The Ledger, every show

“I don't think SaaS in general should do SEO”

“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, even OpenAI as a startup with Bing's part, with Micros…”

“So now a lot of those keywords are going to be moving into these AI overviews. And I don't want to just focus on Google, although I think Google's going to own the entire search page forever and ever for at least for a very long time. But other engines, whethe…”

“So if you are WebMD, And you're writing content about the human body, just generic content that has existed since medical journals were created. AI overviews are going to be fantastic at giving you that answer. You know, you read a, you know, you have a headac…”

“So G two is another G two and all the sites like G two, like the gardener sites, like Capterra, all going to be massively disrupted.”

“So that's where I think SEO should be is you need to be in the buyer journey with the SEO you're creating. And it doesn't matter what AI overviews does or doesn't do because you're still solving the mid funnel problem with your SEO solution.”

“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 don't think restaurants typically should have a website. Not only should they not do SEO, but I don't know that they should have a website because if you think about the buyer journey for a person looking for food, They don't typically go to a website.”

“I think it was CNET that said they were using AI to create content. And I think they got in trouble because they said they're using AI to create content, but if they had not said they're using AI to create content, I think their entire model would have been ve…”

“And this is a huge issue for Google because the amount of content being created is enormous and it's growing exponentially. And Google's trying to crawl everything. They now have more content to crawl, which becomes more expensive for Google. And which is why …”

“This is the biggest myth in SEO is that you could just build links and link building is, is the secret source and the secret sauce to like growing your SEO footprint. And that's totally wrong because the way most people build links is they buy these guest post…”

“Because the way a link before LLMs and the link, you know, 10 years ago was actually an HTML link. And now Google can read content so they can say, well, you've been mentioned here. That's pretty good. So now we acknowledge that this might be the brand and thi…”

“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.”

“I think the most important thing to leave people with is that SEO is not dying. There will always be a world where users are requesting their own information.”

“When I've 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…”

“I don't think that's at all correct. And I don't think anyone, whether you're doing SEO as your full-time job, whether you're receiving SEO traffic as a part of one of your primary marketing channels, I don't think anybody has to worry about that.”

“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.”

“And in the verdict, it says that Google has 98% of mobile searches.”

“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.”

“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 you're, when you're doing link building, you're creating a relationship between the piece of content that has linked to you and the …”

“If you have a hundred page website that sells a SaaS tool, technical SEO is probably going to be less important. So spending money In time and technical SEO would be a waste of time.”

“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 gonna 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 …”

“So even Google for, 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.”

“When it comes to e-commerce, it's really only Amazon that's doing it amazing.”

“One thing I found to be very effective for cross-linking is just randomization. So if you randomize your URLs, you make sure that provided your randomization algorithm is correct. Every single URL ends up being cross-linked. So if users click it, great. If the…”

“So Google, as much as they say they're really good at understanding and ranking JavaScript, They're not because in real time when they're looking for your content, you are handicapping yourself by not having just raw text words on the page.”

“There are many, many products that are probably never going to be bought on mobile. Like probably no one's going to buy enterprise software on, on a mobile device.”

“It used to be best practices where you would build another website for customers in another country. I no longer think that's the best practice.”

“I think GDPR is one of the greatest things that has ever happened to SEO in the last five years.”

“The other big advantage is that paid budgets are now going to take a huge hit. Because of GDPR, we've gone to this nightmare scenario where you don't know if your paid budgets are working because you can't track users until users Agree to be tracked.”

“Looking at a resume, I've looked at many resumes of people that have done SEO, and I've discovered they don't really know anything about SEO. They've just done SEO. When you talk to someone that would be good in this seat, And that doesn't even have to be as s…”

“I no longer believe in ever measuring keyword rankings, like as we discussed, we're focusing on a user, so it's not just generic rankings.”

“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.”

“So this entire idea of SEO get up until 20, 22 was monetized unstructured data. Whoever wrote the longest piece of content on Best beach hotels in Miami and then built the best links to it. They would win. They would win whether it's ads or win whether it's ho…”

“Like with Zapier, I think it took them a couple of years before they even saw any results because nobody's looking for it.”

“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.”

“And 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.”

“So in the Google verdict, I think Google's said this before, 63% of Gen Z uses TikTok to search.”

“They thought of themselves as a dating app, but it's a loneliness solution problem. The answer is a Google search.”

“In any e-commerce company thinking about SEO, they should have thought about SEO before they chose their e-commerce platform.”

“And my favorite search tool is, is Google Search Console because it, it's from Google. It may or may not be as accurate as can be, but it's probably more accurate than other tools which are sort of projecting what the actual truth is.”

“So for the most important thing when it comes to SEO and making sure that your site is somewhat optimized for SEO is that the site is fully crawlable. So no orphan pages.”

“When it comes to e-commerce, There has to be a good plug-in or something built internally because you're not going to want to have, like, say, a red sweater cross-linked over to, like, a dog leash, right? So, like, that's where a plug-in that sort of, you know…”

“There's nothing you should be doing that's just for crawlers. It should all be for users.”

“So YouTube's different, because Google's not great at really understanding what the video's about. So by giving more information, and it could be a transcription, It's, ah, those keywords that you put in, you're giving a better indication of what the video is …”

“If you have a product description and you only have a hundred words and that somebody else has the same product, but they have a thousand words in different ways of describing the product. More than likely they will get more search traffic because as people se…”

“You don't really need to rank on unclogged drains anymore, because Google is very local. So if you're in San Francisco, and you're a plumber, and someone searches unclogged drains, you now have a much higher chance of ranking on unclogged drains than Roto-Root…”

“Google specifically does not like search within search. Google would much prefer that you don't go to Pinterest, that you go directly to where that image was, but maybe that site didn't do a great job of optimizing the image, but Pinterest did, so now Pinteres…”