In this episode of the International Web Effectiveness Podcast, Bill Scully and Bill Hunt take a deep dive into how SEO is evolving in 2025 and why cross-team collaboration is more important than ever. They talk about the need to integrate SEO into business operations and align it across departments to drive long-term success. Drawing from a recent SEMrush article on AI-driven search behavior, they discuss how user intent is shifting and why SEO teams need to stay ahead of the curve.
They also break down key topics like aggregate KPIs, knowledge sharing, and training to ensure SEO is embedded across teams. Plus, they unpack SEO’s role in engineering, product launches, and digital experiences, making it clear that SEO isn’t just a technical task anymore—it’s a company-wide strategy for lasting growth.
Key Takeaways
- SEO is a collaborative effort across teams, not just a niche skill.
- User intent is evolving, with 70% of queries being new.
- Organizations often treat SEO as an isolated function, but cross-departmental collaboration enhances effectiveness.
- Knowledge transfer, training, and incentives help teams prioritize SEO.
- Proactive SEO integration into workflows improves outcomes and prevents reactive fixes.
- Developers must understand SEO fundamentals to avoid pitfalls, while content teams drive traffic and conversions.
- Aligning KPIs across departments fosters collaboration and shared goals.
- Google prioritizes user experience, making SEO a continuous effort to clean up the web.
- Embedding SEO in product launches and engineering ensures long-term success.
- Feedback mechanisms strengthen collaboration and digital experiences.
Catch the Full Episode
YouTube: https://youtu.be/pVIlPGgaq1A
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4vS5i9IByD0taow9glDVqb?si=BR81Cs9KSRGJAiq-M04Azw
Show Note Links
Enroll for FREE! Epiphanies in Search – https://learn.internationalwebmastery.com/courses/epiphanies-in-search
Deep Dive into LLMs like ChatGPT – https://youtu.be/7xTGNNLPyMI?si=Dgv8FQXVgvz8yKVz
Investigating ChatGPT Search: Insights from 80 Million Clickstream Records by
Brenna Kelly – https://www.semrush.com/blog/chatgpt-search-insights/
Transcript
Bill Scully (00:02.094)
Welcome to Episode 24 of the International Web Effectiveness Podcast, where Bill Hunt and I, Bill Scully, focus on strategies and techniques to improve your web presence and manage global websites.
In our last episode, we discussed why it’s important for CEOs to ask questions and covered key KPIs and factors startup CEOs should focus on to ensure their organization is measuring the right things.
Whether you’re a CEO or part of the digital team, I suggest checking it out. Just search for International Web Effectiveness CEOs.
In this episode, we’ll discuss why SEO should be viewed as a team sport. When teams collaborate, SEO efforts become stronger, more effective, and more successful.
But before we get into that, I want to highlight the latest SEMrush article: Investigating ChatGPT Search: Insights from 80 Million Clickstream Reports by Brenna Kelly. It was a fascinating read. Bill, have you had a chance to look at it?
Bill Hunt (01:20.05)
I did. Yeah, I found it really interesting. They did a great job breaking down what’s happening with AI-driven searches, particularly ChatGPT.
One of the most intriguing insights from the clickstream data was how they could see whether people had enabled the ChatGPT search feature, which pulls in results from search engines. Some of the insights were pretty fascinating.
But I don’t want to steal your thunder—what key takeaways stood out to you?
Bill Scully (02:11.626)
Yeah, there were quite a few.
When I use ChatGPT, I find myself asking things I’d never type into Google. The study showed that 70% of queries represent new intent types—we might be witnessing the decline of keyword-based search.
Here’s what’s really wild: when users disable the search function, their prompts expand to an average of 23 words—nearly five times longer than when search is enabled. And it’s not just Q&A; it’s about problem-solving directly within the search interface.
I don’t know about you, but I often refine my prompt two or three times just to get a direct answer without having to click on anything. And most of the time, it works.
Bill Hunt (03:12.926)
Yep, same here.
A lot of people using AI-driven answer engines are really trying to solve problems. That 70% intent shift you mentioned stood out to me too.
I actually wrote an article on whether companies need a “VP of Answers,” which we’ll discuss in a future episode. Coincidentally, this study came out just an hour before I was about to publish it.
The researchers framed these as new, unseen intents, but I questioned whether that’s entirely accurate. If you have queries ranging from 23 words to 2,000 words, I think it’s more about how we define intent. Traditional intent classification seems too simplistic when dealing with such complex queries.
One of the biggest takeaways for me was how informational queries jumped to 52%. Just like you said—you want an answer, not just a list of links.
For example, when my daughter was traveling in India, I asked, What time is it in New Delhi? Google gave me the exact time immediately. But for more nuanced searches—like What foods should I try in Azerbaijan?—I found myself using ChatGPT or Perplexity AI because I wanted deeper insights, not just restaurant listings.
Bill Hunt (05:35.198)
The downside is that sometimes AI search engines still get things wrong. When I asked about Azerbaijani cuisine, it gave me restaurant recommendations for New York City instead of actual traditional dishes.
Another fascinating point from the study was how users revert to shorter, Google-style queries—around 4.1 words—when they enable search integration. It makes me wonder: are people refining their queries to better extract results from traditional search engines?
Another similarity with Google is how ChatGPT prompts users with options like Create an image, Make a plan, Help me write, Surprise me, or Brainstorm. This structure guides users toward specific capabilities, something conventional search engines don’t do.
SEMrush also interviewed industry experts like Mike King, Chris Long, Aleyda Solis, and Kevin Indig. Kevin brought up an interesting point about first-mover advantage in emerging markets when it comes to AI-driven search.
Bill Scully (07:31.971)
Yeah—
Bill Hunt (07:56.299)
I think it was fascinating research that tied directly into some of the things we’ve been discussing lately.
Bill Scully (08:03.778)
Yeah, Kevin also mentioned that LLMs will soon develop their own weighting algorithms. I think that might be part of the solution for your location.
I watched a really interesting four-hour video where someone demonstrated how LLMs actually crawl and extract information. It showed that they essentially strip out everything except the words, which suggests that schema might not have any impact on chat results. Similarly, location might not influence chat results either.
To stay competitive with Google, they’ll likely need to make adjustments. I also saw research from Michael King analyzing branded search results. The companies that ranked well had almost no structured formatting—just simple text pages with listicles.
For example, they would create articles like Top 15 SEO Companies in the United States, and these listicle-style pages ranked well. It appears that LLMs are simply scraping and extracting text without considering traditional ranking factors like formatting, weightings, or algorithms.
Bill Hunt (10:19.786)
Right. At this point, the logic is still very probabilistic. If A happens, the sequence continues with B, C, D, and so on.
One interesting takeaway from that research—going back to Michael King’s findings—was that some websites receiving a lot of referral traffic weren’t necessarily the biggest sites. The study analyzed the 10,000 most-visited domains after ChatGPT interactions, and it made sense which industries performed well: online services, education, and mass media.
Many users click through or re-query after reading a news article or conducting research. However, some of the top-performing websites were unexpected. They weren’t ranked in the top 1,000 for regular Google traffic but were major winners for traffic originating from ChatGPT.
This shift suggests that LLMs are prioritizing certain relevancy factors when selecting data to present. It’s changing the landscape, which ties nicely into today’s discussion—an extension of our previous episode, where we advised CEOs to integrate search KPIs across their teams.
Bill Hunt (12:40.106)
It’s interesting how sometimes these research findings align perfectly with what we were already planning to discuss.
Bill Scully (12:51.5)
Yeah, let’s dive into the main topic.
Imagine building a football team where only the quarterback understands the rules of the game. That’s how most organizations treat SEO—they see it as a specialized skill exclusive to the marketing team while everyone else remains in the dark.
But what if the key to dominating search rankings isn’t just hiring better quarterbacks but ensuring the entire team understands the game? That’s exactly what we’re here to discuss today. And Bill, you’ve been writing about this exact issue. Why don’t you explain the article?
Bill Hunt (13:35.85)
Sure. The article is titled SEO is a Team Sport: Integrating Search Optimization Across Departments. It’s the first in a series exploring how to implement the strategies we discussed last week.
Previously, we advised CEOs to ask key questions about search within their organizations. Now, this article focuses on moving from an individual contributor approach—where SEO is handled in isolation—to a team-based model.
To put it in sports terms, think about a pole vaulter. It’s a solo effort—just the athlete and the pole, competing against the bar. Contrast that with a relay race. Even if you have an incredible sprinter at the end, why rely on them to make up for teammates who didn’t run their best?
The same applies to SEO. The quarterback—often the SEO lead—gets all the credit, but SEO success requires a team effort. CEOs can’t expect to get useful data from teams that aren’t working together.
Some SEOs, for job security reasons, tend to hoard knowledge. But that’s counterproductive.
Bill Scully (15:17.954)
That’s an important point. You were expressing frustration about how many SEOs hesitate to involve others in the process.
Bill Hunt (15:41.362)
Right. We were discussing a specific section in the article called Why Reactive SEO Falls Short.
The issue is that SEO is often an afterthought. We’re constantly reacting. A dev team decides to relaunch a website or update templates. The UX team changes the menu structure. Then, search teams are blindsided and forced to fix problems after the fact.
Bill Scully (16:16.226)
Exactly. Instead of proactively ensuring SEO is part of the process, we’re stuck fixing issues after they happen.
Bill Hunt (16:27.292)
That’s the core problem. SEO should be wired in from the start. If a new template is being developed, why isn’t search a built-in consideration?
Bill Scully (16:38.572)
Yeah, and now that I think about it, probably 50% of my tickets involve fixing things that weren’t just overlooked but actively broken by other teams.
Bill Hunt (17:04.136)
Exactly. And the issue is often lack of knowledge.
When I train developers and managers, I always use this example:
Let’s say we have a page that’s being moved. Page A is now Page B. If we tell a developer, “Make sure users who try to access Page A get redirected to Page B,” they have six possible methods to accomplish that.
Out of those six, only one is truly optimal for search. Some of the easier methods—like zero-second refreshes or JavaScript redirects—are actually the worst for SEO. But developers, in the absence of SEO knowledge, will often pick the most expedient solution.
And this isn’t about laziness. Developers have a lot on their plate. If a quick solution meets the requirement of getting users from A to B, they’ll use it. But if they don’t know which method is best for search, they might unknowingly harm the site’s SEO.
Bill Scully (18:48.93)
Yeah.
Bill Hunt (18:55.166)
That’s the least optimal option. There is a better one, but it sometimes requires teams to do additional tasks and coordinate with others. It’s not their fault.
That’s what I explain to managers because, when I train management first, their initial reaction is: Fine, we’ll just get people to cooperate. We’ll teach our developers to be SEOs. But that mindset was the catalyst for our discussion.
A lot of times, developers are either in defensive positions or aren’t enabled to learn SEO fundamentals. I was on a quest to find out why.
At PubCon in Florida, I met a lead trainer for MSDN training—the Microsoft Developer Platform, including certifications for managing servers. I asked him, Why don’t developers know SEO?
He replied, Where does that fit in their curriculum? Where does it fit?
That was such an interesting question. When we broke it down, we realized developers are trained to keep servers running and build pages—not necessarily to optimize for search. It’s someone else’s job. Until we prioritize knowledge transfer, this gap will continue.
Bill Scully (20:28.6)
And you’re taking this discussion to the highest level—where people are actually trained. The real challenge is getting engineering teams to prioritize SEO fundamentals when their performance is measured by deployment speed and code quality.
Bill Hunt (20:49.478)
Exactly. Or even more frustrating—lines of code.
I’ve worked with dev teams where 90% of the code had bugs, but they were measured on volume, not quality. Their success metric was the number of functions completed, not how many were correctly completed.
Bill Scully (21:11.342)
Right, the volume of code produced.
Bill Hunt (21:16.874)
Exactly. And because they had a QA process, they weren’t always focused on writing clean code the first time. Their priority was getting as many functions out the door as possible, even if they later had to fix them.
When that’s the metric of success, anything that slows them down—like SEO—is seen as a problem.
We talked about this a couple of episodes ago. I was in a meeting in Canada with a company, and I pointed out that none of their new sites were SEO-friendly. They called in the agency that built them and asked, You market your SEO expertise—why isn’t any of that implemented?
The agency responded, Well, SEO wasn’t in the scope of work.
They weren’t being malicious—it just wasn’t required. And if they could sell SEO later as an add-on, why wouldn’t they? The real issue was that the company didn’t know to ask for SEO from the start.
This highlights the divide in how projects are approached. Developers aren’t trained in SEO. And even if they were, is it integrated into their workflow?
Bill Scully (22:33.314)
Right.
Bill Hunt (22:44.144)
This brings me back to training 101. Do developers learn SEO at any point in their career? Is it built into their process?
This was my epiphany at IBM. I had been approaching search optimization the wrong way.
At IBM, I wasn’t sitting with the marketing team—I was placed with the web team. I could hear their sprint meetings and discussions, and I realized I needed to change my approach.
Instead of fighting to fix SEO later, I started working with the developers. I’d ask, When you build a template, can you include a title tag that follows our rule? IBM had strict guidelines governing every pixel on its website. If I could get those rules adjusted, SEO would become part of the system.
The developer’s response? Yeah, I just need to know that. No one told me.
That changed everything for me. If I could get the template builder to include SEO elements, if I could get the database team to store and pull the right data, if I could get the front-end developers to implement SEO best practices, and if I could educate content writers on structuring their content properly—suddenly, SEO wasn’t an afterthought. It was built in.
That realization led to a multimillion-dollar agency where we embedded SEO into workflows. It got the attention of search engines and some of the world’s largest companies. They started asking, Can you train our teams?
To train them, we first had to understand how they worked—and that’s what we’ll discuss in future episodes.
Bill Hunt (27:23.006)
The challenge is: How do we introduce something new—like redirects—to engineers?
Historically, engineers worked under the belief that there was a limit to the number of redirects. Someone, somewhere, made up a number—500. It became a myth that 500 was the maximum allowed.
Bill Scully (28:02.444)
I don’t think I’ve ever heard that. I’ve seen sites with 3,000 or 4,000 redirects. But I have had conversations where teams push back, saying, This will take too long. Google won’t follow them all.
But we’re just talking about a simple text file.
Bill Hunt (28:23.208)
Right, you’re talking about a text file. I’ve heard people say it’s going to be overloaded because every request has to be checked against it. But no, each request gets checked individually. So, do you really know how the web works? Do you really know how your infrastructure works?
People didn’t know because there was no provision for them to know. There was no reason for them to know. We can argue they should probably know, but now they can pass it off to the CDN team. Those managing the redirects should understand this, but the engineers don’t necessarily have to.
The same applies to content. If content teams understood—like you mentioned—the impact of structure, we wouldn’t have these misconceptions. SEMrush recently put out a report saying keywords are dead because of massive AI-generated prompts. But in reality, these systems extract every word from a document and analyze how they fit together. Keywords still matter.
This is why we need to work closely with content teams. I wrote an article about whether companies should establish a VP of Answers—something I tried pushing before with the concept of a “keywords czar.” Someone needs to oversee this.
I also want to do an episode about a company where we trained a team of writers. Initially, they didn’t even want to meet with me. They thought, “Who is this guy to tell us how to write?” But by the end, they realized we were making their job exponentially easier.
Bill Scully (30:41.422)
Hmm.
Bill Hunt (30:46.984)
They literally refused to meet with me at first. They didn’t want some outsider telling them how to write. So, how did we approach that situation? That’s what I mean—we need to find ways to work together.
Bill Scully (31:07.212)
Yeah, let me draw a parallel to that. Writers understand that their value comes from having people read their content. And the best way to get more readers is to rank well. But even with marketers, I struggle to get them to see the benefit of working with PR. It boggles my mind.
Bill Hunt (31:40.852)
It’s not just about search. It’s about getting all departments to work together. Going back to our Super Bowl analogy, how do we align everyone?
I’ve been reading a book about leadership failures in the Marine Corps. There’s this idea of elitism—where if you’re not infantry, you have no value. They even have a term for it: POG, which means “People Other than Grunts.” But in reality, logistics wins the war.
The same applies to digital strategy. If we don’t get traffic to the site, we don’t need your website.
Bill Scully (33:06.924)
Right. SEO is more than just ranking keywords. You could rank and get zero traffic. It’s about user experience, site performance, and valuable content. Every department plays a role.
Bill Hunt (33:07.418)
If your content doesn’t attract people and convert them, we don’t need your content.
Bill Hunt (33:18.802)
Exactly.
Bill Hunt (33:28.871)
It all comes together.
Bill Hunt (33:34.982)
That’s the point—every department contributes. In the article, the next section talks about aggregate KPIs. We discussed this last week: What is stopping us, technologically, from improving our Core Web Vitals score?
Every startup CEO has heard someone hammering on Core Web Vitals. But why does Google care about it? For two reasons: it makes crawling more efficient, and it improves user experience.
I once did a presentation where I said, “Google cares because people blame Google when they land on a bad website.” I was more annoyed at Google for sending me to a restaurant with a PDF menu than at the restaurant itself.
Bill Scully (34:55.446)
Right. People expect answers from Google. But Google can only work with the content provided. Over the years, they’ve done a good job cleaning up the web by forcing higher standards.
Bill Hunt (35:04.906)
Exactly.
Bill Hunt (35:11.388)
And making it faster.
Bill Hunt (35:21.242)
What’s the fastest way to improve the web?
Bill Scully (35:23.67)
Cleaning it up. Removing spam and harmful content. I never worry about clicking a link in Google and getting a virus.
Bill Hunt (35:43.634)
Right. If there’s a risk, Google warns you. And that’s a key point—many of the bad actors are trying to game the system.
Bill Scully (35:51.747)
Yep.
Bill Hunt (36:02.356)
People have told me they’ve had employees who missed their flight connection or got delayed for some reason. They went to Google and searched, “What’s the number for KLM?” or another airline. Next thing you know, they’re calling a number, giving out their credit card details, and it’s not actually KLM—it’s a scammer. These scammers do a good job of ranking their fake support numbers.
Bill Scully (36:19.414)
Wow.
Bill Hunt (36:25.866)
It’s not just KLM—it happens with other airline support systems or even general customer support lines. The scam works like this: the person calls the fake number, the scammer says, “Sure, we can rebook your flight,” and suddenly, there’s a $400 charge. They think everything is fine until they go to board the plane and realize they don’t actually have a ticket.
Because Google is good at capturing intent, people assume the first result is legitimate. That’s part of the reason why Google’s approach gives the impression that certain SEO tactics might be ranking factors. SEOs jump on anything that even hints at being a ranking variable. The moment Google suggests something could impact rankings, SEOs find a way to incorporate it into their workflow.
I thought it was clever on Google’s part. But to bring it back to the main point—we were advising a startup CEO to ask engineering what barriers exist in improving a certain metric. Instead of keeping it an SEO issue, we turned it into an engineering challenge and got senior leadership involved.
For years, companies have shifted responsibility for key performance indicators (KPIs). Some companies I worked with used to include a meta tag for the page owner. It literally listed the employee responsible for that page. That allowed us to track organic traffic, rankings, and revenue for specific employees.
Last week, we talked about involving PR by showing the traffic generated from their backlinks. PR teams provide reports listing all their media pickups, and we match that against referral traffic. We don’t even debate whether SEO link-building contributed—we just credit PR. Then, by tracking referral links, we show PR teams exactly how their work drives traffic.
Bill Hunt (38:50.322)
We can extend this approach beyond PR. For example, in site migrations, partnerships, and even content strategy.
At IBM, we spun out a point-of-sale service. The manager in charge of partnerships joined every relevant industry organization. But when we checked, all these organizations linked to IBM’s homepage instead of the point-of-sale category page.
We told them to change the links. Some resisted, saying they only link to homepages. So we offered to upgrade our membership for a direct link to our relevant category page. Once those links changed, we jumped into the top three search results almost overnight.
Nobody had a way to track whether these membership links helped rankings. But once we saw the impact, we documented the process. We added a rule: If you’re joining an industry organization, ensure the provided link points to the relevant category page—not just the homepage.
By making this a standard practice, it became part of people’s jobs, rather than just an SEO initiative.
Bill Hunt (42:12.938)
This also applies to reporting. People want to see proof that their SEO efforts move the needle. If we tell a team to add four paragraphs to improve content, they want to know:
- Did we rank for any new keywords from that content?
- Did traffic improve?
- More importantly, did leads increase?
Since we already track leads from specific pages, adding keyword rankings and traffic shifts provides a fuller picture.
Bill Scully (43:06.028)
That’s how you get buy-in. Show different teams the tangible impact of their efforts. Just like PR can see how many backlinks they generated, customer service can see how many people found an article instead of calling support.
Bill Hunt (43:56.074)
Exactly. So how do we create an integrated approach where SEO, engineering, and leadership are aligned?
One simple way is through dashboards and reporting. If nothing else, we can acknowledge contributors: “Hey, you did X, and Y happened—thank you.” It’s not about SEO taking credit for 500 extra visits—it’s about sharing credit across teams.
What else can we do?
Bill Scully (44:53.198)
It would be great if there were incentives. How do you make engineering teams prioritize crawl efficiency? You’ve done things like Scrumgle—where you work through tickets—but how do you take it further? Can you get engineers thinking about SEO before the meetings even happen?
Bill Hunt (45:28.104)
Right. Ideally, engineers would proactively include SEO best practices in their tickets. That’s the challenge—finding ways to incentivize that mindset.
Bill Scully (45:34.765)
Yeah.
Bill Scully (45:45.59)
Could you imagine an engineering manager giving someone feedback during their yearly review and specifically praising them for something they came up with themselves?
Bill Hunt (46:09.672)
Yeah. You know, at TripAdvisor, they had these bobbleheads as rewards. There were two sizes, and if you came up with an idea that drove a million or more visits to the site, you got one. The coders who implemented the feature also received them.
It started as an SEO incentive, but because the coders were also recognized, it fostered a sense of teamwork. Seeing those bobbleheads, you could tell who was delivering results.
Bill Scully (47:00.152)
Yeah.
Bill Hunt (47:07.6)
That kind of recognition can be powerful. At Global Strategies, client success was part of people’s KPIs. If all of your clients did poorly, we knew that we did poorly, and it didn’t look good for you.
The same applied to the tech team supporting you. We had different weighting mechanisms, but incentives—whether financial, tangible rewards, or even profit-sharing—played a role in motivating collaboration. Even simple certificates acknowledging contributions can make a difference.
One thing I’ve done at multiple companies is cross-functional training. Everyone who touched the web had to go through search training. It was treated like mandatory compliance training—if you were writing content or coding, you had to complete it. In some cases, developers couldn’t access GitHub or other repositories until they were certified. Search training was one of the required areas, alongside coding standards and version control.
We’ve also talked about centers of excellence.
Bill Scully (49:14.254)
Yep. I want to go back to that earlier point. I’d never thought about this before, but you could create a cross-departmental SEO playbook with shared dashboards and joint workshops.
We already run workshops for different teams, but how do you build collaboration? You create projects where people work together. Maybe you choose a cross-departmental KPI—like backlinks, for example—then build a playbook, run a training session, and assign teams.
Bill Hunt (49:55.134)
I like it.
Bill Scully (50:06.518)
You group cross-functional people into a team and give them six months to work on a shared goal.
Bill Hunt (50:16.456)
Yeah, I love that. It’s interesting how often we circle back to this topic. The whole idea behind the Web Effectiveness Podcast came from people asking me about a web effectiveness guide I created years ago. Dusting that off and developing a more integrated approach makes a lot of sense.
I’m going to take on the challenge of identifying a couple of key KPIs. Since I’ve been in writing mode, I’ll try to draft those out. I think a shared dashboard is crucial—it allows multiple teams to see the bigger picture, not just their individual contributions.
Collaboration is like cooking; you need to highlight the ingredients that make the final dish. When you showcase those collaborative elements, it reinforces the importance of teamwork. Leadership plays a huge role here—creating frameworks, quality control measures, and incentives to ensure teams work together.
Cross-departmental workshops, like you mentioned, are another great tool. How do we get PR and content teams to align?
Bill Scully (52:09.442)
Yeah. I’m thinking out loud here, but a specific project could be a new product launch. You bring in sales, PR, events, writers, and engineers, give them a shared goal, and hold them accountable. SEO can then provide cross-departmental training and support.
Bill Hunt (52:16.168)
Yeah.
Bill Scully (52:39.525)
You keep the teams updated with a common KPI for everyone involved.
Bill Hunt (52:46.6)
Right. I love the product launch example because that’s a whole module we haven’t yet turned into a course—but I have the framework for it.
We’ve both worked with companies like Absolute, where launching a product requires an all-hands-on-deck approach. You have to leverage the visual appeal of the product, its unique selling points, and its market positioning.
That’s another episode we should explore—how to integrate SEO into a product launch. This ties back to the SEMrush report on LLMs. If people aren’t aware of a product, they’re not searching for it. So, ensuring that new product content is indexed and recognized by both traditional search engines and AI-driven models is essential.
Bill Scully (53:43.832)
Mm-hmm.
Bill Hunt (54:02.984)
If no one knows about your new “super high-function widget,” they won’t search for it. And if they don’t know your company makes it, it won’t show up in search.
When creating content for product launches, we need to ensure it’s findable, indexable, and identifiable—not just for classical search but also for AI models and large language models (LLMs).
Bill Scully (54:40.014)
Yeah, and this goes beyond just search. It ties into advertising, branding, PR, and events. You need people writing about it in publications, presenting at conferences, and showcasing it at trade shows.
Bill Hunt (54:53.386)
Yep.
Bill Hunt (55:05.736)
It’s a lot of things.
Bill Hunt (55:10.93)
There are all kinds of things people need to think about. I closed out the article by saying we need to reframe SEO as a team sport. Organizations should move away from the inefficient “we’ll fix it later” approach and be more proactive by integrating search more deeply into the ecosystem.
And I’ll take your point—you were just talking about this. Let’s remove search from the equation of digital entirely. Wherever it fits, we need to weave all these ecosystems together, making them more collaborative.
My final thought was that a collaborative approach not only improves search performance but also creates more efficient workflows and better digital experiences for users. By thinking holistically and breaking down silos, we can avoid passing tasks along an assembly line.
Let’s find ways to help people build their digital Super Bowl team.
Bill Scully (56:25.954)
That’s great. I think this is a good place to wrap up. Why don’t you tell us about the new training?
Bill Hunt (56:35.978)
We have a couple of new training programs. When this goes live, you’ll be able to sign up early. One course we built—based on these discussions—is SEO for developers. But it’s not just another SEO course for developers.
It’s designed from a development standpoint. I’ve done this training a hundred times, but I completely rethought it. Instead of just presenting SEO concepts, the assignments for each module start with: You’re a Googler tasked with X. We’re looking at SEO from the other side of the equation.
Bill Scully (57:25.566)
So instead of just “SEO for developers,” it’s more of a developer-focused mindset for web effectiveness?
Bill Hunt (57:39.078)
Exactly.
Bill Hunt (57:43.688)
We need a cool name for it, but that’s exactly the idea. I actually got excited while revamping this because I’ve been putting it off for so long—even though multiple companies have asked us to do it.
Instead of saying, “You need to know this because you’re messing up our search efforts,” we’re making developers want to know it. The goal is to integrate SEO into their workflow so that when they build a new template, it automatically includes a single title tag, the right elements, and scripts that run efficiently. That way, we get speed, performance, and all the SEO benefits from the start instead of retrofitting them later.
Think about it—how do you teach developers who’ve already taken a dozen “SEO for developers” courses? Most of those are SEO courses made by SEOs for SEOs. This course approaches it from a developer’s perspective.
Bill Scully (59:02.126)
Mm-hmm.
Bill Hunt (59:08.074)
I love making developers think through the barriers we face in search—barriers to crawling, indexing, and now even LLMs. Everyone’s talking about how many LLMs can’t handle JavaScript.
So what’s the solution? I just saw someone say that if you want your JavaScript content to be indexed in AI databases, you need to use pre-rendering. You have to make it accessible.
Bill Scully (59:52.334)
Yeah, that reminds me—I’ll add the link in the notes. There’s a video I shared where they strip all the code, so why would they ever run a script?
Bill Hunt (59:55.103)
Right.
Bill Hunt (01:00:08.596)
How do search engines and AI get this content? If they can’t access it because it either doesn’t exist or isn’t rendered properly, that’s a problem.
That’s what this training is about. And today, I’m loading what I hope is the last piece of my “search evolution” epiphanies. We’ve had a fair number of people go through them, and now it’s complete. There are 14 core epiphanies, plus eight bonus insights that weren’t quite unique enough to be full epiphanies.
Beyond that, we’re rolling out site migration training—not just a core migration course, but a series of specialized modules. These include:
- Site migration for rebranding
- Site migration for acquisitions
- Site migration for divestitures
- Site migration for content sunsetting
Each one builds on the core migration course but focuses on specific challenges. We realized our general migration guide was getting too bloated—people only care about the parts that apply to them.
For example, if someone is working on an acquisition, they don’t need the full course. Instead of charging for redundant content, we’re offering a core course with specialty add-ons. We’ll see how it works, but that’s the plan.
Let us know if this resonates with you. We’re trying to create more thought-provoking content. We get occasional comments on LinkedIn, but we’d love more input. Join our Facebook group, tell us what you think, and let us know what topics you want us to cover.
Bill Scully (01:02:40.962)
Yeah, and if you want a preview of what our paid courses are like, the Epiphanies in Search course is free. Just search for Epiphanies in Search, and you’ll find it.
Bill Scully (01:02:58.68)
Alright, let’s wrap up. We hope you find value in these conversations. If you’re enjoying the show, we’d really appreciate it if you take a moment to rate and review the podcast—it helps us rank.
And like Bill said, we want to hear from you! Your feedback keeps us motivated and helps shape future episodes. Just search for International Web Mastery on LinkedIn, Facebook, or X, and let us know what you think.
Bill Hunt (01:03:35.71)
Cool. See you next time.
Bill Scully (01:03:37.71)
Take care.