Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author)

Meet the Guest

Lenny Rachitsky: You’ve noticed a significant shift in how SEO works with the rise of AI answers being integrated into search results.

Eli Schwartz: Transparently, I thought this was going to be an apocalypse. Up until AI Overviews, whoever won on that long form piece of content would get that first click. But now that doesn’t exist anymore.

How Search Is Changing

Lenny Rachitsky: What should people do to be successful in this new paradigm?

Eli Schwartz: 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.

Impact on SEO

Lenny Rachitsky: To a lot of people, SEO is kind of this dark art.

The Evolving Search Journey

Eli Schwartz: It is not a dark art. It is simple. I think step one is the step that almost everyone misses on SEO, which is.

Real-World SEO Impacts

Lenny Rachitsky: Today my guest is Eli Schwartz. Eli is a growth advisor specializing in SEO and has helped companies like Quora, Coinbase, Tinder, LinkedIn, WordPress, and Zapier develop and execute their SEO strategies. He’s also the author of Product-Led SEO and has a very refreshing take on how to think about SEO and win at SEO. Recently, he’s been spending a lot of his time analyzing how SEO changes with the rise of LLM chatbots, Google giving you the answers straight in the search results, and also how to utilize AI in your SEO strategy.

In this episode, we dive deep into everything that you need to know to be successful in this new AI paradigm. As Eli shares in the conversation, Google is just now rolling out changes to how search works and is greatly increasing how many searches include an AI-generated answer at the top of the search results. So things are going to start shifting under our feed pretty quickly. If you’re at all thinking about SEO, working on SEO, or are just curious about how search is evolving, this episode is for you.

If you enjoy this podcast, don’t forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It’s the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Eli Schwartz. Eli, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

Impact by Website Type

Eli Schwartz: It’s a real honor to be here. You’ve had some amazing guests, and I’m honored to be counted as one of them.

Lenny Rachitsky: It’s completely my honor. You’ve been working on SEO for a long time. You’ve been helping companies figure out how to win at SEO for a long time, over a decade. And we were chatting about what’s happening in SEO, and you told me that you’ve noticed a significant shift in how SEO works with the rise of LLMs, with the rise of AI answers being integrated into search results.

And so I thought it’d be awesome just to spend an entire episode talking about what people need to know about what’s changing in SEO and how to be successful in this new paradigm of SEO with LLMs and AI being prevalent. How does that sound to you?

Structured vs. Unstructured Data

Eli Schwartz: 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 that’s a CMO or that’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.

My last full-time job was out at SurveyMonkey, 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 this 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 stunned me into silence because essentially that is and was SEO, and then that forced me to really pivot my thinking around what SEO might be. And I pivoted my thinking and I’ve 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 the search channel?

Top vs. Mid-Funnel Differences

Lenny Rachitsky:

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It’s also a powerful traditional search engine with real innovations versus big tech options. It fights bias and SEO spam. It brings a cleaner results page with fewer ads, Reddit threads in the search engine results page, powerful local results, and even community- driven ranking options. Tired of big tech’s same old list of links? It’s time to try Brave Search. Visit brave.com/lenny to get started. That’s brave.com/lenny. So just to set a little foundation, talk about just what is it that’s changing in search and in SEO with the rise of AI answers and LLMs.

SEO as Product, Not Marketing

Eli Schwartz: So essentially Google and other tech companies had their hand forced by OpenAI and ChatGPT. Google claims to have invented the concept of LLMs and they may or may not have, and some of the early OpenAI employees were 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 are 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. You don’t need to optimize anything because the entire world will just be given to you. 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 or 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 maintain investments in them, their stock price goes down. And that hurts Google’s ability to recruit employees. It hurts Google’s ability to raise money and invest in all the interesting stuff they do.

So Google has to satisfy the curiosity and the interests of the general world and general investor by saying, “Oh, that OpenAI thing, we can do it too. That’s not that big of a deal.” So then Google responded, badly, of course, first, by launching what was then Bard. So they said, “ChatGPT, look, we’ve got our own version,” and they did a public demo. It didn’t work out well at all 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 ChatGPT 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. 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, like I think there was one where it may or may not have been fake, 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 AI Overviews. And it’s that. It’s essentially ChatGPT in a search assault. They 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. And once they launched it, suddenly they started getting these screenshots of Google told me to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, Google told me to put glue on my pizza, which, 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 ChatGPT and Google is much bigger and a much more interesting target for people that want to share those things in 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. Or 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, non-logged in users are seeing it, so in incognito 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.

Lenny Rachitsky: To maybe help people understand why this may impact SEO, if it’s not obvious, is it pushes results down. People get the answer right there. They don’t have to click your links. And then there’s also the sponsored links at the top of the page that already are pushing you down. So basically your stuff is harder and harder to find, right?

Zapier SEO Case Study

Eli Schwartz: 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 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 liked to rank on was cars. 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 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 is still geared towards those top of funnel, those big keywords that people cared the most about. So now a lot of those keywords are going to be moving into these AI Overviews. I don’t want to just focus on Google, although I think Google’s going to own the entire search page forever, at least for a very long time.

But other engines, whether it’s Perplexity or whether it’s Claude or whether it’s Meta, they 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 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 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 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 ChatGPT or Google, tells you where to now start doing your deeper search.

Tinder SEO Case Study

Lenny Rachitsky: So just to maybe mirror back what you’re saying is the discovery step of search is going to be swallowed up by LLMs that give you direction. And then once you have a sense of what you want, then you go back to Google and that’s where potentially the opportunity continues to remain.

Eli Schwartz: 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. I think that’s where the user’s best served.

User-Need-Driven SEO

Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, this is fascinating. Let’s definitely spend more time there so people understand exactly what that means. Before we get into that and what people should do to win here, what impact have you seen on SEO and search results and the space of SEO as these things have rolled out? Have you seen numbers of like, this is declining, this is growing?

Eli Schwartz: Transparently, I thought this was going to be an 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 of those embarrassing things that happened in May and June when they first launched it. They’re 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 they’re rolling algorithm updates that are happening, which we’ll also talk about, and that will 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 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 riding 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 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 page six and it tells you that 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 and drink some more water.

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.

A Three-Step SEO Framework

Lenny Rachitsky: As you’re talking, I was reminded of something that I forgot about with my own experience. I used to have a website called whenishanukkahthisyear.com, because it changes every year and it’s just the date. That was the whole website. It gives you the date of Hanukkah this year. And I put ads on there and made 10 bucks a year, and then Google came in and just gave you freaking answers right inside the search result. So I’ve experienced this.

Eli Schwartz: So it’s even more than that. So what you are referencing is structured data. So 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 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.

When SEO Doesn’t Work

Lenny Rachitsky: And just to clarify, I didn’t intend to say that that was AI oriented. That happened a decade ago. So yeah, I totally, totally agree.

SEO Is Not Free

Eli Schwartz: Well, I just thought that was interesting to really drill into the difference between structured and unstructured, because unstructured is actually where Google is disrupting everything. So this entire idea of SEO, again, 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 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 unstructured data from the 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.”

The Four Growth Engines

Lenny Rachitsky: So help us understand even deeper this distinction between top of funnel and mid-funnel. So when people are maybe winning at one or the other, what does that look like? What are some examples of like, here’s a top of funnel type of search that Google’s going to eat and here’s a mid-funnel experience that you can win that?

Companies That Don’t Need SEO

Eli Schwartz: 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 a 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. G2 and all the sites like G2, like the Gartner sites like Capterra, 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 would 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 now you’ve narrowed down your list to these three tools. And that’s when you start doing those 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.

That’s bottom of funnel, and that’s where you’ll now go buy 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 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.”

Lenny Rachitsky: First of all, as a user, this sounds great. I’m so tired of just all search results just being a bunch of SEO pages, just with a bunch of BS answers. And so I really prefer, Google, just tell me. Just tell me what I need to know. The other piece is if you really think about what Google has been trying to do, they’ve been trying to do this is like, here’s our best shot at giving you an answer to this question, and here’s links that’ll point you to an answer.

And this is just a better version of it where it takes all the actual information and just gives you the end result. So it makes a ton of sense that they’re doing this and the technology has finally allowed them to do this. Okay, so let’s get to the, I don’t know, $64,000 question, million dollar question, what should people do? What should people do to be successful in this new paradigm that as you’re describing is in motion?

It’s just starting to now happen. And it may be catching people off guard because they’ve thought it’s already been out and things are okay, and you’re saying it’s actually starting to actually move quicker.

When SEO Shows Results

Eli Schwartz: I think it’s fascinating, I’m honored to be one of the few marketers on your product hard test, 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, it 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 expected to make that product fit into the thing that the search results are around. And it doesn’t work because that’s not what 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 the health space. They have an app. It’s a health app. And we talked about 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 wrote thousands of blog posts about health in general. 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?

Lenny Rachitsky: Can you help us make this even more real? Maybe go through an example of a product you worked on or one that’s doing this really well in terms of going from, hey, they want our product. What’s the journey look like? What’s a good example of that?

Conversion Metric Expectations

Eli Schwartz: So the earliest example of where I discovered on this process was about 10 years ago, I met the CEO of Zapier, Wade Foster, and he was a co-worker of mine. I had invested in this company, and he asked me to meet with him to just discuss SEO. They were doing something that no one needed. They had this product which zapped things together, but no one needed it 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, in 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 that 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? And that’s a, again, 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.

Metrics to Measure SEO Success

Lenny Rachitsky: I had no idea that you were involved in Zapier’s SEO work. That’s one of the most legendary successes of SEO. Very cool.

Eli Schwartz: Total accidental. 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. It’s always great to mention that I helped through that.

Time to See SEO Results

Lenny Rachitsky: That’s amazing. Okay, so the lesson there is you realized that the key, the opportunity is to teach people what they could accomplish with this product. There’s this awesome product doing amazing things. They have a need they’re searching for, say it’s like Gmail and Salesforce, and how do we help them see there’s something really interesting here.

Embedding SEO in Buyer Journey

Eli Schwartz: Yeah. I actually have a better one for you.

AI in SEO Content Creation

Lenny Rachitsky: Great. Let’s do it.

When to Use AI Content

Eli Schwartz: So I worked with Tinder for a couple years. 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. In my book, I talk about one of the earlier stories I had of this where I worked at a company where 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 didn’t do anything because they never resourced it. But I worked with this really great product person at Tinder, Udi Milo. He was the chief of growth.

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 is like, “There has to be upside for SEO if they’ve never done it before.” So that… 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 what we built out is if you look for online dating in 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 the loneliness problem you have.

The AI Content Debate

Lenny Rachitsky: So what changes here with the rise of AiO reviews and things like that? Is it this is where… this is how future of SEO looks versus just keywords and endless block posts.

Impact of AI Content on Google

Eli Schwartz: Actually nothing changes here with AiO reviews because if you’re looking for, you’ve gone to Dubai. You’ve just… You’ve gone to Dubai. It’s 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… Again, AiO reviews 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 AiO review 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 AiO reviews does or doesn’t do because you’re still solving the mid-funnel problem with your SEO solution.

Lenny Rachitsky: Let’s go in a direction I was going to say for later, but it might be useful now, which is, say, somebody’s just sitting there at their desk thinking, “Hey, I want to be… I want to start doing some SEO. I want to be successful at SEO. Haven’t really done a ton here.” With this new world of AI and LMs, what would be step one, step two, step three to move down a direction of starting to poke their toe in the water of SEO?

AI Overviews and Brand Building

Eli Schwartz: 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’ve been so many companies, and SurveyMonkey was a great example. One, I spent seven years at 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 and 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 am a user of this SaaS, 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 any in the world because that’s what Tinder does. It solves that loneliness problem in any way you want, of course.

And now we had to think about what is it 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 difference programmatic versus editorial. We know we want to be programmatic because no one wants to in 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, and we’re on a product podcast. 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. 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.

Lenny Rachitsky: So I think there’s a really powerful point here that might be… people might not get, which is the user needs to be thinking of something they will go to Google to search for to find your product.

So it’s if they’re… if nobody is searching for the thing that you’re building in some way, there’s not going to be an opportunity for you to win an SEO or and benefit from SEO. Are there any examples that come to mind to you of B2B, SaaS companies that just like, “This is not… There’s no SEO opportunity here, just like no one’s searching for this thing.”

Programmatic vs. Editorial SEO

Eli Schwartz: Most of them. [inaudible 00:35:30]. One of my first consulting clients, right, when I left SurveyMonkey was Mixpanel. 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 was not an awful client. It was just an eye-opening client where we’re trying to do SEO, and I’m doing SEO and exactly the way that CEO had told me SEO should work, and he was going to do it himself. So I told them 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 show me the user journey. 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 what 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 Mixpanel is a product you integrate in your entire company. You don’t just do a quick Google for it and be like, “Oh, analytics. Yeah. I’m going to tell everyone we got to do it and it’s going to be live tomorrow.” Also, Mixpanel 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 SaaS 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.

So I had another eye-opening experience early in COVID when I was… 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 there wasn’t a chance I was going to take it, and it seemed like an interesting thing to go through a hiring loop and stay at home. So I had a fascinating experience interviewing because every time the… first it was the hiring manager and every time it was 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 does this SEO journey look like?” Because for Google Cloud, they only have two competitors, Amazon and Microsoft, and no one is going to do a search and be like, “Oh, Google’s number one for this term I searched. Let me just go buy it.” There’s a decision-making process. You bring… 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 plateaus really quickly.

Lenny Rachitsky: This is really fascinating, and just to maybe reframe what you’re saying because there’s kind of a couple elements of this. It’s not necessarily that people aren’t searching Google for the problem. So I’m thinking of Vanta SOC 2 stuff. It’s not like people aren’t SOC 2 certification. It’s not like they’re searching… they’re not searching.

And what I’m hearing is the bigger issue is they will never buy your product from that experience and that journey. It may educate them a little bit and may teach them, “Oh, Vanta exists,” but they’re never going to become customers. They need to talk to salesperson. They need to involve bunch of stakeholders. So it’s basically a sales motion. It’s not a product-led SEO motion.

Keys to Programmatic SEO Success

Eli Schwartz: Yes.

Antitrust Ruling SEO Insights

Lenny Rachitsky: Is that right?

Eli Schwartz: Yes.

SEO Is Not Dead

Lenny Rachitsky: Cool. Pulling on that thread a little bit further beyond maybe even B2B, just how does one decide if SEO is an opportunity for you, and also just how much should you invest in this opportunity just to explore it?

Eli Schwartz: 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 and 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. When I was at SurveyMonkey, we generated a couple of hundred million dollars a year off of organic traffic because it was a freemium tool where you search for the prodem… 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 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, [inaudible 00:40:32] 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 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 $1,000,001 back faster?

And that’s where I think the evaluation 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 and is this the right use of funds.

Common SEO Myths

Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. So I think this is really important. It’s not that you won’t benefit from SEO. It’s not that SEO isn’t an opportunity. It’s that you have much bigger opportunities in other areas. Most likely, if you’re a B2B SaaS companies, because the journey isn’t fully online, you’re not going to convert by just reading a bunch of pages.

Getting Started with SEO

Eli Schwartz: Absolutely.

Will TikTok Replace Search?

Lenny Rachitsky: Super fascinating. Yeah.

Eli Schwartz: Yeah. There was once a company I met, there was a SaaS tool, they were in a gardening space. [inaudible 00:42:39] 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 costs them $10,000. So I said, "Instead of spending$15,000 on SEO, you can get… you can 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 they’re leads that you could 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.”

Technical SEO Myths

Lenny Rachitsky: The takeaway here is if you’re thinking about whether SEO is worth an investment for you and you see all these other companies doing SEO winning with SEO, think about how much will this actually cost us. And I think the most important takeaway for me here is if you don’t think it’ll convert online if you think sales is the core motion of the process, it’s probably not a good ROI for you.

Page Speed Is Overrated

Eli Schwartz: Absolutely. Yeah. Really think about what are the trade-offs. Again, from a product standpoint, there’s always trade-offs. So what are the trade-offs to investing in this channel versus another channel?

Lenny Rachitsky: And I think what I’ve seen, there’s all the… the way I think about it, there’s four actual growth engines… there are four core growth engines. SEO, paid, virality, and sales. And what I find is, eventually, large companies do them all. Unless you’re a consumer, you don’t do sale. And so it’s not like SEO should you never do. It’s I think the main point here is earlier stage, when you have limited resources, probably not the best use of your time.

The Top-Down SEO Approach

Eli Schwartz: I think there are companies that should probably never do SEO. [inaudible 00:44:24] going back to what I said when 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’ve converted with all those other things that they’ve touched.

Lenny Rachitsky: And it’s not like you’re saying, “Don’t be on the internet and don’t will make it easy for people to understand who you are, don’t have a great site, don’t have other pages writing about you. It’s just don’t… You don’t need to spend time optimizing the search results for Google Cloud. You’re not going to benefit significantly from that work.

The Value of Keyword Tools

Eli Schwartz: 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.

Lenny Rachitsky: Hot take.

External Tools vs. GSC Data

Eli Schwartz: 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 and just making a decision about where to eat lunch.

Again, if you’re choosing how to cater your kid’s birthday party, that might be a different thing, but you’re not browsing and saying, “These are the places I’m going to go right now.” But more than that, it’s expensive, and there’s no way that that pizza shop knows that the website they have with the soft music playing and their menu that comes up in flash, which is expensive, does a single thing for them. Most of their orders are going to come again through those other platforms.

Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, I hate restaurant websites. One thing I read once that explains why what restaurant websites are so bad is restaurant owners are big on just like what is the experience when someone enters my restaurant that they go through the vibe, and they do that on the website. They’re like, here’s the music, and here’s the imagery, and here’s the animations.

And nobody wants that in [inaudible 00:46:19] on their website. Just like give me the hours and location and your menu. You mentioned a couple of things that I want to drill into a little bit. So, one is just how long SEO should take for you to see results. Two is just expectations of what does good conversion look like. What does it tells you this is actually us, a journey that could work for us well enough that SEO might work? So maybe those two questions.

The Future of SEO Consulting

Eli Schwartz: 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… they’re throwing their hands up and saying, “I don’t really know. I’m not… 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, right. 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. So if you’re… if there’s an… 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, and it drives revenue. Smaller companies, it may take many months before Google notices. It may take many months before the demand is there. 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 that you’re building and how quickly users will come and find and need that solution.

Then, as far as what the expectations are on conversions, that also is really depends on what it is that you’re looking for. There’s… Some companies are building media, and they [inaudible 00:48:09]… 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 it 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.

So you… And again, I think most people don’t do this correctly with SEO. They used 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, a SaaS tool. They’re in a two-sided 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 at 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, 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 be 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 use, 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 they… 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.

Quick Lightning Round

Lenny Rachitsky: So just to give someone that’s starting to do this something concrete to look at. When you come to a startup and help them with SEO, what do you usually track as a sign this is working that we should keep investing? What’s… What are the couple metrics that you look at most?

Eli Schwartz: The first is really understanding what is it 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. 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 a, “We spend this, and we’re this efficient. This is what we drive from that.” And SEO really needs that same rigor.

My Favorite Product

Lenny Rachitsky: So what I’m hearing is look at if you’re in B2B leads coming in through SEO, track that, or rank potentially if that’s like a vanity thing, you can show investors and you’re saying traffic alone, because usually in decks I see and investor updates almost always the metric I see is traffic we’re getting through SEO.

Eli Schwartz: Yeah, total waste of time.

Personal Life Motto

Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing.

Proudest SEO Achievement

Eli Schwartz: 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.

Final Closing Remarks

Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. Okay. Back to the question of just how long it takes just to give someone something here that they can tell… that can tell them when it makes sense to keep going or move on. Say you’re just taking a shot at SEO, how long should you give it to make a decision this is working for us or not? Or is it always, “There’s always something here, keep working.” How do you decide keep doing or not?

Eli Schwartz: 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 and you’re creating milestones. So you say we’re… 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 engineers to start working on. In the third month, they’re going to start working, and they’re going to ship this.

Now, if you start missing all those milestones, so I mean, this is a common problem in consulting in general, you miss all those milestones, and then some will say, “What’s… We’ve been working together for six months, and we have nothing to show for it.” And you can point very specifically to all those milestones that were missed. So that’s the result of not shipping or not meeting the milestones that the SEO didn’t work.

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 in 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.

Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. Okay.

Eli Schwartz: 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 of 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 Quora’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 encourage them to show the answers. Yes, they were going to be giving way 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 the suggestion I made, but 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.

If they create a sitemap, they did this in the past, and if Quora’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 the sitemap, again, it’s HTML sitemap, not just an XML sitemap and way even a user can navigate through it. This is health, and this is health page one and health page two, and you can navigate through this entire site. Then 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 of months, they were able to quadruple traffic.

Lenny Rachitsky: There’s so much here, and there’s so many valuable insights. One that I think is really recurring that I think is really important to people is the point that you’re making about your SEO content pages should solve… should be a product, AKA should solve problems for people as they’re trying to understand the space and the potential problem they have.

So correct me if I’m wrong, but kind of the advice you’re sharing is there’s less opportunity in just generating tons of blog posts that just have a bunch of content. And the opportunity is more things like Zapier and Canva with templates and Notion and Quora where it’s just like, “Here’s the answer.” It’s just like actually help them solve the problem. And with that, “Here’s how our product [inaudible 00:56:03] help you solve that problem further.” Is that…

Eli Schwartz: It’s really building a product around what the company is attempting to monetize. So Canva is 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… 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 it. What is the product that you want to use? So going to mention the templates did at SurveyMonkey, so the survey product.

If someone looked for a template of a survey, they wanted to make a survey. So we were not a survey product, and we just monetized off the 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 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, well, 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, only used it from a marketing standpoint, but [inaudible 00:57:26] Tinder gates you. So if you’d like to get the advanced Tinder experience, you have to pay. And again, they’re… 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.

Lenny Rachitsky: That’s an amazing clarification. So again, it’s another point you’ve been making of traffic alone is not valuable if it doesn’t convert. And so you can look at a Canva, you can look at Notion at Airtable with all these templates, copy that. But if that isn’t the thing people, will buy from you and monetize it’s not going to be worth doing.

… Will buy from you and monetize. It’s not going to be worth doing.

Eli Schwartz: Yes.

Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. I’m excited to chat with Christina Gilbert, the founder of OneSchema, one of our longtime podcast sponsors. Hi, Christina.

Christina Gilbert: Yes. Thank you for having me on, Lenny.

Lenny Rachitsky: What is the latest with OneSchema? I know you now work with some of my favorite companies, like Ramp, Vanta Scale, and Watershed. I heard that you just launched a new product to help product teams import CSVs from especially tricky systems, like ERPs.

Christina Gilbert: Yes, so we just launched OneSchema File Feeds, which allows you to build an integration with any system in 15 minutes as long as you can export a CSV to an SFTP folder. We see our customers all the time getting stuck with hacks and workarounds, and the product teams that we work with don’t have to turn down prospects because their systems are too hard to integrate with. We allow our customers to offer thousands of integrations without involving their engineering team at all.

Lenny Rachitsky: I can tell you that if my team had to build integrations like this, how nice would it be to be able to take this off my roadmap, and instead use something like OneSchema, and not just to build it, but also to maintain it forever?

Christina Gilbert: Absolutely, Lenny. We’ve heard so many horror stories of multi-day outages from even just a handful of ad records. We are laser-focused on integration reliability to help teams end all of those distractions that come up with integrations. We have a built-in validation layer that stops any bad data from entering your system, and OneSchema will notify your team immediately of any data that looks incorrect.

Lenny Rachitsky: I know that importing incorrect data can cause all kinds of pain for your customers and quickly lose their trust. Christina, thank you for joining us and if you want to learn more, head on over to OneSchema.co, that’s OneSchema.co. Okay, so coming back to AI and its impact on SEO, can you use AI to help you with this, and use AI to create content for you?

Eli Schwartz: AI is a tool. Everyone says AI is a tool, it’s not a solution. You can use AI to create content if the content you’re creating is a part of that journey. For example, before AI content really came on the scene, because AI’s been around for a while, Jasper’s been around for a while, Writer’s been around for a while before ChatGPT. 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.

A lot of that content, completely worthless. If you’re just creating content for the sake of content, and you paid someone on Upwork $50 for their content, now you can use an AI tool and just create the content, the same worthless content, for free. 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.

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. 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.

If you’re looking for shoes, the fact that a Macys.com page will have a lot of content about what shoes do doesn’t do anything for the user. They’re just looking for shoes, and then there’s shoes on the page. I think Macy’s actually ranks pretty well on those kinds of things. Using AI content to write more fluff content that’s not necessary would just be a waste of time.

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 hurting your SEO, because what you’re trying to optimize for is the product and the product name itself.

Lenny Rachitsky: Got it. Basically, don’t use AI to generate entire blog posts. I know people are doing this all over the place, but absolutely leverage AI to help you add to existing pages, descriptions, titles, things like that, which I can see why Google, Google would’ve no idea that you were helped to write this thing with AI, right, if it’s just a small part of the page versus the entire page?

Eli Schwartz: 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.

Lenny Rachitsky: You don’t have to name names or reveal anything, but do you know of a bunch of companies using AI now to generate tons of high successful pages, high converting pages in some way? In this way?

Eli Schwartz: There’s this hatred of AI content by users in general. I think once companies declare that they’re using AI, people get upset about it. It was a Red Ventures company, I think it was CNET that said they were using AI to create content. 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’ve been very successful.

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. I don’t know, 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 the 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. Their company will issue, they’ll file their earnings report, and then now it’s AI. Before AI, it was basically like Mad Libs kind of content. It would extract pieces of the earnings report and then it would write a blog post, which is actually fairly useful. I don’t think there’s an issue with it itself. 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 the SEC and read an earnings report.

Lenny Rachitsky: There’s this guy, Noah Smith, he’s on Twitter, he’s got a newsletter called No Opinions. It’s awesome. He had this tweet about how we’re approaching an age of a ton of slop of content, just a lot of really bad content generated by AI for better or worse, this is related to SEO, but it makes me think about just how much bad stuff we’re going to see.

To your point, it doesn’t matter whether it was generated by AI or not, people will gravitate towards and Google will gravitate towards stuff that is useful and good, whether it’s written by people or not.

Eli Schwartz: This is a huge issue for Google, because the amount of content being created is enormous, and it’s growing exponentially. 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.

Lenny Rachitsky: The crazy thing for LLMs is now to be trained. They’re trained on content on the internet in a big way, and they’re struggling with not training their LLMs on stuff that AI has written because it becomes this, a bad direction that LLMs will go. They’re trained on themselves. Anyway, something I wanted to come back to around AI, which is AI Overviews. I imagine many people are like, “How do I get into that answer? How do I get my product into the answer that Google gives at the top?” Is that something you recommend people try to do? Is that something you can do?

Eli Schwartz: I think of AI or AI Overviews as a branding exercise. 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 protection. They’re having links. 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 didn’t plagiarize. 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 linked to it, so it’s fair.”

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 SurveyMonkey experience. It’s not a statistically significant survey in general, but it will never go to 99% and one. 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.

You have this AI Overview which summarizes, then you have a link so you can link off of it, and then beneath it, you sort of have the exact same thing. That’s the challenge that Google has to work through. For a company to show up in AI Overview, it’s a brand challenge. 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.

If you’re showing up in the 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. 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. If you show up as a brand, you’ve done good branding, but if you show up as a link, it means Google has stolen your content, and people may or may not click off of it.

Lenny Rachitsky: Along this lines of brand and SEO, do you have any… That’s always this question of are we investing in brand? Do we just want people to be aware we exist, or are we trying to actually drive conversion? Any advice on how to think about brand building and SEO, especially with this world of AI?

Eli Schwartz: The biggest myth in SEO is that you could just build links, and link building is the secret source and the secret sauce to growing your SEO footprint. 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.

It’s funny that everyone complained about Google as this really, really smart, all-knowing LLM, and at the same time, they think they’re dumb enough to fall for these guest posts that are on websites that no one really read. The right way to build links is to build a brand. It comes part and parcel of what you’re trying to do. 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.

If you can build this product that’s awesome and everyone loves and wants to use, and you get not links, but mentions, and links might be mentions now, because the way a link before LLMs and the link 10 years ago was actually an HTML link. Now, Google can read content. They can say, “Well, you’ve been mentioned here,” that’s pretty good. Now, we acknowledge that this might be the brand, and this might be the match for that kind of thing.

That’s helping to build that brand. 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. It all comes together as being one big effort. The same thing you’ll do on PR, you’ll do for SEO.

Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. Okay. I’m glad we touched that. There’s a few other directions I want to go, so I’m going to bounce around a little bit and cover some of the other stuff I wanted to extract from your deep experience in this space. One is you’ve mentioned this idea of programmatic SEO a couple times versus editorial. Maybe first, just clarify what those two directions are, just for people that don’t exactly know what you mean. Then two, what’s your general advice for which direction to go, programmatic or editorial?

Eli Schwartz: It might be obvious at this point, but I’m going to say it’s dependent on the user, but essentially, what programmatic is is it’s taking a bunch of data sources and building out a page that is a combination of all these data sources. In my book, I talk about two of my favorite programmatic SEO companies. One of them was created by a past, well, it’s not created, the strategy was created by a past guest of yours, Luc Levesque, who introduced us, and that was TripAdvisor.

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. TripAdvisor did not write a piece of content on every single hotel. They don’t write a piece of content on, “Here’s this long form blog post as an influencer on the Waldoff Astoria of 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 the beginning of the time. They still own it. That team has cycled through many, many leaders, many different, a lot of different things, and they’re still number ones. It’s the strategy that has allowed them to build that brand and to dominate it.

The second example is Zillow. What Zillow did is they solved an early problem many years ago in the real estate space, which is no one understood what the value of a piece of property was. Zillow took in all of those data sets. They got, some of them are government data sets, some of them are their own comparison data sets based on other home sales. The government can say a house is worth one price, and based on their comparison, Zillow can completely disagree with it.

They’re building in these data sets, and they’re taking photos from realtors, they’re taking neighborhood data, they’re taking school data, and that’s a programmatic SEO page. SEO is the only channel to bring in traffic to each one of these pages. They’re not going to do paid traffic for my house, they’re not going to do paid traffic for your house. The only way someone would find that page on Zillow, either they start at Zillow.com and then just navigate through it, or they Google it. Those are programmatic SEO efforts.

On the flip side is editorial. Editorial would be, in TripAdvisor’s case, writing out that long form piece of content around each hotel, each city, and all the things they’ve done. Zillow would be the same. Zillow would take 500 million properties and write out an editorial piece of content. Neither of those would be a fit for their model, and it would be extremely expensive. Say each piece of content would cost a thousand dollars, that would be cost prohibitive for anyone to do.

Going back to my distinction based on the user, what is it that the user’s looking for? Is the user looking for the value of a home? They don’t need a long form piece of content. They need a piece of content or a page that just says what the value of that home is. TripAdvisor’s case, they’re looking for a single thing, a rating, or maybe they need some of that UGC, but really, they’re looking for that rating. That long form piece of content, there’s a purpose for it, but not on TripAdvisor’s site.

Understanding, what is it that the user needs will help solve, do you approach this from an editorial standpoint, or do you approach this from a programmatic standpoint? Some of the companies I mentioned earlier, like G2 and Capterra, which are completely being disrupted, so they’re being disrupted by editorial, but they’re also being disrupted by Google itself with their AI Overviews.

If you look for the top CRM tools, you have G2 or you have Capterra, but you also have Forbes writing out a long form piece of content on what Salesforce is, what HubSpot is, and that’s probably unnecessary.

Lenny Rachitsky: I think generally, you would, programmatic is the better path and the most common success path is what I’m hearing. What are things you need in place to be successful in programmatic SEO? Like basically, you just need some sort of data source that you own. Is that just… What’s a checklist of like, “Here’s what tells you you have a big opportunity here?”

Eli Schwartz: Programmatic is the right solution when there’s scale and when there’s a user use case. If there is not, you create scale for nothing. An earlier version of programmatic, again, pre a lot of the internet companies now, is building out a piece of content for every single zip code in America. Say you offer some sort of local product. You would build out a page for every single zip code that is, in theory, programmatic, but users don’t look for it, and Google has completely disrupted that with their own local products.

Programmatic can always be something. I see programmatic mistakes all the time, where websites look at, they say, “Look, we’re making reviews of software. There’s 10,000 different softwares in the world. We’re just going to make out a page for each one and we’re going to combine it with, I don’t know, a city.” You can make programmatic pages like that, but there’s no use case. Really knowing what programmatic solution to use comes down to, “Is this something that someone would actually be looking for? Does this page itself provide a solution?” Zapier provided a solution because someone was looking for that combination, but there are many tools like Zapier, which try to be Zapier, but they’re not looking for that solution. Going back to some of the template companies you mentioned, I don’t think a lot of companies that make templates, they’re making programmatic, but there’s not a use case for every single one of those templates. They’ve made programmatic for no [inaudible 01:15:53].

Again, SurveyMonkey was one where we had a fat head of templates we could make, but it wasn’t a long tail. We could make a hundred templates, but we couldn’t make 10,000.

Lenny Rachitsky: I want to do a rapid fire of SEO myths. Before I do that, I know that you spent a lot of time actually reading the recent ruling against Google and their whole deal with Apple, and you were telling me it revealed there were a lot of interesting stuff about their strategy and where search was going. Let’s spend a little time here, just what did you learn doing that exercise?

Eli Schwartz: It’s fascinating. It’s 286 pages. I basically read a book. It was a verdict.

Lenny Rachitsky: Oh, geez.

Eli Schwartz: I would say that the judge or the clerk that wrote this verdict has a better understanding how the SEO works and how digital marketing works than most people I meet in digital marketing.

Lenny Rachitsky: Wow, I did not expect to hear that.

Eli Schwartz: Yeah. This verdict explains how Google decides to rank a page. The verdict explains how the auction model works in ads, in Google Ads. I think that’s fascinating. Talked about the comparison between social media. This court really understood a lot of the questions that were posed to them. For example, Google tried to say that they’re not a monopoly because they’re social media. The court analyzed that question and said, “Social media is not a comparison to Google search.”

Google tried to say a lot of the things they did were non-monopolistic because there’s alternatives like Bing. The court really analyzed a lot of these things. Why I found it fascinating was, again, a lot of the testimony was public, is the summary of how the court put it all together in a verdict. A few of the things I learned is one, the market share, Google’s market share. That’s been a number that no one really liked to talk about.

Google would say, “Oh, we think it’s like 80%,” because they didn’t want to be viewed as a monopoly. Microsoft would say, “Well, maybe we have 20%.” I just found a recent document from Microsoft where they claimed to have a lot of market share in search. In the verdict, it says that Google has 98% of mobile searches. I forget whether it said that the court said it, and it said Google didn’t disagree, or that came from Google’s own documentation, but 98% of mobile searches.

The thing that I thought was most fascinating from the verdict is how much the default partnerships that Google has contributes to Google’s success. The plaintiff in the case was the Department of Justice suing Google for being a monopoly. However, I don’t know what the word is, but one of the complainants in this is this company, Neva, which was a search engine started by a past Google, I think it was like a head of research or something. A senior person at Google created a new search engine.

A lot of the trial was focused on how Neva could not be successful, despite having a better search engine, despite having a better experience for users, because they didn’t have any of these default distribution agreements. That’s the part that I thought was most fascinating. Google has these default agreements with Apple, and they also have Chrome.

They have all these inputs into Google searches, which means that I don’t think there’s a chance, and this is the biggest takeaway, I don’t think there’s a chance that ChatGPT, or Perplexity, or Claude, or any of these other LLM startups, because they’re startups now, even OpenAI is a startup with Microsoft’s investments, still a startup. I don’t think they have a chance at really unseating Google purely from a quality standpoint.

That’s what a lot of the documentation in this verdict is about is how much a force of habit, how much the brand, and how much the distribution agreements Google has, drives searchers to Google. There were a couple of very interesting insights. One is that Bing tried to give itself to Apple for free, and Apple said there was absolutely no price that they would take to use Bing search within Apple.

Another one was Mozilla had a partnership with, I think it was Yahoo, and they did a rev share deal with Yahoo, and everyone switched back to Google. When people say, “Well, SEO is dead, everyone’s going to go to OpenAI,” and you just look at the 25 years of Google’s existence and what they’ve built, I really don’t think so. I really think distribution and the force of brand will keep almost everything Google has today.

Now, why is Google fighting back so hard to build AI Overviews? Well, I think there’s two answers. One is, like I said, Wall Street. They really want Wall Street to think that they care and they’re doing this thing. The other is losing small percentage points to ChatGPT costs Google a lot of money, so it’s worth it for them to invest in it, but I don’t think that they have any fear about not being the most dominant search engine in the world.

Lenny Rachitsky: Well, isn’t the idea with this trial that this may change, and they may lose that default status, whether it happens or not, that’s the whole game here, right? It’s like maybe they can’t be that anymore, and that maybe opens up. I think that’s the opportunity potentially.

Eli Schwartz: I don’t think so. Yeah, I’m no legal expert. I don’t know what the DOJ will do, but what’s interesting, if you saw Google’s press release when the verdict came out, so Google tweeted, “We thank the court for recognizing that we’re the greatest search engine in the world, and more to come.” They’re going to fight back, and it’s almost like a bully being declared the world’s greatest bully. They’re like, “See, told you we’re strong.”

When reading the verdict, it actually said, “There is no competitor. Google is the greatest search engine. They have 25 years of great data. They’ve done a fantastic job.” I don’t see any way that those, if they break the default agreements, Apple actually loses all that money Google’s paying, and then users will still Google. That’s not what will do it. I think the only thing they can do is figure out how to prop up a competitor.

Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah. I think that’s an interesting takeaway. People will go to Google, will switch to Google even if it’s not default. There’s actually a really interesting takeaway from Ben Thompson’s analysis of this stuff, and I will point to the podcast episode. I think that shifted my perspective on this, because when you hear Google is paying Apple to be the default search engine, it sounds nefarious and unfair. The deal is actually revenue share. They give them a percentage of the revenue from the ads, which ends up being $20 billion, something like that, a lot of money for Apple. Anyone else can come to Apple and say, “We will give you a revenue share of our searches also.” It’s just nobody is as big and can pay as much. If you think about it, why can’t Google come to Apple? “Hey, we will send you tons of money by doing the search for you and giving you a large percentage of the ads that we are doing for you.”

It’s weird to not allow that if you really think about it, but it’s also unfair, because no one else will ever be able to compete with that.

Eli Schwartz: Yeah, and that’s what the court said is like Neva didn’t have a chance because of that. One other point is, so I did this survey, this was years ago when I was at SurveyMonkey, I did a search market penetration survey to figure out who used what, like Bing versus Google. On my survey, I was generous. I threw DuckDuckGo on there, and I came back, I had thousands of responses, and came back that I had 1% of people use DuckDuckGo.

I didn’t realize it, that DuckDuckGo didn’t actually know what their market penetration was. When I shared the survey, Gabriel Weinberg, who’s the CEO of DuckDuckGo, hit me on Twitter and he said, “Can you share the data with us? We really would like to see it.” This was, let’s say 10, 12 years ago. In the verdict, it said that DuckDuckGo’s market share is 2%. I came back with 1% 12 years ago. DuckDuckGo, I think they raised a hundred million dollars.

They have all these brand partnerships. They have, at baseball games, they have their logo, they’ve done everything, and all they’ve been able to do is get from 1% to 2%. There’s a lot there, and Google being Google, I don’t see anyone knocking them off.

Lenny Rachitsky: Fascinating. Well, thanks for sharing your takeaway so that we don’t have to read this report. Before I move to rapid fire SEO myths, is there anything else along the lines of AI or SEO that you think is really important to share that you want to leave listeners with?

Eli Schwartz: I think the most important thing to leave people with is SEO is not dying. There will always be a world where users are requesting their own information. One of the reasons I think these home assistants, whether it’s from Google, or Apple, or Amazon, have never taken off, is because you don’t have choice. You talk to your Google, and it gives you only one answer. You talk to Amazon, and it gives you only one answer. Like, “I want to buy toilet paper,” and Amazon just buys you whatever it decides to buy you.

There will always be a world where there needs choice. One other piece from the verdict is Google believes that we’re in the very early days of LLMs, and even with all the machine learning they do and understanding users, you will always need real user data, which Google has on past searches. I think users will always be requesting their own information, and there’s never going to be an AI that understands you so perfectly, it’s going to know that for you personally, you would like to click result number five.

That’s the best fit for what you’re looking for right now, which means that there always needs to be multiple choices to make. Yes, most clicks are probably going through the first one, two, or three results, but there needs to be seven, 10, multiple pages of Google, because some people do go to those other pages. I think that’s the most important thing to underscore is that all of this means that search changes, a lot of top-of-funnel search goes away, but in general, there’s always going to be a world where people are doing the searches.

Then the last piece on that really is when you’re looking to do something with search, you’re looking to take an action. Companies benefit from those actions. Say you’re a hotel, and you want people to sleep in your hotel and pay you to sleep in your hotel. The aggregate number of people needing to take that action and pay you for it does not change even if search volume gets cut. If you’re selling shoes, people still need to buy shoes.

If you’re selling information, though, your media, if you’re WebMD, yes, your revenue declines, because that information that you now aggregated and curated and gave away for free in return for people clicking on ads, Google is now going to give away for free in return for no one clicking on ads.

Lenny Rachitsky: Interesting. I wonder if there’s an investment arbitrage opportunity of predicting which businesses will decline with this and which will thrive. Anyway, I want to talk about SEO myths. I know that you have a few things, and we’ve talked about a few of these, I think, of just things that you know people believe about SEO, but they’re actually wrong. Let me just ask you, what are some myths that people get wrong about SEO?

Eli Schwartz: Probably the biggest one we’ve said over and over is they even need to do SEO. There’s this always default assumption that you’ve raised money, you have a marketing team, you should do SEO. I think that one is really worth putting to bed is think about that user journey. Should you do SEO? It’s a question like, “They ask about other channels, should you do brand…”

It’s a question like they ask about other channels. “Should you do brand marketing? Should you take out an ad in Times Square?” And no one will say, “Well, I just raised a million dollars. I should totally take out an ad in Times Square.” And congratulations on being in Times Square, by the way.

Lenny Rachitsky: Thank you.

Eli Schwartz: No one will just decide, “Oh, I’ve got money to burn, let me just burn it.” So somehow SEO becomes this thing of like, “Oh, I’ve raised money. Now, I need an SEO team.” So that’s I think the first myth that’s really important to just put to bed.

Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. What else?

Eli Schwartz: Link building. So link building is brand building. So it’s thinking about how you’re going to build a brand and have people mentioned to you. And when you’re doing link building, you’re creating a relationship between the piece of content that has linked to you and the product or whatever you’re trying to monetize. So that should be link-building. Just getting the idea of getting links on… An HTML link will equal SEO success, again, I think that’s completely wrong. And then I mean probably the biggest myth in general is thinking that Google itself is a black box. So I think there’s nuances to how you rank, and no one can really unearth what is it that will you be number one and what it is that will make you be number three. But the basic idea of how you build SEO is very simplistic and Google has a best practices guide on what it is that you should be doing, which is build a website that Google can understand, link to the pages in that, write content that is helpful and that users want to read. And those are the basics. And starting with that is how you’re going to build an SEO strategy that improves upon it. But the idea of if, “I take all three of these steps right now. I’m guaranteed to be number one,” I think is something that is completely incorrect. And there’s an assumption that if you do a lot of things around SEO, you’re going to be successful. And I think that that’s incorrect.

Yes, there are nuances. But for the most part, you get from most… Zero to 10, you can get to step eight by just doing the best practices.

Lenny Rachitsky: Oh, wow. It sounds very empowering. I like the sound of that. Maybe just on that thread briefly. If someone wanted to start down the road of SEO, I know you’re going to be a little bit biased because you help companies with this, but do you recommend bringing someone like you in first or having someone just give it a shot, listening to this podcast, reading some books and blogs, or something else?

Eli Schwartz: Yes, so I am biased. I think they should have the right people give them advice on SEO. So if someone wants to be… If they validated that there is an SEO effort, paying for help on SEO, it goes back to that resource discussion we had before. So if you want to hire a growth advisor, a growth advisor might be very expensive, but you squash a learning curve so you don’t make as many mistakes as fast.

If you hire someone in-house, and a lot of times they see this with roles where I’m helping companies hire someone for SEO, they don’t have a lot of budget, which means they’re going to have someone that doesn’t have a lot of experience. So is that the right decision to make? If you’re hiring an agency, agencies are typically expensive, and agencies a lot of times get paid on deliverables. So are the deliverables they’re doing worth paying for?

An easy deliverable that a lot of agencies produce now is content, but that goes back to our earlier discussion. Do you even need the content? It’s very easy for agencies to sell content as deliverable because it’s something they actually deliver. Delivering strategy the way most of my growth advising works is very difficult because I don’t have a strategy to offer in a proposal because I haven’t developed a strategy, and we don’t actually see the fruits of that until we implement the strategy. But agencies can end-run that by just saying, “Oh, you pay us on a monthly basis and these are the things we’re going to shift to you.”

Lenny Rachitsky: Something that I wanted to touch on, which might be a myth and might not be a myth. But I think you’re going to say it’s a myth based on what you said about Google being so dominant. There’s a lot of talk about TikTok and Instagram replacing Search for people. I actually do search TikTok a lot now for like, “How do I solve this problem? How do I cut a watermelon? How do I, I don’t know, find a cup for my baby?” It’s really good. What’s your take on TikTok and Instagram videos basically replacing a lot of searching for Gen Z, especially, and younger kids?

Eli Schwartz: In the Google Verdict, I think Google’s said this before. 63% of Gen Z uses TikTok to search.

Lenny Rachitsky: Oh, wow.

Eli Schwartz: Yeah. I think that’s just a headline number because it comes down to, you said it over and over in the podcast, user journeys. So there’s going to be things that are more appropriate for TikTok or Instagram, and there are going to be things that are more appropriate for Search. So I think if you’re doing top-of-funnel discovery, you’re going to maybe watch TikTok videos to learn more about the topic. But as you go into the mid-funnel, so say you want to… A popular TikTok search is around travel. So you want to go on a trip. You want to go to Southeast Asia. You don’t know where exactly you want to go. So you might want to watch a bunch of videos and see influencers and see experiences. But now you’re ready to book. And you want to book a hotel. You want to book your flights. All of that is not going to happen on TikTok. All of that’s going to happen on Google Search. So that’s the mid-funnel again.

A lot of search will move different places, but ultimately, Google is still the right place to do those searches, to do those mid-funnel searches. So maybe it was more inappropriate that there ever wasn’t TikTok for you to get those better experiences. For those top-of-funnel things, you had to suffer through reading awful content that was written only for SEO purposes, and now you get rich dynamic content that comes from TikTok.

And one interesting piece on this is if TikTok does get banned in the US, which looks like it’s likely, a company that will pick up all of that users is YouTube. So YouTube has YouTube Shorts. And again, we’re looking at a potential monopoly with Google as Google tries to put those YouTube Shorts to solve the problem that TikTok was now solving. So that will be kind of interesting.

Lenny Rachitsky: Oh, man. Google all the way down.

Eli Schwartz: Yes.

Lenny Rachitsky: A thought I had as you were talking about this idea of mid-funnel versus top funnel is a simple way to think about the mid-funnel is where there’s intent. You actually have intent to now buy a thing, a specific thing. Yeah. Cool.

Eli Schwartz: I mean that’s what it is, but it’s a buyer journey. So at the top of the funnel, you’re curious. You don’t know if you have intent. And in the older way of doing SEO where you only focused on top of the funnel, you only focused on rankings as a KPI, which I think is sort of the incorrect way of doing things. There is no intent. So you showed a KPI that matched with a non-user, which matched with a non-buyer.

As you move down the funnel, there is intent. So there is a user and there’s less traffic. There’s always going to be less traffic at the middle of the funnel. But that doesn’t matter because your KPI is closely related to your business metrics.

Lenny Rachitsky: Let’s do a couple more myths if there’s anything else that we missed, and then we’ll wrap up and get to our very exciting lightning round. Is there anything else that you think is an important myth that people get wrong about SEO?

Eli Schwartz: I’ll touch on one more myth, which is that technical SEO is an easy solve to any SEO problems. So there’s been a lot of Google updates recently. Again, I think… I don’t like to defend Google because in reading the Verdict, I think that Google did some pretty evil things. But a lot of what Google has been doing is pushing back on the things that users hate. There’s a lot of bad SEO content out there. So Google’s trying to get rid of a lot of this bad SEO content in their recent updates.

When sites get hit by these updates, they try to solve the problem that they think happened to them by doing technical SEO. So they’ll reach out to me or to someone like me and say, “Can you do an SEO audit and understand why our traffic has suffered?” The reason their traffic has suffered is because they’ve done things that were not really useful for users and they sort of polluted Google. They need to solve that problem. Technical SEO has a place. So if you have a large website with tens of millions of pages, if you’re Zillow, how you link to each listing, if you’re Airbnb, how you link and allow Google to crawl a site and understand a site, very, very important.

If you have a hundred-page website that sells a SaaS tool, technical SEO is probably going to be less important. So spending money and time on technical SEO would be a waste of time. So I think that’s another big myth is you solve SEO problems with the right SEO solution rather than, “Let’s do an audit or let’s get better links or my page…” Page speed is another one that… Agencies like to sell on… If things related to page speed, Google keeps changing the words of what that is, but it doesn’t matter as much.

Because at the margins, yes, maybe if you’re Kayak and you’re competing, you get Expedia, and Kayak is maybe slightly faster, maybe that matters. But if you’re in a space where you’re competing against lots of slow terrible websites, it doesn’t matter at all. So spending a lot of money on making that fix is not the right thing to do.

Lenny Rachitsky: I like how you just make SEO feel much more approachable and simple and something that you could just do and not have to again figure out the dark arts that…

Eli Schwartz: It is not a dark art. It should be for most things, it is simple. And then there are tons of companies out there get in a lot of trouble, and there’s billions of dollars to be made on doing the right SEO. But a lot can be unlocked by very simplistic SEO. PMs that don’t really have an SEO background can do enough SEO to make a lot of money for the company without needing to be an SEO expert.

Lenny Rachitsky: I love that. That’s actually how it worked at Airbnb. The PMs work in SEO were not like historically SEO legends. They were just PMs figuring out SEO and they had a really big impact. So that really resonates with me. Eli, is there anything else that we haven’t touched on that you think is important to you or something that you think might be useful to people to leave them with before we get to our very exciting lightning round?

Eli Schwartz: Yes. So I think we talked about how to decide whether to resource SEO, but we didn’t talk about how to understand what the expectations are from SEO. So this is something I came up with while I was working at Faire, which is a very interesting company. So it’s F-A-I-R-E. They are a wholesale Shopify. They were launching in a new country, and they wanted to understand what the upside of launching in that country was from an SEO standpoint. So the way most people do SEO forecasting is they do a bottoms-up forecast, which is they look at keywords. So say we want to sell a pair of shoes.

You do a bottoms-up forecast, you go onto a keyword research tool, and they’re all fairly the same. Look at how many people search for shoes every month. And then you try to estimate what your ranking would be on that word shoes, and then you estimate what you click through it would be, and then based on that, that’s your clicks. And then you get a conversion rate, and that’s your bottoms up.

And you make an assumption that the word shoes in that tool didn’t capture all the people that search like white shoes and black shoes and running shoes, so you just gross it up. You just pick a number and you gross it by 10, and that’s your SEO forecast.

Now, the problem with that is that usually it’s too small. So you get this number and now you’re pitching to launch in a new country. I want to launch in Japan and sell shoes. And you say, “Well, I think I can get 500 users because based on the way I got here, this is my click-through rate and this is my rankings and I’m 500 users.” And no one will ever fund that. That’s too small.

Now if you’re launching in a new country, it’s actually fairly easy to figure out what your SEO upside is because you can take the population in the country. So this is not something Pharoah sells, so I don’t have to… So I’m not giving away anything. But say you’re launching shoes. You’re launching a new product website that you’re selling shoes in a country like Japan.

I’m going to guess. I don’t know the actual numbers for Japan. So say Japan has a hundred million people and you’re selling shoes. And you’re not going to sell shoes to a hundred million people. We’re only selling shoes to men. And let’s just divide it in half. 50% of Japan is men, so we got 50 million people that would buy shoes.

But now, we’re also going to say, “Well, there’s older people and younger people and we’re not selling shoes to them.” So now we can take 25 million and cut that in half. And then from there, again, we’re selling shoes on the internet. Not everyone buys shoes on the internet. Some people buy shoes in a store. Some people buy shoes on the internet. So you take some percentage rate of the amount of people that are going to buy shoes on the internet and say, “We’ll take 10% of our 25 billion people in our market. 2.5 million people buy shoes on the internet and we want to do SEO for 2.5 million people. And our expectation is we want to get this number of market penetration, whether it’s 10% or 50% or 100%.” And there’s your number and multiply that number by the amount of shoes they’re going to buy every year and your AOV and there’s your forecast.

And that may be inexact. And you can tweak those numbers up or down. You can say, “Well, my AOV was wrong. My market penetration was wrong. I was wrong on the total population. I didn’t realize that in Japan, no one bought shoes on the internet.” But at any point in time, you can go back and adjust your forecast. Whereas if you’re doing this bottoms-up forecast, it’s actually in many cases wrong to begin with because the keyword research volume is wrong.

I worked with some really fascinating companies where the largest query in their space was the biggest query. So I worked with WordPress. So WordPress, the word WordPress is the biggest query in the web development space itself. There’s no other word that’s as big as WordPress. And the number that every single keyword research tool had was completely wrong of what Google Search Console said for the word WordPress is, “When you’re building these forecasts based on keyword research tools, that first number that you build the entire forecast off of if it’s wrong, your forecast is wrong.” So when you do this top-down, it’s a TAM forecast essentially. When you do a top-down, you’re closer to the truth. Now, you probably aren’t going to get to the truth. I’ve never seen a product plan get to the truth of what it could do, but it will help you make a better decision than if you just guess.

Lenny Rachitsky: Wow, this is a massive insight you’re sharing. So you’re saying the keyword research tools are not actually that accurate in terms of the opportunity there. And why is that? That begs the question. Why are they so off? What are they doing wrong? What are they missing?

Eli Schwartz: They have their own secret sauce for estimations. So even Google, again, for past monopolistic reasons, Google’s not allowed to give the real number that they see on Google Ads for how many people search it. They have to buy it from another data source, and then give that out. I forget why. They’re all basically guessing. So they’re using whatever sort of proprietary algorithms to guess, which is why a lot of them are not aligned because they have their own algorithms. So you’re using, whether it’s Semrush or Ahrefs, one of my favorite tools is Similarweb, which Similarweb has a lot of browser plugins, which snoop on the way people are searching. So whatever it is that they’re… Because Similarweb has browser plugin, but they’re not seeing every single person’s search, so they have to use algorithms to estimate how much the entire world would be.

And again, I don’t know that any of them could get close to truth was when I… I worked with big companies where there were keywords that I could look at Google Search Console, some of them, the tools were overestimating by 10 times. Sometimes they’re underestimating by 10 times. So I’m not saying they didn’t get the exact monthly number wrong. I’m saying they got it wrong by many factors.

Lenny Rachitsky: Wow, that’s crazy. So your advice is… Do you just ignore those numbers? Or is it just, “Check it out but don’t roll it. Don’t use that number”?

Eli Schwartz: They’re indicative. So I would say if you want to know like, “Do most people spell WordPress with a space or WordPress without a space?” It’s pretty indicative that people spell it without a space. But if I were building a forecast and say, “Oh, I absolutely choose this based on this defined number.” I don’t think so. I can use it for normalization. And I use them only for normalization to understand how do people search. And I really like user journeys and they’re helpful for understanding user journeys. But as an exact science, it’s hard to really use that.

Lenny Rachitsky: That’s wild. And so it’s mostly useful for order magnitude and comparing one keyword to another relative in this bit. Okay, interesting.

Eli Schwartz: Yes. I mean I have a great example of how wrong it could be in estimating traffic. So there was a company I was working with early in COVID. The public company, their board member emailed them and said, “You guys are getting crushed by your competitors in COVID because look at your competitors. I’m looking at one of these tools and you’re at the bottom and you’re doing everything wrong.” And the CMO says, “What do I tell this board member?” I said, “The board member is completely wrong. This is the Google Search Console.” And Google Search Console is not perfect, but again, it’s real data and our Google Search Console shows that our traffic has quadrupled in COVID, so it doesn’t really matter what this external tool shows. So they’re helpful. Tools are helpful. But I don’t think they are a source of actual truth.

Lenny Rachitsky: Wow. That’s an awesome point in closing. One thing I had noted here that I want to make sure you have a chance to talk about is just you’re really passionate about helping people get into SEO and also just becoming advisors the way you are. Share what you think might be useful to people along these lines.

Eli Schwartz: As my own forecast and prediction, I think the need for SEO expertise is going to explode because a lot of what is happening in the search layouts is going to mean that companies have to pivot their approaches. So again, companies focus on rankings, they focus on traffic, and a lot of that goes away. Suddenly the layout changes, the traffic changes. It’s not necessarily going to impact their bottom lines if their SEO wasn’t a right fit. So this is going to create a lot of interest in SEO help, and I’m seeing this.

Over the last year, my own inbound has really grown because there’s a lot of questions as things shake out. So there will be people that want to go into SEO consulting, and I think there’s going to be a huge need for it in growth advising in general.

What I would say is, and I had amazing mentors along the way, some of your past guests like Casey Winters and Yuriy Timen, Ethan Smith, they’re all guests with great episodes, but they advised me and they shared with me not on how to be a better operator, but on how to do sales better, how to propose better.

And for anyone out there that wants to become a growth advisor, I’d say that that’s the skill you really want to perfect. Communication, sales, proposals, and not really worry about being the best operator. You should be the best operator, but that’s probably the skills you already have. And don’t make an assumption that because you’re a good operator today, you’ll also be a great growth advisor. Build that growth advising muscle by staying on your day job. Don’t quit your day job, and moonlighting and practice selling, closing, working, retaining, and that’s where if you’re successful there, you can be successful on your own.

Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. And I know you have some posts that get into this stuff that we’ll link to you, right?

Eli Schwartz: Yep.

Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. It’s kind of think of yourself as a product and the journey of working with you.

Eli Schwartz: Yes. You’re building a brand. You’re not building a consultancy.

Lenny Rachitsky: I love that. Eli, this has been amazing. And with that, we’ve reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

Eli Schwartz: Absolutely.

Lenny Rachitsky: Here we go. First question, what are two or three books that you’ve recommended most to other people?

Eli Schwartz: As has been apparent, I really like user journeys and understanding people. So there’s a book called Small Data by I think Martin Lindstrom. I don’t know if I’m pronouncing his name right, where he talks about understanding people and understanding how people buy. And he digs into that entire process. He actually goes and lives in people’s houses and watch how they use different tools and toys. I always find that book to be fascinating, and recommend to people who want to understand users.

Simon Sinek’s Start With Why. Again, the same idea. Really understand what a product a business is supposed to be doing to understand users. This is specifically for growth advisors and not necessarily for PMs, but Million Dollar Consulting. It’s a book I read, recommended actually by Ethan Smith many years ago. A fascinating book on how to build a brand and become a growth advisor. I ended up working with the author as a coach for almost a year. Amazing book.

And then the last book that’d be remise in not recommending is my wife’s book, which is How To Stop Caring What Others Think: For Real. So it is a book for precisely that. Understanding your own successes, not worry about what other people think about you.

Lenny Rachitsky: Beautiful. Is that in the background, by the way? And if not, you got to put it in your background, your wife’s book.

Eli Schwartz: My wife made the background. So yes, it is in the background.

Lenny Rachitsky: Which one is it? Which color am I… Just so people recognize it. Oh, the big one right there. I was wondering why that one was a little taller than the rest.

Eli Schwartz: Yes, this is the book.

Lenny Rachitsky: There it is. Wait, move it up a little bit so we can see the full cover. Oh, beautiful. Stop Caring What Others Think. Beautiful. I need that. For Real, I like the ends, but for real.

Eli Schwartz: For Real.

Lenny Rachitsky: I love it. Okay.

Eli Schwartz: It may or may not be a Google Search query.

Lenny Rachitsky: Oh, man. I see. I see what happened there. Genius. Okay, next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you’ve really enjoyed?

Eli Schwartz: I was on a plane and I saw this movie Blackberry and it looked like a documentary, so I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but it was fascinating. Because it’s one of those movies, it has a cliffhanger, and you know exactly how it ends. And it is such a fascinating movie. I didn’t know all that history, but they owned the entire smartphone industry, and they went to zero. And it really charted that journey and it makes you think like, “You can never really rest on your laurels. You have to create a product people want and understand your users and keep selling that product.” And not be like, “Well, we’re number one, this will never go away.” And great movie.

Lenny Rachitsky: Funny, it was just recommended by another guest very recently, so there’s trending up. It’s been around for maybe a year at this point. I watched it.

Eli Schwartz: Yeah, I never would’ve watched it if it wasn’t on a plane. It was totally… It seemed like a plane movie, but it was perfect.

Lenny Rachitsky: I watched that at home. And I love just the technical… Their ability to find clever ways to use the cell networks, that felt impossible, and that’s what allowed them to all these. I like the messaging and things like that. That was really fascinating because I didn’t realize they basically reverse-engineered the way the cell networks worked to allow what they allowed. Yeah, awesome movie, and crazy story.

Next question, do you have a favorite recent product that you’ve recently discovered that you really love? It could be an app. It could be some physical.

Eli Schwartz: It’s not a recent product and it’s the kind of thing I fall in love with over and over again. And it might be cliche, but it’s my phone. So I recently traveled in Southeast Asia. I lived there for a little bit. So I haven’t been back in eight years. And the things I was able to do with my phone like traveling, Google Maps, Waze, and ordering food. I went from multiple countries and I was able to use the same app to book rides and make payments. It was so useful.

Eight years ago, and I was there and I had to buy a SIM card and my phone didn’t really work and I couldn’t make payments. It changed my entire experience. I almost didn’t need a computer. So falling in love with my phone again.

And then another one that… It’s not necessarily recent, but I absolutely love, which is Grammarly. So I like writing. I write all my own stuff. I don’t write with AI. Grammarly helps me to be a better writer.

Lenny Rachitsky: You know what I’ve realized about Grammarly recently? I just upgraded to their pro plan. They’re like the best product at upselling you on their paid plan because they’re just right there in your face all the time. “Hey, we have stuff. We have so many tips for you. We have so much we can improve. Just pay a hundred whatever bucks and we have so much advice to make all your writing so much better.” It’s right there in your face all the time. They’re so good at it. And they got me. They got me. And I’m happy. It’s not like that much money in the scheme of things if you’re doing this full-time.

Eli Schwartz: I’m so embarrassed when I use Grammarly on my book and it just shows up all blue and green. I’m like, “Oh, man, if only I had known.”

Lenny Rachitsky: I actually have a copywriter on my newsletter who’s incredible. She finds a hundred things every time to improve that even when I think it’s perfect. And interestingly, she doesn’t do what Grammarly suggests in more cases than I would expect. So that’s kind of interesting I’m finding. But anyway, yeah, Grammarly is great. I use it all the time.

Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often use yourself, share with friends or family, find useful in work or in life?

Eli Schwartz: I don’t know that it fits into a sentence, but it’s something I always encourage people, which is to really think big and think long. So I just started working with LinkedIn as a consulting client, and I’ve talked to LinkedIn about working with them for six years. So, never give up. You meet someone and propose something and suggest an idea you never know where it’ll go. I had that all through my career with living in different places, really not think about the moment of where things will go, but just it’s a relationship you’re building. You don’t ever know where anything will happen. So look at the big picture.

Lenny Rachitsky: Love that. And kind of following along those lines, last question. Curious if something comes up here. What SEO win are you most proud of?

Eli Schwartz: I don’t know if I could say most proud of. But I really like what I do with Tinder because it brought the entire journey together. There’s users out there that didn’t know that Tinder would solve a very specific problem, and it’s just there to solve that problem. And it’s not the way Tinder thought of themselves. They thought of themselves as a dating app, but it’s a loneliness solution problem that answers a Google Search.

Lenny Rachitsky: This has been awesome. I think this is going to help a lot of people think through SEO and especially as they realize how things are changing, they’re going to have this resource now to be like, “I see. This is what I should change. This is what I should be doing.” And I just love, especially the pattern and the thread of, “It’s not actually that complicated. You can do it even if you’ve never really done it before.” So I really appreciate you being here and sharing all this wisdom with us. Two final questions. Where can folks find you if they want to reach out to work with you? Also, check out your book. And finally, how can listeners be useful to you?

Eli Schwartz: You can find me on LinkedIn. So search Eli Schwartz, and you should definitely look for my book. So the book is Product-Led SEO. Actually, one piece on just your own personal brand and your own personal rankings. It doesn’t matter where you rank if you search your own name. So if LinkedIn shows up first for your name, that’s great because they’re finding you. And a lot of times, brands and people will be very focused on where they’re positioned, but it’s about the journey. If they find you, they find you. It doesn’t matter if it’s number one.

And that also underscores that it’s not all about links. I believe for my own name and probably for you too, I outranked LinkedIn. And my book, so if you search Product-Led SEO, my own personal website, which does not have the best domain authority, it outranks Amazon. So that should right away disprove that it’s all about links. That’s all about SEO metrics. It’s really all about the right fit. So be the right fit, and you’ll show up where you’re supposed to.

And then users can be most helpful for me by subscribing to my newsletter and giving me ideas and feedback on what to write. I really enjoy writing, and I really enjoy hearing from people. So my newsletter is Productledseo.com.

Lenny Rachitsky: It’s so consistent across all your things. I love it. Productledseo. Eli, thank you so much for being here.

Eli Schwartz: Thanks for having me.

Lenny Rachitsky: Bye, everyone.

Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

Glossary

English	中文
Ahrefs	Ahrefs（SEO 分析工具）
AI Overviews	AI 概览（Google 的 AI 搜索摘要功能）
Airbnb	Airbnb（短租住宿平台）
algo update	算法更新
AOV	AOV（客单价，Average Order Value）
Ben Thompson	Ben Thompson（科技行业分析师，Stratechery 作者）
beta	beta（测试版）
Bing	Bing（微软搜索引擎）
bottoms-up forecast	自下而上预测
buyer journey	购买旅程
Capterra	Capterra（软件评测平台）
Casey Winters	Casey Winters（增长与产品顾问）
Cleveland Clinic	Cleveland Clinic（克利夫兰医学中心）
click-through rate	点击率
CMS	CMS（内容管理系统）
CNET	CNET（科技媒体网站）
CPM	CPM（千次展示费用，Cost Per Mille）
CRM	CRM（客户关系管理）
default agreements	默认协议（搜索引擎与设备厂商/浏览器的预装合作协议）
DOJ	DOJ（美国司法部，Department of Justice）
DuckDuckGo	DuckDuckGo（注重隐私的搜索引擎）
editorial	编辑型（内容）
Ethan Smith	Ethan Smith（SEO 顾问，Graphmate 创始人）
Expedia	Expedia（在线旅行预订平台）
Faire	Faire（批发电商平台）
fat head	肥头（与”长尾”相对，指搜索量集中在少数热门关键词的分布形态）
Fiverr	Fiverr（自由职业者服务平台）
flywheel	飞轮
freemium	免费增值（免费使用+付费升级的商业模式）
funnel	漏斗（营销漏斗，指用户从发现到转化的旅程阶段）
G2	G2（软件评测平台）
Gabriel Weinberg	Gabriel Weinberg（DuckDuckGo CEO）
Google Search Console	Google Search Console（Google 搜索管理工具）
Healthline	Healthline（医疗健康信息网站）
hockey stick	曲棍球棍式增长（指先平缓后急剧上升的增长曲线）
inbound	inbound（入站流量/渠道）
index	索引库（搜索引擎的网页数据库）
Jasper	Jasper（AI 写作工具）
JCPenney	JCPenney（美国百货零售商）
Kayak	Kayak（旅行搜索引擎）
keyword research tool	关键词研究工具
KPI	KPI（关键绩效指标，Key Performance Indicator）
lightning round	闪电问答
LLM	LLM（大语言模型，Large Language Model）
Luc Levesque	Luc Levesque（SEO 从业者，TripAdvisor 早期增长策略负责人）
Marriott Marquis	万豪侯爵酒店
Martin Lindstrom	Martin Lindstrom（品牌顾问与作家）
mid-funnel	漏斗中部
Mixpanel	Mixpanel（产品数据分析工具）
MQL	MQL（营销合格线索，Marketing Qualified Lead）
Neva	Neva（前 Google 高管创立的搜索引擎公司）
No Opinions	No Opinions（Noah Smith 的 newsletter 名称）
Noah Smith	Noah Smith（经济学家、时事评论作者）
Nordstrom	Nordstrom（美国高端百货零售商）
OpenAI	OpenAI（AI 研究公司）
organic traffic	自然流量（非付费搜索带来的访问量）
page speed	页面速度
Perplexity	Perplexity（AI 搜索引擎）
persona	用户画像
PM	PM（产品经理，Product Manager）
PRD	PRD（产品需求文档，Product Requirements Document）
product-led SEO	产品驱动型 SEO
programmatic SEO	程序化 SEO
Quora	Quora（问答社区平台）
Red Ventures	Red Ventures（数字营销与媒体公司）
rev share	收入分成
SaaS	SaaS（软件即服务）
SEC	SEC（美国证券交易委员会，Securities and Exchange Commission）
Semrush	Semrush（SEO 与数字营销分析工具）
SEO	SEO（搜索引擎优化）
SEO audit	SEO 审计
Similarweb	Similarweb（网站流量分析工具）
Simon Sinek	Simon Sinek（领导力与激励领域作家）
SOC 2	SOC 2（服务组织控制报告，一种安全合规认证）
structured data	结构化数据
SurveyMonkey	SurveyMonkey（在线调查平台）
TAM	TAM（总可达市场规模，Total Addressable Market）
top of funnel	漏斗顶部
top-down	自上而下
TripAdvisor	TripAdvisor（旅行点评与预订平台）
Udi Milo	Udi Milo（Tinder 增长负责人）
UGC	UGC（用户生成内容，User-Generated Content）
unstructured data	非结构化数据
Upwork	Upwork（自由职业者服务平台）
Vanta	Vanta（自动化合规平台）
Wade Foster	Wade Foster（Zapier 联合创始人）
Waldorf Astoria	华尔道夫酒店
WebMD	WebMD（医疗健康信息网站）
Writer	Writer（AI 写作平台）
Yuriy Timen	Yuriy Timen（增长顾问）
Zillow	Zillow（房地产信息与估值平台）

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