Revolutionise your SEO to acquire traffic that converts into actual sales with Aditya Jain

So SEO is broken for most businesses. Why? Because they are chasing rankings, not revenue. High traffic doesn't pay the bills, conversions do. Yet companies waste months optimizing for high-volume, low-intent keywords that never lead to sales. The real game changer, understanding which keywords actually drive revenue and how to adjust SEO in real time to capture more business. Welcome back to Mastering Tech Growth, where we interview industry leaders to bring you actionable insights and inspiring stories. I'm your host, Mike Sirius, and joining me today is a guest who's gonna change how you think about SEO, Aditi Arun Jain, a leading SEO growth strategist who has helped businesses move beyond traffic vanity metrics to true revenue-driven SEO. With over 10 years of experience, Aditya has worked with brands like Mastercard, Alipay, and leads a global team that optimized over 145,000 keywords for high-intent conversions. Welcome to the show, Aditya.

Thank you, Mike. Pleasure to be here.

Pleasure to have you. So we'd love to open with this one. When I say mastering tech growth, what comes to mind?

I think SEO is obviously the first thing that comes to mind because without that, I think it's hard to have low CAC and actually master growth.

All right. I love that. Very, very clear, very short answer. It's SEO. Of course it's SEO. I'm an SEO expert, right?

I'm biased.

So let me, let me make this more difficult on you. So from all the things you can choose, which is sales, marketing, SEO, product-market fit, people, technologies, and all of these different things, and you can choose only one, would you still choose SEO as the most important and the number one that drives growth for Tech Ventures?

I think actually what drives growth is like customer pain point, like figuring that out and figuring out positioning. Which then actually feeds into everything else. Like, I think even we in our initial stages really struggled, uh, with finding that, um, accurate pain point that we're working with. Like, it could be growth, but like, within growth, what's the subset of the problem? And then how you position yourself to solve that problem, and then everything else falls in place after that.

I love that. I love that. So if we're making like a pyramid, the apex of that pyramid is that Just do market research, really understand what are the pain points of your customers, how your product or service is solving them, and then everything else is below that.

Yeah, and like, it seems very obvious, right? Like, I think everybody talks about this, but I actually don't think like we go deep enough in terms of understanding exactly what's the problem you're solving. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, continue.

Yeah, so I think what I was saying there was like, like for example, like, right, this podcast is helping people like solve for like lack of— like for understanding better how they can solve for growth. But like if you dive deeper, right, like what's the experience before they came to this podcast, what's that experience after, and then what value did you really create in that journey that you're aiming for that then drives that impact? Like the deeper and deeper you go here, the actual impact you realize, okay, this is the pain point that I've really solved for. Yeah, I think when we've been— we do this exercise like every 3 months to reiterate like how the customers we're servicing, how their lives are changing, so we can narrow in on that exact pain point so we can optimize our positioning, which then does everything else that we want to do.

I love that. Can you tell us how you actually do that? Like, what's your— is there like a framework or just, you know, Aditya's framework?

Yeah, so actually, uh, there is a framework we have. This is a list of about 30 questions, um, and we call this exercise the Pomodoro exercise, where when we do the exercise, we're doing nothing else and we spend 5 minutes on each question independently. And through that journey, we're basically diving into different aspects of both the customer's problem but also our vision for the solution. From different angles. And we have different team members, both part of the founding team and other members, do this exercise. And then we join our answers together and cross-read them to see how aligned we are. And then we kind of create that structure in terms of what's the common pain point we think we're solving for.

So, so the pain point is actually your opinion, then it's, it's opinionated in the sense that you provide that pain point you think you're solving, or are you actually going to the market and asking these questions with the current customers or potential future customers?

Yeah, so when you're answering those questions, you're actually using data you've gotten from the customer. So oftentimes, because we're like interacting with over 100 customers on a weekly basis, right, like there is a lot of data that's educating how we answer those questions. At an earlier stage of the company when we didn't have that, um, those interactions going on it was an active conversation we were having, not with exactly customers because they're not buying your product, uh, but at that time they're actually just either people that have tried to solve this for people in the markets, or other agency providers that didn't— like, that were just helping us, or even just like other people, whether it was CMOs or marketing team members that were trying to solve that problem for other folks.

I love that. Do you have a question you like to ask the customers, uh, to, to source that pain point or pain points? Or is it more of like, hey, can you give me 30 minutes? You know, we'll give you Amazon voucher, just jump on a call, answer a couple of questions, and then it's just a free flow type of conversation.

Yeah, so there's a really good book on this thing called The Mom Test. It tells you how to conduct surveys and how to ask questions. So what we really did there was used that book to come up with a list of questions about asking our target audience, where you cannot direct them to answer related to a problem. Because if I ask you, do you have this problem, you'll think about it and you're more likely to say yes. But it's actually just asking them things about where they're at today. Um, so like, what are key things you're thinking about? How have you actively tried to solve this problem? And then you kind of start seeing patterns the more of these conversations you have, and then you can assimilate data to then try to answer it.

Okay. And it is just a simple conversation, or do you use any tools to sort of interview people in the sense of capturing information? I've seen some good AI tools coming out where they help to conduct product type of conversations, and they capture the transcript, and you can highlight the transcript and move that as a pain point, like anything like that, or is it just more like, you know what, I'll just take human notes?

Yeah, so there are a couple of interesting activities you've done here, right? So we actually built our own AI survey tool in the initial stages of when we were doing this research so that it can ask leading questions automatically without us having to think about them. So that's something we built. Then recently we've been using a lot of tools like Fathom and Fireflies, and then we created a repository of all the sales calls that we've had, and then we input that into different models we've used and then take out insights. So we actually have a living, breathing document of like all the common questions and concerns in states and stuff like that. We've bifurcated that, then clients are asking us, and then we also use like ongoing servicing questions to feed into our tech stack to think about what customers are really concerned about.

I love that. I mean, we're drifting away from the main topic of the, of this episode, but I love how how actionable all of that is. And I love that you guys using those tools. I was surprised. I did, I did a couple of demos myself with a couple of them and I was like, these are really game changer in the sense of assimilating information and how easy it is to just have these conversations and then extract exactly what you need. Just, just a huge time saver. Huge time saver.

Okay. All right.

So you're doing the chats, you're getting this, you have this living, breathing document, which is, you know, giving you a lot of insights and content, and then you're asking those 30 questions. Are these questions again from a book, or did you come up with those 30 questions you internally ask yourself and, you know, to the team? Uh, are these like custom ones?

Yeah, so it's actually a mix of things we've come up with but also like taken inspiration from. So one of our investors, um, his name is Mike Maples, he's written this book called Pattern Breakers. And that book is really, really fundamental in terms of understanding why you're building what you're building and kind of who are you really solving the pain point for. And through those conversations and after reading that book, which I highly, highly recommend, there's a lot of insight that comes out that's helped us create those documentations. And he has really been critical here in terms of coming up with the right questions that we should be asking ourselves on a regular basis. And I think that's really helped us. I'm happy to share that list post this.

Oh, that would be awesome. I mean, in the show notes. Yeah. If that list is somewhere publicly accessible, we can add the link. I think people would love to see that list. And thanks for the recommendation for a book. We'll put that in as well. Okay, well, let's get back to the core of this episode, which is the SEO, real-time SEO, and as well understanding the keywords that actually drive sales rather than playing the traffic game. And most businesses are the— and you probably know that very, very well— is that they play the traffic game. They think about keywords and they think like, okay, which one, which of these will bring me most of the traffic rather than thinking of the revenue game, right? And according to 2024 Ahrefs study, sorry, 90% of pages receive no organic traffic because they optimize for broad, low-intent keywords instead of searches that lead actual sales. So how do you approach your research when it comes to understanding which keywords actually are traffic game and which ones are sales game?

Yeah, so I think first is, I think people have been forced to do this primarily because there's not— there was not enough data that let them know what this differentiation is between keywords that were driving traffic versus keywords that are driving sales. So I think companies have tried to do that through commercial intent and intent classification, which you can see on Ahrefs and stuff like that, right? But it could be driving traffic for, uh, traffic and sales for for Company A but could not be doing that for Company B just because the product alignment is missed, right? So what we really did here was we created our own tool, um, where for both B2B and consumer companies, we actually created a tool that we can track for each keyword what number of, um, uh, what, what number of revenue or key events, whatever the KPI you're measuring your company's success against, is that particular keyword driving. And I think that's very, very critical. Now, if you don't have the tool, I think what's really important is, is that keyword driving traffic to the correct page that you care about? Or is that— is traffic coming onto that page driving conversion in that session? So for example, you can see on GA4, like, landing page data and see, okay, for all the traffic that came on this landing page, be it a blog, be it a service-level page, be it a product page, whatever it may be, were there any conversions at all? And if that's no, then you're focusing potentially on the wrong page and inherently the wrong keywords that, that are driving traffic to that page, right? So if you don't have access to the tool, I'd recommend doing this.

Okay, so that means first of all, we need to have an actual, uh, journey capture tool. Could be Google Analytics or whatever is a free one for, you know, for the people listening and going like, how can I do this today? So even if we're writing a blog post, we still want to think like that, right? So it's not just I'm going to put out the content, one block, two blocks, three blocks, you know, optimized for a couple of keywords. But we need to be thinking like, okay, like if people will come to my blog post by searching for that keyword and they will land on my landing page, which is just basically a blog post, I still should be thinking how that will actually convert to whatever I want that to convert to.

100%. Okay, but one caveat here is just because that's how we're tracking revenue or what's important, um, a lot of other pages are still required to help you build authority. Or even if somebody comes to your website, like, just because they probably didn't convert in that session doesn't mean they hadn't heard about your brand, because they might convert through a completely different channel at a completely different time. So at the end of the day, like, your North Star is not just revenue, it's actually like Am I matching my user's intent? And am I building topical authority? Which is like, am I producing the right amount of information that's relevant to my brand? Then you narrow down on what you want to focus on with this thing we're talking about, which is like what pages are really the pages that are driving revenue for me? Or like whatever KPI it is, right? And that's how you narrow down your focus and then you double down on those.

So effectively, majority people just spitting out content. And right now with AI especially going like, oh my God, we have all of these papers and documents and, you know, historical information. Let's just put it up. Let's just put it online. Let's just put it online. So that's the best what that can do is basically build some type of authority, right? And that's where it stops. It's just going to bring you traffic. The traffic will come in, read, and they will leave. But what we're saying is that every single page where the traffic comes should be optimized for the conversions, a.k.a. making more sales or just bringing more businesses.

100%. One caveat here which I was mentioning was now that more and more of the internet is being scraped by literally like robots, it's very important that you're not just writing content for humans. Because like for the pages that you're not even seeing traffic for, there is a scraper from now increasingly more and more sources that is reviewing that and is going to present your information on a search GPT or Perplexity and other sources. So it's very important you're also writing content and enabling your pages to be structured in such a way that they can digest it. And for that, the readability of your code base, et cetera, becomes increasingly important.

Okay. I mean, that was fairly important while back with all the H1s and H2s and articles and all of these HTML tags. But what we're saying right now It's even more important because of advances with AI and just pretty much half of internet being robots.

Yeah, so I think the difference here is, um, the page structure is still relevant. What's more increasingly relevant is how you're adapting to how these AIs and these new scrapers scrape the internet. It's not just the structure of your page, but it's like actually the semantic value And how it— like, AI is now just so much more capable of understanding intent and visibility without the structure being like, you know, schema perfect and stuff like that, where it's still very important to have those things in place. But you have to write content in different, more digestible ways, targeting more targeted questions, so that it can be picked up and be shown to users when they're searching for very specific queries that are very, very long. To answer very niche questions that customers might have.

So I was saying then that— and we're talking about blogs like newsletter type of situation. So if we're producing that type of content, we should be thinking what that content is answering. So it's not like, hey, I'm going to sort of put out an article about SEO and I'm going to look at 7 different things and just give this generic overview of like, you need to have tags, you need to do this and that. That doesn't really have intent. It's just like generic information about the topic itself. So what we're saying, a much better approach is to actually write for intent. And that intent is pretty much what people are looking in online, AKA the how-tos, the questions they have.

Exactly. Because now content has become like a commodity, right? Everybody's writing it. How well you're able to understand your user's intent and then write better content targeted towards that is actually a USP. Everybody now today can generate 50 articles a month and produce low-quality generic content, which is now no longer a USP.

Right. And I spent like 4 hours writing this newsletter about personal branding, and then you just gave me this, and I was like, that was a shit newsletter then because I wasn't thinking about intent. I was thinking, you know what? Here's how you can 10x your influence, you know, in this year if you do this couple of things. But it was generic. I wasn't thinking about intent. It just blew my mind that I did. I need to go replay this now. So tell me, tell me, when did you realize that? Like, you know, you've been in the game for like 10 years plus. Like, at which point in time and what happened? Like, what's your backstory in a sense? Like, where you went like, you know what, this traffic game is not what what makes sense, you know, writing generic one is not what it's going to make. It's actually intent. And then looking how keywords converted to sales. Like, when was your realization that this is the game?

Yeah. So actually, my co-founder and I, we were running a fintech company in the US, right? And fintech is like extremely competitive for Google paid ads, overall paid traffic. And it's very, very competitive to get customers, right? Um, and that's when we were spending money on Google Ads, but it was just getting very, very expensive and CAC was getting through the roof. So that's when we tried our hands on SEO. And when we— like, I think in our second week, we got like maybe like 300 loan applications from a site that you would think is a scam because like we just MVP'd this site and we were like shit, like there's something here. And that's when we started diving deeper and deeper into how SEO works, what are the different variables, and how do you really do it. And we're like, dude, like, yeah, there are like 100 different levers you can move, but if you just focus on some of the core things that we were really targeting, because we, we were trying to understand our customer and trying to find where a larger player is not playing ads, we were really able to drive impact for us. And we really scaled the applications we were getting purely through SEO. And that's when the more niche we got and the more we narrowed that down, the better we got at it. So that's when we had the initial spark, um, but then we continued doing this, um, and then with AI coming in, we just realized we can do this at scale just for a lot more people, um, and that's where things just become a game changer. So I think when that transition happened, we were like, this is what we need to spend our time doing.

Okay. So how, how better did— so did you left all of that fintech situation behind you and you just went like, you know what, I'm just going to go all in on that because that's a game changer? Or is that almost like a spinoff product when it comes to SEO? What's your main fintech game? Yeah, yeah.

So we exited that and then started this, um, so it's a different journey. This, this journey kind of started off with, um, after that venture we were focusing on like solving problems founders have, and then we realized growth is— as your, uh, podcast is dedicated towards, right, like must helping people master growth, uh, and then we were like in that same way, like growth is the biggest problem no matter how good a product you build. but SEO is just something nobody's really made meaningful contributions to in terms of changing the game at it. And this just felt like the exact right time to do it. And that's how Passionful was born.

I love that. I mean, AI, the generative AI, from, from, you know, people just generating content with it and just, you know, repurposing the same things to just different strategies like having interviews with the customers and taking the transcript to keep authenticity and just spit out more content and what you guys doing with intent and things like that. It just seems that the whole topic of SEO is just coming back to its surface and sort of evolving to something new, which is quite exciting to see. So how do you measure that? Like all the things right now on the table with AI and And just doing the general strategy, I want to understand if I'm putting energy and time and potentially money into buying any tools and things like that, like what is my success measure? Is it just purely sales? Like, you know, ins and outs, or is there other measures which you deem very important to measure return of investment on SEO game?

Yeah. So I think it just comes down to your funnel. Right, um, so there's your top of funnel where how many people have seen my brand, my company, my link, right? Um, second is like how many people have actually entered that funnel and engaged with a particular thing I've put out there in the world. And then comes down to like different pieces within the funnel in terms of, okay, what are the things, the activities they did in terms of before conversion and then end conversion. Right? Um, and I think it's very important to measure all, um, because like you can move a couple of these levers, capture a bunch of intent, and then also drive your end lever, which is sales, right? So depending on what stage of the company you're at, I think there are different measures that are a lot more important. Um, so what we generally recommend people to measure is, um, number of keywords you're ranking for in the top 10. Number of impressions, clicks. We make a listing of number of key events that have happened and then revenue. And we work with a company to define what the key events they want to track are so that we're making meaningful improvements in that. And then we index our larger-term progress on the number of key events driven and number of sales driven, because at the end, end of the day If I can't justify an ROI for a client in 6 months, there's no reason for them to continue investing in this channel.

Exactly. Yeah. And I felt like this is the history of SEO for me at least, because I had an agency probably like 8 years, maybe 10. I mean, time flies, honestly. It probably was like 10+ years. And at that point in time, SEO was— it was almost like a— like a— not magic, but it was— it was not tangible in the sense of like, hey, If I pay you X, what I'm going to get after 3 or 6 months? And everybody were like, you know, in the industry, we're like, you know, SEO is a long game. You know, it could be taking 12 months, you know, to rank for this keyword. And market would accept those answers. They would be like, okay, well, cool. We still want to do that, right? And now what we're saying is that, no, the game has changed to the point where companies should be able to justify SEO strategies and give some real success metrics, which will come down the line, right?

100%. 100%.

I love that. Okay, that put some ideas in my mind right now. So can I ask this idea? Um, the funnel you gave, the very first step, which is the traffic we're getting, if we replace this with organic traffic, which is SEO game, and would you say you're buying traffic, which is ads, the whole rest of the funnel still applies, isn't it?

100%.

Yeah. Okay, so effectively the funnel itself is, is your business funnel, but the entry of the funnel at the very, very top, that's where SEO brings you the, you know, the, the all the people.

Yeah, I think the only difference here is from SEO traffic there's less you can learn, which is a weakness, right? Uh, because if you're running paid ads, you know what, what customer base you targeted, and then you understand, okay, like maybe this is what's working, this is not this is what's not working, and you can funnel them into predictable kind of pages and, um, like flows. With SEO, it's sort of less— it's like harder definitely to be able to funnel them into whatever you want to take them to. Um, but I think there's a lot of innovation left to happen where you can strategically create separate funnels and really innovate there, um, to capture more and more information there. The one difference I have seen is generally traffic from SEO and now increasingly from like channels like Perplexity, etc., are just much higher intent. So they are more— even if like you're getting maybe 100 visitors from that versus 100 visitors from paid, they have a much higher conversion rate than from paid channels. Um, so it sort of compensates for, um, the less learning you have on the generic traffic you're getting. But I think there's a lot of innovation left to be done in this space around optimizing that funnel itself.

Yeah, I mean, the funnels in general is a whole, you know, new ball game by itself. You know, that's a different topic, really different episode. But that gave me an idea. I need to find a funnel expert now. Right. So let's go back to that time measurement and in general, you know, looking at the report. So majority of the businesses right now, they don't look at SEO in real time. They basically open up some type of SEO report could be Google Analytics, or maybe they use some, some type of service and they look at best like once a month. But realistically speaking, they probably look like once a quarter, maybe even less. Right. So a report by BrightEdge found that 53% of website traffic comes from organic search, yet only 10% of marketers check their SEO performance daily, meaning they miss chances to pivot strategies on live performance data. So the question is, was there a specific moment or a case study, you know, for you, Adi, that proved that real-time SEO adjustments is essential to capture growth?

So this metric is true. And like one experiment we ran was we asked founders and certain individuals at especially younger companies, right? What percentage of your traffic is coming from what channel. And there was very high discrepancy in what team members said, uh, amongst themselves depending on the department they were in, as well as what the data spoke, right? So I think, um, that's very, very true, and there's a lot of assumptions that we make around that. Um, so SEO is, um, something that has a lot of real-time impact, especially around click-through rates and changes you can make in real time to your business and the funnel you're creating, the products you focus on. Because essentially what SEO is, is providing you data on, right? Like, if I know what types of queries customers are coming to me for, it actually also feeds into understanding why are customers coming to me. So if I create an ad, it's me projecting onto the world what I think they should see my brand as. With SEO, it's actually a user telling me they found me because I solved this query for them. And the more actively I look into that data and use that data to feed into what products I'm making or what, like, information I'm putting out there in terms of content, the faster you can close in that loop and better address your customers' needs. And we do this on an ongoing basis. Like, we're constantly looking at where are we getting customers from, especially high-intent customers, and that informs what's the next type of content we create. What's the next type of service level pages we create and what are the queries we need to service further? And that helps us really double down on the growth we can cause for a company.

Okay, so are you looking at this? So the engine you have, the tool you have, is it actually capturing this and going like, hey, you should be focusing on this one and actually provides you sort of like a summary? Or is it more of like you just get the data and you need to extracted the conclusion of what that data means by yourself. I'm just about AI here.

Yeah, so currently we focus on understanding the data and providing that to our experts, but in more of a data format, because our experts understand how to leverage that data and make sense of it. Because sometimes what happens is AI has certain lapses where it's not able to capture all the results and might overlook some of the features. Some of the data points that are still important, right? Um, but what we are is— we are— what we are currently actively working on is these conversational agents that extract all that data and provide that in a more digestible format for users to be able to go in and act on themselves.

So, sorry, go ahead. Interrogate the data, as in— exactly, yeah.

Okay. Yeah. One interesting thing we did do, however, was whenever a company wanted to launch a particular product. So for example, you're launching a lipstick, right? And you're considering like between 5 different features and 4 different colors. We actually leveraged publicly available data on search to approximate what's the demand for products like that.

Mm, I love that.

And that was very exciting, right? Because I'm assuming after talking to 5 customers, even though I'm selling to over a million, like what I think they want. But search data is literally readily available data on what customers are asking for.

Tell me more, how, how did you do that?

So we have, um, some proprietary clustering algorithms, right? Um, and we pulled a bunch of publicly available data, clustered them based on pink lipstick, which is matte, uh, brown lipstick, which is gel or gloss, um, and created— found all the keywords that are relevant to these topics and then provided exactly what the search number of searches in their target geography is, as well as what are the current products that are currently showing on top for these, along with their price, features, etc. So they knew what is a segment they're competing against and what type of customers are coming here, because Google has already done a great job at servicing those requests by populating the right products. Okay, so that information together really, really provides a lot of data.

How did you pull the data from the public? Is it just like going, going to Google and scraping relevant websites?

So data aggregators like Semrush and Ahrefs do a great job at index— like pulling that data to some extent. Yeah, but then the clustering and the analysis of that, as well as The self-analysis, all stuff that we do in-house.

That's a nice tool. It's a very, very good edge for anyone looking to launch e-commerce products, like it sounds. Okay, so, um, with all that you guys do, and if you think from a perspective of someone who's not using a tool, what would be the biggest bottleneck or the biggest time drain, you know, the biggest energy drain in the whole SEO game right now?

Yeah, I think the biggest problem, I think this also happens in finance, right? When an industry accepts themselves as being a black box, they invent all these terminologies and all these complicated tasks that makes a customer feel like, dude, like this is way too complicated, just handle it. And if you say 6 months, a year, like they just stick to it. And I think coming back to the first point, right? Any marketing strat, be it producing content or doing SEO, just comes down to delivering on customer need. And this data is all an inlet to help us filter that at a more real-time basis quicker. But I think even a small company that is not using a tool like ours, whatever, they can just use a tool like Semrush or even just search a couple of terms. And be like, dude, this is what my customers want, and just start creating content for that and start doing very, very basic activities without having to do like the gamut of 200 activities that we've made a list of that we feel like are required. Um, and I think what people assume is SEO is not true. SEO has changed fundamentally, um, and we've made SEO feel like this black box, and that's what we disagree with. At Passionfruit very, very heavily. Like SEO is a very transparent activity that can drive very meaningful impact just if you're aligned with what your customer wants. And it's as simple as that.

So from all these steps, let's call them stepping stones. So understanding what you want to target, going to a tool, understanding customer intent, producing content and potentially optimizing content. You've got the landing pages, the conversions, the tracking, looking at the real-time reports. Sort of coming back, iterating. There's a lot of, you know, like touch points you're going to be doing in this SEO game. Which one would be like the biggest bottlenecks? Like, where are you going to spend most time? Just doing the content or doing the research in the beginning? Like, yeah, which one is the most time-consuming one?

Yeah, so I think the two most time-consuming ones, and one actually people don't spend enough time on, So I think creating content— content doesn't just mean articles, but like creating the right pages, the right website copy, the right articles— all of that is definitely like super, super intense, right? And that takes a lot of time. And I think the second one is like what people spend the least amount of time in, is looking at the data in terms of where am I getting traffic from today and what does that teach me about what I need to do next? Loop. And the faster you can make that loop and the better you make that, I think just the better you get at SEO.

Okay, I love that. So here's the golden question I was waiting to ask. How does automation improve the biggest bottlenecks, which is the blog and website creation and all the content and looking at the data? How does AI and automation help with that?

Yeah. So AI is huge in a couple of different fields, right? Um, in SEO, what people have tried to do is reverse engineer what a search engine believes is the best web page to target a particular query, right? Now, theoretically, with AI, you can do that at scale because you can have an AI literally go in, understand the patterns of, for particular queries, what pages are coming, and feed information in being like, okay, this is the type of page you need to create with these different elements. And you can do that at scale. So that's the first point of data which AI can do really, really well. Second is automation of content is not new news, um, and I think that's just great. Like, AI is great at doing that, and it's a superpower, and it can really, really help up drive the productivity up, right? As long as you marry that with expertise, like, you're golden. But if you think you're going to just produce 100 pieces of content a day and push them out, okay, it's not going to really help you, right? That's part 2. Uh, and part 3 is actually, um, as you're playing with a lot more data, it's very, very hard for an individual to be able to spend time looking at over 20,000 queries, understanding what to target, seeing the traffic data, seeing each page's rankings, seeing what else is ranking there, and then making the correct iterations on your pages to then improve your ranking and then improve the traffic and then feed all that data in, right? Like, because there's just too much data to process here. And that's where AI is just insane, because you can feed it as much data as you'd like, and it's really good at bifurcating that reasoning through it and finding the signal amongst the noise. and you can do that on a recurring basis ongoing in real time, right? And that's where we realized you create that feedback loop and you're just informing strategy just a lot better. Um, and if you marry that with like the experts that are creating the content and creating the initial strategy, like using AI as your best friend is just intrinsically a lot better, right? So opposed to like targeting 100 keywords, We're targeting like 10,000, 20,000 keywords for our clients, and that's where you see impact because you are actually able to process that data and make sense of it, which a human can then digest and then implement on. And that's where the real automation lies.

I love that. So there's a— if I'm thinking from a smaller perspective, and let's say I'm a business owner, a founder of a small business. So I'm probably going to manage to do all what we just discussed manually, you know, look at traffic coming in, look at keywords I'm getting, iterate on the traffic content strategy. But then at some point there's going to be a scale which you just mentioned with tens of thousands, you know, keywords where the human just just it wouldn't be possible, right? Just time consumption and just sheer amount of data to go through would take weeks. So that's where AI comes in play. And at that point in time, you have to choose a tool which does that very well. So that's a very, very nice shout. You mentioned lots of content and that it's not going to work. So I want to give you this use case, which is— I love you saying that, by the way, because I'm like, I hate that. If the internet would go to the point where everything is just AI content. I just, I just really afraid that this might take place. So I really hope like Google and majority of the search engines like YouTube and, you know, LinkedIn and all of that will, will do something with the algorithms and updates that is just gonna not work, you know, if you just spit out content AI. But I'm getting newsletters because, you know, I'm interested in podcasting and content creation. Industry. So I subscribe to many pages which I feel like they are good pages and I can see when they started producing content with AI. I can see it because I use it daily. It's almost like a sixth sense now I have. I look at the content and I'm like, AI, AI, human, AI. It's like it's portable. So I get these newsletters and I'm like, oh my God, you just generated like 10 things you should do for podcast marketing. I can see it's generated, right? So, so I can see people getting success with that, and you're saying like it's not going to work. Like, is it, is it really not going to work?

So I think it's exactly what you said, right? Um, when you keep seeing AI-written content, right, AI-written content has the lack of experience where it's, it's literally just like taking information and predicting what's the next best word to put out, right? Um, and it's very, very easy for you to actually— like, it's not that easy for you to detect it exactly what percentage of that is AI, but you can tell when a human has written it versus not, right? So I think it's about finding that balance so that you're actually engaging your user and you're enabling them to convert. Um, and I do think there's a good balance of AI-written content that actually works because AI is just really good at providing correct facts and gathering a bunch of resources and pushing that out. Um, and I think that's super important, right? Because like, it's very— you can't be an expert as a human in everything, but an AI has the capability of doing that. But then you need to humanize the content so that a human reader that's reading it feels like they can relate to it. And I think it's similar to like AI-generated images, right? Like, they were pretty bad, they got good, now they're insane, right? Like, you soon can't tell what the difference is. Um, and I think that's gonna happen soon as well with the content that we write, where you won't— it'll be indecipherable. But until it gets there, I think it's very important to have this mix, especially because currently a mass, like a majority of your users that are going to be purchasing the product is going to be a human before agents take over and they're buying everything for everybody else. But until then, like, you have to just write content that you and I can digest and understand and feel connected to and then go and make a purchase if we think we want to make.

Okay. So you put me at ease a little bit. I'm still scared there's going to be shit everywhere on the internet content-wise. Okay. So if I want to use this AI and I want to get just more efficiency in my processes, meaning I just want to do things faster, I don't want to decrease the quality of my content because, you know, I build up this blog post and maybe I have a newsletter, but everyone using AI, everyone's becoming faster instead of doing you know, one good newsletter a month. Now they're doing one good newsletter a week. So maybe I'm losing some market share and I'm like, look, I have to start competing. Well, what is the right way? How can you utilize GenAI to just get the content but still not, you know, lose the quality of your content?

Yeah. So I think it depends on the type of content you're writing, but it's very important to not be stuck to one type of AI model. So like for a ChatGPT, um, for a Claude, all of these models have very different strengths in terms of what type of content they're good at writing. So depending on the type of content you're writing and what you— I think even within the section of a blog you're focusing on, you should first of all use different types of models, and that comes through trial and iteration. Right? Um, if you are trying to scale that up, I think like especially writing factual contents, populating FAQ sections, and really like gathering a bunch of resources, it's really, really helpful to use these models. And then I think like tools like Perplexity have become so good at gathering a bunch of resources and answering very critical questions. Um, so another very important resource if you're trying to create kind of how-to or top 10 tools for stuff like that. Like, there's just really, really good resources for that. So I think if the question is, how do I use GenAI for increasing my content output and doing that at a good job? First is, don't just use ChatGPT for everything. You should experiment with more than just one tool because they have different strengths at what they're good at. Um, second is, using tools like Perplexity, etc., is an important tool stack to have at your disposal because they're really good at AI, like at aggregating information across the internet, um, and providing that in a newer format through which you can compare. And I think third is, at the end of the day, like, your subscribers are subscribing to you because they want Mike's opinion on things. And I think if you're not adding that take and you're just trying to mass generate content, you're going to soon lose that engagement. So I think like, as much as AI is an enabler like not losing that originality is just like super important. We've seen a lot of companies where like you see that like heavy, heavy uplift in traffic and then suddenly there's that crash in traffic because like you generated so much content, you started ranking for it, and then you start ranking a bunch, you start seeing a bunch of bounce rates, and then you see that dip. And it's because like they just lost that human element. Like this happened to HubSpot, this has happened to, um, oh yeah, HubSpot saw like a massive, massive dip, right? and it's because like there was just so much mass content being produced out there. So it's very, very important to have that, uh, because it's happening to the best of companies out there.

I love you saying and using HubSpot analogy. I actually canceled my subscription with them this year. They went somewhere else. Side note, right? So all the things you're sharing, which is just excellent, thank you for that idea. Let's imagine our listener right now going like, oh my God, you blew my mind on multiple occasions. Can you just tell me what I can do today to just start playing this game? So, so in a quick summary, if someone with a small business right now and just have access to like Google Analytics, which is a free tool or a very similar free tool, how they can go from I'm just writing blog posts and checking some keywords to I'm changing my game in such a way that it's intent-driven, you know, I'm capturing sales, just like bullet points of things people could do today.

100%. So on Google Analytics, the first thing they should do is just go into traffic acquisition and see based on what channel, how much traffic are they getting and how much revenue are they getting, right?

How you How do you measure the revenue you're getting? Let's say it's not e-commerce. Let's say something like I'm a coach, you know, I'm selling my coaching services, which is very, very popular right now, by the way. Trying to monetize your, your expertise is like, it's like a trend right now. I don't know if it's right now, maybe it's a couple of last years, but I'm just seeing this all over the place. It's just everyone is just, I'm a coach, I'm a mentor now. Everyone just basically with their own expertise. Let's say that's what they're doing. So they don't really have definition of of sales per se, you know, like for them maybe it's just, I just want to get the lead in my pipe. Maybe I want to have a phone call. Maybe I want to have a, you know, a meeting like that.

Yeah, so that's what I meant by key events, right? So if revenue is not your target, right? Like you can't track that, like just go filter on key events. Like Google does a great job at automatically scraping your website and understanding what a key event is and choose the one that matters to you. And you're seeing from what channel are you getting what percentage of all the phone calls or signups or bookings, whatever it may be, right? And if that number is significant enough for you from an organic channel, then the tool you need is a Google Search Console where you just see, okay, what are the pages that are really driving traffic for me with what queries? Um, that you can get from Google Search Console. You can also try to get that from GA. Now, once you understand the pages that are doing well for you, you should just try to understand what are the queries that are driving traffic to those pages and pick your 5 queries and then make a list of sub-questions you think are related to those queries. So selling a coaching service and somebody is finding you because they found best marketing growth coach in X area, you think about the top 5 other questions that customer could have related to your service and just write content or create service level pages for that. I would go either just make a Google search or a Perplexity search, see what's coming up, and just try to copy that same format and write my own spin on that. And then if you just keep doing this, as you keep seeing more and more activity on more pages, and pick your top 5 queries recurrently, you're good. You're basically just thinking about how you're catering to customer needs, seeing what's working in the market, and then just replicating that with your twist.

What if it's taking you somewhere you don't want to go? Like, uh, you see, like, let's say someone kicked off and they were like, I'm gonna be a social media growth expert or something like that, right? And then they started writing about this, maybe targeting, you know, a broad broad topic, right? They went into it, started producing content. People are coming, you know, reading stuff, and they, they're doing this sub, sub, sub-level questions, and, and they see that it's taking them to something like Instagram, Instagram for, for like influencers in Spain or something like that. Like, that's, you know, that's like trending. But if they will continue produce content in that area, you know, they're gonna go somewhere where they don't want to go. Like, what do you do then? Do you just go like, I'll just keep with what I wanted to do, or do you just follow the trend because you want to capture the growth?

100%. I think like it's important to do what you want to do, right? Like, for example, like even the traffic that we get, like we get traffic from all over the place, and that's also feeding into our funnel where like oftentimes like people are coming to us for the wrong services and we don't sell that. Um, now if that's something we don't think we want to go, like, we just ignore that and we rebalance our focus to the areas we care about. Um, but sometimes that data signals us opportunity where we think, okay, like, I didn't even consider that somebody like this could be interested and wants to be a customer. Maybe I should have a product for them. Um, so I think, like, reviewing that data actually just tells you what type of customers want you, uh, and then you make that choice. Is this a customer I want? Out. Um, but I think it's, as you said and rightly pointed out, it's very important for you to know, is that something you want to cater to or not? And if it's not, then don't write on it and don't make pages for it, because then you're wasting your time, uh, fixing problems for a customer you don't want to cater to.

I love you saying that. Yeah, I love you saying that. Some time ago we had an episode where effectively we talked about Exactly. That is like, how do you capture growth? And there was a strong opinion expressed that you should effectively go where, you know, where people are going because that's where the trends will be. And effectively, potentially, you need to readjust how you believe you're positioning yourself to the market if you want to, you know, get some eyeballs. And I felt like that's just selling yourself out to some extent. Side note. So You mentioned, Adi, that SEO is an open game. It became maybe a little bit black boxes, but if you know the steps, it's actually quite a simple game to play. With that statement, is there anything you think is a very important rule or action or framework or something that not a lot of people know, but you know from experience that it will be impactful that you could share with us today?

So first, I think like SEO isn't— so just to clarify the earlier statement, I think SEO is a simple game to start. Um, I think it's— to make it a valuable growth strategy, it's, it's still pretty hard. Um, and you have to really build, um, and have the right tools in place to be able to really scale that up. Uh, but I think to test viability of organic as a channel, I think it's something that you can start with scarce resources. And then as you scale, I think it's something you have to invest resources in because the data moat is just too high for you to be able to find signal from the noise and actually work on it. I think the thing that I've, the thing that I've noticed that I think like, um, I mean, obviously I'm biased towards our tool where I think like the revenue by keyword tool that we have is like probably it helps us find signals so quick, um, and just like double down on it because of which we can focus on like KPIs the company cares about instead of vanity metrics. But, um, one other thing that I think like everybody should just do is like Like, this simple act of seeing what is the landing page that's driving the highest conversion for me is like such an important activity, and seeing what those pages are, because it'll be shocking where like you could be getting insane amounts of traffic on some random pages and you'll assume that they're driving my KPIs, but there are actually just certain pages that drive a bunch of traffic but never drive a KPI. But then there's some pages that have like maybe like 30 clicks, 100 clicks, and they're driving an absurd percentage compared to their clicks in terms of traffic, in terms of like key events. And I think like if you just figure that out, you're going to be so much golden because you're going to focus on the right KPIs. And I think that's just an important activity I don't think anybody does. And this is not just for SEO, I think this is just general.

In general. I love that. We'll take that. So people getting excited hearing you speak, sharing all these actionable tips, and they want to know more, how do they find you and how do they go and experience Passionfruit?

Yeah, so they can find me on LinkedIn or they can send me an email at aditya@getpassionfruit.com. And our website is also getpassionfruit.com.

getpassionfruit.com. We'll have it in the show notes, of course. And to experience the tool, What is your module? Is that like a freemium? Like they'll get like 30 days and then it's paid, or is it 7 days, or is it just no trial? Like, what's the setup for people to get a sense of the value they would be getting?

Yeah, so we've actually just launched a completely free set of 4 tools which are free forever, so people can definitely go in and start using those tools. But for the rest of the tech stack, we sell it as a service. We don't like we don't yet provide a fully self-serve module for people to use. So for that, we have a service-based approach that we do.

Okay, excellent. Here you go, guys. So I feel like this was an excellent, strong message to whoever is doing SEO and you as a business owner, you as a growth strategist, or just in general interested in a topic. It's not really about just producing as much content as you want and getting as much content as you can and being done. It's really about thinking the whole funnel of the business, thinking about your KPIs, putting some intent into getting that done. And then that's where the content strategy comes from. All of these things need to align for a proper growth to take place. That was an excellent little episode. I do thank you very much. And for our listeners, if you did enjoy that, and especially if you have a friend in your network who needs to hear about this, please share the episode, subscribe, leave us a comment. We would love to hear what you're thinking. And as always, until the next time, stay safe and see you online.