How to Actually Win at SEO & Marketing in a Tough Environment with Eric Siu

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. I am brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Billion Dollar Moves. Today, we'll be breaking down how to actually win at SEO and marketing in a tough environment. To drop these value bombs, I am brought to Eric Hsu and the EO Fire Studios. Eric is the founder of the digital marketing agency, Single Grain. He hosts two podcasts, Marketing School and Leveling Up, which get over 2.1 million monthly downloads combined. Over the years, he has helped companies such as Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, and Salesforce acquire more customers.

0:36And today, we'll talk about what's working in SEO today, programmatic SEO, AI-assisted content, and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Eric and our sponsors. The Next Wave, your chief AI officer, hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lanz, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Matt and Nathan are leading AI creators in your guiding light in the AI and technology frontier. AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented. The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business.

1:14Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts. Are you looking to start or grow a successful business? Attend the world's highest rated and most reviewed business growth workshop taught personally by Clay Clark and football great Tim Tebow at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire. Again, request life-changing tickets today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO Fire. Eric, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Yeah, thanks for having me, John. So good to be here again. So I would say the one thing that maybe most people won't agree with is if you want to build something generational, it's not going to take you a year or five years or 10 years.

2:00it's probably going to take you 20, 30 years or so. And most people just don't have the stamina to do that. One thing I do love is a Tony Robbins quote, which is so many people overestimate what they can do in a year, but they underestimate what they can do in 10 years, in 20 years, in 30 years. And like you said, you can do something generational if you are willing to commit that kind of timeframe to what it is that you're creating. So this is a really good start to a really interesting conversation about how to actually win at SEO instead of losing. And also, same goes with marketing, winning at marketing in a very tough environment that we find ourselves in today.

2:39So it's a tough environment, Eric, because it's an ever-changing environment. So I wanna break down right now, in this moment in time, what's working in SEO? People think SEO is dying, you know, chat, GPT, AI, everything. Not really. And so, you know, as long as human beings are searching for things, there's going to be SEO. And so one thing that's working really well for us and for clients at the ad agency is we're doing this thing that's called programmatic SEO. And what that is, John, is when you think about a website like TripAdvisor, they drive over 120 million visitors a month from Google, from SEO alone.

3:15And they'd be paying Google$66 million per month for that traffic if they were buying that traffic. And they're not. I mean, that traffic is quote unquote free. It's not really free, but you get my point. And they also rank for about 24 million keywords. Now, they've been doing this programmatic SEO thing for decades, right? You talk about compounding for decades. Now, this is now available to people like you and me because of the advent of a chat GPT or more so OpenAI's API. Because you can now create these pages at scale and you can now rank for these pages provided that you have – there's a couple of asterisks there, right?

3:51But you are now able to create these pages at scale. We've done that for ourselves, and that's worked out really well. So let me give you an example for us. For us, as an agency, what kind of keywords do we want to rank for? We want to rank for permutations of services pages or agency pages, right? Services, agencies, consultancy, whatever. And within those, you can say Los Angeles Digital Marketing Agency or Los Angeles SEO Agency. So there's thousands and thousands of permutations in there. That's an example for us. Now, if I think about TripAdvisor, what do they rank for? They rank for things to do in Rome, things to do in Puerto Rico, right?

4:27Things to do in Condado, things to eat, right? In Puerto Vallarta. That's millions and millions of permutations that can be created programmatically. And that's just one example of being able to scale in today's AI-driven world. And I'll pause for a second. That's already one thing. I have another one I can share, but I'll pause. No, keep on rocking, brother. You're on fire. Cool. So the other piece is AI-assisted content. So the podcast that I do with my co-host, Neil, we do it. It's basically a weekday podcast now. Every podcast is about 15 minutes and it's all audio. And so the thinking here was, okay, we're spitting out a lot of stuff that's trending, which is, you can argue it's news related, but we're not leveraging the SEO power of that.

5:10We're not getting it to text. And so one thing that we do is we use riverside.fm to record our podcast. There's an automatic AI transcription that comes with it. We take that transcription, we dump it into like a chat GPT, for example, we just tell, we just prompt it to say, Hey, convert this transcript into a blog post with nice headers and a nice headline. And then that's 60 to 70 % done. You following so far? Yes. Okay. 60 to 70 % done, but we still add in a human in the loop. So we call, again, we call this AI assisted content because 60 to 70 % AI, but 30 to 40 % still a human in the loop where they're fact checking, They're adding statistics.

5:45They're adding links. They're adding media. And at the end of the day, the piece ends up being a really nice piece. And you can't even tell that it was more heavily influenced by AI. And so that's been working even better than the programmatic SEO stuff. So those are two examples of things that are working from an SEO standpoint. This is the kind of stuff, Fire Nation, that I hope you're taking notes on. Because again, this is proven activities, strategies, tactics that are working right now in today's environment. Eric is a person that actually does what he recommends, what he preaches, what he teaches.

6:19So keep that in mind. Now, I've heard this phrase programmatic SEO, but I personally have no idea what it means. Let's dive deeper. Yeah, sure. So programmatic SEO is just you creating programmatic pages. So you're looking for a list of keywords that you want to rank for first, but these are hundreds, if not thousands of pages that you're looking to create. And then you would create those pages much like how a trip advisor would do it. So again, things to do in Rome, things to do in Japan. Fire Nation, very interesting stuff, ways to think differently about creating SEO, specifically on that programmatic SEO side.

6:53And you kind of mentioned a little bit earlier, AI-assisted content. I want to really dive deeper because there is this thing, it's, you know, chat GPT, it's artificial intelligence, there's other things around there. So what is this all about? and let's get some examples specifically around AI-assisted content. Easy example is the one I gave earlier with Marketing School, where we would just take our transcript and then add in a human in the loop. We can also do this, let's say AI-assisted, with your content, right, John? So if you look at all the interviews you've done over the years, I believe it's thousands by this point, right?

7:29Yeah, 4 ,362 and counting. Yeah, you're a machine. So it's like, how do you take the transcripts from all of these and look for patterns for what entrepreneurs are saying. And I think you've done this to an extent, right? But how do you continue to pop out these transcripts? So when you take the transcripts, you create them into long form blog posts, right? And then you have a human in the loop there. I think you're doing show notes right now for the most part with your podcast, correct? Correct. Okay. So the show notes don't do that well. The reason from an SEO standpoint, the reason is because there just isn't that much content.

8:02But if you were to ask a chat GPT, for example, to expand on the transcript and then you add in a human in the loop and they they make the elongate the post even more what's going to happen is you're going to add a lot more capabilities in terms of uh or capacity to rank for long tail keywords right these are longer tail not like shoes more it might be basket red basketball shoes for example that's an example of a long tail keyword so fire nation i mean how can you take what you're currently creating and then add the juice, which is AI assisted content to say, hey, juice this up, flesh this out, add to this.

8:38And, you know, come in afterwards and clean it up and make it, you know, very enjoyable and readable and not sounding, you know, computeristic and AIistic. Although as every day goes by, that's becoming less and less of an issue because AI just keeps stacking the cool, keeps exponentially improving in every facet of what it does. It's insane. But man, these are just some things that I hope is getting your mind spinning, Fire Nation. A lot of awesome opportunities, more of which we'll talk about when we get back from thanking our sponsors. We all know that starting a business is hard, but there are tools out there that help make it easier.

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11:58Become the next success story. Schedule a free consultation and request tickets to join Tim Tebow and Clay Clark at the next business conference today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire. Eric, we're back. And I want to talk about diversifying our marketing because you're currently diversifying your marketing in a number of ways. So what are you doing and why is it so important? If I were to start today, I wouldn't start an SEO because it's getting harder and harder, even though that's my background. And so what we've been doing with the podcast, so I have two, one's called marketing school, then one's called leveling up.

12:32We record everything live. So when I do the podcast, they're live interviews. And when I record marketing school with Neil, we live about half a mile away from each other. So we just record at his place or my place and we get a lot of clips, right? So we have a long form podcast that's for video and we publish it to audio, but then now we publish it to YouTube shorts, Instagram reels. And you see a lot of people, you see a lot of podcasts now on TikTok, on Instagram, right? On YouTube. And for us, that's just a discoverability mechanism. And so we are diversifying across socials without using our podcast as the base layer.

13:08And then what Neil and I are both doing, actually, we're going a lot harder on Twitter now. I started going harder recently. He's been doing it for maybe two months or so. That often helps us set a pillar piece of content too, that will give us ideas for what else we might want to create. So if I look at the results in the last 30 days or so, about 12 million views across my socials. And we think we can probably get that to three to four X more. I mean, this is just the kind of stuff, Fire Nation, that again, continues to compound what you're doing, leveraging, scaling, all of this stuff. Let's use another example within this that you and Neil are doing, or you guys are doing separately that you really find is working, either for yourself or maybe you're recommending it or talking about it on the show or recommending it to clients specifically?

13:53What is that? Yeah, sure. So I invested in a company called School about two years ago. It's a company ran by Sam Ovens. And I'm very bullish on communities. And you see people now talking about driving people into a community funnel. And let me explain what that means. So a community, if I back up a second, when you think about in the past, It would have been like a Facebook group. A community could be Reddit, for example. A community could be a Discord channel or a Slack. Now, the way school is set up, it doesn't have to be school, but the way school is set up is it kind of just looks like a private Facebook group, but you have much more control over it.

14:29And so, you know, the way I see it is you can build an audience all day long, but if you want to actually retain people, you want to nurture people, then you're going to build a community. And you've done this a lot. You have a couple of communities, right? I think it's going to grow more and more. You see people in tech talking more and more about communities. And the way I look at it, I'm in a group called YPO and I was in a group called EO before. Those are very much communities. I see the unbundling of YPO happening where there might be a community for podcasters, which is what you have, right?

14:59Or there's communities for marketers. Neil and I actually just made a group called the Agency Owners Association, targeting agency owners. And that's what we're driving people to. Because if you do a community well, you know this. you're able to retain people pretty well and you can actually push different offers to them. So what we're thinking about now is when someone reaches one of our thank you pages after opting in is just to drive them to a community. And then we have a community manager that that's actively managing it. I will say that community is such a powerful tool for you to use fire nation.

15:29People like being a part of something like interacting with other humans who share struggles, obstacles, and challenges. And that kind of communication, you know, a lot of times when people are working out of their home, they're solopreneurs, they're kind of just like interacting with only themselves all day, you give them an opportunity and an outlet to connect with real people that have shared interests in a real environment. And a lot of people that listen to the show know that they're the average of the five people they spend the most time with. So they want to surround themselves with really awesome and cool people.

15:57That's a community. Now, AI marketing is going to continue to be huge going forward and is only going to get bigger and more interesting. I mean, as we just come out with all these different ways to leverage, to utilize as it improves by itself, et cetera. So what else are you doing in this area? And what do we need to know about this really new and exciting field? One thing that we do internally right now is let's say someone, let's say, John, you visit our website. We're immediately able to identify who you are. So we're able to enrich your data. So we can see, we'll get your personal email address.

16:31We'll get your LinkedIn URL. We'll look at the pages that you visited. and based on your behavior on our website, because of the sheer amount of content that we create, we'll continue to surface content, relevant content in the last 90 days from our YouTube channel. It could be from Marketing School, it could be from Leveling Up, it could be from our blog. And we're just trying to lightly nurture you with content. We're just trying to continue to be helpful, but that's all AI-driven, right? And so basically what we're trying to do, and I think that the problem for most people is that they're only focused on converting people that are hand raisers on their website.

17:04So for us, what I mean by that is someone that wants to work with our agency, right? But the vast majority of people visiting our website aren't looking to work with an agency immediately. And so what becomes really important if you're in B2B is, so business to business, is you're looking at marketing to the 60 to 70 % of people that aren't ready to buy right now. And so what we're looking at, we've already started doing this internally, but we're looking to productize this as well, is how do we build an entire customer acquisition system that that will increase our meetings booked. And then eventually, how do we then start working with the enterprises on this?

17:38Because they'll pay a lot of money per qualified meeting book. They'll pay thousands of dollars for a meeting booked, right? So that's kind of how we're looking at it. How do we build something where you don't, we don't necessarily need, once we build it out, we might need a human in the loop to maintain it, but you don't need a lot of complexities, human complexities for the long-term there. And I think that's going to help people be a lot more efficient and people we'll be a lot happier and companies be better. See, Fire Nation, there's just so many opportunities to approach this, so many niches to dive into and to conquer and to dominate and to become the number one solution to that real specific problem and to leverage AI to help you do that.

18:16So Eric, take the mic. I mean, we just have this brave new world ahead of us. I mean, there's only been a certain number of inflection points in our life. Of course, you and I were alive when the internet actually became a thing. And then, you know, we were alive when we went through some crazy times with like, you know, Bitcoin and crypto becoming this potentially new way to change the world with blockchain, et cetera. And now here we have AI and AI is just this fascinating topic. What do you want to leave Fire Nation around this specific focal point? I tweeted something a couple of days ago just saying that really companies of the future are going to be wildly different.

18:56So let's use an agency as an example. Currently, a good quote unquote agency has a revenue per employee of maybe$100 ,000 to$200 ,000, which is pretty good. I think in an AI driven world, that's going to be at least$1 to$2 million per employee. So companies are going to become a lot more efficient. And the way I see it is people that adapt to AI, people that are continually learning, those are the ones that are going to be fine. The rest of the people, unfortunately, I think the majority of people are going to be, and maybe this is a contrarian thing to think, but I think a lot of people are going to be relying on universal basic income.

19:33And maybe that basic income gives them more time to explore their creative freedoms. But I think only the best of the best are going to survive. And I'm kind of excited about that. It's exciting times, Fire Nation. don't get anybody wrong because when there's disruption, when there's something new, there's opportunity. And the opportunity is there when you're listening to the right people who have their finger on the pulse, who are forward thinking. Eric is one of those people. So Eric, if Fire Nation wanted to connect with you, learn more from you, what is your call to action for our audience today?

20:06Yeah, they can go check out Leveling Up with Eric Su on YouTube, or they can just go check out Marketing School, the podcast. Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with ES and JLD today, so keep up that heat. For links to everything we talked about, just visit EO Fire and type Eric, E-R-I-C, in the search bar. The show notes page will pop right up. Eric, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thanks, John. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Eric for sponsoring today's episode.

20:42And Fire Nation, successful entrepreneurs are great at three things, productivity, discipline, and focus. That's why I created the Mastery Journal, so that you can master productivity, discipline, and focus in 100 days. And we're talking step-by-step. Visit themasteryjournal.com, and I will catch you there or on the flip side. The Next Wave, your chief AI officer, hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lands, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Matt and Nathan are leading AI creators in your guiding light in the AI and technology frontier.

21:13AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented. The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts. Are you looking to start or grow a successful business? Attend the world's highest rated and most reviewed business growth workshop taught personally by Clay Clark and football great Tim Tebow at Thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire. Again, request life-changing tickets today at Thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire.