DN #8: The Future of AI SEO: How to Rank in ChatGPT (w/ Chris Tweten)

Niklas:Hi and a huge welcome to you, my lovely listeners. So glad you're here. Today you're joining me for a chat with Chris. Chris is co-founder and CMO of Spacebar Collective, a leading CEO agency specializing in helping AISAS and B2B enterprises achieve predictable growth through advanced content and search strategies. Hi, Chris. So lovely to have you.

Chris Tweten:Hey, thanks for having me on here. I appreciate the invite.

Niklas:Yeah, really awesome. And it's a great topic because I think a lot of founders struggle with growth and SEO is a very specific area of growth that is also changing quite fast. So what is special about SEO maybe as a start?

Chris Tweten:Well, one of the best things about it is once you're ranking in the top position, basically you're going to stick around that top position. You're not paying for additional cost per click or anything like that. Like if you were doing pay-per-click ads and you turn it off, well, that's the end of your growth. But with SEO, ⁓ it compounds over time.

Niklas:This is really great. And how did you end up in this space? You co-founded the spacebar collective. What is it and how did you get there?

Chris Tweten:Yeah, so I've been in marketing for about a decade, a bit over, and I've touched SEO in the past. I've done like travel industry SEO at a previous agency. But B2B SaaS has been what's most consistent for me in my career. I co-founded this out of necessity with my wife during COVID. We needed something to go on. I was working at a previous startup before that as a CMO, and we were using SEO to drive science. up pretty well, doubled their MRR in about nine months and then we basically the marketing team got gutted so we needed to find something new and ⁓ SEO seemed to be the hot spot for us.

Niklas:So, and I think SEO is something for AI founders when they start, you might, you have different ways of early stage outreach. SEO is not the fastest. SEO means usually building up a ranking in Google. How does it actually work? How do you end up in the first place in Google and how long will it take? Like if you get there.

Chris Tweten:Right. Yeah, it really depends on the actual niche you're in, whatever ⁓ category of software your SaaS is in, or AI or whatever it is. ⁓ But basically, the more websites that refer to your website as a trusted source that Google already trusts, they're going to pass on some of that equity towards your site. say we did, I don't know, say you were in the ⁓ HR software space. and all of a sudden a lot of HR blogs are writing about your software or mentioning your blog or content that you've written. Google is gonna see that and they'll begin to trust you. Now, the time it takes to actually get lift on SEO as a growth channel is gonna depend on the competitiveness of your niche. So the more backlinks that a company has or a competitor has, the longer it's gonna take for you to catch up because there's a gap there in authority. But if you're in a relatively new space like an AI SaaS, you can rank a lot quicker usually because these aren't established markets. ⁓ found that we work with a lot of AI-based companies or AI-powered companies, whether that's in hardware or software. And we're able to rank for competitive keywords in just a matter of months. Usually six months is like the sweet spot range where the winds start compounding and like adding up.

Niklas:And what's different if you have ZAS versus other industries? Is there a difference in CEO and also the effect of it?

Chris Tweten:⁓ It's kind of like e-commerce actually, so when you have e-commerce you have really define conversions. So it makes sense. Like in e-commerce, you're selling product, but in SaaS, you're selling ⁓ subscriptions. So the conversion and like investment factor of like our efforts actually working is very well defined compared to other niches. Like say if you were in the, I don't know, the nonprofit sector, your success might look like donations or it might look like brand awareness instead of conversions. ⁓ We have the most experience. in SaaS just because it's a field we're familiar with. So in terms of strategy, it doesn't change too much. There are opportunities that are SaaS specific. So ⁓ when you're building out citations or ⁓ getting listed in business directories, there's a lot of SaaS specific and AI specific websites that you can get listed on, which is nice so that it helps your lift in the short run. ⁓ In terms of strategy on content, it's all about being bottom of funnel and trying to create content that is going to convert to sales. ⁓ not too dissimilar to e-commerce, but there are similarities as well.

Niklas:What can I imagine if I think about content that converts basically? What would it be?

Chris Tweten:It would be like... ⁓ listing out alternatives to your competitors and positioning yourself strategically. So not necessarily being completely biased towards your own product. But if you build out say an alternatives article and you're like positioning yourself as the best alternative to I don't know HubSpot or something for a specific niche say it was for accountants or lawyers. ⁓ You're gonna get conversions that way because people read it and you're basically doing their ⁓ buying journey research for them. Another type of content that we convert is just doing like listicle that's best of whatever category software it is ⁓ or comparisons. So comparisons are really good for conversions because people are already deciding between two products, yours and another when they're searching. So in the case of, I don't know, it could be comparing yourself to a competitor and giving the real nitty gritty on what makes you better than the competitor, what makes the competitor better than you. for different niches and if they fit within a niche that it makes sense for the purchase, then they're gonna convert.

Niklas:This is really interesting. So you would probably share some kind of blog post or something that positioned you as the thought leader or generally as a leader in that space. And how does this then get visibility? How does it work?

Chris Tweten:Yeah, so people are already searching for alternatives. They're searching for comparisons. They're searching for buyer's guides. ⁓ Generally speaking, this is the bottom of funnel content that you can tackle at the very start of an SEO campaign because it's sure to convert. And ⁓ the competitiveness compared to ranking for your category of software. Say you were in the referral marketing space, which is the startup I was at previously. We ranked for referral program software and referral marketing. software but that took quite a bit of time it took nine months ⁓ but we were able to rank for alternatives pages and buyers guides and for comparison articles maybe you're in the three-month mark so it people are already searching for it and the competitiveness isn't as strong so ⁓ it's a good short-term win to tackle

Niklas:And I have heard that a lot that it takes a little more time, but once it works, it works nicely and you don't have the ad spend anymore. So probably 90 days, not enough. When did you feel, when do you feel it really kicks in and Google starts to recognize something new and users that does see how much time do you need to invest in the first place?

Chris Tweten:Yeah, so I mean six months is the bare minimum to see any kind of measurable lift, but usually SEO results compound over the years. So if you're looking at it as a growth channel in the long run, compared to paid ads or social media or whatever it is, every year that you do SEO, it's going to get better and better and better. we had a campaign for B2B SaaS. and it was a campaign for four years and we saw them get most of their conversions in year three and four. Not to say year one and two weren't good, but it was just much stronger. So even year one, after one year, ⁓ cost per acquisition was much lower than their paid channels. ⁓ But... Yeah, it compounded so the volume was like much higher in year three and four, but the cost per acquisition was still relatively low in the first year.

Niklas:And I think there's then the big elephant in the room these days. It's always Gen.ai. I think the world changed a bit with GPT-3 back in the day, 3.5 since GPT-4. I would say text is very good. ⁓ What do you see there as a change?

Chris Tweten:Yep. Yeah, GPT has, ⁓ well, LLMs in general have changed the marketplace quite a bit. It's kind of leveling out the playing field. It's making it easier and more accessible for people to produce content on ⁓ a cheaper budget. ⁓ It's basically like... It's made it so that more creative minds can win in SEO. So if you're more creative than someone else using AI, your content is sure to rank. And when I say more creative, mean more creative angles, more creative ways to satisfy search intent. So that's the main thing, search intent. that's basically if someone searches something, what are they actually meaning when they search for it? Now, what that looks like is very different on a niche to niche case or even a keyword. keyword case but if you were to search for say ⁓ I don't know, recruitment software, and you see that a lot of the articles or a lot of the pages are not listicles, they're not product pages, but they're comparison pages, then it's probably best that you write a comparison page. And if you use AI to do that, to lower your cost, I mean, it can help. ⁓ But generally speaking, AI has just leveled up the playing field to make it so ⁓ smaller companies can compete with larger companies a lot easier.

Niklas:Yeah, that's also my feeling in a lot of the space. So if it gets easier and more accessible in a competitive market, you probably need to put your energy elsewhere to outrank or outplay the other ones. I think it's always been about putting more effort in. Maybe you can, as there's a chance for a while to kind of catch up with this as a smaller company with a smaller budget, but also the larger players will adapt the tools and then play the same. game that you would play as a smaller one. ⁓ AI tools and ethic. How would somebody use this ethically in CEO generation? I think we see a lot of bands currently on X, for example, for people using AI reply tools. ⁓ What to do and what not to do.

Chris Tweten:Yeah, so it's a great question. The main thing I would say is like, as long as you're using it creatively or using AI to provide value instead of trying to, I guess, game the system or game the algorithm, you're in the clear. ⁓ One thing I think is really underutilized right now in AI and SEO is to use it to create unique data points or charts or tables, that kind of thing. In the past, you would need someone to manually code a comparison chart or a pricing chart or anything like that. or like a pygraph to create custom graphics for a blog to visualize data. This can be used pretty easily and much easier than even inserting a chart into an Excel spreadsheet or a Google Sheet. because you can customize things without having to actually know the process. Personally, I don't really code. So when we create content, we'll use AI to generate comparison tables and yeah, that sort of thing.

Niklas:I think it, so for me, it has made my life a lot easier. For example, if I look at a new idea, I would just throw it in GME night, deep research, get 15 pages on it. And then through this into another tool, I've built a small one that can convert it into an audio book. And then I take it to the gym and listen to it during a gym session. And then I continue thinking about it. So I think there are a lot of tools that just make your life so much easier in that space.

Chris Tweten:Yep.

Niklas:Um, also content production, I think got a lot easier, especially on the video side. How was it with video? Does it also work like CEO? really have no clue.

Chris Tweten:Yeah, mean, video does help because it's... I feel like SEO is being rewarded right now by content that is higher ⁓ effort to produce and higher ⁓ barrier to entry. So if you produce a video and say embed a YouTube video into a blog article, ⁓ you will be rewarded in some way. it is a competitive advantage. And then on the opposite end of the spectrum, if you were to take that same blog and put it in your YouTube description, that YouTube video might perform better on YouTube as well.

Niklas:That's really interesting. So there is a cross link between Google and YouTube.

Chris Tweten:For sure, yeah. And YouTube videos are ranking in Google results as well. So if you wanted to tackle a specific keyword and you did a video on that keyword as well as a blog article and combine them together, your efforts are gonna compound.

Niklas:How is it with links and YouTube descriptions? I've never thought about this. Do they count as a backlink?

Chris Tweten:it does, but not in the traditional sense. like basically if It's considered a user generated content link ⁓ and it's a no follow which means it passes less link equity. Basically, the easier it is for anyone to create a backlink, the less powerful it is. So anyone can create a YouTube video, anyone can edit a YouTube description, so it's not going to pass on much link equity. But if that video is getting a decent amount of views and it ranks well in YouTube, ⁓ then it's going to pass on some equity. It's not going to be powerful. or anything like that, like really move the needle, but you know, backlinks are, they add up.

Niklas:think that helps to understand how Google actually worked. The big invention with Google was that it ranked sites by relevance. And relevance is largely how many other important sites link to your site. This is the fundamentals of the Google algorithm. It's more complex, but simplified. It's this. So if you have very trustworthy, well-known sources pointing. your site you'll get more traffic and more views because you rank higher in Google. think that's basic of SEO.

Chris Tweten:Yeah, I would agree. And actually, like keeping things simple like that is how we've been operating at Spacebar Collective. ⁓ We try to execute on fundamentals really well and then do them at scale. ⁓ building out content that people want to read and content that actually converts to sales and then producing guest blog content to build backlinks from trusted sources and doing that at a high level.

Niklas:There are a lot of these like launchpad sites out there and I was always wondering how much is a link worth if I'm on one of them. Do you have a feeling about that?

Chris Tweten:Yeah. Yeah, I've actually for a client recently that we signed on in the GTM space, we were working on like they had the same question, like they saw some Twitter threads of a long list of launch sites and review sites. And they're just like, which ones are worth it for us. So we did a deep dive and we analyze each site in SEO software. We use Ahrefs for that as well as. a few other tools to just take a look at their site map. ⁓ And we found that very little of them possess any strong SEO value. There's a few, like Product Hunt is still useful. ⁓ You need . I don't remember their domain extension, but UNEED ⁓ was another one that was like somewhat strong. But the rest of them, a lot of these launch sites are based in countries that we aren't targeting. So they aren't powerful backlinks. They aren't relevant enough. And then others don't get enough traffic. they're like strong authority, but they're giving out so many outgoing links that the value per link is really low.

Niklas:Yeah, that was also what I would imagine. Like if it's just a linked database and the value is probably not that high, if you are very, very frequently visited site that is linked to a lot and then has good links, then that's probably worth a lot more. So where would I want to be visible as an early stage startup if I started out?

Chris Tweten:Yeah, right off the top of my head, you'll probably want to be on ⁓ any startup directory site that gets actual traffic. You can check this in Ahrefs or just use kind of like gut feeling. ⁓ If you're building out citations, we actually did a blog on our site. ⁓ We built out a list. I don't remember offhand what they were. ⁓ G2 was up there, Captera. So like the software review sites that are credible, you want to get on those. ⁓ ProductHund was a good one. You need, again, like I said, that that's a good one as well. ⁓ Yeah, I wish I could remember this list off the top of my head.

Niklas:⁓ no worries. It's just, I think it's just a really interesting topic, but also people can reach out to you. think that's service you offer to take a look at it. What I'm wondering sometimes is it's really hard to create good content at scale. And what is, how do you do that? Also, if you did it in a previous role, what are the tricks to make this work over a longer period of time and how important is consistency there.

Chris Tweten:Yeah, consistency is the name of the game. You basically need to create processes that allow you to create content on a consistent basis. So the way we do this is just through content research. So. ⁓ We researched the keyword first, so we'll take a look at what's actually performing well on search engines already, whether that's Google or if we're targeting Bing, we'll go to Bing, but generally we're talking about Google. ⁓ We'll want to see what types of content people are producing for that exact search, so making sure search intent is going to be satisfied by the content we produce. And then we've built a content brief, and the brief is for the writer. So ⁓ as an agency, we're giving it briefs to our writers ⁓ for the most important pieces of content, generally speaking. ⁓ We've reached a stage of maturity in our agency where we've had writers for so long that they can produce their own content briefs. understand our processes and what we're looking for in content. But if we started, say, a new writer, ⁓ they would have to learn our processes and learn to create content briefs for themselves as well. ⁓ The content brief would include things like target word count, different headers they should include, ⁓ different... pieces of content that has to be covered within the blog post. And then internal linking, so what other pieces of content and landing pages you want to link towards from our content. And if it's a SAS, then it would be what features of the SAS are going to be featured in the article so that there's a CTA there and it leads content, or it leads the reader to our landing pages.

Niklas:And when you do an audit on something somebody built, for example, landing page, they're starting out, what are common mistakes that you see in like when early stage founders launch, what do they miss?

Chris Tweten:⁓ for landing pages, it's all over the place. ⁓ I don't really see clear patterns. One thing I'll, I do notice is like people will try to, ⁓ build internal links to their other landing pages or their other products from within their landing page or other blog content even. And, ⁓ this is a huge no in landing page design because it's leading people off of the buyer journey towards something more educational. So if you think about a landing page as being bottom of funnel, ⁓ you don't want to lead someone to a top of funnel or middle funnel page when they're already ready to buy. That would be the biggest mistake I see. ⁓ Other ones would be just having vague or like confusing language in the above the fold and people exit out too quickly because they just don't understand what your software does. So just like letting people know on a very basic scale what category of software you are, who it's for. What problem you solve?

Niklas:When you say top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel, what do you have in mind? I think there's usually a good way of conversion, right? So how should the funnel look like?

Chris Tweten:Yeah, so top of funnel is going to be just brand awareness and educational type content. Middle of funnel, maybe they're thinking about buying, but they aren't committed to a purchase quite yet. And then bottom of funnel is ⁓ maybe they can be nudged in the direction of making a purchase or doing a free sign up, a free trial, something like that, or a product demo, ⁓ or they're ready to buy.

Niklas:that would probably happen in different places, right? So for us, the landing page is bottom of funnel. Hopefully they convert if they have made it to your landing page, at least a free sign up or whatever it is, what are the levels above it? How would that work?

Chris Tweten:Yeah, so there's a few different ways to structure it. Some companies we work with, we just do everything on the blog and then landing pages are the bottom of funnel. Some mid and top are, they exist on the blog, but other times we do them as pages. So sometimes it's ⁓ comparison pages with like actual comparison charts and pricing details of competitors, stuff like that. ⁓ Or white papers or use case pages, like, you this is HR software for lawyers, or it's HR software for accountants, and you have different pages going over the benefits of why it's good for those niches.

Niklas:And are there, now you have the people that got through the funnel. How can you measure this with KPIs? Probably KPIs beyond traffic that are really relevant for measuring the effect of SEO and also maybe the long-term effects.

Chris Tweten:Yeah, so we just measure signups and then filter by signup source of where that traffic came from. So if it's ⁓ organic search, then that's SEO doing its job. We can track this through Google Analytics 4. If you have proper event tracking set up, it's a bit of a pain to set that up. I don't like Google Analytics 4. I like 3 a lot better. But I've had clients as well use other platforms like PostHog. ⁓ I know... There are other SaaS specific analytics tools out there, but I haven't touched much else outside of Google Analytics forum post hoc. That's been like the staple. People, people trust Google, so they'll just deal with how difficult it is to use sometimes.

Niklas:Yeah, I think that's like, if there's a standard, you usually use it. I also feel that Google Analytics hasn't improved much over the years, I have to say very frankly. Privately, use plausible, for example. I think it's a lot easier, maybe also not as detailed in the views, but still a lot easier to run. And then scaling-wise, so you see the first effects. kicking in after 90 days is more like an exponential curve or linear how does it typically look like

Chris Tweten:Yeah, so it It kind of goes in phases, like you'll have an incremental phase and then it's like exponential ⁓ or it's just exponential off the hop. It really depends on the niche because the keyword volume is going to be different for each company that you do SEO for. There's a famous phrase in SEO, it depends, and that rings true for just about every, I'm sure I could have said it depends to every question you've asked me so far. ⁓ It really rings true with what growth looks like because if the search volume is high, and the competition's high, it's gonna look really slow and maybe you'll hit the hockey stick over time. But if it's ⁓ different kind of search volumes, different competitiveness, maybe you can get incremental growth and just have like a very steady growth chart. But it really depends, we've seen it all.

Niklas:Now we are evolving, think, and SEO has been around since the early days of the internet and search. We are now also seeing ranking in AI, I would say search engines, chatbots. What do you think if you look at SEO versus AO or Geo, what will happen? What will dominate the next five years? How will this world change?

Chris Tweten:Yeah, so it's a great question. There's a lot of overlap between traditional SEO and what we'll call AI SEO for the sake of this conversation. There's a lot of acronyms you could use, but I think AI SEO is the most ⁓ understandable colloquially. So we'll go with that. Basically, A lot of the principles that you use in SEO are going to travel over to AISEO. If your site is indexed well, if it's trusted by Google, it's probably going to be trusted by LLMs as well. There are things you can do that are LLM specific to get visibility, like building up citations from sites that are already being cited by, say, ChatGPD. ChatGPD really loves to cite and... site the same sites over and over basically so if you build guest blogs or get brand mentions in those sites it's likely they'll cite that website again. They also really love consensus so if you're building out say a listicle campaign or brand mention campaign and ⁓ They're all from sites that ChatGPD's already cited, and you take a look at that and you ask it, what's the best software for this category? It's gonna take a look at ⁓ all those citations and give you an average of maybe the top three and give you a bullet point list. So if you're on average in the top three of all the sites it checks, you're gonna be recommended.

Niklas:And I think that for this is good to understand how LLMs search. So what they will do is they will convert your chat input into a search query. Then they will throw this into an internal chat engine or even Google search. And this will return a list of results. And these results then get passed and put into the LLM. That's at least how I understand it in the largest part. And then it makes a lot of sense that there's a strong overlap in between SEO and AI SEO. Maybe, and I'm not sure if this is already being done, maybe it's predictable what typical chat inputs will produce as search outputs and you can fine tune your keywords or search terms.

Chris Tweten:Yeah, it's, it's a, you're hitting the nail on the head. It's a bit difficult to do specific keywords or specific prompts because everyone... The thing is when people Google search something, it's ⁓ static rankings. It's ⁓ average rankings. It's going to show you ⁓ because Google indexes the web, LLMs don't. They don't index the internet. They don't use ranking algorithms. They don't rank the results in a static manner. But you can improve your visibility over time by building consensus. So ⁓ yeah, there is some overlap there. The methodology is slightly different. We did a campaign that was quite large scale. a 12-month AISCO campaign for a B2B SaaS client. And at first we were building, I think we built in the first month five brand mentions for them, and then it quickly escalated. We were doing like 40 to 60 per month. And that consensus led to some serious sign-ups for them.

Niklas:That's really interesting. And for me to understand it better, what does consensus mean? How can I imagine that?

Chris Tweten:Consensus is just agreement. if you have to think of it from the perspective of a crawler or a bot or an agent, I guess, in this case for LLM. So consensus would mean if it's looking at a bunch of different websites, say 20 websites, and on average in those 20 that it looks at, ⁓ your one software is being recommended more than the others, that's considered consensus. And it'll recommend that more often than not.

Niklas:That's really interesting. And how is it different from traditional search?

Chris Tweten:Yeah, so it's so similar. ⁓ But basically, if you're building citations or like building brand mentions on sites that are already used as chat GPD citations, ⁓ it's going to build consensus. In Google's aspect, they're using static rankings. So they're using ranking algorithms. They're taking the weight of each brand mention or ⁓ backlink. and it's averaging out, or not necessarily averaging out, but it's taking a look at who has a stronger backlink profile, so things compound over time. ⁓ If you wanted to compete with HubSpot for the keyword CRM, for example, they have... I don't know how many years, over a decade at least, building backlinks. So it's going to take a long, long time or a lot of resources to catch up to them. Versus on chat GPD, if you want it to outrank or like have better visibility than HubSpot for CRM related prompts, you just need to build consensus among the say 20 sites that chat GPD is consistently using as citations for CRM related prompts. So the

Niklas:Or let's...

Chris Tweten:the window is much quicker.

Niklas:That's very interesting. if I, mean, would I now try to put my same article in all of the different blogs basically, or try to get different people to post the same article? Does the content have to be different? Do you know how this works? it enough to just spread the article in a lot of places?

Chris Tweten:I wouldn't do the same article because that'll get picked up as a pattern ⁓ by Google as well. So Google will see that you're publishing the same content in a few places. And then all of sudden, link, those links don't really matter too much because it's just like, ⁓ OK, it's one piece of content, not a bunch of pieces of content. But if you were to write 20 articles where you're position number one or top three, that's a different story.

Niklas:That's probably where AI can help me. So if I have one article, I want to rewrite it 20 times. The content stays the same, but the article should be different. Can the tools already detect that? think that would be a cat and mouse game between the search engines and people who try to do SEO, right?

Chris Tweten:Yeah, it's a tough thing because AI detection has historically been like two or three steps behind the acceleration of AI. ⁓ So. You don't necessarily get punished for it, but it doesn't help you as much. ⁓ This is what's working with LLMs right now. So I mean, this could change, this consensus strategy could change, and if they start ⁓ indexing the internet or if they start ⁓ discounting... ⁓ articles where you're ranked number one. But then, like you're saying, it's a cat and mouse game. So if we discover that being ranked number one in all these listicles isn't paying out anymore, if it's plateauing, then we could put ourselves at position two or three in some of the articles and it'll look more natural to LLMs. This cat and mouse game exists in SEO quite a bit as well. being listed in your own listicles where you're the best solution and mass producing them. That doesn't really work on Google anymore because Google sees that you're self promoting, like you're positioning yourself as the number one solution on your own website. But it hasn't picked up on ⁓ if a bunch of third party websites are doing that. So if you guest blog on other people's websites or you get other people to write content or mention you or I don't know, if you're there's an existing piece of content and you pay to be the number one spot, it's not really detected. in the way you think it would. Google hasn't really caught up to that so much. We've done it for clients and won some really competitive keywords.

Niklas:Really interesting. the, what, what I heard, think HubSpot had a very unique marketing or SEO strategy early on. think they grew really big. Do you know the story behind it? Is this also somewhere SEO related or is it different?

Chris Tweten:⁓ I have seen the headlines on this on like, and I just, haven't read it. I don't know.

Niklas:I was wondering because they must have done something right when they came up and they got really big on a good marketing strategy, but I also don't really know. Today, if we talk about startups and I would be a first time founder or founder, I've just set up my company, what's an actionable advice for CEO? How do I start? Like, that I do something.

Chris Tweten:Yeah, so your foundation is going to be really important, making sure that you have good technical SEO. And technical SEO is like, a lot of people overspend on technical SEO trying to perfect everything. They pay for an audit of their site and they're just like trying to fix everything, scrambling to have the perfect technical SEO website. But really the lift on technical SEO is for larger sites. So if you have a larger website, say, Even a mid-size site with like a hundred blogs or a couple hundred blogs or a thousand pages on your site Technical SEO is going to help you get more lift but for a new founder for a new website The lift isn't that strong. So making sure you have an okay to good technical SEO foundation is more often enough good enough. And then in terms of when to invest into SEO, I like to bucket this out into two groups. the first is If your MRR is too low or if you don't have enough funding or whatever it is, however you get your money, like if you're bootstrapped, it's going to be your MRR. If you're raising money, then maybe you can sort out some of your raise into SEO. But if you don't have money that you can park with in the short term, don't invest into SEO because it's a long term play. Now the other aspect here is like right when you're launching your site, you should keep SEO in mind at the very least. So a lot of times you can pay a consultant like. They're going to charge by the hour. Sometimes it'll be quite expensive, but if you're paying for just an audit, you can get generally get an audit for like a thousand dollars or less, especially on a new website. ⁓ Paying for an audit and paying for a bit of strategy in your site architecture, your site structure, how your URLs are made up. This can have long-term payout because it's going to give you a strong foundation for future SEO efforts, whether that's producing content in-house for your site or if you're outsourcing to a future SEO agency you can give them that strategy and that audit and be like okay here's what we want to do and you're not paying for as much retainer.

Niklas:Even if I now started with ads like short term, if you feel, ⁓ can you compare like cost per click, for example, for SEO down the road versus tip? what does typical cost per click in this, this word longterm, if you work with an agency or you employ somebody to do it versus ad spend, do you have numbers on that?

Chris Tweten:Yep. Yeah, absolutely. This is like one of the main ways we pitch SaaS companies nowadays. We take a look at how much it costs, pay per click. So say... I'm so bad at mental math, but I'll give you some general numbers. If cost per click was, $8 and, I don't know, the search term gets 10,000 clicks per month, and then you use average conversion metrics of like 2 % click to lead, 10 % lead to conversion, you can calculate out cost per acquisition. ⁓ Once you have that, it's just a matter of comparing cost per acquisition to how much backlinks you'll need to invest to rank for that keyword. say the gap between your site because you're a new website. In the top three, they average, I don't know, let's say 40, 50 backlinks. You're going to need to catch up to them at the very least. Like I said earlier, because the window is ⁓ compounding. It adds up over time. It's your total backlink profile. rather than the consensus with LLMs. So you'll need say 50 backlinks of equal or better quality to compete with them on an even playing field. That amount can be made up in the pay-per-click budget being cut and just reinvesting that into SEO. ⁓ But there is like a break even point here that's important to note. So if your break even was say six months and that's six months of not doing PPC, you're just doing SEO, your metrics for runway need to make sense. So this is why I recommend. ⁓ getting some MRR through whatever other channels you can in the early stages of a startup or cold email or cold DMs. Get your initial customers through quicker means and then invest into SEO once you're ready to divert some of your MRR. ⁓

Niklas:That's really, think, great and actionable for you yourself and Spacebar Collective. What's next with AI SEO? So what are you working on?

Chris Tweten:Yeah, so right now we're. We're in a growth phase right now. Like we're trying to land new clients. We're taking on new clients left and right in the AI space. ⁓ So AI SEO as well as traditional SEO, we do them hand in hand now because it is so important to invest into a company's future with LLM SEO. And in some cases you can get quicker wins off LLM SEO. We have one client right now that's ⁓ in the proxy space. So they're doing like ISP proxies, static residential proxies. And we started a backlink building campaign for them, started a brand managing campaign for them. And we do combine efforts. So websites that have authority for Google, but are also being cited by chat GPD. So it's like two burns with one stone. We started a campaign with them just like a month ago, built, I think, eight brand mentions backlinks combination. And ⁓ they started seeing More traffic from chat GBD almost immediately and they started ranking a bit better not quite where we want to be yet for Google, but it's getting there and ⁓ That's what's next for us. We're just trying to combine efforts so that Traditional SEO is satisfied while also doing AI SEO and I think that's gonna be a winning combination for companies going forward Yeah, but the main thing for spacebar collective right now is we're in a growth phase. We're trying to land new clients. We're trying to expand the verticals that we service. So right now we're trying to get into the finance space a bit, into the legal space and home services. So not just SAS.

Niklas:Really interesting. Final question. Also for me, something to read. Any books, tools or resources you would recommend that I could take a look at?

Chris Tweten:⁓ Books, let's see, Product-Lud SEO by Eli Schwartz would be the book that you want to check out. It's a bit... older. It's not that old, but in terms of AI moving fast, it's in the whole book. But the principles in there are really strong for AI SEO and for traditional SEO. In terms of online resources, honestly, like I get all my SEO news from Twitter and a handful of newsletters. SEO FOMO by Aleta is really good. And then the official ones from Ahrefs and SEMrush and then follow some industry leaders on Twitter. and you'll get there. You'll get all the news you need.

Niklas:That's so awesome. Chris, thank you so much for being here. That was this episode of Dr. Niklas Wintergraet. See you next time.

Chris Tweten:Thanks for having me.