Optimize Episode 003: Tyler Hakes on AI and Dark Search, Building Topical Authority, and Google's SGE

Learn More About Tyler Hakes 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyler-hakes-40545514/ 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TylerHakes (personal) or https://twitter.com/YesOptimist (business)

Website: https://www.yesoptimist.com/

Check Out: https://www.yesoptimist.com/tofu

Episode Transcript

Tyler Hakes (Speaking)

0:00:00

The way that people use search and the way that search sends traffic to websites is going to change. I think that's undisputed at this point. But the question is, of course, in what ways — and sort of how do we prepare for that as we are thinking about SEO, and especially for clients. And so I'll say I coined — but I don't know — I've been using this term dark search. And I sort of borrowed that idea from the idea of dark social, which is this concept in sort of social media marketing, which is that it's very hard to attribute social marketing, because there's sort of all of these unattributable mentions and essentially word of mouth that's happening through social, and it's very hard to measure and capture the value that you're creating through social media. And I think that with SEO, we're sort of entering a similar era. And the reason why I say that is because so many queries are now going to essentially answer the question immediately, and so there will be zero clicks, meaning that we won't be able to see the traffic, but there can still be an impact from appearing in that.

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Nate Matherson (Speaking)

0:00:57

Hi, and welcome to the Optimize podcast. My name is Nate Matherson, and I'm your host. On this weekly podcast, we sit down with some of the smartest minds in content marketing and SEO. Our goal is to give you perspective and insights on what's moving a needle in organic search right now. Today, I'm thrilled to sit down with Tyler Hakes. Tyler is the founder of Optimist, a content marketing and SEO agency focused on startups and growth stage businesses. Tyler has worked with a number of incredible startups like Sendbird, Submittable, and HelloSign. And before that, Tyler built an incredible organic search channel at a startup called College Raptor. I know that Tyler has a number of interesting thoughts on the changing SEO landscape, building topical relevance and authority, and scaling organic search channels. I'm excited to unpack all of that today with him on our episode. 

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Ad Break

This episode of the Optimize podcast is brought to you by Positional. At Positional, we're building tools for content marketing and SEO teams. We've got a great selection of tools for everything from content optimization to keyword research and technical SEO. And you can visit our website at positional.com. 

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Nate Matherson (Speaking)

Hey, Tyler, thanks for coming on the podcast. I'm really excited to chat with you today.

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Tyler Hakes (Speaking)

0:02:19

Hey, Nate. Yeah, it's good to see you, man. Thanks so much for inviting me.

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Nate Matherson (Speaking)

0:02:22

Yeah, and I just want to say before we start this, I love your Twitter. I find that I'm getting at least five or 10 awesome talking points each week just by following you on Twitter. And so there's a lot for us to unpack here today just from your tweet feed. Everything from AI and dark search to building topical relevance and search intent. And so we have a lot to cover and I really appreciate you coming on.

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Tyler Hakes (Speaking)

0:02:42

I'm always torn on Twitter. I go back and forth between taking it seriously and not taking it seriously. So I'm glad to hear people do get value out of it when I try. 

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Nate Matherson (Speaking)

Yeah, whatever you're doing, keep doing it, at least for me. But before we get into the nitty gritty, I'd love to learn, how did you get into content marketing and SEO? How did this ultimately become your career path?

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Tyler Hakes (Speaking)

0:03:02

Yeah, I've found out over the years that I have actually a pretty common story. So I studied journalism at the University of Iowa, and I've always been pretty good at writing and I enjoyed writing. But what I realized was, I was about to graduate from the J-school, and I realized that newspaper writers and journalists were making about $19,000 a year coming out of college. And so, you know, it did not look like the most lucrative career path at the time for me. And so, you know, luckily I was able to kind of take some of the skills and some of my writing abilities, I guess, and kind of apply those to the world of marketing. And it was kind of — I wouldn't say the early days, but maybe the heyday of sort of content marketing and SEO and so many companies really figuring out how to do this kind of stuff. And so, yeah, man, I got a job right out of college working at a consulting firm in the higher-education space. I was the lowest person on the totem pole on the marketing team, basically, and I helped kind of build their content marketing strategy, and I turned into kind of the internal subject matter expert on SEO and so, yeah, that was sort of the starting point for my career. And from there, I just kind of worked my way through other agencies. I did a little bit of in-house work in corporate insurance. I lived in Des Moines at the time. So, you know, you have to work in insurance at some point if you live in Des Moines, Iowa; that's the rule. And then I found my way to College Raptor. The background there, just for the audience, is, College Raptor was a venture-funded startup based in Iowa, founded by a guy I actually interned with when I was in college, Bill Staib. And Nate, I think that's kind of how we got connected, too, was maybe through mutual board members or investors or something along those lines. And yeah … and that was really — I would say that was sort of like the first real test of everything that I've learned. We were doing content marketing SEO work for, I don't know, local businesses and all kinds of different stuff at these other agencies, but the venture game is sort of a totally different beast. And basically, the job that I got tasked with was to figure out how to build a content and SEO strategy to get us two million users, starting from scratch. And so the stakes are a lot higher when you're talking about spending other people's money and all that stuff. And so we really dove headfirst in. Obviously, like I said, I knew a lot about content marketing and that kind of stuff coming into it, but I really had to sharpen my skills and really study what was working at that level of being able to scale from zero to a million. And so ultimately, you know, we figured out a lot of things that worked really well. They really built what I consider to be sort of a pretty solid framework around how to make content marketing work from a business perspective and really rapidly scale traffic and conversions and that kind of stuff. And ultimately we did scale from zero to a million users in just over a year working at College Raptors. So that was sort of my first taste of the startup world. And I guess, although I tell people that I burned out, I do content marketing and SEO for dozens of startups.

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Nate Matherson (Speaking)

0:05:43

Yeah, you and I got connected back in 2015, I believe. And I spent about, like, four months in Iowa. And if you know anything about the Iowa tech ecosystem, it's very connected. And you and I got connected through those and similar investors, I believe, in our company and also College Raptor. And that was right around the same time we were both thinking about content marketing. And very early on in our business, content marketing became a really important channel, and I know at College Raptor it did, too. And so going back to 2015 and ’16, I remember sharing notes with you and in some sense watching what you were doing, at least trying to learn how we could keep up in some sense. I know we weren't directly competitive, but we always took inspiration from the work you were doing back in, like, 2015 and 2016. And I think you guys did a fantastic job at scaling that channel. But I know since then you've shifted and now started your own agency. So what made you shift from being an in-house contributor to wanting to go out and start an agency and work with a large number of individual startups? 

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Tyler Hakes (Speaking)

Honestly, I left College Raptor about two years ago. I sort of joke about this, but I was pretty burned out. I mean, the startup life is a grind, as you know, Nate. And I was working 80 hours a week and sort of on call at all times, and we had developers overseas, and so midnight calls all the time and just a lot of craziness. And so I just decided that I needed to take some time to kind of figure out what I wanted to do next and how I wanted to spend my time. And so I actually started freelancing originally when I first left College Raptor, and I would work with these companies — a lot of them were startups — or even just like bootstrap ventures and stuff. And they would hire me to do sort of a part of content marketing. And what I realized really quickly was that they never had sort of the full picture, right? So they would hire me to write content, but there was really nobody building a strategy, or they would hire me to build a strategy, but they didn't have good enough writers to actually rank for the keywords that I would suggest and things like that. And so what I realized pretty quickly was that most of these companies — and again, a lot of them were sort of early stage startups, bootstrapped tech companies, and stuff like that — was that they really needed, like, a content marketing team, you know: folks to really run the program from start to finish and really put all the pieces together to actually drive business results rather than just cranking out blog posts or doing keyword research. And so that's really how Optimist started. I realized that there seemed to be this need, and so I created Optimist with that vision that we would be sort of a content marketing team in a box that's really focused on growth stage companies. How do we help you stand up that channel and really scale it as rapidly as possible to make it work from a business perspective?

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Nate Matherson (Speaking)

0:08:26

Yeah, and I want to get into the nitty-gritty. And I know on Twitter recently, you've tweeted a few times about AI and dark search. And I had never heard that term before. So when you say AI and dark search, what do you mean, and where is search going? Like, what can I take from AI and dark search? 

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Tyler Hakes (Speaking)

Yeah, so we're at a very interesting time right now in SEO, right? So obviously, if you're watching this, or listening to this podcast, then you are probably very aware of everything that's happening with AI and chat GPT. And so the latest big development has been Google and the beta rollout of what they're calling Search Generative Experience, SGE. That's the version of Google where at the top of the results, there's an AI generated snippet, essentially, that tries to answer the query that somebody types in. And so, of course, a lot of people are prophesying that this is the death of SEO. Everything's the death of SEO, right? But yeah, I mean, there's no doubt that it's going to have a profound impact on the work that we do, right? Because the way that people use search and the way that search sends traffic to websites is going to change. I think that's, you know, that's undisputed at this point. But the question is, of course, in what ways and sort of how do we prepare for that as we are thinking about SEO and especially for clients. And so I'll say I coined — but I don't know — I've been using this term dark search. And I sort of borrowed that idea from the idea of dark social, which is this concept in sort of social media marketing, which is that it's very hard to attribute social marketing because there's sort of all of these, like, unattributable mentions and essentially word of mouth that's happening through social media. And it's very hard to measure and capture the value that you're creating through social media. And I think that with SEO, we're sort of entering a similar era. And the reason why I say that is because so many queries are now going to essentially answer the question immediately, and so there will be zero clicks, meaning that we won't be able to see the traffic, but there can still be an impact from appearing in that search result. So for instance, if you type in the best content marketing agency and Google spits out a list of the best content marketing agencies and Optimus is on that list, I may never see that in my analytics, but there's some value there that we now need to learn how to capture. And so that's where it gets tricky, right? How do you capture that? And I don't know the answers yet, but I think that's what we're going to be learning together here in the next couple of months.

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Nate Matherson (Speaking)

0:10:47

Yeah, and people have been saying SEO is dead since I first started learning about SEO. So it hasn't died just yet. I guess it's been like nine or so years. So it could die in 2024. I'm not totally sure, but I agree with you. I think search is changing. Like, the new experience to me feels like expanded featured snippets. Like, you and I have been trying to optimize for featured snippets for the last six years. And there are a lot of different ways that you can do that. And so now, like, what I'm thinking about with my own sites is, like, how can I optimize the placement of my site into one of these new generative type experiences? Do you know how to do it? Like, how should we be thinking about it? Is there a way that we can optimize the placement of our sites into these new experience boxes?

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Tyler Hakes (Speaking)

0:11:31

That's a great question. The short answer is no, I don't know for sure yet. But I do actually have some … interestingly I just published — if you happened to check my Twitter today, now, you may have seen — I just published a bit of a thread. So I've been closely following the beta of Google’s SGE, which has started to roll out for folks who signed up for that. And so there's been a lot of speculation, a lot of people have been digging in and sharing their experiences and what they've learned. Just to go back to your point really quick, I think that SEO, as we have sort of traditionally thought of it, is definitely changing. A lot of people are using the term AEO, which is, like, answer engine optimization. So to your point, yeah, how do I show up in that snippet that gets generated? So again, there's no 100% consensus on exactly what that's going to look like or the best practices, but I do have a couple pieces of potential speculation. One is that we're seeing already that the links that are provided as sort of citations or attribution in those snippets are not the top three results, for instance. It's generally something that's sort of deeper in the search results, and it seems to be correlated with this idea of topical authority. So sites — for instance, if you search for a hiking … you know, something about hiking, the sites that appear as the links in the snippet tend to be sites that are specifically about hiking rather than a New York Times article about hiking, for instance. And so, part of my speculation there is that this idea of topical authority, which I think we're going to get into in a bit, is going to become even more prevalent, right? Because Google ultimately has to figure out who is an authority on this topic and who should we trust if we're going to generate a response and feed it back to the user — we have to know that that's a correct and valid piece of information, right? And so that's a difficult thing to achieve.

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Nate Matherson (Speaking)

0:13:14

When you say topical authority, what does that mean? What does it mean to build topical authority? Like how do you build it at least today in 2023, maybe with the new search experience aside?

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Tyler Hakes (Speaking)

Yeah, I don't think that topical authority is going to change a whole lot, but topical authority is — just to be transparent — it's a bit of a speculative thing. I believe, I don't know that there's any actual hard evidence that this is truly a thing, but essentially the speculation has always been, or has been for several years, that Google tends to favor sites that have a narrower focus, or at least have a significant number of pages that are related to the same topic. And so just to give you an example about that, if I have a bunch of domain authority on my site and it's all about content marketing, I shouldn't be able to just publish an article tomorrow about cooking and rank because I have a bunch of links pointed to my site and because it's just generally a high authority site. And so the way that Google sort of figured that out is by saying, like, “OK, you have a bunch of different pages about content marketing; you are generally an authority on content marketing and other related topics to that topic.” And so the way that you build authority is that you create more pages, generally, on related topics and sort of connect those, generally, you know, internal linking that, you know, sort of the general best practic is to signal to Google, “Hey, look, we didn't just write one article about content marketing. We're actually experts on this because we have all of these different pages that talk about this topic.” 

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Nate Matherson (Speaking)

100%. Whenever I'm talking with, like, a potential customer or startup founder who's building their blog from scratch, I always say to them, “The long-term goal should be to have a piece of content on every keyword or question in your niche or your category as a way to show Google you are that expert source of information about this topic.” And on the flip side, I've actually experienced losing topical authority and relevance as part of building our websites. You might remember when we started LendDU, at the time it was, like. a student loans–focused website. And so, like, every piece of content on our site was about student loans. But then we eventually expanded into all sorts of things, like home equity loans and pet insurance and investment accounts. And over time, like, student loans only represented, let's say, 10 or 20% of the content that was on our website. And so we actually found that our website ranked worse in the student loan–focused topics as we went and expanded into all of these new verticals. And so the traffic to our website was increasing, but the traffic to our student loans–related pages was actually decreasing. And that was, like, the most valuable part of our business at the time. And so it was a scenario where the traffic to our website was going up, but the actual dollars we were making was going down, because as we lost that topical relevance and topical authority in terms of being, like, the best student loans–focused site, I think Google was trying to figure out, OK, like, what is this website actually the best at? That's a mistake like I'll see startups make with their blogs. Like, they'll have many different types of topics about many different things. And to Google, it's pretty confusing. Like, what is your website actually about? And as far as, you know, building backlinks goes, is building backlinks a way that you can improve topical relevance or authority, or do you see topical relevance as a content thing and not necessarily a backlink-related endeavor?

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Tyler Hakes (Speaking)

0:16:39

No, I definitely think they're related. Authority is sort of an overarching theme here, and then it sort of breaks down into different components, is the way that I think about it at least. And so one thing that matters overall is sort of your overall website authority, which generally is correlated with links or referring domains. But then I think, within that, you can sort of hone more targeted authority around specific topics. There's really sort of two sides of that. One of them is the content and the stuff that you actually have on your site that sort of signals that authority. But the other piece of it is also those links that you are generating and how relevant are they? Where are they coming from? What are those sources talking about, right? So if you have a bunch of, you know — again, going back to that, that example, right — if you're lending to you and you have a bunch of links pointing from a cooking website, Google probably doesn't really understand why those links exist. And there's likely something that's happening in the algorithm there that sort of devalues those links in some way, or at least doesn't pass authority in the same way as they would if they were from other sites talking about loans and that sort of related topics. 

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Nate Matherson (Speaking)

0:17:35

Yeah. Speaking of backlinks, do backlinks almost become more important now with this new search landscape and experience with those different positions, but also the massive increase in AI-generated content and Google trying to cut through the noise in terms of what is actually a helpful piece of content? Do you think that backlinks are going to become more or less important from here? And is that something that you're working on or thinking about with your clients? 

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Tyler Hakes (Speaking)

0:18:01

I mean, I've always considered backlinks to be fairly important, but I've generally used them as more of a tactical tool, at least at this point in my career. And when I say a tactical tool, what I mean is, hey, we currently rank position three, we're trying to get to position one, let's try to build a couple of links to this specific page. I probably think that the volume of links likely decreases in importance, is my speculation here. And again, the reason why I say that is because I think the majority of results are going to have some kind of AI-generated snippet that appears at the top. Those results are generally going to be powered by these sites that so far we've seen have been generally correlated with topical authority rather than sort of sheer domain authority. And so, I mean, I think they'll be as, you know, they will still be important, for sure. Don't get me wrong. I think that it will be less like sort of a perpetual arms race to just have more links. And I think it will be, you know, sort of more equally split between building that topical authority and building links. They'll be more on a level playing field. 

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Nate Matherson (Speaking)

0:18:58

And then as far as content creation goes, I think between the two of us, we've spent seven figures on content creation over the last nine or 10 years. It's not cheap. It's gotten more expensive over time, I think, too. But like with the popularity of these AI tool sets, you can create content a lot faster and at a much lower cost than maybe you could have a few years ago. In terms of AI-generated content, like, are you using it? Should I be using it? What do you think about AI-generated content as part of the content production process?

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Tyler Hakes (Speaking)

0:19:28

We are not using AI right now to generate actual content for clients. We are using AI in sort of experimental ways throughout our workflow. So things like creating briefs, building outlines, you know, sort of the ancillary tasks that go into content creation. And our goal is basically, you know, how do we kind of make the job as easy as possible for our writers to create the content? So I think, you know, you can replace a content team with AI; there's no doubt about it. I don't think that the content is at the same quality, of course — I think there's just a lot of challenges that still exist there. And the other interesting thing about using AI is that perhaps counterintuitively what we've found is that it can be rather tedious. Things that seem simple can become tedious when you're trying to move a wholesale piece of content from an AI tool into a doc and format everything correctly. And just the things that seem simple become sort of laborious. So that's another challenge that we're dealing with right now. I think that AI will get there ultimately or will get, you know, continue to get better, no doubt. So we'll kind of keep a pulse on that. And to whatever extent we can, I mean, I have nothing against using AI to write content. It's just, it's not the level that we need it to be at this moment.

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Nate Matherson (Speaking)

0:20:36

Yeah, neither do I. Like, I'm certainly not like the anti-AI guy. I think there's definitely a place for it. I think the sites that I've seen use AI really effectively, like, are using it as a supplement. So they're still, like, adding that human touch. They're still sourcing appropriately and fact-checking. And it's, like, they have, you know, actual experts as part of that process and not just blindly copying and pasting 2,000 articles from ChatGPT, which I have seen startups do as well with moderate success. I think it'll be interesting to see, you know, where we go from here. I think low-quality content is something that Google's been dealing with since they first started. And going back to like 2012, 2013, there were Panda updates around like spun content and large amounts of low-quality content. So it's not like low-quality or even AI-generated content is actually as new as I think it may appear to be.

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Tyler Hakes (Speaking)

0:21:30

Yeah, I think the bar for that low-quality content has just been raised, right? I think that's ultimately what's happened here is that, you know, Google is going to have to sort of raise its filter, so to speak, in terms of what is sort of an acceptable level of quality in response to all of the AI-generated content. So I don't really think it's changed anything except for it's, you know, it's made it more challenging to create content that's sort of worthy of ranking. And another thing that I want to touch on is the idea of E-E-A-T, right? So, like, expertise and authority, and a lot of times I always forget the acronym and what all the letters mean, but.

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Nate Matherson (Speaking) 

0:22:03

Trustworthiness.

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Tyler Hakes (Speaking)

0:22:05

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Google has been talking about this forever. They've been saying that they're using it in all these ways. It's become sort of a joke, I think, in the SEO circles because there's so many blatant examples of very clearly not authority websites ranking for topics that they should not be ranking for. But I think it has to become a serious factor here because, like you just mentioned, right, any schmuck can spin up a million articles about, I don't know, your health or food or content marketing, whatever the topic is, right, with AI and make it pretty convincing, you know — reasonably convincing to an average reader. And so how does Google then figure out which of that content is good enough to then surface on the search results or even use in a generated response that Google itself is feeding back to the user. Like, they don't want to just feed random misinformation to people. Uh, so they have to be able to somehow filter that out. And so I think that's where we're going to see an increased focus on this idea of E-E-A-T. I don't know exactly what that looks like or if it's, you know, the current version of E-E-A-T or some new version of it or what, but I think there's some filter there that's going to exist.

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Nate Matherson (Speaking)

0:23:10

Yeah. It always amazes me when some of the startups we talk to don't have author profiles or even a byline on a piece of content. And I think that's like a single small example of, like, if a piece of content is generated by AI, but someone's still willing to attach their name to it as, like, a licensed physician or attorney, then, like, they're putting their reputation onto that piece of content. And whether they wrote it themselves or used AI as part of that creation process, there's someone for Google to hold accountable in some sense as the author of that piece. I think personally, E-E-A-T is only going to get more important, but I also just think it's helpful for readers coming to your website. Whether it's helpful for Google or not, I don't know. But I think for a reader, when they come to your site and see that Nate is an expert in this topic and here are his credentials and here's an about page and terms of service for this website … I think all of that information is just actually helpful for a reader and might improve, like, the time on page and scroll depth and bounce rate and all of those other things that Google does look at in terms of judging the quality of a piece of content. Like Core Web Vitals: I think people tend to obsess too much over E-E-A-T, but I think there are some, you know, boilerplate best practices that all sites should incorporate as part of their strategy.

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Tyler Hakes (Speaking)

0:24:27

I was just going to say, I think that at the end of the day, when we think about SEO, and is SEO dead, and how is SEO going to change, it's always … every time that there's been a change, it's always come back to that, right? Like what creates the best possible experience for the user and how can Google algorithmically figure that out? And that's usually where we lead to. So I think any time we think about this, we think like, “OK, if Google rolls it out and it does this, that will suck for the user.” Then I would expect that Google's going to figure out some way to solve that. Obviously, they have legions of incredibly intelligent engineers working on these problems every day. I don't think they're just going to roll out something that's, like, oh, now it's the wild west and anybody can write on any topic with AI and rank number one overnight. If anything, that's a short-term hack, but it's never going to work in the long term, is my expectation.

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Nate Matherson (Speaking)

0:25:17

And fact-check me on this if I'm wrong, but I remember Google saying that there will be certain industries, maybe like Your Money, Your Life — like, websites in the finance or health verticals where this new generative AI experience is going to roll out in a much slower way or not to be rolled out at all. Is that what you've heard? Am I right in that, that there are certain industries where these changes may take a lot more time to eventually impact the SERPs?

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Tyler Hakes (Speaking)

0:25:46

Yeah, I've also heard similar stuff. And I've actually seen a thread from someone where they went through just a bunch of different searches and a bunch of different industries and different search intents and things. It was probably 70-30. 70% had some kind of an AI snippet; 30% didn't. It wasn't … I wouldn't say it was 100% clear what the pattern was there, but I definitely think Google is sort of using, exercising some caution there on when and how they roll those out. The other interesting thing, too, is that they seem to be collecting user preference data. So there's some results where it will say … it will offer you an option to generate a snippet, but it doesn't generate automatically. And so I think, you know, in that case, what they're basically doing is sort of testing, like, do users want a snippet here, or would they rather just, like, click into a link? And so, you know, I think there's a lot of testing that's still happening, to be honest. And I don't think that the current version of SGE is what goes live, is my personal opinion. Yeah, it definitely makes sense that they will exercise, I would say, extreme or extra caution around Your Money, Your Life, anything like that, where, you know, it just opens them up to all kinds of, you know, lawsuits and misinformation issues and things like that.

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Nate Matherson (Speaking)

0:26:53

The last thing they want is someone Googling cures for heart disease, and then their generative AI response is from Bob's heart disease blog. But you mentioned search intent. So what is search intent? How are you thinking about search intent when planning the content calendars and the content for your clients?

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Tyler Hakes (Speaking)

0:27:12

I think this is an area where folks, I would say — especially sort of less-experienced SEO people —  tend to struggle. And so search intent is basically just sort of how Google categorized a particular query, is the way that I think about it, based on what they expect the user wants. So for instance, if you search for podcasting tools, you probably want a list of tools. Whereas if you search for how to start a podcast, you probably want an article that tells you how to do that thing, right? And so a lot of people make a mistake in this, in that they try to sort of swim upstream against the search intent, right? They say, “Hey, podcast tools, I want to rank number one for that, so I'm going to write an article about how great our podcast tool is.” Well, if your content, if your page that you're trying to rank, doesn't match, doesn't look like all the other pages that rank, your chances of ranking are very low. And so I think that's, again, a challenge that a lot of folks have with SEO right out of the gate, is that they just look at the keyword; they don't look at what actually ranks or think too much about why someone is searching for that. They just think, “I'm going to create a blog, we're going to target this keyword, and we're just going to use that keyword 20 times, and we'll rank.” Interested to get your thoughts on this, Nate. I don't know how search intent changes in this sort of AI world, right? Because I think the way that people search for things is going to be radically different, right? We think about keywords, and that's even sort of an antiquated idea at this point, but the fact is that if Google is more conversational, then people are going to use more conversational prompts or queries, right? Rather than, you know, “Nike shoes” or whatever, they might search for something, you know, very specific:, “which Nike shoes should I buy to do X, Y, and Z,” or whatever. And so that search intent, I think, becomes more nuanced.

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Nate Matherson (Speaking)

0:28:56

Yeah, I have a couple thoughts here. My first thought is that Google has gotten increasingly good at identifying search intent over the years. Like, back in like 2015 and 2016, like, you used to be able to write, like, a 6,000-word mega-guide and rank it for, like, 25 different primary terms instead of actually going and creating 25 different articles, which I think is probably the better approach in a lot of industries in 2023: aligning a more specific article to that exact intent, versus trying to use a mega-guide to rank for all of those keywords. So I think Google has gotten much better at delivering a piece of content to that specific intent. I do think you're right about keyword research. A big mistake we'll see our customers make is they'll get a list of keywords, but then they won't actually go to the SERPs and see what's already ranking for a given keyword. And so I always remind them to do that as part of the outlining and briefing process. I actually talked with a guest on an earlier episode who had a really interesting approach to doing keyword research and actually identifying search intent for a given keyword. His name is Aakash. He's the co-founder and CEO of a company called Wyndly. They've grown their blog in the health space to over 100,000 visitors per month over a period of, like, 15 months. So they've done an amazing job at building their content strategy, and they've used no keyword research tools. And so I asked them, “How did you pick the topics to write about?” And they actually started with a video-first approach. So they were creating all of these videos for TikTok, and they would get a sense for what was going viral on TikTok. And if a certain video generated, like, X number of views within a specific period, that gave them a signal that they should go and write a piece of blog content about that specific topic. And so they've essentially built a blog that gets 100,000 readers per month without doing keyword research, which I think is pretty amazing. But they've, I think, identified these different intents in another sort … in a way without using a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush or our toolset. So I think as the search experience changes, I think maybe getting a little bit more creative in terms of how you actually identify what to write about and how to write about it. Maybe it's using video on TikTok; I'm not sure. But I thought that was a really interesting approach that I had not heard before. I do want to get your thoughts on strategy or maybe KPIs. And when you're working with a client, a question I always get asked is, like, “How long does it take to actually go and build a content marketing and SEO channel?” Like, can I do it in two months? Can I do it in six months? Like, how long does it actually take from start to finish to go out and build a meaningful organic search channel, either for your clients or in your past experience? Like, how long does it take? 

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Tyler Hakes (Speaking)

31:35

So, let me be a marketer for a second and say it depends — because that's obviously a big caveat here. The most important thing there is where they're starting from. So did they just register this domain yesterday and are starting literally from zero? Have they been around for a while but they just haven't really invested in it? That's going to play a big role. But what I always tell clients is pretty much the same thing, is that within two or three months, we should have clear data that shows that it's working, that it's growing. Now it's not necessarily going to be through the roof after two months, right? But there's a clear pattern of growth in terms of the traffic and the things that we're seeing. And again, generally that's two, three months, usually six months to a year is where we start to see some of the compounding returns really, really starting to escalate, and we see more of an exponential growth curve. So again, you know, depending on if you're starting at zero or you're starting at a thousand or whatever it is, that's going to dictate sort of the trajectory that you see from a growth perspective. But yeah, I would say, you know, for most of our clients, six to eight, eight to 12 months, somewhere in that range, will, you know — it's sort of a defensible strategy at that point for most, you know, from a business perspective. There's a million caveats I can include here, but I'll just say, you know, that's a pretty standard benchmark for ours, in our experience. 

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Nate Matherson (Speaking)

I know that was a tough and broad question. 

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Tyler Hakes (Speaking)

All good. No, all good. 

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Nate Matherson (Speaking)

And then another tough and broad question, but a question I always get asked, is “How much does it cost? How much does it cost to go and build an organic search strategy?” Whether you're doing it internally or working with an agency, what should a startup be budgeting for this channel over the next 12 to 24 months if they're serious about it and they know that could become an important channel for them? 

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Tyler Hakes (Speaking)

33:12

I would say six figures for sure. So for us, standard engagement for us is about 10 grand a month. And keeping in mind that that's really sort of a full-service team. So if you're really sort of investing and you're going all in on this idea of content marketing and you want what I consider to be a top-notch team in terms of executing that and running everything from strategy to writing and that kind of stuff, of course you can do it in a leaner fashion. There's a lot of ways that you can cut costs and save money from that. But when you really think about all the moving parts that go into content marketing, right — you've got SEO, you've got content strategy, you've got writing, you've got design, you've got, you know, just loading content into the CMS, then you've got to think about, you know, link building, promotion, all of these ancillary things. Right? And so I think that's where, honestly, I think a lot of companies hurt themselves and get sort of jaded about content marketing, is that they try to take the cheapest route possible. There's missing pieces in the puzzle. And then they're trying to figure out why this isn't working for my company. And it's, like, well, because you only wanted to spend $50 an article and you didn't have anybody doing strategy and you're risking all this. So I think our price point, while slightly on the higher side, 10 grand a month is pretty reasonable when you think about it. It's a single full-time employee salary in most companies. And if you're really going to build your team, a lot of our clients work with us for a couple years and then they ultimately build their own in-house team. And you're talking three, four, five full-time salaries in a lot of cases. Now you're talking about a million dollars a year in some cases.

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Nate Matherson (Speaking)

0:34:38

Yeah, if it's okay with you, I'd like to transition into a rapid-fire round. I've really enjoyed this conversation. I've learned a thing or two so far, and I know our readers have too. So if it's OK with you, I'm going to ask you five or six rapid-fire questions. Quick response is great. Does that sound good?

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Tyler Hakes (Speaking)

I'll do my best. 

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Nate Matherson (Speaking)

So what's one thing that you see content marketers or SEO teams spending time on every week or once a month that's just a total waste of time and not something worth doing?

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Tyler Hakes (Speaking)

0:35:05

I think people spend way too much time on what I consider to be sort of optimizing, like, antiquated ranking factors, right? So things like alt text or meta description, stuff like that, where people sort of agonize over trying to perfect them. Now, don't get me wrong, they are important to do, but in our workflow, at least, it's sort of a minor point rather than a major thing that we're investing a ton of time in.

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Nate Matherson (Speaking)

0:35:26 

Does it ever make sense to buy backlinks in 2023? Like, should I be buying backlinks? 

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Tyler Hakes (Speaking)

0:35:34

Probably not. Most sites that would sell you a backlink are generally not sites that you want a backlink from. 

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Nate Matherson (Speaking)

0:35:39

I know there's been a lot of talk that Google is going to lose its monopoly status in terms of search, and it might not be a very good business model going forward. Do you think that Google is at risk of losing its dominance in search as that go-to search engine for most people?

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Tyler Hakes (Speaking)

0:35:55

I think it will see an erosion in market share. I think it will probably still be the dominant player, but it's been at, what, like, 98% or, like, 94% or something insane like that. I think it becomes more of like a 60% kind of situation where people are using a broader variety of tools. I don't know that Bing is necessarily going to see a huge surge, but I think, you know, ChatGPT, other things that people are going to have conversations with rather than using a traditional search.

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Nate Matherson (Speaking)

0:36:21

And as far as tooling goes, what's your favorite tool in the SEO space? What tool are you using most often? Is there a tool that our listeners should be using too? 

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Tyler Hakes (Speaking)

Ahrefs is always my go-to. I mean, I've been using Ahrefs, you know, basically since I started in this space or since it started, however long ago that was. So that's probably the tool I spend the most time in. One other tool that I'll give a shout out to is Keyword Insights. That's a really cool tool. And, you know, we were talking about sort of search intent and sort of thinking about all that stuff. Basically what it does is it sort of groups together keywords or it does a lot of different things, but that's the way that we use it. So, you know, basically it helps you determine things like search intent and also, you know, which terms are related and which terms are sort of their own query and things like that. S, it's really helpful for us. 

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Nate Matherson (Speaking)

Tyler, I really appreciate you coming on. I really enjoyed doing this with you. And like I've mentioned, you've got a lot of interesting things to say on Twitter on the daily. And I've been following you at @YesOptimist on Twitter, but outside of Twitter, how can our listeners get in touch with you? How can they connect with you if they're interested in becoming a client or working with you?

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Tyler Hakes (Speaking)

0:37:20

Yeah, absolutely. So you can actually find me personally on Twitter at @TylerHakes. And then I would love for folks, if you're interested, to join our free community. So we run a community; it's about 2,000 marketing folks. So mostly content and SEO people. And it's called Top of the Funnel. You can find that at yesoptimist.com/tofu. It's a free Slack community. We host all kinds of live sessions, workshops, and really cool stuff inside there. So yeah, I would love to have people join us.

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Nate Matherson (Speaking)

0:37:47

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on. You'll get a backlink from us when we publish this podcast on our website. So at a minimum, you'll get that. But for all the listeners, I'd highly recommend connecting with Tyler, either on Twitter or LinkedIn. He knows more about content marketing SEO than most do. And I've really learned a lot from him over the years, and I really appreciate him coming on. Thanks so much, Tyler.

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0:38:14

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