Welcome and Introductions

[00:00:00] 

Will Soprano: I don't see it as, like, I'm optimizing a search engine. I see it as i'm optimizing to find customers and help them find us. Like, that's what we're doing here. We're trying to, you know, improve the bottom line. We wanna see revenue increase.

We wanna see customers get what they're looking for. We wanna, improve the lives of our customers. that's really what we're doing here.

Welcome to the Simple and Smart SEO Show

Crystal: Welcome to the simple and smart SEO show podcast!

I'm your host, Crystal Waddell, here to bridge the gap between SEO strategy and real world business success. By bringing you insights, stories, and conversations from the SEO community and beyond.

Grab a coffee. Or your favorite tea. And let's dive into Smarter SEO for your business

 I'm here with a new buddy, Will Soprano.

He happens to be a fellow North Carolinian, Will, thank you so much for joining me today, and welcome to the Simple and Smart SEO.

Will Soprano: Thanks for having me 

SEO at Enterprise Scale

Crystal: We are recording this on a Tuesday morning, and knowing a little bit about what you do in SEO, I was curious what does a normal Tuesday look like doing SEO at a [00:01:00] scale that most people never touch?

Will Soprano: Yeah. So for some background, I mean, I I work for a large F- fortune 500 company. The large company isn't really what the scale is. The, the scale is that it-- we have 20 different web properties, 20 different physical properties, and hundreds of, of, of smaller properties within all of that.

So I mean, the, the scale is huge because of, you know, the nature of the business, not just because the company is large. But yeah. I'll just tell you what I got on my calendar today.

Because we have so many cross-functional teams that don't directly report into me. Or aren't a part of my team. Depending on what, what we're working on, I might have to prepare, prepare, prepare documentation for dev, creative, and design.

And by creative, I mean leadership.

And so this morning I've been preparing technical documentation for dev. And that'll be translated into a, a doc for for design. And then that'll be translated into a doc for leadership.

And then after [00:02:00] this call, I've got backlog refinement, which is refining our Jira backlog. And then later on today I've got a one-on-one with my director. And after that I have heads down individual work. And after that I've got cross-functional calls with content and individual properties.

Crystal: Dang. First I should say thank you for making time for me today ' cause it's not like you have anything else to do.

Will Soprano: I'm happy to

Why the Old Playbook Died

Crystal: we had conversations before about the changes that have been happening in SEO. You said that SEO isn't really about content.

Will Soprano: Yeah. 

Crystal: And so I was wondering if you could just, explain a little bit to me about what that means.

Will Soprano: Yeah, with a big caveat that, like, content is everything still. But You know, the content marketer's playbook has been dead for a few years, and people are still applying it. People are s- are-- You know, when, when AI came out, people just tried to figure out how to scale the content marketer's playbook.

That was just like the, you know, the, the easy next step was, great. You know, automate all of [00:03:00] this. And just create a bunch of content using this playbook. Basically the core fundamentals of all online marketing for the last 15 or so years.

And if you don't know what I'm talking about, look it up. Because you've probably been doing it and didn't realize it. 

New Discovery Channels

Will Soprano: So yeah, like... I don't know, maybe 10 years ago people tried to create Web 3.0. The idea was to decentralize the web. So that people didn't, you know, enter the web via Google or Facebook or Instagram or social or whatever.

The idea was that They would enter the web via the internet and have more agency and control over where they go. That did not happen. Their idea did not come to fruition. But AI kind of forced that. And what I mean is, is that it gave people this chatbot that they could in- interact with and then use that information to go and find these individual websites instead of just relying on Google.

Now, people still Google. You know, Google's not dead. SEO isn't dead. Like, the, [00:04:00] that's not what I'm saying. But there's, you know, there's a new way of, for people to find information. And so, you know, what we're finding more and more is not that people are doing, are using Google less, they're just using Google and ChatGPT, and Reddit, and Wikipedia, and all these, you know.

So it's, it's really Google and. And so When I say, you know, like SEO isn't really about content, like it's with this big caveat that like content is still king, but how, how, how is different today. 

Tools as SEO Content

Will Soprano: And so those delivery systems need to be things that are useful. You know, I, I was, I was on a s- a sunglasses website the other day, and they had a tool to measure your pupillary distance.

And they had another tool that told you the shape of your face. But then like how do you-- if all they did was build that tool, and do nothing with it and just like sit it on a URL, nobody's gonna find it, right? So that's the caveat, right? So now we have to add content to this.

What do we put on [00:05:00] this page to make sure that the correct people find this thing?

And how do we make sure that we do it in such a way so that these, these bots find this thing? Whether that's AI or, or Google Bot or whatever. Content is still king. Content will be king forever. And the reason that content will be king forever is because what we're trying to do as a, as a species is to communicate.

And so that's what we're doing when we do content, is we're communicating. So yeah, it's, it's more how that's changed. It's, it's delivery systems. 

Three Modern SEO Buckets

Will Soprano: I, I kind of break it down into three, three buckets. There's, there's product-led SEO, which any of the SEOs probably know what that is by now. There's there's progressive revelation, which is a term that I thought that I made, but I found out later on it's a religious term. I don't mean it to be religious. But the idea is, is progressively revealing the products and services and providing just-in-time information programmatically through technology.

And then there's editorial-led SEO. And that sounds like traditional SEO. But when I say editorial-led SEO, [00:06:00] I mean real editorial. High-quality writing, not AI. Good interviews. And then taking that content and finding places to p- to, to put it. And I don't mean paid placements.

I mean like, "Hey, I've got a legitimate piece of editorial here. I wanna give it to you for free, but I don't want it marked as paid because this is a legitimate piece of editorial." Or. Becoming the publisher yourself. Creating hubs that enable our audiences to, you know, find the experiences that they're looking for.

So that in this new-- in this era of like things being more disconnected, they have a place that they can index on and they can come back to.

And they can get the things that they're looking for. Whether that's short-form video, long-form video. Short-form text, long-form text. You know, connection with other people. The information that they need.

Become the publisher that... Become the publisher that you wish existed, that is dying today. The power is going into the hands of the publisher, [00:07:00] and the publishers are multiplying. Because anybody, all of these businesses now can be publishers.

Crystal: I have one client that I'm gonna have to follow up with you off podcast about, because I follow her YouTube content. And brought it to her website, and I still do that... And, I was always trying to align with, strong keywords that would match search intent for, whatever content she'd created. But I've found that it's not necessarily cannibalization at this point. But that things need to be organized differently now for AI, and be more of that hub and spoke model of the past, but, for the future. And it's interesting that you say that because I have a specific situation where that's a little bit of a challenge right now.

Because it's ooh, the old way of doing SEO doesn't match up with the new way of, how this stuff needs to be found and organized.

So that, that kinda hit with me. 

Will’s Unusual SEO Start

Crystal: But could we back up just a little bit? Because one of the things that I love what you said in our off-camera conversation was that, you [00:08:00] started in SEO, differently than where you're at now.

What was the first version of Will doing SEO? And what did you believe that, turned out to be completely wrong or different than you expected?

Will Soprano: Yeah, so like I was doing SEO and didn't know I was doing SEO. And, I think that's true and to varying degrees I think that's true for a lot of people. At least for the people who are like doing stuff. I don't mean that's, that's not... Just because you have a website doesn't mean that... But I mean like the people who are like trying to market their website.

Like I think it to, to varying degrees I think they're, I think that's true for anybody who's out there trying to, you know, find their customers and help their customers find them. But yeah, like I, I, I started at a technology company that, you know, had a community of, of programmers and they taught me how stuff works.

They didn't say anything about SEO, they just taught me about like how the internet works. Like some of these, some of these programmers like wrote some of the first nodes on the internet. B- b- built some of the first websites on the web. And so like they, so they taught me how [00:09:00] search engines work. But nobody said like, " This is SEO," you know? "This is how you optimize a search engine."

Nobody said any of those words. But yeah, I was creating content for a publication for developers and actually there's a lot of things that I did back then that I still do today.

There are very few things that I did back then that I don't do today. Because I didn't enter SEO as an industry.

Like I didn't like start off as like an SEO junior analyst, you know what I mean? I don't even tell people I work in SEO. If you ask me what I do, I'll tell you I work in tech. And part of that's because that's primarily what I've done in most of my career. But the other part of it is like, That's not the way that I see it.

Like, I don't see it as, like, I'm optimizing a search engine. I see it as I'm optimizing for customers, you know? Like, I'm optimizing to help... I, I'm optimizing to find customers and help them find us. Like, that's what we're doing here. We're trying to, you know, improve the bottom line. We wanna see [00:10:00] revenue increase.

We wanna see customers get what they're looking for. We wanna, you know, improve the lives of our customers. You know what I mean? That's really what we're doing here. I'm not optimizing for a search engine. anyways.

Republishing to Real Editorial

Will Soprano: Okay, so this is how long ago this was. We had to create to, to, to manage this publication, which was, you know, I mean, not a small publication. I mean, we had, like, a million subscribers. We had, like- 20 million unique visitors a month. And it w- wasn't a small, I mean, it wasn't, you know, ABC. But yeah, it wasn't small.

In order to publish enough content to serve all of these users, we did what we called republishing. And so we would go around to developer bloggers, and we would find the ones that, like, were producing good content. And we would ask for their permission to republish their content.

And if they said yes, we would take their RSS feed, and Google had an RSS feed reader. And it would just pull all this stuff. and so we would just, every day, like, we would open up this thing, and we would find something that was interesting, and we would either republish it or we would write [00:11:00] content based on it.

And so that was, like, in the early days, that's what they told me to do. Like, they sat me in front of a computer, and they said, "Here," like, "republish this content. You don't know anything. Republish this content, and as you're doing so, learn what this is."

That's how I learned this stuff. That's how I got into tech. That's how I learned about software. That's why I ended up in, you know, in, in, in product roles because of this stuff.

Pretty quickly I realized, like, this is low-value work. Like, and this is low-value result too.

Like, me republishing this gets, like, 10,000 views. But if all I do is add an editorial to this, all of a sudden it gets 17,000 views. Whoa, like, what's going on here? And then we would have these c- these comments from these developers who would be like, "Oh, this sucks." Like, " This is good. This isn't good." You know, they would let us know.

And so I realized, like, "Hey, why aren't we talking to these people?" And so I would pick up the phone. You know, we built a program called The Most Valuable Blogger program for, like, people who produced good content. And that influenced them to write better content. And when they wrote better content, then, like, we had better [00:12:00] content.

We could have better conversations with them, which would produce better content on our site. 

Relationships as SEO Fuel

Will Soprano: And so, like, I was building relationships for the purposes of SEO, and I still do that today. Like, if you would ask me, like, the most important things to do in SEO, building relationships with other websites and people in your industry, probably thing number one.

And nobody would ever tell you that, right? Like, if you look up, like, how to do SEO, like, that's not on a list. Of course, you need to have the fundamentals, but

Crystal: and you did k- just kinda say, but can you explicitly explain why that's the number one thing? 

Will Soprano: The relationships piece is really important because number one, you'll generate backlinks. Number two, you'll generate a collaboration so that, like, when you do something, it's multiplied. You're not just doing it in one place. Now you're doing it in three places.

Now you've got, you know, this person that you partnered with for this piece of content, now they're tweeting about it. Now they're, you know, LinkedIn posting about it. Now they're talking about it on their website ' cause they're proud of this partnership. They're proud of this work. 'Cause you did a good [00:13:00] thing.

You know, when I worked in the music industry, the most important thing that I did, the thing that drove more revenue for that company was build a relationship with the media of that industry.

This company that I worked for e-every year they, they spent, like, half a million dollars with all these media publications to, like, have an ad and, you know, to, to, to get a link to get them to talk about their products.

Nobody ever thought to build a relationship with them and ask them, like, "Hey, what do you need?" And that's what I did, and then next thing you know, we're getting free publication. Like, we're getting free run.

We're getting videos that are, like, talking about us. Now next thing you know, we're creating content, and they're like, "Hey, can we put that on our YouTube?"

And I'm like, "Of course you can. Yes please." Like, "We want your... We, we wanna talk to your audience. Your audience is our audience."

So yeah, like, building relationships is mission critical to performing search engine optimization.

Crystal: Wow, that's so interesting, and I love the fact that you didn't come from the SEO perspective. You brought a marketing perspective [00:14:00] into SEO.

And, obviously that's where it has now turned back to in its current state. So it makes sense that, your original thought process still works today. 

ChatGPT Changed the Game

Crystal: so was there a specific project or a moment when you realized that it was like, "Okay, the old way is dying. This doesn't work anymore"? Or, even if it was just an observation, if it wasn't what you did?

Will Soprano: So to be clear, like I have-- I do all the fundamentals, like the basic fund- foundational fundamentals that any SEO does, right? Like H1 on every page.

Using good heading structures, H2s and H3s, not, you know, ignoring all the rest of the Hs. You know, paragraphs following headings.

Internal linking, find ways to generate backlinks.

Obviously keywords and that. So like, just to be, just to be clear so people don't think that I'm a kook., Like yes, I do all the same things that you do. Image file names. Okay, now I feel like I'm justifying myself. Anyways, I do all the things that you do. But yeah, like [00:15:00] I would say

I would say after year two of the release of ChatGPT is when I realized, okay, like things have changed. Not because SEO is dead and not because, you know, Google Search is dead. Like I said earlier, like quite the opposite.

Google hasn't really lost much market share. I mean, I think it's lost maybe like 4%. Maybe an additional two or three points to, to Bing because of what they're doing. 'Cause they're doing some good things.

But like there has not been a large erosion of, of, of search. And quite frankly, it behooves ChatGPT and Anthropic or OpenAI and Anthropic that Google Search survives and thrives because guess what they do? They perform Google searches. So like ChatGPT performs a Google search when you ask it a question.

So yeah. So Google Search is, you know, still a critical part of, of, of discovery, and revenue ops. Anyways, so yeah, like I would say like after year two of, [00:16:00] of ChatGPT being released it was clear to me that stuff had changed and changed forever. And like I said, like it, it's not that SEO is dead, it's that we need to think differently about how we find our customers and how they find us.

SEO Beyond Google and Web

Will Soprano: And the POV that I have now from a large organization, it's really everything. Like SEO is no longer Google Search and your website. SEO now is like the website is the core. But Google Search, email, social.

I think there's a certain point, I think there's a certain persona.

I, I don't wanna say that like anybody can do this, but I think there's a certain person who works in SEO that will forever be hireable, no matter what changes. Because SEO now touches all these surfaces.

I did an audit recently, and this company has an app. And they have a website. And their website has all of their revenue [00:17:00] opportunities and their app has all of their utility opportunities. And when you make your first purchase on, on, on their website, guess what they do? They send you an email and tell you to download the app.

You've just lost a potential of that customer staying in that revenue ecosystem where they might buy more. And only SEO would, would, would recognize that. The email team wouldn't recognize that. The app team wouldn't recognize that. The marketing team wouldn't recognize that. So yeah, like there's a certain persona within SEO that will forever be valuable. Even if search engines die. Because of the place that we sit in the organization.

Crystal: being s- a super small business owner, being able to talk to my customers, having to do everything myself. I spend a lot of time just trying to figure out okay, where do I fit?

Where does all this information I found fit within my role as an SEO for my company when I do everything?

I'm the social media manager, I send the emails. I optimize the website, all of those [00:18:00] things. So it's so refreshing, and validating for you to say that, just because my perspective has always been, like, search is a part of everything. And, I kinda envy the people who could partition it over here, and have the silos of process.

But, I just never had that luxury, because when you are the person who runs the business, talks to the customers, does the website, you don't have silos.

I feel like I'm built for this time in search. Because I've already been here. It was like, that's the reality that small business owners live in. So it's been an interesting transition. Watching other people Oh, okay, I guess now we need to integrate with social teams," and who owns Reddit, and all this stuff, and I'm just like, welcome to the party, everybody." 

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