The Old School Approach to SEO That Still Works Today

- We all have these notions in our head,
"Oh, there's this new shiny object, TikTok.
We should be spending all our time on that."
And I'm not saying you shouldn't leverage TikTok,
but there's all these old, boring, ugly channels
that still produce massive ROIs.
You should be doing those first because they're proven
and then spend a portion of the time on TikTok
and whatever else is new that people are talking about.
(light upbeat music)
- Hello, everyone,
and welcome to another episode of "The SaaS SEO Show."
I'm your host, George Chasiotis,
and today I'm very happy and excited.
Should I say honored as well?
I don't know, maybe, to be joined by Neil Patel.
Neil is the co-founder of NP Digital.
"The Wall Street Journal" calls him
a top influencer on the web,
"Forbes" says he's one of the top 10 marketers,
and "Entrepreneur" magazine says
he created 1 of the 100 most brilliant companies.
I don't know, you know, which company they refer to,
you will tell me,
because I know you've launched many, many companies.
Neil is a "New York Times" bestselling author
and was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur
under the age of 30 by President Obama
and a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 35
by the United Nations.
Neil, welcome.
- No, thanks for having me.
- So needless to say
that as, you know, most people, I guess,
who are into marketing,
I started my career by reading your blog,
and so you were always this iconic figure, I guess, for me
and kind of a role model
as I was like getting into marketing
and trying to figure things out.
I will not ask you the first question we asked
most people who join us here at the podcast
to share a few things about your background,
because I guess people can, you know,
watch on of the many interviews you've done
to learn more about you,
but I will ask about NP Digital.
So for people who are not aware of NP Digital,
can you please share a few things about NP Digital,
who you are, and who gets the most value out of the service?
- Sure.
So NP Digital is a global performance marketing agency.
We help people and companies all around the world
increase their traffic to their websites,
generate more leads, generate more sales
whether it's through paid ads or social media or media buys
or SEO or conversion optimization or email marketing.
The list goes on and on
and yeah, we've been helping a lot of enterprise companies
and been having a blast from it
from, you know, like the Adobes of the world to LinkedIn
to, you know, Panasonic that we recently just closed,
but we have tons of big brands,
Accor hotel, CNN, ESPN, PwC, Intuit, et cetera.
- And the growth has been,
the growth of the agency, I mean,
has been like impressive, right?
And one of the things that you serve very often,
and I'm really interested in that,
is the fact that you actually,
you know, when you say that we have presence
in these countries,
you actually have local operations there
who serve, you know, clients from these countries,
which I think makes like a very big difference
in how NP Digital is perceived in these countries, right?
- Yes, we have.
Well, we have local operations in the countries.
So for example, we have a team in Brazil, team in India
and the team in India
isn't outsourcing for America to India.
The team in India is to service companies in India,
like we work with Tata.
Tata has some of the biggest companies
like they own Range Rover and Jaguar.
I think Jaguar was a Aston Martin.
I think Range Rover, Aston Martin,
they own Taj Hotels.
They own a lot of businesses.
It's one of the largest companies in the world.
But, yeah, we have local operations
and we have that in many countries,
like we have, you know, someone in Singapore
to help with APAC.
We have people in Malaysia now.
We have people in Philippines and Australia.
We added France recently, Italy, Spain.
We're going to release Germany soon and Netherlands soon.
We're interviewing right now.
My co-founder, as we're doing this interview,
is interviewing someone to potentially lead up MENA for us,
which is Middle East and North Africa, so...
But yeah, we have people in these regions
to service that market.
- I think that's a great lesson
for agencies who want to expand globally.
I would like to ask you,
I would like to start from this question.
You're doing this for almost,
I know if not over two decades now,
have you seen anything like the changes
we are experiencing right now?
I'm referring to generative AI,
more specifically, you know, content and Google's SG.
- We haven't seen tons of changes and impact yet.
Like when we're looking at analytics,
we're seeing websites still getting a lot of traffic.
We're seeing search volumes still being great,
places like Google and even Bing.
We're not seeing Bing take away
really any market share from Google
from what we're seeing
based on the actual analytics and data,
because we track a lot of websites.
We do think in the long run, it will have an impact,
but we think the impact will be positive.
And when I say positive,
that doesn't mean a website will get more traffic
or even less traffic.
What I mean positive is it's going to create
a better experience for the searchers
which will cause the platforms to be more popular as well.
And this generative AI can also help companies
with things like creatives.
So when you're doing advertising campaigns,
it costs so much money to film ads in different countries
and with different backgrounds
and doing different variations,
but with AI, you can start spinning up
different backgrounds and images and changes
for pennies on the dollar.
The other thing that
is it can also create revenue potential.
So for example, there's this company called Alpha Insights.
Alpha Insights is a research firm,
and they'll pay people for consultations,
like calls for a hour or two hours,
and they may give you $1,000 hour, 500, or 5,000 an hour.
It's whatever you negotiate with them.
And companies hire them
to get feedback on whatever industry they're interested in.
So for example,
literally two hours before this interview, okay,
I got hit up from someone at Alpha Insights,
and I get hit up by them every once in a while,
and they wanted me to do a call
with the management consulting company in the Middle East.
I didn't do it.
We couldn't come to an agreement on pricing
and I also didn't care to do it,
so I just told them to give me $10,000 for the hour.
I knew they were going to say no.
But if they said yes,
I was like, "Okay, I'll jump on a call with the hour,"
but I was also with my children
and helping get ready for school.
So getting 2, $3,000 for the hour,
it's a lot of money, don't get me wrong,
but I'd rather see my kids grow up
and be there for them than make more money
because I don't believe money is everything in this world.
But the way he chose me was he used ChatGPT
and asked a question on,
"I'm looking for information on social media
and social media engagement.
What expert should I talk to to get advice on this?"
and ChatGPT's response was, "Talk to Neil Patel."
I'm not saying I'm popular or I'm famous
or I'm the one people should be talking to.
More so, the point I'm trying to make
is you can also generate business from these tools as well.
Yes, it may take away traffic from your business,
but it can also provide business to you as well.
For example, if they ask ChatGPT
what agencies I can talk to within these regions,
if ChatGPT gave mine as an answer
and you optimize for ChatGPT,
which creates a new form of marketing,
that can also help you produce more income as well.
- I wonder if they had,
if this person had Bing on when like he conducted the search
or was that, you know, an answer given by ChatGPT
based on the data it was trained on.
I guess, you know-
- It was from ChatGPT, it was not from Bing.
- Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I get it.
I think that's a difficult pitch
to make to our clients at least,
you know, that let's optimize for that now
because it's a completely different game, right?
- It's not about let's optimize for that now.
Technically it is, it depends how you perceive that.
It's more so, let's optimize for all the existing stuff
because it produces results,
and let's also spend a small portion of the time
optimizing for ChatGPT and Bing and Bard
when they're using their generative AI.
So it's a combination of both.
It's a very small percentage
that should go to ChatGPT, et cetera,
because it's not proven yet
on how much revenue can drive a business
and businesses are ROI based,
but there's nothing wrong
with spending $10,000 a year, $20,000 a year.
If you're a really massive corporation,
you know, even $100,000 a year.
If you're a company
that's doing 10 billion a year on profit,
what's spending a few hundred thousand dollars a year
on some of these platforms
and just being prepared.
The risk is low.
- Another thing that I, you know,
they released plugins.
Speaking of ChatGPT, they released plugins the other day
and a couple of weeks ago actually,
and I thought, "Oh man, this is another opportunity," right,
for plugins.
I don't think that as of now,
they have any paid plugins or anything like that,
but that's a great opportunity.
For example, I know that you use, for NP Digital,
tools like Ubersuggest
and recently you acquired another tool Answer the Public
as a vehicle for growth,
and I've, you know, heard you speak about that
and I think this is a brilliant strategy, actually.
But I'm thinking about,
"You know what, like, moving forward,
why not, like, launching a plugin
that's dedicated to ChatGPT?"
Do you think that could be also like a way
to get in front of, you know, these peoples' eyes
or in the users now?
- Potentially, it depends on the adoption.
- Yeah.
- But I don't know the right or wrong answer.
I think a lot of this stuff,
sadly, is going to be experimentation.
You try three, four, or five different approaches
and you see what sticks
and you double down on the stuff that's producing ROI
or at least in the beginning, getting some traction.
- That's a good point, yeah.
Now, you started your career as an SEO professional
and then, of course, got into pretty much everything
around online marketing, right?
Do you think there is a future for SEO in online marketing?
And if yes, how does that future look like?
- There is a future of SEO in online marketing.
It's not dead.
People have been saying it's dead for ages.
We built the 21st fastest-growing company
in the United States
according to "Inc." magazine through SEO.
Now, we've done many things since then to continually grow.
SEO will not build you the biggest company in the world
or anything like that,
nor will paid advertising,
but you're going to have to take a omnichannel approach.
You're going to do SEO, you're going to do EMO marketing.
People say EMO marketing has been dead for ages
and people don't use EMO
yet MailChimp sold for double-digit billions.
So is EMO marketing really dead
if MailChimp sold for that much?
Or look at Klaviyo.
Klaviyo filed to go public
and what I read online is they either do 600
or 700 million a year in revenue.
EMO marketing can't be dead
if they're doing that much in revenue, right?
But we all have these notions in our head,
"Oh there's this new shiny object, TikTok.
We should be spending all our time on that."
And I'm not saying you shouldn't leverage TikTok,
but there's all these old, boring, ugly channels
that still produce massive ROIs.
You should be doing those first because they're proven
and then spend a portion of the time on TikTok
and whatever else is new that people are talking about.
- The reason I'm asking this question,
and I agree with you like every,
I mean, usually at the end of the year,
towards the end of the year,
you see these articles like, you know,
or these headlines or something like that,
that SEO is dead and so on and so forth,
so I don't know.
I agree with you.
There is a future for SEO,
but at the same time I expect, you know, things to change,
especially with Google's, you know, SG.
By the way, have you tried SG?
What do you think? (Neil speaks faintly)
I think it's great.
I love it.
The user experience is better,
but there's still tons and tons of queries
where they don't provide that.
People said SEO's going to change drastically
with knowledge graph
because they're answering a lot of questions for you
and giving you the data.
That's true.
People are getting a lot less clicks,
but there's still a lot of revenue to be made.
And funny enough, it depends on the industry as well.
When you talk about clicks,
I'm talking about percentage-wise of the people searching,
but in total, Google has continually driven
more clicks to websites each and every single year
since their existence,
according to Danny Sullivan who works at Google.
- One thing I, you know,
one thought I have about that
is assuming that websites get less traffic, right?
Maybe that's a possible outcome, right?
That may not be a bad thing after all
if we think that, "You know what, after all these,
like, interaction and quote, unquote, 'clutter on the SERP,'
if someone ends up visiting your website after all,
maybe there is a higher intent there.
Maybe there is a stronger intent either to learn something
or to, like, take some sort of action
with a monetary value."
Do you see that happening?
I mean, intent being like more stronger from visits?
- So check this out.
So we did brand recall studies
when you look at like knowledge graph
and sometimes Google giving you an answer
and saying what site they got it from.
We've seen, when we do brand recall studies,
that even though people aren't clicking on your website,
when they're seeing your name, seeing the answer,
seeing the company logo, or not logo, company name,
it's causing more overall revenue than not being there.
We think something similar is going to happen with AI
and search engines.
- So you have to be present, right?
This is the point.
- Yes, because just because
someone doesn't go to your website
but if they're getting the knowledge from you
and it's clear that it's coming from you,
still helps with branding.
You see all these TV commercials
and you see Nike everywhere,
around the whole world, right?
Not just in the US, not just in Europe
but literally around the whole world.
Nike's not getting clicks through the websites
from a lot of these ads
but that branding has helped Nike become
one of the most popular shoe companies in the world
if not the most popular shoe company in the world.
- Yeah.
Can I ask you, though,
let's say that director of SEO at a SaaS company
is listening to this episode
and most likely they are confused,
maybe even concerned about the announcements
and the new SG and all that, you know, stuff.
What would you advise them?
Like keep doing the same stuff
or keep in mind that what you're doing,
what you've been doing so far
probably won't work in a while,
so you should probably have to shift your focus
and kind of rethink your strategy?
- No, so it's a big unknown
on what percentage of the SERPs it's going to impact
and how it's going to impact all different industries,
including SaaS.
If I were them, I would be spending 90, 95% of my time
on what's been working in the past,
including traditional SEO,
and then let's say, if you're just talking about SEO,
spend 90, 95% of the time on the traditional SEO,
carve out 5% of the time
to have your team learn about the changes that are happening
and figure out unique strategies that they can use to adapt.
That's how it all would structure it.
- And that's a good point because I mean,
we had questions from some of our clients,
kind of rushed, you know,
let's change the strategy and so on and so forth.
And I mean, we wouldn't advise that
because we don't know what this thing will be, right?
It's still in beta
and the public version may be completely different
than what we see right now.
Like how can you optimize for that?
How can you prepare for that?
- So check this out.
Did you know that Google generates over $30 billion a year
from publisher sites like AdSense,
sites running AdSense?
Did you know over 30 billion a year?
It's a little bit more than 30 billion, okay?
So if it's $30 billion, right?
And I got this data from Statista,
which is, I'm assuming they're just pulling it
from Google's earnings report.
If it's $30 plus billion a year,
how do you think most of these publishers
who are running AdSense get their traffic?
What do you think?
How do you think most of these sites get their traffic?
When you see sites with AdSense,
how do you think they get their traffic?
- Google?
Or- - Yeah,
but they buying it from Google
or do you think it's organic?
- If I had to guess, I would say organic.
- Right.
Because if they're buying it from Google,
it would be really expensive
to get a click over your website
and then only a small percentage will click on the ads,
which makes it really hard for that to be profitable, right?
Most of them get their traffic organically.
If Google just crushed all the organic rankings,
that 30 billion wouldn't go to zero
but it would go down drastically.
Do you think they would just do that
and potentially affect their stock
in a really negative way
when they're a trillion dollar company?
No, it doesn't logically make sense.
Would they make changes over time
if they know how they can replace that revenue
with these AI changes?
Sure, they may do that
because it's just a math equation at that point.
But just like how we don't know what's going to happen,
they also don't know how these changes
are going to impact their revenue.
It's unknown yet.
They may have some ideas,
they may have run some tests,
but they haven't rolled it out fully to everyone,
so it's too hard to make assumptions.
- That's a very, very, very good point.
Very valid one.
And, you know, backed by data,
so I don't think I can say anything.
- These are (speaks faintly) companies.
No one is just going to squash 10, 20, $30 billion in revenue.
And the reason I say 10, 20 is it wouldn't all go to zero,
so what portion do you end up losing?
That's a lot of money.
People don't just make those changes overnight.
They think about these kind of things.
They're planned.
- Yeah. - Right?
These companies have shareholders.
Shareholders are looking for revenue gains,
not revenue being flat.
They're looking for revenue gains
and profitability increase over time.
They want more revenue and more profit.
That's it.
That's how the majority of companies are valuated
in the public markets.
And if they can't produce that,
typically that means your stock is going to go down.
If the stock goes down,
that means the leaders, the board members,
they all make less money as well.