Ever wonder why some websites rank higher than others, or how to make your site the jewel in Google's crown? Michael and Stuart unravel the mysteries of search engine optimization in a candid chat about Google's latest SEO Starter Guide. We're not just rehashing the same old keywords tactics; we are talking about the current state of Search Engine Optimization and what has changed since the last time we spoke about it. And Spoilers: it's a LOT.
Learn more about our sponsor NIVODA: https://nivoda.com/intheloupe
Send feedback or learn more about the podcast: punchmark.com/loupe
Learn about Punchmark's website platform: punchmark.com
Ever wonder why some websites rank higher than others, or how to make your site the jewel in Google's crown? Michael and Stuart unravel the mysteries of search engine optimization in a candid chat about Google's latest SEO Starter Guide. We're not just rehashing the same old keywords tactics; we are talking about the current state of Search Engine Optimization and what has changed since the last time we spoke about it. And Spoilers: it's a LOT.
Learn more about our sponsor NIVODA: https://nivoda.com/intheloupe
Send feedback or learn more about the podcast: punchmark.com/loupe
Learn about Punchmark's website platform: punchmark.com
Welcome back everybody to In the Loop. What is up everybody? My name is Michael Burpo. Thanks again for listening to In the Loop this week. I'm joined by Stuart Blussman, the director of digital marketing at Punchmark, and this week we're going down to the basics and we're talking about Google's brand new SEO starter guide, and Google actually re-released this after I think it was like four or five years since they released the last one, and this is essentially like the beginner's manual to what SEO is. And, in case you're at the very beginning, seo stands for search engine optimization and what we're typically meaning is Google's search function though it also does apply to Bing, if you use that and what we do is we break through like the key points of the SEO starter guide and we talk about what no longer matters, what used to matter, what we're doing about it now, and this is actually a really fun talk. Stu's great to talk to you and he's good on the mic, so I hope you enjoy and learn something new.
Speaker 2:This episode is brought to you by Punchmark, the jewelry industry's favorite website platform and digital growth agency. Our mission reaches way beyond technology. With decades of experience and long lasting industry relationships, punchmark enables jewelry businesses to flourish in any marketplace. We consider our clients our friends, as many of them have been friends way before becoming clients. Punchmark's own success comes from the fact that we have a much deeper need and obligation to help our friends succeed. Whether you're looking for better e-commerce performance, business growth or campaigns that drive traffic and sales, punchmark's website and marketing services were made just for you. It's never too late to transform your business and stitch together your digital and physical worlds in a way that achieves tremendous growth and results. Schedule a guided demo today at punchmarkcom. Slash go.
Speaker 1:And now back to the show. Welcome back everybody. I'm joined by Stuart Blessman, Digital Marketing Director at Punchmark. How are you doing today, Stu?
Speaker 3:I'm doing pretty good, looking forward to talking to you about some SEO stuff.
Speaker 1:Absolutely so, maybe the biggest buzzword of all time I feel like it has. Ever since I heard about it, it's been one of the biggest topics that we discussed with our clients the most Maybe we've done probably about six or seven or 10 of these episodes in the past. Probably a full 16th of our entire discography is about SEO, but maybe someone found this podcast today. Can you introduce them to what SEO is?
Speaker 3:Sure, Whenever somebody goes on the internet, they typically use a search engine. A search engine like Google or Bing finds the websites that are on the internet and serves the websites and the web pages and the jewelry and the products to whoever is looking on that search engine. So you go into Google, you type in necklaces near me. You want to show up very high and have Google serve you high.
Speaker 1:And it's like there are more than enough websites more websites that are even feasible for Google to be able to serve. So then it comes down to how does Google know what to serve, what is relevant, and relevancy is one of those topics I feel like we talk about all the time. So what are some key factors that Google looks at when it comes to website relevancy?
Speaker 3:So I like the fact that you opened up by talking about how many of these podcasts we are done, because the thing with SEO is it's ever evolving, ever changing. Google updates their platform, microsoft updates Bing, the rules and the game, how it all works, constantly changes. So one of the things we've learned over the last couple of years that Google really looks at when it comes to SEO for websites and how it kind of works for jewelry stores in particular, is all of the results are tailored to the person searching for something, whether it is the time of day, it is the location, physical proximity to a jewelry store, whether it is the relevancy of are you looking to purchase? Are you looking for information? There is no one Google. There is no one type of search rankings. There's a bunch of things under the hood, all towards giving the actual person searching the best experience possible when they type in those words into Google.
Speaker 1:There you go, and I just went back quickly and looked in our backlog the eighth episode. I guess that would make it the 15th overall episode of In the Loop, but eighth of In the Loop proper not. The Jewish survival kit was called SEO, the strategy to drive more people to your website, and that was four years ago, wow. And then we've made it out of a pandemic and we have Apple AR Goggles and all sorts of cool stuff. As a result, the technology is changing and it's kind of like a cat and mouse game.
Speaker 1:So in the beginning Google was like, okay, we only are going to care about, so if you are looking for jewelry, then we're going to serve websites that have the most iterations of the word jewelry in it. So then people were like, oh, so we have to have the word jewelry in there 30 million times. So then people would game the system and then they would stick the word jewelry in there hidden and in like micro-text and all sorts of things. And then Google was like, okay, hang on, that's not right. And then I keep saying Google, it's Bing too. No one cares.
Speaker 3:I hate Bing, so I refer to it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, google's the number one one. And so then people were like oh, google's like, oh, we only care about websites people like using. I've skipped a couple of iterations since then, but whatever Websites people like using or use a lot, which means essentially time on page. So what did people care about? They care about, maybe obfuscating some stuff, maybe they make it, so it's kind of hard to find what it is, but that means you're going to be on their page for a long time. And then Google was like no, no, no, no, no, let's make it, and that is the game that has been playing. But, like you said, the point of this episode is a starter guide, because this is 2024. It's no longer whenever Google was started, in 1999 or something like that. Let's talk about the starter guide. And what is this SEO starter guide and why did you bring this to me? And you were like, hey, we should do an episode about this.
Speaker 3:So actually, Mike, when is the first memory you have of using Google?
Speaker 1:Man, I remember man, this is going to be so, that is so crazy. I remember googling Kingdom Hearts 1 images on the elementary school school computers and what you could do is you could find awesome videos and photos and you could put them at the background of your desktop computer. And I remember going on there and using Google images. That's what I remember the most.
Speaker 3:Wow, kingdom Hearts. 1. Nice yeah.
Speaker 1:What about you? What do you remember about it?
Speaker 3:So I was a Yahoo devotee. I used it exclusively up until about 2003, 2004, 2005, when somebody introduced me to Google and I realized very quickly this is a much better experience. So the way Google worked back then is completely different than the way it works now. Every time we come up with a new podcast, there's a portion of the information, the sites, the suggestions that are no longer relevant. One of the things Google has given everybody on the internet is what they call the Google's SEO starter guide. It is something they started, I want to say, 15-ish plus years ago, and they updated it when enough big things have happened. So in this case, they're just released a new version this month, february or January of 2024. The last time this Google's SEO starter guide was updated was in 2017, really a decade ago in some ways.
Speaker 1:So was that they usually call them by, I think, animals. I think was it hummingbird back then.
Speaker 3:Hummingbird, panda, when they released something that's like an animal thing. It's more of this is a series of updates that is happening to the platform. We're just calling it this quote name, product name, things like that, and then there's a bunch of stuff underneath it like, hey, we made these changes or here's what we can't tell you. But think in these ways of thinking, the SEO starter guide is something that summarizes all those things. It might not mention things like a panda or a hummingbird, but it is the accumulation of where we are at now and what Google says 80, 90, 95% of what your attention should be focused on.
Speaker 1:So I think that one thing that's really important is knowing that, because it's this very complex, what Google actually is, the Google search is the most refined algorithm in the world of century Algorithm, just meaning it's a series of ones and zeros that are going to serve the best results and hopefully get better over time. Can you boil it down to what are the big changes for this, this edition?
Speaker 3:So the biggest changes that I noticed as I read through the documentation and compared to the previous documentation was Google is removing a lot of the technical jargon. They want you to think a lot more in general concepts. They're also aiming to make this accessible to as many people as possible. So you don't need an engineer, you don't need to have a technical background, but you can find links to those things where, if you want to go down the deep dive, you can.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and one thing that's always been interesting is and I'm sure you hate this, but I always say that 99% of digital marketing is so readily accessible by you running your website. The secret is that it just takes a lot of time. It's very manual, and that's why you can pay us the money to do it for you is because you probably don't have the time or the. Maybe you don't want to learn how to do it or, you know, maybe you're just a little bit lazy. That's okay too, but I think that's one of those things to know is that it's good that they're I don't want to say dumbing it down. That's the wrong impression. It's more like they are making it more accessible for the layman.
Speaker 3:Yep, they've done this in a few different ways too, like they've removed a ton of outdated advice. So if you compare the 2017 to the 2024 version of this guide, it is over 50% smaller. Wow, there's just tons of stuff that they removed from it, and the new guide has a lot more practical examples. And if you're kind of like reading between the lines and what they're saying, with some of the examples they're really calling out a lot of bad practices and basically putting some people on blast to kind of like game the system in certain ways. Not only is there, like you know, the official produced SEO guide that they've released, there's also a podcast that goes with it. There's a YouTube series that put that with it, and if you know who the people are who produce those things, you can go find their comments on Reddit, find their comments on Facebook, find their comments all over the place, where you can kind of get an extra picture of like okay, there's some things you guys are working on and you're going somewhere with this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I guess my concern about this has always been that Google used to be like. The sales pitch for Google search was always it is the library index of the internet. It was where you went when you went to the library and you were just like okay, like maybe serve me something random or I'm looking for something hyper specific and it'll put you right next to that bookshelf. But over the past couple of years correct me if I'm wrong I feel like the impression has started becoming that it's not really so much about serving you the best results. A lot of the time it's increasingly about serving you some paid results. I feel like paid marketing is really kind of to the detriment of Google search right now. Am I wrong on that?
Speaker 3:You're not wrong on that. Google recognized over 10 years ago roughly around the same time, facebook recognized this as well that there's not much money to be made by just serving a list of organic results and then maybe a banner along the side. It's much more impactful and you get much better data too, plus money, obviously, when the first three are an ad one, two, another ad, two, three, another ad. That is where they make a boatload of their own money, and we're never going back to the time when everything was free. This is the reality. This is the world you are in. If you want to play, really play within Google.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's like why are these ads so effective and arguably worth the dollars? Well, Google knows a ton about you and there's this one podcast I listen to all the time. It's called Pivot, by Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher. We talk about tech, and one thing that Scott Galloway has always said he's a business professor for NYU Stern is he will talk about how Google.
Speaker 1:You go to Google to share thoughts and concerns that you would never bring to any rabbi or pastor or your parents or even your spouse, things related to your health, things related to hey, you could say, I have a rash and I don't know. Where is this? Concerning the number one thing people do, in that instance, they're not going to a healthcare provider of right away anymore. They are Googling it and, as a result, now Google knows this person has a rash on them, but that's kind of. Maybe you serve them medical related advertisements or something like that. Or you see a whole bunch of searches for Valentine's Day. We just had Valentine's Day. Well, suddenly, what does Google know about you? Well, Google knows that you are probably in a relationship of some sort and most likely you are scrambling to find a gift really soon. So what do they do they're going to serve you with fast acting gifts or things that other people who are similar to you would most likely want to purchase?
Speaker 3:So, and you have multiple Googles of who you are, like you know, my personal one is completely different than my work one, my work one. Everybody or Google thinks that I'm, like you know, a 25 year old female who's recently engaged and I'm looking at different engagement options. But that's a reflection of the amount of digital marketing work we're doing regularly trying to promote and sell engagement bridle etc. Versus at home, I'm much more closer to a mid 30s male interested in, you know, fitness, weightlifting, youtube, whatever it might be.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I guess it kind of comes down to this Like in the end, we do have tons of stores that are with us, that are using your services and working with Hope and hopefully trying to appear higher in these paid results, but also the natural results, which is what the SEO rankings are going to be good for. What are the five main takeaways for this newly written SEO starter guide from Google?
Speaker 3:So what are the top five takeaways from this SEO starter guide? What has been changed? What has been updated? The first one that they talk about a lot that I noticed throughout the entire document was Google's focus on what results mean within Google. Specifically, they call out right away. It may take several months to see beneficial changes in Google. We've known for a long time that it could be weeks, it could be months before like a website is fully indexed. You do a big SEO project. What are my new rankings? Rankings in terms of like, where I'm at right now. That is a constantly moving goalpost. You will lose the Super Bowl each time if you try to focus on that. But what Google is basically saying is when you do SEO updates, when you come up with new pages and things, you will see results from it, but it might be three, six, 12 months later, when it takes time. The world constantly changes and evolves. Plus you're dealing with competition, changing all that stuff too.
Speaker 1:But the good thing, though what I've always heard and you've said that this still stands at test of time is that the ranking, though, is slow to go away also Is that once you work to get a page to rank high I always use this example. We had a client for a pretty long time that they had this weirdly good landing page. It was ahead of its time, it was all original content. The guy wrote it all himself. He had all these great images that were all original, and it was really long. For some reason, it ranked nationally for, I think, the term diamond engagement rank. As a result, she made so much money and sales off of it, just off of this one landing page. It was one of those things. It took a lot of effort, I'm sure, and if we were to just copy everything and put it on someone else's website, it wouldn't have the same result. For some reason, it just always did. Well, it's not like he was paying to push it, but it got indexed and shelved really high and it just continued to pay off.
Speaker 3:I've had jewelry stores and I've had other clients too that will rank very highly for certain phrases, certain pages on their website, but they're often not relevant to their business. Maybe they wrote a blog post about an event that happened or something. In that kind of case a lot of store owners will be like, hey, we want to protect our rankings, but when you look at that ranking, it's getting you zero traffic or it's giving you zero conversions, zero email signups, zero purchases. Who cares if you rank number one for it? There's nothing happening there, so kill it. It might take time to kill it, but kill it.
Speaker 3:The second area that Google called out a lot on was the area of duplicate content. This is something that's come up multiple times over the years, and Google explicitly says duplicate content is not an issue if you have repeated content on your website so think of things like terms and conditions, a bio for the store, shipping information. None of that is ever going to hurt a website. But what they say will hurt a website is if you copy and paste that content from somebody else's website and try to pass it off as your own. Google is smart enough to figure out where did it come from originally and give them the credit.
Speaker 1:Which is again very interesting because that is not always how it has been, because back in the day it used to be a very common practice to write a blog or write a landing page or content or something for one business and then use it again on another business, and it would do really well because all Google was caring about. Is this content compelling and interesting and have all the right words and people reading it? If yes, will rank it high. But now it also has to be original and a part of me is like is this a little bit about AI? A little bit? You probably have to guess, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Google has their own AI search engine. We're not talking about that right now. It's still.
Speaker 1:They're working on it All right everybody, we're going to take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsor. This episode is brought to you in part by Novota. Strong margins and sales are key to running a successful jewelry business, but with cash tied up in stock and high diamond prices from limited suppliers, it can be difficult to gain an advantage over your competition. With access to over 1.6 million natural and lab-grown diamonds, melee and gemstones at the best prices, novota's online marketplace levels the playing field, allowing smaller or growing jewelers to compete with the giants. And with Novota's team of experts handling everything from QC to invoicing and shipping, you'll have more time to focus on your customers and growing your business.
Speaker 1:But Novota doesn't only provide a place to source diamonds they help you sell them too. And whether you operate online or run a brick and mortar store, with Novota's powerful retail tools you can showcase hundreds of thousands of diamonds to your customers via feeds on your website or the Novota Showroom Customer Facing Platform to present them with the perfect diamond at their very first consultation. You'll never have to turn a customer away again when you always have exactly what they're looking for. If today is the day you decide to take your jewelry business to the next level, then book a demo at novotacom. That's N-I-V-O-D-A dot com. Slash I-N-T-H-E L-O-U-P-E. Thanks, and now back to the show, and we're back. When it comes to duplicate content, though, is that just like another kind of double down on? You just need to be writing your own content.
Speaker 3:It is slash, it's a I mean view it from the sense of somebody looking at the content. Is this relevant? Is this helpful? I've seen this copy and pasted across a number of different places. I mean that's one of the key reasons why we don't recommend doing a lot of those blogs, syndication services, because you don't know how many hundreds of other websites are getting that free blog or that $50 blog. Is it benefiting them at all? Not really.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that working with writers or having a member of your staff that as part of their duties when it comes to you know, if you got time for leaning, you got time for cleaning Instead of cleaning. You know, writing blogs is not a bad use of their time. I do think that that is one of those things. Whether it's a write up about a recent event, or write up, sprucing up the copy or just buffing out, making a one sentence description turning into a one paragraph description, I think that that's a reasonable use of their time.
Speaker 3:Putting a pin in that or building off of that. Before I go to the third thing, the, we're talking a lot about search right now and that tends to be, you know, what everybody goes through, default wise, and a lot of people still look at their desktop computer first, but in the last five years, arguably in the last ten years, they've added in, you know, maps, images, shopping, video. There's so many different areas now that websites rank for organically that just hyper focusing on, like the keywords misses. Like you know, it's only 20% of everything that a website could potentially search for and grow from. That segues into the third thing Google.
Speaker 3:Throughout the document use of the word Influence quite often, like noticeably so. They say influence and specifically they're talking about you can influence the results in Google rankings and the visual elements around those rankings, but they're not guaranteed in any way. Hmm, so common example hey, our logo and Google is not quite the right color. It's pulling this one image that I don't like the look of that ring. Can we change it to this other ring? What about our store hours, things like that? Those are all things that in the code on the websites you can influence and say this is what we prefer. This is what we want it to be, but Google gives zero guarantees it will honor that. It will show those things because they know they could probably provide a better result to the person searching, based on everything you have available.
Speaker 1:I mean, they're just so smart I believe it. You know, it's like they're almost taking the manualness out of it, where they're like we understand that you have your preference, but we have a robot and that robot. I know you might not love this, this pic, but 95% of the time the pic is gonna be pretty good. So I actually I actually kind of don't mind that. I do think I mean, google is really good. I just said I hate how they always are ranking paid stuff. It's like it's honestly not that bad.
Speaker 3:Now there's like what? 10 billion searches or something like that. That happened every day. I think they have the data to know what works better than like the one smart idea you and I come up with.
Speaker 1:How many Google searches per day? Answer I also don't know. 8.5 billion searches Wow, I overestimated. That's two trillion global searches per year.
Speaker 3:Holy smokes but you're gonna pie for everybody. Absolutely. The fourth thing and this is funny because this is an SEO starter guide they mentioned promoting your website fairly frequently, because promoting and let's just call it what it is Google ads. It leads to faster discovery, not only the customers, but also within Google ranking your website better. It helps you on your social media. So there's gotta be some kind of agreement that they have on there as well. Advertising, word of mouth, there's a ton of different things that they go into, but they very much say hey, if you're not getting the results fast enough or you're not able to influence what shows up well enough, you can pay, you can promote.
Speaker 1:Yeah, do it so funny. So I think I would make this recommendation across to all of our listeners. If you haven't done a Google ad, this side of 2020, this side of the pandemic, yep, I absolutely recommend that you just try it. I understand? Oh, I've tried it before and we weren't impressed by the results. I get it. Like I said, seo is changing all the time and it is really good. It has gotten so freaking good.
Speaker 3:I'm not impressed with the results either. I mean I audited a client's or, excuse me, I audited a prospects digital marketing and Google ads account within the last few weeks and you know they had a small budget. It was like $300 $500 a month, but whoever they had running it was targeting the whole country.
Speaker 1:Ah, yes, that's a problem.
Speaker 3:That's a problem.
Speaker 1:You're gonna get terrible results and you'll be very angry and upset at whoever's running it, as well as Google, you know yeah, I think that it's just Really spending some dollars and I think that the actual kind of net, net, solid that comes out of it is actually getting a an audience, building an audience and using that to kind of Gain some insights. I think it's really interesting. I use it on my. I have an Etsy. I use it on my Etsy all the time.
Speaker 1:I like seeing and on my Instagram seeing you know which age group am I most popular with which? You know that sub demographics and in cities. It's like obviously the cities that I live in I do the best in, but what sub cities am I doing well in? And that's the kind of stuff that you actually get as a secondary product. Of course, you probably want to sell. You'd love to sell a big engagement ring off of off of an ad who doesn't? But I do think that the actual added value that comes out of these Google ads is going to be Creating the audience and then using that in the future for making look-alike audiences. I think are just fantastic.
Speaker 3:Yep, and that's why you know we offer like a starting at $400,. You know, among PPC management, but it's hyper focused. We want it to be on what's gonna have the best impact right now. Who's your best potential like purchaser? And it's almost somebody local and somebody on their phone. It's not gonna be a state over or like even a country over, kind of thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's one of those things when you start, let's just say you got that person, had a thousand dollars a month Budget and they were targeting the entire, the entire US. I mean that means you're spending, you know, one cent on every single county or something like that, and it's like, obviously you're gonna have poor, you're not gonna get any results.
Speaker 3:Yep, yeah, I think the lowest budget I've ever worked with was something around like 100 to $300,000 a month. But at that scale you can afford to get very complex, target a lot of different places and even go international if you want to, depending on what it's every going. What are the costs for acquisition You're gonna be ultimately?
Speaker 1:or that's the most budget. That's the most budget, right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know nobody's here spending. Yeah, don't spend that right now. Yeah, um, the last thing that Google kind of really harped on and focused on in this, this update they built a section into it on what people should not focus on and they call out a lot of different practices and give some of those Examples of like this is a bad example, don't do this anymore. Here's a better way of thinking about it, kind of thing, and, in particular, the ones that are more relevant for our conversation right now. They say do not focused on Meta keywords. Those have been dead for over a decade. There's literally two search engines the entire world Google or not Google, china and Russia that still look at meta keywords.
Speaker 3:Don't focus on keyword stuffing. So don't go nuts with throwing the word jewelry, necklaces, diamonds, bridle, like if you, if it's ridiculous on a website page Is Google's gonna know about that and it's it's not a good experience for anybody. Um, don't focus on things like keywords in your domain. So everybody wants to buy, like you know, michaels jewelry center, calm jewelry center, plus Michael Boom. You got a bunch of different keywords and phrases there. Those don't matter at all. They have no impact period.
Speaker 1:What about extended URLs, that that might have some keywords. So, for example, like Michaels jewelry, comm slash, you know, at Jewelry that's amazing and special for the holiday period. Oh, you know something like that.
Speaker 3:There is a character limit, so after some point Google's not even show that to somebody. But keywords, especially under like a, like a comm slash, you know, jewelry slash necklaces, jewelry slash labs, dash Grown, dash diamonds those have an impact, definitely. And if your website is a full of different Phrases, that mean nothing, whether it's like, you know, just the skew in the URL, things like that, you're missing out on a lot of things, unless you want to rank for that skew.
Speaker 1:I see, do you know what's so funny, though, and I'll give the props we don't give enough props to our developers at Punchmark enough, and maybe I'll try to do that a little bit more. One thing that we did is we saw, when we were building version six, we saw that Google changes things all the time. I mean, this is our sixth iteration of Site Manager and just of the platform in general, and one thing we saw is that Google changes all the time and, as a result, we need to have things, the ability to make things dynamic, or just to change things on the fly, and one of those things is like yeah, urls, urls could accommodate long, extended URLs, like what I was just mentioning. That was popular in 2017 or 2018 as well, but we were like you know what? There's pretty good chance that Google will change this at some point, so now we make it so that it doesn't have that as much.
Speaker 1:Same thing with meta keywords Like we have them built into our platform, but we also just have it so that it auto fills into them and you don't actually have to write into them, so you don't spend as much time. It's just one of those things. It's like maybe one day they come back to it, but in the meantime, just chill and just focus on what we know matters.
Speaker 3:And one of the big changes. I wasn't around when you guys were building v6, but one of the big changes that occurred during and around that time was Google said flat out we no longer care how your desktop computer website looks in Google, we are only ranking you based on how it looks and performs in mobile. That has not changed. That has not changed either. That is like everybody's always like hey, pull it up on the website or on the desktop and I'm like cool, it looks great. It has no impact at all in terms of how it ranks. If you even go into Google's reports a little bit more, like within Google search console, they have separate rankings, average rankings based on desktop, mobile and tablet, and guess which one performs the best?
Speaker 1:Oh man, it's probably mobile, because that's probably what it looks like it's always mobile.
Speaker 3:Mobile ranks higher than desktop and tablet period because that's just what they look at.
Speaker 1:It's just so important. I mean, one of the things I actually had Andy, one of our developer, back end developer is at Punch Park. I asked him to build out a whole slew of new data points and hopefully do a presentation about it as an in the loop episode later on this year. But one thing I had him break down is purchasing rates off of mobile desktop tablet, and I think my I've been predicting this for years hasn't come true yet, but I really think it's coming Is I think that desktops are completely getting phased out. I think that the future is either through laptops, potentially, or just through very strong phones that can essentially just jack into a like one of those accordion screens you know what I'm talking about like the ones that sort of slide up like a projection screen but have some type of LED monitor in there that would allow you to view things on a larger screen.
Speaker 1:I just think that the concept of it is very antiquated, this hyper computer that is only usable from your this yeah, this workstation, when actually you see increasing number of jobs that need to be mobile, whether that means that you work in a mobile workspace, so like we're going to open concept place or room or whatever or maybe you're just a guy that you know likes to work from coffee shops, but I think that needing to have having that ability to package things up and work somewhere else, I think that it's only going to mobile right now and I think, increasingly, that's what really matters.
Speaker 3:Yep. So I want to make a prediction right now that in the next five years and I have in my hand right now an iPhone 15 pro it has the new USB-C connector. Fancy, fancy, yeah, apple's. Well, my old one was dying. I had to make a change.
Speaker 3:Sure sure sure Apple got away from the lightning. One of the benefits of the USB-C connector is that this phone can now power a desktop monitor. So give it five years you might be issued a mobile phone as your work computer, Absolutely. And then here's a desktop and something else, or here's a monitor.
Speaker 1:I think it's not outside of this world to have a mobile phone that's just so strong that it has the exact same processing powers of whatever your desktop has. I think that you ever see those photos. It's like 10 years of advancement at a clip and it's like a USB stick, and one of them is like it contains 500 megabytes of storage, and then the next one it's like 500 gigabytes of storage, and then the next one is like five terabytes. That is what we've got right now, and if five terabytes, you could literally put I don't know all of the Lord of the Rings extended editions on there multiple times and you wouldn't even have 1% of it.
Speaker 3:You want to tie this in even further? Yeah, macbook Pros, iphones, the Nintendo Switch they're all ARM-based processors. Desktop computers and most consoles like a PS5 or an Xbox Series X, they're still x86, that's the processor architecture and things. Everything is ultimately moving to an ARM-based processor, because ARM-based fits into this form factor. It is meant to be mobile, power, efficient, good batteries, all of that stuff. This is the future, right here.
Speaker 1:Let's do this holding up his phone, like he's presenting at, like Steve Jobs presenting the first iPhone. All right, everybody, we're going to take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsor. This week's episode is brought to you in part by Accessibi Punchbox ADA Compliance Partner. Creating inclusive websites is crucial in today's digital world. The Americans Disability Act, or ADA, requires website compliance and ensures equal access to information services for individuals with disabilities, fostering a positive user experience and social responsibility.
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Speaker 3:Two different things. The first one we've been getting a number of different technical SEO audits from a couple different vendors and agencies in the Jewish space. If you ever get one of those, please send it our way. We'd love to review it. We've already taken a ton of learnings from them and while a lot of the audit is not applicable and now basically it's completely dead because of how Google has changed the game and updated their guide, there's still some things in there that we've already learned from and incorporated into our platform that everybody who is on a Punchmark website will be able to take advantage of and see results from over time. Nice, so if you get an audit, send it to us.
Speaker 3:The second one we do have a number of different digital marketing service plans. Some have SEO, some don't. It really depends on the need of your store and what you're trying to accomplish. But coming up here at the IJO Dallas show, we are going to be launching several new $200 a month SEO products that are meant for the smaller stores. The mom and pops, those who want to grow their appointments start showing up on the map more often and they're very low touch. They're very kind of assisted slash. You tell us what your goals are, and there's a bunch of things we can do behind the scenes to help you grow to that. But, as always, results will take time. Results will be varied. It's the best place for a lot of jewelry stores to start until they're ready for a bigger project.
Speaker 1:To me it's just dipping your toe in there and just checking what the current temperature is. I really think that every jewelry store needs to at least be trying something related to promoting their website. The biggest reason is because then you at least can set what a base is and kind of work from there. And it's kind of like maybe it's like, instead of setting a goal to run a marathon, maybe sign up for a little 5k, see how you feel, Maybe you get your legs going and you'll learn from there what it feels like to actually perform.
Speaker 3:But focus local and focus relevant. Don't try to be number one in the world for bridal jewelry. You will never be that. There's people who will outspend you and I'll perform you to get there. But within your local market you can be known as the bridal jewelry store near me in my town.
Speaker 1:That's how you win the destination. Mm-hmm Stu. This is great. Thanks so much, I'm sure, hey, we'll do this again in a year when, undoubtedly, things change again.
Speaker 3:We'll check in how you know iPhone 16 is doing. Yeah, right.
Speaker 1:And when they I hope that they add like joy cons to like a future iPhone or something that, like you, can slap on the sides of them. That'd be sick.
Speaker 3:They are working on a foldable iPhone, but apparently it keeps on failing product tests.
Speaker 1:I believe it. I don't know if I want to fold the phone again. I've already done that. I'm good, all right, everybody. That's going to be the end of it. Thanks so much for listening and, stu, thanks for being a part of this. This was really good. I really enjoyed speaking about. This is something I find very fascinating. But, everybody, we'll be back next week, tuesday, with another episode. Make sure if you're going to IJO Dallas this is probably already aired, but I hope that you are contacting Stu or hope to learn more about these packages even after IJO Dallas. Thanks, everybody. We'll be back next week, tuesday, with another episode. Bye, all right, everybody. That's the end of the show. Thanks so much for listening.
Speaker 1:This week's episode was brought to you by Pundit. This week's episode was brought to you by Punchmark and produced and hosted by me, michael Burpo. My guest this week was Stuart Blussman, the director of digital marketing at Punchmark, and you can reach out to him at Stuart at punchmarkcom and let him know that in the loop sent you, this episode was edited by Paul Suarez with music by Ross Cochran. Don't forget to rate the podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. It's the best way to help us grow and leave us feedback on punchmarkcom. We'll be back next week Tuesday with another episode. Thanks Bye.