SEO in the Age of AI - with Aidan Shaw, Founder and CEO Myst Marketing

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of BenchMarket, and your host of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show.
Welcome to the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. Today, I am joined by Aidan Shaw, the founder and CEO of Myst Marketing. I'll be talking about SEO, Search Engine Optimization with Aidan, and we'll talk about a few specific topics, including the role in the ROI of SEO in today's environment, SEO versus paid advertising, complimentary partners or foes, the role of content in your SEO strategy, and then the future of SEO, especially in light of all the buzz around AI. Aidan, welcome to the show. Can you take a brief minute to provide an overview of your journey to being my guest?

**Aidan Shaw** (1:21)
Absolutely. Thank you for having me on the show, Ray. My name is Aidan Shaw. I am an SEO guru, been eat, breathe, sleep SEO. That's all I do every day. I own Myst Marketing. We are a innovative SEO company who specializes in AI. I'm using AI to boost the SEO strategy. I've been doing this for about five years now. We really specialize in working with emerging technology, SaaS platforms, more in the advanced technology space.
Just been really passionate about SEO for the last five years, been doing it every day.

**Ray Rike** (1:57)
This is a little bit of a new path for me here at the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. Often we talk about business strategy, go-to-market strategy, the metrics that CEOs and investors use. But this one is a little more tactical but also very strategic. Let's start with the return on investment of SEO. Many businesses are divided about even how to calculate that tangible ROI for SEO. Can you shed some light on potential ROI measurements and how to maybe even increase your SEO investment based on how that ROI figures out?

**Aidan Shaw** (2:32)
Yeah, absolutely.
When you look at SEO, it's one of those longer-term plays. When you're doing SEO, you're not going to see results for about six to eight months even. That's one of those things that strays people away from doing it because they're going to make a massive investment in the beginning and they're not going to see results until later on. But the ROI and the cool thing about SEO is 53% of traffic that's coming through Organic Search is usually converting. The average business usually is driving a lot of sales from Organic Search and they don't even realize it. Looking at your ranking in the top three position of Google, you're getting a massive chunk of that traffic. Whatever it is you're selling, whether it's a product or service, if you're able to get in the top position of those really high intended keywords for your specific product, you're going to get a lot more sales. When people are searching for specific things on Google, they're actually looking to actually buy something and convert, versus a lot of other marketing tactics. They're not as specialized in, hey, we're going to try and make a sale from this. When you're running ads, it's really testing out and seeing if people are going to come and buy something. When someone's actually searching for something, they're out there, they're looking for it, you just need to be found. When you're measuring the ROI of that return, if you look at your lifetime value of one customer, what's it worth? Figuring out the number of your lifetime value and then figuring out, okay, what's it worth to have me on the top position of Google, and having someone actually go in there and a 53 percent conversion on that is huge. Measuring the ROI is one of those things that's very hard to do in the beginning, but once you look at that long-term strategy, it actually starts to make a lot more sense than paying each time for ads.

**Ray Rike** (4:20)
That inherently is going to create this dilemma for CEOs and CFOs who are measuring their investment by sometimes shorter-term things like inbound leads or inbound handraisers, which you can get from organic, but you can also get from paid advertising, and paid often will have a much shorter. Oh, I just spent $20,000 last month and I got 100 leads. So how do you kind of frame that debate on investing more in SEO versus more in paid advertising?

**Aidan Shaw** (4:50)
Yeah, totally. So the biggest difference I would say with paid advertising versus SEO is you're paying, like you said, each month or each week for that specific ad to be run, and they're going to click it and then you're going to pay and they might not convert versus SEO. There's a way higher conversion as well as when you do SEO, you stick. So you run a campaign about months six, you start seeing those results, you're on the page one of Google, you're going to stick there. Say you stopped paying for SEO, say you stopped doing any sort of SEO, you're still going to be up there. So it's not like you have to keep paying for these big campaigns each month and having to pay a lot to get that traffic. You're still going to get that traffic without actually doing anything. And it's a lot higher quality traffic because, like I said, in that first question you asked, people are actually going on. They're searching for that and they have intent of actually buying something.