MarTech Interview with Kyle Byers, Director of Organic Search at Semrush

Kyle Byers, Director of Organic Search at Semrush chats more on how generative AI is impacting SEO and digital marketing trends:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Kyle, tell us about your marketing journey through the years and more about your time as Director of Organic Search at Semrush…

Hi, thanks for having me! My marketing career has consisted of a mix of in-house, agency-side, and entrepreneurial roles. Before joining Semrush in 2022, I was a user and fan of the tools for over a decade. So it’s really exciting for me to now work at Semrush and be able to have an impact on its growth.

I first got started in marketing working for the ecommerce arm of Guitar Center back in 2007. After several years, I decided to go backpacking through Europe while freelancing and building some small websites for side income. At the time, I thought of those websites as a hobby. But they turned out to be an important part of my career journey, because they gave me a reason to study and learn SEO.

I still remember the first dollar I made from my fitness blog, the first keywords I was able to rank for with it, and so on.

After that, I led the digital marketing team for the largest independent audiobook publisher in the U.S. From there, I co-founded a PPC and SEO agency that became a Premier Google Partner, making it one of the top 3% Google Ads agencies in the U.S. And I co-founded the startup Exploding Topics, which helps people find brand-new trends before they hit the mainstream.

Then I joined Semrush in 2022, and have been having a great time here.

Take us through some of Semrush core marketing and content processes and what your team looks like…

My role at Semrush is all about acquiring new customers organically, at scale. My team is the Organic Search Team and it consists of four smaller sub-teams: SEO, Organic Content, Conversion-Rate Optimization, and International Blogs. We grew last year from 7 to 17 full-time employees in about 6 months.

We’re focused on attracting organic search traffic, and especially non-brand organic search traffic to the Semrush website—and making sure those visitors convert into happy customers.

So we’re tackling technical issues and optimization opportunities on the Semrush website, finding and building out programmatic SEO opportunities, and publishing excellent blog posts that rank well on Google for competitive keywords in English and in six other languages.

We’d also love to hear more about the martech that helps power your core processes and strategies?

Since Semrush is a martech company, of course we love our own tools…My team relies on Semrush for keyword research (Keyword Magic Tool and more), content creation (SEO Writing Assistant and Content Outline Builder), competitive research with trends, and so on.

We also use tools like Monday.com for project management, Loom for asynchronous communication, Grammarly and Hemingway for content creation, and ChatGPT for all sorts of things.

How can marketers today drive better online efforts and SEO practices with better tools/strategies given new market dynamics?

It’s an exciting time to be working in marketing in general, and in SEO specifically. Everyone now has access to world-class marketing tools and knowledge, at a very low cost.

My tip is to focus on getting really, really good at your craft, and also understanding your customers as well as possible. You need to develop expertise in both of those areas. And then you should use the available tools and technologies as leverage to increase your impact and improve your team’s output. But it all starts with your own expertise.

What are some SEO trends that you feel will dominate digital marketing trends through 2023?

Generative AI is the top SEO trend this year, without question. Everyone is trying out AI tools like ChatGPT, Bing Chat, Google’s Bard, and Semrush’s own SEO Writing Assistant. These tools can allow users to scale up their content production, brainstorm topics, generate click-worthy title tags, and lots more. And outside of SEO, other tools are making it so much easier to create images, narrate videos, and even create new videos just by describing them in text. It’s incredible.

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A few common misconceptions about the modern state of SEO that you’d like to dispel?

The biggest one is probably that SEO is going away, or that Google is.

Every year, without fail, people publish articles about how SEO is dying. The reasons have varied over the years, from social media to smartphone usage to voice assistants. But every year, more people make more Google searches and buy more products and services that they find.

This year, the scary monster people point to is AI. It’s true that AI will change things. In fact, it already has. But that doesn’t mean it’s the end of SEO.

ChatGPT isn’t a search engine replacement. And Google and Microsoft aren’t going to be able to perfectly summarize the answers to most search queries. Even if they could, doing that would break their business models. So even though I believe AI is the most impactful technology and trend we’ve seen in a long time, I’m certain that it’s not the end of SEO.

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