Marketing

Grant Hendricks

Snake oil. Silver bullets. Magic beans. Charlatans have been shilling nonsense for as long as there have been people willing to buy it. Once upon a time, this nonsense took the form of cure-alls, elixirs for long life, and zany hair tonics.
In digital marketing, we have our own industry rife with nonsense: SEO. To be clear, just as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil#History">snake oil</a> may have had legitimate medical benefits, SEO is real, valid, and important. It&#8217;s also an industry that attracts hucksters, amateurs, and quacks.
<ol>
<li>Our first suggestion is to be skeptical about seeking out SEO support. Boosting SEO performance is hard. SEO is competitive by nature. Top spots on Google receive many times more traffic than pages even halfway down the first page of results. Great SEO companies can measure and report their value and charge accordingly. Terrible SEO companies beg you for $300/month contracts and spin their wheels, accomplishing nothing but wasting your money.</li>
<li>Our second suggestion is to be considerate and strategic with your content. Content is the cornerstone of SEO — without content, there is nothing to rank. However, many businesses think any content is good content. As long as it&#8217;s relevant to my industry, it must be impactful, right? Not so, I&#8217;m afraid. 
Here&#8217;s an example based on experience. An automotive repair business starts blogging. Their marketing partner identifies some low-hanging fruit, topics they can rank for in Google, and helps them write articles that start <a href="https://blackbeanmarketing.com/insights/whats-the-root-cause-of-the-labour-shortage">building web traffic</a>. Over time, web traffic doubles, then triples. Great success!</li>
</ol>
Except it&#8217;s not. The topic chosen by the marketing partner is DIY tire rotation. The articles generate tons of traffic — traffic actively looking to avoid hiring the automotive shop. Though their traffic increases greatly, their sales barely grow at all. This is an example of throwing money at a problem without understanding the problem. A near miss is, after all, still a miss.
Marketing, like anything else, involves risk. You should invest in content marketing. You should invest in SEO. Just ensure it&#8217;s a calculated risk. Rolling the dice isn&#8217;t good enough.

Don't Gamble on Your SEO Strategy

Trends

FAQs about AI

Is your website optimized for ChatGPT referrals?

Over the past several months, we’ve noticed an increase in referral traffic coming from ChatGPT. It’s a tiny segment of our web traffic but a valuable one. Using data from sixteen of the busiest Google Analytics accounts we manage, we segmented ChatGPT referral traffic against traffic from all sources. The performance difference is stark:
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-3407 aligncenter" src="https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/lead-gen-performance-ai-vs-the-rest.jpg" alt="table showing the performance differences between chatgpt referrals and all other sources" width="1920" height="555" srcset="https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/lead-gen-performance-ai-vs-the-rest.jpg 1920w, https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/lead-gen-performance-ai-vs-the-rest-300x87.jpg 300w, https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/lead-gen-performance-ai-vs-the-rest-1024x296.jpg 1024w, https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/lead-gen-performance-ai-vs-the-rest-768x222.jpg 768w, https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/lead-gen-performance-ai-vs-the-rest-1536x444.jpg 1536w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" />
Users who arrive via ChatGPT spend more than twice as long browsing the website on average. The number of engaged sessions per user is 50% higher for ChatGPT traffic. These users generate 25% more events per visit and convert 33% more often.
Essentially, ChatGPT referral traffic is the gold standard for engagement in the B2B sector, outperforming any other single traffic source across most metrics. So, how do we get more of it? SEO has proven long-term ROI. Can the same tactics be applied to improve visibility on ChatGPT? Is AI Citation Optimization the next big thing for digital marketers?
This article will explore possible tactics to improve website visibility in ChatGPT and other AI applications. We’ll explore some top-performing pages across websites we manage, identifying possible reasons why they’re appearing in AI—and why others aren’t. Then, we’ll offer our top tips for marketers looking to scale their website’s AI visibility. Let’s get started.

<h2>Chatbot referrals: what are they, and where do they come from?</h2>
When AI chat tools like ChatGPT first launched to the public in 2022, they were unable to connect to the internet. Relying on prebuilt models, they were unable to provide up-to-date information or fact-check their own statements. This could lead to severe <a href="https://blackbeanmarketing.com/insights/why-chat-gpt-is-bad-for-seo-content-generation">‘hallucinations,’</a> particularly when queried on current events.
Within months, developers had patched in the ability to search the internet for context. This allows ChatGPT and similar tools to provide more accurate responses on timely topics and—at least in theory—provide credible sources for its claims. These sources appear as in-line citations—hyperlinks in the chat response linking out to relevant web pages.
This system is far from perfect. In many cases, cited web pages are only broadly applicable to the topic at hand. The feature has steadily improved over the past few months, correlating with a sharp increase in the amount of referral traffic observed from the platform.
Chatbot citations present an interesting marketing opportunity. Where SEO is a crowded, highly competitive field dominated by the world’s biggest brands, AI citations seem to be a more level playing field for now. How to rank for them isn’t fully understood, but it seems that small and mid-sized websites and brands have more opportunity to capture citation links than to rank first overall in Google.
<h3>Search engines vs. answer engines?</h3>
Some marketers are beginning to refer to AI chat tools as “answer engines” and the process of optimizing websites to appear on them as “answer engine optimization” or AEO.
It points to a key difference in the functionality of these so-called answer engines versus conventional search engines.
A search engine’s job is to find websites relevant to your search query. Users search simply and act quickly, often relying on volume (clicking several results to find the right answer) over specificity.
An answer engine’s job is to actually provide the answer, potentially supporting it with supplementary information and citations. While a search engine is part of a user journey, an answer engine may itself be the destination. For many queries, users can get their answers directly from ChatGPT without ever leaving the chat window.

<h3>Different user intent on ChatGPT vs. Google</h3>
The average Google search term is four words long. The average Google search session <a href="https://backlinko.com/google-user-behavior">lasts for less than fifteen seconds</a> before the user clicks a result. Nearly all Google searches result in a click on one of the first ten results. This means a Google search is unspecific and conducted quickly.
The average ChatGPT session <a href="https://www.demandsage.com/chatgpt-statistics/">lasts over six minutes</a>—24X longer than the average Google session! A chat format is conducive to deeper, more thoughtful searching. Users on ChatGPT don’t input four words and choose from one of ten results. A user who clicks on a ChatGPT citation may have been discussing the topic for five minutes beforehand, digging deep and searching for a highly specific answer.
All this is to say that traffic from AI platforms is warmer and more engaged than search traffic. Both are high-intent inbound platforms, but ChatGPT is on a different level of engagement.
Generative AI may have gone public about two years ago, but it’s still an emerging technology. A much smaller portion of internet users are on ChatGPT than on Google. This smaller audience is of higher quality than the general population and is more likely to consist of working professionals and tech early adopters.
<h2>Best practices to increase AI referrals</h2>
<h3>A note on data limitations</h3>
Before we dive into our recommendations, let’s talk about the data we have available to us—or, perhaps more importantly, the data we don’t have.
<ul>
<li>SEO benefits from a really <a href="https://blackbeanmarketing.com/insights/google-algorithm-leak-what-it-means-for-your-b2b-seo-strategy/">high level of visibility</a> from search platforms and website analytics. We have data and attribution from end to end. In many cases, we know which search terms resulted in traffic to which pages, along with all kinds of demographic and engagement data along the way.</li>
<li>AI chat applications don’t give us this end-to-end visibility. When a user clicks an AI citation link, we do not receive any data regarding the nature of the conversation that led to the click. All we get is the referrer value—where the click came from in a general sense.</li>
<li>There are also many AI models, all of which work somewhat differently. None have released specific guidance on how to optimize web content for citations. In short, we cannot say that improving this metric or that will directly increase your ChatGPT referral traffic. We can only observe and report on the factors and conditions that top ChatGPT referral pages share. These attributes are like best practices by proxy: it’s not always clear that they directly contribute to visibility in AI platforms, but it’s likely that by improving the following metrics, your pages will be more attractive to AI chat applications.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Internal linking: higher PageRank correlates to more AI referrals</h3>
Our analysis shows that pages with strong internal PageRank are considerably more likely to get cited by AI. PageRank is a well-understood component of SEO. It’s a score generated by Google based on the number and quality of links to a given web page. If a page is considered highly authoritative, other websites will likely reference it, providing backlinks to the content. If those other websites are themselves authoritative and high-quality, they will pass on higher PageRank scores with their links. It’s fundamental to how Google and other search engines rank websites.
Internal PageRank is just what it sounds like. Rather than measuring external backlinks, it measures internal link structures on your website. The same principles apply: High-quality, high-traffic pages confer more PageRank than lower-quality pages.
Improving internal PageRank must be done mindfully. Trying to boost a specific page by having every single page on your website link back to it will not be very effective. Internal linking should be logical and focused on user intent: does adding a link help users access your most important content? Are interlinked pages relevant to each other? These are powerful internal links that may boost your visibility on AI platforms. Less relevant links may confer little PageRank.
Our recommendation is to audit your internal link structures, looking for gaps and inefficiencies. What information on your website is crucial for customers to understand? Are you sure that users will encounter that information in a typical visit, or is it possible that they will miss it?
<h3>Content length: word count matters, but not as much as the topic</h3>
We found a moderate correlation between word count and AI chat visibility. Though some pages that received referral traffic had as few as one hundred words, the average word count for ChatGPT referral pages was 1128. A typical website’s average word count per page is far shorter than that, often between 200 and 500 words.
In most cases, shorter pages that <a href="https://blackbeanmarketing.com/insights/google-algorithm-leak-what-it-means-for-your-b2b-seo-strategy/">received referral traffic were homepages.</a> The longer pages tended to be blog posts, service pages, news articles, and case studies. Top performers are niche informational articles, often with a focus on educating readers. This is intuitive; ChatGPT and other AIs excel at answering highly specific questions and will often rely on citations to back up their assertions.
<h3>Home pages get top billing on ChatGPT.</h3>
Of the sixteen websites we analyzed for this article, eleven saw their homepage receive the most referral traffic from ChatGPT. For five other websites, their homepage was the second-most visited referral page. Only one website did not receive clicks to the home page from ChatGPT.
This may reflect a particular and seemingly common type of query on AI chat programs. Many users report using ChatGPT to generate lists of products or services that suit their needs. For instance, users might ask ChatGPT something like:

<blockquote>“I’m looking for the best suppliers of eco-friendly building materials for kitchen renovations. They need to ship to Arizona. Give me five options to choose from.”</blockquote>
This type of query will inevitably result in a list of links, and those links will be to the homepage of each identified company.
There’s little to be done to increase the visibility of your homepage beyond <a href="https://blackbeanmarketing.com/insights/want-better-seo-focus-on-brand-awareness/">typical SEO best practices</a>. Instead, consider how your homepage might be adjusted to better address the needs of this type of AI user. We know that your homepage is the most likely page on most websites to appear in a chat citation, so the goal is more about optimizing the conversion rate of visitors from AI. Perhaps more social proof elements above the fold would put this user’s mind at ease? Maybe your homepage could do a better of job of communicating your unique selling propositions to new users?

<h3>If ChatGPT is an “answer engine,” ensure your content has the answers!</h3>
In the age of the answer engine, marketers may want to rethink their approach to content production. We find that direct, instructional content—including case studies and Q&amp;As—is more likely to be cited by ChatGPT. Consider what AI chat users love about AI: quick, easy-to-read answers on almost any subject. ChatGPT wants to reference things you know about. Do you have that type of content on your website? Consider your existing content paragraph by paragraph. Ask yourself how well each section answers a user’s possible questions. Clarify and expand upon thin content. Remove or replace unclear, vague, or low-effort content.
<h2>The Citation Ceiling: AI links are unlikely to deliver traffic volume</h2>
While we’re big believers in the potential of ChatGPT as a referral channel, it’s unlikely to become a top referrer by traffic volume for your website.
Not every chat response provides citations. Not every citation in a chat response gets clicked. As of writing, a typical response with citations may have anywhere from two to five links—not the effectively infinite choices offered by a Google search. In short, even if ChatGPT completely replaced Google Search tomorrow, you would see far fewer users from ChatGPT than you do from Google today.
AI referrals are and will likely always be a quality-over-quantity play. While AI should be prioritized in your marketing strategy, don’t expect to grow your website user count through AI.
<h3>AI citations are a level playing field…for now.</h3>
Anyone who’s used AI for long enough knows that it can generate some amusing or even disturbing hallucinations. From telling people to eat rocks or put glue on pizza to making eerie claims about sapience, AI gets things wrong.
If a user requests a list of the top five industrial marketing agencies in the world, AI doesn’t actually know anything about that. It’s going to perform an internet search on your behalf, using criteria we don’t directly understand. The list it delivers isn’t arbitrary, but it’s also not necessarily true.
It’s somewhat reminiscent of earlier days of SEO. Over the course of decades, the internet and its search engines matured together. While many early winners of the SEO battle don’t even exist anymore, others are entrenched. Websites like Forbes have a kind of SEO critical mass that’s unshakeable. They rank on the first page for millions of queries spanning every topic imaginable. It can be difficult, if not impossible, to take a top ten search ranking from these entrenched websites.
At least for now, we control our narrative in ChatGPT. It uses—some would say steals—our content to generate its responses. Whatever ranking factors it considers aren’t as biased toward top websites. What we discuss on our websites and the tone in which we discuss it materially affects how AI will describe us.
Be aspirational, bold, and upbeat about your company and its offerings. Write authentically but energetically. Present yourself as you’d like to one day be seen. Right now, there is a golden opportunity for businesses to establish themselves in the answer engine economy. It probably won’t last forever.

Lead Generation with ChatGPT: The Power of AI Referrals

Brand

In the United States, it’s another big election year. It has me thinking about gaffes. Remember gaffes? Remember when politicians could do something incredibly stupid, and it would, ya know, end their careers?
I remember Howard Dean in 2004 and his infamous “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6i-gYRAwM0">Dean Scream.</a>”
From <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binders_full_of_women">binders full of women</a> to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basket_of_deplorables">baskets of deplorables</a>, sometimes all it takes to lose an election is a stupid turn of phrase. It’s perception in action. Even if it’s meaningless in the grander scheme of things, a gaffe can infect a candidate with negative public perceptions, dooming them to irrelevancy.

<h2>How the sausage gets made</h2>
Consider the humble hot dog.
The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council (because, of course, that’s a thing) maintains a <a href="https://www.hot-dog.org/resources/Hot-Dog-Ingredients-Guide">glossary of hot dog ingredients</a> on its website. Many people love the taste of a good dog, but we’re all pretty aware of the fact that they’re gross.
Lips and assholes, they say. That’s what’s in your hot dog. The NHDSC begs to differ. It describes the types of meat used quite clearly. For beef dogs, it claims that the meat used is “most commonly pieces of meat cut away from steaks or roasts.” It clarifies that “organ meats are not typically used in hot dogs or sausages, and if organs are used, the specific organ will be included in the ingredients statement.”
Looking into it some more, I see that it is indeed true. Most hot dogs aren’t made from lips or assholes or anything else grotesque. At least, nothing more grotesque than trimmings from an animal carcass.
You know what is made from lips and assholes? Chorizo sausage.
Ok, maybe not assholes. But traditional chorizo is made from lymph nodes, salivary glands, and pieces of pig head. You can look it up. Or don’t; just check the ingredients list on this package:

<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-3299 aligncenter" src="https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/chorizo.jpg" alt="" width="895" height="416" srcset="https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/chorizo.jpg 895w, https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/chorizo-300x139.jpg 300w, https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/chorizo-768x357.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 895px) 100vw, 895px" />
The intention here is not to make you eat more hot dogs, nor is it to stop you from eating chorizo tacos. It’s an exercise in branding—in perception. Hot dogs have a reputation for cheapness and low quality. Chorizo is seen as something gourmet. So hot dogs get the old lip/asshole treatment, while we turn a blind eye to chorizo.
If this section was a bit much, here’s a palate cleanser. A photo of former U.S. presidential candidate Rick Perry getting frisky with a corn dog:
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-3300 aligncenter" src="https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/perry.jpg" alt="" width="758" height="426" srcset="https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/perry.jpg 758w, https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/perry-300x169.jpg 300w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 758px) 100vw, 758px" />
Howard Dean gets lampooned for getting a little too enthusiastic during a speech, but year after year we not only permit but encourage presidential candidates get intimate with corn dogs. Make it make sense.
Anyway, let’s get back to it.
<h3>Isn’t it offal? Rebranding “gross” meat products</h3>
Particularly in our sanitary (and sanitized) western world, there aren’t that many die-hard fans of organ meat. Elsewhere in the world, palates lean a bit more adventuresome. But North Americans are a squeamish sort. We like our chops, our steaks, our chicken wings. Hearts, feet, gizzards? That’s dog food, right?
Over the past decade, some epicureans have tried to challenge that perception. There’s a bit of a culinary resurgence focused on the overlooked cuts, the organs, the offal. The so-called “snout to tail” movement advocates for processing and enjoying the entire animal.
It’s presented as a boon across several dimensions that speak to different concerns among consumers:
<ul>
<li>Efficiency. For those who bemoan the horrific resource inefficiencies of meat production, it makes good sense to maximize the value we get from each harvested animal.</li>
<li>Flavour. Those with adventurous culinary leanings may appreciate the novelty of “exotic” cuts.</li>
<li>Nutrition and health fads. It’s been said that there’s a sucker born every minute. On a probably unrelated note, there seems to be a new health fad born every minute. Some of those fads rely on unconventional sources of nutrition like I dunno, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liver_King">liver.</a></li>
</ul>
In the end, “snout to tail” reframes a disgusting product like organ meat and connective tissue and makes it…I was going to say sexy, but that’s just wrong. Palatable. Let’s say palatable.
It elevates lips and assholes beyond their station. Hot dogs continue to catch strays for a crime they aren’t even guilty of, while the same hipsters that dismiss them line up at butcher shops to get their hands on fresh <a href="https://castandspear.com/nose-to-tail-cooking/">lamb brains.</a>

<h2>Coffee breaks and Kleenex: context and messaging matter</h2>
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-3301 aligncenter" src="https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/covfefe-1.jpg" alt="" width="454" height="576" srcset="https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/covfefe-1.jpg 454w, https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/covfefe-1-236x300.jpg 236w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 454px) 100vw, 454px" />
If you’re reading this, there’s a fair chance you’re doing it on your coffee break.
If you were a time traveller from 1940 reading the previous line, you might ask yourself (among many other questions), “What is a coffee break?”
Workers have always had breaks in their day, but the notion of a coffee break is inorganic. Before the 1950s, Americans perceived coffee as a treat to accompany a meal. You had a cup of coffee for breakfast. Maybe a pick-me-up with supper if you were so inclined.
A concerted effort by the <a href="https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/sep-keyword/pan-american-coffee/">Pan-American Coffee Bureau</a> in the early 1950s created the coffee break. Citing improved productivity and worker happiness, they ran a $2 million ad campaign to encourage workplaces to adopt a coffee break. Coffee’s popularity exploded as a result. To this day, it’s found in break rooms and offices around the world.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleenex">Kleenex</a> was initially sold in the 1920s as a product for removing cold cream and makeup. Over the next decade, Kleenex manufacturer Kimberly-Clark realized that consumers preferred using Kleenex as a disposable handkerchief. They rebuilt their brand around this concept, and the rest is history. A moderately popular cold cream remover became the broadly accepted colloquial term for an entire category of products.
In the case of both coffee and Kleenex, the product itself didn’t change. The message did.
<h2>Are you in an ugly industry?</h2>
No matter what you do, there’s someone out there who hates you for it.
Chemical? Check. Manufacturing? Yep. Mining? Affirmative.
What it comes down to is that everyone wants to drive their car over to paradise, but they get angry when we put up parking lots. It’s having your cake and eating it, too. All sunshine, no rain.
The harsh reality is that an ugly industry allows for the existence of clean industries. The powerful magnets used in renewable energy turbines rely on minerals like dysprosium. There is no replacement for it; it’s not terribly abundant, and mining it is rather dirty. But if we want to “electrify America,” as many people do, we have to keep mining it. Those open pit mines and leaching pools that environmentalists so despise are absolute necessities for their brighter, greener future.
That doesn’t mean dirty industries cannot do better, but there are limits. A mine is a deep chasm carved into the earth. That’s simply how it has to be. No amount of legislation, commitment to environmental standards, or corporate social responsibility policy will make mining clean and green.

<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-full wp-image-3302 aligncenter" src="https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/iStock-1362567340-1.jpg" alt="" width="1254" height="836" srcset="https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/iStock-1362567340-1.jpg 1254w, https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/iStock-1362567340-1-300x200.jpg 300w, https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/iStock-1362567340-1-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https://partners.blackbean.marketing/blackbean2023/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/iStock-1362567340-1-768x512.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1254px) 100vw, 1254px" />
<h2>The unique challenge of marketing in the industrial sector</h2>
The further removed people are from something, the less consideration they give it and the less they tend to understand it. Industrial processes are out of sight and out of mind for the majority of people. Not without reason: the industry is indeed polluting. It can be disruptive to local communities. In some cases, it can be dangerous.
None of this takes away from its necessity. Lack of visibility of industry is part of the broader context of marketing primary and industrial sector goods and services.
Fundamentally, marketing for industry deals with three major challenges:
<ol>
<li>Small addressable markets. There’s great benefit in gaining traction with the general public (more on that later), but most industrial businesses have a niche, highly specialized target market. Contrast that with typical B2C goods and services. Everyone needs shoes or pants. Only a select few need industrial chemical blending services by comparison.</li>
<li>Commoditization and industry consolidation. Many industrial companies operate in a highly commodified, highly consolidated vertical. Chemical suppliers compete against Dow and DuPont to sell products with tight margins and difficult-to-parse unique selling propositions—if there are any. Other industries like oil and gas and mining deal with commodities quite literally. There’s no way to sell premium copper by the ton or bespoke barrels of crude.</li>
<li>Negative reputation and social/political opposition. Industrial companies rarely get spotlighted in a positive way. Visibility in the primary and manufacturing sectors often centres around protests, job losses, strike action, environmental impact, and other negative stories. Generally, negative perceptions toward industry can result in onerous regulatory environments, smaller hiring pools, and even workplace disruption due to politically motivated protests or acts of sabotage.</li>
</ol>
It should be made clear that there’s a big difference between advocating for a fair regulatory environment and free market absolutism. Industrial companies that operate in bad faith, lie to and mislead the public, or hide their environmental impact contribute to the negative perceptions that affect industry at large. Honesty and transparency are pillars of ethical marketing. Companies that make a good-faith effort to meet or exceed social and environmental best practices can actually help their industry avoid sledgehammer legislation that eats into profitability.

<h3>Messaging: your secret weapon in B2B industrial marketing</h3>
When the products are commodities, the directly addressable market size is small, and the marketing landscape is tilted against you, what’s left for industrial companies to grow their influence?
In many cases, the answer is messaging. Even in commodified industries, someone wins public bids, gets first dibs on mineral rights, or gets their new facility fast-tracked for development. Sure, that’s a lot of personal network at play. Growing and leveraging that network will always matter. But there’s more to every deal than just who you know.
B2B deals, particularly those with a public component, get approved by committee. Everyone knows that things done by committee are always great and more than the sum of their parts, but I digress.
You might have an in with the primary decision-maker, or you might not. It’s unlikely you have a personal connection to everyone involved in a complex B2B deal. It’s also probable that effective strategies like gift-giving are regulated in your industry, either by government or by corporate policy. This is where your marketing steps up to help grease the wheels.
In B2B marketing, the pitch never stops. Your message continues to work for you after the proposal is submitted for review. Messaging is how you show your customers who you are and why they should choose you over your competitor.
Consider the three major challenges faced by many in the industrial sector:
<ul>
<li>You may deal in a commodified market. You can compete on price, but is that the best idea? It’s a race to the bottom, sacrificing margin to close deals. Companies run themselves out of business chasing competitive pricing. Isn’t it better to compete on, well, anything else?</li>
<li>Your market size is small, which also makes it distinct. With a solid understanding of target market characteristics, you know what they value and how to communicate those values back to them.</li>
<li>Many industrial business deals hinge on political support across one or more levels of government. This creates a broad audience of tertiary stakeholders—voters, local residents, politicians, and city staff—that can either be friends or foes, depending on what they believe about your project.</li>
</ul>

Sales teams are a critical component of communicating the message, but they’re targeted to your prospects. A salesperson can’t pitch to every stakeholder at once, especially if we consider broader political support and all the tertiary stakeholders involved in political processes. It’s your marketing material, your messaging, your brand experience that can influence a broad range of stakeholders. In a more limited marketing environment, these elements matter more, not less.
<h2>Change your fortunes by changing perceptions.</h2>
Perception management in industry gets a bad rep. Dishonest messaging results in accusations of greenwashing and propaganda. These criticisms actually highlight the effectiveness of perception management via brand and messaging. Such tactics would not be derided as they are if they weren’t effective. There’s no need to lie or deceive to receive benefits from messaging-based marketing, either. As we’ve discussed, industrial goods and services are absolutely necessary. Whether it occurs in our communities or gets offshored to the developing world, we rely on heavy industry and manufacturing to live our modern lives.
It’s all about selecting the right angles. Building a new pulp mill might result in a serious and unavoidable increase in local air and water pollution. What if it adds a hundred well-paying, stable jobs to a struggling small town? Calculate the broader impact of that job creation—all the money that flows into that local economy, in turn creating more jobs in unrelated industries, improving tax revenue for the municipality, and potentially funding a community revitalization.
Selling heavy equipment with high carbon emissions may run counter to decarbonizing the economy, but what if that heavy equipment gets used to protect communities from floods and wildfires? Tell that story. Make it human and relatable.
Industrial marketing is the discipline of finding silver linings in every cloud. Industry is at a disadvantage in the messaging battle; its benefits are underappreciated, and its necessity is misunderstood. Many of your competitors don’t care.
That’s why you should.

From Hot Dogs to Heavy Industry: The Power of Public Perception

The “Privacy Sandbox:” breaking down upcoming changes to analytics tracking

Development

On May 27, 2024, SEO experts <a href="https://ipullrank.com/google-algo-leak">Mike King</a> and <a href="https://sparktoro.com/blog/an-anonymous-source-shared-thousands-of-leaked-google-search-api-documents-with-me-everyone-in-seo-should-see-them/">Rand Fishkin</a>, among others, revealed that Google’s search ranking API documentation had leaked. An automated system published the documentation to a public code repository under an open source license in March. Although the leak has since been removed, copies of it have been distributed around the internet.
The leaked content is dense, highly technical, and limited in important ways. While we have more visibility on which factors Google uses to determine search rankings—some of which are surprising—we don’t know the weighting of these factors. It’s like having a recipe that lists every ingredient but doesn’t provide the quantities or method to complete the dish.
Nonetheless, we’ve gained new and unexpected insight into Google’s ranking system. Let’s look at some of the more surprising insights gleaned from this leak, and how they might impact your B2B SEO strategy going forward.
<h2>Clicks and sessions inform performance: user behaviour as a primary ranking signal</h2>
It’s long been suspected that clicks impact search rankings. It’s something of a feedback loop that can cement top results. A website ranks highly, gets clicked on, the number of “good clicks” improves their performance, it ranks higher, it gets more clicks…
This leak (as well information exposed during the ongoing Google antitrust case) proved that clicks aren’t just a signal, but a major one.
I’ll reiterate that we don’t know the precise weighting of clicks, but clicks, users, and sessions come up a lot in the docs. We can infer that the number of references to these topics mean they’re particularly important when it comes to assigning rankings.
<h3>Insights from the leak</h3>
<ul>
<li>Clicks definitely get used to evaluate search rankings, despite some official statements from Google to the contrary</li>
<li>Not all clicks are created equal. Google’s docs show ranking factors such as “bad clicks,” “good clicks,” and mysterious “Unicorn clicks.” We can guess that bad clicks hurt rankings, while good and “Unicorn” clicks likely help them.</li>
<li>What users do after the click matters as well. SEOs have claimed that metrics like “dwell time”—how long users actually spend on-page after clicking a result—may be a factor in ranking. While dwell time isn’t explicitly described in the report, other factors related to session duration are.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Our analysis</h3>
This is something of a worst-kept secret in SEO, but getting confirmation is always good. What intrigues us most is the way clicks get defined. What entails a bad click? A “Unicorn” click?
Bad clicks might be easier to define. If a user clicks your listing but immediately bounces, it suggests they didn’t get what they wanted. That might be a bad click. Given that Google also appears to define good, bad, and Unicorn users, it could be that “badness” follows you around the internet like a bad odour. For instance, known bots and malicious users might be permanently designated as “bad” to prevent them from manipulating search results.
Unicorns are more intriguing. In sales, a unicorn is a prospect that checks off every single box. They’re best-fit clients that are so rare, they’re unicorns. What makes for a unicorn user?
At this point this is just idle speculation, but what if a unicorn user is one that “plays ball” with Google to the greatest extent possible? Someone who never uses an ad blocker, always stays signed in, and otherwise acts as a model citizen within Google’s tracking ecosystem?
This user would provide Google with the most complete picture of their online behaviour. Perhaps this is what Google means by unicorns?
<h3>Next steps for B2B SEO</h3>
Confirming the importance of clicks and on-page behaviour might refocus your SEO strategy away from content creation and toward experience optimization. SEO should never be about producing low-value content—we’ve always wanted to engage and delight audiences. Sometimes this user-first focus gets lost in the mix of content calendars and technical tweaks. In a click-focused SEO paradigm, we need to grab users with effective headlines, then convince them to stick around once they’ve clicked. For some SEOs, this might be an inverted way of thinking about the challenge.

<h2>Browser-based user tracking and Privacy Sandbox: Chrome is king?</h2>
Google Chrome is the number one (desktop) web browser in the world. In fact, its underlying framework—Chromium—powers most competing browsers, from Edge to Opera.
It’s a good thing for Google that they have such browser supremacy. As we approach the death of third-party trackers in 2025, the <a href="https://blackbeanmarketing.com/insights/the-privacy-sandbox-and-its-impact-on-b2b-marketing">Google-led Privacy Sandbox initiative</a> aims to provide advertisers with tools to target users in a more privacy-friendly way, such as the “Topics API.” Some of these methods depend on tracking tools embedded in Google Chrome. A user in a different browser may not be assigned any topics based on their browsing behaviour, making them less visible to advertisers reliant on the new Topics API.
Within the leaked documents, we see reference to Chrome-specific signals like the total number of views for a page from Chrome users. It’s unclear what the significance of Chrome usage is, but in the context of Privacy Sandbox, it seems like Chrome users may provide higher-quality data to Google. Is it possible that a Chrome user is worth more to your website than users from other browsers, all else being equal?
<h3>Insights from the leak</h3>
<ul>
<li>Google explicitly analyzes Chrome users differently than they do users on other browsers.</li>
<li>The emerging Privacy Sandbox initiative depends on Chrome usage for some tracking and targeting features.</li>
<li>Chrome users may therefore be perceived as higher-value from Google’s perspective as they have a clearer picture of their behaviour and interests.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Our analysis</h3>
Privacy Sandbox will strictly limit the amount of cross-site tracking that advertisers are capable of. Given Google’s interest in user behaviour when assigning organic rankings and their separate tracking of Chrome users, it raises questions about the importance of Chrome users across all forms of search marketing.
Are Chrome users weighted more heavily? It seems plausible. The separation of Chrome users from others suggests there’s something important about them from Google’s point of view, and I doubt it’s pure brand vanity.
When we discussed user quality in the previous segment, it may be the case that user behaviour across sessions informs their quality. On-device processing like the Topics API is one of the methods Google proposes to balance privacy and trackability, but it only works if browsers support it.
So the question becomes, which browsers will support it and why? Microsoft and smaller browser publishers like Mozilla really don’t have a reason to add Google’s tracking tools to their software. For many, not having these trackers might be a reason to switch! Apple and its Safari browser may have some incentive, as Google pays Apple billions to ensure it’s the default web search for Apple devices.
Watch for a flare-up in the browser wars in 2025. Google will push hard for Chrome usage, while other browsers may push back, suggesting a higher degree of privacy and security as a major selling feature.
<h3>Next steps for B2B SEO</h3>
Consider exploring browser and device splits. At this point we simply don’t know enough to verify whether there’s something different about Chrome traffic and its impact on SEO. We also can’t really assign particular behaviours or user attributes to Chrome users specifically, making it hard to optimize content and experiences for Chrome. However, knowing is always half the battle. As Chrome usage becomes more significant for digital marketers in the year ahead, tracking Chrome usage is a good first step to understanding what’s to come.

<h2>All pages are equal, but some are more equal than others</h2>
Fairness, or at least perceived fairness, is crucial to the SEO industry. We want to know that if we do better work than another company in our niche, we’ll reap the reward. Equally, we want to know that others can’t cheat their way to the top and expect to stay there. The whole idea of a search engine is merit-based. The cream must rise to the top!
In practice, it doesn’t work that way. It’s not a completely rigged system, but there are thumbs pressing on scales. Google doesn’t weight every page according to the same rules.
For example, homepages are exceptional in Google’s eyes. They see a homepage as a logical “front door” to your website, a declaration of precisely what you are. Google appears to temporarily apply its ranking score for website homepages to newly published pages on the website until the page ranks on its own merit.
There are also broader content classifications that get handled differently. You may be familiar with “YMYL,” or “Your Money or Your Life.” Google attempts to identify particularly sensitive or risky content, like content that advises on medical treatments or financial advice, handling it with more care and attention than general informational or entertainment content.
YMYL pages (as identified by Google) get subjected to more scrutiny. It’s an attempt to prevent Google from serving dangerous information—a problem they’re dealing with right now as their AI results have been telling users to <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd11gzejgz4o">eat glue</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/24/technology/google-ai-overview-search.html">jump off bridges.</a>
In bygone eras, SEOs harped about content and title lengths as though they were legitimate ranking signals. What we see in this leak is that longer content gets truncated, prioritizing the first few paragraphs of an article. Shorter content gets evaluated for uniqueness. Even elements like font size and weight may be ranking factors, albeit likely minor ones.
The leak shows that Google has quite a number of specific categories that contribute to their rankings. Small personal websites are one such category, but we don’t know to what end. Is Google punishing small websites in favour of big and noteworthy brands? Are they trying to make it easier for small websites to grow, creating a more dynamic results page? Whatever the case may be, they track these websites in a separate category. They’re treating pages differently according to each page’s context. That’s meaningful.
<h3>Insights from the leak</h3>
<ul>
<li>Google prioritizes your homepage. Your homepage’s score appears to be a stand-in for newly published content until it ranks on its own merit.</li>
<li>Small websites, websites featuring “risky” content, and other specialized website categories get classified separately. It is not known how these categories affect rankings.</li>
<li>Google summarizes long pages, using the first segment of the page to determine its topic.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Next steps for B2B SEO</h3>
Work on your homepage. Make sure it’s a great entry point for your website, imbued with relevant context. Consider how you can grow brand awareness—and try to track the SEO impact of any new brand awareness campaigns you try.
When producing long-form content, focus on your introduction. Make sure the first paragraph or three provide enough context for Google to understand your article, because after that it stops reading!
It may be a good idea to classify your own website and frame future competitive analysis by website category, knowing how distinctly Google views each type of website.
<h3>Our analysis</h3>
Homepages seem to serve as something like a benchmark for your overall search visibility. It’s interesting to consider the implications of the high value of clicks and on-page behaviour combined with the high volume of branded search clicks received by homepages. Clicks seem to matter quite a lot to page rankings, and homepage rankings matter quite a lot to overall visibility.
If we connect the dots, it puts branding and brand awareness front-and-centre. Brand keywords have high CTR and tend to have good engagement. We see the potential for other marketing disciplines to contribute meaningfully to SEO performance by boosting brand awareness.
If you’re looking for a focus area to work on, consider improving your homepage experience. Ensure it’s perfectly relevant to your niche. Create easy-to-navigate pathways from your homepage to key converting content so that users and search engine crawlers alike understand what your site is and how to navigate it.
Long articles are great, but SEOs can’t afford to bury the lede. Consider blog and article formats that up-front useful information so both Google and your users can quickly verify what it’s about.

<h2>Content freshness and author profiles</h2>
Another finding from the leak is the likely importance of content freshness and author attribution. Both are considered best practice for SEO anyway, but the scope of their import became clearer.
For instance, an article’s date property gets inspected in three ways, comparing the returned value for each. Google checks for a date value in the article, compares it against date values in the URL, and derives further date information from metadata and other sources. This could mean that ensuring alignment across all potential date values will impact page rank.
SEOs are well familiar with a concept Google calls E-E-A-T: Expertise, Experience, Authority, Trust. Until now, it’s been unclear how such a thing could be gleaned. With insights from the leak, it seems that Google really does care about authorship and may use author metadata as a major E-E-A-T signal.
<h3>Insights from the leak</h3>
<ul>
<li>Dates seem to matter quite a lot, as Google verifies article dates via three separate techniques.</li>
<li>Authorship is a tracked signal, pointing to the importance of maintaining good attribution and schema</li>
</ul>
<h3>Our analysis</h3>
We don’t really know how deep this authorship and content freshness rabbit hole goes. If properly structured, authorship attribution might be able to follow you around the internet. Can Google understand that your social media posts are part of your E-E-A-T profile, contributing to the value of your authorship page? It’s an intriguing thought.
To be frank, authorship and content freshness are signals we’ve been lazy about, and we plan to change that. It’s easy to become complacent about tagging and structured data that often feels ineffective in terms of moving the meter. If nothing else, this report shows that at least some of that schema directly impacts search rankings.
<h3>Next steps for B2B</h3>
If you aren’t already, get serious about author schema, author pages, and attribution. Move from publishing articles by [Company Name] or “Contributed” and toward publishing articles by thought leaders at your business, tagged in such a way that Google and your users both know who wrote what. As with any SEO update, take note of what upgrades you made and when. Compare YoY and month-over-month data to see whether it’s made an impact.
<h2>Conclusion: SEO is all around us</h2>
If we learn anything more about SEO from this huge leak, it will be through the hard work of the industry’s leading analysts and thinkers. Given that we’re missing so much context, all we have today is a list of what-ifs and maybes. In time, and with a commitment to research and testing, the industry may be able to uncover novel, specific, and prescriptive methods for growing search visibility.
For now, we’re left with questions. Leading questions, but questions nonetheless.
One truth that seems evident already is that Google’s ranking factors go well beyond what they’ve publicly disclosed in the past. The official line from Google has always been—and continues to be—to produce good content and the results will follow. Bear in mind that most of the exposed metrics involve identifying quality content. Factors like authorship, content relevance when compared to the rest of your website, and user engagement all speak to better quality making for better SEO results.
As of writing, our leading hypothesis—and our suggested advice to fellow B2B SEOs—is that SEO happens everywhere. It’s not just your website, your backlink profile, and the thoroughness of your content. Offline brand awareness ought to improve SEO performance. In the near future, events that occur in your users’ browser might inform your results, independent of anything you can control directly from your WordPress admin dashboard.
So listen, watch, test, and analyze. Wait for Google’s response to the leak, then take their words with a massive grain of salt. If this API documentation has indeed exposed Google’s “secret sauce,” the SEO world ought to get very interesting through the remainder of 2024.

Don't Gamble on Your SEO Strategy

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