What is Audience First SEO?

audience-first SEO, and we've been seeing amazing results from our clients. So when most people do SEO, they start with keyword research, right? Well, we're starting with, and it's not rocket science, we're not starting with topics or anything like that. We're starting with your ICP and your ideal customer by far, right? So there was an example that I ended up giving earlier today when I was doing a recording. We work with a wealth management company, and when we look at all the wealth management terms online, there's, in the United States, there's roughly 2.7 million monthly searches. We pick queries because when you look at wealth management, it could be someone trying to understand wealth management. It could be someone trying to save for the future in retirement. It could be a business owner getting ready for a sale, or it could be an ultra-high net worth family that's focusing on generational wealth. And this company wants to focus on the best leads, the ones that could make them the most money, which are ultra high net families, right? Like generational wealth. The search queries for that audience is only 222,000 searches a month. All right? It's not that bad. So it's roughly 12x less. So when we look at last year's results versus this year, We scrapped everything from saying, hey, we're just going to go after traffic. When we started the campaign, we're like, we're just going to go after traffic for your ideal customer profile and no one else. Less leads converts higher. The pipeline that they've built in the first 6 months is bigger than the whole pipeline they built all of last year through SEO purely by just only targeting on their ideal customers. Less leads, higher quality leads, more revenue. And that's the way I see not only SEO but GEO working in which it's not, I'm a marketing agency like Eric and I are, it's more so I'm a marketing agency and my ideal customers are franchises or they're enterprise businesses that are global that need help in 14 markets or 28 markets. And you start getting really specific and you're creating content and you're optimizing for rankings only for those customers and no one else.

Yeah, I'll add something to that. So Neil just talked about a case study that's actually worked out for our clients. Neil, there's a workflow that we've built right now and I've— we've continued to refine this workflow. And the way it works is it will ingest calls like this, it'll ingest from our content, right? YouTube, podcasts, it'll ingest from internal calls that we have, it'll ingest from customer calls, sales calls and things like that, or prospect calls, right? And then everything's queryable now. And what it does is it will draft content and it's using ClickFlow to do it, right? And so let me actually show you what one of these looks like. And so I wanted to illustrate this because I was running it back and forth because I'm just testing this for ourselves right now. And then this is something that we're going to roll out into ClickFlow. So this is what it looks like and ignore the design, but you've seen me, Neil, obviously I've been talking a lot about company brains the last couple months or so, right? So Like all the stuff we talk about, Neil. So company brain, how many permutations are we going to have from that? Revenue company brain, a finance company brain, whatever company brain, company brain services, company brain agency, right? Company brain agency based in Los Angeles. Like you just keep going and going and going, right? Like, how does a company brain help? So all I'm saying here is that this has gotten this workflow where it pulls from, it ingests from content that you already have and it knows what your writer guidelines are and it understands AEO practices, best SEO practices. So what I have, what I'm scrolling through here, Neil, you can see this table of contents. This has like 35 sections in this table of contents. I didn't ask it to do this, right? It just said, hey, here's like the top 30 that I want to go for, and here's bottom funnel, middle funnel, top of the funnel. And I said, just go ahead and do this. In fact, I think I have this in our Skills Dojo right now where there's a public version that you can access for free. I think if you go to skillsdojo.com, you can just access this. But the whole idea here is that when I was talking to the editor on the team, I was like, hey, Like, you know, how many good quality pieces of these can we crank out per month, right? And keep in mind, these are more cornerstone pieces that will live on our site. So we're not trying to spam anything. She's like, at least 80, if not more, right? And obviously, we try to have a human in the loop still. We can go way harder if we didn't have a human in the loop. But my take on this right now is you got to have a human in the loop. So basically what Neil said, ultimately, I'm going to come back to you in a second, Neil. This is a new workflow that people can try. You can access it. I think a lot of people are going to be doing it this way. But Neil, my understanding from what you did for your client is that you focused it on higher intent traffic and it drove less leads, but higher quality leads. Is that correct?

You nailed it. Higher quality leads, way less leads. And this is also more efficient because then you don't need as many sales reps. You don't need sales reps to go through all these leads. I know you can say you can have AI go through it as well. For things like targeting ultra high net individuals, you're not going to want to use AI for something like that. That is very relationship based, especially if someone has hundreds of millions of dollars, they're not going to want to talk to AI. They're going to want to talk to a human.

I would say, I mean, the caveat I think, Neil, on that one is like AI can tee it up, like draft it for you, but you need to review it and you need to add your taste to it. Like AI might say, hey, based on this pattern, maybe this person's worth reaching out to, and maybe it gets it 50, 60% of the way there, but you still very much need that human in the loop with good judgment. That's what I think.

Yeah, but when you're talking about very high end and dealing with a lot of money, AI can definitely help with the analysis and tee things up, but you're going to have to get on the phone. Email's only going to get you so far. People don't make decisions with hundreds of millions of dollars over email.

Totally. Yeah. It's a really— and by the way, like, as much as I like to talk about AI, I am not saying that, and nor is Neil saying this. Neil's never saying this, but it's— the relationship piece still matters. No matter what, you're going to have to be talking to humans. And don't think that, oh, just because you've made all these workflows or whatever, you're not going to have to talk to humans. You might talk to humans less because you're doing, you know, you're doing very high-quality work, but you're still going to be talking to humans. And the relationship game goes a long way. Because if I think about, you know, the clients that have stayed with us the longest, well, one, they came through the content, a lot of them, right? But the second piece is I have an in-person relationship with them. Same thing for Neil too, right? Every little bit that you do actually extends the lifetime value of the customer and they give you a longer leash because you're going to mess up sometimes too. They give you a longer leash. They're more tolerant of the mistakes that you make.

Yeah, they definitely are. And that's another thing too in marketing. I was talking to one of my buddies the other day and we were talking about moats. A moat could be, it's hard to leave your company. I know that sounds bad, right? If you look at Workday, for example, it is not easy to migrate off of Workday or NetSuite. That is a moat. Even if someone may have a better product or not, I'm not saying they do or they don't, but it's a moat to make it very hard to migrate off of your product. As a business, owner, I don't think you should do that, but that could be a moat in your overall business philosophy and it makes your marketing more profitable if your churn goes down or people have to use you longer because switching costs.

Dude, speaking of switching costs and, you know, we can talk about SaaS a little bit. So, you know, a couple months ago we talked about Atlassian, right? So let's just first bring this up for everyone just so everyone can see this. So just so everyone knows, Atlassian is a— they are a software company. They have Jira, they have things like they bought Loom, right, as well. And if you look at how their stock performance has been in the last month or so, they're up 82%, right? You look at the 6 months, up 97%. You go year to date, you know, there's a little bit of a dip, right? You know, at this moment over here, now they're low of $58 to $162 around. And, you know, again, what I would say is this, right? They crushed their numbers. You know, and Neil can speak to this a little bit. They crushed their numbers, but I want to speak to whether they can sustain this or not, because we did talk about how we think the SaaSpocalypse is a little overblown. But, you know, I do want to talk about the future a little bit too. So you can look at this real quick. Quarterly revenue of $1.7 billion, right, up 28% year over year. Quarterly cloud revenue is up 31% year on year. Subscription ARR of $6.6 billion is up 23% year over year. And then remaining performance obligations of $4.8 billion, up 44% over year. And then I'm just going to leave it at that. So, Neil, you want to react to this first?

Yeah. So we're looking at Atlassian stock. It's $162 as we're recording this podcast. It had a 52-week low of $56 for perspective. So it's up not triple, but roughly triple since its all-time lows. It's hard to time the bottom. And the reason Atlassian got hit so hard is People are like, you don't need their software solutions like Jira or anything like that. You can just build it all using, you know, Claude or whatever solution out there. What ended up happening was a lot of businesses decided not to try to build their own version of Jira or some of their other products, and they felt that they should focus on bigger problems than trying to replace a software that works quite well. And what Atlassian's seen is AI has actually caused more growth and more people using their products, including all these agents that are coding out there. And it's caused their stock to rise because their growth rate has been accelerating, especially their cloud revenue. And does it mean the SaaSpocalypse is real or not? That's for anyone else to decide. I'm not here to give you financial advice, but the reason their stock is doing well is They're continually just exceeding expectations. They claim it's because AI is causing more growth.

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 to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. Well, I am here to give you financial advice. So here's what I would say. The reason I'm bringing Atlassian up too, so congratulations to them. I think there's some little nuances here. So, you know, I'm assuming some people on your team use Loom. You know, we use Loom as well. And Loom is the video, the screen recording tool that they have that they bought a while back. Here's the thing. They're making it now where my— what my understanding is that a lot of the free seats are going away. And so they're starting to charge, right? When they start to clamp down on these areas to kind of drive growth, that is a little bit of a negative signal because the party's kind of over in these areas, right? I will also say this, this is a different company, Canva, but Canva is, they allow you to design flyers and things like that, quick designs, right? And so what they reported, I believe their CEO, Melanie Perkins, was it Perkins? I think it's Perkins. So they have these there's a lot of pressures, like headwinds now. So their AI inference costs are going up a lot, right? And that's actually slashing their growth, their revenue forecast, revenue growth forecast from 30% to 20% or so, right? And so the thing is, like, there are a lot of the cool AI features, they can't kind of give it away for free. It has to be for the paid users. And so the question now is, how is a company like Canva going to adapt? And when you look at Atlassian, you know, they're kind of— when they're starting to charge for a lot of these things that used to be free, Like, are they just trying to squeeze as much as they can, right? And so I look at these 2 companies as a little different than, like, I don't know, like a Salesforce or HubSpot, for example, where you still have the agents doing a lot of these API calls to the CRM, right? And then, you know, Salesforce is like, you know, they own Slack too, and a lot of people are using Slack. And so I don't think they're quite out of the woods yet, I would say, with the SaaSpocalypse stuff. But, you know, my hope is that Especially Canva can turn around because if you look at what they said, the cost reduction here, Canva is reporting lowering its cost per AI task by nearly 90% since April, which is a good thing, right? Token optimization. And they had a bunch of leadership shifts too as well. So what do you think, Neil, about all these potential pressures?

They exist, and I don't think anyone can do anything really about it other than just weather the storm and keep pushing forward. And we've seen this impact so many companies. We see it impacting marketing budgets. But if you look at the playbook Eric and I typically run is when things are really good for a lot of players in this space, we don't push as hard because it's really expensive to push hard. What Eric and I personally do in both our companies, and it's just random that we both do the same thing, but when times are bad, we push really hard because it allows us to compete due to the fact that things are cheaper and it's easier for us to— well, it's not really easier. It's still very painful for us to spend money and double down, but it gives us a fighting chance to gobble up market share from our competitors. Well, during a good time, We're smaller than our competitors. Some of them have billions of dollars. We can't compete with them during good times, but during bad times everyone slows down. So we push harder because things are just cheaper.

It's just more interesting too when there's chaos. But that depends on the person. So, well, I think that's a good place to end, guys. We will catch you next week and yeah, have a good weekend.