The Traffic First Approach to Explosive Business Growth with Nick Eubanks

Zero-click searches. AI overviews. Rising ad costs.

For many businesses, traffic feels harder to earn than ever.

But today’s guest believes we are not entering the end of SEO. We are entering the most exciting era of search yet.

Nick Eubanks is VP of Owned Media at Semrush, a lifelong “traffic junkie,” and one of the sharpest minds in digital strategy today. Over the past 20 years, Nick has built, bought, and scaled digital assets by mastering one thing: how and where audiences actually discover brands.

In this episode, Nick breaks down why the old “rank on Google and wait” playbook is breaking, and how businesses can shift from chasing clicks to owning attention across Google, YouTube, TikTok, Amazon, Reddit, and even ChatGPT.

If you want your website to become a true growth engine, not just a brochure, this conversation will change how you think about traffic forever.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• Why Nick calls himself a “traffic junkie” and how that mindset shaped his career
  
  
• Why SEO is not dying, but search has expanded far beyond Google
  
  
• What “Search Everywhere Optimization” really means for SMEs
  
  
• How AI is changing discovery without killing SEO fundamentals
  
  
• Why informational content still matters, but formats must evolve
  
  
• The traffic-first approach: find sustainable traffic before figuring out what to sell
  
  
• How Nick helped a global brand generate $60M in organic revenue from a single page
  
  
• Why owned media (blogs, newsletters, communities, content assets) is the most defensible growth strategy today
  
  
• The shift from click share to surface share in an AI-driven world
  
  
• The first step any business should take when building an owned media strategy
  
  
• Nick’s billboard advice for growing traffic in 2025 and beyond
  
  

A Standout Story from the Episode

Nick shares one of the most powerful SEO case studies you will ever hear.

A multi-billion-dollar travel brand could not rank for its most valuable keyword despite working with an agency for seven years. In one meeting, Nick spotted a single canonical tag error. Removing it moved the page from page two to page one in days. After a year of focused optimization, that single page went on to generate $60 million in organic revenue in one year, the largest attributable SEO win Nick has ever seen.

Key Mindset Shift

“Stop chasing algorithms. Start owning surfaces.”

Nick explains why businesses must think less about rankings and more about where their audience looks for answers, what they trust, and how to show up across every surface that matters.

About the Guest

Nick Eubanks is VP of Owned Media at Semrush and a veteran digital strategist with over two decades of experience in SEO, product-led growth, and digital asset acquisition. He has built agencies, lead generation businesses, affiliate sites, communities, and media brands, including Traffic Think Tank, and now leads Semrush’s owned media strategy.

Who This Epi

Transcript

Rana (00:00)
I'm a traffic junkie, I think at heart. Once I discovered that I could get traffic, that there was traffic that I didn't have to pay for, that was sustainable, and I could get enough traffic to make a living from selling whatever it was, depending on the audience, it was like an addiction. It is still possible to grow a business with organic traffic? Absolutely. But now more than ever. think SEO search as a category has never been bigger than it is right now. So most businesses are struggling with zero clicks and no traffic, and you're saying that it's exciting time. So what is your favorite way?

to grow a business in today's age. You still need the informational content, you still need the content that explains what a concept is and how your product fits into it. think, so I told them in the meeting, like, just remove this canonical tag, like, go delete this one single meta tag from your header. And they was done within 24 hours and five days later, they popped from like position 18 to like position six. And that page did around $60 million the next year in revenue, just attributed from organic search to that single page, which is the most money I've ever made attributable.

It's the most attributable revenue I've ever seen in any SEO. The very hot topic, our favorite topic nowadays, AI and SEO. So how do you see AI changing this SEO landscape in the coming years?

Rana (02:21)
Nick, welcome to the website growth show.

Nick Eubanks (02:23)
Thanks so much for having me, Rana.

Rana (02:24)
Amazing. I'm really excited to learn digital strategy that should work in today's day and age. excited to learn from you. Before we go into the nitty gritty of digital strategy and how businesses can turn their website into their number one growth tool, can I ask you why do you help businesses with exclusive growth?

Nick Eubanks (02:46)
I'm a traffic junkie, I think, at heart. Once I discovered that I could get traffic, that there was traffic that I didn't have to pay for that was sustainable, and I could get enough traffic to make a living from selling whatever it was, depending on the audience, it was like an addiction. My life's mission became, where can I find more traffic?

Rana (03:06)
Well, and it is still possible to grow a business with organic traffic.

Nick Eubanks (03:10)
absolutely. But now more than ever. think SEO, like search as a category has never been bigger than it is right now. Not just, mean, search used to be Google and Bing and in other parts of the world, Yahoo and Yandex, ⁓ but search now has become this huge category that doesn't just mean search engines. Search now is YouTube and TikTok and Amazon and ChatGPT and it just keeps getting bigger.

Rana (03:37)
Amazing. So most businesses are struggling with zero clicks and no traffic. And you are saying that it's exciting time. So what is your favorite way to grow a business in today's age? old playbook was find a low competitive keyword, create some content, build some link, and you are in business, which is not working at the moment as per our history.

Nick Eubanks (03:58)
It's it

can the fundamentals of SEO at least are are still are still Critical and they're not changing and they haven't changed the fundamentals that all the most important things that you should have been doing the whole time Are still the things you should be doing today What's I think changed is the the mindset of that, you know a single channel that's we'll just call it organic search is enough and and I think that what's happened is the

strategies that SEOs, especially folks who've been in the game a long time, understand in terms of brand building and product marketing. They've spread out across all these other surfaces and the SEO people are in the best position to understand how to acquire those searches, how to leverage those channels to acquire traffic and sell products and services.

The idea now is that we are getting or should be getting in terms of, you think of search as a category and it's a very smart guy on my team and a lot of really smart people in the industry have been using, have been changing the vernacular around what the acronym SEO means and they're talking more about search everywhere optimization and I really like that because it's understanding how do you show up for both branded and unbranded terms on

Instagram on LinkedIn on Google search in Gemini on chat GPT when you know if people if you're a product brand and people are searching on Amazon What's the story they're finding? If people start their search for product on Amazon, which is like 65 percent of product searches But then they go to Google to find more reviews and see if it's a scam and see if there's a cheaper price Or they can find a coupon. How do you show up for branded and unbranded searches? So I think that the journey of

⁓ discovery has become scattered at an extreme rate. And I think that's only going to continue.

Rana (05:44)
exciting and the people who are listening who used to do this, know, starting from keyword create content and build links steps. What is the first step in today's digital strategy? How the businesses should approach to grow their business?

Nick Eubanks (05:58)
So I actually still, I mean, call me old school, but I actually still really believe in the keyword research component. I think it's a great foray into what is the terminology that's being used. The problem is, as you had mentioned in the beginning of the call that in the advent of AI overviews, like zero click is our new reality for most of the top of the funnel. What's nice is there are still entire stores of query classes where AIOs aren't showing.

And maybe they won't. Who knows? mean, Google has rolled them out very aggressively, obviously, over the past two years. But we're sort of seeing a stabilization to some extent of the types of queries that are where the clicks are sort of all being stolen by Google. But also a lot of the search behavior itself is changing. So it's figuring out what are the concepts that are in my audience's mind? based on the intent of what my audience is looking for, where might they go?

to find that information and how do I need to show up on those surfaces.

Rana (06:56)
Excellent. another one more challenge is, normally we used to create informational content and how-to content, which is, eaten by AI overviews. So is there any, in your digital strategy, which you recommend to the businesses, the type of content that creates is changing as well?

Nick Eubanks (07:13)
You still need the informational content, you still need the content that explains what a concept is and how your product fits into it. I think what we're seeing, at least what we're seeing at SEMrush is the format, the media types for this type of content have shifted. And so we are shifting a lot of our investment into video and not just YouTube, which is very important, especially because it's a huge inclusion item in AI overviews.

but breaking that video up and making channel-specific formats for that video. So short form native video for LinkedIn, having video on TikTok, having video on Instagram. I'm seeing more more searches for informational and educational content. Even in Google, it's returning Instagram URLs, it's returning LinkedIn URLs. These are things that weren't happening just a few short years ago.

Rana (08:01)
Excellent. And one more thing I was reading about you that you guide businesses with traffic first approach. So can you explain us a bit more? What do you mean by traffic first approach?

Nick Eubanks (08:11)
Yeah, yeah,

this was like back in my affiliate days. This was sort of something that I had realized that almost every business that I've ever built personally came down to me finding a way to get traffic and then figuring out what to sell them. This was how I built my second agency. This was how I built lead gen businesses. This is how I built affiliate businesses, ad.

ad revenue supported businesses where we used content and drove as many page views as we could and the focus was on how do we get our RPMs up, our revenue per thousand page views. But it was always this concept of if I can find a sustainable source of free traffic and it doesn't have to be a lot of traffic for like super valuable B2B terms, let's call it loans. You don't need a ton of traffic to make a significant amount of revenue like you would if you were just doing ad rev on recipes which...

Google is killing off pretty quickly, or at least you'd say AI content is killing off pretty quickly in the current state of things. But the concept I feel like is sort of backwards for a lot of business folks. A lot of entrepreneurs are like, what is the product that I need to go find? Or what is the service that I should be selling? And then let me figure out, that's why a lot of people buy traffic first, to validate a business idea, to find product market fit. And I've always come at it from the opposite direction, which is if I can find the traffic and it's a sustainable source of traffic where I'm not paying for each click,

I'll figure out what to sell you later.

Rana (09:34)
Amazing. Many content businesses started this with the blogs, you know, 10, 20 years ago. They built traffic and they created, like a copy blogger, they created the softwares. And I think you acquired back, back.

Nick Eubanks (09:40)
Yeah.

Yeah, copy bloggers are

as a great example. One of the original SEO strategists from copy blogger John Naster, who runs digital commerce partners now, they just specialize in like very scalable like ⁓ SEO and AISO for DTC e-commerce brands running Shopify. And it's amazing to watch what he did as part of his growth strategy for copy blogger then and what he's done now to shift the strategy.

you know, hone in on a niche. So like, I guess what I'm getting is just the content only model has really shifted, right? And I think it's a great time to be a publisher if you are willing to change, adapt your business model. Like the, you know, some of the publishers that we own at SEMrush, the demand has never been higher for a lot of the media packages because brands are understanding that AI loves a good publisher.

if the relevance is deep and strong and recent.

Rana (10:40)
Got it, got it. And your specialty is digital strategy. And how do you define the successful digital strategy?

Nick Eubanks (10:49)
Well, mean, my niche within digital strategy, so I always liked building products. That was what I sort of started 20 years ago when I got into digital marketing. was finding ways to build product and use product-led growth to drive my SEO strategy. And what I've really been focused on for the past three years is owned media, right? Which are what are all the different surfaces that an audience with a specific affinity.

Trusts and look for and find when they're in the discovery phase and how do how can I help a brand? Own as many of those services and we can't own them. Let's rent them It's just a very different approach You know you could you can rent Something like by sponsoring but it's usually a short-term transactional relationship, you know where I'm talking about rentals It's like what would it be like to rent a blog post that was really important?

and pay for an inclusion that's disclosed, but like to make sure you appear in this very important, very public, far-reaching post for 12 months. And it's not a sponsored post, you're finding something that's already working, and you're just getting added into the conversation.

Rana (11:51)
Amazing. This is something I knew I learned that you can advertise on a blog but finding a blog you can you

Nick Eubanks (11:55)
You can, mean, one thing I've done is I've

bought entire blog posts. So I've found a blog post from a specific author that has some really important visibility and negotiated to buy the blog post, move the blog. Sometimes we'll leave it there, but we own it. Sometimes I'll move it to one of my other sites and have it redirect. And so we're just moving the rankings and the visibility from this URL that's on this domain to the same URL on a domain that we own.

Rana (12:18)
Amazing. That's very interesting. And on this show, I know there is so much context to my content out there. So my main goal here is to find growth case studies where people can relate more. So I'm curious, what is your favorite growth case study which you've done it or an inspiration you can share and we can learn something from that.

Nick Eubanks (12:40)
My favorite one is probably my favorite because I'm a little salty. There's only one time in my life when I was an agency owner in a previous life where I applied for, I submitted us for like an SEO award because I thought that my team had done such a tremendous job on this one campaign and it would be really hard to this campaign. We got beat out.

⁓ which I think I'm still upset about, apparently I am because I'm talking about it, but it's my favorite campaign. we had a client that was in the all-inclusive vacation space, a very big international brand, a multi-billion dollar a year revenue company. And they had been working with an SEO agency for a long time, like seven years. And they just couldn't get their, they couldn't get to page one for their most important keyword. It's a three-word keyword.

very high search volume, very qualified, extremely valuable. The average client value for a purchase on this keyword was over $7,500. So was a very, very high revenue term, individual term. And obviously there's hundreds of variations, but we're talking hundreds of thousands of searches every month in the US.

what we found in the pitch meeting. So we're actually in the client's office in the pitch meeting and I'm just looking at the website for the first time as they're telling, because we were, you know, we had signed an NDA, they're just gathering the information, learning what keywords are really important for them, the ones that they spend the most money on, on paid media, but would really love to own the organic listings for. And we learned from this keyword and I go and I look at the page and one of my,

browser extension sort of goes off. It flags that this page is not indexable. And I look and it's because this landing page was canonicaled to the home page of the website. And it's just very clear, this is a terrible idea, guys. You're trying to rank your home page, which should really just be a brand asset for this very qualified non-brand keyword. So I had told them in the meeting, just remove this canonical tag. Go delete this one single meta tag.

from your header and it was done within 24 hours and five days later they popped from like position 18 to like position six. And that's how we got that deal was because they're like, like obviously like our other SEO agency doesn't know what they're doing. We should come work with you. And then it took us a while. It took us about a year to get.

to the number one position with that page. We had to do a lot of content work, a lot of internal and external link building, really massage the performance metrics on the page, really make the experience worthy of ranking number one. Once we got the number one ranking for just that, it was that keyword and again, probably 100 variations, but all around that query class. That page did around $60 million the next year in revenue, just attributed from Organic Search to that single page, which is the most...

money I've ever made attributable, it's the most attributable revenue I've ever seen in any SEO campaign. I'm sure there's many others, but that was like really a mind-blowing amount of revenue we were able to generate. And when I submitted it for this SEO award, we got beat out by somebody who had a local limousine company in Dallas.

Rana (15:40)
This is a fantastic case study and so far the best case study I have listened on this show so far. My favorite one is, ⁓ as you said, this content first approach is James Clare, Atomic Habits. I followed him from the start and three, four years I could not figure it out why he's sending so much valuable emails and he's not asking for anything, no affiliates, nothing. And when he launched the book and

Nick Eubanks (15:45)
No kidding.

yeah.

Rana (16:05)
its a number one best seller for all time now.

Nick Eubanks (16:08)
Yeah, it's funny.

have a friend, I have a friend I just was hanging out with who's working on his first book and he's working really hard to build his audience right now. And the thing that we just ended up going deep on for hours, like we took over the dinner and the conversation carried on for hours after dinner was just like, Hey, what are all the things you're doing to launch your book before it's done? He's like, what do you mean? He's like, I'm building my audience. I'm tweeting, I'm writing LinkedIn posts, I'm writing articles, I'm being on a lot of podcasts. And I was like, no, like you need to start.

building all of this value, it's exactly what you're talking about. Build all this value with your target audience now. Really push your newsletter. Spend money to acquire newsletter subscribers if you have to. Pay to get on podcasts. Really build the ⁓ brand association of what you mean and what you know about before your book is ever even announced. The James Clear example is perfect one in my mind.

Rana (16:59)
Yeah, I think I read somewhere or maybe in newsletter or in his book that he was maintaining himself by building websites for other people for very probably three to five years while he was preparing for his book. I think I learned so much from him. At that time, I was unsubscribing all the newsletters, but somehow I couldn't unsubscribe to him. And that's the best to see. And I made and I build a team out of his education still.

Nick Eubanks (17:08)
It's so funny.

Rana (17:24)
I'm trying to get 1 % back to here as well with the podcast, everything we do. So, know, hats off to him. He did a remarkable work.

Nick Eubanks (17:27)
Yes.

Nah, could not agree more.

Rana (17:33)
Yeah, and going back to this case study, what was the SEO lesson with other people can learn from that amazing case study?

Nick Eubanks (17:42)
I mean it was it was what we it's old news now. I mean this was this was years ago at this point but you know what we realized was because so many of the other keywords that supported that makes the keyword was all inclusive resorts and then the thing was what people look for

as the value propositions where they're looking for an all-inclusive resort, like does it have a concierge, how many restaurant options do I have, is taxi, like transfer to and from the airport included, are there boat rides, there sailing, are there catamarans, it's all these different inclusions, right, all these amenities. And a lot of people, lot of competitors were putting all of them in different parts of the website. They were putting them in amenities sections, they were building them into the route trying to rank for.

snorkeling and scuba diving and we took a different approach. At the time it was different, everybody's copied it since. But the idea was like, no, these all are what make an all-inclusive resort all-inclusive. These are all the things that you get that add value. So these should all be child pages underneath the all-inclusive top level page, the subdirectory.

And so let's build this page that has, that lists all these inclusions but doesn't go deep into any of them. We don't want all that content on the page because it's gonna cannibalize all inclusive resorts. Instead, we're gonna link down to these individual pages and build deep, rich pages with rich media on each of those detail pages. They'll all link back, obviously, with our breadcrumb back to our all inclusive resorts page. We'll prominently link to the all inclusive resorts page high in the document object model on the home page.

and we'll run focused link building efforts with lots of varied anchors to this page. And again, it took a while. was like fighting brick by brick to finally, to get from position six to five, and slowly moving up month over month. But once they got into position one, man, we held it for four years, five years. mean, that page just printed money for them.

Rana (19:31)
Fantastic. There is so much to learn, and I will review this conversation once again to improve our SEO efforts. So thank you so much for sharing ⁓ this part. While we are discussing on keywords, so with this AI in the mix now, is there any shift I know you at SEMrush, you guys have so much data to look at it? So are people are moving on, they're changing their keyword research as well? For example, from.

Nick Eubanks (19:40)
of my project.

Rana (19:58)
Usually it's for informational how to stuff now. We are getting information.

Nick Eubanks (20:01)
Well, that's the thing, right, is

the idea of like, the tool providers, and we're not very different, what marketers are paying, who are paying attention to AI search, like they should be, all looking at are these prompt libraries. How big is your prompt library? How many inclusions do you have? Because the aha moment for anybody who's using a tool to try to find out.

where am I showing up? somebody, somebody, like what are people asking chat GPT where my brand is mentioned as a reference or a citation? Like how do I find this out? The bigger your prompt library is, the better the chances that you've actually got realistic coverage on where you show up. The problem is AI search is hyper personalized, right? Like you can have a hundred people put in the exact copy and paste the same prompt and get a hundred different answers, right? Cause it's truly generative. So the idea is how are you building relevance to attach to these different

In SEO it was topics, we call it, in SEMrush we call it concepts. It's not just this topic, it's what are all the things that surround this topic? And in a lot of ways, it's kind of glorified TFIDF to throw this way back to document retrieval and where Google started. And the best example, when you hear about TFIDF or term frequency times inverse document frequency,

People are always like, what is that? Give me a practical example. What does that mean? And my favorite example is if you were gonna explain what a watermelon was to somebody who had never seen or heard of a watermelon before, you're not gonna use the word watermelon to explain it. You don't explain something by using, by talking about what the thing is called. So like that same sense, what are all the ways, all of those additional queries that you would need to include the terms you would expect to see on a page?

if you were gonna understand what a watermelon was, it's very similar to that. So like you have to understand what the concept is and what are all of the terms that surround that concept and start to understand like what are all the different paths that somebody can take to find you and your business. And I think that can give a lot of insight into starting to understand like, these are the keywords that we've historically been, that have driven business for us before. These are the ones we ran our paid search experiment to get.

conversion attribution that we built our SEO campaign from that paid search data. And so we know with pretty decent certainty that these are the terms that people are searching for that we sell really well into. So now just to take it a step further is what are the concepts, right? To expand that out, to use like a query fan out model example. What are all the other ideas that we need to make sure that we're building content and we're building visibility for? It's just, it's not, it's not,

a difference, it's just a shift, it's like an extension in my opinion.

Rana (22:42)
Very interesting. Here we are talking about how to show up in AI search. still, AI is important, but Google search still dominates ⁓ by far.

Nick Eubanks (22:50)
Oh, by far. It's

the 800 pound gorilla. I GPT, the funny thing is GPT or AI search is such a teeny tiny percentage of traffic, yet I have met people who are now seeing 30, 50, I met one guy who has 70 % of their revenue now comes through CHAT GPT So it's not huge volume, but it can, not huge volume of traffic, but it can be a huge volume of customers for certain businesses.

Rana (23:15)
Yeah, it's a qualified traffic. But while we're talking about the search, so my main point I want to learn from you is should the businesses change for producing informational and how to stuff to more commercial-oriented, ⁓ commercial intent-oriented content because that is still getting some traffic in the Google.

Nick Eubanks (23:34)
I know, that's the thing is I think the foundational elements of a sound SEO strategy, like building educational content to, not like a what is, I you should maybe have that component, especially if you're selling something that's new, a new technology or a new version of something, your widget is a new take on something that's been established, right? there were tools before the fork and knife.

But the fork and knife were revolutionary. The wheel was the hot shit technology in the time. And you still have to educate consumers, if you've got something that's an improved version. My favorite quote to come back to is people were like, well, how did you take feedback from your customers? And they're asking Henry Ford. Henry Ford was like, we couldn't talk to our customers. If we asked our customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. So when you're innovating,

⁓ truly you need that educational content. There's a really important place, I think, in the marketers journey for that type of content. Again, like I had mentioned briefly earlier, I think you have to, instead of not doing it, you have to shift the format. So maybe you still do that how-to content and maybe it lives long form in terms of building topical depth and relevance on your website, but it probably makes more sense for you to shoot a video.

and make sure that video is on YouTube and getting views and that you're participating in conversations on Reddit and other places that, other surfaces that your audience is talking about, those types of questions.

Rana (24:57)
testing so what I learned how to and informational stuff is still important but you need to add more value to it you need to compete with AI now

Nick Eubanks (25:06)
Yeah, and just more surf, support more types of media.

Rana (25:09)
Exactly. Yeah. Brilliant. Nick, what is the unusual habit or hack that really helped you over the years with, you know, building lots of traffic for businesses?

Nick Eubanks (25:20)
To

oversimplify, there's probably a couple. One is I've been buying, I've been doing owned media even for myself for a decade. I just didn't know what it was called back then. But I would buy newsletters when they were small, off market. I bought a Meetup once. I sold Meetups. Building things that I would.

the exact name of the keyword I wanted to search for. So, you know, like I really wanted to rank for technical SEO Philadelphia when I had an agency and that was a big service for us. And so I launched a meetup in Philadelphia called the technical SEO meetup. And the meetup page ranked number one and then our blog post about the meetup ranked number two and then we got press, we got an article written about us in a local Philly newspaper that ranked number three.

So it was really owning as much of the online real estate and the click share as possible. And that's really what an owned media strategy was before AI got really prevalent. Now it's not click share, I would say it's surface share. So what used to be like how do I own as many results on Google as possible to get all the clicks that I possibly can. Now it's how do I own as many of the mentions and references and citations across all these different services whenever a concept is being talked about.

Rana (26:33)
Excellent and people who are interested who don't who didn't know about own media and looking to explore now to grow their traffic and grow their businesses. What is the first step you would suggest they should go buy a newsletter or do some research which on media will be will be best for them.

Nick Eubanks (26:47)
no, no, it would be, yeah.

Understand what audience affinity is. What are the things that your audience and the subsets of your audience really care about? What do they have an affinity for? Where are the channels that your audience is showing up? Because they show up very differently in different places. you may have, your audience may be, the top of funnel for your audience may be on Reddit, and the middle of funnel for your audience may be on...

publishers and YouTube and the bottom of funnel is maybe what you really need to have on your website or what you can potentially buy a newsletter audience or a podcast audience for. But understanding audience affinity as I think is the first thread you have to really pull on if you're gonna design an own media strategy.

Rana (27:25)
Excellent. Thank you so much for this another amazing suggestion. Next one, what is your latest or a favorite tool at the moment which is helping you with SEO? Apart from SEM Brashup, of course.

Nick Eubanks (27:35)
I mean, I'm really, I'm really biased. It's like, that's not, that's not a great

question. I mean, it's some rush one is, is, is what I'm using. You know, it's what my team is using day in and day out. They're the ones that are in the trenches, you know, growing our brand visibility, uh, on, on, uh, on traditional search and on AI search and everywhere else. And that's been the, you know, with our acquisition with some rushes acquisition of dados, the largest clickstream provider last year, we just, you know,

Again, I'm biased, but the facts are the facts. We've got a powerhouse of data. Nobody's got as much data as we have, thanks to not just our database over the past 20 years, but because of the data of subjection and enrichment of all of that data.

Rana (28:17)
Okay, let me tweet my question. So your favorite tool, SEMrush, what is the best way to get most out of SEMrush? I think probably that's that.

Nick Eubanks (28:24)
No, SEMrush One

specifically, the newest product that we just launched last month. SEMrush One blends traditional search with AI search into one unified view of visibility. That's, you know, if you want to understand how your brand is showing up in Google and on ChatGPT and Gemini and Perplexity, that's the tool that you need to use.

Rana (28:30)
Hmm.

And any suggestion on how to use that tool to get the best out of it?

Nick Eubanks (28:50)
Well, that's the

best part. talked about, mean, I very briefly skimmed over, but like that aha moment. Like you could go to SEMrush one and you could drop your domain in and it'll instantly be like, here's how you show up, not just in Google, but here's how you show up in all of the LLM models. Here's the topics. You can see the individual prompts. You can see where your competitors are that you aren't. You can understand where there's positive and negative sentiment. Something that Ken Savage has been talking about a lot recently. He's got a really cool Reddit product called Launch Club.

is how if you've got really negative sentiment, if your brand has a lot of negative sentiment on Reddit, you're probably not gonna show up in ChatGPT, and that seems to be true. So it's really important to understand what is the sentiment out on these other surfaces around you and your brand.

Rana (29:31)
Excellent. Thank you so much, Nick, for this. what is your, again, coming back to own media or any other investment in SEO, what is your best SEO investment so far?

Nick Eubanks (29:41)
my best SEO investment. Back Lingo was a really good one. Exploding Topics has been going really well. mean, it's just the brands that I've bought as part of the own media program at SEMrush have been, they were very calculated moves and the integrations were very strategic and I'm just very blessed to have a ⁓

world-class team. I've never worked with more talented marketers than I do right now. So I can't actually really take any of the credit. The strategies that are being deployed, that are working really effectively are all because of the brilliant minds that I get to work with.

Rana (30:17)
Amazing. And the very hot topic or favorite topic nowadays, AI and SEO. So how do you see AI changing this SEO landscape in the coming years?

Nick Eubanks (30:27)
I mean, I just, think it's supplementary, right? I think it's an expansion of search and I don't care what anybody calls it. I know the SEO mafia really hates the GEO, AEO terminology, but it is fun to poke at them a little bit, which I've certainly done on social, just because I think there is a lot of nuance. I don't think it's different. I think people selling it as a completely different thing are complete shysters.

But I do think it takes supplemental strategies. I think it's really fascinating that enterprises are allocating separate budget. Like it's a separate effort and not just an additive effort. But if that's the way that brands are buying and if you want to get that budget to do this work, you have to change the way you're packaging up what you're selling. And that's just the fact, that's just the...

the way the market has spoken and that's what it said.

Rana (31:18)
Excellent. Anything keeping you awake nowadays when it comes to Seo?

Nick Eubanks (31:22)
I just how to get better at video man video is really hard So that's that's been my own personal thing I think I'm gonna make a big commitment in 2026 to Finally go build the YouTube channel that I keep saying I

Rana (31:36)
Definitely. finally, businesses who are watching, if you have a big billboard at the busiest motorway or highway, what would you say on that for people who are trying to ⁓ build traffic and grow their businesses?

Nick Eubanks (31:50)
Probably start with a content audit. Kill stuff that doesn't get trafficks. Anything that hasn't gotten an organic click in realistically 180 days, maybe 90 depending on your vertical. And then all the stuff that's still getting clicks, go update it. And update it really often. And probably add 20 or 30 % more internal links than you have. These are just like, across the board, these are just always a good idea. And...

especially big websites, publishers, established brands are definitely not auditing their existing library of content nearly enough. It is virtually an opportunity for every single site I talk to.

Rana (32:24)
and the people who are, you know, have content on their websites. it a, do they still continually publish often? What should be.

Nick Eubanks (32:32)
Maybe not as much. yeah,

maybe move those new content investments. Maybe do bigger, deeper thought leadership style pieces on your site. So maybe if you're doing 10 a month, for example, maybe cut it down to one or two and instead shift that budget to taking that content and slicing it up for these other channels in other formats.

Rana (32:51)
Excellent. You shared so much valuable information. I think there is so much to learn from this podcast. On this topic, when businesses are trying to build their website and grow traffic and make the website as their number one growth tool, is there any question which I should have asked you on this podcast, which I haven't?

Nick Eubanks (33:09)
The only other thing I would say is I still get asked pretty often, is link building still important in the age of AI search? And my answer is absolutely. I think it's never been more important than it is today. And people ask, does it even matter? Would you still really put a big effort on getting a linked mention versus an unlinked mention? And again, my answer is absolutely. I will always take a linked mention over an unlinked mention, and so should you.

Rana (33:36)
Fantastic. This is a very valuable advice. Nick, I really appreciate your time and very generous answers to my difficult questions. So I really appreciate it.

Nick Eubanks (33:46)
You're very welcome,