97FL (00:00)
Hi, welcome. In this podcast, we talk B2B marketing and what it takes to know your customer, innovate and profit. We're glad you made it. This is the campaign by 97th floor.

Pax (00:20)
Hello everyone. Happy Friday. I am Paxton Dre and this is the campaign, a B2B marketing podcast about better knowing your audience, innovating beyond best practice and converting visitors into customers. The campaign is a weekly conversation with B2B marketing leaders designed to fit as much possible values possible in 30 minutes. You can catch the campaign live on Fridays at two Eastern and you can find past episodes on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, and at 97th floor.com.

We've got a really great topic today and a really great guest. and it all revolves around the world of SEO, ⁓ which is changing a lot right now, in case you haven't noticed, ⁓ there's so much going on in terms of AI and rethinking strategies, rethinking value. And, ⁓ honestly, we're at a point in the industry where, ⁓ SEO needs to focus on showing that value and the opportunity frankly is still there.

there's so much traffic still coming through those organic channels and, but what marketers need to do to secure investment and, ⁓ to succeed is really show how they can connect those actions to the bottom line. And, ⁓ that really begins with, the customer, which at Nice and floor, like that is our focus. ⁓ the channels and the channel strategy is our bread and butter, but the way that we weave those channels together is based in the user and understanding their journey.

and how we can best connect with them. So I'm excited to bring on our guest today. Eli Schwartz. Eli is an SEO expert and consultant with over a decade of experience driving successful SEO and growth programs for leading B2B and B2C companies, collectively driving billions of dollars in revenue. He has helped countless companies and marketing professionals stop the guesswork and start asking the right questions to understand what their customers want, where they're looking for answers, and how to build an SEO channel to meet them where they are.

Eli's clients have included WordPress, Shutterstock, Blue Nile, Quora, Get Around, Mixpanel, and Zendesk, all of which he has helped build and execute global SEO strategies that dramatically increase their organic visibility at scale. He's also the author of the popular book, Product-Led SEO. Strongly recommend checking that book out. It's a really great read and it goes through a lot of the core things that marketers should be thinking about as they rethink their SEO strategies.

With that, Eli, welcome to the show today.

Eli Schwartz (02:46)
Great to be here, Paxton. Good to see you again.

Pax (02:49)
Yeah, you too. So I'm really excited to dive in and I think it might be good for us to frame this conversation by starting off talking about product led SEO. So how would you summarize the idea of product led SEO for those that are unfamiliar?

Eli Schwartz (03:02)
So I think it's important to understand what most SEO is before we can talk about product-led SEO. So most SEO is really driven around keywords. So going to keyword research tool, understanding what the most popular keywords are for any particular vertical, and then writing content for that vertical or for those keywords. And the reason that's done is because the SEO is centered around the way search engines would work.

Instead, I like to think of doing product let SEO, which is to take many steps back to understand who the user is, why the user is going to fetch something from a search engine, maybe from chat, GBT, maybe from perplexity, maybe from Google lens, but they're going to fetch something. And by taking those steps back and understanding what the user is looking for and what their intent is, then you create the product experience for exactly what that user wants.

So the assumption is when you're doing regular SEOs, the assumption is they want content. They looked for a keyword. They want content that matches that keyword. When in fact, they don't want content. They want to solve maybe pain, maybe curiosity, but they want to solve something and you solve it with an asset. Most of the time, it's probably going to be written content because that's the way the web exists today, but very possibly could be a video. It could be a widget.

It could be a video, but where it could be an image, but it could, it would be something that you're creating for the user, not creating for the search engine. So that is product led SEO in a nutshell. And there's some really, really good companies that have done well at it. And I think product led SEO is something that will thrive in the future as search changes, as search engine experiences change. Cause if you're building a product for the user, well, the user will always exist until we go into the matrix and we're just plugged in and

You know, our AI agents go and look for stuff for us, but as long as there was a user, there will be some sort of SEO, but there won't necessarily be the old way of doing SEO, the traditional way of doing SEO driven by keywords.

Pax (05:07)
Right. Tell me if this rings true to you, but I've, I've thought that marketing, you know, like a good litmus test or a good thing to aim for is can you get your marketing to be so good that someone would pay for it agnostic of their product itself? Like, are you building a product separate from the rest of the company that's tied and obviously leads into, but like, is it good enough to stand on its own? How do you feel about that comparison?

Eli Schwartz (05:33)
I think that bar is way too high and unfair. mean, you think about all the good product led SEO companies out there, and I don't think people would pay. think people are too cheap. Like Zillow is a great example. Zillow is one of the, my favorite examples of product led SEO. The only way to find a Zillow page is with search or going to zillow.com and then navigating to it. But I think people would be too cheap to subscribe to Zillow as like a, it'd probably even be a B2B tool rather than B2C. I think product...

Pax (05:35)
Ha ha.

Mm.

Yeah.

Eli Schwartz (06:02)
Part of SEO thrives on giving away some sort of level of information to the search user who's not really committed. They're not, they're agnostic to whether it's Zillow or Redfin, but Zillow does a great job of creating that product. And the best is if you're building product with SEO, you're building for the actual user. You're not building for the engine. You are less likely to be disrupted by AI because you've created a product. AI can give information. It can't give product. can't be the product for now.

And I think it will be challenging to become the actual product unless the search engines or those search products want to enter every industry. at how many industries Google could enter but doesn't because they're not profitable and they're distracting.

Pax (06:46)
Right. Right. So on the topic of AI, I know you've posted about this recently. ⁓ there's seems to be a bit of a way forming around the idea of GEO versus SEO. What's your take on that?

Eli Schwartz (07:00)
I think there's people trying to sell software. So they're creating this new concept of geo there, or there's agencies that want to be differentiated because it's very hard to differentiate as an agency. You know that very well, but if suddenly you're offering a service, nobody else offers, you're instantly differentiated. But I think that geo doesn't exist in a vacuum. think that geo generative engine optimization is just SEO. The best way to be visible in a generative

response, whether that's on Google or chat, GBT or perplexity or any of those engines is by doing really great SEO. I find it extremely unlikely that you would have high visibility in one of those engines. If you didn't already do great SEO and be a brand. And that's what's really important. think brands should be more concerned. And there's some great tools that I've been looking at about how brands are showing up in, any of these responses. If you are a beverage brand,

And, or let's say a beer and someone asks the question about like, what's the best beer to drink. And there's hundreds of different craft beer options as a brand. want to make sure you show up. That's not SEO. That's brand. So if you do great brand, but if you are a website selling products and services, it's unlikely that you would show up in any of those lists. If you didn't already do great SEO, because what these, these engines are doing is they're crawling and ranking the web, which is exactly what search engines did just that output format's a little different.

Pax (08:27)
Right. Right. So it seems like the, the play for that is more close to PR, ⁓ getting your brand mentioned in reputable sources, getting your brand on lists, like lists to me from my experience seemed to be, ⁓ have a pretty big impact, which again is not new lists have always had a big impact in search engines. ⁓ but, that seems to continue to be true in generative, results.

Eli Schwartz (08:55)
Yeah, I think the most important thing to think about with general results is that they're instantly responsive. So I've seen many, many Google updates have been the victim of many Google updates. And the interesting thing about Google updates is they're conceived in a lab. So the engineers and the product managers will say, there's this, this bad thing that's happening on the internet. We want to fix it. And then they propose a product that will fix it. And then they spend many months creating an algorithm update that's designed to fix it. And then they launch it and it misses.

because it was conceived in a lab and it was a product and it was designed. It's not specifically targeted at any website. It's targeted at a concept, a form of SEO, a form of, of, you know, black hat activities. And it's not always going to be perfect. So they launched these things and then everyone will be like, Hey, you have this algo update. You want to kill Forbes and look, Forbes is doing better than ever. And that's because it was designed, you know, with it was tested obviously, but it's not perfect. The differences with, with AI is it's instantly responsive.

So if you game AI and you say, look, I see, if I get a list on Forbes, it helps promote me on any response. now users are going to go do that. They're going to ask that question of like, Hey, what's the best? I don't know. What's the best website for, for news and some obscure website was able to get listed on Forbes. then the AI response will say, these are the websites that you should look at. But number one is this obscure website. Users will say, well,

give me a list without that obscure website. So they're doing two things. One is they're teaching the engine to ignore that website, but they're also teaching the engine to correct itself on how it even learned about that. And that's instantly responsive. So I think if you find loopholes to like show up in AI, it closes much faster than if you game SEO, which many of those loopholes can last years.

Pax (10:31)
Mm.

Yeah. I mean, we did have the kind of click through rates and bounce rate, ⁓ which, know, over time, you know, would help Google correct, but you're right. I mean, it's much slower and then Google's not going back and changing the way that they understand these pages based off of bounce rate, at least in my understanding. so. Right.

Eli Schwartz (11:02)
It's like many, signals and with AI,

the signals are almost infinite. And if you have infinite people and they're all training different directions and, and, it, again, it works immediately. It has this repository and adjust things like on the fly. Like, I'm sure you've done this where like you've asked it a question and then an hour later, you asked the same question and you got a different response because it learned it. was like, well, there's something wrong. If Paxton had to ask this question again, we obviously did something wrong. Whereas Google like

The whole concept of ranking tools is the fact that it doesn't change. Like if rankings were volatile to the point where, you you were changing by the hour and I had bosses which would make me, they would make me check rankings every day and multiple times a day, but rankings were never that volatile. If they were that volatile, it would be a useless signal. No one would want like rankings updates three times a day because like it's irrelevant. So rankings are very, very static. Whereas AI is anything but.

Pax (11:57)
Right. So in the face of all these changes, you know, I still believe, and I'm sure you do that. There is a place for SEO in the mix. ⁓ but those activities that are going to lose are going to be activities around deliverables, checking the boxes, doing your standard audits and all of those things. And what's going to win is driving value, getting conversions. And from everything that I'm seeing right now, those conversions are still happening. The traffic may not be there like it was, but the conversions are still there.

The revenue is still there. ⁓ so if you, let's say, let's, let's talk to the market or the leader who is in that old school mindset of the deliverables, the keyword research, and just checking those boxes. What is the best way that they could kind of change the way they are looking at this or their approach or the framework to getting more toward what is going to continue to work in the SEO realm.

Eli Schwartz (12:50)
So I think there's a huge problem in the SEO industry, which is that the leaders are asking for the wrong thing. And it's very challenging. And I had a recent newsletter post that I wrote on this of like how to transform the way you're doing SEO into product led SEO, which is actually very challenging because if you're hired to do a specific job, like I love looking at these job descriptions, like your job is checking rankings and buying backlinks and doing all these things. And then you come into this role and you're like, you know what?

I know you hired me to do all this, but I want to push back and say, I think these are bad activities. It's a challenge and not many leaders will be open to that level of challenge when they want their team to do what they want and what they think works better, not from any malicious standpoint, but they just, they think it works better. They're the leader. So what the issue is that you want to do the right things. You want to provide different deliverables, but you're being asked to provide the wrong deliverables. So there's this process.

of being able to train and show that we need to do different things, that there's other things that will work in SEO. I think there will be. And I actually think it's great for the creative and smart SEOs because it's not about checking the box. And one of the challenges that many agencies and freelance consultants have is that you can easily outsource a lot of SEO activities to a much cheaper country where you don't need to earn as much to live. And that was something I ran into when I started doing consulting and I was asked,

By a CEO is like, well, this is, you're going to do keyword research for me. Why can't I go on Upwork and find someone in any Southeast Asian country to do it for me at a much cheaper rate? And they didn't have a great answer because if I can go to some Russia or Ahrefs and print out keywords, why can't they? And it, and I think good SEO is not that if all you're doing with SEO is printing out keywords, if all you're doing with SEO is taking keywords and turning it into content briefs, that's not really creative SEO. The best SEO is understanding the product.

Pax (14:30)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Schwartz (14:45)
understanding the company, understanding the user. And that I think will have sustainable value no matter what happens with search engines, because there will always be until again, we have our agentic AI's that plug into us and we sit in the matrix and you know, vats of cooling fluid. There will always be humans going to do a search. Now it may be that they do searches on chat, GPT, or maybe they do searches on meta, which is possible. We don't see it today, but it's possible. It may be they do searches with their glasses.

However they do it, the role of SEO is to be that middle layer in a good way to understand the product, understand the user and understand the best practices for the engines. And as we get a fragmented search environment where you now have to optimize for glasses, you have to optimize for AI responses, you have to optimize for local, which will be extremely challenging for many AI responses. You now, the SEO role becomes even more important because you can't just be

Well, I know how to do keywords and I know how to write content. You need to know how to do classes. You need know how to do all these things. And SEO becomes so much more critical. And I am excited for that future. I think many SEO employees and SEO consultants and SEO agencies are undervalued today. They're looked at as service providers and too often the cheapest service provider. But now we're going to look for the best person who understands the complexity

of an AI engine who understands the user and empathizes with the user, understands the product value and can put that all together into a marketing effort because it is marketing. You want to find that user and convert that user. It's not, again, just being a service provider who can follow directions.

Pax (16:22)
Yeah. Yeah.

Hey, you still there? looks like you cut out right at the end. said, being a service provider who can. Love it. Okay. ⁓ no, I love that. mean, I used to teach this, ⁓ SEO class at a college near us. And, ⁓ this was years ago. And one of the exercises we would do is we would do keyword research, but then I would have them pick a keyword and I would say, what does this person want? Tell me about this person. And one of the examples I remember was, ⁓

Eli Schwartz (16:40)
Follow directions. I thought you cut out.

Pax (17:06)
queen mattress sizes was the word. How big, like what's the size of a queen mattress? And I would say, what do they, what do they want? Like, tell me about this person. And they would say, they want to know the size of a queen mattress. And I say, yeah, they want that. But tell me more about what they may want. We don't know, but like, imagine, you know, maybe they're moving, maybe they're concerned, you know, like there's so many things to think about that this person may want that goes way beyond this one keyword. And that will

Should help inform our strategy about what, like who this person is and like how we can connect with them and what other things they may need. In addition to the size that they need right now, there's other things that they need to know, you know? And so I think learning about who that person is, and you can't just do that from one keyword, obviously, but it is so easy to get trapped in thinking at like keyword level deep. When in reality, these people are much deeper than that.

And we should be doing our best to provide them a great experience all the way through beyond just the single query, you know? ⁓ so how, how, how should a marketer go about understanding their audience? Because I think the, on, on a certain level, everybody knows that understanding an audience is important, but often goes like it's, it's skipped or earns a bad rap of just being super fluffy and a waste of time. Or, you know, we just want to get straight to the tactics.

but you know, those tactics aren't going to be effective unless we understand that audience. So how would you recommend a marketer approach that, okay, well, I, know, Eli says, I got to know my audience. So what should I look at first? How should I understand them?

Eli Schwartz (18:43)
Yeah. And this is a competitive mode for SEO and competitive mode for marketing. the, I was once, ⁓ this was recent, I was on a call with a potential client and we went through like a strategy for like how they could do something, build product, let us go around their audience. And like, is there a tool, is there a shortcut? I'm like, no, that's the best part about it. There is no shortcut. If you, and I want to play off your example, if you're selling queen beds, the

There are so many use cases for who's looking for the queen bed. Is it a senior who wants a really comfortable queen bed? Is it a teenager who wants a queen bed because like, you know, they're graduating and want to fill up their room? Is it someone who is moving to a new house? Is it someone that is getting divorced? Is someone that getting married? Like really diving into that because their needs will all be different. Do they want the most comfortable? Do they want the cheapest? Do they want the one that could fit up the stairs? Do they want that?

want the one that is, is, you know, fits on a box sprint. Like there's so many variations, but those aren't keywords. Those are needs. Those are pain points. Those are requirements and pleasure points really. So the way you find that is by, by being curious, talking to those customers. And the thing that I always think is baffling with most companies I meet, which is they have a specific thing they do in marketing. Like let's say they sell queen beds to senior citizens who are budget insensitive. They don't care. They just.

And they actually want it like brought and delivered and like the fact that the delivery person is going to recycle their old bed. Super important. That's what they do as a business. That's how they get funded. They get loans from the bank and they explain that to the business does, but then they're like, hire an SEO agency and they're like, optimize for the word queen bed and like put the word box spring in there, right? Me content. Like it's completely disconnected from what all the other marketing does. Like maybe if they're, you know, this particular company does marketing on daytime TV that senior citizens watch.

Pax (20:36)
Mm-hmm.

Eli Schwartz (20:36)
Then why

would you do SEO on a platform that maybe your senior citizens don't necessarily use? Maybe they don't use search to discover things. They discover things from daytime TV and they discover things from friends and family. So SEO should not be a effort that you invest any money in. So I think there is no shortcut and that's the best part about it. By having that customer empathy, by meeting the customers, by deep diving into the customer use cases, you don't necessarily have to meet them, but you could look at all the history of past clients.

and look at LTV like, Hey, we converted the most alpha this kind of customer and they happen to live in this place or they have this amount of budget or all those things. You're building a deeper, richer view of that customer. And this goes beyond personas. Like I've worked at companies where they had these awful personas that made no sense. They'd be like, this persona, she has a coach bag and she drives a Honda. Well, that had nothing to do with the product that we're trying to sell. But again, if you're selling a mattress to somebody,

Knowing that they have allergies, that's important. Knowing what car they drive, not important whatsoever. If you want them to pick up the mattress from your store, knowing whether they drive a car or a pickup truck or a U-Haul truck might matter. But that's all the things you want to put in there. Again, if you're selling products from a store and you don't have free shipping, you don't have free returns, again, those are all things that you incorporate into the way you approach SEO. And again, I see this so often with companies where they don't

put their biggest value prop in their SEO. There was a company I was working with where their value prop for all of their marketing was that they were cheap. They were cheaper than everyone else. But when it came to their SEO, they use the word fast because I don't know, was a high keyword. Like why would you put in your title tag fast? Everything else you do is cheap. So this isn't even really SEO. This is just marketing. I had them put the word cheap or inexpensive or something related to that in their title tags.

Amazingly, their click through rates went up because that's what their customer base wanted. So it's really understanding the customer base. I saw that this is what didn't require me to talk to any customers. This required me to look at all of their ads and to look at everything else they did and to look at the LTV of their customers and like, ⁓ the LTV is because people were cheap. Like you can buy us in bulk because we're cheap. And like, so again, do that in SEO. So it comes down to like meeting and understanding and knowing the customer rather than

keyword research.

Pax (23:05)
Yeah. So, right now the industry is in a bit of a state of flux and there's probably a lot of people who are in orgs who are saying, okay, this sounds good. And I believe this and I want to do this, but I've got pressure from the higher ups that I need to be ranking for this one word and they keep checking it every morning and they want me to report on this every week or whatever. How, how should a professional who wants to move in this direction?

balance the expectations that are currently placed on their shoulders versus where they know they can be adding value. And they also need to sell that different direction and perspective. how, what would you offer? What advice would you offer to them?

Eli Schwartz (23:45)
Yeah. my last news week newsletter that came out two days ago was exactly this. I find that there's one kind of manager. This is the manager that just tells you how to do SEO. You're not going to able to sell it. You have to like embrace reality that your job is going to be to be taking their directions. Or if you're an agency, you're doing their strategy. And if that's okay with you, then that's okay with you. That's how you earn your income. If it's not okay with you, then you have options, then don't. The other kind of managers are the managers that

are skeptical and then there's the kind of manager that's curious. So the kind of manager is skeptical. You really have to prove and like you can't just logically say, Hey, look at our past way of doing SEO. It doesn't really convert, but here's a different way. I'd like to try it. You have to like bleed into a test, but the other kind of manager is the one that's just like waiting. We're not necessarily manager, but client. They're already believed there was something wrong with their SEO. I have the

calls like this all the time with potential clients where they say, well, our blog doesn't really convert, but our agency has us continue writing the blog. What do you think? And we're like, stop writing the blog. It doesn't convert. They're like, I was just waiting for someone to tell me that. So those are the best kind of people. They're just like waiting and then you're giving them a new way and then you can launch into it. The other kind of people are like, well, we're going to keep writing our blog because we're convinced that it builds our brand authority, but is there something else we should be doing? And that's where you can say,

Well, if you think about it, we're selling mattresses and we're selling mattress to seniors and we don't really approach that at all. We don't talk about our, you know, our allergens. We don't talk about our comfort. We don't talk about delivery. We don't talk about recycling of old mattresses. Can we try it? And you give it a shot and they say, Hey, look, this converted value, earned some political capital to do something else. And it, it can't be this grand approach of like, okay, I'm throwing out your entire SEO strategy. Let's try this new thing.

Pax (25:26)
Hmm.

Eli Schwartz (25:40)
It has to be the steady slow process of selling with data and logic.

Pax (25:45)
Yeah. Yeah. Too often SEOs will kind of throw the user over the fence and say, great. got, I got the visit. Now you do something with it, but, before you stop investing in those blogs, look at those value props and look at those CTAs because often there's a chance to convert there. Although this does remind me of a client that, we worked with where they sold water filters and they ranked number one or close to it for the water cycle.

And, ⁓ they got so much traffic from that. But if you look at who's searching for the water cycle, it's like kids doing their homework. They're not in the market for a water filter. Is it related to what they do? Yes. But are the people who are searching this any, in any way, going to buy their water? No. And so, ⁓ we shut that down and focused on things that produce revenue and traffic fell a lot, but conversions went up and that's really what matters. And that's the ultimate goal of what we're doing here. Not just the traffic. ⁓

I love that. So you've referenced your newsletter a couple of times. How can people go sign up for your newsletter? Where should they go?

Eli Schwartz (26:49)
Product.seo.com. So those are my hot takes, my thoughts. I'm not curating news on SEO. There's a lot of other great places where I assume 97th floor has one too. Mine is just like my view on where SEO is going, my thoughts and like, what I'm seeing in the marketplace.

Pax (27:05)
Okay. Yeah. So product led SEO.com go subscribe to newsletter and, ⁓ this is an endorsement for me, but go get a copy of product led SEO. it's really good. There's there. And there's an audio book version of that too. ⁓ so check that out. ⁓ thank you so much for joining Eli. I feel like we don't have enough time to cover all of the sweeping, ⁓ changes that are happening right now in the SEO space, but we'd love to have you back to talk, through more of them. ⁓

Thank you listeners for joining today.

97FL (27:34)
Thanks for listening. The campaign is produced by 97th Floor, a 20-year-old marketing agency that helps companies like McKinsey, Pluralsight, and Checkpoint know their customers, execute innovative campaigns, and drive profitable growth. If you have an allocated growth budget and product market fit, we'd love to do research and build a proposal for you. Visit us at 97thFloor.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe. See you next time.