19 September 2024 | Link to podcast + transcript.

Loong episode at nearly 2 hours, but worth a watch for any founder / operator wrestling with SEO or content. Eli is one of the foremost thinkers in the SEO space today, author of the book ‘Product-Led SEO’ and advisor to Zapier, Tinder, LinkedIn etc.

In the podcast, he covers how AI / LLMs will impact search / SEO. Effectively the top of the funnel will now be owned by Google and LLMs – so content like 20 best beach hotels in Southern Europe will now either get aggregated into AI Overviews (top hit on Google Search) or within LLMs with occasional citations, and your site will get pushed further downward. Hence the best SEO content will move midfunnel and have content that is helpful to drive conversions. This is how SEO should have been from the beginning but because it is hard to measure conversion, and harder with SEO, and relatively easier to show rankings impact, SEO got positioned as Top of Funnel. 

The other metapoint that Eli makes is around whether you need SEO at all. Not everyone has to do SEO he says. It is best used in contexts where the customer is aware of the problem, uses specific keywords or language to understand the problem or look for a solution, and this behaviour arises naturally in the user / customer journey of addressing the problem. User Journeys is a term which comes frequently in the podcast episode, and effectively Eli is saying that if searching for content is not helpful for the user in solving the problem / and not relevant for you in driving conversion, then you don’t need SEO. Too many companies default to doing SEO because they have raised money and now need to spend on SEO. This is wrong he says. It is expensive when you add up all of the cost of creating the content and hiring the experts. You need to consider the ROI of the investment actively like you do with Paid Marketing, but not enough companies do that he says. In his perspective, most sales-led / top-down SaaS motions can eschew their investments in SEO. It is more relevant for PLG motions like Zapier, Notion etc.

Link to a doc with my notes of what I found interesting from the episode.