Why Neil is Re-thinking His Conference Strategy, Revamping Our Content Structure, Top VC's Declare SEO Dead, and an SEO 2025 Update

0:00I'm thinking about traveling all over again. why yeah you you I you know what's weird I could feel it that you wanted to start traveling again the other I think I was thinking about a two nights ago I was like it feels like Niels wants to travel again and I don't know why I felt that I've been really happy being at home for two months it's actually been a little bit more than two months um I traveled to Phoenix last week for call it less than 24 hours. I'll travel to Orlando this week for call it 24 hours. And it's good to get on the road, but the real reason I'm thinking about it, when I look at my competition, one of the key differentiators for us in them is I'm able to get on massive stages and push our brand out there to a lot of people in the room that are our ideal prospect.

0:54It won't generate revenue right now, but a year or two later, it generates a lot of demand. And I was like, you know what? Why not keep pushing hard on this as long as I can? Because what's if I didn't have this edge? Like I'm taking it for granted. Who says that people are going to keep inviting me if I stop speaking? And I'm not saying that I'm going to accept as many speaking gigs as I did last year. I don't think I'll do that. I'm just being picky, and I'm just trying to pick the big stages. Like there's some events that are easy for me to speak at. Like HubSpot, we have a great relationship with them, you do as well, where I can speak and I don't know how many people will be in the audience, call it 5 ,000 people.

1:37I'm making up a number, but I'm going to guess around 5 ,000. I think that's somewhat accurate. Or in Brazil, I can speak at an event in Sao Paulo where, again, at least 4 ,000 to 7 ,000 people will be in the audience just hearing me speak. I have one in Italy right now, similar size. that'll hear me speak. I don't look at how many people attend the event because some of these events will have 60 ,000 people. The key is how many people are going to hear you speak. Yeah, how many attendees for your webinar. Yes. And how many are attending that are ideally marketers or work for big corporations that you want to hear your spiel because eventually they can include us in RFP.

2:14Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, plus I also think you like traveling too. I think I do too. Yeah, I do enjoy it. I mean, just even that trip to Dubai too, like it's just, it's fun and it's short, but it's fun. I, you know what? I actually know a lot of people or a handful of people that, that go around speaking or doing things, but they end up bringing their kids with them. So they get to experience these things. So they keep building the relationship and the kids get to see other things that are, because you travel to a lot of interesting places. Like when you, when we get to speak internationally, you go to Italy or if I speak in Japan or something like that, those are nice experiences that you can also create with your family.

2:52too yeah but i i'm starting to do ones with my family this year that are like las vegas because i can just put them in a car and drive to las vegas i'm still excluding them from the ones that are international because it's just too far for a flight at three and five i don't know what they're going to be like on a plane okay and i just don't want to deal with it i love them to death i just don't know how it's going to be traveling can't you just try flying them a short distance to see how they'll be on a plane like four hours five hours orlando disney world yeah they've been to disney world okay um but yeah five hours is a long time to try i want to try it first on like a hour flight okay yeah so you try vegas first and which is 30 minutes i'm gonna drive why not just try to fly uh we need a car boomer there this is like experimenting and you run bigger and bigger experiments yeah but like phoenix or something like that i'll pick short flights to get them to go on their first trip and then i'll extend the flight length i think dude okay think about this remember when we went to frankfurt imagine they were like six seven eight years old or so you brought them and then maybe at the end of the trip that after the talks and all that you just plan something out for them and you spend another two three days and you just do that for every every trip i think that's amazing well i did that i took them from vegas to orlando and I was there for an event or technically I had to go to Miami but I went to Orlando first, Disney World then we went to Orlando then we all flew back to Las Vegas Oh, that's great But I want to try an hour flight first So what were you going to decrease your days to?

4:33Because last year I decreased my travel to 87 days You were at 200 So what is it going to be now? Back to 200? No, that's too many I would do half the year Okay Well, half the year is still 150 It's more than 150 oh yeah 360 180 yeah that's the same thing 180 max i'm gonna try to see if i can do so you're gonna decrease by 10 percent i'm gonna realistically try to see if i can do like 120 130 days yeah 120 130 is doable it's still a lot though i me at 87 last year i was pretty happy yeah my thing is 130 my thing is it's not about the number of trips it's the number of days yeah so it's about being efficient and getting them back to back where i'm only at places for one day or less than 24 hours then i don't mind because it's quick because like even when i went to hong kong the last time i went i flew there from monday around 10 a.m was my flight time i landed there tuesday night spoke to my meetings on wednesday morning and i flew back on wednesday and i landed back on wednesday because of the time change so it wasn't bad dude those are so draining i don't mind that i stack them all together it's so draining but um okay well it's good you're back to speaking.

5:42I'm going to continue to hold mine around the same. We'll see what happens. Yeah. And yeah, we'll go from there. Yeah. It'll be interesting on what, what happens. And I think the big thing that's changed for me is I've gotten in a rhythm where content minus the blog where I can pretty much do it really efficient and keep my traveling. I'll tackle the blog in the next 30 days and then it'll be back to normal. You'll tackle the blog in the next 30 days and it'll be back to normal revamping the whole blog how everything from the content deleting posts to the quality the topics that we're picking focusing more on large enterprises um the structure of the blog the design of the blog uh recruiting writers to help out and then once i have the system and process in place it'll take a long time to fix to get it to where i want but once i've figure it all out in less than 30-ish days, then I'm good to go.

6:39Dude, let's talk about this. Let's talk about how we're revamping our content. By the way, we've kind of changed our style. It's a lot more conversational. But you and I are both a lot more involved in our internal marketing now because a lot more because I'm just like, fuck it. Right. And like, there's a certain way I want it done. There's a certain way you want it. What ends up happening with Eric and I to give everyone context. We do it our way, then we typically hand it off to people, and they usually can maintain the quote-unquote our way of doing it, but things change, and people keep improving quality.

7:14So then Eric and I get pissed that our quality isn't to quote-unquote the new standard, and we're just like, no, no, no, we don't want this and that, and then our team will come up with ideas to get it back to quote-unquote other people's standards, but him and I don't like doing it to other people's standards. We want to one-up people, do it even better. So then we had to get re-involved in the whole process. And then once we get it going, we then get away from it, let other people maintain it. Yeah. Whole cycle repeats and we go and focus on something else. It drives people nuts. And this is unfortunately the way we're, and this is, this is probably more of an argument that's on, if you want the quality to stay high, you have to be involved and you got to look at everything as a, as a thermometer.

7:52So again, Toby from Shopify to CEO likes to say that entrepreneurs are, we increase the heat in the room, right? But usually when it's room temperature, people are usually at room temperature because they like to just adapt to whatever the room temperature is. They're not going to increase the heat. Our job is to increase the heat, but to keep the heat up is very difficult. And so look, you're revamping your blog. The way we're revamping stuff is we are revamping how we do paid media internally and it's actually working really well. Paid media for yourself or your customers? For ourselves, yeah.

8:25So we have a general awareness campaign where we have 14 to 16 ads and we'll take high performing like reels from this, for example, and then we'll rotate them and we'll have ads driving them to either single grain or carrot. And then we also run carrot ads for carrot, too. And that actually has led to three closed deals already. That's awesome. And so we're doing that. And plus, we're starting to pay for email subs again. And then we're running like Facebook. Yeah, because we don't get as much nearly as much traffic as Neil does. So Neil goes SEO, build email list. We have to use paid because we don't have, we get good traffic from SEO, but not nearly as much as you.

9:01So that's that. And then on the SEO side, we're revamping heavily what we're doing with SEO. We just haven't had a lot of priority on it. And I'm like, dude, like I'm known for SEO. Like I'm like, guys, we've got to prioritize this. So there's a lot of stuff going on with, oh, we actually need to delete a lot of content. Oh, we actually need to create a lot of localized pages. Okay, there's actually a lot of homepage stuff or localized stuff that we haven't done yet, right? And that's that. So that's how we're going about revamping. And the other thing I'll say, one final thing, and I'll pass it back to you, is I look at my IG Reels.

9:37I'm like, man, a lot of these suck. And the reason is the problem with snipping from a podcast like this is you and I are having a conversation right now. We're not starting with a story. We're not necessarily hooking people in. We're dropping them into a conversation where they have no context at all. and so you wonder why no wonder why it doesn't perform as well have you noticed i don't use any of the podcast stuff for no you don't because it doesn't perform and i'm like guys like we can do as much filler as possible but what i'm going to do is i that um that that studio you record in for your your new long forms that's in century city huh no where's it hollywood it's in hollywood okay well i need the info from you after because i'm just like i'm just gonna go into the studio because no and i we used to record for like three four hours in the downtown la office right was it three, four hours a pop or two hours a pop to two hours a pop.

10:20Yeah. You do like what? Two hours a pop, four hours a pop. Uh, for me to do four long form videos in 12 shorts, it takes literally exactly two hours. It's a little bit under, look at that. That's all I want to do. Right. And it's, um, people can tell what, like when I talk about stories or when I, even if it's crappy quality, it performs so well. Yes. Yeah. So when I first started my business, the overwhelm was real. I If only I had Shopify from the start to handle all the behind the scenes work. Shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally from huge names like Mattel and Gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started.

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13:11I listened to that piece because someone sent it to me. And I said, I don't know where they're getting their data from, but I have data that is very different than what they're showing. Not because I'm in SEO. I just have more data points than them. They took some of the SEER data and they said, yeah, now publicly traded companies are reporting sometimes like 20%, 40%. I'm paraphrasing here. Their SEO traffic is down and it's just crushing their business. and i was just like yes for some people it is down 20 40 a lot of them are in categories like health but uh like ex web md i don't know what web md's traffic ads but i'm assuming that hit pretty hard from the ai overviews but there's a lot of categories where we're seeing companies still do extremely well in traffic and the traffic that they're getting even if it's summer down or summer up um the conversions are still good and the reason i say that is for some of the people that we work with, they're in categories that got more affected by AI overviews, but a lot of those visitors were never converting into revenue.

14:09One customer specifically that I saw AI overviews impacted their traffic negative 13, 14%. No joke, nothing really changed in revenue from SEO. The conversion rate from SEO went up, but it was a lot of the keywords that they were getting weren't converting, but they're not getting as much brand awareness, quote unquote. Yeah, so let me set some context around this one too. So Bill Gurley, Brad Gerstner, they're very successful venture capitalists. Brad Gerstner actually started with$3 million in 2008, I believe, and built up to what he has now. They're investors in OpenAI. Bill Gurley famously pushed Travis out of Uber.

14:46He's the one that started that. He also gave Travis his money early on for Uber as well. Yeah, so they're both very – I love what they say. And to me, they're kind of like the new All In podcast. When All In first started, they just focused on their investments and talked about technology. Now All In's a little more political. All In's a lot more political. It basically is politics now. But Bill Gurley and Brett, so Bill said this. He's like, you know, SEO, he's got a really, really deep voice. So, you know, SEO is really fucking dead now. And if you didn't think it was dead, it's really fucking dead now.

15:19Pardon my language. But so anyway, what they're saying is basically what we've been saying. SEO as we know it is dead. And so you can't just optimize for the same blue links anymore. AI overviews are taking more real estate and all that. But it's no different than what we've been saying. Some people like to call it omni-SEO. We call it search everywhere optimization. It's just that behavior has changed and you need to adapt to it. And that's what we really mean. I think that's what these people are trying to say. When they say SEO is really dead, it's not dead. It's just, it's changed. It's evolved and changed.

15:50And now when we talk to companies, they want to optimize for Google, Instagram, Pinterest, chat GPT, perplexity, and all the solutions out there. And when we're running campaigns where you're doing search everywhere optimization, we're seeing really good growth in numbers, specifically on social, because not enough people optimize for social, corporations yet. Some of them are catching onto it. And most people, the data will show you don't use social to search, but the younger generation does. And depending on the data or the survey data you're looking at, A lot of people don't have the younger audience in their pool when they're serving, but it is really a lot of those Gen Zers who are using social to perform searches.

16:31Yeah. And the cool thing about Search Everywhere Optimization, if you're an agency and you sell this stuff, is you get to bundle a lot of these services together and your LTVs go higher. And people like it when you say it, their eyes pop up. Oh, that's different. Right? Yes. So you better figure out if you sell SEO, you're going to have to diversify. It can't just be you're doing outreach and you're producing content. and this form of seo has been going on for a while well over a year it's been a few years uh but more and more focus on it in the last 12 months i would say and like at our agency np digital we've not seen good results but we have a lot of case studies on search everywhere optimization it just works it's just like oh you're going to ignore instagram and tiktok when they're you know have so many users within the united states or even globally you just can't ignore them yep all right you want to talk about similar webs speaking of seo similar web state of seo for 2025 yeah so eleda solis uh tweeted this one by the way i've see a lot of these people that tweet this stuff like i've actually met and hung out with eleda when i spoke at a conference in spain right so this is a good reason to speak at these things because you throw dinners again becoming a node becoming a connector um goes a long way so um eleda tweeted it says she says similar web has just released its 2025 SEO benchmarking report across the top verticals, providing insights into organic traffic and website performance using similar web data, analyzing US data from January to November 2024 for the top 1000 websites in a given industry.

18:00So the high level, I'm just going to give three bullet points here. So this is on the e-commerce data. We see a winner takes all environment as giants get approximately 900 times more traffic than emerging players and win on engagement metrics across the board. Number two, a big success story in the US market from 2024 was Chinese brand Timu, increasing its organic traffic by 39 % and achieving strong engagement, positioning itself as a brand to watch in 2025. Number three, last one, SEOs in the e-commerce space need to track and shift focus to SERP features, shopping results, and even AI overviews, which are steadily increasing.

18:38And you can see, I'm just looking at this graph. I'm only going to name one row here so the giants um are averaging 37 million visitors per month challengers these are top 11 to 100 um i just gave you the top 1 to 10 um challengers 11 to 100 813k visitors per month average and then emerging players from 100 to top 1000 43 000 average monthly visits so they're talking about people who rank in the top 10 versus people who rank outside of top 10 correct and this is just for the top thousand websites correct yeah so um again the the whole premise of this is winner takes all yeah but that's been seo for a long time and it's becoming more and more winner takes all over the last four or five years the good thing is with search everywhere if we're talking about like the other channels like instagram for example or tiktok it's not winner takes all it's it's who who actually has the best video or the most engaging video yeah but it's similar because you start ranking at the top when people are searching yes for those terms yes um But I think in terms of just, I'm talking about just engagement on the videos.

19:40Yeah. But the big difference is with social media, and Eric is right on this, when someone types in a search term on social media from what we're seeing, they will go through a lot more content while on Google, they'll perform a search and they'll go to one or two results. And the data is quite interesting on how many more pieces of content someone will look at, like on an Instagram or a TikTok. Yep. When performing a search. Yep. Alright guys, so that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe and we will catch you tomorrow.