Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author)

you've noticed a significant shift in how SEO works with the rise of AI answers being integrated into search results transparently I thought this was going to be apocalypse up until AI overviews whoever won on that long form piece of content would get that first clip but now that doesn't exist anymore what should people do to be successful in this new paradigm think of SEO as a product the product managers are the people that should be thinking about this SEO question because it's a product question product people need to think about how do we position this

to the user that is is not going to find out about this from a social Channel that's not going to be attracted by an ad this is a user that's doing their own self-discovery Journey if you can't answer the question about what is it that someone's going to do a search on then don't do SEO to a lot of people SEO is kind of this Dark Art it is not a dark art it is simple I think Step One is the step that almost everyone misses on SEO which is today my guest is Eli Schwarz

Eli is a growth adviser specializing in SEO and has helped companies like Kora coinbase Tinder LinkedIn WordPress and zapier develop and execute their SEO strategies he's also the author of product let SEO and has a very refreshing take on how to think about SEO and win at SEO recently he's been spending a lot of his time analyzing how SEO changes with the rise of llm chat Bots Google giving you the ANW straight in the search results and also how to utilize AI in your your SEO strategy in this episode we dive deep into everything that

you need to know to be successful in this new AI Paradigm as Eli shares in the conversation Google is just now rolling out changes to how search works and is greatly increasing how many searches include an AI generated answer at the top of the search results so things are going to start shifting under our feet pretty quickly if you're at all thinking about SEO working on SEO or are just curious about how search is evolving this episode is for you if you enjoy this podcast don't forget subscribe and follow in your favorite podcasting app or

YouTube it's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously with that I bring you Eli Schwarz Eli thank you so much for being here welcome to the podcast it's a real honor to be here you've had some amazing guests and I'm honored to be counted as one of them it's completely my honor you've been working on SEO for a long time you've been helping companies figure out how to win at SEO for a long time over a decade and we were chatting about what's happening in SEO and he told

me that you've noticed a significant shift in how SEO works with the rise of llms with the rise of AI answers being integrated into search results and so I thought it'd be awesome just to spend an entire episode talking about what people need to know about what's changing an SEO and how to be successful in this new paradigm of SEO with LMS and AI being prevalent how does that sound to you that's an awesome idea I I really like what what's happening with AI in general for SEO because it's causing everyone that cares about SEO

traffic whether that's a PM whether it's a CMO whether it's a CEO to really be forced into pivoting their thinking about what SEO traffic means because the tactics around SEO haven't really changed it's always been the exact same thing like I was um when I was my last full-time job was I would Survey Monkey and I was I was Moonlighting on the side and I was introduced to a CEO a of a a big company and they were asking me about my approach to SEO and I wanted to close it I wanted to get Consulting

engagement and the CEO says to me so essentially what you're telling me is I need to find my keywords put that into content and then build some links is there anything else you're going to do for me why should I pay you and it's it's done me into silence because essentially that is and was SEO and then that forced me to really pivot my thinking around what SEO might be and I pivoted my thinking and I you know I've talked to worked with many companies around how they should think about SEO and what SEO traffic

should mean but others have not because those tactics did work and llms and AI in general is forcing people to think again how should SEO work how should I be driving business from a search channel this episode is brought to you by pendo the only all-in-one product experience platform for any type of application tired of bouncing around multiple tools to uncover what's really happening inside your product with all the tools you need in one simpl to use platform pendo makes it easy to answer critical questions about how users are engaging with your product and then

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driven ranking options tired of big Tech's same old list of links it's time to try Brave search visit brave.com Lenny to get started that's brave.com Lenny so just to set a little Foundation talk about just what is it that's changing in search in an SEO with the rise of AI answers and LMS so essentially Google and other tech companies had their hand forced by open aai and chat PT so prior so Google has claims to have invented the concept of llms and they may or may not have and some of the early open AI employees

were Google employees but chaty BT came on the scene at the end of 2022 with this ability to ask any question and then get a written out answer and suddenly people are like well I don't need a Google and click all these results so there's there started this conversation of you don't need Google anymore Google is ending even more than that you don't need SEO no one's going to No One you don't need to optimize anything because all the entire world will just be given to you we'll we'll dig into that I don't think that's

at all correct and I don't think anyone whether they you're doing SEO as as your full-time job whether you're receiving SEO traffic as as a part of one of your primary marketing channels I don't think anybody has to worry about that however Google was worried about it and I think one of Google's primary stakeholders is really Wall Street so if Wall Street suddenly thinks that Google is a hasb been company and they're not interesting anymore and they don't want to maintain investments in them their stock price goes down and that hurts Google's ability to recruit

employees it hurts Google's ability to raise money and invest in all the interesting stuff they do so Google has to satisfy the Curiosity and the interests of the general world and general investor by saying oh that open AI thing we can do it too that's not that big of a deal so then Google responded badly of course first by launching what was then barred so they said open CBT look we've got our own version and they they did a public demo and didn't work out well at all and their stock price actually went down and

then they fixed it and then their stock price went up but they also had to have an answer to this concept of is search dying does anyone need to search anymore when the entire world can just be given to you so they launched what at the time they called sge search generative experience which is essentially chat gbt in a search result so they they launched that but they launched it as a beta and there were huge issues with what they were doing there because there's monetization issues they monetized I mean everything they do comes from

ads the majority of their their revenue comes from ads so if you're going to show this AI answer on a search result then you also can't have ads you need to go all in on one of them that was one issue which they actually have not solved yet another issue they had was liability so if they have a generative response that tells you to do something awful like I think there was one where it may or may not have been fake there a lot of people made some fake ones that told you to jump off

the Golden Gate Bridge are there liability concerns because Google Now is the publisher they're not a search engine that told you how to find out the answer to that they told you to do it themselves and the third issue there which is another liability concern is it plagiarism so those are the things that they worried about so they took about a year to test this thing which was fascinating because you know we're tech people and most of the listeners are tech people Google is very much a launch fast kind of company they reveal something and

then it sort of rolls out very very quickly they're not the kind of company that says we're going to launch something and then they take a year to do it so AI overviews what was then called search generate experience launched at Google IO this past year in May of this past year and they renamed it to AO reviews and it's that it's essentially chat gbt in a search result they launched it to Great Fanfare of course it was live right away they said it was going only only going to be logged in users only in

the US obviously they always have concerns about launching things in Europe because Europe's a little bit more litigious than the US and once they launched it suddenly they started getting these these screenshots of like Google told me to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge Google told me to put glue on my pizza which is of course Google didn't do that they just crawled things from around the web I'm surprised that Google didn't predict that because the exact same thing happened with chat gbt and Google's much bigger and a much more interesting Target for people that

want to share those things on social media so Google launches it and that was a little bit embarrassing so they they rolled it back somewhat but what's even more interesting is they've given up on this rollback and or not given up they've gone back into it and they've relaunched it and now it's on so many more search results I'm seeing it on on most of the search results that that I see and on top of that it's now on it's non-logged in users are seeing it so Incognito users or users without any history of Google

are seeing it and just launched it in the UK so this thing is coming and it's really going to be affecting search results to maybe uh help people understand why this may impact SEO if it's not obvious is it pushes results down people get the answer right there they don't have to click your links and then uh there's also like the M the the sponsored Links at the top of the page that already are pushing you down so basically your stuff is harder and harder to find right actually it's not that it's harder to find

your stuff becomes less relevant and that that's the part about SEO that I'm excited about so SEO was exactly like that CEO said to me years ago it's just about creating some content and then it's just like this sort of this race to the top of getting your ranking results on that top keyword so years ago I worked at a startup where we were in the automotive space and we uh wrote content about cars and a word we like to rank on was Cars we bought ton we wrote the homepage was ranked for the word

cars we bought tons of links and we were just a Cars website obviously not something anybody could expect to do now because you don't search like that you don't search oh I I need to buy a vehicle I'm going to use the word cars and sort of see what comes up because cars means a lot of things cars is a movie Cars is a kind of car you drive cars could be a go-kart it could be a lot of things so no one's going to think about those search results however SEO still geared towards those

top of funnel those big keywords that people cared the most about so now a lot of those keywords are going to be moving into these AI overview use and I don't want to just focus on Google although I think Google's going to own the entire search page forever and ever for at least for a very long time but other engines whether it's perplexity or whether it's Claude or whether it's meta they all have this opportunity to give AI overview type responses that I think those top of funnel kind of queries are a great fit for

what's going to come out as an answer so if you're looking to go on vacation and you want a Beach vacation you can ask a very explicit question about give me a Beach vacation that is not in America but is a 2-hour flight from X airport that's the kind of thing that you could do in a Google search but would take you a very long time to do and those are great answers from just getting a paragraph and then from there you move into the midf funnel so now you do this query and Google suggests

to you that you should go to Cancun or sorry not Google but whatever that answer is suggest to you that you should go to Cancun and now you're sort of in the midf funnel and that's where SEO begins to matter so the reason why I think this disruption is so big is because the the journey changes the discovery changes so whereas before if you were a travel site you were able to rank on on a best best best Beach vacation within two hours of the United States that's your ranking result and then you have your

long piece of content and you have your ads and you can monetize that that all changes when you can still rank number one on that but you're all the way at the bottom of the page the AI answer whoever that's from whether it's again from chat gbt or Google tells you where to now start doing your deeper search so just to maybe mirrorback what you're saying is the Discovery step of search is going to to be swallowed up by llms that give you a direction and then once you have a sense of what you want

then you go back to Google and that's where potentially the opportunity continues to remain absolutely and I I think that's where things are good that's where I'm excited by the user experience for search because I don't think the user was best served by I don't know us news or Forbes writing out where the best vac Beach vacations are within two hours of the United States with that piece of content that was written by a freelancer who's not a travel expert so now you're going to get that information also from not a travel expert you're going

to get an AI summarized answer and that will give you more clues and more ideas to do a deeper research search at I think that's where the user best served okay this is fascinating let's definitely spend more time there so people understand exactly what that means before we get into what PE that and what people should do to win here uh what impact have you seen on SEO and search results and the space of SEO as these things have rolled out have you seen like numbers of like this is declining this is growing transparently I

thought this was going to be apocalypse so I shared about a year ago that it's going to be an apocalypse we have not seen it yet and a lot of people are declaring victory that there's no apocalypse because we have not seen it yet however this thing just launched in a way that I think it will start impacting traffic so prior to the last couple weeks it was not available on logged out search it was only on logged in Search and even more than that on that logged in search Google had rolled it back significantly

because those embarrassing things that happened in May and June when they first launched it they only just now launching it broader and I do think we're going to see impacts of course another challenge with pinpoint any impacts is they rolling algorithm updates that are happening which we'll also talk about and that will sort of mask what's happening because if you've been hit by an algo update and suddenly you recover from the algo update you'll see more traffic but you might have seen more traffic but on a lower base because these AI overviews are changing things

so I think if you take all those steps back and you look at this from a a journey perspective there's no way that it won't be impacting search it's just going to be hard to find and there'll be certain examples where it is extremely prevalent and there'll be others where it won't impact things at all and I think the dividing line is the journey where in the funnel that user is so if you are WebMD and you're writing content about the human body just generic content that has existed since medical journals were created AI overviews

are going to be fantastic at giving you that answer you know you read a you know you have a headache and you just like well this headache's not going away should I take more Advil or should I take an app and then you find that WebMD article and you get to like page six and it tells you that you know 0 2% of people out have a headache actually have a brain tumor and you don't need that anymore because Google can tell you you're good you should take a nap and drink some more water and

you know WebMD was competing with Healthline and and other Cleveland Clinic and Dallas clinic and all these other hospitals and it's totally unnecessary to go and look at all these results and go through six pages of information about headaches so a sight like that will be impacted by a AI overviews an e-commerce site maybe not it depends where in the funnel that user is as you're talking I was reminded of something that I forgot about with me my own experience I I used to have a website called when is Hanukah year.com uh because it changes

every year and it just is just the date that was the whole website it gives you the date of Hanukkah this year and I put ads on there and it made like 10 bucks a year and then Google came in and just gave you freaking answer right inside the search result so I've experienced this you so it's even more than that so what you're referencing is structured data yeah so that's a very easy thing for Google to tell you when is Hanukkah in 150 years from now it's it's in a data set yeah what's happening

now is Google's taking this unstructured data from content and building it into structured data so you could ask a question of like what is the likelihood of a baby needing to go to the hospital because they're showing this sort of symptom and again instead of reading all that content and making a decision Google could take all that unstructured data and not just Google again chat jbt or Claude can take all that unstructured data and give you a statistic based on everything they've read and that's very helpful to users and I think again users benefit and

then a user might find out there's another piece of information where I'd actually like to read a medical paper or that now I'd like to Google and find the closest doctor to me who has certain hours that's a Google search that's not an llm AI search yeah just to clarify I didn't intend to say that that was a recent uh that was AI oriented that happened like a decade ago so yeah I I totally totally agree well I just thought that was that was interesting to really drill into the difference between structured unstructured because unstructured

is actually where Google is disrupting everything so this entire idea of SEO again up until 2022 was monetize unstructured data whoever wrote the longest piece of content on best beach hotels in Miami and then built the best links to it they would win they would win whether it's ads or win whether it's hotel bookings now Google can start you off at the top of that and say these are the best beach hotels based on all the people that have written content or actually Google's own on structured data from the reviews and give you that and

then you can say okay I'd like to go to this hotel or I'd like to stay in this city so help us help us understand even deeper this dis distinction between top of funnel and mid funnel so when people are maybe winning at one or the other what does that look like what are some examp of like here's a to of funnel type of search that Google's going to eat and here's a mid funnel experience that you can win that so in general SEO has always been more at the top of the funnel generally because

you're you're curious about something so let's say you're you're looking for a new software you're looking for new podcasting software so you you search for top podcast tools and you get back a list on let's say G2 so G2 is another G2 and all the sites like G2 like the gardener sites like cap Tera all going to be massively disrupted so you would get back a list from G2 which would give you out all the software and you look at some and it would say this one's geared towards Enterprise this one's geared towards small podcasters

this one's free and then you have you now you've narrowed down your list to these three tools and that's when you start doing those searches now you're midf funnel now let's say you've chosen Riverside and you've gotten enough information from those other searches now you start searching Riverside price Riverside capacity Riverside with right those that's bottom of funnel and that's where you'll now go by Riverside however at the top you're doing top podcast tools so again up until AI overviews up until this entire concept of llm whoever won on that long form piece of content

would get that first click but now that doesn't exist anymore you just go to Google and Google tells you these are the tools oh you're looking for a new CRM this is what a CRM is you want to know do you need a CRM or do you just need a calendar look at that and Google will just tell you in a paragraph and now you've redirected your search somewhere else into middle of the funnel so I think that's where SEO always should have been because that's where conversions could potentially happen however SEO never was there

before because the way most SEO measures its performance and its success is rankings so they would say well it doesn't really matter if we convert on the word CRM but look we're number one so we're winning first of all as a user the sounds great uh I'm like so tired of just all search results just being a bunch of SEO Pages just with a bunch of BS answers and so I really prefer Google just tell me just tell me what I need to know the other piece is if you really think about Google has been

trying to do like they've been trying to do this is like here's our best shot at giving you an answer to this question and here's links that'll point you to an answer and this is just a better version of it where it takes all the actual information and just gives you the end result so it makes a ton of sense they're doing this and the technology has finally allowed them to do this okay so let's get to the I don't know $64,000 Question million dollar question what should people do what should people do to be

successful in this new paradigm that as you're describing is like in motion like it's just starting to now happen and it may be catching people off guard because they've thought it's already been out and things are okay and you're saying it's actually starting to actually move quicker I I think it's fascinating I'm honored to be one of the few marketers on your product part cusk but I think of I think of SEO as a product and I think the product managers are the people that should be thinking about this SEO question because it's a product

question it's there are users that are coming in from the search channel what is the product that I need to create for them what is the experience that I need to create for them so typically was thought of as a marketing challenge of the product people have created this thing for me and now I expect the marketers to go and do the SEO thing for it but there's a mismatch so for example I find very often when I talk to SAS companies I don't think SAS in general should do SEO but very often when I

talk to SAS companies they have created a product for whatever user and then the marketers are expect to make that product fit into the thing that the search results are around and it doesn't work because that's not what they're looking for no one asked the question of what it is that they're looking for so now that SEO is changing and you really need to think about this mid funnel and you need to think about a a user experience and a buyer experience when they're doing the search I think it all comes together and this is

where the product people now need to think about how do we position this to the user that is not going to find out about this from a social channel the user that's not going to be attracted by an ad the user that's not going to discover this tool from a trade show this is a user that's doing their own self-discovery journey and this is what is what is the thing they're looking for and how do we position this product in a way that they're going to find it so that's what everyone should be doing product

really collaborating with marketing and discovering what is it that the user wants and showcasing that and I was recently talking to a company in a health space they have an app it's a health app and we talked about their marketing their marketing was their SEO in general was they write thousands and thousands of blog posts AI has allowed them to do things they should never have done they write thousands of blog posts about health in general and then they wanted me to I told them they shouldn't do that in general but they wanted me to

experience their product so they gave me a code to download their app and their app is awful it's a bad product so they're trying to do marketing that doesn't fit for a product that doesn't do the thing they say it's going to do they if they fix the product and understand the user now it becomes well if I'm a user looking for this product what are they looking for how do we showcase that again in the mid funnel can you help us make this more real maybe go through an example of a product you worked

on or one that's doing this really well in terms of going from hey they they want our product what's the journey look like what's a good example of that so the earliest example of where I sort of discovered on this process was I got about 10 years ago I met the the CEO of zapier way Foster and he was uh a cooworker of mine had invested in his company and he asked me to meet with him to just discuss SEO they doing something that no one needed they they had this product which Zapped things together

but no one needed because they didn't know it existed but people knew that they needed things to work together they just weren't looking for zap year so in in my discussions with them in our SEO experiments that we came up with we said well people are looking for let's say Gmail and they're looking for Salesforce they know that Gmail doesn't connect to Salesforce they know Salesforce doesn't connect to Gmail but they're looking for ways to pair it together so what if we created as a product a marketing way to Showcase that this product of zapping

Gmail to Salesforce and Salesforce to Gmail exists and that's what we did so we built that at scale for everything that could work and that was the experiment that I did with them where everything would be available and it creates this flywheel of wow if Gmail can work with Salesforce what else does Gmail work with can it work with this other tool I have and that's an again early example where I stumbled upon this idea of people are looking for that other thing that you could do showcase the fact that your product could do this

thing uh I had no idea that you were involved in zapier's SEO work that's one of the most legendary successes of SEO so uh very cool total accidental like whenever people ask me about programmatic SEO and I know we have to dig into that what programmatic SEO is they're like I want to imitate zapier so that was it's always great to mention that I helped through that that's amazing okay so the lesson there is you realize that the key you need like the opportunities to teach people what they could accomplish with this product like there's

this awesome product doing amazing things they have a need they're searching for say it's like Gmail and Salesforce and how do we help them see there's something really interesting here yeah I actually have a better one for you great uh let's do it so I worked with Tinder for a couple years and I worked with you know when we talk one of the biggest challenges I've ever had with with SEO especially as a consultant is getting things done and I worked with amazing companies and there's great people but then they run into this wall so

like in in my book I talk about one of the earlier stories I had of this where I worked with a company we I worked with I was hired by the CMO and we built out a great plan and then we go to the CEO who brings in the CTO to discuss our plan and the CTO says I don't have Engineers for this so you decide whether you want to F you work on the product or you want to work on this marketing thing you've done and then we didn't do anything because they never resourced

it but I work with this really great product person at Tinder udy Milo he was the chief of growth and he really saw a problem where Tinder had never done SEO all of tinder's inbound came from the word Tinder and he's like there there has to be upside for SEO if they've never done it before so that he was convinced of that he was willing to drive forward on this idea so when we started working together the first thing we came up with is what is someone going to be searching when they look for Tinder

and it's not online dating that's a single word we're not going to write out long form content around everything related to dating because that's that's not the Tinder product you're not reading a piece of content about how to fall in love and then somehow converting into Tinder but in our user research and in the discussions we had on what the investment we could make into SEO was we discovered that Tinder is a loneliness solving problem loneliness solving solution so you're lonely you've gone to a new city you don't know anybody you'd like to solve your

loneliness problem so because you're in a new city it occurred to us that this is a local thing so we're going to look for anything related to local so we built out is if you look for online dating in many cities around the world this is beta it it you know it remained in its beta state but if you look for online dating in many cities around the world you're going to find a Tinder page which gives some examples of places you can go on a date and more than that it gives you Tinder as

a solution to solve the the loneliness problem you have so what changes here with the rise of AI overviews and things like that is it this is where this is how future of SEO looks versus just keywords and endless block posts actually nothing changes here with AI overviews because if you're looking for you've gone to Dubai you've just you you've uh gone to Dubai it's a brand new country you've never been there before and you're lonely so you look for online dating in Du by and you're going to get you know again AI overviews might

tell you what the dating scene is like it might tell you where to go on great dates however it doesn't allow you to solve the loneliness problem you have the loneliness problem you have is a mid or bottom of funnel problem you're still going to click on tinder's result no matter what the AI overview does so that's where I think SEO should be is you need to be in the buyer Journey with the SEO you're creating and it doesn't matter what AI overviews does or doesn't do because you're still solving the mid final problem with

your SEO solution let's go in a direction I was going to say for later but it might be useful now which is say somebody's just sitting there at their desk thinking hey I want to I want to be Su I want to start doing some SEO I want to be successful at SEO I haven't really done a ton here and with this new world of AI and LMS what would be step one step two step three to move down a direction of starting to poke their toe in the water of SEO I I think Step

One is the step that almost everyone misses on SEO which is be the user try to understand who your user is and there have been so many companies and Survey Monkey was a great example when I spent seven years at Survey Monkey and when everyone got onboarded at Survey Monkey they gave you a Survey Monkey account and told you that you should run a survey I think later in the later years they forced everyone in their onboarding time to use a survey run a survey with people in the company but before that no one did

so they had this account and they never did a survey so they had zero customer empathy for why people use the tool and then when you think about it from a product to a marketing standpoint you're thinking about it as a work challenge rather than a customer empathy challenge so the first thing anybody should really do around anything that they're trying to do SEO is try to be that customer so if I'm a user of this SAS I'm building SAS and I want to I want to Market this tool what is a user going to

look for what's the problem they're going to look for that would make them want to do a search and you earlier I referenced that I don't think most SAS tools should do SEO and the reason is because a lot of times when I talk to SAS companies about SEO I ask them this question and they give me a Blank Stare so if you can't answer the question about what is it that someone's going to do a search on then don't do SEO because SEO is about appealing to that user if you can understand what the

user should do around looking for whatever product you have then that's the first step for SEO so who is this user who am I marketing to you're sort of creating this Persona in your mind step two is think about the asset you're going to create so pivoting over to way talks about Tinder so we understood that it was a user that was solving a loneliness problem any in the world because that's what Tinder does it solves that loneliness problem in any way you want of course and now we had to think about what is it

that we're going to create we know it it should be Global of course we would know we want it to be programmatic which is something we should dig into like difference programmatic versus editorial we know we want to be programmatic because no one wants to in position of writing a page out for every town or every city or every neighborhood in the entire world so we want it to be programmatic what things do we need to pull into that and then the third step is really building and we're on a product podcast of course to

the product people you're building the product for that SEO user so where do you get those inputs what does this page need to look like so the again the reason I think SEO needs to be on product is because the inputs for SEO aren't the way many people people think of SEO which is a piece of content optimized for Google based on the keywords I've chosen I think of it as a product which means you need design resources you need engineering resources of course you need a product manager to really oversee the building of this

you need user research so it's again more than just a piece of content so going through those steps again it's understand who your user is decide what it is that you need to create for that user and the third is Envision this product so I think there's a really powerful point here that might be people might not get which is the the user needs to be thinking of something they will go to Google to search for to find your product so it's if there if nobody is searching for the thing that you're building in some

way there's not going to be an opportunity for you to win an SEO or and benefit from SEO is there any examples that come to mind to you of B2B SAS companies that just like this is not there's no SEO opportunity here of just like no one searching for this thing most of I mean I one of my first Consulting clients right when I left suring monkey was mix panel so I I mean I just left my job and I'm going to take any client that I have I have some awful clients that I took

but mix panel was not an awful client it was just a eye openening client we were trying to do SEO and I'm doing SEO in exactly the way that CEO had told me SEO should work and he was going to do it himself so I told them the keywords we we came up with the content we built the links we did all the stuff SEO was supposed to do and it didn't work and we were sitting there and and I asked them to like show me the user Journey like they have a tool that does

it that's what mix panel does like so someone clicks on a search result and they land on this piece of content which we did research and we know people look for but why is it that it doesn't convert and then I realized that there were other problems to this conversion which is mix panel is a product you integrate in your entire company you don't just do a quick Google for it and be like Oh analytics yeah I'm going to tell everyone we got to do it and it's going to be live tomorrow also mix panel

is expensive so again it's the kind of thing that there's friction of you don't just click from a search result and then decide to just purchase it you can't even purchase it on your credit card I don't believe so those are the issues and that's why I think SAS is not the best fit for SEO because if you think about that Journey the problem doesn't necessarily exist the SAS solves the problem but only once you know that problem exists and getting people to know that problem exists is typically not an SEO challenge it's typically a

brand challenge you know you make a a viral video of you didn't realize that you could use this tool we've created to solve your problem but no one is necessarily searching for a problem they didn't know they had or a solution they didn't know could exist so that's that's where the breakoff is and then the other issue of course is now they know the problem exists but it's not an SE Journey so I had another eye opening experience early in covid when I was you know everyone was home and there wasn't a lot of things

to do Google reached out to me about a a role on their team on Google Cloud for doing SEO and there wasn't a chance I was going to take it and it seemed like an interesting thing to go through a hiring Loop and stay at home so I it was I had a fascinating experience interviewing because every time the the uh the first it was the hiring manager and every time was someone on that team that that started the interview they said are there any questions that you have for me and then I spent the

next 45 minutes asking them all the questions like why are you doing SEO what kind of keywords would you want to do what does this SEO Journey look like because for Google Cloud they only have two competitors Amazon and Microsoft and no one is going to do a search and be like Oh Google's number one for this term I searched let me just go buy it there's a there's a decision-making process you bring there's a committee decision so SEO sort of made no sense for that even to be included as a part of a marketing

channel and you know at a grand scale Google Cloud should not be doing SEO at a small scale a lot of SAS tools shouldn't be doing SEO because there isn't necessarily an SEO journey I get a lot of push back from companies when I tell them they're like look at all the SEO we've done but that Plateau is really quickly this is really fascinating and just to maybe reframe what you're saying because there's kind of a couple elements of this it's not necessarily that people aren't searching Google for the problem so I'm thinking of like

vant sock 2 stuff it's not like people aren't sock 2 certification it's not like they're searching they're not searching it's and what I'm hearing is the bigger issue is they they were never buy your product from that experience and that Journey like it may educate them a little bit and may teach them oant exists but they're never going to become customers they need to talk to a salesperson they need to involve a bunch of stakeholders it's basically a sales motion it's not a product at SEO motion yes is that right yes pulling on that thread

a little bit further Beyond maybe even B2B just how does one decide if SEO is an opportunity for you and also just how much should you invest in this opportunity just to explore it so we we have to really put away the myth that SEO is free because it's absolutely not free there's a cost in time there's a cost and resources and of course there's the direct expense for SEO so if you're deciding that you should do SEO so now we have to go through this evaluation again this is where I think of it as

a product where you have this all these product ideas and what should you spend time and money on so SEO is a channel you may or may not want to invest in so say there's a SAS tool and they're convinced there is an SEO Journey people do search for this solution you know when I was at Survey Monkey we we generated couple hundred million dollars a year off of organic traffic because it was a premium tool where you search for the problem the problem you find the solution it's free you sign up for it if

it works for you you end up paying and that's the revenue we generated from organic so say there is a journey so people do search for it and it makes sense to invest in SEO now is when you'll decide how much should you invest in it and how you should invest in it so typically wait again for serving monkey it was around creating content it was around templates it wasn't very expensive but let's say there's a company that does not have a Content team they don't have a product yet that people are going to search

for they don't have a product manager that's going to be overseeing this SEO process so say you need to hire this PM or you want to hire an agency a typical SEO agency I mean you're not going to spend $500 on an SEO agency it's going to be up of $10,000 just because that's the cost of someone's time so it's $110,000 a month $120,000 a year gets even more expensive if you have a full-time employee so that's one expense you're going to outline then you're going to add in all the supporting resources you need a

CMS that costs money you need an engineer to support them that costs money you need a potentially design you need content so can really add up quickly and now you look at that investment and you say for this tool if I invested a million dollar a year in SEO do I expect to make back a million dollars a year soon right SEO will always make back money for if it's the right fit but soon so SAS tools especially startups they need to make that money back soon or if they took that exact same million dollars

and put it into brand ads or they put it into influencer campaigns or they put it into just traditional paid marketing on meta and Google would you make that million dollars or million1 back faster and that's where I think the valuation should happen instead of this default well I just got my funding I need to invest in SEO because it's free and everyone does SEO and look my competitors do SEO it should really be this thoughtful strategic decision-making process of how much will this cost me all in and is this the right use of funds

amazing so so I think this is really important it's not that you won't benefit from SEO it's not that SEO isn't an opportunity it's that you have much bigger opportunities in other areas most likely if you're B2B SAS companies because the journey isn't fully online you're not going to convert by just reading a bunch of pages super fascinating yeah yeah there was once a company I met there was a SAS tool they were in a gardening space is it like they made a SAS for gardeners and they were insistent on doing SEO and they asked

me to look at a proposal they got from an agency for $15,000 a month and it was all content and then I I asked them how they their users found them how did they get all the customers they had that paid them how did they find them they said they go to these gardening shows around the country and they have a booth and each Booth costs them $10,000 so I said instead of spending $115,000 on SEO you could get you can go to all these shows for the exact same budget and you get users who

are interested they're in Market they try your tool out at the booth and then they leave and their leads that you could follow up with instead of investing in me like hope it works it's sort of free there are searches for it but it's not the right searches the takeaway here is uh if you're thinking about whether SEO is worth an investment for you and you see all these other companies doing SEO winning with SEO think about how much will this actually cost us and and I think the most important takeaway for me here is

if you don't think it'll convert online if you think sales is the core motion of the process it's probably not a good Roi for you absolutely yeah really think about what are the tradeoffs again from a product standpoint there's always tradeoffs so what are the trade-offs to investing in this Channel versus another Channel and I think like what I've seen there's all the the way I think about it there's four actual growth engine there four core growth engines SEO paid verality and sales and what I find is eventually large companies do them all like unless

you're a consumer you don't do sale and so it's not like SEO should you should never do it's I think the main point here is earlier stage when you have limited resources probably not the best use of your time I I think there are companies that should probably never do SEO going back to what I said in Google Cloud I don't think that Google could ever say really pinpoint that there was a customer that they got purely from SEO and you're going to do all sorts of weighted attribution and maybe that person did discover Google

cloud from a piece of content or piece of SEO asset but they never would have converted with all those other things that they they've touched and it's not like you're saying don't be on the internet and don't make it easy for people to understand who you are don't have like a great site don't have like other Pages writing about you it's just don't you don't need to spend time optimizing the search result for Google Cloud you're not going to benefit significantly from that work yes I mean again go really digging into this user Journey piece

I don't think restaurants typically should have a website not only should they not do SEO but I don't know that they should have a website because if if you think about the buyer Journey for a person looking for food they don't typically go to a website so if you're looking for pizza and again a lot of pizza shops have websites but if you're looking for pizza you're going to Google Maps door Dash Uber Eats you're not going on Google and saying Pizza near me and then browsing the websites and making a decision about where to

eat lunch again if you're choosing how to cater your kids's birthday party that might be a different thing but you're not browsing and saying these are the places I'm going to go right now but more than that it's expensive and there's no way that that pizza shop knows that the website they have with the soft music playing and their menu that comes up and Flash which is expensive does a single thing for them most of their orders are going to come again through those other platforms yeah I hate restaurant websites uh one thing I real

I read once that explains why restaurant websites are so bad is what restaurant owners are big on just like what is the experience when someone enters my restaurant that they go through with the vibe and they do that on the website they're like here's the music and here's the imagery and here's the animations and nobody wants that on on their website just like give me the hours and location and your menu you mentioned a couple things that I want to drill into a little bit so one is just how long should take for you to

see results two is just expectations of what is good conversion look like what do it tells you this is actually a a journey that could work for us well enough that SEO might work so maybe those two questions so those will be custom for anything and I hate to use the word it depends because I I think whenever Consultants say oh it depends they're just you know they're throwing their hands up and saying I don't really know I'm not I'm I don't have an opinion on this it's like when you go to a doctor and

the doctor's like well it depends I mean you could be dying or you could just you know need to take a nap right so there's a there's a custom answer here and it it comes down to what the company is and what the expectations are so how long it takes that depends on what you're building so if you're if there's an opport like again with Tinder took us a while to actually build anything so it took us all this time to build for id8 then build and then to see results but once we built and

I love working with big companies that are well-known Brands because what we build as soon as it's available on the web it's like this turning a a huge ship it starts driving revenue and it starts being super effective because it's there something didn't exist and now it exists and it drives Revenue smaller companies it may take many months before Google notices it may take many months before the demand is there like with zapier I think it took them a couple years before they even saw any results because nobody's looking for it so it comes down

to what it is it that you're building and how quickly users will come and find and need that solution then as as far as what the expectations are on conversion that also is really depends on what it is that you're looking for there's uh some companies are building media and they they write I mean again I think most companies should just not write a lot of content unless they're Media company but if you are building media and you're monetizing that content from a media standpoint so maybe leads maybe clicks off the page and Del leads

or maybe it's CPM advertising so then your conversion is what you're trying to do with SEO is get a lot of Patriots because the more patri you get the more clicks off that page you get into something else if you're a SAS tool then your conversion should absolutely be whatever a mql should be so you and and again I I think most people don't do this correctly with SEO they use the wrong conversion metric which is top of funnel ranking oh I'm ranking my SEO is successful I'm number one for this instead of how does

this benefit me there was a company I was working with uh Sasol they're in a two-sided Marketplace they worked with in an HR space so they on they only monetized one side of that HR space but all the traffic was on the other side of the HR space so I when we were talking about their SEO conversion problems I suggested that they delete all the content that was on the wrong side of that Marketplace because they didn't convert at all and there's no and this is a common misconception people will think you get a benefit

from traffic Google Sees oh I get all this traffic from search they think I'm a very good website so even though none of this converts for me should have a Blog because blogs are good it doesn't really work like that I mean maybe if you're this massive website and I don't know you're let's say get millions and millions of visits then you can build some sort of authority and some good experience in Google and now you can launch something else and you don't have to worry about needing to build up that Authority but generally driving

traffic to something that doesn't convert you for you wouldn't be a good idea so really understanding what is it that you're trying to do with SEO traffic that's your conversion metric so could be mqls could be page views could be dollar conversions it could be people picking up the phone or watching the video it but it has to be some sort of conversion so for a startup it might mean that they you're getting links I mean at at a minimum people reading your content deciding to link to you and give you social shares that might

be something you put in a pitch deck whatever it is there has to be a conversion metric that matters for the business so just to give someone that's starting to do this something concrete to look at when you come to a startup and help them with SEO what do you usually track as a sign this is working that we should keep investing what's like what are the couple metrics you look at most the first is really understanding what is it that they care about so and rankings could be something they care about if someone else

cares about it so for example if a they're going to put in their pitch deck we're number one for this tool and investors they don't know that that doesn't convert so that might be something that we should care about they should they should be number one for that tool if it's mqls so they just need people filling out lead forms so really understanding who it is that they're trying to attract with SEO that's the metric we're going to use and again I don't know why SEO this happens with SEO but not other any other channel

no one doing paid marketing will ever say this is how many times I'm number one on this search or this is how many clicks I get or look at how much I spent there's really a we spend this and we're this efficient this is what we drive from that and SEO really needs that same rigor so what I'm hearing is look at if you're in B2B leads coming in through SEO track that or uh rank potentially if that's like a vanity thing you can show investors and you're saying traffic alone because usually in decks I

see and investor updates almost always the metric I see is traffic we're getting through SEO yeah total waste of time amazing yeah it it's I mean l there's a reason for it so if you're a media company and traffic means that that number keeps going up then yes it matters but if you are driving leads and that that that traffic number goes up you're not driving more leads from SEO you're getting worthless traffic it doesn't help the business awesome okay uh back to the question just how long it takes just to give someone something here

that they can tell that can tell them when it makes sense to keep going or move on say you're just like taking a shot at SEO how long should you give it to like make a decision this is working for us or not or is it always there's always something here keep working like how do you decide keep doing or not when you're building out an SEO effort and I'm keep going back to this it's a product so you're building out a product road map and you're creating Milestones so you say we're it's going to

take us this first month to id8 on what it is that we're building it's going to in the second month we're going to build out a PRD for the engineers to start working on in the third month they're going to start working and they're going to ship this if you start missing all those Milestones so and then this is a common problem in Consulting in general you miss all those milestones and then someone will say well we've been working together for six months and we have nothing to show for it and you can point very

specifically to all those Milestones that were missed so it that's the result of not shipping or not meeting the Milestones that the SEO didn't work so as you're meeting those Milestones you can say well we we launched and our expectation was that after the first month of launching we would have X amount of pages indexed did we meet or did we miss that Milestone and then you can say SEO is working at a small scale and I've seen in many companies it takes a really long time but eventually when you look back you see like

this hockey stick but while you're in it you don't necessarily see that awesome okay okay let me showare an example of one that worked really quickly so uh this was also a an interesting one and I was at Survey Monkey and I was introduced to the CEO of quora who was interested in doing more SEO so Kora had never done SEO or never done SEO effectively from a product standpoint and there were a couple things I was able to recommend to them and within 3 months they had quadruple traffic so it really will depend on

what is it that's holding things back in kora's case they weren't showing any answers so they were really pushing to get people to log in before they saw any answers so I encouraged them to show the answers yes they were going to be giving away answers for free but they were also going to be giving answers to Google so that was number one that they were able to quadruple traffic and the second thing is they had no way that Google could navigate within the site so when you came to Kora and it's like this again

so they reversed the suggestion I made but it was it I think it was 12 years ago so when you came to Kora and when you come to Kora today you see related questions so you see a question and then there's related questions and that's the way a bot or a human will navigate through the site if they create a site map they did this in the past and if cor is listening they should do this again if you create a categorized sitemap where you can say these are all the questions on health and from

this sitemap again it's HTML sitemap not just an XML sitemap and a way even a user could navigate through it this is health and this is Health page one and Health page two and you can navigate through this entire site then a search engine could navigate through the entire site and all of their questions and answers are discoverable so when I made that suggestion to them within a couple months they were able to quadruple traffic there's so much here and there's so many valuable insights one that I think is really recurring that I think is

really important to people is the point that you're making about your SEO content pages should solve should be a product AKA should solve problems for people as they're trying to understand the space and this potential problem they have so to correct me if I'm wrong but kind of the advice you're sharing is there's less opportunity in just generating tons of blog posts that just have a bunch of content and the opportunities more things like zapier and canva with templates and notion and core hour was just like here's the answer it's just like actually help them

solve the problem and with that here's how our product can help you solve that problem further is that it's really building a product around what the company is attempting to monetize so canva is building templates because then they're going on to monetize that templates by having other people build off those templates with upgrades and subscriptions but if if a company was like let's say there was an Enterprise version of Cana and they didn't monetize those temp so putting out a bunch of free content on the internet that just looked good wouldn't benefit so it always

comes down to what is it what is the product that you want to use so going to mentioned the templates we did Survey Monkey a survey product if someone looked for a template of a survey they wanted to make a survey so if we were not a survey product and we just monetized off a survey templates that would not have done anything for us so copying someone else's version of programmatic doesn't do anything and generally doing programmatic for the sake of programmatic so just to have content wouldn't do anything unless that programmatic fed you into

exactly what your product did so zapier they did programmatic it feeds you into making other zaps between different products Tinder we did programmatic it fed you into oh You' like to solve your lonely we showed you that your loneliness problem is solvable in the city you're in you have to solve that problem by downloading the Tinder app and I've never used Tinder only used it from a marketing standpoint but if you Tinder Gates you so if you'd like to get the advanced Tinder experience you have to pay and again there it's all part of that

buyer journey and anything you're building SEO for it has to be a piece of that buyer Journey so programmatic blog posts anything you're doing if there is no product Journey for there's no user Journey it just stops that's an amazing clarification so again it's another point you've been making of traffic alone is not valuable if it doesn't convert and so you can look at a canva you can look at no a table with all these templates copy that but if that isn't the thing people will buy from you and monetize it's not going to be

worth doing yes awesome I'm excited to chat with Christina Gilbert the founder of one schema one of our longtime podcast sponsors hi Christina yes thank you for having me on Lenny what is the latest with one schema I know you now work with some of my favorite companies like ramp vant scale and Watershed I heard that you just launched a new product to help product teams import csvs from especially tricky systems like erps yes so we just launched one scheme of file feeds which allows you to build an integration with any system in 15 minutes

as long as you can export a CSV to an SFTP folder we see our customers all the time getting stuck with hacks and workarounds and the product teams that we work with don't have to turn down prospects because their systems are too hard to integrate with we allow our customers to offer thousands of Integrations without involving their engineering team at all I can tell you that if my team had to build Integrations like this how nice would it be to be able to take the sopite road map and instead use something like one schema and

not just to build it but also to maintain it forever absolutely Lenny we've heard so many horror stories of multi-day outages from even just a handful of bad records we are laser focused on integration reliability to help teams end all of those distractions that come up with Integrations we have a built-in validation layer that stops any bad data from entering your system and one schema will notify your team immediately of any data that looks incorrect I know that importing incorrect data can cause all kind a pain for your customers and quickly lose their trust Christina

thank you for joining us and if you want to learn more head on over to on schema. that's on schema. okay so coming back to Ai and its impact on SEO can you use AI to help you with this and use AI to create content for you so AI is a tool everyone says AI is a tool it's not a solution so you can use AI to create content if the content you're creating is a part of that Journey so for example before AI content really came on the scene because ai's been around for a

while you know Jasper's been around for a while writer's been around for a while and before chbt so before these tools a lot of ways that companies created content for cheap is they went on Fiverr and they went on upwork and they just created content so a lot of that content completely worthless so if you're just creating content for the sake of content and you paid someone an upward $50 for the content now you can use an AI tool and just create the content the same worthless content for free so AI as a tool is

a tool creating something that's not necessarily useful for the end journey of the company and for the user journey in general however if the content you were creating was pretty useful and now you're using AI to create really useful content for cheaper and better of course you can use it so an example of a place you can use AI content is if you're an kmer site and you're selling your own products of course you can use AI content to write product descriptions it's not a Content website so there's um a lot of big companies out

there and you know if anybody wants to to look at some of the e-commerce sites and how they do SEO a lot of them have large SEO teams you know the typical JC Penney the Nordstroms the Macy's they have a lot of content on their category pages but if you look at the the keywords that drive traffic to those pages it's the products on the pages so if you're looking for shoes the fact that a macy's.com page will have a lot of content about what shoes do doesn't do anything for the user they're just looking

for shoes and then there shoes on the page and I think Macy's actually ranks pretty well on those kinds of things so using AI content to write more fluff content that's not necessary would just be a waste of time but using AI content to feed in a product and describe what that product is and maybe some features of the product which help a user that's not hurting your SEO because what you're trying to optimize for is the product and the product name itself got it so basically less don't use don't use AI to generate entire

block posts I know people are doing this all over the place um but absolutely leverage AI to help you add to existing Pages descriptions titles things like that which I can see why Google like Google would have no idea that you were helped to write this thing with AI right if it's just like a small part of the page versus the entire page and in their their documentation they say that AI is itself is not the problem it's the helpfulness the usefulness of the content that would be a problem do you have any you don't

have to name names or reveal anything but do you know of a bunch of companies using AI now to generate tons of high successful Pages High converting pages in some way in this way there's this uh hatred of AI content by users in general and I think once companies declare that they're using AI people get upset about it so I it was a Red Ventures company I think it was CET that said they were using AI to create content and I think they got in trouble because they said they using AI to create content but

if they had not said they're using AI to create content I think their their entire model would have been very successful because there's no reason you can't take in they they take 10 products and they want to review 10 different products there's no reason you can't tie that all together have ai write the original piece of content and then have a human editor just review it I don't know years ago it's not AI but it's sort of like AI but there are sports websites that will take in a lot of the things that happen in

the sports game to merge it all together into a piece of content if you look at any earnings reports on public companies it's sort of the same thing the company will issue they'll file the earnings report and then now it's AI but before AI it was basically like Mad Libs kind of content it would extract pieces the earnings report and would write a blog post which is actually fairly useful so I don't think there's an issue with it itself and I don't think user have an issue with it I think if you read that old

piece of content again on earnings reports it's pretty obvious that it wasn't written by a financial journalist but it was useful you got a quick summary you didn't have to go into like the SEC and read an earnings report there's this guy Noah Smith he's on Twitter he's got a newsletter called No opinion this awesome and he had this tweet about how we're we're uh approaching an age of a ton of slop of content just a lot of really bad content generated by AI for better worse this is unrelated to SEO but it makes me

think about just like how much bad stuff we're going to see but to your point it's doesn't matter whether was generated by a or not people will gravitate towards and Google will gravitate towards stuff that is useful and good whether it's written by people or not and this is a huge issue for Google because the amount of content being created is enormous and it it's growing exponentially and Google's trying to crawl everything they now have more content to crawl which becomes more expensive for Google and which is why there you have this backlash by Google

against many websites because they're trying to clean the index to save their own costs and to protect the users from having to see this awful content the crazy thing for llms is now to be trained they're trained on content on the internet in a big way and they're struggling with not training their LMS on stuff that AI has written because it becomes this uh bad a bad Trend a bad direction that LM will go they're trained on themselves and anyway something I wanted to come back to around AI which is AI overviews so I imagine

many people are like how do I get into that answer how do I get my product into the answer that Google gives at the top is that something you recommend people try to do is that something you can do so I think of AI as or AI overviews as a branding exercise so getting into the AI overview and Google has links I mentioned this earlier that Google has has links within the content and I I think a lot of what Google does is around potentially liability protection so they're having links so they're saying well we

didn't tell you to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge the this website which we summarized told you to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge or we didn't plagiarized we just linked to the piece of content we may have extracted more from the content than we were supposed to and the law hasn't decided that yet but we link to it so it's fair so I right now Google has these links in the content and it it sort of links off of it I did a survey on LinkedIn and I was surprised by the answer I thought

most people did not click on the links I got a couple hundred responses and it's sort of 50/50 and based on my survey mik experience it's not a statistically significant survey in general but it will never go to 99% one so like that's fairly indicative that people are clicking the links which surprises me because I don't think that the links are necessarily meant by Google to be useful which means that AI overviews is essentially duplicating search results so you have this AI overview which summarizes it then you have a link so you can link off

of it and then beneath it you sort of have the exact same thing and that that's the challenge that Google has to work through so for a company show up in AI overview it's a brand challenge so if your name if your link shows up there then you likely were showing up beneath it in the ranking results so you've already done the work you're supposed to do but if you're showing up an AI overview mentioned as a brand like these are the top CRM tools you're showing up as a brand that means you've exercise brand

efforts and it's working out so I I don't know that companies necessarily want their content to show up because they're giving away their content for free they want their they want to be showing up in a way that benefits them so if you show up as a brand you've done good branding you show up as a link it means Google stolen your content and people may or may not click off of it along this lines of brand and SEO do you have any that's always this question of like are we investing in brand do we

just want people to be aware we exist or are we trying to actually draft conversion any advice on how to think about brand building and SEO especially with this world of I mean this the biggest myth in SEO is that you could just build links and Link building is is the secret source and the secret sauce to like growing your SEO footprint and that's totally wrong because the way most people build links is they buy these guest posts or they pay for links on low Authority websites it sort of look like they might have authority

and it it doesn't really benefit anyone because no one's reading these sites and it's it's funny that everyone complain about Google as this really really smart all knowing llm and at the same time they think they're dumb enough to fall for these guest posts that are on websites they don't really read the right way to build links is to build a brand so it comes part and parcel of what you're trying to do so if you're building links and going back to all the SAS examples we talked about so if you've created a bunch of

content that is not relevant for the product you're trying to sell building links to the content that doesn't really benefit the product doesn't really benefit the links don't benefit the product but if you you can build this product that's awesome and everyone loves and wants to use and you get not links but mentions and links might be mentions now right because the way a link before llms and the link you know 10 years ago was actually an HTML link and now Google can read content so they can say well you've been mentioned here that's pretty

good so now we we acknowledge that this might be the brand and this might be the match for that kind of thing so that's helping to build that brand so in general en I think of any SEO effort is promoting a brand building up a brand rather than building a product and then separately building out an SEO effort which has content that may not be relevant and links from websites that are certainly not relevant to content that's not relevant so it all comes together as being one big effort so the same thing you'll do on

PR you'll do for SEO awesome okay I'm glad we touched that there's a few other directions I want to go so it's kind of I'm going to bounce around a little bit and cover some of the other stuff I wanted to extract from your deep experience in the space one is you've mentioned this idea of prag pragmatic programmatic SEO a couple times and versus editorial what's your maybe first just clarify what those two directions are just for people that don't exactly know what you mean and then two what's your general advice for which direction to

go for for grammatic or editorial it might be obvious at this point but I'm going to say it's dependent on the user but essentially what program drammatic is is it's taking a bunch of data sources and building out a page that is a combination of all these data sources so in my my book I talk about two of my favorite programmatic SEO companies one of them was created by a past well it's not created the strategy was created by a past guest of yours luk LEC who introduced us and that was Trip Advisor so Trip

Advisor took in all these data sources of this is the hotel these are the cities and then it allowed ugc to combine into one comprehensive page about each property so Trip Advisor did not write a piece of content on every single Hotel they didn't write a piece of content on here's this long form blog post as an influencer on the Waldo for story in New York and here's a long form blog post about the mar the Marriot Marquee in San Francisco they built it all from a programmatic standpoint they took all these data sets they

took all the countries in the world they took all the properties and they merged into one comprehensive page which has dominated the top of search results since the beginning of the time right and they still own it and that team has cycled through many many leaders many different you know lot of lot of different things and they're still number ones it's the strategy that has allowed them to build that brand and to dominate it the second example is Zillow so what Zillow did is they they solved an early problem many years ago in the real

estate space which is no one understood what the value of a piece of property was was so Zillow took in all of those data sets so they got some of them are government data sets some of them are are their own comparison data sets based on other home sales so the government can say a house is worth one price and based on their comparison Zillow can completely disagree with it so they're building in these data sets and they're taking photos from Realtors they're taking neighborhood data they're taking School data and that's a programmatic SEO page

and SEO is the only channel to bring in traffic to each one of these Pages they're not going to do page traffic for my house they're not going to do pay traffic for your house the only way someone would find that page on Zillow either they start at zillow.com and this navigate through it or they Google it so those are programmatic SEO efforts on the flip side is editorial so editorial would be in trip advisor's case writing out that long form piece of content around each Hotel each City and all the things they've done Zillow

would be the same they would Zillow would take 500 million properties and write out an editorial piece of content neither of those would be a fit for their model and it would be extremely expensive so say each piece of content would cost $1,000 that would be cost prohibitive for anyone to do so going back to my distinction based on the user what is it that the user is looking for so is the user looking for the value of a home they don't need a long form piece of content they need a piece of content or

a page that just says what the value of that home is trip advisor's case they're looking for a single thing a rating or maybe they need some of that ugc but really they're looking for that rating that long form piece of content there's a purpose for it but not on trip advisor site so understanding what is it that the user needs will help solve do you approach us from an editorial standpoint or do you approach us from a programmatic standpoint some of the companies I mentioned earlier like G2 and capterra which are completely being disrupted

so they're being disrupted by editorial but they're also being disrupted by Google itself with their AI overviews so if you look for the top CRM tools you have G2 or you have capterra but you also have Forbes writing out a long form piece of content on what Salesforce is what a HubSpot is and that's probably unnecessary so I can I think like generally you would programmatic is the better path and the most common success path is what I'm hearing what are things you need in place to be successful in programmatic SEO like basically you just

need some sort of data source that you own right is that just what's like a checklist of like here what tells you you have a big opportunity here so programmatic is the right solution when there's scale and when there's a a user use case if there is not you create scale for nothing so an earlier version of programmatic again pre you know a lot of the internet companies now is building out a piece of content for every single zip code in America so say you offer some sort of local product you would build out a

page for every single zip code that is is in theory programmatic but users don't look for it and Google has completely disrupted that with their own local products so programmatic can always be something I see programmatic mistakes all the time where websites look at you know they say look we're making reviews of software there's 10,000 different softwares in the world we're just G to make out a page for each one and we're going to combine it with I don't know a city so there you can make programmatic Pages like that but there's no use case

so really knowing what programmatic solution to use comes down to is this something that someone would actually be looking for does this page itself provide a solution so zapier provided a solution because someone was looking for that combination but there are many tools like zapier which try to be zapier but they're not looking for that solution and going back to some of the template companies you mentioned I don't think a lot of companies that make templates they're doing they're making programmatic but there's not a use case for every single one of those templates so they've

made programmatic for no purpose so again Survey Monkey was where we had a fat head of templates we could make but it wasn't a long tail so we could make you know 100 templates but we couldn't make 10,000 I want to do a rapid fire of SEO myths but before I do that uh I know that you spent a lot of time actually reading this a recent the recent ruling against Google and their whole deal with Apple and they and you were telling me to reveal a lot of interesting stuff about their strategy and where

SE is going so let's find a little time here just what what did you learn doing that exercise so it's fascinating it's 286 pages so I basically read a read a book it was a verdict Jesus and I would say that the judge or the clerk that wrote this verdict has a better understanding how the SEO works and how digital marketing Works than most people I meet in digital marketing I did not expect to hear that yes so this verdict explains how Google decides to rank a page the verdict explains how the auction model Works

in uh in ads in Google ads I think that's fascinating talked about the comparison between social media like the this court really understood a lot of the questions that were posting so for example Google tried to say that they're not a monopoly because there's social media and the court analyzed that question and said social media is not a comparison to Google search Google tried to say a lot of the things they did were non monopolistic because there's Alternatives like bank and the court really analyzed a lot of these things so where I found it fascinating

was again a lot of the testimony was public is the summary of how the court put it all together and a verdict so a few of the things I learned is one the market share Google's market share so that's been a number that no one really liked to talk about Google would say oh you know we think it's like 80% because they didn't want to be viewed as a monopoly and Microsoft would say well maybe we have 20% They al I just found a recent document for Microsoft where they claim to have like a lot

of market share in Search and in the in the the verdict it says that Google has 98% of mobile searches so and I forget whether Google it said that the court said it and they said Google didn't disagree or that came from Google's own documentation but 98% of mobile searches the thing that I thought was most fascinating from the verdict is how much the default Partnerships that Google has contributes to Google success so the plaintiff in the case was the Department of Justice suing Google for being a monopoly however I don't know what the word

is but like one of the complainants in this is this company Neva which was a search engine started by a past Google I think is like ahead of research or something a senior person at Google created a new search engine and a lot of the the the ver a lot of the trial was focused on how Neva could not be successful despite having a better search engine despite having a better experience for users because they didn't have any of these default distribution agreements so that's the part that I thought was most fascinating Google has these

default agreements with apple and they also have Chrome and they have all these inputs into Google searches which means that I don't think there's a chance and this is the biggest takeaway I don't think there's a chance that chat gbt or perplexity or Claude or any of these other llm startups because there startups now uh even even open AI is a startup with being with Microsoft's investment still a startup I don't think they have a chance they're really unseating Google pure purely from a quality standpoint and that's what a lot of the documentation in this

verdict was about is how much a force of habit how much the brand and how much the distribution agreements Google has drives Searchers to Google and there were a couple very interesting insights one is that Bing tried to give itself to Apple for free and apple said there was absolutely no price that they would take to use Bing search within Apple another one was Mozilla had a partnership with I think it was Yahoo and they they did a share deal with Yahoo and everyone switched back to Google so I when people say SEO is dead

everyone's going to go to open Ai and you just look at the 25 years of Google's existence and what they've built I really don't think so I really think distribution and the force a brand will keep almost everything Google has today now what what I mean why is Google fighting back so hard to build AI overviews well I think there's two answers one is like I said Wall Street like they really want Wall Street to think that they care and they're doing this thing and the other is losing small percentage points to Chach BT cost

Google a lot of money so it's worth it for them to invest in it but I don't think that they have any fear about not being the most dominant search engine in the world well isn't the idea with this trial that this may change and they may lose that default status whether it happens or not that's the whole game here right it's like maybe they can't be that anymore and that maybe opens up so I think that's the opportunity potentially I don't think so yeah that's I mean I know legal expert I don't know what

the the doj will do but what's interesting and if you saw like Google's press release when the verdict came out so Google tweeted we thank the court for recognizing that we're the greatest search engine in the world and and more to come right like they're going to fight back and it's almost like you know a bully being declared the world's greatest bully and they're like see told you you we're strong like but the ver when reading the verdict it actually said there is no competitor Google is the greatest search engine they have 25 years of

great data like they've done a fantastic job so I don't see any way that those def like if they break the default agreements Apple actually loses all that money Google's paying and then users will still Google so like that's not what we'll do it I think the only thing they can do is like figure how to prop up a competitor yeah so I think that's an interesting takeway people will go to Google we'll switch to Google even if it's not default there's actually a really interesting take away from Ben Thompson's analysis of the stuff and

I will point to the podcast episode so I thing that shifted my perspective on this CU when you hear Google is paying Apple to be the default search engine it sounds nefarious and unfair uh the deal is actually Revenue share they give them a percentage of the revenue from the ads which ends up being2 Billion Dollar something like that a lot of money for for apple and so anyone else can come to Apple and say we will give you a revenue share of our searches also it's just nobody is as big and can pay as

much and if you think about it why can't Google come to Apple hey we will send you tons of money by doing the search for you and giving you a large percentage of the ads that we are doing for you like it's weird to not allow that if you really think about it but it's also unfair because there no one else will ever be able to compete with that yeah and that's what the court said is like Neva didn't have a chance because of that and and one other point is so I did this survey

this is years ago and I that Survey Monkey I did a a search Market penetration survey to figure out who used what like B versus Google and on my survey I was generous I threw Duck Duck Go on there and I came back I had thousands of responses and came back that 1% of people use duck Dogo so but I didn't realize that that duck Dogo didn't actually know what their Market penetration was so when I shared the survey Gabriel Weinberg is the CEO of duck. go hit me on Twitter and he said can you

share the data with us because we really would like to see it so this was let's say 10 12 years ago in the verdict it said that duck duck Go's market share is 2% so I came back with 1% 12 years ago duck ducko I think they raised 100 million dollar they have all these brand Partnerships they have like you know at baseball games they have their logo they they've done everything and all they've been able to do is get from 1% to 2% so and there's a lot there and Google being Google I don't

see anyone knocking them off fascinating well thanks for sharing your uh takeaway so that we don't have to read this report before I move to rapid fire SEO myths is there anything else along the lines of AI or SEO that you think is really important to share that you want to leave listeners with I think it the most important thing to leave people with is that SEO is not dying there will always be a world where users are requesting their own information so one of the reasons I think these home assistants whether it's from Google

or Apple or Amazon have never taken off is because you don't have choice you talk to your Google and it gives you only one answer you talk to Amazon and it gives you only one answer like I want to buy toilet paper and Amazon just buys you whatever it decides to buy you there will always be a world where there needs choice and one other piece from the verdict is Google believes that we're in the very early days of llms and even with all the machine learning they do on understanding users you will always need

real user data which Google has on past searches so I I think users will always be requesting their own information and there's never going to be an AI that understands you so perfectly it's going to know that for you personally you would like to click result number five that's the best fit for what you're looking for right now which means that there always needs to be multiple choices to make so yes most clicks are probably going through the first you know one two or three results but there needs to be seven 10 multiple pages of

Google because some people do go to those other pages so I think that's the the most important thing to underscore is that all of this means that search changes a lot of top aunal search goes away but in general there's always going to be a world where people are doing these searches and then the last piece on that really is when you're looking to do something with search you're looking to take an action and companies benefit from those actions so say you're a hotel and you want people to sleep in your hotel and pay you

to sleep in your hotel the aggregate number of people needing to take that action and pay you for it does not change even if search volum gets cut if you're selling shoes people still need to buy shoes if you're selling information though your media if you give if your WebMD yes your Revenue declines because that information that you now aggregated and curated and gave away for free in return for people clicking on ads Google's now going to give away for free in return for No One clicking on ads interesting I wonder if there's a investment

Arbitrage opportunity of predicting which businesses will decline with this and which will Thrive anyway uh I want to talk about SEO myths I know that you have a few things and we've talked about a few of these I think of just things that you know people believe about SEO but they're actually wrong so let me just ask you what are some mths that people get wrong about SEO probably the the biggest one we said over and over is they even need to do SEO so there's this always default assumption that you've raised money you have

a marketing team you should do SEO and I think that one is really worth putting to bed is like think about that user Journey should you do SEO and it's a question like they ask about other channels should you do brand marketing should you take out an an ad in Time Square and no one will say well I just raised a million dollars I should totally take out an ADD and Time Square and congratulations on being Time Square by the way so I thank you no no one will just decide oh I've got money to

burn let me just burn it so somehow SEO becomes this thing of like oh I've I've raised money now I need an SEO team so that's I think the first myth that's really important to just put to bed awesome what else link building so link building is is brand building so it's thinking about how you're going to build a brand and have people mention to you and you're when you're doing link building you're creating a relationship between the piece of content that has linked to you and the product or whatever you're trying to monetize so

that should be link building just getting the idea of getting links on you know an HTML link to will equal SEO success again I I think that's completely wrong and then I mean probably the the biggest myth in general is thinking that Google itself is a blackbox so I I think there's nuances to how you rank and no one can really unearth what is is that will make you be number one and what it is that will make you be number three but the basic idea of how you build SEO is very simplistic and Google

has a best best practices guide on what it is that you should be doing which is build a website that Google can understand link to the pages in that write content that is helpful and that users want to read and those are the basics and starting with that is how you're going to build an SEO strategy that improves upon it but the idea of if I take all three of these steps right now I'm guaranteed to be number one I think is is something that is completely Incorrect and there's an assumption that if you do

a lot of things around SEO you're going to be successful and I I think that that's incorrect yes there there are nuances but for the most part you get from you know most like zero to 10 you can get to step eight by just doing the best practices oh wow sounds very empowering I like the sound of that maybe just on that new on that thread briefly if someone wanted to start down the road of SEO I know you're going to be a little bit biased because you help companies with this but do you recommend

bringing someone like you in first or having someone just give it a shot listening this podcast reading some books and bogs or or something else yes so I I am biased I think they they should have the right people give them advice on SEO so if someone wants to be if they validated that there is an SEO effort paying for help on SEO is goes back to that resource discussion we had before so if you want to hire a growth advisor a growth adviser might be very expensive but you squash a learning curve so you

don't make as many mistakes as fast if you hire someone in house and a lot of times I see this with with with roles where I'm helping companies hire some for SEO they don't have a lot of budget which means they're going to have someone that doesn't have a lot of experience so is that the right decision to make if you're hiring an agency agencies are typically expensive and agencies a lot of times get paid on deliverables so are the deliverables they're doing worth paying for so a easy deliverable that a lot of agencies produce

now is content but that goes back to our earlier discussion do you even need the content it's very easy for agencies to sell content as deliverable because it's something they actually deliver delivering strategy the way most of my growth advising works is very difficult because I don't have a strategy to offer in a proposal because I haven't developed a strategy and we don't actually see the fruits of that till we implement the strategy but agencies can you know end run that by just saying oh you pay us on a month on a monthly basis and

these are the things we're going to Shi to you something that I want I touch on which might be a myth and might not be a myth I think it you're going to say it's a myth uh based on what you said about Google being so dominant there's a lot of talk about Tik Tok and Instagram replacing search for people like I actually do search Tik Tok a lot now for like how do I how do I solve this problem how do I cut a watermelon how do I uh I don't know find a cup

for my baby like it's really good uh what's your take on Tik Tok and Instagram videos basically replacing a lot of searching for for Gen Z especially you know younger kids so in the Google verdict I think Google said this before 63% of gen Z uses Tik Tok to search oh wow I think that's yeah I think that's just a headline number because it comes down to I you said it over and over in the podcast user Journeys so there's going to be things that are more appropriate for Tik Tok or Instagram and they're going

to be things that are more appropriate for search so I think if you're doing top aunal Discovery you're going to maybe watch Tik Tok videos to learn more about the top but as you go into the mid funnel so say you want to uh you know a popular Tik Tok search is around travel so you want to go on a TR you want to go on a trip you want to go to Southeast Asia you don't know where exactly you want to go so you might want to watch a bunch of videos and see influen

see experiences but now you're ready to book and you want to book a hotel you want to book at you know your your flights all of that is not going to happen on Tik Tok all of that's going to happen on Google search so that's the midf funnel again so I a lot of search will move different places but ultimately Google is still the right place to do those searches to do those those bid funnel searches so maybe it was more inappropriate that Google ever that there ever wasn't a Tik Tok for you to get

those better experiences for those top of funnel things you had to suffer through Reading awful content that was written only for SEO purposes and now you get rich Dynamic content that comes from Tik Tok and one interesting piece on this is if Tik Tok does get get banned in the US which looks like it's likely and a company that will pick up all of that users is is YouTube right so YouTube has YouTube shorts and again we're looking at a potential Monopoly with Google as Google tries to put those YouTube shorts to solve the problem

that Tik Tok was now solving so that will be kind of interesting oh man Google all the way down yes one a thought I had as you were talking about this idea of midf funnel versus topfunnel is a simple way to think about the midf funnel is where there's intent like you actually have intent to buy now buy a thing specific thing yeah cool it I mean that that's what it is but it it it's a buyer Journey so at the top of the funnel you're curious you don't know if you have intent and right

in the older way of doing SEO where you only focused on top of funnel you only focused on rankings as a kpi which I think is sort of the incorrect way of doing things there is no intent so you you showed a kpi that matched with a non-user which match with a non- buyer as you move down the funnel there is intent so there is a user and there's less traffic there's always going to be less traffic at the middle of funnel but that doesn't matter because your kpi is closer related to your business metrics

let's do a couple more myths if there's anything else that we missed and then we'll wrap up and get to a very exciting lightning round is there anything else that you think is an important uh myth that people get wrong about SEO I'll touch on one more myth which is that technical SEO is an easy solv to to any SEO problems so there's been a lot of Google updates recently again I I think I don't like to defend Google because in reading the verdict I think that Google did some pretty evil things but a lot

of what Google has been doing is pushing back on the things that users hate there's a lot of bad SEO content out there so Google's trying to get rid of a lot of this bad SEO content in their recent updates when sites get hit by these updates they try to solve the problem that they think happened to them by doing technical SEO so the reach out to me or to someone like me and say can you do an SEO audit and understand why our our traffic has suffered the reason the traffic is suffer is because

they've done things that were not really useful for users and they sort of polluted Google they need to solve that problem so technical SEO has a place so if you have a a large website with tens of millions of pages if you're Zillow how you link to each listing if you're Airbnb how you link and allow Google to crawl a site and understand a site very very important if you have a 100 page website that sells a a SAS tool technical SEO is probably going to be less important so spending money and time on technical

SEO would be a waste of time so I think that's another big myth is you solve SEO problems with the right SEO solution rather than Let's do an audit or let's get better links or my page page speed is another one that agencies like to sell on on if things related to PHP Google keeps changing the words of what that is but it it doesn't matter as much because at the margins yes maybe if you're kayak and you're competing get Expedia and and kayak is maybe slightly faster maybe that matters but if you're in a

space where you're competing against lots of slow terrible websites it doesn't matter at all so spending a lot of money on making that fix is not the right thing to do I like how you just make SEO feel much more approachable and simple and something that you could just do and not have to again figure out the dark arts that it it it is not a dark art it should be for most things it is simple and then there are tons of companies out there they get in a lot of trouble and there's so there's

billions of dollars to be made on doing the right SEO but a lot of can be unlocked by very simplistic XO PMS that don't really have an SEO background can do enough SEO to make a lot of money for the company without needing to be an SEO expert I love that that's actually how work at our BNB the PMS work at SEO or not like historically SEO Legends they were just PMS figuring out AO and they had a really big impact so that really resonates with me Eli is there anything else that we haven't touched

on that you think is important to you or something that you think might be useful to people to leave them with before we get to our very exciting lightning room yes so I think we talked about how to decide whether to Resource SEO but we didn't talk about how to understand what the expectations are from SEO so this is something I came up with while I was working at Fair which which is a very interesting company so it's F A they are a wholesale Shopify so they were launching in a new country and they wanted

to understand what the upside of launching in that country was from an SEO standpoint so the way most people do SEO forecasting is they do a Bottoms Up forecast which is they look at keywords so say we want to sell a pair of shoes so you do a Bottoms Up forecast you go onto a keyword research tool and they're all fairly the same look at how many people search for shoes every month and then you try to estimate what your ranking would be on that word shoes and then you estimate what you clickthrough rate would

be and then based on that that's your clicks and then you get a conversion rate and that's your Bottoms Up and you make an assumption that the word shoes in that tool didn't capture all the people that search like white shoes and black shoes and running shoes so you you just gross it up you just pick a number and you gross it by like 10 and that's your SEO forecast now now the problem with that is that usually it's too small so you get this number and now you're pitching to like launch in a new

country I want to launch in Japan and sell shoes and you say well I think I can get 500 users because based on the way I got here this is my clickthrough rate and this is my rankings and I'm 500 users and no one will ever fund that that's too small now if you're launching in a new country it's actually fairly easy to figure out what your SEO upside is because you can take the population of the country so this is not something Fair sells so I don't I don't have to I'm not giving that

away anything but say you're you're launching shoes you're launching a new product website that you're selling shoes in a country like Japan so I'm going to guess I don't know the actual numbers for Japan so say Japan has 100 million people and you're selling shoes and you're not going to sell shoes to 100 million people we only selling shoes to men and let's just divide in half so 50% of Japan is men so we got 50 million people that would buy shoes but now we're also going to say well there's older people and younger people

and we're not selling shoes to them so now we're going to take 25 million and cut that in half and then from there we're again we're selling shoes on the internet not everyone buy shoes on the internet some people buy shoes in a store some people buy shoes on the internet so you take some percentage rate of the amount of people that are going to buy shoes on the internet and say we'll take 10% of our 25 million people in our Market two and a half million people buy shoes on the internet and we want

to do SEO for two and a half million people and our expectation is we want to get this number of Market penetration whether it's 10% or 50% or 100% And there's your number and multiply that number by the amount of shoes they're going to buy every year and your aov and there's your forecast and that may be inexact and you can tweak those numbers up or down you can say well my aov was wrong my market penetration was wrong I was wrong on the total population I didn't realize that in Japan no one bought shoes

on the internet but at any point in time you can go back and adjust your forecast whereas if you're doing this Bottoms Up forecast it's actually in many cases wrong to begin with because the keyword research volume is wrong like I worked with um some really fascinating companies where the largest query in their space was the biggest query so I I worked with WordPress so WordPress the word WordPress is the biggest query in the web development space as itself right like there's no no other word that's as big as WordPress and the number that every

single keyword research tool had was completely wrong of what Google search console said for the word WordPress so when you're building these forecasts based on keyword research tools that first number that you build the entire forecast off of if it's wrong your forecast is wrong so when you do this top down it's a tam forecast essentially when you do a top down you're you're closer to the truth now you probably aren't going to get to the truth I've never seen a product plan get to the truth of what it could do but it will help

you make a better decision than if you just guess wow this is a massive insight you're sharing so you're saying the keyword research tools are not actually that accurate in terms of the opportunity there and why is that that begs the question why are they so off what are they doing wrong what are they missing they're doing they're they have their own secret sauce for estimations so even Google for again for past monopolistic reasons Google's not allowed to give the real number that they see on Google ads for how many people search it they have

to buy it from another data source and then give that out I forget why so none they're all basically guessing so they're using using whatever sort of proprietary algorithms to guess which is why a lot of them are not aligned because they have their own algorithms so you're using whether it's semrush or HRS one of my favorite tools is similar web which similar web has a lot of browser plugins which Snoop on the way people are searching so whatever it is that and because similar web has browser plugin but they're not seeing every single person's

search so they have to use algorithms to estimate how much the entire world would be and again I don't know that any of them can get close to truth was when I've you worked with big companies where there were keywords that I could look at Google search console some of them the tools were overestimating by 10 times sometimes they're underestimating by 10 times so I'm not saying they didn't get the exact monthly number wrong I'm saying they got it wrong by many factors wow that's crazy so your advice is like do you just ignore those

numbers or is it just like check it out but don't roll don't use that number they're indicative so I would say if you want to know like do most people spell WordPress with a space or WordPress without a space it's pretty indicative that people spell it without a space but if I were building a forecast and say oh I absolutely choose this based on this defined number I don't think so I can use it for normalization and I use them only for normalization to understand like how do people search and I really like user Journeys

and they're helpful for understanding user Journeys but as an exact science it's hard to really under you know use that that's wild and so it's mostly useful for order magnitude and and it comparing one keyword to another relative this bit okay interesting I mean I have a great example of how wrong they could be in estimating traffic so there was a company I was working with early in covid their board member the public company their board member emailed them and said you guys are getting crushed by your competitors in covid because look at all look

at your competitors I'm looking at one of these tools and you're at the bottom and you're doing everything wrong and the CMO says what do I what do I tell this this board member I said the board member is completely wrong this is the Google search console and Google search console is not perfect but it is again it's real data and our Google search console shows that our traffic has quadrupled in Co so it doesn't really matter what this external tool shows so they're they're helpful tools are helpful but I don't think they are a

source of actual truth wow that's an awesome Point uh in closing uh one thing I had noted here that I want to make sure you have a chance to talk about is just you're really uh really passionate about helping people get into SEO and also just becoming advisers the way you are share what you wanna what you think might be useful to people along these lines so as my own forecast and prediction I think the need for SEO expertise is going to explode because a lot of what is happening in the search layouts is going

to mean that companies have to Pivot their approaches so a lot again companies focus on rankings they focus on traffic and a lot of that goes away some suddenly the layout changes the traffic changes it's not necessarily going to impact their bottom lines if their SEO wasn't the right fit so this is going to create a lot of interest in SEO help and I'm seeing this over the last year my own inbound has really grown because there's a lot of questions as as things shake out so there will be people that want to go into

SEO Consulting and I think there's going to be a huge need for it in growth advising in general what I would say is and I had amazing mentors along the way some of your past guests like Casey Winters and Yuri timman uh even Smith like they're all guests with great episodes but like they advised me and they they share with me not on how to be a better operator but on how to be do sales better how to propose better if for anyone out there that wants to be become a growth advisor I'd say that

that's the skill you really want to perfect communication sales proposals and not really worry about being the best operator you should be the best operator but that's probably the skills you already have and don't make an assumption that because you're good operator today you'll also be a great growth adviser build that growth advising muscle by staying in your day job don't quit your day job and Moonlighting and practice selling closing working retaining and that's where you'll you'll if you're successful there you can be successful on your own amazing and I know you have some posts

that get into this stuff that will'll link you right y awesome it's kind of think of yourself as a product and the the Journey of working with with you yes you're building a brand you're not building a consultancy I love that Eli this has been amazing and with that we reached our very exciting lightning round are you ready absolutely here we go first question what are two or three books that you recommended most to other people I as has been apparent I really like user Journeys and understanding people so there's a book called small data

by I think Martin Lindstrom pronouncing his name right where he talks about understanding people and understanding how people buy and digs into that entire process he actually goes and lives in people's houses and watch how they use different tools and toys found always find that book to be fascinating recommend to people who want to understand users the uh Simon s next start with why again same idea really understand what a product a business is supposed to be doing to understand users for growth this is specifically for growth advisors and not necessarily for PMS but million

dooll consultant it's a a book I read recommended actually by Ethan Smith many years ago fascinating book on how to build a brand and become a growth adviser I ended up working with the author as a coach for almost a year amazing book and then the last book that I'd be remiss and not recommending is my wife's book which is how to stop caring what others think for real so it is a book for precisely that understanding your own successes not worry about what other people about you Beautiful is that in the background by the

way and if not you got to put it in your background your wife's book uh my wife made the background so yes it is in the background which which one is it which color am my just so people recognize it oh the big one right there I was wondering why that one was a little taller than the yes this is the but there it is wait move it up a little bit so we can see the full cover oh beautiful stop carrying what other think beautiful I need that for real I like the ends like

but for real for real I love it okay it may or may not be a Google search query oh man I see I see what happened there G genus okay next question do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed I was on a plane and I saw this movie blackberry and it looked like a documentary so I don't know if you've seen it but it was fascinating because it's one of those movies that it has a cliffhanger and you know exactly how it ends and it it's such a fascinating movie

like I I didn't know all that history but it was they owned the entire smartphone industry and they went to zero and it really charted that journey and it it makes you think like you never really rest on your you have to create a product people want and understand your users and and keep selling that product and not be like well we're number one this will never go away and great movie so funny it was just recommended by another guest very recently so there's trending up it's been around for maybe a year at this point

yeah I never would have watched it if it wasn't on a plane it was totally like seemed like a plane movie but it was perfect yeah I watched it at home and uh I love just like the technical uh like their ability to find clever ways to use the cell networks that felt like impossible and that what that's what allowed him to do all these like the messaging and things like that that was really fascinating because I didn't realize they basically like verse engineered the way they sell networks work did allot what they allowed yeah

awesome movie and crazy story next question do you have a favorite favorite recent product that you've recently discovered that you really love could be an app could be some physical you know said it's not a recent product and it's it's like the kind of thing I fall in love with over and over again and it's might be cliche but it's my phone so I recently traveled in Southeast Asia I lived there for a little bit so I hadn't been back in eight years and the things I was able to do with my phone like traveling

like Google Maps and and ways and ordering food like I went from multiple countries and I was able to use like the same app to like book rides and like make payments and like it was so useful like eight years ago and I was there and I had to like buy a SIM card and my phone didn't really work and I couldn't make payments and it changed my entire experience I almost didn't like need a computer so like falling in love with my phone again and then another one that it's not necessarily recent but I

absolutely love which is grammarly so it I like writing I write all my own stuff I don't write with AI grammarly helps me to be a better writer you know what I realized about grammarly recently I just upgraded to their Pro Plan they're like the best product at upselling you on their PID plan because they're just like right there in your face all the time hey we have stuff we could we have so many tips for you just we're we have so much we could improve just pay a 100 whatever bucks and we have so

much advice to make all your rating so much better it's like right there in your face all the time so like they're so good at it and they got me they got me and I'm happy you know it's not like that much money in the scheme of things if you're doing this full-time I'm I'm so embarrassed when I use grammarly on my book and like it just like shows up all blue and green I'm like oh man if only I had known interest so I actually have a copywriter on my newsletter who's like incredible she

finds like a hundred things every time to improve that even when I think it's perfect and interestingly they she doesn't do it grammarly suggests in like more cases than I would expect so that's kind of interesting I'm finding but anyway yeah grammar Le great I use it all the time two more questions do you have a favorite life motto that you often use yourself share with friends your family find useful in work or in life I don't know that it it fits into sentence but it's something I always encourage people which is to really think

big and think long so uh I just started working with LinkedIn as a Consulting client and I've talked to LinkedIn about working with them for six years so never give up like just when you know meet someone and propose something and suggest an idea like you never know where to go like I had that with with all through my career with living in different places like really not think about the moment of where things will go but you know just it's a relationship you're building you never know where anything will happen so look at the

big picture that and kind of following along those lines last question curious if something comes up here what's your most what SEO win are you most proud of I don't know if I could say most proud of but I I really like what I did with Tinder because it was understand like it it brought the entire journey together there's users out there that didn't know that Tinder would solve a very specific problem and it and it it's just there to solve that problem and it's not the way Tinder thought of themselves they they thought of

themselves like as a dating app but it's a loneliness solution problem that answers a Google search Eli this has been awesome I think this is going to help a lot of people think through SEO and especially as they realize how things are changing they're going to have this resource now to be like I see this is what I should change this is what I should be doing and I just love especially the the pattern and the thread of it's not actually that complicated you can do it even if you've never really done it before so

I really appreciate you being here and sharing all this wisdom with us two final questions where can folks find you if they want to reach out to work with you also check out your book and finally how can listeners be useful to you so you can find me on LinkedIn so search Eli Schwarz uh and you should definitely look for my book so the book is product let SEO and and actually one piece on on just your own personal brand and your own personal rankings it doesn't matter where you rank if you search your own

name so if LinkedIn shows up first for your name that's great because they're finding you and a lot of times brands and people will be very focused on where they're positioned but it's about the journey like if they find you they find you it doesn't matter what number one and that also under scores that it's it's not all about links I believe for my own name and probably for you too I outrank LinkedIn and my book so if you search product Le SEO my my own personal website which does not have the best domain Authority

it outranks Amazon so that should right away disprove that it's all about links and it's all about you know SEO metrics it's really all about the right fit so be the right fit and you'll show up where you're supposed to and then users can be most helpful for me by subscribing to my newsletter and giving me ideas and feedback I want to write really enjoy writing and I really enjoy hearing from people so my newsletter is product let seo.com it's so consistent across all your things I love it product Leto Eli thank you so much

for being here thanks for having me bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny podcast.com see you in the next episode