CEO Warns: SEO Traffic Will Be Zero?

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 Neil and Eric break down the etiquette of podcast collaborations, why giving raw recordings drives reach, and how a give-to-get mindset shapes long-term wins. They share lessons from speaking at the Social Commerce Summit, including QR code lead capture tactics, why case studies supercharge AI sales presentations, and how to calculate ROI on paid speaking gigs. A practical episode on collaboration, lead generation, and choosing the right events to grow your business. Key takeaways ◾Give raw recordings to maximize podcast reach ◾QR codes turn talks into qualified leads ◾Pay-to-speak events can deliver 40x returns Chapters 00:00 Podcast collaboration etiquette 03:00 Give-to-get philosophy 06:26 Social Commerce Summit recap 06:46 QR codes for lead capture 09:00 Lead qualification tradeoffs 11:52 Community in the AI era 12:17 ClickFlow AI content break 12:48 Conversion stats from the event 14:14 Single brain and AI implementation 16:01 Adding case studies to presentations 19:30 Getting paid to speak 20:33 Paying to speak for ROI 22:36 Criteria for paid speaking events 24:11 Calculating speaking ROI 26:04 HubSpot Inbound and brand-building events 27:29 Repurposing speaking clips 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 📩 Free Resources Ubersuggest: https://www.ubersuggest.com/ Answer The Public: https://www.answerthepublic.com/ ✅ Subscribe for Daily Marketing Insights!

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Finding customer information shouldn't mean digging through emails, call notes, and spreadsheets. HubSpot's Starter Plan brings all of those details together, so it's easier to track what's happening with every deal, and what to do next. It pulls information from calls and emails. Then it gets to work, logging and summarizing them. Right after your call ends, HubSpot pulls next steps from your call notes and drafts suggested follow-ups. And it stays up to date for you, so you can build demand, win more deals, and spend less time on repetitive work. Your records, insights, and next steps are ready for you to act on. And you don't have to miss a beat searching for any of it. Try the Starter Plan for $10 a month. Learn more at hubspot.com. Did you see what the Conde Nast CEO said? He's basically saying, "You want to act as if SEO is dead." So this is the part that everyone missed about Conde Nast CEO. He is saying that you want to act as if SEO is dead.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  So I'm going to share my screen right now, so you all can see this and we can react to this, Neil. And then I'll go first on this reaction. So, look at what he's saying. So this dude, Roger Lynch, who's the CEO of Conde Nast, I don't know if I pronounced that correctly, has directed all of the company's brands to operate as if search traffic to their properties will be zero. He says, "The era of turning the search and social media traffic into profitable businesses is gone." "We took a snapshot of search results from seven or eight years ago, and what you saw were a few sponsored links, then the 10 blue links." "Did the same search today, you get an AI overview, then you get rows and rows and rows of commerce links, then you get the sponsored stuff." "Each of the last three years, we would do our budgets, and we put forecasts of search traffic declining, because we see the pattern of algorithm changes, and generally, those algorithm changes were negative."

• 1:29Speaker 00

  "Every year, our search traffic was down more than we had forecast." So last year, I told my teams, "Assume there's no search." "You have to have your business plan as if search is zero." "We don't expect it to be zero, we expect it to be a single-digit percentage of our traffic." So here's what I would say first, and then Neil, let's get your thoughts too. So, my take on this is that I think it's a smart thing to act as if it was zero, but that doesn't mean you treat it as nothing, okay? So you still treat it as part of your strategy, right? Because the understanding is, AI overviews or LLMs, they're still grounding on these search results. These LLMs still need content from somewhere, whether they're grounding on, you know, Google.

• 2:10Speaker 00

  They're looking at YouTube, they're looking at Wikipedia, they're looking at Reddit, they're looking at TikTok, they're looking at, they're even looking at LinkedIn now. So you still want to have some type of strategy, but what I, what I'm really looking at here is Neo, maybe ten years ago or so, fifteen years ago, where companies bet their entire strategy on SEO. Those days are gone, okay? So I think, oh, I thought you were saying something, but it's actually a car going by. So those days are gone, and I think you need to start thinking about the search everywhere strategy that we've been talking about for the last few years. Uh, but I think certainly, like, having no expectations around search traffic, I think that's a helpful mindset to have.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, this Conde Nast example that you're using, I just approved an outline for one of my next presentations, and it has that early on in my slide deck. Um, and it breaks down how they try to look at it as a single-digit percentile.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  One caveat I want to give you here is, for everyone listening, Conde Nast is a publisher. Their monetization model is very different than most businesses, right? Most businesses that I know are not publishers. Uh, I agree, it's really hard for publishers. If you're in e-commerce, you're selling a service, or a product, or whatever it may be, that's non-publishing. I think SEO traffic is still really valuable, but you don't need the views that a publisher does. A publisher typically makes money from ads, so they need the traffic to then go sell ad inventory typically on a CPM basis. A company, you don't need the traffic, you need the sales.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  And what I mean by that is, if someone does, uh, research on your company through LLM, or even Meta's AI, or through an AI overview and they see your brand, but they don't click over right away, right? Because typically, when people did research in the old search model, let's say there's ten blue links, they may click on five or six, decide what site they want to go with, and then they go back to the website. So they clicked on those five, six, then they go back to the one where they want to make the purchase. In today's world, if they don't click, but they understand about your brand and product and the reviews and the ratings and what others think. And they know they want to go with you. It's okay if you don't get all that traffic, but you should still be able to generate more sales.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Not the same amount, not less. You should be able to generate more sales with even less traffic. That's a pattern we're seeing when people are doing their marketing right. So in a non publisher world, you still need to rely on search traffic. Whether it's from an L L M or traditional search engine, but more so you need to make sure that your brand is visible. And the sentiment and the context of what your brand or your products or services are stated is very positive compared to your competition. So that way you get the business and you don't need to just measure traffic. You need to also measure visibility in this new world and sentiment.

• 5:09Speaker 00

  Yep. So what I would say, I mean, there's a, there's always been talk of the death of S E O. Okay. Um, I think there's always been about adapting. We, we've said that for as long as this podcast has been going. It's just a matter of adapting, um, because you know, the, the, the, the game board is constantly changing right now. I'm going to go to the, the other side of this, Neil. Let's go to the death of another channel over here. So this is regarding the death of email. Okay. So, which is really interesting because emails like, I think, um, when you look at the return on investment, whether it's like thirty six to one, forty to one, or something like that. So Tomasz Tungus, who's a popular venture capitalist. So he says, nobody will open Gmail five times a day in five years. The average knowledge worker receives a hundred and twenty one emails a day. That's one every four minutes during work hours.

• 5:54Speaker 00

  The inbox is a conveyor belt that keeps accelerating. You open Gmail, you read, you decide you respond one at a time, but the belt, the belt doesn't wait. It just moves faster. Okay. So obviously today, the way we triage our email, Neil is like, we just kind of decide what to, what to read, what not to read. And Neil actually has a, I think you're, you're like an inbox zero freak. I just let it compound. And so I would just say this, you look at this chart over here. A I email architecture is this, you get a hundred twenty one emails a day per person. You have the A I process over here. So skills and rules on device models, workflow triggers. And then maybe the A I will process one fifteen and you know, decide how to auto route it or draft responses and then handle it for you. Then you have six that are high priority.

• 6:36Speaker 00

  And it's really every day, Neil, when you think about my email inbox or your email inbox, there's only a couple that really matter. Or maybe you can go into like the tens or so, um, tens, twenties, thirties, maybe a little more than that. But you're not necessarily processing one hundred twenty one important emails a day, right? And so that's, that's what's interesting to me because email marketing has been so huge. And now that you have the AI kind of processing here, how do you make sure that whatever you're sending is ultra important? Where you can get past the AI processing, because that's what it really comes down to from a marketing standpoint. What do you think?

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, I, I don't, I don't see emails being dead. I think they're really valuable. But I do agree in which you may only get like ten, twenty, thirty emails max a day that are really important that you need to go through. Assuming you're a larger organization. If you're getting a hundred emails that you have to go through, that's super unproductive of A, your time. And B, that means your management and the other people in your organization aren't able to solve their own problems. And they're bringing you into too many things and you probably need some personal change.

• 7:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, it means you're not good enough.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, like you shouldn't be on that many email threads. But yeah, dude, on a daily basis, do you remember how I used to get over a thousand emails a day? Like, no joke, over a thousand emails a day because of the blog.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Now I don't know how many I get. I know it's, we have also filtered emails. So like speaking goes to Marina and not me, uh, support goes to a different email. So a lot of the emails I are diverted, but to my inbox, I know I still get more than a hundred a day. I do know I get less than two hundred a day. It's somewhere within that band. Weekends are less than a hundred, that I know for sure. But if you're talking about just Monday through Friday, assuming no vacation, somewhere between a hundred and two hundred. On a daily basis, there's not more than call it like. Three to five that I really need to handle that are super important.

• 8:35Speaker 00

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• 9:10Speaker 01

  And there's probably another 10 or 15 that need responses, you know, that I need to really check up on and stuff like that. Now, when I'm giving you this 100 to 200, I'm not including, you know, getting, hey, you know, uh, hey, this is Amazon emailing you, check out this new sale or promo, or this is Legion Athletics, check out this protein powder for sale. I'm not including those in emails. I'm talking about actual work-related emails. But yeah, I, I, I think people are emailing more than they need to, um, not from a marketing standpoint, but I do believe they're also, uh, with email, like, people just don't know how to prioritize their time and focus on what's important.

• 9:53Speaker 00

  Real quick, if acquiring customers has been a struggle for you and you are trying to figure out how AEO works, Answer Engine Optimization, or the new version of SEO, how paid works, how all this AI stuff is going to play into your customer acquisition strategy, then check out my ad agency, Single Grain. It's singlegrain.com. And if it looks like it's a good fit, we'll help you with a free marketing plan. So again, go to singlegrain.com and we'll see you on the other side.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  And speaking of email, there was a guy that you talked to named Matthew Paulson. I think we both follow him on X.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  Matt Paulson, yes.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Matt Paulson. And he had this strategy that has helped him generate, I think Eric mentioned yesterday at the event, what was it? How many millions? He's pretty public about his numbers. Was it like 15, 60?

• 10:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, he's pretty public. I think in public, he said 40, 40 million, 50, 60, some, let's just say something around that range, 40 to 60 million dollars. A year and he's been running this this email list newsletter market beat for quite a while. And he has this concept known as the make money button. And the way the make money button works is if you opt into his investment newsletter, right? His they give you like tips and things like that. If you click three emails within the first seven days, you get put onto this make money button list. Okay, what the make money button list is it has your primary offer. So you can have different products and services. So you might get one here's here's a product service offering over here because you're very engaged. Right? Your your open rate is going to be extremely high. And I implemented this this make money button and our open rates on that that that particular segment is like eighty five percent.

• 11:20Speaker 00

  So so then it goes one offer, you get another offer two, three days later and another offer. And you can just keep going through all your offers. Now, the way it works is after you go through that sequence, you are on a cooldown for the next thirty days or so. Or you can be a little more aggressive and say twenty one days. Now, after thirty days or so, you click three emails again in seven days. Guess what? You go right back onto the make money button list again and you you cycle through it. So you should probably be adjusting that segment and updating it every quarter or so because you don't want to burn people out. But the whole idea here is that if he's added a lot of value and clearly you find a lot of value in his list. Then he will auto segment you into this other one and then run you through that. And I think that's been genius and he said that's made him millions and millions of dollars.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  And I'm assuming his make money messages are different the second time he puts you on, right? Because I'm assuming that if you do the same message over and over, they don't work as well. And I'm assuming it's different. It's the same.

• 12:13Speaker 00

  He runs the same, same.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  So he doesn't change up any of the copy or anything like that?

• 12:18Speaker 00

  I would recommend changing it every quarter or so, but like I've ran the same. I've ran the same copy over and over because I literally just copied his his segment because he put it up on X. And and it's it's been it's it's worked well for us, so.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I I believe it works. We do something similar on our in which we have a drip sequence. People go through the drip of our most important emails and we sprinkle educational. And then when we're seeing people engage every week outside of education, we'll pitch them. A email for one of our products and consulting. And then the third one is a webinar. So anyone who's engaging, we try to push them on those three things once a week. And we constantly have education. We constantly have pitching every week. We rotate up the webinars, we rotate up the consulting pitch, and we rotate up the product pitch on a weekly basis, and we found it to work well.

• 13:13Speaker 00

  Well, Neil, let's talk about this because, you know, people talk about the death of email, right? And sure, I think AI filtering is really going to get more aggressive. But if you're constantly focused on education and adding value and making sure that, okay, yes, you're absolutely, you're teaching, you're sharing numbers, things like that. And you get them interested enough in your other stuff, that's cool, right? Because that is interesting enough where people want to continue to open your stuff. But if you're constantly pitching all the time, then of course you're going to get filtered out. But if they say, if they tell their AI, hey, I really like this email list over here from Neil. I really like this email list over here from Eric because they're constantly providing value. Then sure, you can maybe get past the filters, right? So we'll see how this goes. I don't think email is going to die. I think people are so used to using email. I think a lot of these things take a long time to die anyway.

• 13:58Speaker 00

  So I would say focus on adding value because I look at Neil's talk yesterday, I look at my talk at this conference. I've never really been a pitch guy. Neil, I don't think you've ever really pitched hard. Whenever I've tried that, that just never worked out well for me. So at least that's what works for us.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  I've tried pitching hard. Remember the Agora days?

• 14:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, but that didn't really, that wasn't you.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  It wasn't. Yeah, sure. I pitched hard for other people due to partnerships and

• 14:25Speaker 01

  it did generate more money from the same emails to the same people than when I didn't pitch hard.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  But you also kill a lot of goodwill, too.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  I do believe you kill goodwill. I don't have the exact date on it, but it just, forget the revenue side, it doesn't feel right. And if it doesn't feel right.

• 14:44Speaker 00

  It's not you.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, if it doesn't feel right, it's just like. Your soul's not in it, your heart and soul's not in it. And then eventually, I believe you'll see a revenue decline from it.

• 14:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's also, it doesn't feel right. It also kind of feels exhausting too. So, so I just like teaching and it's, I like seeing when people have a lightbulb moment in their head and they might take whatever they do with it. And sometimes they become customers and they don't, right? But I'm a big fan of, and I mentioned this when you're, you're away for a moment, but the more you give, the more you get. You help others get what you want, you're gonna get everything that you want, right? And so it's like, almost like you're, you're, the goodwill comes back to you. It's like a, a wake that you leave, a goodwill wake where you're like driving a boat or something like that.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  So. Yeah, but if you look at the contrarian viewpoint, and let's keep using Agora as an example. Agora has always pitched hard and they continually do. And they've done it for more than 10 or 15 years or however long they've been in business. Bill Bonner is one of the richest people in the world, right? I think just his real estate portfolio in Baltimore, because he picked up stuff for like a dollar, you know, when the city was just giving it away and then he had to gentrify the buildings. His real estate portfolio is massive, his castles and all the businesses. When you look at Agora, all the divisions, I don't know what they generate now, but when I used to be closer with some of the people in marketing there, again, they have different divisions, like they used to have Agora Financial and Stansberry and Money Map Press and the list goes on and on.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  They're generating over a billion a year in revenue and maybe some years closer to two. And the reason I point this out is Eric and I don't pitch hard, but we don't make anywhere near the amount of revenue that Agora makes, right? I don't know Eric's revenue, but I'm pretty sure if you combine his revenue, my revenue, we're much smaller than Agora in totality by far. So even though we don't like pitching hard, there's a lot of people who make much more money than we do pitching hard. We're not saying it's right or wrong. We both just choose not to do it because it just doesn't feel right for us, but for others it may feel right.

• 16:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, if it feels right for you, more power to you, do it. I think you just gotta do what's true to you. I think there's anything we've learned in our, you know, roughly 40 years of, of, of living, kind of around the, the same time. But you gotta do what feels good because it's gonna be more long-term. If it doesn't feel good, then you're not gonna be able to do it for long-term and it's gonna suck the soul out of you. So there you have it. Guys, hope you enjoyed this episode and we'll catch you next week. We'll see you later.