In episode 541, Eric and Neil discuss how SEO, as we now know it, is slowly dying out. Tune in to hear how SEO is morphing and what you can do to continue successfully marketing your company.
Time-Stamped Show Notes:
- [00:27] Today’s Topic: How SEO Is Dying and What You Should Focus on Next
- [00:34] SEO the way you’re used to it, is changing.
- [00:56] Voice search is going to change the way we search and use SEO. Google is starting to focus heavily on voice commands.
- [01:30] The end result is that you will most likely be sent to the top paid result.
- [02:13] You have to focus on where your audience’s attention is.
- [02:45] How can you market to people and grab their attention?
- [02:57] You have a lot of different targeting options: Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- [03:40] By experimenting, you will learn what is working for you.
- [04:17] Leverage paid ads, social media marketing, or business development.
- [04:35] Run one or more experiments per week.
- [05:38] When one channel tanks, you won’t be out of luck, because you are trying a few different channels.
- [06:14] You can re-target people based on the content that they visited.
- [6:55] That’s it for today!
- [06:57] Go to Singlegrain.com/Giveway for a special edition of Crazy Egg, the heat mapping tool.
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The post How SEO Is Dying and What You Should Focus on Next | Ep. #541 appeared first on Marketing School Podcast.
Full Transcript of The Episode
Announcer: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Sui.
Eric Sui: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Sui.
Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.
Eric Sui: And today, we're going to talk about how SEO is dying, and what you should focus on next. Neil, do you want to kick things off?
Neil Patel: SEO and Google is out there. Google, I don't see them dying in the next few years, but they're changing. SEO the way you're seeing it in which, yeah, there's a listing page, there's 10 results, is dying. Yes, everyone's talking about how Google's doing their mobile indexing and they have a mobile version of Google that's coming out. You know what? That's not going to cause SEO to die.
What's going to cause SEO to die is voice. Everything is starting to move to voice. You look at Alexa. You can now tell Alexa, the device from Amazon, "Alexa, please order me a pizza. Alexa, what's the weather out, today?" Everything's going to start moving to voice. Google's focusing heavily on voice. They know this. As people start talking to Google, do you think they're going to get a listing of 10 results, and Google's going to respond back, "Listing Number One, is singlegrain.com and this is what they do. Listing Number Two is neilpatel.com and this is what they do." Of course, that's not going to happen. It's going to be where they end up sending you to a place or they end up giving you the answer.
Who do you think they're going to send people to? In most cases, the paid result. What's going to end up happening? No one knows yet, but we all know that the trend is moving towards voice. As it moves to voice, and more and more people keep using their phones, you're going to start seeing less results, and you're going to start seeing SEO die first, by less people clicking on Page Two and then on the bottom results of Page One. Eventually, even if you're Number Three, you're not going to get as many impressions or clicks as the first listing.
Eric Sui: So, in terms of where you should focus next, here's the thing. It's a loaded question because a lot of you listening, you all come from different niches. You're working on maybe a different product or service, you got to focus on where the attention of your audience is. There's no blanket answer for this. For example, let's look at people in the entrepreneurship space. Let's look at Gary V, motivational. He's focused on YouTube. He's looking at Instagram as well, right. That's where the attention is of the people that he's trying to motivate.
It could be people in their teens and their early 20s. This is Marketing 101. Where is your audience hanging out? How can you market to these people? How can you get their attention? Thankfully, right now you have Google, and Google has just overtaken Facebook again as the Number One referrer of traffic, but then you have Facebook, too. You have a lot of different targeting options that are out there.
In the old days, maybe you could go to certain niche forums, things like that, but think about it. For us, as a marketing agency, sometimes we forget about these other channels such as Twitter. Twitter's got a couple hundred million users. Yes, it's not growing that much, but sometimes the right people are hanging out there, certain venture capitalists or certain affluent people. So, think about where your people are hanging out, first, and then focus in on that. From there, what Neil and I talk about is building some kind of micro-brand, diversifying through content marketing, and building your audience. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Start to think about one thing first, and then branch off from that.
Neil Patel: You know what? You're going to end up experimenting. By experimenting, you'll learn what's working for you, what's not working for you. You should be, ideally, running one or two new experiments each week. Don't wait for SEO to die. If it's going to die, the question is just, when is it going to die? Keep trying to do new things. SEO's becoming harder and harder. You've already seen this trend in which six years ago, you can end up ranking within a few months, then it becoming, "Oh, you'll see good results within six months." Now, you really start seeing good results in one to two years. It's becoming harder and harder. It's becoming harder to get to the top. It's becoming harder to stay there. You can't rely on it. Why not leverage paid advertising? Why not leverage social media marketing? Why not leverage LinkedIn and Twitter? Why not leverage Business Development?
I don't know what the right channel is for you. Eric got it right when he was saying, each and every single one of your businesses is different, but the one thing that is consistent is, you're going to have to start experimenting. You should be ideally running one-plus experiment a week.
The way I run things is with growth teams, and we have meetings every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Every Monday, people are put up into groups, usually groups of three from different departments, and everyone talks about different ways we can grow and different tests. Each group picks one thing, and that thing has to be small enough where they can implement it within a few days. By Wednesday, it has to be implemented. We have a quick meeting. Everyone discusses what was implemented. By Friday, we go over the results, if they were good, bad, and what we learned. By having those meetings and having those teams structured in three people, they're moving fast, they're agile, there's no real overhead, and we're seeing results really quickly on what's really moving the needle. Once we start seeing things, "Hey, this has a lot of potential," we start diverting a ton more resources into it. That's how we're staying on top of our game and not relying on any one channel.
Yes, SEO's dying, but it's not just SEO. We don't want to rely on paid advertising, SEO, content marketing. We want to do whatever works for our business, so that way, when one channel tanks, we're still up and running and our business isn't going out.
Eric Sui: You know what's interesting? When people come to say, "Hey, Eric, we walk to work with your agency," they want to do just one thing. They tend to silo everything. It's like, "We've got this one agency doing this, one agency doing this, da, da, da." This is why I like in-house teams. Everyone's on the same page. They're focused on the same thing. When you don't operate in silos, when you think about, if you have a good content foundation, SEO's going to help. SEO and content, they go hand-in-hand. If people visit your piece of content, you have re-targeting pixels on there, you're going to be able to re-target those people based on the content that they visited, or the lead magnet that they downloaded.
Let's say that they come in on your email list, too. Then you take them through a flow and you give them a similar experience where they're being taken through, they're learning your story, and you have marketing automation that kicks in, and you're tagging people a certain way. Everything plays in together. Paid advertising, SEO, content, email marketing, all this other stuff. It all plays in together. Don't just think about SEO by itself, "We're going to bet everything on SEO," because I'm telling you, both Neil and I know people that bet everything on SEO only to see everything torched. You can't rely on one thing at the end of the day.
That's pretty much it for us. We, of course, have our usual giveaway. It's special. You want to learn more about it. Go to singlegrain.com/giveaway.
Neil Patel: All right. That's it for today. We'll see you tomorrow.
Announcer: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. Don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow, right here on Marketing School.
Eric Sui: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Sui.
Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.
Eric Sui: And today, we're going to talk about how SEO is dying, and what you should focus on next. Neil, do you want to kick things off?
Neil Patel: SEO and Google is out there. Google, I don't see them dying in the next few years, but they're changing. SEO the way you're seeing it in which, yeah, there's a listing page, there's 10 results, is dying. Yes, everyone's talking about how Google's doing their mobile indexing and they have a mobile version of Google that's coming out. You know what? That's not going to cause SEO to die.
What's going to cause SEO to die is voice. Everything is starting to move to voice. You look at Alexa. You can now tell Alexa, the device from Amazon, "Alexa, please order me a pizza. Alexa, what's the weather out, today?" Everything's going to start moving to voice. Google's focusing heavily on voice. They know this. As people start talking to Google, do you think they're going to get a listing of 10 results, and Google's going to respond back, "Listing Number One, is singlegrain.com and this is what they do. Listing Number Two is neilpatel.com and this is what they do." Of course, that's not going to happen. It's going to be where they end up sending you to a place or they end up giving you the answer.
Who do you think they're going to send people to? In most cases, the paid result. What's going to end up happening? No one knows yet, but we all know that the trend is moving towards voice. As it moves to voice, and more and more people keep using their phones, you're going to start seeing less results, and you're going to start seeing SEO die first, by less people clicking on Page Two and then on the bottom results of Page One. Eventually, even if you're Number Three, you're not going to get as many impressions or clicks as the first listing.
Eric Sui: So, in terms of where you should focus next, here's the thing. It's a loaded question because a lot of you listening, you all come from different niches. You're working on maybe a different product or service, you got to focus on where the attention of your audience is. There's no blanket answer for this. For example, let's look at people in the entrepreneurship space. Let's look at Gary V, motivational. He's focused on YouTube. He's looking at Instagram as well, right. That's where the attention is of the people that he's trying to motivate.
It could be people in their teens and their early 20s. This is Marketing 101. Where is your audience hanging out? How can you market to these people? How can you get their attention? Thankfully, right now you have Google, and Google has just overtaken Facebook again as the Number One referrer of traffic, but then you have Facebook, too. You have a lot of different targeting options that are out there.
In the old days, maybe you could go to certain niche forums, things like that, but think about it. For us, as a marketing agency, sometimes we forget about these other channels such as Twitter. Twitter's got a couple hundred million users. Yes, it's not growing that much, but sometimes the right people are hanging out there, certain venture capitalists or certain affluent people. So, think about where your people are hanging out, first, and then focus in on that. From there, what Neil and I talk about is building some kind of micro-brand, diversifying through content marketing, and building your audience. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Start to think about one thing first, and then branch off from that.
Neil Patel: You know what? You're going to end up experimenting. By experimenting, you'll learn what's working for you, what's not working for you. You should be, ideally, running one or two new experiments each week. Don't wait for SEO to die. If it's going to die, the question is just, when is it going to die? Keep trying to do new things. SEO's becoming harder and harder. You've already seen this trend in which six years ago, you can end up ranking within a few months, then it becoming, "Oh, you'll see good results within six months." Now, you really start seeing good results in one to two years. It's becoming harder and harder. It's becoming harder to get to the top. It's becoming harder to stay there. You can't rely on it. Why not leverage paid advertising? Why not leverage social media marketing? Why not leverage LinkedIn and Twitter? Why not leverage Business Development?
I don't know what the right channel is for you. Eric got it right when he was saying, each and every single one of your businesses is different, but the one thing that is consistent is, you're going to have to start experimenting. You should be ideally running one-plus experiment a week.
The way I run things is with growth teams, and we have meetings every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Every Monday, people are put up into groups, usually groups of three from different departments, and everyone talks about different ways we can grow and different tests. Each group picks one thing, and that thing has to be small enough where they can implement it within a few days. By Wednesday, it has to be implemented. We have a quick meeting. Everyone discusses what was implemented. By Friday, we go over the results, if they were good, bad, and what we learned. By having those meetings and having those teams structured in three people, they're moving fast, they're agile, there's no real overhead, and we're seeing results really quickly on what's really moving the needle. Once we start seeing things, "Hey, this has a lot of potential," we start diverting a ton more resources into it. That's how we're staying on top of our game and not relying on any one channel.
Yes, SEO's dying, but it's not just SEO. We don't want to rely on paid advertising, SEO, content marketing. We want to do whatever works for our business, so that way, when one channel tanks, we're still up and running and our business isn't going out.
Eric Sui: You know what's interesting? When people come to say, "Hey, Eric, we walk to work with your agency," they want to do just one thing. They tend to silo everything. It's like, "We've got this one agency doing this, one agency doing this, da, da, da." This is why I like in-house teams. Everyone's on the same page. They're focused on the same thing. When you don't operate in silos, when you think about, if you have a good content foundation, SEO's going to help. SEO and content, they go hand-in-hand. If people visit your piece of content, you have re-targeting pixels on there, you're going to be able to re-target those people based on the content that they visited, or the lead magnet that they downloaded.
Let's say that they come in on your email list, too. Then you take them through a flow and you give them a similar experience where they're being taken through, they're learning your story, and you have marketing automation that kicks in, and you're tagging people a certain way. Everything plays in together. Paid advertising, SEO, content, email marketing, all this other stuff. It all plays in together. Don't just think about SEO by itself, "We're going to bet everything on SEO," because I'm telling you, both Neil and I know people that bet everything on SEO only to see everything torched. You can't rely on one thing at the end of the day.
That's pretty much it for us. We, of course, have our usual giveaway. It's special. You want to learn more about it. Go to singlegrain.com/giveaway.
Neil Patel: All right. That's it for today. We'll see you tomorrow.
Announcer: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. Don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow, right here on Marketing School.
