Robert Lai: Growth Happens Before Search Intent - Why Funnels Don’t Accurately Represent Buyers

Good morning everyone. How is everyone? Good. Yes. I just want to remind you cuz this preparing for this speech has reminded me that it's already May. Uh and I don't know where the time has gone. Um and uh what I wanted to share was I want to start off with a bit of a joke. Um I've done the last uh H three HF evolve conferences. Uh so thank you Tim and the team for having me. Uh, and for the last two, 2024, 2025, I feel like I'm in a room of regular SEO nerds. Uh, so sorry to call you that. I'm no too. Uh, and this year, you guys all rock stars. Every CEO, CMO, everyone wants to get to know what you do all of a sudden because you guys are the most interesting people in the room. And I saw a statistic out there and it basically shared, you know, if you switched your LinkedIn title from SEO to GEO, you're getting a 20% raise. So congratulations to you all. You're all rock stars. I feel like this is the Oscars now, you know. Uh so just to make fun of that, I feel like you guys are changing your name. Uh you basically become Macloven. I don't know if anyone's watched the film, but uh anyways, maybe the joke didn't sink. So uh what I did want to talk about is I'll probably start off with the introduction. Uh who am I? Uh I started a company called Caliber here in Singapore. I moved here uh for love. Didn't move here for any other reason. I'm from Australia originally. uh and uh and yeah I started my career at Google in Sydney uh in paid search and then went to different ad agencies went to Google New York and then decided to move here. So over my over the last 14 years I've probably spent the last two probably being more involved in the brand side to be honest uh just wanted to understand that nuance a bit more trying to understand what triggers people to then do things like search. I think a lot of times people like hey let's run a YouTube video and see people start search for our name that just doesn't happen. I mean, I've tried that. I've tried measuring that. I've tried working with advertisers that spend millions and millions of dollars to be able to to try to make that happen. It just doesn't happen very linearly. So, I dived into that and as the world has changed the last 6 to 12 months, I've also then tried to marry the two ideas together. So, what I'm presenting today, I think, is somewhat in ways unique of approach to the way that you guys are currently approaching GEO. Um, and I want to start that by walking through my own journey. So for Mother's Day, uh I bought a gift for my wife. Uh I think every father should knowing what moms go through. Uh and sadly, uh being a typical startup founder husband, I am quite forgetful. So she told me what's on board. She told me that she was, you know, was sitting on the couch and she's into LED face masks now. So I quickly looked it up on Google and searched in marketplace for you guys, maybe Amazon. for us. It's Shopee. Uh, and I'm like, "This shit's expensive, right? It's not cheap. You're looking at $700 to $1,200." I was thinking, you got face masks. You know, face masks are like these little $5 things you put on your face. And the one that she's thinking about is $1,200. So, I'm like, "Okay, cool. Forget about that for 4 months." And then I walk through the mall and realize that we're walking through the mall. Our intent for the going to the mall was to help buy a Mother's Day gift for her mother. So then as I'm going through there, I'm like, "Hey, actually might make sense for me to think about a gift for my wife now." So uh then I quickly trigger a search. Uh oh, there we go. I trigger a search. I start looking at brands, products. I turn to ChatBT, turn to Gemini. I turn to all these different sources. And I know what my wife likes. I know she's not going to accept a $200 face mask. And she knows I didn't put in the research and didn't put the love into it, right? So then I then went to the higher spectrum and looked at the brand that was most expensive and why they're so expensive. So long story short, I then concluded what I needed was to be able to have a valid approach. So then I typed in Gemini, can you give me which is the best based off scientific value? What I mean by scientific value is so my background prior to marketing was engineering and I know a bit of physics. So for me it was understanding wavelength and all these details. How much of this is marketing gimmick versus actual science, right? So then long story short for those that look into a face mask, don't buy any face mask that offers green light, yellow light, orange light. Those don't work. When it comes to just basic wavelengths, it's red and blue. Okay? So that's the only two you have to worry about. So that actually ruled out the first the highest most expensive option because I no longer trusted them because they were charging 1,200 bucks for a whole different range of lights when I knew they all useless. So, I actually ended up buying the one that I didn't want to buy. The one that looked too OEM or looked like it came straight out of the box from China. Uh, that's the one that ideally add a bit of, you know, touch to it, add a Kendall Jenner to it and makes it more more better, right? But I ended up buying the one on the top left uh that I originally did not want to buy. So, long story short, when it comes to purchases that we make, when I start when I started searching, the demand was already generated. What triggered my search was my wife's research, what she then concluded, what she wanted. For me, it was a matter of urgency. Mother's Day's around the corner. I'm forgetful. I'm a terrible father. I'm a terrible husband. I'm not always present mentally. And I wanted to be able to make up for that, right? But uh the the point of this being is by the time that someone searches, the buyer is already not neutral. I already had an indication of what I need to buy. I wasn't going to buy the cheap option. Researching wasn't going to help. So whatever brands you guys are representing, put in front of a customer. If it's not put in front of the customer with the right context or earlier in the process, that buyer has probably already got an idea of what they what they're what brand they're looking for and what they're going to buy beforehand. So this is me speaking from my own personal experience and career. We confuse visible intent with original intent. So when I speak of visible intent, I'm talking about us looking to search terms or Google search console and looking at what users are typing in, right? Uh, I mean those things are easy things to work on because you can map them, you can categorize them, you can optimize for for them, but they don't really represent what triggered the question in the first place. So that's the reason why I dived into brands to just try to understand a bit more of you know what is going through a user's head and why did they try to search for this and that led me down a huge rabbit hole. The main purpose here is you know when we get a query from one of our reporting platforms the query is the receipt. The person has already concluded a large journey a large amount of thinking well before they type that in. And the reason why I mention this is because uh I feel like the user journey has changed quite a lot. Right? when it comes to you know the platforms that were used before Google search was used to find pages now it's there to find you just spoke about Gemini just now it's there to find meaning like I speak to chatbt as if it's my advisor my business advisor my mentor I speak to it as if it's my marriage counselor I speak to it for all different purposes and reasons and my keywords and my what I type in is unique to me even though we may share the same topic it's likely that I'm typing a very very different way than the way that you're typing it. The other part of this is when I spoke around reporting and you know I'm I'm guilty as someone that's used the funnel aggressively to try and win pictures and do things. Uh it's great for reporting but it's not great for understanding user behavior. Why someone did something and what triggered them and their user journey as I shared with mine is incompletely chaotic to follow. I didn't even go into the awareness phase, right? My awareness was like, you know, half a second cuz my wife said, "I want a face mask." Okay, go get a face mask. Right? There's nothing more that needs to be served. And when these brands are serving ads, they're not serving to me. They're serving to my wife, right? But then they see some random 36-y old male pop up in the list of uh uh whoever purchased and it's like, "Okay, is this guy a male model or something?" As you guys know, I'm not a male model, right? So for many years we've relied upon funnel thinking but to be honest uh you know I think it's heavily flawed because buyers do not move neatly as I did they loop they forget they compare they disappear they come back and they change the ask and they change the category right and I was asking which brands work best and then I said actually f that give me the scientific value of what these are cuz I don't want to waste time going back and forth I have 10 days before I have to order and I also specified actually I want my product to come from Singapore because I can't wait for delivery and I can't risk it coming from any other country. So that's then uh what I then did and when I speak of search being the receipt or the query being the receipt, you know, when someone types in things like why did organic traffic drop, there are many reasons why this would occur, right? Or why someone will type that in. Well, maybe they saw a report. Maybe they have an upcoming pitch. Maybe they've boss has yelled at them and noticed that things had dropped. So, when it comes to that, there's lots of reasons and lots of different situations a user is in to then trigger a search. The other part other part about this is, you know, most of us in the room have a playbook to try to rank for the keyword best dentist near me. Similar to what I just shared, there are many reasons why someone is looking for a dentist. One could be my tooth just got knocked out. Another could be my child's gums are bleeding. There are whole range of different situations that a user is in. And I feel like the blue ocean opportunity cuz this is a red ocean keyword or what I like to use it internally is with AI search user behavior has changed. people are going to I mean as parents I don't know how many parents in the room but we ask a lot of questions to understand what's going on cuz we're lost they they when it comes to driving a car or getting a car license they put you through all these series of tests when you have a kid they're like here's here's a bag and you're off off to the races right go figure out yourself no playbook no nothing so we turned to we've turned to search we turn to AI a lot to try to understand how to how to deal with certain situations and that's a part that I and my team then embarked upon the last 6 months is how do we then rank for situations. So the example I use just now uh so one example I like to use when I mention best dentist near me is why do my gums bleed every time I floss. Now, that's a very very valid thing for us to type into chatbt or Gemini. And dentist isn't always the answer, right? It could be you need new floss or you need a softer toothbrush or you have gum disease. Then someone may type in what is gum disease, right? And then eventually you may trigger yourself to go see a dentist. But depending on the severity, you know, it's it's something that people will type in and it's not yet a commercial query, but it is in commercially important moment. The commercial query is seeing a dentist, but the commercially important moment is what caused it. So for myself, you know, the battle starts when the buyer is still diagnosing the problem. Everyone's trying to fight for best dentist near me. And with AI nowadays being so easy to create a blog or create a post or create whatever it is to analyze stuff, I feel like longtail opportunities is where it's at. Personally for me, I think uh when it comes to the wide coverage you're able to look into, uh there are so many more opportunities to be able to win in longtail areas than it is just to rank for sort of short tail ones. I mean, I'm I'm not wellversed enough and frankly I'm going to rely on paid ads for anything that is in red ocean territory, right? And just hope my my client has enough budget. But when it comes to blue ocean territory, there's so much out there and it's not hard to rank for, but there are problems with it. And I'll share that in a second. So before I start going through the how, I want to sort of uh just define a few things. What's on the right hand side is a keyword. What's on the left hand side is a situation. And when it comes to trying to sort of go into the experience of understanding situations, uh I mean it's easy for us to be able to map out the keywords and map out the things we need to do. When it comes to situations and moving upstream, it's a lot more complex. when it comes to the old world of working you know when it comes to search rank click website convert the new world is far different and the answer page is becoming a very very limited battleground what I mean by limited battleground is I think across all digital services uh when it comes to Instagram Facebook and all those places more and more brands want to advertise and there's far less real estate available to be able to to be there right um and when it comes to I mean it publishers are struggling Everyone's struggling at the moment because of the limited real estate that that that that's available. My prediction in 12 days as someone that used to work at Google is Google will announce at Google Marketing Live that they will announce air overview ads. What that means is that all the real estate that you guys are currently waiting for will be taken away because Google wants to make money off of that. And that makes total sense, doesn't it? So then you're going to be really really limited on fighting for best dentist near me. The only way to be able to move is to move upstream and that's what we've experimented the last six months. What I will tell you is we made a lot of mistakes from these m from this experiment and maybe these are basic to you guys but I can tell you it's not the same of being retrieved as it is being recommended. We create a lot of content to try and compete in the fintech space against stripe for example. And what we found was you know whilst our content is being retrieved and cited we paved the way and put on silver platter for stripe to be recommended. So these are some things I will share out of my own experience of just trying this approach of approaching things via situations versus uh versus a regular sort of keyword or prompting answering type approach. So your you can influence the answer without owning the credit. And that's exactly what happened for us. We started publishing all this sort of localized content and very very specific content to try and rank for for for payments. Uh and then we saw everything getting ranked. It was super exciting and all reports were showing, hey, we're starting to show up in AI overviews and whatnot, but our name was not there. What's important for you guys to be able to uh to do when you're planning around moving upstream is to make sure that you're not just connect answering the question. You're connecting the answer to the category to the proof and to the brand. It all needs to be packaged as one. Cuz if you don't do that, then you're going to end up with the same situation I as I had. And the things that we were missing in certain situations was to be able to link the proof and the brand all together. So, as we've in the past couple months, we've got received a lot of RFPs uh around Jio and whatnot. Um, and what we did notice in those RFPs is every agency is submitting their RFPs based off of how many questions and how many prompts you want to then rank for. And when we received it and they're like, "Hey, Rob, you know, your your your RFP is coming off a bit different. you're pricing things based off of the content universe of things you're going to do do for these situations. And yeah, I said, "Yeah, I'm going to stick to that. I'm not going to change it." Because for me, a situation is a reason for a question, right? A situation will open up to a whole range of different questions. In this situation here, my boss asked why traffic dropped. I have a boss except for my clients and my wife, but uh my my boss asked why traffic dropped. One question could be AIO views reducing our clicks. Another question could be what happened to our website? Another question could be did the algorithm change? Right? There are many questions that can come from that situation. And with those questions, there also lots of keywords you can look to target as well. So the situation creates the search. So when it comes to then uh looking at situations and other things we learned as well is being specific helps. What we looked at was Stripe wasn't answering questions around Singapore or Hong Kong. They were just generically talking about payments and Stripe is the leader. If you type into chat GPT why it keeps mentioning Stripe, it'll literally tell you that we built all of our data off of Stripe's uh information. Their millions of blogs and product documents. So everything that they know of finances off of Stripe's documentation. So by default, Stripe is Chat GPT when it comes to finance. So what we noticed was when we started being localized and localized does not mean translation. Localized mean understanding the local payment methods, understanding local nuances, understanding those things. We were able to have a 90% chance of being cited and uh recommended versus a 50% chance when we went generic. So, what we learned about being specific is it doesn't take long to rank. You're able to answer questions that Stripe hasn't answered yet. And as a result, you're able to then we outranked and uh and uh outranked and also one on share of voice when it cames to keywords around uh payments in uh in Singapore and Hong Kong for this particular client. So one question that may stem is how do we identify these situations right there are so many of them. So first answer is we use every tool on the face of the planet. I use hrefs. I use scraping tools. I look at what comments are being made in Tik Tok. I try to find whatever's on the internet, right? But what I've learned from brand people is they also ask a lot of questions to the customer themselves. So then we will go through sales calls transcripts and just get claw to just go scrape through everything. We'll also speak to and interview the customer success teams. We'll also get as much qualitative data as we possibly can to be able to help map out, which is important. Now that we have all this information, we also need to categorize it and then prioritize, right? Because there's thousands of situations that we can potentially go after. So how we do this is we'll look at volume, right? Right now I don't have a real way of best measuring volume from a scientific uh perspective. I use search as a proxy to understanding what volume may look like. I then look into competition and relevance if it's something that my customer stands a chance of ranking for. And then thirdly is then I'll also look into the commercial intent. How closely related is a situational problem that customer has to a solution that my customer that my customer can provide. Oh [ __ ] Okay. And when it comes to then sort of uh mapping that out rather than us mapping out a keyword map we try to map out the buyer journey right and understanding what's happening in the buyer's world. what problem did it create? Uh what will we ask chat GBT? What would we do those things? What what like I mean we use AI to be able to process most of this. But the idea here is how can we find a way for the brand to come to mind? How early in the stage do we need to look to target? How do we then position the brand? As I shared with the dentist example, right? There are other solutions that are there. If you have bleeding gums, you change your floss, get a softer toothbrush, hygiene, there's lots of reasons that you need to then cover. So then at which stage do we look to enter the user journey as it relates to reporting? When it relates to reporting, we also need to change that as well. But I just want to touch up on this because I think everyone has different ways to report. For us, the setup was so specific, right? We know what the business does. We know what the customer wants. We did our research both qualitative qualitatively and also quantitatively. So what matters to us most is just for this problem that exists, how much are we showing up? What is our share of voice? How much are we owning the conversation? So the rest of it noise, the rest of it of traffic, conversions, I can't control that, right? I can't control that because frankly, you know, the system doesn't reward it anymore. What incentive is there? Like Gemini would do a terrible job if it was to get a click and move for have that user go to another page. They're optimizing for people never to leave platform. All the platforms optimizing for people never leave platform. So for us to we report on these things but we don't care for it. I only care that this problem that we're showing up for we're showing up in the right way in the right manner. We're answering the questions that matter to to to the person and able to insert a brand into. I'm running out of time but I'll cover this last piece. So ultimately what we're trying to do is we're trying to optimize for growth. And how do you optimize for growth? It's very simple for us to say, hey, you know, let's try and show up for when people search and own that real estate. But the real estate that presents the most amount of growth opportunities is the one that's in the user's mind. If you're able to find yourself and playing yourself early in the journey of helping handle the diagnosis down towards becoming part of the solution, then you have a real chance to be able to grow because whilst everyone's fighting for red ocean territory, you're there producing more and more and more being more specific to be able to answer all the blue ocean territory questions. So feel free to scan and follow me on LinkedIn. Feel free to to have a chat with me uh outside as well. Uh as mentioned what I tried to do here is to be able to marry two things together of my experience with brand and my 14 years of experience uh experience in paid search. Um as shared I think things are still about to change. Uh my prediction is in two weeks time you will hear a big announcement from Google around view ads. Uh and that will change the landscape once again. Uh but what won't change is user behavior and buy behavior until AI agents come and represent our buyers. But uh long story short, um the idea here is to own situations, build memory, and become the answer before the buyer ever clicks. So, thank you very much for your time and uh enjoy the rest of the day. As well, if you don't mind, I'm just going to take a quick photo with everyone. If you don't, if everyone can put up their hand. Thank you.