Campfire Chat with Eli Schwartz Transcript

Noah: sure we're good.

Eli: Hey, Amy, you got great sound. hope I sound as good.

Noah: Okay, here we go.

Excellent. All right, everybody. Welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome. This is great. We're doing our, what is this, our fifth? I can't remember. This is our fifth Campfire Chat.

We're so lucky today to have the one, the only Eli Schwartz with us, the author of an amazing book, if you haven't read it yet, it's called Product Light SEO.

Eli: party.

Noah: I was pretty mesmerized actually. Nick told me you were going to show up. You were flying in for the party and I was like, my God, my God. I finally get to meet Eli. And since then I've read your book and I've read a bunch of your articles and I've just taken a ton of notes of, can you give us a little bit of background? Can you tell us a little bit about your career arc? And I just want folks to get to know you because you're one of the most important thought leaders in our industry.

Eli: I really appreciate it. It's great to be here. I'm honored to meet you. Uh, I, I was on, I don't even know if you still do it, but the club houses and you, you were like the guy putting together all the good club houses. And I was like, I don't want to miss Noah's stuff. And you had your dashboards and the stuff you were sharing them like this guy is a genius. So I was equally honored to meet you and Brighton and really great to be here. So my career, I, um,

I've had a lot done a lot of interesting stuff, but I want to say that most of it is luck, like right place, right time kind of stuff. I, my, my very, very first job, I worked at a company called Quinn street. I did not do SEO.

I didn't know anything about digital marketing. I worked with affiliates and I worked with these affiliates and they did SEO and it was fascinating to me and I taught myself SEO from them and I really wanted to get a job in SEO.

but I couldn't because I didn't have any SEO credibility except for messing around on websites. And then I applied for this job and the CEO of the startup decided that the company I was working for, Quinn Street, and they're still around, they own a bunch of insurance sites, is the best SEO company in the world. And he just, or they were best at SEO and he decided he only wanted to hire some from Quinn Street. So even though I didn't do SEO,

I got hired for a role I didn't know anything about because the company I worked at was thought to be good at SEO. So then I went there. I don't have any of the educational pedigree to ever get into the really good companies.

And then I was at the startup and I wanted to get into really good company, but I couldn't because I hadn't gone to all the really good schools that people like to hire from when they hire from in Silicon Valley.

like hiring for a role in SEO at SurveyMonkey was the exact same recruiter who had hired me at my first job at QuinnStraight. So again, total luck. And then I was very fortunate working at a big brand.

I got to do cool SEO stuff and we'll dive into like the alliances and the technicals and the tacticals that I did there.

Noah: wow. Yeah, yeah.

Eli: you know, know, kicked off Reddit and all that. And we work together and he had past experience with SEO and he thought everyone in SEO was a scam artist and a snake oil salesperson. And somehow I impressed upon him that I wasn't. And then he said, Well, you obviously know what you're doing with SEO stuff. And he introduced me to all the YC companies. So if you like, look at my LinkedIn, I did some work with Quora. That was a YC company.

And so much of what I've done have come through. I see I was on the YC podcast before I even know what it was. It was the exact same podcast that Elon Musk was on.

didn't get any as many views as he did, but that drove even more brand consulting. And for anyone, you know, listening, watching brands lead to other brands in general. Like if you work at Google, someone's like, Oh, you're a genius.

want to hire you on my startup.

Maybe true, maybe not. like my ability to like my luck really in consulting for some of these really cool logos has led to other really cool logos. And like I said, a lot of it right place, right time.

And then I you know, I did learn a ton. Obviously, I went, you know, worked with these great companies and saw great stuff. But I, I feel like you know, the real start was being right place, right time.

Noah: Wild. Okay, so I've read a bunch about your time at SurveyMonkey and I read, think it's in your, right at the beginning you dedicate the book to the founder of SurveyMonkey. He had a huge impact on you, right?

Eli: Yeah, so he wasn't the founder. So SurveyMonkey had an interesting story arc. They were a 12 person company and they were a cash cow. And then in 2009, Dave Goldberg, who passed away and I dedicated my book to, he bought SurveyMonkey and turned it into what it became. that was in 2009. They were founded in 1999. So it was a small company and then they turned into a powerhouse. The reason I dedicated my book to him, and I don't want to take up too much time. So I'm going to give the very, very quick version of this.

And I've written about it. It's on, it's in my newsletter. It's like one of my first newsletter posts, but essentially I wanted to get international experience.

I wanted to live overseas. got a job. I was going to leave survey monkey. got a job in, in Singapore leading an SEO team for an agency. And when I went to give notice, Dave Goldberg was a CEO who I didn't have very much to do with, but you know, cross paths.

was a small enough company insisted that I not leave survey monkey.

And he allowed me to write my own job description, write my own salary. And he sent me to Singapore reporting directly to him. So the reason I dedicated my book to him is because like that was my experience with entrepreneurship experience with someone like taking a big bet on me.

And I feel like a lot of, you know, what my career became was because he took that bet on me. So that's why I dedicated the book to him, but that is a very, very short version of an amazing story. So please check out the longer version on my newsletter, which is basically my blog.

Noah: Which is amazing. It got me wondering. So there's a couple things that I loved about your onboarding process. So I signed up for your newsletter and you're like, yeah, by the way, you should also sign up for, we'll automatically sign you up for Lenny's and we'll automatically sign you up for growth. yeah. And it does growth memo and then there's two or three others, but I was like, Ooh, that's sticky. I like that a lot because it's like.

Eli: I didn't know it does that. That's cool.

Noah: cross suggesting. Yeah, that's super wild. So tell me about what it was like to build the team inside SurveyMonkey. And like I want to hear about your failures.

Eli: Totally.

Eli: I failed a ton. I mean, for anybody that didn't read my book, if you read my book, this is going to be repetitive. But if you didn't read my book, it's a really great story. So I joined SurveyMonkey. I came from a startup. The startup I was at before I wrote about it in my book, we got hit by Panda was traumatic startup. Like I thought the company go under we, you we survived Panda, got rescued, like we rescued the sites from Panda. And then I joined SurveyMonkey is my first like real big company coming from a 20 person startup.

We're like, is that in the same room as anybody as everyone else? And then going over to a real company, it was, it was tough and I'm there. It's my, my very first week.

And I did what anybody in SEO would do. You audit the site, look for some problems, find a quick win, which, you know, if anyone's new at SEO, do that, find a quick win, just earn some political capital. So I found some quick wins.

I forgot exactly what it was, but something around redirects and iframes or something. And I was like, this is an easy one. We're going to like.

redirect some stuff from we're to get great internal links and we're gonna get more traffic. This is great. So I went in, I told my boss, and he's like, Okay, go talk to this engineer.

And I went over to this engineer. And I was like, this is it like an engineer, I'd never had a problem with engineers listening to me before you tell them to fix stuff and they fix stuff. told this guy what I needed.

I didn't even know how to write a ticket brand new with this company is my first week. He turns his back on me. And he says marketing doesn't get to tell engineering what to do.

And he just sat there went back to his work.

And he just completely ignored me. And I was like, wow, get his brand new job. I'm so excited. I just burn my bridges with the startup. I'm gonna get fired.

I'm gonna get fired in my very first week because the one layup I found no one's going to do because marketing doesn't get to tell engineering what to do. I was like, I can't go back to my boss. I can't cry to my manager and say, I can't get my job done.

They just hired me to do this. So that is when I decided I had to start building soft skills around diplomacy.

and earning political capital. And I forget the precise things I did. But that engineer did end up doing what I wanted. And he never forgot that he said that we like I was there for, I think with him for another five years when he left here, he remembered and like, you know, we became friends and that was great.

And I'm glad he said that to me. But that was that was a massive that would have been a massive failure. And I learned so much throughout my time there in being able to get others to do stuff when they don't care.

Eli: Right? Like at a bigger company, I have my SEO goals. They have engineering goals. They don't win from my SEO goals. I have my SEO goals. The content team has their goals. They don't win from my goals. So it's really about how to get goals to align. So someone wants to do something that they don't get paid for. They don't get a bonus for. So like that becomes so much more important. And now as a consultant, I have my goals. I'm getting paid. And if I don't get other people who don't work for me to do stuff,

My contract gets terminated. And that's where I learned that. But one really, really big failure. And I don't know if I talked about this in the book.

It's been a while since I wrote the book. So apologize to everyone. I should read my own book again. I was at, I was at SurveyMonkey and I was responsible for international stuff.

And I came up with this idea that we would do better internationally if we would have TLDs. So, you know, for anybody not deep in SEO, TLD, top level domain.

dot co dot UK versus a dot com. So we had survey monkey.com. I came up with this idea that we should have survey monkey.co.uk and survey monkey.de. Now we were happened to have been, uh, this is in the story I told many times, but it's a cool one.

We happened to have been capital G, which is, Google's private equity arm. We happened to have been there very, very first investment. So Google invested into survey monkey, they invested $50 million into survey monkey as a private equity, not as a VC.

For anyone to check it out, have capital G is their own website. They invested into, you know, competitive companies, even to Google. So they've invested into like, you know, Lyft, which competes with Waymo invested in Augusto.

So we were their very first investment. the CEO, Dave Goldberg decided that if we were their investment, we were entitled to advice and support from them. So at this point, I'd been doing SEO for a really long time.

I didn't think that to be true. However, he insisted, he said, you need to email Google and tell them they own us.

And we need advice on how to do this TLD thing. So again, I didn't know how to say no to him. So I wrote the email and he sent it and they routed it from, from our investment manager at capital G and it made it over to Matt cuts.

Again, for anyone new at SEO, go Google that Matt cuts was the, you know, the guy at Google, the SEO gatekeeper. So it made its way to Matt cuts and Matt cuts blew it off. So it came back to me through this CEO.

Eli: And I read the blow off email. It was like, we don't tell people what to do. And Dave Goldberg is like, well, that's not an acceptable answer. They own us and they need to tell us what to do. You need to write the response and I will send it back through these channels and it'll go back to this guy. I don't know who this Matt guy is, but he needs to give us an answer because they own us. So we went back and forth and Matt eventually did actually give the answer. And the answer was something around

brand authority, it would be helpful from a user standpoint and blah, blah. But reading me through the lines, he said, build these TLDs. So we went to go build the TLDs, but it took us three years to actually do it.

We got data centers, the GDPR wasn't in effect yet, but there were other privacy laws and we really spent a lot of money on it. And by the time we launched it, everything had changed. And my role had changed completely too.

So at this point, I'm now doing international marketing, not just SEO. And as a part of this role, I went to the UK and I went to Germany and I met with some SurveyMonkey customers. And one of the things I asked them during my customer interviews is like, how much does it matter to you that we are now surveymonkey.

co.uk and surveymonkey.de? Every single person I met said, is this something you're planning to do? Let's say no, it's been live for a year. Like, sorry, I haven't noticed.

We built this entire thing, spend billions of dollars, and it didn't do anything whatsoever. So to me, that big failure was not my money. It's great. wasn't my money.

Not barely even my time is engineering time is a massive project. Like every quarter of the engineers had to update how they're doing this thing. It's actually for anybody in engineering.

And I know I think you understand this a lot. It's very complex because you had to carry over the cookies. So if you log into surveymindmonkey.com and it brings you over to surveymonkey.

co.

It's got to bring your log in and bring all your information. You have to protect it behind these walls because if someone logs into the wrong website, they need to be able to see their surveys or they think something's broken. So it's pretty complex.

So it was very expensive. my God. It was, it was very complex. So that was massive to me. And that really had me shift my thinking around. We should have done that piece first.

Should have gone to the British users and said, Hey, does it matter to you? Like, do you care?

Noah: They could do a man in the middle attack on that potentially. Yeah. Yeah.

Eli: It didn't even matter for SEO either.

Noah: So that gets me to a question. I've got a whole bunch of questions on this, but like the first is when I think of you, think of focus on the user, stupid, you know? So can you walk us through that mental framework a little bit?

Eli: Yes. So I'm actually working on a new book. So I have a book deal with Wiley on this concept. It's not for SEO, just understanding users. So I've been consulting full-time for six years. Almost every single conversation I have with a prospective client or just casually for networking, I find that most founders and many times marketers don't know what their user looks like. They usually think their user looks like them.

So the user has their problems and would do things the way they would do things. And they rarely sit in the user's seat and try to understand the user's very specific pain and how the users would do things. So I find that general, right?

The only people that are really, really good at this are some empathetic marketers, but founders very rarely are good this. product people, engineers, like when I was at SurveyMonkey, engineers rarely even logged into the website.

So like they were building stuff and they didn't have any user empathy whatsoever. And I learned this user empathy concept by doing what I just mentioned, like meeting with actual users, seeing their surveys, asking them why they ran surveys. And to me, it was fascinating.

I learned things I never would have learned unless I asked them that. when I say understanding users and focusing on users, I mean that it's not like, I'm going to find the keyword the user would search and therefore I'm going to build my SEO around.

this hypothetical keyword that I think the user wants. When I'm building SEO, I really want to get into the mindset of the user. What are they looking for?

What are they trying to solve? So in today's paradigm of SEO, they're forced or today's paradigm of search really, they're forced to conceptualize what they're looking for in a few words that they type into a search engine. In two years from now, it might be something they speak in a whatever, chat GBT.

That's still search. That's still SEO, but it's really understanding what the user is trying to solve and why the user is trying to solve. And I'll go back to, you know, the startup and it's, something they didn't understand when I was doing it.

So was working in this automotive content startup. We were competing with admins and Yahoo.com and our most popular keywords were photos, things related to photos.

And I didn't get it. like, why does someone want to look at Honda, you know, Odyssey photos? Why does someone want to look at Honda Odyssey 360?

Eli: photos, right? So I was optimizing for these terms. We got a lot of traffic only when I had kids and when I was buying a minivan, did I get it. I spend all this time like looking at photos, like, okay, how does the car seat fit in the car? Does a bike go in the back seat? Can I, how many suitcases can I throw in there? So that becomes user empathy. So photos is the way that someone conceptualizes their own thinking behind that purchase. really if you get at the intent, those become so many more keywords.

It becomes minivan that fits a bike. It becomes minivan that fits a ski rack. And those become so many of our keywords. And again, it's keywords, but it's intent.

It's concepts behind what the user is looking to solve. And I think you can do so much better SEO if you understand the user, what the user is trying to do with whatever it is they're doing online. And you build SEO for that.

And that's where you get into what I didn't invent whatsoever, but is Blue Oceans.

a place where no one is really competing, where people are, again, you're solving a problem that should be solved, but no one thought about it. In SEO, there are so many blue oceans. Again, the photos is a great example because everyone's like, wow, went into Ahrefs, I went into Sunrush, went into Google Keyword Planner.

Honda Odyssey photos is a very popular keyword, but it doesn't tell you the intent behind the photos. If you understand the intent behind the photos, you open up this blue ocean of why does someone care?

Noah: I love that book.

Eli: what a Honda Odyssey looks like that they need to see a picture. Massive blue ocean.

Noah: I love that. Are you a proponent of the jobs to be done framework?

Eli: somewhat.

Noah: Somewhat? That's cool. I love that. Let's go back to SAS and working inside both SAS and startups. You've been lucky enough to work with a whole bunch of big brands. I think we SEOs tend to get into specific niches. I don't think a lot of folks have exposure to this. What's unique about working with SAS and startup?

companies that have been through a couple rounds of funding, I guess.

Eli: You know, the larger the more funding they get, the more complex the company gets. And the more the harder it is to actually get anything done. And I'll use SurveyMonkey as an example, when I joined SurveyMonkey, there were just over 100 people, which is why I had that relationship with the CEO. When I left, there were close to 3000 people. But if you look at the revenue, it did not scale proportionally to the employee size. So and what happens is, and I find this is very, very common, where companies scale

they get a lot more employees and that creates more complexities. And all those employees are working 40 hour weeks, 50 hour weeks, which means they're doing a lot of work. And that creates different roadblocks, different things to navigate.

When I've consulted for large companies, I discover that everyone wants to, I don't wanna degrade all them, but they wanna feel like they're doing a job, that their job, they throw up a roadblock because they wanna feel important.

So there was a large company I was working, I was consulting for. I had to run a title tag by the legal team, by the marketing team, by the PR team, by the brand team, and then international country managers in five different countries. And only then did they approve four words and a title tag.

And obviously it took many, many months for that to happen.

And we had, we had a lot of traffic from that title tag, the title to the title tag before was awful. So if you can imagine if it took that much effort to get a title tag approved, imagine how much more effort is to get like, I don't know. was trying to help them change a CMS even more.

Everything exactly. So that's what I found as companies get bigger, you have more of those people and no one's going to say, you know, my job is really unnecessary here. Uh, you know, just, just do what you got to do.

No, they need a meeting.

Noah: Yeah, or new page template or anything. Yeah.

Eli: They need an hour meeting too. And you have to get through that.

Noah: Mm.

I'm a huge proponent of thinking differently about the work we do. And I've really enjoyed talking to a whole bunch of guests that, for some reason or another, I'm aligning with. And it's focus on business goals and not things like rankings.

we'll get to that as a bigger topic. But I want to know what's unique or different about aligning to SAS tool business goals.

What kind of specific challenges have you found with that?

Eli: Yeah, no, that was, that was a very early consulting experience for me. So one of my very first consulting projects, I worked with Mixpanel and I don't know how Mixpanel is doing right now. This is six years ago and Mixpanel only had a couple of competitors. So they were competing with Google Analytics and they're competing with Adobe. I don't know if Amplitude was really around, but like they only had a couple of competitors and Mixpanel was very expensive. And for anybody not familiar, it's an analytics tool.

which means that it's baked in like very, very much baked into the product. And it's, it was a product analytics tool, which meant that you baked it into your app too. So it's not the kind of thing that a product manager or a marketer is going to be Googling and be like, Oh, wow.

Mixpanel solves all my problems. making meetings right now and I'm meeting engineers and tomorrow it's launching. And it was expensive. So I was working with Mixpanel built out all SEO by the book, the way we should do SEO.

We wrote all the content or built out all the pages.

And nothing happened. Like it did not impact the business. And then I said to the mix, but I met with the mixed panel team and I said, don't we have a tool that could look at this?

Obviously mixed panels, that tool. And what we discovered is that it took so many months for anyone to buy mixed panel because it's so baked into the process. It's so expensive.

Maybe SEO mattered, maybe it didn't, but by the time you bought, it didn't matter. And so many other things had to happen. And I'd say that's the challenge with SaaS in general.

The goal of SaaS, if you're doing, if you're in e-commerce, you're going to buy within the next 30 minutes or not. Maybe you'll never buy and that's where retargeting comes in, but you're not going to buy in a year from now. And with SaaS, it becomes like that.

So means you have to have earlier KPIs to show that the SEO is working. And in many cases, many of the prospective companies I talk to that are looking for SEO consulting, I tell them not to bother with SEO at all.

because it's so narrow, the SEO is so narrow, they're better off just taking that money and putting into those other channels, whether it's like more trade show booths or more paid marketing or even a billboard because it will drive more of what they're looking for. Whereas SEO, they could, and like, I don't mean not to do SEO at all, maybe they just do brand SEO, but even for Mixpanel, like yes, Mixpanel does analytics, but they don't need 80 different pieces of content on what analytics are to actually drive a lead.

Eli: And with a, with a really long sales process, it's check out the website, maybe read enough content that you're willing to give your content, contact info. Then a salesperson is going to do a demo. Then another salesperson is going to harass you and try to get you further down that funnel. Then maybe it'll show up at your office. Like those are all things that yeah, sort of SEO mattered, but even without SEO, would you have made that purchase ever? So probably you would have. And that's, and that's the SaaS challenge.

Noah: My, I love that. favorite invite when I was, I was getting courted by Snowflake's analytics tool. I forget what it's called, but they were like, oh, we're going to be in Denver. We want to like throw axes with you. I was like, yeah, I'm good. I don't need to toss axes.

Eli: That's pretty funny. Actually, I an interview experience like that. During COVID, I interviewed at Google to do SEO for Google Cloud. And I went through the interview process. I didn't really think I'd take the job, but I thought it'd be kind of interesting anyways, because they'd reached out. It's not like I had to go anywhere for an interview. I kept pushing on. So like, because I didn't care if I got the offer or not, I was more open to like asking lots of questions. each of the interviewers, I had six interviewers started with like, have any questions for me?

And then I took the next 30 minutes to ask all my questions, which were like, why do you want to do SEO? What kind of keywords do you focus on? And to me, it was baffling because it was the Google cloud product, which only has two competitors, Amazon and Microsoft.

And I doubted that any CIO that they were going after the big companies, any CIO who's making a Google cloud of purchase is not going to take a pitch from Amazon or Microsoft. So yeah. And, oh, and also I thought it was funny.

They were like really focused on Google rankings.

So like we want to rank like number one for like cloud tool. I'm like, is there someone you can call to like make that happen? So I asked all those questions and tried to understand more about their firewalls and all that.

But, to me it's baffling. Like when you really think about it, like should they be spending that much money on SEO for Google? Yes. I mean, I think that business makes a billion dollars.

So what difference does it make if they spend some rounding error on SEO, but for other businesses, if it's meaningful to them, there might be better channels.

Noah: Eric Wu has been one of my mentors in terms of learning how to think critically about things. And the first time he told me that about SaaS and startup companies who need to get traction fast, that EISCO is in the right channel, they need to do digital PR, that totally blew my mind when I heard it the first time.

What are some of the challenges you face as a consultant integrating with external teams these days?

Eli: It's always been a challenge. Like there's always various challenges. And I'd say now the biggest challenge is that internal teams feel threatened by external consultants because there are more layoffs happening in SEO. There are more layoffs happening in marketing. So that has always been a challenge I faced. I always prefer to work with companies that don't have an internal SEO team because I'm not competing with anyone. It's much easier to get things done when the people have hired you. If it's a

product manager team, product team, or a growth team, they're looking for that external expert to tell them what to do. When it's an SEO team, if the SEO team hasn't hired me, they're very focused on making sure I look stupid, because I threaten their job. And I understand that.

And I try to never make them look stupid. And I want to support them. So they become an advocate so we can work together and we can both accomplish our goals.

Maybe the SEO leader has hired me, but then some other counterpart also doesn't wants to make me look stupid. So that, that because become more of a challenge of late and I'm very cognizant of why it's like that. And I want to support them.

But most of the time when I, I meet with a company that has an SEO team, if I think the SEO person is great, I try to encourage them to save their money, not hire any consultant because I feel like it's going to fail anyways.

Noah: I want to dig into your brain a little bit. One of my favorite questions is to ask people how they think, but I feel like that's too broad for you. So I want to get into strategy. Like how do you formulate strategy when you're taking on new clients? How do you kind of do zero to one to build strategy? Can you take us through a mental framework at all?

Eli: Yeah, so it's very, very user focused. All of my onboarding calls are always focused on the pain of the user. Who is this user? What problem are we solving? And trying to dig into what is that user looking for? And then it becomes a lot easier to conceptualize what is that user looking for in search? And what would they expect to find when they click on a result? And what would the funnel look like?

So there are many ways to capture that user and to steer them in various directions. So I'm working with a client right now in the healthcare space. And there are many ways to solve the pain of their specific user.

That user's pain could be solved with medicine. That user's pain can be solved with acupuncture. That user's pain could be solved with, I don't know, hypnosis.

The user's pain could be solved with therapy. So when they're Googling, they are open.

They could go in any of those directions. They can go in any of those funnels. So as I go higher in the funnel and try to understand what prompts them to do a search, what prompts them to go online to seek help.

So therefore what they're looking for is they're looking for some sort of validation and only then can you bring them to a funnel. So if a hypnosis page is ranking number one, they now fall into the hypnosis funnel. If an acupuncture page is ranking number one, they could fall into the acupuncture funnel.

much higher in the funnel and understanding who this user is and what they're trying to solve, you can meet them exactly where they are and bring them to lower points in the funnel. And I find many SEO strategies are purely focused either at only the top of the funnel or only at the bottom of the funnel. So let's say, and the client is not in the back pain space, but let's say it's back pain.

So they're Googling back pain. So you might say, well, this is back pain. These are all the things that you could have back pain from to top of the funnel.

Or if they're Googling, I don't know, some sort of specific procedure to solve their back pain, that's all the way at the bottom of the funnel, not as many people search it, and it may be very competitive, let's say, local providers. So understanding the user as much as possible allows me to build out those strategies of how we could find those users and bring them into a funnel. And then ideally, I love working with clients when there's a programmatic way to do this. So if it's some sort of health condition,

Eli: There's programmatic ways to address every single health condition. And it's not the spammy way of, well, these are all the parts of the body. So I'm going to build out a page for all the parts of the body. It's really understanding all the various ways this pain manifests and building out again, understanding each one of these users. And it's not that I'm afraid of duplicate content like this page. the back pain page is going to be same as like the upper back pain page. Well, upper back pain and back pain are two different things. That's not duplicative.

But if they are the same thing, it does become duplicative. really looking at the, from a user standpoint, it allows me to build out these strategies. So that's the way I always approach it.

And then it needs to be validated. So there's, you know, clients I worked with where I built out this entire strategy and did nothing. And the reason why is because maybe it works from a user standpoint, but from a Google standpoint, they don't yet see it as differentiated.

And I'll give you, there's another SurveyMonkey example.

So when I joined SurveyMonkey, they only had four keywords that they ranked number one up or got any sort of traffic from. The word survey, the plural of that, surveys, online survey, and online survey. So those are the only four keywords they ranked on.

So that was the situation I came into and I was able to grow that channel. A couple years after working there, they actually lost the rankings for the word survey and the word surveys.

to position number eight. And the reason why was because Google determined that when someone searched survey or surveys, they were not looking to do what SurveyMonkey offered, which was create a survey. They were looking to do what all those spammy sites online that pay you points to do stuff were doing, which is they were looking to take a survey. So despite the fact that SurveyMonkey had links,

from every website in the world, including Google and including the White House and including the parliaments of every government in the entire world. We were being outranked by spammy sites that stole information and convinced people to take surveys and paid them in like, you know, seashells. But that is what Google determined the user wanted.

And this was in 2014. We're now 11 years ahead of that. So we're much further from this. So I might come up with a strategy that addresses what the user wants.

Eli: But Google's data might still say, yeah, we're still, we're a couple of years back. And an example of that might be something around AI. There's a lot of AI tools that solve problems that are very niche. And maybe the AI companies have determined that people want what they're doing, but Google says, yeah, there's not enough search volumes. People still want that old solution. I don't know. When people search note taking, they want like, you know, paper notebooks. And that's what we're going to rank for that.

doesn't matter what your research says. So those two things have to align and that is, you you can do that and that's where Blue Oceans fit in. But sometimes it's a blue ocean on the user side, but not yet a blue ocean on the Google side.

If the research and if I'm very convinced of it, you know, that this is actually a user pain and the user will be there, it's worth leaving up. It's worth continuing to invest in and waiting for Google to show up.

Noah: As you're building this, you have questions that you lean into over and over again? Like, is there a blue ocean strategy opportunity here that hasn't been addressed yet? I mean, do you have a set of questions that you like to ask yourself?

Eli: No, I just always prioritize curiosity, like continuously asking why and what.

Noah: the Five Wives. Okay, cool. So you've also, I mean, one of the things that I dug about your book was how you get into all the tools that you've built, not like lead to anything, but you'll advocate for significant investment because you'll think there'll be a big ROI on the backend for it. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Eli: Yeah, so it's really it's a quantitative process of understanding what will happen with something. And I think this is missing in a lot of SEO plans. So SEO plan usually starts with like, this is this much keyword volume, and we're just going to build it because there's some sort of expectation. I like to focus on it from more of a quantitative standpoint of if I understand this user's pain. So let's say I'm dealing with and there's two aspects this one is Tam, which I

I'll do all of my SEO forecasting off of TAM, which is Total Adjustable Market, which I don't think most people approach when they're doing any sort of SEO. So if there's something that is very specific to males and is not prevalent at all with females, I immediately cut whatever population size I think I'm focusing on in half. If there's something that's focused only on 18 to 24, then as I'm doing the forecast, that's the only age that matters for any upside.

So doesn't matter. So search volume doesn't really matter. It really comes down to that. So I was working with this company. They were looking to expand into a women's clothing in Germany.

And we, they wanted to understand how much search volume they could expect. So they did the bottoms up. They did like coats and dresses and they looked at the search volume and it wasn't meaningful.

So I looked at it from another way, which was what was the population of Germany?

how many females are there in Germany, how many females there are in Germany that fit the age group they were looking to target. So you can have the total number of females, but some of might be too old and some of them might be too young. So then looking at that age group and then we cut it a few more times, but the most important thing that we looked at, which was how many of those people in that slice of that cohort we looked at were going to shop online.

So it didn't matter whatsoever if like, you know, it's a jacket and all, you know, people in Germany that are female buy jackets every year. It doesn't matter. If 95 % of people in Germany that buy jackets, buy them in a physical store, then that was it.

That was the only, we can only capture 5%. So from a quantitative standpoint, that's what I focus on. So if I'm doing an ROI analysis, I do, I first do the TAM, understand which users I'm targeting.

Eli: I don't know that enough people in SEO have done this, but if you have, if you're an SEO and you've never done any paid marketing, do it for a little bit, learn a little bit of paid marketing because it will help you in SEO a lot, which is focus on all of your SEO analysis as if you're doing paid and use paid numbers like CAC, cost of acquisition or LTV. So that's where I think SEO wins when you focus on CAC and LTV. So when it comes to CAC for paid,

If you convert one out of a hundred, let's say it's Google ads, you need to get a hundred clicks on Google ads before you convert one person. And then when you, as soon as you convert that one person, you move into the next cohort, which is you need a hundred clicks on Google ads. Where SEO becomes so much better is you do all your SEO stuff and your CAC actually continues to decline as long as your SEO is effective.

Your page is up.

divided by all the customers you've acquired continues to improve. And then there's LTV, which, you know, might be fuzzy for paid marketing. like, well, this cohort will, you know, stick around for two years, this one will stick around for five years, this one will stick around for one month.

Your LTV on SEO is all marginal. So if you've acquired users, and then you continue to acquire users, and they stick around forever, your profit on SEO continues to grow and grow and grow.

Anyway, spend time in paid marketing. They know that's how you look at paid marketing, return on ad spend, ROAS, do the same thing for SEO. So that's the, those are the things I like to approach from an SEO standpoint.

The last thing I've done for SEO is build out these, these spreadsheets where I use the Rice format. think, it came from Sean, some of it came from Sean Ellis, the growth hacking. So Rice is reach, impact, confidence, and effort.

So just to break down these things, and I'll go back to something we talked about earlier, this building out the TLDs in the UK. So reach, if I'm building out the TLDs in the UK, I'm reaching only people in the UK. It only matters to people in the UK.

So if I'm trying to decide whether I should do something for the UK or Canada, the UK has more people, I think, than Canada. So my reach might be higher. So I'll score it like that.

Then impact. So this is a guess.

Noah: Yeah, a lot more.

Eli: Right? How much will this effort that we're doing, how much will it impact the people in the UK? I'm guessing. So score between one and a hundred or one and 10. Just a guess. Confidence. That decides how confident I am in the impact of what I'm doing. So I might be like, well, Matt Cut said to do it. So my confidence is 10. I got it straight from the top. Or I'm making this up. It's just a messier theory. So my confidence might be one. And the last is effort.

So this is where working with engineers, you understand I'm changing a title tag. They could do it in three seconds. So the effort is very, very low, or I'm, you know, building out an entire new CMS where I'm launching a TLD that took three years to launch.

So the effort is very, very high. So adding all this together, you can do it higher or low, however it is when you do this scoring, it shows you what you should focus on. So I found, and this has been my own experience.

A lot of times SEO is all about.

The first thing, this title tag is broken. It's very important we do it right now. There's a 404 page. We must fix this right now. But if you take all the potential things, whether it's building a new product, launching a new page, launching a new language, or just fixing 404s, lay this down on a spreadsheet and then score it and say, well, we could fix the 404 pages.

It's good. It's meaningful, but it won't add anything to the bottom line.

on having them do this and it doesn't move the needle, they may be less likely to do that other thing that moves the needle. So when I start a new engagement, it's all about really scoring out these things, doing the things that are easy and impactful to earn more credibility to do the next things that are slightly harder and slightly more impactful and leading up to it. If you do it the wrong way and say, well, this is the big thing we're doing.

And this is where a lot, I see a lot of SEO audits. So like you got to fix page speed. We need to make the page so much faster.

And then you do it and they're like, did it work? You're like, well, you know, we were green. It probably worked. Like, did we make more money? Like, well, I'm not really sure.

So now they don't want to do that next thing. You know, one of the, one of the companies I saw this. no, I got even better one. when I consulted for Mixpanel.

So one of the things I get, so I'm a, I'm not an agency. I'm a consultant. I'm an advisor. So I get, I joined a company and then I become, sometimes I get an email address.

Sometimes I get added to Slack.

Noah: You just stole my joke, by the way. was about to ask how important picture it is. Yeah.

Eli: But I always get added to the Google drive because I'm, I'm part of the team. And one of the things they always send me, they're like, here's the SEO Google drive. They always have the other agency's proposals. So I could see if I priced right. So Mixpanel there's a, agency, one of the massive agencies had given them a proposal that was 200 pages and they had 50 pages on page speed and how much Mixpanel's page speed sucked. Unfortunately for me, they were priced many, many times higher than me.

And I won and I beat them because I was priced too low. So that was, that was my mistake. And I learned from that, but they were all about focused on page speed.

Now, keeping in mind what Mixpanel does, they have a script that runs on every single page of one of their clients. Page speed is so important to them as a business. I'm pretty sure that like they've optimized the hell out of it.

And like what they would have had to do where they were debating this other proposal and fixing page speed. They're like, we think we have to get another data center.

going to cost us $2 million. Do you think that's a good idea? I don't like, I don't think you're going to get $2 million back in your investment. Maybe you'll get $2 million if you like you lower churn because people are pissed about your, you know, your script loading, but you're not going to get it back from SEO.

So like that was one of those things. So I see that often. If you evaluate, if you use this rice format and evaluate things like getting another data center for $2 million, that should fall to the bottom of the pile.

Noah: I love that. What else do most SEOs get wrong?

Eli: they don't have any confidence. And this is something that I noticed in COVID. So at the beginning of COVID, you had all these people going on TV, and they didn't have any answers. like the, you know, the reporter would say, so doctor, you're, you know, you're, the biggest doctor in the world. Are people gonna die if they get COVID? And then they were just like, well, you know, you know, if they have a comorbidity, maybe they'll die, maybe they won't die. So everyone freaked out. So they closed the whole world because they didn't know, are we gonna die?

you know, the whole world can end. But if someone would have that level of confidence, be like, yeah, you'll get very sick, you may die, but more than likely, if you're, this age, you're gonna be okay, there would have been far less panic. And I suddenly started seeing that SEO.

So I would have all these SEO clients, and they would ask me questions. And if I said it depends, they're looking for an answer. So they'll go shop around to find the right answer.

But if I can give them a confident, direct answer, I could be wrong.

Hey, if we launch in the UK, will we double our traffic? I'm like, well, based on what we're analyzing here, there's a strong possibility we'll double our traffic. think this is a great investment.

There was a 5 % chance that this happens and 10 % chance that that happens. Could either those happen? Yes. Many times I've been totally wrong. And I can say, look, that was one of the scenarios we looked at.

This was the likelihood. It was 5%. It was 10%. And that's what happened. Up front, I don't have to say, it depends. So I'm holding myself back from ever being accountable for it.

And I find that's one of the things I know everyone makes fun of like SEO says it depends. want to go even further from that. People should just be more confident.

Like, you know, your stuff, you've seen this before, just confidently say what you think will happen. Give yourself an out. Like you actually know what could also happen.

So give yourself an out.

Noah: But are you, let's dig into this a little bit. So are you just presenting a swag, like a scientific wild ass guess that you're defining in the moment, like, hey, there's a 10 % chance this happens, a 70 % chance this happens, and let's see, 100 minus 70, and there's a 20 % chance that, or are you actually doing a bunch of math behind the scenes coming up ready for it?

Eli: I'm not doing the real math. The thing is, you know, most of the time I know what will happen because I've seen it before. So if someone says, we invest $2 million in a new data center? I can confidently say, no, I don't think you should invest $2 million in the new data center. Like, how do you know? I'm like, because I've done it before. I have not $2 million, but it won't happen. If they say, if we launch a brand new website, will we double our traffic? I can say, well, I don't think we'll double our traffic, but I think in the next three weeks we'll see impressions increase.

There's a chance and I don't put it on percentages. There's a chance that Google doesn't crawl the site and this will happen. Um, if we know index the entire site, how long will it take for Google to do this?

Seen it before. So I can confidently say this is what I believe will happen. There are some other possibilities. If they push me to give an estimate, I can say based on my experience, 80 % of the time it happened.

So it's less than a uneducated, it's less than a guess.

Noah: Okay, got it. Tell us some things that the public doesn't know about you. Let's get to know the real you.

Eli: I already started with that about how I ended up doing all this awesome consulting totally by accident.

Noah: Well, mean, let's see, I don't know. I'm really into Tai Chi. I can often be found in a specific coffee shop. I really like a certain brand of socks. I really like darn tough socks. Give us a little more personal stuff.

Eli: So my favorite thing is that I love travel. So I love going to new places. Yeah.

Noah: I was gonna get to that, yeah. Tell me about Asia, like you've been all over.

Eli: Yeah. So, so I'll tell you where the Asia thing came from. I went on vacation to Japan when I first joined survey monkeys. So I never really went on vacation anywhere because I didn't have vacation time, but I joined survey monkey and they had unlimited vacation. And they're like, wow. I, nobody cared. They actually were allowed to take it. It was a really great company to work for. So I went to Japan on vacation and everything was different.

And I was fascinated by it. like for anybody that's ever been to Japan or seen anything Japanese, like a web page in Japan is very, very messy. And that's what they expect.

Like there's characters everywhere and there's no white space. Whereas if you look at like an American website or a Western website, it a lot of white space like Google. Like if you look at Yahoo Japan and you see how messy it is, it makes you feel uncomfortable and you don't want to stare at the page if you're used to white space.

a Japanese person might look at Google with just like a search box with all that white space and just feel very uncomfortable. So going to Japan and seeing all that made me very curious about like different people and how they responded. And I would ask questions and look at what apps they use to do stuff.

And that made me even more interested in like, Hey, I have to, I don't want to just visit countries. I want to move to a country and experience that. And that's where that move to Singapore came from.

So I was in Singapore for two years.

different countries. And the thing I found most fascinating is really those nuances of like people and psychology and how they they thought differently. I spent a loved going to Indonesia.

Indonesia is one of the poorest countries in the world, but also one of the happiest countries in the world. And the way they solve things, I went to China, and you really can't understand all these places until you do you go to it. So China has amazing startups, but they don't necessarily have amazing logistics.

So lot of the things they do in China, they do with people. So they don't have minimum wage. So like in China, they'll be like, Oh, you order a product and set your house in 30, 30 minutes.

It's not because they have this amazing logistics system. It's because like there was a person with a bike just waiting in a printed out, you know, in the warehouse and they just grabbed it they brought it to your house. And that's not something we can do in America because we don't really have bikes and we have minimum wage and all that stuff.

Like being able to see this stuff up front, I'd always find to be fascinating. So that's where I'm always motivated to travel.

Eli: Love going to Europe. I love like when I can mix it with business stuff, like I get invited to a conference and then go to somewhere. Love going to Europe, but I always find Europe to be a little bit more homogenous between all the different European countries versus going to Asia and seeing how different Indonesia is from Thailand or Vietnam.

Noah: Mm.

Noah: I just looked at the clock. We've got officially 10 minutes left. I have more time. Do you have more time to chat or you have a hard stop? OK. OK, cool. I want to know, what's your perspective on where we're at right now in terms of our industry? What are you watching closely?

Eli: Yeah, yeah, no, I'm good.

Eli: So AI is a huge threat and I think that some are not approaching the threat the right way. So the way they're approaching the threat is by pretending it's not a threat. So they're saying business as usual. Some are approaching the threat as existential and I think neither approach is correct. I think if you approach it from a user standpoint, is SEO I think will always exist.

because we're never gonna live in a world dominated only by robots that tell us what to do. We always wanna be in control. We have free will. And free will, we exercise that by requesting information.

So we'll go on search engines and decide what we want and request ideas and information from it instead of like going to our AI and say, hey, it's time for you to eat lunch. This is where you should go eat lunch.

So I think we're always going to be in a world where we make requests. SEO's job is to facilitate the companies we work for, whether full-time or whether as consultants or whatever, or whether we own them, facilitate those products and companies and services in showing up in those requests at a high level. That might mean in chat GBT, that might mean in Gemini, that might mean in regular Google search.

So I think we're always going to be in a world where users are requesting information.

the means for requesting that information, the mediums, maybe that will be in our self-driving cars. Maybe that will mean from our alarm clocks that have screens on them. Maybe that will mean that we continue to use mobile phones or glasses or whatever it is.

There will always be that. So the role of SEO is to facilitate that. So that's where I think if SEO adapts and we can say it's not, again, it's about, and I think LLM optimization is the wrong approach because it's an answer.

it will be some sort of answer. maybe it's search results. It's interesting to see what AI overviews has become. It's basically become search results with a summary attached, because it's pulling in the same search results.

It changes the query. So I don't think we're in an existential crisis. I do think we're in a very strong pivot moment where SEO is changing faster than we can understand it.

Eli: platforms get fragmented. So when I first started doing SEO, there was a Yahoo, there was an MSN that became Bing. We're now back at that point where I think for the most part, people still use Google, but now you can, you have to think about other things other than Google that actually are a little bit different. Like many times, like for now you can do SEO and it sort of covers your Bing. I don't think I've logged into Bing Search Console in a long time. It does. mean, for the most part, you don't really have Bing users, but I do think if you're thinking about LLMs,

Noah: It covers your bing. I love that.

Eli: You do need to think about how you show up in Gemini, which will be different than ChachiBT, which will be different than Perplexe, which will be different than Claude and different than Grok and all the other ones that come out there, which means that SEO is actually more valuable and more complex. And that is the way I'd approach it.

Noah: Can you tell me a little bit about impact and what impact means to you? And I think your book ties into this a little bit, like, and in a number of ways, like the way you, I mean, you touched me when we were at Brighton SEO. I can't tell you how special it made me feel when we talked for a couple of minutes. I was like, holy shit, I get to talk with Eli.

Eli: Appreciate that.

Noah: and you signed your book for me and you said some really nice things to me that made me feel like what I was doing mattered. So I'd love to dig into what impact means to you.

Eli: Yeah, I mean, impacts, so there's this personal and career impact, like, I think it matters what people do, like, you know, who you talk to, and how you help people like, I love helping people on LinkedIn find new roles. I wish I were I was as successful as it looks like I am at helping people find new jobs. In you know, the last six years of it was mostly been since COVID. But you know, four or five years since COVID of helping people get new roles. I've only helped handfuls of them actually get hired. But because like I try

So many people email me every single day like, I just got laid off. It allows me more insight into the industry of what's happening, but I just got laid off and I feel sorry for every single one of them. And I try to connect them to people.

I've hired people to try and help me manage it. And it never been successful. I've tried technology, help me manage it. But unfortunately, what I do is mostly life.

last in first out. So if someone emails me, they're like, Hey, I just got laid off. And then someone else emails me. I'm looking for new director SEO.

That's who I connect.

deep diving into who emailed me a month ago. But I think that's important. I want to see people get better jobs. And that's, on a personal basis. On a career basis.

I think that SEO matters. And I think it matters as an acquisition channel. And I don't like to work with companies where they don't actually reach that potential.

Like SEO can matter. It built properly should matter more than just rankings.

I, what I want to do is work and have impact on it. And I only end up signing clients where they're willing to do that. All of my SOWs have a paragraph about accountability and that they need to assign someone that will have internal ownership.

feel like, you know, when engagements end badly, they didn't read that accountability part because like I'll, they'll get onboard and I'll say, well, who do I talk to? And they're like, we're deciding like that should have been decided. That was, there was that paragraph in SOW.

But if you don't have someone assigned to shepherd SEO internally, it's not going to happen.

Noah: Visibility not rankings.

Preach.

Eli: Yes, just using the word rankings really distills it down to the wrong place.

Noah: Okay, we've got some questions in chat here that I want to make sure we get through because let's start with the last in first out. Is it really necessary to wait for LLMs to display our links or should we be more concerned about mentions?

Eli: Mentions in LLMs. Interesting. I think if you think about the goal of SEO, it answers the question itself. So if you're selling ecommerce, and you need someone to show up on your website and click that product, you need the link. You need the sale. If you are a service or an informational product, the mention is good enough because it builds out that brand awareness. I think that's where SEO is changing. And I've written about this on my newsletter about mid funnel SEO.

So top of funnel is all the way at the top. Like, you know, I talked earlier about back pain. Bottom of funnel is like, how do I, you know, specific procedure for solving my back pain.

Mid funnel might be like back pain from anxiety. Like I already, I've been educated that my back pain comes from anxiety. That's, and now you can say these are the different ways to solve it.

I haven't already been educated on that. Mid funnel I think is where SEO should be, but it depends on what you're doing as far as like product or services. So.

If you like SEO might become a brand awareness channel where I Google and I find out these are the best services in my industry. And then you go find them. However you find them, like maybe find it on Google maps, or maybe you do deeper searches and bottom of funnel e-commerce.

Like you need someone to come to your website and buy that product. And again, there's no catch all answer. It really will always depend on the different products or services.

Noah: I got a two parter for you. Who have been your mentors and who are you jealous of?

Eli: Yeah. so, one of my, biggest mentors in SEO, he, passed away. His name is Aaron shear. So everyone should Google him. Did you know him? So Aaron shear, old, old SEO, I think he passed away from diabetes. He, was a consultant at that startup I worked for. And when I was being interviewed, so he interviewed me and then he was stayed on as a consultant after I got hired.

Noah: No. No.

Eli: And one of the things that always impressed me and I learned this from him about the confidence on SEO answers, the founders would ask him questions and say, Hey, if we launch this website, what happens? And he would not ever say, depends. He would just give a straight answer like, Oh yeah, we're going to quadruple our traffic. And then the next week, nothing happened. And then be like, what happened? You're going to dribble traffic. He's like, well, I can't be entirely correct ever because I don't control Google. But all the other times I've done this at quadruple traffic.

And like that confidence, like you consulted for amazing companies like eBay and Zappos. I was like, wow, that's, that's the way I want to be an SEO consultant. Just like really understand this.

And he taught me so much around SEO and like helped me get some of my first speaking gigs and showed me how to be successful in that role. So like he was a big mentor. and, and then who am I jealous of in SEO?

I mean, I'm jealous of the people that take their SEO knowledge and build it into companies and build it into products and services. And we have, we have so many people like that.

I don't think I have the capability of doing that. I can barely build an agency. I don't want to build an agency. I like being on my own. So I wish I could do that, but I got it.

I got to do what I do.

Noah: Seems like you're doing pretty okay. I love that. Do you love speaking? How does it make you feel before, during, after?

Eli: the, the first time I spoke, was, I, was so scared. And then I got on the stage and I was like, this is great. sometimes I like it depends on the topic. It's much easier to speak when you know, the audience will respond. There's actually something that happened to me in Asia. So in certain countries in Asia, they are, they show less emotion and it was very hard to speak because I saw no emotion. So I would, I would tell a joke.

And it was emotionless. And then I felt like I was doing a really bad job or my joke didn't work. And then I figured out that they, and I watched other people who were genuinely funny and like, they got emotion.

They didn't get emotion either. So was like, it's not me. So what I started doing is I started putting a lot of words on slides and making them very small.

And then people would stand up and take pictures. And then I was like, that is how I get a response. Like I would do these polls, like raise your hand.

If like you ate breakfast today, no hands.

Raise your hand if you didn't eat breakfast, no hands. I'm like, oh, okay, it's not me. But then when I started doing these things, like here's a QR code and I'd make it really, really small and everyone would stand up and crowd the stage, take pictures and like, oh, they are paying attention.

So it's hard to speak when people don't respond. So I love speaking when it's like an engaging audience, tougher when it's not.

Noah: That's super funny. found that, I mean, my career highlights probably in terms of speaking, we're speaking at MozCon. Like in, when I spoke there in 2023, I did this deck called Down the Mountain. And in the moment, it felt like I crushed it. I told some jokes, audience was laughing. It felt raucous from the stage. And I'd spoken in London the year before.

I don't get to travel like you get to travel, but like I spoke at Searchlove in London and I said something that I knew was funny and I was like, man, they are so quiet. Like it's just not the same as the United States. And I'm going to Japan in October and I'm a little afraid because it's like, I think it's going to have that same vibe of being a very quiet room.

So.

Eli: Fantastic.

Eli: Try that with the slides, like make something really small and you'll get that response. Yeah, I went to, I spoke at a conference in Brazil in November and no one spoke English. They had translators, had headsets. So I would tell a joke and then I would pause and then wait till it got translated and then they were left.

Noah: I love it.

Noah: That's hysterical. OK. I feel like I'm running out of questions. But that's awesome. I feel like we covered so much ground. I want to know, we talked about this at the time, but tell us about what the book has done for your career. Is it the content of the book? Is it having the book? Do remember that conversation we had?

Eli: Yeah. So there are probably three things the book has done. One is it allowed me to create a concept of product led SEO, which gives me something like, and the reason I wrote it was because I wanted to create this concept product led SEO. I just didn't know so many people would read it. So I wanted to create this concept. I want people to think about SEO differently. So it gives me that asset to point to me like, Hey, this is a thing you hear of all these agencies and consultants. This is my thing. So that's one.

The second thing it does is it allows me to have a business card so I can meet companies and I can say, Hey, here's a thing. This is, this is me being different. And the third is it gives a ton of background on how I would approach a challenge.

So a lot of times when I'm pitching against agencies, they're all saying the exact same thing. And then companies will say, why are you any different? I'm like, well, this is, this is the way I'd approach it.

I'm not making this up as a sales pitch. This is the thing I wrote five years ago.

four years ago, and it is still the same today. So that's what the book did. And it has become a great Legion tool, but I didn't expect it to be I didn't expect to like, you know, sell that many copies.

I was very lucky that I had really good friends on social media that when I wrote launched the book, they all like shared and promoted it. And it became the thing of like, I also have to check out the book. And then that created its only its own snowball effect.

But I didn't expect that to happen. I thought I would sell 100 bucks.

Noah: Well, I gotta say, I've loved spending so much time with you today, and I'm just super grateful that we get to do this. Any parting thoughts you wanna share with our audience?

Eli: Yeah, I think that many people in our industry feel like now is a tough time. And I agree. I see a lot of emails and I woke up this morning to a bunch more of people getting laid off or losing their consulting clients. And I think it's a tough time. But I also think that many of the companies laying off their SEO teams firing their SEO agencies and consultants are making a huge mistake. They're doing the wrong thing. They're

not investing in a channel that will mean so much more. And the monopoly powers of meta and Google and other ad platforms will mean that those channels will get more expensive. And this is a channel that creative companies, creative people can really dominate.

So I think there's a huge light at the end of the tunnel. I'm personally raising prices. sorry.

I'm personally raising prices on prospective consulting clients because I want companies to really invest in this channel and it is it is absolutely a tough time but I think things will improve very soon.

Noah: Awesome. Eli, thank you so much for today and I'm hopeful that we can stay in much closer contact through the coming months because I just feel like you're a brother from another mother when I hear you talk.

Eli: man, I love this. No, it's so great to talk to you and get to know you here.

Noah: Yeah, cool. All right. So everybody, thanks so much for an amazing Campfire chat. Our next Campfire chat is going to be with Joe Hall, two weeks from today. And I'm super stoked to get to hang out with Joe. He's super funny, super smart. I've loved sharing the stage with him at MozCon. And I think our audience is going to get a real kick out of that. Eli, you're amazing. Thanks so much. Everybody, see you in two weeks. Peace.

Eli: Cheers.

Eli: Thanks, Tom.