Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted SEO podcast host. I'm here with Nick Leroy, who doesn't need much of an introduction if you're in the SEO space. Some of you are literally working your jobs because of his work on SEO jobs. And apparently now some PPC folk out there have their jobs thanks to him. He's an SEO freelancer who's been in the space for quite a while. Excited to jump deep in, but I'll give you a chance to introduce yourself and tell the folks what you would say you do here. Nick.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, first and foremost, Jared, thank you for the invite. I'm really glad that we could make this work. And I don't know if I can say nicer things about myself than you just did. So you did a great job. But my, you know, two minute flex is always just, you know, pain. I'm Nick, been an SEO for, I think it's 16 years now. The first 10 years were was agency side, you know, through a couple different jobs and then I've been out on my own for the last six years as you were also kind enough to share. You know, I've been very vocal about my experience, you know, switching jobs, being fired, trying to find jobs. And that really led into the passion project that is SEO jobs. Com.
And I think we all still to this day can say we've been on the linkedins, we've been in the indeeds type in SEO with, you know, remote or your area, and the first thing we get back to this day is always like, you know, the Java developer that contains a bullet that says SEO knowledge. Nice to have.
And so I ultimately built what I refer to as the site that I wanted when I needed it or after I needed it.
[00:01:57] Speaker A: That's fair. I'm curious what your take is for freshmen that are coming into SEO in this day and age.
What you're saying as far as when you're putting up getting these postings, what the feedback is of people who are applying for this, like, what's the state of play of the hiring side of SEO right now?
[00:02:22] Speaker B: I think that's a single word is ugly.
And what I mean by that is not just like SEO is dead or nobody's getting a job, like that's not true.
But where we are now with the combination of so much remote work, AI and if I'm being completely honest, just kind of greediness, like we're in a situation where it's a buyer's market we have never had until, you know, this last year or Two, this situation where the demand for SEO talent being lower than the stock of talent that we have, that's how a lot of what I used to call C SEOs were getting six figure A salaries. Because it was just they wanted, they needed to fill, you know, the seat.
And now that, you know, AI is kind of making these entry level jobs almost irrelevant, it's now turning into, okay, well, there's a lot of talent available, but because I have the upper hand as a hiring manager, it's how can I pay you less? How can I demand more for less?
And it's become very difficult.
I'm going to try desperately not to go too deep into it. But there's two things specifically that come to mind that is kind of separating the SEO world right now.
One, I would just say the soft skills are what matter and differentiate you. Now, I always ask people that reach out to me, Jeremy, like, cool, you're looking for a new gig. I know you've been there forever, but what makes you stand out? And if I'm in a crappy mood, I might even say, what makes you special?
And more times than not, the response that I hear is, you know, I've been an SEO for 20 years.
Cool. Tell me, like, something else you do, Nick, you don't understand 20 years.
And it's just like, wow, okay. What that tells me is that your expectations are going to be sky high for salary. You know, that four day work week, full remote, you know, max work life balance. And we're not in an economy right now that you get to kind of demand those things.
But what's making people stand out is kind of passion, projects, how you're able to communicate.
And I think that there's an art of persuasion with SEO that a lot of people simply don't have.
And that brings me to kind of that second point where I think things are struggling is, you know, Jarrett, you and I, you've been in this for like 20 years. I've been in for darn near 20 years.
We remember what it was like to have an Internet connection, a Twitter account, and like SEO Book and Mozart. I mean, that's kind of like where we started.
And if you weren't curious, you know, you didn't learn. And if you didn't learn, you didn't get results.
We have a newer generation. It's not necessarily their fault, but this generation that I'm kind of identifying from like 2015 to 2023, maybe they came in and SEO had been kind of structured because how many times have you been told? It's like, okay, welcome to the team. We want you to start off by reading the Moz Guide to Learning SEO. And then we're going to basically walk you through how we do SEO, which I, you know, say in a not so nice way, it's just like, that's the checkbox SEO.
So what SEOs were required to do at that point was less about how you present it, that critical thinking. It was, how quickly can you execute tasks.
Yes. And that was your value.
Because up until recently, those best practices for the most part could show positive roi. Like nothing that's like hockey stick or crazy. But so what it's left now is a lot of SEOs that are gifted in the tasks.
You know, I know how to do image alt tags, I know how to do titles, I know all of this. And AI is doing most of those, if not all of those, better, quicker, cheaper.
And what that leaves is SEOs who now have that skill set that truly makes you valuable.
Which again, kind of goes back to that first point of, you know, how are you communicating with AI? Things are only more complicated.
So how do you take SEO where it was, where it is, and AI, and, you know, we'll just kind of sprinkle that, it depends all over the top of it.
But it's like, how do you talk to someone in a C suite now? They already don't really care about SEO, but now you're going to start talking about, you know, index rates and crawl budgets and DLLMs and your MCPs, like, no, you've already lost them.
So that's a very long winded way to say that. Like I said, the market is ugly. And I don't think people looking to hire always understand, or maybe their job descriptions just don't show what they really want because we're all kind of defaulting to what you used to expect from like a job description.
And then again, because individuals were, you know, building their career, getting accolades, getting raises by doing checkbox SEO, they haven't really been encouraged to, you know, network, think critically, build a side project. You know, all these things that are deemed kind of extra.
But right now, the people with large networks and share their opinion, those people aren't struggling to get work.
[00:08:50] Speaker A: Right.
That's fair.
And it's, it is a changed game.
I'm having a lot of conversations. You know, I talked with Brett Sklar who said, AI isn't taking your job, it's taking your tasks. But if your job consists of just completing tasks, then yeah, you're in danger.
And so that definitely I've seen that at different, at places where I'm consulting right now, a couple of different teams where I'm, I'm working, working and hooked in on like, there is such an advantage right now to handling those tasks that they, what used to be, you know, hours of an SEO's time of like custom writing, you know, it's embarrassing. I got paid like more than $1,000 to write meta titles and descriptions because they insisted they be bespoke one person.
Really look at these pages. Load each of them and write. Right, write it. That's gone, you know, and, you know, good riddance.
[00:09:58] Speaker B: Mapping.
[00:10:00] Speaker A: Oh, gosh.
Yeah. I mean, it's funny because the problem hasn't gone away, but you can do it so much smarter. Like, I'm literally in my cloud code instance that's open in the background here. I'm working with a new client and it's mapping right now two different WordPress instances. One has the blog section, one has the main section. It's looking at the logs for it and comparing and then finding what are relevant to it. And it's going to give me a suggestion while we're in the middle of this, of, hey, here's some redirects based off of what we chatted about earlier of our goals. And I'm like, hours and hours worth of work turned into a background function while I do something else, without a doubt.
[00:10:52] Speaker B: And that is the conversation that I'm having with all my consulting clients, as I'm sure you are as well.
You know, I write in my SEO newsletter, the SEO for Lunch, every single week about this concept of an easy button and how everybody wants to unleash AI so that they can kick their feet up and automate their job, but they still get the paycheck at the end of the day.
And as you know, it doesn't work that way.
You know, I've been a big advocate for what I call, like human led, you know, AI.
And it's just this idea of like, AI is fantastic and we have already talked about these type of tasks that you and I close our eyes and just kind of shudder at the idea of like, I remember mapping 5,000 URLs one by one, like in a spreadsheet, you know, and now they can reasonably do that.
Now, the biggest problem with AI, and you might agree with, is it does those tasks.
But you and I may get the value, like the full value, because we can spot when it's providing you garbage.
And what I mean by that is with 20 years of SEO experience. It's like if your meta descriptions are coming out with 812 words and they're writing them in French, you know, it's like it probably not, you know, what you need.
And the issue is we have leaders in organizations, we have SEOs, and they want at face value to just say, hey, AI bot do SEO.
And they don't know enough to be able to like, stop it from doing good or bad. I guess.
[00:12:33] Speaker A: Yeah, it is a lack of.
It's the wanting the easy button, but the easy button. You're talking to a yes man. You know, Claude is an ultimate yes man. It will confidently tell you something wrong, and even if you push back, it might persist that it's right. But if you, like, you almost have to argue for yourself.
I've taken several, you know, detours of creating, you know, backlink research. I'm working on kind of understanding if anchor text functions the way that we think with a sample of data.
And I came back to it, wasn't paying attention, did it in a separate instance and it didn't have access to the actual data.
It came up and accessed for a small segment of just my own sites and made up results confidently. And I was like, why is no, this.
This is. It's the shape of what it needed to be. But it lacked the substance and it lacked the context, the knowledge of the data pool of like, hey, he means this, you know, that this pull from data from SEO for 200 sites backlink information.
Well, he asked for us to do this at 25 sites. Yeah, I guess this is the context. It just made it up.
And, you know, it's that level of.
It's artificial intelligence, not artificial wisdom.
And so SEOs need to adjust to a world where we can, we can deploy additional intelligence, but we need to show that we have the wisdom to apply it and confidently ship that in those conversations to our paying clients, to our bosses, and also, you know, do what we have always done, which is clear. The landmines of, of false expectations.
And it is harder to argue against AI directly. It's one of those catch 22s of like, the more you let you deny something, you've. You've put it into your own voice.
But I don't think we have an option, you know, like in a human conversation, you know, you can just say, I said what I said.
But with AI so confidently wrong, you know, you'll get, you know, a Claude get clod hopped by a client and they'll like, oh, hey, I did this great thing. And here's 40 pages of, you know, white text on a white background that I want deployed on the site. I talked to ChatGPT, it asked it for like, shortcuts and tweaks and exploits that could reasonably work. And I totally overrode what it said. And you know, like, no, I totally get it though.
[00:15:43] Speaker B: But you're right. I think that's the problem though, and you nailed it, is people are looking at AI as a like 100% solution or 0%.
And that's where, that's my whole basis of this whole like human LED AI. You know, it's like, why, you know, I even wrote a post about it. It was something along the, the idea of like, when did 25% efficiency not become good enough?
And the idea was, you know, Jeremy, if I came to you five years ago and said, hey, thanks for showing me like your whole process, I have some ideas and it's going to save you 25%, you'd probably just roll your eyes and be like, yeah, probably not. You're selling me some bullshit like, this isn't going to work well.
And now we adopt AI.
We are able to use it as something that's a complement to our knowledge and historical information, but maybe it only makes things go 50% faster.
And now in this world that is deemed bad.
And that just blows my mind. And I mean, I literally am like waiting to hear this. These like, laugh or joke and it's like, no, they're, they're serious.
I just, I don't get it. And the last thing I'll say about that too though is like, I've been in a very unfortunate situation where I've had leadership come to me and be like, you know, who can I cut from my team? Because we're going to be, you know, using AI and I, I refuse to get into those conversations. I was like, I'm not going to be responsible for somebody not having the money to feed their kids, but I do challenge them. I say, I understand that payroll is the number one expense for basically everybody, but why instead of a one time P and L boost by, you know, firing a bunch of people, don't you realize this as like opportunity costs? Like, instead of cutting your team in half, what about you won't have to hire again until the output of that team is doubled?
Yeah, yeah. And it's just like I'm trying to challenge it and unfortunately, maybe I don't get business, you know, enough. I have far more passionate about SEO than I am the perfect, you know, business strategy, but, you know, it's just like there's a little bit of humanity, I think that just, you know, you can invest and, you know, get more from what you used to have versus the 100% solution.
[00:18:23] Speaker A: Absolutely. You, you hit it on the head.
That's.
I've been in that C Suite room, room when I was a customer support manager and they, they said, you know, we need to reduce Our. Our biggest line item is human resources. And our, you know, our most expensive resource is Johnny Camacho.
And, you know, he's just got to go. I'm like, you're cutting off your nose to spite your face and save, save some money. Because he does the work of four other reps, like, and you pay him just a quarter more.
And they had to hire him back. Like, the team struggled so badly. Then they had to hire him back in the next cycle and give him additional benefits and reassurances that they weren't going to do that again.
So, you know, and that was before.
Yeah, and that, that was before AI. So the instinct of C C Suite to make human resources cuts has always been there. It's just now there's a convenient oversell. I mean, there's so many link bros. There's so much. Every single platform, every single message that C Suite receive is, oh, AI can do this now. AI can do, can deliver.
But I see a little bit of the patent patina wearing off because last year, last December, I was genuinely worried about the state of SEO overall because C Suite was totally bought into it. But now we've had, you know, more than half a year, two quarters for things to not exactly materialize when it comes to the raw numbers and the prediction of, oh, you're going to get so much output from LLMs, you know, there's going to be so much workflow savings from adopting these.
You know, I don't think that, you know, AI has on the whole, proved to be the excelsior that it is, you know, claimed to be like.
But it is transformational, you know, and I don't.
It is transformational for my work for SEO, for my clients, my projects, my podcasts. Like, I couldn't possibly have put out 140 podcasts, podcasts in the past year without the extensive assistance of Claude Code and helping me, you know, contentize each transcript afterwards and get everything done.
Just the fact that Riverside FM as a studio, it's got editing, it's got AI clips, everything in it has a layer of some AI influence capability. But, you know, so it's It's a weird world where, you know, you're in some ways like we're kind of replaced, but in other ways, as my last guest said, SEOs are almost needed more than ever.
[00:21:32] Speaker B: I share your exact sentiment and the individual you talked to previously, because I was in the same situation. You know, you may know, you know AJ Cohen? Yeah. I chat with him a couple times a year.
You know, just kind of run ideas, think with somebody who I've always, you know, valued opinions on.
And I told him this was probably like Q maybe the beginning of Q2 of last year.
And I told him, I said, you know, I don't believe in SEO is dead.
But for one time, like, now is the most I've ever been concerned about my skillset being irrelevant tomorrow.
And it didn't help that, you know, for 2025, you know, I started right out of the gate with getting some really good leads and like, some it would be really great work. And like, I kept losing them.
And I don't mean to say, like, I'm awesome, but normally if I'm losing work, it's because of two things.
Somebody has come and promised the world for half of the price that I told them they could have it, you know, or it's inaction. Yeah, it's like they just talk too much, talk to too many people.
But all that to be said, like, I had taken L after L after L and it's a combination of everybody just like, you know, going lower than the next person or I just wrote a blog post about, I had one company that was open to paying me the five grand minimum that is for my retainers.
And their solution instead was to pay $99 for an AI platform because they were told it will do everything.
And I think that goes back to what I was mentioning about, you know, 20, 30% efficiency.
You know, it's like we want AI to do it all and it's being sold as this complete 100% easy bun. So I won't speak for you, but, you know, I want to sit on the couch and make a ton of money while doing nothing. Like, the idea is great.
I don't believe that it's possible, but, you know, especially when you're not knowledgeable in a particular field and you have more than one bro telling you how it can be automated overnight.
Like, I, I understand it, but I'm just surprised at how surprised people are when they get like the egg out of their face.
And Jeremy, the final part you mentioned too, like, now that we are a Good. Like, two years into mainstream, like AI adoption, they're not seeing the results.
And like you said, it hit like, content writers hardest and first.
And then I would say as it started impacting SEOs, I started seeing content writers starting to get hired again.
And then SEO got hit really hard.
And then, you know, I would say that year later, kind of where we're at now, people aren't getting those results. The people that are truly adopting AI as 100% replacement strategy aren't seeing it.
So to your other guest's point, I do think that we are in a space where people that have our skill set and as I mentioned at the top of our call, are able to communicate appropriately.
Like, we've never been more valuable than we are right now.
[00:25:19] Speaker A: I'm curious what your take is, you know, with the state of Google and, you know, if Cohen had shared something, you know, I think one of his last pieces was, it's goog enough.
What's your take on, you know, the state of play in Google? Because I just spoke with Giselle of House Fresh, which was, you know, they. They had that big hit. They were, you know, doing the right. What was supposed to be the right thing for reviews and being, like, an honest arbiter. And they even got crushed with everybody else that got crushed in hcu. Thankfully, she says, you know, it seems like, you know, she didn't want to change what she was doing because what she was doing was right, but Google was. Google was not right. And it's like all of these consultants are like, no, you move.
But it's slowly coming around for her.
What are you seeing as far as trends in actual Google results?
Any facets or directions that are of note that you've taken notice on?
[00:26:26] Speaker B: So I think that's a great question.
And I am kind of doing my. My public, like, eating crow, because I was one of those people that told Giselle, like, right to her face and be like, no, like, your sole purpose was to make money off of reviewing. It may or may not have impacted, you know, your actual review itself, but without being compensated, you know, for that content, you would not create this site.
And, you know, we were kind of debating back and forth, and I just basically told her, I was like, no, like, you got hit. Like, that's how it works. You know, move on. And then, you know, they moved to their YouTube strategy and arguably had more success with YouTube than they were previously with Google.
And then I think they get to that point, and I always say the number one SEO strategy is basically make Google look stupid if you don't display in their search results.
Yeah, blast from the past. But it's like, Jeremy, you might remember JCPenney and BMW both penalized and removed from the SERP at one point in time. Yeah, but what kind of user experience is it when you type in BMW
[00:27:40] Speaker A: and like, no BMW?
[00:27:43] Speaker B: Yeah, hobby blog comes up. So that's always my kind of strategy now. And it's easier said than done. But I think that Giselle and team had essentially done that. Like, they built a lot of trust, you know, through that YouTube platform, was able to build that audience.
And while Google may not specifically say, like, you made us look stupid by not being found in Google, inherently when you have all these metrics, you know, showing quality signals on their sister platform YouTube, but then you are literally like, no, no showing on their search results. Like, I think that is the best way that she and team could have approached that. Because you can't argue with Google. They don't care about any one particular instance.
I make it known, but then pivot and basically prove them wrong. And, you know, she had done that. And so I always make sure now when we have these type of conversations that I say, you know what, I was kind of pigheaded and I made a statement.
And, you know, it's like, sometimes we all learn and grow from our mistakes. And that's my end going to your other questions. So, like, how is Google shifting, you know, what is kind of standing out?
I think that I am in the minority when I think the search results are better than they've been previously.
Now, that is me as a consumer, a web user.
I really like AI overviews.
I also feel like someone with your knowledge, our industry's knowledge, we can bypass it when we know what to expect.
You know, I think Willy Ray was the one that had called out way early when it was like sge that, you know, Google wanted you to add glue to pizza to keep the cheese on there. Yeah, it's like you have that basic knowledge of like, no eating glue is bad. You know, maybe I'll go check that, you know, safety label one more time. But that is bad.
But there are a lot of searches that don't need to go to a website because it's either a calculation, a snippet, a quote, a source.
And I hate it as an SEO.
But what we all just have to remember is like, traffic was never the raw goal.
It was just kind of what we built as a secondary KPI when that traffic wasn't yet converting on the site.
So I have stronger opinions about how SEO in a bucket, like isn't the value that it used to be because it's really just that larger, you know, strategy.
[00:30:45] Speaker A: It needs to be more integrated.
[00:30:47] Speaker B: Yeah, well, that. And that's exactly what where I was kind of going is. You know, I wrote another post that was like, finally, you know, SEOs are allowed to sit at the adults table because.
[00:30:58] Speaker A: Right.
[00:30:59] Speaker B: It's like the C suite. I don't care if anyone can tell me they're CEO unless they were previously an SEO. Like, yes, like Search.
So but now it's like AI came the shiny object syndrome and that's all they care about.
And whether AI should live in SEO or engineering or wherever. That's a whole nother conversation. But you are the most qualified person in the entire company to have an opinion on something that doesn't have a definitive right and wrong answer.
And I also, you know, I talked to Kevin Indig and you know, we were talking about how both of us were leveraging AI to get like Jura tickets that we've had filed for years with our clients. And as soon as you could tack onto that, that, you know, okay, when we do the site architecture change, that's going to help, you know, AI discover as well as like Google discover it, you know. And I think back in the day when ChatGPT was doing like Bing, you know, as Bing Discoverability.
And it's like the second you added AI to any like legacy SEO task, it became top priority.
So there was this world where it's like I got to catch up on three years worth of tickets.
That's all the excitement.
Now I think where Google is kind of going the wrong direction, if you will, is we already talked about AI kind of being like a, you adopt it or you don't. Yeah. And I think AI mode is the hundred percent solution. You know, removing AI overviews is the zero percent solution.
Yeah, I don't think where we're at now is like the perfect solution, but I don't really like the idea that it's we have to gun for one or the other because there's a lot of resources that I have learned over the years only because I searched for something and had never seen them before that, you know, and then joining do you a newsletter and all this kind of stuff. But I'm happy from an SEO perspective because we get to have that seat at the table. SEO is more integrated and requires, you know, activity and support around many other channels to win now.
But the last thing I'll leave you with because I know I'm being very long winded. Today is for me, like the one thing that I love telling people and it pisses them off and I'm all for it, is like Google is doing a much better job. I said that I think the search results are better because I've always believed that if you had a good product or service, that the reflection should be good results in Google.
Now, I'm not saying that technical SEO doesn't matter. We all know that does. I'm just saying that inherently, when you have superfans, they talk on the Internet which leads to inbound links, and Google should be able to do that. If we're talking about electric scooters, whichever brand is the one that my kids insisted on is the one that's been showing up on the Internet the most.
And then when we looked for them, they showed up at the top.
So it's a lot less about manipulating Google and doing tactics, which we talked about to trick Google, or as we have all said, oh, we're doing this for the bots.
It's really about how do you take the knowledge of how Google works, how AI works like with these LLMs, and integrate it to make your business better.
Yeah. And that is where I'm excited because it's like you see a lot of people just thinking they're owed these organic clicks.
And my argument is you need to diversify because if your company is reliant just on Google, you're in trouble and you're double. So if your product or service sucks and you've just been, you know, buying some links, you know, doing that white on white texting background.
[00:35:28] Speaker A: Yeah. That came up in a panel I ran with Patrick Stocks, Ben Wills and BenSonescu of, you know, one of the best things that you can do to improve your Google rankings is to fix the problem with your product that is causing the negative reviews. You know, part of that is having a function for social listening, for reputation management, you know, and you know, it. I think of what's happening with AI and SEO is this way is I haven't seen a single thing stripped away from, from SEOs as far as like functionality. Everything that we do can impact it. But there are these ancillary areas where we. It's been kind of corned off. I'd helped with like reputation management once or twice or helped, oh, hey, we should drive some more reviews. But it really owned somewhere else or customer support really had its own aspect. And you know, the sales and PPC landing pages were a Separate function. Well, bad news Bears, AI Max is going to analyze your small business site and find pages that are live right now to send as landing pages.
So if you haven't optimized your site, you're not going to get the PPC result out of the box that you thought that you were going to get. And you know, the, if you're not retooling your campaign now that's going to be mandatory by I think she said In February of 2027, a IMAX is going to be the default out of the box and it's going to be harder and harder to get it to land on these unbounce pages or customized landing pages that aren't indexed. And so that's a golden opportunity for us in SEO niche to cross pollinate and to get approval for budget. Hey man, PPC has been separated from us, but we have the same goal to optimize this site as PPC does. So let's use that, you know, let's collaborate on this budget, you know. And you know, the same with the community building aspect that you talked about too. Like, you know, let's look at organic as a bigger picture than just Google.
Like how can we build community elsewhere? Like Giselle did, she made YouTube, but she also made, you know, a subreddit and interacted honestly and faithfully there. Like how what are the other places that you can find audience at? Those are legitimate things. At some point we just siloed ourselves to being glorified Google optimizers. But search is now everywhere. There's search facets in Amazon, there's search facets in all kinds of platforms that you wouldn't expect. So stop narrowing yourself down and look for additional organic.
[00:38:30] Speaker B: Jerry, I love everything that you're saying. I have so many thoughts, so hopefully I can structure what I'm saying here correctly. But there's just a couple key points.
The last one that you said about search used to be basically viewed as the Google ecosystem.
Now Google search is a part of a much larger ecosystem.
And the best example that I have yet to have an SEO that hasn't resonated with this is every SEO ever gets asked, hey, are videos good for SEO? And then we all kind of go, oh well, you know, it's not about the video itself being embedded in the content.
It's going to rank in, you know, YouTube, which is not going to show in your analytics.
But you know, if you do, you know, create a kick ass video, you know, then you could get more attention on your page and you know, it's just kind of this, like, you know, oh my gosh, I almost did like the 6, 7 thing, but, you know, so now this idea of, well, if I'm not going to see the direct results via my Google Analytics report from my site, like, nobody would do anything. The idea of being out of Reddit, like, no CMO like, ever has understood the concept of injecting yourself in a truthful and honest way within, like, your own community.
But similar to Giselle, I, I set up Reddit or I have a subreddit for SEO jobs. And I happen to notice that SEO Jobs previously was like, unmoderated and nothing had been posted for like two years. So I was fortunate enough to be able to go through and learn the process of, like, how you can take over a subreddit that is not being used.
And I'm just shocked, like, literally, I bet Reddit is probably like fourth or fifth on sources of traffic to my site, but just the engagement and people there, it's just a reminder that when you can, like nail these other sources of where your people are at, you don't really care if your Google traffic goes down by 15%.
I mean, literally, I mean, SEO Jobs is probably not a good example, but the investment in an exact match domain every single month, give or take 5 percentage points, 50% is direct traffic.
And that's because all I have to do is say SEO jobs dot com, you don't forget it. You may purposely not go there or not suggest it because you think Nick's a jerk or, you know, LinkedIn is still better, but you don't forget.
And that is a whole different type of marketing than, you know, if you comb through my site, you know, Jeremy, there's probably five things you could find in 12 seconds. So you'd be like, nick, you know better. Like, you gotta do this. But SDO is not my first priority for that site. It's doing real marketing.
When I help the industry actually find jobs and I connect these hiring managers to people that are, you know, good, they have quality.
I can't do anything else in a marketing world to get more value than that. Because you telling your friend that you had a good experience on my site.
Again, I can run all the ads I want. I can get those clicks. Yeah, but I need Jeremy and Jeremy's buddy and that person's buddy to hear, yo, did you know that we finally have a place, like, for us, you know, to hire?
So it just, I think that's just very validating for what you're saying.
The last thing I want to say I should have started is I want to share just, like a quick story that I think will really validate what you were saying about, like, you have to address root issues versus trying to layer on tactics to kind of make up for, you know, bad reputation.
I had one client in the sleep space, and this individual was super smart. Like, they'd got their exact match domain.
You know, they basically dominated Google for the last 15 years because of that domain and basic on page optimization.
And then as Google started kind of using these other aspects, you know, in their rankings, they dropped.
Now, not off of like the first page, but it's like instead of being number one for everything, they'd be, say, 3, 4, 5. So noticeable amount of traffic and revenue lost.
They brought me in and I gave the CEO the kudos, like, great domain pickup, like, everything. You guys are doing fine. But I was just kind of explaining how things are different.
And he was so adamant that there was a silver bullet to this issue, like a technical issue, a server issue, something like that. I had to stop him because he would not listen to me.
So just like you and I are now, we jumped on a call.
I opened up Google in incognito because I didn't want him to talk about personalized results.
You know, if that's even a thing. It's like, you never know anymore.
But I put in, he goes, I have ranked number one for this product name for like 20 years. He's like, I've never been number two.
I go, oh, okay, so let's type it in product name.
And then I scroll down. He's not number one. He's not number two. He's not number three. He's like, in that four or five now, not to be confused with six, seven. But so, but what was interesting is now for that particular query, like, Mayo Clinic was ranking one, and then John Hopkins was like, number two. But that was an informational solution. So I explained to him how 1 and 2 isn't even an option for you.
[00:44:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:44:49] Speaker B: And then I scrolled down, and this was the part where he really decided he didn't like me anymore because there was Amazon and then one of his biggest competitors, three products stacked on top of each other. He's at the bottom.
And I just told this individual, I said, let's look at this as a user.
I was like, they're both cheaper than you are.
You charge for shipping.
They don't.
And you have a 10% restocking fee for returns.
And they don't have that so I got a little bit aggressive and I was just like, why the fuck would Google rank you over these other guys like you? There's just no reason. It's the same product, they're cheaper. They essentially have better user experience and customer support.
Like it just seemed really, he really didn't like it. But at the same time it's like you could tell that he couldn't fight it and all that to be said, you know, he made some radical decisions in deciding that SEO is dead.
Let me go, let his in house team go. But you know, we can't all make great decisions.
But that is what gets me a little bit excited about the direction Google is going in.
Simply because of what I mentioned before.
My hope is always that SEO is more of a reflection of building a really good business.
And it brings us to this point that we've never had to deal with before.
SEO was always supposed to be this like, you know, everybody on the same playing field level, we all stood a chance.
And now SEO AI optimization, it just isn't for everybody.
And it's our job to tell people that. I tell people that, you know, our leads. I don't think you're going to get the value that you're looking for from this without major investments and major, you know, commitments.
And too many SEOs are willing to just sign everything and anything.
[00:46:50] Speaker A: So anyway, I think it's about, you know, helping businesses make better business decisions. You know, both with like clarity on what the data actually means. You know, the Mark Williams cook made a great post about the difference between precision and accuracy and how they're co independent. But it's also like fundamentals. You know, SEOs are in a great position to point out the fact that, you know, you say that you want more leads, but you know, I think it was Ignavito Jake Malindi, he said they did a study, 68% of businesses never responded within 24 hours with an inquiry to their business.
68% didn't respond in 24 hours. And I think it was like 1800 businesses that they surveyed, you know, manually. Like that's, that's the type of like, like duh moment. But it's also like, you know, it's been so par for the course of like, you know, SEO is being shoved to the outside. Now we're at the big boy table of like, hey, we know what's going on, we can bring this wisdom. We need better speed to lead. Let's do that.
And you know, in this moment where if traffic is shutting down from Other sources. How can we make the traffic that we get more valuable? Let's fix our conversion rates. Oh, hey, it takes six seconds to load the site. Let's fix that. Like, there's the UX ui. There's a confluence for us there. There's getting access just to the CRM to see what happens with these leads afterwards. Are you tied in? Have you had a conversation with customer support? What are they complaining about that they need a whole customer support department about your job should be to like.
Part of your savings for any sizable organization that's large enough to need a customer support team is reducing the amount of spend you need for your customer support, as well as like your ability to earn gold stars from that support by drafting articles that solve the functional problems or the functional secondary questions that arise from your particular problem. If you're a SaaS, that's, you know, walk walkthroughs, tutorials with accurate screenshots, accurate videos. Because if you watch a walkthrough video and the UX changed, you know, six months ago, that video is unused, is actually worse than unusable. It's actively anti helpful.
And we want to be a couple
[00:49:31] Speaker B: tools that I use online where I'm looking for that walkthrough. And it's like the UI is so completely different.
You know, it's like, you know, Canva is one of them. I was like, I was trying to figure out how do I make this feature work? And I was like, great. There's a YouTube video kind of scroll halfway and it's like, it's different.
[00:49:50] Speaker A: Okay, yeah, don't, don't make another AI sloppy article.
Make a great workflow like an sop. What can they do with this? And that's a fantastic. That's niching down. That's.
You can make that specific to the, to the industry. Like, there's so many things like we're just hanging up our hat because we can't, you know, just write four blog posts a month and buy some links and do SEO anymore. Well, too bad. Let's. Let's grow up. Like, we gotta be better. We need. There's so much opportunity to help these businesses.
[00:50:26] Speaker B: Let's.
[00:50:26] Speaker A: Let's do it.
[00:50:30] Speaker B: Jeremy, I think you will agree with this, but I'd love your opinion both on two things. Like, one, I think the industry itself, including me, like, we have to take ownership of like a lot of what we're fighting right now is because we kind of pitched SEO as a after the matic, you know, type, after the matter type solution.
And we constantly were able to get ROI from less budget, less resources, less everything than what would be ideal.
So it's like now when we come back and say, okay, SEO is a reflection of how you run your business and you know, you need to change your customer service at this and this and this point.
They look at us and go, what does that have to do with SEO?
Like it. And they don't see it now because historically it was. Jeremy would say jump on your title tags. Nick would say these are the right redirects, you know, we're going to do xyz. And they all just kind of lived independently on their own island and it worked.
But Jeremy, I'd be curious, like what do you think, think about this statement, something along the lines of like if your recommendation solely benefits a company for Google, it's probably not worth prioritizing.
[00:52:07] Speaker A: Ooh, that's hard to hear.
Having I grew up in the golden age of SEO.
[00:52:17] Speaker B: I got it. I was thinking this while you were talking. I was like, oh, I got to ask him.
[00:52:21] Speaker A: No, definitely. I, I think it is, it's the end of the monopoly and we, we had a wild west period when I started 2007, you know, to, until the browser wars ended. You know, if anybody knows what that even means. Like Chrome 1, Netflix died, Internet Explorer died. There is, you know, like people don't think about the browser on, on Macintosh, but it's Safari, you know, it's, it is subservient, you know and, but the one Google won the, the, the browser wars, they became so dominant that you know, we just signed ourselves up to be Google optimizers and that's the monopoly is breaking up.
And part of it is self inflicted wounds. A part of it's part hubris, the other is just the nature of the beast and the mechanisms and the growth of technology can't be, you know, totally contained, you know, things things.
So yeah, you do need to think about the impact of what you're doing.
Needs to be more than just Google. It can't not be a part of the function, but you need to think through.
And it's a great framework too to ensure that we don't become blog pushers again. We have to become strategists with artificial intelligence. We have to. I do worry about the future of what happens with an entire generation of SEOs that's undercut and can't get those entry level roles when you know, when the stock of information dries up, like there's going to be a, without entry level people pushing buttons and, you know, earning their stakes and making mistakes, then the we're going to have more calcified old hands and we're not going to stick around in this industry forever. I know plenty of SEOs that have moved on to greener pastures.
Plenty of SEOs. Just SEOs.
The unscripted SEO podcast is because Mark Preston moved out of SEO exclusively and he handed keys over to me and said, hey, I hope you can make it more out of it than I did. So I do kind of worry a little bit for the future, but I'm very glad to have this conversation with you. And SEOjobs.com stands out as a fantastic industry talking point, something we did for ourselves. Thank you.
I've gotten a job through there, so hats off.
And I'll make sure that the transcript of this recording this podcast is available on unscripted SEO Searcade.com, jeremy Rivera, SEO I'll hand over some clips and content for your site as well, but I'm really appreciative that you've taken the time to have this combo.
[00:55:40] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, iron sharpens iron. And I can't reiterate enough the points I made at the very beginning. It's just simply we have to be critical thinkers, we have to take risks, we have to make mistakes and we have to learn from it.
Because if there's anything we've learned from AI is if you can summarize what you're doing in bullet points, you're replaceable.
I said it.
But I also think that there's going to be a fairly big exodus from SEO this year going into even next year because SEO is no longer like the easy money and a lot of people have already tasted the like six figure salary for executing the checklist and when they see what is actually required and needed, they're going to. Nope, they're going to opt out.
So I hope so now. It'll make us more in need.
[00:56:45] Speaker A: Yes, I think real SEO talent is more in need. I think there will be a thinning of the herd, definitely. But hopefully it's not me.
You and me both. I can see myself bouncing out one
[00:57:00] Speaker B: day at a time and you know, it's just we gotta do right by our customers. We have to make sure that we're not just relying on the tactics.
We have to be upfront. Communicate, Communicate, Communicate.
[00:57:15] Speaker A: Solid. Thank you so much, Nick.
[00:57:18] Speaker B: Yeah, you bet. Thanks for having me on.
