Why We Start SEO With The Customer, Not The Keyword

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Most SEO starts with keyword research. Neil and Eric start somewhere else entirely: the customer. Neil breaks down audience-first SEO, the approach Single Grain's Nicky Lamb wrote up and the one they have been quietly running for clients. Take wealth management: 2.7 million monthly searches in the US, and almost none of them are one audience. Someone trying to understand the term, someone saving for retirement, a business owner preparing for a sale and an ultra high net worth family are four different buyers behind the same keyword. Then Eric walks through the company brain he is rolling into ClickFlow, and what Atlassian's numbers say about where a SaaS moat actually sits. Key takeaways ◾Start with the ICP, not the keyword list, and the queries sort themselves ◾One high-volume term usually hides four buyers who need four different pages ◾A software moat is context and workflow, not the model underneath Chapters 00:00 Audience First SEO 02:19 ClickFlow Content Workflow 07:48 Atlassian and SaaS Moats 𝗔𝗕𝗢𝗨𝗧 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗖𝗛𝗔𝗡𝗡𝗘𝗟 Welcome to Marketing School, one of the top business podcasts with over 61 million downloads. Each episode delivers actionable marketing tips and strategies from two entrepreneurs who truly practice what they preach. The show is hosted by Eric Siu, founder of Leveling Up and Single Grain, and Neil Patel, co-founder of Neil Patel Digital and recognized by Forbes as a Top 10 Marketer. 🎙️ Learn More About the Hosts Eric Siu – Leveling Up: https://www.youtube.com/@LevelingUpOfficial Neil Patel: https://www.youtube.com/@neilpatel

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:34Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  It could be someone trying to save for the future retirement. It could be a business owner getting ready for a sale. Or it could be a 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? 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 gonna go after traffic.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  When we started the campaign, we're like, we're just gonna 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 six 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

• 2:39Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'll add something to that. So Neil just talked about a case study that's actually worked out for the 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, it'll draft content, and it's using Clickflow to do it, right? And so let me, 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 my, our sales right now, and then this is something that we're going to roll out into Clickflow. So this is what it looks like.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  And ignore the design, but you've seen me, Neil, obviously I've been talking a lot about company brains the last couple of months or so, right? So like, all the stuff we talk about, Neil, so company brain, how many permutations are we gonna 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. You just keep going and going and going, right? Come, 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 content. This has like 35 sections in this table of content. I didn't ask it to do this, right?

• 4:22Speaker 00

  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, I was talking to the editor on the team, I was like, hey, like, you know, how many, how many good quality pieces of these can we, 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 tried 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 gotta have a human in the loop. So basically, what Neil said ultimately, I'm gonna come back to you in a second, Neil.

• 5:06Speaker 00

  So this is a new workflow that people can try, you can, you can, you can access it. I think a lot of people are gonna be doing it this way. But Neil, my understanding from what you did for your client is that you focused it on a hot, on higher-intent traffic, and it, it drove less leads but higher-quality leads. Is that correct?

• 5:27Speaker 01

  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, 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 gonna 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 gonna want to talk to AI, they're gonna want to talk to you.

• 5:51Speaker 00

  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 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.

• 6:09Speaker 01

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

• 6:26Speaker 00

  Totally, yeah. It's, 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 gonna 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 gonna 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, they, 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? Any, every little bit that you, that you do actually extends the lifetime value of the customer,

• 7:10Speaker 00

  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.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, they definitely are. And, 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. You know, a moat could be,

• 7:29Speaker 01

  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. And even if someone has, 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.

• 8:02Speaker 00

  Dude, speaking of switching costs, and you know, we can talk about SaaS a little bit. So, you know, you, you know, a couple of 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 six months, up 97%. You go year-to-date, you know, there's a, there's a little bit of a, little bit of a dip, right? You know, at this moment over here, now they're, they're low of 60, 58 to 162 around. And, you know, again, what I would say is this, right?

• 8:43Speaker 00

  They, they crushed their numbers, you know, and Neil, 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 SaaS apocalypse 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 gonna leave it at that. So Neil, you wanna react to this first?

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we're looking at Atlassian's 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, you know, 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.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  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 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 SaaS apocalypse 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

• 10:40Speaker 01

  is they're continually just exceeding expectations. They claim it's because AI is causing more.

• 10:45Speaker 00

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• 11:20Speaker 01

  For growth.

• 11:21Speaker 00

  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 a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as UberSuggest and Answer2Public. 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 Neil, I'm assuming some people on your team use Loom. You know, we use Loom as well and Loom is the video or 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

• 12:06Speaker 00

  the free seats are going away. And so they're starting to charge, right? When they're starting to, when they start to clamp down on these areas to kind of drive growth, that is a little bit of a, a little bit of a negative signal because what the party's kind of over in these areas, right? I will also say this, this is, this is a different company, Canva, but Canva is, you know, they allow you to, you know, design, you know, flyers and things like that, you know, 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, the revenue forecast, revenue growth forecast from 30% to 20% or so, right?

• 12:50Speaker 00

  And so the thing is like there, 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, the question now is, 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, they can, right? And so I look at these two 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. A lot of people are using Slack. And so I, I don't think they're quite out of the woods yet, I would say with the SaaS apocalypse stuff. But you know, my, my hope is that, you know, they can, like especially Canva can turn it

• 13:35Speaker 00

  around. Because if you look at what they said, the cost reduction here, Canva is reporting lower, so lowering its cost per AI task by nearly 90% since April. So, which is a good thing, right? Token optimization. And they had, they had a bunch of leadership shifts too as well. So what do you think Neil about all these, all these potential pressures?

• 13:53Speaker 01

  They, they exist, you know, 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

• 14:34Speaker 01

  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. While 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.

• 15:01Speaker 00

  It's just more interesting too, when there's chaos, but that's, 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.