Fireside Chat with Eli Schwartz & Kelly Hopping — From SEO to AIO

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Julia Nimchinski: Thanks, Jonathan and Wade, and we are transitioning to our next session. Welcome, Kelly Hopping, the CMO of the Mendes, and Eli Schwartz.

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Julia Nimchinski: Best-selling author, the reasonable voice in all things SEO. Welcome, how are you doing, both?

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Eli Schwartz: Great to be here.

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Kelly Hopping: Yeah, glad to be here. How you doing, Julia?

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Julia Nimchinski: Amazing! Excited for this, and everybody who’s watching, please share your questions in the HSC Slack, and yeah, let’s kick things off.

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Kelly Hopping: Awesome. Well, thanks for having us. Like Julia said, I’m Kelly Hopping. I’m the Chief Marketing Officer at Demandbase, and obviously, as a marketing practitioner, we are living and breathing this every day, so I’m super excited to hear from Eli Schwartz. He is the author of Product-Led SEO, and can help us understand this whole new world of AIO, or GEO, or AEIO, or whatever they’re calling it these days.

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Kelly Hopping: And so we’re gonna, we’re gonna start there. So, Eli, let’s kick off with that. Tell me what…

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Kelly Hopping: Help me with the acronym soup that’s going around this whole new world of AI search, essentially, and what should we be calling it, and are there differences? What does that even mean?

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Eli Schwartz: So it’s called SEO. We’re gonna keep that one. When you’re optimizing, or actually not even optimizing, when you’re building a marketing channel for people that use search.

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Eli Schwartz: And search can be comprised of going onto Google, it can be going onto Bing, it can be going onto ChatGBT, it can be going Claude.

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Eli Schwartz: Perplexity, Grok, the list goes on and on. And it could also be people using the refrigerator to do a search. It could be people using their metaglasses to do a search. That’s also search. Meta search, too. So all of that is search. There’s no reason to create a new acronym.

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Eli Schwartz: And I find that a lot of times people are creating acronyms because they want to sell a new service. So there’s some mystique around this, like, oh, you’re not doing great at SEO, but you’re doing even worse at this new acronym I created, so I’ve created something new, and now I can sell you another value-added service, or my agency does SEO, SEM, and then these three new acronyms I created. So I don’t think there’s any need for any new acronyms or any new channels.

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Eli Schwartz: This is the search channel. This is the…

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Eli Schwartz: not the other side of the coin, but the parallel side of the coin to paid search. So, paid is anything that you’re going to pay for visibility, and SEO is anything that you’re going to get organic visibility with whatever the medium is, and with whatever the platform is, and those are… those are the channels. We, like, SEM didn’t reinvent itself when TikTok came out.

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Eli Schwartz: And there’s no reason to reinvent SEO with a new acronym or a new way of doing things.

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Kelly Hopping: I love that, and that certainly makes things simple. It also maybe puts some, new agency offers out of business a little bit, back to, to traditional SEO. So when you read, you know, there’s articles all over the place right now saying, is SEO dead? Is traditional SEO dead?

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Kelly Hopping: From what you’re saying, no, it’s absolutely not dead, it’s just been reinvented or expanded because there’s new search channels.

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Eli Schwartz: Absolutely, and in fact, it’s constantly being dead, and it’s constantly being reinvented. And the part of SEO that’s dead, and this is the part I really like, is the fact, or like being dead, which is the ability to manipulate search results to do things that users shouldn’t see.

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Eli Schwartz: So, up until this point, where LLMs are sort of overtaking search, or LLMs are being comprised of a search, you were able to manipulate things that are not to the benefit of real users. So, for example.

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Eli Schwartz: this idea of stuffing keywords into pages. So you want to rank for something specifically, you stuffed a bunch of keywords, and you tricked the engine into thinking that now you’re more relevant. But you’re not, and the engine had loopholes because it’s an if-else algorithm, and it sees that you use the keyword many times, so it falls for that. The same goes with things like backlinks, where you’re able to manipulate links

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Eli Schwartz: by obtaining them without earning them, and then you manipulate the search engine into thinking that you’re more credible and more authoritative than you actually are. Now we bring LLMs into the picture, and LLMs are very simplistic AI, but you expand into real AI that thinks like humans. So if you want to be the best at something for a human.

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Eli Schwartz: humans know what they’re looking for. They’re looking for certain brand signals, they’re looking for certain quality signals. That’s what search is supposed to be, and that’s what search will become. The manipulation disappears. So that’s the part of SEO that is dead.

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Eli Schwartz: SE manipulation against search engines, which is really against users, is bad. So, for example.

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Eli Schwartz: If you’re shopping for a new car, and you’re actually not a good car, it’s not actually a good car maker, it’s not a good product, you could be… appear to be the best car without being the best car.

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Eli Schwartz: Now we’re bringing that together, so the same way that you’re going to be the best offline, because you have that brand, when you search for what is the best car for my family, ideally, you should be finding something that reflects what is actually the best car, so the algorithms are catching up to reality.

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Kelly Hopping: Incredible. So…

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Kelly Hopping: I mean, it sounds like in that environment, then, that the potentially better brands, better quality brands, are going to… maybe bigger brands, I don’t know, you tell me, are going to rise to the top when it comes… so it’s not even just about optimizing for search, but it’s also the scale and volume and quality that comes with it that’s going to help you rise to the top when you’re searching in the GPTs, for example.

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Eli Schwartz: Absolutely. And when I talk… so, the downside to this, of course, is that big brands who have lots of money are going to succeed.

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Eli Schwartz: And that’s actually the way things already are. I mean, if you are a big brand with lots of money, you can buy a… you can rent a store on the most popular street. And the startup brand can’t really do that. That’s reality. That’s, you know, unless you can raise a lot of money and convince people they should lend you money, and now you can get a store in, you know, on the biggest street.

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Eli Schwartz: You can’t do that. So, offline is now going to merge into online.

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Eli Schwartz: But there’s a way that smaller brands can be successful and build this brand, and it’s still online, you can still be super creative. So I met a company recently who’s starting a brand new

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Eli Schwartz: product. And they said, how do we become, like, how do we get this visibility? Well, now, this is when you do things that are brand building that aren’t necessarily SEO. And I… I am a holistic SEO consultant. I help build SEO strategies. So for me, it’s like, I’m not just trying to sell another SEO

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Eli Schwartz: tactic that I can monetize, I want to see companies succeed. So what I recommend to this business is they start doing TV ads. So they, through the Roku platform, through YouTube, through Reddit ads, you can build a brand, then now you have brand search, so now you’re going to get more people that see your brand.

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Eli Schwartz: and you accrue SEO signals at the same time. So it’s not just I’ve optimized for best widget near me, it’s I’m actually becoming the best widget, I’m using these other channels to convince people, to try me, to see that I’m the best widget, to create K-factors and virality that lots of users are using it and understanding it, then the SEO comes together.

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Eli Schwartz: And just to put… to tie this together with one quick thought, in this respect, an NPS score is actually more valuable than domain authority.

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Kelly Hopping: Wow, okay, wait, that just, like, that was sort of a bomb you just dropped right there. Tell me what that means, and why would NPS affect, that more than your traditional domain authority?

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Eli Schwartz: So, domain authority is…

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Eli Schwartz: we can look at it as, like, a loophole or a gap in the way that search engines are going to quantify the internet. So, initially, when Google was created, they saw this way of looking at the internet from a scholarly standpoint that scholars think… link and talk about other scholars, so therefore, they said the internet should be the same thing.

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Eli Schwartz: Of course, marketers see this and say, wow, I can pay other scholars to talk about me. Now I appear scholarly because I’ve offered money.

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Eli Schwartz: So that’s a gap. But now… but you… again, you might not be the most scholarly, you might not be the most authoritative, you just paid for it.

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Eli Schwartz: But the way to actually be the most authoritative, the way to be the best brand, is to be the best brand. So if you’re tracking your NPS score, that people actually like your product, they talk about your product, they write about your product, they tell their friends to use it.

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Eli Schwartz: those would be leading signals that eventually you’re also going to accrue those SEO signals that the LLMs and traditional search are going to say that you’re the best product. If your NPS scores are terrible, but you’re doing all these SEO tactics, yes, you may have short-term gains, but then they align and you disappear.

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Kelly Hopping: Wow. The reason why I’m in kind of awe, because as I think as a marketer who, you know, we spend a lot of money on sponsored ads on Google, paid search, now we’re saying, hey, those, one, traffic’s probably moving away from a Google and moving into a different search engine, like a GPT. Now, as of today, there are no sponsored ads in a GPT environment.

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Kelly Hopping: And… and now you can’t even sort of buy traffic, because it has to be kind of authentic and organic in the way that it drives if you’re… I mean, if it’s NPS, essentially product happiness and satisfaction and things that are going to rise you to the top. How do marketers now use

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Kelly Hopping: Search, to their advantage.

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Eli Schwartz: So, I think one thing that many marketers don’t do enough of is to flip around and sit in that other seat, and to be a buyer, to be a user. So too many marketers, they look at their marketing task as something that’s been given to them by their bosses, or even themselves, to say, I need to market this product.

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Eli Schwartz: Rather than, I need to buy this product, what would I do if I were actually buying it? So I hear a lot of, and I meet many companies, so I’m fortunate that

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Eli Schwartz: I can meet many companies and hear their challenges, and I always hear the same thing, which is, how do I promote this?

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Eli Schwartz: everyone’s using ChatGBT, and I’m not as visible in ChatGBT, and I’m going to spend my money on a ChatGBT visibility tool, because that’s marketing today. And then I ask them, what kind of things do they do in ChatGBT, and do they realistically not use Google anymore? And suddenly the picture changes.

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Eli Schwartz: it becomes what it amounts to, some sort of reality, which is, you know, maybe 10-20% of people use ChatGPT,

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Eli Schwartz: Or 10-20% of their searches are on ChatGPT, and the rest of them are in a Google-like environment. So again, it could be Bing, it could be Perplexity, but it’s searches, it’s queries, and they’re looking at search results. So that’s still traditional search. So when they sit in that other seat.

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Eli Schwartz: of, how would I find this thing? Now they get more insights of, how do you market this thing? So generally, I think marketers don’t do enough of this actual pretending to have empathy. Not just like, well, I thought about it, what is the empathy like? Or I’ve put personas on the wall, and these are

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Eli Schwartz: you know, I’ve been in companies where they name their personas, and they give them really weird characteristics. Like, they drive a Honda, and they have a coach bag. I’m like, how is a coach bag and a Honda relevant to your software product?

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Eli Schwartz: Not at all. You really have to say, this is a CIO, they’re purchasing software. This is a senior manager, they’re recommending to their CIO they purchase software. What do I need to do to appear for that person doing that search?

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Eli Schwartz: How do those other channels factor in? Does social factor in? Does things like, you know, and this is very common in our space, where you… the first place you get a recommendation is you go into Slack and you ask your friends.

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Eli Schwartz: your other Slack, not your work Slack, and you say, what’s the best tool that you use for this? Well, if that’s something that you do, why would your customers not do the same thing? So the best way to get there is to pretend you’re like your customer, and to think like your customer.

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Kelly Hopping: Interesting. So, fun story where my mind went as you were talking. So I have, you know, I’m in my 40s, I have a son who is 17, and I have a son who is 15.

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Kelly Hopping: And recently, I told them, I said, hey, you guys, we were making a meal for a homeless family, and I said, hey, I need you guys, I have to work today, so you need to come up with a way to make lasagna. Like, figure out what ingredients we need, find a recipe, make this thing so that tonight we can deliver it.

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Kelly Hopping: I immediately, like, trying to help, reached up and grabbed our recipe book, like.

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Kelly Hopping: Where I go for all recipes. I pulled it off the shelf, I’m flipping through it, and the same time it took me to open that, my 17-year-old Googled a recipe, and he was like, got it, I found a recipe, and he was proud of his recipe. Same time, my 15-year-old chat GPT’d a recipe, and what he came back with, I got our shopping list. Like, in 90 seconds, we had 3 different recipes, we had a shopping list.

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Kelly Hopping: And it was because, to your point, knowing buyers, each… I mean, in this case, our buyer, or my customer, was, you know, two different teenagers, even just two and a half years apart, went through two different search vehicles to find their answer. One was looking for shopping list, one was looking just for the end result. And I just think, gosh, that’s really what it’s like about knowing our personas. They’re all gonna shop different, they’re gonna use different resources.

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Kelly Hopping: I’m gonna grab a hard book, for some reason. My kids immediately go to the internet. So just thinking about what you just talked about, I think that’s so right and so real, because you’re really saying, like, hey, understand it’s not about, you know, paid sponsored ads. I think all of us have kind of outsmarted that. We scroll past some of the sponsored ads and get to the organic, hopefully, to find the real kind of recommendations on the internet.

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Kelly Hopping: now that that’s being synthesized so much through, because, like you said, the GPTs are just smarter, and they can distill out kind of the reality, I think it’s just going to be a different… a different model moving forward. So I ask now, like, what happens on the back end?

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Kelly Hopping: So what used to happen, or what does happen still in Google, is organic link to one website pulls up.

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Kelly Hopping: And if you decide it’s worthwhile, you click on it, you read it, you go back to Google, you click on another one, you do two or, you know, however many to do your complete search. Now all of that is synthesized into one place. What’s gonna drive you to actually go visit now

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Kelly Hopping: a company? Are they gonna click through GPT? Are they following? Are they actually reading the little resource links? Or, like, how do we get… how do we get them to take an action beyond just searching in a GPT?

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Eli Schwartz: So, the big thing that I’ve been talking about the last couple of years is thinking about funnels, and where a user is in that buyer journey.

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Eli Schwartz: And I think that SEO has moved from the top of the funnel, which is ranking on a one- to two-word keyword search phrase, to mid-funnel. So we have to assume

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Eli Schwartz: the users have now educated themselves, and now they’re in the mid-funnel, and they’re ready to take an action, and that’s when you want to appear to show them your action. I was working with a company in the mental health space, and they were addressing anxiety. So, from the top of the funnel, anxiety, that no longer exists as a search query. I search anxiety.

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Eli Schwartz: Google’s going to tell me this is what anxiety is, this is what it feels like, and these are some options to treat it.

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Eli Schwartz: The middle of the funnel is where this company can offer one of their options of treating it, this company

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Eli Schwartz: treated it with therapy. But there are many ways to treat that. You can treat it with meditation, you can treat it with drugs, you can treat it with illegal drugs, you can treat it with retreats. So, the mid-funnel is now someone is aware that these are the different options, and they can take that journey all the way to the bottom of the funnel.

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Eli Schwartz: Bottom of the funnel in search is paid. So I figured out that I want to go to this retreat center, I googled it, and that’s where your paid ad comes up and say, don’t go to that retreat center, come to this retreat center. That’s bottom of the funnel. That’s not… that’s very difficult to do in SEO, because

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Eli Schwartz: you know, paid marketers know that they can interrupt that, and they can retarget it. Mid-funnel is now where the meat of SEO is. The top of the funnel, in many cases, won’t exist anymore.

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Eli Schwartz: for many queries, because it’ll answer. Now, if you’re selling a product or service, so your example where you’re talking about a recipe.

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Eli Schwartz: That’s a commodity, right? It’s not unique. So you’re selling, like, there are many, many websites that try to monetize commodities. Let’s say, not commodities, but commoditized traffic and content. So think about, like, anything in the medical space. That content has existed for 2,000 years.

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Eli Schwartz: It’s not unique and proprietary to you. When you move down that funnel, that’s when you can present something that’s unique and proprietary that can’t be given away by the search engine. So someone might want your specific recipe.

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Eli Schwartz: maybe there’s a diet angle to it, maybe there’s a health angle to it. So when they’re getting deeper in that funnel, instead of, I just want a recipe, well, Google can give away that recipe, or ChatGPT can give away the recipe. Middle of the funnel.

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Eli Schwartz: is where you can monetize. Middle of the funnel is where you get that snippet and say, come to our website, and now transact, or now sign up, or now buy, or whatever that next action is. But if your only way of monetization

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Eli Schwartz: was visibly read content, that’s disrupted unless it’s in a news space. So, interestingly enough, many content websites are being completely disrupted by AI overviews and ChatGPT and AI search in general. ESPN is not. And the reason ESPN is not is because

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Eli Schwartz: yes, they’ve lost the sports score searches. If I want a sports score, I go to Google, I get the sports score. But if I want to be entertained by a long-form piece of sports reporting.

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Eli Schwartz: AI’s not gonna tell me that. I’m not going to read the play-by-play in an emotional sort of way that I go to ESPN. So, ESPN loses some aspect of search, but there’s still value to be added in the middle of the search. The same goes with any media property.

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Eli Schwartz: Wirecutter, which is a New York Times property, has lost a tremendous amount of traffic, and of course, revenue, because they monetize that traffic.

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Eli Schwartz: The New York Times, the news content, does not, because that’s unique and proprietary. So when you think about it from a buyer perspective, and the value you’re adding.

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Eli Schwartz: That’s where SEO still exists. If all you’ve done is try to rank and grab clicks that were not unique and proprietary to you.

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Eli Schwartz: the traffic goes away. So there is a follow-on. Whether that comes from clicking on an AI overview, or scrolling past the AI and clicking, or doing a deeper mid-funnel search, that SEO will always exist.

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Kelly Hopping: Got it. Okay, that makes sense. We’ve got a couple questions in the chat, which we’ll get to. Before we go into those.

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Kelly Hopping: I want to talk about why we have you here today. So, you wrote a book called Product-Led SEO. Tell me a little bit about that book, and what your intention was in writing, and how it connects to this topic now. I mean, I think you wrote it a few years ago. What’s the connection between… like, does it still hold true today?

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Eli Schwartz: Yeah, so I wrote the book, it came out about four years ago, so I started writing it a little bit of, you know, five and a half years ago, and it was my way of saying everything about SEO seemed to be wrong to me, and one company I worked at got hit by such a significant penalty, we lost 80% of our traffic before all was done.

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Eli Schwartz: And that could have been fatal, but we recovered it. And that’s where my thinking around what SEO should be became.

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Eli Schwartz: Which is, it’s not about tricking Google, it’s not about trying to be one step ahead of Google, it’s about marrying what Google is trying to do, which is service a user.

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Eli Schwartz: and the user. And that became what I called product-led SEO, which is you’re developing the entire product experience around the searcher. So, Zillow is a great example of that.

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Eli Schwartz: The only way you’re going to find a page on Zillow for an address is with search, or search either on a search engine or within Zillow itself. They’re not sending paid traffic to my personal address on Zillow.

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Eli Schwartz: That’s a product created for search. So I wrote this book, and really thinking about how you think about SEO from a user standpoint.

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Eli Schwartz: it landed well enough that people read it, and people adopted it, and obviously I got enough inbound, you know, contacts that I was able to build a consulting practice out of it.

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Eli Schwartz: But I think it resonates now more than ever, because it was hard to resonate when the short-term tactics work. When you were able to say, well, this product-led SEO thing sounds novel, but I’m writing a bunch of keyword-driven content, I’m driving traffic, and I’m monetizing, or I’ve written content, and I bought a bunch of links, and I don’t need to really be creative and strategic about this.

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Eli Schwartz: As those tactics disappear, as the sort of gray hat SEO disappears, all that’s left is really understanding users and building experiences around users that benefit users, because that’s what the search engines are looking for. So I’m actually seeing more sales and more reads of my book.

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Eli Schwartz: Than the year after it came out.

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Kelly Hopping: Oh, interesting. That’s good. Well, hopefully this… this message of SEO is still SEO, whether… no matter what your search platform is, continues to drive that. I think that’s great. One question that came in in the chat was, says, interested in how you think marketplaces

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Kelly Hopping: can use SEO and AIO to survive and continue to capture value in a world where LLMs can bypass those intermediaries and instead give direct product or service recommendations. So where do the marketplaces fall in there?

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Eli Schwartz: So, this is the thing that if we, like, flip to the other side of the desk, and you sit in a user’s seat.

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Eli Schwartz: If an LLM can disrupt you, then you weren’t really adding a ton of value to begin with.

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Eli Schwartz: So, if anybody can just scrape your website, and then that’s the marketplace, so an LLM is essentially a scraper, then there wasn’t a lot of value. So, Yelp

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Eli Schwartz: let’s say Yelp is a marketplace, it’s not a pure marketplace, it’s UGC, but Yelp adds a ton of value that Google couldn’t really disrupt. So Google Disrupt, they took a lot of traffic from them, but Yelp’s value add is a user base that gives unique recommendations and unique referrals and references to restaurants to go eat at.

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Eli Schwartz: So, if ChatGPT can do the same thing and apply the same

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Eli Schwartz: you know, algorithms on where you should eat based on some score, then the content really wasn’t a value add. So that’s… that’s the way I think about it. Amazon can’t be disrupted by an LLM. They have this huge database of sellers and obviously many buyers, they can’t be disrupted. So if all you’ve done is just aggregate something and vibe-coded something even worse.

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Eli Schwartz: in an afternoon, then anybody can disrupt you, not just an LLM. So that’s the way I think about it. If what you’re doing is novel and proprietary enough that you can’t be copied in an afternoon, then I wouldn’t worry about it. I would think about what the angle is that someone can search it.

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Eli Schwartz: So let’s say eBay, despite everything that has happened within e-commerce, the best place to buy unique, vintage stuff is still going to be eBay. So that’s the thing. You’re building a product, and you’re building a brand, and you’re building something that’s not just commoditized SEO traffic.

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Kelly Hopping: So the big theme… I mean, the big theme I’m hearing through all of this is that the onus is back on the businesses, back on the brands, to… to be special, to deliver quality product.

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Kelly Hopping: to deliver a quality experience, to offer something unique and differentiated, that is not commoditized, that can’t get scraped like normal content, that really makes you stand out, that’s gonna make you rise to the top with NPS, organic, organic meaning authentic love, versus sort of bought links.

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Kelly Hopping: In order to rise to the top. And so, what that’s gonna be, it sounds like a benefit to customers, ultimately. We get the best experience because we know the best things are rising to the top.

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Eli Schwartz: Yeah, and not just the onus on the business, I put it the onus on the marketer. So the marketer has always found these shortcuts of, like, oh, I found a way to buy cheap traffic and get eyeballs and lots of people coming to my website.

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Eli Schwartz: well, they’re not quality, you’re not creative. If you found this angle so someone else can do what you’re doing and bid one cent higher, or you found a way to buy backlinks, and now they’re gonna go on Sumrush or Ahrefs, and they’re gonna find your exact backlinks.

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Eli Schwartz: And copy you. But if you’ve done something creative where it’s not just about the SEO, but it’s also about the brand.

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Eli Schwartz: That has more staying power. So I think marketers need to do more, and we’re being forced to be creative because those old hacks, they don’t necessarily work anymore, and they shouldn’t work anymore because they’re the detriment of the users.

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Kelly Hopping: Yeah.

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Kelly Hopping: So if you’re really saying, other than…

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Kelly Hopping: marketers being better at their jobs, nothing else is really needed to capitalize on LLM search as compared to traditional, you know, Google search. Then what advice would you have for maybe a CMO, or a digital marketing leader, demand gen leader, in this era to capitalize on getting the most traffic, to get the most quality, to get in touch with their customers in the most

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Kelly Hopping: authentic way? What’s that sort of, like, what is, what does Digital Marketing 101 look like moving forward?

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Eli Schwartz: So, I think this is a pivotal moment. This is the time where you can say, I’m not just gonna have a playbook SEO process where, like, this is what you do for one site, and you can do… you can replicate the exact same thing for another site. It’s really about being creative and thinking about what does it for your business. There was, you know, early in my journey of writing product-led SEO, it was spurred by a company I’d met.

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Eli Schwartz: In the insurance space. And the insurance space, I think GEICO or Progressive, one of the insurance websites, is older than Google.

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Eli Schwartz: So, if you’re building a brand new insurance website, and this was in 2018 or 2019, you’re not going to outrank GEICO and Progressive because their websites are older than Google.

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Eli Schwartz: you need to do something creative. So as I dug into what they were doing, they were doing this spamiest stuff, like, you know, insurance quote in this zip code, insurance quote in this town, buying a ton of links, programmatic content. Now they call it AI content, but back then it was still AI content, just less AI.

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Eli Schwartz: They eventually got hit by a huge Google penalty, but when I talked to them about their business, what they specialized in, and what they raised money on, was that they were able to do sticky insurance cases, like teens with accidents, or adults with drunk driving, or whatever it is that made it harder to get quotes that your typical insurance websites couldn’t do.

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Eli Schwartz: So then I asked, well, if that’s who you’re trying to monetize, and that’s your value add, and that’s how you raised money, why is your SEO not doing the same thing? There is search for that, clearly, because that’s what they’re monetizing. Why are you doing this boring thing and trying to outrank GEICO and Progressive, which is absolutely impossible? So that’s what I would say to the CMO.

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Eli Schwartz: what’s your reason for raising money? What’s your reason for standing on a stage and saying, this is what our business does? That should be reflected in SEO, rather than, well, this is the primary keyword of our business, and I want to figure out how to rank and get traffic just for that keyword. There is an angle, there is an ideal customer. Another business I recently met, I asked them about their personas, and I said, who do you service? And they said, everyone.

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Eli Schwartz: Like, you can’t service everyone. It has to be that there is a 40% grouping that makes sense to focus more on for SEO. And they’re like, of course! We have females over 35 that live in New York. Like, so then do SEO around that.

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Eli Schwartz: Maybe it doesn’t… it’s harder?

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Eli Schwartz: But that’s who you monetize.

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Eli Schwartz: Think about what that cohort is searching, rather than optimizing for the top keywords in the entire space.

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Kelly Hopping: Yeah, those longer tail, kind of the middle of the funnel, too, that you talked about, both longer tail and more specific in the, in the research they’ve already done. So, a question just came in from the audience. It said, how should brands balance building their own entity authority versus focusing on third-party platforms?

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Kelly Hopping: Probably a follow-on a little bit to the marketplace, but as we think about a brand who is a participant in a marketplace versus a participant in their own brand building, how should they balance their focus?

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Eli Schwartz: So I think if you think about it from a, again, human perspective.

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Eli Schwartz: then you don’t want to just make sure that your own website is ranking. So I’ll point this to myself. So, like, from a personal brand standpoint, I have a personal website. I don’t think I even rank on my own name.

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Eli Schwartz: But my LinkedIn does. So that… that means I’ve done SEO effectively, because if you search my name, you find my LinkedIn. You find my newsletter, you find my book. So, doesn’t matter whether the About Me page on my own personal website is ranking. So that’s what I would answer, which is.

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Eli Schwartz: If it’s so hard for you to get your own website ranking on some sort of term, but it’s very easy for you to get YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, whatever it is.

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Eli Schwartz: focus on that, because that’s what humans will look for. Like, I don’t… again, I don’t care if I find a brand’s corporate page where I find their TikTok, which says the same thing the corporate page does. So that’s the way we think about it. Think about it from a human perspective of, like.

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Eli Schwartz: what does brand authority look like? And I know there are many, many in AI and, you know, whatever they call it, they’re making up new acronyms, say spam reddit.

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Eli Schwartz: or Reddit is one thing that seems to work today, but in the future, it might be Quora. In the future, it might be other forums. Go where the humans would look for understanding authority.

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Kelly Hopping: Awesome. Yeah, I think that’s… that’s such a wise… I think that’s just good guidance for marketers, period, regardless of whether we’re talking about SEO or not. And so I love… that’s my big takeaway from this… this whole session. We have one minute left. I’m gonna ask one more question that just came in, which is really about… we talked a little bit about, kind of, how paid fits in all of this.

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Kelly Hopping: But this one’s more about multi-touch attribution. So, what are the overall impacts on current multi-touch attribution with LLM search moving from traditional search?

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Kelly Hopping: Will there be a monetization plan for LLM? Do you think in the future, we talked a little bit about that, but do you see this with and without an ad monetization path? Like, is it going to be sourced in a similar way? Are companies like Visible or any of these multi-touch platforms pulling in organic, or LLM search in the same way?

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Eli Schwartz: Yeah, it’s interesting that, you know, we talked about this before, like, there’s software that claims to… that people are investing, and they claim to show your LLM visibility, but none of them can show whether you actually get traffic from the LLM keywords that they’re helping you measure. So, I think there is absolutely a need for multi-touch, but when you think about SEO holistically.

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Eli Schwartz: It might be that someone, and this is impossible to measure, that someone Googles something, or ChatGPT something, and they see your brand, but never click.

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Eli Schwartz: So if you think about SEO from a holistic marketing perspective, it’s paired with SEM, it’s paired with brand, it’s paired with newsletter, it’s paired with all of those things.

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Eli Schwartz: from a holistic standpoint, that’s what multi-touch should look like. I don’t need you to click, I don’t need you to convert, I need you to see the message I wanted you to see when you’re in that place in the funnel where SEO makes the most sense. So, it’s hard to capture, but if you approach it from a logical standpoint.

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Eli Schwartz: It makes sense to be able to invest in it, because you can explain why it should exist.

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Kelly Hopping: Awesome.

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Kelly Hopping: Well, Eli, thank you so much. I know everyone, enjoyed this session. I learned a ton, just on the responsibility back on me as a marketer, and making sure that we do really, really authentic marketing. SEO is SEO, just a different channel, and we need to keep building thought leadership, keep building our brands, keep focusing on quality, and keep focusing on the customer experience, and we will continue to do that. So thank you so much for being here today. I love the chat.

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Eli Schwartz: Thanks, Kelly.

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Julia Nimchinski: Thank you so much again, Eli and Kelly, and let’s do one minute of shameless plugs. Eli, is there a new book coming?

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Eli Schwartz: I do have a new book. So my book is the same idea as product-led SEO, but without the SEO in it at all. So in my consulting, I’ve discovered, like the examples I just gave Kelly, where companies aren’t focusing on who their buyers are, so I want to teach people how to figure out who their buyers are. So it’s called Customer Intelligence.

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Eli Schwartz: And it’s companies that have done a fantastic job about understanding their users, and how any business can replicate these ideas, and understand their users, and build their marketing around their users.

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Julia Nimchinski: Amazing, and when is the day of the release? Gosh.

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Eli Schwartz: When I finish it. I’m publishing it with Wiley, it’s due to them in January, so I think it comes out in August.

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Julia Nimchinski: Huge. And Kelly, what’s next for demand base?

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Kelly Hopping: Oh, we have a lot of things coming, mostly things all around AI. So, all about, pipeline generation automated, for growth without, without a lot of intervention. So, outcome-based optimization of, of generating pipeline based on defining your audience, and, and then it reading the signals and building, campaign journeys to match to that. One piece that Eli said was that,

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Kelly Hopping: CTV, or digital TV, is a big opportunity, I think, moving forward with this, and so CTV is a big area we’re investing in as well. We obviously have a, a proprietary solution that already for B2B businesses, but we’ll continue, to do more and more there. So, excited for the future of Demandbase.

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Julia Nimchinski: Awesome, we’re excited as well. Everybody, follow Kelly and Eli, and yeah, thanks again. Zach Holland, welcome to the show!