What's the future of SEO looking like, SEO as we know it is dead, how influencer marketing is moving into a more rigorous, metrics-driven era, and 100% of marketing and sales execs who post on LinkedIn… fail?

0:00I guess we can predict the future of SEO here. Do you want to add anything to this? No, but I think when it comes to the future of SEO, if you think about it right now, most people just optimize for Google. They think SEO equals Google rankings. I think the future of SEO is going to be Google rankings, TikTok rankings, Instagram rankings, YouTube rankings, search GPT, and the list continues on and on. And a great example of this is we talked to so many corporations that create social content for Instagram or TikTok or YouTube. But yet they don't really optimize for their rankings on these platforms.

0:35So it was like, oh yeah, we got a lot of comments and views, but you could continue. You can actually rank on these platforms. When you type people type something in, they can recommend your videos or your content, and you can keep getting more views. And a lot of just businesses forget that aspect. They're like, oh, SEO is just for Google. Well, no, if you're creating content on other platforms, you should optimize for them to continually get engagement and views versus just one off. Yep. So here's what I think the future of SEO is going to look like. First and foremost, it's not just Google anymore.

1:06Actually, when I was traveling, my travel buddy, we'll just call it the travel buddy, the way she behaved was she searched for things on TikTok. So TikTok search, that's one. Amazon search for shopping. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. Let's also not forget that these LLMs, like an open AI, they use RAC, retrieval augmented generation, right? And they pull from search engines for that data. So basically, these LLMs are building on top of search engines, like a Google, for example, and they're working in tandem. So I don't think these LLMs are going to replace Google necessarily, but that's what the future of SEO is going to look like.

1:47And by the way, it's getting harder. You get these AI overview results, you get these local packs, You get these other, everything's being pushed down by the ads as well. So SEO is just getting tougher overall. And also when we think about attention, attention's kind of fading away from like, Google's still getting a lot of search, but the attention's still spread out now amongst all these different social platforms. So I think, Neil, we've talked about this, that the future of SEO is you have to, we've talked about going omni-channel. We talked about having to diversify because, you know, we used to be one trick ponies.

2:20We used to be all in on SEO. but over the years we're just like the attention marketing is is marketing 101 is you're bringing people to the point of sale well if you're trying to find those people to bring them to the point of sale you have to understand where they're hanging out they're not just hanging out on google anymore no dude even podcasting we've been doing this podcast for what seven plus years now i think eight eight years oh my god it's been a long time i used to live in the mandarin when we did this waldorf now yeah dude that's the long heat we used to turn off the ac yeah speaking of ac my ac doesn't work here i stayed at your place for like a week yeah yeah wait your ac AC doesn't work here?

2:52Dude, they've been having issues at this Mandarin for like a week. I always have bad luck at mandarins with AC. Wow. But I mean, look, by the way, we've been doing this consistently for eight years. I mean, we're in our early 30s when we first started doing this. And you just have to stay consistent. By the way, if the attention is there, you stay consistent with it no matter what. That's the reason we're still here. Yes. And if you look at what Eric and I are doing, we adapt to the channels that we see people are on and we optimize for them because that's what we know the attention is. But there's one caveat that most people get wrong.

3:25What Eric and I do is we optimize for the channels once they start becoming popular. We don't go after the new and up and coming and be like, oh my God, like I think one was called Be Real or something like that. I made that mistake with Clubhouse, remember? I tried to drive you onto Clubhouse. Yeah. And same with, what was the other one? You didn't get into that one, but, um, NorGuard did it with, uh, uh, AirChat. AirChat. Yeah. Neither of us really used it. And what you want to do is you want to focus on the ones that you know are popular enough and they're getting enough traction where you know they're not going to die.

3:57A great example of this is threads. Threads cost, I think, 200 million monthly active users. Right? Meta made an announcement on that. It's big enough where it's not going to die. If you're already creating content, it doesn't take much more to post it on threads and you should. Just port it over. Yeah, just port it over. Copy and paste. You don't have to do much more than that. Yeah. By the way, you do that for LinkedIn as well. It's not like you're natively posting to LinkedIn. Yeah, and it works well. It works well. Do you do the same thing? You're just copying and pasting? Totally, yeah. I just found it like, I used to dedicate like an hour to writing, taking our shorts and writing like a caption for them because I found that the copy that my team was writing wasn't, it didn't feel like it was in my voice, but now I'm just like, whatever.

4:37So. Dude, sometimes, same thing with me. Some of my team write emails and I'm like, man, this email isn't as good enough. I can make it better. And then when you look at the ROI of massaging the email, just a little bit, it's not really there to say, okay, you're better off buying more companies. Yes. Yeah. I got to take a minute to tell you about the agency owners association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie and we asked her, what do you like most about the group?

5:07She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes. We share leads in this group as well. This one from Alian, he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need and the group responds. Great experience members, getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io slash agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created. And our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future.

5:40So again, marketingschool.io slash agency, and we'll see you inside. Can we just talk about how SEO as we know it is dead and here's what the future looks like? Yes. Okay. And then we'll move over to yours. So this tweet from Charles SEO says, If you're an SEO consultant, agency, freelancer, then it's time to admit that our entire industry doesn't revolve around Google anymore. Which I wanted to triple down on what we're talking about. So he's basically saying the future of SEO is becoming a jack-of-all-trades, quickly adapting to where the audience is, and then quickly gaining market share. Most of these platforms take considerably less time to see success than Google too.

6:14The SEO industry is only dead if your audience isn't using the only search engine you can optimize for. So again, we both started with Google, okay? Or we were mainly focused on Google, but now we've learned these other channels like YouTube. Oh, on YouTube, you got to learn good headlines. You got to learn good packaging. You got to learn how to retain them within the first 30 seconds. So that's a game in itself. Okay, well, what do you have to do with TikTok, with Reels? Oh, you got to have a really good hook and you got to hold, you got to make sure they don't swipe away, right? you got to make sure you have a good title thumbnail there there's just all these games you have to understand how to play and you can't keep playing the same game over and over especially when that game is dying we're not saying don't do Google SEO but SEO is much more than that now and I just wanted to reinforce that piece because SEO as we know it is dead like the old SEO you got to evolve you got to evolve and we're seeing companies slowly start evolving at our agency NP Digital we're getting more and more people each and every single week saying, hey, can you help us optimize our content for TikTok, Instagram?

7:11And a year to two years ago, that would rarely ever come in a conversation. But by the way, they ask you for like, when they reach out to us, it's like, oh, we need help with Reddit marketing. We need help with WhatsApp marketing. It's like, yeah, it's going further and further out. Go ahead. And there was an article on Adweek, you know, Kate Spade and a few others were talking about it in which there are more and more companies are aligning branding and performance. I had a similar conversation about this earlier. earlier today and we were talking about Nike and you and I discussed Nike on our last podcast episode in which Nike is bringing back the old CMO.

7:46Phil Knight is the CEO now of Nike and they're going back to their roots of branding. If you look at a lot of companies, what they're really doing, whether they want to admit it or not, and where the future of marketing is going, branding and performance are becoming more and more closely aligned. You can do branding campaigns on television and use AppSyc or use services like Tatari to figure out if those campaigns actually drive revenue. Because it can tell you if someone watched that commercial and then they went to your website and purchased because TV now is usually connected by internet, right?

8:19So they're using IP addresses. Similarly, if you do tons of Google ads and people are like, oh, that's performance. Well, if you spend$5 million a month on Google ads and all these people are clicking on your website, you're getting a lot of branding from it. It's not just performance. It is actually growing your brand at the same time. And you're seeing a closer and closer alignment with it, especially with a lot of traditional channels that were typically used just for pure branding, being able to be purchased through digital channels and they're becoming more and more trackable as well. Yeah.

8:52I think before maybe 10 and 15 years ago, we might've said, oh, it's all about performance. But no, the reality is it's or, oh, sorry, it's and. And so you want to have both. And by the way, I think Adidas talked about how performance marketing didn't work. We had that discussion where this Nike executive that was a brand executive was like, performance didn't work. It's not that it doesn't work. You got to do both at the same time. Otherwise, if you don't, it's like cutting one of your legs out. Well, if performance didn't work, Google wouldn't be a trillion or$2 trillion company. And Facebook wouldn't be a trillion plus dollar company either.

9:28Yep. So I think that's what we've got to say about that. All right, quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain. And Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. We'll talk about a couple of new strategies. And if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. So it's building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint.

9:56And we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint. And our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more. And we'll see you inside. You have this one over here about how influencer marketing is moving because we're talking about performance. It's how influencer marketing is moving into a more rigorous metrics driven era.

10:26So there's this article on ad age and what you were seeing before with influencer marketing where people would be like, I need Kim Kardashian or Giselle or Tom Brady or LeBron James or Steph Curry to promote one of my products. Oh, look at this. Christian Ronaldo promoted most popular Instagram user. We paid him$20 million for this campaign. I'm making up a number. And they're like, yeah, I got our brand really out there. look at all these likes and engagements. And what companies are realizing is it's a big, expensive black hole, especially if you just do it with the big influencers. And they're like, wait, we just spent 50, a hundred million dollars on these influencers.

11:06What was ROI? Well, I can tell you the engagement. Well, engagement doesn't mean ROI. You're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars. A lot of big corporations don't care as much, but you want to start ramping up to 10, $20,$30,$50 million, they actually care about ROI. And what they found over time, which you and I have talked about this time and time again, is with influencers, you can actually track the ROI. There's many ways to do it. You can create them unique landing pages. You can have promos with them. You can have them tell their users to swipe up. Let's say if it's a story and go to your site so you can get direct conversions.

11:38Yes, some of the conversions aren't trackable, but with micro influencers, you can get a much better ROI. It's way more work because you have to recruit so many more people, but the ROI is much more positive. And they're like, wait, with smaller influencers, or especially with ones where we can hold them to these numbers and KPIs, not only are we getting the branding exposure, we're actually driving direct sales and it's trackable. And it's easier to not necessarily scale up, but continually do it quarter after quarter, year after year and get the budget because we can prove that it's driving ROI.

12:13That's interesting. Is there any tech that they're using for this? Usually most people just use their own analytics and they're using a lot of campaign variables when they're asking people to promote. That makes sense. That's simple. So standard. Speaking of, because we're an influencer, a lot of it's talking about socials. Did you see this LinkedIn post from Jason Lemkin basically saying that 100 % of marketing and sales executives who post on LinkedIn are failures? No. Okay. 100 %? 100%. So this is interesting. So Jason Lemkin, he founded EchoSign. Can't be 100%. That's too high. I think he's just exaggerating.

12:50He's exaggerating a little bit, but this over here, I'm trying to pull it up. Okay. So I found an almost 100 % correlation between sales execs constantly promoting content on LinkedIn and failing at their role in sales or marketing, at least across all my top investments and companies I work closely with. I know this may be triggering to some and that many folks who produce prolific amounts of content will disagree. I also know we produce a lot of content at SASTUR2, so that's the largest SAS conference in the world. I'm not a sales exec per se, but it's also a fair critique of even me. But here's the thing.

13:22It took me a while to figure it out. Why? Why do folks posting multiple times a day on sales advice on LinkedIn flame out every single time I've seen them join a portfolio company? The reason is it just becomes your core focus past a certain point. Can you be good at sales if it's not your number one focus? Maybe. Can you be great at it? And perhaps more importantly, can you be a truly great VP of sales if something else is your top focus during daytime hours? Maybe, but not in my experience. LinkedIn has turned us into B2B doom scrollers just on LinkedIn, not TikTok or Insta. It is what it is, and it can feel great to build a big audience, but it also is a big investment to scale that.

14:03It can often become your core focus, at least of your passions, of your creativity, of your quiet moments, instead of closing that deal or running that campaign or building that pipeline. So he's actually specifically talking about sales executives. Did you put marketing in here too? No, but he said sales executives. He did. Talking about sales or marketing. Failing at their role in sales or marketing. Yeah, because some sales actually, CROs, marketing reports into them. Yep. I don't know if there's a direct correlation. I know quite a few people who post content on LinkedIn, but they're not posting endlessly each and every single day.

14:41They may just post one thing a day and they're posting it on all the social networks. Yeah, that part's fine. I think the ones that are, you know, you know who does this, who's pretty prolific and it's actually worked out well for him is Adam Robinson from retention. So they've, they've grown their business. I think, I think they're probably, you know, mid 20 million ARR or so, but he's built everything in public and he's done well with that. And then there's this other guy, Chris Walker, Refine Labs. He did pretty well with LinkedIn, but you actually, I think about it now, it's like, there aren't many LinkedIn influencers that I know of that have big businesses.

15:14No, and I don't log into LinkedIn often, so I don't see any of these people. I literally log in once a week just to see if there's any messages that I need to respond to. And that's really it. The Black Friday, Cyber Monday weekend is where systems get stress tested. Traffic surges, inventory moves fast, and every second counts. You need a platform built for the moment. That's Shopify, the commerce platform behind millions of businesses and 10 % of all US e-commerce. With Shopify, you can launch fast with thousands of templates and tools that make your site not just beautiful, but conversion ready.

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16:16Go to shopify.com slash marketing school and make this black Friday one to remember. Jason Lampkin's point here is well taken. It's keep the main thing the main thing. It's going to be hard to crush out your role if your main thing is you're trying to focus on building an audience. More power to you for doing that. Actually, I know someone that does this. They were VP of marketing at a couple of companies and they were posting a lot on LinkedIn. All the time you're spending on doing that, engaging with other people, if you're VP of marketing at my company, I'm scrutinizing you. You know what I mean?

16:48There's a lot of shit to do at my company with marketing and you're spending time marketing yourself. Don't do it on my dime. I think people got it wrong. A lot of people are posting on social because they believe it's going to help them build a bigger brand, which it does. And they believe in turn that's going to help them make more money. The real way to make a lot of money in the corporate world is you do an amazing job and you continually get promoted and you keep working for bigger and bigger companies. That's how you do well. and people are writing this personal brand hype too far, in my opinion.

17:19Even though we do a lot. Not anymore. We used to do, I would say we used to do a lot more and now we're just focused on the business. So I think we're different than like 10 years ago. Yeah, I haven't done much in the last like four years. I really cut back down. But 10 years ago. 10 years I did a lot. And I had this notion that personal brands would be the new big corporations and that hasn't come around really. If you look at Kylie Cosmetics, did she do an amazing job? Yeah, she's done a better job with me than a personal brand. But Kylie Cosmetics is still not Estee Lauder or L 'Oreal. And I'm not trying to knock her.

17:53She's done an amazing job. And again, I, Neil Patel, am no WPP or publicist or Omnicom. You look at the big corporations out there, it has nothing to do with personal brands. Is branding important? Yes. Is a personal brand better to have than not have? Sure. But I think what's more important is building a really amazing corporate brand. yeah and then compounding it for decades yes because wpb publicist omnicom they've been around for a while dude the fortune 25 in the united states guess how old they are on average uh 106 years old yeah you read my tweet i was looking that up i literally put an excel spreadsheet and i was averaging out i was like how many years old are they 106.7 that's what you put yeah right or is 107.6 or 106.7 that's one of the others yeah all right guys so that's it for today's episode, marketingschool.io slash agency.

18:43If you want to grow your agencies faster, that's our little community. In fact, Neil, do you want to come to the next session next week? Are you in town next week? Depending what time I'm driving home, but yeah. All right, we'll figure it out. So this is when Neil and I will jump in every now and then, every month or so, and we'll have guest speakers and all that. And you have an entire community of people all trying to grow. We're talking seven, eight-figure agency owners, six figures as well. And yeah, that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, and subscribe, and we will catch you tomorrow.