My Interview on the SEO Unscripted podcast

I recently had the privilege to be on the SEO Unscripted podcast. Your can listen to it here: https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/from-newspapers-to-neural-networks-matt-bailey-on-30-years-of-digital-marketing-evolution

What follows is a transcript/article from the podcast, but I highly encourage you to go listen to it!

-Matt

---

The Unscripted SEO Podcast Interview

Jeremy Rivera: Hello, I’m Jeremy Rivera, your Unscripted SEO Podcast host. I’m here with Matt Bailey. Give me an introduction to yourself focusing on your credentials, your experience that’s led up to this moment in time.

Matt Bailey: Thank you, Jeremy. I appreciate it. Yeah, I started developing websites around 1995, ’96. I was working in real estate at that time. Funny enough, I had a journalism background, but what it taught me is that I don’t want to do journalism. But it also taught me how to lay out a page, headline, subheading, bullet points, how to arrange content on a page for quick and easy consumption of information.

Taking those design skills, that’s how I started building websites, primarily for electronic version of a printed page. Not realizing that the markup that you use to do that is exactly what worked with search engines. Now it was prior to Google, so I got into resubmitting pages all night long to get the rankings in AltaVista.

But once Google came along, it was very quickly, you know, just seeing how those pages that were developed a certain way performed well, and just putting one and one equals two—here’s how the content algorithm works, and then building from there.

The Evolution: From Real Estate to SEO

So then you just start to add different skills. For example, like I said, I was doing real estate. So my interest is in selling these properties that we’re putting on the website, and then it’s developing how to deal with customers, how to prioritize work.

One night I’m sitting there saying, what can I do on the website that will have the biggest impact? And I didn’t have an answer. So I had to learn analytics. I started with Web Trends. And if anyone has ever dealt with Web Trends, you set it up and then you let it run for a day, and then you realize if your setup’s right or wrong. And then you might have to do it again. It was one of those trial and error moments.

But that’s how I learned analytics and then learning how analytics play into a B2B lead generation system. From there, it’s just adding on additional skills. And you know, in the late ’90s, early 2000s, all I had to do was tell an ad agency that I knew SEO and I was hired. It was a quick transition.

I’m from the Midwest, and everywhere you look it’s B2B, B2B industrial, B2B services. And so that’s where I learned how to do a lot of this and integrate it with additional marketing, larger campaigns. That’s where you start developing the UX UI skills. That’s where you start looking at conversion optimization, and just building more and more from there.

Building Departments and Starting SiteLogic

So it just grew working at a couple of different agencies. At two different agencies, I built the SEO and digital marketing departments. And then, you know, went from one agency to the next agency until finally, you know, you get that sense of, wait, I’ve done this for two other people. I think I can do this for myself.

Jeremy Rivera: Yeah, you gotta start earning for yourself.

Matt Bailey: Exactly. That’s how businesses start. So in 2006, I started SiteLogic. At that time, we were more of a client services and I didn’t want to get into development of websites. This is where we’re gonna hit our sweet spot and it’s the marketing of websites, the auditing, marketing and promotion of those websites.

About 2015, 2016, I had also developed another business of teaching and training. So I was working with a direct marketing association, travel associations and automotive associations. And I was traveling and speaking to their audiences and their businesses about how to do these things.

And so I had to make a choice. Do I go the agency route or do I do the training route? Because both were highly demanding of my time. So around 2015, 2016, turned SiteLogic into a training company.

The OMCP and Educational Contributions

I was also working with a company called Market Motive. Out of Market Motive, that developed what is now the OMCP, which is the Online Marketing Certified Professional Organization. And they’re a third party certification organization of digital skills.

And so heavily involved in defining what are the—you know, what makes an SEO? What does an SEO have to know? What are the competencies of an SEO? And worked with the organization to define those competencies. And then also, how do you test for that? So that’s my contribution with the OMCP and still work with them now today and align all my training materials to those defined competencies there.

Then also, I went back to school and got a degree in instructional design to figure out how to take 30 years of digital marketing and how do you teach it according to educational pedagogy. And now I’m actually working on my master’s degree in digital marketing so that I can teach undergraduate, because our education system is a little tricky when it comes to degrees and qualifications.

The Education Problem in SEO

Jeremy Rivera: I have a run into the educational conundrum when it comes to SEO in a couple of phases. You know, I worked with Ross Jones and Michael McDougald who were interfacing with the universities in Nashville and they wanted to have trained professionals come in and speak at their marketing classes. So that led to me kind of auditing the class and realizing, you’re kind of maybe eight years behind where we are right now in SEO.

But I’m going to say that in the friendliest way possible because I’m not actually sure that with SEO that it is plausible to keep the pedagogy, as you call it, of a university up to date, cutting edge.

What are your thoughts on the pace of change and trends versus creating educational materials that are going to be worth the bang for the buck? Anybody going to university is paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to be there. So how do you ensure that what they learn is going to help them once they actually get their degree?

Matt Bailey: That is a great, great question. And I’ve worked with training organizations for years now—LinkedIn, Simply Learn, Udemy, Udacity, you name the training organization. I’ve worked with them to create training materials. And I’m very upfront with them when they say they want a course on SEO. I tell them the most amount of shelf life you’re gonna get is probably 18 to 24 months.

And if you don’t have a plan to update this course within that 18 to 24 month period, you’re going to have an outdated course. LinkedIn is typically very good about recognizing that any courses that I’ve done for them, around that 18 month or 24 month period, we’re looking at, okay, what needs to be updated? What needs to be revised?

There are a lot of SEO educational providers out there that have content that’s probably bordering on 10 to 15 years old. And it’s out there, it’s published, they’re still selling it. And I’m not gonna name names, but when you’re involved in this, that’s the danger of it.

The Metaverse Textbook Problem

From a university perspective, from an undergraduate perspective, this is where enabling undergrads to get into some of the mini graduate courses where workshops or experts coming in and providing that—here’s what’s happening in this industry, here’s how we do this—the problem is a lot of it is education itself.

For example, I taught an undergraduate class last semester. The textbook for an intro to marketing course was only a year and a half old, but there was a whole chapter on how the metaverse is going to change marketing. And so even within just not SEO, the textbook itself was already out of date.

And then you look at the authors of the book and they’re all PhDs in marketing who have never had a marketing job. They are—you look at their bios and they have consulted with companies, which tells me you’ve never dealt with the politics. You can have the skills, but you gotta deal with politics. You’ve gotta get ideas sold internally. You’ve got to adapt things and you’ve gotta play the game that you can do six of the 10 things you want because the IT staff doesn’t want to do that.

From an SEO perspective, it’s not just SEO, it’s many, many subjects suffer from—and I say this in the kindest way possible—academia. And that’s just the way academia has been structured. And in academia, they’re starting to ask the right questions. So that’s where we’re at there.

The Red Tape Reality

Jeremy Rivera: That makes sense. You know, Michael McDougald of Right Thing SEO Agency says, the most expensive thing in SEO is red tape, especially when it comes to the enterprise level. And I’ve experienced it personally. I worked with HCA and it was a relatively small project. I needed to edit 10 pages as a subcontractor for a subcontractor of an agency.

I had to take a drug test—a drug test—go to their campus, use their laptop, get three sign-ons, then sit in a room with a security guard to monitor that I didn’t run off with their secured laptop to edit 10 pages.

Matt Bailey: Yep. It’s absolutely insane.

The Evergreen Principles of SEO

Jeremy Rivera: I love having somebody on who has been in the game for longer than I have. I started in 2007. And already I’ve seen cycle after cycle where this newfangled thing comes out and SEO is dead and everybody buys into it. All of the articles talk about it.

Mobile-first results is going to kill it. Voice search is going to kill it. We had a huge problem with HCU when it first came out. And now it seems like we’re on the tail end of the boy who cried wolf, the zombie boy who is constantly devoured by the wolf and comes back.

I’m curious from your perspective, from 1995 to now, I know that SEO is going to be dead again in two years. It’ll be a newfangled thing. Something will come out. What are the through lines that have been true then, are true now, and will be true in 10 years when it comes to optimization, when it comes to SEO?

Matt Bailey: I love that question, Jeremy. That is the question. And I think that when you ask that question, you’re naturally defining what has always worked versus tactics. And I call them tactics that come and go.

Why “SEO” Needs to Change

I’m one who advocates that we need to change this from SEO to something else. I have never liked the term SEO, search engine optimization, because what are you truly optimizing?

Ideally, you’re optimizing for visitors, you’re optimizing for their conversion, you are optimizing for their engagement. And so those are the skills and those are the aspects that to me have always been there.

I absolutely love that question because you are necessarily putting a split into what we define as SEO. In fact, I’ve never liked the term SEO because it implies that the only thing you care about is the search engine.

I go back to my early experience, which I just talked about. I built websites as if I was creating a newspaper page. The layout, the readability, the content, that’s never changed.

Tactics Come and Go

And so yeah, the early days we played around with doorway pages, and some of those things—I remember, I won’t say arguing, we debated about for many, many years, which tactics are too aggressive, which are the black hat tactics. I had good friends that did black hat, but part of it is because of the type of clients they had. They dealt mainly with affiliates. They dealt mainly with Forex trading or Viagra.

My clients weren’t like that. My clients were B2B lead generation clients where I couldn’t take those risks. And so it was content. It was PR. It was building links with associated businesses. And so those skills are evergreen.

When you know the content and when you can work within the site to increase the conversion—I always say that after learning SEO, if you’re not learning conversion optimization, you’ve lost the game because that’s where you really maximize what you’ve done.

So to me, those are the things that have never changed. Whereas you can list the tactics in a book of things that have come and gone. And so when people say SEO is dead, I interpret that as the old tactics are dead because writing content, engaging content, content that reaches visitors, that answers our questions, that converts them into customers, those are the evergreen skills.

The Holistic Webmaster Approach

Jeremy Rivera: I agree and there’s also a blindness that I always like to point out. This is what Matt Brooks over at SEOteric and I dish about on a regular basis—what you do with your traffic that arrives on your site is as important as how you got them there to begin with.

And in handing off the keys to the kingdom and saying, no, no, no, social media traffic is coming from this bucket, so the social media manager needs to manage those pages. And no, no, no, the paid guys, yeah, they can control this set of pages. And no, no, no, SEO can only publish to the blog and our brand managers, no, no, no, they only can manage these pages on the site. No.

Check the whole thing out. Let’s go back to 1998 and reestablish ourselves as webmasters. Let’s look at this holistically and say, I am in charge of the site. I am going to optimize all of this traffic because there are crossover opportunities at every door.

Email sends can lead to branded search. Email sends can lead to organic social media activity. Organic social media activity can lead to website traffic, which leads to newsletter conversions, which leads to email traffic, which then needs to still be converted.

The 2010-2020 Comfort Zone

So if you have siloed—the problem is that I think that we got too comfortable from 2010 to 2020 when there was so much traffic available through Google that we could just say, yeah, you know what? I don’t need to be cross-disciplined. I don’t need to talk to the email guys. I don’t want to talk to the PPC guys. I don’t need to talk to the social media guys.

I can just publish blog posts and get backlinks and get all of the traffic that the CEO is going to be happy about and claim value from all of those other secondary channels boosting it. Yes, ignore the fact that we spent $20,000 on radio and video ads that then drove huge brand traffic.

No, we don’t even look at brand traffic. We only care about non-branded traffic. Why? Why was that ever a thing that you’re ignoring the singular signal that attaches to the market awareness of your business and industry just because you can’t control it by publishing a blog, a singular blog post that you can tailor and bring links to? No, that’s madness.

Matt Bailey: Yeah. What’s interesting too is the OMCP, the organization I talked about earlier, has done a lot of job delineation studies. And it’s interesting that SEOs have more of a track towards management and leadership than other disciplines like social media, email, or paid.

Because they have their fingers in all these different areas, they understand how they work, how they integrate, how to measure them. And so as a result, they are much more adept at moving up into leadership because they’ve already been corralling everyone together.

And so if you’ve been taking advantage of those relationships, it actually enhances your upward mobility more than any other responsibility in that digital marketing realm.

Specialization vs. Multi-Discipline

Jeremy Rivera: I’m curious how your experience has played out sorting by vertical. Have you found a significant difference if I’m consulting with, you know, an e-commerce company selling a niche product versus B2B and lead generation? Is there bifurcation there that’s significant enough or should every SEO try to be multi-discipline?

Matt Bailey: That’s one thing I absolutely loved about agency work is having multiple types of clients because, like I said, in my years were B2B, lead generation. And so you learn what works and then all of a sudden, you get an e-commerce client and it’s nice to have someone who’s worked with e-commerce because it does require additional UX UI skills, requires someone who understands more database work.

But early 2000s, that’s just something we had to figure out ourselves. But when you can then show up somewhere and say, yeah, I’ve worked in B2B, Lead Gen, I’ve worked in e-commerce, I’ve worked in publishing, I’ve worked in different areas like that, I’ve worked with affiliate, because that’s a whole other realm there that each requires different levels of skills.

That’s why I love the agency experience, because it exposes you to so much more. And then what you do with that is completely up to you. You can consult in different areas. I found that having that background enabled me to bounce back and forth pretty easily between travel, automotive—which I consider more lead gen, sometimes it’s e-commerce—but also in advertising, brand work, things like that, really enables you to bounce in between those fairly easily.

The AI Elephant in the Room

Jeremy Rivera: All right, well, let’s go to the elephant in the room, the thought in every SEO’s back of their head. The tiger in the CEO’s office that says, AI, AI this, AI that, ChatGPT, we need GEO, we need AI SEO, we don’t need to invest in an SEO budget anymore.

There were three different Reddit threads that I saw where SEOs lost their job because the CEO had determined SEO is no longer relevant. And they need to stop doing SEO. Instead, they need to start making content and get articles placed so that these LLM bots can find these articles and mentions and links.

There’s an inherent irony to me in that, but I’m curious what’s your take on—obviously we’re kind of diagnosing this time what it is that killed SEO, but really what is—it is true that LLMs have been a part of SEO since 2010, 2015. I used Jarvis before they had to rename it because of copyright and Iron Man. And it’s now Jasper.

But we used content spinners. I’m sure you remember those tools in 2005, the 2005 era. So there have always been these things that help you create more content. But what do you see as the bigger impact of these types of tools? Both in the hands of SEOs and on the general marketplace and on the psyche of those stakeholders who have to approve budgets.

SEO Still Works—Even on LLMs

Matt Bailey: Yeah, yeah. First, like here’s the first point. SEO works. It still works. In fact, SEO works on LLMs. They look at the same things and honestly, LLMs are like early search engines. It’s almost like pre-Google search right now with the LLMs.

What amazes me is how many companies are jumping on the “we can track your visibility in LLMs,” which blows my mind because even if two people on ChatGPT give the same prompt, they’re gonna get different answers. So how are you tracking the prompt? How are you tracking how it responds other than, basically we’re back to doing rank checking in that kind of scenario.

We’re back to rank checking and it’s all based on how are you developing the prompt? But then you’ve got to think like, the millions of people that are asking different ways. It’s a lot of shiny objects right now. A ton of shiny objects.

Basic, good, well done SEO works. And I’m gonna also caveat that with good marketing works. You have to have SEO with good marketing and that is dependent upon a clear strategy.

The Strategy Problem

And most of the businesses that I talk to—I still do some consulting once in a while, I still have some clients—but when I talk to a business and when they are enthralled by the bright shiny thing of AI, usually what I find is they don’t have a clear strategy.

They don’t have a clear understanding of what they’re trying to accomplish, how they’re going to accomplish it, what’s going to be the process by which they do this. One company I talked with didn’t even have a CRM in place and they’re looking at AI to generate leads and generate content for their website.

And I’m like, but you don’t have a CRM, you don’t have a process. You don’t have anything on the backend to take care of what you want to do in the front end. And this unfortunately is the type of thinking that makes these things just take off.

The Cycle of Shiny Objects

It’s—we saw this with the metaverse, we saw this with NFTs, we saw this with big data, we saw that—let’s just keep going down the list. Everyone sees this shiny object and they think it’s going to answer all their problems, it’s going to save their business.

And unfortunately, if you don’t have clear strategy that drives your marketing and your marketing decisions, you’re going to lose. And unfortunately, the downside of this with AI, I think it’s going to take a lot longer to realize the losses because if you’re firing people because AI can write articles, boy.

It’s led to a dramatic increase of slop. You know, before we had scrapers, scraping content, reconfiguring it, and it would be gobbledygook, and sometimes it would work. Well, now, the LLM has essentially scraped the content that it’s learned from. And now it’s pushing out average content.

The AI Slop Problem

A site that I looked at the other day that someone asked me to look at, their blog was 90% AI generated pages. And I consider myself a high level AI user, but I don’t think it would take me to figure that out. You just need to look at their pages and you can see it. And the blog doesn’t perform well. It’s generic.

And so AI can’t create something new. It can’t create—and you can feed it. You can create your own GPT or whatever, those things help. But from a strategic standpoint, if all you’re using it is to pump out volumes of content, great, use it.

If you want strategic approach through a system, then you’re gonna need someone to direct that. Especially if you have a purpose for branding, a purpose for reaching your audience and converting them into users and all the back office things that go with that, you need people to manage that.

That is not something a machine can do effectively yet. Nor do I think we’re gonna see it too soon.

Conversion: The End Game

Jeremy Rivera: One thing for sure that I know that AI and LLMs can’t do is make the types of edits to the site that is going to positively impact conversion rate. And as good as some of these tools might be getting, there are still things that are going to move the needle.

What are some of the things that you put into your best practices that are at that end point? What are you thinking about? How do you talk to your clients about conversions, about leads, about best practices? Some hands-on tactical examples would be great.

The Seven Strategic Questions

Matt Bailey: Great, yeah. Well, and that’s where I like to start that conversation from that strategic branding standpoint. I’ve got seven questions that I work everyone through, starting with:

Who are you, what’s your objective?

Let’s just start there because I need to know that. And that is, you as the business or you as the decision maker, those two questions are your responsibility. You are telling me who the brand is, what the personality of the brand is, the tone of the brand, and here’s your objective.

Now I can take that and now I can do the research. Who’s the audience? Who are our different audience segments? Do I need to modify messaging to those segments? And if so, do I need to reach those audiences differently?

Beyond Tactics

And that’s what I find is the majority of marketing or I will say even the SEO industry, when they start talking to someone, they’re immediately jumping into tactics. What channel, what social media, how often are we going to post and when are we going to post and all that?

And they forget to have the conversation at the front end, which is who are our audiences? What do they need? Where are they? Is our message good enough? Do we differentiate ourselves from the competition? And are we doing a good job in communicating that to them?

That’s the foundation that we need to work from. And those are some things that LLMs are not great at. So it requires that planning and how are we going to make this happen? Developing that framework, developing that plan, then moving that out.

The Microsoft Example

I worked with Microsoft Worldwide Education for about five years, going to different Microsoft offices and working with their marketing teams, their operations teams. And one of the great examples we had there is when I would ask them, who’s your target customer?

And we would talk about the small business owner. And so like dealing with someone who—we’re going to sell them Microsoft Office. We’re going to sell them the Office Suite. And I would ask them, OK, now, what do they need?

And invariably that myopia would take over. “Oh, they need a full service suite that integrates all of their content and”—and they’re describing Word and Excel and the full service single suite and stores their information.

I’m like, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa. That’s not what a small to medium sized business owner wants. What they want is to make payroll. They want to be more efficient and spend less time at the office. They want their people to be able to accomplish more.

And until you change your language to those needs, they’re going to dismiss you because—and that’s a lot of it is what is the need and how does our product fit that need rather than just coming in with the product sledgehammer.

The “Enterprise Solutions” Problem

“You need a one size fits all, comprehensive solution.” As soon as you hear words like that, and you know from an SEO perspective, how many times is “enterprise solutions” overused? And it doesn’t mean anything. It’s a nonsense phrase.

Those are the areas where I love working with companies in that—you have got to change your language. As my grandmother would say, you have got to change your language because it doesn’t resonate with your audience. You’re not meeting their need. You are hammering your brand attributes expecting them to see the connection and they don’t.

The “Which Is Your Copy?” Test

Jeremy Rivera: I’ve done a number of audits where I copied the text off of their homepage and off a competitor’s homepage or a website from another brand that did something totally different and said, which is your copy?

Because you excel at customer service, but so does this guy. And you do restaurant rebrands and he is an industrial carpenter. So your pretty sounding sales phrases mean jack to readers, to SEOs and to LLMs.

One of my interviewees said, ChatGPT is your least trained customer service representative. So you need to, for them, for SEO, and for your readers, for your site, take a second cut and look at what you are doing to support your business with the content you develop.

Removing Friction Down the Funnel

Are you providing the sample shop drawings for your precast concrete firewalls that your construction teams are going to put in their RFPs to the county? No? Well, they need to do that to get the bid. You’re leaving that out there. You’re going have them have to make that up. They’re going go to somebody else that provides that for them.

If you’re not thinking about the friction down the funnel that’s going to prevent the sale, then you’re not leveraging your capability to have a website correctly.

Because that’s what it’s really about in my opinion—you have a fantastic tool, a portal, an address where people who are clients or potential clients can get information. You don’t have to mail them a book. They don’t need to be physically speaking to somebody one-on-one. You have an incredible opportunity.

And that’s why I think the power of digital marketing budgets are still increasing by billions of dollars every year. And a huge part of that will continue to be forever spend on SEO, but should be considered part of your marketing strategy. How do we use this tool to its best capability?

The Positive Side of AI

Matt Bailey: Absolutely. And that’s what I’m seeing with AI. What I would say the overall effect of AI, the positive effect is from one standpoint, from an SEO standpoint, I am seeing some content be so much better written, so much more in depth, answering real questions.

When I start seeing SEOs publishing like, “here’s the template that works,” I’m like, yeah, that template was 20 years old. It’s being in depth. It’s the question answer. It’s yes, you’re being found for the questions people are asking.

And if you haven’t been researching what those questions are for the past 20 years, welcome to the party, because this is what AI is helping you to do is understand those questions a little bit more.

AI as a Thousand Interns

You say it’s like the least qualified customer service rep. AI is like having a thousand interns. They could do it speedy, but it still required someone to knock off the edges, clarify, add some better writing and get it there.

So in some ways, we worked on a site just a couple of months ago, just basically rewriting all of their content because it was so thin. Now we used AI to help, but 30% of the project is keyword research.

And it’s not just to find the keywords to rank for. It’s what are people asking? How do they formulate their questions? What words do they use in their questions? How do you organize what people want and how do you translate that into answering their questions?

And so then developing that, but also in the tone and the personality of that brand that highlights their distinctive characteristics. And yeah, instead of saying we have great customer service, we’re defining what that means.

Here is how our customer service works and why people like it, and then list specifics of that because, like you said, the generalities don’t work. And so this gives you the chance to define it. And when you do, it works great in AI and it works great in Google.

Where to Find Matt Bailey

Jeremy Rivera: Love it. I was trying to wrap up, let people know where they can find you if they want to have a conversation, if there’s any resources that you’ve been building that are helpful for particular people. Go ahead and shout that out and we’ll make sure it gets added to the show notes.

Matt Bailey: Thank you, Jeremy. I appreciate it. You can find me at sitelogic.com

And then also I have a learning site at learn.sitelogic.com and there I offer online courses in:

• Content marketing
• SEO analytics
• How to present analytics
• How to do customer research
• How to do in-depth keyword research
• Market research

And these are all coached courses. I’m not looking to get a thousand people in these courses. I want five.

Because I’m gonna personally walk you through each course. I’m gonna assess your—you get hands-on assignments. I’m gonna give you personal feedback. These are coached courses with real world activities that are taken from my agency work.

And so at the end, you’ve got a portfolio, you understand what’s happening through one-on-one hands-on coaching as you go through those courses.