What They’re Not Telling You About SEO & AI for 2025

0:00 I'm going to give you a couple things that are practical to grow your business and I'm not just talking about generative AI stuff I I want to give you practical things that you can actually use we'll talk about agentic workflows we'll get we'll share some prompts as well and uh we might share some new tools that we found maybe in the last week or two um so first and foremost my name is Eric Sue and uh main company is an ad agency called single grain and I do two podcasts one's called leveling up and the other one's called marketing school and I did a couple marketing School sessions this morning with my co-host uh he has now sent left he's flying back home um but these are an example these are examples of what we do with the podcast and I'll be talking about how we leverage the podcast as well and how we actually combine AI from an SEO standpoint and also from a repurposing standpoint there's also a free thing that you can use there that I

0:46 think will help you with repurposing so if you stick to the end we'll get there um and I think maybe for starters I do want to talk about how this one quote from Sam mman and he said that 95% of marketing work or creative work is AI is going to handle most of it I don't know if I agree with 95% but I think a good chunk of it going to be handled by AI um not sure I agree with that but he does say another thing he does think that in-person communities such as this right you guys are all inbound will become way more valuable in the next 5 to 10 years or so right and I tend to agree with that and there's also an SEO angle with that too um and we'll get to that in a second so first and foremost I'm going to just put some structure on this I'm going to talk about how we've been increasing our

1:31 traffic and conversions um and we'll start with SEO first and so one thing I've been talking about quite a bit for maybe the last 12 months or so is this whole concept of programmatic SEO and a lot of people that have been doing it you know they got torched meaning that they lost their traffic they went a little too aggressively they created a lot of these Pages for SEO purposes and um Google caught on and they torched their websites right they lost all that traffic um sites that would go from like zero zero to Millions hundreds of thousands of visitors per month um they weren't paying attention to the Quality right and that's why everything fell apart so this right here if you look at the top right um maybe you can't read the stats but this is Trip Advisor so they get about 131 million visitors per month give or take um just from SEO and

2:19 they would be paying Google about $66 million a month for that traffic right that's according to HFS and they rank for 24 million organic keywords now am I saying that's possible for you I don't think we need to go for 24 million keywords I think even if you rank for a th000 or 100,000 or so you'll probably be in a good spot um I think what's worth calling out is the whole idea of programmatic SEO right so you know they rank for things to do in Seattle things to do in Japan fun attractions in Kyoto right I'm I'm going to Japan in two weeks so I'm thinking about it quite a bit um so they could they have a lot of these location based or geographically based uh pages but if you're an agency here how how many of you are agencies over here a good chunk of you right so you can create agency page Boston digital marketing agency Boston SEO agency right you have a lot of

3:04 permutations that you can create so if you have a if you're a location based company or if you have a lot of different products or Services then you can create a lot of programmatic content but the problem with it if you see this graph over here is we shot up in to the right initially this is just for one section on our website we shot up and we didn't push as hard as we could have and you can see at towards the end of this that the graph starts to it starts to stagnate right and if we go a little more in detail here like it's it's like oh W it in the very beginning it's like we should have bet harder we should have pressed harder when we had the advantage right so if I go over here you can see that we got hit by a Google core update because we published too many pages that weren't high quality and I'm going to talk about how we recovered too and and now everything's just kind of shooting up into the right now some of you that are seos can argue that it's just all coming from that recent Google algorithm

3:51 update and everyone's shooting up and to the right that could be the case but we like to think that we focus a lot on content uh quality and that's one of the reasons why we shot up right so one of the core lessons that we learn here is that when it comes to content yes you need to update your content yes you need to prude your content yes you need to consolidate your content and I'll put a pin in the consolidation piece cuz I'll come back to that in a second I'll show you what we're doing with workflows so you don't have to do that on your own manually um so if you stay till the end we we we'll get there but you can see here look on the left side slow start and then the Google update happens we start moving down into the right I'm like oh my God is the site going to get torched right and then recovers it recovers because we deleted a lot of lowquality pages and we focused a lot on the on the quality of the pages that

4:36 we're putting out right so instead of volume instead of quantity it's more so quality and it's still even to this day even we're talking two years into this chat gbt push too many people are focused on just hey let's just use Ai and autopilot it right um even today and I think that's just us being lazy people and we need to if we can just go the extra mile a little bit we're going to do a lot better than most people right we're going to do a lot better than our competitors so just on this little experiment over here we added this is about a 300% Roi campaign we invested about 26 Grand or so and basically in the in maybe the first I don't know C sixish months or so 26k invested $105,000 in Revenue out the gate right so it's not bad for initial test and now we're pressing harder on it and we're trying to figure out what else we can do

5:21 um so this is really just the first Arc of the story right yes like you know a year ago or so we started doing programmatic SEO right but in moment I'm going to talk about agentic workflows I'm going to talk about programmatic cro as well these are all things that everyone here can do as long as you have hopefully you have an engineer on your team you can do all this stuff it's not that complex right um I'm going to show you a customer example so this is one of our clients over here they're in the wine business so originally you know they want to rank for like Peno gregio under $10 right or charday under $50 there's a lot of programmatic opportunity here so their average click the rate was less than 1% that's an One initial stat right so our goal here was to scale content production while increasing conversions and so what we did was we didn't go hardcore here we just created 200 new pages for them

6:08 programmatically and keep in mind this is a very small test so I'm not going to give you numbers in the millions I'm trying to make this that anybody can do this right so 200 new pages that we created and all we did topics wise look best wine type under price point that's all we did for them right and those of you that like numbers here are some numbers over here so previously they were averaging about 3,400 clicks or so and when we added these programmatic Pages for that specific section now they're getting 6,300 page uh clicks per month and then 184,000 Impressions before they're getting 100,000 Impressions right so pretty significant we're just talking basically double is right the click theough rate instead of 8% shot up to 3.4% and it's simple because it's these

6:53 are high intent keywords it makes a lot of sense for the click the rate to go a lot higher we added about 1123 new keywords keep in again small test and about 111 of them are in the top three positions right and these are pretty good stats for just adding 200 Pages it's actually kind of insane right so again I think at least for me I was trapped in the beginning saying oh if Trip Advisor doing millions of pages I need to do millions of pages too it's not the reality in fact 200 Pages look what you get for us we added we added some agency pages I think we went a little too aggressively in the beginning um but it does really well for us now and you can do the same thing too so before I move on I just have this little QR code over here this is our email list if you want to get on it um we this is we just nered out on all the marketing stuff not going to try to sell

7:39 you anything I'm going to leave leave it up for about 10 seconds and I'm going to move on to what we're talking about with our podcast and how we're making the most of that all right agency owners if you want to grow faster my partner Neil Patel and I we are hosting live agency owner workshops in Beverly Hills and you're going to learn how to get more clients you're going to learn how to take yourself of the day to-day you're going to learn how to recruit the right people and you're going to be hanging out with people like-minded people such as yourself so if you want to learn more just go to marketing school. io/ agency again it's marketing school.i agency and we'll see you on the other side these are when we think about our pillar our content pillars we think about um we think about how are we going to take all the content from the long form podcast we do for marketing school for leveling up which are the two that I do and the

8:26 reason why we we we record video all the time is I look at social media as like a slot machine right you never know what's going to take off and sometimes the stupidest things take off like I remember Neil and I were kind of talking about this Shake Shack offer uh where you can get like a coupon off like you can get free Shake Shack on Sunday or something um and that got like 3 million views right or another one where I talked about this Discount Store in Italy and that got like 6 million views or something so you just you don't know what's going to take off and uh some of you might be saying okay creating this top of funnel content does it drive Roi from that that uh one Italy discount store video that I made I got five texts and one of the texts was from a CMO of a multi-billion dollar company right um and these were like all marketing execs and Founders that were texting me so you never know what's going to hit um sometimes that's why you do top of the

9:11 funnel content so we do this I mean there's views over like 900k views 2 million views 140 142k views and I don't say this to brag I mean we're getting a decent amount of views per month as a B2B company so this is about 11 million per month the point here and earlier this morning we talked about as being Search Everything optimization not just search engine optimization because it's not just Google anymore people are searching on Tik Tok people are searching on YouTube people are searching on Amazon right so it's it's evolving quite a bit and um if you're an SEO you must adapt I think the problem you know coming from an SEO background is we always think everything's about SEO no you got to Branch out you got to Branch out or else the business is going to be in trouble right you can't put all your eggs into one basket so our goal this year with the podcast okay we have the long form let's chop it up into

9:57 short form Tik Tok Instagram reals right YouTube shorts okay what else can we do from that we need to pump out more content I talked to a guy we had lunch and uh for his business partner they're getting 200 million views um per month per month so that's 2.4 billion views a year and they get all their leads all their traffic just comes from organic social right um and so you know for me as a be boring B2B marketing agency if I can do it I think anybody here can do it as long as you have a point of view on something it's worth talking about um so that's on the organic social piece now how does this apply to SEO well I'm glad you asked so for SEO this screenshot is actually a little dated our traffic is actually moving up to the right I think it's probably tripled since this graph

10:43 and this is only a very small section on our website right and all we're doing from this is we're taking the transcript we use riverside. FM we're taking the transcript and we're just dumping into a chat GPT and then we have a human in a loop that takes on the last 40% The Last Mile right so we're not just let AI do everything but this is what's happening initially when we started this experiment it wasn't really doing much but now it's really moving up into the right it's driving more leads it's driving more email signups for us it works well for us and I would say for my business at least word of mouth is probably the number one um marketing channel but number two or if you want to call that a marketing channel customer acquisition channel number two would be SEO number three would be webinars right so your mileage may vary but that's what works for us so initially with this setup we're paying about $100 per post

11:29 which is prettyy expensive um and it was five posts per week originally before that maybe a couple hundred per post because it was a fully human writer right now we're paying about 25 bucks per post and we're get we're doing 25 posts per week and we're trying to make it more efficient and what we do right now just so our writers can't go Haywire is we're actively in our internal marketing meeting every week we're rating the post right is this above at least eight out of 10 ideally it's a 9 out of 10 right and if not like why isn't it and then we we take that feedback and we try to carry it over into to all the AI assisted content that we put out so there's a certain quality bar to it now I talked about okay we went podcast we went to short form we just went to SEO as well we need to talk about how you can continue to find more efficiency when it comes to your short

12:15 form content so this is a product or a tool whatever you want to call it I found it found this about two three weeks ago it's called overlap and it's completely free and they're not paying me to say this I have no equity in the company um just go to join overlap. comom and you can sign up for this again completely free right now and I've used tools like Opus doai you know our team has tried a lot of different things but this is great you can just take any YouTube video it can be a YouTube video you made you can take one of those videos dump it in here and it'll find all the clippable moments the right moments and it also give you the right title tags as well right the pretty pretty good title tags it makes me want to click too and we we've just been randomly throwing this on my YouTube channel and some of these videos will get get a good chunk of views and so you can see I did this interview with Gary ve over here and it what what do we pull I can't even read that my eyes are so

13:00 bad but um I think they're pretty good we posted a couple of them and so if you're looking one of the biggest challenges we have when it comes to producing short form content or just Clips in general is finding a clip coordinator finding someone that has tastes that understands the right moments right it's really hard to Outsource that you you have to find someone that that's cultured that has taste well thankfully this AI is getting a little closer to it and I've been talking to the founder and they've been talking about hey actually helping you with that component right um again completely free right now so that's a little bonus so so far we've talked about PSO we've talked about we've talked about short form content we've talked about AI assisted content and then if I talked about PSO I should probably talk about pcro as well because if we if you're going to produce hundreds of pages or

13:45 thousands of pages probably should be optimizing them from conversions right so in the little orange call to action over there it says get get quality leads um maybe it's behind me I don't even know it was behind me but um get quality leads so be usually on our website the call to action it says work with us what we do is we basically scan the context of every page and we customize the call to action and you you don't need to be a genius do this I'm going to share the prompt with you in a minute um you guys can just take a picture of it and just give it to your have your developer deploy it and you just need open a API it's not that difficult to do this right and so what this has done we also customized the little the pop-ups too right so it says gain better Roi instead

14:31 of work with us gain better Roi or like you know and then right below it says you know get more help with Google ads cuz the page is about Google ads now just by doing this the lift that we saw just to the clicks was about 50% so 47.5% on the clicks for these called actions the conversion rate went up by about 20% or so so give or take 50 plus 50% and then plus 20% on conversion rates right that's pretty good we're just using a prompt that I'm about to share with you um so that's that's you combining PSO plus pcro a little disclaimer for you before you know if you guys want to hit me up that's that's fine but like just FYI if you don't have strong domain Authority you you cannot do PSO right cuz there's there's no votes of confidence going to

15:16 your website your website's not strong enough just because you publish thousands of pages doesn't me mean you deserve to rank for those the good news is if you have some resources you can go out there and you can go acquire a website that's in your space um that's definitely not free but at least that's something you can do that's something that's available it's not completely shut off from you versus having to spend years and years building up links and building up your domain Authority from scratch and the link building thing is a whole another conversation right a lot of seos are now saying that link building is not as effective right so that's a whole another conversation um but I don't think we have time for that so here's an example of a prompt that you can use um and this prompt over here improves the headline the call to action and the form subtitle this is a prompt for that and I'm going to have a more detailed one I can share in a moment but

16:01 I'll give you about 10 seconds to scan this OR take a picture of it and then I'll move on all right quick note this is about my company it's called single grain and single grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving Innovation and so want to talk about a couple new strategies and if you need help with marketing great if not here a couple new strategies that you should try out one is programmatic cro so we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site we're building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates we're also Auto optimizing auto updating uh from a from a SEO standpoint and we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using Ai and so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint and

16:47 our mission is just to drive more Innovation so if you want to learn more just go to single grain.com grain like rice so single grain.com to learn more and we'll see you inside the next part that I want to talk about might get a little complex but I I don't think it should be too crazy um but all of you or some of you have probably heard that Mark Zuckerberg is talking about agents all the time right SAA nadela is talking about agents all the time everyone's big on agents right um I think one of the hups at open aai he went off and and started uh or sorry no no previous CTO I think Brett Taylor maybe he went to go start an agent company right so agents are going to become a lot bigger the one thing I tell my team every single week is guys we can only afford to hire the top 5 to 10% of talent we need to have an unreasonably High Talent bar because in 5 10 years you're going to have 10,000 100,000 maybe millions of Agents

17:33 working for you and implementing your strategies cuz you're really smart and there's no time to be held back right um and it's scary for some people to hear but it actually I I see it motivating the team um so we have a initiative that we're running right now called AI Workforce right so when we think about the jobs to be done for an agent so an agent basically will automate a lot of the the jobs to be done for your organization so we got to think about the jobs to be done for an SEO manager an SEO manager has to do keyword research they have to do they have to figure out um the right titles to update internal linking they also have to figure out technical SEO there's all these things they have to figure out it's it's a thanless job right and I think most jobs are pretty tough to do and there's a lot of tedious work to be done so our first thing here before we

18:19 build an agent or agentic workflow is we need to figure out what are all the jobs to be done and which one should we prioritize first so there's a method to this that's the first thing we need to do now the second thing we need to do is okay earlier I talked about you need to update your content you need to delete delete your content you need to consolidate your content this is the AI consolidation agent and what it does if you start from the top left and you go you work your way to the bottom right what does it say it says Okay first it goes into Google search console and then as it continues on it's like okay let's figure out the vectors that are similar let's figure out what we need to consolidate let's let's remove the other URLs right so there's a process for all this and once this finishes it we're saying hey we're not just going to let the AI do its thing we still need a human in the loop to check these things right so when we do this work for clients we're constantly checking this

19:05 work um and making sure that it's it's it's good before we push it live and so once it's good we push it live then it's like okay which agent should should be running next and you can Daisy change these agents together if you want if this then that and then these agents are are are doing a lot of the tedious work for you and you're able to accomplish more at scale and so when I talk to my SEO team I'm like how much faster do you feel they're like they feel like they're 10 times faster might be a little bit of a exaggeration but that's how they feel now when I talk to my developers they're like I'm like how faster do you feel now he's like well one of the developers he's like I feel three times faster with chat GPT and now that they've added a cursor AI he's like I feel two times faster right he said one workflow I had was taking 5 hours now it's taking me two and a half hours so we're cutting down the time it takes to get things done and one little bonus I want to

19:52 share with you that that's not in these slides is um I was in a group chat with a couple of friends this week and they shared a new tool called tripr found.com so TR r y the word profound p r o f o u n d.com and what it does is it helps you with generative engine optimization so optimizing for Gemini optimizing for chat GPT and it shows you brand sentiment it shows you how your Brands just scored overall on these um these generative engines and it's something cool that you can test out so you know we've talked about cursor AI we've talked about profound um if you're not technical by the way you can use replit replit helps you anybody here anybody here can code a version of agry birds or Flappy Birds right um so people that are non-technical can now code and I think

20:38 they just they they raise quite a bit of money um I was just talking to to Neil about it this morning so Sky a limit with what you can do I think there's no excuses now even if you don't have any resources you should be playing with repet right and here are some examples there's another I guess I'll give you another product that we use um for agentic workflows we use air Ops so that's a i r o PS and this these are a couple workflows that we built inside of a Ops so once you're aware of this I think you have a one to twoe Head Start before everyone starts doing this stuff it's not just for SEO it's for really anything that you want to figure out um that you really want to automate so you can use air Ops these are just some examples of agentic workflows that we built inside of it and then as we work towards um my other slides we're actually going to have some more promps so get your your

21:24 phones ready for that so here's another example this is not exactly a prompt but the example that my team wanted to show here was that um when we update meta information at scale so title tags and meta descriptions when it comes to SEO you're going to get a higher click to rate right because if you have a really good title that hooks them in they're bound to click and marketing is all about bringing people to the the point of sale and at the end of the day if you're an SEO you don't want to spend all that time but it's really important to me it's like conversion rate optimization for the the search engine result Pages um but someone needs to be doing it and that someone should be a robot doing it for you here's a prompt for programmatic SEO I'll let you guys take a picture of that so this is again what Trip Advisor

22:09 does fun things to do in Japan fun things to do in Rome digital agency in Boston all right waiting for the cameras to come down okay cool this is another example of what we're doing with pcro so we we have a page called what cro services so you can see it says optimize your conversions it doesn't say work with us optimize your conversions and what we do we're not necessarily doing it on this page but um we if it says e-commerce cro Services all those logos that you see below will change the e-commerce logos that we've worked with if it's SAS cro Services they will all change it SAS logos and so that should help a little bit with with conversion rates whatever we can do can

22:56 we add a relevant Market School podcast that's related to the topic on the page that helps with internal linking that helps with building trust because it shows that we're creating content around that um so all these things come together and so I might have started this conversation with PSO and I went into social I went into pcro I wanted to agentic workflows but all this stuff comes together and I think we're really just scratching the surface of it right now and so I think yes it's cool that people talk about mid Journey it's cool that people are talking about you know this the umso like these are all cool things but what's actually going to drive revenue for your business at the end of the day it's the boring stuff it's the boring blocking and tackling stuff that you're already doing but you haven't quite figured out how to how to automate right um I promise you more prompts so this is a prompt for

23:48 pcro and you guys are really interested in AI there a lot of cameras all right so this is example by the way as I continue on here this is is this is p SEO so going back to the SEO comp components these are landing pages being created at scale and the copy is not necessarily the best copy in the world it maximize Shopify store sales with the right cro efforts but it's pretty good i' say it's maybe like a seven out of 10 or so what we're doing now is we're focusing on leveling up the quality on all these pages right um I would say this screenshots a little more dated I think we we've we've upgraded it since then but on these landing pages now let's change the logos the let's change the the the call to actions let's change the other internal links related content we w we want we want to bridge

24:34 everything together there and that's how we're going to get better better results I I mean we've already seen that with the with the SEO side of things now the final thing I want to talk about is this graph over here and those of you that were in the session this morning I want to continue on this conversation because you hear a lot of people talking about community community community you see a lot more results with Reddit right you see on on the search engine result Pages going back to SEO when you search for things you see a lot more Kora you see a lot more Reddit in fact Reddit added about 700 million visitors per month they went from about 1.6 billion to about 2.3 billion and you know some can argue oh they did a deal you know and it a deal with Google I don't think that's the reason it's because ugc content is even

25:21 more valuable now in a world where we're seeing a lot more robotically generated content and so this is a community right we're here at an inperson Community but online communities too if you can't do an inperson Community you can at least do an online community and you can use a platform like school that's Skol l or you can use a platform like circle. so and not only are you going to drive way more organic traffic um because look here this is this is we got Shopify in the blue we got HubSpot we're at a HubSpot event they're in the black and then zappier who I just saw weigh a couple minutes ago um they're at the bottom but I don't think they focus a lot on their Community but it's all moving up and to the right and so okay great you want more you want more SEO traffic Community right oh but how do I start a community there are a lot of hungry Community managers out there that

26:07 work at companies that will gladly I think they're all heavily underpaid I think that's going to that's going to correct in the next couple years but you can find some amazing people and they will do a good job for you and I'm not going to name any companies cuz I yeah I'm not going to name in companies um but there are some good companies you can pull from and Community to me is also it's a retention mechanism right it keeps people together so people might buy from you but people ultimately stay for the community they stay for each other and then within the community you'll have people that will be ambassadors for you the work really they they just love working for for for free basically right you should probably compensate them but you find those people that are engaging all the time and those are the people that you want to hire as your ambassadors and then they'll keep the retention they'll keep

26:53 the party going it it'll be a good thing right and that's how a community like this becomes so big over time um because one the product's great two people really like connecting with each other which is why we're here right and three we also need we all need a reason to get out of the home um so so you can do that and then you can if you want to build an impers component you you definitely can but I think this is the future of SEO it's going to be a component of SEO because I don't think they're going to roll back that Reddit change and that Kora change and to be honest I get a lot of value from from Reading Reddit and then s Nadella says this too right he's like the future of of of AI is an agents which I talked about earlier um Mark Zuckerberg has said the same thing so I think if there's any key takeaway from

27:38 this talk it's to get out there to explore and to understand that you're actually not that far behind but if you don't get on this stuff in the next year or two I think you'll be pretty far behind um so I think it's worth talking to people in your space you know maybe getting a little AI working group going with your founder friends I certainly do that as well um and we talk about all the new stuff that we're doing try to get we we we do an in-person meeting once a year but we'll we'll get on Zoom calls every now and then but get your peer groups together and talk about this stuff um and then you'll be you'll be ahead of the curve so that being said this is all my information here you can scan that barcode again if you want but thank you so much for your time and hope you have a good rest of your inbound [Music]