Your SEO Is About to Run Itself (Autonomous Engine Optimization)

10:51Neil Patel:get it for your wife no she won't care for this half the time she has a lot of consumer half the time she just uses a handheld she'll be like you use it first and then let me the problem with the

11:01Eric Siu:handheld is i brush really hard right it causes your gums to recede and then you have to like repair it i thought you got that fixed i did get it fixed that was five years ago and then i brush so hard again. If you're building an e-commerce brand, you should check out DTC Pod, hosted by Ramon Berrios and Blaine Bolas on the HubSpot Podcast Network. They speak with founders, marketers, creators, agencies, and platform experts about what it actually takes to grow a direct-to-consumer business, from paid ads and influencer marketing to conversion, email, brand building, and consumer trends. I particularly enjoyed their conversations around scaling a brand without losing what made customers care in the first place.

11:36Eric Siu:Listen to DTC Pod wherever you get your podcasts. It's eating again. All right, so I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital and they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and Answer to Public. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more and we'll see you on the other side.

12:00Neil Patel:Mine tells me don't brush too long. So the problem that I have is you're OCD. They're like, don't keep brushing. They asked me how long I brush. I said on average, I brush four minutes, three times a day. They're like, that's too long. Slow down how, uh, how many minutes you brush four minutes, three times a day. That's crazy. All you need is two minutes. I can not enough time to clean teeth fully in two minutes. That's

12:24Eric Siu:why his teeth are so white. It's almost like you have veneers, but you don't know my teeth are

12:28Neil Patel:crooked. Veneers are really expensive.

12:29Eric Siu:I learned that veneers are like 60 grand and, and, and people get loans for that.

12:33Neil Patel:People get veneers in Asia. Yeah. But like, I don't understand 60 grand. it's really affordable.

12:38Eric Siu:I, well, I've heard here, around here is 60 grand. Yeah,

12:41Neil Patel:because this is Beverly Hills. Yeah. Go somewhere else and it's half the price.

12:45Eric Siu:Yeah, but also that's a permanent thing too.

12:48Neil Patel:Well, veneers, they shave down your teeth and they put fake teeth over it. I'm saying, so it's permanent.

12:54Eric Siu:Yeah, you can't undo that. No, you can't undo it. Yeah. Anyway, I saw something, interesting post from Andrew Werner recently because you and I have been working, you know, I believe that we're putting a little more effort into our YouTube channels, at least I am. So, It's interesting to me. Andrew Warner, Mixergy? Yeah, Mixergy. Because he started a new YouTube channel, right? And so he has 50 ,000 subs, okay? So you have like 1.6 million or something like that. I have about 200 ,000, something like that, right? But the subs don't really matter. Because in the last month, he posted the numbers here.

13:22Eric Siu:He got 937 ,000 views, right? This is, you know, in aggregate. And then 58 ,000 watch time and then 12 ,000 subscribers added, right? I think these are great numbers. Let me guess. He's talking about the next new hot thing, and that's why it's doing well. Exactly. So that's the first takeaway in terms of how he's grown his YouTube, right? Exactly. And we've talked about this on the podcast. Hence the views. If you hit a trending topic, like you're going to win. Like my GrokBot, my last few videos, it's like, it's not bad, right? If I get it over 10 ,000 for a video, I'm like happy with it for long form.

13:48Eric Siu:So my GrokBot for business won 14 ,000 views. The other one's like 12 ,000. So he said five things that helped my new YouTube channel take off. One, info calls. Jesse Pugy taught me how to have frequent informational calls with people who do YouTube well. And one, I learned to turn on ads. That's a big one. So whenever you don't turn on ads, like they're not incentivized to show you as much, okay? And he learned how vidIQ can be a good thought partner, okay? The second piece, so is around data. So choose rich, show me how to look at the minute by minute view data that YouTube gives to help me cut fluff off.

14:21Eric Siu:So you just look at retention metrics, like 30 second retention or three second retention for short form. And then X, he says, X is the best indicator of what the world will talk about. So whenever you see what people are talking about, like open call agents, you attack it quickly, right? If you're attacking trending topics. and then four, you lean into not knowing. So just like learning from other people, bringing them on. And then five, PR, having other people promote it. And he says, you know, what didn't work is talking about YouTube on X. That doesn't work that well. So, but like you and I have been doing YouTube for a little bit and I will just say, I'll share my learnings first and then Neil can share his learnings.

14:53Eric Siu:Yes, if you're talking about trending topics, like whenever I talked about NFTs when they're hot, oh my God, 100 ,000 views, right? If I talk about dating and finance, oh my God, 600 ,000 views, right? Right, and so you can talk about wide-time topics or you can talk about trending topics, but they might not necessarily drive leads for you. Okay, so you have to keep that in mind. And then the second thing I'll say around this is that people are like, oh, okay, the packaging does matter, like your YouTube and your thumbnail and your headline. But honestly, if it's a trending topic, it doesn't even matter.

15:23Eric Siu:You can have the crappiest thumbnail in the world. You're still gonna get like an 8%, 9 % click-through rate.

15:27Neil Patel:Yep. You know, when I look at social media, I bet you Eric actually knows more of my social stats. bless you thank you eric knows more my social about my social stats than i do and i know this because last time we did uh a recording here is the time before you're talking about one of my videos i didn't know the views he knew the views he even told me what my average views are on the other videos and i looked and i'm like oh he's actually right yeah that's how little i check on views i look at all this stuff when it comes to social media i think markers have it off. Thinking about the views is just a waste of time.

16:04We measure internally revenue from all

16:08Neil Patel:the social content we create and what actually drove the revenue. We also look at leads that come from all the social content and how much revenue that generated. So the leads for us is more top of funnel. The bottom of the funnel is revenue. And then we map it out to which topics produce the best results. And we just double down on those. And we don't care if it creates a thousand views or 50 ,000 views. It's all about the end result. And we found our business to grow faster operating that way than just focusing on views. And I think that's a big thing. Even with clients, we try to take them from stop looking at your total search traffic, look how much revenue your search traffic drives.

16:48Neil Patel:And we have case studies, no joke, like real case studies of large companies worth billions of dollars, where we show half the traffic, more revenue, double the traffic less revenue because you got the wrong type of traffic and it's really hard to get marketers to get away from top of funnel traffic and shares and view metrics instead of just looking at things like what is actually producing results because your ceo doesn't care if you have one tenth of search traffic he rather have one tenth of search traffic and double the revenue from that channel especially if it is profitable you know i was interviewing someone

17:27Eric Siu:this week for like an SEO role, right? So I was like, and this guy worked at like Smartsheet, for example, or like Drada, right? Like these are, you know, good enterprise companies, right? And I was like, so what's your biggest SEO win? And he's like, he couldn't give me a number, right? And he's like, oh yeah, you know, the share of voice went up, blah, blah. But like, how did that affect revenue? How did it affect pipeline? Oh, you know, I just don't know. But I'm like, but this is your most impressive SEO win, right? He's like, yeah. I'm like, well, then how do you not know these numbers, right?

17:53Eric Siu:And so, but my point with that conversation is like, This is the majority of most marketers. They think about the vanity metrics up top because it absolves them from the responsibility of having to go deeper in terms of driving pipeline and leads and revenue.

18:06Neil Patel:A new thing that I learned. So all of our executives in all the countries need to know how our ideal customer found us. Example of this is Javi, who runs LATAM for us, got a lead, one of the biggest companies in Latin America. and he asked him how they found us because it's required for internally we track it all. And he said they found us from Claude and then he follows up with, what did you ask? And then it was specifically around paid ads on Google and SEO and Claude recommended us for that as well as if they wanted GEO, we can do all three with them and do it combined and they talked about the efforts and the results because we have some data on this, but it also mentioned other agencies.

18:57Neil Patel:This is helpful for a few reasons. One, you can ask these engines these questions too, and they told us, yeah, we hit up you and the other agencies that recommended for this RFP. So if Eric asked the same question, he may get different results from Claude, but there's usually some overlap. We now kind of have an understanding of the other agencies that are competing with us in the pitch. So that was really helpful. Two, we've noticed a trend from a lot of our executives. Six months ago when they asked, where are you finding us? Most of them would say, ChatGPT or Gemini when it came to these LLMs or AI overviews or Google, right?

19:37Neil Patel:So Google version or ChatGPT. We're starting to see companies are starting to say Claude more frequently. It's not that Claude has a massive market share of people using Claude which is just do searches or ask questions like they do with ChatGPT. It's that a lot of businesses have been buying Claude for their employees and their employees are now also using it to answer questions related to things that are not related to execution. Because a lot of the people that I know who use Claude use it to be more efficient in execution within their job. But because the company's already paying for corporate accounts, people are starting to also use it to search or ask questions even though they also have chat gpt subscriptions so we're starting to see an uptick in b2b i'm sorry not b2b uh we are both you and i are b2b but businesses finding other businesses through uh claude where we did not see that as frequently six months ago we've seen a big change in that for us it changes i mean the it's interesting

20:45Eric Siu:because Claude took the mindshare the last few months or so, and then everyone kind of, you know, moved over to that. And what's to say they won't in the future, right? So it might go back to OpenAI, it might go back and forth. That's just like a side thing. I think when it comes to sales in general, what you mentioned around how did you first find us, right? How did you first hear about us? That should be one of the first sales questions you ask, in fact, because when you're starting, I was like, hey, cool, nice to meet you, right? By the way, how'd you hear about us, right? Oh, cool. Well, you heard from Claude.

21:11Eric Siu:Okay, well, what prompt did you use exactly? What did you see exactly? And then by the way, like you can even ask like, would you like us to do it for you? Right. But by the way, recently, I've been talking to my sales team about this, but I think the way to get larger deals is actually having an extended sales conversations now where you're just being curious about how all their work goes. Like, what are your priorities overall? What are you trying to do exactly? But because if you just try to...

21:37Neil Patel:You're talking about with potential customers and employees. With potential customers.

21:39Eric Siu:Because if you just try to force one solution down, you're actually losing the fact that maybe they're looking for multiple things. If you just try to force the one thing that you know versus having a conversation.

21:51Neil Patel:But you already know this. Dude, you've been doing sales for years. It doesn't matter what you're selling. I know you're selling more AI stuff now. The first thing you would have all your people do, including you, is you hear them out and understand all the problems because then you can discover where you can help them. Versus just going in and selling a solution.

22:07Eric Siu:And that's most salespeople. That's the lesson for everyone here. Most salespeople like to force their solution down. Like, remember you met one of the salespeople from like another agency last year at the, maybe two, yeah, a year ago at the Global Marketing Summit, the YPO one, remember that? That person only knew how to sell her solution and didn't try to learn the other solutions that we had and thus didn't ask good questions and learn the entire problem set. So I think in sales, you have to be more like a doctor. You have to understand all the things that are happening within their business and then have an extended conversation.

22:43Eric Siu:And so I think the patient salesperson actually ends up winning more. Patient conversation, not patient with like moving things forward. It's all problem solution solving, right?

22:52Neil Patel:Exactly. So you're trying to understand someone's problem and then you end up selling them a solution that works for them and is customized for them. But the really cool part about listening is sometimes people tell you that they have a problem A, but really A isn't the problem. the root cause of it is B. If you solve B, you'll solve A as well. If you solve A, it doesn't solve B and it creates other problems that you didn't think about. Right. Um, but so understanding is super important. Like I had someone hit me up the other day. He was like, I want to work with you. And we have, uh, we, we are in the kitchen space.

23:31Neil Patel:so they deal with like moen or cohen i don't know all the faucet names and they work with them to get into other architects and other designers and builders to recommend their products so their job is to get other people who sell the products to recommend them over the competition and he was showing me all the stuff that he was trying to do and he's like yeah i'm struggling with GEO and I'm struggling with Facebook ads and it's not working. And I was like, you should just go to account-based marketing. And he's like, oh, would you help us with account-based marketing? I'm like, no, but this is what you should end up doing.

24:11Neil Patel:I'm like, the other channels are a waste. You're trying to figure out these channels that don't really matter too much for you, but account-based marketing will be much more effective. And then they shifted focus, but they thought how they're actually leveraging these channels, like chat GPT is off. Instead, it's the channels aren't the right fit for his business. Yep, totally.

24:30Eric Siu:So that's the lesson.

24:32Neil Patel:Keep being consistent. That's how you went out marketing. Yep. All right, goodbye.