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

“They were doing something that no one needed. They had this product which zapped things together, but no one needed because they didn't know it existed. But people knew that they needed things to work together. They just weren't looking for Zapier. So in my discussions with them and our SEO experiments that we came up with, we said, well, people are looking for, let's say, Gmail, and they're looking for Salesforce. They know that Gmail doesn't connect to Salesforce. They know Salesforce doesn't connect to Gmail, but they're looking for ways to pair it together. So what if we created as a product a marketing way to showcase that this product of zapping Gmail to Salesforce and Salesforce to Gmail exists? And that's what we did. So we built that at scale for everything that could work. And that was the experiment I did with them, where everything would be available and it creates this flywheel of, wow, if Gmail can work with Salesforce, what else does Gmail work with? Can it work with this other tool I have?”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the earliest example of where I sort of discovered on this process was I got about 10 years ago, I met the CEO of Zapier, Way Foster. And he was a co-worker of mine that had invested in his company, and he asked me to meet with him to just discuss SEO.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we talked about their marketing. Their marketing, their SEO in general was they write thousands and thousands of blog posts. AI has allowed them to do things they should never have done. They write thousands of blog posts about health in general. And then they wanted me to, I told them they shouldn't do that in general, but they wanted me to experience their product. So they gave me a code to download their app and their app is awful. It's a bad product. So they're trying to do marketing that doesn't fit for a product that doesn't do the thing they say it's going to do if they fix the product and understand the user, now it becomes, well, if I'm a user looking for this product, what are they looking for? How do we showcase that? Again, in the mid funnel.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're looking for no one asked the question of what it is that they're looking for. So now that SEO is changing and you really need to think about this mid-funnel and you need to think about a user experience and a buyer experience when they're doing the search, I think it all comes together. And this is where the product people now need to think about. How do we position this to the user that is not going to find out about this from a social channel? The user that's not going to be attracted by an ad, the user that's not going to discover this tool from a trade show. This is a user that's doing their own self-discovery journey. And this is what is the thing they're looking for and how do we position this product in a way that they're going to find it. So that's what everyone should be doing. Product really collaborating with marketing and discovering what is it that the user wants and showcasing that. I was recently talking to a company in a health space. They have an app. It's a health app.”
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 it's fascinating. I'm honored to be one of the few marketers on your product podcast. But I think of SEO as a product. And I think the product managers are the people that should be thinking about this SEO question because it's a product question. There are users that are coming in from the search channel. What is the product that I need to create for them? What is the experience that I need to create for them? So typically was thought of as a marketing challenge of the product people have created this thing for me. And now I expect the marketers to go and do the SEO thing for it. But there's a mismatch. So for example, I find very often when I talk to SaaS companies, I don't think SaaS in general should do SEO. But very often when I talk to SaaS companies, they have created a product for whatever user. And then the marketers are expect to make that product fit into the thing that the search results are around and it doesn't work because that's not what.”
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 where you'll now go by Riverside. However, at the top, you were doing top podcast tools. So again, up until AI overviews, up until this entire concept of LLM, whoever won on that long form piece of content would get that first click. But now that doesn't exist anymore, you just go to Google and Google tells you these are the tools. Oh, you're looking for a new CRM. This is what a CRM is. You want to know, do you need a CRM or do you just need a calendar? Look at that and Google will just tell you in a paragraph and now you've redirected your search somewhere else into the middle of the funnel. So I think that's where SEO always should have been because that's where conversions could potentially happen. However, SEO never was there before because the way most SEO measures its performance and its success is rankings. So they would say, well, it doesn't really matter if we convert on the word CRM, but look, we're number one, so we're winning.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in general, SEO has always been more at the top of the funnel, generally, because you're curious about something. So let's say you're looking for new software, you're looking for new podcasting software. So you search for top podcast tools and you get back a list on, let's say, G2. So G2 is another G2 and all the sites like G2, like the Gardner sites like Kaptera, all going to be massively disrupted. So you would get back a list from G2, which would give you out all the software. And you look at some and it would say this one's geared towards enterprise, this one's geared towards small podcasters, this one's free. And then you've narrowed down your list to these three tools. And that's when you start doing the searches. Now you're mid funnel. Now let's say you've chosen Riverside and you've gotten enough information from those other searches. Now you start searching Riverside Price, Riverside Capacity, Riverside Bandwidth, right? That's bottom of.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I just thought that was interesting to really drill into the difference between structural structure because unstructured is actually where Google is disrupting everything. So this entire idea of SEO get up until 2022 was monetize unstructured data. Whoever wrote the longest piece of content on best beach hotels in Miami and then built the best links to it, they would win. They would win whether it's ads or win whether it's hotel bookings. Now Google can start you off at the top of that and say these are the best beach hotels based on all the people that have written content. Or actually Google's own structured data from their reviews and give you that. And then you can say, okay, I'd like to go to this hotel or I'd like to stay in this city.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's even more than that. So, what you're referencing is structured data That's a very easy thing for Google to tell you when is Hanukkah in 150 years from now. It's in a data set. What's happening now is Google's taking this unstructured data from content and building it into structured data. So you could ask a question of like, what is the likelihood of a baby needing to go to the hospital because they're showing this sort of symptom? And again, instead of reading all that content and making a decision, Google could take all that unstructured data, not just Google. Again, ChatGPT or Claude can take all that unstructured data and give you a statistic based on everything they've read. And that's very helpful to users. And I think, again, users benefit. And then a user might find out there's another piece of information where I'd actually like to read a medical paper or that now I'd like to Google and find the closest doctor to me who has certain hours. That's a Google search. That's not an LLM AI search.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And drink some more water. And WebMD was competing with Healthline and other Cleveland Clinic and Dallas Clinic and all these other hospitals. And it's totally unnecessary to go and look at all these results and go through six pages of information about headaches. So a site like that will be impacted by AI overviews. An e-commerce site? Maybe not. It depends where in the funnel that user is”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI overviews are changing things. So I think if you take all those steps back and you look at this from a journey perspective, there's no way that it won't be impacting search. It's just going to be hard to find. And there'll be certain examples where it is extremely prevalent. And there'll be others where it won't impact things at all. And I think the dividing line is the journey. We're in the funnel that user is. So if you are WebMD and you're writing content about the human body, just generic content that has existed since medical journals were created, AI overviews are going to be fantastic at giving you that answer. You know, you read a, you know, you have a headache and you're just like, well, this headache's not going away. Should I take more Advil or should I take a nap? And then you find that WebMD article and you get to like page six and it tells you that, you know, 0.2% of people that have a headache actually have a brain tumor. And you don't need that anymore because Google can tell you you're good. You should take a nap.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Transparently, I thought this was going to be apocalypse. So I shared about a year ago that it's going to be an apocalypse. We have not seen it yet, and a lot of people are declaring victory that there's no apocalypse because we have not seen it yet. However, this thing just launched in a way that I think it will start impacting traffic. So prior to the last couple weeks, it was not available on logged out search. It was only on logged in search and even more than that, on that logged in search, Google had rolled it back significantly because those embarrassing things that happened in May and June when they first launched it. They are only just now launching it broader, and I do think we're going to see impacts. Of course, another challenge with pinpointing and impacts is their rolling algorithm updates that are happening, which we'll also talk about. And that will sort of mask what's happening because if you've been hit by an algo update and suddenly you recover from the algo update, you'll see more traffic, but you might have seen more traffic, but on a lower base because these”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And I think that's where things are good. That's where I'm excited by the user experience for search because I don't think the user was best served by, I don't know, U.S. news or Forbes writing out where the best beach vacations are within two hours of the United States. With that piece of content that was written by a freelancer who's not a travel expert. So now you're going to get that information also from not a travel expert. You're going to get an AI summarized answer and that will give you more clues and more ideas to do a deeper research search. And I think that's where you...”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you should go to Cancun, or sorry, not Google, but whatever that answer is, suggests to you that you should go to Cancun. And now you're sort of in the mid funnel. And that's where SEO begins to matter. So the reason why I think this disruption is so big is because the journey changes, the discovery changes. So whereas before, if you were a travel site and you were able to rank on a best beach vacation within two hours of the United States, that's your ranking result. And then you have your long piece of content and you have your ads and you can monetize that. That all changes when you can still rank number one on that, but you're all the way at the bottom of the page. The AI answer, whoever that's from, whether it's again from ChatGBT or Google, tells you where to now start doing your deeper search.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most about. So now a lot of those keywords are going to be moving into these AI overviews. And I don't want to just focus on Google, although I think Google is going to own the entire search space forever and ever for at least for a very long time. But other engines, whether it's perplexity, whether it's clawed or whether it's meta, they're all have this opportunity to give AI overview type responses. That, I think, those top of funnel kind of queries are a great fit for what's going to come out as an answer. So if you're looking to go on vacation and you want a beach vacation, you can ask a very explicit question about give me a beach vacation that is not in America, but is a two-hour flight from X Airport. That's the kind of thing that you could do in a Google search, but would take you a very long time to do. And those are great answers from just getting a paragraph. And then from there, you move into the mid funnel. So now you do this query and Google suggests to you.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, it's not that it's harder to find. Your stuff becomes less relevant. And that's the part about SEO that I'm excited about. So SEO was exactly like that CEO said to me years ago. It's just about creating some content. And then it's just like this sort of this race to the top of getting your ranking results on that top keyword. So years ago, I worked at a startup where we were in the automotive space and we wrote content about cars. And a word we like to rank on was cars. We bought the homepage was ranked for the word cars. We bought tons of links and we were just a cars website. Obviously, that's not something anybody could expect to do now because you don't search like that. You don't search, oh, I need to buy a vehicle. I'm going to use the word cars and sort of see what comes up because cars means a lot of things. Cars is a movie. Cars is a kind of car you drive. Cars could be a go-kart. It could be a lot of things. So no one's going to think about those search results. However, SEO still geared towards those top of funnel, those big keywords that people can.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once they launched it, suddenly they started getting these screenshots of, like Google told me to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, Google told me to put glue on my pizza, which is, of course, Google didn't do that. They just crawled things from around the web. I'm surprised that Google didn't predict that because the exact same thing happened with ChatGBT and Google's much bigger and a much more interesting target for people that want to share those things on social media. So Google launches it. And that was a little bit embarrassing. So they rolled it back somewhat. But what's even more interesting is they've given up on this rollback. We're not given up. They've gone back into it and they've relaunched it. And now it's on so many more search results. I'm seeing it on most of the search results that I see. And on top of that, it's now on non-logged in users are seeing it. So in Cognito users or users without any history with Google are seeing it. And they've just launched it in the UK. So this thing is coming and it's really going to be affecting search results.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Launched it to great fanfare. Of course, it was live right away. They said it was only going to be logged in users only in the US. Obviously, they always have concerns about launching things in Europe because Europe's a little bit more litigious than the US.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, I think there was one where it may or may not have been fake. There are a lot of people made some fake ones that told you to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. Are there liability concerns? Because Google now is the publisher. They're not a search engine that told you how to find out the answer to that. They told you to do it themselves. And the third issue there, which is another liability concern, is it plagiarism? So those are the things that they worried about. So they took about a year to test this thing, which was fascinating because we're tech people and most of the listeners are tech people. Google is very much a launch fast kind of company. They reveal something and then it sort of rolls out very, very quickly. They're not the kind of company that says we're going to launch something and then they take a year to do it. So AI overviews what was then called search generative experience launched at Google I.O. this past year, in May of this past year, and they renamed it to AIO reviews. And it's that. It's essentially ChatGPT in a search result.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And their stock price actually went down. And then they fixed it, and then their stock price went up. But they also had to have an answer to this concept of, is search dying? Does anyone need to search anymore when the entire world can just be given to you? So they launched what at the time they called SGE, search generative experience, which is essentially ChatGBT in a search result. So they launched that, but they launched it as a beta. And there were huge issues with what they were doing there because there's monetization issues. They monetized, I mean, everything they do comes from ads. The majority of their revenue comes from ads. So if you're going to show this AI answer on a search result, then you also can't have ads. You need to go all in on one of them. That was one issue, which they actually have not solved yet. Another issue they had was liability. So if they have a generative response that tells you to do something awful,”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We'll dig into that. I don't think that's at all correct, and I don't think anyone, whether you're doing SEO as your full time job, whether you're receiving SEO traffic as a part of one of your primary marketing channels, I don't think anybody has to worry about that. However, Google was worried about it. And I think one of Google's primary stakeholders is really Wall Street. So if Wall Street suddenly thinks that Google is a has-been company and they're not interesting anymore and they don't want to make”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So essentially, Google and other tech companies had their hand forced by OpenAI and ChatGPT. So Google claims to have invented the concept of LLMs and they may or may not have in some of the early open AI employees where Google employees. But ChatGPT came on the scene at the end of 2022 with this ability to ask any question and then get a written out answer. And suddenly people were like, well, I don't need a Google and click all these results. So there started this conversation of you don't need Google anymore. Google is ending. Even more than that, you don't need SEO. No one's going to optimize anything because the entire world will just be given to you.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then that forced me to really pivot my thinking around what SEO might be. And I pivoted my thinking. And I've talked, worked with many companies around how they should think about SEO and what SEO traffic should mean, but others have not because those tactics did work. And LLMs and AI in general is forcing people to think, again, how should SEO work? How should I be driving business from a search channel?”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's an awesome idea. I really like what's happening with AI in general for SEO because it's causing everyone that cares about SEO traffic, whether that's a PM or whether it's a CMO, whether it's a CEO, to really be forced into pivoting their thinking about what SEO traffic means because the tactics around SEO haven't really changed. It's always been the exact same thing. Like I was when I was my last full-time job was I would survey monkey and I was moonlighting on the side and I was introduced to a CEO of a big company and they were asking me about my approach to SEO and I wanted to close it. I wanted to get consulting engagement. And the CEO says to me, so essentially what you're telling me is I need to find my keywords, put that into content, and then build some links. Is there anything else you're going to do for me? Why should I pay you? And it's done me into silence because essentially that.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think of SEO as a product. The product managers are the people that should be thinking about this SEO question because it's a product question. Product people need to think about how do we position this to the user that is not going to find out about this from a social channel that's not going to be attracted by an ad. This is a user that's doing their own self-discovery journey. 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.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Transparently, I thought this was going to be apocalypse. Up until AIO reviews, whoever won on that long form piece of content would get that first click. But now that doesn't exist anymore.”
2024-09-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source