Join Nate Matherson as he sits down with Kevin Indig for the twenty-third episode of the Optimize podcast. Kevin Indig is a Growth advisor and angel investor who helps the world’s market leaders define and evolve their Organic Growth strategy. He previously led SEO and Growth for Shopify, G2, and Atlassian.
Once a week, Kevin sends an email with Organic Growth strategies and case studies to over 10,000 subscribers called The Growth Memo. He also co-hosts the Contrarian Marketing podcast with Eli Schwartz, which gives you ideas you might not be thinking about.
In this episode, Kevin and Nate dive deep into analyzing the state of SEO in 2023 (including the recent algorithm updates), debate the future of SGE, and discuss AI's role in content creation. Kevin also shares his experiences in both enterprise SEO and startup SEO environments, providing critical insights for setting KPIs, managing cross-organizational communication, and avoiding activities that don't move the needle.
Closing out the episode is our popular lightning round of questions! For more information, please visit www.positional.com or email us at [email protected].
Depth basically goes into how deeply do you cover topics. And to be fair, you can go infinitely deep on things down to physics. So there is a natural cutoff point. When you write about car insurance, for example, infinite-depth could mean you talk about how the quality of the tires affect the probability of having an accident and what tires are made of. And so you can go infinitely deep. So there has to be some sort of a cutoff point. And there is no perfect formula to where that cutoff point is. But the better pieces of content, those that perform better in search, typically go a couple of clicks deeper than those that don't and stay relatively high level.
Hi and welcome to the Optimize Podcast. My name is Nate Matherson and I am your host. On this weekly podcast, we sit down with some of the smartest minds in content marketing and SEO. Our goal is to give you perspective and insights on what's moving the needle in organic search. Today I'm thrilled to sit down with Kevin Indig. Kevin is one of the best in SEO. He's currently a partner at Hypergrowth Partners, a sweat equity advisory that helps companies achieve hyper growth. And before that, Kevin has led SEO teams at fantastic companies like Shopify, G2, Atlassian, and Kevin is also a growth advisor to a number of startups like Riverside, where we're recording this podcast today, but also companies like Bounce and Workstream. In our episode, Kevin and I go deep on a number of topics, ranging from algorithm updates to enterprise SEO, GBT bot, backlinks, and more.
And this episode of the Optimize Podcast is brought to you by Positional. If you don't know by now, my name is Nate and I'm one of the co-founders of Positional and I'm really excited to announce that we just launched our content analytics tool set. This is very quickly become my favorite feature. It's one that I've wanted for the last 10 years and it's really effective in identifying which pages on your site users might be having a low quality experience on. What we do is we track metrics like scroll depth, bounce rate, and time on page to score your pages and then allow you to go deeper to see where within a piece of content, for example, which paragraph is causing people to leave or where, for example, you might wanna add a call to action within that page. This tool set is called Content Analytics. It's our newest feature. I'm stoked about it and you should be too.
Kevin, thank you so much for coming on the Optimize podcast.
Thanks for having me on. It's a pleasure.
First of all, I just want to say I love the content that you create on Twitter and LinkedIn. And a lot of the questions that I've put together today have come directly from some of your recent posts. So for all of our listeners, hopefully you finished listening to this episode, but you should definitely be following Kevin on LinkedIn and Twitter. But Kevin, the first question I ask all of our guests is how did you get into the world of content marketing and SEO?
Yeah, thanks by the way. The way I got into SEO and content and marketing was a zigzaggy path that started with computer games and then eventually landed me in the agency world where I learned the craft and the way to talk to companies and make things happen. But I'm a nerd at heart. I'm deeply curious, I always was, and I really enjoy taking things apart. So computer games were kind of the gateway drug for what eventually turned to online marketing and SEO. But at the time, which was about 13, 14 years ago, maybe a bit longer, it was not what it was today at all. It was kind of a leap of faith. It's almost like, I mentioned you're having a kid and that kid says, oh, I want to become a content creator. You know, like, are you sure you want to do that? And that was me with SEO back in the days.
And I need to start with algorithm updates because there have been so many of them in the last two to three months. I think there's been like three, one in August, one in September, one in October. And our customers are always asking me, like, what should we do? Especially if they've recently lost, like, a sizable amount of traffic, which, like, a lot of companies did in September. I'd be curious to get your thoughts on, like, here in 2023, like, what do you make of the recent algorithm updates? For example, like, the helpful content update, and what are you telling your customers and the clients you work with?
It's interesting because algorithm updates are sort of new mutations that are introduced to an environment. They're basically a step change where Google says, okay, this thing that either used to work doesn't work anymore, or here's a new thing that's now important. And interestingly, it feels like the pace and amount of algorithm updates has increased instead of decreased. And there are different reasons for that. But one of them is that there's simply so much more content on the web and the bar for quality steadily rises. And also Google paces out of pressure from other platforms and so they really need to get their stuff in order. But then there's this whole other dimension of Google updates, which is changes to the SERP landscape, so the search results landscape, or their understanding of searches. A lot of this is due to behavior changes. One example I can give you is that the term car insurance in Australia – I know this because I'm working with one of the largest insurances in Australia – about a year ago has been what I call localized. So long story short, previously, you were able to search car insurance in Australia in Sydney or Melbourne, you would get the same results, and then Google decided, no, we actually want to localize these results. We want to individualize them based on where you search from. And that also is a significant algorithm update, but it's not something that Google will explain in that way. And it's also very difficult to detect with the normal telemetry. So long story short, there are different types or surface areas of impact from algorithm updates. It seems like Google has really ramped up the intensity and volume of these algorithm updates. And the last point I want to make about it is that, I would say maybe five years ago, maybe a bit longer, Google algorithm updates have become increasingly complex. So when I started in SEO, there were basic updates like Panda or Penguin. And once they launched, there was this whole wave of SEOs analyzing and dissecting them and then bringing the lessons back to the community. And as updates have become more complex, that is not really happening. And instead, a lot of mindsets shifted to this idea of don't chase the algo and just create good content, which I think is not helpful. I have a bit of a contrarian opinion here where I think that you actually do want to try your best to analyze updates. You won't always understand what they do simply because the complexity is so high, but that doesn't mean you should drop the attempt. So I think it's worth looking deeper into them. There's still some stuff that we can see. And I think by not doing that, we're kind of losing opportunity to share more insights with the community and also with our clients.
Yeah. Back in 2018, 2019, I feel like there was a series of algorithm updates, especially in 2019, where at least my websites were pretty heavily impacted. And since then, it feels like these updates have come at just a more rapid pace and keeping up has gotten a lot harder. Like you described, those updates maybe aren't as clear as they were in the early to mid 2010s. And of course, there are winners and there are losers. You tend to hear a lot more from losers than you do from the winners. But a question I'm always asked, especially lately, is who's winning? Have you seen one or two or three characteristics from a set of websites that are doing well over the last couple of months after these updates?
That is a fantastic question because it's not asked a lot. So I really like how you bring this up. There are a couple of examples I can share. One is Progressive.com, one of the biggest insurances in the US. And they've done a tremendous job in cleaning house and working on the content. So one of the recurring patterns is that these – again, when I say these updates, it's actually lots of different updates and some of them target specific verticals like product reviews or local results. So I have to be careful with how I word this, but especially when we talk about core algorithm updates, a lot of them will reward things like obviously good content, which we have to dive a lot deeper into because it's a very broad way to phrase things, but just focusing on the quality of your content in general. Second, cleaning a house as in moving technical errors, being very resourceful with Google's resources. And then lastly, a great user experience. And this thing about user experience is very fussy, right? It's a very broad term as well, but it often goes back to how good does it look and feel? Is it modern? Is it easy for me to find what I'm looking for? Do I face any pop-ups or any disturbing elements on the side? So these things have become increasingly more important as Google factors things into their systems like user behavior. Are people clicking back to the search results? Are they looking for specific brands? These kind of things. And again, this visually appealing element has become so much more important but also very hard to measure. And so, that's why you see brands that keep their sites modern and attractive and easy to use, they're also being rewarded. And again, Progressive is a great example, very clean side, very easy. I did a deep dive not too long ago into their success because they're the fastest growing insurance sites in the US and they're growing really, really fast compared against any type of site. And I touched base with the team at Progressive and they confirmed that my observations were correct. And again, a lot of what they did is remove content that is not good, old content, remove confusing elements, and those are the kind of things that are being rewarded.
Well, I have to ask now, what is great content, or what is good content, for maybe a company like Progressive, as an example?
Totally. So number one, it's written by an expert. So this idea of expertise, obviously one of the key elements that Google is looking for in general, but there's this misconception that expertise means you have an author bio from someone who works in this space. That's only a small part of the story. The much bigger part is just that when you have an amateur writing about a topic who maybe does some research on the internet compared to somebody who spends a lot of time who's a true expert in the field, you can just tell the difference. You can tell it by the words they choose, the way they explain things, the concepts they refer, sometimes the sources that they're linked to. And these are all very critical parts. So this idea of first and expertise is really important. Second, there's this idea of comprehensiveness. And that's something that Google references and mentions in their documentation and their output in general. Comprehensiveness is basically, do you cover the topic holistically? For example, like car insurance, it's a very broad topic, but there's a lot to be covered and a lot of questions that people have. So Google will look at if you target the query car insurance, do you really go into all these questions and give answers that are helpful, that are useful, meaning not too shallow, not too fluffy. And then third is this whole element of information gain. And that is a tricky one. It basically means if I go to your result, if I go to the result or to the article or the landing page of Progressive.com for the query car insurance, do I learn something new compared to the other results? That's the basic idea of information gain even though it's a bit more complex. That's why the good content is written by an expert firsthand. Second, really covers the topic holistically, all the facets, all the questions. And third, it provides more depth or value compared to other results.
I love that. And I always say to our customers, you need to make your pages uniquely helpful. And then they'll come back to me and they'll ask, like, how can I make a topic like car insurance uniquely helpful? And I always say to them, like, there are a lot of ways you can make your pages uniquely helpful. Maybe it is with that first party experience or know-how from an actual expert. Maybe it's a graphic or a visual or a video. There are so many ways to be, I think, critical about our pages as long as we keep that kind of north star of making our pages uniquely helpful and that kind of sounds like what you've described, maybe in a slightly different verbiage, but do you agree generally with that statement?
Absolutely, and I love that you bring up things like videos, infographics, statement. Absolutely. And I love that you bring up things like videos, infographics, these visual elements, they matter greatly because people use platforms like YouTube or TikTok or Reels where everything is visual and fast and to the point. And you kind of have to compete with that when you use text or any webpage for the matter, right? So anything that explains things visually is superior to just text.
And this reminds me of like one of your recent LinkedIn posts where you broke down like three of the most overrated things that SEOs are thinking about and three of the most underrated things SEOs are thinking about. And if I remember correctly, one of those three things that are underrated was content depth. And is that what we're describing here? Like the depth of those pieces?
Yes, that is correct. And to be fair, you can go infinitely deep on things down to physics. So there is a natural cutoff point. When you write about car insurance, for example, infinite depth could mean you talk about how the quality of the tires affect the probability of having an accident and what tires are made off. So you can go infinitely deep. So there has to be some sort of a cutoff point is. But the better pieces of content, those that perform better in search, typically go a couple of clicks deeper than those that don't and stay relatively high level.
But that doesn't equal word count, right? Because I saw one of the overrated things that you said SEOs were thinking about was actually content length. So on one hand of things, you said content length was overrated, and then on the other hand of things, you said content depth was underrated. So if I'm understanding it correctly, like word count does not necessarily mean depth. Is that right?
That is correct. It is not causal, but there is a relationship. So when you bring depth to a piece, you naturally have to write more, even if you keep your writing very concise and to the point. Whereas on the other hand, just longer content for the sake of length, introduces an element of fluff that is easy to suss out for users and for Google. And you can tell the difference just by reading it and especially reading it out loud. A piece that's really, that has a high density of information compared to a piece that's drawn out just to hit a certain word count, the difference is day and night.
And for all our listeners, by the way, we will include links to all of the social posts of Kevin's that we've referenced in this episode in the show notes. So you'll find a link to this exact LinkedIn post that we're talking about in the show notes when this episode goes live. And Kevin, I saw you want to focus on the most overrated thing you'd mentioned, which was Core Web Vitals. Is that something we just shouldn't be spending any time worrying about?
Yes, with a few exceptions. So one thing that's really important to understand about any of these signals and systems is that they're highly individualized based on the application and the situation of the user. An example is when people search for queries in the finance space where maybe banks are ranking signals like a secure connection or SSL are much more important compared to say you know queries in the SaaS space or in the consumer space which is not that important. In the same veins, query vitals matter a lot when it comes to e-commerce, when speed is important, when you make a purchasing decision. And maybe in some marketplace instances, say you're looking for a dinner on DoorDash, that might be a case as well. With Core Web Vitals, you definitely want to get them right. But then in most other verticals, they don't have any effect. There's a client who told me this story about how they spent six weeks, which was three sprints, just getting their Core Web Vitals top-notch, meaning best in class compared to their competitors, and the impact was zero. So they wasted a lot of time and resources. So the way I go about Corvette Vitals is, for any business, if they're really, really poor, you probably want to get them to the green, which is not very difficult. It usually doesn't demand a lot of resources. But the incremental gains from hitting Core Web Vitals – they're thresholds, their hard numbers, the incremental gain from making them even better, in most cases, is zero. So it's just a waste of time. But at the same time, of course, Google is very vocal about them because Google wants sites to have good user experiences. And it's something that teams can measure. You hit them, yes or no, and it's a number. And executives can look at this and say, oh, we're successful here or not. But if you take it a step further and look at the actual returns, it's close to zero in most cases.
Yeah. Core Web Vitals to me sometimes feels like a metric that was created for SEO consultants because it gives them yet another project to work on with their clients. And then on the other end of things, on the underrated side, your number one underrated thing that SEOs aren't spending time on was brand and brand combination searches. What does that mean? What can we take from that?
The definition of brand combination searches is a mix of a brand name and a generic term. An example would be Shopify brand name generator, where Shopify is a brand, or a business name generator. A business name generator is the generic term. And by people looking for these brand combination queries, they send a very powerful signal to Google that this specific brand is especially relevant for that generic term. And I've seen it, especially over the last couple of years, that this is an increasingly powerful factor, especially if you want to rank number one. And it doesn't always trigger. There are cases where it's just not as important, but there are other verticals where it's so much more important. And so the thing that I suggest everyone to do is for them to identify their most important keywords and to see how do we perform in terms of brand combination search and how do we stack up against our competitors. You can use lots of tools to check the search volume for these types of queries. I do it with most of my clients and it increasingly shows that if you have an uptick in brand combination searches, your ranks for the keyword will also increase. And of course, that's not the only factor here. And of course, there are other things like content, backlinks, technical optimization, but generally, I see this trend growing more and more. And it makes perfect sense. Why wouldn't Google reward Adidas when people search for Adidas sneakers, for example? Why wouldn't they reward Adidas for ranking for sneakers?
And this leads me to my next question, which is in a topic of enterprise SEO. I think for a lot of the startups and smaller companies that are listening to this podcast that are just starting now to build their brands, like there might not be that opportunity today to track or look at brand combination searches. But for like large enterprise companies like Adidas, like you mentioned, and I know you've got experience at companies like Atlassian and Shopify and G2, like enterprise SEO is often a different game as you've described on your social channels. How is enterprise SEO different or similar to doing SEO at the different startups that you advise?
The way I think about it is a little bit like driving go-karts versus Formula One, where you can go relatively fast in a go-kart and you can tune it yourself and dissect it yourself and be super agile with it. But when you drive Formula One, you need a team and every decision weighs much more heavily. And it's the same game with enterprise versus smaller businesses or affiliate, for example, where you often have super smart people, especially in the affiliate space, and they can make changes very, very quickly and can have impact. But then you have enterprise companies where you have this massive engine of a brand, massively successful brands. They do all sorts of marketing activities, especially on the paid side. So you have a lot more firepower, you have a lot more people, but it also takes a lot longer to get things done. They're just not as agile. And that's why enterprise SEO is a completely different game. There's much more meta work involved where it's basically about how to get stuff done rather than knowing what to do. And so because these often are the larger size or again, larger brands, once you get something out, you need to scope, align, prioritize, plan for it, measure. There's a lot more involved compared to a smaller company or an affiliate site.
And in the post, you go on to mention like 18 harsh truths that enterprise SEO teams should know about or should be thinking about. What are like one or two or three of those harsh truths that stand out to you that I think are worth mentioning on this podcast.
Sure, sure. One that I already touched on is that it's much harder to get things done than knowing what to do. I gotta be careful with how I say this, but you will sometimes have amazing SEO cracks working at enterprise companies, but you typically find the people who are, you know, much more at the forefront in like these, again, affiliate projects or smaller sites, with exception, I gotta be careful, I wanna generalize here. The other thing is that you need to be much more diligent about the storytelling aspect of SEO. So how do you explain executives and other teams who you collaborate with, the importance of SEO, how to think about it, how to measure it, what numbers to look at. You have to be much more diligent. Whereas compared to a smaller company where you can basically just look at revenue or just look at ranks and that's fine because it's a smaller team or it's just you where you don't have to put things in context, you have to invest a lot more into communication at enterprises, right? There's rituals, there is memos, there is like reports, there's all sorts of stuff. And then the other thing is that this idea of resources or support in enterprise is a completely different one. In most smaller companies, you just need to like, you basically, the budget conversations are much, much shorter, whereas in a big company, you need to influence teams in a positive way, but basically persuade them to collaborate with you, to prioritize your asks. You need leadership buy-in, you need to pitch leadership. So there's a whole bucket of work that might even be bigger than the SEO work itself that you need to be successful at in order to make things happen. And if you're successful at that, then you have the best time. You can make amazing progress. You can really do company changing things. But if you fail at that, then it doesn't matter how good of an SEO you are, you're going to fail.
Is that the role of an in-house team or is that the role of an in-house team plus an agency? Because I know a lot of enterprises do have in-house teams plus agencies. Who is responsible for delivering all that communication across that org?
Typically it's the in-house team. I would say that they also have the responsibility of steering agencies in the right direction and giving agencies the asks and requests that they need to be successful. So I don't think the agency is necessarily responsible for making sure that there's leadership buy-in, that the work gets prioritized and stuff. But at the same time, of course, the way that consultancies or agencies package the work, that also of course can make it easier or harder for in-house teams to be successful. The exception I would mention is when there is no real SEO team, but maybe somebody who leads marketing who works with an SEO agency. In that case, I think it's important for the agency to be able to package things the right way and have some element of storytelling. But I would usually, when we talk about enterprises, see the in-house team as being on the hook here.
Kevin, this sounds so frustrating. I've never been on an enterprise SEO team. I've always been a DIYer, building my own sites, and I couldn't imagine spending half of my time navigating red tape and memos and all of that. That sounds so frustrating for a person like me. But one of the things that I do love about SEO, even with smaller companies, like a lot of the companies we work with, is that it is such a cross-functional role. Like the content and SEO team is talking to the paid team and the social team and the product marketing team. And it sounds like those conversations are so important as the size of the company gets larger. Is that right?
They're critical, absolutely critical. Also because, I mean, if you look at it, the output of SEO is recommendations. There's not much that we can do. Say that you work at a company where you have no engineering design content or paid resource and nothing. Sure, you can do some of these things yourself, but not everything. But you can maybe upload an XML sitemap and write the robots.txt, but there's not that much that you can do all by yourself. So you're reliant on other teams well, they can accelerate your path to success. And here's what I mean with that. If you collaborate, for example, with the pay team, they can give you insights that make your SEO strategy much more successful. For example, by sharing which keywords or ad groups convert well, you can then say, oh, cool, now we actually know what works, now we can go after these keywords in SEO. And in return, we help them be more efficient with their ad spend because they don't have to pull all the weight by themselves. We can support them from an organic search perspective. It's these kind of push and pull mechanics that if you know how to leverage them, you're much more likely to be successful in-house. And of course it can be incredibly frustrating. There's also an element of company culture here. Some companies make it much easier than others, but that's part of the job. And that's why typically at enterprises, you're better compensated, you have equity, and all that kind of stuff. So the benefits come with a price. And what I've also observed in my in-house experience is that there's typically a period of 6 to 12 months where you kind of set the table, you establish these rituals and norms and comms and whatnot. And then you get to cruising altitude, they're not as exhausting anymore unless their major leadership changes or the company faces a massive change on the market or threads or something along these lines. So there are cases when it can be disrupted again, but generally when you find your cruising altitude, there's a lot more calm and steadiness, but the first six to 12 months can be a bit wild.
And you mentioned setting goals and tracking metrics and KPIs. And I found in my career that setting goals and KPIs for my content and SEO teams has always been incredibly hard. Like of course there are algorithm updates, there's a delay in the work that we do until when it actually shows itself. And I'd be curious to get your thoughts on like, what is the right way to set a goal or like a KPI for a content and SEO team? Or what's the right thought process? What process do you use?
It's a skill. It's absolutely a skill. And some of the best get it wrong, you know? So it's not something that you learn once and always perfect at it. It's very dependent on the company you work for, the market environment. I mean, look at this year, look at last year, almost everybody missed their goals. There's a lot of variability and volatility, but generally a couple of things that help. One is to build a logical chain of metrics. And here's what I mean. Not every number is the same. There are some numbers that are lagging indicators, for example, revenue. That's a lagging indicator because it's the result of lots of other things that you do. And then there are leading indicators which are very early on in the work that have an impact downstream on lagging indicators. So just by differentiating between the type of number you look at, you already set yourself up more for success because you have a logical argumentation of why you land at a certain goal and you can detect whether you're on goal or off goal much, much earlier. So if you wait, for example, a whole quarter for revenue to come in, that's a long time and there's a lot of risk involved to see if you land on target or not. But if you look at something like the amount of content created, which is generally a leading indicator, you have a much better pulse on whether you're on or off track and you can de-risk projects earlier on. So building a logical chain of argumentation is the first piece in my mind. Second is the context in which you set goals. Do you have historical references? For example, if the business has been established for 10 years and SEO has been done at the business for 10 years, you have a lot more historical context to say, oh, this goal is way higher than anything we've ever done before. It's way lower, right? So you can use that historical context. And then lastly, I would say it also depends on the type of goal you set. Is it a goal that the team has 100% in their control or not? And I see this a lot in enterprise companies that have a sales team or where sales is a fundamental part of revenue because marketing or growth channels basically get the leads to sales or the pipeline to sales and then it's the job of sales to close. So if you then incentivize an SEO team with revenue or set a revenue target, that means a critical part of the goal is not in their hands and that's always a tricky one. So that's where you probably want to push back as a SEO team and say, why don't we look at pipeline or why don't we look at leads? And then we control all the aspects within that goal and we're not too reliant on other teams.
For a startup that's just getting started, because I know you've invested in a number of companies, you're also an advisor to a number of high-growth startups. For a team that's just getting started in building this channel, what are one or two of those like key KPIs they should be looking at before revenue or before leads or whatever It might be down the funnel?
The key metrics that teams should look at depend on the business model. So generally distinguish between two types of sites and business models, integrators and aggregators. Integrators are typically companies that have to create the content themselves. Most SaaS companies fall into that area, affiliates, and whatnot. Aggregators are typically companies that have user-generated content or an inventory of products. So think about an Uber Eats where the inventory is restaurants and dishes or meals. And then on the other hand, think about a G2 where the inventory is reviews and obviously user-generated content. And these companies set goals very differently than integrators where they have to create all the content themselves. If you're just starting out, it's very difficult to set a goal because you don't know what works and what the pace is and all that kind of stuff. So the best thing you can do there is you can see what are other growth channels of the company and how fast are they growing and can we derive a goal from SEO. But you want to do a lot of stakeholder work and clarify that you don't have a good reference point for these goals and it's very likely that you're going to be off-goal. Another tricky thing actually to factor in is this idea of a ramp-up time where a lot of things in SEO take a while. So even when you ship a change to the website or new pieces of content, they don't immediately bring traffic. They obviously have a ramp-up time. And so it's the same complication where when you just start out, that ramp up time is probably a much, much slower. Whereas if you're already established and the site has backlinks and there is some trust and it's a brand and all that kind of stuff, then the ramp up time is probably much, much shorter. So lots of variables to factor in, but any team starting out, I would strongly suggest simplify the goal setting process and make it clear to everyone that these are early goals and you're probably going to be off. So you need a couple of rounds or reps to get confident in your goals.
There's a lot that I want to unpack here. Really quickly, backlinks, because you mentioned them. How important are they? Are they something that we should be thinking about as part of our SEO channel?
Generally more important than most people make it seem. When I started out, backlinks were the number one thing, right? All you needed was good links, or maybe not even good links, just a lot of links. Then it became you need a lot of good links and now it's more variability. And the way to think about it is that it depends on the vertical. So if you notice that your competitors all have very strong link profiles and they're being rewarded in the search results, that is an indication to you to say, okay, backlinks are probably important. Whereas if you see sites ranking in top positions for keywords that are important to you and they don't really have a lot of links or good links, then it's an indication to you that it's probably not that important. I want to give you an example. Coming back to car insurance, the pages ranking for a term like car insurance are typically landing pages of insurances and they're not very sexy to link to. There's no publisher or news site writing about car insurance and then linking to a landing page of a car insurance. It's very rare, very rare. Backlinks matter a lot less in that case. Whereas if you talk about a keyword that is more like a listicle, say like the top 10 startups of 2023, that is a term that has a high likelihood of having lots of links where links matter a lot more. So you want to differentiate between these cases and kind of look at the landscape to gauge whether you need backlinks or not. But generally in 2023, we're in a world where there are some very competitive terms that don't need backlinks at all. And there are others that are very competitive where you really need backlinks and you need to analyze and figure out for yourself whether you are in that territory or not.
Would you say that SEO and content marketing is getting more competitive than it used to be or at least like than it was five or 10 years ago?
Absolutely. I think it's a lot more competitive. And it's a lot more competitive on two dimensions. One is it's easier than ever to create content. There are lots of playbooks out there that work. So there isn't really this time anymore where you figure out something completely new and then have this breakthrough success. You compete much more on the margins. The other dimension of competition is the format and platform in itself. So I think it was last year where the statistic came out that 40% of Gen Z search on TikTok instead of Google. And there was a lot of debate about this, but I think the point that holds true is that it marked a step change where people might search a lot more on other platforms than on Google for certain topics and terms, recipes, for example, or locations. And that is the other form of competition. As a company, you want to ask yourself, do we want to invest the same resources into creating this article or in having a blog in general? Or do we want to play on another platform like YouTube or TikTok, Reels, or whatever fits in their business model and your target audience? And that I think is something that we're not talking about a lot because as SEOs, we're so focused on Google as a platform and on text as a medium, but what about the other competition? And it goes back to audience research, where you actually look at, okay, who are we targeting? And maybe talk to some people and ask them, hey, what do you consume? And what are you watching on YouTube? And what are you reading on Google? What newsletters are you consuming? That's another form of content marketing that has nothing to do with SEO, but that can be very effective these days. So long story short, it's not just about the inner competition within SEO and content marketing, it's also about what competes for the attention of your audience.
Speaking of new platforms, I want to ask about SGE. Do you think like search is going to fundamentally change over the next few years?
I'm in a camp of yes, I think that's the case. And the reason I'm saying that is, first of all, I use ChatGPT and BARD a lot more and it shows that Google search for the longest time has actually not been great. It's been fairly good for shorter keywords or queries, but for longer questions, it's actually been pretty, pretty bad. And I think that comes to light right now where, again, I can just ask these chatbots much longer questions and give you a much, much better answer than Google ever could. Google's results, in my mind, start to drop off after four to five words. It gets really, really bad. Sometimes it doesn't understand the context at all. A quick example, just because it's been top of mind, is there was recently something I saw on X or Twitter where a VP in Google's ads team had reached out to the search team and asked if they could make a change to the search results or to the algorithms to generate more clicks on ads. That comes out in the antitrust case right now with Google. And not so short. I saw this on X and Twitter and I wanted to get a link about that as well. And so I searched that on Google. I reframed my search probably five times and then I just went to ChatGPT and I got it right away because ChatGPT was able to understand the context much, much better than Google. So what does all of that mean for SGE in the future of search? I think that's similar to how more people search on TikTok or YouTube for different things compared to Google. I think a lot more people will use chatbots for tasks that they had previously done on Google. Google tries to capture some of those behaviors with SGE. I'm not sure if they're going to be successful with that. So far, the quality is bad, I would say. At the same time, there is a cannibalization effect on the broader Google ecosystem. So it's going to be very interesting to see how Google tries to solve that problem. But I think the fact that they have BARD and SGE instead of just SGE or just BARD goes to show that they take it very seriously. They need to figure out a problem for that. I don't think they have a great solution to it yet, to be also honest. I think SGE is basically a copy of lots of other attempts of search chatbots. But either way, I think there is an agent that has been introduced into the Google ecosystem that cannot be reverted or taken away. I think the genie is out of the bottle. Google has to react in some way. They're probably going to take a hit. And the question is much more, what is the end state going to look like for these chatbots? For example, ChatGPT just introduced voice search and voice answers, which are pretty good. You can also search with images. So this multi-modality has taken hold. The question is, what's the user interface and how can Google position itself in that game, much rather than how good is SGE going to be? Because I think it's more of a short-term solution.
Do you think Google was forced into this new workflow as a result of ChatGPT? An in, without ChatGPT existing, do you think Google would be going down this path?
I think Google was absolutely forced. I think that Bing, by adding chatbots or AI chatbot capabilities to Bing search, I think Microsoft sent a nuclear bomb in Google's camp and forced them to move. I think at this point, it's relatively clear that Bing hasn't gained much more market share against Google. And honestly, I don't think Bing ever will. I think that train has left, but I think Microsoft uses Bing, again, as a weapon to force Google to move and to cause a reaction. And they have been successful in that. So yes, I think Google is forced to move. And I think they're on red alert. I think it's the biggest threat to their business model that there ever has been. And we know that Google has had some of that technology for a long time and hasn't published it. There was this famous case where one of the Google engineers started to believe that one of the AIs has become sentient and went crazy a little bit. And so we know that the quality has been really, really good for a long time, but Google held back, likely, and this is my assumption here, I know this is a fact, but likely because it's so cannibalizing to their business model, but they also cannot allow another company to be leading on that forefront. So yeah, I think they were forced to come out and dance and now they're dancing.
Speaking of AI, slightly different context. AI writing tools are highly debated in my SEO circles. I have some customers that love them, some customers that will never touch them for their websites. Do you think there's a place for an AI content creation tool within like an SEO strategy? Should we be using AI in our content creation process?
I absolutely think so. And the big difference to make here is whether you wanna use AI to create all of the content or you wanna use AI for certain steps in the content creation process. And I've been very vocal this year in all the conference that I spoke at about the latter. Think about it as you have a big machine and at the end of the machine comes out a really good piece of content. And instead of just replacing the whole machine with AI, you want to think about the cogs, the little wheels, the little parts of the machine and use AI for that. Could be brainstorming, editing, it could be generating lists out of unstructured data, all these kind of little things. And that's where AI is actually really good. But you need to be very diligent in providing lots of context, very clear instructions, and then it works. I've actually ran lots of AI projects by now with my clients and all of them have been or most of them have been successful as in they've not been punished by any update from Google. They have driven pipeline or sales and we could vouch for the content quality. But we never just created content with an AI writer and then didn't do anything with it. There was a lot of vetting, preparation, reviewing, fact-checking, making sure it's valuable and good. And we invested a ton of time into the prompts as well. I've been writing prompts between 400 and 600 words because there needs to be so much specific instruction about what exactly you want. The good thing though is that once you have that prompt down or once you have a workflow with the tool, you can scale it almost infinitely. So I think you can create really good content with AI. It just takes a lot more work than most people are willing to invest. And I think that just because content has been created with AI, it's not per se bad. I will also say, though, that I think there is some sort of a window of opportunity right now where people or companies that adopt AI and test and experiment can gain a competitive advantage over those that don't. But there will be a point in the future where almost everyone uses AI, similar to how almost everyone uses Excel or Google Sheets these days, instead of doing things on paper or whatever. And once we have reached that point, I think the marginal benefits from AI are almost nothing, almost null. And instead, it will depend much, much more on what your input is and what other ways of getting a competitive advantage you have. But I think that that point is still a bit far out. And again, I'm seeing companies now using AI to grab land share, and that's something to pay attention to.
I like how you've described that process. We talked with a recent guest who is in the health space, and their site's doing very well. They spend something like 6 to 12 hours per piece of content they've created. And they mentioned to us, this was a recent episode we published with Mike, from Levels, that they are using AI in an experimental way right now, and they've been able to reduce the amount of time it takes to create a new piece of content from six to 12 hours to three to six hours. But they're still spending three to six hours on that piece of content. I do wanna ask one more question before we transition to the lightning round. I know you had this really interesting post on LinkedIn the other day about websites blocking GPT bot. Do you think that's a trend that will continue? Should we be blocking GPT bot on our website?
I think for the majority of sites, it will continue and it's probably something that is necessary. So in this post, which goes back to a growth memo that I published, I made the differentiation between the site of types where it makes sense to be in chatGPT versus not. And just to spoil it a little bit, for 80% it doesn't make sense because there's no return, right? Especially, say, a publisher, a newspaper, they gain almost nothing for providing their content to large language models so that they can be improved or trained upon. And again, so there's leverage that sites have that create a lot of content, especially good content. And by exposing their content to LLMs like ChatGPT, there's barely anything to be gained. There are experts in the space who have a different opinion, who say that it's going to be similar to Google, where you have to be present and people will still click on citations. I am not sure if I share that opinion. Right now I don't share that opinion. And again, the reason is that LLMs have become so good with their answers that in many cases there's no need to click through to websites anymore. Again, there are cases where that's not true. E-commerce, like obviously if you want to buy a product, you still need to go to the shop and to the store and actually buy the product. But in lots of informational queries, the LLM gives you an answer that is good enough. And if not, you would just ask a question back and get another answer. I don't think people will click on these citations. Therefore, there's nothing to be gained. And where I think this will go is that the large language model builders will have to strike deals with websites to license their content for model training. And then I think it's a great deal. I think publishers should really push for that type of deal because their business models are – I mean, media is a tough business model, but they have this treasure trove of content that is super valuable for tech companies that they can use to train their models. So that's kind of my stance in a nutshell.
Kevin, this has been such an awesome episode. If it's okay with you, I have, I think, four or five rapid fire questions that I'd love to ask you. Does that sound good?
Let's do it.
You're an investor in a number of startups, and I know like OpenAI's valuation is somewhere in the neighborhood of like 80 to 90 billion. Say for example you've got 100 grand and you have to invest it for 10 years, would you rather put that 100 grand into OpenAI here at a 90 billion dollar valuation or Google at like a 1.7 trillion dollar valuation?
That is such a good question. I love that question. If it's only these two choices, I would probably go with Google because I think that the $100 billion valuation is based on Microsoft's investment and I think they're smart enough to price in the long term. So I don't think there's that much of an upside. That being said, there are rumors that OpenAI already makes $1.3 billion in annual revenue. That would still be a 100x valuation or almost, and that I think is a bit too steep. Even though if I could, had I been able to invest in OpenAI before the deal, I would have certainly done it. There's a no-brainer about that. But I think Google still has some – they're still an outstanding company, one of the biggest companies in the tech space. They make the ARR that is equivalent to the GDP of countries like Finland or Peru. They have some of the smartest minds in the world. So I do think that accounts for something. So I'll probably put my 100k in Google if it's just these two options.
What's more fun? Is it more fun to work with enterprise SEO teams or startups?
I don't want to give a cop-out answer. I'll give you an answer to your question. I will say startups. With the caveat though that I think there are different types of fun, right? Like startups you can just execute much, much faster. And I'm working with some hyper-growth startups and it's just a bliss because you see changes within days or weeks. But there is a different type of fund with enterprise companies because you can add so much value by just getting everyone on the same page and providing strategic insights. And so I think the total impact you can make at an enterprise is larger than at a startup. And that is a certain type of fund, but then the execution fund that lives in the startup. But again, I would pick the startup.
Internal linking, is it something we should spend time doing? Is it move the needle?
100% yes.
Is SEO going to be dead in 10 years from now?
Current form of SEO, yes, absolutely. And I would argue that the current form of SEO is already very different than what we did 10 years ago. So it has already died before, but it is cognitively very helpful for us to keep the term SEO because it helps us understand what we're all talking about. I adopted this other term called organic growth, which I think is much more encompassing of all the different things that happen, not just to get traffic to the site, but also convert it and retain it. But to give you an answer, I think, yes, it's going to be dead, but the term SEO will live on. It will just mean something else.
Should an SEO team also be responsible for CRO or is that a different team, different person?
In the old school definition, it would be a different team or person. In new school, I would say they should also be responsible for it. The challenge is that SEO teams typically don't have the mandate to make CRO changes and launch experiments. And Shopify was different, but it was also, it was not just the SEO team that I led. We actually called it the organic growth mission and we had CRO under our purview. And that was massively impactful and helpful. So my answer is I wish SEO would be responsible for it. Their reality is in most companies today it's not.
Kevin, this was such an awesome episode. Thank you so much for coming on. We will link out to your social profiles as well as to the growth memo in the show notes. And for all the listeners, like I mentioned, we're also going to link to the handful of Kevin's LinkedIn and Twitter posts that we talked about specifically on this episode in the show notes. Kevin, is there anything else you'd like to say to our audience?
This is fantastic. Thank you very much, Nate, for having me on. And, you know, it was great and I love the preparation and the homework. Very, very thorough and insightful questions. So all I want to say is I'm looking forward to the episode.
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Positional's tools are an essential supplement to any search-driven content effort. They help us save time and produce better content for both our company blog and our clients.
We used to create outlines for our posts, either by paying a consultant $75+ each, or by spending 1-2 hours researching and creating each one ourselves. With Positional, we can create the best outlines for our target keyword clusters and get alternatives within a couple clicks.
Positional has proven indispensable in our SEO strategy. Its rapid optimization capabilities for our blogs led to noticeable improvements in search rankings within a month. From planning to making our content better, it’s like having a teammate. Our team loves it!
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Positional has been an amazing addition to our SEO and Content team's workflows, enhancing our overall efficiency. We particularly love using AutoDetect and Internal Linking on a daily basis!
Nate and the positional team are the best of the best in SEO, content marketing, and helping you grow your organic traffic. The combination of their expertise and the SEO and content tool they’ve built has allowed us to build a scalable content engine. Reach out to me anytime for a testimony. They are truly phenomenal.
As an SEO novice, Positional makes it easy. I can quickly go from keyword research, to clustering, to content outlines, then go focus on just making good content. I felt like it helped bridge the gaps between what would’ve taken 3 or more tools in the past.
The first time we used Positional's toolset was to revamp an older but important piece of content. We used Optimize for optimization, and Internals for internal linking suggestions. We went from position #6 to #1 with the changes and increased our organic search traffic to the page by 400%. Today, Positional is an integral part of our blogging strategy, from topic generation to blog renovation.
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Positional's tools are an essential supplement to any search-driven content effort. They help us save time and produce better content for both our company blog and our clients.
“We’ve been moving up the search rankings. When we first started using Positional, we had about 1,000 visitors from organic search per month, and today, we have over 12,000 visitors from organic search per month. And obviously, Positional has played a large role in our growth.”
Positional takes the guessing game out of our content and SEO strategy. It allows me to do extremely quick keyword research which I can then turn into detailed instructions for our content writers through their Optimize tool. I love the speed new capabilities are being added!
I've been using Positional since its closed beta, and it boosted our SEO results so far! We've published over 80 articles with Positional and it has gained traction very well. The "Optimize" tool is my favorite — it ensures we use the right keywords for better rankings. The "Content Analytics" tool is also great for showing us exactly where we should improve our content.
Positional's tools are an essential supplement to any search-driven content effort. They help us save time and produce better content for both our company blog and our clients.
