New SEO and AI Strategies You Should NOT Miss!

0:00All right. So this next episode is a collaboration with HubSpotts Marketing Against the Grain podcast. So we got the CMO, Kip Bodnar, and they also have Kieran Flanagan, who's their VP of marketing on the pod. And it's also Neil and myself. And we talk about the future of marketing. That's where the talk is focused on. We talk about the future of SEO, the future of CRO, what we're excited about. We talk about what's old that is carrying over into the future. It's a great episode. We think you're going to enjoy it, and we'll see you inside. Big fan of the marketing school pod. I know you both have avid followings because you're deep practitioners of marketing and you're kind of deep at the intersection of both results and kind of emerging trends.

0:42And what I'm hoping to do today is take us through a tour of some of the most important aspects of marketing and talk about them and give people a new blueprint moving forward. And one of the places that I was hoping we could start was SEO. SEO. If you go read the SEO subreddit, it's a very depressing place. There's a lot of people talking about all the traffic they've lost, the websites they're shutting down. It's very, very doom and gloom. I think you all are probably more positive about the future of SEO and leveraging AI for SEO and those things than most people I talk to. And so I guess I'd love to kick it off and hear from both of you around what's happening with SEO.

1:26What's the state of the state and what should people who are trying to get traffic from search do in this kind of post-AI era? Yeah, I'll let Neil go first because he's been saying this quite a bit. He has a new definition of SEO that I think is catching on well. So, Neil, why don't you kick it off first? Yeah, so first off, we look at SEO as not search engine optimization. We look at a search everywhere optimization. You know, as a Google VP said, I won't read the quote word for word, but he was talking about how when young people are doing a search, they're now turning to TikTok and Instagram before Google.

2:00People are now asking ChatGPT for questions and hiring companies based on the results that they're getting on ChatGPT. Like I was talking to this lady and I was like, how'd you find out about us? She's like, ChatGPT told me to hire your marketing from NP Digital. I was like, all right, sounds great. Sweet. So you can optimize for so many channels, right? YouTube has search. It's the second most popular search engine outside of Google, which funny enough is owned by them. I don't have great stats on Baidu. It's a little bit tough to get stats on Baidu comparing to other channels because it's in China.

2:32But platforms are everywhere that have search now. The second thing to keep in mind is when you see the doom and gloom on the internet like Twitter and Reddit, it's usually from people who are very technical and that's one end of the market. Danny Sullivan, who's a search liaison of Google, has stated every single year Google has driven more organic traffic to websites than the previous year. It doesn't matter that there's more zero clicks or any of that. Overall, net-net, they're driving more organic traffic to websites than the previous year. And even with the AI overviews release, we saw an increase in traffic to our client sites, assuming you're doing SEO well because you got another place to get cited.

3:18Not by much, a little bit more than a percent, but that's better than a drop. And the real point that I'm getting at is when you think of SEO, when people talk about, oh my God, look how much traffic I lost, my rankings went down. Well, if you lost rankings, someone else climbed rankings. It just doesn't happen where everyone loses rankings, right? Google has roughly 10 results on the first page. And I say roughly because it really does vary. But if you dropped, someone has taken those spots and is getting traffic. So the concept that organic traffic or SEO is dead, not really. It's changing, though, and you've got to adapt with it, not just focus on Google.

3:57But there's still a ton of traffic to be had. Yeah, and just to add some context to that, so the sales intelligence tool we use is Gong. And so I was telling Neil and I were talking about this about a week ago, and I was just like, if I type in podcasts, Okay, so 10 % of the sales conversations involve podcasts in there. And then about 9 % to 10 % involve the keyword YouTube. The fact that we're here, Kip, this is a collaboration with the Marketing School podcast and the Marketing Against the Grain, right? We're both pushing this to YouTube. We're both going hard on podcasts. It's because the attention is being spread everywhere else.

4:30I think we tend to see the people that complain the most, especially on Twitter or X, whatever you want to call it. It's what Neil mentioned. It's the SEOs that complain about it. And the SEOs that complain about it are typically they put all their eggs in one basket. And once they start to lose that traffic, they start to panic. And Neil and I, we've gotten a couple of texts from friends this year talking about, oh, my God, we've lost all our traffic, right? But some of these friends, they've bet most of their traffic into SEO. And it's no wonder why they're panicking, right? And so attention has changed quite a bit.

4:59I mentioned that I would travel with friends this year, and I look at their behavior, and it's like they're not even using Google. They're just using TikTok to search for things, right? So we have to adapt what the change is and what the role of the punch is. I think the people that complain the most are the ones that are unwilling to adapt. Yeah, there's a few things I would bring up. The people who are losing the most search, to your point, they're not diversified. They're all in on search, which means they're deeply into informational search, like very how-to-based search versus transactional search queries.

5:29And those how-to-based search queries are getting more disrupted by AI overviews, by chat GPT, by YouTube, by TikTok, all of those things. And I think that's what's challenging. I think the advice we're giving people is like, look, you have to be multimedia by default. Like people are using video and podcasts more than ever before. And you're going to have to be there as search kind of basically fragments and this, gosh, I can't even talk right now. it unbundles and it comes across all the different platforms. The second thing I think we're talking about today is that AI is a new force in recommendations.

6:12And it like, I call it like we're going from the word of mouth to word of machine era, which is like a hyperbole, but like it's, you know, you will go and just get an answer from chat GPT that is far more in-depth and action oriented than previous search queries would be. And like I use the Replit agent to like build lightweight apps and like that agent is telling me what APIs to use, what web infrastructure to use. It's making the buying choices for me. And so if we don't show up in those platforms, you're not going to be set up for success. I think my follow-up question to both of you is what do you think are the advantages in SEO right now or in terms of like, how can you use AI to actually get more traffic to your website versus worrying about the traffic disruption?

7:03Yeah, I can go first. So what we do at my ad agency, Single Grain, so I'll use a case study here. So, you know, some people poo-poo on programmatic SEO and the way you want to think about that is you're just creating, you know, location-based or templated content, right? So a trip advisor would be a good example, fun things to do in Rome, fun things to do in Japan. And that's why they rank for millions and millions of keywords, right? Or like a Yelp, for example, or an Expedia. So you can generate these pages programmatically, but I think some people have taken that too aggressively. And so if you think about SEO 10, 15 years ago or so, there's a lot of these black hats that were just pushing out spam and they would rank for whatever.

7:38This programmatic content to me is still a way of spamming, but it's a way of spamming where you're adding value, I believe, to the web. And as long as you're doing it in a tasteful way and you're putting out quality content, Google has said themselves that they don't care about it, right? Like as long as it's helpful to the humans, that's great. And so we have one client, they rank for about, they were ranking for maybe like 500, you know, bottom of the funnel keywords, transactional keywords. And then now they're ranking for about 7 ,000 or so. So it's not like we went hardcore for them. Like we went, we produced some programmatic content for them, but not millions and millions of pages, right?

8:11And so I think some people tend to over index or just not do it at all. It's like, oh, I'm not to do AI content or they do too much of it and it's low quality, I think it's a happy medium that works. And the final thing I'll add before I flip it over to Neil, actually two things, is if you're creating maybe hundreds or thousands of these pages, and again, you're queuing them pretty closely and making sure the quality is good, that actually enables you to do programmatic conversion rate optimization, where you can change the call to actions on these pages, and we're seeing about a 50 % lift on these pages.

8:40I'll give you an example. On our website for single grain and I'll slow down a little bit on our website single grain our typical call to action says work with us now maybe we have a page that talks about converge rate optimization services for e-commerce well in that case we'll change the call to action on that page to optimize your conversions which seems trivial but it actually increases the conversions on those pages by about 50 or so and so what we do there is we leverage openai's api and then we just scan the context of that page and we'll just, we'll create a prompt for it and we'll make it like a, you know, six character or sorry.

9:15We try to make it like less than six words, the call to action. And it's worked out really well for us. And then, you know, I'm happy to talk about how we QA things, but that actually leads me into the third and final point before I flip it over to Neil, is where we're producing agentic workflows, right? And I know you and Kieran have talked about this, but for us, it's like, okay, SEO is a very thankless job. I don't want to spend time updating content. I don't want to spend time looking for internal links. I don't want to spend time doing a lot of this stuff at the end of the day. And so what we've created is, okay, we think about all the jobs to be done for SEO.

9:47You have to update your content. You have to index your content quickly. Okay. So we create all these agents that are able to do the work for us now. And I've asked my developers, I was like, how much time are we saving from those? They're like 10X more time and we're way more efficient. Right. And so it's like, people talk about agents, but how do you actually implement it? You think about the jobs to be done first, then you map out the workflow for it and then you can figure out how you want to daisy chain them together can you give us like a specific example of an agent what it does like what was built on i'm just what everybody watching to understand like what is possible and what something that they could go and do on yeah let me um let me do a little screen share here so okay this should this should work out so let me share my screen all right does can you see this yeah and if i make it bigger can you see this Yeah.

10:33Okay, cool. All right. So here's an AI consolidation agent. So in SEO, we know that if you update your content, you're going to gain more traffic. If you delete content, you help free up crawl budget. You might gain more content from it. But also, you have to consolidate content that might be very similar, right? You guys do a very good job of this at HubSpot. And so, okay, what if we created an AI consolidation agent where what we do in the very beginning is we simply look at Google Search Console, and then we fetch Google Analytics metrics for URLs. And then as we continue down the workflow over here, we'll look for, you know, the closest vector matches, right?

11:06What are the closest types of content that should probably be combined? And then we'll filter Google Search Console data, and then we'll fetch the URL. And then at the very end of it, we'll provide all the URLs that we think should be consolidated. And then my belief right now, at the very least for the next two to three years, is you probably need a human in a loop for this stuff. You can't just let it roll on its own. And then that's what we basically do. So this is one example. So is that all a series of agentic prompts for like the open AI API or like, tell us about the technology behind it.

11:32Cause everybody's going to drop comments on the YouTube and be like, all right, well, I like this. How do I go and like actually do that? It's exactly that. So it's, it's leveraging open AI's API. I believe we're using some, some newer products as well. I think we just started using something else. Our dev started using something else maybe like two weeks ago or so. I don't know what it is right now. So unfortunately all I can say is open AI's API. Yeah. But basically what you're saying is you can build basically a series of small web apps on the OpenAI API to basically automate different parts of SEO.

12:00In this example, it's like consolidating similar content to basically have fewer, more authoritative pages on your website instead of having 10 different pages that are kind of all saying the same thing and diluting your search power. Yeah, and Kip, imagine this, right? You guys are producing a lot of podcast content. So what we're doing for a lot of our pages to keep them updated is we're linking to the most recent podcast episode or the most recent YouTube video that's related to that. So it keeps refreshing the page. And then we also are keeping – if we have an internal linking agent that's constantly working, then we're probably – we're trying to put in the most relevant or the most recent internal links as well just to help give love to those pages.

12:42So a lot of this stuff, I think humans – we're very limited, but this stuff to me seems like it should be done programmatically. I totally agree with that. All right. So I wanted to take a second to tell you about the agency owners association. So this is a agency peer group ran by my podcast co-host Neil Patel and myself, Eric Su. And these were nine and eight figure agency owners respectively. And what I will say is at the end of the day, you want to learn from people that have been there, done that. If you want to grow your agency to seven figures, eight figures and beyond, this is the group for you.

13:11And we bring in other agency owners to speak as well. And it's a great peer group where you can help each other out. And you're going to learn how to acquire more clients. You're going to learn how to take yourself out of the day to day. and to build the business of your dreams. And the cool thing, till November 30th, we are holding a special price and you can apply at marketingschool.io slash agency. And the great thing about it as well, if you try to get into group, there's a seven day free trial, right? So once November 30th hits, we're gonna increase the price by$200 per month. So right now you're getting it at the lowest price possible.

13:40So go to marketingschool.io slash agency to learn more and we'll see you inside. The way we use AI, you can end up using it in many different ways. but when we look at results for customers, we really see two avenues producing the most results. The first being research, because if you look at the content that Google tends to rank, it's a content that's the most thorough. So the more thorough you are, typically the better you're going to end up ranking, assuming you answer everyone's objections that they have around a specific topic. If not, they click the back button, sends a signal to Google, they keep searching, looking at the next webpage and the next webpage until they get their answer.

14:15So, a great example of this is we work with a company called University of Technical Institute. We were able to grow their search traffic by more than 200 % by using AI. So they have campuses all around the United States. We use AI to do research for all the locations and cities and all the information about those cities that we know interest students that go there around those campuses. So then when we sent that and through AI you can also have it organized in a specific format and a layout that you want. You then have your team where we had our team go and create content based on all the research that OpenAI or ChatGPT ended up providing.

14:58And then from there we ended up going and modifying all the local pages and that saw massive boost in traffic. The second way is if you do a Google search for anything you see Wikipedia. The reason you see Wikipedia ranking for most things is their content is fresh and up to date. Most people have this wrong that are SEOs though. They believe if you just quote unquote update a page and modify a line or two or add a video, add a link, it actually helps. We actually see if you update a page too frequently with very little value that you're adding, it does not help your rankings. We're actually seeing it hurt rankings.

15:34But if you go and you update a page and make it more thorough, answer objections, improve the user experience, right? All the things that are causing people issues, we're seeing rankings go up. But the key here is you can go into search console, you can use the agent for this, you can see what pages are decreasing in traffic year over year or quarter over quarter, however you want to end up basing it. From there, those are typically the pages that need updating. You can then end up running a search for all the keywords that have dropped in rankings, see who's ranking above you, what are they doing that your page is not doing, and then you'll have better ideas of what you need to do to update the content and make it better.

16:16You can have AI help you write some of that content, but you need a human in the loop. And the big thing that Eric and I believe in is you can't eliminate humans. Maybe in the future, and that's a real maybe, and the reason being is with AI, there's a lot of edge cases. For example, if you're a HubSpot and your terms of service page gets little to no traffic, you can't have an AI just say, hey, this page is getting little to no traffic, where your SEO, you should only have pages that are getting traffic sales eliminated, you're going to be in legal trouble, right? And there's a lot of edge cases like that in all forms of marketing.

16:51For example, in paid marketing, you know better than anyone else, if you're running a new paid campaign, whether it's Google or Facebook and your AI is analyzing your data in real time, in most cases, during the first day, first week, first month, that campaign is going to be negative. And AI would tell you, hey, you're losing money on this campaign. Shift the budget to these campaigns that are more profitable. Well, it takes time for Google system to learn. It takes time for Facebook system to learn and for you to fine tune and tweak the campaigns. And then as you're scaling things up, it's not like they perform the best instantly, right?

17:29But all these things will give a computer a signal that, hey, eliminate, stop, pause. I'm not saying the computer AI can't get smarter in the long run. It's just you really need to have a human in the loop. And the best feedback I got was from a Google engineer who's actually works on their AI piece or their AI algorithm or AI overviews, whatever you want to end up calling it. Another example with AI is if you're running paid campaigns, let's say it's with Facebook or Google as marketers, we know that you can't just say, Hey, your campaigns are good or bad in the first day or week or month, because it takes time to scale up and it takes time to learn.

18:09Like Google's performance max, isn't going to be optimized and ready to go with your campaigns from day one. But if you just rely on the AI, it may end up telling you, Hey, you should shut this off and you should stop tomorrow and reallocate the budget. But as marketers, Eric and I know that we need to be patient and give it time. Look, the big thing with AI is you really need a human in the loop. I was talking to a Google engineer and this engineer works on Google's algorithms specifically with things like the AI overviews. And their biggest problem, and they've been fighting this problem since Google ended up coming out back in the day, is there's misinformation on the web.

18:49But with AI, it's pulling from everywhere on the web and every day there's new misinformation how do they know what to eliminate and what not to when it's giving you answers these are reasons why they cite sources and why chat GPT is doing this and other players are copying because it's too hard for them to eliminate misinformation if this was possible Google would have done this years ago and this is why AI is never gonna be perfect when I first started my business the overwhelm was real I didn't have the tools to help me scale if only I had Shopify from the start to handle all the behind the scenes work.

19:23Shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally from huge names like Mattel and Gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started. The best part about it, it has everything you could need. Say you're ready to launch your own design studio. Shopify has hundreds of templates to create a beautiful store that matches your brand style. Or if you need help with content creation, Shopify has got AI tools that write your product descriptions, craft page headlines, and even enhance your product photos. Shopify lets you easily create email and social media campaigns to reach customers wherever they are, whether they're scrolling or strolling.

19:53If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school, shopify.com slash marketing school. If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast. That's where Framer comes in, and it totally changes the game. Framer is the design-first, no-code website builder that lets anyone ship a production-ready site in minutes. I recently built a custom landing page in just a few hours, animations, fast load times, responsive layouts, all without writing a single line of code.

20:36It was easy to use, and the end result was polished enough to look like a developer spent days on it. One of my favorite things is that Framer's AI handles translations with a single click. So your site can be up and running in multiple languages almost instantly. And with real-time collaboration, your whole team can jump in and work together. No issues with versions or miscommunication. Whether you're starting from scratch or using one of their templates, Framer lets you focus on design while handling the technical side for you. Animations, responsive layouts, search optimization, and all the things that matter.

21:06Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at framer.com and use code MS to get your first month of pro on the house. That's Framer.com, promo code MS. Framer.com, promo code MS. Rules and restrictions may apply. Yeah, I think maybe we can work towards talking about the old stuff that still works really well today, even though we're talking about the future of marketing, right? So what's old is kind of becomes new. And then I think we can end it with talking about the new stuff that we're excited about. So maybe I'll kick it off with some of the old stuff that Neil and I have been doing here.

21:40So what we really like, So we really like events. Neil and I are both going to Germany to speak at a conference called This Is Marketing, leaving this Saturday or you're leaving Sunday, I guess. But within that event, what are we doing? So we're speaking at the event. The event organizers were gracious enough to host a private dinner for us as well with other entrepreneurs in the area. That's super high value as well. yeah so one of the big things that we do with events is if you're gonna if you're going to event there's usually a lot of people that are there from corporations of all sizes so one thing that we tend to do is we tend to invite people for either private events or we tend to invite people for our own quote-unquote session that may be hosted in a room at the event or a separate place and we'll give a talk and a speech and we found that to generate a lot of revenue and separately we'll do our own events excluding you know events like hubspot or whatever maybe where we're running our own thing we're reaching out to our network to people on linkedin inviting them and these are quote-unquote ideal customers and they're in roles where they would be decision makers we found this to help us generate quite a bit of roi over time because you're closing quite a few deals from it.

22:57We don't close deals right away. It takes us a year to two years to see ROI from any events that we host on our own. I want to take a second to tell you about my podcast co-host agency. So NP Digital, so Neil Patel Digital, what they do is they do a whole host of marketing services and they are global. They're worldwide. They have SMB services as well. They have mid-market to enterprise services as well. They cover the entire gamut. So you can Just go to mpdigital.com to learn more about it. And now back to the episode. I think the other stuff too that we still, what's old is still new today is, you know, Reddit has been around for a while.

23:34Quora has been around for a while, but communities have gotten a bump and Google's kind of adjusted a little bit, but still you cannot doubt that Reddit's added about 700 million in monthly organic visitors. And that's a lot, right? So in a world where we're going to see a lot more AI content production, that this is why Quora and Reddit are taking off. But, you know, there's also other communities out there that you can make yourself. You can use apps out there called School, S-K-O-O-L, or Circle would be another one. And then for Circle, for example, I know you can put it on a subdomain so you can get some SEO benefit.

24:04And so I think communities to me are interesting because not only are you going to gain SEO traffic from it, but you're also going to build a retention mechanism in for your business, right? Because people ultimately, they might buy from you, but they stay for the community, right? And so community could be in person like the events that we just talked about, or it could be online too. Or ideally, you're doing online first, and then you're bringing them to in-person, right? So Neil and I, we have this agency group called the Agency Owners Association. And there's an online component, but we're adding an in-person component because Neil and I basically live half a mile away.