Why Neil is Re-thinking His Conference Strategy, Revamping Our Content Structure, Top VC's Declare SEO Dead, and an SEO 2025 Update

In episode #2930, Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss their desire to travel again, balancing family commitments with professional speaking engagements, and the importance of revamping their content strategies. They delve into SEO, sharing insights from industry experts and emphasizing the need for adaptation in digital marketing. TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES (00:00) The Desire to Travel Again (02:53) Balancing Family and Travel (06:07) Revamping Content Strategies (09:04) The Evolution of SEO (12:01) Insights from SEO Experts (15:11) The Future of E-commerce SEO Prefer single topic episodes? Head over to our YouTube channel. To suggest a topic, go to https://www.marketingschool.io. For more content from Eric and Neil, check out Eric’s Leveling Up with Eric Siu YouTube channel and Neil’s Neil Patel YouTube channel. Connect with Us: Single Grain << Eric's ad agency NP Digital << Neil’s ad agency X @neilpatel, @ericosiu Instagram @neilpatel, @ericosiu Drop Us a Review If You Enjoyed the Episode!

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:34Speaker 01

  I'm thinking about traveling all over again.

• 0:36Speaker 00

  Why? Yeah, you, you, I, you know what's weird? I could feel it, that you wanted to start traveling again. The other, I think I was thinking about it two nights ago. I was like, it feels like Niels wants to travel again. And I don't know why I felt that.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  I've been really happy being at home for two months. It's actually been a little bit more than two months.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  I traveled to Phoenix last week for, call it less than 24 hours. I'll travel to Orlando this week for, call it 24 hours. And it's good to get on the road, but the real reason I'm thinking about it, when I look at my competition,

• 1:14Speaker 01

  one of the key differentiators for us and them is I'm able to get on massive stages and push our brand out there to a lot of people in the room that are our ideal prospect. It won't generate revenue right now, but a year or two later, it generates a lot of demand. And I was like, you know what? Why not keep pushing hard on this as long as I can? Because once if I didn't have this edge, like I'm taking it for granted. Who says that people are going to keep inviting me if I stop speaking? And I'm not saying that I'm gonna accept as many speaking gigs as I did last year. I don't think I'll do that. I'm just being picky and I'm just trying to pick the big stages.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Like there's some events that are easy for me to speak at. Like a HubSpot, we have a great relationship with them, you do as well. Where I can speak and I don't know how many people will be in the audience, call it 5,000 people. I'm making up a number, but I'm gonna guess around 5,000. I think that's somewhat accurate. Or in Brazil, I can speak at an event in Sao Paulo. Where again, at least 4,000 to 7,000 people will be in the audience just hearing me speak. I have one in Italy right now, similar size, um, that'll hear me speak. I don't look at how many people attend the event. Cause some of these events will have 60,000 people. The key is, how many people are gonna hear you speak?

• 2:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, how many attendees for your webinar?

• 2:38Speaker 01

  Yes, and how many are attending that are ideally marketers or work for big corporations? That you want to hear your spiel, cause eventually they can include us in RFP.

• 2:48Speaker 00

  Yep, yeah, so, I mean, plus I also think you like traveling too.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  I think I do too.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I do enjoy, I mean, just even that trip to Dubai too, like, it's just, it's fun. And it's short, but it's, it's fun. Um, I, you know what? I, I actually know a lot of people, or a handful of people that, that go around speaking or doing things, but they end up bringing their kids with them. So they get to experience these things. So they keep building the relationship and the kids get to see other things that are. Cause you traveled to, to a lot of interesting places. Like when you, when we get to speak internationally, you go to Italy, or if I speak in Japan or something like that. Those are nice experiences that you could also create with your family too.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I, I'm starting to do ones with my family this year that are like Las Vegas. Cause I can just put them in a car and drive to Las Vegas. I'm still excluding them from the ones that are international, cause it's just too far for a flight. At three and five, I don't know what they're gonna be like on a plane.

• 3:46Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  And I just don't wanna deal with it. I love them to death. I just don't know how it's gonna be.

• 3:52Speaker 00

  Well, I can't you just try flying them a short distance to see how they'll be on a plane? Like four hours, five hours? Orlando, Disney World?

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, they've been to Disney World.

• 4:02Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  Um, but yeah, uh, five hours is a long time to try. I want to try it first on like a hour flight.

• 4:09Speaker 00

  Okay. Yeah. So you try Vegas first and which is thirty minutes.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  I'm gonna drive.

• 4:13Speaker 00

  Why not just try to fly it?

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Uh, we need a car bomb right there.

• 4:17Speaker 00

  This is like experimenting and you run bigger and bigger experiments.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, but like Phoenix or something like that. I'll pick short flights to get them to go on their first trip. And then I'll extend the flight length.

• 4:28Speaker 00

  I think dude, okay, think about this. Remember when we went to Frankfurt? Imagine they were like six, seven, eight years old or so. You brought them. And then maybe at the end of the trip, the after the the talks and all that, you just plan something out for them. And you spend another two, three days and you just do that for every every trip. I think that's amazing.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Well, I did that. I took them from Vegas to Orlando. And I was there for a vet or technically I had to go to Miami, but I went to Orlando first Disney World. Then we went to Orlando, then we all flew back to uh, Las Vegas.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  Oh, that's great.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  So, but I want to try it on an hour flight first.

• 5:03Speaker 00

  So what were you gonna decrease your days to? Cause last year I decreased my travel to eighty seven days. You were at two hundred. So what is it gonna be now? Back to two hundred?

• 5:12Speaker 01

  No, that's too many. I would do half the year.

• 5:15Speaker 00

  Okay. Well, half the year is still one fifty.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  It's more than one fifty.

• 5:20Speaker 00

  Wait, oh yeah, three sixty, one eighty. That's the that's the same thing.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Uh, one eighty max. I'm gonna try to see if I can do.

• 5:27Speaker 00

  So you're gonna decrease by ten percent?

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Uh, I'm gonna realistically try to see if I can do like a hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty days.

• 5:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. Hundred twenty, hundred thirty is doable. It's still a lot though. I me at eighty seven last year, I was pretty happy.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, my thing is it's not about the number of trips, it's the number of days.

• 5:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  So it's about being efficient and getting them back to back where I'm only at places for one day or less than 24 hours. Then I don't mind because it's quick because like even when I went to Hong Kong, the last time I went, I flew there from Monday around 10 a.m. was my flight time. I landed there Tuesday night, spoke at my meetings on Wednesday morning and I flew back on Wednesday and I landed back on Wednesday because of the time change. So it wasn't bad.

• 6:09Speaker 00

  Dude, those are so draining.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  I don't mind those.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  I stack them all together. It's so draining, but, um, okay. Well, it's good. You're, you're back to speaking. Um, I'm going to continue to hold mine around the same. We'll see what happens.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:19Speaker 00

  And, uh, yeah, we'll go from there.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it'll be interesting on what, what happens. Um, and I think the big thing that's changed for me is I've gotten in a rhythm where content minus the blog, where I can pretty much do it really efficient and keep my traveling. I'll tackle the blog in the next 30 days and then it'll be back to normal.

• 6:41Speaker 00

  You'll tackle the blog in the next 30 days and it'll be back to normal.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  Revamping the whole blog.

• 6:45Speaker 00

  How?

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Everything from the content, deleting posts to the quality, the topics that we're picking, focusing more on large enterprises. Um, the structure of the blog, the design of the blog, uh, uh, recruiting writers to help out. And then once I have the system and process in place, it'll take a long time to fix it, get it to where I want. But once I've figured it all out in less than 30-ish days, then I'm good to go.

• 7:13Speaker 00

  Dude, let, let's talk about this. Let's talk about how we're revamping our content. By the way, we've kind of changed our style today. It's a lot more conversational. Um, but

• 7:22Speaker 00

  you and I are both a lot more involved in our internal marketing now because

• 7:25Speaker 01

  A lot more.

• 7:26Speaker 00

  Because I'm just like, fuck it, right? Um, and like, there's a certain way I want it done. There's a certain way you want it done.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  What ends up happening with Eric and I to give everyone a context? We do it our way, then we typically hand it off to people and they usually can maintain the quote-unquote "our" way of doing it, but things change and people keep improving quality. So then Eric and I get pissed that our quality isn't to quote-unquote "the new standard" and we're just like, "No, no, no, we don't want this and that." And then our team will come up with ideas to get it back to quote-unquote "other people's standards", but him and I don't like doing it to other people's standards. We want to one-up people, do it even better. So then we had to get re-involved in the whole process. And then once we get it going, we then get away from it, let other people maintain it.

• 8:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, whole cycle repeats and we go and focus on something else. It drives people nuts. This is unfortunately the way we're... This is probably more of an argument on if you want the quality to stay high, you have to be involved and you got to look at everything as a thermometer. So again, Toby from Shopify, the CEO, likes to say that entrepreneurs are... We increase the heat in the room, right? But usually, when the room's... When it's room temperature, people are usually at room temperature because they like to just adapt to whatever the room temperature is. They're not going to increase the heat. Our job is to increase the heat, but to keep the heat up is very difficult. And so, look, you're revamping your blog. The way we're revamping stuff is we are revamping how we do paid media internally and it's actually working really well.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Paid media for yourself or your customers?

• 8:59Speaker 00

  For ourselves. Yeah. So we have a general awareness campaign where we have 14 to 16 ads and we'll take high-performing reels from this, for example, and then we'll rotate them and then we'll have ads driving them to either single grain or carrot. And then we also run carrot ads for carrot too, and that actually has led to three closed deals already.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  That's awesome.

• 9:17Speaker 00

  And so, we're doing that and plus, we're starting to pay for email subs again and then we're enriching.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  So running like Facebook ads.

• 9:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, because we don't get as much... Nearly as much traffic as Neil does. So Neil goes SEO, build email list. We have to use paid because we don't have... We get good traffic from SEO, but not nearly as much as you. So that's that. And then on the SEO side, we're revamping heavily what we're doing with SEO. We just haven't...

• 9:45Speaker 00

  Had a lot of priority on it and I'm like dude like I'm known for SEO like I'm like guys we've got to prioritize this so there's a lot of stuff going on with oh we actually need to delete a lot of content oh we actually need to create a lot of localized pages okay we there's actually a lot of um homepage stuff or localized stuff um that we haven't done yet right and um that's that so that's how we're going about revamping and the other thing I'll say one final thing and I'll pass it back to you is I look at my my IG reels I'm like man a lot of these suck and the reason is the problem with with snipping from a podcast like this is you and I are having a conversation right now we're not starting with a story we're not necessarily hooking people and we're dropping them into a conversation where they have no context at all and so you wonder why no wonder why it doesn't perform as well

• 10:27Speaker 01

  Have you noticed I don't use any of the podcast stuff for my reels?

• 10:29Speaker 00

  No you don't because it doesn't perform and I'm like guys like we can do as much filler as possible but what I'm gonna do is I that um that that studio you you record in for your your new long forms that's in Century City huh?

• 10:40Speaker 01

  No where's it Hollywood?

• 10:42Speaker 00

  It's in Hollywood okay well I need the info from you after because I'm just like I'm just gonna go into a studio because Noah and I we used to record for like three four hours in the downtown LA office right was it three four hours a pop or two hours a pop two two hours a pop you do like what two hours a pop four hours a pop?

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Uh for me to do four long form videos in 12 shorts it takes literally exactly two hours it's a little bit under

• 11:03Speaker 00

  Look at that that's all I want to do right and it's um people can tell what like when I talk about stories or when I even if it's crappy quality it performs so well

• 11:13Speaker 01

  Yes

• 11:14Speaker 00

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• 11:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then when we get involved, things change, they slowly improve, and then we go on to another thing in our business and then go from there. But speaking of SEO, did you see how you have it in your spreadsheet? On BG squared, which is Bill Gurley and Brad Gessner, they declared SEO is effing dead now.

• 12:10Speaker 00

  Really effing dead. Did you listen to that podcast?

• 12:12Speaker 01

  I listened to that piece because someone said it to me and I said, I don't know where they're getting their data from, but I have data that is very different than what they're showing, not because I'm in SEO, I just have more data points than them. They took some of the SEER data and they said, yeah, now publicly traded companies are reporting sometimes like 20%, 40%, I'm paraphrasing here. Their SEO traffic is down and it's just crushing their business. And I was just like, yes, for some people, it is down 20, 40%. A lot of them are in categories like health. But like EX WebMD, I don't know what WebMD's traffic has, but I'm assuming that hit pretty hard from the AI overviews. But there's a lot of categories where we're seeing companies still do extremely well in traffic and the traffic that they're getting, even if it's some are down or some are up.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  The conversions are still good. And the reason I say that is for some of the people that we work with, they're in categories that got more affected by AI overviews, but a lot of those visitors were never converting into revenue.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  One customer specifically that I saw, AI overviews impacted their traffic negative 13, 14%. No joke, nothing really changed in revenue from SEO. Their conversion rate from SEO went up, but it was a lot of the keywords that they were getting weren't converting, but they're not getting as much brand awareness, quote unquote.

• 13:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, so let me set some context around this one too. So Bill Gurley, Brad Gersner, they're very successful venture capitalists. Bill Gurley, Brad Gersner actually started with three million bucks in 2008, I believe, and built up to what he has now. You know, they're investors in OpenAI, Bill Gurley famously pushed Travis out of Uber. He's the one that started that.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  He also gave Travis his money early on for Uber as well.

• 13:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, so you know. They're they're they're both very, I I I love what they say and to me, they're kind of like the new all in podcast when like all in first started, they just focus on their investments and talk about technology. Um, now all in's a little more political.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  All in's a lot more political.

• 14:06Speaker 00

  It it basically is politics now. Um, but Bill Gurley and so Bill said this, he's like, you know, S E O is, he's got some really, really deep voice. So, you know, S E O is really fucking dead now. And uh, if you didn't think it was dead, it's really fucking dead now. Um, pardon my language, but so so anyway. What they're saying is basically basically what we've been saying, S U as we know it is dead. And so you can't just optimize for the same blue links anymore. A I overviews are taking more more real estate and all that. But it's no different than what we've been saying. Some people like to call it Omni S E O. We call it search everywhere optimization. Um, it's just that behavior has changed and you need to adapt to it. And that's what we really mean. Like, I I think that's what these people are trying to say. When they say S U is really dead, it's not dead. It's just, it's it's changed.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  It's evolved and changed.

• 14:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  And now when we talk to companies, they want to optimize for Google, Instagram, Pinterest, uh, Chat G P T, perplexity. And all the solutions out there. And when we're running campaigns where you're doing search everywhere optimization, we're seeing really good growth in numbers. Specifically on social, because not enough people optimized for social corporations yet. Um, some of them are catching on to it. And most people, the data will show you don't use social to search, but the younger generation does. And depending on the data or the survey data you're looking at. A lot of people don't have the younger audience in their pool when they're serving, but it is really a lot of those Gen Z'ers who are using social to perform searches.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. And the cool thing about search everywhere optimization, if you're an agency and you sell this stuff, is you get to bundle a lot of these services together. Um, and your your L T Vs go higher. And so and and people like it when when they, when you say it, their eyes pop. Oh, that's different, right? Um, so you you better figure out if you're, if you sell S E O, you're you're gonna have to diversify. It can't just be you're reaching, you're doing outreach and you're producing content.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  And this former S E O has been going on for a while, well over a year. It's been a few years, uh, but more and more focus on it in the last 12 months, I would say. And like at our agency, N P Digital, we've now seen good results, but we have a lot of case studies on search everywhere optimization. It just works. It's just like, oh, you're gonna ignore Instagram and TikTok when they're, you know, have so many users within the United States or even globally. You just can't ignore them.

• 16:17Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  All right. You want to talk about similar webs, speaking of SEO, similar web state of SEO for 2025?

• 16:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, so Alada Solis tweeted this one. By the way, I've, see, a lot of these people that tweet this stuff, like, I've actually met and hung out with Alada when I spoke at a conference in Spain, right? So this is a good reason to speak at these things because you throw dinners, again, becoming a node, becoming a connector, goes a long way. So Alada tweeted, it says, she says, "Similar Web has just released its 2025 SEO Benchmarking Report across the top verticals, providing insights into organic traffic and website performance using Similar Web data, analyzing US data from January to November 2024 for the top 1,000 websites in a given industry." So, the high level, I'm just going to give three bullet points here. So this is on the e-commerce data. "We see a winner-takes-all environment,

• 17:10Speaker 00

  as giants get approximately 900 times more traffic than the emerging players and win on engagement metrics across the board." Number two, "A big success story in the US market from 2024 was Chinese brand Timu, increasing its organic traffic by 39% and achieving strong engagement, positioning itself as a brand to watch in 2025." Number three, last one, "SEOs in the e-commerce space need to track and shift focus to SERP features, shopping results, and even AI overviews, which are steadily increasing." And you can see, I'm just looking at this graph, I'm only going to name one row here. So the giants are averaging 37 million visitors per month. Challengers, these are top 11 to 100, I just gave you the top 1 to 10.

• 17:53Speaker 00

  Challengers, 11 to 100, 813k visitors per month, average. And then emerging players from 100 to top 1,000, 43,000 average monthly visits.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  So they're talking about people who rank in the top 10 versus people who rank outside of top 10?

• 18:07Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  And this is just for the top 1,000 websites?

• 18:11Speaker 00

  Correct, yeah. So, again, the whole premise of this is winner takes all.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that's been SEO for a long time, and it's becoming more and more winner takes all over the last four or five years.

• 18:21Speaker 00

  The good thing is, with search everywhere, if we're talking about, like, the other channels, like Instagram, for example, or TikTok, it's not winner takes all. It's who actually has the best video or the most engaging video.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's similar because you start ranking at the top when people are searching.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  Yes, for those terms, yes. But I think in terms of just, I'm talking about just engagement on the videos.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, but but the big difference is is with social media and Eric is right on this. When someone types in a search term on social media, from what we're seeing, they will go through a lot more content while on Google they'll perform a search and they'll go to one or two results. And the data is quite interesting on how many more pieces of content someone will look at like on Instagram or TikTok.

• 19:03Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  When performing a search.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  Yep. Alright guys, so that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe and we will catch you tomorrow.