From Developer to Swiss Army Strategist-Nathan Stenberg’s MKG Playbook

Overview:

Nathan Stenberg didn’t take the traditional marketing path—and that’s exactly what makes his strategy so effective. In this episode, he unpacks how his early days as a developer shaped his approach to SEO, content strategy, and full-funnel growth. You’ll hear how he balances data and creativity, why AI is only as good as your structure, and how to scale content without sacrificing soul. Whether you're a tech-savvy marketer or a founder trying to make sense of it all, Nathan offers sharp, actionable insights with just the right dose of humility.

Transcript:

Nathan Stenberg 0:00

Adobe. What had happened is they had lost a lot of organic real estate to companies like Canva and free tools that were online as the online kind of editing became a real thing.

Elijah Drown 0:18

Welcome to Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders. I have an internal brilliance here to me. With me today, a fan of Star Wars and strategy. His name's Nathan Stenberg, and he's MKG Marketing in house Swiss Army strategist. Started as a front end developer, fell in love with SEO troubleshooting some client websites, and they wrote a research playbook. The powered a keyword engine for more than 1500 sites. No big deal. Easy peasy. Right at two decades, he's guided boutique agencies, enterprise brands building repeatable omni channel processes and training teams mates along the way, because he doesn't want to do all the work. He wants people to help him and make sense, and today, he leads strategy across SEO, paid media analytics and ABM for high growth cybersecurity clients, little SAS, little b to b, and applying the same, if this, then, then logic he used in code and now in every marketing decision. And when he's not mapping user journeys, you'll find him gaming Overwatch. I believe I stole that from the website. It may not be current, but he is a gamer. He snowboards with his partner two kids, or at least he did it one day before the beard, and he's experimenting in the kitchen, still testing, iterating. Welcome. Thanks for hanging. I appreciate this. Thanks for having me absolutely, can we warm you up? Maybe you look super comfy and relax, but I want to get you excited. Maybe a quick fire round, real quick to get you all sparks, cylinders flying if you're awesome. So I have a little rapid-fire remix. I have three quick prompts. Take an answer in one sentence. See if you can make it super quick and punchy. If not, I'll forgive you. I'll start with the first one. It's choose one metric to keep forever and ditch the rest if you only had one metric to live by for the rest of your life. What is it?

Nathan Stenberg 2:03

There's a tough one. There are so many good metrics, and they do so many different things.

Elijah Drown 2:07

Attribution.That's yeah, too much.

Nathan Stenberg 2:11

I mean, realistically, like at the end of the day, it's about ROI. So whichever metric that is for the client, it would be that. So whether that be, could we make you globally, call that conversion or but that could be a lead, or it could be a click, or it could be something like that. But I would say conversion holistically is probably what we're looking for, because that's what we're always optimizing towards.

Elijah Drown 2:31

Show me the money, make it right. That's what Nathan's all about. Launch day fails or slow burn wins, which teaches you more, which gives you more street cred.

Nathan Stenberg 2:42

When you say launch day fails, you're like campaign launcher. You like website launch. What are you What are you talking about?

Elijah Drown 2:48

Let's go with campaigns to make it the conversion play that you're talking about.

Nathan Stenberg 2:51

I would say we try not to have any launch day fails, because you're not going to really learn much there. So I would say slow burn wins are going to be the ones that show us the most as we as we're able to to test and iterate and get data that shows us what's happening. Yeah, failing on the starting block is not definitely it teaches you, but it doesn't necessarily teach you more.

Elijah Drown 3:16

It's the wrong fields that I need on launch day. And after decades, you're going through the slow burn of learning. You've learned so much. Yeah, that's awesome. And favorite, stacked tech stacked upgraded you've implemented in 25 so far, in the year 2025, you got one tech stack upgrade. I mean, you love a Santa, but there's got to be something else.

Nathan Stenberg 3:36

Honestly, like the tools. I don't think we put any major upgrades in.

Elijah Drown 3:41

You've been, you've been dabbling the GPT. Does that count? You get?

Nathan Stenberg 3:45

I mean, if you count that, I would say the enhanced ongoing education of how to manage AI and how that integrates would be probably, I don't know if it's an upgrade as much as it's just an ongoing, ongoing education, which is in some ways upgrading. So yeah, I would say, yeah. AI is probably where that has been the most this year.

Elijah Drown 4:10

With GPT. Do you think you're the Snoop Dogg of creative storytelling now, thanks to the AI help, or get closer.

Nathan Stenberg 4:18

I would say it's less. I mean, what I've been working on it is probably less the storytelling that's definitely starting to get to that point. But for me, it's really been helpful with just developing kind of the process and starting to really dig into the data analysis side. I think that's where we're starting to see the most wins. As mkg from the AI lens, is the data analysis and the speed to reporting and the quality that it's able to output have been really impressive.

Elijah Drown 4:45

And while we're speaking of mkg, it's people first organization, you guys are still tolerating me, which is fabulous, a true testament to your culture. How does that principle shape the way you present hard data? Do you take the feelings? Do. Into the data. Do you have like, a kumbaya thing, or is there a certain approach that you take from MKG's culture?

Nathan Stenberg 5:08

Well, we're very, very key on transparency and making sure that we provide what our stakeholders need from the people-first lens. But we won't, at the same point, we won't sugarcoat because, again, Transparency is key to what we do. We're not going to sugarcoat stuff if we've bombed on startup, or we've noticed issues that we've that we've been we've impacted in our in our day to day management like we will take ownership for that, but we're not going to sit here and try to try to hide it from you and but on the same we're going to call out our wins and what and what we are able to do it from a success standpoint. So we heavily lean on our values. It's our really what I feel as we move as probably most agencies move into this day and age and other businesses as well, and AI becomes a bigger role in the day to day execution of stuff. The pieces that set us apart are the human pieces, and what that brings to the table. So we were really looking at an evolution of making sure that just the relationship is very, very strong, because the human value is now the connection versus the execution all the times.

Elijah Drown 6:13

So differentiator, isn't it? It's the people. It's the Star Wars that you want to talk about before you get into the meat and potatoes.

Nathan Stenberg 6:18

Absolutely, absolutely.

Elijah Drown 6:21

If I can step back into the earlier days of Nathan, you came up with a subscription service called SEO boost in your career. Did that teach anything about packaging strategy or how to do the add on thing or to clump things together what customers needed? Or was that just kind of a trial and error thing see what happens.

Nathan Stenberg 6:37

It all the story can be as short as long as we need it to be. I guess it all started back in the day when we were all as SEOs, realizing that you had to publish content on a regular basis, so your content stayed fresh on your website. And I can't honestly remember the name of the algorithm update, but it

Speaker 1 6:55

was savvy, right? 2010

Nathan Stenberg 6:58

to somewhere back in those days, like it's been, been 15 years so, but we we discovered, and I had a client at the time who would was basically one of those high-touch clients who call you every week because the website wasn't on page one, like it used to be three months ago. And so as an SEO I just needed a way to kind of get them off the phone and stop bothering me every week because I had other things I need to be working on. But they had been a long-term client of the company, one of the first adopters of this company, and so they were very they had a lot of pull with original owners and tech support people, so we took care of them as you should. But I basically came up with a plan to have them send me a piece of content and I would publish it once a month. We just were just getting a consistent rotation of adding more content to the website, and this was about the time that that algorithm updated was happening. And so therefore, we were able to push them back to the to the page one through by doing this. And it worked really, really well. They were very happy. They stopped calling me. It was a win-win for everybody, which is awesome. So I took that and realizing, okay, hey, you know, I've got a system here where that I've done a few times with this client now, and all they're doing is they're doing all the writing. We're not doing anything. All we're doing is posting this stuff for them, basically, because this is before, well, the company I worked for had its own CMS, and it didn't have a blog feature. So there was a lot of, you know, there's a lot of reasons we were having to do it manually, but, but anyway, ultimately realized, like, hey, if we could get other people to do this one, it would improve their SEO. They need to do this to improve their SEO. But if we say, hey, we can do this for you. You know, you pay an extra I think the subscription cost was 5999 a month. And so I think we build them 40 bucks a month, or something like that. We bill you 40 bucks additionally a month. Once a month, you send us a piece of content, and we'll post it for you, and we'll reach out to you and remind you about it. And that was really it. It was like the reminder piece was the selling point on that we would reach out and it was just a calendar reminder, and we would just, or we'd have a task back in whatever your tool used back in those days, and it would remind us to send a an email saying, hey, you know, we need to piece content for this month. And it worked. It worked really, really well. We sold a lot of those and added it on. And the cool thing was, I mean, if you want to look at it from a business profitability standpoint, was, I can't remember how many people we got signed up before I left, but let's just say it was at least 100 only 25% of those people actually ever sent responded to the emails that we sent. So of those 70, 75% of those people were paying an additional 40 bucks a month on their subscription and never taking advantage of the service. And so it actually didn't really increase our workload that much, but it did increase our revenue. So. Significantly, though, you know, at the same time, we could easily the system was so automated that, like, if they everybody had sent their stuff, and we could have totally managed it. But the reality was, is, just like with any subscription service, once it gets going, people forget about it, and they just, they don't get in there, and all we had to do was make sure that we sent the email so that we were accountable for our piece of it. So it was a really low touch product that really enhanced, enhanced the people that used it, if they used it, right, but at the same time, enhance the business profitability. On the other side of it as well.

Elijah Drown 10:28

Talk about being transparent and the accountability partner that some people didn't care about. They're like, Yeah, whatever, you guys are doing a job, but for 40 bucks a month, some are bigger companies that they wouldn't miss it, right? But, yeah, it's nice to have a case. Basically,

Nathan Stenberg 10:41

It was, it was, it was a cool little thing, yeah, but it definitely to your point about, like, how does it help with packaging? Absolutely, I would say, like, even inside of mkg now, we've really kind of streamlined our SEO service offering to be in a package and scalable format that aligns to what we need internally from a profitability standpoint, but as well as we can take it to startup to enterprise level, and it's really just a matter of, it's like Legos. It's like you need five of these cool stack, five of them on top of each other. You need one of them cool. Here's one. You need 25 of them. Here's 25 of them. And it's really just been a matter of making sure we staff up depending on what we need for the for the engagement.

Elijah Drown 11:20

So accountability partner is more low-touch. But when you get, I guess you get inherited some sort of GA for property that's a hot mess, and you go, Oh God, where do I start? Do you have an idea or a plan or process where you triage first or or start kind of untangling the hot mess? Or do you just kind of subscription eyes and automate the crap out of it?

Nathan Stenberg 11:44

Yeah, no. With the DA four side of things, we leverage our at mkg, we leverage our analytics team pretty heavily to kind of audit the initial setup, and so we have the things that we look for and why, and we check them out and make sure that you know everything's doing what it's supposed to do. And if it's a hot mess, we just, at that point, we'll say hey to the client that's in that we're talking to here, here's your hot mess and, and here's how you fix it. Here's the here's what's messing up, what's making the mess in your hot mess, and so, and we fix it and, and they make a lot of times, we'll go in and make the fixes, but obviously once approvals have been made, and just in case there was a reasoning behind why they're doing it. So it's it's triage. In a sense, we definitely prioritize that at the beginning of our all of our engagements, though, because we want to check, because tracking integrity is imperative for us to be able to come back with any type of recommendation and or reporting. So that is very important to us.

Elijah Drown 12:41

It's nice to have a dedicated partner in your team that does the thing, instead of you having to be a generalist that cries in the corner when you don't know what to do. It's kind of nice.

Nathan Stenberg 12:50

Yeah, oh no. It's definitely nice to have a team. That's one of the great things I've learned over my time doing agency work, is just the ability to pull really, really intelligent people together, to work together and all towards the same goal, as is one of the most rewarding experiences you'll ever you'll ever have.

Elijah Drown 13:09

Have you ever been able to change an executives mind based on a data point around time to say, hey, this taking up too much time spent? You're spending too much. Or do you find that, like the accountability partner, the SEO boost, that you charge them, and they don't really care?

Nathan Stenberg 13:25

I mean, I think it's always, especially with our enterprise level partners, like that's always one of the conversations we we run into. It's a resourcing issue. They a lot of times, our stakeholders have multiple pieces of the pie that they're managing from different angles that we don't even see. We see the one little, tiny slice of what they've got with us, and they're very, very busy in other roles and areas, as well in supporting other aspects inside the business and so, so resourcing and what's what, what is priority is important. We had one client recently. The reason they had left their previous agency is because they didn't get priorities and why it was important. From when when recommendations were being made of things they needed to do, they just were getting like, hey, you need to go do this. And they didn't know how to prioritize that inside of the scale of all the other things they had to do at the development level. And so one of their specific requests as they came on was make, can you make sure that this happens and and so priority is very, very important. And there are times when it when we say, hey, you know, here this, these are all things that need to be addressed at some point in time. But if you've got to take, if you've got to spend the hours and you've got this much time prioritize this, because this is going to drive the most impact for you, and we're always looking for what's going to drive the most impact in the shortest amount of time. Ideally, it's easier. It's harder with SEO in some cases. But again, much like our SEO package, it's geared to focus on the things that will drive the most bang for the buck. In the shortest amount of time, first, and then keeps the other pieces moving at a cadence that still checks the boxes, but is able to not, not over over, stretch the resources of of our counterparts.

Elijah Drown 15:15

In to find that balance. You're always optimizing sites, you're always going through audits and business delivery, and figuring out impact with your strategy as you onboard clients. Are there still any surprises to you to this day when you audit a new company? Or is everything kind of you just, yeah, I've seen that before. You know, whatever.

Nathan Stenberg 15:37

You know, especially from the SEO side of things, there's not a lot that surprises me anymore. If there's anything that's surprising, it's an example that comes to mind one of our favorite companies of all time, probably most of us in this in the marketing world, Adobe, at my previous agency, we did a big project for them, and what had happened is they had lost a lot of organic, organic space, organic real estate, to companies like Canva and free tools that were online. As the online kind of editing became a real thing. And so, you know, like online photo editor used to be, you know, anything that said photo editor, Photoshop was the number thing that would pop up. But then Canvas started showing up, and a few others, and it became a lot more of a competitive space. And they had just kind of because they were Adobe, and they'd been Adobe for so long, and they'd own the space for so long, it kind of never really put any thought around maintaining that. And so. So they came to the agency that I worked at at the time, thesis based in Portland, Oregon. Great, shout out. Thesis and and we did a, basically, essentially what we do now at mkg as well. What a content hub or a pillar page project for them that went on for years. I don't know if it's still going on with with them, but, I mean, I'm sure they're still continuing the content production process for because it worked really, really well. And basically due to their size and their ability to scale with whatnot, they produced a massive amount of content in a short period of time that really focused at a topical level, about the topics they wanted to own very thoroughly. And I would say, like it was even at a layered approach, where there was very top level first and then deeper into each subject, and then deeper into each of those subjects, if it was applicable. And it really built out fast, and it was, it was a phenomenal project, and paid off in dividends for them from an organic perspective. So again, I think the surprise is sometimes it's just it's just like you've got these huge companies who've had marketing teams who've known about SEO for a long time, but we're still having, you know, maybe very old processes that you know, that have evolved over time, that we still encounter, or whatever. So sometimes surprised to see that, but most of the time, it's not too surprising anymore.

Elijah Drown 17:59

So Adobe is busy getting comfortable, or at least they did about organic play and search. But there's got to be misconceptions about a technical SEO. I know you're not in the weeds anymore with SEO. You're on strategy planning, nonboarding, but there's got to be still something wonky that people are taking for granted or screwing up in 2025 you seen anything happen like that?

Nathan Stenberg 18:18

It's the usual suspects. If anything you know, site migrations or site upgrades, new websites built without, really, you know, just paying attention, paying attention to the details, doing the pre and post audits and making sure that redirects are in place and and all that jazz. It's, it's nothing surprising. I would say there's, there's definitely heavier technical SEO users that would probably disagree and have things they call out to your point, I definitely was, I would say, reasonable technical SEO. But listen, there were aspects of it that I never got into. But the reality is, in my experience, most of the time, like even in just using the Site Audit Tool in SEMrush, looking at clients holistically over my career, they usually deal with the same issues. For the most part, those issues get addressed or they a lot of times just never. Technical SEO always takes a back seat. So and then the reason for that is a lot of times it unless it's a really, really, really bad air, like something like your homepage is being blocked or something like that, you don't see the bang for the buck by implementing technical SEO fixes like you don't see all of sudden, my organic growth just spiked 150% like doesn't work that way, so trying to sell that upstream and prioritize something that you're not going to See was ROI from internally at a company is challenging, and so a lot of times dev teams will de prioritize because of that. They're going to focus on things that are more important, that's going to make you know, like, make the people that they're reporting to happier.

Elijah Drown 19:53

Fair. And you see a lot of things happen that are on the front, like branding and things, but you don't see a lot. Of Stell startups and hundreds of people chasing the cybersecurity drink because it's hot, it's exciting, and there are a lot of holes on the internet, if I may say, so that freaked people out, and rightly so. But there are so many people in cybersecurity and brands chasing the same keywords. Do you have a balance in mind between carving out unique ground without inventing random jargon that nobody really has a clue about.

Nathan Stenberg 20:23

Yeah, you know, that's always. Regardless of industry. It's a tough

Elijah Drown 20:27

one. It depends, isn't it? It really, yeah, it depends.

Nathan Stenberg 20:31

I mean, my philosophy is this, if you're supposed if let's just say you're let's talk cybersecurity, and let's say, let's just use App application do app sec, for application security, for lack of just for a niche. If you're an application security company, you need to rank for application security, like, it's not like you like you could go make a special word that says this is the same as application security, and create that, you know, like you could, yeah, but that would be a lot of you one, you'd have to build a lot of content that told that basically told the search engines and or nowadays, the llms. This is what this actually means, and this is how we talk about it. And you're talking about basically creating, you know, a library of information that's basically about a topic that already exists and it's already known. So it's an approach, but it's, you know, it's probably a big resource sink at best, and at worst, it's just a waste of time. And so I really, my personal approach is, if you're supposed to rank for something, rank for it. Now, I think it's important, especially nowadays, is that you just need to need to be able to bring your point of view creatively through and tie it to those topics, because those topics you still need to rank for. But what is it that you do that sets you apart from your competitors? And that's where the brand side of it becomes a play, and it's about really understanding how the brand messaging ties to what we need to rank for, and how to really kind of marry the content strategy together, so that way, you're showing up and setting the different and explaining the differentiators, but still also producing enough content that is topically applied to these core non brand keywords that you should be found for. But then this also gets much deeper as well, because if you start to think about it from that lens, it's like now who are you targeting with these with, you know, with the keywords that you're trying to rank for, if you're, let's say application security software provider, you know, so you provide application security software solutions? Well, the people searching for application soft security software solutions are going to be someone who's struggling or needs to have one of those solutions available. Now, they may not know who you are, but they know, probably, if they're in that industry, what an application security software solution is. So you don't have to tell them what what application security is. They already know what application security is. Now you need to tell Google what application security is, because Google needs to know that you understand what it is, so you can rank for it. But when you're actually speaking and talking to the users that are going to be doing it, you need to be looking at it from a different like, just a different kind of point of view, because the communication to them and the and at different levels, because sometimes it's a CTO versus a developer, you know. So you need to have align your content strategy to kind of support the different pieces inside of the topic cluster. So if you have application security, and what is application security is the broadest aspect, but then you have application security software solutions as a very specific subset of that, then you need to be able to, you know, then you target that content and the pages that are optimized with that towards the user who's going to be most aligned with it. And so one of the things we've been kind of exploring with a couple different clients recently is more persona based optimization, so that we identify the keywords inside of the topic clusters that are most aligned to Fred the CTO versus George the developer. And then making sure the content that is designed for them, and identifying the content on the different sites that are aligned to them, and then optimizing with those keywords inside of that. So we can really try to focus the optimization towards specific people at the different points and pieces of content in their journey, as well as still optimizing for the search engine. So they recognize that we have an authority around the topic.

Elijah Drown 24:25

And you clearly do, because half of the stuff, I'm sure that people listening like, oh, that that you really, you know. And there's so much that goes into this rabbit hole SEO that you can get lost in for centuries. Yeah, you clearly know what you're doing. Do you know what you're doing with llms yet and getting searched and found? Sorry, maybe you have a top five due to moral things that you can at least get closer to getting those AI summaries. I know we're still trying to figure it out. I'm curious if you've dabbled anywhere and got a sense of what's going on.

Nathan Stenberg 24:57

Yeah. Well, I think the one of the key things, and I. Think this will be a surprise to anybody, is informational queries holistically are have been kind of driving the majority of what we're seeing in AI overviews, and I would say any results in llms, if you're asking like, what is this? Or can you tell me about this topic, those having content that answers those questions is performing fairly well from a technical standpoint, structured data is a big key. Now, this isn't new for SEOs, because Google has been using structured data for a long time and has requested us as SEOs to make sure structured data is in our website for a long time. There's a bigger focus on it now, because of the llms, the platforms like chat, GPT and perplexity and those. And what's interesting, I think, and what we'll probably come to find sooner than later, is there's additional structured data that we need to be providing to show up inside of those platforms, they all have their preferred structured data that they like. You know. Now it may mirror currently, what Google, Google wants because, but the reality is, is, and again, as SEOs know, and some end developers, Google has a specific list of structured data is that it wants depending on what the content you have on your website. But that is just a snippet of the actual structured data that exists if you go to schema.org so that means that there's a lot of other structured data out there that could be used to mark up the content on your website, regardless of whether Google wants it or not. So I think what the best probably recommendation and something that should be explored. And again, like I said, I think we'll find out in some someday in the future, who knows how long, but that chat, GPT really likes these pieces of structured data. And perplexity may like these ones, or, you know, so there may be some, some find some, some nuance by platform. Or it may just be holistically, we want as much as possible. Just give us as much context as possible. But structured data is going to be a big, huge piece, but you should be doing it very at the very least. What, at least when we're looking at SEO and AEO, kind of as a holistic approach, at least what Google wants for the time being, and that'll help for the AI overviews, piece of it. And then the final thing, and this is, this is pretty new even to me. I would just kind of in the past week is the LLM s dot txt file, which is operates similarly to a robots dot txt file, which essentially it tells crawlers what they can and cannot crawl on your website. The LLM s is txt has a component of that, but the real focus of it is to actually, from what I understand on my brief my brief reading so far is to you get to dictate the URLs you want it to focus on a little bit more specifically for the llms to say, you know, these are the important pieces of content on our website to really understand what we are as a brand and who what we want to talk about as a brand. These are the pieces. So it's not like every single page on your website, like it's being indexed, it's actually being used to inform and kind of build a profile of sorts about your website for the LLM, so they understand you better as a company, as well as what's important for people to know about you. So, I think is a new one. I built my first one today, so we'll see how it goes from next week.

Elijah Drown 28:21

Do you think there's any nonsense about just kind of tapping into Reddit, Wikipedia, say, LinkedIn, because they're heavy on on the search and the reach, and just kind of creating content with those and then kind of just hope and pray, especially if they kind of glazed over at all the technical acumen that you have, and they don't. They're too stubborn to deal with Nathan and work with him, if I may say, boldly and transparently. Is that going to be enough to get them in the door of the AI summary?

Nathan Stenberg 28:47

The strategy that we employ here at mkg is the same strategy that I help support at thesis, and it's, it's not an unknown approach and strategy for kind of catching, catching. Ai overviews, I think Reddit, and Reddit is, you know, there's, I think there's plenty of technical people on Reddit and and even, and even Google's, you know, reps will show up there and have conversations with with people. So I'm, I don't think, I think Reddit would be fine if people want to, if people want to, you know, go figure it out themselves. That's great. I mean, that's how I learned all this stuff. So that's wonderful, but, but, yeah, at the same time, like, it's, it'll take a while, and it'll be trial and error, and if, if you're not cut, you know, I mean, I've been working on websites. What? 20 years, 20 almost, you know, over 20 years now, and and and working with digital products for at least 30 and if you're not comfortable doing it like if you're a small business owner who's really good at doing what you do, and you're trying to go to Reddit to figure out how to optimize your website you know, or you know, or your new marketing leader who's wearing every single hat. Like, like, maximize your resources. Get someone who, like, hire someone who knows what's going on. And regardless of mkg, there's plenty of great SEOs out there. Like, find someone who knows what's what to do. And so you're actually more efficient in the big picture, and you're actually maximizing your ROI.

Elijah Drown 30:15

But I'm curious, how much time do people save you? Think you talking about going to Reddit being a marketing hero. Or can they go and say, just kind of go and be like, it's going to be six months going to be here, or it's just going to be, you can go on vacation to Florida or to the Bahamas or to Greece for a year and come back and we got everything sorted, and you'll have, like, 100 times elites

Nathan Stenberg 30:37

Fair. All right, great. So like, time saved. I mean, that's, that's a great question. It really depends on, like, we'd have to understand the individual who was asking for the support and the time that they had available to them to begin with. But the reality is, like, if, if I'm going to sit down and optimize a website each page, let's just say, hypothetically, in our current processes that we're using is going to take, we usually spend somewhere between 30 minutes to an hour a page. So let's take the high end, just so we can have the big number. So say an hour a page. Let's say we're working with a medium sized website. We need to optimize 30 pages. There's 30 hours of work out of the gate right there to optimize those 30 core pages. That may not even be every page on the website then, but that's going to make sure. And then, let's say this website has some technical issues, so we're going to have to run it, we'll pull our audit, and then we'll need to go through that audit and make recommendations around that, and so that, depending on the amount of URLs impacted and and the complexity of the issue, you know, that's going to take a couple hours per per issue, probably, you know. And so let's say there's five of those, so there's another 10 hours. And this is and then, and that just kind of like and let's say they get all that done. So there's what's that. We got 40 hours of work that needs to get done? Say, a week? Sure, yeah, a full week of work that would need to get done if you were just eight hours a day SEO, that's all you did. That's all you did. That's that's a lot. And most people, most marketing teams, one person is in charge of that. Maybe that's all they do. At some companies, it's just SEO and so maybe that's not a big deal, but in most cases, that person's also doing something else, like helping manage socials or helping, you know, develop this strategy, and they're touching other stuff internally at that company. So they may not have all that time, but that's just the beginning, too. That just sets the foundation of, hey, now everything's optimized. So what do you do next? SEO doesn't stop you have to start producing content, you know, and you have to start producing intentionally optimized content towards that. So you can tie that in a few different ways. You can have a very specific, SEO focused piece of content production, like we do with pillar pages, and then building SEO content briefs that then drive blog posts specifically through topics. That's one way to do it. The other option is to have a holistic content strategy that from the top down, that ties in. Okay, here's the here's where we're going as a brand in 2025 this is how we're going to market that. From a marketing from a content standpoint, we're going to produce x, y and z. The SEO team is going to support by optimizing these pages. Here's a list of keywords we're going to use for each of these topics. Here's the topics. Here's the process and how that's going to flow through. Once this piece of content is produced, then we're going to take this, the organic social team is going to take it, they're going to chop it up. They're going to turn into organic social posts. And you can have it plug in in a variety of different ways, but ultimately, content has to be produced, and that's really the ongoing piece of SEO. And then you just, of course, you want to check and you want to refresh your optimizations. You know, once a year, check, you know, run, run technical audits to make sure things are, you know, going so if there is ongoing maintenance. But the reality is, it's the content production piece where things really start to stagnate from the SEO lens, in my experience.

Elijah Drown 33:57

So eight to 10 blogs a month, enough? Or does it all depend on how long they are. Like 2000 words meaty content, some are a little shorter. Or is it really just focused on the strategy and what you want to do with the content to match up that 40-hour baseline that you've set with SEO?

Nathan Stenberg 34:12

Write for your user. Always write for the content for your user. So sometimes that may not be a 2000 word blog post. It may need to be a 500 word blog post, because the topic doesn't require that, as long as it's written for your user. That being said, if you're worried about it ranking in Google, 500 words may not cut it, because we do know that longer form does better. So maybe go bigger if you can. But the first person you need to produce content for in any shape or form, is for your user first. Always right for the user first. From there, I would say. And so then it's not necessarily about the amount, either like if you can, you know, if you can produce one big piece of content for your user that they really find value in you. A month. Great. Just do one a month, and it's doing well and giving you what you need in the results. That's great. That being said, if you can produce at scale, there is a better opportunity to to provide but do not scale and lose quality. Scale and maintain quality like otherwise, you're just, you're just putting content up for the sake of putting content up, and Google will figure that out. May not happen immediately, but they'll figure it out.

Elijah Drown 35:25

So there's a balance, fine line between optimizing with AI content, right and then just letting the flop happen. So I wonder where that happy medium is to kind of scale a bit, especially if you're in that small, scrappy team, to just letting the AI do a thing, how much damage can people realize if they're just letting the slop go to town?

Nathan Stenberg 35:47

Well? And I think it's hard to say right now, just because there's so much happening with the AI production, it's hard. I one of the things that's one of the areas like we have not as mkg expanded out into what I'll refer to as contextual content production, something that requires a POV, a mind like, you know, like from from, from experience, but we will produce definition, focused content. So, like, a pillar page that's just really talking about, what is this topic? Because then we can pull, like, that's got source material that we can pull from, and it's already exists out there. And so when we when we'll produce that with AI, so we can get, you know, the initial draft, you know, 85 90% of the way there, and then let a subject matter expert review it, because there's still it's still there. Still needs to be a human touch for any stuff that we put out from our quality standards. But, but I do feel, I do feel like initially when AI came out and Google was like, Oh, well, don't use that to break your content at all. And then they're kind of like, it's okay if you make that. And even last week, I think I think I read something that said, like, you know, if AI makes your content, it's not a big deal anymore. Like, and so it's not I think, I think it's going to grow and evolve over time. So again, it just goes back to the quality piece, like, produce your first draft, second draft, third draft, refinements with AI, but make sure that there is a human element involved. And I would say, like, instead of just like, Okay, write a blog post on how to make chocolate chip cookies. That can be your first prompt. But then you're going to want to go in there and be like, can you tell me why it would be better to do it with this versus this and this, and start to ask it questions and get it to answer and get it to develop more. So even if it's still AI written, it's human, prompted and and so and has more personality than just write a blog post about how to make chocolate chip cookies. And so I think that, I think they'll be, again, going back to what you said earlier, there'll be a balance that will become over time, and people will figure it out. I think it's still early in the game, but it does present the like, I still say, like, go back to quality. Like, always land on quality first, and always make sure that it's good for your user. If the content that's just coming out is not going to help your user in any way, shape or form.

Elijah Drown 38:20

Yeah. So you love gaming, whether it's Overwatch or you playing the latest Star Wars Lego with your kids. I don't know, but there's got to be some way you challenge yourself every day to keep exciting. Do you do use the gamification style to company level up and keep going? Or is there a secret sauce to keep things a little lively and exciting in the SEO world, that's not always as exciting as we'd like it to be?

Nathan Stenberg 38:41

No, that's a great question. I do love gaming Overwatch. I've evolved beyond and I play Apex legends these days. For the apex legend gamers out there, there's like a lot of us, but they're all about 20 years younger than me. So

Speaker 1 38:58

So rough, it's

Nathan Stenberg 38:59

rough. It is rough getting done by the kids out there, but

Elijah Drown 39:02

The 10-year-old screaming at

Nathan Stenberg 39:05

ya know, I definitely leverage gaming, not necessarily gamification, like for processes per se, but I definitely like to sit back and kind of take my real-world experience in gaming and kind of like think of it strategically through that lens. So for those who don't know, sorry that I'm going to get a little nerdy here. Love it. Apex Legends is a battle royale, much like fortnight and other battle Royals out there, where you have a team of three people that are going out and trying to be the last team standing, you know. And in some ways you can apply that real quickly to any type of business, like, you know, we want to be the last business standing when it comes to, like, the pitch game, or we want to get that sale, you know, like, so, I mean, you can kind of think Battle Royale from that lens. But what I think is interesting especially is I watch a lot of it as well. Yeah, and I watched the competitive level, and there's different levels of play. I am not anywhere near good enough to like think about competition really, yeah, but the but the way the competitive people think about it is so much more thoughtful, and I think that's what piques my interest, because there's real strategy involved in what they're doing in the game and why they're doing the making the moves that they're making, you know? And at the end of the end of the day, it still comes down to who's got the best presentation, aka, who's got the best shots, you know, and who's who's got the best position, you know. But like, you can really take the concept of the game and say, Okay, I need this piece to be able to achieve, like on this map, with this with this road, with this circle closing, I need to be able to be in this position at this time to maximize my efficiency, to deliver the win. And so I think you can take that in and start to think about, like, Okay, I need, like, the other day, we had an issue, or not an issue, a stakeholder reach out to us last minute. He's, he was, he's in Britain. It was four o'clock his time on a Friday, and he got a request from his cmo that says, hey, I need x, y and z by end of day. And he was basically just about to head out and go, you know, spend the weekend out, you know, do what he's doing over there in the UK. And so we reached out to us, and Sam, our account director, pulled myself and one of our PPC experts, Lee Snyder, in to the call. And again, we got that we got that trio, the pieces that we need. We got the information from the client. We sat down, we had a little pow wow. Here's what we're going to do. Here's how we're going to execute this. Each person went out, started doing their own thing, and we all came back together for a collaboration. Once made sure we're so aligned, stepped back, kept doing her own thing, came back together as a final collaboration to make sure everything checked out, I mean. And it was like so real time that, like, as Lee was updating numbers that she had to get out of the the paid media platform, I was working in the in the spreadsheet and updating the formulas so as she entered her stuff, it was completing. It was, it was literally like updating the numbers that the forecast that he needed, the client needed, and in real time. And like, it's that level of collaboration that it takes to win at Apex legends. It's that level of thinking. Like, you need to have smart people playing and and working together, and you need to have someone who's a good leader who can kind of pull the pieces and say, hey, you need to go here right now. I need you to go right here right now. You're going to take care of this piece. I'm going to take care of this piece. We're going to and then we go and we work and we execute our pieces. And therefore, as a team, we come together and win. So there are a lot of things you can take from gaming and pull over into the marketing strategy.

Elijah Drown 42:37

You do gaming, you do Star Wars, and now you're giving Ted level talks on podcasts like that was inspirational. Outside of work, beyond marketing, what brings you joy in your personal life? My man

Nathan Stenberg 42:49

You know the kids, the kids growing up, brought me a lot of personal joy. It's most rewarding, probably. I also enjoy gardening. Do a lot of gardening. Just put in some strawberries this year, holding a strawberry patch. So that's pretty exciting. Gardens doing pretty good, getting lots of good tomatoes. Do some fishing. Like to get out and put the line in the water, catch some trout. Help, help my youngest catch her first fish this year, which is pretty exciting. So that was awesome, yeah. Otherwise, honestly, I play a lot of APEX legends, my guy, and that's my downtime. That that's how I decompress, if you can believe it, on the end, when I'm once the kids are in bed.

Elijah Drown 43:28

they'll play with you, soon enough, I'm sure they'll compete and try to beat you. Get the time, you know,

Nathan Stenberg 43:33

We'll see, I mean, and that won't take long, because they can move their fingers so much faster than me. But we're just getting the youngest started on the Minecraft journey, which is pretty exciting as well. She is, she is loving it so

Elijah Drown 43:44

He can get the Creator mode, doing the roller coasters with the mine carts all day long. Ah, I remember those days. Those are fun. Oh yeah.

Nathan Stenberg 43:52

We're just about there. We haven't started the roller coasters yet, but she is definitely, definitely building her own houses now and moving on her own. And she's very, very just, just in the past couple weeks, has really, just started to really catch on. It's been a lot of fun to watch that growth.

Elijah Drown 44:07

I gotta say, this was gold. So if we'll have links in the description, connect on LinkedIn, talk about Apex legends with you, and maybe over at MKG Marketing to see all the cool stuff you're putting together, the case studies and the big wins. This podcast powered by mkg marketing, that's us. Hey, what do you know? We manage the details so you can capture the market. And while you wait for the next episode, queue up these tea time conversations that pair perfectly with Nathan like a sweet spot, like jam on a Sunday afternoon that he makes from a strawberry patch. He got metrics demeaning our pine Babylon. She builds revenue-driven marketing. That was pretty cool. When she goes tactic to pipeline, Mike Moreno he talks about GTM, new playbook for visibility, little bit of AI action. Pretty cool as well. And go to a importance of attribution in today's marketing landscape, because nobody really knows what attribution means anymore. She does. Should go check it out. I'm Elijah. I'm too sexy for your microphone, my microphone, your microphone. Who knows. And appreciate you tuning in. Thanks, Nathan, this has been the bee's knees. I appreciate you so much.

Nathan Stenberg 45:10

You're welcome. Have a great day. Thanks for having me.