When You Can’t Beat ’em, Buy ’em : Growing Your Audience Through Strategic Acquisition Featuring Nick Eubanks

Garrett: Okay, y’all, welcome back to The Next Chapter of Search, our mini podcast produced by SEO Week and iPullRank. End of April, April 28th to May 2nd, we’re going to be in New York City joined by 35+ of the most influential smart people in the world of SEO, business, AI, marketing, you name it. SEO is the focus, the Next Chapter of Search. I’m joined today by Nick Eubanks. Nick is the VP of owned media at SEMrush. We are going to have a fascinating conversation. He’s doing a lot of interesting things behind the scenes. But first off, Nick, thanks for joining me. How you doing, man?

Nick: It’s great to be here, Garrett. It’s always good to see your face and like we were just talking about a moment ago. It’s been a while, so it’s very cool to catch up.

Garrett: Dude, it has been a minute from the traffic think tank days to when you came on the Agency Ahead podcast. But I am psyched to talk about where the hell are we right now when it comes to the current state of SEO. How are you looking at things?

Nick: I mean, it feels very much like I’m the dog sitting in the house on fire, you know, just saying “it’s fine!” The fact of the matter is it’s not fine in that like there’s just a lot of it’s known unknowns, right? I think that there is a general awareness that like we’re not really sure what this all means because of how fast it’s changing. Is search dead? Is it going to die overnight? Are people going to stop going to Google by the end of this year? Of course not. Absolutely not.

But I think the way that people use Google is changing very, very much. You know, I think the if anything, like my hunch is sort of the middle of the funnel is moving away from Google, you know, where you used to be able to build a full funnel strategy and you could have Google as sort of the hub. And I guess you’d have other social components and own media components like an email list, something we really actually own the contact information, you own the audience. And maybe there would be a YouTube component and paid media and it’s sort of all fit around. But you’d have search that you could support each stage of the funnel with a search function. I think we’re seeing that disappear. Well, I sort of evaporate like really, really quickly where I think what I’m seeing at least and what some data that I’ve been privy to is showing like we’re still seeing folks start certain user journeys on Google, although more and more of those sort of top of funnel questions are being funneled into LLMs and into AI tools.

And then we’re still very much seeing the bottom of the funnel show up on Google. I don’t think the recommendation engine that is being served by LLMs is so good yet that folks are getting what they want and they’re getting their queries satisfied. That will probably change at some point, but it’s not going to be this year. And so I think the question on everybody’s minds right now is how big of a share of searches, of queries and then of the clicks that come out of those queries is going to go to these to GPTs and LLMs and what does that mean for us as folks who identify as SEOs or recovering SEOs?

Garrett: Exactly. And that’s the thing that’s so interesting to me is how search behavior is potentially changing. Is it changing? But you, like your current role is almost this like bird in the sky look to the point of this changing ecosystem as purchasing all of these assets that are part of SEMrush. You guys have been in the news over the past year. In terms of like what you’re presenting at SEO Week and what people can really find for you, whether it’s like conversations or your actual presentation, what are you thinking about in terms of the business aspect of owned media, of an enterprise level brand and owning these different properties in the context of SEO?

Nick: I think more than anything and what I will probably will talk about, you know, if you guys let me, is the true concept of owned media and how you start thinking from a brand perspective of what owned media needs, right? Of having ownership over your audience, how you can insulate yourself from major sort of, you know, major shifts in the search landscape, right? So like one of the things that I’m really focused on right now, what we’re trying to do with the portfolio that we’re building is to, you know, find traffic sources that are organic, but aren’t necessarily driven from search. So you know, you buy something like Backlinko or Exploding Topics or Third Door Media that all have, you know, multi-hundred thousand email lists or, you know, Backlinko’s got a bustling YouTube presence and YouTube channel. You know, where are there other opportunities like Third Door Media where like, you know, a big part of the traffic profile is direct, you know, people bookmark them, people have that as their homepage on their browser. And they have, you know, because they’ve been around so long and it’s a news source, it’s a trusted, you know, brand and news source. And it comes with an event that, you know, we’re resurrecting this year in June, like we’re going to bring SMX back for the first time in five years, you know, that’s something that went fully virtual and that Third Door Media never had any intention of bringing back into real life again, because it was way more profitable to run it virtually.

But, you know, we’re not looking at this from a how do we profit from this event? It’s how do we resurrect this brand? How do we, you know, breathe new life back into these brand assets as brand assets that, you know, can hopefully capture and expand on mindshare and build trust within the entirety of our audience segment. So, I think more than anything, you know, the lens to look at this through the one that I’m trying to look at this through is what does it mean in a land where search directly becomes less important? And what can we do to protect ourselves from that shift?

Garrett: I love it. And it’s really interesting. And so if you were to speak to someone who’s in a position similar to yours at a Fortune 500, where they can focus on purchasing these owned assets and building their audience, what’s a practical recommendation in the way that you think about that strategy that they can start implementing like right now?

Nick: I think it’s got to be understanding the audience affinity, right? And the way that we are still approaching that in the way that I think almost anybody that has a significant search footprint, you know, we still we still rack up tens of millions of visits every month just to SEMrush. And then when you look at the whole ecosystem, it’s a big number. And so we’re still able to look at the audience that we are acquiring from search and the keywords and the topics that we’re acquiring them for, you know, where is the overlap there? Who else has mindshare or click share for those same topics? And using that as sort of a leading indicator to go identify, you know, where we want to go or, you know, if we’re going to buy email lists, it’s what’s the percentage of overlap from the subscribers for this asset we want to buy versus this subscriber list for SEMrush or Backlinko or Third Door Media?

You know, is there is there a percentage overlap that that’s significant enough that we’re like, hey, these folks are already within our audience segment. They’re already within our user or customer segment, which means that the affinity of the other people just like thinking in terms of like lookalike audiences probably is pretty high. There’s a good chance that we can probably sell into those audiences some product or service or build a brand affinity for something within our ecosystem and then beginning to understand how that affinity changes based on the different assets, right? Like the affinity of the audience for exploding topics. There’s a lot of overlap with the SEMrush audience, but there’s also still a whole bunch of people that aren’t in the SEMrush audience that give us an opportunity to expand. And so I think starting to look at it through that lens becomes really powerful when you think about identifying acquisition opportunities, partnership opportunities.

Garrett: Yeah, and I think that that’s like as SEOs, what you’re doing is like boots on the ground real marketing, like that is marketing. It’s all about understanding complementary markets and making sure that you’re building that awareness, that visibility and that market share through the acquisitions in the context of SEO.

So what direction do you think we’re all going in? You and I were briefly talking about it, but where do you think search is going over the next period?

Nick: I mean, I think there’s going to be a big chunk of it that kind of goes away. Like I think there’s going to be, you know, the funnel is not, it already doesn’t look the way it did 12 months ago. I think parts of it are going to sustain in the search ecosystem in Google for the most part or other search engines that are gaining market share very quickly that are built on the backs of LLMs. But I think we’re going to see compartmentalization that we’re already seeing. So like it’s, I think the big question on everybody’s, every modern marketer’s mind is “how much degradation are we going to see and which parts of the funnel are going to evaporate the fastest?”

Garrett: That’s fascinating. It’ll be really interesting to pay attention to this. And anyone who says that they know what’s going to happen really doesn’t. If you had to guess what’s your confidence level that Google’s market share will be, you know, kind of cut into, or do you think they’ll just maintain their dominance?

Nick: I think they are scrambling right now with Gemini and, you know, people are using it. You know, I talked to a lot of people that have it, you know, as part of their, their stack, the folks that are doing the most with, with, with AI right now are, are, you know, chaining prompts and using different Raptors and, and, and building their own GPTs and trying to combine as many components from as many LLMs as they can to, to figure out how, how this all can fit together to create efficiencies or just to be where, where people are going. But, you know, we’re already seeing a departure and I shouldn’t say a shift in just the behavior. And so, you know, the, the billion-dollar question that everybody’s trying to answer right now is how do we make sure that our brands, whatever those are, are the ones that are being raised and recommended and linked to from inside these LLMs. And that’s, that’s the big question, right?

And I think there’s, there’s a bunch of great ideas and there’s a lot of people doing a lot of experimentation. I know you guys are doing, you know, I know, I know iPR is very much doing their own experiments, but I think that’s going to be the most fascinating data to come out. You know, hopefully this year we’ll get some insight into, you know, what it really means, how to, how to attack these things to make sure that you’re following the wave as it moves.

Garrett: 100%. Final question. Has your, has your search behavior changed at all?

Nick: A little bit. Yeah, a little bit. Places, like things that I would probably usually go to YouTube for, or I’d go to Google and expect to end up on YouTube, you know, those things are getting dropped more and more frequently into ChatGPT and, and Claude and, you know, a little Perplexity here and there.

I’m having a lot more fun playing with a lot of the content tools out there and sort of experimenting with like, one of the things that’s probably the most fascinating to me was, you know, eight months ago, I was all about writing these like huge prompts, 2,500 to 3,000 word prompts, huge prompts, you know, where it would take multiple hours to get the output of them from a content perspective. And now, you know, instead of being able to upload just scores of documents, so like building custom GPTs that are brand or function specific and just giving it all the information for ingestion and then the prompts are a sentence or two, you know, it’s, it’s, you know, less is more is such a big way and letting, letting, letting the, the AI sort of do the work now is, is, you know, very impressive.

Garrett: That’s so cool. Well, thank you so much. This has been a really interesting conversation. For those of you who are watching, please, please, please, if you haven’t gotten your ticket April 28 to May 2nd in New York City, join us for SEO Week. You’ll see Nick, wax political and practical on the stage as well as myself and the team brought to you by iPullRank. Catch our next episode. Bye bye.