RIP SEO: Here’s What Works Now

before we start I'm going to do a quick introduction um Neil why don't you tell them a little about about yourself and I'll tell them about me and we'll get going I'm a digital marketer been doing it for 20 plus years at this point I'm a co-founder of an ad agency called NP digital we do a podcast together Eric and I called marketing school and yeah so my name is Eric Sue and like Neil mentioned we do the podcast together I think we're probably over 110 million downloads now so we've been doing it for about eight years and I have an ad agency as well it's called single grain um and that's what we PR really focus on and we actually um what else do we have we have a little agency owners group that we do together too called the agency Owners Association so let's go ahead and jump into it I think the first thing we want to talk about here is why we think SEO as we know it is dead so both Neil and I have a background in SEO and we think it's changing very rapidly and Neil has a new acronym for SEO or a new definition for it so we look at SEO has changed from search engine optimization to search everywhere optimization because if you look at how people search it's no longer just a Google game they're using Chad gbt according to google VP young people use Instagram and Tik Tok to perform a search so you now have to optimize for all the platforms because people no longer just search only on Google and you know when people think SEO is dead we ended up doing analysis we looked at through our sites like uh through our tools like uber says and the the public we have access to a lot of data and people like SEO is dead Google released AA overviews in over a 100 countries now they're taking up all the traffic and what we've actually seen is consistent growth in traffic to websites from Google and according to Danny Sullivan who's a Google search aison he said Google has driven more organic traffic to websites each and every single year since Inception and we ended up validating this with our small sample size date I believe it was over 30,000 websites that we looked at but websites in general are getting more SEO traffic over time and even with the AI overviews we actually saw a little bit more than a 1% increase in traffic that's not a lot but everyone said it's going to demolish SEO traffic and when we compared a week prior and a week after we didn't see a drop in traffic we actually saw increase yep and so look search behavior is changing right so we've talked about this on the podcast where we believe that YouTube at least I Believe YouTube is probably the biggest opportunity for the next decade or so and YouTube's the number number two search engine right and I look at behaviors from 20 year olds and what do they search first they actually search First on Tik Tok right so search behavior is changing quite a bit um but that doesn't mean that Google's dying right um Google themselves has said they don't even know where search is what search is going to look like in the next 5 to 10 years or so so you know we're we're kind of taking it month by month year bye type of situation but I think it is a little overblown to say oh my God AI is going to change everything I think long-term AI is going to shift things quite a bit but I think it's a little overblowing right now um so again long-term big big big tectonic shift that we're going to see right um but right now it's more or less even in the last year it's kind of been more or less the same thing sure you know I'm using perplexity a lot more I'm using Claud a lot more yes I like computer used from Claude there's cool things you know those of you out there um that have used like bolt. new or reflet anybody here is now a pseudo developer right you can basically create a front end maybe 50 to 70% and then send it over to developers and you can make a full-blown app right so a lot of things are shifting quickly but I would say marketing as a whole it's still mostly the same at least right now yeah you you just got to end up being patient um and you'll see how things evolve over time and a great example of is is this graph right here so in 2020 we did a survey with around 5,000 people and what we found was when we asked some where do you go to find answers to your questions online I know this is only a subset of queries that people are searching for but back in 2020 98% said hey search engines like Google fast forward to today people are saying hey 61% of the time when I'm looking for questions for my when I'm looking for questions to my answers I'm going to Google 177% of the time they're looking on social media and 30% they're looking at AI chat BS like Chad GPT 2% other I know that adds up to more than 100% but it's because people are using more than one platform and this is what makes it interesting you're starting to see the landscape shift and search is actually going to start looking more like social media in social media people like oh Facebook's a juggernaut they won well you have Facebook you have Instagram Instagram didn't kill Facebook Facebook actually makes currently more ad revenue from or meta makes more ad revenue from Facebook than Instagram snap still exists Pinterest is out there right Tik tok's blowing up and what you're going to end up seeing is search is going to be a very similar game there's going to be many platforms many options people are going to use a lot of them just like the average person uses 6. 6 social networks I believe according to demand Sage so that's a lot of social networks at the same time people use multiple platforms for search so you have no choice but to optimize for all of them you know it's actually been a while since a new big platform popped out like back you know 10 years ago there was snap there was Instagram all these things were coming out right and now you have these new platforms and some of the attention is Shifting over I don't know I I I'm pretty sure this is the case for you too but when we have leads coming in we're seeing a growing chunk of them coming in from perplexity or chat GPT and we're like I'm like um I listened to one of the calls they're like oh yeah when we search through chat GPT you're popping up for everything how do you do that right um and so search Behavior will change over time search in the past historically like you had before Google it was excite right you had Leos you had all these things and now it's becoming more democratized I guess would be the word and so that's actually a good thing right cu competi breeds creativity even with podcasting if you look at what Eric and I have done with our marketing School podcast you know when we go to events and Eric talks to people a lot of people have found us through a podcast it's a new Avenue to get people in shorts too shorts as well yeah yeah people people walk will walk up to pretty sure it's the same case for you but they'll walk up to me at a conference and be like I watch your shorts it's not like I watch your long form stuff it's not like I read your blog post but I come to you through this medium that I happen to consume right so it goes back to what Neil's new acronym is is it's search everywhere optimization right and I think uh that's going to catch on more and more so let's move on to the next piece and this is something I've been big on and I'm sure all of you are seeing this right now um but I believe that Community is the new SEO and there's a reason for that the reason for that is this because there's a proliferation of AI content that's been hitting the web Google's like oh crap what do we do about that now right and so when you look at this graph everything that's going up and to the right you have hubs spots in here this is hubspot's community zapier's community shopify's community that's all moving up and to the right that's all user generated content and when you think about the search engine results now what do you see more of you see Reddit you see Kora you see a lot more user generated content because that's content that is more trustworthy than all the AI generated content that you're seeing being put out there right and Sam Alman of open AI Fame has said that he believes that not even just online communities but in-person communities are going to be worth wai way more in the next 5 to 10 years and this guys what we have over here this is an in-person Community right we're getting to shake hands with each other we're getting to break bread with each other it's the inperson stuff that really that's what carries over into big collaborations and helping each other grow at the end of the day right now that being said I use a a company called School SK there's actually another one called circle.

Soo these are all Community platforms you can use and when you look at their SEO traffic it's all moving to up and to the right right so they're getting more SEO traffic but the beauty of community to is that it's a retention mechanism it gets people you might get a customer in but it gets people to stay right people stay for the community people stay for the this this conference now is bigger than one of the biggest marketing conferences in the United States right it's because you guys love community and that's what it is at the end of the day have you ever wanted to Target a bunch of accounts on LinkedIn at once and personalize them well previously you couldn't do this let's say you wanted to Target 500 Enterprise companies and you wanted to hyper personalize Those ads you can do that now and Linkedin has confirmed with us that nobody else can do this right now only we can do it the product is called carrot that's k a r r o t and it's carrot account based marketing so if you go to carrot. aai you can go learn more about it and we'll see you on the other side one thing that you need to keep in mind is whether you're in Germany or any other part of Europe or any part of the world people have tons of buying options what community does is build brand loyalty if you look at you're purchasing decisions a lot of the times you're buying from brands that you're already familiar with if you build a community you'll have stronger brand loyalty because what's happening in marketing is a lot of companies are looking very similar to each other but the ones that have a community it creates a little bit of a differentiation which could be enough to get a customer to come to you versus your competition all right so this next slide over here is just an example so this is a community that Neil and I have it's called the agency Owners Association and this is where we just go in and help agency owners grow right but this is example if you go to S SK l. com school.

com you'll see a lot of these communities and in some cases a lot of them are free some of them are paid you can see how much money they're making but it's an interesting way to see how um I think the upside that everybody has here if you go start a community right now is that I believe that Community managers are very underpriced when it comes to like a salary standpoint um so you know I think if you can get these people now they're amazing they're going to help keep your customers they're going to help grow your customer base at the end of the day this is just one of those examples so but if you're going to create a Community you need to make sure that you guys are really involved it's not enough to say hey we're going to have an online community and let our group our members talk to each other that's fine but if you're not really participating the community is not going to grow the way that you're expecting people are joining your community your brand your company's brand someone from the organization whether it's you or someone else needs to be involved in the community if you're not on a daily basis it doesn't doesn't work the same all right so this next section over here we're going to talk about moving beyond AI buzzwords because look chat GPT you know it's it's not really the Advent of AI but that's really what started the the big push right last two years everyone's been talking about AI I think the word's a little overplayed now um I think it's still very important but when we use AI in our marketing I think it's a little overplayed there so let's talk about this one Neil yeah so we did a fun experiment with 60 something websites I think it was around 68 websites we had 744 articles created half the through AI half through human the AI written content was modified by human as well to extent that made it decent enough to publish online after five months you know on a monthly basis we're looking at the organic traffic on average the AI content had 5. 44 X less traffic than the human written content now this doesn't mean that human AI written content is bad or human written content you know is the best content ever you got to end up finding the balance you know overall we are seeing human written content generate more traffic because it's easier to include eat double eat experience expertise Authority and trust it's harder to that with AI content and a lot of AI content is just regurgitated information spun up in a new way I look at AI content a much better version than an article spinner and instead of just thinking about AI want to explain what a spinner is yeah yeah go ahead article spinner back in the day when we Eric and I first got into marketing you would put in texts into this tool and it would spin it up and create a new version so it wouldn't be duplicate it was garbage content but it worked it worked and AI is a much more advanced version than that it's taking everything from the web previously to create an output if you look at the content that's doing the best in today's world it's people talking about new stuff it's hard to do that with AI you people want to hear stuff and read stuff that they have never seen before on the internet and there's a lot of AI buzzwords out there and a lot of people are using this technology and it's amazing Eric has some amazing examples of him using AI what we're seeing with most organizations are they're using AI but they're not adding kpis so they'll spend a year using AI like look at all this cool stuff we did did you get more traffic no did you get more leads no did we get more sales no did we generate more Revenue no if you're not using this technology to help you with your main goals what's the point yep so Neil just kind of brought it up this is an example of one thing that we're doing at single grade my my agency and these are known as agentic workflows and the way I would explain this back up a second you let me know if I'm going too quickly here but you hear about Saia Nadella you hear about Mark Zuckerberg talking about AI agents and how they're going to change the world right these are you know workers that can that are infinitely patient that will work 24/7 that won't argue with you that understand your strengths and your weaknesses right now the way to think about agents um and I was actually having a conversation with a guy that's leading up Microsoft agents last week um and they're they're very much getting into this now and he's like well the stuff you guys are building is like yeah just keep doing this right so here's an example if you want to build let's say an SEO agent the first thing that you have to do so an SEO worker BAS basically you have to think about all the jobs to be done and I recommend that everyone Googles jobs to be done framework just read up what that is okay and a jobs to be done is basically what are all the things that an SEO an SEO worker needs to do so they need to think about technical SEO they need to think about on-site uh you know SEO internal linking external linking they need to think about all these things right and any job is a very thankless job there's a lot of time and effort that needs to go into it right um and so here's an example of an agent of workflow that we created because in SEO what works if you update your content if you delete your content and you consolidate your content that helps with traffic right so this is a consolidation agent over here if you startop start at the very top left you can see that this agent starts off with fetching Google search console data and a it it winds down and it kind of goes through things and it's looking for Content that is similar to each other that should be combined right and so you can see one of the steps over here it says um you know identifying vectors right it's identifying similar vectors and then it's it's combining it's saying hey maybe these three p PES need to be combined over here but the problem also just a little side quest here is a lot of people run AI they think oh we can just have it spin up a bunch of Articles and let it go you can't do that you have to actually have a human in a loop we believe that in the next two to three years you need a human in the loop and so what our agent here does is it'll note all the content we should be consolidating and I'll say hey do you want to consolidate all these pieces a human and a loop will check and then what will happen afterwards is they can hit approve or dis they can disapprove ones but they can do it at scale right this is an example of an agent at play um do you want to add something before I move to the next one yeah and what Eric is doing when he's creating agents in in essence he's looking at the tasks that need to be accomplished by his team to improve his main kpis his key performance indicators such as traffic because he knows traffic leads to more leads or it leads to more Revenue so he looks at the workflows that his team is doing and saying hey can I have ai replicate this and do this 24 hours a day so a it's more efficient two you're getting more done three that should increase the results from the channels that are producing results for him yeah and so by the way if any of you have an agency or a Services business here and you want to build agents for yourself or for your your clients just go to your clients this is the same thing we do at single grain we go to our clients hey what are all the core processes that you have right now that are actually money generating that's a key thing right because the Neil's point if you're not generating Revenue if you're not generating more traffic who cares at the end of the day um and that's a problem with a lot of generative AI right um and so here's an example of a workflow that we built that searches for internal linking opportunities on your website so that's a very simple thing with SEO right so you can see it it's kind of just working right now and we're finding um it's it's it's starting to search right and it's like you can see the agent working right so we build a platform internally we're just like let's build all these marketing agents and just throw them into the platform this is a simple example that anybody here I believe can do um and so I think it's key for everyone to think about again what are all the jobs to be done look it's still working right now um and boom it's like we found these opportunities over here do you approve do you disapprove right this is how we think the future of marketing is going to look we believe that you know you're going to have a lot of smart Talent on your team and they're going to be they're going to be armed with a thousand agents maybe 10,000 agents maybe even 100,000 agents or so and they're going to be a lot more efficient right um I think maybe a couple years ago I was a little more pessimistic about what would happen oh my God all the jobs are going to be lost now I'm a little more optimistic I think people will learn this stuff and um I think more jobs will be created if you're an agency owner and you want to grow faster check out the agency Owners Association that's hosted by my podcast co-host Neil Patel and myself and we have other agency owners that are doing 8 figures a year they were doing nine figures a year they sold their business for hundreds of millions of dollars and they're going to share their experiences with you there's a whole host of other benefits and the cool thing is that there's a 7-Day free trial and you should check it out now because we're going to take the prices up so just go to marketing school. i/ agency to learn more and we'll see you inside and when you also look at AI are you optimizing for these platforms for Revenue you know I had a person message me the other day and say hey Neil want to work with your agency I was like okay cool how' you find us oh I asked chat GPT and they recommended you and when we started doing analysis and suring different companies what we found is when they were looking at their customer base and asking their customers where they find out about their product or service or business we started seeing Chad GPT come up as a channel Chad GPT is still exploding and growth it's growing at exponential Pace if you're not optimizing for these AI platforms whether it's Chad GPT Google has their own version of AI or plexity or whatever it may be that's out there the latest version you're going to miss out you look at Amazon they're integrating you know anthropic into um what is it called Alexa right because they're one of the big investors in it if you're not optimizing for these platforms you're missing out on Revenue the other day I was with my kid I travel a lot but I was with my three-year-old and my three-year-old's talking to Alexa he asked me for chocolate and I said oh we don't have any chocolate so he goes to Alexa and he says Alexa order me chocolate and Alexa purchased him chocolate so then I had to run to Alexa and I said cancel the chocolate I I it didn't it didn't click for me that my kids can start making purchases on Alexa and then I started going to my Amazon account and I started noticing so many orders post it notes I'm like why would I ever use a Post-it note and then I see my kids always write me notes on Post-its all and put it all over the house and it quickly hit me that they're ordering all this stuff off of Amazon through Alexa and on top of that they subscribe me to audible they're subscribing me to HBO Max and they subscribe to um some other video service and music service all through Amazon or the Alexa device and I had to start cancelling all these subscriptions but it just shows these are all channels to think about that a lot of us forget and interesting thing is the younger generation actually uses voice search which is going to be powered by AI more than traditional search because they learn how to talk before they can learn how to type yeah dude let's just face it like Amazon Echo right now or Alexa piece of crap um your Siri also piece of crap but now that they're lering an anthropic and they're lering at open AI it's just going to get way better and I'm excited for that right because we actually have a voice assistant that can that can help us now um all right let's keep moving here we have a couple more things um before we before we get out of here so is it costing you customers Neil's got some cute more these cute extra graphs over here let's go for it yeah so the top marketing channels to invest in time and revenue and if you look on the left side right uh that is where most people invest their time organic social when you look at the graph on the next right you can see that people are getting their Roi not from organic social they're getting it from channels like SEO or paid ads or influencer marketing and we surveyed quite a bit of companies that generate a minimum of a 100 million in annual revenue it just shows a lot of where the revenue actually is coming from versus where people spend their time it's totally two different things and this is important for you guys to know because it's not about where you're getting your Roi from it's okay you may understand that but does your time where you're investing it match with where you're getting your Roi from and it's just like the example that Eric gave with the agent stuff that he's doing he's focusing on doing AI stuff that isn't sexy but it's helping him produce more revenue and by the way it's often the unsexy stuff that makes money right yeah you know I I had someone ask me earlier today do you guys go to cans Eric and I don't go to cans and we're dialing back our conferences yes keep going and him and I you know if you look at a lot of the creative stuff that gets shown on cans or in marketing in general they show the sexy cool commercials that you see in the world cup or the Olympics that stuff doesn't make the majority of the money out there it's valuable we're not saying that you shouldn't do it but people don't like talking about paid ads you know the majority of the internet spend online is Google ads then Facebook Facebook then Instagram then Amazon those are literally the top four in order the fifth one is YouTube all right so we're gon to wrap this I mean we have a couple more minutes to talk about the future of marketing as we see it so um why don't you start off first I mean first and foremost we've talked about the future of SEO being Community right this is community over here we think that's just going to continue to increase um what else do you see happening we talked a little about voice search I think within 10 years the main way that everyone's going to be searching around this world is going to be voice cuz of AI integration I uh two I think search is going to be everywhere not just search everywhere optimization but technolog is moving like I was looking at a company the other day and they're showcasing to me their smart fridge and when I say smart fridge it can detect how much milk is left in your fridge and you can click a button and you're going to have new milk in your house now imagine the fridge making recommendations to you on the brand of milk you should buy based on advertising deal search is literally becoming everywhere and it's being integrated more so into Hardware right now when we think about search you think about searching on google.

com imagine searching everywhere you go like your car Eric has a really sophisticated car his car makes fake noise to sound like it's a petrol car but it's actually fully electric yeah I don't know if it sounds like a petrol car but yeah it sounds electric well electric cars are us quiet there's no noise but his car created fake noise so then that way it sounds like there's a motor in the car yeah all right so look Neil and I we're not technical right but we always want to build we always have ideas we want to build new things all the time correct yes okay so the cool thing earlier I talked about bolt. new so it's B lt. new okay NE e w there's also repet there's also cursor so all the people that are big on AI on Twitter or X whatever you want to call it are talking about this right and and we actually ran a contest with my team um yesterday the contest ended and we paid 500 bucks to whoever came up with the most interesting thing and like people were like going hardcore on this contest right and people were building like different paid Media Solutions whatever their job is they're coming up with new Solutions right they're creating different front ends my point of saying this all to you is that again everyone now is a pseudo developer you have to check this stuff out because literally you can prompt saying hey um I did one just for markeing school for fun I said hey why don't you take our our YouTube links and allow me to upload audio and video files or post a link and then come up with the right packaging for YouTube uh thumbnails and headlines right and it actually built the front end for that it took I could see it coding everything it can I see it like catching its own mistakes and then when I see something's wrong and I ask it to adjust it it'll do it right so you can prompt a front-end app out and then you can have your developers finish the job right um so that's one example I still don't think it stops you from needing to hire Engineers you still need to have technical people on your team so this is is an example of a account-based marketing system we built for LinkedIn and so account-based marketing means that you're looking to Target let's say Coca-Cola you're looking to Target multiple people on Coca-Cola right and so what we do for LinkedIn right here is we say oh Amazon should be doing this Coca-Cola should be doing this right and then we're able to create all these LinkedIn account based marketing ads at scale and they're all customized right this is an example of something you can build using bolt.