YouSaid · the spoken record

Eli Schwartz

lines on the record: 126
first: 2024-09-19
most recent: 2024-09-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And that was TripAdvisor. So TripAdvisor took in all these data sources of this is the hotel. These are the cities. And then it allowed UGC to combine into one comprehensive page about each property. So TripAdvisor did not write a piece of content on every single hotel. They didn't write a piece of content on, here's this long-form blog post as an influencer on the Waldo Festoria in New York. And here's a long-form blog post about the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco. They built it all from a programmatic standpoint. They took all these data sets. They took all the countries in the world. They took all the properties and they merged into one comprehensive page, which has dominated the top of search results since they beginning of the time, right? And they still own it. And that team has cycled through many, many leaders, many different things. And they're still number one. It's the strategy that has allowed them to build that brand and to dominate it.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Essentially, what programmatic is it's taking a bunch of data sources and building out a page that is a combination of all these data sources. So in my book, I talk about two of my favorite programmatic SEO companies. One of them was created by a past, or it's not created, the strategy was created by a past guest of yours, Luk Levac, who introduced us.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mentions and links might be mentions now, right? Because the way a link before LLMs and the link 10 years ago was actually an HTML link. And now Google can read content so they can say, well, you've been mentioned here. That's pretty good. So now we acknowledge that this might be the brand and this might be the match for that kind of thing. So that's helping to build that brand. So in general, I think of any SEO effort as promoting a brand, building up a brand rather than building a product and then separately building out an SEO effort which has content that may not be relevant and links from websites that are certainly not relevant to content that's not relevant. So it all comes together as being one big effort. So the same thing you'll do on PR you'll do for SEO.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, this is the biggest myth in SEO is that you could just build links and link building is the secret. Footprint. And that's totally wrong because the way most people build links is they buy these guest posts or they pay for links on low authority websites that sort of look like they might have authority. And it doesn't really benefit anyone because no one's reading these sites. And it's funny that everyone complain about Google as this really, really smart, all-knowing LLM at the same time, they think they're dumb enough to fall for these guest posts that are on websites they don't really read. The right way to build links is to build a brand. So it comes part and parcel of what you're trying to do. So if you're building links and going back to all the SaaS examples we talked about, so if you've created a bunch of content that is not relevant for the product you're trying to sell, building links to the content that doesn't really benefit the product doesn't really benefit the links don't benefit the product. But if you can build this product that's awesome and everyone loves and wants to use and you get not links, but”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a brand, you've done good branding, but you show up as a link, it means Google has stolen your content and people may or may not click off of it.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To 99% one. So, like, that's fairly indicative that people are clicking the links, which surprises me because I don't think that the links are necessarily meant by Google to be useful, which means that AI overviews is essentially duplicating search results. So you have this AI overview, which summarizes it, and then you have a link, so you can link off of it, and then beneath it, you sort of have the exact same thing. And that's the challenge that Google has to work through. So for companies to show up in AI overview, it's a brand challenge. So if your link shows up there, then you likely were showing up beneath it in the ranking results. So you've already done the work you're supposed to do. But if you're showing up an AI overview mentioned as a brand, like these are the top CRM tools, you're showing up as a brand. That means you've exercised brand efforts and it's working out. So I don't know that companies necessarily want their content to show up because they're giving away their content for free. They want to be showing up in a way that benefits them. So if you show up.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think of AI or AI overviews as a branding exercise. So getting into the AI overview, and Google has links. I mentioned this earlier, that Google has links within the content. And I think a lot of what Google does is around potentially liability protections. So they're having links. So they're saying, well, we didn't tell you to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. This website, which we summarized, told you to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, or we did it plagiarized. We just linked to the piece of content. We may have extracted more from the content than we were supposed to. And the law hasn't decided that yet, but we link to it. So it's fair. So right now Google has these links in the content and it sort of links off of it. I did a survey on LinkedIn and I was surprised by the answer. I thought most people did not click on the links. I got a couple hundred responses and it's sort of 50-50. And based on my survey mic experience, it's not a statistically significant survey in general, but it will never go.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is a huge issue for Google because the amount of content being created is enormous and it's growing exponentially. And Google's trying to crawl everything. They now have more content to crawl, which becomes more expensive for Google, and which is why you have this backlash by Google against many websites, because they're trying to clean the index to save their own costs and to protect the users from having to see this awful content.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Years ago, it's not AI, but it's sort of like AI. But there are sports websites that will take in a lot of the things that happen in a sports game to merge it all together into a piece of content. If you look at any earnings reports on public companies, it's sort of the same thing. The company will issue, they'll file their earnings report. And then now it's AI, but before AI, it was basically like MadLibs kind of content. It would extract pieces of the earnings report and write a blog post, which is actually fairly useful. I don't think there's an issue with it itself. And I don't think users have an issue with it. I think if you read that old piece of content again on earnings reports, it's pretty obvious that it wasn't written by a financial journalist, but it was useful. You got a quick summary. You didn't have to go into like the SEC and read an earnings report.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This hatred of AI content by users in general. And I think once companies declare that they're using AI, people get upset about it. So it was a Red Ventures company. I think it was CNET that said they were using AI to create content. And I think they got in trouble because they said they're using AI to create content. But if they had not said they're using AI to create content, I think their entire model would have been very successful because there's no reason you can't take in. They take 10 products and they want to review 10 different products. There's no reason you can't tie that all together. Have AI write the original piece of content and then have a human editor just review it.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In their documentation, they say that AI itself is not the problem. It's the helpfulness, the usefulness of the content that would be a problem.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a lot of content about what shoes doesn't do anything for the user. They're just looking for shoes and then there's shoes on the page. And I think Macy's actually ranks pretty well on those kinds of things. So using AI content to write more fluff content, that's not necessary. It would just be a waste of time. But using AI content to feed in a product and describe what that product is and maybe some features of that product which help a user, that's not hurrying your SEO because what you're trying to optimize for is the product and the product name itself.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So AI as a tool is a tool creating something that's not necessarily useful for the end journey of the company and for the user journey in general. However, if the content you were creating was pretty useful and now you're using AI to create really useful content for cheaper and better, of course you can use it. So an example of a place you can use AI content is if you're an e-commerce site and you're selling your own products. Of course you can use AI content to write product descriptions. It's not a content website. So there's a lot of big companies out there and if anybody wants to look at some of the e-commerce sites and how they do SEO, a lot of them have large SEO teams. The typical JCPenney, the Nordstroms, the Macy's, they have a lot of content on their category pages. But if you look at the keywords that drive traffic to those pages, it's the products on the pages. So if you're looking for shoes, the fact that a Macy's.com page”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, AI is a tool. Everyone says AI is a tool, it's not a solution. So you can use AI to create content if the content you're creating is a part of that journey. So for example, before AI content really came on the scene, because AI has been around for a while, Jasper's been around for a while, writer's been around for a while and before ChatGPT. So before these tools, a lot of ways that companies created content for cheap is they went on Fiverr and they went on Upwork and they just created content. So a lot of that content completely worthless. So if you're just creating content for the sake of content and you paid someone on Upwork $50 for the content, now you can use an AI tool and just create the content the same.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fed you into exactly what your product did. So Zapier, they did programmatic, it feeds you into making other zaps between different products. Tinder, we did programmatic. It fed you into, oh, you would like to solve your lonely. We showed you that your loneliness problem is solvable in the city you're in. You have to solve that problem by downloading the Tinder app. And I've never used Tinder. I only used it from a marketing standpoint. But you Tinder gates you. So if you'd like to get the advanced Tinder experience, you have to pay. And again, it's all part of that buyer journey. And anything you're building SEO for, it has to be a piece of that buyer journey. So programmatic blog posts, anything you're doing, if there is no product journey for it, there's no user journey, it just stops.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really building a product around what the company is attempting to monetize. So Canvas building templates because then they're going on to monetize that templates by having other people build off those templates with upgrades and subscriptions. But if a company was like, let's say there was an enterprise version of Canva and they didn't monetize those templates. So putting out a bunch of free content on the internet that just looked good wouldn't benefit. So it always comes down to what is the product that you want to use? Like I mentioned at templates we did survey monkey was a survey product. If someone looked for a template of a survey, they wanted to make a survey. So if we were not a survey product and we just monetized off a survey templates, that would not have done anything for us. So copying someone else's version of programmatic doesn't do anything. And generally doing programmatic for the sake of programmatic, so just to have content wouldn't do anything unless that programmatic”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They create a sitemap, they did this in the past, and if Cora's listening, you should do this again. If you create a categorized sitemap where you can say, these are all the questions on health. And from this sitemap, again, it's HTML sitemap, not just an XML sitemap. And even a user could navigate through it. This is health and this is health page one and health page two, and you can navigate through this entire site than a search engine can navigate through the entire site. And all of the questions and answers are discoverable. So when I made that suggestion to them, within a couple months they were able to quadruple traffic.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Suggestion I made, but it was, I think it was 12 years ago. So when you came to Quora and when you come to Quora today, you see related questions. So you see a question and then there's related questions and that's the way a bot or a human will navigate through the site.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, let me share an example of one that worked really quickly. So this was also an interesting one. And I was at SurveyMonkey and I was introduced to the CEO of Quora, who was interested in doing more SEO. So Quora had never done SEO or never done SEO effectively from a product standpoint. And there were a couple things I was able to recommend to them. And within three months, they had quadruple traffic. So it really will depend on what is it that's holding things back in Cora's case. They weren't showing any answers. So they were really pushing to get people to log in before they saw any answers. So I encouraged them to show the answers. Yes, they were going to be giving away answers for free, but they were also going to be giving answers to Google. So that was number one that they were able to quadruple traffic. And the second thing is they had no way that Google could navigate within the site. So when you came to Quora, and it's like this again, so they reversed this situation.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, as you're meeting those milestones, you can say, well, we launched, and our expectation was that after the first month of launching, we would have X amount of pages indexed. Did we meet or did we miss that milestone? And then you can say SEO is working at a small scale. And I've seen, again, many companies, it takes a really long time, but eventually when you look back, you see this hockey stick. But while you're in it, you don't necessarily see that.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you're building out an SEO effort, and I'm going to keep going back to this, it's a product. So you're building out a product roadmap and you're creating milestones. So you say it's going to take us this first month to ideate on what it is that we're building. It's going to, in the second month, we're going to build out a PRD for the engineers to start working on. In the third month, they're going to start working and they're going to ship this. If you start missing all those milestones, and this is a common problem in consulting in general, you miss all those milestones. And then some will say, well, we've been working together for six months and we have nothing to show for it. And you can point very specific.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, unless there's a reason for it. So if you're a media company and traffic means that that number keeps going up, then yes, it matters. But if you are driving leads and that traffic number goes up, you're not driving more leads from SEO. You're getting worthless traffic. It doesn't help the business.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If it's MQLs, so they just need people filling out lead forms. So really understanding who it is that they're trying to attract with SEO, that's the metric we're going to use. And again, I don't know why SEO, this happens with SEO, but not any other channel. No one doing paid marketing will ever say, this is how many times I'm number one on this search, or this is how many clicks I get, or look at how much I spent. There's really, we spend this and we're this efficient. This is what we drive from that. And SEO really needs that same rigor.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first is really understanding what it is that they care about. And rankings could be something they care about if someone else cares about it. So for example, if they're going to put in their pitch deck, we're number one for this tool. And investors, they don't know that that doesn't convert. So that might be something that we should care about. They should be number one for that tool.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A good idea. So really understanding what is it that you're trying to do with SEO traffic, that's your conversion metric. So it could be MQLs, could be page views, could be dollar conversions. It could be people picking up the phone or watching the video, but it has to be some sort of conversion. So for a startup, it might mean that you're getting links. I mean, at a minimum, people reading your content deciding to link to you and give you social shares, that might be something you put in a pitch deck. Whatever it is, there has to be a conversion metric that matters for the business.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Working with a SaaS tool. They're in a two side marketplace. They worked with, in an HR space. So they only monetized one side of that HR space, but all the traffic was on the other side of the HR space. So when we were talking about their SEO conversion problems, I suggested that they delete all the content that was on the wrong side of that marketplace because they didn't convert it all. And there's no, and this is a common misconception, people will think you get a benefit from traffic. Google sees, oh, I get all this traffic from search. They think I'm a very good website. So even though none of this converts for me, I should have a blog because blogs are good. It doesn't really work like that. I mean, maybe if you're this massive website and I don't know, let's say you get millions and millions of visits, then you can build some sort of authority and some good experience in Google. And now you can launch something else and you don't have to worry about needing to build up that authority. But generally driving traffic to something that doesn't convert for you wouldn't.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then, as far as what the expectations are on convergence, that also is really depends on what it is that you're looking for. There's some companies are building media and they, I mean, again, I think most companies should just not write a lot of content unless they're a media company. But if you are building media and you're monetizing that content from a media standpoint, so maybe leads, maybe clicks off the page into leads, or maybe it's CPM advertising, so then your conversion is what you're trying to do with SEO is get a lot of page views. Because the more page views you get, the more clicks off that page you get into something else. If you're a SaaS tool, then your conversion should absolutely be whatever a MQL should be. And again, I think most people don't do this correctly with SEO. They use the wrong conversion metric, which is top of funnel ranking. Oh, I'm ranking. My SEO is successful. I'm number one for this. Instead of how does this benefit me? There was a company I was working with.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it drives revenue. Smaller companies may take many months before Google notices. It may take many months before the demand is there. Like with Zapier, I think it took them a couple of years before they even saw any results because nobody's looking for it. So it comes down to what it is it that you're building and how quickly users will come and find and need that solution.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So those will be custom for anything. And I hate to use the word it depends because I think whenever consultants say it depends, they're just throwing their hands up and saying, I don't really know. I don't have an opinion on this. And it's like when you go to a doctor and the doctor's like, well, it depends. I mean, you could be dying or you could just need to take a nap. So there's a custom answer here and it comes down to what the company is and what the expectations are. So how long it takes, that depends on what you're building. If there's an opportunity, like again, with Tinder, it took us a while to actually build anything. So it took us all this time to build for ideate them build and then to see results. But once we built, and I love working with big companies that are well-known brands because what we build, as soon as it's available on the web, it's like this turning a huge ship. It starts driving revenue and starts being super effective because it's there. Something didn't exist and now it exists.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. I mean, again, go really digging into this user journey piece. I don't think restaurants typically should have a website. Not only should they not do SEO, but I don't know that they should have a website. Because if you think about the buyer journey for a person looking for food, they don't typically go to a website. So if you're looking for pizza, and again, a lot of pizza shops have websites. But if you're looking for pizza, you're going to Google Maps, DoorDash, Uber Eats. You're not going on Google and saying pizza near me and then browsing the websites”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are companies that should probably never do SEO. Going back to what I said in Google Cloud, I don't think that Google could ever say really pinpoint that there was a customer that they got purely from SEO And you're going to do all sorts of weighted attribution, and maybe that person did discover Google Cloud from a piece of content or piece of SEO asset, but they never would have converted with all those other things that they've touched.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. Yeah, really think about what are the tradeoffs. Again, from a product standpoint, there's always tradeoffs. So, what are the tradeoffs to investing in this channel versus another channel?”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was once a company I met that was a SaaS tool. They were in a gardening space, they made a SaaS for gardeners and they were insistent on doing SEO and they asked me to look at a proposal they got from an agency for $15,000 a month. And it was all content. And then I asked them how their users found them. How did they get all the customers they had that paid them? How did they find them? They said they go to these gardening shows around the country and they have a booth and each booth cost them $10,000. So I said instead of spending $15,000 on SEO, you could get, you could go to all these shows for the exact same budget and you get users who are interested. They're in market. They try your tool out at the booth and then they leave and there are leads that you can follow up with. Instead of investing in me, like, hope it works. It's sort of free. There are searches for it, but it's not the right searches.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Design, you need content so it can really add up quickly. And now you look at that investment and you say, for this tool, if I invested a million dollars a year in SEO, do I expect to make back a million dollars a year soon, right? SEO will always make back money if it's the right fit. But soon. So SaaS tools, especially startups, they need to make that money back soon. Or if they took that exact same million dollars and put it into brand ads or they put it into influencer campaigns or they put it into just traditional paid marketing on meta and Google, would you make that million dollars or million one dollars back faster? And that's where I think the valuation should happen. Instead of this default, well, I just got my funding. I need to invest in SEO because it's free and everyone does SEO and look, my competitors do SEO, it should really be this thoughtful strategic decision-making process of how much will this cost me all in?”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To invest in SEO. Now is when you'll decide how much should you invest in it and how you should invest in it. So typically, again, for SurveyMonkey, it was around creating content. It was around templates. It wasn't very expensive. But let's say there's a company that does not have a content team. They don't have a product yet that people are going to search for. They don't have a product manager that's going to be overseeing this SEO process. So say you need to hire this PM or you want to hire an agency. A typical SEO agency, I mean, you're not going to spend $500 on an SEO agency. It's going to be upwards of $10,000 just because that's the cost of someone's time. So it's $10,000 a month, $120,000 a year gets even more expensive if you have a full-time employee. So that's one expense you're going to outline. Then you're going to add in all the supporting resources you need a CMS that costs money. You need an engineer to support them that costs money. You need a potentially”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we have to really put away the myth that SEO is free because it's absolutely not free. There's a cost in time. There's a cost in resources. And of course, there's the direct expense for SEO. So if you're deciding that you should do SEO, so now we have to go through this evaluation. Again, this is where I think of it as a product, where you have all these product ideas and what should you spend time and money on. So SEO is a channel you may or may not want to invest in. So say there's a SaaS tool and they're convinced there's an SEO journey. People do search for this solution. You know, when I was at SurveyMonkey, we generated a couple hundred million dollars a year off of organic traffic because it was a freemium tool where you search for the product, the problem, you find the solution, it's free, you sign up for it. If it works for you, you end up paying and that's the revenue we've generated from organic. So say there is a journey. So people do search for it and it makes sense.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a decision making process. There's a committee decision. So SEO sort of made no sense for that even to be included as a part of a marketing channel. And at a grand scale, Google Cloud should not be doing SEO. At a small scale, a lot of SaaS tools shouldn't be doing SEO because there isn't necessarily an SEO journey. I get a lot of pushback from companies when I tell them they're like, look at all the SEO we've done. But that plateau is really quickly.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I had another eye-opening experience early in COVID when everyone was home and there wasn't a lot of things to do. Google reached out to me about a role on their team on Google Cloud for doing SEO. And it seemed like an interesting thing to go through a hiring Luke and stay at home. So I had a fascinating experience interviewing because every time first it was the hiring manager and every time as someone on that team that started the interview, they said, are there any questions that you have for me? And then I spent the next 45 minutes asking them all the questions. Like, why are you doing SEO? What kind of keywords would you want to do? What is this SEO journey look like? Because for Google Cloud, they only have two competitors.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Analytics, yeah, I'm going to tell everyone we got to do it and it's going to be live tomorrow. Also, mixed panel is expensive. So, again, it's the kind of thing that there's friction of you don't just click from a search result and then decide to just purchase it. You can't even purchase it on your credit card. I don't believe. So those are the issues. And that's why I think SaaS is not the best fit for SEO, because if you think about that journey, the problem doesn't necessarily exist. The SAS solves the problem, but only once you know that problem exists. And getting people to know that problem exists is typically not an SEO challenge. It's typically a brand challenge. You make a viral video of you didn't realize that you could use this tool we've created to solve your problem, but no one is necessarily searching for a problem they didn't know they had or a solution they didn't know could exist. So that's where the breakoff is. And then the other issue, of course, is now they know the problem exists, but it's not an SEO journey.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most of them. One of my first consulting clients when I left SurveyMonkey was mixed panel. So, I mean, I just left my job and I'm going to take any client that I have. I have some awful clients that I took, but Mixpanel is not an awful client. It was just an eye-opening client where we're trying to do SEO and I'm doing SEO in exactly the way that CEO had told me SEO should work and he was going to do it himself. So I told him the keywords. We came up with the content. We built the links. We did all the stuff SEO was supposed to do and it didn't work. And we were sitting there and I asked them to like show me the user journey. Like they have a tool that does it. That's what MixPanel does. So someone clicks on a search result and they land on this piece of content, which we did research and we know people look for. But why is it that it doesn't convert? And then I realized that there were other problems to this conversion, which is mixed panel is a product you integrate in your entire company. You don't just do a quick Google for it and be like, oh,”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, you need a product manager to really oversee the building of this. You need user research. So it's, again, more than just a piece of content. So going through those steps again, it's understand who your user is, decide what it is that you need to create for that user. And the third is envision this product.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That loneliness problem in any way you want, of course. And now we had to think about what it is that we're going to create. We know it should be global, of course. We would know we want it to be programmatic, which is something we should dig into, like different programmatic versus editorial. We know we want it to be programmatic because no one wants to be in a position of writing a page out for every town or every city or every neighborhood in the entire world. So we want it to be programmatic. What things do we need to pull into that? And then the third step is really building. We're on a product podcast. So of course to the product people, you're building the product for that SEO user. So where do you get those inputs? What does this page need to look like? So again, the reason I think SEO needs to be on product is because the inputs for SEO aren't the way many people think of SEO, which is a piece of content optimized for Google based on the keywords I've chosen. I think of it as a product, which means you need design resources. You need engineering resources.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm building SaaS and I want to market this tool. What is a user going to look for? What's the problem they're going to look for that would make them want to do a search? And earlier I referenced that I don't think most SaaS tools should do SEO. And the reason is because a lot of times when I talk to SaaS companies about SEO, I ask them this question and they give me a blank stare. So if you can't answer the question about what is it that someone's going to do a search on, then don't do SEO. Because SEO is about appealing to that user. If you can understand what the user should do around looking for whatever product you have, then that's the first step for SEO. So who is this user? Who am I marketing to? You're sort of creating this persona in your mind. Step two is think about the asset you're going to create. So pivoting over to what he talks about Tinder. So we understood that it was a user that was solving a loneliness problem anywhere in the world because that's what Tinder does.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think step one is the step that almost everyone misses on SEO, which is be the user. Try to understand who your user is. And there have been so many companies, and SurveyMonkey was a great example when I spent seven years with SurveyMonkey. And when everyone got onboarded at SurveyMonkey, they gave you a SurveyMonkey account and told you that you should run a survey. I think later in the later years, they forced everyone in their onboarding time to use a survey, run a survey with people in the company. But before that, no one did. So they had this account and they never did a survey. So they had zero customer empathy for why people use the tool. And then when you think about it from a product to a marketing standpoint, you're thinking about it as a work challenge rather than a customer empathy challenge. So the first thing anybody should really do around anything that they're trying to do SEO is try to be that customer. So if I'm a user of this SaaS.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, nothing changes here with AI overviews because if you're looking for, you've gone to Dubai. You've gone to Dubai as a brand new country. You've never been there before and you're lonely. So you look for online dating in Dubai and you're going to get, you know, again, AI overviews might tell you what the dating scene is like. It might tell you where to go on great dates. However, it doesn't allow you to solve the loneliness problem you have. The loneliness problem you have is a mid or bottom of funnel problem. You're still going to click on Tinder's result no matter what the AI overview does. So that's where I think SEO should be is you need to be in the buyer journey with the SEO you're creating. And it doesn't matter what AI overviews does or doesn't do because you're still solving the midfunnel problem with your SEO solution.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many cities around the world. This is beta. It remained in its beta state. But if you look for online dating in many cities around the world, you're going to find a Tinder page which gives some examples of places you can go on a date. And more than that, it gives you Tinder as a solution to solve.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Upside for SEO if they've never done it before. So he was convinced of that. He was willing to drive forward on this idea. So when we started working together, the first thing we came up with is what is someone going to be searching when they look for Tinder? And it's not online dating. That's a single word. We're not going to write out long-form content around everything related to dating because that's not the Tinder product. You're not reading a piece of content about how to fall in love and then somehow converting into Tinder. But in our user research and in the discussions we had on what the investment we can make into SEO was, we discovered that Tinder is a loneliness solving problem. Loneliness solving solution. So you're lonely. You've gone to a new city. You don't know anybody. You'd like to solve your loneliness problem. So because you're in a new city, it occurred to us that this is a local thing. So we're going to look for anything related to local. So we built out is if you look for online dating in”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I worked with Tinder for a couple years and I worked with, you know, when we talk, one of the biggest challenges I ever had with SEO, especially as a consultant, is getting things done. And I worked with amazing companies and there's great people, but then they run into this wall. So like in my book, I talk about one of the earlier stories I had of this where I worked with a company where I worked, I was hired by the CMO and we built out a great plan. And then we go to the CEO who brings in the CTO to discuss our plan. And the CTO says, I don't have engineers for this. So you decide whether you want to work on the product or you want to work on this marketing thing you've done. And then we just didn't do anything because they never resourced it. But I work with this really great product person at Tinder, Udi Milo. He was the chief of growth. And he really saw a problem where Tinder had never done SEO. All of Tinder's inbound came from the word Tinder. And he's like, there has to be.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Total accidental, like whenever people ask me about programmatic SEO, and I know we have to dig into that what programmatic SEO is, they're like, I want to imitate Zapier. So it's always great to mention that I helped through that.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's again an early example where I stumbled upon this idea of people are looking for that other thing that you could do, showcase the fact that your product could do this thing.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source