Kevin Indig Interviewed By James Dooley

James Dooley interviews Kevin Indig, who explains how organic growth accelerates performance because SEO, product and user behaviour work together to increase revenue. Kevin shares how advisory work shapes strategy because leaders need clear business cases, not isolated SEO tasks. They both analyse AI’s impact on content output because automation raises efficiency and changes how teams operate. The conversation highlights why branding and user trust drive rankings because Google rewards signals that show genuine authority.

Creators and Guests

Host

James Dooley

James Dooley is a UK entrepreneur.

What is James Dooley Podcast?

James Dooley is a Manchester-based entrepreneur, investor, and SEO strategist. James Dooley founded FatRank and PromoSEO, two UK performance marketing agencies that deliver no-win-no-fee lead generation and digital growth systems for ambitious businesses. James Dooley positions himself as an Investorpreneur who invests in UK companies with high growth potential because he believes lead generation is the root of all business success.

The James Dooley Podcast explores the mindset, methods, and mechanics of modern entrepreneurship. James Dooley interviews leading marketers, founders, and innovators to reveal the strategies driving online dominance and business scalability. Each episode unpacks the reality of building a business without mentorship, showing how systems, data, and lead flow replace luck and guesswork.

James Dooley shares hard-earned lessons from scaling digital assets and managing SEO teams across more than 650 industries. James Dooley teaches how to convert leads into long-term revenue through brand positioning, technical SEO, and automation. James Dooley built his career on rank and rent, digital real estate, and performance-based marketing because these models align incentive with outcome.

After turning down dozens of podcast invitations, James Dooley now embraces the platform to share his insights on investorpreneurship, lead generation, AI-driven marketing, and reputation management. James Dooley frequently collaborates with elite entrepreneurs to discuss frameworks for scaling businesses, building authority, and mastering search.

James Dooley is also an expert in online reputation management (ORM), having built and rehabilitated corporate brands across the UK. His approach combines SEO precision, brand engineering, and social proof loops to influence both Google’s Knowledge Graph and public perception.

To feature James Dooley on your podcast or event, connect via social media. James Dooley regularly joins business panels and networking sessions to discuss entrepreneurship, brand growth, and the evolving future of SEO.

**James Dooley:**
anything that can that can move the needle on conversion and I see that as so connected at the hip with SEO as well these days and to be honest with you I absolutely love the term for the last two years I've been an independent advisor to uh to companies like HS Dropbox reddits Snapchats hi so today's episode I'm joined with Kevin indig pleased to meet you Kevin how you doing

**Kevin Indig:**
thanks for having me I am fantastic how are you

**James Dooley:**
yeah very good mate very good for any of the viewers who don't know where you are who's been hiding under a rock and they don't know who you are in the SEO Community can you just give a little bit of a brief kind of background with who you are and what you do

**Kevin Indig:**
yeah sure thing uh so for the last two years I've been an independent adviser to uh to companies like hymns Dropbox Reddit uh Snapchat El those types companies um I can talk a bit more about what I how I help these companies but it's a big focus on on SEO C product that growth those those types of things uh before I went out on my own I uh ran SEO and a bunch of other things the chopy before then at G2 before then at lasting so you know 10 years in house before then did about 5 years agency now I'm back on my own again so uh that's what I do and then apart from that I'm writing this uh newsletter called the growth memo comes out once a week it's free where I share my my kind of insights and Analysis of different topics on search

**James Dooley:**
that's awesome so obviously within obviously you mentioned quite a few small clients there that you're dealing with um the um what what type of work is it that you're doing is it mainly SEO or is it literally all around like CMO type role of doing full marketing Suite of everything

**Kevin Indig:**
yeah it's it has a very strong footing in SEO but it Ventures into other areas as well I don't do any paid channels advertising is not my uh my jam um but you know it quickly goes into decisions it quickly goes into conversion optimization and all these things are very connected um but yeah it's typically that that kind of scope and then in terms of what I do um I often help companies in very undefined or with undefined problems so you know I often look at it this way where a freelancer might do the actual work right they come in they write I don't know 50 pages of of block articles or 50 block articles um then you have a consultant and they might help research keywords of these blog articles maybe create the content briefs and then as adviser I come in and I'm like okay should we invest in content what are our strongest growth levers should we hire Outsource is the team set up you know in an optimal way it's these kind of more tricky broader questions that I work with uh and typically work with uh leadership of the company so it's like a very specific uh Focus that just naturally came up as I as I kind of progressed in my in know's career over the years

**James Dooley:**
yes so I mean within that you're talking about like conversion rate optimization is that to do with design or is it to do with the actual copy as well

**Kevin Indig:**
yeah both um anything that can that can move the need on conversion and I see that as so connected at the hip with SEO as well these days uh James you know you know this so well where it's so important how users like what they do on the page itself and if you can improve the design or add Design Elements uh or improve the copy then that is also impactful in terms of SEO so yeah I'll sit down with designers I'll sit down with copywriters and we'll think about you know how can we change some things this obviously looks very different based on what type of client it is with uh so I work with NEX door for example uh big soci Network here in the US um and and they are you know they have millions of pages uh in Google's index and so any design change you make there obviously scales so much more and then another companies say like Dropbox right if we work on some blog articles there it's a it's a bit kind of you know if we if you create custom um header images for example it's a different type of scale that we're talking about so it always depends a little bit on the type of client side as well

**James Dooley:**
yeah for sure yeah so I've seen quite a lot of the stuff out there of what you're doing you call yourself an organic growth advisor for anyone that doesn't know what that is can you just explain a little bit more of exactly what that type of role entails

**Kevin Indig:**
sure thing yeah it it really buils on what we talked about uh before you know it's that the type of advisor uh work I think is a bit more undefined and a bit more open problem focused and then uh organic growth really came from this awareness that I had of you know so many factors playing into SEO like again the look and feel the type of product the brand awareness and I didn't want to limit myself to just working on hard SEO problems I wanted to open the door to say Okay I want to talk to leadership about what we can do to get more brand awareness so that we improve Authority a little bit right and and drive more brand combination searches and so I I I chose organic growth as uh you know not to reinvent the wheel but as a as a different term uh other than SEO because I found it so limiting I started with that at Shopify uh at Shopify I led a so-called mission that I that I that I called organic growth and a mission is nothing else uh but a group of people from different crafts so it's PE you know it's a it's it's a group of Engineers designers writers seos uh data scientists and we all went after the same goal which is to increase revenue from organic traffic and I called that organic growth because we our spend was so much more than just the blog or some Le gen tools right we also created some features for the actual product like some referral loops and other things and so it just came up as a term that that kind of opened the or broaden the Horizon of what you actually do to to to drive organic traffic

**James Dooley:**
to be honest with you I absolutely love the term and the reason why I like the term so much is because for small businesses it doesn't really matter too much because a lot of the staff might be in the existing office so you can like literally call upon um the PPC team or a technical kind of developer to speak to the SEO and the content writer but obviously as you know like as businesses start to become bigger and bigger and bigger the the technical team and the development team could be out let's say in India where the cont team might be in South Africa and then there becomes a massive kind of Gap from One Division speaking to the next Division and it's crazy how like the paid ads Department aren't speaking to the SEO Department with regards to like youve talking about there with regards to conversion rate optimization either of the copy but also you touched upon like behavioral signals there and like I'm presuming there certain things to do with like dwell times and stuff like that and how many pages visited and that kind of form forms in the bracket then of Engagement which is helping the SEO as well so it's um yeah it's it's clever because so many people are limiting thems by calling them an SEO so to speak when the you can Bridge the gaps between the technical team the development team the um the paid ads team and stuff like that so anyway moving on to your you mentioned the growth memo the newsletter that you have that comes out every week and it's free to a lot of different subscribers I think last time I seen there was over 13,000 subscribers what's the actual number at now what it's is it at 13,000 subscribers

**Kevin Indig:**
13,500 yeah just just across the 500 line today

**James Dooley:**
superb next we so what's in there for anyone that's not yet signed up I strongly recommend for anyone to subscribe to this newsletter but can you kind of sell it a little bit of why someone should be subscribing and getting this Weekly Newsletter

**Kevin Indig:**
thank you James appreciate that uh yeah sure thing um first of all um I think it it provides profound insides into topics that are top of Mind in SEO right so I spent a lot of time for example diving into Ai overviews and provided some firstand data not just from third party trackers but also some search CES and insights so I often try to answer the questions that are top of mind for seos right now for example what's the impact of AI overviews how do you optimize for them uh how leverage them and and what's the impact on traffic um and so I think it's very datab based and I try to be also very critical and then also intellectually honest about it you know so uh the good thing is I I don't have anything to sell you know the the news that are like it's it's it's a mean to an end now there is a paid version of it as well uh but uh you know my goal is to just really uh share back some of the insights that I got especially when I started out right uh I'm sure you have some like an Orin story as well James but for me I I benefited so much from people being very open and and kind of um um uh kind of sharing so much of their of their insights with me and I I'm trying to give that back with the newsletter so yeah it's the insights it's the data it's a kind of objectivity uh and it comes out every week it's been coming out every week for the last 5 years so you can expect some consistency I'm slowly starting to add more Community features as well as I'm as I'm hitting kind of a a sign significant amount of subscribers so I'm trying to bring people together a bit more and have them share the insights as well but there's a bit more to come there

**James Dooley:**
that's great for anyone that doesn't know obviously there was I seen in there there was like a $15 a month kind of premium package is that still going and what extra the people get if they went with a premium

**Kevin Indig:**
yeah exactly uh so I'm monitoring a large data set of keywords across the web on a regular basis and I'm distilling those insights into a premium research newsletter comes out twice a month I'm just starting a monthly live session as well where I'll distill some of the insights I'll do Q&A and I'll engage more with you know like on on a live uh session actually on on a live meeting uh but yeah these two kind of additional newsletters are deep dives into sometimes companies where I will do an outside in analysis for example I you know Nike Landing tree Ang um I'm working on the New York Times right now so I kind of assess what these sites do well from the outside and I'll speak to two leaders and experts in SEO working at the companies and they give me additional Scoops or insights or validate some of my observations um and then the other part is just industry research so I recently published the first uh industry research report about the travel industry where you'll you know you get the full scoop on what keywords matter what are new and trending keywords which players dominate uh which are upand coming what are they doing well how are they designing their landing pages like all that kind of stuff so that if you work the travel industry or say you're an agency that has clients in travel industry you should get a lot of extra value uh in terms of insights that it can then use for itself

**James Dooley:**
on the um the live stream where it's like a Q&A what like is that being done on Zoom or like what what kind of platforms that being done on

**Kevin Indig:**
yeah I'm using uh Google meet actually uh for a couple of various reasons but uh yeah I'm essentially uh it's it's kind of split into a part where I present the kind of latest insights like a summary of all the content that are published then I'm sharing some of the um things that I observed lately in and Outsider search that are important for people to know then there's a 30 minute Q&A session and then sometimes I'll send people home with some more curated content you know like some some stuff that I came across that I think is is uh worth people's time

**James Dooley:**
yeah no that's great what what's your thoughts at present these massive divide it seems it feels like this seems to be if ever there was a recession in the so industry I feel like at present there's are people there's quite a lot of people on a lull at the moment now I always have the opinion that obviously in a res in a recession there's more millionaires made in a recession so actually it's it's now a time where you can actually double down and and crack on with doing things but what's your thoughts on the current kind of SEO landscape at present

**Kevin Indig:**
it's such a great question James because I was asked the same question on another podcast and I called it a midlife crisis I think SEO is in a midlife crisis um and and midle crisis often happen when you realize that you have changed uh or the world around you has changed you're just not there's this kind of Disconnect between what you thought the world looked like and what it actually looked like and so I think this is really happening in SEO for various reasons on the one hand lots of SE in house seos got laid off and they they kind of deal with that uh we had this like very long um uh kind of uh uh time of um of economic boom right and and and since Co we're we're obviously facing the opposite so that's that's new for a lot of people who have maybe been in the in the game for less than 10 years which sounds crazy to say um and then we also have a lot of massive uh changes on Google itself right they roll out all these updates a lot of them are very intransparent there's uh you know I don't think the the guidance from Google is great on a lot of these things like helpful content update I don't think I need to say more all your listeners know what I'm talking about then we had this lawsuit against Google where we found out some of the uh the the kind of um ranking factors or signals or systems that they're using which are uh um kind of um Paradox to what they what Google spokes people have been saying for a long time we had the ranking Factor leak uh then we have uh the rise of AI and machine learning and like it's all these kind of things together that just change the game tremendously and it's a bit um difficult to find your footing but James I do agree with you that I think this is actually the time where you want to double down on right as you said in recessions that typically where some of the most successful startups are being built right for various reasons don't need to go too deep into that but I think also from an SEO uh perspective um there's a time of a lot of opportunity because you can use a lot of the AI Tools in your favor and if there's if there's one thing that people should take away from this podcast is probably that I think people underestimate greatly what crazy stuff we can do with AI tools these days and how much more that's actually going to change the work that we're doing manually today

**James Dooley:**
yeah for sure what so what's your thoughts I'm going to move on to AI in a second actually I just want it's it's good that you've kind of mentioned it but what's your thoughts then on like affiliate specifically um because obviously seems to be that e-commerce type sites have seemed to do well have you looked into this a little bit more of why is it you think is it like the amount of outbound clicks is it the behavioral signals the engagement like what's your thoughts on why so many Affiliates s some I would say that have got very good content on there there's some there that deserve in my opinion too be it but I think there's some in there that have got great content and they've kind of also been thrown under the bus with some of these kind of spam type websites what what's your thoughts on that at present

**Kevin Indig:**
man is rough in affiliate uh is really and you know this better than me I think uh because I I don't have any affiliate sites anymore I used to do a little bit there uh but I had a pretty good insight into the industry when I worked at Shopify because it was very close to the manager who worked with our Affiliates uh and I I saw also what they earned so there still is a lot of money to be made in the affiliate but the the one thing that I saw change over the pandemic already and it I think it's part due to Google updates and and part not due to Google updates but it's that the the the kind of white label Affiliates um perform worse and worse whereas you know influencers creators and people who put themselves from or Center they gain more and more uh in affiliate fees and so I think it's I think it's really tough to be a you know a a white labeled affiliate side these days which means you don't have a strong recognizable brand you might not even know who's behind the site or who's behind that business and you see uh the opposite working really well so I'm giving you an example um there's a site called garage gym reviews um and uh the guy I don't remember his last name last name first name is Coop Cooper um he has a really strong YouTube channel I actually think this the the business started as YouTube channel and then branched into the website as well um check out the website's trajectory it's just it's it's it gains during every update uh continuously organic traffic and I think part of the reason is just that you know who's behind it there is a a certain trust aspect the traffic sources are Diversified the content is really good obviously fulfills all the kind of like requirements from from Google perspective right so it is optimized um but most importantly you know who's behind it and you can consume that content in various formats and I think that's kind of the the the winning business model for Affiliates these days um and and that obviously takes a lot of time and attention and so I think it's much harder these days to have 10 different affiliate projects going on I think my my my assessment situations you you rather want to have like one strong project you're kind of front or you have a person who's front of in Center um and it's much more personable

**James Dooley:**
yeah I think you hit the nail in the head there brilliantly because something that we we do we I'm I do quite a lot of investments into digital assets and exactly what you've just kind of explained is the type of business or brand that I'm looking to buy I'm actually looking to buy Brands and websites that where the website's not that strong wrong from an SEO standpoint but they've got massive followings on Pinterest on Twitter on Instagram on Tik Tok orever it's on YouTube and then what I'm doing then is I'm taking all that content and I'm putting it and SEO in it and optimizing it and putting it online and putting it onto Google I'm not trying to get those ones that are perfectly optimized for Google but then got no brand behind it anywhere else and I think that that's your major play at present is trying to get those places where they're not strong on Google but they're strong in other places and then you can then integrate it within Google that traffic diversification like I've always been a big big believer of Engagement and behavioral signals I I think it's one of the biggest most under talked kind of SEO strategies that people don't seem to do everyone seems to be become obsessed with content and links and then kind of the new buzz word is topical Authority but then they're not they're not talking about dwell time how many pages have kind of been visited where the traffic's coming from i' I've they got an email list a newsletter of they got a big following where the minute you go and create a new post you're going to get two 3,000 eyes on that post just from your social media and Google's seeing all those clicks and stuff like that and instantly then you're jumping in top three top five results with no back links and with very few internal links now obviously with more internal links and more back links hopefully you can then jump it to the number one spot but yeah I think you hit the nail in the head there for sure but NE next question Reddit or user generated websites do you think that the they seen too much too many wins at present like what's your thoughts on that present

**Kevin Indig:**
it's very interesting question I've been struggling with that as well so since the hidden gems update and I think it was May of last year may of 2023 um you see all sorts of forums getting massive traction simply because they're forums right so obviously Reddit Kora front and center because those are the biggest ones but you'll also see forums from Shopify or zapier or some consumer Brands actually gain lots of attaction uh and so it you're right it does seem that Google has a bigger appetite for user generated content forums seem to be the the format that Google can recognize for for ugc the most is it better or not you know as a there are lots of reports of where it's a probably worse answer or not a good answer at all but when I look at people around me who are not seos they actually often value an answer from a forum especially Reddit very much and and there's a specific type for this or a specific user intent better said where ugc answers matter most and it's usually when people want an opinion from a non-expert so a good example is uh fashion right you want to buy a sneaker and you research maybe some Brands but you're not satisfied with the information that that um uh vendors have on their product landing pages and that's when you just want somebody who most likely is a human right Reddit is not perfect right but in grand scheme of things it's it's most likely you get an answer from another human and you want an opinion about how does the sneaker fit like how did you actually like it and part of the problem is that so much of the web has become commercialized right we're talking about Affiliates they obviously have an incentive to sell uh you know then you have Amazon and and some of the other uh bigger uh retail platforms and there you find mostly good reviews but also some fake reviews and it's really comes down to a trust problem it comes down to people actually wanting an answer from another human that is not incentivized uh in any way with uh with money maybe Karma on on on Reddit is an incentive if you will but it's not it's not a monetary incentive it's more about like honor and Glory if you will so uh that's why I'm struggling with that question I can see why people want Reddit answers I also know how quote unquote it is to game Reddit so I know about the dangers here but I also wonder what other options Google really has here right uh they're they're dealing with this big AI wave from one side and AI content is getting really good these days um for specific topics um and then on the other hand again you have this highly commercialized web which Google doesn't like hate right Google benefits from that as well but they they need to somehow balance commercialize and incentivize answers with something quote unquote real and I think that's how we ended up here in this place I don't think this is going to go away uh I I much rather think that Google is going to be is going to get much much smarter about uh where to place uh uh Reddit answers or or discussions and Forums on the serup so higher or lower um and then which threads to uh show on these platforms as well as they make more deals to to get direct access to the API apis of these platforms

**James Dooley:**
that's a really interesting answer to be honest with you and it the the the question that I've asked there completely splits opinions in the SEO industry and the your answer you give is almost the exact same answer as what I normally give as well and and the reason why I try to explain it to Affiliates that sometimes get annoyed with my answer is that if I was Google and bear in mind majority of keywords seemed to be as people started to become more and more frustrated with the search engine results seemed to start asking the question and appending Reddit at the end of it which I also think was a big reason of why Google then started to realize head on a minute so many people are searching for keyword with Reddit maybe we should be promoting redit that a little bit higher but not only that I think the seos actually killed the results page in a negative way and the reason why I actually think that is because everyone became obsessed with correlation of content so then Google when they started to write here's the top 10 Trainers if someone went and clicked on that number one result and didn't like that result and went back to the search engine results page and clicked on the number two result the number two result was very similar to the number one result and they didn't like the number one result so then they go back and click on the number three result and next minute before you know it Google's now got a problem that their user of their platform and their search engine is not not happy with the results that Google are now giving and therefore may be a forum which has lots and lots of different opinions and people can argue with each other as opposed to one person's opinion which generally speaking would sort by who pays the most commission via an affiliate commission that's not really giving the best answer and a lot of Affiliates don't like me answering it in this way but I actually think they've done a good job in in parts now there is obviously information bias out there and a lot of seos and Affiliates might not like the answer that obviously we've both just given but and I'm sure with information bias they'll show me certain results that say what so you think that this is the best answer no I'm I'm saying there is certain there's certain questions and answers that are not good enough but realistically like you called yourself an organic growth advisor if I was doing if I was an organic growth advisor for an affiliate I would be saying go and get your answers on Reddit go and get your answers on quora go and go and participate what what's ranking and get the traffic back to your website if they want a more detailed review why why are you not doing that anyway go and hang about in Facebook groups that people might be asking questions in there that's just that's just marketing stop pigeon alling yourself in just being an SEO and actually start being a better marketer and when you become a better marketer you become a better SEO in directly anyway

**Kevin Indig:**
yeah James you're so right uh sorry to but you get me fired up about this because the the thing here is that you have a chance to actually interact with your target audience right so you want to go after keyword you see this cussion forms is ranking High there's a a Reddit threat that hits right into the target keyword right it's super relevant you go on there and and so I think as seos we quickly think like we think okay what what answer to the question would be super helpful or how can I gain some attention with my answer cool so you spend some time writing that answer you post and Reddit now why wouldn't you take that answer and and distill it into your main content as well right like the the jump that we have to make as seos where we get too obsessed about numbers uh like search volume or some of the other metrics you look at where we're not marketers and up to your point is cool I I've just figured out how to get this relevant answer why wouldn't that be relevant in my landing page or blog article as well right so again it's this kind of like problem that we're a bit overfed with numbers and SEO specifically search volume and we just get obsessed about that stuff and we forget that there's an opportunity with discussion forms to actually engage with potential customers or clients or or you know affiliate visitors

**James Dooley:**
so moving on to artificial intelligence then Kevin what are you doing with regards to a are you leveraging AI are you trying your best to get any of your clients or anything that you're doing to be using Ai and using it to super boost what you're doing

**Kevin Indig:**
I leverage AI a lot actually and it's interesting to see that more and more clients are asking for AI generated content or how can we leverage AI a lot of times because their boards pressure them to do something cool with AI so there's a bit of hype in here as well but I actually think there's a lot more found Foundation that most people think uh just to mention a couple of examples I've built AI generated programmatic SEO um content for some clients um and I think there's a sloppy way that usually goes wrong and I think there's a good way to do it um could talk a bit more about what good means um I'm also using AI a lot in my data analysis or just um kind of exploration so uh one of my favorite tools these days is the GPT for sheets and Docs um Google integration where you can bring um open AI models uh like gbt for Zer to your Google Sheets and then do all sorts of crazy stuff extract entities similarity scores between I know keywords URLs all sorts of fun things or just custom proms which is incredibly helpful uh so I'm using that a ton uh I think the most one of the most basic workflows is that I just go to cat GPT and ask it to create reex formulas for me or Google Sheets formulas that would take me a long time but allow me to get more out of Google Sheets and there's this whole world that I'm that I'm spending a lot of time in right now of AI workflows for where for example you can um uh build a sequence where you you punch in a keyword um then you can you it will the tool will then scrape the search results you can then filter out certain uh results like say discussions and forums then send the machine back to scrape that content and then use llms to do something with content so you know spoke about um or I actually spoke with a client about this earlier this morning but things like FAQs or um you know article summaries you can create that in literally minutes right now at a pretty high fidelity where humans are actually less and less involved to get a good product

**James Dooley:**
so with regards to some of them it was quite interesting that you said that you've now started to get certain clients kind of asking for AI um I presume the powers that be are saying look we need need to start integrating this within um some of our kind of workflows and stuff like that so are you do many them doing it for let's say so if you're going scraping like the search engine results and the people also ask are you managing to pull them in to kind of help assist create like content outlines for what people should be writing about

**Kevin Indig:**
outlines even whole articles now I'm mostly hesitant to to create full articles with AI um the reason is simply because the longer the output typically the the more the quality decreases of AI output um that's a bit query dependent or a bit uh dependent on the article so Evergreen topics or very clearly defined topics uh say glossies for example typically produce really good a output so if you just need to define a term and talk a little bit about the what this is and why it's important AI can do that really well these days when it comes to something where human opinion or experience is more important that's where AI typically fails um but um I think people underestimate how good some of the AI output actually is um and then of course this whole world of programmatic SEO um and again the the two two factors can significantly increase the quality of your ai ai output for programmatic SEO one of them is to split up the prompts so most people will attempt to have a single prompt for a whole piece of content what I actually do is I split it into 10 different prompts or 20 different prompts four different paragraphs right so you're writing about I don't know payroll in California cool now one problem could be about what are the the the specific rules for the State of California when it comes to payroll another prpt would be explain uh you know U the the different components of payroll another problem could be um you know how has uh how have the payroll laws changed over time right so you really want to split it up into smaller segments and the second thing is you want to ground your prompts and your output as much in data as possible so for some clients for example we'll get data from the product we'll get data from surveys we'll get public data sets and we'll use that to ground the output meaning to to guide the output so for example you can Lally do this in Google Sheets where you you you you load the data and then use that integration that I mentioned earlier to then reference every data point and say here take this data point put into context with this other data point create two to three sentences around this and explain it and those type of things work work really really well as opposed to write an article about payroll in California

**James Dooley:**
yeah for sure I mean we're using AI quite a lot um internally um for for Content creation as well we are humanizing it so these areas where like you said we're trying to add our experience on top of them getting a Bas layer of an article being done but but a lot of our prompts are at paragraph level so each each and every question has certain prompts put in place then we'll try and um humanize it and then we'll try to kind of just double check like data and check that there's no hallucinations that's in there to make certain factually that it's correct but yeah I mean it's it's helped us a lot it's helped us it's nearly all of our writers now become editors or prompt Engineers um and the output I think was like last time we checked I think it was 8.4 times more content that the content writer now was able to do now from being a Content writer to being an editor and do you know what if I'm being 100% honest I actually think the content is so much better I think it's more concise I think we're moving all the like contextless words and the fluff that was in there I think that it's more to the point it's more factual it's more entity rich and for me as a reader I'm thinking this is a lot better I think it's better for the users I think it's actually the cost of information retrieval for Google I think for that it's actually better as well so I think all around for anyone that turns around saying that you shouldn't be leveraging AI they're probably not just using the right prompts um in my opinion but it's unbelievable in and we're using it for like League segmentation as well and stuff like that so it was interesting that I've never heard that of what you said that certain customers now or certain big companies are now trying to say how do we leverage artificial intelligence I always thought there'd be a bit of a more of a negative stigma for a while of it it's replacing humans and we shouldn't be using AI in the Dead Set against it so it was quite interesting that you said that part

**Kevin Indig:**
yeah look there there's a a moral conflict here as well I do actually believe that humans can still add a lot of value to content but I also concur that you know we need to be a lot more specific about where and when that that value at happens now when you look at the landscape right a lot of big companies are becoming more interested in AI on the one hand just to make sure they're not missing out on something big that competitors might use but also on the other hand because they have to become more coste efficient right these layoffs that we mentioned the beginning of our conversation um they're obviously a symptom for the the somewhat difficult landscape uh that that a lot of companies have to navigate these days and so as a manager you're looking for efficiencies and you of course you know if the question is can we maybe pay a couple hundred bucks for some AI tools a month to replace maybe three full-time Riders then morally you don't want to make that choice but you also have a responsibility to the business and that's where this Choice needs to be made and I'm not saying you should always replace the writers but I'm saying that's how a lot of managers and decision makers think these days and uh and a lot of times or more and more um the AI wins or at least the compromise wins where they say okay maybe we let two out of three people go we keep one and that person then manages um their eye content and again um there's a lot of Nu on here there are cases where it doesn't work or we shouldn't maybe use it I'm not writing my newsletter with AI either right it's still all me and so there are there are legit cases where you want a human to create the content but that's not every case

**James Dooley:**
yeah yeah for sure the um personal branding you've got an amazing knowledge panel you've got a great kind of brand online for you personally do you think that other seos or other marketers should strive to have like a knowledge panel or build a personal brand like what what's your thoughts on that

**Kevin Indig:**
the knowledge panel certainly helps um but it's you know at the end of the day the question is what is it what is it good for and so it looks good it looks professional but uh it doesn't mean that all of a sudden more people uh you know uh subscribe to my newsletter um I think personal branding is a double-edged sword it and it really depends on what your what your goal is and obviously there are different degrees of personal branding as well I think a like putting yourself out there just a little bit can generally help but there also is that line at which it might take away from your responsibilities as you know an in-house uh SEO or or from your business so you always have to weigh the trade-offs against the benefits um and so uh I think also think there's a there's a right time to do it um I probably wouldn't spend too much time on personal branding when you just start out uh but when once you have maybe five or 10 years of experience and you have something to say it it might really help you but again it it it so much depends on what you're after my journey um it it kind of fell into place by accident I am a fucious notetaker and so I started my newsletter because people asked me to share my notes from uh some of the conferences I went to or from some of the blog articles I read and so it started very organically and then you know at some point I had a th000 subscribers and I kind of woke up and I was like oh okay um interesting let me let me kind of keep going and then I went through many iterations and and kind of um uh ways to go about the newsletter and then I really doubled down uh once I left the in-house world and I you know I didn't have to feel guilty anymore about uh spending so much time with the newsletter but uh long story short I think personal branding can help I think there is uh a a a a degree at which it might distract you from other things and uh at the end of the day the question is what why do it and what do it for

**James Dooley:**
yeah so I mean on that there on your knowledge panel it says International speaker so obviously you travel the world doing quite a lot of talks at certain SEO conferences or business conferences do you find that brings you in more business do you find that that's good for your personal branding like what what's the reason for you doing it or is it literally just to try to give back some value to the community as it a mixture of everything

**Kevin Indig:**
yeah that's funny because uh you know even with with all the activity that I do uh on LinkedIn in the newsletter and speaking 50% of my clients come from Word of Mouth um they come from recommendations some of them are people I used to work with which is honestly it it's so fulfilling personally when when people can hire you after you work with them um but 50% is completely independent of all the stuff that I do 25% is through the newsletter 25% is through Linkedin uh and so you know it's not nothing but it's not as much as people think I do the personal speaking for a couple reasons um one of them is because I enjoy it I have a good time two I like to connect with people in person and uh speaking at a conference is just a you know it kind of lowers the cost of of uh flying uh especially to Far Far distant conferences but I'm working remotely so for me conferences are a great way to kind of get my feel of of connecting with people in person uh and the third is I want to I want to uh grow newsletter subscribers and uh it honestly it it I was expecting a bit more it doesn't help as much as I thought uh but uh you know for me it's it it actually drives very very little business uh almost none and at the same time I think that's a it's actually a feature rather than a bug because it allows me to to give kind of um a a completely unbiased talk and I don't have to sell myself uh in a in a specific way

**James Dooley:**
yeah that's good so I'm now I'm just moving on to a few questions from the community so I posted on LinkedIn and on Twitter and a couple of private groups to what some questions to ask you and know some of these questions can throw you off a little bit because like you're like oh I've not been asked this one before but I want you to name one thing that all right your close friends might know but the SEO Community how people don't know about you personally yeah that's one thing that people might not know about you and obviously there there many things but I want to I want to see if there's something interesting

**Kevin Indig:**
man um I think one thing that could be interesting is I've um I've actually been a club DJ for many years so I started um when I I had kind of my my my kind of uh Peak DJ time when I was in college um and I think it's interesting because it goes back a little bit to my nature um I can I can quickly ESS over things uh and so once I put my mind to something I can I can get really good at it uh and I also really think it helped me with speaking CU I've I've stood in front of thousands of people uh and and made them move and and that to takes away a lot of the fear of just being in front of people now I'm still nervous being in front of people but uh I think I think that was just a big enabler so I'll go with that

**James Dooley:**
I never knew that so that's that's a great one what um what was your DJ name do you have any specific name

**Kevin Indig:**
yeah it's DJ btb um and there is another there's a famous DJ also called B2B so good luck finding uh my old stuff which is probably a benefit but I still have you know thousands of violent records my mom's basement I have bunch of mixtapes on my Dropbox I have I think even some recordings so some of my gigs and it was such a fun time I was a very different person back then I was wearing uh bgy pants and way too big t-shirts you know hip-hop had a big impact on me and uh I don't think people would recognize me these days so it was was literally a different person but um it was it was a really good time and I I caught just the Tailwind of the times where you know people went to the club because they wanted to hear new songs from the DJ and not the songs that they already listen to on their iPod or in Spotify at home so uh such a fun time man and it's a completely different game these days

**James Dooley:**
that's class that's really good so moving on to the next one name one thing that you feel that most seos I'd say I'd go as far as say most advanced seos seem to still get wrong so something that they obsess over too much or something that they don't do that you feel people should be learning more about

**Kevin Indig:**
it's 100% business cases um I think one of the you know things that really helped me along my career is that I always um always probably a bit much but that that I learn how to formulate an SEO problem into something that the business should actually care about uh turn an SEO problem into into Dollars uh and so this is what holds most seos back in my mind they obsess over you know detailed technical stuff they nerd out on things uh and they completely forget why somebody with the director title or BP title or SE Suite should actually care about that type of stuff so being able to translate I think uh uh and making a good business case I think is the number one thing holding seos back and I'm speaking mostly about the inhouse and kind of agency World obviously

**James Dooley:**
so on that would you say more like prior prioritization spending too much time in the wrong areas is that kind of where where you say

**Kevin Indig:**
part of it priorization um and the other part is just to to to figure out a path to the money so um if we fix these canonical what what would the actual impact be um in terms of uh Revenue right uh and that often prioritizes things very naturally uh because you want to go after the big buckets of money uh but just having a a logical rationale of how that translates that to money for example so let's say our conicals are broken on our um on our product landing pages cool we have 100 product landing pages this is the combined traffic that they're driving this is what we estimate we could achieve in an improvement in terms of organic uh rank uh now if we get that much more uh or that much better rank why would that mean in terms of traffic incremental and how could that translate to revenue based on average order value and conversion rate right this kind of simple formula maybe it's not that simple but this type of breaking things down to the money that's what a lot of seos Miss and that's what actually gets you funding and attention from uh decision makers

**James Dooley:**
yeah for sure I mean I we always talk about in the office about a return on investment what what return investment is this work going to get us so we always talk about the free PS one of them being PR prioritization one of them being are you just being a perfectionist and overthinking a certain area and then the third one is procrastination are you overthinking something just stop the free PS sit down work out what's the fastest route to getting you the best return on investment and I always drill into him about the free PS and I think it's so important for to work with but moving on to to the next one here Google engineer right you can sit down with a Google engineer and you can ask them one question and they're going to be 100% honest with you about the way the algorithms work what would you ask them and why

**Kevin Indig:**
I love that question it's a really it's really challenging I would love to understand how they leverage um search uh search demand or search volume to rank sites so something that I have been observing over the years and that I think has a stronger and stronger impact is that at a certain threshold uh Google will will use brand combination searches a lot when deciding who to rank at the top so what brand combination search is a um a combination of a brand name and a generic Cur something like Shopify business name generator and so I would love to understand to what degree they compare brand combination uh search demand to decide who ranks at the top I don't think this is the you know the only thing that they're looking at obviously uh but it seems to have a stronger and stronger impact and I would just love to understand what that looks like from their perspective cuz I think it's hard to judge from the outside right the the way that we think about search volume is obviously very different than Google thinks about search volume or search demand and I would love to get a scoop on what are the factors they look at how well can they tell whether people prefer a certain brand and what's the impact of Google ranking that brand over others

**James Dooley:**
great one yes I like it so last question for you if you inherited Google tomorrow right so you could turn around now and you can sit on the board and you can tell all Google Engineers like I want to dial up the power of B links I want to dial up the relevance of bat links I want to dial down topical Authority I want to dial up clickthrough rate or dwell time or um how many pages are being visited or whatever it is what would you do personally if you went in there now and you could change one or two things with the way that the algorithm Works What would you say of why Google at present are again it wrong and what would you try to tweak and why

**Kevin Indig:**
yeah uh another fantastic question because it it creates a it creates some empathy with people people working at Google who don't have an easy job well pay job don't get me wrong but not an easy job uh and so I think um something that I'd be curious about and I have to be careful with how I say it because I know that Google ran some of these experiments of like what would happen if we decreased all the factors except for one and how would that change the search results and I know that some of the user Behavior signals kind of came out on top when it comes to which ones would still provide the highest quality so but for me I would challenge how well Google actually understands content to me one of the biggest moments of awareness that I had over the last couple of years especially looking into the results or the reveals from the Google lawsuit and the ranking factors that leaked is that Google has been putting a high emphasis on user behavior for much longer than we thought and has only backed into understanding content better over the last couple of years um that went counter to my understanding of Google for a long time where I thought okay they actually have a good understanding of content and good understanding of backlinks and over time they got a better understanding of user behavior and use that to then change the the search results that's that's the opposite of what actually happened and so I think that over time the search results have probably not gotten better in most cases right there's there's obviously um exceptions um and so I wonder if Google truly understands the quality of content well or if maybe they should just try to not understand content as much and and and lean even more on user behavior um the other thing I'd be really curious about is if they tone down actually the brand signals uh cuz I I in all the data that I look at I truly find that Google prioritizes Brands more I do understand why brands are the antidote to the cess pool blah blah blah Eric Schmidt I know um but I still don't think that Google ranks the best content at the top I still think that there's a lot of content that is not well optimized for search that you find a lot of newsletters for example I'm not toting my own horn here right I'm referring to other newsletters uh but I think there's a lot of hidden content that deserves to rank much much higher but simply for example doesn't hit Target keywords as well and that's something that Google should strongly figure out to improve the uh the search results so uh two answers one uh tone down the brand Factor see how that changes the quality of search results and two try to to have have the have Google's understanding of content actually influences search results less

**James Dooley:**
great answers the um it's an interesting one because quite a lot of them when they ask that question they do try to say some of the smaller sites I feel like they be like they might have some amazing experience and amazing content but they're being held back against these bigger Brands where the content's nowhere near as good but like you said they've got a lot of brand signals kind of seem to have a lot of topical Authority the Dr in h revs is really high not that that really matters too much on it's a third party to but like they've got a lot of power with regards to bat links coming through and that just seems the top Trump um the little kind of SES that could have more experience in a certain subjects so yeah I'm all for it as well like I think they should dial down that a little bit um but he so I mean it's such an interesting question because you could sit there and argue all day long and say they need to put more emphasis on power of links or relevance of links but then people just manipulate it but then you kind of say okay you need to have more emphasis on the quality of content but again then people then just try to not keyword stuff but entity stuff and just try to try to gain the system in every way shape or form so no matter what you try to dial up it's so easy to then try to manipulate if people know the formula and I think one of the hardest things to manipulate is good user signals so I think like the like I think in the Google leak that spoke about like nav boost and click data and and I think that they do probably need to put more emphasis on that because it's so difficult to game because people try to game it with like CTR tools but the truth of the matter is Google use a lot more than just CTR that's going in there they'll look at like the browser history this the user history the like a click from someone that's got 10 years of user data history actually has got it's almost like not every single click is weighted the same not every single link is weighted the same if someone's not logged into Gmail and not they don't know who they are that's going to have way almost no impact on the CTR than someone that got history and stuff like that that's going in there so but it's like you said empathy within Google like it's so difficult that if someone as advanced as you could go in there you still might make you might make the the results better in areas but then you might make it worse in areas and then the SEO industry will jump on the bandwagon that says Kevin indig has made this so much worse and show information bias of a few results that's not as good um so I think it's difficult on on that from but anyway it's been an absolute pleasure and where so obviously with regards to the newsletter let's kind of get this out there where can people subscribe to your Weekly Newsletter

**Kevin Indig:**
yeah thanks James and by the way it's been an awesome conversation thanks so much for having me on uh so the newsletter is growth memo you find that under growth dm.com and then have a personal sites kevin.com uh if you're curious about you know next speaking gigs or or advisor who that kind of stuff

**James Dooley:**
where's the best place if someone needs to message you or anything if you got any emails or like LinkedIn or anything like that

**Kevin Indig:**
yeah Reach Out LinkedIn uh or Twitter I use my uh my real name obviously on uh on Twitter as well uh and uh I regularly look at my inbox so yeah reach out

**James Dooley:**
sounds good well it's been an absolute pleasure Kevin and I'll see you again soon at one of the meetups

**Kevin Indig:**
I hope so James thanks so much

**James Dooley:**
cheers mate

**Kevin Indig:**
Cheers