Everyone Wants AI Search Hacks. Nobody Wants to Fix Their Website. With Ryan Erwin, Part 1.

0:00Ryan ErwinI would say, "Who arguably is the most important both blind and deaf user on your website?"

0:06And at the time, Google Bot. And the same thing goes now, but plus one to LLM crawlers. No longer is the web primarily for humans.

0:16CrystalWelcome to the simple and smart SEO show podcast! I'm your host, Crystal Waddell, here to bridge the gap between SEO strategy and real world business success. By bringing you insights, stories, and conversations from the SEO community and beyond.

0:29Grab a coffee. Or your favorite tea. And let's dive into Smarter SEO for your business.

0:34Welcome back to The Simple and Smart SEO Show Podcast. I am here with the director of SEO and AEO at VaynerMedia, Mr. Ryan Erwin.

0:45So Ryan, thank you so much for joining me today on The Simple and Smart SEO Show Podcast.

0:49Ryan ErwinThanks, Crystal. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

0:52CrystalYeah.

0:56It was so great meeting you at SEO Week. And then we just like serendipitously sat next to each other at SEO Week. And here

1:00you are today. So I'm glad that you're here for the conversation

1:02Ryan ErwinMe too. I'm ferociously a front row, get to a speaker early when I wanna see them.

1:07So it's nice to see that you're like-minded as well, front and center.

1:11CrystalYou gave me some great advice right up front because I told you about what I do. And you were like, "Why pigeonhole yourself into just Shopify?" You talked about marketing and different things, and I thought, wow, that was so insightful.

1:22So I did want to say thank you because I felt wow, talking to you just for that brief time was one of the most powerful interactions that I had while I was at SEO week.

1:31And I thought, huh, that was really great to have somebody say I hear you, I see you, and here's some advice for what you're trying to do."

1:37Ryan ErwinOh, thank you. That's so nice. If I'm anything, I'm honest and I'm glad I was able to help

1:42Crystalyou talked about the cycles of SEO and, the fact that people every once in a while are like, "SEO's dead."

1:50What's your gut reaction now when you hear that phrase come up or a new cycle starts?

1:55Ryan ErwinI say bring it on. For me, SEO's been dead every couple of

2:00years, whether it was, part of the news cycle. Or, just me being in a new industry. I've been doing this for about 16 years. Hard

2:10to even explain to people, family members what do you do?" I make you show up in Google."

2:16"Oh, is that paid ads?" " No, it's organic search."

2:20And so for, again, for me, SEO's been dead every couple of years. I used to panic. I can remember even just swallowing now that gulp in my throat and saying "What am I doing with my career?"

2:30But as I said a, a moment ago I welcome it. I love the attention now, honestly.

2:35SEO and now the expanded AEO or GEO, whatever acronym is your preference, they're board-level conversations.

2:44So for me, I've been waiting for this moment for, most of the last 16 years. So again, if SEO is dead, bring on the death.

2:51CrystalYou've also said that the practice of SEO or GEO is half science, half art. What is the part that people don't

3:00understand about that?

3:01Ryan ErwinThere's a ton of theory to distill. So like I see that as the art part. Way back when, it was Matt Cutts, he was the search lead.

3:11Social media wasn't a thing then, so you didn't see people, in their daily lives. They didn't do day in my life at, Google and have a lot of video component to things.

3:21It was, you were lucky to show up to a conference that he was speaking at. And if you know me at a conference, I'm sitting in the front, I'm asking questions.

3:29And then I'm finding the speaker in the hallway. So I just remember those times it was is what he said was true? Is it to throw us off?

3:36Can we prove it? Do we accept it at face value? What is the deeper meaning? And then needing to form our own opinions. And so now you have, search leads and search evangelists that, share insights and debunk myths and, respond to things on online and actually have conversations.

3:55So it's interesting. And you have these standalone experts, as I like to call

4:00them. And their authority ebbs and flows in popularity. And so that's all opinion mixed in with facts.

4:06Mixed in with data, and to me, that's the part art of it. And then science, a- as I say to my team, as I say to clients. I think back to, how did we do experiments in high school?

4:17We found variables, we formed hypotheses. And then we tried to prove or disprove a thesis. So it's like rigorous testing and finding that edge. Leaning into what's working. Prove your thesis. Let's double down on that. What's not working? Let's figure out why. Can we adapt? Can we course-correct?

4:38I used to do a kind of a recurring speech at conferences where I would say, " Analyze, plan, execute, and repeat that cycle. Lean in and exploit what's working.

4:47Pull back and course-correct on what's not working." And, that's how I find that balance of part art and part science.

4:53CrystalAnd would you say that any part of that is gut related? Because for a super small

5:00business like my business. I don't have a lot of resources for research and development and, I do make a lot of hypotheses.

5:07But I have to act very quickly. I know that you can't do that at scale, but is there a version of that at scale that you can implement?

5:15Ryan ErwinAs a consultant, we say a lot of things, we'd love to do a lot of things, but that's not always the reality. Counseling, providing, what we would say is level of effort for the level of impact.

5:28And that's kinda how we, stack rank things on a roadmap.

5:31What do we prioritize?

5:33But for me I was talking to the writer and editor of a major publication about how I'm still baffled; this was probably about six months ago actually at SEO week at a lunch.

5:45I said I'm still baffled at how many people are not even doing the kind of 101 level items. SEO, and now SEO, AEO, GEO 101.

5:55Google pre-AEO GEO gave us these

6:00guidelines on user experience. User experience is a ranking signal. Yes. So it's page speed just the colors how fast things load, how quickly images load.

6:11When you have an accessible website, one.

6:15It's accessible for the world, it's ac- it's accessible for people who can't read.

6:19For people who can't see, who have low vision.

6:22Who have a slow internet connection. Maybe they're in a, a rural area and high speed isn't there. I used to, really lean heavily, and still do.

6:30But I really got excited about web accessibility because I truly believe in a free and open internet that everyone should be able to access on the same level.

6:40And so I used to say to stakeholders.

6:43I would say, "Who arguably is the most important both blind and deaf user on your website?"

6:49And at the time, Google Bot. And the same thing goes now, but plus one to LLM crawlers. No longer is the web primarily for humans.

7:00But a mainstay and a tenant to get away from that overly technical talk and overly robust planning to get more dialed into your question is create a positive user experience for both humans and crawlers.

7:13It's not, Flash animation, which is, no longer there and heavy JavaScript sites. Again, another wow factor in, evaluating a website in an audit, try turning off JavaScript. What does the site look like? More often than not, it's a white screen.

7:30So again, leaning into those 101 fundamentals, if you're doing that, that's good enough for most people. And you're probably doing better than a lot of your competitors in that same, call it startup or SMB world

7:43CrystalWow, that was amazing. So that's definitely an activity that I'm gonna take to my AI SEO Skool.

7:48Because I have a Skool for micro-business owners, particularly Shopify store owners, where we meet every week, once a week, to talk about SEO and marketing. And I used to wanna be a UX

8:00researcher.

8:00When I learned about user experience, and then how bots read websites, like with the accessibility trainings and different things I had.

8:08It simplified things so much, and that was such a practical exercise that I'm gonna take back to the group with the removing JavaScript. And, I'm really excited, a little bit scared to find out what's actually there.

8:19Ryan ErwinTake it one step further and again, pre all of the LLM, AI, et cetera, you know, when it comes to user experience, Amazon and Walmart release this statistic like every year and they've done it for a long time. But if you improve page speed, every 10th of a second has a corresponding increase.

8:39So decrease in page speed has a corresponding increase in conversion rate. So that is how you put dollars and cents to those developer actions.

8:49Or, using open source or something like Shopify or a WordPress, a Drupal, an open source CMS. You optimize, reduce the size of your images.

8:58Lazy load, any of

9:00those very baseline 101, 102 level optimizations, you're gonna move the needle on user experience.

9:06And if there's e-commerce, you're gonna move the conversion needle. Just by making the user experience better.

9:12Crystallet's back up and talk about what it was like before you worked at VaynerMedia.

9:17And for those that don't know, VaynerMedia is spearheaded by Gary Vee. But 16 years ago, Ryan Erwin started his career in SEO.

9:26Can you walk us through your career path to How you got here today?

9:30Ryan ErwinYeah. I had a, I think it was through a job placement agency. I knew I wanted to do marketing, I knew I wanted it to be involving computers, and they said, "Oh, it's a paid search SEO specialist." Didn't really know what that was. But it sounded really interesting from the job description. And I was like, "You know what?

9:49Act as if. I can figure this out. I'm smart, and I will make it work." And so I got my start at, a company called Hammacher Schlemmer. It was a, big

10:00catalog that would come out about four times a year.

10:03They had a web presence. It was high volume, low cost per click search. Keyword research on the SEO front.

10:11They were, at the time actually, interestingly enough, interested in page speed and a little bit of performance.

10:18And again, it was the beginning of the slow death of print magazines.

10:22Where you called a 1-800 number and, gave them your catalog ID.

10:26I got into a few startups.

10:28That's where I like taught myself web development.

10:31And again, the WordPress community opened themselves up to me. It was a unbelievable experience, like a parallel path for me. I brought the WordPress to these couple of businesses that I helped start. That were already evolving, but really helped start the website and the SEO and the paid search programming.

10:50And again, with WordPress, I was able to be totally self-taught. Great SEO plugin that you could just click a few buttons and install.

10:57And really understand the

11:00basics of, metadata, meta titles, meta descriptions. Talked about images, as you said before. If you're gonna, by the way, go back and resize a bunch of images, make sure there's alt text on them.

11:10SEO marker there. Adds some keywords, some context.

11:14Provides a positive user experience for a blind or low vision user. And again it's another factor in, you know, in the SEO world. Another data point.

11:24Moved out of those, smaller scaling startups into starting my own agency. Absolutely loved that.

11:30Worked, wanted to start a family. Did that for a few years. Got into an SMB agency local here in Chicago called Orbit Media.

11:39Crystalknow Orbit Media. Just so you know, that's Andy

11:41Ryan ErwinAndy

11:41Crystalright?

11:42Ryan Erwinyep, absolutely. Great guy. Worked really closely with him, did a, help build out like a site audit consulting arm of that business.

11:52It was really exciting.

11:53And again, for me, I like to model a lot of that behavior. Like I love to teach, I love to share my experience.

12:00That's core to Andy's ethos as well is, sharing and being a part of the community.

12:05And building relationships and authority through that mechanism.

12:09And then really wanted to prove my skillset on the global stage. Moved to Digitas at Publicis and, really proved that out on the global stage.

12:17And then, had that inflection point that a lot of people do, I think, in agency world. I alluded to it before, you're a consultant, you provide all this advice. And then clients do some portion of it.

12:28That's just the name of the game.

12:29Some things are more important to them than they are to you.

12:32Or what you think is most important to them.

12:35And that's a learning process. It's growing. And I had an opportunity to jump back in to, a well-funded scaling startup.

12:42And it's like you have a budget to build a team and do everything you want, and that was really exciting.

12:48Worked in two scaling businesses and got back into paid and paid search and paid social.

12:53And and affiliate and influencer and partnerships and, that really helped me

13:00cross-train.

13:00Like in sports. You do a different sport.

13:02You lift weights. You do other things in the off-season. To build your core skillset.

13:07You're building your balance or, your focus or whatever that may be. And for me, the stars aligned. I had been following Gary for a long time, saw him speak at a conference. Saw this job opening, saw this unbelievable opportunity.

13:22And I pounced on it, and I have not looked back in the near year I've been there.

13:27And as I mentioned earlier with the SEO is Dead, these are board level conversations, and I feel like I'm in the playoffs right now.

13:34I've been waiting for this moment in my career, and I couldn't be more happy and appreciative of the position that I'm in.

13:41And I'm not taking it for granted.

13:43CrystalThere's lots of people who may have been in SEO for a long time.

13:46And people who've been doing something for a long time sometimes kinda get stuck in their ways of, what has always been done is the way it needs to be done.

13:54How do you fight that and how have you managed to stay so excited about search?

13:59Part of it sounds

14:00because you are always learning something new and so you're finding different ways for those things to incorporate together.

14:05But what would you say is like the secret sauce to keep moving forward with the pace of change in SEO?

14:11Ryan Erwinit's always evolving. There's a, a quote from a summer camp that I went to and, still very involved with now.

14:18As my son just went for his first year, but, "Here let him learn to stand up in the storm."

14:23And for me, that has just rung true through me through my career.

14:27You live through good, you live through bad, the highs and the lows, and you have to see it as a journey.

14:32And again, as I mentioned earlier, 16 years is a long time to be doing something that's the same, but it's really not the same. There's a lot of people who, have been in the SEO world that were copywriters.

14:44And they evolved their skill to understand how to write for the web.

14:49To attract attention, to attract visibility from search engines.

14:53That was one component of it. There are the other opposite side, which is that, heavy technical. Web

15:00developers or product marketers.

15:02Product developers.

15:03And it's like I can do these few things to make the product or the technology that I'm building more accessible more search engine friendly."

15:11And those were the extremes. And for me, I wanted both. I wanted to understand the content and be able to really exploit that, call that on the front end.

15:20And then really understand the technical on the back end so that I could be what I consider a full stack SEO and now AEO/GEO professional.

15:29Because it's a superpower in this industry to be able to say, "Here's the content that you need, and why.

15:36And here's how you get search engines and LLMs to access that great content. Here's how you adapt. Here's how you course correct."

15:44And if you can't marry those two, you've got, a big blind spot, which wasn't as big of an issue back in the day. You know, in the SEO-only world.

15:54The game has gotten harder, significantly harder. And, again, that whole

16:00SEO is dead.

16:00We're gonna hear this a lot because the pace of the game right now has, multiplied in speed and intensity, and I just feel like I'm thriving in it.

16:10More information, more data to build that art part of things.

16:16While now I feel like rather than waiting for the science, I've spent the last, five, six, seven years of my career making the science for myself.

16:24I create experiments. We prove them out, and they either work or they don't, and then we move forward positively or course correct and adapt.

16:33I never thought that that many people could say they loved what they do, but I absolutely love what I do.

16:39CrystalWhen I started the podcast a couple years ago, or about three years ago now I'd say, almost three years it was very difficult for me as a very small business owner to talk to people about SEO as they had done it.

16:51Because, they talked a lot about, the in the weed stuff, which, there is the in the weed stuff of some keyword research and blah, blah, blah.

16:58But nobody talked about user

17:00experience. Nobody talked about like personas of why people were buying. They didn't talk about customer journeys. And these are all things, like as a business owner, when you handle the email list, and you handle the social media marketing, and you handle the blog.

17:15And all of that type of stuff, as a business owner, you don't get to separate those things. Like those things that are, have been siloed for whatever reason at bigger companies.

17:23As a small business owner, you wear all of those hats. And so it's rare to find like yourself. Who saw the value in integrating all of those things.

17:32And I feel the same way that you do.

17:35Even though things are moving so quickly, it's like this is the pace that, I love because things are integrated. It's like a, a team sport now, if you will.

17:44Ryan ErwinMeasurement has also become a little bit easier. That was the, that was to me the linchpin of growth in call it an agency scope.

17:53Or, growth in your remit if you're in-house.

17:56Is because no longer are you

18:00siloed to your own team. For me, I always saw the value of sharing with the copywriters, sharing with the art directors, SEO principals.

18:10Don't hand me a piece of final copy, and say, approve or not. It's, "Let's talk about this before you start." I got this advice on the first day of my big agency job at Digitas. It was, " Sink or swim and make sure everyone knows who you are across all capabilities."

18:28And I think about that every day.

18:29And now, that's table stakes. And for me knowing that there's more data makes it easier to make the case to say, "This is why this is important. This is how we're gonna measure success."

18:42Because for a lot of SEO, it was all boats rise. Yes, you could make a bunch of technical optimizations, but if you don't have the data set that, Walmart or Amazon did, you don't see that change 24 hours in.

18:55Sometimes you needs days, weeks, or months to prove things out. New piece of

19:00long-form content. Maybe it's upper funnel. It takes time to show results and stakeholders don't want, "Yeah, we're gonna do all this, and all boats are gonna rise."

19:09That to me is another key factor of pace and speed. But it adds a lot of pressure, I think, to a lot of people.

19:14​