Stephan Bajaio on Why SEO's Identity Crisis Is Self-Inflicted

Jeremy Rivera:

Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your Unscripted SEO Podcast host. I'm here with Stephan of VibeLogic. He's going to introduce himself and tell us why we should trust him as an SEO expert.

Stephan Bajaio:

That's a big promise. I'll start with it depends. Actually, I thought about starting a podcast called It Depends because that would be kind of awesome.

I'm Stephan Bajaio. I'm the CEO and co-founder of a small agency called VibeLogic. My background...let's see... I helped put some of the first e-commerce sites on the internet during the dot-com boom and bust. We'll talk about that because I'm getting a feeling we're in that same bubble right now. A lot of deja vu.

I would later go into publishing, and from there find my way into the link-slinging business of SEO at the beginning, a little company called Link Experts that would later turn into a larger company. I helped become one of the original co-founders of Conductor. Some of you may know it, very large enterprise SEO platform. I helped build that business out for about ten years, after we were bought by WeWork. We bought ourselves back from WeWork. There's a whole lot of stuff that went on there.

Then I decided I want to see how the other half lived. So I did a stint as a CMO, because I'd been telling CMOs how to do stuff for a while at big companies, and it was time to actually do it. That was another version of me.

And then finally I started VibeLogic, this passion project that's become an agency that is growing steadily. I'm excited about what's to come with AI and where we're at. So if you trust me...at your own risk. How's that?

Best Quotes

“We've done a piss poor job of defining ourselves within organizations. We've let others define us for us.” - Stephan Bajaio

“Someone's bullet point is someone else's entire universe.” - Stephan Bajaio

“You could be God's gift to SEO and literally have Larry Page call you on your cell phone... and you would still fail 100% of the time if those people don't go along with you.” - Stephan Bajaio

“Two experts riffing on a subject is the best keyword research you could ask for.” - Jeremy Rivera

SEO Is Dead - Again. (We're on the 17th Iteration)

Jeremy Rivera:

Talking about deja vu all over again - I started in 2007, and what is old is new and what is new is old. It's infuriating. I think we're on the seventh iteration of SEO is dead at this point.

Stephan Bajaio:

Seventh? I think we're on the 17th, to be honest. I actually did an article for Halloween about it where I just kept showing the zombies of all the different times people have cited SEO dying, because it's a joke. It's also very telling and sad that we keep having this conversation over and over.

And in all fairness, it's our fucking fault, guys. It's my fault too. I've been doing this for two decades. Part of my job at one point was to be the Chief Evangelist of Conductor, and that wasn't just evangelizing Conductor, hat was evangelizing search. The reality is that we've done a piss poor job of defining ourselves within organizations. We've let others define us for us.

We still are in an argument right now about what we are :GEO, AIO, and that's our fault. That's no one else's fault. We're letting others narrate what we do, and it's ridiculous. SEOs as an industry, who I love and have grown up with and feel like are honestly some of the smartest people in the room, are acting like idiots when it comes to our actual industry. We need to claim what it is, not let others tell us what it is.

Jeremy Rivera:

You're stepping on your soapbox. Tell me...

Stephan Bajaio:

The soapbox is tall and we haven't even climbed to the first rung.

So What Is SEO, Actually?

Jeremy Rivera:

Tell me what it is then. What would you say, as an SEO, you do?

Stephan Bajaio:

The optimization part is what we do. We take data, take content, and look at opportunities to make whatever ingests that content and judges that content understand it better. That's the core nexus of what we do.

We can complicate it with algorithms, with LLMs, with voice search, with different mediums. We can add universal search on top of it. We can look at it through the context of, I can't understand anything through GA right now. All the things that supposedly killed SEO and didn't let us do any of this stuff? We've been through all of that.

And if you haven't been through it kids, get ready. It's part of what being an SEO is. We have to optimize ourselves. We are the keepers of this great data that lives within organizations, whether you're doing it as a third-party consultant, an agency, or in-house. Your job is to look at the wisdom of this organization, the audience that needs that wisdom, and find ways to connect those two. The search engine is just the medium by which it’s done.

The Loneliest Island in Marketing

Stephan Bajaio:

I have a lot of pain in me, and it comes from the lonely island that is every SEO. One palm tree, two coconuts, and when they see another SEO, they go, we're saved! But in reality, they're still on a little island by themselves. And that doesn't get any better when you go to big enterprise companies. The number of SEOs there are myopic compared to what they're actually trying to accomplish.

The game's been rigged from the beginning. The worst thing that ever happened was that the channel held this amazing data set that was trapped and treated as a channel instead of as an information set we should be using as marketers. I've been preaching and pounding my fists against the table on this for years, even before LLMs came into the picture.

We know more about what a user is going to see = supply, and how they're going to look for it = demand. We know that stuff. We have the data, we have internal search, we have external search signals, we can look at what the SERPs look like.

Unfortunately, we've been treating it like a hammer with a nail. Our response is: I need to rank for that. I need to rank for that. And that has put us in a position where if you don't rank for that, you failed. But that's not true. That's not the way LLMs interpret stuff. That's not the way search engines interpret stuff anymore. They look at whether you're being cited and referenced.

The problem is the SEO is the most lowly position in a company, because they usually don't create the content and they don't do the dev. If either one of those people aren't on board, let alone the executive that sets brand messaging, you're screwed. Doesn't matter how smart you are. You could be God's gift to SEO and literally have Larry Page call you on your cell phone, whisper three little nothings in your ear, and tell you the secrets to the algorithm as if they existed, and you would still fail 100% of the time if those people don't go along with you. There's no other job like that that I know of.

It doesn't actually matter how smart you are. It matters how capable your organization is to actually accomplish the smarts you have.

Jeremy Rivera:

I agree. I've worked in a lot of enterprise scenarios, so much red tape. I got stuck in a trap a couple of times in-house. They were basically spending my entire salary having me create product and marketing dev tasks that they never had budget to fulfill. Everything ready to go, soup to nuts, all done in Jira just like they wanted. And then the meeting would come and resources would go somewhere else.

The most challenging part of enterprise SEO is navigating how to get buy-in from siloed teams. Bringing them together and saying: you can get more out of your email wins if we partner it with resources on the site. Hey CMO, I can bring this traffic in, let's tie that in with paid ads, bring in the social media team. None of those conversations happen when you're just: I am SEO. I use SEMrush. I look at keywords. Jeremy, can you optimize our site? It launches in two weeks and you'll get to see it two weeks after that.

Stephan Bajaio:

Yeah, we'll SEO that for you. Absolutely. It's a verb and we do it after the fact, of course. That nerves me to no end.

Here's what happened: search engines come aboard and people start recognizing the opportunity. They look around their orgs and they look for the person who knows HTML. That person gets handed SEO. Now, speaking tech and speaking exec are two different languages, literally two different languages. And unfortunately a lot of us only spoke tech.

You'll find there are roughly two clusters of SEOs: the tinkerers who love mechanics and cars, and the gamers, board games, Star Wars, fantasy. These are not necessarily the best people suited to go in front of executives. That's why I talk about supply and demand. Why did I use that language? Because those are the linguistics of business, not the linguistics of canonical. You want to see someone roll their eyes? Say canonical in a meeting. It's going to raise more wristwatches than eyebrows.

When I got to be a CMO, SEO wasn't my channel. I didn't care where the leads came from. Someone's breathing down my neck and I could give a crap which channel is driving it. I just want to see results.

The KPI Conflict Nobody's Fixing

Stephan Bajaio:

Maybe the marketing of the future built by channel is the incorrect way of doing it. That channel specificity is actually incorrect. The KPIs in the silos of a marketing department, when you get to midsize, let alone enterprise, are conflicting by nature.

One of the Achilles heels in the SEO world is content. If the content writer is KPI'd on volume,et's say five blog posts a month, and I come back and say pages six, seven, eight, and nine need optimizations, have I actually helped them hit their KPI? No. I've distracted them from it. Those two things are at odds.

As an SEO, you're kind of trapped. You really should be a center of excellence - a keeper of data and direction, but you're treated as a channel.

So I've always said: the key, when dealing with multiple silos, is not to add to the to-do list of the person who's already doing the work. Find out what's on their list. What are their top three priorities? And can you make those better? I can go find out what article someone's already writing and say: here are three things you might want to add that'll make it perform better. And when it does perform better, I'll show you that performance so you can take the credit with your boss.

Now we're working in the same direction, as opposed to being in conflict. And that doesn't happen naturally, unfortunately.

Jeremy Rivera:

Yeah... doing the value add.

Stephan Bajaio:

Here's what sucks, I know there are SEOs out there going, what a luxury to say that and not do it. And they're right. It's so much harder in reality. That's kind of why our industry isn't where it needs to be. It's why the hourly rates are frankly ridiculously low. And it's why people are allowed to say our entire industry is dead just because AI showed up, let alone voice search, let alone Google+, let alone all the things that came previously that were supposedly SEO killers. If you want to play, show up and do the work. Being an SEO is harder than just telling people what to fix.

Do Talented SEOs Look Forward to Algorithm Updates?

Jeremy Rivera:

Here's a quote from Chris Tweeten of Spacebar Collective: “Talented SEOs look forward to Google algorithm updates.” Agree or disagree?

Stephan Bajaio:

That's a really interesting quote. I think it depends on the type of SEO you are. My co-founder Trevor: the Logic in VibeLogic, I'm more of the Vibe. I'm less of a technical SEO. I'll be the first one to tell you that. He gets dopamine from picking apart algo updates because it's a floating math equation in the sky and he loves doing that.

For me, I look forward to algorithm updates when I know we’re doing the right stuff. I would not be looking forward to one if a client of mine was writing all AI content. That would be a very bad day where I'd have to say I told you so, and I never wanted them to go in that direction in the first place.

For me, it's not where I focus anyway. I focus on going deeper and wider into the content. Am I really answering it correctly? Have we really done a good job?

I usually wear a t-shirt that says: “If you’re not helping people, you’re just selling stuff.” I actually believe that as a mantra for marketing. You can give away a lot of stuff to someone and you'll earn their business. You'll earn their trust. You'll do that with the engines. You'll do that with the LLMs. You'll do that with your audience, but you need to earn it first.

Someone's Bullet Point Is Someone Else's Entire Universe

Stephan Bajaio:

There's a great example I use. Someone's bullet point is someone else's entire universe. I was looking at a company dealing in healthcare, and they were talking about change-of-life events. Divorce is a change-of-life event where you're allowed to change your insurance. That was a bullet point.

Do you know what kind of copy brief I wrote on divorce? There are so many questions people have when they get divorced: Can I keep my spouse on my insurance? How long am I allowed to keep them? Do I have to tell the insurance company? What if we're just separated? What if I don't want my spouse on my insurance? All of that is actually helpful. That's the stuff that matters,not the bullet point that says this is a life event. So while this company was going to leave it at that level and call it done.

Is that really helpful? Should that really rank? Does that really solve the problem? Or is the knowledge of this company actually in depth and should be shown to help people? Does that mean every person is going to switch to that healthcare company because they gave them the answer? No. But does it mean that brand will be associated with having made that answer somewhere in someone's head along the way and may find its way back? Yeah. That's what we should be focused on, not whether the latest algo just pushed us up or down.

Because if the SERPs change, if voice search is a thing, if AI takes over in other ways, they still have to interpret. So what are you giving them to interpret? That's the crux. They can't do it without the data. Go back to the source, deal in the data, deal in better wisdom. Expose some of it in the ways you can. Now you're doing something awesome.

The Snake Is Eating Its Tail: AI, Authorship, and the Funnel Lie

Jeremy Rivera:

One of my quotes: Matt Brooks of SEOteric says, “ChatGPT is your most popular but least trained customer support representative.” Tying those together, as SEOs, we need to think about how we help the end customer of the business. What's the process of helping a human through a bot? We've been talking to bots for a long time. Now we have a bot-human sandwich where a human talks to a bot, the bot scrapes Google, and you're on the other side trying to show up in that.

Stephan Bajaio:

The snake is eating its tail. A thousand percent.

Here are three things I think happened. One: real authorship shows up. I think Google Plus had it right and then had it wrong. That whole concept of an author profile, I think it exists somewhere in the back end at Google. They know what you've produced. John Mueller said: if you haven't produced 20 pieces of content about something, you're not an expert on it. There's something about that, you're going to have to show up as a human. We're going to have to put a human's name behind something. The team app does not count.

No longer are you allowed to do this anonymous nonsense where it's: I posted it, therefore it is, and my brand carries its value. I want a human to say I wrote this. And there's a new schema feature now where you can mark content as written by AI, which I thought was quite funny. That's essentially asking us to beat the bushes so they can identify signals and figure out where AI is.

Jeremy Rivera:

Remove not provided and I'll do that.

Stephan Bajaio:

Exactly. That's never happening.

So: authorship is coming and it's going to matter more. Your profiles, your about us pages, your entity linking, these need to exist, they need to interlink, they need to show entities of who you are. It's knowledge graph and it's going to matter more.

Two: the concept of a funnel is wrong. Marketers shot themselves in the foot. It's not a funnel, it's an hourglass, and everything always ends up at the bottom. Unless you're in the business of selling something once to someone, the experience post-purchase matters. That perpetuates into referral, whether or not I tell my friend: you should look at this, it's a great product. That all happens post-purchase. If you don't have the support and knowledge structure for that, you're only a demand gen engine instead of a brand continuity guardian.

Three: go back to your chat logs. See what people are asking. Understand the most frequently asked questions, the most plaguing problems. Maybe it's a problem you already solved, it's a misconception in the industry. There used to be a time where Conductor couldn't do global rankings. Then we solved it. But a prospect from a year before would still think that. Their preconceived notion from the moment they interacted with your brand is where you left them. If nothing confirms or denies that for them in the future, that's a disservice.

Interview the Installer: The Best Keyword Research Is a Conversation

Jeremy Rivera:

I've developed a new best practice (one rooted in content marketing fundamentals): talk to your client. Do an interview. I scheduled time with the precast concrete wall guy, talked to the guy who actually does the installs. What are the questions they need answered when they're on site? Oh, do we have space for this? We need a cleared pad. We need these measurements three times because it's concrete, it's not going to change dimension. This conversation right here is the best

Stephan Bajaio:

Hallelujah, Jeremy. Preach.

Jeremy Rivera:

The best goddamn keyword research you could ask for. Get two experts riffing on a subject and they'll bring up the most cogent pain points. They'll address the elephants in the room. That's what you turn your marketing on. If you want to find out what's happening in home improvement, talk to a home improvement guy, get them on the phone. Don't open Ahrefs first. Don't start SEO with your Semrush tool. I don't care how good your tools are, they are tools. They should support some sort of process to deliver X, Y, or Z. But you're not an Ahrefs executor. You're an SEO.

Somewhere between 2010 and 2020, you could survive by just optimizing keywords on blog posts, staying in Ahrefs, coming up with headlines, never speaking to anybody. I've done it. I'll cop to it. I worked at an agency and I never actually spoke to anybody within that company, but produced dozens of articles in collaboration with our content team, who also never spoke with the customer. All interaction went through a customer support rep who I never talked to. He saw my notes, they talked to him, we saw his notes, and we did our thing in a silo. And then we wonder why we're disconnected from our clients.

Stephan Bajaio:

Right. So let's take exactly what you put there and turn this into actionable practice.

First: LLMs - you're using them wrong. You've been trained to believe they rank. First of all, there is no rank in an LLM. What you need to be thinking about is how easy it is to transcribe conversations today. If you have an installer, go to an LLM and ask: what are the most frequent questions I should ask an installer of precast concrete? Now you have a basis for your interview. Then cross-reference with Semrush or Ahrefs to surface any additional questions. Now go record the conversation with whatever note-taker you prefer: Fireflies, Otter, whatever.

Now what do you do with that data? What are the pain points of installation? What are the friction points? Maybe you can build a calculator out of it, a pre-installation checklist. And guess what? If you don't know a lick of code, throw it to Claude and QA the hell out of it. That's where AI is actually helping you, not generating generic blog posts, but building useful assets for your customer.

Is that going to rank? Probably not. Is it going to be a useful asset the customer service team sends before the installer arrives and says: make sure you follow these steps? Yes. And that checklist links to the content you just created. Now you have FAQs and answers that came directly from your interview, edited down, living somewhere on the site, exposed to the engines, proving that you know what you're talking about and helping your customer whether they're searching the web or already in the process.

Content Value Isn't the Same as Organic Traffic

Stephan Bajaio:

The intention of content was never just to be found through one model. That is the flawed logic that existed in SEO, that the search engine was supposed to be the only source, and if it doesn't come through search, it has no value. But the search engine was just a way for us to understand supply and demand.

I could create something that gets absolutely zero organic visits and it could still be one of the most valuable pieces of content if it ends up being your number one newsletter send, or it's a blog post linked to as a modal on your homepage that every prospect sees. I was told what to write about because I looked through the data, whether in Semrush, Ahrefs, or through actual interviews. I found the pain points, I understood them, and I built the content. That's valuable content, not because of the channel that drives it, but because it does the job it's supposed to do.

After that, how it gets delivered, I honestly don't care. Your number one email piece? I don't care. As long as it helps and you can tie some ROI to it.

The fact that anyone is just reporting on organic traffic to a piece of content they've created and doesn't show the direct traffic, the referral, the other channels, is insane. It didn't exist until I told you to build it. Now you've built it, but you're crediting a fraction of it because it has to fall cleanly within your channel. Otherwise, right?

Building VibeLogic: Agency Life After Conductor

Jeremy Rivera:

You had an adventure with Conductor, you came back to your own agency, that's curious. Why is that a passion project for you now? Are you working in a specific niche? What does agency life look like on a tactical basis?

Stephan Bajaio:

At Conductor I had the luxury of building our professional services team. Started with two kids straight out of school who didn't know keyword research. That turned into a team of seven people doing keyword research full-time,we got that down to a science. We built separate internal tools just to support that team. And as I built it out, we ended up with 65 global SEOs working on managed services and migrations for some of the world's largest companies.

One thing that was always my passion, much of what I've said today, is that the SEO was probably the smartest person in the room, but unfortunately not in the right rooms. They'd show up at the tail end of decisions, when the train's already been rolling for months, and say: stop the presses, we need to go back. That's not a great position.

Then I found an awesome partner. Trevor Stolber, my business partner. We met during COVID through a meetup via Hook Agency. I hate to say we vibed, but we vibed. Before I named the company VibeLogic, which is funny because I'm the Vibe and Trevor's the Logic. Trevor graduated high school at 12, two points shy of Mensa, has about 17 pending patents, and has been doing technical search for 26 years, before Google was a thing. I'm all about the vibe: thinking through crazy ideas, ways people should think about content, how to turn things into something more valuable.

Knowing where AI is heading, and I think it's distracting a lot of executives right now.

I said: let's start building some product, but let's build an agency first to fund it. We run the gamut from a $3 billion enterprise client to a small therapy clinic. Our ICP is getting clearer though, more B2B focused, probably companies with revenue between $10M and $100M where we can go in and solve their real visibility problems.

Web Presence Intelligence: Be Where Decisions Are Formed

Stephan Bajaio:

We call what we do web presence intelligence. I used to call it search presence intelligence, but I changed it because search presence was still too tethered to search engines. This is really about: where does your audience exist across the entire web? Our digital strategy services and SEO SWOT analysis are usually where the diagnostic process starts.

We look at the supply side and say: LLMs are going to show these results, search engines are going to show these results. Is your response to treat it as a ranking opportunity, or is your response to recognize the multi-channel opportunity of influence? We think about multi-channel approaches around topics that make sense to reach that audience.

The phrase I use is: “Be where decisions are formed, not made.” You form an opinion on Reddit. You form an opinion reading an article. You form an opinion on a partner site. The display person isn't going to recognize that opportunity. The social person isn't going to. Performance marketing won't. They're looking at it this way, and we look at it horizontal, the way the consumer actually moves.

We've built products that let us see where those opportunities are. I think of it like a roulette board, we help you decide where to place the bets according to the visibility you're trying to achieve. We also do a self-diagnosis with clients before we even talk retainer: we come up with a few quick things that usually surface dissonance - the CMO believes this, the head of product believes that. That's a conversation that wouldn't naturally happen in their company. And if I can help facilitate that, I'm not doing SEO at that point, I'm showing them themselves.

Then in the next meeting, we give them a roadmap and say: if you want to go without us, go. Here's exactly what we'd do if we were in your situation, in priority order. It's very much like a doctor saying: here's the home remedy if you want it, or here's the ongoing treatment.

Too many companies you go into as a consultant are adversarial by nature because someone's budget is being threatened, there's politics, there's resistance. Versus if they come to their own conclusion of why you're needed, with their own answers, it opens you up to solving for them rather than just searching for them. So to speak.

Passion Is the One Thing You Can't Teach

Jeremy Rivera:

I love that concept of positioning yourself as a solution after they answer the question of: I need a solution.

Stephan Bajaio:

And what is my problem? That's the big one. I can keep giving a client copy brief after copy brief, ut if everything they do has to go through one writer who's tied to 700 other things, have I actually helped them by the end of the contract? I've fulfilled. But did the needle move? No. Because I gave them the wrong stuff , it didn't map back to their capability.

You can do the right stuff and provide the right answers, but if you don't know their ability to execute, and that's more than a discovery call, you have to get in there and understand the pain points of their organization, you can't build a real partnership. Vendorships are a dime a dozen. If you want to be the snake-oil salesman who guarantees ranks, that's not for me. I'm in the business of creating partnerships where people are going to refer me, want more of us, and trust us as advisors.

Near the end of the conversation, what's the number one trait in a great SEO?

Algorithms are going to change. LLMs are going to come in and blow up your stuff. Executives are going to go off on wild goose chases. New shinies. Devs are going to ask you to validate everything ten ways to Sunday. But passion carries you through. That's why I'm still here 20 years later.

I call it shower thoughts, you're thinking about them in the shower, not because it's plaguing you, but because it's passioning you. And that trait, I look for it when I hire. Anyone can teach you aspects of search. You can't teach passion.

Jeremy - the fact that you went out and interviewed your client's installer even when it wasn't the standard playbook is a testament to exactly that passion. Passion doesn't show up the same way in everyone. But recognizing when and how it comes out in the people around you is really important. It's not an SEO agency, it's a visibility agency, and it's all about any surface in which people are looking for solutions.

Jeremy Rivera:

Love it. Tell people where you're visible, where they can have more of this conversation with Stephan.

Stephan Bajaio:

Hit me up on LinkedIn, it is my drug of choice, though the algo's been acting a little strange lately. It's hard to get: S-T-E-P-H-A-N B-A-J-A-I-O  on LinkedIn. VibeLogic vibelogic.com. If you have a business problem, a search problem, or even a communications problem where you don't know how to get it across to an exec who doesn't get it - I've been the cool uncle. I know how to do that. I get real dopamine off of helping when I can.

Jeremy Rivera:

Who you gonna call? It's Stephan.

Stephan Bajaio:

This industry is worth more than we're giving it credit for. And I'm still proud to be a part of it. There's a lot more good stuff on the other side of fear. We just need to get over it.

Jeremy Rivera:

Amen. Thanks, Stephan.

Key Takeaways

• SEO's identity crisis is self-inflicted. The GEO vs. AIO naming debate is a symptom of a deeper failure to define our own value. SEOs need to claim the narrative - not wait for executives or AI vendors to define the discipline for them.

  
  

• SEO data is supply-and-demand intelligence, not a ranking checklist. The search data SEOs sit on is the most direct window into audience intent, pain points, and market opportunity in the organization. Treating it purely as a channel measurement is leaving its most powerful use on the table.

  
  

• The way to win internal alignment is to make other people's jobs better - not add to their lists. Find out what's already on the content writer's, developer's, or CMO's priority list and help them succeed there. When their work performs, they become your allies, not your blockers.

  
  

• The best keyword research is a real conversation with a real expert. Two subject matter experts riffing on a problem will surface pain points, objections, and customer language that no keyword tool will catch. Interview the installer. Talk to the salesperson. Build content from that

  
  

• Content value isn't the same as organic traffic. A piece of content that becomes a top newsletter send, a homepage modal, or a pre-sales checklist is valuable because it was built from real audience insight,not because of which channel delivered it. Report content performance across all surfaces, not just organic.

  
  

• Algorithms validate good work - they don't threaten it. If you're building content that genuinely helps people, you look forward to updates. If you're gaming the system with AI-generated listicles, updates are the reckoning. Build for people and the platforms follow.

  
  

• Passion is the non-teachable trait in great SEOs. You can teach technical skills, keyword research, and content strategy. You can't teach the instinct to go one layer deeper for a client because it matters to you. That passion is what separates SEOs who do the work from SEOs who change businesses.

  
  

Find Stephan at vibelogic.com and on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/stephanbajaio

Listen to the Unscripted SEO Podcast at unscriptedseo.com