicated mobile sites generally. You can watch the interview here:

http://mobilemixed.com/why-your-local-business-needs-a-mobile-site-with-bryson-meunier/

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Mobile Search Ranking Factors Webinar Tomorrow

Bryson Meunier — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 14:46:01 +0000

Tomorrow afternoon I’ll be presenting the same talk I did at Local University Advanced in Seattle this past June. If you want to know more about mobile search ranking factors, including which ones to pay attention to, which ones to ignore, and which ones to put on the back burner until mobile search has matured, this is the webinar for you.

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GI Joemoz?

Bryson Meunier — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 14:32:50 +0000

Big fan of SEOMoz, like most people in our industry, and am also a client, as we’re Pro Elite members at Resolution Media.

However, every time I see Rand Fishkin’s profile pic in my Twitter or Google+ stream I’m reminded of an old school GI Joe head that my cousin had in the seventies.

Granted, there’s a difference in hairline, cheek scar and beard growth, but there is a resemblance, no?

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Is Siri a Google Killer? No.

Bryson Meunier — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 19:47:06 +0000

Speaking at SMX East for the first time this October. One panel is on the knowledge graph and semantic search, and one is called “Meet Siri: Apple’s Google Killer?”

I don’t know what the other panelists think about it, but after playing with Siri for about an hour, quizzing her on various things I normally use Google for, it was pretty clear to me that Siri has a long way to go before she kills Google. In fact, at this point she would be lucky to give a black eye to Bing. Basically every query that’s not local or computational in nature she punts to Google.

More in the panel, as well as optimization tips for Siri. But I wanted to share this screenshot that sums up why Siri is not quite there yet. In her own words…

Yeah, thanks Siri.

She also misinterpreted or sent all of the queries from Google Hot Trends today to Google. For example, most people would expect that a search for [freddie mercury] would return information about the former Queen frontman; but Siri thought I wanted to buy a car…

The gist of it is, if this personal assistant punts everything to Google, and gives incorrect answers to common queries, how on Earth is that supposed to kill Google? Perhaps it will improve in the future, but if you want a personal assistant on your phone today, the Galaxy Nexus with Google Now is a better bet. Eliminate the middle man.

Looking forward to what the other panelists have to say at SMX East. Be sure to register if you want to learn more. Use promo codeÂ smxspeaker15Â to save 15% off an all access pass.

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Mobile Icons in Google Smartphone Results

Bryson Meunier — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 14:08:04 +0000

Noticed this last night while trying to discover how the new NBC TV show Revolution attempted to explain the blackout:

[revolution tv show] with a smartphone icon in the URL field of the first listing. Searched from a Galaxy Nexus running Jelly Bean, Sunday August 5, 2012.

If you’re not a frequent mobile searcher you might wonder what I’m looking at. A smartphone icon was appearing next to Wikipedia, IMDB and other sites that offer mobile (i.e. formatted or created for smartphones) content. Detail is here:

Has anyone else seen this? I’m not seeing any talk in the SEO blogs about it, and unfortunately I’m unable to recreate this morning, so it’s probably a test that Google is doing for smartphone results.

Could be a big improvement for usability of the mobile SERPs, as it indicates when a listing redirects you to mobile content. This is similar to Old Possum/Skip Redirect update Google announced in December, but instead of showing mobile URLs they show a smartphone icon– in a way that’s similar to what they have historically shown in feature phone results. If this becomes a permanent addition to the smartphone SERPs, it could give webmasters more incentive to mobilize their content, as searchers might click through more often to content they know is going to be usable for their device.

Please let me know in the comments if you’ve seen this in your own search results and for which queries.

Update: A Google rep confirmed that this is an experiment, saying “We’re experimenting with ways to optimize the mobile search experience, including helping users identify smartphone-optimized sites.” They declined to offer more details.

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Mobile SEO Whitepaper

Bryson Meunier — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 15:43:34 +0000

I shared this mobile SEO white paper at SMX Advanced this year, but some of you may have missed it. If you haven’t seen it yet, be sure to check it out.

Many SEOs claim to understand what works in smartphone SERPs, but they probably haven’t examined the characteristics of listings that do well in smartphone SERPs. We have over the course of two years and the result is this white paper. You may be surprised to find out that…

The presence of mobile content is correlated with ranking
Links do matter in mobile
Validation and mobile usability doesn’t matter, unfortunately

Get the details on these and other things that can help you with your mobile SEO campaigns with this FREE download:

http://resolutionmedia.com/white-papers/rank-higher-in-google-mobile-search

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Thoughts on Google’s Mobile SEO Preference

Bryson Meunier — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 19:34:19 +0000

It was an honor to be on the iSEO panel at SMX Advanced this year with Cindy Krum, Pierre Far and Barry Schwartz. If you’ve been reading this blog for half as long as I’ve been writing it you know that I’ve been looking for more clear guidance on mobile SEO from Google for years.

Back in 2009 I tried to mobilize some of you to ask Matt Cutts what he thought about SEO for mobile searchers and the specific challenges that optimizers face.

When he finally answered a similar question in early 2011 I was happy with the answer, but thought it left more questions than answers.

In late 2011 I chronicled some of the many answers that Google has given over the years and still wondered what their “official” position was.

Fortunately Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land and Search Engine Roundtable wondered the same, and invited Google to SMX Advanced to clarify their position at the iSEO: Doing Mobile Search Engine Optimization Right panel.

And there Google finally gave us official guidelines for mobile SEO for smartphones, which people like me, and you, have been waiting for for a while.

These guidelines certainly are clearer, in that they do say that they strongly prefer responsive web design, but they also say that they support other options if responsive web design is not the best option for your site. What it comes down to is: do what’s best for your user and we will support it.

However, most people who came out of that session were on a warpath to make their sites responsive. This is unfortunate because responsive web design isn’t an answer for every design and SEO problem, and some users are going to get a better user experience from dedicated mobile content. Google acknowledges this by giving a two pronged recommendation, but webmasters unfortunately seem to be paying attention to the strong preference without reading the whole recommendation.

In my latest Search Engine Land column I go into detail on this point. If you haven’t read it, please do, and share, if you like it.

The long and short of it is, I understand how responsive web design might be a good solution for small businesses who don’t want the added cost of maintaining separate web sites, and I understand the search engines’ need to spend their limited resources crawling and indexing unique content; but at the same time the ‘O’ in SEO stands for optimization. It’s not necessarily about what’s realistic, but what’s ideal or optimal.

In other words, many businesses may not have the time or resources to do mobile-specific keyword research and build pages for smartphones and pages for desktops, but in some cases this scenario is going to give the searcher the best possible user experience. To not create this experience because of resources is not optimization. Someone, maybe their competitor, will be able to get those resources to provide an optimal experience, and that competitor will get better results from their web site.

I didn’t necessarily think that Google’s thinking about this with their recommendation. In talking with Pierre Far at SMX it seems there are a lot of webmasters who make basic mistakes when it comes to making sites mobile friendly, and this recommendation is mostly about helping those webmasters fix basic problems and become accessible to mobile devices. It’s not really about being competitive, as most ordinary webmasters aren’t anywhere near ready to have that conversation.

That’s fair. And to be fair to Google, their job is not really to help us be competitive, but just to do it in a way that is fair to other webmasters and in accordance with their stated guidelines.

However, for those of us who are optimizers, and are more concerned with being competitive than being accessible, we have to understand that Google’s preference for responsive web design may not be our user’s preference, and we have to design our sites accordingly.

Google understands this. This is why they announced that they support three mobile configurations and left it up to the webmaster to decide which is best for their user. I just hope the rest of the industry got that far in reading their recommendation, as it seems most people I’m seeing stopped reading at “responsive web design”.

But overall, I don’t think the announcement changed much with mobile SEO. I delivered mobile SEO best practices right before Google’s Pierre Far gave his presentation, and looking at those best practices afterward it’s odd how what Google said didn’t really make any of them invalid.

It’s also kind of a moot point when you consider that their feature phone recommendations haven’t changed, and the best practice for feature phones is still to build out separate content on separate URLs.

So while it’s wonderful to have their guidelines and their preference, it hasn’t fundamentally changed what people like me do.

More color and details at Search Engine Land. These are just a few thoughts. Thanks, as always, for listening.

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