- 8 months ago
In this episode, host Ruchi Pardal (SVP of Innovation at ResultFirst) sits down with Sam Page, Director of SEO at Slack and former Global Head of SEO at Amazon Business. With 20+ years in the industry, Sam shares how AI-driven platforms like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Bing are reshaping the search landscape.
The discussion kicks off with Slack’s SEO priorities in the era of large language models (LLMs), and why technical SEO is still the foundation before experimenting with AI-driven tactics. Sam explains why SEO can no longer be Google-only, pointing out the rise of new search entry points and the growing importance of user-generated content (UGC) as a major trust signal—potentially as influential as backlinks.
Other highlights from the conversation include:
The rising role of schema markup and structured data for both AI systems and traditional crawlers
How to track referral traffic from LLMs even when attribution is blurred
Why Bing’s integration with ChatGPT is making it more relevant for enterprise SEO strategies
Real-world AI applications like batch-testing meta tags and optimizing titles for higher CTR
The importance of thinking like a product manager when building scalable SEO assets
Toward the end, Sam leaves one big takeaway: double down on UGC. With forums and community-driven content gaining visibility across AI-powered search, UGC is quickly becoming the new link-building.
👉 Prefer YouTube? You can also catch this episode there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8x_3bZ0GwY&t=26s
The discussion kicks off with Slack’s SEO priorities in the era of large language models (LLMs), and why technical SEO is still the foundation before experimenting with AI-driven tactics. Sam explains why SEO can no longer be Google-only, pointing out the rise of new search entry points and the growing importance of user-generated content (UGC) as a major trust signal—potentially as influential as backlinks.
Other highlights from the conversation include:
The rising role of schema markup and structured data for both AI systems and traditional crawlers
How to track referral traffic from LLMs even when attribution is blurred
Why Bing’s integration with ChatGPT is making it more relevant for enterprise SEO strategies
Real-world AI applications like batch-testing meta tags and optimizing titles for higher CTR
The importance of thinking like a product manager when building scalable SEO assets
Toward the end, Sam leaves one big takeaway: double down on UGC. With forums and community-driven content gaining visibility across AI-powered search, UGC is quickly becoming the new link-building.
👉 Prefer YouTube? You can also catch this episode there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8x_3bZ0GwY&t=26s
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TechTranscript
00:00Lots of AI, LLM traffic picking up, people using ChatGPT and Perplexity and some of these other tools.
00:09Start looking at Bing optimization because, you know, the ChatGPT's feeds just come in from Bing.
00:15Doubling down on this UGC, even reviews, that type of content is going to be so valuable.
00:21Welcome to the Performance SEO Unpacked Podcast.
00:24We're leading experts to be practical solutions for scaling enterprise and e-commerce growth.
00:28Deep dive into cutting-edge AI SEO strategies.
00:32Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Performance SEO Unpacked.
00:36Today, I have Sam with me.
00:38He has been, Sam is a seasoned SEO director with over 20 years of experience working on small and large websites.
00:45He's currently the director of SEO at Slack.
00:48Previously, he was the global head of SEO at Amazon Business.
00:52He's passionate about the future of SEO with AI and LLM optimization taking hold.
00:57So, continuing my conversation with Sam, you know, based on what we spoke earlier.
01:02Yeah.
01:03Thank you, Ruchi.
01:04Nice to be here.
01:05Sam, can you start by explaining why is it so important for SEO to think beyond just optimizing for Google these days?
01:12Yeah, so I like the modifier these days because I actually, you know, have been kind of harping on this topic for a while before, you know, the recent updates with Google, which we'll get into.
01:25But, you know, I think that it's been worthwhile for SEOs to look beyond Google for a long time.
01:32You know, looking at platforms like Amazon for optimizations, like Netflix has an SEO element to it.
01:39So anywhere, and even back before Google, we had the phone book where people were doing optimizations for yellow pages, for AAA, you know, whatever.
01:48So I think it's important to keep, like, if this is your fundamental framework for being an SEO, like understanding that things change quickly sometimes, and that wherever your customers are, like where they're searching from, is going to be where you need to be as an optimizer, as a marketer, essentially.
02:10And so today, I think it's particularly salient because we see lots of AI, LLM traffic picking up people using chat GPT and perplexity and some of these other tools.
02:24So the, I guess the pie is being eaten from multiple points at this, you know, at this juncture in optimizations.
02:32So it's very important for us to be aware of like what we consider SEO.
02:39Yeah, no, I 100% agree with this.
02:42And you brought up, you know, things from back in early 1980s, I guess, you know, with the AAAs and it's always been evolving ever since.
02:51What should SEOs have in place, in your opinion, as a strong technical foundation before focusing on AI and LLM optimization?
02:59You know, that's the new thing, but is it open for everybody to just get started on this?
03:03Or do you think there has to be some basic foundation that everybody must focus on before they jump on the new wagon?
03:10Yeah.
03:10So if you own, like, let's say you're a business owner or you own a website and you're saying, wow, this is the cutting edge, you know, of SEO.
03:19We need to be on perplexity and determine how we show up there.
03:23I think it's more important for you to lay the framework of make sure your website is still, you know, in good working order.
03:33So make sure you have good content on your website.
03:36Make sure the technical SEO part aspects of your site are performing well.
03:40So it's being able to be crawled, being indexed.
03:44And then from there, you can kind of consider, like, once you have a good foundation for your website, then you can kind of consider more about, you know, what the LLMs and AI are finding on your website.
03:57So Google is still the king.
03:59You know, Google search is still the king of search at this point for most people.
04:03And I think that it would be negligent to not optimize for Google first.
04:11Do you think it's equally important for people to, you know, also start looking at Bing optimization because, you know, the chat GPT's feeds just come in from Bing?
04:21No, I think so.
04:22I think it's, I used to say, like, you optimize for Google, by proxy you're optimizing for Bing.
04:29But I think that is actually changing.
04:30So I think it's a good point where Bing is becoming, well, for us at Slack, not to give too much away, but Bing is a growing search channel for us.
04:41And we're seeing, you know, we're seeing positive trends from Bing traffic, most likely due to, you know, its investment in chat GPT and open AI.
04:50But I think it's worthwhile for sure to consider Bing more closely maybe than you have in the past if you're at SEO.
04:58Yeah, yeah, yeah.
05:00So last when we were speaking, you know, you mentioned the importance of using schema markups to provide more information to AI crawlers.
05:08Can you share some insights on how you've leveraged schema markups efficiently?
05:14Well, yeah, I think so that's true.
05:16I do think having good schema markup in place, any sort of micro formatting is important for AI crawlers in Google.
05:25I think one of the things that we're seeing too at Slack is Google's taking a lot of AI overviews and we want to indicate kind of to Google and to those crawlers, what we think is appropriate for the AI overviews and whatever they're surfacing in perplexity or chat GPT.
05:44We use, we, I'm not going to, I don't mean, I'm not a paid shill here, but I've used a schema app and I think that's pretty compelling app for schema markup.
05:56I think we're seeing some interesting results from how crawlers are finding the structured data on our site.
06:04Other than that, I think, you know, finding the right, I think there's a, I think SEOs in the past have maybe in some cases overused structured data or, or underused, right?
06:19There's never like, it was never a middle ground of like appropriate usage of schema.
06:25It was either all or none.
06:26And, and, and I think that, yeah, finding that, like finding the right content to markup and indicate these appropriate things to crawlers is, is pretty important.
06:38I think that's just one aspect of AI LLM optimization that I'm, I'm leaning into.
06:44Yeah.
06:45Is there, is there a specific schema markup that, you know, you are your really favorite ones and you think that we should, you know, must include in as a, as a tip to the SEOs?
06:55I'm not going to give you the code, but I will tell you anything UGC.
07:00So it could be review schema, anything like where you user generated content is the, is the basis of that, that it to me is gold.
07:11And to AI LLMs, I think this is something that they're weighing a lot, putting a lot of weight behind is UGC.
07:20So forum, if you can have forum markup and anything user generated content, that's, that's definitely something you want to indicate to these crawlers, because look at, I mean, look at how much, if you look at how much Google's invested into Reddit, it's, it's not surprising that UGC and customer sentiment is something that is top of mind for them.
07:44Yeah, no, that's, that's great information.
07:47And you did share, you know, anything that's related to UGC, everybody must look at and optimize for it.
07:53But, you know, coming to a point, how do you balance optimizing for Google versus optimizing for AI powered search?
08:01Are there, you know, are they mutually exclusive or can strategies complement each other?
08:06I think they're complimentary, at least at this point, it may find a point in the future where things change.
08:13But I think the very complimentary in the way that you need offsite optimization, like Reddit, like Reddit content and having customer and out like customer sentiment out there with UGC.
08:26And then also like having the structured data, right, that's even before AI LLMs were around, that was important to have.
08:34So I think that very much complimentary, I think you, if anything, you probably couldn't go too overboard with the AI LLM optimizations based on the constraints for that, right?
08:46Like, so there's only so much content you can produce, or you can produce from UGC content, if it's legitimate UGC content, right?
08:56So I think, yeah, I think leaning heavier into the AI LLM optimizations will pay dividends in the future, but also could complement your existing SEO strategy for Google.
09:07Yeah, yeah.
09:07And you've mentioned, you know, Reddit and YouTube.
09:10But can you share some of your experiences of using platforms like Reddit and YouTube to build authority and credibility?
09:17Much more difficult to manipulate.
09:20It's more of, you know, I think that I'm not going to share the Reddit, my Reddit experiences.
09:27But I will say with YouTube, YouTube's the second largest search engine.
09:31There's tons of traffic coming to YouTube.
09:33And I think one of the things is with these types of platforms are like attribution is a big issue for especially YouTube.
09:44So companies, bigger companies tend to be more hesitant because they can't quantify the ROI from it, at least not directly.
09:52But I will say, yeah, like success on YouTube to me looks like top of funnel engagement and getting your brand into conversations where it may not be elsewhere.
10:06And I think to me, having like a face to the brand is important too, right?
10:10I don't think having like a no face SEO channel or YouTube channel is ideal.
10:15I think it's good to have someone that people can relate to or identify with your brand.
10:21And I've seen good results with that.
10:23I think Slack has some YouTube SEO involvement, but it would be something I would love to push more for in 2025.
10:31Because these are things I think, again, like people are having conversations on Reddit and YouTube about Slack.
10:38And we're not actually like engaging in those conversations as a company.
10:44And I think it would be great for us to show up there.
10:46And it's very interesting where, you know, you're mentioning that, you know, even for SEO success, it's great to have a ambassador associated, you know, a digital ambassador associated for success.
11:00And then, you know, you're also at the same time broadening the scope of SEO, you know, by even going to places like Reddit and communicating with the actual user and trying to bring in, you know, the right audience to the website in order to generate traffic.
11:15That's a very interesting angle that you just bought in.
11:18And you also touched upon a topic that needs full episode to itself, which is ROI from all these, you know, referral traffics and the redirects and how to measure, you know, what's SEO success, what's social media.
11:30That's great.
11:31But, you know, and coming to the measuring aspect itself, you know, just beyond traditional Google rankings, what other metrics are you tracking to measure the impact of your AI search optimization efforts?
11:43Okay, so this is still like very difficult to do on a one-to-one basis, at least not as clear.
11:50The data is not as clear as it is from maybe like a Goot GA4, you know, search.
11:56There's no search console for perplexity yet.
11:58So I anticipate in the future, like chat GPT will have some type of analytics or data.
12:05Maybe they start doing ads to it.
12:06That's another conversation too.
12:07Sorry, but I think for me, like what we're doing now is we're looking at referral traffic from perplexity, from chat GPT.
12:16And we're kind of modeling out an idea of if we're getting X amount of click-throughs or referrals to our site from these, we have to imagine that maybe it's 1% of these people are actually clicking through to Slack's website, for instance.
12:34And we know, let's say there's 1,000 clicks per month, just hypothetical.
12:40I'm not going to get into any details here, but let's say 1,000 clicks per month.
12:45If that's 1% click-through rate, we're looking at about 100,000 monthly search volume on these channels, right?
12:52So it's not an insignificant amount of traffic and we're watching, just watching it grow week by week.
12:58It's growing rapidly as far as a referral channel.
13:03So we're, we're trying to do our best to understand what the impact is on our SEO traffic, because presumably these people, these, this 100,000 MSV were, was searching on Google or Bing.
13:16And now they're on perplexity or chat GPT.
13:20So, and we're also trying to model this alongside the impact of AI overviews.
13:26So there's a lot of noise and it's tough to find the signal, but I think this is the best, from, from what I can tell, this is the best way for now, for us to understand this traffic.
13:37Yeah, we already, you know, as marketers were struggling to get the attributes right with all, you know, the cookie less world.
13:44And now welcome to the AI world where we do not understand what's contributing to what I, myself, you know, was the other day I had never tried it.
13:53And then I was speaking to somebody and they introduced me to using the UTMs to track the traffic coming in from chat GPTs and the perplexities.
14:02And I was like, oh, this just solves so much for me that it's a lot more easier to track what's coming in from, you know, what location.
14:10But it's, it's so much more complicated to, to attribute the success over here.
14:16Yeah, and also you have to consider like how many of those people are just coming in directly to, right?
14:22Like some percentage of those people probably don't click a referral link.
14:25They just come directly to the site and it's also brand visibility, right?
14:30So share of voice, those types of metrics, they're much more difficult to, to attribute.
14:37Yeah.
14:38So basis your experience, you know, in the past, and I don't want you to get into a lot of specifics.
14:43I understand, you know, there, there's, you know, guidelines around it, but is there, you know, a case study or a scenario where, you know, you would want to share on an AI experiment with the listeners on what you did, how did you achieve and what was the need of, you know, that experiment maybe at a, at a top level?
15:03Yeah, I can, I can give you some higher level idea of what I've done in the past.
15:07I think what I, I've, so I actually try to avoid too much AI intervention in content.
15:15I think it's, I think it's maybe detectable and if it isn't now, it may be in the future.
15:21So I don't, we don't automate AI content or anything like that.
15:25I know some people are all about it, but for me, it's a lot of risk.
15:28The world's going crazy with it.
15:30Yeah, I think that you can go down that rabbit hole and, and I think that kind of sets you up for potential losses in the future.
15:37So what I've done, I really like using AI for conversion rate optimization at scale.
15:45What that looks like to me is maybe pulling in all of your meta tags on, let's say, let's say your blog and, and having AI rewrite those meta tags to be higher converting, but maintaining this, the keywords that are existing in them.
16:01Right.
16:02So rewrite these to be more, more of a high convert, higher converting title tag or meta tag.
16:10It could be even your H ones.
16:11You might want to consider rewriting.
16:14And you can kind of spit that out into a list.
16:16Most people have a lot of like bigger companies have a lot of blog posts, you know, a thousand plus blog posts.
16:21And you can batch test to those too.
16:24So you can say, let's see if we re-optimize these on a six week basis.
16:30Let's see what kind of improvements we can make over time to these blog posts, which in the past you would have had maybe an agency go through and touch up one by one, you know, human intervention.
16:43You can iterate on these things really quickly and get lots of learnings.
16:49And that's something that's been very, very fun and interesting for me to do.
16:53And that's a, that's a very interesting angle.
16:56You know, typically you started by content because that's where the world is going.
17:00You know, it's so much easy to get AI to do your keyword research or to find out, you know, a little bit of competitive data, but using it for CRO and tracking.
17:08I think, you know, recording and improving on the previous data is so critical in making this a success, but that's an awesome angle to start using AI for, you know, the CRO.
17:19So you've been using it for a while and you've seen it progressing.
17:22Yeah.
17:23You know, the thing is at Amazon, we call this a two-way door.
17:26Anything where you can just go forward and then come right back through is, is an, okay, you have full autonomy to do that.
17:33And so this is very much that, right?
17:34You have the baseline, all the title tags existing.
17:38If the, if the experiment is bad, you can go back and put in the, what was there before to a very minimized amount of harm to the site.
17:47But yes, like ultimately you, we've iterated enough to where we see improvements in rankings, traffic conversions.
17:55So blog posts typically don't convert at a huge rate, but the ones that do, it's, it's interesting.
18:01Yeah.
18:02Oh, that's, that's, that's a great angle.
18:03I guess, you know, the listeners are going to enjoy using AI for CRO optimization, you know, something not normal.
18:11Normally a lot of people do.
18:12Yeah.
18:13Sam.
18:13And so as we wrap up this discussion, you know, on the rise of AI and search, what's your key piece of advice for SEOs who are looking for future proofing their strategies?
18:22Double down on UGC.
18:24I think this UGC content is the new link building.
18:28It's the new content creation of the blog.
18:30I, I've looked at dozens of websites and blog traffic is dropping while their forum traffic is increasing.
18:40And it's, it's not an anomaly.
18:42I think that it's very much the case and it makes total sense.
18:47If you're, if you're Google, if you're chat GPT or perplexity, and you can pour through huge amounts of data, why trust a biased blog, right?
18:58Every, every company has a bias they're positioning themselves through on their blog.
19:03So don't trust that.
19:04Trust what you hear from conversations by real people on other, other platforms, even your own.
19:11Right.
19:11So I think doubling down on this UGC, even reviews, those types of, that type of content is going to be so valuable.
19:19And also it's very difficult, it'll be very difficult to catch up once, like once a competitor has invested all a lot into their UGC, you as a, as a person trying to catch up will be very hard for you to, to catch up on that UGC angle.
19:37So you can get ahead of it early on, you're going to, it's going to pay dividends and it'll position you more strongly for the future.
19:45I look at a company like Amazon, like Amazon's this way.
19:49No, that is some serious advice that you've given, you know, and I, I'm, I'm really glad.
19:54And I hope people who are listening are able to get onto this, understand it and deploy it in their strategies, because you're right.
20:01You know, once the competition starts picking up on the UGC angle, it's not as easy as, you know, bringing, making hundreds and thousands of blogs overnight and getting them, you know, hoping that they start ranking and giving us the traffic.
20:13But this is a completely different strategy and a different approach on, you know, on, on doing SEO.
20:19Well, this is such a great conversation, Sam.
20:22I hope everybody enjoys listening and there are some great takeaways that you've given us in this conversation.
20:28While we were speaking, you know, there is so much more with your depth of experience with Amazon and Slack and some of the larger enterprises.
20:35I would love to do another episode with you on talking about, you know, how to manage and deal with the larger website SEOs, you know, where the pages are just endless.
20:44So something to look forward to and we'll be recording that soon.
20:47Happy to do it. Thanks for reaching.
20:49Yeah. Thank you so much. Bye-bye.
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