This Free SEO Hack Will Increase Your Traffic

All right, so today we're going to talk about pay-per-tasks. I'm going to start off with that. So pay-per-task, you know what that means, Neil?

No, like, uh, like a TaskRabbit and you're paying someone to do something for you?

Kind of like that, but now think about for, for software. This is— I think this is where software is going to go, and I think this is where you might convert Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. I think you might start doing this. So when you think about Intercom, for example, they would charge you— Intercom's like a chat, you know, chat customer service tool that you have like a little box that pops up. You can ask questions and stuff and salespeople can ask you questions through it as well. And they would charge like a per-user fee, maybe like $10, $15, $20 a month or whatever. And it starts to get really expensive if you have like 1,000 people at your company using it. Like it starts to get expensive, right? What they're doing now, what Intercom is doing is they are charging you on a pay-per-task model, meaning that if they resolve a customer ticket for you, they'll charge you $0.99.

Are they using humans or are they using AI?

AI. Yeah, and Zapier is starting to do that now too. So let me read this off to you for Zapier. This tweet comes from Greg Eisenberg, who's a friend. So Zapier, by the way, is a $5 billion company, and that's a whole other story we should talk about.

They probably were a $5 billion company.

Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, you get what I mean. So they're moving to a situation where— so 2 weeks, Intercom moved on from one of their products to pay-per-resolution, so pay-per-task basically, instead of a monthly subscription. This new model makes sense to me, and AI agents are accelerating this. Not every software business is ready to charge monthly. What Zapier is doing now, they're saying, hey, we've heard you loud and clear. Our plans aren't working for your needs. Starting today, we're excited to share 3 big changes to help you get the most out of Zapier. Most zaps. So more zaps. You're going to get more zaps. Okay, that's fine. More flexible pay-per-task billing when you go above your plan's limit for all plans. Now, if you go over your plan's task limit, you can pay as you go for additional tasks used.

More valuable.

That's a whole nother feature thing. So I think this will not maybe replace SaaS completely, but I think we're going to see a lot more people doing this.

Well, it's more aligned. You're paying for some sort of benefit. No one likes paying for, you know, just using the same software. And it's just connecting 2 things like, oh, your Salesforce now talks to your Mailchimp or whatever it may be. Well, cool. All right, you guys were charging me $200 for that connection. Now there's another software competitor that just came out and is charging me $50 for the connection. Next thing you know, there's someone that builds it in India is going to charge me $10 for that.

So we talked about this, right? Chamath tweeted the other day, hey, we are— did you see this tweet?

He's building an incubator?

Yeah. Yeah. Go for it. Yeah.

What is it called? 90/80 or 80/90?

I don't know, 80/20 or whatever. Like, but basically he's like, hey, like, we're going to help you build SaaS products and we're going to use offshore talent to do it. And we're going to reduce costs by like 90% or something.

Well, let's see. I'm actually pulling up the tweet. So he tweets quite a bit. I'm starting an incubator funded entirely by me. It's called 80/90. Tell us what enterprise software you use and my team and I will build you an 80% feature-complete version at a 90% discount. We're using AI and offshoring to make this happen.

Yeah. So that's the one. I think we kind of briefly touched upon this on the phone. It's like The software gross margins of 80%, 90% or so, that's probably going to start to get whittled away with all the AI copilots and all this stuff. And that's why Chamath's doing this too because they— I remember they would talk about it with the All-In people about how software is going to come down quite a bit now and now AI is going to help you build a totally feature-complete thing and you don't need to charge that much.

Yeah, most people don't know this. He helped with Tinder or building of Tinder or something like that. It was something Chamath— I'm actually Googling it right now— sells Tinder shares. Maybe I got this wrong, but I'm pretty sure. Chamath Palihapitiya had accumulated Tinder shares via his investment in Xtreme Labs acquired by Pivotal. So yeah, he had Tinder shares and I don't know what it was for. I thought it was because he helped build it, but maybe I'm wrong there.

Yeah. Look, I think this all like— okay, so how does this apply for marketing and business? I think one, This AI transformation is very real, and that applies to business, it applies to marketing as well. So everything you've been used to doing, it's going to change a lot. And I'm in a situation, I don't know how you think about this, Neil. It's like the companies of the future, you might not need to have that many people necessarily. You might, instead of having 100 people, it's probably 10 that are super AI enhanced.

Yeah.

And that's what it is, right? And then we're just going to get a lot more efficient. And what my uncle told me, unfortunately, he's like, hey, most human beings are useless, Eric. And I'm like, wow. He's like, yeah, most people in the future aren't going to need You don't need too many Steve Jobs and Elon Musk in the world. He's probably worth like $400 or $500 million. And he's just like, you just don't need that many.

Let me guess, real estate?

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I know exactly what you're talking about.

Yeah.

And going back to Chamath really quickly, it was from his investment in Extreme Labs because of the mobile development group and the work that they've done for Tinder in exchange for equity. So they did build quite a bit of Tinder for equity.

I think we're going to see a lot of these, like a lot of shops. And by the way, that like for us to have, we have We have ad agencies. It's like, you know, how does this apply to us, right? So I think this— the key takeaway here is just to get you to think about how this might affect you in the future, because I don't think enough people are taking this seriously.

But dude, you know what's funny? AI is changing so many things so fast, including what people are willing to pay for, or this pay-per-task. The thing I fear with AI— the economy revolves around people spending money.

Yeah.

So if AI replaces a lot of jobs, What's going to happen to the spending power for a lot of the people out there? They're not going to have the money to spend. What's going to happen to the revenue and business?

We should talk about this.

It's one big cycle.

So, this is philosophical, right? But I do believe that most people are going to have universal basic income and most people are going to spend all that money on probably creative endeavors and they're going to be more entrepreneurial. They want to, you know, they're going to realize, most people are going to realize if they all have universal basic income that maybe sitting on the beach is not as Cool as it seems to be, and maybe it's a good job. It's a good idea to be productive.

Yep.

So then that the money goes there.

Yes. But no, you know, at the end of the day, I don't see people getting universal income. Like where are they going to get that from? The government?

I'm printing money. That's what I'm doing.

How do you?

You're doing like a camera reel. Have you seen the meme? Have you seen the meme with Jerome Powell where he's just like, yeah, money's just coming out.

It's like, and I don't I don't see it. The government already has tons of issues and so much. debt and we don't have enough cash.

Do you see how the balance sheet just keeps growing?

Yeah, but—

Just doesn't matter.

One day, I believe, and I'm not an economist, but one day it has to stop. And the question is, when does it stop? And who does it stop with?

Yeah, I mean, we'll see.

I think our generation may be screwed. I think my children's generation is definitely screwed.

Yeah, that's why you got to do well. So you can leave your kids some money, you know?

Or you do well, donate it, and tell your kids, I gave you all the tools to succeed, figure it out on your own.

Is that what you're doing?

Yes.

Okay.

No, I really am. The only time I would give them money is if my daughter batted her eyes and said, Daddy, can I live right next door to you? I'm like, okay, honey, you can live next door to me. Don't ever let me—

Anyway, so that's, that's what I got on my side there.

The next thing that I think we should talk about is, you know, because we're already on the topic of AI, you have this nifty SEO trick that'll increase your traffic for free.

Okay, so this one's very simple, everyone. So this is, you can do it for free. It'll take you about 5 minutes or so. And all you have to do, Neil, you probably know about this, but go to your Search Console. So everyone go to Google Search Console. Everyone can do this if you have a website. Go to your performance page. I'm going to slow down my talking a little bit. So go to Search Console, go to your performance page. Are you doing that right now?

No. Oh, okay.

And then sort the queries tab by impressions. So what you're doing is you're looking at the— you're trying to sort like the different keywords that you're ranking for by impressions, right? Top to bottom. And then in the top 20, find the top 5. So basically the top 5 keywords with a click-through rate of less than 50%. And by the way, this tweet's from John Rush. This is just something that's a good reminder. But now what What you do is you insert those keywords and then put them into your homepage hero and your H1 and H2 and meta tags. What happens there is those pages increase their traffic.

Yeah, that's not bad.

Pretty simple.

And speaking of SEO, I want to talk about, you know, the shift we're seeing in B2B SEO. I know a lot of you guys have B2C sites. I should post something about B2C SEO. So 2023 is done and I thought it'd be fun to look at my data from my ad agency, NP Digital, and what's drove us traffic and what's drove us revenue. So keep in mind, we rank in decent positions for keywords like SEO, online marketing, digital marketing, the list goes on and on. And no matter what country you work with us in, we don't really have services lower than 5 figures a year, and it can easily climb into 7 or 8 figures a year. So where does most of our revenue come from, at least from an SEO perspective? Well, what we wanted to first do before we get there was to look at what keywords drove our organic search traffic. So when we look at keywords by keyword length, 1 to 2 word phrases drove 18.43% of our organic traffic. 3 to 6 word phrases drove 57.31% of our traffic. 7 words or more drove 24.26% of our traffic. Now we wanted to see what keywords drove qualified leads, not leads, but qualified leads. There's a lot of people that'll fill in a lead form like, screw off, you know, don't like you, or my website is ibm.com, or, you know, when the person's coming from like a random location and you know it's not ibm.com and they said my budget's $1 a month, right? So when we're looking at qualified leads, 1 to 2 word phrases drove 12.55% of our leads, even though it drove 18.43% of traffic. 3 to 6 words drove 59.32% of our qualified leads, even though it drove 57.31% of our traffic. And 7 words or more keywords drove 28.13% of our qualified leads, even though it drove 24.26% of our traffic. So pretty much 3 to 6 word keywords generate most of our qualified leads, which makes sense because that's where we get most organic traffic. So then we wanted to dive in what keywords are driving most of our revenue. Shockingly, 1 to 2 word phrases, 4.76%. That's tiny compared to it driving 12.55% of our qualified leads. 3 to 6 word phrases drove 46.29% of our revenue when it drove 59.32% of our qualified leads. Now, 7 or more word phrases drove 48.95% of our revenue when it only drove 28.13% of our qualified leads.

And it makes a lot of sense. Like if you search for shoes, for example, that's too broad. It's not going to convert, right? But if you search for buy cheap basketball shoes in China, and just me, I just added the last part because I'm Chinese, but you get my point. It's like that's going to convert a lot higher.

And then we compare that data to 2022. So when we look at 2022, 2022 used to be 6.08% of our revenue came from 1 to 2 words. 2023 was 4.76%. And this again is just for SEO traffic. For 3 to 6 word phrases, in 2022 it was 62.71%. 2023 was 46.29%. So it went down. But the big change from 2022 to 2023 was in 2022, we saw 31.21% of our revenue come from 7 Words or more keywords, keywords that are 7 words or longer. And in 2023, it went from 31.21% to 48.95%. That was, that was a big increase.

So what is the key takeaway for people here? I think it's— Go ahead.

People are getting very specific with their search queries. I think a lot of this has to do with AI and them getting used to being able to type in longer things and expecting the answer.

Oh, are they? You think they're using the autocomplete too?

I don't know if they're using autocomplete because we've done a lot of tests on this. Autocomplete doesn't give you tons of 10-word phrases or anything like that.

Okay.

I think what's happening is they're getting really specific with their needs and they know what they're looking for and they're doing a lot of—

Quick research.

Yes, for the 1, 2-word phrases and even 3 to 6-word phrases, they're doing a lot of research from that. Once they figure out what they're looking for, they're starting to use really long tell search queries to get the exact thing that they're looking for. And if your website answers it, kind of like Quora, you know how they do the Q&A and they get really specific?

Yeah.

It's the same thing. If you answer within your text, I think it drives the most amount of leads. And we're seeing this trend, not just with our website, but with a lot of other B2B websites. Now I don't have data on like, you know, 10,000 B2B enterprise sites or anything like that to make something conclusive, but this is what we're seeing. Here's what we're gonna try for this video.

We're gonna give you $100. We're gonna pick one person, $100, and whoever types marketing is cool in addition to the takeaway that you got in the YouTube comments, or you can write this as a review, just make sure you subscribe to us on Apple. Either or, we're gonna award $100 randomly on this one. So someone go do it and we will do that. Neil's looking at me like, what the— you crazy? Why are you giving $100 away, dude?

I'm okay with it. But make sure you give us a 5-star review. review too.

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's us begging for the 5-star review. So that is it for today, and we'll see you tomorrow.