Eli Schwartz: Why AI is killing top-of-funnel SEO content

1. 0:00 – 2:10

   Eli’s background

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky0:00

      You've noticed a significant shift in how SEO works with the rise of AI answers being integrated into search results.

   2. ESEli Schwartz0:06

      Transparently, I thought this was going to be an apocalypse. Up until AI overviews, whoever won on that long form piece of content would get that first click. But now that doesn't exist anymore.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky0:15

      What should people do to be successful in this new paradigm?

   4. ESEli Schwartz0:18

      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 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.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky0:43

      To a lot of people, SEO is kind of this dark art.

   6. ESEli Schwartz0:45

      It is not a dark art. It is simple. I think step one is the step that almost everyone misses on SEO, which is ...

   7. NANarrator0:53

      (instrumental music)

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky0:57

      Today, my guest is Eli Schwartz. Eli is a growth advisor specializing in SEO and has helped companies like Quora, Coinbase, Tinder, LinkedIn, WordPress, and Zapier develop and execute their SEO strategies. He's also the author of Product-Led 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 chatbots, Google giving you the answers straight in the search results, and also how to utilize AI in 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 gonna 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 to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Eli Schwartz.

2. 2:10 – 11:34

   The impact of AI on SEO strategies

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky2:11

      Eli, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

   2. ESEli Schwartz2:16

      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.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky2:21

      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 you 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 in SEO and how to be successful in this new paradigm of SEO with LMs and AI being prevalent. How does that sound to you?

   4. ESEli Schwartz2:57

      That's an awesome idea. I, I really like what's happening with AI in general for SEO because it's causing everyone that cares about SEO traffic, whether that's a PM or whether that'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 at SurveyMonkey and I was still, 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 some 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- it stunned 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, 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 the search channel?

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky4:21

      (instrumental music) 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 simple to use platform, Pendo makes it easy to answer critical questions about how users are engaging with your product and then turn those insights into action. Also, you can get your users to do what you actually want them to do. First, Pendo is built around product analytics, seeing what your users are actually doing in your apps so that you can optimize their experience. Next, Pendo lets you deploy in-app guides that lead users through the actions that matter most. Then Pendo integrates user feedback so that you can capture and analyze what people actually want. And the new thing in Pendo, session replays. A very cool way to visualize user sessions. I am not surprised at all that over 10,000 companies use it today. Visit pendo.io/lenny to create your free Pendo account today and start building better experiences across every corner of your product. PS, you want to take your product led knowhow a step further? Check out Pendo's lineup of free certification courses led by top product experts and designed to help you grow and advance in your career. Learn more and experience the power of the Pendo platform today at pendo.io/lenny.

   6. NANarrator5:42

      (instrumental music)

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky5:45

      This episode is brought to you by Brave Search. Brave Search is the private independent search engine that doesn't bias or censor results. Brave Search and its Answers with AI feature are available for free to all users on desktop and mobile devices. With Brave Search, you get real answers faster, served from their own independent index of the web.Their AI search engine can give lightning fast, incredibly accurate results for almost any question. But Brave isn't just AI answers, it's also a powerful traditional search engine with real innovations versus big tech options. It fights bias and SEO spam, it brings a cleaner results page with fewer ads, Reddit threads in the search engine results page, powerful local results, and even community-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 and in SEO with the rise of AI answers and LMs.

   8. ESEli Schwartz6:52

      So essentially Google and other tech companies had their hand forced by OpenAI and ChatGPT. So prior, so Google has claims to have invented the concept of LMs, and they may or may not have, and some of the early OpenAI employees were Google employees. But ChatGPT 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 to Google and click all these results." So there's, they 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 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 has 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 OpenAI 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 Bard. So they said open ChatGPT, "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 ChatGPT 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 monetize, 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, 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 were a lot of people who 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 a 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, or what was then called search generative experience, launched at Google IO this past year, in May of this past year, and they renamed it to AI Overviews. And it's that, it's essentially ChatGPT in a search result. They launched it to great fanfare, of course. It was live right away. They said it was going, 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 ChatGPT 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 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, uh, non-logged in users are seeing it, so incognito users or users without any history of Google are seeing it and they've just launched it in the UK. So this thing is coming and it's really going to be affecting search results.

3. 11:34 – 15:30

   Understanding search intent

   1. ESEli Schwartz11:34

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky11:34

      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 mass, 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?

   3. ESEli Schwartz11:54

      Actually it's not that it's harder to find. Your stuff becomes less relevant.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky11:58

      Mm-hmm.

   5. ESEli Schwartz11:58

      And 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 liked to rank on was cars. We bought to- we wrote... The homepage was ranked for the word cars. We bought tons of links and we were just a cars website. Obviously, that's 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 gonna 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 gonna think about those search results. However, SEO is still geared towards those top of funnel, those big keywords that people care the most about. So now, a lot of those keywords are going to be moving into these AI overviews. And I don't want to just focus on Google, although I think Google's gonna 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're 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 two 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 mid-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 suggests to you that you should go to Cancun. And now you're sort of in the mid-funnel, and that's where SEO begins to matter.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky13:59

      Mm-hmm.

   7. ESEli Schwartz13:59

      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 and you were able to rank on, on a best v- bech- 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 ChatGPT or Google, tells you where to now start doing your deeper search.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky14:35

      So just to maybe mirror back what you're saying is the discovery step of search is going to be swallowed up by LLMs that give you, uh, 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.

   9. ESEli Schwartz14:55

      Absolutely. And I, I think that's where things are good and 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 vaca- ba- 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, a travel expert. So now you're going to get that information also from not a travel expert. You're gonna get an AI summarized answer and that will give you more clues and more ideas to do a deeper research search. And I, I think that's where the

4. 15:30 – 20:19

   Real-world impact and structured vs. unstructured data

   1. ESEli Schwartz15:30

      user's best served.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky15:31

      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?

   3. ESEli Schwartz15:51

      Transparently, I thought this was gonna be apocalypse. So I shared about a year ago there was gonna 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 of those embarrassing things that happened in May and June when they first launched it. They're only just now launching it broader, and I do think we're going to see impacts. Of course, another challenge with pinpointing any impacts is there are 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, see 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 how you read a... You know, you have a headache and you're just like, "Well, this headache's not going away. Should I take more Advil or should I take a nap?" 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 that 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 site like that will be impacted by AI, AI overviews. An e-commerce site, maybe not. It depends where in the funnel that user is.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky18:06

      As you're talking, I r- I was reminded of something that I forgot about with m- uh, my own experience. I, I used to have a website called whenishanukkathisyear.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 made like ten bucks a year. And then Google came in and just gave you the fricking answer right inside the search results. So I've experienced this. (laughs)

   5. ESEli Schwartz18:29

      You, actually... So it's even more than that. So what you're referencing is structured data.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky18:34

      Yeah.

   7. ESEli Schwartz18:34

      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 dataset.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky18:41

      Yeah.

   9. ESEli Schwartz18:41

      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 then again, instead of reading all that content and making a decision, Google can take all that unstructured data, and not just Google, again, ChatGPT 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. W- 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.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky19:27

       Yeah. Just to clarify, I didn't, uh, intend to say that that was a recent, uh, that was AI oriented. That happened to, like, a decade ago. So yeah, I, I totally, totally agree with you.

   11. ESEli Schwartz19:36

       Well, I just thought that was re- that was interesting to really drill into the difference between structure-

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky19:40

       As an example.

   13. ESEli Schwartz19:40

       ... and unstructured. Because unstructured is actually where Google is disrupting everything. So this entire idea of SEO, again, up until 2022, was monetized 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 unstructured 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."

5. 20:19 – 22:57

   Top-of-funnel vs mid-funnel SEO strategies

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky20:19

      So help us, help us understand even deeper this distin- 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 examples of, like, here's a top of funnel type of search that Google's gonna eat, and here's a mid-funnel experience that you can win that?

   2. ESEli Schwartz20:35

      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 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 Capterra, all going to be massively disrupted. So you'd get back a list from G2 which would give you out all the software. And you would 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 ha- you, now you've narrowed down your list to these three tools, and that's when you start doing those searches. Now you're mid-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 bandwidth, right? Those, that's bottom of funnel, and that's where you'll now go buy 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 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 wanna 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."

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky22:24

      First of all, as a user, this sounds great. Uh, I'm like so tired of just all search results just being a bunch of SEOed 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 what 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 that they're doing this and the technology has finally allowed them to do this.

6. 22:57 – 31:29

   Case studies

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky22:57

      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 p- catching people off guard because they thought it's already been out and things are okay, and you're saying it's actually starting to actually move quicker?

   2. ESEli Schwartz23:20

      I, I think it's fascinating and I'm honored to be one of the few marketers on your product podcast.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky23:25

      (laughs)

   4. ESEli Schwartz23:25

      But I think of (laughs) 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 it 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, uh, very often when I talk to SaaS companies, I don't think SaaS in general should do SEO, but very often when I talk to SaaS 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 gonna 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 the health space. They have an app. It's a health app, and we talked about their marketing. Their marketing wa- 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 ex- 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 c- 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?

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky25:57

      Can you help us make this even 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, eh, they, they want our product. What's the journey look like? What's a good example of that?

   6. ESEli Schwartz26:10

      So what the earliest example of where I've sort of discovered on this process was, like at, this was about 10 years ago, I met the, the CEO of Zapier, Wade Foster, and he was a, uh, a coworker of mine had invested in his company and he asked me to meet with him to just discuss SEO. They were 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 Zapier. So when, in my discussions with them and 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 I, 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 a, 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.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky27:33

      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.

   8. ESEli Schwartz27:40

      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, it's always great to mention that I, I helped do that.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky27:53

      That's amazing. Okay.

   10. ESEli Schwartz27:53

       Mm-hmm.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky27:53

       So the lesson there is you realize that the key, you need... Like, the opportunity is 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 for them?

   12. ESEli Schwartz28:12

       Yeah. I actually have a better one for you.

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky28:14

       Great.

   14. ESEli Schwartz28:15

       Uh...

   15. LRLenny Rachitsky28:15

       Let's do it.

   16. ESEli Schwartz28:17

       So I worked with Tinder for a couple years, and I, I worked with, you know, when, when we talk... One of the biggest challenges I ever had with, with SEO, especially as a consultant, is getting things done. And I've 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 at a company where I worked at a, 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, "Oh, I don't have engineers for this, so you decide whether you wanna fr- you know, work on the product or you wanna work on this marketing thing you've done," and then we didn't do anything because they'd never resourced it. But I worked with this really great product person at Tinder, Udi Milo. He was the, 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 and 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 gonna 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 can 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 gonna look for anything related to local. So what we built out is, if you look for online dating in many cities around the world, this is beta, it, it, you know, it, 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.

   17. LRLenny Rachitsky30:32

       So what changes here with the rise of AI overviews and things like that? Is it, this is where m- this is how future of SEO looks, versus just keywords and endless blog posts?

   18. ESEli Schwartz30:44

       Actually, nothing changes here with AI overviews.

   19. LRLenny Rachitsky30:47

       Hmm.

   20. ESEli Schwartz30:47

       Because if you're looking for... You've gone to Dubai. You've just, you've, 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 Dubai and you're gonna get, you know... Again, AI overviews might tell you what, 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 we, 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-funnel problem with your

7. 31:29 – 35:20

   Steps for getting started with SEO

   1. ESEli Schwartz31:29

      SEO solution.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky31:30

      Let's go in a direction I was gonna say for later, but it might be useful now, which is... Say somebody's just sitting there at their desk thinking, "Hey, I wanna, I wanna be succe- I wanna start doing some SEO. I wanna be successful at SEO. I haven't really done a ton here, eh, 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?

   3. ESEli Schwartz31:54

      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 I, there's been so many companies, and SurveyMonkey was a great example of one. I spent seven years with SurveyMonkey. And when everyone got onboarded at SurveyMonkey, they gave you a SurveyMonkey 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 and 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 used the tool. And then when you think about it from a product and 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 am a user of this SaaS, I'm building SaaS and I wanna, I wanna 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 know, earlier I referenced that I don't think most SaaS tools should do SEO, and the reason is because a lot of times when I talk to SaaS 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 where I 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 between programmatic versus editorial. We know we want it to be programmatic, because no one wants to be 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... I think we're on a product podcast, so 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 there, again, the reason I think SEO needs to be on product is because the inputs for SEO aren't the way many 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.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky34:55

      So I think there's a really powerful point here that might be... People might not get, which is y- the, the user n- 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 s- searching for the thing that you're building in some way, there's not gonna be an opportunity for you to win an SEO or in, benefit from SEO. Is there any examples that come to mind to

8. 35:20 – 39:17

   Examples of when not to focus on SEO

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky35:20

      you of B2B SaaS companies that just like, this is not... There's no SEO opportunity here, just like no one's searching for this thing?

   2. ESEli Schwartz35:27

      Most of them.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky35:28

      (laughs) Most of them.

   4. ESEli Schwartz35:28

      Yeah, they, I, I mean, I... One of my first consulting clients, right, when I left SurveyMonkey was Mixpanel. So I, I mean, I had just left my job and I'm gonna take any client that I have. I have some awful clients that I took, but Mixpanel was not an awful client. It was just an eye-opening 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 gonna do it himself. So I told him 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 w- 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 Mixpanel does.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky36:05

      (laughs)

   6. ESEli Schwartz36:05

      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 Mixpanel 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 gonna tell everyone we gotta do it and it's gonna be live tomorrow."Also makes panels 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 SaaS is not the best fit for SEO because if you think about their journey, the problem doesn't necessarily exist. The SaaS 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 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 break off is and then the other issue, of course, is now they know the problem exists, but it's not an SEO journey. So I had a, 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 gonna 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, first it was the hiring manager and every time it 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 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 SaaS tools shouldn't be doing SEO because there isn't a necessarily an SEO journey. I get a lot of pushback from companies when I tell them. They're like, "Look at all the SEO we've done." But that plateaus really quickly.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky38:36

      This is really fascinating and just to maybe reframe what you're saying 'cause, uh, 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 Vanta, SOC 2 stuff. It's not like people aren't SOC 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 will never buy your product from that experience and that journey. Like it may educate them a little bit. It may teach them oh, Vanta exists, but they're never gonna become customers. They need to talk to a salesperson. They need to involve a bunch of stakeholders. So it's basically a sales motion. It's not a product led SEO motion.

   8. ESEli Schwartz39:15

      Yes.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky39:15

      Is that right?

   10. ESEli Schwartz39:16

       Yes.

9. 39:17 – 44:00

   Evaluating SEO investment

   1. ESEli Schwartz39:17

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky39:17

      Cool. 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?

   3. ESEli Schwartz39:28

      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 in 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 these, 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 SaaS tool and they're convinced there's an SEO journey. People do search for this solution. You know, when I was at SurveyMonkey we, we generated couple hundred million dollars a year off of organic traffic because it was a freemium tool where you search for the prodem- 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 you've 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, w- again, for SurveyMonkey, 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 saying you need to hire this PM or you want to hire an agency, a typical SEO agency, I mean, you're not gonna spend $500 on an SEO agency. It's gonna be upwards of $10,000 just because that's the cost of someone's time. So it's $10,000 a month, $120,000 a year. Gets even more expensive if you have a full-time employee. So that's one expense you're gonna outline. Then you're gonna 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 it can really add up quickly and now you look at that investment and you say, "For this tool, if I invested a million dollars 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 SaaS 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 million one dollars back faster? And that's where I think the evaluation 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?"

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky42:16

      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 SaaS companies, because the journey isn't fully online. You're not gonna convert by just reading a bunch of pages.... super fascinating. Yeah.

   5. ESEli Schwartz42:35

      Yeah. There was once a company I met, there was a SaaS tool. They were in the gardening space. It's a... Like, they made a SaaS 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 (laughs) $15,000 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 they're leads that you can follow up with, instead of investing and being like, "Hope it works." It's sort of free. There are searches for it, but it's not the right searches.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky43:26

      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.

   7. ESEli Schwartz43:49

      Absolutely. Yeah, really think about what are the trade-offs? Again, from a product standpoint, there's always trade-offs.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky43:55

      Yeah.

   9. ESEli Schwartz43:55

      So what are the trade-offs to investing in this channel versus another channel?

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky43:59

       And I think, like, what I've

10. 44:00 – 46:23

    Understanding the tradeoffs in marketing channels

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky44:00

       seen... There's all the... The way I think about it, there's four actual growth engines. There are four core growth engines. SEO, paid, virality and sales. And what I find is eventually large companies do them all. Like, unless you're a consumer, you don't do sales. 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.

    2. ESEli Schwartz44:21

       I, I think there are companies that should probably never do SEO.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky44:24

       Hmm.

    4. ESEli Schwartz44:24

       Going back to what I said with 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 a piece of SEO asset, but they never would have converted with all those other things that they, they've touched.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky44:45

       And it's not like you're saying, "Don't be o- 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 results for Google Cloud. You're not going to benefit significantly from that.

    6. ESEli Schwartz45:02

       Yes. I mean, again, 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.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky45:12

       Hot take.

    8. ESEli Schwartz45:12

       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, DoorDash, Uber Eats. You're not going on Google and saying, "Pizza near me," and then browsing the websites and dec- making a decision about where to eat lunch. And again, if you're choosing how to cater your kid'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-

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky45:50

       Yeah. (laughs)

    10. ESEli Schwartz45:50

        ... that comes up in Flash, which is expensive, does a single thing for them. Most of their orders are going to come, again, through those other platforms.

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky45:59

        Yeah, I hate restaurant websites. Uh, uh, one thing I real- I read once that explains why web- restaurant websites are so bad is web... restaurant owners are big on just like, what is the experience when someone enters my restaurant that they go through, the vibe, and they do that on the website. (laughs) They're like, "Here's the music and here's the imagery and here's the animations." And nobody wants that on the, on their website. Just like, give me the hours and location and your menu.

11. 46:23 – 52:09

    SEO conversion metrics and expectations

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky46:23

       You mentioned a couple of things that I want to drill into a little bit. So one is just how long SEO should take for you to see results. Two is just expectations of what does good conversion look like. What is it tells you, this is actually, uh, a journey that could work for us well enough that SEO might work? So maybe those two questions.

    2. ESEli Schwartz46:40

       So those will be custom for anything. And I hate to use the word it depends, 'cause I, I think whenever consultants say, "Oh, it depends," they're just, you know, th- they're throwing their hands up and saying, "I don't really know. I- I'm not... I'm... I don't have an opinion on this." And 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 it... There's a, there's a custom answer here, and 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 your... If there's an opportunity... Like, again, with, with Tinder, it took us a while to actually build anything. So it took us all this time to build, for ideate and 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 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 of years before they even saw any results because nobody's looking for it. So it comes down to what 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 conversions, 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 wr- I mean, again, I think most companies should just not write a lot of content unless they're a 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 into leads, or maybe it's CPM advertising, so then your conversion is l- what you're trying to do with SEO is get a lot of page views, 'cause the more page views you get, the more clicks off that page you get into something else. If you're a SaaS 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, a SaaStral. They're in a two-sided marketplace. They worked with ... they ... 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 it 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, I 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 you 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 y- 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 a 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.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky50:20

       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 of metrics that you look at most?

    4. ESEli Schwartz50:37

       The first is really understanding what is it that they care about. So ... And, and rankings could be something they care about if someone else cares about it. So for example, if a ... they're gonna 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.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky51:29

       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, 'cause usually in decks I see. And investor updates, almost always the metric I see is traffic we're getting through SEO.

    6. ESEli Schwartz51:46

       Yeah. Total waste of time. (laughs)

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky51:49

       Amazing.

    8. ESEli Schwartz51:49

       It ... Yeah. It would ... I mean, unless 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 do- that traffic number goes up but you're not driving more leads from SEO, you're getting worthless traffic. It doesn't help the business.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky52:07

       Awesome. Okay.

12. 52:09 – 59:37

    Understanding the time horizon of SEO

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky52:09

       Uh, back to the question of just how long it takes, just to give someone something here that they can te- 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?

    2. ESEli Schwartz52:28

       When you're building out an SEO effort, and I'm gonna keep coming back to this, it's a product, so you're building out a product roadmap and you're creating milestones. So you say, "We're ... It's going to take us this first month to ideate on what it is that we're building. It's gonna ... In the second month, we're gonna build out a PRD for the engineers to start working on. In the third month, they're gonna start working and they're gonna ship this." If you start missing all those milestones, so, and they ... This is a common problem in consulting in general, you miss all those milestones and then some will say, "Well, it's 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.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky53:11

       Mm-hmm.

    4. ESEli Schwartz53:11

       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, again, many companies, it takes a really long time but e- eventually when you look back you see like this hockey stick. But while you're in it, you don't necessarily see that.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky53:38

       Awesome. Okay.

    6. ESEli Schwartz53:39

       Okay. Let me share an example of one that worked really quickly. So, uh, this was an also a, an interesting one and, and I was at SurveyMonkey and I was introduced to the CEO of Quora who was interested in doing more SEO. So Quora had never done SEO, or never done SEO effectively from a product standpoint. And there were a couple of things I was able to recommend to them, and within three months they had quadruple traffic. So it really will depend on what is it that's holding things back. In Quora'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 gonna 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 Quora ... And it's like this again, so they reversed the suggestion I made but it was, it was, I think it was 12 years ago.So when you came to Quora, and when you come to Quora 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 sitemap, they did this in the past, and if Quora's 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 the sitemap, again, it's HTML sitemap, not just an XML sitemap, in 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 the questions and answers are discoverable. So when I made that suggestion to them, within a couple of months, they were able to quadruple traffic.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky55:20

       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, 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 opportunity is more things like Zapier and Canva with templates and Notion and Quora where it's 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...

    8. ESEli Schwartz56:05

       It's really building a product around what the company is attempting to monetize.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky56:10

       Mm-hmm.

    10. ESEli Schwartz56:10

        So Canva's 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 Canva and they didn't monetize those templates, 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 I'm gonna mention the templates we did at SurveyMonkey. It was 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 the 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, well, you would 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, only used it from a, 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, they're, 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 it, if there's no user journey, it just stops.

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky57:45

        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 Notion and Airtable with all these templates, copy that. But if that isn't the thing people will buy from you and monetize, it's not gonna be worth doing.

    12. ESEli Schwartz58:04

        Yes.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky58:04

        Awesome. (instrumental music) I'm excited to chat with Kristina Gilbert, the founder of OneSchema, one of our longtime podcast sponsors. Hi, Kristina.

    14. GRGuest advertiser (OneSchema representative)58:13

        Yes. Thank you for having me on, Lenny.

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky58:15

        What is the latest with OneSchema? I know you now work with some of my favorite companies like Ramp, Vanta, Skale, and Watershed. I heard that you just launched a new product to help product teams import CSVs from especially tricky systems like ERPs.

    16. GRGuest advertiser (OneSchema representative)58:30

        Yes. So we just launched OneSchema 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.

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky58:52

        I can tell you that if my team had to build integrations like this, how nice would it be to be able to take this off my roadmap and instead use something like OneSchema, and not just to build it, but also to maintain it forever?

    18. GRGuest advertiser (OneSchema representative)59:04

        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 OneSchema will notify your team immediately of any data that looks incorrect.

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky59:23

        I know that importing incorrect data can cause all kinds of pain for your customers and quickly lose their trust. Kristina, thank you for joining us. And if you want to learn more, head on over to OneSchema.co. That's OneSchema.co.

13. 59:37 – 1:05:26

    The role of AI in content creation

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky59:37

       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?

    2. ESEli Schwartz59:48

       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, 'cause it, 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 ChatGPT. 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 on Upwork $50 for that 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 e-commerce 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, 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, the typical JCPenney, 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 macys.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's shoes on the page and the... 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 to... 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.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:01:59

       Got it. So basically less... Don't use SE- don't use AI to generate entire blog 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.

    4. ESEli Schwartz1:02:25

       And in their, their documentation they say that AI itself is not the problem, it's the helpfulness, the usefulness-

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:32

       Yeah.

    6. ESEli Schwartz1:02:32

       ... of the content that would be a problem.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:34

       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?

    8. ESEli Schwartz1:02:44

       There's this, uh, hatred of AI content by users in general.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:48

       Mm-hmm.

    10. ESEli Schwartz1:02:49

        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 CNET that said they were using AI to create content, and I, I think they got in trouble because they said they're 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've 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. Uh, 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. Their company will issue, they- they'll file their earnings report and then now it's AI, but before AI it was basically like Mad Libs kind of content, it would extract pieces of the earnings report and then 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 users have an issue with it. I think you... if you read that old piece of content, again, on earnings reports, it was pretty obvious that it wasn't written by-

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky1:04:02

        Mm-hmm.

    12. ESEli Schwartz1:04:02

        ... 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.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky1:04:08

        There's this guy, Noah Smith. Um, he's on Twitter. He's got a newsletter called No Opinions. Awesome. And he ha- he had this tweet about how we're, we're, uh, approaching an age of, uh, a ton of slop of content, just a lot of really bad content generated by AI, for better or worse. This is unrelated to SEO, but it makes me think about just like how much bad stuff we're gonna see. But to your point, it's... doesn't matter whether it was generated by AI 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.

    14. ESEli Schwartz1:04:41

        And this is a huge issue for Google because the amount of content being created is e- enormous and it, it's growing exponentially. And if Google's trying to crawl everything-

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky1:04:52

        Yeah.

    16. ESEli Schwartz1:04:52

        ... 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.

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky1:05:06

        The crazy thing for LLMs is now at... to be trained, they're trained on content on the internet in a big way, and they're struggling with tr- not training their LLMs on stuff that AI has written because it becomes this, uh, bad (laughs) , a bad tren- a bad direction that, uh, LMs will go. They're trained on themselves. Anyway,

14. 1:05:26 – 1:07:40

    AI overviews

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:05:26

       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't do?

    2. ESEli Schwartz1:05:42

       So I think of AI as... or AI overviews as a branding exercise. So getting into the AI overview, and Google has links, I, 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. They... This website, which we summarized, told you to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge." Or, "We didn't plagiarize, 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 linked 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 SurveyMonkey experience, it's not a statistically significant survey in general, but it will never go to 99% one. So, like, that's... be fairly indicative that people are clicking the links, which surprises me because I, 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, and 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 companies to 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 in AI overview mentioned as a brand, like these are the top CRM tools, you're showing up as a brand, that means you've exercised 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. If you show up as a link, it means Google has stolen your content and people may or may not click off of it.

15. 1:07:40 – 1:09:51

    Brand building and SEO

    1. ESEli Schwartz1:07:41

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky1:07:41

       Along those 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 drive conversion? Any advice on how to think about brand building and SEO, especially with this world of AI?

    3. ESEli Schwartz1:07:56

       I mean, this is, 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 that sort of look like they might have authority, and it, it do- doesn't really benefit anyone, 'cause no one's reading these sites. And g- it's, it's funny that everyone complained about Google as this really, really smart all knowing LLM, and 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 SaaS 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 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? 'Cause 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 could say, "Well, you've been mentioned here." That's pretty good. So now we ad- 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, I think of any SEO effort as 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.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:49

       Hm. Awesome. Okay. I'm

16. 1:09:51 – 1:16:06

    Programmatic vs. editorial SEO strategies

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:51

       glad we touched that. There's a few other directions I wanna go, so it's gonna, I'm gonna bounce around a little bit and cover some of the other stuff I wanted to extract from your deep experience in this space. One is you've mentioned this idea of pragm- pragmatic, programmatic SEO a couple times, eh, 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, programma- programmatic or editorial?

    2. ESEli Schwartz1:10:19

       It might be obvious at this point, but I'm gonna say it's dependent on the user.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:10:22

       (laughs)

    4. ESEli Schwartz1:10:23

       But essentially what programmatic 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... Or it's not created, the, the strategy was created by a past guest of yours, Luke Levesque, who introduced us.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:10:48

       Mm-hmm.

    6. ESEli Schwartz1:10:48

       And that was TripAdvisor. So TripAdvisor 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 TripAdvisor 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 Waldorf Astoria in New York, and here's a long form blog post about the Mar- the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco. They built it all from a programmatic standpoint, 'cause they took all these datasets, 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, the time, right?

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:11:31

       Mm-hmm.

    8. ESEli Schwartz1:11:31

       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. So Zillow took in all of those datasets. So they got some of them are government datasets, some of them are, are their own comparison datasets based on other home sales. So the government can say a, a house is worth one price, and based on their comparison, Zillow can d- completely disagree with it. So they're building in these datasets 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 paid traffic for my house. They're not gonna do paid traffic for your house. The only way someone would find that page on Zillow, either they start at zillow.com and just navigate through it, or they Google it. So those are programmatic SEO efforts. On the flip side is editorial. So editorial would be, in TripAdvisor'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 were, 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 m- 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. TripAdvisor'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 TripAdvisor's site. So understanding what is it that the user needs will help solve do you approach this from an editorial standpoint or do you approach this from a programmatic standpoint? Some of the companies-

Episode duration: 1:55:09