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- [00:00]
A
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, IHeAreEverything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast and I Hear Everything Production. In this podcast we'll share the news, knowledge and strategies you need to navigate the ever changing world of SEO, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search podcast, Tyson Stockton.
- [00:47]
B
Hey, what's going on? This is Tyson from the Voice of Search podcast and I'm joined here with Patrick Stokes from ahrefs and and today we're going to be exploring a little bit of the state of the industry, what's going on with ahrefs and then we're going to end cap a little bit towards more of like what does that mean for us as professionals and practitioners in this kind of crazy space of search? Patrick, welcome back to the podcast. Pleasure to have you.
- [01:14]
C
Thanks for having me again.
- [01:16]
B
I don't even know if it was like a year or two years last time you were on one of actually my favorite guests that I had on here. I think we ended up going like way over our normal allotted time. So I'm excited to finally have you back and a lot has changed since the last time we talked and I feel like probably before we dive into everything else we need to kind of like touch on the state of affairs and state of the world today. And so obviously it's been a world of change and there's been variances of opinions of like the direction of that. I would love to hear kind of like your perspective to like being in the space for a long time. How are you feeling on kind of like the state of the industry today?
- [02:11]
C
Scared. It's AI everything search is changing. Automate all the things which I can get behind. Like I've been trying to automate my job away for a decade now or more so I like that part. I think it's great that it's now easier for everyone to just build cool things like vibe. Coding is a thing easier than ever to create content which is a double edged sword. You can create a lot of mediocre bad content very quickly. It's still takes time and effort I think to create good content, but it's a little faster than before.
- [02:51]
B
Well So I mean you, you said scared though, which actually I wasn't, I wasn't expecting from like a response. I mean it's like valid to it, but like what are the aspects that I guess are making you feel more uncertain? Yeah, I'd love to hear a little bit more on that aspect.
- [03:12]
C
Probably the automation. I mean the reality is you, not quite yet, but within a couple more years you'll probably need one person for what 10 people were doing before. And the societal impacts of that are scary to me. You know, will people work less and we have the same number of people, will there just be one person for every 10? Will there be riots in the streets or we make the Star Trek utopia eventually? I don't know.
- [03:44]
B
Okay, so some of it's in like the macro scale of things because it's like, yeah, you have the aspect of like what happens from that, like overall societal progression. And then also like, you have the conversations of like, is our industry disappearing? Are we going to have jobs? And like, personally I've been in the standpoint of like, yes, like we still will have jobs. And it's like I'm viewing it more of a, like an amplification of impact and like the raising table stakes of like what you have to accomplish. And if you know you're not leveraging these things, then you're probably going to be falling behind on it. Maybe that's a shorter midterm and there is that longer term potential, but someone that's focused a lot of time on automation, do you think it's going to replace people altogether in that sense?
- [04:47]
C
I think the current generation, we're probably fine, we probably have a good run rate. But newer folks coming in, what do we have? SEO interns, toy rewriting, title tags and meta descriptions and adding internal links like basic things and it's, it's, you know, that's SEO. As an example, think about a lawyer. A lawyer that's 70 years old, has all these relationships, whatever, he's fine. But the paralegals, new lawyers, get into it, you're just going to need less of people and the pipeline is going to be difficult again. I think the people that are already in, that have experience, that are willing to adapt to these new systems are going to be fine. Those that are not willing to adapt, maybe not so much. But the pipeline for new talent is I think at risk of drying up.
- [05:43]
B
That very valid point. And yeah, I guess maybe it was like, I don't know, maybe it's soul centered or not. Maybe it's more of like in that mindset of like the people that are in roles are already kind of broken in. But oh yeah, I do agree that there is that gonna be a challenge as far as like how do you break in and how do you gain some of that entry level experience when a lot of that area is the main focus for kind of elimination or automation, so to speak.
- [06:16]
C
I was gonna say like, yeah, going back to the SEO interns, go write some content, regurgitate what you read on other blogs. AI is really good at that. So what do we do now? Like you jump into a mid career, mid level. I think a lot of companies aren't going to be willing to take that kind of risk.
- [06:34]
B
But I mean, and I know I kind of said in the intro that we're going to come back around to like the skill set aspect, but from that same like perspective, like do you see a world then that someone can be like joining into a team but maybe they're coming with like more of a technical background and like maybe they're you know, not necessarily doing that like entry level work from an SEO task perspective, but more from like in AI engineering, automation, like that mindset, like if someone comes out of school with that technical foundation, like could you see that being like a launching off point for people like coming in?
- [07:25]
C
I don't. So I'm a little mixed on this. I feel like folks like that are usually good for the roles but also, you know, things are changing. What used to take developers and these technical folks to do, now you just go into lovable and you tell it what you want and it goes, it goes and builds it. So in my mind the future is, you know, who has ideas and usually that be, that requires some amount of experience in the industry, some, some know how domain knowledge, etc. To be like I need this, I want to do this because now like anyone can build it. Like you just have to tell it what you want. And so I don't know like the, again, I don't think you can just jump right in with that.
- [08:12]
B
Fair, fair. Maybe I was diving a little bit more on like kind of the, the aspects of change in the industry and largely I've been you know, talking about in the sense of like you have the, the landscape shifts which may be more of like the strategy side of like where and how do we want to compete and then there's like the tactical of like how we execute and how we do the work from a landscape perspective. Like how are you viewing kind of more of the like, like what bets do you want to be placing from some of the traffics not driving the same impact as before? Like how are you thinking on like that where we compete aspect?
- [09:06]
C
Yeah, it's. I mean I think our entire strategy is changing. Like Ahrefs blog was top of funnel informational but also like we had people read and then collapse the funnel. Basically like you went from I want basic information to you know, problem aware, solution aware immediately AI is taking that like there people aren't gonna go read the blog on Ahrefs cause it was cited. No one is clicking in AI search. They're gonna ask five more questions to AI search before they click through to any of those websites and go ready to. So now it's a lot more, you know, we were always really good about being product led, one of the best products out there. So we have that going for us that AI is already recommending us. But then we never did good on things like comparison pages or that kind of thing or managing, you know, how we're talked about online. So a lot of the things that we're doing around those tactics are changing. Like now it's a lot more like influencer and outreach and that kind of thing. We've even talked about leveraging some of the other websites we have, Tim's old site or now Glenn Alsop and a few others. And it's like, do we just publish the same content on 5, 6 sites? We're more likely to get the AI to say what we want to say if we do that. I don't particularly like spamming the web like that, but at the same time like it's, it's what's working now, at least for a company our size. But you know, someone could easily abuse that. Hundreds, thousands of websites all saying the same thing and likely get the AI to say what you want.
- [10:51]
B
Which is for me like that's been a, like a big change where throughout my career I haven't spent a lot of time with like off site SEO. And it's been, you know, a lot of the companies I've worked with or worked for have had, you know, really strong reputation. So great existing backlinking and most of the SEO efforts were kind of like within our own walls. And for me like that's been a big change of like the state of today is like it's less within your own website. I mean you still have that and that's like I think the standard but so much more as you have to be like thinking externally in other places. Do you feel like that's Something that will, given the nature of these systems, like is that something that you think is going to be here to stay or is that more of this flash in the pan aspect?
- [11:56]
C
Some of both. I mean it's going to be there, but I think they're going to have to rein it back in. Right now as many citations are being thrown. No one is clicking. Website owners are going to revolt. SEOs are going to revolt. The numbers don't look good. I think they'll be published by the time this is out. But I have a few blogs looking at ChatGPT versus Google and AI search versus traditional search and even the click through rate and modeling all that. And like website traffic is going to go away. So I think they'll take these other signals and probably condense it down and say like okay, instead of let me, let me cite these 80 some websites like let me just cite these five that I know and trust and you know, things like links and stuff will probably make a difference there or user signals. Was this site getting traffic? Is this a brand that people are searching? How have people been interacting with this website? Because Google has all that data from browser and Android and all that. All that's going to go in their decision when trying to cut that back. Now I don't know for like OpenAI chat GPT like they don't have a lot of those signals. I don't think they have anything like page rank or a link index. It might be augmented from other systems. They may get this data like third party. You know they had the partnership with Bing for a while but I don't think that's a thing anymore. But they'll have to source it from somewhere I think.
- [13:28]
B
Fair and with that consolidation like because obviously a lot of people have been placing pretty heavy bets on like Reddit as like I mean it's like the perfect training ground for a lot of these systems. Like do you feel like those areas are more of the. Yeah. Safer bets or is it more of like yeah, it's going to be very.
- [13:55]
C
Topical related and yeah, so I'm, I'm mixed on Reddit. It's being spammed to death right now. If the data scientists and all these systems do a good job cleaning the data, it's trustworthy but honestly if they look at it overall it's getting less trustworthy because it is being spammed. So I think we'll see somewhat of a decline there. But it's not going away because it's still great content. But yeah, it's, it's now what systems do you do this and what will SEO spam like? Digg just relaunched and it's already being spammed to death by SEOs. Well, I say relaunch but like relaunched as like a Reddit competitor because they relaunched years ago as information, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, it's almost sad because I like, oh, Dig is coming back and I'm like, I look at it, I'm like, no, Dig is died again already. It's not gonna, it's not gonna come up. I don't think we'll see.
- [14:57]
B
Yeah, I mean, and it's, I feel like it goes through waves too where, you know, it's probably like probably a larger, I don't know, impact place. Like I would assume like even Reddit's gonna come down a little bit, but given like the nature of the content itself, like to me that has lasting power. But then two, I feel like, like our work and our focus has also expanded quite a bit more and I think like citations, yeah, probably oversold over publicized right now, but I don't know if I see like coming back as much. And again it's like, I guess my own like thinking is like before it's like almost all of my thought was within the walls of the website and it's like now it's like I don't really see it getting back to that same level or same extreme where it feels like part of just how we compete and operate is going to be within that kind of external as well as internal. More so than maybe it has been in recent years.
- [16:10]
C
Yeah, I mean these, these systems basically just repeat what they see. If it's set on the Internet, that's what they're going to say. But I would say like there's already some pullback to trusting the websites more. Like this was months ago, but we were seeing a lot of like data poisoning. Like people would just make all these, let's say something in our niche. Say they were saying that like Ahrefs didn't have a certain feature or whatever and they were putting us in all this content and blah, blah, blah. Well, do you believe that or do you go to Ahrefs and you check, do they actually have this? And so that's what they're doing more of now is they're actually like more likely to trust the website itself than the third party sources. But that wasn't a thing for a while. I do think we will probably see more of that, which again, like, why am I, you know, medium and Reddit and 50 bajillion blogs no one ever heard of versus let's just go to the source.
- [17:13]
B
Fair. Fair. I want to dig a little more into kind of like some of your work and I mean I, I know you're kind of caught between like working on the Ahrefs and the product side and getting pulled into some of these external marketing kind of components of it, but I'd love to hear a little bit more on kind of, you know, some of some of your articles. I know you have some new content coming out whether it's. Yeah. Shortly after this is published or when. But I would love to hear a little bit more kind of on like where your research and kind of where your efforts in that area has been.
- [17:59]
C
Yeah, pretty much all AI for the last like year. Published more blogs last year than I think I've ever written in my life. But it's not just me. Like the entire AHREFS team is doing tons of incredible like data studies. We have a data scientist actually specifically for like marketing blogs now and even like testing. You probably saw this, everyone saw this Matej from our team like made up an entire company and was like basically manipulating AI search to see how that worked. And it worked. It worked really well. One of my favorite articles the entire year. Yeah, lots of data studies, conferences, stuff like this, what I do, product side everything, new product ideation, features, entire like new categories of products. Like I specked out our entire. We made a Google Analytics alternative. It's HRS web analytics. Probably have like a three year roadmap for that that I said last year. But that's already seen like incredible adoption. I think we launched that December 2024 and it's been months since I looked, but it was over 130,000 users last time I looked.
- [19:11]
B
Nice.
- [19:12]
C
So that's seen pretty, pretty good adoption. Yeah. And then yeah, tech SEO because that's what I'm known for. But also a lot of ahrefs website is JavaScript so I end up handling most of our front end things and lots of programmatic projects, lots of test websites or test systems, that kind of thing.
- [19:35]
B
Yeah. How do you, how do you balance that? Like I assume a good portion of your time is going towards production and then obviously you have a component that's going to be, you know, marketing oriented, helping you know, push the brand forward. But like how do you kind of balance that being maybe a little bit more removed from the like I guess what the end user is at Ahrefs from the work because it's like you're no Longer that in house SEO or on the agency side. Like how, how do you kind of balance the, like being on the forefront as well as help driving those product decisions. Like, I know that like has to be some, some bit of a challenge because it's like those are two full time roles and like to stay up on that is like, is a, is a challenging feat.
- [20:36]
C
Yeah, like at this point I've done SEO for, I mean know, 20ish years. Like I know what we need, I know where the industry should be going. So a lot of times like we're well ahead of the market. You know, things that should have been done or have been possible for a long time. One of my dream systems is like finally mostly in place within our site auditor for instance. And like it's been possible since 2017 technically before that, but we have almost real time auditor. We get the index now data, all the page changes, blah, blah, blah. So some content's created. You delete something, you redirect something, it tells this. We see that we are constantly crawling a website, but if we can trust that data, crawl it less and then we will just immediately see, oh, you changed the canonical tag. And we can be like, oh, well like you got that wrong. Like this is what it was and now like this is broken. You're pointing to a different page. Did you mean to do that? No, no, you click a button. We have this edge SEO system that lets you change things like before it's sent to servers or like bots, before it's sent to bots or users. So if the canonical is wrong, we can be like, okay, change it back to how it was and boom, it's fixed. You don't have to go in your CMS or anything. It's again like this automation make people's lives easier. That's kind of the whole point of it. We built a whole content tool way ahead of the market. But like we basically had chunking in there, scoring for the different chunks. Before really AI search was even a thing because this was like so obvious. This is where it's going. This is the relevant part of the content. For this, let's score that part of the content, not your entire content piece. There's still a lot of projects like that. But we also like, we have a team of SEO professionals here, not just me. I mean I do still work on other websites, a lot of Ahrefs projects, but we have such an incredible lineup of SEO talent that I think like we mostly know what people want, even if we're not necessarily doing that day to day anymore.
- [22:55]
B
And I mean it, it feels like too, it's like you're getting to build and create all the things that you wish you had when you were the in house SEO. Like of all the various kind of like developments and tools, like what's the one that's like you are most excited about that? You're like, this is what I wish I had, you know, five years ago.
- [23:24]
C
Whatever time frame being that I'm a technical SEO. The one I talked about with Inside Audit, like that combination of the real time auditing and fixing. Because like for a while we only had you could rewrite title tags and meta descriptions, but now it's canonicals, it's redirects internal links. So you just go in there and like instead of logging into WordPress or whatever your CMS is and you're like, okay, like let me find where this section of text was and blah blah, blah, you can just be like, I want that link, I want that link, I want that link done. You click yes and it implements for you. So you've done a lot of this. We're getting things implemented like devs don't care, people don't care, content teams don't care, like oh, you want me to log in and spend time adding these three links to this post or whatever. Or like I gotta log into 20 different pages, go into 20 different pages and add one link to this one thing I want to promote. Not really a great use of people's time. Hard to justify ROI. Like someone making 20 internal links to promote this to maybe get another position or two in Google. Just making that stuff automated like click, click, click. Yes, done, everything's fixed. And I'm really hoping like by the end of this year there's still more like use cases coming. But I kind of want to solve like 95% of technical SEO for websites. Just you see the problem, you want us to fix this? You click yes, done.
- [24:56]
B
I mean I guess first from that I'm taking like you got tired of having one to discover changes and it's and I guess like I'm pinning that knowing that you spend quite a bit of time on like the enterprise side where there's like so many parts of the business doing things on the website that a lot of the SEO's time is like trying to also just know what's happening before instead of just cleaning up everyone else's messes. It feels like some of that inspiration maybe come from just like past frustrations of having to chase down and just kind of Play janitor on the website, so to speak, for those general SEO hygiene fixes.
- [25:47]
C
Yeah, I mean ideally, like you don't launch issues, so you catch it before launch. If you do launch it, you catch it as soon as possible after that launch and then like you get it fixed. But like getting it fixed, it might be, you know, several sprints away making a business case that is almost impossible to justify the ROI for. So just give a system and you know, dev teams are going to hate this. Infrastructure teams are going to hate it. I feel like, like this is the time when we can actually sell it. Like in the past I think it would have been even more difficult, but now it's like we're just going to AI fix everything on the website. Click yes. Execs are going to eat that up. Dev teams are going to have a hard time arguing against that. And so I think it will finally work and see mainstream adoption hopefully this year.
- [26:43]
B
I was just going to ask a question that I feel like you answered in that last little bit there where I was going to say if an SEO was listening to this and they're excited, they're interested, but they're also thinking in the back of their mind, fuck, how am I going to sell this into the Oregon, like get this signed off. Do you have any recommendations for them? Like it sounds like a bit of it is going to be kind of like ride this hype and this momentum from AI awareness. But like what recommendations would you have to that SEO?
- [27:18]
C
Yeah, it's AI everything, automate everything. That's the general trend in business right now. So this can finally get pushed through. I mean Edge workers have been around what, 2016 Cloudflare launched workers. I think in 2017, this, this like serverless technology has been a thing and even before that you could technically use like a middleware system, a reverse proxy. I think Stefan Spencer had something like this in like 2004. And yet most people have probably never heard of this tech. It's been doable, but all these, you know, devs push back and they control everything. Infrastructure teams are like, we're not putting a middleware system in there. But if you already own, you know, a Cloudflare, an Akamai, fastly, Amazon, whatever, they all have workers and like all this can be done. And if I, even when I was at IBM years ago and it's been six plus years, like I was rewriting our web standards to say things like SEOs control the title tags and canonicals and blah blah, blah, not the page owner, you know, the teams, the content teams that own the page, but like the SEO team. And it was all because like at the time I was using our AB testing system, it was like optimizedly performance edge and I just wanted to like why am I letting someone else do this? I should have the control to be able to change that canonical tag, not wait for that dev team six weeks from now to make this change. So that was my way of doing it then, was to say, I actually control this. You can't tell me, no, I'm just going to go do it. But now I think you can bypass all that. Every exact C suite manager is how can we use AI more, how can we automate more, how can we get things done faster? Or how can we fix more, ship more and boom, click a button. Done. I think it's a pretty easy sell these days.
- [29:09]
A
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- [30:37]
B
With okay, so with that if company gets adoption they're able to leverage some of these tools. So you know, hopefully less if I'm an in house SEO, less of my time is chasing down this cleanup work. Where do you feel like more time should be spent from like the in house practitioner?
- [31:05]
C
Probably still on your content. I mean that's where it should have been spent anyway. Like I never really stayed in my lane as a tech SEO. I was like launched entire content, video projects, everything is, that's where the real there's a few things in tech SEO that matter, but for the most part like if you're indexed and blah blah blah, you're fine. So just creating better content, figuring out how to do that, getting more resources there, more insights, figuring out how to get your own experts to review it or interview them and all that can sort of be automated now too. Like we have this thing in Slack now for security or whatever and it like runs you through this and I'm like, can I just have that in people's Slack and be like, hey, if you know about this topic, like do you want to write a few things? Or let me use AI and generate like five questions that if you know about this or send this to the right experts and then they can fill this out and then I can use their info or I can ingest entire knowledge bases. If they've got internal help documentation, external help documentation, documentation, I could have AI freaking call them and like do a 5, 10 minute interview with pre generated questions. There's all kinds of way to get like better info from people and actually make better content. Now that you know it's, it's always been the case the experts don't write the content for the most part. At ahrefs it's not that way because we're lucky we're an SEO tool, we happen to have that. But you go to any business and it's like there's a content team, there's an SEO team, someone is creating this content that is not the expert that's out there in the field doing the work or like dealing with customer. Even like inner sales teams, they have a ton of good information. Now you can like ingest their call transcripts and get all this like what are people asking for? How could I improve the product? What are the common complaints? What are they asking that I need to answer within content? That would be helpful. All that info is there and now it's more accessible than ever before. You talk to a person and they forget five things and you get a fraction of the info. And now I think you can get more out of that and just make better content.
- [33:23]
B
And within that content focus, I feel like I've heard a variety of different perspectives on like potentially shifting focus of it. Of like oh yeah, this content is just being presented within, you know, that top of funnel. You're never going to actually Drive the users to your site. And I've been in debates too where it's like you have one group of people that are like, spend more of your time on the content that's going to drive impact into the site. And I don't want to be like leading on. I don't say. But like, then you also have the thing of like, yeah, but you also have general brand awareness and things that are going to lead from that front end to the other. Like, do you have a personal opinion on prioritization of like different stages, let's say of the journey, knowing the landscape shifts?
- [34:21]
C
Yeah, I mean I'm shifting more towards like end of funnel and stuff. Again, Ahrefs blog was tremendous. Top of funnel. Our YouTube is actually still tremendous. Top of funnel. Video content still really works well. Treat it the same way. Here's what I need to talk about to cover this topic. Well, et cetera. That still works incredibly well. And it's not that like our blogs still, Google is like our number one referral source. It's still, you know, we have, what is it, chat GPT versus google.com with like dashes in between. And we have data from Ahrefs web analytics. And I think Google search is still like 40% of traffic. I wouldn't be ignoring that. I think all the AI search systems together are like under half a percent still. So yeah, everyone wants to focus on like the new thing and you know, yes, it's probably where things are going, but there has to be some balance. Like I'm not stopping creating new top of funnel content either. Like we got to do some of that AI search future proofing. A lot of conversions are happening there. I can't ignore bottom of funnel has to be some mix right now.
- [35:34]
B
Yeah, it's like if you're skewed in one direction or another, it's, I don't know, at least in my mind, like not the best mix. But I feel like it's like you don't want to completely not be present for then the impact that you can have, whether it's in potential like brand recognition and improvements to click through rates and whatever else when they hit those later stages. So I feel like it's like too simplistic to be like it's one direction or another versus like, yeah, you might have just like shifting strategies for each of those stages, but it's that you still have to look at the entire journey as a whole in a lot.
- [36:19]
C
Of ways in, in a lot of our content too. Like you've seen all the data studies, like, that was. That was an intentional shift. Uh, the reason is a lot of these statistics and stuff that we come up with will be cited, and we're like, the only one referenced there, which is great. It's great for the brand. And you've probably seen, like, the shift on social media and stuff too. Like, we've gone. I mean, we were always really good about this, but I think other brands should copy this, where instead of just the brand that's there, like, you have faces, you have me, you have Tim, you have Ryan Law, Glenn Alsop, etc, like, you put real people behind it. Sam OH for the YouTube videos. Every SEO knows who Sam oh is because he's the face ofahrefs on YouTube. Those kind of connections and stuff. Like, people connect to people, not necessarily to brands. And I think, like, if you're focused on this now, like, you. You have to go this route. You have to make your people more visible if they want to be. Don't force people to do it if they don't want to, obviously. But I think, like, that's. That's gonna help you. Like, if I see, you know, this thing and it's quoted for Ahrefs or whatever, I may be like, yeah, but if I see like that, oh, that's from Ryan Law, I'm like, oh, I love his stuff. Let me go. Go read that. And now it's like people actually click.
- [37:43]
B
That's. I feel like that's an interesting dynamic where it's like, in a lot of ways you have, like, more of a detachment from some of the work with the automation, with these other systems. But there's still like a human connection, interaction, reputation, whatever aspect that I feel like, like, that's very difficult to get away from. And so having that at a center of, like, a strategy and how it's being presented is a key aspect, which I feel like that's going to be more and more the case. Granted. I mean, it's a. Yeah. An assumption on my side, but, like, it feels like that's the something that you're not going to be able to separate that. Like, it's a human element.
- [38:37]
C
Yeah, I was. I was literally having a conversation with someone and they were asking me, like, if you were, you know, starting your own company, your own product, whatever, would you like, go directly to SEO? And I was like, no, I would, like, go to my network, like, have them help me, like, advertise it. Like, and I'm lucky enough to have built a network. I mean, I was like a micro Niche influencer. But like I have a pretty passionate network that likes what I do generally. And like they would, they would be how I would try, try and like start not go write a bunch of blogs. I might go make a bunch of YouTube videos though, or you know, short video shorts, TikTok, Instagram Reels, that kind of thing, which.
- [39:23]
B
Okay, I mean, I gotta double back there a little bit. And I feel like you're being a bit modest on your own impact to the industry. And I forget exactly like when we spoke last, at least like on the podcast. But like last year we did an SEO job study where we were just crawling and scraping every single or job that had search SEO in it. And from that, one of the things like one of the findings that I was a little bit surprised by is we looked at like SEO jobs per capita and you're in a hotspot for SEO jobs that are like unproportionately larger than even the major market cities. And obviously there was, you know, the technical SEO event recently. But like I feel like you've had an impact on SEO, especially in like the region. And it's like I'm still a little wondering why there's so many SEO jobs in that area. Like, do you have any additional insight to that? Like I know there's a few big players there, but it still seems unproportional when I looked at other markets.
- [40:46]
C
Yeah, I mean it's, it's always had like a big community turn of the century. I'm, I'm blanking on their name right now. But there was a large digital market, like 200 person strong agency that, you know, there were a lot of folks that came out of there. I think like Garrett French, Jenny Hollis, Bob Maceda, I think JP Sherman, a bunch of folks worked there. And then in what, 0708 Ashley Berman Ale started like the Raleigh SEO meetup. And yeah, we pre Covid there were like basically three monthly meetup groups. Two of them specifically SEO, one like 70% SEO. So it's always been a hot spot a lot because we have talent attracts talent. So like there's a lot of well known SEOs here and then a lot of companies end up moving in and building teams and that kind of thing. Like go fish. Digital was a big one. They got acquired now but like they moved from D.C. down to Raleigh and I think like their entire founding team was here and they really like scaled the team here. You got like JR Oaks, he's over at Locomotive. Like they're huge now. I feel like every Time I turn around, they're buying another company. Yeah, it's, it's good. Like there was, there was that pipeline for talent we had, you know, the monthly training. We finally got one of the meetups kicked off again last year. They kind of died after Covet and we struggled to get them going. But yeah, we're, we're already back up like 4, 40, 50 people at the monthly events and that'll continue to grow. But yeah, before, like, that would have been a, a bad month, a really bad month for one of the events. I mean, we, we would have at times upwards of like 200 people at an event.
- [42:36]
B
Yeah. Which is, I don't know. I mean it, it's interesting too. And it was, I mean, it was already kind of like on my radar, but it was like, interesting to see like through the data, it actually showing up in like career opportunities from it. And it's something that, you know, I pretty visually, we've been talking about a lot of like, wanting to lean in more to like those local community events and like, how do we, you know, contribute to them or help foster like, new ones? Because I think there is that, like, I don't know, closer connection aspect that you're not going to get through the Brightons and the larger kind of flagship SEO events, which are still great. But it's like that, I think personal connection that you get from the local community is something that's a bit unique.
- [43:32]
C
Didn't you start one or partner with one? I think I saw like, Jordan did something out in like la.
- [43:40]
B
We started last year doing quite a few, I mean, quite a few. I think we did like four or so. And then it's something that we want to, we want to keep doing this year and like, we have a few planned out and then also looking, you know, we're based in the Bay Area and so we've also been having conversations about how can we also just kind of help re engage the kind of search community in the Bay Area as far as like doing it in our own backyard. But it's something too that I think, and I don't know, I have different ideas around, like, ways of doing this, but like, I would love to start pulling together, like the individual local communities to have a collective group and impact and, you know, ways of building across each other. And I think there's quite a few, you know, people that have been making the contributions there and so I'd like to see that, I don't know, coalition, if you will, from like the loop local events and stuff. Because I feel like it does. It offers a different experience that you don't necessarily get in a national or kind of like once a year type event. You're not gonna have the reach. But I mean, scaled across like the country, it has the potential as well.
- [45:07]
C
Yeah, that's. That's interesting. I. I feel like most of the groups kind of stopped with COVID Like, I was actually trying to figure out who was still operating, like, you know, monthly, quarterly, anything. I think the Bay Area Search wouldn't shut down. There's. There's like a few small groups, but like, yeah, it's that now meet maybe once a quarter, once or twice a year. But there used to be a bunch of them. Like, there were groups in like Atlanta, Dallas. There was what, Minnesota Search SEM, not pdx. That's their conference. Right. What was it? I can't remember. Anyway, there were a bunch of groups around Bay Area Search. And now like, I think Celeste is getting one going at least hopefully every couple months. But there's. There's not a lot of these running anymore. I think there's like an SEO Beers or something up in Seattle. But I think they had like one.
- [46:07]
B
Event last year, which, I mean, I don't. Probably shouldn't even say this because it's not like. Yeah, but why not? Like, it's not designed as like an announcement kind of piece of it, but like, we have and was hoping actually end of last year to get it off the ground. But we have talked with Micah and like, we want to help carry the torch and that local piece is bringing back Bay Area Search. So that's definitely in the conversations in the cards. So, you know, that's something that we want to do. Just because I feel like we've been. I mean, Jordan's been speaking on it, we've been preaching on it. It's like, okay, we gotta do the legwork in our backyard too. But like, I don't know, it feels like there is a little momentum growing on those ones. Like, I joined one up in like, Milwaukee with the group there. And I think collectively, like, there is that opportunity to not have it from a, you know, hey, we're going to form this, like, corporation, but more of like have some general guidelines that is keeping it more community oriented. And then especially if there's connectivity across the board, it would make it then more interesting for companies to, you know, be able to invest in marketing across all of these different regional events. So I don't know, it is, yeah. A hope or something that I want to be Helping to kind of, you know, hopefully push forward a little bit.
- [47:52]
C
Yeah. And if you're. If you're listening to this, start a community, it's great. It's a lot of work. I recommend getting a few people, but there's always companies that are willing to sponsor. The reason I was asking about who was running is AHREFS had the same idea y' all did. Let's go for the local meetups. Let's see who's out there. Let's get in front of some folks. Let's support the community. You know, lots of goodwill there. And generally a better ROI in our experience, than sponsoring conferences. So our person was looking. They're like, who do you know? Like? And I was like, let me see who's. Who's still going. So I'll. I'll connect you there.
- [48:32]
B
Yeah, Bay Area search. But I think, too, yeah, if we can connect the local groups, then it would make it that much easier for, you know, Ahras wants to do it. They could have a touch point and then know they have access then to an entire network of it. Okay, so now we want to kind of go into, like, the lightning round of it, and this is more of a format that we shifted into where I'm going to throw kind of five different shorter form questions at you. The first one that I'd love to hear is, what do you think the greatest challenge will be for SEOs over the next 12 months?
- [49:18]
C
Proving their value, I think, and keeping budget, because everyone seems to want to go to JIO or whatever, and there's money there. But then where the businesses are still making money is SEO. So trying to find the balance there.
- [49:39]
B
I think mine on that is, like, very similar, but, like, a slight difference. It would be, like, leading the narrative around JIO in the organization, because, like, so many cases I've heard of, like, the SEO teams that maybe are, like, sitting back and not leading it. It's like, it's gotten to such a pop. Like, the mainstream has picked it up, and you have executives that it's on their radar. And so if they're not hearing it from you, they're gonna get their own wild and crazy ideas, and then you kind of lose control of it. So it's like, get in front of that narrative and then lead the direction rather than being the, like, the victim or the, like, the follower of whatever change is going to happen.
- [50:27]
C
Yeah, there's. There's a lot of nonsense already and people coming in for a budget. And I honestly, like, it's all still search it's going to be search. You're not even. Right now I'm, I'm making the distinction AI search and traditional search. We got another year or two and then it's just all search again.
- [50:48]
B
Which. Okay, so I've actually been using the same where it's like, I'm hoping that we can just land on like calling it search from it Geo ao. Like, where's your bet on what, like what verbiage and what naming is going to land here?
- [51:11]
C
SEO.
- [51:13]
B
Ah, see, yeah, I've been going between like traditional search, AI search to give like some. Hey, yeah, we're talking about the new versus traditional. But I've moved away from even caring of like what it is and I'm like, can we just get a consensus and like, move on? Basically, yeah.
- [51:34]
C
It's like I even put together some stuff for our blog team and I was like, look, like we got to stop calling this like five different things. So it's as if for us it's SEO for AI search in AI assistance. I don't want to call them LLMs. They call themselves AI assistants. It is AI search is the common vernacular. And I think SEO have won over like GEO and blah, blah, blah. But like more the Rand Fish can search everywhere optimization. I kind of like that. Pretty true.
- [52:05]
B
Yeah. I mean that's like, like we were talking about earlier, moving further outside of your four walls into the other spaces. Next question. What is inspiring you most in search? You've been in the industry for a long time. Obviously you're still highly motivated, still very engaged in the community and the industry as a whole. What keeps you so motivated?
- [52:35]
C
Well, we, we have a lot of like, changes now, which things were kind of the same for a long time. Like you just kind of did the same things. So it's more interesting now. But a big part of motivation for me is just giving back. Like, the industry gave me so much and I just want to help people now. Like, I want to make your job easier, your life easier. I want new people to like, come up to and their skills and do really cool, fun, great things.
- [53:05]
B
Love it. And I, I think with that, it actually segues perfectly into the next question. But the next question I'd have for you is, what are your top recommendations for someone that's like, new to the industry or starting to break into it? So it's like they're entering at a time of change and a lot of disruption going on. What career advice do you have for new SEOs?
- [53:36]
C
And I think this hasn't changed in like 15, 20 years for me. Be a sponge. Yeah, things are changing. You have a lot to learn. You're probably going to learn some wrong things. So just be adaptable too. Like, things you learn now may not be correct or the way that they will be in five years. So just, just be open to that change and get all the knowledge you can. You have a lot of folks that are willing to share knowledge, help you and help move you along in your.
- [54:05]
B
Journey, which in my perspective is like, that's probably one of my favorite things about the industry is like, for the most part there is like an overall like willingness to share information, share knowledge. Like, it's not as like, I don't know, you have a little more openness, I think, to the industry and sure you could find exceptions to that, but if I look at other industries, like, you don't have as much of like someone willing to take the time to explain something or you know, lend a hand to someone else that they may not have an immediate business value in doing so too.
- [54:54]
C
Yes, it's that I always call it abundance mindset. There's plenty of work for everyone, more than enough work. And so like, there's no reason not to do it. I actually learned a lot more once I started like sharing. Once I started writing and speaking, I would go down deeper rabbit holes, do more testing, that kind of thing that actually like brought my skill set up. So it helped me by helping others, which is awesome.
- [55:24]
B
Fair enough. Next question. And it kind of dovetails from that again, but with all the additional kind of like research information that's coming out with like the shifts in the industry or tactics. What are some of your favorite newer kind of like research studies or works that you would want to point other SEOs towards?
- [55:52]
C
I mean, we've done a lot of interesting studies and tests. I think probably Last year my two favorites were like the 34 and a half percent drop in clicks from AI overviews from Ryan Law and the one where Mateusz was like making the fake company and everything to get that cited. But in a more broad sense, I would say there was a study from OpenAI and Harvard and then I think Claude did another one anthropic quad where they're actually like breaking down the types of search. Like what are these new systems actually being used for? I would say take those with a little bit grain of salt, like what they classified as search is more narrow than I would say what people use Google for for. So I think more people are actually like searching in these AI assistants than we give them credit for.
- [56:45]
B
Yeah. And I've heard a lot of people like especially on the in house team side talking about like noticing changes in like time to conversion where a lot of times you know, they're seeing like a condensed from like first contact or first known contact to actual purchase consolidating which I think you know, would make sense towards. Yeah. If you're gaining some of that in outside forms.
- [57:20]
C
Well before like you would, you would go down rabbit holes and like do all this research and then maybe ask some friends. And now it's more like the, the Amazon top choice, Amazon's choice or the top seller or whatever. People just want to make sure they're making the right decision. And if it's like here are the five best whatever, then they're going to. Okay, like one of those is probably the answer and that's going to cut down the conversion path.
- [57:49]
B
Last question I have for you. If you were to build an in house SEO team, so I mean I feel like a lot of Elise enterprise companies at this point will have established teams, but assuming you have like a blank canvas and you're brought in to build out a search program and manage the channel of search as a whole, how would you think about building that team? What pieces would you want on the team? Like what, what's your dream SEO team that you'd want to build?
- [58:29]
C
Yeah, I mean it's, I don't think that's changed really. Like you're going to need someone for technical, at least one person for content, but probably multiple video is going to be a core part of the team. But I think like the job titles don't matter as much as like I just want creative people that are willing to learn and try things and do cool things and I think you'll, you'll have more of an impact that way. You could have a bunch of people for content but like if they spend all day in meetings and stuff and like don't have ways to differentiate their content from the 50 other companies that do the same thing, then what's the point of it? Like if you can actually have people that stand out that you can put a, we talked about this earlier, like put a few face behind them, like a name, a face, have them actually be visible in the industry on your content, on your videos, that's going to go a lot further than you know, generic person behind company name. That's just not going to work as well anymore.
- [59:35]
B
And so you're looking, you're looking more for the, the character and the individual More so than what their immediate skill sets or specializations are.
- [59:48]
C
Yeah, I won't. I want people with ideas again. We talked about this with the tooling. You don't need a thousand devs anymore. You need someone with that domain knowledge that can come up with a thousand ideas.
- [60:00]
B
That's one of the more harder things to find and hire for like, and spending time in recruiting, it's like, you know, anyone or any system can give you that checklist of like years of experience and they've specialize in this and that. But it's like really judging and like being able to see through the experience and more to like the character of the person is at least in my experience, like the most valuable but by far the hardest to judge and like gauge is because it's not, I don't know, you can't just tell someone what criteria it is. It's like more of a, a feel and, I don't know, something a little bit softer.
- [60:47]
C
Yeah, that makes sense.
- [60:50]
B
Well, that's going to wrap up this episode of the Voice of Search. Thanks again to Patrick Stokes from Ahrefs from joining us. Be sure to check out his work. We'll throw some of his more recent articles in the show notes for it, but be sure to check out his LinkedIn profile and also going over and check out ahrefs.com if you haven't already. But that's it for today. My name is Tyson. Thanks for stopping by the Voice of Search podcast and we'll be in your feed in the next day.