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Ramli John:
Welcome to this live Q&A session. I have here, Eli, and I made sure that I pronounced that correctly. Eli, how are you doing? How are things with you this... it's morning there where you're at right now, right?
Eli Schwartz:
Yes. Yeah, hot morning. I'm in Houston, and I'm getting used to how hot it can be here.
Ramli John:
Shoot, Well, it's super cold and rainy here in Toronto, and we were just talking about... Houston's such a great place for barbecue and guitars, right? And music scene.
Eli Schwartz:
I moved in COVID, so all I know is that it's a great place to work from home.
Ramli John:
When things are locked down... I mean, we're just doing a little [inaudible 00:00:40] where I'm letting people in, but when this lockdown is over, what would be the first thing you would do?
Eli Schwartz:
Oh, I've already been doing it. I went to Cancun in November.
Ramli John:
All right. Interesting. That's really fun. And around Houston? Around Houston, what would you be doing?
Eli Schwartz:
Oh, I'm doing that too. I've been going to coffee shops and working in person. Some of the coffee shops have these signs on the front door that say masks are encouraged, not required, encouraged. So, I'm getting to experience the city. So if anybody wants to travel internationally, I... that wasn't a good idea, so on the way out of Cancun, at the airport, they kept taking temperature.
Eli Schwartz:
They have these surveys, which... those surveys were worthless, I'm sure everyone lies on them, but they actually take your temperature and I was just thinking, "What if I had a 99?" Sorry for anybody not in the U.S. I don't know what the Celsius version is. What if I had 99, and they were like, "Okay, you're stuck in Cancun for the next three weeks until you get a negative PCR test."
Eli Schwartz:
I'd rather not be stuck in Cancun, so hindsight, I shouldn't have gone to Cancun, but I'm glad I went. You're muted, Ramli.
Ramli John:
You know Cory [Hates 00:01:52] by any chance? He used to be head of growth at [BR Metrics 00:01:55], and he was in the same shoes. He went to Cancun a couple weeks ago as well. I was like, "Well, you do get the beach." He was like, "Yeah, I'm in Cancun." So, that's really, really fascinating.
Ramli John:
Let's jump in. You wrote this book, Product-Led SEO. It's actually the first time I heard about this from your book, so can you talk a little bit about that? How did the term "product-led SEO" come about, and what was your journey writing a book about it for you?
Eli Schwartz:
I don't remember where the precise word "product-led SEO" came from. Obviously, I've known about product-led growth for a while and it's very popular. Everyone talks about this idea of product-led growth, and they steal the idea of product-led growth. They just apply it to everything, like the way people apply that word "viral" to everything and then the pandemic taught us what actual viral is. People just use jargon and product-led growth can be a jargon-y term.
Eli Schwartz:
So, I think I came up with product-led SEO because I was trying to explain a concept, and I think the better way of understanding product-led SEO is to understand what it is not. So, I was trying to explain this concept of how most people do SEO, and how I don't think it's the right way to do SEO, and I needed to really explain what that opposite was, and the product-led SEO just hit me. So, the way most people do SEO... and I talk about this a lot in my book is a way that's hard to do, which is, you do some keyword research.
Eli Schwartz:
Let's say you're in the insurance space, so you have a car insurance website, you're in the insurance space, you want SEO. You want to drive SEO content. So, you go to a keyword research tool. Not biased towards any tools, they're mostly the same; the UIs are different. So, you go to a keyword research tool, you pop in your keyword "car insurance" and it spits out 1,000 words related to car insurance.
Eli Schwartz:
I haven't done this in a while, but I guarantee car insurance, the word is going to be at the top, and then car insurance quotes is going to be right underneath it, and you're going to have all these words. Then you're going to go over to a content writer who works for you, or is on Upwork on Fiverr, or wherever it is, and you're going to have them write out this content. And then once you have the content, you're going to go and you're going to build backlinks to it.
Eli Schwartz:
So, that's the typical SEO process. Where this falls down is that car insurance has been around on the internet for 25 years or so, right? GEICO's website and Progressive's websites are probably older than Google. So, this idea that just because you decide to launch a car insurance website, and you wrote car insurance content based on keywords that were provided to you by a keyword tool that you either didn't pay for, or if you paid, you paid something that everyone else can afford to pay, like $99 a month, that this idea that somehow, you're going to be number one and you're going to sell the most car insurance on the internet, doesn't make sense to me.
Eli Schwartz:
And then even worse than that, the way most people measure their progress on this continuum... say they're working for someone, say they're working for themselves. They measure themselves based on these keywords. So, they've chosen "car insurance" as a keyword that they're going to target, they chose "car insurance quotes" as a keyword they're going to target, and then they create this ranking report, and if they are number one in car insurance, which they'll never be, they pat themselves on the back.
Eli Schwartz:
If they're not number one on car insurance, they don't pat themselves on the back, and they're disappointed. Now, this entire process means that they're, A, likely to fail, and then the thing I've seen in my consulting, is that when they don't fail, they're still disappointed, because they're not successful on the metric they need, and the metric they should have, which is revenue.
Eli Schwartz:
So, say they actually do make it to number one for car insurance, but they don't sell the right car insurance, they're not going to drive any conversions. So that's typical SEO processes, content-led SEO. I flip this over to what I call product-led SEO, which is, anytime you're building a product... and I can't be lecturing you about products, obviously, but anytime you're building a product, you build it with the user in mind.
Eli Schwartz:
There's all sorts of jargon-y words, product market fit, which is... it makes a lot of sense. You need product market fit, you need to know that when you create something, that you have users that care for it. Yesterday I was talking to a company, and they were explaining their their new product, and they don't have any users, so they're solving a problem that only they have, and they don't know if it solves their users' problem. So, you need product market fit, you need to create something that users actually want and are going to use and like.
Eli Schwartz:
And of course, if you product-led growth, they have to tell other people about it. So, I like to apply the same things to SEO, which is, going back to car insurance, say I'm in the car insurance business, and I acknowledge the fact that every other car insurance website, whether they provide car insurance or compare car insurance or anything they do, provide quotes. They've been around for 25 years. But I got funding, bootstrapping, whatever it is, because I have some sort of innovation based on car insurance, and I have something to offer to the market.
Eli Schwartz:
Therefore, I'm going to use that to go and do my SEO. I'm going to use that to pitch to the market. And if you don't have an innovation, then I don't know why you'd bother competing in such a competitive space. But say you have an innovation, so then you're creating content around that. So, say it's car insurance for young people, car insurance for veterans, car insurance for people that are prone to wrecking their cars, or car insurance for drunk drivers, whatever it is that you're providing, you write that content, and then you build your content and your SEO efforts around that user that you've identified.
Eli Schwartz:
And you're going to, again, because you used product processes, know that that user exists and create the content in the method that they want. If you are, let's say, trying to appeal to military people and they like long form content or say they like PowerPoint, then that's what you do. You don't just write 1,000 words because it's some sort of SEO best practice. So, it's a really long-winded idea of what product-led SEO is, but essentially SEO is... you're doing SEO around a product.
Eli Schwartz:
Most of the time that product is content, but don't just create content because you're driven by keyword research. Create content because there's a user behind it.
Ramli John:
That's really fascinating with that. I just also want to make it clear for the people who are listening in to this session, and this is something that I just recently heard as well, that there's... can you dig a little bit deeper into the difference of... you talked a little bit about already content-led SEO, audience-led SEO, and product-led SEO. If there's any difference among those three, and you already brought up the example with the car insurance, but just [inaudible 00:08:22] bring to light the difference there among the different types of "led" SEO.
Eli Schwartz:
So, audience-led SEO... and this is obviously something everyone always says, "Focus on the user, don't focus on the engines," and then they don't focus on the engines, right? Because they're doing a certain... creating keywords. So, I'd say the difference between all of these three, audience is one I don't usually talk about, which is, when you're creating product-led SEO, is I'm actually building entire processes for SEO, which is what kind of web platform am I going to use?
Eli Schwartz:
Am I going to be mobile-first, or am I not going to be mobile-first? Obviously, it's best practice in 2021 to be mobile-first, but if you're a B2B SaaS and you're selling cloud software, no one buys that from their phone, so why would you build a fancy mobile website? If you are selling to, let's say, senior citizens, then your content should be able to be viewed on whatever size of the devices they use, and should use language that they're familiar with. If you're selling to uneducated people, then you don't want to use educated words.
Eli Schwartz:
That's what I mean around product. All of that weighs into it. So, whenever I do my growth consulting and SEO advising, I'm working with product teams who... they have engineering resources, they have design resources, all of that goes into play when I'm building my SEO efforts. It's not just, "Oh, here's your content roadmap, these are the 1,000 pieces of content you should create," and then let's ship it off to a content writer and they'll just write it. And one thing to note on when I do product-led SEO is, I like to focus on something that's scalable, something that's programmatic, because your ultimate SEO is going to come from having a lot of pieces of content.
Eli Schwartz:
You're not going to drive millions of visits just from one piece of content, so you need to have a lot of pieces of content. When you're doing content-led SEO, and you're writing pieces of content, it doesn't scale, because a good piece of content will cost you $500, $1,000. So, if you want to have 1,000 pages, multiply whatever you're paying for that piece of content by 1,000, and that is going to be a big budget, and then you better hope you can get ROI from it.
Eli Schwartz:
Again, when you're doing content-led SEO, if your metrics aren't around KPIs and ROI, then essentially, your ROI is going to be, or your KPI is going to be, "Am I ranking? Am I not ranking?" Instead of, "Did this $50,000 or $100,000 investment provide ROI for me?" Audience-led SEO, I would just say, you create content for users. Maybe that's user-generated content, but really, I think SEO has to be dialed much, much further back. It has to go all the way to the product, what you build and how you build, rather than, "Am I creating content that I think there's users and there's keyword research around?"
Ramli John:
That makes a ton of sense. I want to get into the process now. You said you worked with a few clients. I'm guessing this is the thing that you do [inaudible 00:10:58] up to you and says, "Hey, Eli, I need [inaudible 00:11:01] magic. Give me the product-led SEO magic." You said you work with product and [inaudible 00:11:11] tuning in to this podcast as well as the live session are looking forward to get more users for free trials. Using SEO is probably one of the drivers for growth for them. So, [inaudible 00:11:21] if you can give an example of one that you've helped in the [inaudible 00:11:25] with it.
Eli Schwartz:
Yeah, your mic cut out there for a second, so I think I heard the question, so I'm just going to repeat it. You want an example how to go through product-led SEO with the client.
Ramli John:
Yep, that's correct.
Eli Schwartz:
Okay. So, a lot of times when I talk to new companies that are interested in working with me on SEO, I'd say about 50% of the time, I tell them that there's no reason they should do SEO. So, the reason is because when I'm doing product-led SEO, the most important aspect of product what SEO is, is there a user? Is someone going to be going on Google and typing something related to what this company's offering, and then go through a conversion process to go and buy that product?
Eli Schwartz:
In many cases, and about half the time, that's not going to happen. So I'll give you an example of something that's not going to happen, then we can talk about one that is going to happen. Let's say you work for Google, and you're selling Google Cloud. And your competitors are Microsoft and AWS, and your minimum price point for the kind of customer you care about is in the millions. That is not SEO, that is not going to be an SEO conversion. In no way is anyone going to Google and being like, "Best cloud software. Oh look, Google's number one. Let me just pull out my credit card with multimillion dollar credit limit, and I'm just going to buy this thing and go for it."
Eli Schwartz:
SEO, of course, plays a role in that. Before you make decisions, you're going to read reviews. I hope that you're going to read reviews. But there's no way that they're not going to look at all the competitors. There's no way that you won't have many, many steps on this journey. So to think that SEO is going to be the most important effort, makes no sense. Now, Google has a lot of money, so of course, they should spend money in SEO, and many times I've talked to companies that don't have a lot of money.
Eli Schwartz:
And if they're going to spend money on SEO... and I just talked about that budget where it's $1,000 per piece of content. If you're going to spend that money on SEO, you're taking it from something else. And in many cases, especially for B2B, you're probably taking it from, say, a field marketing or an advertising channel. I don't think it's justified. I don't think you're going to be able to track your $50,000, $100,000 budget back to your SEO effort, unlike where if you did paid marketing, you can have more tracking and say, "Did this create an MQL? Did this create a SQL?"
Eli Schwartz:
I think that makes a lot more sense. So, to justify stealing that budget and moving it over, I don't think you should do that. Now again, if you're a big company if you're Google Cloud and you're like, "Well, we already spent $50 million a month in paid marketing, what's another $50,000 in SEO?" Go for it. Spend it, go figure out if it works. But if you're not in that case, if you're not lucky enough to have tons of budget just to experiment with things, and again, big companies like Google experiment with things all the time. They own planes and advertise on planes and they buy billboards.
Eli Schwartz:
They don't know whether that works for them, or probably don't know whether that works for them. So then, you can spend money on SEO. But if you are budget conscious, and you're trying to grow, and you're earlier, then I don't think you should spend money in SEO unless you can say, "I can specifically see the use case and understand my users, of how a user is going to search on Google, find my content, and fall into a conversion funnel." If you can't rationalize that to yourself, don't spend money on SEO.
Eli Schwartz:
So now, an example of a company that I worked with to build a product-led SEO effort, and that idea of B2B and SaaS and not being the best fit for SEO, that came from working with companies and essentially failing, and I talk through some examples of that in my book, of where SEO doesn't make sense. Now, product-led SEO, where it becomes effective is... I was working with a company where they were in a... I don't think I should name the company. Well, I'll hint it.
Eli Schwartz:
They were in a space that was highly, highly commoditized. All of their competitors have been around since early 2000s, and they had an innovation. So like I said earlier, if you have an innovation, you want to put that innovation front and center. The way they did their SEO is they targeted those head keywords just like those competitors. And what I did was, by working with the team... and usually, it has to be a high level team, it has to be a C-suite team, because they're redirecting resources, they're rebuilding, they're changing the way they go to market, because you don't want to just go to market for SEO.
Eli Schwartz:
You're going to market for all of your online marketing, because I think it's silly when people just create an SEO channel, and it's only SEO and has only SEO KPIs. SEO is content, so that content could be used in social, it could be used in email, it could be used wherever. So, that's why you usually need high level buy-in. So, we're talking with the C-suite team. We decided that our SEO go-to market was to be able to put this innovation front and center, so whereas all of their competitors... again, hinting to it, were focused on cities, this company was able to be successful in neighborhoods.
Eli Schwartz:
However, their efforts were focused on cities just like their competitors. By changing the way their site was structured to go from focusing on neighborhoods, to build content around very specific neighborhoods, to build content around something near you, you don't need to travel to find this service, that is the way we went to market with SEO, because everyone that found their service, that's what they were looking for. Everyone that loved their service, that's what they got.
Eli Schwartz:
But somehow, when they went to market with their prior way of doing SEO, they did it the same way their competitors did, and they were never going to win, because their competitors have been around for 20 years, and I find when you're in that sort of space, the only way you can win is if search suddenly changes, which doesn't usually, or if your competitors accidentally shoot themselves in the foot by changing their website, which I've benefited from a few times, but that's not the kind of thing you can count on.
Ramli John:
Really fascinating. Is what I'm hearing, you're finding... whereas they're targeting cities, you targeted neighborhoods. Is it more so you're niching down to a specific... you're focusing effort on something very specific to the target with the product-let SEO? Is that what I heard with that example?
Eli Schwartz:
It's specific... again, because I can't share all the details around this company, and I recommend everyone check out my book because I walk through better examples there of how to think through it from... examples I made up without having to share clients. It's not that I'm niching down into being neighborhoods, it's really the product was built to offer a service in neighborhoods, which no one else did.
Ramli John:
Oh.
Eli Schwartz:
What we essentially did was, we aligned our SEO with what they were doing anyways. There's another company I'm working with that are also a local-oriented service, global company translated in every language in the world. When people use their product, they're only using their product for very, very local, but nothing about their website talks about local. They only talk about global. So, everyone knows they're local. They use their product for local. However, they don't have that search traffic for local for the thing that people are actually looking for, because they never put that forward.
Eli Schwartz:
It's not that we're... again, I'm giving two local examples. It's not the idea is to be local. The idea is to align your SEO, which is essentially your online content, with what people are looking for. I'll give you another example of a company where SEO didn't work, which is... I was talking to a founder who had an innovative birth control product. No one knew that that product existed. The only thing people looked for was the old birth control. So, you have to create your market first. So, product-led SEO can't work unless people start looking for it, so it's sort of a chicken-egg.
Eli Schwartz:
And in my book, I talk about this as blue ocean SEO, which for anyone that has ever read the book Blue Ocean Strategies... so essentially, if you're going after search volume, and you're using a keyword research tool, that's red ocean. Everyone else can use the same keyword research tool, everyone else can create their own content. The blue ocean is you knowing that your customers are looking for you, but that content doesn't yet exist. And you're the one that creates that content, and you create your own demand. So in the case of this birth control company, they obviously provided a great value, but no one was looking for that innovation because they didn't know it should exist.
Eli Schwartz:
If they create other brand marketing around that should exist, suddenly, that search volume is created, and what she was actually looking for was she was looking to rank on typical birth control terms, which I think are very difficult. You're going against the entire pharmaceutical industry, you're going against all the people that monetize stuff, and of course, you're going against the spam industry that likes to sell pills under the table. Actually, from Canada. All those websites say "Canada" in them.
Eli Schwartz:
So that's what I'd say is, you have to align your product and build for product demand. An example I did not work with and I talked about a lot in the book and it's my favorite example of product-led SEO is Zillow. So I know Zillow is not yet in Canada. I hear they're expanding to Canada, but Zillow drives all their traffic off of pages that don't have search volume. Every single person's address in the United States is... that's the keyword. I search an address, either find that or Google Maps. But if you go to a keyword research tool, there's no search volume.
Eli Schwartz:
So, what Zillow did was they knew, using product-led SEO by talking to users, understanding what users are looking for, that that content should exist, and then they created that content regardless of the fact that no keyword research tool was going to tell them to create it. And then, ultimately, they benefited from that. Ultimately, they were even able to rank on the word "mortgage" and the word "real estate," so it really starts with understanding the user and building for the user, building a product for the user, rather than just saying, "Hey, I'm only going to go for the topic you research, and build content here."
Eli Schwartz:
Another example I talk about in my book is TripAdvisor. TripAdvisor was created in a time when there was a lot of travel blogs. There was... you go to a hotel, and you review the hotel. So if you were building a travel blog, the hotels you're going to review are the most popular hotels. TripAdvisor, instead they focused on the product. They said, "This is a necessary product for every single hotel, every single property in the world, so we're going to build the architecture for every single hotel in the world. We're going to build the site structure for every single hotel in the world, and we're going to go and seed the content around some hotels," and ultimately, look at them now.
Eli Schwartz:
They win on every single hotel. They're in the top three for every single hotel name, even higher than the hotels themselves. So, they put that effort into the product rather than the keywords. Again, if you were doing content-led SEO when TripAdvisor started, you just made a travel blog and reviewed the Waldorf in New York.
Ramli John:
Really, really interesting, those examples. One follow up question I have around this is, this sounds like it's more like a programmatic... you're programmatically building pages specific for product stuff, and related to specific local stuff. Is that where that's leading to? To really implement this, you should have some scalable, programmatic way to build pages so you don't have to even write the content yourself?
Eli Schwartz:
Ultimately, yes, I think that's where you'll be the most successful in creating a lot of pages, and I talk through the programmatic and scalable ways in the book, but even if you don't have a pathway to programmatic and to scalable, you should still create a product-led SEO. You shouldn't just create content because the keyword research tool tells you to. You're building a product. You're building something for users, and you're creating...
Eli Schwartz:
One of the things I would say is, I always recommend when I work with larger brands to create as much brand content as possible, because those are conversions they're going to lose when people search for the brand and they find someone else. So, it doesn't really have to be scalable in order to be successful product-led SEO. The most successful is going to be when you create content and it scales and you can have millions of pages, but even if you're creating any content, there should be a user and a product and effort behind it.
Ramli John:
Really, really fascinating. I know you've been giving a lot of examples on the consumer-facing products. Have you ever seen this work for B2B? I know you mentioned earlier that usually, it's tough, but can you think of any examples? Maybe G2 or something that that is more B2B? Because a lot of our audience are usually B2B SaaS or B2B in general.
Eli Schwartz:
I did a project with G2 a few years ago. G2 is a perfect example of product-led SEO. So G2, they focused their SEO effort around architecture and categories, rather than saying, "How am I going to specifically win on this one software? How am I going to win on the keyword 'Salesforce?'" Instead of focusing on how they're going to win "Salesforce," they focused on how they're going to win on their own CRM and all the terms related to CRM, and built the structure to win on everything, or on aggregate, to do well on everything, rather than to win on specific keywords and brands.
Eli Schwartz:
So I think this applies to anything. I think the differentiator here is... again, it goes back to the user and it goes back to the product. Can you see a pathway to conversion into user experience from SEO? Again, Google Cloud is a great example where I don't think there's a pathway, where I don't think users are Googling and looking for a cloud software, and that is bringing them down a conversion funnel. They may, right? I'm not saying they don't, but if you have to justify spending $100,000 on a channel and you don't have the budget of Google Cloud, can you justify that when you're something similar to Google Cloud? I don't think so.
Eli Schwartz:
You're selling some sort of high ticket item which has a long sales funnel. I wouldn't say you should do that for B2B. If you're B2B, it's somewhat transactional, where people come to your website and they fill out a lead instantly and then you can convert that right away and say, "Well it looks it came from SEO," then of course you spend it, because it's B2B but they function like B2C. I spent years at SurveyMonkey, which is of course a B2B tool. People don't use surveys in their personal... maybe some people do, but no one's paying a monthly subscription to go and send surveys to their family, right?
Eli Schwartz:
They could use other tools. So, it's a B2B tool, but they function like consumers. Most of those customers initially, when they found what they like, they just pulled out a credit card and expensed it. So, if your B2B tool is like that, so yes, it's a business but it's also the kind of thing that people just function like consumers, impulse buys, very short funnels, then you could do it. But if your B2B service is something that requires doing a demo and getting on a phone with a salesperson and going through a long process, could you do SEO? You could always do SEO, but you can you justify that investment in SEO? That's the question you need to ask yourself.
Ramli John:
And this view about a lot of companies that are shifting to product-led is they're starting to act like a consumer product, right? You talk about MailChimp and look at Slack and look at Dropbox, and all these B2B products are acting more B2C, so I think that's a really interesting point that you have. One follow up question I have, and this is actually something Costas asked in the audience, is you're talking already about ROI of SEO. What are tools you use to measure and track those channels to make sure SEO is making us money? Obviously, there's Google Analytics, but are there any tools in your back pocket that you pull out and say "Hey, here's what you should implement to really see the impact of your SEO efforts?"
Eli Schwartz:
I saw Costas asked another question too, so I'm going to answer both questions at the same time.
Ramli John:
Sweet.
Eli Schwartz:
Okay. So, first of all, Costas, I don't know if you were here earlier, but I don't measure keywords, I never measure keywords. I strongly recommend everyone buy my book, of course, because I go through it in more detail than here, but I don't think you should measure keywords, because when you measure keywords, you get the wrong keyword. So, I see this all time. My clients will be focused on a specific keyword, but then there's a variation to that keyword that people convert on, but if you're tracking the keywords, you miss out on the variation.
Eli Schwartz:
And most of the SEO tools, they do a terrible job with that. They only track specific keywords. One thing I would tell everyone to do right now is go Google "places to eat lunch" and then go do one more search and say "price" and then it'll be "price for lunch," right? Keywords don't matter. Google puts you in a whole funnel, so they're really focusing on keywords and especially with search queries changing so much thanks to assistive devices. I wouldn't think you should ever focus on a keyword.
Eli Schwartz:
Instead, what I focus on is page level or content level. So, I've created a piece of content, targeting keyword types, right? So, I'll stick with the car insurance. I have my car insurance innovation for people that like to wreck their cars, so I want, let's call it special car insurance. So I don't know that "special car insurance" is necessarily the keyword, but Google will modify what that adjective is, and what the words are people are searching.
Eli Schwartz:
So I want to invest in that piece of content. I want to see how much traffic I can get in that piece of content, again, rather than checking keywords. Now, I don't use Google Analytics, and the main reason I don't use Google Analytics is because I've never, ever seen it to be even close to accurate, whether it under-accounts or over-accounts, there's no rhyme or reason for it, and it could be because of mobile, it could be because of anti-tracking and all that, so, it's very, very difficult to use those reports and say that as any source of truth.
Eli Schwartz:
Instead, what I do is I only use Google Search Console, because Google Search Console may not be accurate, but it is a source of truth, because it's the same source of truth every single website on the internet gets. It's coming from Google. So however Google sanitizes it or denies it or cuts off any visits, they do that equally for every single website in the world. So, I use that as a source of truth. In every single company I've ever worked with, the very first project I work on is helping them to build their analytics. So, instead of using Google Analytics or any sort of bad tracking, we use Google Search Console as the source of truth for traffic, and then try to marry that into internal tracking of actual conversions, right?
Eli Schwartz:
Most of the time, I work with public companies, so the conversions are reporting to Wall Street, so those can't be wrong. You can't under-account, you can't over-account. Causes problems when you have to restate earnings to Wall Street. So, using those reports, I tried to marry that together with the Google Search Console to say, "Here's how many people potentially converted from that page. Here's how many people converted from that country," to get close enough to the truth to say, "Here's the traffic I've driven," and then I use Google Search Console to get query ideas to say, "Oh, these are the queries people are searching. Maybe there are other queries that are related to this that we didn't effectively target. Let's create another page around it," or "Let's add that content to the page."
Eli Schwartz:
So rather than saying, "Oh wow, we used to rank on this query 'car insurance for kids' and suddenly dropped four positions. I should quit, I'm doing terribly at this job." Instead, I say, "Oh wow, as a whole, 'car insurance for kids' as one keyword might have dropped, but I now have more impressions, more clicks coming, because I have more content." So, overall is my traffic growing by X percent a month, X percent a year?
Ramli John:
Really fascinating. Thank you for sharing that, and Costas also said, "Got it, thank you," so, appreciate your generosity with that. I want to drive home another point here around... you talked earlier about working with executives, and a lot of our audience come from a product background, and I'm guessing you also work closely with the product team, the product engineering team, as well?
Eli Schwartz:
This is an epiphany I had working at SurveyMonkey. I was there for almost seven years. I joined the company when it was very small and I switched reporting architecture, or structure, multiple times. So, I reported to marketing, which reported up to product engineering, so I had a lot of engineering resources at my disposal. As the company grew, I started reporting to just marketing and I lost all of my engineering resources, and then I started reporting to the Chief Product Officer.
Eli Schwartz:
And then, I suddenly realized that by reporting up like that, first of all, I became a product manager. My job didn't change, my title changed, and salary changed, too. So anyways, in marketing, get over to product. But what I discovered was that I had to use these product efforts. I couldn't just say, "Oh, today's work is going to be telling that content writer to do something." Today's work was shipping a product or getting close to shipping a product, or participating in the roadmap, which is why I built my whole book around SEO should be product.
Eli Schwartz:
But for that, most of my consulting, I'm only successful when I work with product teams. When I work with marketing teams, I'm not successful, because they don't have enough tools and resources to be successful. The only resource they'll have is maybe content. So I can say, "Here's all the things we should do," and they say, "Well, I got the content person, but if I make recommendations to change the website, they need to talk to their person," whoever's above them, who then horizontally goes over to product engineering to make those changes.
Eli Schwartz:
When I work with product and growth teams, they own all of those resources. They own the website, hopefully. They own engineers. They own design. So, when I can make recommendations and say, "We need to build out a new pricing page," they can get that done. They can't say, "Well, I'll put it in," and hopefully it makes it onto somebody's roadmap. And the other thing I say was when I work with product teams is they work on roadmaps. We think forwards. Most of the contracts I sign are long term contracts.
Eli Schwartz:
We think long into the future, whereas I think marketing, they also think into the future, but they don't think as long into the future. It's more like, "Here are the things that we're going to do this quarter, and be successful," rather than, "Here are the things that we're going to do this quarter, which enables us to do these things next quarter, which enables us to be in this position in a year from now."
Ramli John:
That makes a ton of sense. I love that chief... SEO? What did you say? SEO is product? Is that what you said, or SEO should be product?
Eli Schwartz:
Yes.
Ramli John:
Interesting. Okay. [crosstalk 00:33:16]
Eli Schwartz:
I think SEO should fit within the product.
Ramli John:
Oh, it should be within the product. Especially in a product-led organization. That's really, really fascinating.
Eli Schwartz:
Yeah. In my book, I say I make this suggestion, but I tell people, don't worry about where they sit. They just think like a product manager.
Ramli John:
Interesting. Really fascinating. I believe you also covered this a little bit, but I also want to drive home this point around... okay, you got the contract. Now, they introduce you to the VP of product or the product team. What do you ask from them to start thinking? What do you what kind of information do you need from product team to start thinking, "Hey, this is what we should do, and here's a recommendation?" What kind of data, what kind of information, or customer research that you need to get together to a recommendation?
Eli Schwartz:
I love that question. So, typically I have a couple ideas in order to be able to sell them the contract. The very first thing I do is not an SEO audit. So I know that at most SEO agencies, they come at companies with an audit, and, "Here are all the things that are wrong." By working with product teams and by working with larger teams, and also being the recipient of many of these audits in companies I've worked for, I see how completely worthless they are, because it's a list of things that are wrong that you should fix, but it doesn't prioritize which ones are expensive to fix.
Eli Schwartz:
So, the one I call out a lot is page speed. So Google's always talking about, "Oh, page speed's important," but on an actual measurable metric, it doesn't... if you were to double your page speed, you wouldn't see an increase in conversions. I'm sorry, an increase in in visibility on search. You would see an increase in conversions if your page speed was so slow that people couldn't go through the entire checkout process, or whatever it is you're trying to do.
Eli Schwartz:
So to justify it just for SEO, I don't think makes sense, but I find a lot of SEO audits, they'll call out page speed, because it is basically the only metric which you can red/yellow/green on for SEO. Everything else is qualitative. So, I don't come in with SEO audits, because I can say, "Here's a bunch of things that are broken," and they'll be like, "Cool, here's our roadmap, this is what we're actually working on, so thanks for telling us all the things that are broken, which we're never going to fix."
Eli Schwartz:
The first thing I do is align with all the teams. What are the things they're working on? What are their priorities, and how will that touch on SEO? And try to start folding SEO into what they're already doing. Again, if I were to come in, and I'm hired by a VP of product, I'm hired by VP of growth, if I were to come in and say, "These are the things you should be doing," that VP of product and VP of growth was not bored. They weren't waiting... they even saved me hours in their roadmap, because they had nothing to do.
Eli Schwartz:
They already have things they're doing, so what I do is I try to work with what they're already doing so that next quarter, we can get some SEO priorities and build things specifically for SEO. So, I always find low-hanging fruit, so to try to really get that low hanging fruit, say, "Hey, we're not doing well in Canada, here's a couple changes we can make, here's how many hours it will take from an engineering effort." If we can show that, then we can start justifying the investment in SEO, and I think that's important to call out, is that SEO is absolutely an investment, it's not free.
Eli Schwartz:
So if I'm asking for resources, I'm asking for things, it has to be justified against other investments. To pick on Google again as Google Cloud, for them, they have plenty of money so you don't necessarily have to justify a small investment. I'm sure if you ask for millions, you have to justify it, but the companies I work with asking for tens of thousands of dollars to create content and develop product experiences, it's not enough.
Ramli John:
That is so good. Your point about everybody starts off with an SEO audit, and it just made me chuckle because it's so true.
Eli Schwartz:
They missed the, "So, what?" Right? So, I presented these before, and yeah, because I started consulting. I just did regular SEO consulting, and when I'm done, the right... so if you're working with a lower level person, they pass it on to the higher level person, and they throw it in their drawer, but if you're working with the most senior person, then you take an hour of their time and they're, "Okay, thank you very much for putting this together. So what do we do now?"
Eli Schwartz:
And if you don't really have a what-do-we-do-now, they're like, "What the hell did you do?" So I think that's the most important, is the, "So, what?" and I think the, "So, what?" is most important when they're in middle of a project and they're like, "The engineer standing by. They want to know whether to do A, B or C. Which one's better for SEO?" instead of me saying, "Oh, I need five different engineers," which they're never going to give me. I fold into exactly what they're doing.
Ramli John:
That's pretty awesome. I want to start wrapping up, and if there's anybody else in the audience that has questions, feel free to drop it, as well as I want to make this announcement so that people are aware. For anybody who was in our training programs, we'll buy you the book for free, so we're going to get the Product-led SEO book to anybody who is part of any of our programs, so don't worry about buying it. We want to support you, Eli, but as well, we want to support our people who are invested in us as well.
Ramli John:
But we've talked a lot in the last 40 minutes, 45 minutes. If you can give one or two pieces of advice to product teams, or even... I know Paige is here. She's from the growth marketing side. What would be your advice if it's around SEO, product-led SEO, that you like to give to folks who are tuning in on the podcast but as well as people who are in here live?
Eli Schwartz:
I'd say the one thing you should do when it comes to really getting your SEO started is to take a step back and say, "If I were not in this job, is this what I would look for? Is this how I would look for this thing? Would I actually searched on Google?" And I find that throughout my career, that too often in everyone's careers, whether you're in product or marketing or engineering, they don't sit in the right seat.
Eli Schwartz:
I want to pick on one thing I hate with every single company that I've ever used: signing up on the website when you put your phone number in. You're in a better position [inaudible 00:39:15], but all of us in the U.S. have a harder job. You have to scroll down all the way to U, right? To United States, to get to +1 to put your phone number in to get text messages and sign up for the product, right? If an engineer actually signed up for that and scrolled down, maybe it would occur to them that that sucks, right?
Eli Schwartz:
So when you're creating SEO content, and people say these things like, "Show it to your mom, show it to your dad," forget all that. Just think, "If I were a user, and I were looking for this product, would I even Google for it? And if I were to Google it, what would I expect to find? And what is this answering for me?" So, again, forgetting whether the keywords make sense and people keyword stuff and they do all sorts of shady stuff. Forget all of that.
Eli Schwartz:
The one thing I didn't talk about here at all is Google, Google's algorithm. Google's an AI company. What Google ultimately hopes to do, and an example I used with buying lunch, Google wants to curate the web for every individual person as if that was your personal library. They're not there yet, they'll probably never be there, but that's the direction that AI is going. So, if you're building personal experiences for exactly what people want, to answer the questions they have, and those questions will always change, and the things they need will always change, then I think Google will follow.
Eli Schwartz:
Yes, there will be shady actors, yes, it won't always work, but from my experience in doing this for many, many years, directionally, it does work, and directionally, you do grow, and the shady actors fall away, and Google's algorithm improves and improves for the better and catches up with that. So, the number one thing I would say is, is this what you would look for? Is this what you would find? And then ask yourself that before you go and invest in that effort.
Ramli John:
So good. Thank you so much for your time, Eli, and for everybody else, like I said, we'll get you the book. If people want to know more about you... obviously, we're going to plug the book and we already purchased it for some folks, but people listening to the podcast, and we're going to reuse this for the podcast is, where can people find more about you and the work you're doing?
Eli Schwartz:
So, my favorite social network is LinkedIn. I accept all connection requests on LinkedIn. I've gotten way too many since the book published, but I'll get to all them, even if your name is Spam Spammer, you can add me as a connection, send me that one message about wanting to grab 20 minutes on my calendar to talk about getting leads, and I'll delete you. But until then, we're good, we're friends. So, find me on LinkedIn. Just search for Eli Schwartz. Twitter handle's @5le.
Eli Schwartz:
I do have a blog which I'm going to hopefully start updating now that my writing... I can write again. I was writing only for the book. It's elischwartz.co, and then I have a website for the book, productledseo.com, which Wix helped me build. I would never have done that if I hadn't had someone help me design that, so that's the website for the book. And, of course, get the book, and I'd love to hear feedback and thoughts and questions from anyone, and this is hopefully going to be a growth process where I'll refine the book and refine the ideas around it.
Ramli John:
Awesome, man. Thank you so much for your time. I really do appreciate it.
Eli Schwartz:
Thank you for having me. This is great. I love the questions, love this... poking into talking to product people about this approach.
