Neil Patel and Eric Siu compare AI-driven SEO to paid ads for startups, weighing budget needs and time-to-value. They discuss parasite SEO tactics and share how ChatGPT recommended agencies to a large company, offering practical guidance on which channel wins at different business stages.
Whenever we talk to companies, no matter where I go to speak, and I know it's the same for you, I haven't asked you, but I already know it's the same. Everyone only cares to talk about AI SEO.
Mm-hmm.
And GEO, AI SEO, LLM SEO, whatever you want to end up calling it.
Yep.
Or search everywhere optimization that we like calling it. Don't care. People want to just talk about that.
Mm-hmm.
But when you look at budgets, even though it's one of the highest converting channels, the traffic volume is so low, the budgets are not there where people are willing to spend $1 million a year on that kind of stuff. Yeah, maybe over time it'll get there. The budgets are extremely tiny for this stuff where people are asking us to do stuff for like $100 grand, $200, $300 grand a year versus where they would traditionally for the, for traditional SEO have $4 or $5 million worth of budgets. I know that's a large SEO budget, but I'm talking about large corporations here. I'm not talking about, and these are publicly traded. I'm not talking about companies making Millions of dollars, I'm talking about companies generating billions a year in profit. The AI SEO stuff is where you have to pivot even though they still need the traditional SEO stuff. And if they don't do that right, they won't do well in AI SEO.
All right, so I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital. And they work with a whole host of global companies or global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com/eric And I think for both of our companies, we're doing both right now. Like, so there's a lot of panic around, oh my God, I'm losing all this traffic, which is leading to more leads coming in, right? The panic usually causes more leads to come in. But, you know, I, you do have to do both. We agree on that. We do. I think we both do agree that traditional website traffic, that's going to decrease over time, but it's still very valuable right now. The reason why I call SEO for startups a fool errand right now is Jason Cohen from WP Engine. He posted this, right? So he says, all my company startups are doing SEO, but they're doing it wrong. with paid ads for 22 years. Of course it costs money, but budget and messages are controllable. It's easy to A/B test and relatively easy to measure results directly. I'm not against social and SEO. It's just not automatically better, right? And it depends on the type of business that you're in. So what I said was, look, time to value takes too long with social and SEO, assuming the company plus marketing channels are starting from scratch. It just is what it is, right?
Yes.
And even though you and I are SEO background, like you can't just say, I'm going to build a brand day one, or like I'm going to start ranking unless you acquire a bunch of websites at the same time. So SEO, it depends. I still like it. I think you still like it as well. I don't love it as much as I did before. And I think what was some— someone, a guy responded to me, Travis Jameson here. And he said, you know, the counter to that, Eric, as you know, is effectively using parasite SEO to jumpstart the SEO efforts. And as he said that, I'm like, but God, that takes so much work, right? So I responded, I said, look, sure. But with so many more variables with SEO today, I tend to tread more cautiously, meaning I just Rather, if I'm a startup, maybe I'd just rather not deal with it. But if I'm more established, sure, I'll deal with it.
It's also easier to get results, as you mentioned, when you're established because you already have the authority and the brand out there and the recognition and the PR. Interesting enough, when people talk about SEO, whether they think it's valuable or not, and we are established just like you, there's a company that generates around $160 billion a year in revenue, so massive. Organization, not 2 people generate $160 billion a year. We got a head up for them for marketing in Latin America. We're included in an RFP with 3 others. And the reason being is according to the lady that reached out to us, her boss asked ChatGPT which agencies they should hire for the region they were interested in Latin America. And we were one of the 3 that were recommended.
So it was a ChatGPT ranking.
Yeah.
Yep.
