SEO isn't dead
Contrary to popular belief, SEO isn’t dead.
You may or may not have seen this graph floating around the internet over the past month or two pointing out Hubspot’s “spiraling” organic traffic and sent your leadership or marketing team questioning SEO’s importance moving forward.
So what should we do?
Should we abandon SEO?
Should we try to re-optimize the pages that are losing traffic?
Should we focus on another channel?
Should we make a Lebron-esque commercial asking what we should do? (sorry, couldn’t resist 🤷♂️)
Sponsor: HockeyStack
Your CEO just slacked you: "We have our board meeting in 2 days. Send me a slide with what's working + anything they need to know."
Did your palms get sweaty reading that?
Or is this an easy ask because you can easily get to this info already?
I'm neurotic about forecasting + tracking performance. I have reports upon reports and dashboards upon dashboards.
So when Emir over at HockeyStack asked me what my perfect dashboard would look like, I immediately started geeking out. And when they sent this dashboard mock-up back to me, I was in nerd heaven 🙌
Q1 just wrapped up. And it's also never too late to add some solid reports or views to your dashboard, so hopefully this provides some inspiration to any of you who are looking to level up your dashboarding game.
TL;DR on what’s going on with search
The Hubspot chart isn’t the full story. Or anywhere close to it for that matter.
Search dynamics have changed. Not only does Google have “AI Overview” responses to most search queries now that answer the question/provide the result directly at the top of the SERP, requiring no click to a webpage.
But there’s also a steady rise in people abandoning Google as a search engine altogether for LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and others to get their answers.
Organic traffic is no longer the proxy it once was for the top of the funnel.
Similar to how paid social saw a “decline” in the early 2020s as zero-click content took over, effectively delivering key messages + value directly in social feeds, we’re seeing the same thing happen in search now.
Search has entered the dark funnel.
And if I’ve learned one thing from the past 5 years, it’s that just because you can’t measure something in an attribution platform, it doesn’t mean it’s not working. It simply means it isn’t visible via “traditional” marketing analytics or attribution.
My journey into SEO in 2025
So what does “SEO” look like in 2025 and beyond?
How should we be approaching it?
What’s the same?
What’s different?
That’s what I’ve been exploring the first half of this year. And for the foreseeable future, I’m going to drop a monthly update into this newsletter on how I’m approaching it, what I’m doing, the results we’re seeing, etc.
So for today, let’s start at the beginning.
Why SEO now and how am I attacking it from the ground up again?
Early adopters vs. the majority
Many of us are aware of the lifecycle adoption curve.
Innovators. Early adopters. Early majority. Late majority. Laggards.
We just choose to be blissfully ignorant to it when devising our strategies + execution plans.
I’m an early adopter. I get annoyed by cold calls. I talk to peers about what they’re using.
But early adopters (and innovators) only make up for 16% of the typical market you serve. You know who makes up most of it? The majority. And covering a whopping 68% of it.
You know how most individuals within the early/late majority operate?
They require education. They aren’t proactively seeking new/better/different. But when they do, it’s not complex. They go to places like Google to get their answers. And when they do, they’re looking to answer things like:
I want something that solves a problem I have
I want something built specifically for me
I want something that’s the best (or cheapest)
Combine these three and you have a beautiful, long-tail keyword that SEO does a brilliant job of answering. In my world at Loxo, here’s what that would look like:
I want something that solves a problem I have —> “I hate my ATS”
I want something built specifically for me —> “I’m an agency recruiter”
I want something that’s the best (or cheapest) —> “I need something better/cheaper”
Plug this in and you get "best ATS for recruitment agencies”.
But here’s the problem: our team doesn’t have any SEO experts. We can write well. We know what should be on our website. But we have limited knowledge around how to best structure it on the website. How the technical, back-end should be set up. How to level up existing pages to rank higher.
So we went shopping for someone who could help 🙂
The decision-making process
Do we hire someone to do this in-house? Do we get a freelancer? Do we hire an agency? Do we update the responsibilities of an existing employee?
The above questions aren’t limited to when exploring how to upgrade your SEO. These are questions we ask anytime we recognize a gap in our business + what we want to accomplish.
So how did we go about our decision-making process? What led us to where we’re at today?
“I want us to have the very best SEO in our industry”
Well, when your CEO says the above, it means it’s pretty important. And nested within there are two small words that required some direct conversations between us when setting out on this:
“very best”
This meant not just checking the SEO “box,” but doing it in a manner that will have us executing better than any of our competitors.
These two words mean we need talent to help. Top talent. 1% talent.
It was also a high priority for us that we needed to get started on ASAP, which put me at a crossroads.
Finding 1% talent isn’t an ASAP thing. It requires recruiting. And not just opening a job + posting it to a job board hoping someone comes in. The very best typically aren’t looking. They’re happy where they’re at. So I’d have to proactively source + engage these individuals.
AKA this will take time to do right.
So I proposed the following plan to my CEO:
Let’s get the very best agency for 6 months to hit the ground running on this, and during that time, I’ll recruit someone who can own this internally after that period.
This way the individual we bring on isn’t coming into a mess. The big issues have been cleaned up. A foundation has been laid. Now they can do what they do best and take things to the next level.
Finding the very best SEO agency
I’m not going to lie. This was hard. This was painful. This tested my patience.
But it led to the best outcome.
Ironically enough, go to Google and type in “best SEO agency” and you get more results and options than you could know what to do with.
So I needed to whittle this down quickly. To do this, I created a short scorecard to inform what was most important in this search. Ultimately, it came down to 5 factors:
SaaS focus: Simple as that. If they haven’t done SEO for SaaS before, they’re ruled out
POC expertise: Does the group we’ll be working with know what they’re doing? I’m not talking about the sales rep or founder who takes you through the process. I’m talking about the person/people we’ll be engaging with on the day-to-day tasks once we become a customer. I need an expert. Not a junior SEO manager.
POC tenure/retention: There’s nothing worse than being “transitioned” to a new team member mid-cycle. New learning curve starts for them and you’re set back weeks or months while they catch up. I want an agency where their employees are happy and I can visibly see that they stay for a long time once employed.
Reputation: This one’s straightforward. How’s the agency’s overall reputation? Are they viewed as a leader in the space? What do peers say about them?
Cost: This one wasn’t the most important factor, but it’s 100% a factor. If you have two amazing agencies that are equal on paper and one costs 3x more than the other, this can become a deciding factor.
So who did we choose?
This scorecard has the final 14 agencies I evaluated after heavy research + discovery calls with many of them. As you can see at the top, we went with YOYABA in the end.
SaaS-focus + scored As across the board + their monthly rate was competitive with all of the others.
What surprised me (in a good way) about them is the expertise of the day to day POCs we’d be engaged with AND their tenure. YOYABA is based out of Hamburg, Germany, not the US. Not that being US-based was a criteria, but there’s an underlying cultural factor that came into play here.
The SaaS tech scene isn’t as big in Germany as it is in the US. For the individuals there who want to be working with cutting edge tech companies in Germany + abroad, that opportunity comes from working at an agency like YOYABA. Their strong reputation has them acquiring SaaS clients all over the world, so this attracts top talent in Germany who want to work with these types of companies. And once they’re in at YOYABA, they don’t want to leave. Great pay, an organization of truly A-players, and more all lead to very high retention rates, especially for an agency.
Bonus points came in the fact that they’re 100% aligned to the same marketing philosophy I follow, so I knew we’d be rowing in the same direction with how we approached the market with our targeting, messaging, and content.
What’s next?
Now we’re in the get sh*t done phase. Getting into the weeds with them auditing our site, coming up with a prioritized plan on what will make the most impact moving forward, and getting to work on it.
Stay tuned for an update in a month or so on how things are progressing.
Book quote of the week
“People don’t want to work hard. They want to get to the top without really paying the price.”
- The Fighter’s Mind, by Sam Sheridan
In case you missed these this week
Friday (work) health thoughts: The go-to "focus" setup I use when I need to 10x my output:
See you next Saturday,
Sam