Eric Enge – SEO Pioneer

Eric Enge – SEO Pioneer

Eric Enge is a renowned SEO expert, entrepreneur, and lead author of “The Art of SEO.” Eric shares his fascinating journey from a hardware engineer in the early 1980s to becoming a significant figure in the SEO industry. He discusses his early experiences in hardware engineering, his transition into SEO, and why he took the position of advocate for white hat ethical SEO practices.

In this interview Eric talks about:

His career in the early 1980s as a hardware engineer, working on projects like PC board designs and navigation systems before GPS.
Making considerable amounts of money from lead generation for education-based sites
The significant challenge of being de-indexed by Google, causing a major drop in business. It took a year of diligent work to fix the issues and regain the site’s rankings.
His belief in ethical SEO practices and the importance of creating user-focused content.
The importance of building deep, quality content for long-term success, rather than relying on short-term tactics.
Co-authoring “The Art of SEO,” and how the book came about and why he became the lead author
His new book, “AI and SEO,” which explores the impact of AI on content creation and SEO practices.
How AI can be used to enhance content creation and streamline operations, but he stressed the importance of human oversight to ensure quality and accuracy.
His commitment to ethical SEO and the importance of making users the primary focus of any SEO strategy.
The mentors and influential figures in his career, such as Ron Fisher and Paul Johannsson, with helping shape his entrepreneurial spirit and approach to business.

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SEO Pioneers – Eric Enge Transcript

Shelley Walsh
Hello and welcome to SEO Pioneers. Today I’m speaking to Eric Enge, who started out in the early 1980s as a hardware engineer before he transitioned into SEO. Amongst other things, he founded Stone Temple Agency, and Eric is probably best known for being the lead author on “The Art of SEO” alongside Stephen Spencer, Jessie Stricchiola, and Rand Fishkin. Actually, currently, Eric is also writing a book with the same publisher titled “AI and SEO,” which should be very interesting and is expected later this year.

Eric describes himself as a geek who has learned to navigate the world of business. In 2016, Eric was awarded the U.S. Search Personality of the Year. He has given a lot to the industry over the years and has a very interesting story about how that came about.

So first of all, I’m going to say, “Hi Eric, it’s fantastic to have you here. I must confess I’ve been a bit of a fan girl of yours for many years. I’ve read a lot of what you’ve written, and so I’m really, really excited and interested in hearing your story in our conversation today. So welcome to SEO Pioneers, Eric.”

Eric Enge
“Oh, thank you, Shelley. I’m actually excited to be on. I think it’s a great series that you’re running—a great deal of fun to hear people’s stories, so I just feel privileged to be a part of it.”

Shelley Walsh
Thank you. So I’m going to jump straight in, Eric, and I’m going to say that, sorry, ask you, you’re probably actually one of the guests, when I did my research on you and uncovered, you’re perhaps one of the guests that has got the most experience in hardware engineering because you go right back to the early ‘80s. I know that Brett Tabke also had a lot of early experience in the ‘80s, but can you please tell me about those early ‘80s and some of your experiences in hardware engineering?

Eric Enge
Sure, happy to. So, yeah, no, I got an electrical engineering degree. How that played out is I ended up working for a company called Megapulse, which is a company that manufactured LORAN transmitters, which is what you used for navigation before we had GPS everywhere. I was doing PC board designs and actually enjoyed doing that. These were from-scratch designs; we knew we needed something to do something, and I had to lay out how that would work and make sure we met the design tolerances and all that.

It was good and fun work, but where it started to change for me is at one point, I was responsible for creating a particular board that had a very tight tolerance in the allowable voltage in the output signal—like a 1% tolerance—and you needed to buy really special components for that. There were a lot of stages in this board, so I ended up writing a Fortran program to model the board and figure out what tolerance levels I could afford to have on each of the components to ensure that the output tolerance level was met.

It was a little bit addicting, having created this program. It was fun thinking through how to do it, and it worked well; it solved the problem. It’s sort of like maybe I want to do a little more of the software engineering stuff, is what went through my brain at that point.

Shelley Walsh
Did you have experience with bulletin board systems or anything like that, or what were your first experiences of the internet?

Eric Enge
So, I didn’t do a lot of BBS. I certainly was aware of them and tinkered with them, but honestly, I was working in a company called Phoenix Technologies. These people started talking to me about, well, we need to have email, you’ve got to have email, and it’s like, okay, well, what do I need an email for? And then, of course, you start using it, and it becomes very compelling.

I’m sure for most people today, the idea that email was compelling and new, you know, like, what are you talking about? Yes, it was at the time. And that was sort of another situation; I have this very curious personality, and I like understanding how things work, digging into them, and unraveling the mystery, so that sort of started dragging me into becoming internet-aware.

Shelley Walsh
How did you actually transition from engineering into SEO? How did that come about?

Eric Enge
So that’s a little bit of a story. I mentioned I was working at this company called Phoenix Technologies, and what they make—still, I believe—is a chip called the BIOS, which stands for Basic Input/Output System. It’s a ROM chip, and when you turn on your PC, it’s not true for Apple, they do something different, but on any Windows-based PC, it’s actually the first software that the hardware starts executing. Physically, the hardware, the CPU itself, is wired to jump to an initial start address in memory, and that memory is typically ROM-based or, nowadays, a flash RAM-based memory that’s battery-backed. But anyway, it’s a fixed address, and that’s the first code that executes, and that code starts the process of initializing the whole computer, like making sure the monitor is set up properly, the keyboard input chip is working, and all kinds of different things.

I became the lead for the engineering team there after being there for a couple of years. The company went public in 1986, and I did pretty well by that, actually. I didn’t make enough to characterize myself as being rich, but if you’ll excuse my way of putting it, I got what some people refer to as “F.U.” money, so I could be much pickier about what I chose for work and the like.

I did that for five years, but what happened is the business grew beyond really what I was ready for at that time as a manager. It got a little bigger than I was prepared to handle, and the senior management of Phoenix came to me and delivered the hard message that they needed someone else to run the team. Honestly, that was a bit of a dark time for a year or so while I sorted that out for myself. It was a little bit of a shock I wasn’t prepared for, but I did start doing some other things at Phoenix, and I stayed there.

I started doing some product marketing work. I went through the effort of seeing if a diagnostics, PC diagnostics, product line was a fit for Phoenix, and I actually decided the answer to that was no. But then I did what was my very first startup, which was internally at Phoenix. I put together a business plan for starting a fax software business unit and running it as an internal division of the company. I sold the business plan to the board, they funded it, and I put a group together.

We had good initial success, actually. We sold to a number of large PC manufacturers. We were getting up to around a $10 million-a-year business and doing quite well. We got to a point where the business was doing well, and we were delivering profit to the company, but Phoenix had a long history of trying to launch new startup business units and failing to invest properly in the core business unit around the BIOS chip. So, we—on that side of the Phoenix business—were losing some market share. A guy called Jack Kay took over as CEO, and he was determined to properly invest in the BIOS business going forward.

Myself, as well as a couple of other people that had different non-BIOS-based businesses at the company, he came to all of us and said, “I need you to deliver a 20% profit before tax.” That’s just it, that’s what you need to do. My business wasn’t ready for that level of cash spin-off. I needed to invest in it, but I couldn’t get the dollars to invest in it, and ultimately, it failed.

That led to my leaving Phoenix. By the way, I’m good friends with Jack Kay today, the guy who delivered that hard message to me, but you’ve got to take care of the core business, which was most of the revenue in the company. I had been at Phoenix for 10 years by that point and through a lot of the most formative stages of it, so my long-term contribution there was highly valued. When I sat down with Jack to negotiate an exit package, he gave me a year deal: full salary, full benefits, and use of the corner office I had been using, sitting right by the golf course.

So, kind of a sweetheart situation. But I came into work the following Monday after my last day at Phoenix. I still went into the office because I had gotten used to playing Quake with the QA engineers, having rocket launchers, and fragging each other over lunchtime. I wanted to do that. Then, in the office, okay, work on my resume, whatever. Because I hadn’t even thought about what I was going to do on that Friday, five days after…

A whole week after I had my final day at Phoenix, a guy from an internet company called eShare, a guy called Alan Warms, called me and asked if I would help him by finding deals for people to distribute his software solution. I thought about it and said, sure, and I started a business development consulting business that day. It was five grand a month I was getting paid, and then somebody else came in, I don’t know, a few weeks later, another person. So then, we were three months in, and I was making more money from consulting than I was from my Phoenix paycheck.

The nature of my deal with Phoenix in terms of my separation agreement said that my salary from them would end when I took a new job. I felt a little guilty about this, so I set up an appointment with Jack Kay again. I sat down with Jack, and I said, “Jack, here’s the reality of it. This is what our contract says, my exit agreement says. I’m not even looking for work, Jack, I’m just going to do this consulting thing.” As often happens when you behave with integrity towards others, they give it back. What he said was, “Eric, thank you for coming to me. We’ll reduce the period of time that you’re getting your full salary to nine months. You can still have the full benefits, and you can still have the corner office.”

So, I launched Stone Temple Consulting as a business development consulting business at that time, and I was kind of off to the races. The business development consulting business was doing well, actually, and this was through the internet crash in 2000 and 2001. It got a little bit lean then, but I was doing okay because people were spending a lot less money on consulting. But net-net, it was pretty successful.

But a person who used to be my boss at Phoenix Technologies contacted me and asked me to do some biz dev consulting for him. He was acting CEO of a company called ULLN that was operating a website called BestPrices.com, which was a DVD e-tailer. I started doing some stuff with him, trying to make that work. A month in, two months in, something like that, I called him up—his name was Steve Seeman. I said, “Hey Steve, I’ve been looking at this stuff, studying the market around this, and there’s a lot of stuff happening with these search engines. I think we ought to figure out how to rank in search engines and try to grow the business that way.”

It’s a classic employee mistake, by the way, or consultant mistake, because Steve, being a good CEO, immediately turned around and said, “Okay, Eric, go figure it out.” So, I dove into that process. A year later, we were doing three million a year in sales from SEO, which was at least half the revenue of the business at that point because it was a small company. Kind of, maybe I’ve got to do a little more of this SEO stuff. I was kind of hooked. You could see the journey with me always comes back to my curiosity about something. It sort of sucks me in a different direction.

I had this good success with BestPrices.com, and I just happened to get lunch together with another ex-Phoenix Technology person, a guy called Mark Eisenberg, who had also done some experimenting with SEO. We were just having lunch and shooting the breeze, and somewhere, two-thirds of the way through the conversation, we just happened to bring up the SEO stuff. He was very entrepreneurial-minded, and I was for reasons, it’s another story that’s worth sharing.

Very quickly, during the course of this meeting—I mean, it was just a lunch meeting—we probably got together for an hour and a half. In the last 20 minutes, we started talking about it, and before we left, we decided to launch a website together and see if we could do something with it. We did. Our first website was a site called OnlineMotorcycleParts.com. We launched the website; it was just an e-commerce site. We had a third-party supplier that we were working with, and within seven days, we were ranking number two for “motorcycle parts” in Google.

We used the phrase “motorcycle parts” a lot, and we used the phrase “VAR.” The text, first of all, we were selling what we were selling—never misled anybody about what we were selling—but we were a little over the top on text usage and those old-fashioned tactics. It did pretty well. We started the next site, EducationOnlineSearch.com, which is where we first got off to the races. It was just the two of us; he was a product marketing guy turned into a programmer, and you could argue I was a programmer turned into a product marketing guy. We kind of crossed paths in different ways in our careers, but he was really good at Perl programming. Our site was completely generated in Perl. We had a deal with a company called QuinStreet, which was a major provider of educational leads to the schools. They had the relationship directly with the schools, and then we had a relationship with them.

We’d have a lead form that we’d send them to, and when it converted, we’d get a fee. The fees we were initially getting paid were around seven bucks, which was a steal. We were being robbed by QuinStreet at that point because they were getting 80 bucks or something ridiculously different than the pittance they gave us. But in terms of the creation of the site, it’s just the two of us, right? So, we had a site with 500 pages. I wrote by hand the content for all 500 pages. At this point, we were a little less into massive keyword repetition—the search engines had gotten beyond that—but things had evolved in the direction of links.

We started doing some things to get links. How do people in that era start? They start by swapping links. So, we did that old-fashioned thing where we built a directory of internet stuff on our site, and we swapped links from that page to get a link from these other pages. We had a summer when we got into that where I personally managed all aspects, including the implementation of the links on our side, of a thousand link swaps. But I stumbled upon something, which became my role in it, wasn’t known as a story, but I had a role in a famous industry story involving the Stanford University student newspaper.

I happened to stumble upon that newspaper, and I noticed at the bottom of every page there were two text links, which clearly had been sold because they had nothing to do with the newspaper. They were rich anchor text pointing to some site. I said, well, that looks like a good thing, so I called the Stanford University student newspaper offices and spoke to someone. I said, “Hey, we see that you are linking to these two things down here, and I’d love to pay you to have our links added there.” They had no clue; they didn’t—“What are you talking about? We don’t know how to do that.” It’s student-run, so there’s constant turnover in the people that are involved in running it. Over a three-month period, where I kept getting back to them, I gradually taught them how to do it, and then I forgot about it.

But I ran into another famous industry person, Patrick Gavin, who had a business called Text Link Ads, and they were selling links. I found that through him, I could buy links on a whole bunch of additional student newspapers. We did that on university websites and did that across eight sites. At one point, we were doing 700 leads a day, per day, in a business that had two people. We were doing ridiculously well. Then came December 14, 2004. I logged on to my QuinStreet account to see what the story was for leads the day before, and the answer was zero. It was gone. Yeah, that was a very dark moment in that business, shall we say.

But what it did is it caused me to go to my first industry conference. I didn’t even go and watch the sessions; I just bought an exhibit hall pass. I went there to check it out and walked around. Then I realized while doing that, what I really need to do in the future is just go all in and watch the sessions and things. That’s what started me in going to the industry conferences. It was SCS, so I went to my next industry conference. I bought a full pass, made a point of going and sitting at a session where Matt Cutts was presenting. It was back when he was just on a panel, certainly not long after that, he evolved to a point that they would never think of having him on a panel, but that was the case at the time.

I had prepped for it, and we had been working our butts off to fix the problems with the site. We cleared out all the bad links, improved the content, and earned links from seven State Department of Education websites here in the U.S. I sat in the front row, and I forget who the moderator was, but they get to the point—“Let’s give our audience a hand”—and exactly as I said that, I was out of my chair, and I was the first person to talk to Matt. He appreciated my sincerity and said, “Well, let me take a note about that.” I said, “Oh, well, no, you don’t need to do that. Here’s a document with everything.” He still took a note, but I kind of caused something to trigger in his brain that I had done all this work, right?

Went away, and nothing happened. Then I went to another conference, and Matt was speaking at that, and I sat in the front row. When the moderator starts saying, “Let’s give our…” I’m already out of my seat, first one to talk to him. I did that another couple of times, and then it came to another December, the following year, SCS Chicago. Same routine, went through it, and we kept working on the site and improving it. Oh, by the way, in the meantime, we had purchased the paid inclusion service from Yahoo, which they had acquired from Inktomi and converted into a service. It supposedly didn’t impact rankings, but it guaranteed indexation.

I had learned paid search, and we were spending 30 grand a month on paid search of our own money. If you want to get really good at paid search, spend your own money, and you’ll get really good at it. But anyway, that fateful December 2005, I had another conversation with Matt. I went to bed, and I woke up the next morning, and we were back in the index. Matt has never said a word to me about it, I’ve never said a word to him about it. I can’t confirm anything, but the timing is, at the very least, curious. That, combined with our experiences, put me in a place in my life where I needed to give back because we actually ended up doing very well in the end with that website, and we sold it in 2006. I knew that all three of my kids’ college educations were paid for. I just felt a great deal of debt from that overall experience.

I’ve been relentless in terms of my messaging about the right way to do SEO since then.

Shelley Walsh
Can I just clarify, Eric, what year did you say this was?

Eric Enge
2005 is when we got back in the index, and then February 14th, 2006 is actually when we sold the business.

Shelley Walsh
How long did it take from when you sat in that chair, and you had zero leads coming in when you’d been removed from the index, how long did it take from that point to when you got back in again?

Eric Enge
A year.

Shelley Walsh
A year, okay. When you were removed from the index, did you understand straight away that it was the links? Did you know that, or did it take you some time to figure it out? How did you actually figure out what you’d been doing wrong, and how did you figure out what you should do?

Eric Enge
I don’t think it took very long to realize that it was links that were the cause. It might have been a matter of days, or maybe I knew right away—it’s a little fuzzy to me. But we knew that we had dug ourselves the hole. Part of that is, I didn’t fill in this detail, but it was our third strike. We had actually had sites of ours—not the EducationOnline site, but those sites—tossed a couple of times and gotten them back in. So, we kind of learned from this what Google really wanted.

Quite honestly, looking back at the overall experience, it gave me a perspective, not just on how to view SEO as a way to make lots of money, but on what I should really, in a more holistic sense, be trying to accomplish. That really is about adding value to people. You publish a website, that website should be adding value to the audience. Yes, be smart about SEO and do the things where you’re going to rank. It’s foolish business practice to not be aware of the right tactical things—you create great content, promote it, make people aware of it.

Did it ever go through your mind? Because I know there’s obviously probably a lot of your contemporaries, or probably even a lot of people still today, who create burn-and-churn sites where their main objective is to get it ranked as fast as possible in any way. They try to earn as much money as possible, and then as soon as it gets burned, they just move on to the next one, so they keep going through that cycle. You were making—you had 700 leads a day at $7 a lead. Was there any point that you actually thought, “Okay, let’s just burn that, we’ve lost that one, let’s quickly get the next one up and running and do it all again”?

Yeah, we never seriously considered just burning the site and starting over. As I mentioned, we got the Inktomi feed set up with Yahoo, and that brought us enough money for the business and to live on. Maybe not as well as we were living before, but we were okay. Then the pay-per-click stuff brought in some additional margin. I think we were running at about a 30% margin on that. I think really, even honestly, from the very first conversation with Matt, even though he didn’t do anything about it, at least at that time, I felt a certain amount of encouragement that it could be done.

So, would it have been easier to do it another way? Maybe, don’t know. It worked out.

Shelley Walsh
From what I’m getting from this, you don’t necessarily have a spammer mindset, whereas for some people, it is just a case of putting a website up there, ranking it as quickly as possible, and making the money by whatever means. But from the way you’re talking, and I’ve read your content for a long time, I’ve never had the sense from you that you have that spammer mentality of just trying to rank and make money. It seems to me that you are really motivated by doing something of value.

Eric Enge
Yeah, no question about that. It’s been about that give-back. But even with the second and third lead-gen businesses, the approach to those—the content, and how we started doing content marketing to get links rather than schemes—was about trying to… We were doing education lead-gen, but we were trying to give a good product to people and ended up selling two more businesses. CityTownInfo was the second one, and then the third one was a site called BrainTrack.

My thought process had evolved to, we really need to dig deeply into the quality and depth of our content, and I wanted to build very deep content sites at that point. My partners weren’t up for that. They thought we could keep doing it the way we had been doing it. By then, we’d improved the content a lot, but I was talking about going to a whole other level of depth. I saw a competitor, a site called Education-Portal.com, that was actually going very deep into content on their site, and I thought they were doing the right thing.

When we couldn’t come to an agreement upon this, I talked to the partners I had and said, “We’re not seeing eye to eye anymore. It’s been a great ride, but it’s time for it to come to an end.” That’s what caused us to sell BrainTrack. That’s when I got into the pure SEO consulting side of things with Stone Temple. All of that consulting has always been about doing things the right way. We called it white hat back in the day—nobody uses that term anymore—but it was all very focused on learning how to build your site the right way, understanding what the right keywords are, and having the right content that, yes, causes you to rank, but also helps users.

Shelley Walsh
Do you think that was mainly in part due to your experience of having that penalty that made you want to go down that route?

Eric Enge
Yeah, it certainly accelerated that path for me. Inevitably, even during the days when we were buying those links, we were still providing people the information they needed to assess schools. I never wanted to be someone that was ripping people off, as it were, but obviously, we gamed the system a bit. It’s not the proudest part of my career, let’s just put it that way, because that’s not who I want to be. I want to understand how it should work.

It isn’t just Google sermonizing because, yes, it serves Google’s purpose to give better content to their users, but that ultimately is their purpose. If you’re at odds with that purpose, then something is out of line.

You started writing for Search Engine Watch in 2008, and from your experience, you said that you were almost given a second chance where you got back into the index and started to be successful with the site again. You said that really changed the way you looked at everything. Did that have an impact on the direction of making you want to start giving back to the community in any way?

Well, yeah. It’s all part of the same sequence of events, as it were. As I mentioned, after we got back in the index in December 2005, Matt Cutts—since I had a certain amount of contact with him—followed some of the content I published. Then, prior to 2008, he had actually awarded me runner-up for Best White Hat Blog. That’s when Rebecca Lieb and Elizabeth Osmeloski of Search Engine Watch decided to give me a shot at writing for them. That was all straight-up, “Here’s the search news.” I was writing a post a day, you know, latest stuff in Search Engine Watch and latest news, rather, and trying to fill the gap. I was no Danny Sullivan, but they needed someone to lift some weight, and I did that.

That put me in a position to communicate about things in a certain way. I certainly had much more of an audience than I did on my site. But I had also gotten to a point where, because I had begun to develop some visibility from the positions I was taking with Google myself, I had a certain amount of visibility developing inside of Google. I managed to get to a person there called Shashi Seth, who was responsible for the program launch of Google Custom Search Engines. I developed a strong expertise in the custom search engines, and I managed to get Shashi Seth to persuade him to let me interview him and publish it on the Stone Temple blog. That was my first interview of an industry luminary, if you will. He later, by the way, had a VP role at Yahoo, so he had quite a notable career.

Building on top of that, I started being able to interview some other people because, you know, I mean, I interviewed this guy from Google. I mean, surely if I’m good enough for him, I’m good enough for you, right? Then Danny Sullivan noticed that I had this expertise in custom search engines and sent me a couple of leads because I was the custom search engine guy. But that was a little too niche to make a large business out of, so I found ways to expand that and get into other areas. I had a guy join me, a longtime friend of mine named John Biondo, to help me with Stone Temple, and we worked on growing that together for a number of years.

The first speaking engagement I had at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose resulted because I’d been following this other guy called Rand Fishkin. I’d been a bit perky, saying, “Hey, Rand,” you know. Then finally one day, he wrote a post that said, “Surely someone would want to get the 10,000 links and 40,000 social shares that would result from doing a study comparing how analytics programs measure traffic and the differences between them.” I was the first response, and I said something like, “I got you covered, I’m going to do this.” It turned into hundreds of hours of work, by the way, because getting sites lined up to agree to run multiple different analytics programs at the same time and the tracking of all the data and doing all that was very intense.

But I did it, and I published a thing called the Web Analytics Shootout. It didn’t get 10,000 links or 40,000 social shares, by the way, but it did attract Rand’s attention that I had followed through on what was obviously a massive effort. It got my first speaking engagement at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose. At that time, I’d done some speaking before but in a very different context. I was terrible, but I didn’t completely alienate everybody, and I managed to get some other speaking engagements along the way.

I had one panel with Dave Naylor, Rae Hoffman, and I am Motoko Hunt on a panel which was the White Hat Black Hat Showdown at, you know, SCS again, SCS Chicago. But all the while, the continued messaging was received well by people at Google, and they understood that this was more than a tactic for me. I think that resonated a lot. As I said earlier, when you give to someone or give back to someone, strangely enough, sometimes it comes back your way. Ultimately, I founded and built, with the help of partners, three different lead-gen companies. After fixing the early problems, I never bought a link, never spammed a thing, and did extremely well. I proved, even back in the heyday of link buying, that you didn’t need to do it to build a successful business.

Shelley Walsh
The one thing I wanted to ask you about is, stepping back quite a bit, “The Art of SEO.” Was it 2009, the original edition? Are we, have you just rewritten the third edition, or is it the fourth edition?

Eric Enge
Fourth edition

Shelley Walsh
The original one was 2009. How did that come about, and how did you become the lead author? Because you were the lead author alongside Rand Fishkin, Stephan Spencer, and Jessie Stricchiola.

Eric Enge
Yes, Stephan Spencer and Jessie Stricchiola. What happened there is, between things like the Web Analytics Shootout and starting to speak and writing at Search Engine Watch and the interviews I was publishing on my blog, and also doing data-driven research studies, attracting a lot of attention to the business that way, I developed a certain amount of notoriety. Back in 2008, Rand and Stephan had decided to collaborate on a book and persuaded O’Reilly to let them publish through them. Separately, Jessie Stricchiola had signed an agreement with O’Reilly for “The Art of SEO” title, actually. But they were having trouble progressing, and so were both parties. Then O’Reilly put Jessie together with Stephan and Rand, and they tried to do something, but it was also just going too slowly.

What happened at yet another SES, and I’m tempted to say that it was SCS Chicago yet again because I think that’s the right timing. In fact, I’m quite sure it’s the right timing—that’s the November-December conference it was at the time—Stephan came up to me and said, “You know, told me about this project involving him and Rand and Jessie, and that they needed someone to drive the process because they were just having trouble, people didn’t have enough time, etc.”

I got into a conversation with John Biondo, who was doing a lot of the heavy lifting at Stone Temple at that point, and said, “You know, I could go do this thing. It means there’s going to be more that falls on you, but it’ll be really good for the business if I do this thing.” Then I talked to my wife about it, too. I grossly underestimated the level of effort, by the way.

Once I had agreement, I went back to Stephan and said, “Okay, I’m in.” The understanding was that I would be the last named author. Thirteen weeks later, I had written the first draft of all 13 chapters. I heavily leveraged stuff that each of them had previously published, but I mashed it into a single book. Then the review process started, which is a lot of what you underestimate with a book is how grueling that will be, and then dealing with all the issues around images and getting them right. So, it was—I was thinking it would be really hard for three months—it was really hard for nine months before we got to the point of publishing.

I didn’t bring it up, but I think Rand might have brought it up that he didn’t think it was appropriate that I’d be the last named author, and I said, “You know, yes, given that I’ve done the great majority of everything, I don’t think that’s appropriate either,” and I spoke up. Stephan wanted to be the first named author as well, so we had a very mature discussion about the whole thing. It wasn’t anything of a fight, so to speak, but we needed a way to break that deadlock. Jessie suggested it. She said, “Well, your letters are both close to opposite ends of the alphabet, let’s take tomorrow’s New York Times headline, and whatever the first letter of the first headline is, whoever it’s closest to will be the first named author.” This is the very odd algorithm she chose.

I woke up at three in the morning, or two in the morning, and I went online to look at the New York Times online and see what it was going to be. Of course, the first letter, I forget, it was like an F or something. I have saved a copy of that paper; it’s here somewhere, I’m just going to find it quickly enough. Every other headline on the entire edition that day began with the letter S. The only one that didn’t was the main headline. So that’s how I became the first named author.

The third edition published in 2015, so it was quite a while before the fourth edition published—eight years. That’s a long time in SEO, so the old book was pretty out of date, but the new one is fully updated. It has a solid chapter on generative AI in it, which was written by me at the last minute after everything else was done. I decided that we needed to add this. The whole book and the AI and SEO book, and of course, there’s a content marketing course that I’m doing—they’re all about just wanting to give people tools to help them in their careers. I know Stephan has said this to me many times too, so many people have benefited from the various editions of “The Art of SEO.” The industry has been so, so good to me. To be able to hopefully help make it a better place and help other people succeed in it is a blessing.

Shelley Walsh
I do have an original copy of “The Art of SEO,” and I’m looking forward to reading the updated version. It’s what you just touched on there about giving back and how the industry has been good to you. I do know that you previously cited two people who had a strong influence on your early career: Ron Fisher and Paul Johannsson. You said they really helped you to develop. What was it that was so outstanding that they gave to you at that time?

Eric Enge
The Paul Johannsson story, and there’s another name worth mentioning—a fellow called Hugh Quinn and another one called Peter Rose. They were all entrepreneurs that my father did consulting work for when I was growing up. My father taught physics at MIT for 30 years and was actually a world-renowned physicist in the domain of experimental physics. He won a prize called the Tom Bonner Prize, which is the top prize you can win in experimental physics. Because of that, a lot of entrepreneurs would circle around him and want his help. Paul Johannsson was the one that he was closest to—a company called Megapulse—that was where I was doing the software and hardware engineering in my career. Very successful entrepreneur, and just a very kind and decent man as well. He made such a strong impression, as did Peter Rose and Hugh Quinn.

Ron Fisher was a bit of a different story. If you’re not familiar with Ron Fisher, he was the chairman of SoftBank North America, which is the North American arm of SoftBank Japan, which is run by a person known as the “Japanese Bill Gates,” Masayoshi Son. Sorry, I’m sure I’m getting the pronunciation wrong, so my apologies to him for that. Ron led, on behalf of SoftBank, the VC fund investing here in North America. He led investments in Yahoo! and E*TRADE and companies like that, and he became chairman of the board at Sprint at one point. He was just a brilliant businessman, far beyond my level of expertise just because of the scale of what he’s done. But there was a period of time when he was brought into Phoenix Technologies to be the CEO of Phoenix Technologies, and that was when I was working there.

Phoenix had its own interesting little sub-story in that after it went public, a management team came in that learned how to manipulate Wall Street, but they did it in a way that was not good for the long-term health of the business. Ron, with his CFO-type background, came in to take over as CEO and did a brilliant job of turning the company around and returning it to health. After I sold the board on my first startup with them—and I did a couple of them—Ron was my direct supervisor for two or three years. It was a privilege to see another person who has an enormous amount of grace and kindness, and yet such a strong command of business. It was a privilege to work for him as well. Seeing those, it was inevitable that I had to be an entrepreneur.

It was a little bit difficult when I was leaving Phoenix to go down that path. My intention was to take a job, and it was only because the consulting did so well while I was still getting paid by Phoenix that my wife and I felt comfortable enough to say, “Okay, let’s give this a go.”

That’s quite an interesting background you’ve got there. Obviously, your father was a world-renowned physicist, and you’ve been exposed to these very high-level individuals who have clearly had an influence on you. How much do you think that contributed to your confidence to start an agency and actually be successful in business?

It contributed a lot, for sure. But even in my early days at Phoenix Technologies, when I was first an analyst and then became the head of engineering there, that company by itself was pretty entrepreneurial, so it was a good practice ground. You got to really see how things needed to be done. I had that freedom to have a certain amount of dynamic behavior pattern in growing it, and so I had a lot of dry runs, so to speak. But I think that entrepreneurial spirit is how I got into that role in the engineering group. It’s like, “Yeah, we can do this. We should do that.”

A little sub-story there was a time when IBM recognized that the personal computer space had gotten a little away from them—we call them the clone manufacturers—the other PC manufacturers captured most of the market share. So, they launched a new PC line with a different implementation called PS/2. We needed to develop a BIOS for the PS/2, and it fell to my group to do that. I was running the main business group, the regular BIOS group. There was another model called the Model 30, and that was not what Paul was working on because there were three different product lines where we had to develop a BIOS for it. Anyway, Paul was off doing this for two of these PS/2 models, and the executive staff decided they also wanted to do a third model called the Model 30. They came to me and said, “Paul’s team is full up, and we don’t want to interrupt what they’re doing. We want to see if you can reverse engineer and replicate the Model 30 BIOS in the six weeks we have before COMDEX, which was the big conference back in the day.”

Now, properly done, by the way, this is a six-month project, not a six-week project. This is perfect entrepreneurial experience, right? Yep, okay, we’ll do it. Suzanne Lafier, I think the name was, Dave Boltzman, Jeff Kimman, and I all went to town. I was the analyst, so I did all the decompilation and writing specs, and the three of them wrote the code. We were able to boot a Model 30 BIOS in six weeks flat. So, it was crazy to do, but if you’re going to be a good entrepreneur, you’ve got to be a little bit crazy.

Shelley Walsh
So, SEO obviously changed—it has changed and it hasn’t changed in the last 25 years. Do you think it’s changed a lot to where we are now from when you began?

Eric Enge
Well, it’s very much come of age. Verge article notwithstanding, that article where they lambasted SEO as a… I’m not recalling the right words, but they basically said nothing but negative things about SEO, and all SEOs drive Lamborghinis and take advantage of people, etc. But we’ve really learned as a peer to do, for the great majority of SEOs, is help companies that have websites understand how to navigate the technical challenges of being crawlable by Google and the marketing challenges of building your visibility so you can market your products. That’s just marketing. There are bad marketers too, right? And so the bad SEOs are still out there; they’re still doing it, they’re still doing churn-and-burn websites, but the great majority of us are really concerned about doing the right thing.

Shelley Walsh
This is a very loaded question, and we haven’t got a massive amount of time to talk about it, but how much of an impact do you think AI is going to have? Because obviously, you are working on the new book at the moment with the same publishers as “The Art of SEO,” and the book will be titled “AI and SEO.” How much impact do you think it’s going to have, do you think?

Eric Enge
Well, at the moment, we could do a whole other call on this, by the way, so I’ll try to do the very short version of it. We need to recognize the limitations of generative AI such as it is today. It’s still very prone to errors. I just published a study in Search Engine Land on this, by the way, where I hand-checked across five different generative AI tools how well they responded to 44 different questions. I did detailed accuracy verification and completeness verification.

You’re certainly not going to use—if you care about your customers—you’re not going to use generative AI to publish a whole website or publish web pages without having significant review. You shouldn’t. The underlying core here is statistics—the statistical probability that one word follows the next is how this stuff is constructed. It’s not really constructed from knowledge, and that defines its limitations. There are things that need to happen around having a model for the real world, which AI solutions do not, and having the ability to be creative in an appropriate context, which AI solutions do not because they don’t know how to weight the value of a randomly generated idea.

But they can be very, very powerful in streamlining your operations because if you understand the limitations but use the power, you can significantly increase your ability to produce more content while improving its quality at the same time. It’s just by having the right human review in those processes and using AI to make the human more accurate and effective and ensure that they don’t forget to bring up important things. I know a couple of businesses integrally involved in Study.com, which is one of my projects that I’m doing right now, where it’s becoming an AI-centric organization. But again, all constrained around overdoing it.

So, back to SEO. First of all, that relates to SEO from the point of view of content generation. You can generate more content and better content at the same time. That’s what makes AI disruptive here. You can create a better user experience, and you can also reduce the cost of writing code, which can help in site creation. That includes things like Hreflang code and schema and this kind of stuff. There are a lot of things you can do with AI to help streamline your operations for SEO, and that’s the way I think it should be done.

Shelley Walsh
Are you using generative AI to help you write your book?

Eric Enge
So, that’s a great question. I have not been doing that out of the gate, but it’s probably a good idea for me to use it to help me make sure that I’m not forgetting important subtopics. But 100% of the output of anything I write is owned by me. Its quality is my responsibility. How well it serves people—the readers, the experience it creates—I own all responsibility for that, and I will never have it any other way.

Shelley Walsh
That’s a very diplomatic answer, Eric.

Eric Enge
No, it’s a tool—you can use it, but I mean, yes, I’m not relying on it. I’m going to check everything, you know? But I mean, ask it to generate an outline. “Oh, I wouldn’t have—I forgot about including that in my outline.” Brilliant use of AI, right?

I’m just very interested in your answer that you gave before about how you feel that employing generative AI to help you produce more content and to integrate it into the process so that you can produce more content and more high-quality content. I’d be quite interested to know how you think that process works. Obviously, we’ve not got a massive amount of time to go into that now, so I will look forward to reading your book to find out all about that.

Yeah, no, but the short answer is you can use AI to generate three outlines on something you’re interested in. I would do three, and then have a subject matter expert come in and create the best of those. Also, add their own insights. Then you can use AI to take that outline and generate a content brief to give a writer, which will add extra elements, and then have a subject matter expert clean that up and send it off. Then you could even have AI generate drafts of the article, and then have the subject matter expert go through and clean all that up. That last part depends on how good a job you do with putting in your prompts, guiding the AI, understanding your brand voice, and how you like to message and what you think your audience is. It requires a lot of work. So, I mean, that’s the rough idea—you’ve got to own it at every stage and just use it as a tool to help you brainstorm.

Shelley Walsh
I’ve been experimenting with it, and as a content producer myself, I keep trying to get it to write content, and it’s… Yeah, it’s a support tool, but it certainly can’t just write something straight out of the box. It’s not an easy replacement, as I’ve found so far. It’s not there for me yet in what it needs to do.

Eric, it’s been… I could carry on talking to you. There are so many more questions I have. I know that you—we are running out of time now because I know you have to go, and there are so many more things I wish I could ask you, but I think we’re going to have to wrap up there. Is there one thing you would like to just say about looking back on the very early days in the industry and when you started out or through your entire career? What’s the one thing that really stands out to you that you’re most proud of?

Eric Enge
It’s going to be a very Google kind of answer—learning how to make the users the objective of the work. That’s the best way to generate a great business result from many different perspectives. That’s just something that I feel very passionate about. The people that I consult with still—I only dabble in consulting these days—they’ll ask a question in a certain context, and they know how the answer is going to start because, well, here’s how we’re going to make sure that we make this the best experience for our users. It’s like, “Okay, Eric, we got past that. Now get into the other aspects of it.”

All right, but if you want to schedule more time sometime, I’d be happy to do that.

Shelley Walsh
I would love that. I think I will reach out, Eric. At this point, I’m going to say to you thank you very much for being my pioneer, Eric. It’s been fantastic to speak to you, and thank you so much for having me.

Eric Enge
Sure.