Kevin Indig (ex-Shopify, Atlassian & G2) talks SEO

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hello, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whatever the case may be where you're listening to this. I'm Michael Costin from the SEO Show and this week we have a very special, very well-known, very big guest. Now that might be hyperbole but it's really not because we have Kevin Indig on the show this week. Now, Kevin has held senior SEO roles at some companies you might have heard of, Shopify, Atlassian, G2, just to name three of the big ones. He's also worked agency side before that, and he's pretty well known in the SEO space, has big followings on Twitter, and he publishes a really excellent growth memo, which is a comprehensive weekly newsletter going in-depth on all sorts of different topics, but the chat I had with him was great. We spoke about all sorts of different things, some tactical stuff. You know, Kevin grew Atlassian's traffic from 4 million to 8 million visitors. So we delved into how he did it, and there were three main areas that Kevin spoke about that were really interesting. We also spoke about how he built 30 person teams, SEO teams at G2 and Shopify and how the different functions of SEO were broken down in those teams. Then we also spoke about the state of Google at the moment and its approach to content and in particular, low quality content. There's all sorts of other topics we spoke about on SEO sprinkled in amongst that chat. It was really good. I really enjoyed it. So that's enough from me. I'm going to throw over now to my chat with Kevin Indig. Hi, Kevin. Welcome to the SEO show. For people who may not have heard of you, if you could give us a quick background about yourself and I guess where things are at for you today, and we'll get going from there.

KEVIN: Sure, Michael. Yeah. Thanks for having me. A pleasure to be on. As you mentioned, my name is Kevin Indig. I've been in SEO and growth for the last 12 years, most recently at Shopify. And then before that at a company called G2, which is a software marketplace. And then before that at Atlassian, probably a company you're closely familiar with.

MICHAEL: Absolutely. Yeah, Aussie owners there. So funnily enough, the owner of Atlassian, it seems like he's buying up half of Sydney real estate at the moment, which is interesting. But yeah, look, I've been following you for a while, particularly through your newsletter, The Growth Memo, which is, you know, really great, really great topics, in-depth content that you're putting out. So for anyone listening, well worth checking that out if you haven't. And I want to get to that in a minute, but I always like to go back to the start when I'm talking to people that work in SEO, because I'm always interested in how they discovered it, how they learned it and how they built their career in the space. So yeah, when it comes to that, how did you find this world of SEO and get into it?

KEVIN: Thanks. For me, I think as for many other people, it was kind of stumbling into SEO. I think it started when I was a teenager, I grew up with broadband internet in Germany. So I was born raised in Germany, as you can maybe maybe tell from my speak. And when I was a teenager, internet all of a sudden became very, like a lot more affordable, you know, people forget that these days, but there was a time when you paid internet by the minute. So, you know, when I was young, that changed. And I was an avid computer gamer, I was playing with friends. And when internet became affordable, there were lots of online tournaments for games like Starcraft, Warcraft, Diablo, under the tournament and so on. And so we, you know, we as a group, we wanted to play compete in some of these tournaments. But to register, you needed a website. And so I became the guy to figure out how to build a website. I taught myself some very scrappy Photoshop, HTML, CSS, and I built some very, very bad websites. They fulfilled their purpose, though. And after a while, I asked myself, Okay, where are people coming from? I saw in the CMS back then, that there is that there are different referrers. And one of them is Google. And so I wonder, okay, why so many people coming through Google discovered that there is something like a search engine. And then I went down rabbit holes in online forums to learn more about SEO. Yeah, fascinated pretty quickly, you know, at the time was still like a dark art and very hacky and mysterious. And that that drew me in. And so yeah, and then, you know, fast forward, couple years later, I had a chance to start in industry on the agency side as a trainee, I did a traineeship in Germany at a agency that had big enterprise clients, which was a fast track for my career, because I learned hands on what works for large sites. And I had a chance to understand how to get SEO done in a large corporation. So that's, that's where it all began.

MICHAEL: Yeah, awesome. Okay. Back when you were doing that, were you learning it just by trying things, you know, trial and error, experimentation, or did you go anywhere to learn it? Groups, courses, people that you followed? How did you sort of learn the SEO side of things?

KEVIN: Before I joined this agency, it was really just, you know, some observation, and I didn't do much real SEO, right? I just was fascinated by it. I read about it. But I didn't, besides maybe a couple of smaller sites, there wasn't, there wasn't, I wasn't really experimenting with it. And that changed very quickly when I joined that agency as a trainee. One of the first things that they had us do was to build a website. So you could choose, is it a blog? Is it a little store or something else? And but they made sure that all trainees have their own projects. And that was another way that I just learned very quickly. And then the third thing that I already mentioned was to, you know, to be hands on with clients to shadow other consultants, senior consultants, and learn very hands on from them. So You know, I learned SEO, luckily, very quickly, because I had a lot of practical experience, I was able to shadow people who really knew it. And I would say that was an accelerant to my to my career.

MICHAEL: Yeah, absolutely. So for people listening, thinking about getting into the space, I always say working at an agency for at least a couple of years really lights a fire under your skills and your career development. So sounds like that was the case for you.

KEVIN: Yeah, for sure. For sure. You know, as with everything, when somebody shows you how to do it, it just goes so much faster, way faster than just reading about something. And if you then have to try it yourself with a small side project, that tops it off, right? Those are the two best ways and fastest ways to learn SEO.

MICHAEL: Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. All right. And so after the agency stint, you went client side and you worked at some really big brands there, you know, Shopify, Atlassian, G2, different types of sites, but you know, a lot of traffic going through to them. I'm curious, you know, when you're working at a big brand like that in-house, what does a typical day look like? What does a week look like? You know, where were you spending your time once you're in those types of roles?

KEVIN: Yeah, you know, at Atlassian, I was one of the first, probably the second SEO hire. And it was still very hands on. So that was the day there looked very different than as a director at Shopify or a VP at G2. So, you know, maybe a comment on the last couple of roles, because there's so much more, you know, there's so different from being in the weed. So it was pretty much all it was 90-95% managing. and setting the strategy and the vision. So I had large teams at my hand that at G2 was about 35 people at Shopify initially 25 and then it was 80. And that means you're really, you know, you have to define the roadmap, you have to understand how you track against goals, you have to direct teams in the right direction, discuss key projects and understand how they go in and what, you know, what the approach is, and then do a lot of stakeholder management. know, like, report upwards, sidewards, make sure you have your peers bought in and aligned. And a lot of time really goes into, you know, kind of setting expectations, aligning with various stakeholders and people and kind of making sure that teams have the resources that they need.

MICHAEL: Okay. And when you're working in that sort of a role, you know, later on at G2 and Shopify, did you still get a chance to get your hands dirty and do SEO, so to speak? And if not, did you miss doing SEO?

KEVIN: I didn't get as much of a chance. There were some opportunities where we, you know, had maybe a little bit of extra spare time, and I could go deep on some projects, which I greatly enjoy, which I, you know, always enjoyed. And there's definitely a bit of an itch in those manager positions. not enough to say I don't want to go down management track. I have to say that I, you know, I really enjoy tinkering with sites and trying to figure out problems and just going really deep on something. That's a path that you see throughout all my history, right? Even before I had before I joined an agency, right? Just this idea of like, you know, playing computer games to really figure out the tactics or what works. And then same with, you know, with SEO, just like reading forums and blog articles deep into the night, really immersing yourself. So I greatly enjoy immersing myself things. But there's just very little to no to no time when you're leading and managing. But I also enjoy that greatly, you know, I enjoy this idea of like building an engine or building systems, and the idea of defining strategies. So that that then became kind of the new thing to figure out just at a much larger scale.

MICHAEL: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Well, I sort of want to take a step back maybe to your Atlassian days, maybe when you were a bit more hands-on before we sort of move and maybe talk about some of the other things you got up to. You know, at Atlassian, I've seen case studies or articles in the past about you doubling traffic, you know, 4 million to 8 million a month, I believe it was. Obviously, that's a big achievement. And when you're doing that work, there would have been all sorts of tactical things you're up to. Are you able to delve into some of the stuff that delivered that sort of growth?

KEVIN: Yeah, for sure. There were a couple of key projects that really helped. And it also helped me kind of accelerate my career from there. And I call that career making projects, right, I think it's really important that if you want to go down the career track and SEO, or for the matter, any marketing discipline, really, to collect some career making projects, those are projects that had a huge impact on the company, that you were one of the key drivers off and that you can, you know, showcase in your application for the next role, for example. And so a couple of these career making projects, one of them were certainly these content hubs that we build at Atlassian. So Atlassian, for those who don't know, software company has a product driven growth loop, meaning there's an inherent function in the product that helps it grow. Like when you start with Jira, for example, the Flexure product, It only really becomes valuable once you invite your colleagues and you collaborate. So that means you automatically spread the product to other people. That's a product-led growth loop. And we supported that with content hubs. And content hubs are, in this definition, they're basically little microsites that live on Atlassian.com. One example is Atlassian.com slash Agile or slash DevOps, slash ITSM, etc. And they have sort of their own look and feel, and they're very focused on one topic. In the case of Agile, obviously Agile. And it brings you really from the very beginning of what is Agile, all the way down to how to do canned bandwidth JIRA, right? So there's a lot of content in between. It has a very, very linear flow. So you can, wherever you are in the user journey, you can enter this content hub, and it kind of brings you in a linear path to the product. And we did that for most of our products, and that worked really, really well. So the challenge there is that all the content was created by ourselves. Two other projects that were super impactful and successful, one of them was the marketplace, right? Atlassian has an app marketplace that is pretty large. And that is a very different play. It's much more you open the conversation with integrators versus aggregators. The content hubs are a typical integrator play where you have to create the content themselves. An app marketplace is an aggregator play, right? You have an inventory of apps and maybe categories of apps. And so technical SEO was really important there. This is where I developed this internal link optimization model called Tipper. We can go deeper into that if you like to. And then the third very impactful project was the Atlassian community. There used to be a site called answers.atlassian.com. And we transformed that from a forum to an actual vibrant community, big investment from the company, we had, you know, lots of moderators, engineers working on this was like really almost like its own product group. And that also came with its own kind of technical SEO challenges.

MICHAEL: Awesome, love it, love it. Let's talk about the marketplace first, because you mentioned Tipper there. I definitely came to hear a bit more about that. My understanding of that, is it a similar approach to let's say Zapier, where they have a lot of content around the different apps and integrations that you can build? Was that the general approach? And yeah, let's talk about Tipper, your internal linking strategy that you use there.

KEVIN: Sure, sure. So the marketplace was slightly different than Zapier. I think it could have evolved into something that Zapier does, which again, I think they're doing a fantastic job. It was it was slightly different, not that much. And so the way that I discovered Tipper, and by the way, that's an acronym that stands for true internal page rank. And so the, you know, the challenge with internal link optimization is that a lot of times you take a crawler, like a Screaming Frog, or maybe SEMrush, Ahrefs, Spotify, Oncrawl, Deepcrawl, whatever they're called. And you crawl the website, and you get an internal page rank calculation. Now, that in itself is not terribly bad. But the problem is that it's an incomplete model, because in reality, websites don't live in isolation. In reality, they get backlinks. And these backlinks don't all go to the home page or to the starting page of a hub. They go to all sorts of pages. with if you don't factor these backlinks into your internal link optimization model, then you're you're missing a lot of key information that might make you pick the wrong choices, right, the wrong ways to optimize. And so what we learned about the marketplace is that there was a lot of concentration of link equity around categories. because all the apps link to the category page. But on the app pages themselves, there were links to every version of the app, which means that some apps that have hundreds of different versions, right, every time they update the app, there's a new version. And it creates a new mini page and an internal link to that mini page. And so There was something like a leaky bucket situation where the category pages would get all the internal link equity, the product pages would lose all the internal link equity, because they had barely any incoming links, but lots of outgoing links. And so we, tipper is basically the way to identify that. And once we realize that now, in hindsight, it makes perfect sense, right. But when you look at the site, you're like, Oh, why these product pages not ranking? It took a lot of, you know, working and financing and analyzing. And then eventually, we discovered that that was the case. And then tipper was kind of the way to conceptualize that or to productize that. So in a nutshell, yeah, an internal link model paired with backlinks and factoring in incoming and outgoing links. And that drove massive success. So I think we 160, we drove an additional 160% of organic traffic to that marketplace and made a huge difference from a small fix.

MICHAEL: Beautiful. And so what was your fix? You know, you have a lot of versions of app pages. Are you canonical, like putting a canonical back to the main page? Are you no indexing them or how did you deal with it?

KEVIN: Yeah, we just basically kept all the versions on the same page. So we kind of removed this function of creating many pages, and we just had like foldouts. So instead of getting to a new page with barely any content and information, you would just be able to fold out and see what are the new updates. And that's pretty much it. You get more content on the page, which is actually helpful. And you drastically reduce the number of pages and outgoing links on the product pages or the app pages.

MICHAEL: Yeah, love it. As you say, very, I guess, simple in hindsight, but it's good to understand the process you went through to figure that all out. And yeah, awesome. Well, let's talk about the content hubs that you were building. I'm interested, you know, you spoke about DevOps there and, well, I forget what the other one was, Agile, I think it was. How did you, did you go to like the developers or product team to get the topics? How did you sort of research and ideate all the content that you were creating for these content hubs?

KEVIN: It's a great question. Um, it really came from the product, in terms of what does the product do? Or what does it help people to do? To be fair, you know, like, like agile as a topic that that was invented and started way before I came to Atlassian, I had no doing that, but connecting the product and what it helps teams to do with agile, and then with other topics, you know, after that, That was something that we took a little bit of a bet in. And then we had a lot of super skilled product marketing managers and writers who then created the content for these hubs. And those hubs have very, very high quality of content. you know, at the time, the concept of agile when I was at it last, I mean, we talked about 2016, right, this was the concept of agile was not as default and basic as it was today. Same with things like DevOps and ITSM. So there was a bit of a bet from the company to invest in owning topics that they thought were really important, because they help teams work better and organize themselves in a better way.

MICHAEL: Yeah, great. Love it. Okay. And we've touched on internal linking there. And obviously with a domain like Atlassian, you're making the most of all of the strong backlinks that that domain would accrue naturally. Where did you stand on link building? You know, actually going out and trying to acquire links and, you know, maybe get them coming back to those content hubs and trying to rank them. Was there much of an effort there?

KEVIN: I generally think links are really important. But to be completely honest, we didn't do any link building at Atlassian. I had a link building team at G2, and I had one at Shopify. But Atlassian was just so strong in the software space and the kind of work and team space that we didn't really need backlinks. was, you know, there were slight exceptions, like I was a part of the Slack competitor that then we built. So Atlassian for a long time had a product called HipChat, which is actually pretty cool, had a strong following. And then they realized that Slack was just, you know, on the fast track, getting gaining a lot of market share growing really fast. And there was an effort to rebrand HipChat and kind of, you know, make it the cool competitor to Slack. And we called it Stride. And Stride, you know, as opposed to Slack, The thing is with Stride, it was a brand that was very heavily… that there were lots of other companies for, right? There was stride health, stride universities, stride everything. And so we were, for a while, really struggling to get to, to rank on the first page, and then top results in the first page. And we achieved it in relatively fast time. And it was all through internal link building, we just made sure that from the blog, from the content hubs, wherever it really makes sense, and is appropriate, we linked to stride. And that helped us beat all of these other brands. So And of course, you know, there's always some like PR and marketing that supports the effort as well. It's never just SEO. There's also some, you know, ad campaigns and buzz and whatnot, that helps Google understand, oh, okay, maybe I should rank like everybody's searching for this tried app that don't want stride health or stride university. So should rank that higher, but all that together did the trick. So I think reality is that very, very strong brands, they need minimal link building effort, sometimes none. Whereas, you know, very generic or weaker brands, quote, unquote, might need more link building.

MICHAEL: Okay. All right. And on the internal linking topic there, There's sort of, you know, I guess advice in the SEO world with your content, people might call them content hubs like that, silos, let's say, where they say with your internal linking, you want to keep it within the silo and then not link to other ones, or then other people say you should. With you having such a focus on internal linking, making the most of all that domain equity that you have there, what's your take on that?

KEVIN: I think there's definitely something to it. Not to say that a different approach cannot work, but I had made very great experiences with content hubs that are maybe not 100% siloed, but that have their own digital world if you want to, right? Another brand that by the way, does that is Adobe, they have their they have different content hubs, or microsites for all different products. And if you are if you land on Acrobat, for example, which is about PDFs and signature and signature and whatnot, Then you see blog articles only about that topic and you see tutorials only about that topic and landing pages only about that topic So I think there is a lot to it But there are probably also some counter examples where somebody does something that is much less siloed and concentrated and maybe much broader and that can work as well And that's kind of, you know, another question, because it tickles out the nature of SEO a little bit, where you don't always have this one path that is the one and only way to do it. But you have to take into account that there are many factors that can decide what works and what not. In the case of these more topically siloed content hubs, I think it made it much easier for Google to understand, oh yeah, all the pages are probably relevant for this one key topic. And you can probably also do it in a different way, but then you might have to pay more attention to good backlinks or to some other type of stuff. So there are multiple ways to get there. And this one has worked really well for me.

MICHAEL: Yeah, awesome. So you're touching on what I love about SEO there, which is it's part art, part science, and you've just got to come up with an idea and a hypothesis and then test it and see how you go really in the real world with your site, your unique circumstances.

KEVIN: Exactly, exactly. I love that you mentioned testing. And then you mentioned trying, right, there is, there is this, you know, even in other fields outside of SEO, or even marketing, or even the internet, right, that are very established, there's a lot of trying a lot of like, you know, doing things medicine is no is no different, right? Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying, you know, like, when a medicine doesn't work, I absolutely think it does. But even if you go to a regular doctor, there might be different options of treatment, right? Say, not a doctor, my dad is a doctor, but, you know, say cancer, right? Like, sometimes you have to do surgery, and other times you have to do chemotherapy. So there is even in these very established, non-online, non-techie fields, there's not always this only one route to go. There are often multiple routes. And even doctors might say, okay, we're going to try this treatment. And then if it doesn't work, then we're going to try the next treatment. And I think the exact same applies in SEO, just with the difference that we're not saving lives, we're saving racks.

MICHAEL: That's it. Love it. Okay. Well, let's maybe move on from the Atlassian world. You touched on G2 and Shopify there, and you were doing a bit of link building there. I'm always curious on the link side of things. It's such a polarizing topic in the SEO world. I want to get your idea, like first of all, what do you think when you're doing link outreach, what makes a good link? What are you looking for? And then I want to get into the world of paying for links or not paying for links. So yeah, when it comes to links, what's a good link in your world?

KEVIN: What's a good link? There's one very easy definition, and elegant in my mind, which is that a link that delivers referral traffic is a good link. I think that's kind of the most essential atomic definition of link quality that I've encountered. The challenge is you can only measure that when you are the destination that the link points at. So I think it's fine to use proxy metrics like domain authority, page strength, all that kind of stuff, as long as you know what they truly mean. You don't get hung up on them. But when it comes to measuring the quality of your own links, I think referral traffic is probably the best way to go about it. But there are challenges operationally to set up tracking tracking that, to be honest. When it comes to paying links versus not paying links, I actually think it's fine to pay for links. You don't want to, I think what you have to pay much more attention to is that you're not too aggressive in your link building efforts, you keep the relevance very high, right? So you're not, you're not a car dealer who then gets a link from a recipe site. So don't like don't do those kind of things. But I've seen, I know, I mean, this is a vibrant, like black market, right? backlinks. And I doubt that you can probably some people will agree with me, but I probably wouldn't try to buy links from like the New York Times or the Washington Post, or these like highly established newspapers and publishers, I think you need a much more organic approach or really strong relationships, either of them works, but I think money itself can get you in there. And there might be some people who had different experiences of you know, but for me, that has never worked or been been like feasible. And then when it comes to like link outreach, I actually think that I have an opinion that this becomes less and less efficient. And I'm saying that as somebody I have built an outreach team at G2. And that has worked okay. But we've seen the open rates go down over time, the conversion rates, or how many links we got from from from outreach go down over time. So I think it's just a lever that gets weaker, because everybody on the internet knows now about the importance of links and what it means. In some countries, it's just a transactional thing, right? Like in Latin America, very often, people will right away ask for money, and they expect money, there's no way around paying for links. And then I think in the in the, you know, like in maybe the US, and maybe in Europe as well, there might actually be more opportunities to do really good organic link building by telling really good data stories. Grammarly is a very famous example of a company that has just built amazing links with great data stories. Of course, they had an outreach component, and they had some relationships with journalists. So I guess the question to ask yourself is, when you do outreach, where are you like coming from? Is this is the email sent by, you know, a marketer who has no relationship to the person that they pitch? Or is there isn't a warm handshake? And you know, maybe even like a friendly type of relationship. And so in my mind, relationship, like outbound link buildings is either paying for links, which is fine, or it's really good relationship building.

MICHAEL: Absolutely. Yeah. Another example that always comes to my mind about using data to build links was, uh, during COVID there was a website that sort of tracked all the stats around the world cases and that sort of stuff. And then that was just constantly being used by journalists in their articles or different news sites. So if you can tell a compelling story with your data and package it all up nicely, journalists, you know, they're, they've worked, they're under the pump, they're overworked. So they're going to, leverage that to make articles and then you'll get links on the back of it. So yeah, always a good angle. Totally, totally. All right. Well, you touched on G2 building an outreach team and Shopify G2, you sort of mentioned, you know, teams are 20, 30 plus. I'm curious how you structured those teams. You know, what, how did you break down the functions of SEO and what sort of roles were people working in?

KEVIN: Yeah, great question. So at G2, the way we were structured is we had a technical SEO team with a very large content team of writers and editors. And then we had the link building slash outreach team. This was very straightforward. At Shopify, it was slightly different. And the reason is that they both just have, you know, different business models, and they have different growth mechanics and SEO mechanics. So G2 is an aggregator. Shopify is more of an integrator. There are slight approaches to aggregation, but the nut is built out and essential as with G2. And so at Shopify, the way that I set my SEO teams up was I had five teams. I had a content SEO team, at a technical SEO team, I had an offsite team, a experimentation team, and then an international SEO team. So they structured them and built them based on the levers that really mattered for SEO. And that's what I generally recommend teams to do is to say, okay, or leaders at large companies where you have, you know, like maybe more than five SEO is to say, okay, what, what are the levers that if we pull them, we get more organic traffic, and then structure and build your teams accordingly. So I'm bigger, like on a big proponent of saying that org design has to have a purpose, you know, it's more than just, you know, spending an afternoon and, you know, building a nice picture or something or constellation, but there has to be a goal that you build these teams for.

MICHAEL: Love it. Okay. And when it comes to levers, what were the, what were the most impactful ones that, you know, when you pulled them, you saw the biggest impact.

KEVIN: Yeah. Yeah. You know, um, so for, um, for G2, which is an aggregator, technical SEO is so much more important. And, uh, the website is really an extension of the product essentially. You can even say that the website is the product almost, almost. And so technical SEO is super important. And then all the product decisions, right? Like, what are the critical pieces of information that users want on each page type? How can we make the experience more delightful? Not just talking about, you know, Core Web Vitals or page speed. That's what most SEOs think about user experience. But how easy is it to find the most important information? Is it served to you in just text? Or do you see some charts that help you to put things in the relation and really understand how the information is connected. So you can do all sorts of things to make user experience better. And that were some of our strongest levers at G2. Of course, there's some stuff like internal linking was really important. We did some amazing stuff with title tags, with the on-page content. So of course, we did predominantly SEO stuff. But when you talk about an aggregator, you really have to look at it from a product perspective. At Shopify, on the other hand, levers were very different. We did a lot with blog content, content hubs, programmatic landing pages, some lead generation tools. So since we had to create all the content ourselves, it was a very much more marketing like approach to creating all these pieces of content. And I think the thing that differentiated us the most was that we built a whole tool stack internally. So at Shopify, we built all SEO tools in-house, from Rank Tracker, Sidecrawler, Surfscraper, Log File Analyzer, Keyword Miner, all this kind of stuff, we went and we built it all from scratch.

MICHAEL: Awesome. And why? Why did you build it from scratch?

KEVIN: Why? It was more of a principled decision, to be honest. Shopify is very big on building everything in house. I mean, they have their own kind of confluence or notion like tool, they have their own video streaming service, their own everything that their own game that employees could play, you know, like their own was insane. So they build everything from scratch. And there are also some benefits from building things from scratch, I think, to be completely truthful, I think there are also downsides. But you know, some of the benefits is just that you can build the technology completely proprietary to what you need, and how your CMS works, or how your data lake works, and all that kind of stuff. So the integration is pretty powerful. And you can just build the features that you, you know, you think you should really have. And that allowed us to get to an understanding of what's really happening, the search results, and on our own side, so much faster than our competitors. And I think that allowed us to, to win, you know,

MICHAEL: Very cool. And as I, um, you know, in the SEO team, did you have much, I guess, say in a lot of those products, like Rank Tracker, for example, is that, does that have a product manager and someone building it? Were you as the SEO team involved in the scoping and what you'd love to see in it?

KEVIN: Totally. Yes. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. We were the owner. I was, you know, the owner, owner, owner of the organization. We had engineering teams and they built, I mean with us, right. But we were driving, we're basically the product managers for these tools.

MICHAEL: Brilliant. Okay. Well, sort of on that topic, you've touched at G2, you know, the SEO strategy being product led, I guess. And then over at Shopify, it's more on the marketing side. As a, in general, where do you see the SEO team sitting? Is it like engineering? Is it product? Is it marketing? How, how do you sort of best see it sitting within these types of organizations normally?

KEVIN: Yeah, it's a good question. And today I have like a very, I have much more clarity on that topic, you know, initially, I struggled a little bit with that. And so these days, I think for aggregators, SEO has to sit on a product and for integrators on a marketing. And just simply because if you are not under product, an aggregator, you have no leverage, you have no resources or no way of doing things. To be fair, at G2, When I was there, we sat on a marketing. And then when I left, they put SEO on a product, which was a wise decision. And we made it happen with me under marketing. But we made it happen because we had insanely strong alignment. Because SEO made the majority of revenue, I mean, the absolute majority. And that makes, you know, I don't want to say SEO is everybody's job. But you know, it's like, it's easy to align on goals. But say when you're working at Zillow, and you're in marketing, and I'm just making this completely up right, I don't know how they're structured. But if you're in marketing, right, and you're supposed to optimize city landing pages or category pages, like there's you don't have any leverage, you don't have access to resourcing. So it depends on the business model. And the business model depends on who creates the content from an SEO perspective. And that decides where SEO has to be housed.

MICHAEL: Yep, makes a lot of sense. Okay. Well, um, I want to change pace a little bit here and talk about the growth memo a little, because at the start I touched on, you know, the articles are really in depth, well-researched, interesting, consistent. So it is definitely worth a follow. Thank you. I want to talk about some articles that I've read lately on there because there's something that's very topical at the moment in the SEO world, which is the helpful content update and I guess quality of content and how maybe AI feeds into that. And you did an article recently about how Google's most recent work, they went on a run of back-to-back algorithm updates and it's really leaving no room for quality content. Can you walk through maybe your findings there and what you think is going on with Google at the moment in that regard?

KEVIN: Sure, for sure. So there are basically three big trends at play here that brought us to where we are today. One is that it's easier than ever before to create content, right? Anybody can pick up their phone, create, you know, accounts on social YouTube channel, a website, you know, you can go to Wix Squarespace, you can start your store with Shopify, it's it happens in 30 seconds, and boom, you have a website. That is one thing. The second thing is that Google's resources are limited, they always have been they try to expand them. But in essence, they're they're limited, right, they can only do so much. And then the third big trend that's innate to search is that you only have so many spots on the first page of Google. And I'm saying that a bit hesitantly because there used to be this idea of like top 10 search results, and that is not the case anymore. So maybe we still have the top spots, and they're limited, right? So it's very different than a social network or an entertainment network like TikTok, where you get an experience that is tailored to you. In search, even though there's some personalization on the horizon, There are only so many results. And you put all of these three trends together, and you very quickly come to the conclusion that the bar for what quality means has to raise and has to grow with the amount of content. And Google has to be very, very picky about what they spend their resources on, because the web is way, way larger than what Google can handle, at least according to estimations. And so that's, that's where like these, these three recent updates, it was the helpful content update, the product reviews update, and the core update all within the matter of a couple of weeks and overlapping, which Google said they never would do, which they have then have actually done. That's, that's kind of what a lot of these updates went after, right? So the helpful content update, and the product reviews update, let's start with the helpful content update. So that update really went after sites that that have just a very low quality of content. Sometimes it's like spun content, sometimes it's AI generated content, but it's basically you come to the site, you can already tell by the design, it's terrible, it has like way too many ads. And then the content on is just not very helpful. I saw some sites in my analysis and I wrote about them on my blog article that were basically targeting keywords like, oh, what is one quarter of 15? And then somebody tried to write a painful article about that topic, just to address people who Google that and then get some traffic and show them ads. So that's something that Google just doesn't want to spend their resources anymore. The product reviews update targeted sites that predominantly pretended to have tested and reviewed a product, but actually have not. And that, by the way, hit a lot of larger publishers pretty badly. And so there's also no world anymore where you can pretend to have tested a product and then write about it, but there's actually no evidence that you ever really had the product in your hands or you had it on your computer. And then a core update is just an ongoing version where Google re-evaluates what quality means and what users are really searching for and what sites users are happy with. So again, all that together leaves no room for cutting corners to display more ads or quickly get some search traffic. If you have a business model that depends on organic traffic and on SEO, you really have to go the extra mile to provide something that's way, way better than everything else that's out there. And that's not gonna slow down or go away. Every company has to ask themselves, okay, how is my result? like, first of all, differentiated, and how is it better than everything else out there, right? If you're one of a million people who will sell t shirts on the internet, you know, good luck differentiating yourself. Or if you write about the same topic as everybody else, you got to find a way to stand out from the crowd. And that bar is is continuously raising.

MICHAEL: I can speak from experience in this space. I actually had some affiliate sites that were built based on using an API and it would pull data from the API, but it's the same data that anyone else that wants to do that has. And the sites had tens of thousands of pages and they'd done well for years. But this year, They've slowly but surely been obliterated because it's Google saying, no, we don't have time for that. Our resources are not going into crawling your site, which is similar to anyone else that's doing that same strategy. And you know, if you want to win in that space, you need to, I guess, stack on top of that and build out more value and content in the page because they're the only ones that are going to survive when you commoditize like that, right?

KEVIN: Totally, totally. You already mentioned the keyword here, commodity. I call this type of content commodity content and really means when everybody has the same information and provides the same type of stuff. And as you mentioned, that worked really, really well for a long time. make some good site money. And sometimes you build a living off of that. So, you know, all the power to you. And now you have to, I think, I think there's still there's still versions of that that can work out, you just have to be clever about how you combine different data streams and different inputs into something new, that maybe doesn't exist, that really helps users out, right. So there are all sorts of versions for that. But typically, this is not a weekend project anymore. But maybe, you know, like, like a, a couple months of a weekend project, or maybe you take two full weeks off and build something really amazing. But if you have the technical chops, I think you still can do some of that stuff. But you always have to ask yourself, okay, what can I provide that nobody else has that is actually valuable to users?

MICHAEL: Yeah, yeah, that's the mantra value to the user. If you think in those terms, usually you do all right when it comes to most things in SEO. Yes. So you touched on AI there, which is an interesting topic. You know, there's people creating sites purely in AI, ranking well, making a lot of money from it. There's other sites being blown out of the SERPs. What's your take on AI content?

KEVIN: Yeah, it's funny you bring that up, because I recently had a, you know, a little bit of a discussion on Twitter about that. And, you know, who knows if you should really have any discussion on Twitter. But it's, it's a controversial topic. And here's my stance. I made good experiences with AI content. I have created content with or helped multiple companies to create content and perform really well. And but the thing is that not all content can be created. Well, with AI right now, there's only certain use cases. And that brings us to basically thinking about what are the different functions of content. Sometimes content is the product, right? When you, for example, grow primarily with a blog and you write all the content yourself, the content really is the product. And that type of content, it's really hard to let that be created by machine learning or by AI. But then sometimes there is content that's much more functional, where it just either it describes the main product, in the case of e-commerce, all the description content, that's all much more functional. It's not the main thing. It just helps users to really understand the benefits and value of the main product that they're evaluating. So I think that's where AI can come into play and does come into play. And then the last one is, excuse me, where maybe it's just a very shallow piece of information that users are looking for. Think about like a glossary, right, where they just want a definition of a term. And that's also something that machines can do so much better than humans. I think this is good. I think this is good for humans, too, because who wants to write about, you know, some some boring definition about something you want to, you know, write about, like, really exciting stuff, where you can bring your craft to the table, right? And we can make a difference. So I think there are certain use cases for AI content, I think in this, these use cases, if you do it well, and do it right, it can absolutely rank and there are many, many examples. And I would also even question whether it's good or bad that AI created content. In my mind, all that should count is how good and how valuable that content is. Now, there are some things, maybe many things that I cannot do that humans can do right now. And I think the down, you know, down the line, the best results will come from a combination of AI and humans. Humans will use AI to create much better content much, much faster. But I don't think that humans will have to outsource completely to AI and that there will be no more writers or no more designers.

MICHAEL: Hmm. Yeah, I totally agree with that. Anything, I guess, uh, creative, you know, funny showing a bit of personality. I can't see a point where AI ever is able to do that. Well, not for a long time anyway, but as you say, using it as a tool for the, I guess the lower level stuff that is just soul destroying to do as a writer. Absolutely. It makes sense as long as it, as we say, serves the end user, it's a good experience for the end user, which is what it's all about at the end of the day. Exactly. Well, look, it's been awesome chatting to you today, Kevin. What I like to do with everyone that comes on before we wrap things up is ask the same three questions about SEO, just to see how people think about it. So I'm going to throw to you on these three. The first one is what do you think the most underrated thing in SEO is?

KEVIN: I think the most underrated thing in SEO is to actually invest the time to truly understand what's happening in the search results. I think we spend way too much time behind tools, behind data, and we don't look at the search results enough. And there's actually a ton of stuff that impacts our performance that most people don't even notice. And I'm speaking specifically about SERP features and the layout of the SERPs.

MICHAEL: Okay. And conversely, what do you think the biggest myth in SEO is?

KEVIN: The biggest myth, that's a good one, because there are lots of myths. I think, you know, okay, I'm going to pick one that I know will upset people. I think the biggest myth is that it doesn't matter whether you have, you know, content on a subdomain or subdirectory, or CC tilde, these all these things matter greatly. And I think you can tell whether people actually have experience in a topic or not better based on how they what their argumentation looks like.

MICHAEL: Okay. Yeah, I agree with that one. Okay. Last one. In the SEO world, we're all pretty nerdy by nature. We love our software. We love our tools. But if you had three to get the job done every day, what would you pick?

KEVIN: Three SEO tools. That's a good one. Let me think about something actionable because, you know, like these days, honestly, some of the most tools, the tools that I use the most are Google Docs and Notion to just, you know, communicate and write stuff down and whatnot. But I would say, probably SEMrush, Ahrefs, and let's take Systrix.

MICHAEL: Okay, great. Well, it's been great chatting to you, Kevin. For people that want to get in touch or maybe follow you, where can they go to find out more about you?

KEVIN: Thanks. Yeah, I appreciate the conversation as well. Great questions. We had a lot of fun with this. If you want to learn more about me or follow me, my website is kevin-indig.com. And then on Twitter, I'm at Kevin Indig and on LinkedIn, I'm pretty active as well. Awesome.

MICHAEL: All right. Well, thanks, Kevin. Love chatting to you. Thanks for coming on the SEO show. Likewise.

KEVIN: Thanks so much.