When you weren't looking, somehow "The Algorithm" took over every aspect of growing your business. This week it's Google, next week it's TikTok, soon we'll all be drawing ape pictures in virtual reality—but in every case there's a faceless machine that decides, on a whim, whether your customers will even know that you exist. And if the mighty Algorithm doesn't choose you for its inscrutable blessings, you can't phone support or write a nasty letter or sacrifice a goat, because the Big Tech companies aren't listening; your best shot is to hire a practitioner of the mystic art of "search engine optimisation" and throw money at her.
The problem is, of course, that just like so much tech mumbo-jumbo, it's nearly impossible to tell what the return is on your investment in SEO. If you hadn't written that keyword-stuffed blog post or added "like" buttons in just the right places, would your ranking have gone down, or up, or stayed the same? And does the ranking actually matter to your customers, or would direct mail or word of mouth actually have been better? Ask a typical SEO magician, and you'll just hear magic words like "page rank" and "AMP" and "core web vitals" without ever understanding anything.
My guest Eli Schwarz is different: he's a product-focussed SEO expert who knows how to get accountability for a real commercial return on your what you're spending to propitiate The Algorithm. Join this livestream to hear us discuss: