#104 – SEO and the approaches for pursuing a strong organic growth strategy (Ben Grynol, Mike Haney, & Eli Schwartz)

SEO is often overcomplicated. Instead of focusing on technical SEO hacks and ways to beat the Google algorithm, the best approach is to focus on what your users are looking for. In this episode, Levels Head of Growth, Ben Grynol, and Levels Editorial Director, Mike Haney, chatted with Growth Advisor and SEO Strategic Consultant, Eli Schwartz. They discussed the idea of SEO as a strategic growth lever, the most efficient and inefficient ways of using it, and how the marketing team isn’t the best place for it to live.

07:04 – Prioritize content by user need

Technical SEO based on keywords will never be as effective as structuring your content around what your users are looking for.

So that’s precisely my approach, which is most people are going to approach SEO from like, they go to Semrush, they go to Ahrefs, and they find all the keywords in the space and that’s what drives their growth. Whereas, I don’t think that makes any sense and I’ve been doing this for really long time. Even if you achieve whatever you want to achieve on those keywords, if it’s the wrong keywords, you’re not going to drive any conversions. So unless you’re a media company that gets paid on eyeballs viewing your content, it doesn’t help you. Whereas, when I’m actually focused on SEO and building a strategy, it’s around what the users want. So exactly what you’re doing, take the user’s questions. Talk to the users. Look at the journey. I was just talking to a company and they were thinking about features content. And I said, “People are coming onto your homepage. The content we’re building for SEO is the content you want to put at CTA buttons to get them to read it because it’s a part of that journey. Don’t prioritize based on how much traffic there is for it. Prioritize based on what the user need. It’s like, ‘I want to buy this, but I don’t understand enough about it.’ Write that content.

10:46 – Don’t overcomplicate SEO

It’s not magic. It’s being the broker between what the search engines want and what your users want.

So the biggest mistake people make is, they think it’s this complicated channel where you need an expert’s help and there’s all this black magic and it’s all about algorithms and hacks and secret things that some people just know how to do and that’s the only way you’re going to be successful at it. And if your competitors being really successful at it, it’s because they have the secret and they’re doing the black magic. It’s really not the case at all. It’s really a channel driven around users. There are users using search and they’re finding a website. When you’re doing SEO, you become that broker between what search engines want and what the users want. You mold the website and the content into that, because it doesn’t happen by chance. You can’t just be like… Amazon wouldn’t have been Amazon if they hadn’t done great SEO. Clearly, Walmart had better distribution, it was a bigger brand, had more access to products and they couldn’t beat Amazon at it because they didn’t do the right SEO. So you need to do SEO, but it’s not as complicated as some might make it out to be.

12:33 – Fit SEO into the funnel

Don’t think of SEO as a separate mechanism. It has its place within the funnel.

When it comes to SEO, it’s like, “Well, I’m in car insurance. Car insurance’s my word, let’s throw a bunch of content around the word car insurance. I’m going to measure my KPI by if I’m breaking on car insurance without digging into same level of data and analytics of, is this the right thing? Am I going after the right user?” And that’s, I think, the biggest mistake is the KPIs for SEO should be the same as KPIs for everywhere else in marketing. You don’t stupidly go and throw ads on bus stops and ads on during the Super Bowl just because it sounds good. Why would you kind of do the same “Pie in the sky. Here’s my idea, I’m going to throw it at the wall and to see if it works in SEO”? And I think that trickles down into everything where they’re not really thinking about what’s the reason behind it, what’s the logic behind it. That goes into the idea of linking so people go after guest posts and sites that no one in the world would ever read or trust or click a link. Why would Google do that? Or they go after keywords that they’ll never convert on and they write content for SEO that they’d be embarrassed to show their family. So it shouldn’t be siloed off. It’s a marketing channel. It fits in a specific place within the funnel.

17:12 – Focus on search intent

Don’t just think of related keywords, but think through the intent a user has for searching that term in the first place.

So I was just in Dubai. I was trying to figure out… They don’t change the times there. They don’t go to daylight savings time. So I was trying to figure out what time sunset was to understand my day. So I searched sunset time in Dubai, and then you get a bunch of questions, just like People Also Ask. So most people that do SEO as a silo, they would say, “What are the People Also Ask? What are the related search suggestions for sunset times?” They’re going to be like sunrise time, similar words. But the suggestions were, “What time is prayer?” Right? Dubai is an Islamic country, so what time is evening prayer? That’s interesting because that’s getting at intent. Why does someone want to know what time sunset is? Because they want to connect it to the next thing, and that’s intent.

20:41 – Think beyond Google

Google won’t be the dominant search engine algorithm forever. Other platforms could expand into search, so you want to think about how users query things no matter where they are.

Whether it’s Instagram, whether it’s Facebook, whether it’s WhatsApp, we’re all using Facebook, we’re all logged into Facebook. So it’s not a big leap for Facebook to say, “Well, stay on Facebook and you could search for things there.” So as we think about where search is going, you can’t just say, “I’m going to understand the Google algorithm and only the Google algorithm and figure out how to hack this algorithm,” it really has to be about what are users looking for when they query things. And that querying things be happening on any platform, whether that’s Google today, or maybe some people are using Bing, or that does become an Amazon search engine or app search engine or Facebook search engine or any other big company out there that we’re all logged into all the time. For these companies, it becomes about capturing eyeballs and users rather than the underlying algorithm, because again, the differences are not that big.

23:42 – Don’t chase the algorithm

Trying to duplicate what a larger and more established competitor has done won’t give you the same results. Build a great brand.

I was just working with an eCommerce company who was competing with some of the biggest big-box companies, and they said, “Our category page is exactly like our competitor’s category page. We sat down, we broke it down and it’s the exact same thing, yet they’re on page 1 for all those terms and we’re on page 50.” That’s because that’s not the secret. It’s not copying their SEO. It’s not, “Here’s your perfect link WAP.” It’s really about building that great brand the search engines they’re looking for. When they say there’s 200 elements in the algo that they’re looking for, it’s not just 200 elements, yet there might be things they look for. But if they’re looking at it in real time and looking at it for users, there’s all these other aspects they’re looking at, so if you achieve a perfect score on those 200 elements, you’re still not going to beat your competitor. So I would say, don’t be the best Healthline you could be. Be the best Levels you could be. That’s the way I would say, is like, don’t chase the algorithm because chasing the algorithm might not get you the right results. But if you chase the user, you’re going after the right user

26:55 – SEO isn’t always a great growth lever

It depends on your product or category. For some, it’s the biggest lever you have, for others, not at all.

It really depends on the product, the category, and the vertical. So if you’re in a B2B category, I don’t think it’s growth lever at all because you don’t necessarily have the demand for that B2B product. And that’s why B2B companies have sales teams and they try to get people to see demos and get on the phone and have conversations in person and you go to trade shows and all that. Because the demand isn’t yet really there, they’re trying to interrupt potential buyer and convince them that they shouldn’t be thinking about that product. So those people are not going on search engines and looking for that. Now, if you go into consumer product like eCommerce, I don’t think there is a better growth lever than SEO. It’s hypercompetitive. And you’re not going to, let’s say you’re doing eCommerce, getting people to come to your homepage and then click through 60 different pages to find that specific product is not really feasible. That’s where you want to use SEO to find exactly what they’re looking for, the exact moment they’re looking for it. And your ranking does matter. Being number one for commoditized product matters a lot more than being number 11 and on the second page.

29:10 – Put SEO in product, not marketing

Having SEO under the product team gives you more opportunities to implement it at every stage.

I came up with Product-Led SEO because it seemed like a good name. When I say product-led SEO, it’s really user-led SEO. The product aspect of it is that I think SEO belongs in product rather than marketing. So most companies will put SEO under marketing team, which means that the tools at their disposal and the levers they could pull are marketing levers. So I can write content, I can get design. That’s about it. But when you put it in product and you’re a product manager doing SEO, now you can say “I’m building a roadmap for an engineer. I’m creating a ticket for a designer to go and design my page. I’m going to go out create a ticket for the marketing team to go create content for that.” So I think it’s more full function, it’s more dynamic, and you can really build something more robust than, “The engineering team already built me a blog. The engineering team already created a page template. And then as an SEO team, the only thing I could do is populate it.”

31:48 – Engineering-driven SEO is more scalable

Content-driven and engineering-SEO can look really different. Engineering-driven SEO has the ability to scale faster and more efficiently.

Another example I talk about in my book is Tripadvisor. So Tripadvisor, they built out, first, every country and then every state and then every city and then every property, like hotel property, and then they populate the content. So some hotel properties don’t have any content, some do. But at a minimum, they all have, let’s say description content. So that’s engineering-driven SEO, and then they get the UGC in it to make the product more robust and more actionable and have a better user experience. But initially, their SEO is really about building a page for every property. Now, had they done it from a content-driven SEO, they would do it just like every travel blog out there, which is like, “I’m reviewing my stay at the Waldorf Astoria in New York.” Here’s a thousand words. “And here’s my stay at the Hoboken Hilton,” thousand words, right? Same idea. So content-driven SEO and engineering-driven SEO, in my opinion, should always be about creating a great user experience. But the difference is, which is more scalable?

42:14 – Don’t do SEO first

Startups and small companies shouldn’t invest in SEO right away. Wait until you’ve got a buffer to invest.

Now, what I’m going to say is counter to what most people that do SEO whatever say is, once you have a category and you create a product, the first thing you’re going to want to do is not use SEO. You’re going to want to do brand advertising, you’re going to want to do paid advertising, because that is where you start that flywheel of people understanding it. So like in the Zillow example, I look at one value, now I want to look at other values. So you got to get that started. No one’s really going to Google for you if they don’t know it exists. So you go to those other channels. And I talk to startups all the time and they say, “When is the right time for SEO?” And I say, “Not now.” Because in my book, I’ve said SEO’s like saving for retirement. You don’t make an investment, an 18 month investment. It could be significantly expensive when you can’t really put food on your table. So the right time is when you have buffer, when you feel kind of comfortable and you’re like, “I’d like to start exploring this other channel. I understand my customers. I have an existing flywheel. I understand what converts and how long my customers stick around before they turn. Now, I want to go invest in another channel.”

Eli Schwartz (00:06):

So as we think about where search is going, you can’t just say, “I’m going to understand the Google algorithm and only the Google algorithm and figure how to hack this algorithm,” it really has to be about what are users looking for when they query things. And that querying things could be happening on any platform, whether that’s Google today, or maybe some people are using Bing or that does become an Amazon search engine or app search engine or Facebook search engine or any other big company out there that will all logged into all the time. For these companies, it becomes about capturing eyeballs and users rather than the underlying algorithm, because again, the differences are not that big.

Ben Grynol (00:52):

I’m Ben Grynol, part of the early startup team here at Levels. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health. And this is your front row seat to everything we do. This is A Whole New Level.

Ben Grynol (01:17):

SEO, search engine optimization, it’s a word that you hear thrown around a ton when it comes to websites and website development. Well, what exactly is it? How do you optimize websites so you can surface information to the top of search? That being something like Google or Bing or whatever search engine you use, DuckDuckGo. In SEO, there are a bunch of different strategies and approaches that companies take. Some will be based on keywords, creating content around keywords to surface that in search. Others will take more of an edge approach. They’ll surface some type of data associated with their website so that it surfaces in any type of search.

Ben Grynol (01:57):

Eli Schwartz, a thought leader in SEO, recently wrote a book called Product-Led SEO, and Mike Haney, editorial director for Levels, the three of us sat down and we discussed this idea of SEO. How can you actually use it as a strategic growth lever and what are some of the strategies? What are some of the myths that can be debunked about SEO? How are people approaching it in possibly an incorrect way? And how can we at Levels start to use SEO to our advantage to make sure that we’re educating the world about metabolic health, being the right people, the right information at the right time? Some of it comes down to intent. What is the intent of the search that people are looking for?

Ben Grynol (02:36):

In the episode, we went into this one example around flax and PCOS. It’s very much a fictional example that was brought up just to illustrate maybe one of the search terms that people are actually interested in. Well, turns out after the episode, I went on search and dug in, and of course, flax and PCOS, there are actually papers written about it. There’s been some research done. So it’s not that long tail of a thing if people are searching for it and if people are researching it. Here’s an example we used to illustrate how we can think about creating long tail content that is going to serve a certain group of people on the internet who might be interested in that topic. It’s the idea of not engineering content for the sake of content, but creating content that’s actually meaningful and going to help people. Anyway, we dug into all these different avenues around SEO, and it was a great conversation. Here’s where we kick things off.

Ben Grynol (03:34):

Man, thanks for carving out time to do this. It is very fun. So for context, I’m just going to say Haney because we don’t call him Mike. Haney is the editorial director and has been running point on everything SEO since he came on board, which was November of some year, I think 2020. We’ve been starting to think about it more as a company and all these things. So anyways, that’s sort of what led to… The precipice for this was, Mario had put up that LinkedIn post and then someone tagged you and I was like, “I have to reach out to this Eli guy. He looks super interesting.” So anyway, that is context for where we are at right now. If you want to jump in Haney before we actually like jump in, jump in, then…

Mike Haney (04:13):

Yeah. I would say just to kind of set the context for how we’ve been thinking about SEO here and maybe the sort of inflection point that we’re at, certainly a moment of reexamination, if not necessarily change that I think will… Just to give you a sense of where some of our questions are coming from, as a company, we are pre-launch so we’re still in a closed beta, which means we haven’t been driven by growth up till now.

Mike Haney (04:39):

So really, our SEO has been around our content effort. We put a lot of effort into our blog. We try to treat it more like a kind of editorial health publication than a marketing tool. We really don’t use it for marketing. It’s really just to educate people about this space that we’re in, because the sort of premise is like, we’re never going to sell anybody any sort of products related to metabolic health if they don’t know what metabolic health is. And so the goal of the blog and the content is really just purely education. If you want to think about it through a growth lens, it would be very high top of funnel sort of category awareness more than even product or company awareness kind of stuff.

Mike Haney (05:16):

And so the way we’ve thought about SEO, the way I’ve thought about SEO and I’ve worked with an agency for the past year, what I’ve said to them is what drives this content, because we are defining a space, deciding what we’re going to write based on what people are searching for is sometimes tricky because people don’t know to search for this stuff, right? Nobody’s searching for metabolic health. They don’t know what it is. They might search, “Why do I get a headache mid morning? Why do I feel fatigued? How can I cut sugar?” Maybe some of these type of topics. And so what largely drives the ideation behind what we write is, questions we get from our members, things that we know we want to write about, pieces that don’t exist in the world that explain some of these concepts and ideas we’re trying to put out there.

Mike Haney (06:03):

The way that I then use SEO is like, “Look, we’re going to write this piece, but we want to make sure people can find it as opposed to the SEO telling us what piece to write to match an existing sort of query that’s out there.” It’s a little bit of a kind of reversal, I think, of the way it’s often approached. But now we’re moving into a period where there will be growth. We will want to drive people in some ways to the company and the product and the membership while we’re still also growing this education component out on the blog.

Mike Haney (06:32):

So it’s maybe a little too in the weeds, but just to give you some context for kind of what the tenor of the SEO style conversations are here. And so yeah, I’m super curious to dive in with you, I’ll let Ben sort of throw out the questions, but just hear more about your perspective because I appreciated… You seem to bring some kind of unique thinking that I don’t hear from everybody in this space. And I feel like there’s often a lot of sameness in this space. I’ve interviewed agencies about coming on and doing in it. It’s like you can almost exchange the pitches one for another. So anyway, that’s a little bit about where we’re coming from.

Eli Schwartz (07:04):

Got it. So that’s precisely my approach, which is most people are going to approach SEO from like, they go to Semrush, they go to Ahrefs, and they find all the keywords in the space and that’s what drives their growth. Whereas, I don’t think that makes any sense, I’ve been doing this for really long time. Even if you achieve whatever you want to achieve on those keywords, if it’s the wrong keywords, you’re not going to drive any conversions. So unless you’re a media company that gets paid on eyeballs viewing your content, it doesn’t help you. Whereas, when I’m actually focused on SEO and building a strategy, it’s around what the users want. So exactly what you’re doing, take the user’s questions. Talk to the users. Look at the journey.

Eli Schwartz (07:41):

I was just talking to a company and they were thinking about features content. And I said, “People are coming onto your homepage. The content we’re building for SEO is the content you want to put at CTA buttons to get them to read it because it’s a part of that journey. Don’t prioritize based on how much traffic there is for it. Prioritize based on what the user need. It’s like, ‘I want to buy this, but I don’t understand enough about it.’ Write that content. And that’s the way you should be doing it.” So you’re right. Most agencies, they’re very deliverable focused. They’re doing these content plans. They’re just outputting Semrush and just putting pretty colors on it. They’re doing technical SEO. I think in most cases, technical SEO’s a waste of time.

Eli Schwartz (08:20):

Actually SEO is not that complicated. Agencies complicate it. People overcomplicate it because then they can sell against it. It’s really simple. Google is an AI engine that is trying to understand users. They’re not there yet. You can still trick Google, but that’s where Google’s trying to go. So if you build your SEO for users searching on a search engine, that’s actually what you should be doing and assume that Google will eventually be there. There’s no hacks. Technical SEO is mostly a waste of time. It depends on the scale of the site. Content plans are mostly a waste of time. It’s really just about building for users.

Ben Grynol (08:56):

Nice. Let’s jump into this idea of SEO. So you wrote this book, Product-Led SEO: The Why Behind Building Your Organic Growth Strategy. A ton of interesting nuggets. So you’ve got all of this insight behind SEO and approaches that companies can take. And then you actually put this so it’s not just this theoretical ideas behind like, “Hey, here’s how to approach a SEO.” You did it for years with SurveyMonkey and then you’ve done it with a number of companies as an advisor, whether it’s Coinbase or Gusto or Mixpanel or Zendesk. We can keep going down the list, you’ve got this wealth of knowledge. So it would be good to jump into this idea of why don’t we start out with this idea of what is it that most people get wrong about SEO in general and what things have changed with it recently that people should spend more time focusing on.

Eli Schwartz (09:50):

I’d say there’s two big things that people really get wrong. The first thing they get wrong is they over complicate it. They think that they need to do something for robots. They think they’re focusing on search engines and algos. Big words. It sounds scary. That’s where this… You get this inclination of like, “Oh, I need help. I need to go to an agency. There’s no way I could do this on my own. There’s no way my employees are going to understand this.”

Eli Schwartz (10:16):

Story wise on that, I was talking to a company, a big public company. They had an SEO manager and she seemed like she was pretty capable. So I said, “Why are you looking for external SEO help?” And the CMO says, “Because she has no idea what she’s doing.” I just thought that was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. I was like, “I never want to work for a company again. I love being a consultant. That’s just disgusting.” But that aside, I think people overcomplicate it. They’re like… Well, maybe this employee in that case, she couldn’t explain it to the CMO, so they’re like, “We need to go external.”

Eli Schwartz (10:46):

So the biggest mistake people make is, they think it’s this complicated channel where you need an expert to help and there’s all this black magic and it’s all about algorithms and hacks and secret things that some people just know how to do and that’s the only way you’re going to be successful at it. And if your competitors being really successful at it, it’s because they have the secret and they’re doing the black magic. It’s really not the case at all. It’s really a channel driven around users through our users using search and they’re finding a website. When you’re doing SEO, you become that broker between what search engines want and what the users wanted to mold the website and the content into that, because it doesn’t happen by chance. You can’t just be like… Amazon wouldn’t have been Amazon if they hadn’t done great SEO. Clearly, Walmart had better distribution, it was a bigger brand, had more access to products and they couldn’t beat Amazon at it because they didn’t do the right SEO. So you need to do SEO, but it’s not as complicated as some might make it out to be.

Eli Schwartz (11:43):

The second big mistake I think people make when they approach SEO, is that they silo it off. So when it comes to doing paid marketing, for example, no one says my goal in paid marketing is “I want to be number one on this keyword,” whatever that keyword is. No one says, “I’m willing to pay whatever it takes, because this is the biggest keyword of my space.” Let’s say it’s insurance. I love talking about car insurance. You go to Semrush, you put in the word car insurance. And Semrush tells you the biggest keyword in the space is car insurance, and you’re like, “That’s it. That’s all I’m doing. I’m throwing all my eggs in that basket. I want to bid $80 a click to be number one on car insurance. That is my KPI, and that’s it.” No one would do that. When it comes to paid marketing, they’re adjusting their bids by the day, adjusting the bids by the hour, they’re adjusting the bids of the keyword. They’re really looking at the search terms and that throughput and LTV and really complex data analytics on making sure they’re spending the money right.

Eli Schwartz (12:33):

When it comes to SEO, it’s like, “Well, I’m in car insurance. Car insurance by word, let’s throw a bunch of content around the word car insurance. I’m going to measure my KPI by if I’m breaking on car insurance without digging into same level of data and analytics of, is this the right thing? Am I going after the right user?” And that’s, I think, the biggest mistake is the KPIs for SEO should be the same as KPIs for everywhere else in marketing. You don’t stupidly go and throw ads on bus stops and ads on during the Super Bowl just because it sounds good. Why would you kind of do the same “Pie in the sky. Here’s my idea, I’m going to throw it at the wall and to see if it works in SEO”? And I think that trickles down into everything where they’re not really thinking about what’s the reason behind it, what’s the logic behind it.

Eli Schwartz (13:16):

That goes into the idea of linking so people go after guest posts and sites that no one in the world would ever read or trust or click a link. Why would Google do that? Or they go after keywords that they’ll never convert on and they write content for SEO that they’d be embarrassed to show their family. So it shouldn’t be siloed off. It’s a marketing channel. It fits in a specific place within the funnel.

Eli Schwartz (13:41):

So at the top of this buyer’s journey might be awareness, that’s brand. And then you might have SEO. And then beneath that, you might have advertising. That’s what you have to do when you’re really coming up with your SEO strategy is like, “This is where SEO belongs for my funnel. How do I find those users?” Instead of, “I’m going to just do SEO completely different” forgetting the fact that it’s a part of a buyer’s journey in a funnel.

Ben Grynol (14:01):

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Interesting. We’ve been doing a lot of stuff and Haney can provide more color on it. But the idea of our mission is to educate the world about metabolic health and, I love saying this especially when Haney’s here, is to let the world know that metabolic health is a thing that people can do something about it and that it actually matters.

Ben Grynol (14:24):

What that comes down to is educating people, right? So writing a ton of content. There is one part in the book where you highlighted the idea of really thinking long tail, where you start to just create content and you’re doing of these things from a product-led SEO standpoint that you end up sort of finding a market. It’s interesting because all the content that Haney’s been putting out is, it really has that same long tail lens. It’s like, we’re not going after the click bait article to just draw people in to drive a bunch of traffic. It’s more a matter of like, “Hey, this thing around, I’ll make it up, flax and PCOS, there are people that can actually benefit from that article.” So he goes and writes it, and it’s really interesting. But we’ve got that and you can extrapolate it into the furthest ends of the earth. It really felt analogous to what Haney’s been doing from a content strategy and then like what you wrote in the book from this product-led SEO standpoint. So I don’t know. Anything to add to that?

Eli Schwartz (15:24):

I think it really comes down to understanding users and what the user wants out of this. So it sounds like you are understanding the user and you’re writing the content for the user rather than writing the content just around there’s a keyword for it. It’s funny because marketers, they forget that when they’re not being marketers, they’re just users. I love to really focus on being the user all the time and finding cool insights, and then to bring that into marketing.

Eli Schwartz (15:50):

So as an example, I’ll give you two example on this. One is I’m obsessed with Google devices because I think they’re good. I know they’re spying on me, but they make good products so it’s a decent trade. So every year I get the newest Google phone. I’ve never owned an iPhone. I love using the Google devices because it gives me an insight into what Google as a company is able to do from an AI standpoint. So Google just sent out an email yesterday about new features they’re launching on the Pixel 6. That’s their newest phone and they’re launching new features. One of them is they can do live translations in, I think, French, Spanish and Italian. So I can have a conversation with someone on my phone. I think as a phone call, I can speak English and it’ll tell them what I’m saying in French. Probably not great, right? Google Translate’s not great, but that’s really good AI, like live AI.

Eli Schwartz (16:41):

And then, so you see something like that and marketers will see something like that and they’ll ignore it. And then they’ll be like, “Well, I’m going to launch in French. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to use Google Translate. I’m going to change every other word and then it won’t be like machine translator. I’m going to trick Google and now they’re going to think I’m a French site.” Wait a second. If Google can live translate a phone call, you don’t think that they can just figure out that you changed every other word and your machine translated your site? So it’s really those kinds of things.

Eli Schwartz (17:07):

And then the other thing, which I think… Again, every time I see something in Google, I just press screenshot that I think is interesting. So I was just in Dubai. I was trying to figure out… They don’t change the times there. They don’t go to daylight savings time. So I was trying to figure out what time sunset was to understand my day. So I searched sunset time in Dubai, and then you get a bunch of questions, just like people also ask. So most people can do SEO as a silo. They would say, “What are the people also ask? What are the related search suggestions for sunset times?” They’re going to be like sunrise time, similar words. But the suggestions were, “What time is prayer?” Right? Dubai is an Islamic country, so what time is evening prayer? That’s interesting because that’s getting that intent. Why does someone want to know what time sunset is? Because they want to connect it to the next thing, and that’s intent.

Eli Schwartz (17:55):

So it sounds like what you’re saying you’re doing is the exact same thing. There is a user need for it regardless of what the words you use are, and you’re approaching that need and you’re building content for that need to really help better a user’s life. I think as we think about the direction of search in the world, and I’ll get to this in a second, but if you think about the direction of search in the world, you don’t necessarily need to use search engine. You don’t necessarily need to use keywords because search is going to continuously improve based on the devices that are out there, the assistant devices. They could becoming conversational. So you can ask a follow up question to whether it’s your Google assistant or whether it’s your phone. And they’re understanding the intent and understanding the direction you’re trying to go regardless of the keyword. So really it becomes about the user.

Eli Schwartz (18:41):

And then what that means is the keyword family that you’re now even going after becomes so much bigger. If you think about early, early days of search, let’s say AOL, in AOL you used to own a keyword. You wanted to look for cars, you’re like, only one website showed up for the word cars, and that was it. When I started doing SEO, there was head keywords and you want to own those head keywords. Now we’re talking about sentences. So when you’re expanding to sentences, the potential keyword set that you could even have on your site, or people are even going to search, is going to grow exponentially.

Eli Schwartz (19:13):

Th other thing I wanted to add to that, which is a lot of SEO becomes Google focused. I think we live in a world now where a new search engine could come out, and it’s not necessarily Google because the search challenge isn’t as hard as it used to be. Google’s obviously leaps and bounds ahead of everyone because of more data. But the search challenge isn’t as hard as it used to be because the content space is pretty good and the algorithms are pretty good. So even if it’s DuckDuckGo, or it’s Bing, we all use Google because we default to Google. But if someone defaults to Bing, their life is not dramatically worse. They see great results. Maybe they’re looking for a new coat to buy and they see JCPenney first instead of Amazon, they still buy the same coat from JCPenney. Their life isn’t dramatically worse. The search engine is pretty good.

Eli Schwartz (20:00):

So yes, Bing’s algorithm is different. Google’s algorithm is different. So where I think we’re going to see new search engines is, it’s very possible that Apple will come up with its own search engine because they already have the users, they’re already using the iPhones, they’re already using MACs. It’s very possible amazon could expand into keyword search, not just product search, because you’re already going on Amazon so maybe Amazon can prompt you. And like Bing, they could pay you and say, “Why don’t you check out the weather on amazon.com?” Or look for products and services that Amazon does not sell on amazon.com and then Amazon commoditize with ads. It sounds crazy now, but it’s not a far leap. And we all use Amazon. We’re all logging into Amazon all the time.

Eli Schwartz (20:39):

And then one more company is Facebook, right? Whether it’s Instagram, whether it’s Facebook, whether it’s WhatsApp, we’re all using Facebook, we’re all logged into Facebook. So it’s not a big leap for Facebook to say, “Well, stay on Facebook and you could search for things there.” So as we think about where search is going, you can’t just say, “I’m going to understand the Google algorithm and only the Google algorithm and figure out how to hack this algorithm,” it really has to be about what are users looking for when they query things. And that querying things be happening on any platform, whether that’s Google today, or maybe some people are using Bing, or that does become an Amazon search engine or app search engine or Facebook search engine or any other big company out there that we all logged into all the time. For these companies, it becomes about capturing eyeballs and users rather than the underlying algorithm, because again, the differences are not that big.

Mike Haney (21:32):

I’m glad you talked about the algorithm there and this sort of distinction between pleasing the algorithm versus thinking more broadly about what the point of the content is as an answer to it, search that people are doing. Because this is the sort of conundrum I feel like we run up against all the time, right? It’s like you make content, you want it to solve somebody’s problem, right? Somebody has PCOS. We have got a bunch of information that could help them eat better to make that condition better. And I know, because it’s not a huge space, that our content is probably the best content out there on this. But Health line is almost always going to get the search result because they exist basically just as an SEO play. All they do is write stuff to make sure that Google ranks them number one, whereas I’m not writing specifically through that lens.

Mike Haney (22:25):

And so I end up in this conundrum of like, I want people to see my content. I think I have content that answers their question, right? Like, what’s a good diet for PCOS or whatever it might be? But unless I make that algorithm happy, they’re not going to find me. And I feel like this is where you start to then get into these negative feedback loops where all of a sudden your keyword packing and you’re doing like backlinks on all sorts of random sites because those feel like the “hacks” that you have to do to get people to your site. So I’m wondering if you could just dig in a little bit more on not just where we’re headed, I love that kind of future vision, but even in the near terms, say year to two years, whatever it is, how do you make the algorithm happy while still answering people’s questions? And if that’s a completely false distinction, tell me so.

Eli Schwartz (23:12):

I think it is a false distinction, because if you were to replicate everything Healthline did today, you still wouldn’t beat Healthline. That’s where people start thinking there’s magics in the algorithm and there’s hacks and there’s secrets that Healthline is doing better. And really, I think it’s a lot simpler than that, which is, Healthline invested money into building a really great brand and to satisfying users. They slowly built that up over time and you can’t catch them just by replicating them.

Eli Schwartz (23:42):

I was just working with an eCommerce company who was competing with some of the biggest big-box companies, and they said, “Our category page is exactly like our competitor’s category page. We sat down, we broke it down and it’s the exact same thing, yet they’re on page 1 for all those terms and we’re on page 50.” That’s because that’s not the secret. It’s not copying their SEO. It’s not, “Here’s your perfect link WAP.” It’s really about building that great brand and the search engines they’re looking for. When they say there’s 200 elements in the algo that they’re looking for, it’s not just 200 elements, yet there might be things they look for. But if they’re looking at it in real time and looking at it for users, there’s all these other aspects they’re looking at, so if you achieve a perfect score on those 200 elements, you’re still not going to beat your competitor.

Eli Schwartz (24:27):

So I would say, don’t be the best Healthline you could be. Be the best Levels you could be. That’s the way I would say, is like, don’t chase the algorithm because chasing the algorithm might not get you the right results. But if you chase the user, you’re going after the right user. And for some of the clients I work with, they’re in spaces that the demand is not yet there. I think that’s another big fallacy with SEO, is that people think it’s a demand creation channel that if you put good content out there, all of a sudden you’re going to get this magic traffic. And that’s not true if no one’s really looking for it. If no one’s looking for, as you said, flax, PCOS and flax, if no one knows to look for that, they’re not going to find you even if you go and use a rank checker and you’re like, “Hey, look at this. We’re number one for PCOS and flax.” If no one Googles it, you get no traffic and you get no conversions.

Eli Schwartz (25:15):

There was a client, I was working with her like, “We have six of that top 10 results on this term. How do we get more traffic?” And I’m like, “I don’t think getting the other four results is going to do anything. Clearly, it’s not competitive and no one searches this term.” So it’s really about capturing the demand that is already there and it’s about chasing the user. So if you’re chasing the user, the demand is there. If you’re chasing the algo, then you don’t know if you’ll ever achieve it. So I don’t think you could ever go wrong by chasing the user and adapting SEO best practices to that.

Ben Grynol (25:47):

And for context, PCOS and flax is a fully hyperbolic example that I had made up, unless Haney is researching it at this time and I don’t know, but-

Eli Schwartz (25:55):

Well, there you go. So if you rank on that, you will get no conversions and no clicks.

Ben Grynol (26:01):

It’s funny though, because there’s a thought around how much of a growth lever is SEO. But even before diving to that, you brought up this one part in the book that was around the idea of like, well, SEO isn’t the silver bullet. Have a great product to begin with. So it’s like if you’re trying to manufacture traffic through SEO and you’re selling sand shovels for fruit flies, something just so absurd, it’s like there’s probably not a market there or people don’t care to search for that. And so then it’s back to this idea of, how much of a growth lever is SEO? Or do you think it really is just like build a great product, build a great brand, have great content and don’t try to, in your own words, don’t try to trick the algo. Just be great at what you’re doing and that is the growth lever. How do you think about SEO as a growth lever?

Eli Schwartz (26:55):

It really depends on the product, the category, and the vertical. So if you’re in a B2B category, not, I don’t think it’s growth lever at all because you don’t necessarily have the demand for that B2B product. And that’s why B2B companies have sales teams and they try to get people to see demos and get on the phone and have conversations in person and you go to trade shows and all that. Because the demand isn’t yet really there, they’re trying to interrupt potential buyer and convince them that they shouldn’t be thinking about that product. So those people are not going on search engines and looking for that.

Eli Schwartz (27:31):

Now, if you go into consumer product like eCommerce, I don’t think there is a better growth lever than SEO. It’s hypercompetitive. And you’re not going to, let’s say you’re doing eCommerce, getting people to come to your homepage and then click through 60 different pages to find that specific product is not really feasible. That’s where you want to use SEO to find exactly what they’re looking for, the exact moment they’re looking for it. And your ranking does matter. Being number one for commoditized product matters a lot more than being number 11 and on the second page.

Ben Grynol (28:05):

Interesting.

Eli Schwartz (28:06):

Somewhere in between. And like I said earlier, it’s really about the user journey and the buyer’s funnel. So it could be that you’re creating awareness. I think it’s really important to understand where SEO plays a role. So if you’re creating awareness, let’s say something that you’re doing where you’re creating awareness about your magical solution to PCOS with flax, now, I don’t know if you self stuff, but I don’t know if someone might not be ready to go all in and become a subscriber or buy, but now you’ve cookied them, you can now retarget them. So they’re a little bit higher in the buyer’s journey, they’re a little bit higher in the funnel, but you can remind them you exist. Or maybe you can capture their email address, or maybe you can get them to follow on social media. And that is what SEO is supposed to accomplish. It’s an assist. It’s really moving them further down that funnel.

Mike Haney (28:53):

I’m curious about content-driven SEO versus engineering-driven SEO. And I think this might relate back to sort of your thesis around product-driven SEO. So I’m wondering if you could just dive in and unpack that phrase a little bit more and what that means and how it’s different than the way people typically think about this.

Eli Schwartz (29:10):

I came with Product-Led SEO because it seemed like a good name. When I say product-led SEO, is really user-led SEO. The product aspect of it is that I think SEO belongs in product rather than marketing. So most companies will put SEO under marketing team, which means that the tools that their disposal and the levers they could pull are marketing levers. So I can write content, I can get design. That’s about it. But when you put it in product and your product manager doing SEO, now you can say “I’m building a roadmap for an engineer. I’m creating a ticket for a designer to go and design my page. I’m going to go out create a ticket for the marketing team to go create content for that.” So I think it’s more full function, it’s more dynamic, and you can really build something more robust than, “The engineering team already built me a blog. The engineering team already created a page template. And then as an SEO team, the only thing I could do is populate it.”

Eli Schwartz (30:05):

So that’s why I call it Product-led SEO, because I think SEO belongs in the product side, because as you’re building something for a user, you do want to have as much flexibility as possible. So we’re going to keep going back to it because you created a brand, but your PCOS and flax thing, maybe that needs to be an image. Or not an image. Let’s say it’s a dynamic graphic. So if you’re on the product team, you can go and get the resources to create the tool that’s necessary to satisfy that user intent. But if you’re on the marketing team, the only thing at your disposal might just be a blog. I can just write a title and put some content in it. And maybe I can insert an image, but that’s about it. So that’s why I call it Product-led SEO.

Eli Schwartz (30:45):

Now, going back to your question, Haney. Engineering versus content, it could be… Either way works. Content driven SEO might challenge with content driven SEO, it’s just not scalable. So if I create a big roadmap of all the content I want to create, then, let’s say you are trying to be Healthline, it’s thousands and thousands of pieces of content. If that’s SEO, it just doesn’t scale. Whereas if you can come up with your engineering-led SEO, that becomes scalable. So you can create, in my book, I talk about Zillow. Zillow’s one of my favorite examples where they built their initial products back off of every address that I don’t know where they extract the data from, but off of every address that exists in America because the first thing they did was create a page for every address. And then you can continue to build upon that so it becomes as rich as it is today. Whereas their initial product was just every address in America. And they’re getting millions of pages in one fell sweep.

Eli Schwartz (31:35):

Imagine if they did it from a content led SEO standpoint. If they take an address, 123 Main street, write a blog post, 124 Main Street, write a blog post, they would never, ever be done in history. The same goes… Another example I talked about in my book is Tripadvisor. So Tripadvisor, they built out, first, every country and then every state and then every city and then every property, like hotel property, and then they populate the content. So some hotel properties don’t have any content, some do. But at a minimum, they all have, let’s say description content. So that’s engineering-driven SEO, and then they get the UGC in it to make the product more robust and more actionable and have a better user experience. But initially, their SEO is really about building a page for every property.

Eli Schwartz (32:19):

Now, had they done it from a content-driven SEO, they would do it just like every travel blog out there, which is like, “I’m reviewing my stay at the World of Story in New York.” Here’s a thousand words. “And here’s my stay at the Hoboken Hilton,” thousand words, right? Same idea. So content-driven SEO and engineering-driven SEO, in my opinion, should always be about the user creating a great user experience. But the difference is, which is more scalable?

Mike Haney (32:45):

I like that distinction there from the sort of production or input side, right? That I could appreciate the difference between trying to write an article about every address in America versus sort of, from an engineering perspective, auto creating those pages to populate it. You touched on the user at the end there. Is there a qualitative difference in the effect that you will get toward whatever your end goal is, let’s call it conversions, between those two scenarios? Is there an argument… Those are pretty extreme examples, right? But if you’re kind of somewhere in the middle and you can create 500 or 1,000 pages of content versus creating 1,000 or 5,000 pages from an engineering perspective, are those going to get you different outcomes from the user coming in through those different kinds of pages?

Eli Schwartz (33:33):

That would always come back to who the user is. So let’s apply a specific scenario, which is eCommerce. In eCommerce, there are some companies that put a lot of effort into SEO on their eCommerce pages. They’ll change product descriptions. Let’s say it’s a suitcase. It’s a Samsonite suitcase. So you take a Samsonite suitcase. Whoever gives you the content, whether it’s Samsonite or the distributor, “Here’s the suitcase. Its blue. Yeah, this is sizing. And then here’s the description as written by the technical writer at Samsonite.” So now you can take that content and leave it as is and just slap it up on the website and then have good internal architecture so people can find it. Or you can be like some companies who say, “Well, here’s 50 words that Samsonite wrote about this suitcase. Now I’m going to improve upon it. I’m going to say, instead of the word wheels, I’m going to say durable, non-slip sturdy wheels.” And they put all this effort into it.

Eli Schwartz (34:33):

I’ve seen this multiple times in both clients I’ve worked with and the clients I have compared to other eCommerce sites. In the end of the day, it does not increase search traffic in most cases and it doesn’t increase user experience.

Eli Schwartz (34:43):

A particular egregious example. I think it was Macy’s so I apologize, Macy’s, if I’m wrong. On their shoes page, at the bottom of the shoes page, it tells you where shoes go. Shoes go on feet, right? So telling the user that the shoes go on their feet and there’s a right foot and a left foot does not impact conversion whatsoever and neither does it impact search. So it really will be continued on what the vertical is and how you’re doing the content. If you’re plugging a bunch of content on eCommerce page, which is just engineering, that’s waste of time. Now, if you’re enriching a Tripadvisor page with more content, because your Tripadvisor monetizes on clicks, then you might be more likely to get the click. So no hard and fast rule there. It really will depend on what the vertical is and what the category is and who the customer is.

Ben Grynol (35:31):

When you start to think about some of these examples, how do you think about SEO as it pertains to volume of content? Right? So what happens when you’re a small eComm company and you’re doing content-driven SEO, and you might create 20, 50, it doesn’t really matter the end. But a small enough end of blog posts or pieces of content that you’re in the game of push, where you’re like “I’m pushing this out” and then you become Healthline or WebMD or Levels one day, you become this organization where you have to think about content from a poll perspective, right? Because there’s just so much of it. You can’t push out 10,000 blog posts or 10,000 pieces of content. So you’re in that pull game, but you run the risk of context collapse where there’s just like so much information.

Ben Grynol (36:23):

So how do you think about SEO helping to mitigate this idea of context collapse so that you’re still hitting people with the right information, you’re hitting the long tail in whichever case possible, but you’re trying to hedge against this ongoing context collapse that’s going to happen naturally just as more content gets created?

Eli Schwartz (36:47):

Yeah. You may have heard me say this before. It really depends on the user. Sorry. So if you’re writing a lot of content because it has to do with keywords, your content is collapsing right away because you’re not differentiating. You’re taking this key… You’re out outputting a keyword list you find from Semrush. And then each of the keywords becomes an item on a checklist. And the truth is the most keywords fold into each other. So PCOS and flax is also flax and PCOS, or if there’s a synonym for flax, it’s all the same thing. But if you look as a checklist, you’ve already collapsed your context. So it would depend on the user.

Eli Schwartz (37:24):

I’d say with where you are, the human body, as we know it today is continuously expanding. There are more diseases, there are more problems that people will have. There are more feelings that people will have. And as they search for the way to address the problems and feelings they have, it will lead to even more searches and more detailed searches. So I don’t think if you find the right angle that you are ever going to be in that place of context collapse because you’re helping specific scenarios. Even with what Healhline does, I don’t think they can ever fully attack the human body. So there’s always some opportunity to really grow.

Eli Schwartz (37:58):

Now, if you’re in a B2B Saas space, you’re done. You’re done the day you start. You said you’re going to talk about me being at SurveyMonkey, and I’m like, “I’m going to bring it up first,” which is, they’re a SaaS company. And there’s really only a few ways to say survey. And it’s all the same. So one of the things I did there where I was able to really expand on growth is by finding different examples of surveys. However, as you keep pulling the tail out, I can create more pages and attack more keywords, but I’m not finding more users because there’s a reason that customer satisfaction survey is the most popular survey. So now if I create like, I don’t know, mechanic customer satisfaction survey, yes, it’s a keyword. Yes, I can rank number one for mechanic customer satisfaction survey, but how many people are really looking for that?

Ben Grynol (38:42):

Interesting. There’s a thought around personalization, right? Which is what we’ve been thinking a lot about as a company. There’s so many… For what people care about when it comes to metabolic health, it’s just so wide. Its endless. It’s literally endless. You could write in perpetuity and there still would be more to write about. So this idea of personalization seems to be in line with Seth Godin’s outlook on this, people like us do things like this, right? Where it’s just… We’ll keep riffing on the PCOS and flax. There’s a group of people that will look for that thing maybe, will look for that one thing and there’s kind of this expanded group, but it’s okay that it’s only that and you can keep you’re writing because you’re writing the right things as opposed to trying to manufacture, which is what it sounds like you were saying from the get go where it’s like, if you try to game the system, it’s like you’re dead before you start.

Eli Schwartz (39:43):

Well, it’s also category creation. So if you create this content where now you have a solution, flax for PCOS, that leads to more searches. So you’ve educated people and they become more curious and there’s more search to be had. Again, going back to Zillow as an example, prior to Zillow’s creation, if you want to find out the value of your house or the value of your neighbor’s house, you had to go to the courthouse and you had to research it. I don’t even think you could do it. You could find out how much your neighbor paid for their house and then you try to go get comps from the government on they’re valuing and what they’re paying on tax is. You would have to create your own zestimate to understand what your house is worth, where you’d have to like, I don’t know, list your house on the market, see what people are willing to pay for it. There was no real way to access it.

Eli Schwartz (40:26):

But then Zillow comes out there and you can look at anybody’s house value for free. And now you have a lot more searches. You’re like, “Wow. I want to look at everyone I knows house. I want to go try…” I do this all the time. When I was living in the Bay Area and I’d go to nice neighborhoods, I’m like, “I want to know what kind of block I’m on. Let me grab an address,” right? So because it exists, I’m going to do more searches. So you’re in the same space. You’re creating this metabolic health space. You’re providing quality solutions to things and found someone’s can be like, “Well, what if I smoke flax? What if I eat flax? What if snort flax?” Right? You have all these different… It’s just more content.

Ben Grynol (41:04):

It’s so funny.

Mike Haney (41:06):

I mean, it’s really interesting, that idea of sort of building a category. And I love this estimate idea, right? That here’s the thing that didn’t exist before, they took a sort of engineering-led approach to generating the traffic around that. But what does that look like to sort of create the category? There was a moment at which nobody knew you could use Zillow to get this estimate, right? And at some point they had to create that awareness. How does that kind of flywheel work when you talk about creating a category and then creating more search, which then creates more surge? How does that flywheel get spinning?

Eli Schwartz (41:40):

Great question. So, two things on that. The first is, before you go create a category, you need to know it’s a problem. So a lot of people, there are a lot of startups that solve problems that are stupid. Only the founder was bothered by it and then they raised a bunch of money and they tricked the VCs and they solve a problem that no one else really had. But if you’re doing this right, you know when Zillow was created, they obviously knew that there’s a problem. Everyone want to know how much a house is worth. Before they list the house to the market, they don’t want to just trust the broker’s intuition. There was a data solution for this. So you have to validate that this is truly a problem.

Eli Schwartz (42:14):

Now, what I’m going to say is counter to what most people that do SEO whatever say is, once you have a category and you create a product, the first thing you’re going to want to do is not use SEO. You’re going to want to do brand advertising, you’re going to want to do paid advertising, because that is where you start that flywheel of people understanding it.

Eli Schwartz (42:33):

So like in the Zillow example, I look at one value, now I want to look at other values. So you got to get that started. No one’s really going to Google for you if they don’t know it exists. So you go to those other channels. And I talk to startups all the time and they say, “When is the right time for SEO?” And I say, “Not now.” Because in my book, I’ve said SEO’s like saving for retirement. You don’t make an investment, an 18 month investment. It could be significantly expensive when you can’t really put food on your table. So the right time is when you have buffer, when you feel kind of comfortable and you’re like, “I’d like to start exploring this other channel. I understand my customers. I have an existing flywheel. I understand what converts and how long my customers stick around before they turn. Now, I want to go invest in another channel.”

Mike Haney (43:22):

Then maybe this will inspire a question for you. But the thing I think about all the time, and you and I talked about this a little bit is, what fundamentally changes in the way that we think about or execute SEO in a post launch world, right? When it’s not just about driving eyeballs to education, but in which we actually have other kind of metric targets that we want to hit. We want to bring people not just to a blog post, but maybe to the homepage to become a member, to learn more about our products. How do you think about that? And what kind of questions does that lead to for you?

Ben Grynol (43:57):

So this is what Haney and I have been talking lots about is the idea of, should we ever deviate from this lens of education? So there is merit in driving traffic to drive conversions, but then we get away from our mission. We start to play a game with ourself. And so if we hold steady and we say, we are not going to deviate from trying to educate the world about metabolic health. Let’s create the longest of long tail of pieces of content that you can start to get all of these people in and interested.

Ben Grynol (44:32):

It also comes back to this, this idea of focusing on perennial content versus ephemeral. When you were talking about, is there a world where Apple or Facebook create a search engine or Amazon? Maybe. Maybe there is. Walmart too. I mean, Walmart is a search engine right now as much as Amazon is. And all of those are search platforms, but the way they’re going to be indexed is totally different.

Ben Grynol (44:59):

So we started thinking a lot about, all of our pillar content needs to be perennial and needs to be created for the platforms where perennial content can exist. There’s really only two of them. And they’re both owned by Google and they’re both like search engines, YouTube and Google, right? And so what are your thoughts, Eli, on this idea of are we pulling the wool over our eyes and thinking, “Hey, we can do the right thing by creating this educational long tail content and not play the game of driving traffic and focus on perennial pillar content”? Are we way out to lunch on it? Or is that the game you’d play?

Eli Schwartz (45:39):

That is the game I’d play. I really focus on who the user is and what the user’s going to want because I do think eventually it aligns, right? Google’s goal is to… And for now we’ll talk about Google because they’re the search engine, the dominant search engine. But Google’s goal is to get users to do searches, get to their result as fast as possible because then they’re going to do it other Googles. They’re going to keep going back to Google and they’re going to click on ads and they’re going to do all that. So if the users want something, if you’re creating content that your users want, then you’re satisfying what Google wants out of this entire thing. So if this is the content that you are creating and not playing this game, I think that would be worthwhile.

Ben Grynol (46:24):

It’s such a slippery slope and it’s so easy to get into throwing a CTA off [inaudible 00:46:30].Haney always tells this story of creating an article about bicycles. And then it was like at the bottom of it, it was a contract job, and at the bottom it was like, “And by the way, Ford Ranger’s a great truck to carry your bicycle.” It was something like that. And that’s why Haney and I always have these conversations because it just feels like it dilutes everything as soon as there’s something. And the, “By the way,” you’re like… People didn’t come there and there’s probably a world where you can get like a little bit of overlap and we sort of do it with member stories where it’s showing some positive outcome of making lifestyle choices or changing behavior to improve metabolic health. Maybe that’s a little bit product marketing, but it’s not really meant to be. It’s more just inspirational and aspirational. But yeah, we just don’t want to get into the world of like and click here. It just feels kind of gross.

Eli Schwartz (47:23):

It is. And CNN has gotten into this world too, where they have these articles and they’re just pumped full of Amazon affiliate links. They have these articles on like, How to Manage Your Financial Life in 2022 and it’s got affiliate links over credit cards. It just dilutes the whole, like, I’m supposed to trust this really authoritative article that’s happening in the war in Ukraine and then you have an ad that links me over to the credit card I need to have, it just seems wrong to me. Kudos to New York Times for not digging that deep into it. The Wirecutter blog, it does review products and they do have affiliate links, but they don’t seem to order things based on who’s paying them the most money. At least that’s the way it looks to me. It’s very possible that they’re also playing the same game, but yeah, even the authoritative sites and the way they do that, it’s just wrong.

Ben Grynol (48:18):

The reading experience sucks. It’s just so bad when you’re on a site and you’re trying to consume something. It just feels like there’s mosquitoes going around you and you’re like swatting them away. You’re like “Get away.” Can you imagine reading a book? A hard cover, like people who are old skeletons? Haney and I still read paperback books, because that’s what we do. But can you imagine reading a book and there was something that came up in the middle of it? Or even listening to audio books and there was some distracting mosquito that was like, “Ugh, what’s that?” Like some ad or affiliate thing. It would just feel so weird. And so that’s why we’re… I don’t know. It seems like the integrity goes out the window when you start to inject some of these SEO hacks, if you want to call them that, into anything that is driven very much by editorial. That’s why we call the pillar of thing that Haney’s doing, editorial, so that we never ever feel mixed up of it’s content. Because then all of a sudden we’re on that slippery slope of just doing the wrong thing.

Eli Schwartz (49:23):

I have a great example of this. So before SurveyMonkey, I was at a company, an automotive content company. The company was startup. We were competing with KBB and Edmunds because they were really… Interesting fact in how the company got funded. Cars is, after real estate’s, the most expensive thing that a consumer will buy. And also it was the most monetized space on the internet outside of porn. I don’t know if that’s still true. But no one had really built anything in the automotive space when this company who started. Now, there’s a bunch of other platforms that are really in that space, in the content space.

Eli Schwartz (49:59):

So when I was doing SEO and I was focused on the keywords we want, the word Chevy, I always wanted our editorial team, they were journalists, they were automotive journalists, I’m like, “You got to say Chevy Camaro. No one’s like Chevrolet Camaro.” And they’re like, “I can’t say Chevy because it’s called a Chevrolet. That is the [inaudible 00:50:18]. We’ve got like GM says, it’s called Chevrolet.” And I’m like, “But no one searches that.” Today it doesn’t matter. Google like has combines those things. So I do think you want to balance between good editorial and good user experience. And as long as those stay paramount in your mind, you avoid the terrible things that people do just for SEO. You read some of this content and I do think CNN, at least they’re a little… Their content’s terrible, the way they might monetize on that credit card content. At least it doesn’t read like it was written by someone just monetizing affiliate links. At least it was written by someone who may have journalistic experience.

Ben Grynol (50:59):

I got to push back. I’m definitely a Chevrolet Camaro guy. I’ve never called it a Chevy Camaro.

Mike Haney (51:04):

Well, you’re Canadian, so that might be it. Maybe it’s a Canadian thing.

Ben Grynol (51:07):

You know that it’s called a Zed 28, not a Z28 here.

Eli Schwartz (51:10):

Exactly. [inaudible 00:51:12]. If you look at the search volume, most people were Chevy. And at the time, the rankings between Chevy versus Chevrolet were different. Now they’re the same, right? So Google understands a Chevy Camaro. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Chevrolet Camaro, GM Camaro, Chevy, it’s all the same because it’s user intent. That’s what you’re looking for. So they’re not really good to differentiate. Now, if you did say like, if you put something else in there that indicated you wanted different results, Google would change results for you. I can’t think of on the fly what that would be, but it becomes all about user intent. Like that example I gave with sunset in Dubai, there’s a reason you’re looking so therefore they give you that. And they’re not going to be like, “Well, you searched for Chevy Camaro. You must not be a Chevrolet Camaro type of person, so we’re going to have different results,” right?

Ben Grynol (51:59):

I love it.

Mike Haney (52:02):

I’m wondering if I could sort of lightning round with you on a few of these. You mentioned at the very beginning a lot of technical SEO stuff is kind of a waste of time, a lot of this stuff gets over complicated. So I want to just throw a few of the kind of terms and the hacks and ideas that get-

Eli Schwartz (52:15):

Page speed.

Mike Haney (52:16):

Yeah, that gets brought up. Okay. Page speed is a good one. Backlinks, do they matter?

Eli Schwartz (52:21):

All right. But I’m predicting, you got page speed, you got backlinks and then we’ll do something around internal linking. Is that what all is on your mind?

Mike Haney (52:29):

That’s one of them.

Eli Schwartz (52:30):

Okay.

Mike Haney (52:30):

Featured snippets is a big one.

Eli Schwartz (52:32):

All right. Awesome. Okay. Let’s lightning round them all. All right. So backlinks, going back on the previous thing we said about crappy content. When you look at some of the places where people focus on their backlinks, no one in their right mind would ever read any of these websites. It’s like, you go to the ones… I’ve seen this, like, “Hey, we hire this agency and they got a bunch of backlinks.” So I’ll go check the backlinks and I’ll notice like… Let’s call it like creditcards22forpeopleinamerica.com, right? That’s the website. And you go to that and you’re like, there’s an article about “The best of vest to put on your dog” and then there’s “Flares that you could put in your car.” And t’s like, “This is the latest news.”

Eli Schwartz (53:12):

And I’m like, “We got a backlink.” And I was like “This garbage website that no one in the right mind would ever read and Google’s smart enough to be the connection between flares and credit cards and dog vests is nonexistence. This website is garbage.” It doesn’t matter what domain authority is because they can fake all that. It’s just worthless, right? You buy a domain and you backlink it. So I think backlinks are valuable in the context that Google wants backlinks to be valuable, which is if you’re a new site and you get a link from CNN, that’s a good vote of confidence. If you are a health website and you get a link from a hospital or a university, that’s a good backlink. But if you get a link that’s out of context, I don’t think it matters that much. And that’s the AI that we see Google driving towards.

Eli Schwartz (53:56):

As an example, when I was at SurveyMonkey, on three occasions, I got links from what many would be considered to be the holy grail of backlinks, which is whitehouse.gov. So two of the times were because some of the cabinet members stole content from SurveyMonkey’s blog that said good things about the Trump administration. So they just verbatim took it links and all. And it did nothing. I saw no impact whatsoever from those links. Yes, that’s a DA100 or whatever it is. It’s the White House. It doesn’t do anything. So I think links, on the face of it, each link is a value and it’s like, how does this link really give a vote for something? And you don’t know.

Eli Schwartz (54:34):

So going back to your early question about like, you want to be like Healthline, you don’t know which link matters or which link doesn’t matter, which link matters for which query or which doesn’t. It’s not this fixed “This is the way it works. Oh, you have 10 links and all these links matter.” Now you have 10 links and they matter for that query and this query doesn’t need links at all. It’s totally different.

Eli Schwartz (54:54):

So how about page feed? Page speed is the same thing where it comes down to the user and it comes down to really approaching this with a logical lens, which is Google’s priority is that they want users to have a good experience. So if you go onto Google and you do a query for something and then you click the first result, it takes 10 minutes to load, you’re going to be like, “Google’s broken. I clicked and it didn’t load the page.” So Google’s going to remove that result from mobile search, or if it’s someone’s on desktop and if there aren’t very slow connection, which is unlikely today, right? So Google will remove it, but it comes down to having a baseline. So the baseline is like, “This is the baseline. It’s half a second.” If you’re faster than that, you don’t get at improvements. You don’t get higher rankings. If you’re slower than that, you’d have to be significantly slower, but you have to be significantly slower than all the competition. Because if all the websites are slower, then you’re you’re meeting that baseline.

Eli Schwartz (55:50):

So you’re only really going to get removed if you have this terrible experience. So for some reason, a lot of SEO agencies focus on this page speed thing, because it’s the only metric within SEO that you could be red, yellow, green, too fast, too slow, kind of okay, or you’re good. It doesn’t really matter. If you improve on page speed on most websites, you’re not going to see that much difference. If it’s a hyper-competitive result, say you’re in a travel space and you have a kayak competing against a bunch of other travel sites, maybe that fraction of a second matters. But for most websites, not something worth focusing on.

Eli Schwartz (56:22):

There was a company I was working with where their agency had told them to focus on page speed and they had priced out the page speed improvement at $2 million. I was like, “You’re never going to see a cent of that back.”

Ben Grynol (56:33):

And like you always say, it doesn’t matter how fast your pages load, bad content is bad content. You either have a good product or a bad product. It doesn’t matter. It does matter like you want it to be… You don’t want it to be totally sluggish, but it doesn’t matter how fast it is if it’s not great and it’s not helping a bunch of people.

Eli Schwartz (56:54):

Exactly. I was working with a company in the car rental space and they were competing against Enterprise, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, enterprise.com. They had a page speed score on Google’s [inaudible 00:57:03] page… I forget what’s it called, of one out of 100. And Enterprise seems to do quite well. So it doesn’t matter as much as people think it does.