Pay per Task: Intercom & Zapier, a Nifty SEO Trick That Will Increase Your Traffic for Free, New Data: Here’s What You Should Change in Your B2B SEO Strategy

0:00All right. So today we're going to talk about paper tasks. I'm going to start off with that. So paper tasks, you know what that means, Neil? No, like a TaskRabbit and you're paying someone to do something for you? Kind of like that. But now think of that for software. I think this is where software is going to go. And I think this is where you might convert Ubersuggest and answer to public. I think you might start doing this. So when you think about Intercom, for example, they would charge you. Intercom is like a chat customer service tool that you have like a little box that pops up. You can ask questions and stuff.

0:33And salespeople can ask you questions through it as well. and they would charge like a per user fee, maybe like 10, 15,$20 a month or whatever. And it starts to get really expensive. If you have like a thousand people at your company using it, like it starts to get expensive, right? What they're doing now, what Intercom is doing is they are charging you on a pay per task model, meaning that if they resolve a customer ticket for you, they'll charge you 99 cents. Are they using humans or are they using AI? AI, yeah. And Zapier is starting to do that now too. So let me read this off to you for Zapier.

1:03This tweet comes from Greg Eisenberg, who's a friend. So Zapier, by the way, is a$5 billion company. And that's a whole other story we should talk about. They probably were a$5 billion company. Yeah, you get what I mean. So they're moving to a situation where, so two weeks, Intercom moved on from one of their products to paper resolution. So paper tasks, basically, instead of a monthly subscription. This new model makes sense to me, and AI agents are accelerating this. Not every software business is ready to charge monthly. And then what Zapier is doing now, they're saying, hey, we've heard you loud and clear.

1:36Our plans aren't working for your needs. Starting today, we're excited to share three big changes to help you get the most out of Zapier. Most Zaps, so more Zaps, you're going to get more Zaps. Okay, that's fine. More flexible, pay per task billing when you go above your plan's limit for all plans. Now, if you go over your plan's task limit, you can pay as you go for additional tasks used. More valuable, that's a whole other feature thing. So I think this will not maybe replace SaaS completely, but I think we're going to see a lot more people doing this. Well, it's more aligned. You're paying for some sort of benefit.

2:08No one likes paying for just using the same software, and it's just connecting two things. Like, oh, your Salesforce now talks to your MailChimp or whatever it may be. Well, cool. All right, you guys were charging me$200 for that connection. Now there's another software competitor that just came out and was charging me$50 for the connection. Next thing you know, there's someone that builds it in India that's going to charge me$10 for that. So we talked about this, right? Chamath tweeted the other day, hey, we are, did you see this tweet? He's building an incubator, that one? Yeah, go for it. Yeah, what is it called?

2:3890-80 or 80-90? 80, I don't know, 80-20 or whatever. But basically he's like, hey, we're going to help you build SaaS products and we're going to use offshore talent to do it and we're going to reduce costs by 90 % or something. Well, let's see, I'm actually pulling up the tweet. So he tweets quite a bit. I'm starting an incubator. funded entirely by me. It's called 8090. Tell us what enterprise software you use and my team and I will build you an 80 % feature complete version at a 90 % discount. We're using AI and off-trolling to make this happen. Yeah, so that's the one. I think we kind of briefly touched upon this on the phone.

3:14It's like the software gross margins of 80, 90 % or so, that's probably going to start to get whittled away with all the AI co-pilots and all this stuff. And that's why Chamath's doing this too because I remember they would talk about it with the all-in people about how software is going to come down quite a bit now. And now AI is going to help you build a totally feature-complete thing, and you don't need to charge that much. Yeah, most people don't know this. He helped with Tinder or building of Tinder or something like that. It was something. I'm actually Googling right now. Sells Tinder shares?

3:50Maybe I got this wrong, but I'm pretty sure. I don't remember this. Chamath Pepetila had accumulated Tinder shares via his investment in Extreme Labs acquired by Pivotal. So yeah, he had Tinder shares and I don't know what it was for. I thought it was because he helped build it, but maybe I'm wrong there. Yeah. Look, I think this all like, okay, so how does this apply for marketing and business? I think one, this AI transformation is very real and that applies to business. It applies to marketing as well. So everything you've been used to doing, it's going to change a lot. And I'm in a situation, I don't know how you think about this, Neil.

4:21It's like the companies of the future, you might not need to have that many people necessarily. You might, instead of having 100 people, it's probably 10 that are super AI enhanced. Yeah. And that's what it is, right? And then we're just going to get a lot more efficient. And what my uncle told me, unfortunately, he's like, hey, most human beings are useless, Eric. And I'm like, wow. He's like, yeah, most people in the future aren't going to need to work. You don't need too many Steve Jobs and Elon Musk in the world. And he's probably worth like$400 million or$500 million. And he's just like, yeah, you just don't need that money.

4:50Let me guess, real estate? Yes. Yeah. So anyway. I know what you're talking about. Yeah. And going back to Chamath really quickly, it was from his investment in Extreme Labs because of the mobile development group and the work that they've done for Tinder in exchange for equity. So they did build quite a bit of Tinder for equity. I think we're going to see a lot of these, like a lot of shops. And by the way, for us, we have ad agencies. It's like, you know, how does this apply to us? So I think the key takeaway here is just to get you to think about how this might affect you in the future because I don't think enough people are taking this seriously.

5:22But, dude, you know what's funny? AI is changing so many things so fast, including what people are willing to pay for or this pay-per-task. The thing I fear with AI, the economy revolves around people spending money. So if AI replaces a lot of jobs, what's going to happen to the spending power for a lot of the people out there? They're not going to have the money to spend. What's going to happen to the revenue and business? We should talk about this. it's one big cycle so this is this is philosophical right but i do believe that most people are going to have universal basic income and most people are going to spend all that money on probably creative endeavors and they're going to be more entrepreneurial they want to you know they're going to realize most people are going to realize if they all have universal basic income that maybe sitting on the beach is not as cool as it seems to be and maybe it's a good job it's a good idea to be productive yep so then that the money goes there yes but no you know at the end of the day I don't see people getting universal income.

6:17Like where are they going to get that from? The government? I'm printing money. That's what I'm doing. I thought you were doing like a camera reel. Have you seen the meme with Jerome Powell where he's just like, money's just coming out. It's like, yeah. I don't see it. The government already has tons of issues and so much debt, and we don't have enough cash. Do you see how the balance sheet just keeps growing? Yeah. It just doesn't matter. one day I believe and I'm not an economist but one day it has to stop and the question is when does it stop and who does it stop with yeah I mean we'll see I think our generation may be screwed I think my children's generation is definitely screwed yeah that's why you gotta do well so you can leave your kids some money you know or you do well donate it and tell your kids I gave you all the tools to succeed figure it out on your own is that what you're doing yes okay no i really am the only time i would give them money is if my daughter battered her eyes and said daddy can i live right next door to you i'm like okay honey you can live next door to me don't anyway so that's that's what i got on my side there um the next thing that i think we should talk about is you know because we're already on the topic of ai you have this nifty seo trick that'll increase your traffic for free.

7:40Okay, so this one's very simple, everyone. So this is, you can do it for free. It'll take you about five minutes or so. And all you have to do, Neil, you probably know about this, but go to your search console. So everyone go to Google Search Console. Everyone can do this if you have a website. Go to your performance page. I'm gonna slow down my talking a little bit. So go to Search Console, go to your performance page. Are you doing that right now? No. Oh, okay. And then sort the queries tab by impression. So what you're doing is you're looking at the, you're trying to sort like the different keywords that you're ranking for by impressions, right?

8:13Top to bottom. And then in the top 20, find a top five. So basically the top five keywords with a click-through rate of less than 50%. And by the way, this tweet's from John Rush. This is just something that's a good reminder. But now what you do is you insert those keywords and then put them into your homepage hero and your H1 and H2 and meta tags. What happens there is those pages increase their traffic. No, that's not bad. Pretty simple. And speaking of SEO, I want to talk about, you know, the shift we're seeing in B2B SEO. I know a lot of you guys have B2C sites. I should post something about B2C SEO.

8:50So 2023 is done. And I thought it'd be fun to look at my data for my ad agency NP Digital and what's drove us traffic and what's drove us revenue. So keep in mind, we rank in decent positions for keywords like SEO, online marketing, digital marketing, the list goes on and on. And no matter what country you work with us in, we don't really have services lower than five figures a year, and it can easily climb into seven or eight figures a year. So where does most of our revenue come from, at least from an SEO perspective? Well, what we wanted to first do before we get there was to look at what keywords drove our organic search traffic.

9:25So when we look at keywords by keyword length, one to two word phrases drove 18.43 % of organic traffic. Three to six word phrases drove 57.31 % of our traffic. Seven words or more drove 24.26 % of our traffic. Now we wanted to see what keywords drove qualified leads. Not leads, but qualified leads. There's a lot of people that will fill in the lead form like, screw off, don't like you, or my website is ibm.com. Or when the person is coming from a random location, it's not ibm.com, and they say, my budget's$1 a month. So when we're looking at qualified leads, one to two-word phrases drove 12.55 % of our leads, even though it drove 18.43 % of traffic.

10:17Three to six words drove 59.32 % of our qualified leads, even though it drove 57.31 % of our traffic. And seven words or more keywords drove 28.13 % of our qualified leads, even though it drove 24.26 % of our traffic. So pretty much three to six word keywords generate most our qualified leads, which makes sense because that's where we get most organic traffic. So then we wanted to dive in what keywords are driving most our revenue. Shockingly, one to two word phrases, 4.76%. That's tiny compared to it driving 12.55 % of our qualified leads. Three to six word phrases drove 46.29 % of our revenue when it drove 59.32 % of our qualified leads.

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13:26It's not going to convert, right? But if you search for buy cheap basketball shoes in China, I just added the last part because I'm Chinese. But you get my point. It's like that's going to convert a lot higher. And then we compare that data to 2022. So when we look at 2022, 2022 used to be 6.08 % of our revenue came from one to two words. 2023 was 4.76%. And this, again, is just for SEO traffic. For three to six word phrases, in 2022, it was 62.71%. 2023 was 46.29%, so it went down. But the big change from 2022 to 2023 was in 2022, we saw 31.21 % of our revenue come from seven words or more keywords, keywords that are seven words or longer.

14:14And in 2023, it went from 31.21 % to 48.95%. That was a big increase. So what is the key takeaway for people here? I think it's... Go ahead. People are getting very specific with their search queries. I think a lot of this has to do with AI and them getting used to being able to type in longer things and expecting the answer. Oh, you think they're using the autocomplete too? I don't know if they're using autocomplete because we've done a lot of tests on this. Autocomplete doesn't give you tons of 10-word phrases or anything like that. Okay. I think what's happening is they're getting really specific with their needs and they know what they're looking for.

14:51And they're doing a lot of… Quick research. Yes, for the one, two word phrases and even three to six word phrases, they're doing a lot of research from that. Once they figure out what they're looking for, they're starting to use really long tail search queries to get the exact thing that they're looking for. And if your website answers it, kind of like Quora, you know how they do the Q &A and they get really specific? It's the same thing. If you answer within your text, I think it drives the most amount of leads. And we're seeing this trend, not just with our website, but with a lot of other B2B websites.

15:20Now, I don't have data on like 10 ,000 B2B enterprise sites or anything like that to make something conclusive, but this is what we're seeing. Here's what we're going to try for this video. We're going to give you$100. We're going to pick one person,$100. And whoever types, marketing is cool in addition to the takeaway that you got in the YouTube comments. Or you can write this as a review. Just make sure you subscribe to us on Apple. Either or, we're going to award$100 randomly on this one. So someone go do it and we'll do that. Neil's looking at me like, what, are you crazy? Why are you giving me$100 away, dude?

15:54I'm okay with it. But make sure you give us a five-star review too. Yeah, that's us begging for the five-star review. So that is it for today and we'll see you tomorrow.