The Future of Search Is Product-Led with Eli Schwartz

In This Episode

• [01:01] – Stephan welcomes Eli Schwartz, a respected growth consultant and author of Product-Led SEO, emphasizing his impressive client roster.
• [07:37] – Eli reflects on his experience at SurveyMonkey, where he recognized the need for a more holistic approach to SEO beyond traditional keyword optimization.
• [11:11] – Eli explores how SEO may evolve with emerging search engines like Deep Seek, focusing on strategies to effectively surface content in these new environments.
• [13:16] – Eli and Stephan examine the significance of delivering valuable, actionable information to users rather than producing content solely for SEO.
• [28:38] – Stephan underscores the value of engaged employees who grasp the user journey and customer needs.
• [31:09] – Eli advises companies to map out the user journey and determine how SEO aligns with it before making significant investments.
• [39:33] – Eli stresses the need for affiliate sites to adapt to the shifting SEO landscape and adopt user-centric strategies.
• [42:36] – Stephan elaborates on his creative approach to show notes, incorporating embedded YouTube videos, actionable checklists, and clickable timestamps.
• [44:29] – Stephan details his innovative process for developing video courses from podcast episodes, leveraging AI to generate scripts and quizzes.
• [54:25] – Eli and Stephan explore the potential of niche content tailored to specific user interests, such as curated lists of must-watch shows for marketers.
• [65:53] – Eli recalls being in Brooklyn and witnessing the collapse of Building 7 in Lower Manhattan.
• [78:23] – Eli promotes his book Product-Led SEO and encourages listeners to subscribe to their newsletter.

Jump to Links and Resources

It’s great to have you back. Eli, thanks for coming. 

It’s great to be here. Stephan, it’s an honor. I love your podcast. You’ve always had the most fascinating guests, so it’s an honor to be counted among them.

Oh, well, thank you. What pops into your mind is the most interesting or inspiring guest you’ve ever heard on my show.

Oh my gosh, you’re making me dig so far back you had a memory of a person many years ago; I thought of this the other day because I’m working on my taxes. So, taxes in California are due on March 15 for my business, which is earlier than April 15, and there are no extensions you have to pay. And you had a guest that talked about stacking LLCs and never paying taxes. And it just popped into my head last night. I said, “Oh, I should listen to that podcast and figure out a stack of LLCs and never pay taxes.” And I was like, “Wait, that sounds like so much more work than paying taxes.” So maybe I’ll do what I’m supposed to.

It’s funny that you mentioned that because I did that for a number of years, and you’re just delaying paying the taxes. You’re not actually getting out of paying taxes. So I had an LLC and a C Corp. It was all this extra headache to maintain a separate C Corp and have one company own the IP. The other company has consulting and agency income, and there is an IP licensing fee. Then there was a consulting fee backward, you know, for my time, so that the money could travel back and forth between the two companies. And it was just a hassle. 

And at one point, I got a different accountant who said, “What are you doing here? This is not saving you any money”. And you’re opening yourself up for scrutiny because this smells fishy; even if you’re doing everything above board, this is not helpful at all. You’re an audit risk” because you’re doing this; you have the calendar tax year for one business and then mid-year for the other business so that you can put a bunch of expenses during the first half of the year into one business that is just not worth your time.

It just seemed like so much effort, because I was even looking, so my taxes are due in California on March 15, because that’s the third month after the close of the business year, but, like, that’s where it said I could have a fiscal year so I can make up a year. It seemed like such a headache to figure that out. And then I remembered your podcast where you had made up years, so every business ended its year at a different point, so you’re just, like, loaning money. And I was like,”Wow, what a headache. Just pay the taxes.”

Yeah, one principle I like is the idea of being your own bank. So instead of paying the interest to Bank of America or whoever, you pay the interest to yourself, but it’s a separate company or entity, and it’s all you know above board and all that. But it’s called Infinite Banking, and you have a lot of cash value you stash into life insurance policies. 

They have to be a certain kind of insurance policy, like a whole life, you know, some sort of special structure has to be set up, and only certain companies can you do this with because it has to be a mutual insurance company, that it’s essentially owned by the people that are getting insured. So, the insured are the owners. That’s what a mutual insurance company is. And if it becomes a corporation where all the profits go to the shareholders, then this doesn’t work. But if it’s mutual and you set it up right with the right policy, like whole life, blah, blah, then you can be your bank. You can borrow from yourself, and it’s earning interest while it’s sitting in there. 

It’s just an interesting model that I’ve gone with, and I’ve been doing it for several years now, almost a decade. And yeah, so if you check, there are a few episodes on Get Yourself Optimized on my other show about this infinite banking. And, yeah, let’s see, the one episode that comes to mind that would probably be the go-to for this is Ray Poteet, Episode 32 and then Tom McFie, also spoken on the topic, which is Episode 188, so I wouldn’t waste your time with the other stuff of all that companies. But yeah, be your bank. 

Okay, I’ll check it out. 

All right, let’s talk about SEO. So, how did you end up focusing so much on Product-Led SEO that you made in a book? I know we talked a bit about product-led SEO in your first interview here. So, I don’t want to spend too much time rehashing stuff we’ve already talked about, but I want to set the stage here for some things. And so, let’s talk a little bit about Product-Led SEO and how that became a book. 

So, one of the real catalysts for me thinking about SEO? Well, a couple of big ones, but one of the biggest catalysts for me thinking about SEO in a different way was when I was working on SurveyMonkey. I was probably considering launching my consultancy, but I wasn’t doing it officially, and I was just moonlighting. 

I met the CEO of a big company who was looking to replace their agency, and he asked me about SEO and how I would do SEO. I gave him the typical pitch, and then he said, “So I’m going to put keywords in my title tags, and I’m going to write content with keywords, and then I’m going to internally link those pages, and then I’m going to build some backlinks. Is that what you’re saying SEO is? I could just do that in India, the Philippines, or Indonesia, or we’re anywhere cheaper, and that’s what you’ll do. Why should I pay you?” And I didn’t have a really good answer to that, and I realized that, within that process, there’s not much creativity. 

These are the best practices that have pretty much existed since Google started. There are ways to manipulate Google, and Google’s gotten better at pushing back on the manipulation, but it’s the very formulaic approach towards SEO as if there has to be something better. There has to be something that bigger companies do here. That’s not this formulaic approach.

Amazon didn’t become Amazon because they used better keywords or they built better backlinks. What am I saying, Amazon? There are other things Amazon does, right? However, their Amazon SEO was not because they built better keywords and backlinks. Then I thought about all these other businesses, and it really had me take a more holistic and higher view of what SEO looks like. That’s where I stumbled upon this idea that it’s a product. 

Build the asset that the user is searching for.

The product itself, is the SEO, so in Amazon’s case, the product is the E-commerce page. When you look for a camera, where you look for a new iPhone, or you look for a USB charger, you’re not looking for a 1000-word blog post that uses the word USB 32 times. You’re not looking for a blog post that has really good, high-domain authority links. You’re looking to buy that product. So Amazon built the e-commerce product landing page with the best SEO practices, and that’s their product. Now that works for E-commerce. 

But what did Zillow do? What did TripAdvisor do? And then what did I end up doing with all the companies I ended up working with while I had a full-time job? I did it at SurveyMonkey, and then I moved on to these other companies. I built the product. I built the asset that the user is searching for when they do that query and serves the user intent. So, that’s how I stumbled into product-led SEO.

The other way I stumbled into it, as I said, was that there were multiple catalysts, as they did SEO the wrong way, and I got penalized. I discovered that SEO is not meant to be a game of manipulation. It’s meant to be something that serves the user, and when you over-manipulate, then Google pushes back because Google wants to serve the user. Google’s ultimate goal is not global domination because they want global domination. 

Google’s ultimate goal is shareholder value. They’re a public company, and if they want global domination, it’s because there’s more shareholder value. They don’t get shareholder value by having a search engine that’s easily manipulated and that users don’t want to use. And yes, despite all the articles about how awful Google is and how awful the search is, we still use it and click the ads. So, Google has to push back against this manipulation. 

SEO really succeeds in aligning with Google’s goal of serving users. That’s the long-winded answer of how I stumbled into product-led SEO and stuck with it, and I think it’s the SEO of the future because it aligns with the user and aligns with the search engines.

SEO succeeds in aligning with Google’s goal of serving users.

The way I approach SEO and product-led SEO is not Google-centric; it’s user-centric, which means that tomorrow, we all start using deep seek. I don’t know when this podcast will come out, but right now, the topic of conversation is all about deep seek and how China’s overtaking OpenAI if we all start using deep seek. I hope we don’t, but if we all start doing that, then SEO becomes. How do you surface your content, site, and services and deeply seek them? Because that’s what SEO is supposed to service. It’s not supposed to focus on Google rankings. 

So SEO does have a future in your review. It’s just you have to adapt to whatever the “engines are of the future,” not just to Google.

Yeah, exactly. So, if you think about it, AI can do a lot of stuff. AI can make movies. AI can tell us jokes. So if someone says comedy is dead, no one will ever go to a comedy club. Well, then you went to really bad comedy clubs. You went to comedy clubs where a comedian had a teleprompter and didn’t read the audience, and you read jokes that were written for them by someone else. AI can do that, but you go to a comedy club and watch comedians on Netflix and YouTube for the experience, and SEO will always exist.

If SEO is just manipulation of useless content, then SEO shouldn’t exist. But if SEO is an art, a way of servicing users and providing value, SEO will always exist in the same way comedy, movies, and books will always exist. We’re not going to live in this dystopian world where we just consume, where AI agents consume AI-created content. I can’t see that kind of world.

People want experiences, not just information.

People want experiences, so if you don’t provide one, you just provide information. You’re not actually solving the problem or doing what the users are. So if let’s say it’s a book, or let’s say it’s a movie, back in the day, movies were black and white, and even before that, they were without sound, so the talkies came, and then suddenly we had black and white with audio, and that was the new thing. 

Well, the future is an immersive VR, maybe a kind of 4D experience, like where you’re getting more senses involved, and maybe the storyline is adaptable based on your involvement in the movie. So I’m gonna kind of do a choose your own adventure sort of thing here and go down this path, and then the characters do these things instead of these other things, which they would have done if you’d gone down the other path. That’s still a movie, but it’s a movie of the future and provides an experience. 

Absolutely, I  think that movies are a great place to really think about this. So SEO, let’s say 20 years ago, is basically its beginning. A very small number of people knew SEO, a very small number of websites that could really own search, and a very small number of people who were making money off the search. The pie has gotten tremendously bigger. 

So the same goes with movies, where, when you’re talking those early black and white movies, there was one movie in that one movie theater in the town, and now we’re in a world where we have every single streaming platform, there are many, many more movie kinds of products, and the same goes with those movie actors. 

Whereas 25 years ago, there were celebrities and famous movie actors that everyone wanted to see. Now we have YouTubers. My kids talk about these actors, and they’re YouTubers. They make as much money as actors, but the platform has expanded, and I think the internet, SEO, and websites are the exact same thing. You can have far more SEOs, making less money because the few do not dominate them. But the barriers to entry have been lowered. The barriers to being really good at this have been lowered. Many sites can be great at this, but websites or SEO will always be needed.

So let’s talk about experience, not as having an experience, but being experienced. And that’s where AI falls very short, right? You can’t find an AI that has ever weaved a basket, gone scuba diving or downhill skiing, or represented itself in court.

So if you’re writing about these topics, and you’re using AI to generate those answers or blog posts or in-depth how-tos that are fraught with problems, and that’s why the additional E was added to E, A T, so E, E, A T, and the Google quality rater guidelines has an extra E for experience, because if you don’t have experience, if you’re an AI, then you shouldn’t be writing about these things that require experience. Otherwise, you know, somebody’s scuba diving and screwing up the way that they plugged in a tube to their air tank because they got the wrong information online from an AI that was just doing a fancy autocomplete

When we’re talking about information, the world is changing. I think we will get a lot more information from AI responses. So I rented my house, and I have a very fancy fridge with a computer in front of the Samsung fridge. It’s a smart fridge that, you know, plays music and Google stuff. It has a browser, and it’s buggy. So recently the touch screen stopped working. This happens every couple of years, and I have to google how to fix it every couple of years.

I think the last time I did it, I had to go through all these Samsung forums and figure out what other people have done to solve it. I’ve gone through Reddit, and this time, I Googled it. I guess I’ve Googled this exact same thing before, and AI overviews, which is Google’s AI, just told me what to do, so it stole or read or learned from the content that was produced on Reddit and in the Samsung forums, and gave me the correct answer. 

So, if you’re in an information business, it will be challenging to continue monetizing that information because it has been democratized. SEO will exist if you are in a service business, but the nodes and mediums where people arrive at your service will change.

In my newsletter, I’ve talked about this as becoming mid-funnel. So, the top of the funnel is a new fridge. I need to buy a fridge, and I would do that top-of-funnel search for the best fridge, and then I would go to all these websites. Maybe I will go to Reddit, or maybe I will go to these influencer review sites. 

Now I do a search for the best fridge, and then the AI overviews will tell me from all those websites what the best fridges are. And then now I become mid-funnel. Now I say I want a Samsung French door fridge that’s a mid-funnel, and then I become bottom of the funnel, which is I want the best price on, you know, the A 123 version, that’s bottom of the funnel. And that’s where I may go to Best Buy, or I may go to Walmart or The Home Depot. That’s the bottom of the funnel. 

SEO will exist if you are in a service business, but the nodes and mediums where people arrive at your service will change.

So SEO now moves to that mid-funnel because the top-of-funnel informational queries get answered by AI, which is commoditized information, and think about totally switching from products to health.

So, a common informational search query is health queries, which is why I have this strange backache. And I would go on to Google, and I would talk to Google about my back ache, and I would get WebMD, and I would get Healthline, and I would try to get this diverse opinion so I can decide whether I need to go to the hospital or I need to call a doctor. I just need to take Advil now; AI can just say, “Oh, just lay down, or stop staring at your computer so much,” and that that information is commoditized and democratized, that AI can just give that away. 

What AI can’t do for me is it can’t give me Advil. I need to go buy that from a site. It can’t bring me to a doctor, or a doctor has to do all that. So that’s where, again, AI can answer information, but mid-funnel becomes the dominant place where SEO can surface that doc. Can surface the places to buy a prescription. Can surface a massage table or whatever it is that would treat the thing I discovered from the top of the funnel search queries?

So, how does our listener take advantage of this market disruption? If they’re just doing the regular old SEO, they’re skating to where the puck already is instead of skating to where the puck will be, which is roughly the Wayne Gretzky quote. So how do we get them to capitalize on this whole mid-funnel opportunity and the larger opportunity of AI answer engines and LLMS being a much bigger player versus just regular Google searches? Yeah.

So, it brings us back to the first thing we talked about, which is product-led SEO, which is why I think SEO does not become obsolete. The essence of product-led SEO is understanding the user and building that experience for the user.

The user’s journey has changed, so if you have not been aligned with the user journey in the past, and you were just going on to Ahrefs, Semrush, Similarweb, Google Keyword planner, or whatever tool you were using and just fishing out the keywords, that was not SEO. Well, that was SEO. It’s just not the best SEO that changes. 

So now you have to align yourself with the user and understand that user journey and realize that you can’t start with, I sell refrigerators. I’m going to go to Ahrefs, SEMrush, or similar websites to find the best keywords for a refrigerator. You have to say, “Who am I selling a refrigerator to? What is the journey?” And then that brings you to brainstorm it, or you can actually talk to users, which is my preference, but talk to those users and find out from them what the mid-funnel is. 

SEO is an art, a way of servicing users and providing value.

So you may not be able to service that entire journey. Let’s say, you know, you want to sell refrigerators to college students. A college student is not going to buy a $5,000 French-door refrigerator with a computer that won’t fit in their dorm room. So, understanding who your users are will define your journey and where your SEO makes sense instead of the refrigerator. Well, the top keywords are French door and refrigerator, and that’s what I’m going to write about, regardless of whether that is what you want to sell. 

I think, for the most part, that has been lacking in the SEO industry because it was not required. The other way worked. It worked to say, what is the top keyword, I will insert that all over my website and buy links for it. If I do not buy them, I will obtain links. Maybe you exchange money.

But I will earn them through merit.

I will earn them through merit. But that worked. But I think that it’s not that links cease to work. It works for that other thing; it just ceases to work for the user journey because that user’s in a different place. So yes, if it was just a generic refrigerated query, the person or website with the best links might rank for a generic refrigerator query, but we’re not going to do generic queries anymore. 

We have conversations with AI that’s not a single word like, you know, in my earlier SEO career, optimized for single words like the web. The company I worked for optimized for the word cars, and we ranked on it. We were in the top five for the word cars. No one buying a car is just going to search for the word car because we don’t live in that world anymore. So I can buy all the links in the world I want for the word car, but no one searches for it. 

Keyword fishing from tools isn’t SEO- understanding the user journey is.

So, you really need to dive deep into that user journey. And I think it’s been lacking in the SEO world to understand the user, and I know it’s cool to say, “Oh, I do user-focused SEO.” We’re supposed to say that, but we don’t really. Many businesses don’t really do user focus at all because they weren’t required to. I think the best businesses succeed by doing that. Before we started, we talked about the book I wanted to write, the concept, and the content I wanted to write about understanding users. And I think that’s missing everywhere. It’s not just SEO, where companies create products for their problems. They create services for their own needs without really getting into users’ minds and understanding them.

I always think back. It’s not so relevant now, but I think back to this course I took in college. I think it was a marketing course, and it talked about a car company. I couldn’t even find it. I was trying to get the actual story, so maybe it’s made up in my textbook. However, a car company was making a car that was primarily sold to women. Women were the major buyers of this car, so a product manager or an engineer made all the engineers with long nails as they designed this car. So they would experience what it’s like with longer nails, pressing buttons or opening the glove compartment, and they would design for the ultimate buyer. 

I think that’s great, and I think that’s what every business should be doing. What does your buyer want if you’re marketing again, returning to the refrigerators or marketing to college students? Well, is your product in the right price range? Like, or did you do cost-plus pricing, which is how much a refrigerator costs me to make, and this is how much margin I want, forgetting, does my buyer, can my buyer afford that? Or will they pay for that? Or do they want the cheaper version? So that’s what I think is missing in many businesses, but certainly in SEO. What is the user journey? What is the user intent?

Yeah, it’s full immersion in the user’s mindset, way of life, and way of being in the world. So, I love this example. I don’t remember if it was Nike or Adidas, but I heard this at a conference. One of the speakers shared how one of those two shoe companies had this whole area where you can, like a full immersion experience, what it’s like being a high school kid buying their shoes. 

So they had these school lockers, and inside the school lockers, they were all decorated differently, you know, posters on the inside door, sports gear, textbooks and notebooks, and the usual kind of school gear and shoes and whatever else. So they could open this person’s locker and imagine what it’s like to be that person. And then they go to the next locker over, and it’s completely different, and on the next locker over, and it’s completely different because everybody’s different. And so then you can feel what it’s like to be their target audience. 

It’s not just an ideal client avatar. You can now relate to these people because it’s like, they also had full-size posters of the owners of each of the lockers, so you could see the person see their locker, open the locker, and kind of go through it like you’re spying on them. How cool is that? That’s full immersion.

The essence of product-led SEO is understanding the user and building that experience for them. Share on X

I love that. I wish more companies did it, but my experience has been that most companies just pay lip service to these things. I know when I was at SurveyMonkey, so there was a time when our systems went down. We were down for many hours, and the CEO called in all hands and yelled at everyone. He’s like, our customers are freaking out. They can’t access their surveys, and you guys are drinking coffee and hanging out. They were doing their work, but no one had that sense of urgency. 

I realized that most of my colleagues, the engineers, the product managers, and the salespeople didn’t use the product. So to them, this is like, “Oh, the product we built and we service, but they didn’t understand, for the customer, that you sent a lot of surveys, how critical this was.” So, the same way everyone would freak out if Gmail was down, like, “Oh, I can’t communicate. I don’t get my emails; I can’t send my emails.” We know that pain. They didn’t know that many SurveyMonkey customers were experiencing that same pain level. They were survey creators, and they needed their data, and they couldn’t access it. 

I felt that pain because I loved creating surveys and meeting many customers. I knew people who logged in multiple times a day. Check, did I get another response? Does my data change? I understood there was nothing I could do about it because it was an engineer, but I understood that our customers were likely in pain, and we were checking every five minutes. Is it back up? Can I get my data? And the engineers didn’t because they never ran, and many of these engineers had never run a survey. They didn’t even have logins to the product. And not to just pick on my past employer, but like, I’ve been at many companies where they don’t understand the product because they don’t use it, and they don’t understand the customer, and they’ve never met a customer. 

Yeah. I think it’s a rampant issue because employees are no longer engaged. They’re disengaged. They’re actively disengaged. A Gallup survey found that only about 30% of employees are engaged. They really care. The vast majority just don’t give a hoot. I don’t know, like 20 plus percent or something, actively disengaged, one foot out the door. They just don’t really care what happens. So, on top of the fact that they’re not really users of the product or the service, they just don’t get their world; the customer’s world that is on top is just a recipe for disaster. 

100%. But I’m not going to blame the larger companies, where many companies and employers are just employees. Employees are disengaged. I meet startup founders all the time who have these ideas, and they have these ideas around SEO, and I asked them, like, “Well, is this something someone would search for?” And they’re like, “I don’t know.” I’m like, “I’m not a user of your product, and I’m just thinking, if I wanted this SaaS, I don’t think I would go on Google to find a SaaS product I didn’t know existed. I’d probably ask my friends, what do they do for this solution?” So, in that case, maybe SEO to them doesn’t make any sense. 

And a lot of times, I meet companies, and I tell them they just don’t do SEO. Do paid marketing because there’s probably not an SEO use case that justifies spending, I don’t know, 10-$20,000 a month on SEO. If SEO were free and it’s not free, then yes, great, do it. But if it costs significant sums of money that could be deployed elsewhere, then deploy it where it would be most effective. But they don’t know what could be deployed elsewhere because they never do that cost-benefit analysis, or even that ROI journey of what happens on search, like what will happen if I do rank number one for all these keywords, do I drive any users? Do I drive any value? They don’t go through that because they don’t have enough of that customer empathy.

Large companies need deep attribution for budget optimization, while beginners must first define their path.

Yeah, so how does our listener effectively track that user journey, accurately attribute the customer to whatever channels and do that ROI analysis? How do they deal with multiple sessions with multiple types of devices, locations, and so forth? This is kind of a nightmare, right? 

It is absolutely a nightmare. And I’d say the answer varies for the kind of company and for the size of a company. So the most important thing before doing any of the like deep attribution, weighted measurement, multiple touches, and long journeys is just a whiteboard journey. Are there multiple touches? How will this work? Will someone Google this? Or will they not Google it? Does it all begin with word of mouth? They ask their friends, and then they Google to follow up. Then, you could try to calculate it manually. 

Does this matter? Does SEO matter in this journey, and try to give it some sort of value for larger companies that are spending significant sums of money on SEO and other marketing channels? It makes more sense to really do deeper attribution analysis to decide whether they should spend more money, how much money they should spend, where they should allocate the budgets. Still, I’d say, like anyone who’s just looking to start that journey, they have to really outline what doesn’t make sense and what that journey looks like. 

And if you can’t really elaborate on what that journey looks like to yourself, maybe don’t spend the money. And that’s the conversation I frequently have with startups, where they’re not sure. And I’m like, “Why would you take money or not sure about it and take it away from channels that you are sure about?” There was one company I was talking to, and they built a mobile app and a SaaS for gardeners. So, I don’t remember exactly how they use it. Maybe it’s like a CRM for gardeners. People are outdoors. They’re doing large gardening projects there. Some of them are doing smaller ones. They’re mowing lawns and want to spend $10,000 a month on SEO. 

I asked them where they got most of their customers from, and they said it was trade shows. They exhibited at trade shows and met gardeners in their gardening trade shows all over the country. And I said, we walked through a journey, and they didn’t really think. They also didn’t think many of their customers were very technological, so they’re not very technological. They’re not really like googling stuff in general to find new tools. 

Why would you spend money on a channel you’re unsure about and take money from a channel you are very sure about, which is trade shows? Spend more money going to more trade shows, having more booths, meeting more potential customers and converting those customers. And maybe when your business is in a better place, where you could say, “Well, I can afford $20,000 a month, $50,000 a month, try this SEO thing. If it works out, then do that.” 

You can have the best links in the world, but it's useless if no one searches for them. Share on X

But why do that early on? And really, that process of what that journey looks like is what led them to maybe not do that. And I say, again, I frequently meet businesses that don’t understand their customers. They don’t go through that journey. They just say, “SEO is good. It’s free. People Google stuff.” instead of getting really granularing, do my people Google stuff? Do my people buy this journey from googling stuff? And again, that journey changes. So I know I’m picking on Google, but I do my people, ChatGPT stuff, click links, and then buy stuff like that. That is a question that has to be answered before you go and spend the money.

Yeah, and if you can’t connect the dots but have a little user study or something focus group, or some survey or something where you can estimate the value for the trackable piece, then you can extrapolate. The example I’m thinking of here is from Mike Moran. He worked at IBM doing SEO for them and explained that the webinars drove real value. Still, they didn’t know how much value it was because a consulting gig for IBM might be worth millions of dollars, but it’s a lot of offline back and forth, schmoozing, and the webinar might just get the person into the system. But then they kind of lose track of them, or they come in through another channel, and that channel gets the sale. 

So what he did was a study to find out that roughly, let’s say, $50 was the value of somebody signing up for a webinar, so they were able to spend a certain amount of money on SEO and paid search and paid social and whatever to drive webinar signups because they knew each one was roughly worth about $50.

Yeah, and I think it’s different for companies like IBM than it is for startups. So, years ago, I interviewed at Google for an SEO job at Google Cloud and had a lot of back and forth during this interview. I didn’t really want the job, so I was more candid with my questions to the hiring managers, and I was very curious about why they cared so much about SEO for multiple reasons. Obviously, it’s Google, so I figured there was someone they could call at Google to take care of things for them. 

Google is an algorithm. It has false positives and false negatives, but for the most part, the algorithm is trying to identify who the source is.

Google says they don’t do that, but I find it very hard to believe that you can’t just meet someone at the cafeteria and just say, “Hey, like, what do I do here?” And they can give you answers. Obviously, they’re supposed to be firewalls, and they can’t officially make a request. But if I can get Google advice from Googlers who just, you know, say, “Hey, that we think that also works like this,” there’s no way that someone surrounded by 10s of 1000s of Googlers can’t get that same advice. 

So first, I was curious why they care so much about hiring an SEO manager with experience. I was also curious about why they thought SEO was a part of their journey. They sell a product that costs the most important customer millions of dollars and only has two competitors. They had Microsoft and Amazon, and I didn’t think anybody in the world would buy Google without first doing a bake-off with their competitors. Or should we be a Google shop? Should we be an Amazon shop? Should we be a Microsoft shop? 

I just didn’t think anyone was going to Google, and then I found Google Cloud at number one, and I just plunk down a credit card for a couple of million dollars a year. So I was very curious about why they thought that. They were very curious about why I thought I would ask them those questions. They were very into ranking on some super obscure keywords, like cloud services, which, again, didn’t make any sense to me that someone plunked down money and be like Google’s number one for cloud services. I’m going to ignore that Microsoft’s number two and Amazon’s number three, or actually, Google’s not number one, which is why they want to hire for SEO. 

But either way, after not getting great answers to my questions, I realized there didn’t need to be answers to my questions. They spend a billion dollars on marketing or whatever it is that they spend. Who cares if they waste a million dollars on SEO? No one’s chasing that money. They do a lot of stuff to acquire, I don’t know. They sponsor trains, and they sponsor planes, and they do billboards, and they do TV ads like SEO is a drop in the bucket, so why not hire an SEO manager? 

So if you’re in that, if you’re IBM, Google, or Microsoft, go spend the money. You don’t need a track attribution. You’ll probably never know the same way. You’ll never know what that TV ad does for you. You can measure it, and you can have levels of confidence. And I don’t know if your brand marketers listening to the podcast will send you angry emails and say, “We know how much every dollar works.” There’s just no way it doesn’t track the way digital does so, but again, if you’re a big company, do it, you’re a small company, and $100,000 a year on SEO could be better spent on engineer for an entire year or on paid marketing that returned two to one on every dollar. You should know; you should have that level of confidence.

So, did they give you an offer? Did they want to hire you?

Now? Did they do a hiring freeze? I’ve interviewed at Google a bunch of times, and it always ends up in, like, “Oh, sorry, a hiring freeze. Oh, they changed the title. Oh, that hiring manager has left.” I got close once, but I’m glad I never worked at Google. I think you and I probably agree that the universe has good ideas and plans, and yes, the way it’s supposed to work.

You were not supposed to work at Google.

I think I’m better off for it, but it was an interesting experience to peek under the hood there.

Yeah, that’s cool. So, let’s say somebody is making money off of affiliate marketing. They’re like an affiliate site owner, and they probably have gotten hit in recent times from things like the helpful content update, which isn’t so helpful, core updates and so forth. What would you advise an affiliate site owner to do to kind of retool or focus on pivot in some fashion?

So, I empathize with affiliate sites. I began my digital marketing career on the affiliate side. I was working for a company as an affiliate manager, so I worked with a lot of affiliates who made a lot of money in the grayer areas of digital marketing. Many of them were creative, and they uncovered these grayer areas and were able to make a lot of money. I’d say the grayer areas have become blacker or whiter, and there’s less gray now, and one of those areas where the gray has been removed is helpful content. 

So, whereas years ago, it was a strategy to go and create a lot of thin content and rank on Google and then draw people in and get them to click your links and then get the affiliate commission, that probably doesn’t exist as much anymore. Maybe it shouldn’t exist because Google has gotten significantly smarter about which sites they want to have in the index and provide value. I know again, we’re going to get angry emails about this and say,” Well, you hear about these sites that got penalized,” but Google is an algorithm. It has false positives and false negatives, but for the most part, the algorithm is trying to identify who the source is. 

Figure out how to provide value that is not just a layer on top of a source.

So, if you’re selling something as an Amazon affiliate, Google potentially wants to see Amazon. They’re ranking, not Amazon affiliates, who send the traffic to Amazon. There was a site I met last year that was destroyed and helpful content, and they were a site that was curating Amazon links and replicating Amazon; they just had a novel way of approaching search and categorization, and they made a lot of money, made millions of dollars, and then Google obliterated them because there’s no reason that they should be there in search, fronting Amazon when Google would much prefer to have Amazon. 

Why should a user go through that extra click? So to the affiliate that has had that experience, I would say the same thing I said to that Amazon front site, which is figure out how you can provide value that is not a grayer area and is not just a layer on top of a source, whether it’s Amazon or whether you’re a travel site sending traffic over to booking or even if you’re a casino site, which is very challenging, in order to rank on Google, what is your angle? 

You can be a casino site and show people how to make money on those sites in some novel, creative way you have identified. You can share your expertise and then send people to the casino site just trying to rank on those gambling keywords because the gambling site itself can’t rank; it is less of an option because the algorithms have gotten smarter. 

So again, to the site that’s been hit by the helpful content update, and I’m not going to take Google’s side and say you deserve it, but what the algorithms are looking for is the original source, is the most helpful site. There will be false negatives, and there will be false positives, but add the creativity back, and the creativity again, 10 years ago I can make crappy content that Google can identify. That’s not so much of a strategy anymore.

Let’s talk about creativity and how to innovate in these interesting times that we live in. So there’s a Peter Drucker quote I love. The business has only two functions: marketing and innovation. So, suppose we have an innovative way of presenting products from Amazon or whatever. In that case, we have a market advantage for a period of time until Google takes it away or whatever. But if you can come up with innovative approaches, innovative ways to present information, bubble it up to the surface, rehash it, or whatever, remix it. 

Let me give you an example. Get Yourself Optimized, for this podcast and my other show. I care very much about the quality of the show notes page, so it has so much more than any podcast or website. I think it’s not just the transcript. That transcript has been turned into a long-form blog post, so it’s very readable. It also has pull quotes set aside in bigger text and displayed in a nice, pretty format.

It has relevant YouTube videos embedded. It has a lot of imagery, stock photography and so forth, with captions underneath each of the images. There’s a checklist at the end with actionable insights like it’s an action-based checklist that you can really do stuff with. It’s not just a summary of the main points from the episode. All the links and resources are recapped at the end, even though they’re also linked in the long-form blog post. It’s just really next level. But that’s not enough. I think again, you don’t want to skate to where the puck is. You want to skate to where the puck is going to be. 

So here’s what I’m doing differently or how I’m innovating this. I’m starting on Get Yourself Optimized rather than this show. An example episode is Mary Resenbeck; I interviewed her, I don’t know, a year ago. She’s a homeschooling expert. She has a book on homeschooling, and I thought, wouldn’t it be cool to create video courses, three modules with a workbook with quizzes and whatever else that you’d normally get from an online course website? 

What if that’s just a bonus, an add-on to the episode, and it was in the voice, ideally, of the podcast guest, so Mary is narrating it, but it’s not actually Mary? It’s an AI clone version of her voice, right? So, using ElevenLabs. And then it’s a video course. So it’s got lots of B-roll, captions, and all that. It looks like an engaging online course that you’d want to watch, maybe an hour or 45 minutes long. It’s not just a rehash of the episode; it’s actually a full-blown educational course on, let’s say, the introduction to homeschooling.  Everything you need to know about homeschooling, if you’re interested in homeschooling your kid based on the episode, plus filling in the gaps, and it’s all generated through LLMs. 

So the video scripts, the course outlines, the quiz questions and answers, all of that workbook material, etc, are all generated through AI, and yeah, so I’m starting to do that. And Mary’s episode is one of the first prototype examples. 

But that’s an example of innovation. You have to think differently and do stuff that really is remarkable. Seth Godin‘s definition is remarkable and worthy of remark. So, what would be an example or two of that kind of innovation for our listeners? So, they have several examples. 

Yeah, I love that you talk about how you’re using show notes because this is something that, again, the old way of doing SEO, we would be, “Oh, look, I can produce content,” because the content is expensive in some way or another, so, like, Google doesn’t know the content. So I’m going to take video content, and I’m just going to produce a transcript and look at its words; it will rank. And there was a time when that did work. And now, if you take a couple of steps back and you think, put yourself in Google’s shoes, and say, Why? Why would that matter? Why should a transcript rank and search just because it has words like, how is that valuable to users? 

But if you can innovate and make the show notes and make the transcript valuable so it has information and it can teach you something, and it’s not just a transcript, then there’s value. But again, it has to be, actually, what a user would want. What would Google want? What is valuable? What would someone want from this instead of, oh, it’s words, and it’s cheap words, it’s free words? Essentially, words have been spoken, and now I’ve created content out of the spoken word into the written word. And again, that used to work.

I think it is crucial to tie back to what you were saying earlier about the user and usability of this information. It’s got to be valuable and usable.  So an example of that in my show notes is the table of contents, a kind of summary at the beginning after the little intro part in the show notes like the written part is kind of like a table of contents with an important edition of a timestamp next to each bullet, and that timestamp is clickable. I use a plugin, a Simple Podcast Press plugin WordPress that will take anything that looks like a time, numbered, colon, or another number with square brackets around it, and it will turn it into a clickable link, which will start the player, the audio player at that moment in the recording. 

So if it says seven, colon, thirty-two with square brackets around it, if I click on that because it will be a clickable link, then it will start playing the episode at seven minutes and thirty-two seconds. That’s pretty cool. 

That’s very cool. I’d say there are some other things I’ve seen. So, like Lenny Rachitsky, Lenny’s podcast, I don’t think he made this. I think someone else made it, but they made a tool. It’s not an SEO-friendly tool. So whoever made it, if you’re listening, make it SEO friendly, but they listened to every podcast, crawled every podcast, and extracted all the books mentioned on the podcast. 

So Lenny, in all his podcasts, asks what your favorite books are, three favorite books. So, every single podcast has books, and then this person built a book-curated list from all the podcasts. And now it’s an affiliate site. You can buy the books from Amazon. See, that’s valuable. That is not just taking show notes and saying, “Oh, this is words spoken,'” but this is like,” Hey, these. These are the votes. This is the person who recommended this book. Here’s the list. I’m giving you the votes. And. Endorsement from this person”. That makes sense as an affiliate site. 

And again, this site isn’t SEO friendly, so they don’t have to worry about helpful content. I think they’re invisible. But there are ways you can do those things. Like, let’s say software is recommended where you want it, like, you know, I told you, I shared about that experience interviewing at Google, you could build a layer of what’s it like in reviewing at various companies based on your podcast guests, you can talk about, how do you get into marketing? That’s something you talked about. You and I talked about that at the beginning of this podcast. How did I start product-led SEO? 

I know many of your other guests have shared how they ended up on this journey. I listened to your recent podcasts like Tom Shipley, how he started his journey in marketing, and Jason Hennessey, how they started his journey in marketing, that could become not a transcript of my podcast or Jason’s podcast or Tom’s podcast, but an overarching how do you start a journey in marketing.

You have to think differently and do remarkable stuff.

And you, Stephan, can write your opinions on how someone should start their journey, and then you can populate it with those pieces, the transcripts, like the precise words that were mentioned on that, and that is not just here’s a transcript, but it’s a piece of information. How do you start based on the top 10 marketers from your podcast? How do you start a journey? Maybe it ranks on search, maybe it doesn’t, but that is still a valuable piece of content. 

Yeah. Oh, that gets my little gray cells going about what I could do to really take all the book recommendations that I’ve given in episodes and that my guests have given. One thing we do that’s nice is in the show notes; anytime a book is mentioned, it’s gonna in the show notes display the book cover with a link to the Amazon page to buy the book with an affiliate link; we make almost nothing off of that whatever. 

So, yeah, the 2005 version of SEO has an SEO producer for you. Building the show notes like, oh, make sure to like, insert the author name and the subtitle, because maybe, just maybe, we’ll rank on that book title, and then maybe we’ll get affiliate revenue. And now, if you’re realistic about SEO, you could ask why. Out of all the websites in the world that have been entered, I don’t know; it’s never split the difference. Which is a book you’ve talked about a lot in your podcast?

Yeah? Why? I’ve had Chris Voss on?

I remember hearing that. But, like, why should your show notes rank on that book title? Maybe you would rank on the actual podcast and like the audio version, and someone would come and listen to it, but maybe it’s on the Spotify website. From your perspective, who cares whether they come to your website, Spotify site, or Apple site from search results and then listen to your podcast? But why would you rank based on the book title? And the 2005 version, again, is like, well, insert all those keywords, and the 2025 version is, “Well, is that the best use of SEO?” 

Yeah, there’re really profound, provocative questions. And yeah. So, just to connect some dots here for what I might do next to innovate on all these book recommendations, I might create a sort of curated master list of all the books with my take on it, on each book, because a lot of the books will be recommended by guests. And then, what else could I do to innovate on that? 

Oh, you know what? This is something I’ve already done. It’s kind of a version of this, but not for books. I have created a favorite things page. So you go on, getyourselfoptimized.com, and click on Favorite Things. It’s kind of like Oprah’s Favorite Things. You know how she does that every year. So whatever gets featured in her favorite things sells out and takes the company to a whole other level.  

So, not that my favorite picks are going to reach a new level of growth because they’re on my list here. Still, it’s nice to have because if let’s say, I’ve tried some sort of biohacking device, or I use a supplement regularly, or whatever, and I want to feature it on my favorite things. And you can go to that page, and you can see all this cool stuff that is not really that commonly known about, things like how to source, I don’t know, spring water that is legit from real springs and comes in big glass bottles, and you don’t have to drink from the tap or drink from plastic bottles and that sort of thing. 

If SEO were just manipulating useless content, it would not exist. However, if SEO is an art and a way of servicing users, it will always exist. Share on X

I’ll push back on your things because I can’t see the search volume for Stephan’s things. Forgive me, I have a different idea for you. Okay, I don’t watch much TV, but I’m picky when I want to watch TV or a show. I want to watch the best thing because I’m not going to get into shows and spend hours every night watching a show. 

So I googled for things like the best real-life drama or the top shows on HBO or Netflix. That is a huge market of people looking for shows that go beyond the recommenders on Netflix and beyond the recommenders, HBO, Hulu and all that. So, many websites cater to this, such as the top shows leaving Netflix and the top shows coming to Netflix. 

But you know what? There is no site I know of that says the top shows marketers watch; the top shows where digital marketing is mentioned. Is that as big of a space as real-life dramas or horror movies? No, absolutely not. But that’s a niche that when you take steps back and try to be innovative and creative, it’s a niche. And could you create a category? Could you say, “wow, look at all this traffic I get for marketers?”

Well, maybe you can do one for designers, and maybe you can do one for product managers. Maybe you can do it right so, like, you just think about the road you go down, and it becomes programmatic because you’re taking feeds from Netflix and HBO, maybe you’re incorporating some AI and listening out for what popular shows are. You can also go to other podcasts and find other shows. You can also do product-led SEO because it’s the product people are looking for. I’m looking for a show that mentions SEO there. There are many shows I’ve mentioned SEO. I’m looking for a show that talks about product managers. There’s a renewed interest in the show Silicon Valley, which is an awesome show, and I recommend that you put it on your first SEO marketing list, right? 

But, like, there’s renewed interest because the founder of DeepSeek has been using clips of his name, Jian-Yang, in the Silicon Valley show. I don’t know his real actor’s name, but he’s using clips to promote deep-seeing himself. 

So there are shows, right? A genre of people is looking for this; you can make a programmatic way to surface this. And the best thing is, you’re now an affiliate site. You’re an affiliate site of Hulu and an affiliate of Netflix, and you provide helpful content. 

So it’s not that Google will hate it just because it’s an affiliate. It is a new angle and approach that provides new creative, helpful information that is a product and is product-led SEO, and you don’t need to write out manual reviews of every show because that exists. You’re doing a programmatic feed and a product feed of everything that’s useful. So we’ve closed that gap by bringing how, like, you mean affiliate and how you can do show notes and all that together. But I think there is something there; maybe it is not massive, but that is an angle.

Yeah, I like that. That’s getting my creative juices going, thinking about Get Yourself Optimized. I could have the best shows on Netflix and other streaming platforms and the best movies. It’s kind of the positive side of disclosure, right? Because you have stuff about multiple universes, the multiverse, and multiple timelines, and some of it’s quite dark and dystopian and godless, like Marvel Stuff, it’s really not good. I can’t believe I wasted all this time watching the Loki series. You know, I had all this stuff about timelines. I was really fascinated by multiple timelines at that moment. 

By the way, it’s a great movie about multiple timelines; that is a really feel-good sign of positive disclosure, a type of movie from the 90s with Gwyneth Paltrow, Sliding Doors. Have you seen that movie?

I have not. 

So it’s a good one. She either catches the train or misses it, and she has a completely different life just based on the fact she caught that train or she didn’t catch it, and it follows both timelines. So that’s a pretty fun movie. Another one that pops into my mind isn’t specifically about timelines, but it’s about, I don’t know, Awakenings, and it’s like this illusion we live in called reality. And it’s from, I think, the 90s. It’s Pleasantville. Did you ever see that movie? 

I have not. I’ve seen photos of it. 

It’s black and white, and then slowly, it starts turning into color, and certain people turn color first, and everybody else is black and white. And it’s a metaphor, and it’s a really powerful metaphysical metaphor. And when I first saw it decades ago, I didn’t get it, but when I re-watched it, I was given a nudge, like intuitive nudge, to watch it again decades later. I watched it again with my wife a couple of years ago, and we loved it. We got so much profound insight from it. 

So, if I were to create a big list and expound on each of these movies and shows, why they should invest their time and which ones they should avoid, like the Loki show, like everything everywhere, all at once. Oh, that is a dark movie about multiple universes and stuff that, you know, has little bits of truth in it, but it has so much darkness in it. It just drags down your vibration. It’s just not good. 

You know, there’s a concept in Judaism called “Shmiras Einayim”. I’m probably mispronouncing it, but it means protecting the eyes. So, they basically protect your eyes from seeing things that will lower your vibration. It will disconnect you from receiving messages from above and being connected to your higher power. 

So if you’re thinking about really lewd stuff because you watched a really lewd or R-rated sexual innuendo kind of movie, then that lowers your vibration, and it’s not good for you. It’s not good for your soul. If you watch a really bloody violent movie, some of these action movies are just so gratuitously violent. They just throw all this stuff in there that is so unnecessary, and it just makes you feel bad, but you don’t realize it. You’re not consciously realizing how it’s affecting your connection. 

So, I avoid all that garbage. It’s like eating Twinkies or something. I don’t want it. I don’t want that in my system. So that’s my explanation for “Shmiras Einayim”. What’s yours?

I know much deeper. I didn’t actually know any of that around how it upsets that whole beta physical, as I was curious about you. I just thought, you just watch your eyes and make sure you don’t see anything bad.

In Israel, we’re I’m recording this, there are separate beaches for men and separate beaches for women, and they have big walls separating them so that they don’t see the other sex with their bathing suits on for modesty. 

Now, a lot of people don’t buy into that, and so it’s a small percentage of the total population that’s going to those segregated beaches. Most people just go to the regular beaches, but if you are careful to avert your eyes when you know, say you’re happily married. You avert your eyes when you see scantily clad women on the beach or at the gym when you’re working out; that’s good for your soul, and that’s good for your relationship. So why wouldn’t you do that? 

Right.

We’re off on all sorts of side topics here. Yeah, but thank you for that suggestion. I love that. I’m excited to create a resource area and get yourself optimized.com for that. 

Links don’t matter if you don’t understand your user.

That’s all about adding value. I just googled, and someone actually made a list on IMDb of movies that mention SEO. He is an SEO, and he wrote descriptions of the list and inserted a backlink to his SEO agency in the UK. So other than this one spammer who did it at IMDb, and I can’t imagine it adds a ton of clients to maybe the backlink helps, but no one’s done this. 

That kind of misses the point. Okay, then that’s okay. Joe’s episode on Marketing Speak is so good. I highly recommend our listeners listen to that episode. Anyway, one of my favorite quotes from Joe is that sometimes people are in our lives just to be a bad example. 

That’s great. 

Yeah, so that guy doesn’t do what he did on IMDb. You can do better, but you’re either going to learn by doing the stuff, making the mistakes, and screwing things up yourself, or learn it through someone else’s mistakes and then you avoid getting your hands dirty. 

And that works for me. One of the best sources of my leads for my SEO consulting is companies that have hired SEO agencies that don’t produce any value. They only produce deliverables. They buy links that don’t do anything because links probably don’t matter if you don’t understand your user, and they produce a lot of content that just creates traffic but not revenue. 

I have a different approach towards SEO, which doesn’t resonate as easily with many companies, but they have to try that other way. And then they come to me and say, “Well, we’ve got this agency. We paid them a million dollars but don’t see any value. We got traffic, or traffic has spiked up. Is there another way we could go about doing SEO, or have we read your book? Is there? Could that work for us?” It may work or may not work, but it is helpful. They already have that background of trying another way.

Yeah, good stuff. Well, I know you add a ton of value. I know you give so much to the community and the industry through webinars, newsletters, and podcast interviews like this one. I just want to make a shout-out here for your newsletter that our listeners should subscribe to because you really put a lot of heart and soul into it. Is it a weekly newsletter, monthly newsletter, or something?

It’s a weekly newsletter. I try to keep it on that schedule because I could skip it, but I feel responsible for myself, not necessarily for the readers. Thank you, readers, for listening to reading, but I feel responsible for making sure our newsletter goes out every week. 

Yeah, that’s a commitment, like I did for nine years, almost 10. No, I say it’s about 10 years now. I have been publishing an episode a week on this show and on Get Yourself Optimized without fail.

That is a very serious commitment, 

Yeah, but you’re also included in your newsletter, so that’s good for you. And how does somebody subscribe to it? 

Productledseo.com, so that’s the name of my book; that’s the website I have. And then, if you go there, that is a newsletter, and you’ll get a pop-up telling you to subscribe, or you can bookmark it and read it without subscribing. 

Yeah, awesome. Okay, so this is the last question I wanted to ask you, and it has nothing to do with SEO, but I know that you post this probably once a year on your LinkedIn and maybe other social platforms; you publish it on September 11, and you have a really powerful story to share about 911 that I think would be great for our listener to hear, if you’re open to it.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I actually recently went to the 911 Museum. It wasn’t traumatic. I mean, I knew everything there, but it brought back that day’s physical memories. The reason I post on my LinkedIn every year, I mean, is the person I like; I post a business card of a person I was friendly with, but this is what we were 24 years ago, right? 23 years ago. I wasn’t a close friend, but the reason I posted is that it was an extremely traumatic event, and it changed everything about America. 

We went to war because of it. We take off our shoes when we go on planes because of it. And I want to remember it. I think it’s important that I remember, remember, like all the people that died and how much the world has changed, and when I think about everything I’ve gone through in life, I’ve gone through a lot of traumatic events, that was one of the more traumatic ones, and I’ve lost people I’ve been close with. 

I’ve lost my grandparents who have passed away, so like all that, but like, this is one that I think we need to remember. America needs to remember, and the world needs to remember, because it’s a terrorist attack, and it changed the world, and it showed us that evil could be delivered to our doorstep. So that’s why I post it, not because this is an event that really changed me. I think it’s an event that changed the world, and it should be remembered more than, like, never forgetting flags at half-mast. 

But the story was, I was working. I didn’t start my career as a marketer. I had not actually gone to college at the time. I wanted to work in the stock market because I watched, you know, going back to movies about people getting rich in the stock market; it seemed like a very legitimate way to make a lot of money fast. And, like, I want to do the stock market, make money on Wall Street, and become a billionaire. 

I was 18 years old and went to Wall Street. My first job on Wall Street was as a runner on the New York Stock Exchange, which was basically indentured servitude. I would literally run. I would bring tickets from one place to another that had orders, and I had to get lunch, and I had to get coffee, and I got paid very little, but it was a real job. And I had a badge.

And you got exercise. 

I got a ton of exercise. I had so much back pain from standing on my feet for the entire trading day. It was exciting, and I was around interesting people and celebrities going down to the stock exchange floor to ring the bell. And I, you know, met tons of celebrities who said that the Yankees won the World Series and the Yankees would come to ring the bell. It was cool. It was cool to be in a place like that.

Again, pre-911 wasn’t that secure. So it was like that was a secure place, but it was fun to be there. And then I lost that job because I was terrible at the job, so I got fired, and that was awful. So I wanted to stay in that area. Then, I had some other jobs in finance. Then, I got a job because I was desperate to stay in finance. I’m giving the really long-winded version that I never post on LinkedIn, but I want to stay in finance, so I got a job in a boiler room. 

And again, another movie recommendation for anyone. It’s this movie, like, 20 years old. I don’t know how old it is, but it’s a movie called Boiler Room, about a company pitching stocks that were fake and fake money, and I think everyone went to jail. But it’s a good movie. Strongly recommend it. They should remake it because it’s been sold. 

So I got a job in a boiler room, exactly like that movie. The name of the company rhymed with another name of a company that sounded more legit. There were people in the boiler room I was working for who weren’t allowed to use their actual names because their actual names were banned from trading stocks. So, they used the names of other people on the phones who were not banned from trading stocks. When the documents came in, real people would sign them, but the people on the phone would introduce themselves as other people because they were good at sales, and the legal people were not as good. 

So, it was precisely a boiler room. So I’m working there. I’m working on getting my stock broker’s license and learning how to sell stocks on the phone. This will be very foreign to anybody, even a Gen Z person. Yeah, stocks used to be sold on the phone, you know, just go on, you know, websites and Robin Hood and just swipe you to get access to the stock market. And there was a lot of money to be made. And these bigger companies, when they sold a stock, would front-run like you. If they get a big order, they would sell the stocks themselves or buy the stock themselves, then execute for the client; again, this is not something you can do anymore, which is great. 

So I’m working for this company, and my boss, an awful, terrible person who was not allowed to be trading stocks because he’d been previously indicted for selling out fake stocks, was terrible. He was cheating on his girlfriend, cheating on multiple girlfriends, and he was a terrible person; he berated me all the time, so on September 10, he berated me. And it was awful. I left work and was like, This is not for me. I cannot continue to go into this environment and get yelled at and belittled, and I mean, they would like to cut my clothes, like I’d be wearing a tie and to wear a tie, and they would just cut it in half. Now go get another tie like terrible, terrible people. 

So on September 10, I don’t remember what it was, but I was berated more than usual, went home, and was like, these people are terrible. I never want to go back to work again. On September 11, I woke up, as I always did, at six in the morning to take the train. I woke up, gonna go to work. I’d forgotten about what I’d gotten over the previous day’s experience. And took a shower, and I got dressed, and then I thought about it, I was like, You know what? I haven’t taken a day off in a really long time. I work for some terrible human beings. I’m not going to work today. I’m just not going to go. I’m not sick. I’m not just not going to go to work today. And I went back to sleep. I woke up, I don’t know, between eight thirty-nine, whenever it was, whenever the terrorist attack started happening, and my phone was ringing, and it kept ringing and ringing. I kept ignoring it because I assumed my boss asked me why I had not come to work that day. 

So it kept ringing. I picked it up, and a friend said, “I’m so glad you picked it up. Are you okay?” I said, “I’m fine. I’m not going to work today. I hate my boss,” and she said, “Okay, I’m just so glad you’re safe.” And she sounded like she was crying. And I’m like, “Why? What’s the matter?” And she’s like, “I gotta go.” So I was like, “Wait, this is really freaky.” So I turned on the TV because maybe something happened and the TV didn’t work. So because of the tower, the antennas were on the top of the building. And then I turned on the radio; I thought I was listening to, like, again, for the younger listeners, TV used to be on the radio. They used to have stories on the radio. So I thought I was listening to an action story on the radio because they were talking about planes hitting buildings. I think the second plane had just hit, and then there were missing planes. Early on that day, they thought there were planes all over. There were multiple missing planes. I was like, “What station is this? It’s like a Tuesday morning. They’re not supposed to be telling stories during Newshour”. 

And then I realized it was real, and I started freaking out because I knew a ton of people there, and I went to a friend’s house who had cable because the TV antenna wasn’t working, and we watched it as teenagers. I thought it was a really good idea for us to go down to the World Trade Center. So we were in Brooklyn at the time, when we went into Manhattan and went to lower Manhattan, and I was really close to the buildings, and I saw the building seven fall down, and I saw things like, I knew a ton of people there, and I saw, like, friends of mine. They were building stretchers out of plywood, and there was enough ash that it was like snow walking in inches of snow. 

It was just ash from the buildings, and they were, like, business cards still falling from the sky. They had landed on other things. They’re still falling. It was a terrible day, but really, like, I didn’t go to work that day. I don’t know what would have happened, but my colleagues were fine, a couple, you know, again, like, I share a business card. I knew people who died in the buildings, and I knew people who were injured in escaping from the buildings, and I knew people who were traumatized from seeing things that they should never see, no one should ever see, but I wasn’t there because I didn’t go to work that day.

Yeah, the message that pops into my mind about this for you is that it wasn’t your time. That was all orchestrated for you to miss that day because it was in your time. I have another friend who has never missed any planes. She does not miss flights. And it was September 11, and she was going to be on one of those four planes, but they had just closed the door, and she was screaming at them, you gotta let me on. I can’t miss this fight. And they wouldn’t do it. They would not let her on. And that was one of the four planes I met someone.

I think I met her in Israel, or her niece had been; this was during the time of the Intifada in Israel in 2000 and 2001 when there were a lot of terrorist attacks and bus bombings. Her niece had been living in Israel, and her mother, her sister, and the person I met insisted that the niece come home from Israel because it was too dangerous and that she come back to America and live in New York and get a job. And she got a job at Cantor Fitzgerald, and she died on 911, so that was reverse trauma. On the other hand, their side. 

Another thing I learned a couple of years after 911 the first person who died on 911 was a trained counter-terrorism soldier from the Israeli army. His name was Daniel Lewin, and Daniel Lewin was the CEO and founder of Akamai, a company that still exists as a public company. It powers many websites and loads balances between different sites, so you see a faster site wherever you are. He was living in Boston, and he was on the plane. He was flying from Boston to LA, and the reason they say he was the first person to die on 911 was because he was sitting in first class, and he was sitting behind two terrorists and in front of the terrorist that became the pilot. And they think, and they don’t know. They think he stood up when he hurt and saw it was happening. He was a trained counter-terrorism soldier, and he tried to stop it, but the terrorist behind him just killed him. They know he died before the plane crashed because he was on the American Airlines plane, and the flight attendant had called night. I actually heard the calls in the 911 Museum in New York. Flight attendants said the plane’s been hijacked and a passenger in first class had been stabbed and killed. 

So they think that they don’t know. They think it was him. And the thoughts of like, wow, what if we would have had police on the planes, or what if all these things, you had someone who was trained to take out multiple people by hand, and he was there. Nothing changed. So, for anybody curious, Daniel Lewin is on Wikipedia. There are articles about him from MIT. He’s the founder of Akamai. It is a fascinating story.

That’s heavy stuff. Yeah, thank you for sharing. Yeah. You never shared that full story with me. I know we talked about 911 once before, but wow, I’m glad you’re alive.

The real trauma that day was wow. I could have been there. I’m not traumatized. I don’t want to claim any victimhood and survivorship. I did not survive. I was like any other person in New York that day or any other person in America who lived through it, and I did not live through it in a way that would have been traumatizing because it goes. And the reason I share that is not that, like,  “Oh, look at me and like, I survived.” The reason I share is because I think it changes who we are as Americans, like an attack came to our shores. And every single time we travel, we are impacted by that. And, you know, we’re impacted by the words fought in the last 23 years because of it. So I think it deserves more than never forgetting.

Yeah, yeah. It impacts our every waking moment. Think about how much we use our cell phones, and the NSA tracks everything. It’s just crazy, like some of the stuff, the mass surveillance that has been leaked out by Snowden and so forth is just terrible. And you know, a lot of the excuse for why that is necessary is because of 911.

Yep, yeah. It changed everything, and we should always remember it. And if anybody has not been to the museum in New York, it’s fascinating. It’s a very heavy Museum. I’ve been to Honolulu and Pearl Harbor, and, as you know, obviously, that also changed America. And this is a modern attack in a modern museum of something that should be incredibly relatable to everyone in America.

Thank you for sharing your story; I’m glad it wasn’t your time. Thank you. All right, so how does our listener learn more from you? Potentially work with you, hire you for services. 

Well, definitely check out my book. So, product-led SEO google it, and it’s on Amazon. You can buy from an affiliate. I don’t care. It’s Amazon’s money. If you read my newsletter and productledseo.com and find me on LinkedIn. 

Thank you, Eli, and thank you, listener. I appreciate sticking around till the very end of this longer-than-usual episode. So, have a fantastic week. I’m your host. Stephan Spencer, signing off. 

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Your Checklist of Actions to Take

Identify user intent before conducting keyword research. Instead of using keyword tools, I must first understand my target users and map their complete journey.

Evaluate SEO ROI before investment. I should whiteboard the complete user journey to determine if SEO makes sense for my business model.

Build product-led SEO assets. Instead of creating thin content around keywords, I should develop actual products or tools that serve user needs.

Adapt to AI’s impact on search. As AI increasingly handles top-funnel informational queries, I need to shift my SEO focus to mid-funnel queries. 

Create innovative content angles that serve specific audience niches. For example, create curated lists of industry-specific shows and movies rather than generic “best of” content.

Align with search engine goals. I must ensure my SEO strategy serves actual user needs rather than trying to manipulate rankings. 

Focus on user experience over metrics. I should track conversion metrics and user engagement rather than just ranking positions.

Develop programmatic SEO solutions. I can create scalable SEO by building systems that automatically aggregate and organize valuable user information. This could include pulling data feeds and creating dynamic category pages that serve specific user intents.

Validate SEO investment by testing if my target audience uses search to find solutions like mine. I need to confirm through user research that SEO is a viable channel for my specific business case.

Connect with Eli Schwartz. Read his book Product-Led SEO and subscribe to his weekly newsletter at productledseo.com.

About Eli Schwartz

Eli Schwartz is the author of Product-Led SEO, and he is a growth consultant with more than a decade of experience driving successful SEO and growth programs for leading B2B and B2C companies. He helps clients like WordPress, Coinbase, Shutterstock, BlueNile, Quora, and Zendesk build and execute global SEO strategies that dramatically increase their organic visibility at scale.