Jono Alderson with Jason Barnard at YoastCon 2019 Jono Alderson talks with Jason Barnard about SEO and AEO in a world without websites. With the SERP increasingly offering solutions to queries, we are facing world where websites are increasingly less important (as it were). Jono Alderson talks extensively about on-SERP SEO, a great continuation of Rand Fishkin’s approach in this episode – communicating across channels, all along the user journey. SEO is the puppeteering of all the channels.Jono Alderson Not a volume game any more, it’s a right-fit and quality game.Jono Alderson Market to everybody and bring them gracefully down the funnelJono Alderson Plus we talk about WordPress, Jono tells me the interview was a Treat (great phrase !)… and right at the end, we discover that SEOisAEO rhymes with Jono ! Jason:SEO is AEO, welcome to the show, Jono: Anderson.Jono:Wow. Amazing, amazing.Jason:It's losing some of its shine.Jono:No, no, it was great.Jason:Lovely to meet you, Jono:. Thank you for being here.Jono:Yeah, thanks.Jason:Bit about you, you're a futurologist.Jono:An amateur one I think, but I don't know if you can be a professional one, so-Jason:I don't even know what one is.Jono:I think I have a lot of opinions about what might happen next, and needed a way of describing that, and it was a handy word.Jason:Oh, it's not a thing then?Jono:Oh, it is. It has connotations of pretentiousness. I know there are in large organizations...Jason:I didn't say that :)Jono:No, but everyone else will. I spent a lot of time in agencies and SEO trying to build strategies for clients, and a lot of that depended on understanding where everything was going and what the world might look like in five years from now, if you're building a big strategy, committing a lot of resources. So I had to build an understanding and some estimated guesses on whether we'd have flying cars and what Amazon were up to and all these things, and yeah, that turned into futurology, so that's quite fun.Jason:Brilliant. You basically say, "Where will we be in 2024," if it's five years?Jono:Yeah, or maybe even a bit further, but obviously it gets harder the further out you go.Jason:Last night, I saw we were gonna be with Global Corporation.Jono:Yeah, the evil overlords.Jason:That was brilliant by the way, last night. A great piece of acting.Jono:Yeah, well maybe, maybe. I spoke to the guys from Google afterwards and they were like, "This feels like a really accurate description," of where they are and how everything works, so it might not have been theater at all.Jason:Oh, right. Oh no. Everybody can be very afraid.Jono:Yeah, always.Jason:You said ... "what the Walking Dead taught me about the future of consumer loyalty"... what the ... is that?Jono:Oh God, that was a while ago. That was really fun. That was the precursor to a whole bunch of stuff I've been thinking about around where digital marketing goes, and the core of the premise was that we are as consumers saturated with choice. Everything is becoming commodified. Products get cheaper to manufacture, they get cheaper to distribute. It's cheaper to enter most markets. Increasingly everything is service-orientated, and consumer choice becomes the differentiator. In a world where I'm empowered to do my own research and make decisions on what I want, then what makes the difference is quality, and I can choose which brands I do or don't want to engage with, and the only thing that really sets them apart is the quality of the experience they deliver.Jono:As you start to change what it means to be a brand, to focus on that rather than I'm cheaper, I'm faster, I'm closer, because none of those things make sense to compete on, we need to really reinvent how we think about marketing and consumer research and SEO in particular. It's not about trying to sell things about the bottom of the funnel, it's about trying to build awareness and preference.Jason:Rand was talking about that.Jono:Yeah, yeah,