Surprising AI-Marketing Opportunities Driving INSANE Results ft. Neil Patel & Eric Siu

Hey, everyone.

On today's show, we are doing an SEO and digital marketing masterclass. I am joined by Eric Hsu and Neil Patel from the Marketing School podcast and they're breaking down for us how to think about search in the AI era, how to use AI to scale programmatic SEO. Is Google search dying? Is it dead? Is it doing great? We're gonna get the pulse. Check on that and so much more. Let's get to today's show. Hey, everyone. Welcome to today's Marketing against the Grain. I have two amazing guests with me. I'm joined by Eric Hsu and Neil Patel, who co host the Marketing School podcast. And we're talking all things future of marketing and emerging marketing strategies today. Eric, Neal, thanks for joining us on Market against the Grain today.

Thanks for having us.

Same awesome man. Thank you both for being here. Big fan of the Marketing School pod. I know you both have avid followings because you're deep practitioners of marketing and you're kind of deep at the intersection of both results and kind of emerging trends. And what I'm hoping to do today is take us through a tour of some of the most important aspects of marketing and talk about them and give people a new blueprint moving forward. And one of the places that I was hoping we could start was SEO. SEO. If you go read the SEO subreddit, it's a very depressing place. There's a lot of people talking about all the traffic they've lost, the websites they're shutting down. It's very, very doom and gloom. I think you all are probably more positive about the future of SEO and leveraging AI for SEO and those things than most people I talk to. I guess I'd love to kick it off and hear from both of you around what's happening with SEO, what's the state of the state, and what should people who are trying to get traffic from search do in this kind of post AI era?

Yeah, I'll let Neil go first because he's been saying this quite a bit. He has a new definition of SEO that I think is catching on. Well, so Neil, why don't you kick it off first?

Yeah. So first off, we look at SEO as not search engine optimization. We look at a search everywhere optimization. You know, as a Google VP said, I won't read the quote word for word, but he was talking about how when young people are doing a search, they're now turning to TikTok and Instagram before Google people are now asking Chad GPT for questions and hiring companies based on the Results that they're getting on chatgpt. Like, I was talking to this lady and I was like, how'd you find out about us? She's like, chatgpt told me to hire your marketing from NP Digital. I was like, all right, sounds great.

Sweet.

So you can optimize for so many channels, right? YouTube has search is the second most popular search engine outside of Google, which, funny enough, is owned by them. I don't have great stats on Baidu. It's a little bit tough to get stats on Baidu comparing the other channels because it's in China, but platforms are everywhere that have search now. The second thing to keep in mind is when you see the doom and gloom on the Internet like Twitter and Reddit, it's usually from people who are very technical, and that's one end of the market. Danny Sullivan, who's a search liaison of Google, has stated, every single year, Google has driven more organic traffic to websites than the previous year. It doesn't matter that there's more zero clicks or any of that overall net net. They're driving more organic traffic to websites than the previous year. And even with the AI Overviews release, we. We saw an increase in traffic to our client sites. Assuming you're doing SEO well because you got another place to get cited. Not by much, a little bit more than a percent. That's better than a drop. And the real point that I'm getting at is when you think of SEO, when people talk about, oh my God, look how much traffic I lost, my rankings went down. Well, if you lost rankings, someone else climbed rankings. It just doesn't happen where everyone loses rankings.

Right.

Google has roughly 10 results on the first page. And I say roughly because it really does vary. But if you cropped, someone has taken those spots and is getting traffic. So the concept that organic traffic or SEO is dead. Not really. It's changing, though, and you gotta adapt with it. Not just focus on Google, but there's still a ton of traffic to be had.

Yeah. Just to add some context to that. So the sales intelligence tool we use is gong. And so I was telling. Neil and I were talking about this about a week ago, and I was just like, if I type in podcasts, okay, so 10% of the sales conversations involve podcasts in there, and then about 9 to 10% involve the keyword YouTube. The fact that we're here, Kip, we're on, like, this is a collaboration with the marketing school podcast and the hubs and marketing against the grain.

Right.

We're both pushing this to YouTube. We're both going hard on podcasts. It's because the attention is being spread everywhere else. I think we tend to see the people that complain the most on, especially on Twitter or X whatever you want to call it. It's what Neil mentioned. It's the SEOs that complain about it. And the SEOs that complain about are typically, they put all their eggs in one basket and once they start to lose that traffic, they start to panic. And you know, Neil and I, we've gotten a couple of texts from friends this year talking about oh my God, we've lost all our traffic. Right. But some of these friends, they've bet most of their most of their traffic into SEO and it's no wonder why they're panicking, right? And so attention has changed quite a bit. I mentioned that I would travel with with friends this year and I look at their behavior and it's like they're not even using Google, they're just using TikTok to search for things. Right. So we have to adapt what the changes and with the role of the punches, I think the people that complain the most are the ones that are unwilling to adapt.

Yeah, there's a few things I would bring up. The people who are losing the most search, to your point, are not, they're not diversified, they're all in on search, which means they're deeply into informational search like very how to based search versus transactional search queries. And those how to based search queries are getting more disrupted by AI overviews, by ChatGPT, by YouTube, by TikTok, all of those things. And that's, I think that's what's challenging. I think the advice we're giving people is like, look, you have to be multimedia by default. Like you have like people are using video and podcasts more than ever before and you're going to have to be there as search kind of basically it unbundles and it comes across all the different platforms. The second thing I think we're talking about today is that AI is a new force in recommendations. And I call it like we're going from the word of mouth to word of machine era, which is like a hyperbole but like it's, you know, you will go and just get an answer from ChatGPT that is far more in depth and action oriented than previous search queries would be. And like I use the replit agent to like build lightweight apps and like that agent is telling me what APIs to use, what web infrastructure to use. It's Making the buying choices for me. And so if we don't show up in those platforms, you're not going to be set up for success. I think my follow up question to both of you is what do you think are the advantages in SEO right now in terms of like, how can you use AI to actually get more traffic to your website versus worrying about the traffic disruption?

So what we do, what we do at my ad agency, Single Grain. So I'll use a case study here. So, you know, some people poo poo on programmatic SEO. And the way you want to think about that is you're just creating, you know, location based or templated content, right? So a TripAdvisor would be a good example. Fun things to do in Rome, fun things to do in Japan. And that's why they rank for millions and millions of keywords, right? Or like a Yelp, for example, or an Expedia. So you can generate these pages programmatically. But I think some people have taken that too aggressively. And so if you think about SEO 10, 15 years ago or so, there's a lot of these black hats that were just pushing out spam as and they would rank for whatever. This programmatic content to me is still a way of spamming, but it's a way of spamming where you're adding value, I believe to the web. And as long as you're doing it in a tasteful way and you're putting out quality content, Google has said themselves that they don't care about it, right? Like as long as it's helpful to the humans, that, that, that's great. And so we have one client, they rank for about, they were ranking for maybe like 500, you know, bottom of the funnel keywords, transactional keywords, and then now they're ranking for about 7,000 or so. So it's not like we went hardcore for them. Like we went, we produced some programmatic content for them, but not millions and millions of pages, right. And so I think some people tend to over index or just not do it at all. It's like, oh, I'm not going to do AI content or they do too much of it and it's low quality. I think it's a, it's a happy medium that works. And one final thing I'll add before I flip it over to Neil, actually two things is if you're creating maybe hundreds or thousands of these pages and again you're queuing them, you know, pretty closely and making sure the quality is good, that actually enables you to do Programmatic conversion rate optimization, where you can change the call to actions on these pages. And we're seeing about a 50% lift on these pages. I'll give you an example on our website for single grain, and I'll slow down a little bit on our website. Single Grain, our typical call to action, says, work with us. Now maybe we have a page that talks about conversion rate optimization services for E commerce. Well, in that case, we'll change the call to action on that page to optimize your conversions, which seems trivial, but it actually increases the conversions on those pages by about 50% or so. And so what we do there is we leverage OpenAI's API and then we just scan the context of that page and we'll just, we'll create a prompt for it and we'll make it like a. You know, we try to make it like less than six words, the call to action. And it's worked out really well for us. And then, you know, I'm happy to talk about how we QA things, but that actually leads me into the third and final point before I flip it over to Neil is where we're producing agentic workflows. Right. And I know you and Kieran have talked about this, but for us, it's like, okay, SEO is a very thankless job. I don't want to spend time updating content. I don't want to spend time looking for internal links. I don't want to spend time doing a lot of this stuff at the end of the day. And so what we've created is, okay, we think about all the jobs to be done for SEO. You have to update your content, you have to index your content quickly. Okay, so we create all these agents that are able to do the work for us now. And I've asked my developers, I was like, how much time are we saving from those? Like, 10x more time and we're way more efficient. Right. And so it's like, people talk about agents, but how do you actually implement it? You think about the jobs to be done first, then you map out the workflow for it, and then you can figure out how you want to daisy chain them together.

Can you give us like a specific example of an agent, what it does, like what was built on? I just want everybody watching to understand, like, what is possible and what something that they could go and do.

Yeah, let me, let me do a little screen share here. So, okay, so here's an AI consolidation agent. So in SEO, we know that if you update your content, you're gonna gain more traffic. If you delete content, you help free up crawl budget, you might gain more content from it. But also you have to consolidate content that might be very similar. Right. You guys do a very good job of this at HubSpot. And so, okay, what if we created an AI consolidation agent where what we do in the very beginning is we simply look at Google Search Console and then we fetch Google Analytics metrics for URLs. And then as we continue down the workflow over here, we'll look for the closest vector matches, right? What are the closest types of content that should probably be combined? And then we'll filter Google Search Console data, and then we'll fetch the URL. And then at the very end of it, we'll provide all the URLs that we think should be consolidated. And then my belief right now, at the very least for the next two to three years, is you probably need a human in the loop for this stuff. You can't just let it roll on its own. And then that's what we basically do. So this is one example.

So is that all a series of agentic prompts for like, the Open AI API or, like, tell us about the technology behind it? Because everybody's going to drop comments on YouTube and be like, all right, well, I like this. How do I go and actually do it?

It's exactly that. So it's leveraging OpenAI's API. I believe we're using some newer products as well. I think we just started using something else. Our devs started using something else maybe like two weeks ago or so. I don't know what it is right now. So unfortunately, all I can say is OpenAI's API.

Yeah, but basically what you're saying is you can build basically a series of small web apps on the OpenAI API to basically automate different parts of SEO. In this example, it's like consolidating similar content to basically have fewer, more authoritative pages on your website instead of having 10 different pages that are kind of all saying the same thing and diluting your, your search.

Imagine this, right? Like, you guys are producing a lot of podcast content. So what we're doing for a lot of our, our pages to keep them updated, is we're linking to the most recent podcast episode or the most recent YouTube video that's related to that. So it keeps refreshing the page. And then we also are keeping, if we have an internal linking agent that's constantly working, then we're probably, we're trying to put in the most relevant or the most recent internal links as well, just to help give, give love to those pages. So a lot of this stuff, I think humans were very limited, but this stuff to me seems like it should be done programmatically.

There's a lot of marketers out there using AI. Most of them are just kind of copy and pasting ideas around. That's not the right way to do it. The smartest marketers are going to use AI to transform their marketing. At HubSpot, we've used AI to turn videos from one language to multilingual in minutes, not days. AI has completely changed the game for us and it can change the game for you. In fact, we just dropped a 12 page guide of AI prompts that are going to turbocharge your marketing. And if you're somebody who's trying to get started with AI, once you the right prompts to kind of push you in the right direction and outline the best use cases, this is the guide for you. So click that link in the description and go check out our free prompt guide.

The way we use AI, you can end up using it in many different ways. But when we look at results for customers, we really see two avenues producing the most results. The first being research. Because if you look at the content that Google tends to rank, it's a content that's the most thorough. So the more thorough you are, typically the better you're going to end up ranking, assuming you answer everyone's objections that they have around a specific topic. If not, they click the back button, sends a signal to Google, they keep searching, looking at the next webpage and the next webpage until they get their answer. So a great example of this is we work with a company called University of Technical Institute. We were able to grow their search traffic by more than 200% by using AI. So they have campuses all around the United States. We use AI to do research for all the locations and cities and all the information about those cities that we know interest students that go there, around those campuses. So then when we sent that and through AI, you can also have it organized in a specific format and a layout that you want. You then have your team, where we had our team, go and create content based on all the research that OpenAI or ChatGPT ended up providing. And then from there we ended up going and modifying all the local pages and that saw a massive boost in traffic. The second way is if you do a Google search for anything you see Wikipedia. The reason you see Wikipedia ranking for most things is their content is fresh and up to date. Most people have this wrong that are SEOs, though they believe if you just quote, unquote, update a page and modify a line or two, or add a video, add a link, it actually helps. We actually see if you update a page too frequently with very little value that you're adding, it does not help your rankings. We're actually seeing it hurt rankings. But if you go and you update a page and make it more thorough, answer objections, improve the user experience, right? All the things that are causing people issues, we're seeing rankings go up. But the key here is you can go into search console, you can use the agent for this. You can see what pages are decreasing in traffic year over year or quarter over quarter. However you want to end up basing it from there. Those are typically the pages that need updating. You can then end up running a search for all the keywords that have dropped in rankings. See who's ranking above you, what are they doing that your page is not doing? And then you'll have better ideas of what you need to do to update the content and make it better. You can have AI help you write some of that content, but you need a human in the loop. And the big thing that Eric and I believe in is you can't eliminate humans, you know, maybe in the future. And that's a real maybe. And the reason being is with AI, there's a lot of edge cases. For example, if you're a HubSpot and your terms of service page gets little to no traffic, you can't have an A.I. just say, hey, this page is getting little to no traffic. Where your SEO, you should only have pages that are getting traffic. So it's eliminated, you're going to be in legal trouble, right? And there's a lot of edge cases like that in all forms of marketing. For example, in paid marketing, let's say it's with Facebook or Google. As marketers, we know that you can't just say, hey, your campaigns are good or bad in the first day or week or month because it takes time to scale up and it takes time to learn. Like, Google's performance max isn't going to be optimized and ready to go with your campaigns from day one. But if you just rely on the AI, it may end up telling you, hey, you should shut this off and you should stop tomorrow and reallocate the budget. But as marketers, Eric and I know that we need to be patient and give it time. Look, the big thing with AI is you really need a human in the loop. I was talking to a Google engineer and this engineer works on Google's algorithms, specifically with things like the AI overviews and their biggest problem, and they've been fighting this problem since Google ended up coming out back in the day, is there's misinformation on the web, but with AI, it's pulling from everywhere on the web and every day there's new misinformation. How do they know what to eliminate and what not to when it's giving you answers? These are reasons why they cite sources and why ChatGPT is doing this and other players are copying because it's too hard for them to eliminate misinformation. If this was possible, Google would have done this years ago. And, and this is why AI is never going to be perfect.

I think maybe we can work towards talking about the old stuff that still works really well today, even though we're talking about the future of marketing.

Right.

So what's old is kind of becomes new and then I think we can end it with talking about the new stuff that we're excited about. So maybe I'll kick it off with some of the old stuff that Neil and I have been doing here. So what we really like. So we really like events. Neil and I are both going to Germany to speak at a conference called this is Marketing. You know, leaving this Saturday or you know, you're leaving Sunday, I guess. But within that event, what are we doing? So we're speaking at the event. The event organizers were gracious enough to host a private dinner for us as well with other entrepreneurs in the area. That's super high value as well. Neil and I will typically try to get meetings with other entrepreneurs in the area too. Neil's got employees over there.

If you're going to event, there's usually a lot of people that are there from corporations of all sizes. So one thing that we tend to do is we tend to invite people for either private events or we tend to invite people for our own, quote unquote session that may be hosted in a room at the event or a separate place and we'll give a talk and a speech. And we found that to generate a lot of revenue and separately we'll do our own events, excluding, you know, events like HubSpot or whatever it may be where we're running our own thing, we're reaching out to our network, to people on LinkedIn, inviting them. And these are quote, unquote, ideal customers. And they're in roles where they would be decision makers. We found this to help Us generate quite a bit of ROI over time because you're closing quite a few deals from it. We don't close deals right away. It takes us a year to two years to see ROI from any events that we host on our own. Cool.

And I think the other stuff too that we still, what's old is still new today is, you know, Reddit has been around for a while, Quora has been around for a while, but communities have gotten a bump and Google's kind of adjusted a little bit. But still, you cannot doubt that Reddit's added about 700 million in monthly organic visitors. And that's a lot. Right. So in a world where we're going to see a lot more AI content production, that this is why Korra and Reddit are taking off. But you know, there's also other communities out there that you can make yourself. You can use apps out there called Skool S K O O L or Circle would be another one. And then for Circle, for example, I know you can put it on a sub domain so you can get some SEO benefit. And so I think communities to me are interesting because not only are you going to gain SEO traffic from it, but you're also going to build a retention mechanism in for your business. Right. Because people ultimately, they might buy from you, but they stay for the community. Right. And so community could be in person like the events that we just talked about, or it could be online too. Or ideally you're doing online first and then you're bringing them to in person. Right. So Neil and I, we have this agency group called the Agency Owners association, and there's an online component, but we're adding an in person component because Neil and I basically live half a mile away. And like when we're both home, it makes sense to have, you know, a, like a, like a workshop that we can do in person.

Right.

So Sam Altman himself has even said that he believes that in person communities will be even more valuable in the next five to ten years or so. Because the fact of the matter is when you look at charts, humans are getting lonelier and lonelier. They're not getting out, they're not talking to people. We're kind of not doing well with our social skills. And so I'm excited and I'm pretty bullish about that. Anything else missing there, Neil, before we talk about other stuff? Future. Yeah.

When you look at community, I think the biggest issue that we're facing right now is with technology and AI, it's becoming less of a person to person world in which people are interacting online more with robots, technology, agents, whatever you want calling them versus other humans. And people are actually craving those in person interactions. When Eric and I started in marketing.