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Noah: Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to our, I can't believe I'm saying this, this is our ninth edition of Campfire Chats. Before we jump in, I just wanna say thanks to all of our community sponsors, which are totally amazing. Aerox, Citation Labs, Ahrefs. I'm gonna forget everybody, but Amy, can you put them up on screen?

as we're going, because I just want to make sure we jump in right away here. It's my pleasure today to welcome Arnott Hellemans. He's a trusted and experienced business optimizer based in Amsterdam.

He's been working in SEO, CRO, and consulting since 2006. He's worked with many giants in the field, including Joost de Valk, Robin Allenson, and many more. Arnott works with medium to large brands, helping themselves crawling.

indexation and performance issues while driving sustainable organic growth. He's spoken at the biggest conferences in the world, including a co-presentation with John O Alderson at Conversion Hotel that folks absolutely rave about. I'm so stoked that he's joined the SEO community's team as a co-host of BS Time, our European time zone edition of our shooting the poop room on Clubhouse. Arnout, it is really

My pleasure to welcome you to the campfire. So great having you here. Yeah, totally. So great to see you. Yeah, totally. come on. Did I capture you? I was trying.

Arnout Hellemans: Well, thanks for having me, Noah.

Thanks for having me and the kind words, right? It just makes me blush.

Noah: Okay, so for folks who don't know you, like one of the, I've known you for the past four years. We got to know each other. think Dave Sotomano said, you got to talk with Arnout when I started building branch explorer. And I showed you what I was building and you were really into it at the time. And you gave me like feedback that was unique and incredibly useful.

And at that point in time, I'd probably talked to two or 300 other SEOs and out of that entire cohort of people, I was like, man, I gotta get to know this guy. Like, because you think so differently than anyone I've ever met before. And I think anybody who's encountered you and talked with you probably feels that way.

where the hell does your curiosity come from?

Arnout Hellemans: You

Arnout Hellemans: I don't know and I never knew, right? But I think my curiosity comes from having a bit of a neurodiverse brain. And I've always questioned anything I was supposed to learn with a counter question saying, why should I learn this? And if you could sell it to me.

that I needed to learn it for X and I was on board with that. I was on board for everything. And so I've always in my life have been optimizing anything.

Right? So I'm all about inefficiencies and fixing those. Right? And it starts with understanding what the end goal is. Right? What am I? So you build a dashboard, which is fine.

But I basically wanted like, what if I want this because this is the desired outcome, right? And then work backwards from there. And then you can give constructive feedback and don't give feedback on as is because then it's just minor tweaks.

But if you completely rethink it from, is the data we have. This is what I tried to do, right? This is a use case because I have this problem and you have the data, but it's just not.

workable for me at the moment. I have to look at different sources and combining that. Why can't I just do that? Right. So it's starting from a different point.

And I think if you do that, you get different insights, right? Because you don't start at the status quo. You start at what you finally want to have. Right.

So I think, I think it's that.

that I have ADHD has also taught me that I just store a lot of not useful information at that moment, but I still store it. So it helps me connect loads of dots and my brain is always racing. So I think that's the other big thing.

But I think the biggest advice is understanding what you want from what's there.

Arnout Hellemans: And then you can start talking about improvements and give proper feedback. And the other thing is, and this is with any SEO tool, right? The only real task I'm willing to pay for is not what the tool can do, but it is how much it makes me look good as an SEO. Right? So.

Noah: Hmph. Hmph.

Arnout Hellemans: If you have a tool that can warn you that something has happened on the website, which instead of the client coming to you or your boss coming to you as if you as an in-house, you can basically prevent that from happening and solving it before that. Everybody's willing to pay for a solution like that. So I think it always, so if a tool can save me an hour or

tens of hours in a migration, right? I'm willing to pay for it. Right? But if it's just another thing that can do another thing, it just adds cognitive load to my brain and adding everything together.

it just, as an SEO tool, you need to make my work easier.

what we talked about was the Google confirmed Google updates. Because if you can just show those, it makes the comparing of data of different data sources. And it's nothing more than just a Google sheet with dates and what kind of update it was.

Right. It's a simple thing, but it saves me so much time. And if it saves me time, it saves a gazillion other SEOs time, right? Because they all have the same questions.

So it's.

Noah: it

Arnout Hellemans: that way of thinking.

Noah: And as you were talking, I was thinking about our friend, Renee Bigelow in the chat the other day. She talked about connecting dots and how she had a very visual brain where she could almost see ideas out on a plane. And I was like, holy crap, that's why I Like I visually connect things. And I think you probably think the same way, right?

Arnout Hellemans: Hmm?

Noah: Little bit.

Arnout Hellemans: Well, I don't do it visually. Right. so, but what I found is that explaining, if somebody has a question, I start racing, solving the problem, right. In my brain. And then I say, you should do this. But the problem is how can you get people on board if you just say you should do this, right? Because they need to understand you the whole way. So I was using drawing.

as a way to structure my brain. Because if you start drawing any problem, it forces your brain not to stop. It forces you to the next step. Right? So it forces structure in your brain.

Having said that, I needed this more when I would not take medication. If I take medication, it's a lot easier. I can have the ease in my brain to go A, B, C, D, E.

So I don't think I'm...

that visual, but what I am is, what I am is just, I just want to lay it out, but everything happens in my brain. I don't think visually, I don't think so.

Noah: Let's go through some of your favorite questions because I think that everybody has a lot to learn here. Let's start with onboarding. What's your favorite question when you onboard clients?

Arnout Hellemans: Yeah.

Arnout Hellemans: well, it's the one, it's the one question that everybody should be asking, right? How do you make money? Because if they are going to pay you for services, if you need to add value, it's not about driving traffic. It's about driving profitability. Right. And if you don't understand how a business makes money, it's very hard to prioritize anything you're going to do. Let alone.

create a business case why they should keep you on board. So every, because people come to me and say, I've lost traffic. Well, I've seen countless, especially with the latest updates, they've lost a lot of traffic.

But then when you look at the bottom line, their bottom line has grown. And I'm like, well, what the heck? Right? It's basically search engines are figuring out that you weren't a good fit for this intent.

You were a better fit for that intent.

So you always need to start with the profitability. Like how do you make money? The one question, because if you can add say 10 % to the volume line, say you have a client making, I don't know, 200K a month.

And then what you can do is if with a few tweets in the first session, you can already get it to 220, right? That means they, their revenue has grown or their profitability, let's say profit.

has grown by 20K every month. So you've added so much money already, right? And by looking at that way, it makes pricing easier, it makes everything easier, but also prioritizing.

So is this going to move the needle in the bottom line? We've lost traffic in all of these blogs, yeah, but okay, let's see how much in that customer journey it adds in terms of value. If it doesn't add a lot.

Noah: I love how you cut to the heart of the matter there because like when you think about how some agencies report or think about success, they talk about rankings or they talk about impressions. And if they're doing better than that, then they think about like, Oh, I got traffic. And then if they think of even better than that, they think about, Hey, we got conversions and we got revenue, but you're, but you're like, no, it's not revenue. It's fricking profit.

Noah: So it's like, yeah, totally.

Arnout Hellemans: It has been profit all the time, right? Because I've had clients where I'd come in and say, okay, so you make this much. But the problem selling on the web is if say a product costs say, I don't know, $8, right? Selling that product, getting it sent over, eats into your profit margin like hell. So even if you have like 4X profit margin, 400%.

it won't be a product you want to sell in one go. If you sell say a big product like, I don't know, Wetsuit, say 2000, right? The profit might actually be only 20%, but that means $400.

Now that is a product you do want to sell online because 400 is a lot of money, right? In terms of profit.

Noah: Yeah, totally. Yeah.

Arnout Hellemans: And that's like, people need to start things that way. And I've had a client where I showed him this and he was like, so we should turn off Google ads for all of these. And I said, yeah. And we immediately went from losing money big time into making profit by just focusing on the ones that were profitable and were profitable selling on the web.

Noah: And you've also, I mean, this is a slightly different tack, but you've also had situations where clients lost a lot of traffic and the business challenge was how do we reduce our costs? Right. It wasn't like a, do we win with more revenue? was how do we reduce costs in order to maintain some level of profitability? Okay. So you've asked them, how do you make your money? Where do you go next?

Arnout Hellemans: Hmm.

Arnout Hellemans: Well, usually they can't really say. So this is the weird thing, right? Um, when, when you really think about it, like when I was at one of the largest banks consulting for them and I said, how do you make money? Most people that were optimizing the website didn't know. But if you look at banking, it's very simple. Everybody, a bank makes money by loaning money.

Noah: Ha

Arnout Hellemans: And by mortgages, the rest is just getting a few customers through the door. Right. So if you're going to prioritize things on the website, those are the ones you should prioritize on. But people higher up in the company in a bank will know this, but do people like they don't know this, right. And, it's, it's every single time, right. It's like the answer.

is you can also reframe profitability, right? And basically say, so this is your homepage. What do you want people to do? It's reframing the same question in a way, right?

And then they say, you can do this, you can do that, you can do that. And I said, no, but what do you want them to do?

Because that is closer to the goal. And it's, you need to create that light bulb moment with your client. Because if they don't see it, it becomes very hard to sell why you focus on this and not on another thing.

They need to be on board with.

Noah: Are you seeing that lack of clarity even with companies that have many billions of dollars in gross revenues every year? Like that lack of focus and clarity or?

Arnout Hellemans: Mmm.

Arnout Hellemans: think less because there is a reason they're this big, right? And they've grown, especially online. So there is a way bigger focus. And usually the people that I have the conversations with, they're pretty high up. So they usually know this. But for most SEOs, let's be honest, most of the work we do is for slightly smaller companies or you get the request for those.

Noah: Mm-hmm.

Arnout Hellemans: And that's where you can make the real impact, right?

Noah: Mm, totally. So you not only help with consulting, you also like to speak. When did you get started?

Arnout Hellemans: no. You know what the thing is? No, I have one person to thank for it. I don't know if I want to thank her because I'm still not sure if, but I had a massive imposter syndrome, right? And one of the main, one of the main reasons that I would, that I would talk and help people

was to benchmark myself.

So how can we get the, where was I in the story? Lost it.

Noah: Imposter syndrome, benchmark yourself.

Arnout Hellemans: Yeah. So yeah, the imposter syndrome. And so I went to conferences just to benchmark myself and talking to people would give me confidence, right? Because people are listening to you and say, that's an interesting thought or that's really cool. like that really helps your confidence. But I was doing this a lot with the Sembers chat back in the days. at some point, Olga Andrienko, she invited me over to St. Petersburg.

where Samarish was at the time. And she introduced me to all of like the head of SEO of Booking.com was there and Bastien Grimm and like, and suddenly there's this no-no guy, freelancer from Amsterdam, right?

So I was, and basically talking to these people, I started understanding a lot more and then the next step she did, she invited me over three months.

two more times, so once in Helsinki and another time in Pittsburgh. And I met all, like met Jono Eldersen and all of these speakers that were already out there. And she was like, you should speak.

And I was like, way, right? That's not going to happen. And what she basically did in 2016, I guess, well, the very first talk was one, I was introduced by a good friend, Tim Stewart, and it was on CRO.

because I went from SEO doing more CRO and this was on CRO. So I was doing, and this was 2015, I was using click data to create predictive preloading of next pages. So I was using previous data to understand what a user was doing so I could preload the next page in Chrome, which would basically make, and I was talking all of this and I asked like,

What's the level of the attendees and they were like, it's really advanced. So I, I like four slides in, lost a whole audience. It was an absolute freaking nightmare.

It was so bad for my confidence. It was really, really bad. There were four speakers sitting in front row. They came to me and said, wow, man, that is fucking amazing.

And the rest of the people just said, like lost them completely lost them.

Arnout Hellemans: So then I said I'm not going to do it and then Olga basically started pushing and what she did was every time Samrush was sponsoring an event she would put me on stage. She would just say go. And you don't need to talk about Samrush. Talk about whatever you want.

Noah: Wow. So, so I'm hearing you've bombed. you ever, how many times, I know you've bombed at least twice because I heard about another one that you told me about. How do you pick yourself up after you bomb?

time.

Arnout Hellemans: Well, you need to learn from it, right? And that's the goal, right? So the first time it was, I was thinking about the same time. I understand it now. We spoke. So the first time it was just too advanced, right? The second time, same thing, right? The audience was just not ready for a talk like this. So it really made me understand that.

If I want to talk about a more advanced topic, I really need to understand the audience. Because you can, like it's easier to start low and then at the end of the slides go in deeper, more technical, because then for the majority of time they're there. But if you lose them on slide four, it's an absolute nightmare.

Right?

Noah: If you're

Arnout Hellemans: So, yeah, so the thing is you need to, in a lot of ways, it's just picking it up, understanding where the mistake was. And the other thing is don't trust what the organizers say, right? Because they basically say, we're extremely advanced.

Noah: That was inspired to that, I guess. So my next question is really tied into speaking, though. Like, as we advance in our career, I believe, and I think you believe, too, like how important soft skills are, communication skills generally are. And my next question was, how do you make the complex simple? But really, as I'm thinking about it, it's like...

How is that tied to speaking and how does speaking enable you to do that too?

Arnout Hellemans: Well, the best way is storytelling. Right? So when you do a talk, there needs to be a storyline. You need to get the buy-in. Why are you listening? What will I get out of it and why? And then you kind of gradually take them on the journey. I've seen in companies that you, so often an analogy works really well, right?

So just bring it back to brick and mortar or bring it back to money instead of users or sessions. and then, and then the second thing is try to like, a story around that because, because otherwise it just becomes, I see so many SEOs just running a crawler and then doing the exports and this needs to be fixed, but they have no clue what.

the actual benefit is. You need to sell the benefit. You should not sell the work. Right?

Noah: People don't realize when they talk to you, like just how technical you are. there was a point in time where I had to crawl a website. had to crawl, I think it was Rover.com and they had set it up to block all kinds of user agents and the only user agent that was available. Do you remember this? It was like Amazon fire with a 12 inch display. Like I had to use that particular display.

in order to crawl their website. And just so folks understand just how bad ass you are, you figured this out while sitting in an airport lounge in, I don't know, Reykjavik or some crazy place. Yeah, Wild.

Arnout Hellemans: I remember this. It's a very early morning, right? Yeah. I mean, well, that's the thing, right? So my brain just loves puzzles. I love being challenged. And once you have that, it's, it's, it's

Noah: Talk about that. Go into the puzzle mindset. You've talked with me about that so many times about how important the person who loves puzzles and how important that is for what we do.

Arnout Hellemans: Well, the thing is, in a way, we have always been battling algorithms, right? In whatever way, right? Because it's in between the user and our website. So trying to understand what happens is attention to details. So I see a lot of cases, you Google something, you go, why is that there?

Like you store that information and that might come in handy at a later stage. but try to go. So people come to you with a problem, then that's the, the thing they noticed, but the actual thing, it might be something different.

So you need to be able to figure out what the puzzle is that solves that problem. So what has been happening? Right?

store ratings have disappeared for my URL, right? For my website. Or there's a steady decline of that. Now the question is, is that my fault? Is that a Google rollout?

Is it whatever it is? So I often tell people it starts with the SERP. You first need to notice that, right?

any of those topics and you see no store rating wherever, then you kind of know like, it's not me, right? It's just Google saying, I'm not going to use them anymore. So it's, you start with an observation or a problem and then you try to figure out what it is. And the thing, the thing is, if, I mean, we're in a beautiful age when you're puzzled because

You have companions in generative AI where you can just describe the problem, your desired outcome. And it comes up with loads of theories. Right. So it helps you get to the bottom of that.

but I'd always look for it, right. I'm not just going to blatantly copy paste that, but it's just inspiring to see that. And then you start figuring things out.

And I think, so the puzzling mindset is about trying to figure out why is this happening?

Arnout Hellemans: It's all about the why, right? How many SEOs actually have go, go, why is this happening? Right.

Noah: So you've said things to me where the paraphrase or the meaning that I took away from it was, if I'm going to hire somebody, this is what I'm looking for. I'm not looking for a tech skillset. I'm looking for that mindset.

Arnout Hellemans: 100%. And I think the biggest example that I've seen in life, right, was I was involved in a company called Vintage Cash Cow in Leeds. And at a Christmas party, 3 a.m. in the morning, I see a guy standing there with a whiskey and Coke. And I start talking to him and I said, what are you doing? We started chatting and...

I immediately saw that it was a curious mindset. You kind of feel this, right? And what I found was what he was doing, he was packing boxes, right? So this is a company that buys old stuff.

And if you don't like their offer, they'll send it back. So he was repackaging it for sending back. Right? Now the thing is he was making 15 pounds an hour.

We're now fast forward two years later and he's head of digital.

Noah: Not making 15 pounds. Yeah, yeah.

Arnout Hellemans: with massive budgets. No, no, no, no, no. I think he now makes, I don't know, between 60 and 80 K a year. but the thing is it was that curious mindset. you could feel that. Like when, when I explained, was that what I was doing? said, how does it work then? Cause I've tried and I can't figure it out. And I started giving him some pieces and he was like, this is interesting. And he started working on it. So.

Noah: Yeah. Yeah.

Arnout Hellemans: I'm a big fan of, you could almost say, so people that drop out, right? They, they have a high enough IQ to do a university or college. They just never finished because it's, it's boring, right? These people want to be challenged all the freaking time. And once you have that mindset, so then it's easy because what you say is this is my goal. You don't say, I want you to do this.

This is what I want to achieve because if you do that, they will work towards that and they will use any means to get there. So if you're battling an algorithm or you're working in Google ads or Facebook, you try to crack the code.

Noah: I got a question for you. I introduced you recently to someone who'd been working in SEO for three or four years and he had that. Did you notice that in that conversation? Yeah, like, when I talked to that guy, I was like, holy crap. Like, this guy's gonna be scary in three or four years. yeah.

Arnout Hellemans: Yeah, 100%. 100%.

Arnout Hellemans: No, no, it was an amazing chat, an amazing chat. And, what's the name? Finn's was it? Yeah. it was an amazing chat and he booked me for half an hour. We almost spend an hour and a half, almost two hours. I was just explaining that mindset because I think you need to be triggered, right? And not be told what to do. You need to be triggered. So.

Noah: Yeah.

Noah: Yeah.

Noah: Yeah, yeah.

Arnout Hellemans: we talked about changing the status quo. Like how, how can you change the narrative? How can you truly understand? Like instead of talking about this much traffic or ranking this high, how much value does that page add? And when we actually looked at that page, it was like, well, actually it isn't because it was an infographic talking about Instagram versus Facebook. And I said, yeah, but how is that related to the business?

And so that was an example, right? But it's all about creating that curious mindset. And sometimes you need a bit of help, but the problem is most people are hired into a job and being told what to do, not being told what the desired outcome is.

Noah: Can we talk, we're gonna shift gears a little bit. Can we talk about going from the puzzling mindset to the experimentation mindset and help people get into that head space and not really talking about the tech stack or all the minutiae of it, but can you talk about that a little bit? Because that's core of who you are too, right? And connected to the puzzle mindset.

Arnout Hellemans: Yeah. Yeah, but I think once you come up with hypothesis on why a page is ranking, right, or why a certain thing is happening, then you need to act on that hypothesis. So an example on how this works is, right, I love a tool called also asked, right? Because it gives you a lot of insights around the user.

Noah: Mm-hmm.

Arnout Hellemans: But I noticed something, because when I exported the also asked, so the questions, the answers and everything, there were answers with three dots in it.

Noah: Mm. Mm-hmm.

Arnout Hellemans: all the time, right? And those are not coherent answers because it's a bit of a sentence, then a few dots, then a bit of a sentence, a few dots. That gave me a hunch that if Google was serving a mashup of different parts of the page, they don't have a source that has it in a nice sentence.

So I started hunting for those, right? So the hypothesis is now is here's the question, here are all the questions where Google just comes up with a, how do you call it, a answer which is handpicked throughout, but no, so we just took those. We started creating content for that and we took over those in a minute, right?

Very simple.

experimentation mindset, right? You have a hypothesis, then you go, how can I do this? What if, and then you do it. Have I filled those? Of course I did, right?

Here's another one, which not a lot of people have talked about, but I was going through Google Search Console data, right? And I saw hash URLs.

Noah: Mm-hmm.

Arnout Hellemans: which iPhone should I buy and then hash compare 15 to 16, whatever, or 13, 14. Now what was interesting was those are being counted as impressions in the SERP, but they're actually jump to links to a different part of the content. Now what you can do, you can filter on those, right, for one article for all of those, and then you can see the intent.

that was triggering those jump two links.

Noah: Tell me more about that.

Arnout Hellemans: Now, because if you have the hash, right, it's basically Google making it easier for you to scroll straight to the relevant part of the page. It makes perfect sense, right? That's why you have those jump toolings. But the thing is, because they're sharing the data, right, the URL, you can also filter on that URL with the hash, and then you'll get all the search queries.

Noah: Right. Yeah.

Arnout Hellemans: So now you can start optimizing for the one which is most prevalent, which has the most impressions, which will at the same time help you rank better because you become more relevant for everything around it. So these are little examples where you need to think like you spot something and then go, how can I, is there anything for me to be had? Right? What can I do with it? So for instance, another one, which

Noah: Mmm.

Arnout Hellemans: is I don't, I see a lot of people looking in, in, in, tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Majestic, Moz, whatever, and rank trackers. I'm like, Google it yourself. Like if there's only photos and videos for your intent and you're writing a blog post, you're never going to get any traffic. Right? Yeah. So it's these kinds of things, right? So it's just,

Noah: Yeah, start with the syrup, yeah.

Arnout Hellemans: And I think you always need to be able to validate what an assumption is. Another big one, I mean, I don't have a knowledge funnel anymore, but this taught me a lot about

Noah: this is a topic.

Arnout Hellemans: Yeah. Yeah. But I used to have one, right? and there was a guy with my exact same name who lived in the 16th century. Now, every core update, he took over the knowledge panel. Right. And this, so that was a pattern, but, interestingly, after four weeks, mine would come back. had no clue why.

Noah: no.

Noah: Ugh.

Arnout Hellemans: And then you start thinking about it. So, and then they rolled out the second core update, which was I think in June or May 2019. I lost it again, but my assumption was Google needs to be able to trust the SERP. So if he is ruling the SERP with results about this guy from the 16th century, then obviously the knowledge panel should be his. But the problem was,

And this is how I learned about user signals. So what I started doing, I started picking up everybody's phone, Googling my name, scrolling to the first result. was me.

And within a week, within four or five days, I owned the SERP and my knowledge panel was back. So this has taught me a lot about user behavior, influencing the jumps. So when, when Google rolls out back in the days, it was especially heavy, but I started monitoring.

SERPs, right, every minute and especially in the CBD niche, it would change. Like literally every search would be different because there were so many people, so there were so many signals, so it was changing on the fly. This is why Google says it takes two weeks to roll out.

And I only noticed this because I lost a knowledge panel. I was curious to know why.

Noah: I was seeing that with the SEO communities website where every time there was a core update right before there was a core update, I would watch our website due to user signals get better and better. And then the core update would happen and we'd drop to position 10 or 12 or something, work our way up to position three, drop again. It was wild.

Arnout Hellemans: But do you know why that's happening?

Noah: Because there's when it's when it's clean, when when there's an algorithm update, there aren't user signals impacting it. And then as as time goes on, it impacts it and it it re-ranks and re-ranks and re-ranks and re-ranks.

Arnout Hellemans: Yeah, but you used to think about it this way. They revert back to Patreon.

Noah: Okay. Yeah. And I just thought of it as there's a core update. I hadn't thought about the patron.

Arnout Hellemans: Right? So that, that, that is still their core. Right. And I noticed this because the guy in the 16th century based on links, like he was close to the Royal family in the same name, right. In the Netherlands. So he's mentioned everywhere on big books and there's pages on universities and everything. based on link based signals, he needed to be there, but based on relevancy of users, he should not.

Noah: Yeah. come on. One of the things that I love about you is your ability to disagree with people without being disagreeable. And this is how I've noticed it in countless hours talking with you. Someone will be saying something and you'll say, agree and then you'll say the opposite thing.

Arnout Hellemans: Even though I'm not a popular guy.

Noah: Can you talk about that?

Arnout Hellemans: It's framing it. I probably do it on purpose, but I don't feel like I do it on purpose. It just happens. I don't like confrontations. I want to inspire people. I want to help people. I don't like going head on. I hate... In some ways, right, after a few years of doing SEO, I moved more into analytics and CRO, and I love that space.

Noah: Mmm.

Arnout Hellemans: Main reason SEO back in the days was a lot about tricks. Where do you get your links? How do you do this? And, and nobody was really telling what they were doing. Right. I've seen people doing talks about this is how you do content marketing. And I knew for how much they were buying links. So it just like, it's a, it's a schizophrenic in a way. Right. And.

And I didn't like that. And I went into the CRO space and this is way more interesting because CRO is a lot more difficult because yes, it's not about changing a button color. It's about fitting in with the brand, with the design, with your premise, with like loads of things.

And you can't just blatantly copy paste. You'll end up nowhere. Right? So there's a way more sharing mindset in CRO people than in SEO people.

Noah: Hmm.

Noah: Mm. Mm.

Arnout Hellemans: especially back in the days. I think now it's slightly different. think also partly because of the user signals and because of everything changing. But SEO in a way is a zero sum game, where CRO is not a zero sum game. We're not battling in the same battleground. We're battling on our own website, creating less friction. That's our goal. So yeah, I think...

So I just don't want to pick a fight with anyone. I just don't think it's necessary. I might bring them on other thoughts and I've never noticed this when speaking, but probably I do.

If you noticed it, I probably do that.

Noah: It's amazing. I've always been totally amazed. was like, man, he is so good.

Because sometimes when someone says something that I don't agree with, I'm sitting there like, I'm like calm, I'm placid, and then I start to like, inside my brain, I just start changing and I start feeling myself get emotional and I feel myself getting heated. And then I'm like, know, and you've heard me do that with specific people. Okay, so we got

Arnout Hellemans: Well, thanks for the compliment.

Arnout Hellemans: no, I don't really have that.

Noah: We got a couple of questions in the room chat. I just want to take a break for a minute. How do we get higher ups to listen to us? How do we get stakeholders to listen? Does it go back to the money? I mean, is it?

Arnout Hellemans: No, no, no, it's very simple. Big companies, big stakes, job stakes. So your only task as a consultant, as an agency is make them look good. That's it. Right? It's not about you. It's not about your success, right? They pay you to get there, but you should never claim the success.

Claim the guy who sponsored you.

Right. And that's very simple. So you need to figure out what his or her ultimate goal is. Because if you can attribute to that, you're doing a really good job.

And if you don't like contributing to it, it because it's unethical or for whatever reason, then you say, I don't want this, but I see so many people claiming successes. Yeah, that was us. It's not about you.

It's about the person that basically says this invoice needs to be paid. So if you can make them look good, you're good.

Noah: Yeah, I love that. We've got two super long questions. Amy, can you reframe those? Those are too difficult. I can't, I can't read, that's brutal. I can't get through that. Okay, there's another one. I'm gonna read this slowly or no, because this one's hard too. Page rank is always there.

but there is a big layer of user interaction data like NavBoost. Are you saying this layer gets wiped sort of during core update? So page ranks, links is the strongest for bit?

Arnout Hellemans: Okay, so interestingly, I've had long conversations with one of the smartest people in the industry, in my opinion, which is Dawn Anderson. And Dawn basically, so I explained what I saw and she said, but I said, there are dampers on it now, right? So at the very first core updates, what would happen was I was working at the next web.

And we would get impressions on a Facebook article from four years ago, because based on page rank, that was the article that Facebook, that should rank for the word Facebook because it was on a massive site like thenextweb.com. that has not happened after, after, right?

So I think what has happened is they roll it out.

Noah: Yeah.

Arnout Hellemans: but not blatantly back to paycheck. So they put some damping factors on there. So back in the days, there wouldn't be any certain features either. And now I think they have some modifiers. If you say near me, pull the map. If you say images, have an image carousel, whatever. But also some other things. So as Dawn was saying, they use reinforced machine learning and the learnings from that to

Noah: Mm.

Arnout Hellemans: when they roll it out, first get some stuff out and then they roll that and look at the user signals, right? So it's, because otherwise it would be irrelevant because sites would be so big in page rank 15 years ago, but completely irrelevant now, right? So you need to do some sort of cleaning, but I think it's the best way to have a base ranking you can use.

You can use Navboost and all of these, like machine learning that, and this is also why they say it takes a long time to roll out. For some Serbs, it doesn't take long, but I, I feel like they do, they don't go purely patron. They go patron plus a few things.

What those few are, I don't know.

Noah: Mmm, got it. Okay.

So I'm looking at the clock here and I wanna make sure we get through a couple of my other questions and then we'll get to this reframed question that was expertly retyped. One thing that you've done that I think is amazing, you've told me about it, I don't know how publicly you've talked about this, was dealing with performance tests as a core part of making code updates on a website.

companies when they go to push code, they have to pass performance tests, SEO performance tests, and if they don't, they don't get the push. Can you talk about that? I think a lot of people should be doing this and don't even have not even thought about how to execute it.

Arnout Hellemans: So this was in 2018, 19, I think 19 or 20. I was doing a big project at a big financial, a big bank, right? Massive bank. And the problem, we made a business case for SightSpeed. So I got the budget approved and the impact was gigantic, massive. But the problem that I've seen with a lot of performance improvements is we get to a certain level.

And then we turn away and people start releasing new stuff and it's all fucked up again. Right. This happens all the time. Right. So this is when, and this is how I knew Dave Sottimano, right?

So Dave Sottimano basically built me a tool that would read the sitemap.xml would then test all the pages against with a headless Chrome.

you can basically do Core Web Vitals in Headless Chrome. So it would crawl all the pages and get all the data. So how much JavaScript, what's the image sizes and all of that.

So I'd have that. And there's another thing in Core Web Vitals, is that performance budgets.

What it basically does is you can set boundaries and then use headless Chrome to test all the pages against that. So what I would do, I would make groups of templates and then when they would push a new page live, I knew the template and I would know the performance budget. So you're allowed 500 kilobytes of JavaScript.

You're allowed 300 kilobytes of CSS.

I don't know, 500 kilobytes of images. If it would exceed that number, it would hold the deploy. So it would just go, no, you can't deploy. And this way, what you can do, you can have a continuous improvement because you can change those thresholds.

And then the next page that gets in doesn't screw it up because it needs to be better. the nasty thing here was I put this in a contract.

Arnout Hellemans: So the development agency was only needed to improve the scores by 20 % or by 10 % every year. So this means in the beginning it's doable, but at some point you need to refactor the code for it to become a lot better. So you can do this with performance budgets. If people just Google it, I'm happy to talk about it. It's just open source, it's free, you can use it.

Noah: Hm.

Noah: Yeah.

Arnout Hellemans: Use it in your CI CD. in your continuous delivery, you can put this as a point of where you need to be tested. And if you don't like it, then so yeah.

Noah: Let's can we talk about, mean that takes us into core of vitals and you talked about the impact was gigantic. So core of vitals is not about ranking. Let's bring it back to money. Like tell us why core of vitals is important.

Arnout Hellemans: Well, okay, as John Mueller put it, it might influence rankings, which is a very political way of, if you're looking at a user and if a user is decertified because you have an extremely slow loading website or it can't even be loaded, yeah, of course, it's gonna drop in rankings. However, so what we did here, and I love this part of the piece,

Noah: Yeah. Yeah.

Arnout Hellemans: We needed to get buy-in to do this at a big financial. So what we did, we aligned with their core values, which was profitability, we need to become greener, we need to become leaner in what we do, we need to become, it needs to be cheaper. Like we went to all of those, right? And then we looked into how does Core Web Vitals influence this, right? And what we started noticing is,

You can do this with the carbon calculator website, carbon calculator. You can basically go to a webpage and it will do some ballpark checks and then say with so many users, if you want to offset the carbon footprint of this page with so many users, you need to plant so many trees. So we ended up for the bank that we needed to plant 80, was it 28,000 trees or something like that.

Right. So that was the green part of it. Now, if you improve the code and you make it a lot meaner, a lot better understandable, it means you can deploy faster.

You can do a beta spatter because it's understandable code, like loads of things. on the other hand, if you, your website, becomes a lot leaner, you're sure you're saving, hosting costs.

especially we were doing everything on premise and we had 20 million customers or 16 million customers or so, which would hit the website quite frequently. Now that times the saving ends up also being just money. So you need to compile all of those.

And the last one we did, we looked at conversion rates in buckets of low time, pre and after. And I did this with an analytics team, right? Very smart data guys.

Noah: Mm-hmm.

Arnout Hellemans: And it ended up 0.8 seconds was, I think it was 23 or 20, I don't know, somewhere in the 20 millions in revenue on a yearly basis, right? But for the sake of argument, who is going to believe that half a second gets you so much? Nobody's going to believe it, right? So what you do for the sake of argument, I just divided it by two. I divided it by two again, till I ended up with 200k.

because the investment I needed was only 50. But taking them all the way in helps them also understand that even if we're only making 200 more, it's still four times the money that they need to spend on it.

Noah: Mm.

Noah: Yeah, yeah.

Arnout Hellemans: So this is about framing it in different ways, basically taking away all the objections. And that's the way you should think about it.

Noah: Hmm. Well, I mean, what I love, the part that I always distilled from that was core vitals isn't about ranking. It's about conversion rate up. You know, it's like, if I have a faster page, I'm going to make a lot more money.

Arnout Hellemans: Yeah. I think, yeah. But no, but, but Eve said, Eve said something, she's an Irish SEO. She said something interesting. And she said, also think about the potential risk for Google if they don't make the web greener because their energy consumption is through the roof, right. for all these companies, right. So, but they can say, we do everything in our power.

Noah: I love all the value stuff, don't get me wrong.

Noah: Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Arnout Hellemans: to save consumption, right? And at the same time, they're not only saving the planet, but they're saving Google themselves a lot of money, right? Because if you crawl the pages, I think there's a piece out there by the guy from web.dev on the real cost of JavaScript. And if you read that, Adi Osmani wrote that. And it's all about that, right? So if we stop.

use way less JavaScript, means Google becomes five times more profitable or whatever, right? Because they save so much money crawling. And it saves the planet as well.

So there's no reason not to do it.

Noah: Let's see, looking at the time here. Did you have any questions for me?

Arnout Hellemans: I have one, like, are you enjoying this whole community thing? I think I know the answer. And so that's the first thing. And the second thing is what's in store? Like, what do you want to take it? Like, what's your...

Noah: Haha.

Noah: What's my thing? So am I enjoying it? Hard yes. I had a period of time that probably was about a year in the middle where I felt less enthused. And I felt less enthused because I was doing a lot more work personally and I've just been way better about asking for help and a lot of people have stepped up to help. so yeah, I'm having a lot of fun. In terms of what's in store,

Arnout Hellemans: Yeah.

Arnout Hellemans: You

Noah: I think the future looks like just continual growth of the community generally in Slack. I think we're gonna do more in real life parties and events around. year, I mean, this year we have three and first one's gonna be in Chicago on July 17th. It's gonna be a meetup, probably we're targeting up to about 150 people if we can. Second one is gonna be Brighton SCO in San Diego where we're hoping

Arnout Hellemans: I'd love that.

Noah: that we can get 300 people together. And then the third one we're working on is in Durham in conjunction with Tech SEO Connect. And so for that one, it's gonna be December, whatever that Thursday is, December 3rd or 4th. And then next year, our goal is to do, hopefully we can do Brighton SEO again in San Diego. And then we'd like to do one in Europe and one in Canada.

Arnout Hellemans: You

Noah: And I really have to huge call out here for Citation Labs because they've given us just a ton of funds to be able to pull that off. I mean, Garrett French and James Worth and the rest of the team there are just amazing human beings.

Arnout Hellemans: That's cool.

Noah: If you're in that space where you are looking for links, I strongly recommend you reach out to Citation Labs. They're really, really good humans. Yeah, so that's, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And that's why we want to do the European one. It's either going to be, I mean, I'm thinking Amsterdam or London, and it might be somewhere else in England other than London. I don't...

Arnout Hellemans: That's cool. Oh, it sounds good. I hope I can join at some point. European one for sure.

Noah: I can't see us doing something at Brighton SEO because that's just too crazy. But maybe there's something in Germany too, like there are cool events in Germany happening, like SMX happens over there. So I can see trying to be a part of that. I think the thing that I learned doing the in real life events is just how special being together in real life is. That's the core of it, yeah.

Arnout Hellemans: Jesus, I mean it is right? We've all been through COVID and it's what I like the most as well, right? It's connecting with people, it's for 100%.

Noah: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. 100%. There's a whole bunch of stuff we didn't get to talk about. We didn't get to talk about your biggest fails, your biggest wins. We didn't get to talk about neurodiversity. I wrote that down as a note. Yeah. But I think we'll have to have you on again. If you're up to it. Yeah. So any last thoughts?

Arnout Hellemans: In a way, in a way, in a way we did.

Arnout Hellemans: Happy to do so man, happy to do so. Be cool.

Noah: Any messages, any takeaways you want people to leave with?

Arnout Hellemans: yeah, I, I think, we're in a pivotal time with regards to search and, and you really need to develop a more holistic skill looking at things, right. And, as an SEO, because,

It's no longer tricks. It's about truly understanding how you can help business perform better in acquiring customers. And this is generative AI. It is proper marketing.

read books like, Britney Hodak, was that, the, it's an amazing book. it's got a bad name. the other one is don't make me think, understand Robert Cialdini's principles, like understand why users do what they do.

And I think that's where us as SEOs and marketers should be developing a way bigger skill in.

Noah: That always followed for me, like we keep hearing about how we're getting less traffic, right? And I always felt like if we're getting less traffic, then we need to figure out how to get more, higher percentage of them to want to do business with us if they're at that point in their buyer journey. That just totally made sense to me. Other people see it differently, but you know, it always made sense to me.

Arnout Hellemans (@hellemans) (01: 01:05.198) Well, it depends on their KPIs, right? Because if the KPI is traffic, we'll do a full circle here, right?

Noah: Okay.

Noah: Unfortunate. Yeah. They have the wrong KPIs probably, but hey, who am I to judge? Okay. Hey, this has been an amazing talk. This has been a really, really rad Campfire chat. Our next one is going to be super fun. We have Cindy Crum coming along. So yeah.

Arnout Hellemans (@hellemans) (01: 01:17.614) You

01:30.446) She's amazing. I love chatting with her. I always get new ideas and spark some new ideas in her head. So yeah.

Noah: He's super smart. Yeah, so that's going to be really exciting. That's in two weeks. And for everybody watching, hope you really enjoyed this and we'll catch you on the flip side. See you soon.

Arnout Hellemans (@hellemans) (01: 01:46.56) Yeah, and reach out if you have any questions, please.

Noah: Yeah, thanks so much.

Arnout Hellemans (@hellemans) (01: 01:51.726) All good.