Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space

Speaker 1 43% of the top 10 million websites are powered by WordPress technology. I mean, you know, and the next closest are in the single digits.
So it's like, it's not even close in terms of market share.

Speaker 2 This is right about now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network Production.

Speaker 2 We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month.

Speaker 2 Taking the BS out of business for over six years in over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping necks and cashing checks? Well, it starts right about now.

Speaker 3 What's up, guys? Welcome to Right About Now.

Speaker 3 We're always talking about now. We're always getting right here today.
Gotta, you know, sometimes, Nick, we have people on and they're doing some amazing things. And they're doing things with brands.

Speaker 3 that you've never heard of, technologies you've never heard of.

Speaker 3 But there's a word that I think I would guess 97% of our audience probably knowing.

Speaker 3 We know our audience pretty well. They know it.
It's WordPress. He's the CEO of WordPress VIP.
Nick, Gernard, what's up, Nick?

Speaker 1 Hey, well, hello. How are you? Great, man.
Thanks for joining us.

Speaker 1 Yeah, man.

Speaker 3 You say the word WordPress,

Speaker 3 you know, it's like people know what WordPress is. They know websites.

Speaker 3 You don't have to,

Speaker 3 things, especially if you're talking to marketing people or digital or just somewhat in the landscape.

Speaker 3 I think we've heard of WordPress. So

Speaker 3 carrying the brand for 11 plus years. Good job.

Speaker 1 I don't know that I get to take all the credit.

Speaker 1 But you know, I'll take it right now.

Speaker 1 We'll give it to you.

Speaker 1 We'll assign it to you. That's fine.
All right. Thanks.
I appreciate that.

Speaker 1 Oh, man.

Speaker 3 Nick, I appreciate you joining us. I'm excited to talk all things WordPress and you.
Let's set the table for our audience.

Speaker 3 Let's give them a little bit of who Nick is, both beyond WordPress and maybe otherwise, you know, a little bit of your background.

Speaker 1 Oh, man. All right.
How much time we got? Thank you.

Speaker 1 Thank you. So,

Speaker 1 yeah. So it's great to be here.
Thank you, Ryan. It's always fun to talk.
Big fan of yours and what you've done over the years as well. So congrats on this.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So as you mentioned, I'm the CEO of WordPress VIP,

Speaker 1 which is a business that's within a much broader ecosystem that is the WordPress ecosystem. That kind of what you know that

Speaker 1 I'm very happy if 90 plus percent of your audience has immediate recognition of WordPress.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 my background prior to the 11 years you just gave me credit for in this was all digital agency comms, et cetera, on the practitioner side. So

Speaker 1 pretty much for my entire career leading up to this moment, I was working in digital agency at some level of

Speaker 1 starting as a con as a freelancer all the way up into working into one of Omnicom's brands there. And so I have

Speaker 1 really a deep love of the application of technology in general, but also I'm a product of kind of growing up in the 90s when the web was in its infancy.

Speaker 1 And it was something that I got access to really at some pivotal moments in my life and have been fortunate to build a career around helping folks navigate the web.

Speaker 1 So a lot of my work

Speaker 1 on the agency side leading up to bringing me into VIP just happened to be with really large brands, sort of as I was

Speaker 1 kind of in the final years of my agency side. And

Speaker 1 there's this really interesting dynamic that some really large brands that were more daring in how they were trying to engage with their customers.

Speaker 1 So think of this as like a time when social media marketing and things like this were still really trying to,

Speaker 1 brands were trying to wrap their head around it. And so we were working with really ambitious brands on how they could engage with their customers in a new and exciting way.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 there was a lot of WordPress that we ended up recommending that customers use.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 WordPress, this big open source community movement,

Speaker 1 I'm part of a company that was started by the creator of WordPress, a guy named Matt.

Speaker 1 This company Automatic that I'm part of as WordPress VIP

Speaker 1 was

Speaker 1 started to really help support the broader open source ecosystem. But 11 or so years ago, Automatic didn't really have

Speaker 1 this business that was focused on some of the largest customers that could really serve some of the

Speaker 1 biggest use cases,

Speaker 1 biggest brands,

Speaker 1 large, thorny public sector rollouts and things like this that you might do.

Speaker 1 And yet that was already happening. We were doing that as part of, you know, my work when I was at Omnicom and things like this.
So 11 or so years ago,

Speaker 1 I had some discussions with Matt and others at Automatic and said, you know, like there's a whole market out here that WordPress already exists in in some capacity. It could just be a lot bigger.

Speaker 1 We should really try to build, you know, if you wanted to build a business around that. And I think the response at the time was like, yeah, it sounds interesting.

Speaker 1 Maybe we should build, you know, let's, if maybe we can try to explore something like that.

Speaker 1 And so, joined Automatic on a pretty loose charter to try to look at like how could you take something like WordPress that was known for blogging and personal websites and a million other things across the web and say, No, as maybe some of the biggest brands in the world, you could you could trust this as well.

Speaker 1 Um, so that started 11 years ago, and they've kept me around at least this long. So, uh, I feel like we're doing some things right, having a lot of fun.
So, um, and now I get to chat with you. So, um,

Speaker 1 that gets us an oversimplified view to today. Yeah.
And,

Speaker 3 you know, Nick, I think,

Speaker 3 I do think our audience knows the name WordPress. And I think it's interesting as you think about the history of websites and you think about the,

Speaker 3 I don't know why, and I've been in digital. You know, I'm a traditional digital guy.
Like, you know,

Speaker 3 they call us something like,

Speaker 3 I'm not a native digital. I was probably native analog, but now, you know, a lot of my adult career in digital, you know, on both sides of it.

Speaker 3 But had a, but definitely always been on the, I think, the forefront of digital and innovation and technology, because even the clients that I had working at big agencies were all in that space.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 3 technology, what we were selling was technology and watching the evolution of WordPress and from the blogging platform to really the go-to CMS

Speaker 3 for most,

Speaker 3 definitely mid-market agencies and clients to all the way up to like what you're talking about, corporate level, as the sort of transition and evolution from that,

Speaker 3 I don't know, I think of almost like MySpace, you know, back like as the, as the, as the, it had, which,

Speaker 1 like,

Speaker 3 the evolution, though, is like if MySpace had made it into the booming company that WordPress did, like, cause they evolved the right way or something, you know, WordPress went from the blogger to the small, you know, everyday person to what become became and is still for even us as an agency, our go-to kind of CMS for clients that need functionality, but something that's workable for a mid-level market, you know, client.

Speaker 3 It's been fascinating to sort of watch that evolution of the company. You know, and I'm sure you've been, had a seat right at the table.

Speaker 1 Yeah, a seat right at the table. And you got to think, I mean, WordPress started in 2003.

Speaker 1 So, I mean, like, just think about like what we, what devices were we using in 2003? A really crappy PC or a really shiny Mac. You know,

Speaker 1 something like

Speaker 1 an Aqua Mac. But I don't know if that was that age on the iMac.

Speaker 3 Those first iMacs came out like 200,

Speaker 3 I don't know, five-ish, maybe, I think.

Speaker 1 Might be, yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 The ones that were cool that swiveled, like the, you know.

Speaker 1 Yeah, to make me feel old. But, you know, to think about where we were there and then where we are today.
And WordPress has been this. It's been along through that and continued to grow.

Speaker 1 Market share still like inches up. It gets it's harder at the, like, once you reach certain scale, like, I mean, that number, that's a big number.
You keep moving up. Yeah, what?

Speaker 3 No, let's go ahead and tell it, Dick.

Speaker 1 That's a good one.

Speaker 1 43% of the web.

Speaker 1 43% of the top 10 million websites are powered by WordPress technologies. You know, and the next closest are in the single digits.
So it's like, it's not even close in terms of market share.

Speaker 3 We call that a category king.

Speaker 1 That's what that is.

Speaker 1 All right. Yeah.
You know, I'll take it.

Speaker 1 You're the agency guy. So, you know,

Speaker 1 workshops.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 3 Category King WordPress.

Speaker 3 It is

Speaker 3 CMSs. And it's known for that.
And so you guys have worked hard for that. It's

Speaker 3 what's that

Speaker 3 talk about working for a company that has that market share and then bringing to life.

Speaker 3 sort of even a new not new category but it is a new category for y'all like you know dominant cms overall but again,

Speaker 3 bringing to life the brand for corporate to kind of go direct to.

Speaker 3 Because that was that, that transition is kind of what I was kind of building to all this, the MySpace and all that is you're at this level and everybody respects you, you agree, but then trying to be the corporate, you know, king, so to speak,

Speaker 3 or go to. I mean, was that a hard transition to get people to make mentally?

Speaker 1 Yes. So, you know, the corporate kings and queens, we're like this, this transition for us,

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 that was the opportunity as coming into the business because, as ubiquitous as WordPress is on the web, it's not in that corporate sense.

Speaker 1 It was, there was niche adoption of WordPress from a like, oh, we use it for the corporate blog. Like one of these examples was like Boeing, you know, I had like Randy's blog.

Speaker 1 This was like a pilot named Randy. He was blogging.
He leveraged WordPress, but it was in no way like the corporate homepage or anything like, you know, that was core to business operations.

Speaker 1 It was like, yep, that's fine as a side project. And really the whole vision was like, how would you legitimize this thing? So it's not just playing a second or tertiary role in the enterprise.

Speaker 1 It's playing like a primary business aligned role at the center. And

Speaker 1 so that a big challenge for us is like, how do you take something that is as ubiquitous as WordPress, but also ubiquitously known for its blogging and maybe more consumer and small business and up to mid-market.

Speaker 1 But then there's a mental model that says, like, it's good to a point, but not for this point, sort of thing.

Speaker 1 And so, a lot of where we end up focusing in that transition and where we focused as a business was like, I'll talk about it, like food, shelter, water, of like the hierarchy of needs of enterprises.

Speaker 1 It's like at that base, you have to be able to speak authoritatively around security, compliance, reliability, et cetera. Like last night, I think was a big night for a lot of web traffic here.

Speaker 1 And not to, I know that folks will view this, but we're chatting here today after last night was election night here in America.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of organizations that rely on our platform through a night like that. It's like,

Speaker 1 how do we reassure them that we are ready to go for traffic and everything else that's going to come in sort of that critical moment that you don't get back? It's like that moment goes past.

Speaker 1 You can't rewind the tape and then, all right, we fixed it. Let's try it again.
It's just gone. So we had to invest heavily in just that foundation there.

Speaker 1 And then there's everything you know about like working with large organizations. That's the intangibles of like, how do you show up as an account team?

Speaker 1 How do you show up as like understanding their business needs, their objectives, their

Speaker 1 like, how do you then meet them there so that whatever software we're providing, and as much as I want to have say software is the, is the solution to everything, really, I think 70% of it's people.

Speaker 1 And that's actually one of the strengths of WordPress is that it's so, um, it's so centered around people and creating access for people that the 30% actually that technology impacts in the organization, we do really well.

Speaker 1 And so, but how do we really bring people together? Because so much of actual success and digital and everything else is like, can you access the tools? Can you access your audience?

Speaker 1 Can you access your customers, et cetera? And so much of the existing market, from my perspective, prevents that, actually doesn't enable that. So we're like, how can we open that up?

Speaker 1 How do we focus on opening that up so that our transition is really like how do you take something that the web at large has accepted and said this thing's great fit for purpose but enterprises have a bit of skepticism around that we've you know been spending 11 years and we'll continue to spend many many many more years trying to really help serve that market and adapt as you know who knows what happens in the next 20 years of wordpress's story yeah and it's interesting i could say this being on the agency side and i've worked at some of the largest agencies in the world and now own my own

Speaker 3 boutique shop. Like

Speaker 3 sometimes we try to make things complicated. Like it seems like some of these platforms and CMSs that I think are starting to wind down, I hope they are.

Speaker 1 God, they're so complex.

Speaker 3 And so, like, I feel like...

Speaker 3 I don't know this, but I've always been skeptical. Like they, they're complex for complex sake.

Speaker 3 You know, that's like always been what I loved about WordPress is, yeah you got to learn it and get your way around it but it's meant to be easy but robust you know like it's way better than like your off-the-shelf platform as far as you needing it to talk with this code or this plug-in and all the stuff that it can do but it's manageable but i feel like these corporate you know because we've we've worked with some corporate clients they bring us in there using this platform like why in god's earth are we what are we on and why and it's like everything is like pulling teeth.

Speaker 3 Is it, is it, is that like just to protect the agency?

Speaker 1 Or why the hell's it got to be so hard, Nick?

Speaker 1 You know what I'm talking about.

Speaker 3 I'm not going to name any names, but you know, it's just like, oh yeah, we're on a corporate CMS. It's insert name here.
And it's like, you get behind the hood and it's like, Jesus.

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 yeah. Yeah.
Jesus. Like,

Speaker 1 it's words like digital transformation and all these things were architected in a ways to create massive budgets to extract a bunch from an organization that was looking for a solution to a problem that they really didn't understand like, you know, what the root causes were in the first place.

Speaker 1 And so I definitely lament.

Speaker 1 I think like as, you know, going back and being the product of someone who came up in the earliest days of the web, there's actually like a beautiful simplicity behind how the web actually works.

Speaker 1 That when you fast forward to today and look at all the layers that now have been created in the stack,

Speaker 1 I like completely sympathize and empathize with marketers and others that have to think about how do I, what is the MarTech stack? What is the web stack that I bring together?

Speaker 1 My developers are telling me we need to do this thing and use these technologies. My executives are telling me these analysts are recommending this highly complex and

Speaker 1 enterprise level solution. And usually when we say enterprise level, it's like they're overly complex, heavy-handed, massive suites of things that you don't end up using.

Speaker 1 And that's the status quo. And from my perspective, it's like that beautiful simplicity.
You're like preaching to the choir here from a WordPress perspective.

Speaker 1 It's like, how can we, that's how we show up differently.

Speaker 1 It's just, we'll come into an organization of a couple hundred thousand people and they'll say our existing technology, six people know how to update our digital properties out of 200,000.

Speaker 1 We got six people internally that can touch this thing. And our goal is then like, how do we open that up? Like, how do we

Speaker 1 turn six into hundreds or thousands? Because, like, the reality for marketers and organizations is

Speaker 1 if you're trying to connect with your customers and you're trying to catch attention, you have to be doing this in a way where you're able to move quickly and you're able to engage authentically and directly.

Speaker 1 And usually, the best way to do that is not through like six gatekeepers in the organization.

Speaker 1 And so that's where we think actually like WordPress and WordPress VFP like brings a superpower into these big companies because it's like, get the rest of the stuff out of the way.

Speaker 1 You don't need the complexity for complexity's sake.

Speaker 1 And so that gives me plenty of stuff to work on for the next, I don't know, decades because I feel like it's ingrained in these large companies that we need complex platforms.

Speaker 1 And actually, like the simplest solutions are the best solutions. So.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And in today's world, like,

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 it's like, I just need to throw a landing page up, you know, like,

Speaker 3 can we get the communication out there? You know, like, how fast does this have to be?

Speaker 3 And, you know, you've seen technologies like Canva and other things that have tried to, you know, democratize, you know, content development and landing page. And that's what I always.

Speaker 3 liked about WordPress is that you could do things quickly using and having and the openness, you know, having the open source side

Speaker 3 and then all the plugins.

Speaker 3 So we're, you know, it's a wonderful thing when you guys, the way you guys are willing to work with so many other partners, because so many other things need to talk to things.

Speaker 3 And that's what the great thing, like when a client comes to me and they do have maybe some complexity or whatever, that's why I'm always, you know.

Speaker 3 WordPress is top of mind because I'm like, okay, it's the fastest to integrate. It has a plug-in for that, a plug-in for this.
And some people get like their hair like in a mess over all that.

Speaker 3 But like, that's what I've always liked about WordPress is the willingness to sort of partner with anyone to bring these integrations to life and seemingly do it in an open way.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And then you get to focus on actually solving new challenges.

Speaker 1 Like the most frustrating thing to me is like when you've like come up with 10 different ways to integrate with whatever CRM you're using. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And it's like in reality, like you're like thousands of other organizations that have also needed to integrate with that CRM or that digital asset management platform or an ad platform or analytics or any number of things and so why spend the time recreating these elements and then actually spend the time on like what actually what are your business challenges what are your business opportunities how do you focus on those because you know authentication systems and crms are not value generating activities.

Speaker 1 CMS, creating your own CMS is not creating more value for your organization. So how do you let this ecosystem and our organization help with solved problems?

Speaker 1 So you really just focus on business strategy and execution and your customers or your audiences,

Speaker 1 new problems. That's way more engaging anyway in doing that.
So yeah, that's the hope.

Speaker 3 Nick Gernert, he is the CEO of WordPress VIP. Nick,

Speaker 3 you know,

Speaker 3 the elephant in the room, whenever you're talking about content,

Speaker 3 AI, artificial intelligence.

Speaker 3 What's been the general,

Speaker 3 you know, WordPress slash WordPress VIP slash automatic sort of corporate position on AI in general and even your own sort of position on how it's been coming to unfold the last couple of years?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Look, I mean, I think our position is this is there's a lot that's exciting in this. And, you know, being perfectly honest, I'm also the person that wants to be really pragmatic on

Speaker 1 what are new approaches, new technologies, et cetera, bringing to the work we need to do? And how do we actually stay focused on the value of that and not just necessarily chasing trends?

Speaker 1 Because a lot of that complexity we were just talking about comes from the temptation to maybe chase trends and throw things in there and hope they actually make things better.

Speaker 1 So but I think like with AI, this is something that, and particularly generative AI, this idea that machines can generate text and images and video, et cetera, in ways that we have just not been able to do historically is exciting, especially when you think about, you know, our role as a content management system.

Speaker 1 So we're the source of record and creation for a lot of these things. So our position is like, what is the best of those two things coming together?

Speaker 1 Because like anything, you want to focus.

Speaker 1 You want to focus your people time on the most valuable activities and let the machines do like what they're well suited to do.

Speaker 1 This has been like the, I mean, this is the history of technology in general is that we see a big technology shift and then we wonder if the status quo is forever changed.

Speaker 1 And really, we then look at like how it adapts into the future because like, you know, the role of a CMS has been called into question many times over the years in terms of different waves of technology evolution.

Speaker 1 And we're still here and we're still very critical as part of this. So I think from our perspective, it's like, how do we make humans more?

Speaker 1 How do we give them superpowers in this moment here in doing this? We don't see it. I don't see it.

Speaker 1 And I don't see it anytime near where there's a strategy where it's just like, look, we just let the machines now run our content strategies, our content creation, everything

Speaker 1 in that. Our approach in our view is very much like there's a human in the loop.

Speaker 1 This is human directed.

Speaker 1 And then it's aided through a lot of these technologies here that actually help take care of a lot of things that historically have been time consuming or just not even done well.

Speaker 1 So you can think of like overly simplified things like image descriptions for accessibility, alt tags, things like this that we've had to do in mobile technology. Like nobody likes to do that.

Speaker 1 And then we have like certain parts of our audience suffering when it's not well taken care of. Like those kinds of things are absolutely accelerated.

Speaker 1 The categorization and taxonomy around our content, way easier and way more streamlined with the help of things like what we're seeing in AI right now.

Speaker 1 Translations and the acceleration of things like translations.

Speaker 1 This is, again, these are things that there's solutions for. We don't even have to build them all as like automatic or WordPress VIP.

Speaker 1 There's great organizations out there building these kinds of solutions today. And like anything with WordPress, it's like, oh, it just easily snaps into what I'm already doing.

Speaker 1 So we actually view ourselves as kind of a platform by which a lot of folks will just experience AI and maybe not even fully realize they're experiencing AI.

Speaker 1 It's just like, wow, the tool just works really well on these tasks that I need to do around it.

Speaker 1 Some things we're doing uniquely, like we as WordPress VIP, we sit on, we have a lot of analytics data. that we have access to by virtue of some products that we provide.

Speaker 1 And so we're looking at how do we help our own customers take their analytics, their content performance, what has worked, et cetera, and how do we actually feed that into

Speaker 1 the content that is generated through AI?

Speaker 1 So if you're looking at like, I want headlines or titles that perform better, we can actually help say based on historical performance, we'll write headlines in your tone of voice or your business tone, you know, based on your performance, and we will recommend things.

Speaker 1 And so we're looking at this as a way to say, we can start to get predictive on how to help customers understand what has worked historically and apply that to the future. And so

Speaker 1 we're looking at that as saying, How do we take our unique

Speaker 1 assets we have as an organization, which is a lot of data that otherwise you don't necessarily have access to, and how do we apply that to things that get generated?

Speaker 1 So I think

Speaker 1 there's the other side of this is we actually went out to

Speaker 1 the market earlier this year and just said, hey, how are you applying AI in your workflow?

Speaker 1 And, you know, there was

Speaker 1 the response was, you know, about half of folks, and this is like just a couple months ago, about half of folks responded, we've experimented with AI in some way.

Speaker 1 So, and then about 10% are saying, I'm using it consistently.

Speaker 1 So, we're still in this moment from an AI adoption standpoint where folks are, it's still very mason on the consistent adoption and application of it.

Speaker 1 And so, I think, again, part of how we're thinking about this is how do we just incorporate this into our product that supercharges an editor's experience, a content creator's experience, in a way where they might not even really realize they're working with AI necessarily?

Speaker 1 It's just helping them do their jobs that much more effectively.

Speaker 1 That's definitely going to be our focus for years to come here.

Speaker 1 Rather than thinking that suddenly this shift makes the CMS irrelevant or the content creator irrelevant or anything else, it's just going to make us more effective, like any other technology shift we've seen in recent decades.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 It's interesting, as you're talking, I was thinking like the evolution that you've witnessed being there 11 years with like mobile and the smartphone.

Speaker 3 And because I was thinking, okay, WordPress is this

Speaker 3 envelope or, you know, the carrier of content. You know,

Speaker 3 and it carries the content. And when that was a desktop experience, that was one thing.
And it's still, you still have these experiences.

Speaker 3 We have laptops and we're working on, you know, desktop experiences, wherever that, even if it's mobile.

Speaker 3 But then you've got the mobile phone and education versus entertainment and the role of WordPress as the carrier of that.

Speaker 3 Like a lot to unpack there, but my brain just started to go down this rabbit hole, Nick, like going, Nick's seen a lot.

Speaker 3 through the evolution, you know, of how the web gets used and the device that it's on, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yes. And like, so your mobile example is a a great one because, you know, in the earliest days of mobile, like we carved off specific teams that focused on the mobile experience.

Speaker 1 We're like, look, you're the mobile team. You are the caretaker of this new paradigm.

Speaker 1 And it was a big unlock for Oregon to think about like, okay, now I can reach an audience in a whole new place, in a whole new way, et cetera. So you focused on that.

Speaker 1 And now we don't have a mobile team anymore. Like mobile is just part of what we think about as part of like, well, we know half the audience is at least going to be coming from a mobile device.

Speaker 1 So we need to make sure it works great in that context, in that use case. AI is going to be a similar thing here.
It's like, wait, you know what? We do have AI teams carved off right now.

Speaker 1 And we're saying, like, hey, go focus on this sort of new thing.

Speaker 1 But, you know, give it a few years. This will just, we will settle into an understanding of like, all right, here's where the value is really accruing and generated in this.

Speaker 1 And it's just part of the work we do. It's not an and or like another lane.
It's just another part of this paradigm.

Speaker 1 So to your point, like these fundamentals, this evolution, the more you just have the very broad foundations that WordPress is built on, it helps you adapt and say, okay, something new is here.

Speaker 1 We're going to focus on that for now. And then it just becomes part of the common platform over time.
And then we'll be ready for the next thing and adapt to that, ideally. Yeah.

Speaker 3 You guys are the FedEx of, you know, content. You're the delivery

Speaker 3 system in a way.

Speaker 1 You got to explain that.

Speaker 1 You know?

Speaker 3 like, but no matter what it is, I mean, I don't know, like it comes through. You know, I get this package analogy.
That's the way my brain works.

Speaker 1 It's like the world on time. Yeah.

Speaker 3 But it's the content delivered when you want it, where you want it, without you having to think about necessary.

Speaker 3 Like the best thing that FedEx can do is make you not know they exist because it's so ubiquitous. So there's no issues, right?

Speaker 3 We only worry, the only problem there's an issue is when the package doesn't get there. So if I never talk or think about FedEx, that means FedEx is doing their job.

Speaker 3 Same thing almost with WordPress, because no matter what you're trying to get at, the content, whether it's entertainment, education,

Speaker 3 you know, whether it's the brochure or the TV show that's encapsulated, video and encapsulated on the site, you know,

Speaker 3 no one needs to know you exist. You know, the least, you know, other than the corporate person that you work with, but the user experience, you know so that's a fascinating kind of analogy right

Speaker 1 totally agree with everything you're saying there and um and and our job is well done when we kind of just fade into um the you know the back um and we and as long as we're enabling folks to do their jobs and as

Speaker 1 long as people can get what they need when they need it every like that's the job well done and it's not about us like, having a visible spot somewhere in that stack.

Speaker 3 Um, so that's why when you said AI built in, not you might not even know it because you don't need to know it. You guys are leveraging the technology, bringing a better experience to life

Speaker 3 without actually, you know, again, it's like we don't have to package the things and call it AI. We just call it a company using technology in a good way to make your experience better.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 3 Sometimes we market things, you know, like, and I'm a marketing guy, you know, I love putting monikers on things.

Speaker 1 But we know that's the audience we're talking to right now. And that's part of our own, I mean, that's part of our own challenge, honestly, is like, look,

Speaker 1 folks want to know about AI right now. And folks want to know what your product is doing.
I don't think it's as much about AI.

Speaker 1 It's like, folks want to know, like, what are you doing to keep up with the pace of change? Yeah. And like, please talk to me about how you're shifting with change.

Speaker 1 And so AI is that lens we view it through right now, but it's like, how adaptable are you really? And so,

Speaker 1 you're right. And it's like, you need to talk about it.
We need to talk about it through the lens by which you are viewing things.

Speaker 1 And also, I don't want to overstate that somehow this is an entirely new product.

Speaker 1 This becomes something that actually takes something you've already been doing and improves upon it in ways that are like really exciting and haven't been transformed this way in many years.

Speaker 1 So, just an exciting shift in the work. How How do you think?

Speaker 3 Because when I go, I start thinking websites and WordPress and my mind gets pretty fast, probably being a digital agency guy, like SEO.

Speaker 3 And I think not only like, okay, within WordPress, optimization of SEO that could be done with, you know, machine learning and AI and all that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 But also the user experience for how people are searching today. It's kind of like twofold.
And

Speaker 3 how do you guys think about SEO within the landscape of the product and just overall with everything happening with AI?

Speaker 1 Yeah. So, I mean,

Speaker 1 the foundation is

Speaker 1 WordPress has had SEO sort of at its core since its earliest days that in most cases we'll see folks migrate into the platform and immediately see a dramatic SEO improvement just because of all the care and attention that's gone into how documents get structured and delivered.

Speaker 1 It's just a very SEO friendly way.

Speaker 1 The most exciting thing we're working on as a business right now that's AI related

Speaker 1 is

Speaker 1 related to backlinking. So one of the things that drives authority from an SEO, and you know this,

Speaker 1 is what points to what and what authority

Speaker 1 How can you take high authority things and point them to something so that it also then gets more authority?

Speaker 1 So one of the things we've actually been working on from an SEO standpoint is how do we take, so

Speaker 1 you can do like, we do Google Search Console integrations into our platform into our products.

Speaker 1 So our customers can start to feed Google Search Console

Speaker 1 data. into our platform.
So immediately we start to already know like a lot of the insights around SEO.

Speaker 1 And what we're then doing at the time of something being published, so you go out, you're going to publish

Speaker 1 our interview here today. And you're like, I've got what I want to do is I want to get this thing ranking well for AI and content or something like this.

Speaker 1 And I know I posted some things years ago about CMS or whatever. And what we'll quickly do is go into your archives.
We'll match up your highest authority existing content.

Speaker 1 and say, you need to insert links to this new thing in this content. And we'll walk you through a workflow by which you can go about and do that.

Speaker 1 And then at the global enterprise scale, we're actually then saying, hey, we'll actually go do that across a network of sites.

Speaker 1 So you might have one.com here, but actually you probably run 100 websites with us. So we'll actually go through your entire catalog and say, how could you relate across your entire catalog of content

Speaker 1 to these new things?

Speaker 1 And so, and that is that this, the accuracy and the efficacy of this has been unlocked in a new way thanks to AI and just how quickly you can do this and how accurately you can do this.

Speaker 1 That for me, it's probably the most exciting thing. Like, yes, we're also doing things.
It's like generate me an SEO-friendlier headline and things like this from a document construction standpoint.

Speaker 1 That's great. This just like supercharges it in a new way that I, at least I'm not seeing anyone else right now is able to really do this kind of thing.

Speaker 1 So that's definitely one of the things that has me most excited about. Yeah.

Speaker 3 I wrapped my head around that the moment you said it.

Speaker 1 Like, I mean,

Speaker 1 yeah, like that, that's big.

Speaker 3 And that is, I have not heard of anyone else connecting those dots. And it does, I mean, it's backlinking for SEO value.

Speaker 3 For anyone listening, like, there's an SEO specialist, like your SEO, where you fall in those search rankings are driven by a lot of things, but two really, the most important things, the content

Speaker 3 and the relevance of that content, the keywords that are used that are highly searched. when people are looking for that.

Speaker 3 And then the sometimes lesser known is the backlinking from authoritative sites that have high domain authority that are linking back to your content and your website raises your seo value and what nick is saying is they're making that a lot fucking easier with uh

Speaker 1 with uh

Speaker 3 with ai so practical use

Speaker 1 practical use yeah and hopefully an improved user experience too so if i land on one of your old pieces of content i'm like oh great actually there's an updated thing on this as well. So not all,

Speaker 1 it's SEO and ideally an improved user experience as well along the way. So thank you for validating us on the like that you think is also potentially valuable.

Speaker 1 That is very valuable for the right people.

Speaker 3 And if it isn't valuable to them, it means they don't know or understand

Speaker 1 how valuable it is.

Speaker 3 And I don't mean to, and I'm not being harsh, I'm just direct.

Speaker 1 People

Speaker 1 this is an opinion show on some level. So you're going to get mine.

Speaker 3 If you don't know that's valuable, call me.

Speaker 1 Nick and I will hook you up. There you go.
I love it. I love it.

Speaker 3 Oh, talking to Nick Gernert. He's the CEO of WordPress VIP.
Who doesn't want to be a VIP?

Speaker 1 Very important person.

Speaker 3 I like being a VIP.

Speaker 3 Nick,

Speaker 3 you know, staying down that search train just a little bit with

Speaker 3 AI, it's interesting, you know, chat GPT and, you know, asking things.

Speaker 3 Are you guys seeing or you have data that supports? I mean, you guys have so much data. I can't even imagine how much data, like information you guys have.
It makes my head want to explode.

Speaker 3 But that's why the computers get to do it for us. But, but think, but like, user,

Speaker 3 how much use it goes like to almost like the, you know, people Googling or chat GPTing? Like, do you guys seeing those kind of trends and that data and reacting in any way to it?

Speaker 1 Yeah, so I mean, there, I mean, there's a few things here. I mean, like, I think on one end,

Speaker 1 um,

Speaker 1 what's informing these models tends to be a lot of the content that's been created and exists across the web.

Speaker 1 And so, I think there we've been helping folks navigate attention of like, what's fair use of my content? How do I, you know, so we're trying to help at a platform level.

Speaker 1 Like, look, if you want to restrict certain things or whatever, like, we want to help you there and make sure you've got those types of things.

Speaker 1 And I think, you know, the web, the website and web in general will have a significant role to play for the foreseeable future in what informs the responses and what is considered fact and opinion, et cetera, comes from these sources.

Speaker 1 So yes, there's a certain amount of training models against those things, but I don't see it usurping the importance of the sources anytime soon.

Speaker 1 So, but we're helping folks navigate like fair use of their content.

Speaker 1 And then your point on what are we seeing from a trend standpoint in terms of consumption, like is, you you know, we were asking ourselves over the summer that was the introduction of AI summaries on Google, was that leading to a decline in Google referral traffic to our customer websites?

Speaker 1 Was were people searching, they got the answer in that synopsis, and then they never actually clicked the blue link anymore. I think that's the big fear that folks are worried about at the moment.

Speaker 1 That's the most kind of pressing concern is where's that? We dug into a bunch of data around this.

Speaker 1 And overall, right now we're actually seeing referral traffic from Google to the websites that we look at which we're looking across a couple hundred million visitors every day so it's a significant amount of traffic

Speaker 1 Google referral traffic is actually increasing right now so in aggregate and then if you've got and kind of peel that back

Speaker 1 the the

Speaker 1 the There's disparity though between the size of the organization.

Speaker 1 What we're seeing is like the bigger you are as an organization, kind of to your point, the the better you are at navigating SEO, relevancy, et cetera.

Speaker 1 So you might have teams you can dedicate to this more than the smaller players. And so we are seeing a bit of a, it's not as evenly distributed from big to smaller in that spread.

Speaker 1 So that gives us more of an impetus to say, how do we help folks navigate this despite whether or not they have massive teams that can stay on top of these things or not?

Speaker 1 So what we're seeing is like, look, if you're able to engage and build great content, backlink it, relate it, do all the things that help you, you're maintaining at least or even growing audience right now.

Speaker 1 And so we're going to continue to monitor this and watch this and just help folks navigate what may or may not change in this.

Speaker 1 I think there's a healthy, there's a well-earned, healthy amount of skepticism towards Google at the moment. And

Speaker 1 how much should I rely on them for traffic? And as a platform that directs people to me, I think that's fair. They are a very important source of traffic, though.

Speaker 1 And I think it's both like leveraging that and also thinking about like how do you, how do you have a strategy that doesn't make you overly dependent on any one particular technology?

Speaker 1 Because I mean, you know this better than I, but it's like the overdependency on any one social platform or search or chat GPT or anything else might help you in a you know six to 12 month time horizon and may really hurt you on a multi-year trajectory if you're trying to think long-term.

Speaker 1 So same rules still apply. How do you have like a well,

Speaker 1 how do you um hedge against overdependence on any one particular company to drive your business?

Speaker 1 We're trying to help folks navigate that because we think we as WordPress and something that is open, we're not a platform that owns your data or you or anything else.

Speaker 1 You actually own all of these things. We're here to help you kind of navigate that and, and have a stronger owned presence on the web.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's you nailed the word there at the end. I was going to go is like rented versus owned land.

Speaker 3 And I've always seen WordPress, because I'll say this to people, you know, whether it's social media or other entities, you know, YouTube even.

Speaker 3 And look, you got to look, take advantage of the platforms. I'm not a hater on the walled gardens, you know, but just know that's rented land and not owned land.

Speaker 3 And WordPress may sell products and services, but they are part of the good guy owned land territory.

Speaker 3 And I've always coached that your website needs to be your own property, your newsletter, your website, your content.

Speaker 3 You've got to own it and have places that it lives in sort of your yard and not your neighbors or the one that the beach house you're renting down the street

Speaker 1 that could go away at any time. Right.

Speaker 1 One good storm away from God. So, yeah.

Speaker 3 Nick, as we close out here,

Speaker 3 you know,

Speaker 3 what are you seeing? We've talked about, you know, the trends with AI, pragmatically improving, you know, experiences on the web, things that WordPress are doing.

Speaker 3 Maybe for our listeners, what are like maybe some practical things that you're seeing in

Speaker 3 corporate business, website, like

Speaker 3 go-to-market strategies these days?

Speaker 3 Or just like, what are some trends or things that are real that are using your pragmatic approach that you think people should be thinking about as they maybe embark on a new site or a new project within a web experience, those kind of things.

Speaker 3 Anything top of mind as sort of some actionable things?

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 yeah, I mean, I think, look, I think we're in a moment here where it's a great opportunity to reassess just what are you investing in those, in your own channels right now.

Speaker 1 And so I think Actually, one of the challenges is, are folks even embarking on this journey that you're describing, which is, am I looking at these own channels? Am I investing in them?

Speaker 1 Whether that is in microsites for a particular audience or like our broader digital presence?

Speaker 1 Because I think, you know, there's never been a better time to really think about your investments in your own space of web and digital.

Speaker 1 And you're naming all these things from newsletter, because no one can own how you distribute into somebody's inbox to web and website.

Speaker 1 There's a reason these things have had a resurgence in recent years because we've seen really the dynamics of platforms and who controls what in terms of an audience really get called into question.

Speaker 1 And as a large organization, it's highly dependent on these connections to your customers and your audiences.

Speaker 1 It's chilling to think that that can easily be cut off. And so the trend and the thing that we're seeing, folks, is just how do I invest more in this?

Speaker 1 Because one of the trends that we see and that we've heard from people is like

Speaker 1 more than half of folks want to get their information from a source that's not a social platform.

Speaker 1 But yet interestingly, those same folks are saying like, yeah, more than half the time I'm just going to social and getting this information.

Speaker 1 And I think a lot of that is due to the fact that the experiences on the own side have been neglected and are not nearly as robust or as engaging as some of these other platforms and things like this.

Speaker 1 And that's not to say that everyone needs to recreate the platforms, but you need to be investing in experiences for your own customers that actually are

Speaker 1 generating positive customer experiences. And you can do this in your own channels and you can do this there.

Speaker 1 But folks, so that is for me the thing that I would just encourage everyone to be revisiting right now is how much are you investing?

Speaker 1 in that because there's long-term returns on that and some of our most successful customers on the enterprise side are the ones that five years ago even pre-pandemic were like, we're making a big investment in the channels we own and the content we drive to those channels.

Speaker 1 We're going to own more of a relationship with our customers.

Speaker 1 And those were the folks that navigated like the, you know, a shutdown to entire digital and, you know, in early 2020 and then emerging from that now have navigated from that the best and the strongest.

Speaker 1 So it's like the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, best times today, or second best time is today. And same sort of thing.
I think like the

Speaker 1 time to invest in your your own strategy would have been five years ago, but you know, start today

Speaker 1 would be my hand.

Speaker 3 I think we need to start a new campaign. There's no political affiliation here at all, but you'll get where I'm going here, Nick.
Let's make websites great again.

Speaker 1 You know, like I'm just saying, like,

Speaker 3 I know that that conjures up like a feeling no matter where you fall politically. I'm sure, but I'm, but I'm serious though, Nick.
Like,

Speaker 3 it's sort of like

Speaker 3 it's as you were talking, I'm sitting here going, when's the last time I went into a website and really was surprised and delighted?

Speaker 1 It's been a while.

Speaker 3 And it's time to like surprise and delight again on the web.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 the web is a wonderful and beautiful, weird place where you can do these really creative and inventive things that no one necessarily gets to control those bounds.

Speaker 1 And I think we've lost some of that in more of a homogenized experience.

Speaker 3 The cookie cutter, you know, you're within those walled gardens and you've got your profile and people are learning about you, but you can't bring your brand completely to life.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And maybe we'll start a site.

Speaker 1 Maybe we just start a site that's like highlighting really great things that folks are doing with the web right now, because there are some really great examples of great experiences that folks are investing in and building.

Speaker 1 So maybe you've given me an idea of like we just. We need some inspiration.
We need some inspiration, Nick. That's what it is.
Let's inspire. That's what this is about.

Speaker 3 Inspire web greatness on your own branded properties with Nick Gerner Gernert and WordPress VIP. Nick, it's been a pleasure, brother.
Where can everybody keep up with everything you're doing?

Speaker 3 Learn more about WordPress VIP, et cetera.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you can find us at wpvip.com. You can find me on just about any channel at my name, Nick Gernert.

Speaker 1 You'll find me anywhere there, or we're WordPress VIP all over the typical networks you look at as well. So find us all there.

Speaker 1 And I really appreciate the time. This has been a ton of fun.
You're, I don't, you know, we're very aligned on many of the things that, uh, you know, could be great here. So I really,

Speaker 3 I think there's, there should be some partnership or something on this. And uh, love to have you back on the show regularly, uh, Nick.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 3 Hey, guys, you know what to find us, RyanisRight.com. We're bringing together all the best all in business and marketing here on the show, Nick.

Speaker 3 Everything you're doing over at WordPress, look, don't be on rented land. You got to get that own land where it needs to be.
Go check out WordPress VIP.

Speaker 3 We'll have the show notes where we link to all the content from today, Nick's information and WordPress VIP. You can follow me on all the social channels at Ryan Alford.

Speaker 3 You'll see that blue check before you can buy it.

Speaker 1 We'll see you next time on Right About Now.

Speaker 2 This has been Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network Production. Visit ryanisright.com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities.

Speaker 2 Thanks for listening.