← Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
The fusion of SEO & CRO with AI/LLMs
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- [00:00]
Sean Hinklein
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth.
- [00:12]
Podcast Network Announcer
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.
- [00:25]
Sean Hinklein
A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts.
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Podcast Network Announcer
Sit back, relax and get ready for.
- [00:34]
Sean Hinklein
Your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search Podcast, Jordan Cooney.
- [00:43]
Jordan Cooney
AI is reshaping SEO and CRO strategies Tools analyze data faster than humans. Marketers must adapt or fall behind. How can you balance automation with strategic thinking? According to SEMrush 2024 Think Big with AI report, 76% of businesses already use AI for content marketing and SEO and 78% are satisfied with the results. This highlights the rapid adoption of AI across the search marketing landscape. Here's the challenge. SEO and CRO require both data and creativity. AI tools promise efficiency, but demand oversight. How can you leverage these technologies while maintaining quality and performance? This is the Voice of Search Podcast. I'm Jordan Cooney and joining us today is Sean hinklein, head of SEO at Apollo I.O. which helps B2B companies connect with potential customers through data driven solutions. Today, Sean will share how to effectively combine SEO and CRO strategies using using AI and LLMs. Sean, welcome to the Voice of Search Podcast.
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Sean Hinklein
Hey, thanks for having me Jordan. Appreciate it.
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Jordan Cooney
Absolutely.
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Sean Hinklein
Not intimidating at all with that beautiful open. Yeah, I know, right?
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Jordan Cooney
I mean obviously we have tons of topics to cover, lots of things to to dive into. But before we get started, I remember from, from our prep and kind of conversations like give give our listeners a little background on yourself, your, your, your history in SEO, what companies you've worked with and and then a little bit about Apollo and what you're doing there.
- [02:25]
Sean Hinklein
Yeah, it sounds good. So a little bit about me without boring every every reader or listener to to tears. I was a journalist major. Played around with WordPress at MTV2, learned how to do SEO, never looked back. It was a really cool way to be creative and also analytical at the same time. Been very lucky, blessed and fortunate to to be at the right place at the right time with certain companies. I was the head of SEO@ramp.com did some stints at Comic Con for a very long time and now I'm at Apollo. Absolutely love the team and the growth team here and what we're doing is we're radicalizing data driven content. You know, we're taking all of our SEO know how and all of this AI LLM ecosystem growth, and we're trying to combine it into the best user experience for people that are on Apollo possible. And we're doing this, yes, through content, but we're doing it in a lot of different ways as well.
- [03:21]
Jordan Cooney
All right, curveball question, just for the start, out of all these crazy, fun, unique brands, which one did you just enjoy the most? Which one did you like in your heart of hearts? You had to move on. You had to take on whatever other role it was, but you just loved working with that brand or that division. Which one was it?
- [03:43]
Sean Hinklein
Yeah, hold on, let me just check my Venmo real quick to see who. Oh, okay, great. No, all right, jokes aside, definitely Comic Con. It was San Diego Comic Con, WonderCon, that whole shebang on and off for years, but admittedly, hopefully not a super cheese answer. It's the people you meet. So many amazing, interesting people. Like Artist Alleys. Anybody who's listening, if you've ever been to a Comic Con, you know what I mean by Artist Alley? If you've never been to one, Artist Alley is where you should immediately go. It's usually in the back. It's all the independent artists who have a lot of really good books, cartoons, animations, you name it. They're making board games over there. They're doing such cool stuff. An insane cool opportunity for anybody who worked there to go to different shows all across the world and talk to those independent artists and build a network. As much as I love being at Apollo and Ramp and Squarespace and all of these big, big awesome names, that there's nothing there that can compete to that experience.
- [04:40]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, I mean, that's awesome. And I think whenever you get an opportunity in any job or a career to be able to connect with the people who are actually building the great things. That's what makes it tons of fun.
- [04:51]
Sean Hinklein
So 100%, that's why I'm at Apollo.
- [04:54]
Jordan Cooney
Awesome. So, I mean, I have to start off with the age old AI question, right? Because that's just, you know, how most of these podcasts are starting these days, and we're going to talk about AI and its evolution in search. So how has AI and LLMs reshaped the connection between SEO and Conversion Rate Optimization or CRO over this past year? I mean, you guys got an intimate view at that of that at Apollo, so I'd be curious to see where the connections are between SEO, CRO and what you guys are seeing.
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Sean Hinklein
Yeah, for sure. So I guess I'll start this by making fun of all the dudes who say SEO is dead. Because that happens again.
- [05:33]
Jordan Cooney
I've done it. I regret it now.
- [05:35]
Sean Hinklein
I think, I think I have as well. So I'll take my potshots. Right. I'll eat my humble pie. But yeah, it's very cyclical. Right. Time is a flat circle when it gets in the SEO aeo. I remember people were freaking out about Google Authorship, rank and schema markup. As long, like if you've been in this space for a bit, you know that sensationalism is a thing. Yeah, but that's. That said, AI is not sensationalism. AI is definitely here to stay. It's the new, it's the new norm and we have to adapt. In your open. You said that like 78% of companies love that they're doing it and 76 are already using AI for content marketing and SEO. That's great to hear the entire, but to answer your question head on, the entire landscape is changing. You have to be on the know of artificial intelligence and agentic models. You have to know how Google values different content in relation to Gemini and AI mode coming out. You now have to, from an SEO perspective, understand the user experience. The reason that I've stayed in SEO as long as I have is because I think I'm just a really big hippie user experience person. And I got into journalism and then I got into SEO and I kind of rode that wave. And I love the gig, I love the career. But now I'm even more in love with it because what LLMs and AI have inadvertently done is make everybody focus on the user experience and the quality of the content. There was this opportunity for like scalability where everybody was donking off like terrible, terrible stuff. Yeah. You know, like 4,000 landing pages. I'm just going to grab as much as I possibly can.
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Jordan Cooney
Right.
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Sean Hinklein
And that was cyclical because black hat SEO has been a thing forever and now we're going to have Black hat LLM and. Okay, cool. Like it's totally going to happen and it's very, it's. And it's so cyclical that it should at least my opinion, calm everybody down a little bit, stop with the anxiety attacks and the FOMO of not being on top of the net, the latest agentic model and focus more on like what your brands can do to, to kind of crush and provide a really kick ass user experience. And I really do mean a good user experience. Not saying that as A way to. To hide. Make a bunch of money for the. For your board. Like, no, just focus on you. Like Jordan and me, Sean. Like, what would we read and share on LinkedIn and Reddit? And it's a hard question to ask, and it's really hard. And sometimes people ask it and then walk away from it. Don't. Because you have to answer that question in order to answer your question about, like, how does AI affect SEO and CRO? It's. It's all user experience now. It's like, what do you have that nobody else has? An ongoing joke that I make way too often is like, if you want to learn how to tie your shoe in the worst way, Google it, because you'll get 50 articles about how to tie your shoe. Yeah. And then just pick one at random. Like, where's the value there? There's nothing new. Yeah. Versus if I were reading something from. I don't know if Stride Ride still exists. I'm dating myself here. But that's like the kids shoe store over here in Jersey. If they had something like, hey, we asked a bunch of parents, what's the easiest way for kids to learn how to tie their shoe? Immediately. Better immediately. And you can use that. You can craft that a lot more efficiently with AI and LLMs. And that's where we get into the real answer of, like, CRO. Efficiency. Efficiency and velocity. A colleague of mine at Apollo, Matt Kurl, he was on a podcast and he said that AI speeds things up, you know, And I couldn't agree more with him. So I think, what. And I'll end the rant here. The way that we're approaching SEO and CRO is like, there's no shortage of good ideas, but there is always a shortage of bandwidth and time. AI has allowed us to execute faster, and we're all about what we ship. So we just want to ship a really great quality user experience quickly. And that's really how we're combining it. We're not optimizing for LLMs. We're using the technology to create a better user experience using our proprietary data so that we can tell you really cool stuff. Like, hey, the best time to call a CMO is Tuesday at 8:00am yeah.
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Jordan Cooney
Yeah.
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Sean Hinklein
Like, that's really cool. And we can only do that.
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Jordan Cooney
So let's talk a little bit more about this from this B2B software perspective. Right. Which you have. And when we talk about CRO, we often kind of can cover a ton of ground. Right. We can talk about design, we can talk about layout, we can Talk about data and what engages users. When you think about the experiences you're trying to build at Apollo and what you're creating, what is the real driver? What is the thing you're trying to unlock? From a user perspective, regardless of if.
- [10:03]
Sean Hinklein
It'S SEO or CRO brand, I want people to recognize that Apollo has value and, and our brand resonates with what they're trying to achieve. So with, with SEO, right, Macro, funnel, I'm looking at a bunch of keywords I'm trying to get you to click into me. It's kind of like a flea market or a mini mall, if you will. And once you're in my store, I want you to find value. If you walk right out, bounce rate, exit percentage, big on analogies today. I don't know why, then there's no value and I just achieved half the goal. But I didn't achieve the main goal that I wanted to achieve. I didn't, I didn't give you the value that you needed. I didn't get you through conversion event, a sign up, a newsletter, something to make you realize that there's actual value here. I look at this as all about brands. If we're successful, then yeah, we can have more signups and more demo requests. And in the world of B2B software, MQLs, SQLs, like throw a million acronyms at people, right? Yeah. But at the end of the day, if you didn't have a good quality user experience, you're going to forget Apollo ever existed. Or worse, you're going to look at Apollo and go, yeah, they're all right, but no, we're all about making sure that you have the best user experience that you can through this content, through this data, through CRO and making sure that you're not getting lost, making sure that you're not wasting your time, making sure that we're not convoluted in our messaging because, you know, in the B2B space, not naming names here, but that's pretty, it's easy to fall into that trap. Yeah, so it's a big emphasis on like what, what's going to make a quality user experience. I know this is a cheat answer because it's kind of the same answer as before, but no, I think there's.
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Jordan Cooney
Some value here in, in being clear about how you want to make data and make the brand visible to the users. And I actually think this is a great way for us to unpack our next data driven decisions question, which is how are you guys using these AI tools, these AI Methods to best identify keywords. And I would even argue it's beyond keywords now. It's really about understanding topics, prompts, requests, inquiries from users. And how are you doing this to really understand the parallel to conversion.
- [12:19]
Sean Hinklein
Right.
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Jordan Cooney
Like how are you getting to that conversion? To your point earlier, like, a lot of B2B companies just throw stuff up, right? They'll put up the page, the logo pages, or they'll put up all of these very low value type automatic pages across their ecosystem that are intended to drive traffic because there's some sort of very, very base veneer type answer that's given through that page. But does it really give you that deep level of insight like you were talking about that Apollo can do? Apollo can tell you very, very specifically when it's the best time to contact a cmo. That is a much higher value proposition than please email cmos and you will get leads. Right. Like that's just not a very useful page. Right. So curious to get your perspective how you guys are using AI to really unlock that use of data in the different scenarios and experiences that you're building.
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Sean Hinklein
You're like 100% correct. It's not just about keywords. Keywords are a leading indicator at this point. I think they've kind of always been. But let's just, you know, it's all good, right?
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Jordan Cooney
Yeah.
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Sean Hinklein
The way that we're really using it, I think most effectively is by taking advantage of what we've had, which is like we've had this data, we've had this giant DB of billions and billions of records and we want to extract value to our user, like for our users from these records. So the real way that we're using it is to figure out those data points that you just said. Like, best time to call a cmo. If you're a VP of Sales and you're selling to lawyers, when do you want to talk to these lawyers? What subject line in your email is the best? What's the word count? How many follow ups do you need? What kind of sequences are AI power up should you be using? And conversely, if you're targeting certain industries, what are the. No nos, you know, like, what are the things. Hey, don't email this person three times, they'll just block you immediately. These are things that we are discovering using Pythia. And Pythia is our internal LLM tool. It's an internal tool that allows us to look at all of these records, scrub for pii, of course, and then understand, you know, like if someone's targeting a certain industry or if they're selling, if it's an sdr, using email as their PR sales tool to book meetings, how can we get them to book more meetings? How can we get them to sell more? That's ultimately the big. The global question. The global question is like, if you're using Apollo and we have all of this data available to us, we could go one of many routes. But for convenience, I'm just going to go with two. We could go the Ahref Semrush route where I download a bunch of keywords and then I go to copy AI or writer Free shout out for you guys. Lucky. And you know, I make a bunch of blog content. Everyone's done that already. That happened like a year and a half ago. It doesn't work. Google can like filter it out.
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Jordan Cooney
Yeah, that's kind of dead now, right? Especially in B2B. The download the list of keywords and then do some content because I found a keyword that's. That's gone. So like where are you guys going to get data and insight? Is there anything internal at Apollo that you guys like seek out to like really understand that sdr? Understand that cmo?
- [15:31]
Sean Hinklein
Oh, absolutely, man. And what a wonderful question for a guy like me. So, yeah, like their email templates, how often they're in the product, how many sends do they make? What's happening with their phone calls, what's happening with their transcripts? This is all stuff that we have that we can scrub and then create data to help people sell more.
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Jordan Cooney
Right.
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Sean Hinklein
If you were to like look at this from a very pure Webster definition, I wouldn't really call this SEO. Hell, I wouldn't even call this CRO. I would call it like growth content, LLM stuff. And when we finally get out of the label problem and I think we can just build really, really cool stuff and a lot of companies don't have this label problem. It's more just understanding that like SEO is an evolving medium. It's a pretty little acronym because it's fairly long to write search engine optimization a bunch of times. But I never really want to get too in love with the search engine part because to me not to be super cheese, the universal language of the intern Internet is search. We've just conflated that with Google. But that's not. They're. They're not the same. Searching is like TikTok, LinkedIn, Reddit. It's not even a company. It's more just like the hunts for information or human connection. Again, not to cheese it up hardcore here, but it's definitely not Google. So like if we're giving value for best time to call a accountant. If you're selling QuickBooks, you know, if you're like a QuickBooks consultant and you're, and you're selling accountants and actuaries and you want to know like what's the, what's the subject line that's actually going to help me get an open rate of over 50%? We could probably help you out there, but what keyword is that? Yeah, it's probably something like accountant email template in which 90% of SEOs are going to go to keyword planner, semrush, screaming frog or Ahrefs. They're going to see 50 MSV and they're going to go ew, I don't want that. My boss is going to hate that.
- [17:24]
Jordan Cooney
I'm never going to use that.
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Sean Hinklein
Yeah, yeah, it's a reshifting of value and like a reshifting of where we're going.
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Jordan Cooney
Let's talk about discovery. Because you brought up all these other ways that consumers can find information and gather insight and data. How are you thinking about discovery differently now? How are you looking at the world of how your users and your core audience is finding your data, finding your content? And how are you balancing the different possibilities and channels that exist?
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- [19:26]
Sean Hinklein
That's a really great question. I think email is more important than ever. It's always been incredibly important. I think most SEOs understand that like the email conversion numbers are astronomical compared to, you know, non brand search. Email is going to be your best litmus test to see if the content that you're creating and making that you really think is a great user experience is a great user experience. Like you can ask these users ahead of time. You can pilot something within a community, you could blast it before you share it publicly on social media like a site like Reddit or anything like that. So definitely email is more important. But also just cross channel discoverability is a thing that I think a lot of SEOs kind of just silo on. You should definitely care more about like Slack communities, discords, people that are in these micro communities that have referral traffic. Of course I think the sexy answer that I'm not 100% aligned with is like LLM referral traffic. But admittedly we're so early in that world that there's, we're still in the space of people coming out with SaaS, companies that are just like I can track all of your GPT and perplexity for $500 a month. All right, well we gotta like mature a little bit there. We don't know anything about prompt volume and if we claim we do, we're using search volume as a proxy and now we're back in Ahrefs and Google search console. So I feel like that has some time to blossom. I also think that like affiliates and partnerships are probably going to be a big, big deal right now, especially the more human ones. AI has already taken Spotify bands into the top 50. I don't know if you saw that that's trending right now. They've taken multiple dead Internet theory Instagram accounts where it's just AI slop and they're racking up like 500,000 followers. So this to me going back on that weird cyclical comment, people are going to get sick of that stuff really quickly and then this human authentic connection is going to be incredibly valuable in the market. It's going to be really tough to do that B2B but with a brand like Apollo, I think we could and can because we are, we're talking to the sellers. We're not talking to necessarily like the champions or the executives. We definitely want to, we were talking to them and in certain capacities. But SDRs and salespeople and marketing people, they can relate to the content. They get an idea of like, like what we're trying to send to them. So we gotta reach out to where they are. And this is finally my long winded way of answering your question. So are they on Google all the time? Hell no. Because we're not on Google all the time.
- [21:57]
Jordan Cooney
No.
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Sean Hinklein
Then it goes back all the way to user experience. Where are they? They're doom scrolling at 1am Eating Ben and Jerry's just like me. So that means I gotta pop up somehow and give them value. Do I wanna scare the shit out of them and give them a B2B gated PDF and be like, here's the 10 things you gotta know. You're gonna lose your job, Jonas. No, but there has to be a craftsmanship in the messaging, the content, the tone, and then syndication. And that's why I give a lot of crap to SEO as an acronym because it's syndication. It's really at the end of the day.
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Jordan Cooney
Yeah, yeah, you brought up this human aspect here and how all these different channels really engage with different users at different moments, whether it's at 1am or at 9:30 with your coffee, that, that multi channel component and the ability to reach human interaction is critical. So how do you balance automation in all of this? How do you balance your SEO, your CRO, your other page web page development strategies that may be automated but you still need to create that human authenticity and connection. So how are you balancing those efforts in your mind? And feel free to use examples that go beyond Apollo. I think that there's. You've had a great career in different places where you're trying to scale efforts and at the end of the day you're trying to make a connection with real humans.
- [23:19]
Sean Hinklein
Yeah, I can use an Apollo 1. And thanks for that question. I think it's understanding the role of the tools is the very first prerequisite. And understanding that when you say automation. I had a colleague who jokes about AI because he was like, no one says machine learning anymore. And that's the entire joke is because like there's a reason no one says machine learning anymore. It got a rebrand, it got a glow up. It got a really good glow up.
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Jordan Cooney
Right.
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Sean Hinklein
And understanding that that's where it's coming from. It's not going. It can do these things to emulate human connection and it can get you to the finish line. But ultimately people are going to see real like right through it because especially in B2B, you're targeting yourself, you're targeting the people that are in your seat, in your career, in your job, taking the same trajectory. You never want to seem inauthentic. So the balancing act is tough, and it is a really good question. But the way that I personally perceive it and execute on it is that AI gives me velocity. And the human connection is something that I have to get manually. So, like, this is something where we're talking to customers, we're building community, we're getting testimonials, we're figuring out what they like and don't like about the product, we're enhancing the product based off user feedback. We're looking at CRO and heat maps to wonder, all right, this content that we assumed that we thought, based off of this data, that was going to provide this big value, is it providing this value? And if it's not, let's change it. Let's not, like, have it die on a landing page where no one's going to see this thing. Let's actually try to give them some sort of value. And a lot of times that value isn't just some paragraph or some YouTube embed. That value can be a testimonial from a company, you know, like a Reddit or a Vanta or anyone, really. And that social proof is huge in a world where AI can just empower like 5,000, 6,000 pages in automation, we also want to make sure that we don't grow AI pages too quickly. You know, we're not. I know other. There's. There's different schools of thought on this. So I want to. I want to respect it. But, like, pressing a button and having 1000 URLs a week is dangerous, very dangerous. And it implies a few things. If you look behind the wizard of Oz curtain, it implies growth above all, cost for my domain and lack of a quality experience on these pages. Now, that is a very gross statement. It's a very assumed statement because I'm sure somewhere there's somebody dunking off like 200 URLs, and they're really, really great. But we want to make sure that what we put out there actually does have some value. It is a very. It's. AI is a sweet temptress. You know, like, it's great if your numbers are down and you want 5,000 landing pages and you want to blast out and boil the ocean, be my guest. But I can assure you from personal experience, it does not work. You got to focus on the user. So I think that's the Balancing act.
- [26:22]
Jordan Cooney
And this is a great segue because I want to talk about performance and performance measurement and like, what actually is working right and like, what's working for you guys. And I'm especially curious because you brought this up earlier in our episode. You know, you said, hey, there's this keyword that has got like 50 search volume. You know, how are you looking at performance? Like, I gotta believe that there's segments even within Apollo or within other businesses where you've worked on campaigns that really were just driving very, very, very few visitors. But those visitors were highly valuable, highly critical to the infrastructure of what you all are trying to do as a company, that the messaging you're trying to convey. So tell us about how you think about performance metrics in this new AI world. How you're thinking about components like traffic conversion rate and the expectations that you're setting with your coworkers and leaders.
- [27:14]
Sean Hinklein
That's a really great question. For better or for worse, I like to be on the hook for product analytics and performance like KPIs, you know, like signups and core reg, depending on the client and what we're doing, of course. But what I think AI is doing is they are deprioritizing traffic and increasing the prioritization of impressions and aios. Yeah, so like aios, basically that was like a nuclear bomb exploded. Right? Every SEO was like, oh, great, we're losing traffic hand over fist and my impressions are going up. So what can I ascertain from that other than that, you know, traffic down bad. Yes, of course. I feel for you. It's happening to all of us. But if your impressions are growing, that means Google thinks you're relevant in certain topics. That means you could create a content ecosystem and a flywheel. It could also mean that Gemini is serving a lot of this information because Gemini has stated they use AI overviews to power Gemini. And now that we're going into AI mode soon, and now you start to see this thread that we keep pulling on, pulling on, pulling on. So we're looking now at where impressions are indications of AI overviews, which are indications of Gemini, which are indications of LLM mentions an entirely new stream that is centered and starts with search. It starts with SEO. Yeah. So I think we have to not only track that, we have to acknowledge that. Well, first you got to acknowledge that it exists, then you got to track it. And there are companies that do that, like Telepathic and tracker and GPT trends. They do a really good job at like setting up, you know, different proms and the volume. But like I said before, that can only get you so far because we don't know one to one measurement how many people are typing something like this in? How do you aggregate all of these different types of prompts? What is prompt relevance versus prompt volume? This is still a very evolving space. There's a company called Profound. They're probably doing the best job at it right now. But we still got a long way to go. And because we have a long way to go, the way that I'm looking at analytics are like, my goals haven't really changed. I'm just looking at the product analytics and what can grow the business. An SEO CRO growth guy. But I am acknowledging that now the doors to come into Apollo have increased dramatically and LLMs and AIOS have changed the landscape. Absolutely. But I would argue, and this is a hot take because I don't like traffic going down, I would argue for the better because it gives your brand the, the ability to be in more places at one time. And it also tells you as an, as an SEO, like, what am I good at versus what am I bad at?
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Jordan Cooney
Oh, I love that.
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Sean Hinklein
Yeah. If I want to rank really well for, I don't know, camping gear, I got a camping chair right there. I don't even camp camping chairs with cup holders. All right, so I could get like a Google Ad carousel with 18 different chairs and. Or I could find out that I. There's an AI overview there from a camping website that's like, all right, we tested out four of them. We asked 10 people that are camping in Yellowstone. They hate brand XYZ and they love brand 1, 2, 3. Way better to get that in an AI overview than not at all. And in this new frontier, I can quantify my AI overviews over time either through like virtual machines or ahrefs. I think has like a new feature that you gotta pay for and that'll give me like a data driven content plan that'll tell me like, what does Google think I'm good at and what does Google think I suck at? This is also all to say that we've known this with keyword ranks. Like, this is basically a proxy, right? Like, if I'm on page one or two, I'm good, and if I'm on page nine or ten or not ranked, I suck. So AI overviews aren't necessarily doing anything very radical. They're increasing velocity by saying, hey, we don't have to wait two months for you to get on page two. Now we know this is good we're just gonna serve it right to the top.
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Jordan Cooney
Push you up to the top.
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Sean Hinklein
Yeah.
- [31:09]
Jordan Cooney
And I think it's interesting, I was in a conversation yesterday where we were talking about what does it mean to be in position one. Right. And it was really interesting. The response from the team was position one isn't about being in position one anymore. It's about that being the gateway to be more visible in AI overviews and AI mode and all these responses. But maintaining that requires analysis of position one at all times. You have to be checking at all times because moving in and out of position one can happen real fast. It can happen in various segues. Segues being like your example of camping chair versus camping chair with cup holders. You might be position one for camping chair, but you're not position one for camping chair with cup holders. And so that understanding is incredibly critical to this highly volatile, fast paced new environment where you have these AI overviews and these AI mode responses.
- [32:01]
Sean Hinklein
Yep, 100%. It's been really fun looking at competitive SERPs now with more of a understanding that it's not just a keyword content, juke the stats, add anchor, text, update my content type of game. Like now we can go, oh, you know what? No, to get the AI overview, this has to be better. So I am now obliged and have the privilege to invest time and resources and energy and bandwidth in making a good user experience because this is going to, this is what's most likely to get get me that AI overview versus I'm going to add two paragraphs and two links and I'm going to tell all my friends, I'm going to shove it on Reddit and go to fiverr.com like that, that shit's over. So it's great that we're getting better.
- [32:46]
Jordan Cooney
So let's go into implementation and what this looks like in a roadmap. So give our listeners some practical steps that they can take to integrate some of the ideas, concepts and utility of AI into their web pages, their websites and just give our listeners a couple real practical steps that they can take.
- [33:07]
Sean Hinklein
Yeah, I'll actually give you something that I did earlier this week and roast me in the comments. By the way, if this is a terrible idea, if you're going to be like, hey Sean, I could do this in a minute and you took 10 minutes to do this. I always want to learn more, so hit me up. But I'll tell you, all right, I'm going to stop burying that lead. So what I like to do is I like to look at a SERP for a keyword. I just start there. I start with Google. Ahrefs and Semrush are great and eventually we'll talk about Emily a little bit more if you have those accounts. But let's get right into it. So let's say it's Camping chair, because we're just going to pick on camping chairs. I want to see the syrup. I want to take some screenshots of it. I want to analyze each source code of each result on page one and I want to save it in either a Google spreadsheet or rich text editor like Sublime. Then I want to throw that into Claude and I want to throw it into GPT or whatever. But dealer's choice really. Gemini makes sense as well because it's Google. And then I want to ask it, why does this rank really? Well, what is the difference between these pages? What's the word count difference between these pages? How many links are on this page versus this page? What's it outlinking for or doing external linking for? You know, and then grade it. Tell me, like, where, where's the, what's the sweet spot here? Like how long? And then once you do that and you have a big report card of all this competitive intelligence BI data that would like McKinsey and Forrester are just going like, you know, like you have this like treasure trove of amazing shit. Then you go to Ahrefs and you look at the graph. I think other nerds listening, you know what graph I'm talking about. But if you don't, you look at, you go to Keyword Explorer, type in your keyword, scroll down and then you're gonna see this nasty looking line graph that you can go back two years so you'll be able to see. Oh man, I'm not a camper, so I don't know, does camperchare.com rank number one for camper chair or Camping Chair for the last like three years and like they're impenetrable or is there a ton of volatility there? And if there is a ton of volatility there, well, you just got all this BI data from Claude or GPT. So now incorporate the volatility and ask it over time, like who's losing rank and why do you think they're losing rank based off of the source code? And this probably means that they've been updating this article because they're probably looking to fight for this rank. This is the new version. In my opinion of keyword research. Everything that we just discussed is like keyword research, content research, user experience optimization research. Everything that you can think of to make a really kick ass user experience before you've even started. Because now you know what Google likes, you know what users like, you know if you can beat them because relative to Dr. And UR, you'll see that graph over time and you're not going, don't, don't fight a brick wall. I forget what Rand Fishkin said, but he's like, don't slam your head against a brick wall because you don't want to do that. That sucks. Like, you don't want to be beat. Canva for Canva. Like it's not going to happen. So doing all of this will give you. Let's say you wanted to rank for email template. You know something that's like mailchimp, Canva, Apollo, one of the, you know, one of those. Yep. If you wanted to do that, you're going to need to know everything about ranking for email template. It's not going to start from the Jackson Pollock studio where you're just like, let's make this like. Because you could make the best thing on the planet and no one could look at it. I think I remember hearing content is king Distribution's King Kong. You could have Slaughterhouse Six by Kurt Vonnegut, but no one's going to read it if no one knows it exists because it doesn't. Doesn't exist.
- [36:32]
Jordan Cooney
Exactly. So one of the things I think is really fascinating is how you connect to your user base, how you connect your brand to what you guys are trying to do and sell. Is there anything that you guys do at Apollo that helps you better understand that customer?
- [36:48]
Sean Hinklein
Yeah, we talk to them. I know that sounds a little silly, but we.
- [36:52]
Jordan Cooney
No, I love it.
- [36:53]
Sean Hinklein
Yeah. I think that's honestly the most important thing is setting up those inroads so that we can build community and talk to our customers. We have a lot of customers at Apollo. We're very fortunate. We have VSBs, SMBs, Mid Market Enterprise and everybody is going to need something different. They all have different goals. So it's also talking to our customers, but also assuming that they're not all the same, that's super dangerous. They're not. We have lots of different Personas and ICPs that we set up and getting that in a matrix so that we can build things for them and prioritize for them in terms of not just content marketing, but also what goes into our demo, what goes into the onboarding, what goes into prioritizing for internationalization and localization all of these things are not just decided as a dimly lit basement room with like five, five Apollo execs. It's more. It's the accumulation of a lot of like, feedback that we get from our, not just our customers, but also Apollo employees as well. You know, like, we're a global remote first organization. We have an incredibly awesome support team and they're on the front lines helping as many people as they possibly can. There's a feedback loop that's incredibly important that goes to the growth team and the marketing team and the sales team to help us empower. So, like, if those inroads didn't work and we all worked in silos, we would be just scatter shot. The brand would be kind of like in different pieces. I think you need to have that and it takes a long time to build it, especially as you're growing and as you're scaling. So listening to our users. Absolutely. But also creating content that is for them. You know, like the whole Pythia thing. Best time to email a CEO that. That took some time to come up with because we had to really look at what can we offer that's going to help people. That's really where we landed with like email templates and phone calls. Like, we want to give people who are selling the ability to sell more through data. And once we have that global statement, okay, great. That means that we're always going to be talking to our users. We're always going to be looking at user data, we're always going to be looking at emails and product usage. And that's not traditionally an SEO guy's, you know, job.
- [39:01]
Jordan Cooney
Right?
- [39:02]
Sean Hinklein
But it definitely is.
- [39:05]
Jordan Cooney
All right, and that wraps up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. A big thank you to Sean from Apollo for joining us. If you'd like to contact Sean, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or@voicesofsearch.com for more information about Apollo, visit Apollo IO. If you haven't subscribed yet and want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your Podcast Apply app or on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed soon. Okay, that's all for today, but until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.