In this episode, Eric Siu and Neil Patel dissect LinkedIn’s user‑generated content (UGC) and AI‑driven SEO strategy, referencing a Semrush post by VP of Brand Marketing Olga. They explain how LinkedIn creates question prompts, incentivizes influencers with badges (e.g., Top Voice), and leverages the resulting content for search engine crawling, which has boosted LinkedIn’s monthly visits from roughly 1 million to 3 million. The hosts caution that raw traffic numbers are a superficial metric; true marketing success hinges on conversion‑focused KPIs such as sign‑ups, revenue, and customer lifetime value. They discuss the compounding nature of LinkedIn’s growth, noting that even modest monthly growth rates could become significant if conversion rates are healthy. The conversation expands to broader applications: using AI to transform podcast transcripts into blog posts (60‑70% AI‑generated) and employing programmatic SEO, emphasizing that these tactics are accessible to marketers of all sizes. The episode concludes with a reminder to prioritize revenue‑driving outcomes over vanity traffic metrics.
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All right, so we're going to go a little deeper into the LinkedIn UGC strategy. So Neil, I don't know if you remember this, but we did an episode about LinkedIn's SEO strategy. And I wanted to share this good post from the VP of Brand Marketing at Semrush, Olga. And so I am pulling up my screen right now and I will read off of it if you're not following on YouTube, but here's the headline. So, and then Neil, you can recap on what this actually, actually, you know, Neil, why don't you recap on what the LinkedIn UGC thing is, or do you want me to do it?
Go for it. You're already sharing your screen. Dude, I can't even see this. I'm getting old.
Yeah. Well, yeah, whatever. But so the LinkedIn UGC strategy is basically how they are adding a bunch of questions for people to answer and you can have influential people answer the questions. And so they're creating a lot of these user-generated, it's just user-generated content, right? For very specific business questions and they're just making it available for search engines to crawl. And so what's happening is, this is the title of this post from her is How LinkedIn Leveraged AI and UGC to Rank. And now when we talked about this, I think they were maybe getting a million visits a month or so. Now it's up to 3 million visits. And so Neil made a point about how this is like a blip in terms of how much traffic they're getting.
Yeah.
But my point is like it's compounding and it could start to get significant after a period of time. But I didn't know this part, Neil. Let me just read this off. The way they're doing this, they're incentivizing people like you and me to post by giving you badges. And so if you post enough, they'll give you like a yellow top voice badge or they'll say top voice in digital marketing, top voice in AI or whatever. So like they're gamifying it and that's how people are starting to post more and more. Because like people are like, oh, if I can look good, if I can be influential, maybe that'll help me get business, blah, blah, blah.
Dude, not even that. I've gotten emails from LinkedIn. They ask you to participate in certain things and they'll tell you, if you participate, we'll give you the badge, right? So it's really direct and that's how they're getting a lot of influencers or people with followings to jump on the bandwagon. But you know, the big thing I say here too, and us as marketers, if you look at this UGC strategy, LinkedIn has amazing authority, amazing backlinks, Amazing brand queries, which is a factor in their ranking. If a lot of people type in your brand, you know, if you look at most of the popular Google queries, they're actually brand names like Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, et cetera. They have a lot of the factors to do well from this UGC strategy. But again, what people forget is in marketing, don't just be enamored by a number like 3 million visitors or whatnot. It's such a blimp in their overall traffic profile. If that traffic doesn't actually cause more signups, more revenues, it doesn't matter as much. And I think that's where people mess up a lot. They focus on the number instead of focusing on KPIs that really matter, right? What's your key performance indicators? What's the stuff that really moves the needle for the business? That's what marketing should focus on. Creating content could be one of those things. It may take a lot more time. When the 3 million visits turn into 300 million, all right, now we're talking. Maybe that helps move the needle, but it's all about what really moves the needle. And when I say move the needle, I'm not talking about from a traffic standpoint. That's where a lot of marketers get wrong. I'm talking about from a revenue standpoint. What are the most important metrics like lifetime value of customers and revenue, whatever it may be, What moves that? And that's what marketers need to focus on instead of just being like, look what I did. Look at the visitor count. Look at this blog post. It ranks for this keyword. Did it drive any sales or leads? No. 6 months later, did it drive any sales or leads? No. All right. It doesn't really matter then.
Yeah. So I'd be keen to see what their numbers are. They'll probably share maybe in 6 months or so, whoever's on their LinkedIn SEO team on how this actually went for them. Because neither Neil and I can speak to that. But we can speak to is if there's a compound monthly growth rate, not even an annual growth rate, That, I mean, it's 50% right now from what we're seeing, right? It's not going to hold that 50% forever. But if they can maintain that 10, 20% monthly growth and there's a decent conversion rate from it, then it's a win. So maybe we'll come back to this in a year or so and see how it goes. But I do, at the end of the day though, it's not really about traffic if it doesn't convert. What matters in marketing is traffic and conversions, right? That's how you got to look at it. So that is it for today. And by the way, you might be thinking, well, how does this apply to me? Like, yes, this applies to large websites out there. Like if you're like a TripAdvisor or whatever, you have a lot of users. And that's why you can have UGC, user-generated content. But this is just another way of leveraging the power of AI, right? But we've talked about in the past and maybe we'll reiterate in a few episodes or so, but there's AI-enhanced content, which is what we're doing with this podcast where we're taking a transcript and we're making it into a blog post and we're enhancing it. 60 to 70% is done by AI. The other 30% is done like a human being. And then you can also do programmatic SEO. There are things available to everyone, right? And we want to make sure that you understand that. And this is not just, This whole AI plus SEO thing is, it's going to enhance everybody. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow. Bye.
