Building on the example above, a skill set that will become increasingly vital for success is the ability to understand and anticipate consumer tastes and preferences.

As markets become more saturated and consumers are bombarded with an endless array of choices, marketers who can tap into the pulse of their target audience and deliver content, products, and experiences that resonate will have a significant advantage.

However, it’s equally important to recognize when an attempt to connect with an audience falls flat or, worse, offends. Take, for example, the infamous Pepsi ad featuring Kendall Jenner. In the ad, Jenner joins a protest and offers a can of Pepsi to a police officer, seemingly resolving the tension. The ad was swiftly met with backlash, with critics accusing Pepsi of trivializing the Black Lives Matter movement and using social justice as a superficial marketing ploy.

This is a prime example of a disconnect between a brand’s intended message and the actual tastes and sensitivities of its audience. In attempting to capitalize on a cultural moment and appeal to a socially conscious young demographic, Pepsi instead came across as tone-deaf and opportunistic. It’s a cautionary tale for us marketers — understanding your audience isn’t just about knowing what they like but also being attuned to what they will find insensitive, offensive, or simply in poor taste.

As a marketing leader, I frequently encounter this message/taste mismatch in the content targeted at me. Many of these ads come across as patronizing, failing to truly understand the complex pressures and challenges I face in my role. Rather than providing meaningful, tailored solutions, they often address intricate issues in a superficial, generic manner.

This disconnect goes beyond simply failing to resonate with me — it often actively diminishes my perception of the brand. When I encounter content that makes me think, “they just don’t get it,” it undermines the very purpose of the marketing effort. Instead of building a connection or establishing credibility, it creates a cognitive barrier between the brand and me, making me less likely to engage with them in the future.

As we look to the future, the role of the marketer may also shift from managing people to managing machines. With the rise of AI and automation, algorithms and software will handle many of the repetitive tasks of marketing, such as data analysis, transactional copy creation, etc.

However, this does not diminish the importance of human judgment and discernment. In fact, it amplifies it! As a marketer, your role will be to manage the outputs of these machines to ensure that they are aligned with your brand’s voice and values and the tastes of your target audience. To do this effectively, you will need to have a keen sense of what really good looks like.

This means constantly benchmarking your work against the best in your industry, staying attuned to the shifting tastes and trends of your audience, and having a clear vision for what excellence and resonance look like for your particular brand and market. It’s no longer enough to simply push out volumes of content or ads and hope for the best. Marketers will need to be curators and arbiters of taste, with the ability to separate the signal from the noise.

Now, let’s deal with the task at hand.

Now that you have calmed yourself down and got a clear head, it’s time to get on with the task. There are all sorts of techniques you can use, but I’m going to go through one I use a lot: the traffic light system.

The traffic light system

First, work out what you do know and don’t know using the traffic light system.

List out all the things that you feel you need to do; it could be as simple as:

• Create a plan

• Add the timeline

• Build a team

• Talk to someone

And you’ll find as you think and write, more ideas will come to mind. Keep building on that list, be creative, think of similar problems you have faced, and as you do, jot them all down.

Once you have exhausted ideas, go through the list and color code it as follows:

• Know how to do it – GREEN

• Have an idea on how to do it – AMBER

• Absolutely no idea – RED

This process will take you from “I don’t know how” to “I have some idea how.” It will give you a visual representation of the task, with steps, and you may be surprised at how much green there is on the list. You probably know more than you think you know. We often do, but fear and panic can get in the way of clear thinking.

Who do you need to talk to?

Now you have a better idea of what needs to be done, talk to the people who will help you build on that. They may be part of your team, connected teams, a supplier, or maybe even a client.

This often is easier said than done, as insecurity can come into play. One of my clients once said, “But how can I ask for help? It is my job, and I am supposed to know how to do all of it.”

Together, we challenged this view of thinking by going through the ABCDE model that neuroscientist Giulia Panozzo talked about on my podcast.

ABCDE stands for:

Action

Belief

Consequence

Disrupter (another belief)

Energise

Learn more by listening to the podcast episode:

Using Neuroplasticity for Personal Growth with Giulia Panozzo — The SEO Mindset Podcast

In my client’s case, it went something like this —

Action — She didn’t want to ask for help.

Belief — She believed her job was to do it all and know it all, or else she wasn’t doing her job well.

Consequence — She was stuck in the project

Disrupter — Her manager was someone who was there to support her. Someone she could learn from, and this project was an opportunity to grow.

Energize — With this new belief, she could feel energized and move forward.

By speaking to others, and leveraging their knowledge and expertise, continue building a plan and/or solution for the task that will help you gain progress.

What do you need to learn?

This step is about is about figuring out what you need to know. That may be a course, a book, learning from someone in your organization, and so forth. And remember, you don’t have to learn everything, just the bit that takes you forward.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t learn more, read more, or do the whole course, but as a person with these tendencies, I know it can delay the actual progress of taking action.

Take action

So, remember that traffic light exercise? And the subsequent steps to find out more? Don’t wait to have an entire board of green or to ‘know it all’ before you start. It won’t happen, and you actually don’t need to. As you start having a go, you’ll learn more, and the project will open up.

Often, while searching for a perfect solution, it can feel easier and safer to get lost in the details and planning or get busy with other tasks. These actions could be rooted in fear of failure, reluctance to venture out of the comfort zone, or not feeling confident.

However, confidence will come from taking action, so just start!

Once your site is successfully connected, you should have another tab open the URL of the site you entered with a box indicating that it’s connected to the debugger (don’t worry; that box is only visible to you, not to anyone who might be visiting your site.)

On the left side panel in your Tag Assistant tab, you’ll see a summary that outlines all the events that occur on the page you’re checking. At a minimum, you should be seeing at least three events listed here: Container Loaded, DOM Ready, and Window Loaded. If you see more than three events listed, that’s okay. But if any of those three main events are missing, you’ll need to check into why those events are missing because it’s a sign that something needs to be fixed.

When you click on any of the events in your timeline, you’ll see all the tags that are set to fire when that event occurs. Click on any of the tags to see more detailed information about its triggers, properties, and if there are any blocking triggers associated with it.

As you work in Preview & Debug mode, you’re the only one who can see the information about your tags. That said, let’s say you find an issue that you need to bring to someone else’s attention. You can share your preview with that person through Tag Assistant. In your Tag Assistant tab, look for the three vertical dots in the upper right, click on them, and choose Share. From there, you can select the tags you need to debug to get a shareable link to send to the person who can help.

Once all of your tags are firing correctly, go ahead and publish them. From your GTM dashboard, hit the Submit button in the upper right corner, and you’ll be asked to review your changes. If everything looks OK, enter a name and description for your new container version and publish it.

When you publish changes in GTM, it creates a new version of your container. If there’s ever a problem and you need to revert to an earlier version of your container, all you have to do is click the Versions button at the top of the GTM dashboard, choose the version you’d like to revert to, click Action, and then Publish.

Suppose you’re migrating your tags from another tag manager or from tags directly coded on your site. In that case, Google recommends setting up all of your tags in GTM, then removing your old tags all at once and publishing the GTM container with your new tags as quickly as possible. You might have a very small gap in your data collection, but there shouldn’t be any more issues after your new tags are live.

While globalization has connected the world like never before, successful localization requires more than surface-level translation. By aligning content with nuanced cultural insights, brands can overcome barriers to build authentic multi-local engagement.

In marketing, optimal familiarity may relate to the ideal level of brand recognition and consumer exposure to a product or service. Achieving optimal familiarity in this context means ensuring that your website and content resonate with and are relevant to the local audience in each target region.

Fight for alignment

Localization should reflect the local market’s preferences, habits, and values. Prioritize organic search goals that align with business objectives. In order to capitalize on high-value SEO opportunities, you must test and measure initial efforts. Then, scale what resonates. Regularly refresh your audience and journey research to stay relevant as behaviors evolve.

Machine translator, human editor

Machine translation is an amazing way to scale your presence in various markets. However, machine translation often falls short of capturing nuances. Inaccurate translations can create a sense of unfamiliarity and distrust, undermining the brand’s efforts to build familiarity. Your workflow should always involve local experts or native speakers to help ensure the end result provides a culturally-nuanced translation. An innocent phrase in one country can be offensive or nonsensical in another. In-depth cultural knowledge, sometimes even at a subnational level, is crucial for avoiding such pitfalls.

Internal search is a hidden threat to proper localization

If your website’s internal search engine isn’t localized, it can drastically affect user experience. Make sure to adapt the search algorithm to local needs. Brand names can vary; often, people will use a brand name instead of a product name to describe a product (Kleenex, Whiteout, Frigidaire). You must ensure that your internal search engine is able to return results for these queries; otherwise, customers may feel you do not carry them, and you could lose out on a sale. By adapting the search algorithm to local needs and considering variations in brand names and product terminology, you align your store with local, familiar customer expectations.

Be wary of promotions

Avoid blanket promotions that exclude certain regions. Restricting access to deals due to geographic limitations is extremely frustrating for customers.

Brands frequently run into this issue when running contests or offering coupon codes. Instead, segment promotions by locale to feature appropriate offers. This may require region-specific landing pages, geo-targeted emails, or personalized on-site messaging.

If regulations limit certain promotions, be upfront about eligibility to manage expectations. For example, limitations around Quebec’s strict language laws are understandable if explained clearly upfront.

Set up tracking to monitor promo success by country and tweak based on response rates. Continually optimize to improve the relevance of offers for every locale you serve. Localized promotions require extra effort because you need to keep regional holidays, customs, color symbolism, and laws in mind, but they drive engagement. McDonald’s is known for adapting its menu and promotional offerings to suit regional tastes and preferences around the world. For example, in Japan, they offer seasonal items like the “Teriyaki Burger” to cater to local flavors, while in India, they have a range of vegetarian options to accommodate cultural dietary preferences. But they go beyond that with their marketing strategy, adapting ads to various cultures worldwide.

Choice overload is partially why users choose familiar options, and this is why leveraging familiarity can be a superpower to make your brand stand out in a sea of similar choices.

2. It modulates the way we perceive experiences

Familiarity bias is not only a resource optimization process but also a real tool that has been shown to modulate attention, memory, brand preferences, donation behavior, and even perceived taste when it comes to food.

Let’s take an example that hits close to home for me: As an Italian, my childhood afternoon snack was Nutella on bread, so whenever I see any other chocolate spread, I don’t even consider it, as they all seem to taste weird to me; however, my Spanish friend Isabel grew up with Nocilla and swears by it, saying that Nutella tastes bad in comparison.

But why does that happen? It’s because familiarity can even modulate the way we perceptually experience something, producing an affect-biased preference behavior, as shown by the Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands. The research group tested brand recognition and taste preference in soy sauce and concluded that if the brand of the sauce was known and familiar, it was reportedly liked more. This taste preference applied even when participants thought they recognized the familiar brand but were incorrect. Recognition, either correct or incorrect, of their own familiar brand significantly increased liking scores.

While theories of decision-making and emotions are more complex and still under investigation, the power of familiarity on brand perception and preference has been demonstrated by several other studies throughout the last few decades (Monroe, 1976; Park & Lessig, 1981; Maria Sääksjärvi, Saeed Samiee, 2007; Ma, Wang & Da, 2021 to name just a few). For example, an iconic one by McClure and colleagues investigated the behavioral preference displayed for familiar brands by exposing participants to a blind taste test of Pepsi vs. Coca-Cola. When participants did not know the brand of the drink they were tasting, the preference for one or the other was split equally in the group; however, when the drinks were labeled, ‘brand knowledge for one of the drinks had a dramatic influence on expressed behavioral preferences and on the measured brain responses.’ In short, both brand knowledge and cultural influences bias preference based on affect.

3. It makes us feel safe

As we have seen, the familiarity bias allows us to skim down options and free cognitive resources to allocate to other important tasks, but what makes it so powerful in behavioral and financial decisions is something more profound – the perception of safety it can convey.

While it is undoubtedly a resource-effective mechanism, familiarity also modulates how we feel about brands, especially the perceived trust we can put in them. And it is precisely the perception of safety that can lead a casual visitor to a trusted customer.

The familiarity heuristic has been widely known in behavioral economics, with investors choosing local or domestic companies as they associate it with less risk. The same seems to happen for online businesses, too. If you dig into the Google Search Console (GSC) queries of some global companies, you will find that branded, location-based keywords are bringing in a lot of searches – and sometimes minimal click-through rates (CTRs), which is where they might lose prospective customers who are evaluating their offers.

AI opens up a universe of opportunities. As new AI tools emerge every day, so do new ways of using AI in your business and everyday life. You can use AI to do almost anything.

But that doesn’t mean AI will replace content marketers, SEOs, or writers — or, at least, won’t replace them yet.

AI has a lot of potential. But it also has limitations. Before using AI for content marketing, it’s helpful to get to grips with the constraints of AI.

It isn’t sentient

AI doesn’t have a brain like you or I do. It can’t think or feel.

AI’s knowledge is based solely on logic. In contrast, our knowledge is based on a mix of reason and emotion. Our experiences and feelings shape how we see things. But AI doesn’t have that ability.

AI might feign human emotion, but it’s merely an illusion. AI’s emotion is curated. AI can only perceive things based on the information it is fed.

You can’t rely on it to be accurate

Sure, AI is powerful. But it isn’t always accurate. Just like humans, AI sometimes gets things wrong.

When using ChatGPT, you will see a disclaimer stating, “ChatGPT may produce inaccurate information about people, places, or facts.” While AI tools do their best to provide factually accurate information, they still need a human touch.

If you’re using AI, fact-check the information it gives you. This is particularly important when writing YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) content that has real-world effects on the readers. In these cases, a human touch is crucial for ensuring E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) runs through your content. AI cannot replicate this, running the risk of your content being inaccurate and low quality.

The output is limited by the input

Getting the best possible results from AI depends on feeding it the best possible information.

It’s like asking someone to design you a logo without giving them the exact details about what you want the logo to look like. They might get it right. But it is more likely that they will get it wrong — and you will end up in a back-and-forth ping-pong match of reiterating the design.

You need to tell AI exactly what you want. Otherwise, it’s going to hazard a guess (and likely get it wrong). Be specific in your request — like really specific. Want AI to give you ten content ideas for a blog post on programmatic SEO? Tell it! Want to make sure those results are all about the SaaS industry? Tell it! The more specific your generative AI prompt is, the better the output will be.

The responses can feel canned

You can get AI to write your landing pages, blog articles, and ad copy. But you might not want to.

Remember how I said AI isn’t sentient? And that the output is limited by the input? Well, both of those factors also contribute to the responses feeling somewhat meh.

AI responses can feel canned. They lack the originality and personality you get from a human writer who knows your brand inside and out.

With that said, you can train some AI tools, such as ChatGPT, to produce content that mirrors your brand’s voice, personality, and tone. You can do this by sharing examples of your writing style, providing background information on your company, and feeding it your tone of voice guidelines. But I’ll share more on that later in the article.

Another attribute that limits the creativity of AI outputs is that it doesn’t automatically consider the user journey stage, their current motivations or desires, or the exact words that drive action for them. AI doesn’t know your deeper brand origins or future goals — unless you train it on them.

All that adds up to creating generic content anyone could write. Use AI enough times, and you will notice familiar patterns in the responses. It sounds like AI.

Edited by Emilie Martin

The short answer is yes.

Businesses that rely on Google Search to bring traffic and revenue to their websites are always trying to keep up with how their results are shown or where they come up in the search results. Generative AI and AI chatbots are reshaping how people search and find information, challenging traditional SEO strategies.

It’s been over a year since OpenAI’s ChatGPT, backed by Microsoft, burst onto the scene. This created a frenzy of interest in generative AI (GenAI) capabilities from consumers, the media, and venture capital (VC) investors and put the largest search engine, Google, on red alert. This has led to Google and Microsoft going all in with generative AI as a core to their future of search.

The macroeconomic conditions for VC funding in 2023 had tightened for everything except AI-related startups, which received $68.7 billion in 2023, according to PitchBook data reported by Techcrunch. This forced Google to announce several new AI-powered products, including its chatbot named Bard, and launch its new AI answer-powered search engine called Search Generative Experience (SGE) in beta.

So, a question that has been on my mind for the last few months as I have been playing around with these AI tools: What is going to happen to startups, small businesses, and publishers who rely on search traffic from Google when they decide to roll this SGE out officially to users worldwide?

On December 12, Gartner put out several marketing predictions for 2024, one of which was about organic search traffic:

“By 2028, brands’ organic search traffic will decrease by 50% or more as consumers embrace generative AI-powered search.”

This rapid adoption of GenAI in search engines will significantly disrupt chief marketing officers (CMOs) ability to harness organic search to drive sales. They suggested that companies that rely on SEO should consider shifting resources to test other marketing channels to diversify.

Is this prediction accurate? According to Gartner, it came from a small survey of under 300 consumers. While the ultimate impact on organic traffic revenue remains uncertain as AI search evolves, it is on business owners’ minds.

In a recent Business Insider article about the rise of AI-generated content and the problems it is creating, Gary Survis, an operating partner at a VC firm, Insights Partners, told BI,

“AI-powered search experiences such as this may lead to traffic declines of as much as 25% for many websites.”

Will this mean that large brands will get all the search traffic, such as marketing consultant AJ Kohn has suggested is already happening? When you search for a topic in Google’s new SGE, it will display an AI-generated answer summary and cite the top 3 websites it used to generate that answer above the traditional ten blue links search results. The SGE experience feels like it is ranking for a Featured Snippet, AKA position zero. Still, instead of one answer, the AI parses snippets of content from several sites to show a comprehensive answer to a search query.

According to Search Engine Land columnist Julia McCoy’s perspective,

“Contrary to popular belief, this means SGE won’t steal your traffic. If anything, it’s giving publishers more ranking opportunities.”

It is too soon to know since SGE is still an experimental technology.

So you know your Difficulty benchmark, and you’ve compared it to your current list of target keywords to better fortify your strategy. But what if you want to find new keywords to target? Or spot keywords that you may have missed, haven’t thought of, or have been considering exploring? Well, I have a bonus step to add to your workflow to help you find those new opportunities.

The Keyword Suggestions section of Keyword Explorer offers the ability to find new keyword opportunities to track and target. Start by entering a keyword you’d like to research – it can be one you’re already ranking for or an all-new keyword related to your site or business. Once the list of keyword suggestions populates, click the Filters button at the top of the table. Using the drop-downs, select a Difficulty range that matches the range we identified in Step Three. In the example below, I’ve opted to extend my range to include the lower end of my “stretch” goal for Difficulty to identify some keywords for my long-term strategy, as well.

Strategic:

Before delving into the technical audit head-on, consider the following framework shared by Aleyda Solis:

The above framework helps to get into a solutions-focused framework state of mind, allowing the client or stakeholder to not get overwhelmed with too much data.

This audit framework will differ according to the business and website you are working on.

A framework like this will enable clients/stakeholders to understand the problem, project (tasks involved), and how it ties in with their goals. Giving a clear summary of the scope of the audit will remove ambiguities, and you can get your recommendations implemented faster.

In the above example, by understanding the business type and its goals, both in the long-term and short-term, it is easier to give recommendations that would be easier to implement. For example, a technical audit for a small private gynecology practice would be very different from a large international e-commerce site.

So, the first step to get your technical audit executed is to reduce data overwhelm and have a clear framework for the task, relative to the type of business you’re working with.

Revenue-focused:

Instead of checklists, providing a revenue breakdown for each task is more likely to prompt stakeholder action.

For example, let’s consider our e-commerce business. 404 errors are a common issue that you’ll encounter when working on a website. However, instead of just stating the number of 404 errors, to ensure this issue gets resolved, I would:

1. Show the stakeholder all of the internal links pointing to the respective page.

2. Find out how many backlinks the 404 pages have. Backlinks to a 404 page don’t count towards page rank. Prioritize actioning them using backlink data based on how many backlinks the 404 pages have and their Domain Authority (DA).

3. Provide the revenue generated from those pages in the last 12 months. You can find this data in Google Analytics or internal systems if you have access.

4. Provide visual support for your data, such as graphs and charts. You can use Moz Pro to crawl your website to find what pages might be experiencing critical errors.

The repetitiveness of FAQs can seem like a bit of a local business hassle, but there’s treasure hidden in them for improving customer service and reputation.

If you’re old enough to remember working at a business pre-internet, you likely remember picking up the phone dozens of times a day to answer the same questions, over and over, ad infinitum. Yes, we’re open on New Year’s Eve. Yes, we accept returns with a receipt. Yes, we have no bananas.

If we thought the web would put an end to this Q&A cycle, we were wrong. People are just asking these common questions in more places now, doubtless because they are either having trouble locating the answers or because they don’t know whether the information they do find online is current and accurate. No one wants to arrive at a closed shop or come for dinner only to find out a place no longer serves vegan food or be presented with a bill from an establishment that doesn’t take their card.

These surprises aren’t good for the equanimity of the customer or the reputation of the business, and so the online FAQ page was born, hoping to reduce both risks and time spent answering repetitive questions.

But, in some ways, huge FAQ pages have never sat very well with me, partly because I find them a slog to wade through but more because I feel they may indicate that a company has failed to answer these questions wherever the customer was before resorting to this run-on page.

FAQ pages have their place, but they’re only one thing you could be doing with your customers’ most common questions. Let’s spark some good ideas for additional/alternative FAQ implementations today!