B (3:42)

Don't have them review your code. All right.

C (3:44)

Oh, my God. It's like shame code, you know, but, you know, but it gets the job done. That's what matters. And so, yeah, spending a lot of time building things lately. Still spending a lot of time writing and advising. So it's like, you know, a third each. And. And it's a good time. I'm in a great place, man. I'm having so much fun. I'm. I'm really doing what I love, and I'm appreciative every day.

B (4:12)

I love. I love hearing that. And, like, I think one of the things is, like, you got to be happy with what you're doing, and I think that is something that, you know, I simply cannot replace. It doesn't matter how much you may try as a human being, you know, AI isn't going to make you happier. It may make you faster, more efficient, but it isn't going to make you happier. So. So congratulations on conquering AI on that, on that feat. But what are you building? What are some of the things that you're doing that you think are really transformative in how we're approaching the market today?

C (4:45)

Every spreadsheet is an app now, where every spreadsheet should be an app. And so what that means is I have all these concepts, frameworks, templates that I've been using with clients and refining over decades now, and now I'm just turning that into an app. And now it does a whole lot of stuff automatically. So, you know, that's a crazy thing, right? Like, I'm really seeing this convergence between strategy and execution, and I don't think they will become fully the same, but I, you know, I'm seeing that the advice that I'm giving, I can almost implement that myself, end to end. Almost. Right. We're not there yet. And so I'm building a lot of stuff for clients, whether that's fully, like, page templates and Content. And to be fair, I'm not creating all the content myself with AI yet. I think it's still important to have a human in the loop. But you can create a whole lot of outlines, drafts, or just send full pieces to editing so I can do a lot more fulfillment. And then for other clients, I'm building apps of, for example, what topics and pages and keywords should we prioritize at all times? There is this concept that we invented at Shopify called the keyword universe, which is essentially just a long big database of keywords and topics that are scored by a thorough algorithm to then say, okay, these are the opportunities you should go after first. And I was just able to build that within days for my client. And so now I have essentially like, I mean, I'm not joking, I think I could probably sell that to others, right? And I'm not because I don't want to deal with like, know, service and customer support and uptime. But for my clients it's no problem, right? So for them, I'm building the SEO tools that are currently missing and I'm able to deeply integrate them into their Systems, into their CMS, into their rank trackers, all with APIs, MCPs and LLMs. So it's a wild time, man.

B (6:50)

It is a wild time. And actually this is a great topic for us to discuss because in transformative periods like this, any industry, including the organic SEO industry, is going to have to learn new skills, right? We're all going to have to like, learn how to do things better, faster, more efficiently. You and I both come from a background where, you know, we got, we got really good at SEO because we would build our own websites, we would do our own web development work when web development work wasn't easy. What are the skills that anyone in this space should have? What are the capabilities that we should be focused on? And how are they changing from what they were just two to three years ago?

C (7:38)

First of all, it's very easy to overbuild. Now you have this powerful tool with agents and agentic coding and it's very easy to just spend a lot of time on stuff that doesn't matter much. And that has not really changed. I would say that's been a skill for a long time, but not now. It's so much more important because the barrier to execution is so much lower, right? So prioritizing your time, prioritizing what's most important for the business or for the teams, I think that's like a, that's a skill that is becoming Increasingly more important. Hand in hand with that goes attention. And I think that's a, that's a skill that's becoming so much more important for every knowledge worker, but because of the same reason, because there are so many ways to get distracted. For example, when you build some of these vibe coded apps, right, it's very easy to just spend way more time on them than you should and then spend not enough time on the other things that you need to do. So prioritization, attention are critical. And then third, judgment is this thing that has always been important but now also becomes so much more important. And the way that I would think about judgment is the following. So AI allows me to, for example, write a pretty good contract or can probably help me self diagnose some medical issues fairly well, but I don't know how well because I'm not an expert in that field. And so a lot of, you know, like, I see like a lot of noise on social media about, oh, here's my cloud code skill that will automate, automate SEO or that will replace your agency. And it's like you probably want to be careful because you cannot judge how good that really is, you know, so when I'm talking about judgment, I'm talking about understanding what good looks like and what better than good looks like and understanding where the traps are, right? So I would say these three skills, prioritization, attention and judgment, are infinitely more important now that you can do like so much, I wouldn't say everything, but so much more with AI.

B (9:35)

Look, Kevin, one of the things I appreciate about you the most is that you're German. And you know, being German and I'm, I'm mostly German, most people don't know that, but I'm mostly German. And, and I appreciate it because there's a, there's always a process to follow, right? There has to be some form of order to this in order to get to an outcome. Right? And so Kevin, what I want to ask you is it during this transformation, and your points are spot on, that you, you know, executives want to get to outcomes, we're looking at metrics slightly differently than what we've historically looked at. There's a transformation of this category going to more brand perception and when, when what we've seen is that there's been this massive prolification of this concept of AI visibility. And here's my question for you, which is, what's the order here? I've seen some teams do what you just said and shift from clicks to impressions or shift from traffic and Revenue to citations and AI visibility. What's the order that we should be taking to justify transforming the way we measure this and how that should that order or process then help indicate what we do as organic SEO members of an organization?

C (10:57)

It's a fantastic question. That's why you're, that's why it's so good. Jordan. So here's the process which by the way Germans over process a lot sometimes, not always. Sometimes don't process their food, but man, they process the rest. I love it.

B (11:15)

I love it.

C (11:16)

The, the point is you need to start with assumptions. What are the assumptions that we are holding on to that are no longer true? Assumptions like traffic leads to conversions, right? That was true for a long time. That is not true anymore since I would say 12 months ago, maybe even sooner. And so making these assumptions explicit together with leadership, right, that is a great first step because then you start to uncover what the strongly held beliefs are and you can start to slowly open up people's perspectives again, not like nobody has their ex. Their perspective changed, right? People change their perspective proactively, but they don't have them changed. Try changing someone's mind. Right? Good luck. Impossible. So you need to start with the assumptions and then see if people are open to kind of, you know, adopt a different perspective. Next you need to obviously have a model ready, right? Like you need to a change management process is taking an organization from A to B and you need to know what B is. If you don't know what B is and you just throw some stuff in there, right? Like we need to measure visibility, that's not going to help people. They need a branch that they can grab and that is the new metrics model. And that can look slightly different based on what type of company you are. Say if you're an E commerce or if you're in B2B or local business or whatever, that might look slightly different. So I'm hesitant to prescribe a universally perfect model, but it's probably going to look something like, you know, citations, mentions in a relative context, like share of citations, share of mentions. Impressions make a lot of sense. And then it has to be tied to revenue. Everything you sell, meaning the model you're trying to pitch has to ladder up in some way shape or form to revenue or market share. Otherwise it will, it will hit a glass ceiling. So assumptions have the right model ready. And then lastly you also need to kind of help leadership understand how the ways of working are changing. Right. So what does it not just mean for our goals but also for the way that we execute. So in our current landscape, for example, where SEO becomes more of a brand channel, that could, for example, mean that maybe we don't, you know, assign budget by. By expected dollars, but maybe we assign budget by capacity, right? So one of the things that I've noticed over the years is that SEO scales with capacity, not with output, right? So for advertising, for example, every dollar you put in creates, hopefully a dollar more that comes out or a dollar plus one that comes out. For SEO, it's not that simple, right? You cannot say, oh, now we got budget for a tool, right, or to create content. And that's why we can create, that's why we get more dollars. It's a capacity. So we increase our capacity to create content, we increase our capacity to make technical changes. That's how you want to think about it. So ways of working, I would say, is the third thing that you need to help leadership understand how it changes after that transition from A to B. I love that.

B (14:27)

And I actually think that that's one of the most critical components, that third one, which is connecting two ways of working. And one of the things that we've been seeing in this industry is these massive hype cycles that have dramatically impacted the way we think about doing our work. Ultimately, we've seen hype cycles around Reddit. We're seeing a hype cycle right now. As we're recording this around publishing in LinkedIn, we're seeing hype cycles around using visibility over any other KPI. This is becoming a very tumultuous period of time for us. And as organic marketers, it's very difficult to both manage expectations and manage work when you're constantly going through a vicious hype cycle. How are you managing the conversation? How are you looking at this industry when it comes to these hype cycles? And what do you predict the future is going to look like? And I will probably ask you more questions on this because I think this is a really important topic for our entire, our entire industry at large.

C (15:30)

Hallelujah. And speaking of the industry, I think a lot of people get into SEO because it's changing so much, right? I think people are attracted by, I am attracted by that constant change. And to be fair, right. I think there is like a stem of SEO that remains constant and then there is a whole bunch of stuff that's changing. And so you're absolutely right. We're going through these hype cycles and you need to be very careful which hype cycle you jump on and which you don't. And if there's leadership interest, you know, not every leadership team is interested in fast moves, but when we talk about tech companies, they typically are. And so it's, you know, like first of all, you need to be able to understand to explain the current hype cycle. So one hype cycle that we're in, for example right now I would argue is you can create a lot of content with AI and that is not completely unfounded. Like it's, it's, it's true. The other question is how well does that content perform? And so I see like in the, you know, in the industry, I see a lot of trigger happiness of leaders to say, hey, can we just you know, maybe like fire or reduce our headcount because we can just automate a lot of stuff and maybe. Yes, right. I'm not saying that's completely unfounded. There is a logic to it. But now you want to think about, okay again, what are the assumptions leading up to that conclusion? So one assumption in that tree diagram of assumptions is that AI can create content that is just as good as humans.

D (17:06)

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C (18:34)

And I think that's in, maybe in some cases true, but not in every case. And so now I can Say, okay, let's test that assumption, right? Let's go out and write some content on LinkedIn, let's go out and do some stuff on Reddit, but let's not over invest before we have some signal. So it's a testing approach, right? Every hype, you want to test and see what's behind that hype. Because you don't know if it's a hype or if it's a step change, right? That's the beauty of this. It's only a hype. Like when you, afterwards, you know it's a hype. When you're in the hype, you know if it's a step change or not. So test it, look at the results and act accordingly. But don't shoot too fast, at least not until you can see the whole distance and what's in front of you.

B (19:17)

Yeah, and let's talk about that testing and that ability to drive on some of these efforts, because one of the components that I think is largely misleading is that AI radically reduces the cost of doing SEO or organic marketing. So how are you approaching that conversation and what are the concepts or beliefs that SEOs should have in their organizations today? And how should agencies or agency owners be thinking about the conversation of budget if we are in this perpetual cycle of both hype and experimentation?

C (20:00)

So look, when the computer became mainstream around the late 80s 90s, there was this notion that people would just use computers and then work half a day and then go home and spend more time with their family. And that has, I don't know if you noticed, hasn't really materialized. What has actually happened is that people work more. And so the lesson from that is that technology can go both ways. It can save resources or it can increase output. And so the way that I approach this conversation is let's make a very slow and careful decision here because we can either reduce our cost and automate more at the current output level, or what if we can double, triple or 10x our output, right? So that's why I think if you're working in the house and you're an individual contributor, it is a good time to spend a lot of time with AI, because I would argue in most cases it will grow your productivity. I have yet to see somebody who uses AI intentionally and well and then is less productive. The downside of this is, I would argue, I would argue it's going to become an expectation, right? Like when everybody becomes more productive, then you cannot stay at your current productivity level, right? So on top of that, right now you don't want to dismiss it. There's a lot of AI washing going on, right? Like there's some economic headwinds, there is inflation, there's less discretionary income. There's a whole lot of reasons also Covid hiring, why companies might want to reduce their headcount or fire a lot of people. And most of the time that reason is not AI, because why would I want to reduce my potential output if AI can increase my output now, if somebody is resistant to adopting AI, sure, different story, right?

B (21:54)

Right.

C (21:54)

But I would argue that right now we're looking at this thing the wrong way.

B (21:59)

I totally agree with you. All the headlines are about workforce reduction because of AI, Right? But in reality, it's just a masquerade. It's, it's, it's a lie to what's really going on in these organizations. Let's talk about that in context of more the organization that drives organic. How are, how should people be thinking about budget asks? I mean, how should leaders and both SEO managers and agency partners think about that ask specifically knowing that output can be dramatically higher? I'm sure you get this example all the time, Kevin. Client comes to you and says, oh Kevin, you know, Kevin, you're basically a one man shop, but you should be able to write me 10,000 pieces of content. Because AI writes content better than humans. So please, Kevin, get all this content on my website. And you're kind of like, okay, there's a, there's an ask behind that, which is like an investment, a value ask, like, is it just worth doing so? Like, how are you managing some of those expectations of higher output, some of those expectations of more critical decision making, some of those expectations around judgment while using AI and still managing a channel in house, being organic or SEO and being an agency partner or consultant partner to a brand.

C (23:31)

So the first thing you need to understand or bring to that conversation is an understanding of how value shifts and changes over time. And the way that value changes is if something becomes very easy, it loses value, and if something is very hard, it gains value. And I'm saying that because it matters very much for how search engines reward content. Right? Any content that is a commodity that is easy to create, they will either create themselves or answer outright in the search results, or you'll have so much competition that the chances of coming out on top are very, very small. So you need to understand where the value shifts. So it's maybe less of the 10,000 how to guides or so. However, if you have, you know, like if you're a Company like Airbnb and you are creating 10,000 or maybe a million experiences pages, okay, different story, right? There might be something unique that you can add to that mass generated content and then all of a sudden it makes a lot of sense to build this. So again, that's why I'm saying not every ask is outright nonsensical, but you need to put it into perspective and you need to understand where the value is really generated. To make, to drive organic traffic and then also to drive organic revenue. I shouldn't have said traffic because that's not. See, there's no reflex. But when you try organic value, that ultimately leads to revenue. So that's number one. Number two, right, you as an in house person, whether you're a leader or not, you, first of all, you have so much more capabilities, right? Analytics and getting data is not a problem anymore. There might be internal hurdles to come over. Yes, maybe you need to get access to your BigQuery or to your data lake or whatever. But anything that is now being tracked, you don't need to go to data science for that. You don't need to go to data ops or marketing ops. You can just fetch it yourself very, very quickly. You can create a prototype out of anything and everything, right? Like whether it's a web app, an article, a page, a design, you can create it yourself in no time. Right? And so after, after value, we're going to judgment what should you build? You can build everything. What should you build? And these are intrinsically connected once you know where the value is. Okay, now you can focus your increased capabilities on the stuff that matters the most, right? Yeah. So that's number two. And then number three, there is something to be said about getting data from that you don't have. So when we talk about budget and budget asks, you know, first you probably want to make sure you have, I don't know, enough tokens and good LM and all that kind of stuff set up, right? So that could be one budget ask, but I would argue most companies solve that centrally. Second, what data do you need from maybe tools or vendors or public data or. So what APIs do you need to pay for, including databases and whatnot? That is probably the next step and maybe even goes into scraping data or like getting stuff like getting access to like APIs that cost money. So I would say these are kind of the three buckets that you want to think about and that you need to bring to a budget ask because you know, after all, you still need to make business cases if you if you spend money on something, even if

B (26:44)

it's headcount, how should SEOs and marketers be thinking then about investment of time on their website? Because historically, where SEOs have spent a ton of time is editorial blog posts reaching more scale, featuring more content assets on a page like FAQs and things. But arguably I'm seeing a transition to going back to a lot of the core parts of a website and the core parts of your product offering pages. Where's the balance there? How do we rethink quality metrics in these different types of content or experiences on our sites?

C (27:26)

There's a lot changing because of AI. I would argue that a lot of the content should probably be more like a tool or a Legion tool or a mini product. These days, I think a lot of the evergreen content is not worth doing anymore. And look, in some cases it is because you might have a unique authority or a strong authority in a space. So I don't want to say that it doesn't matter who has that content, but the margin is shrinking. And so stuff like thought leadership, content and research is much more valuable. Interactive experiences and all that kind of stuff. How other people and the web is talking about you, I call that reputation. But just like how and where you appear, in what context becoming so much more important. So you mentioned in the intro, right, that 85% of your brand mentions are influenced by stuff that's not on your website. So I would say you still need to display your product in a trustworthy way. That is absolutely important. Trust is such an underrated ingredient these days. But then you want to transition from evergreen stuff and the classic type of blog content probably more to like mini products and to research and thought leadership. And then you want to spend more time, you know, maybe with a modern approach to PR or getting your brand out there so that you get good coverage across authoritative resources. I think that is probably it in a nutshell.

B (28:59)

All right, Kevin, now we're going to go to my favorite part of the podcast, which is our lightning round questions. I'm going to ask you five questions related to the themes of our our episode, and you're gonna give me a quick response on each of those to enlighten our audience. You ready?

C (29:17)

Love a good lightning run.

B (29:18)

All right, great. Okay, so the first one is around metrics. Should. Should SEOs be focused on classic SEO or AI visibility if they only had $1 to spend a visibility? Okay, tell me why. Tell me more.

C (29:35)

Because, you know, everything is AI now, right? Even Google, they're pushing overviews Hard and AI mode and it's just like a click away from AI mode becoming the default experience. We're probably going to transition there, but yeah, there's not that much difference anymore. And the impact of being visible in AI answers is very high. It's just a different game to play. And that's why we need to change our metrics as well.

B (30:03)

All right, if there is one metric that every organic marketer should add today, what is that? Business metric.

C (30:12)

Share Voice because you want to think more about relative metrics rather than absolute metrics. Because things change so much more with AI, right? Like the number of possible citations you can get and mentions, they change a lot faster than with like classic ranks and clicks and all that kind of stuff. So you're looking for a relative metric that is in context of your competitors and that's why Sheriff Voice or share of citations. Right. There are kind of these variations that would be my go to.

D (30:40)

Awesome.

B (30:41)

There's so many hype cycles going on in our industry right now. So much information about both how to use AI, what AI is doing to organizations and teams. What's the biggest misinformation that our industry is telling us about AI?

C (30:59)

It's just like a token predictor. And so while not wrong at the technical perspective when it comes to an LLM, AI has long learned to reason, right? Like this is not new reasoning models. They're not pure token predictors anymore. There's a lot of personalization going on. And now with agents I think it's a very short sighted perspective to say oh yeah, they just predict the next word. It's like they kind of do a lot more than that now.

B (31:26)

Interesting. And how does that impact work for SEOs and AI visibility marketing managers?

C (31:36)

Well you can automate so much more now, right? Like there is legit like AI and content creation is getting is so much better. Like automating content refreshes is working really, really well. Really well as long as you have the right guardrails and stuff and you approach it from the right perspective. Right. And expectations. But that stuff is working really well. So it's a lot more than people make it out to seem. And my fear is that if you underrated or if you know, if you think it's just this thing that use for certain things, you might not get as much out of it as you could.

B (32:14)

What should our listeners be expecting out of growth Memo? What are some new things that they're going to learn or grow from if they sign up for for the newsletter?

C (32:26)

I have a beautiful Big backlog of that sound like the one big beautiful Bill. One big beautiful backlog for more research coming out. So I'm very excited. There's a lot of research from user behavior studies where we recorded people in their normal behavior, to data analysis. So I'm really excited about that. I'm currently running a couple of beta programs, I would say that I cannot disclose yet, but that are making the membership so much more valuable and more change over time. I think it's to the point that we've been talking about with the technology and with the user behavior and with all these things that we're seeing that are changing right now. The growth remote has to adapt to it. And so you can expect more varied topics in the future about what works, how to still grow. Because at the end of the day, this is a newsletter about growth. It's deeply rooted in SEO and ao, but it's not limited to that. And so I think it's time to open the gates and broaden the horizon a little bit.

B (33:38)

Last lightning round question. As our industry transforms and SEO evolves into this broader organic marketer and leader, what's the one skill set that we all have to master?

C (33:54)

Meta thinking and meta thinking. Because it is very easy to get sucked into AI. We're talking about building, we're talking about pitching and change management, et cetera. And it's very, very easy to sit right in front of the screen with your eyes and completely forgets how you act in a certain moment. And so I think what's critical is to be able to take a step back and reflect on your thinking and your behavior and whether you're still working on the right stuff, whether you still hold the right assumptions or whether you're too close to the screen. And that matters because again, like, you get, it's almost like you get sucked into a stream and you function more on autopilot and being conscious about how you spend your time, where you spend your time and what you're working on is critical when you can work on anything.

B (34:54)

Love that, love that, love that. Thank you, Kevin. And that wraps up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Huge thank you to Kevin Indig, advisor and founder of Growth Memo, for joining us today. If you'd like to contact Kevin, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on the voicesofsearch.com or you can visit his company website, kevin-indig.com or get more amazing insights and knowledge from his newsletter, growth-memo.com if you haven't yet subscribed and would like a daily stream of SEO and content marketing knowledge in your podcast feed. Hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or on YouTube and we'll be in your feed every week. Okay, that's all for today, but until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.