Adrian Dahlin: The More SEO Changes The More It Stays The Same (Except Those Tactics!)

The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

In this episode, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Adrian Dahlin, founder of Search to Sale, to explore the intersection of traditional SEO principles and emerging AI technologies. Adrian brings a unique perspective as someone relatively new to SEO—having focused on it for just over three years—combined with a master's degree in applied data science and a background in creative marketing.

The conversation tackles the evolving landscape of search, from Google's helpful content update to the rise of generative engine optimization (GEO). Adrian shares candid insights about the challenges of selling SEO during a period of industry uncertainty, how reframing services around AI unlocked new client conversations, and why the convergence of SEO, digital PR, and Reddit marketing is creating powerful feedback loops for brands.

Key themes include the timeless nature of authentic storytelling (drawing on Simon Sinek's "Start With Why"), the shift from top-of-funnel content to bottom-of-funnel solutions, and Adrian's compelling analogy of AI as "a consultant working for your customer" rather than just another marketing channel. The discussion also explores the darker implications of writing for robots to write for humans, the dilution of authority online, and the challenges of vetting information in an age of AI-generated content.

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Key Takeaways

On Fresh Perspectives in SEO

Adrian: "Trust me because I am relatively new to it and so what's normal to me is what's current and I'm not stuck doing it a version from 10 years ago."

Jeremy: "Dinosaurs like me have a lot of baggage. It's interesting because for me, the more that it changes, the more it stays the same."

Adrian: "I think I agree that the principles stay the same, but tactics kind of change."

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On the Art and Science of SEO

Adrian: "I am a marketer with a data science background. I got a master's degree in applied data science, but I also really love like flushing out key messaging and like developing a voice and a brand... I love words and numbers and SEO is all about using data to help guide creative content projects."

Jeremy: "I have always seen SEO as part science, part art. There is definitely a heavy data sciences aspect to it... but also, you know, the artistic capability to understand the flaws in the data and understand the incredible multi-layer, multi-tiered black box that we're playing with for organic results."

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On Authentic Marketing and Storytelling

Adrian: "I'll start with Simon Sinek. So his TED Talk, Start With Why, was one of the very first things that started to form how I thought about marketing... people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it."

Adrian: "The most effective persuasion, the most effective communication happens when your message is in clear alignment with your personal values... people believe what you're saying because it's in alignment with who you are."

On the paradox of authenticity in marketing: Adrian: "I mean I guess the proof is in the pudding. It's like if it works, probably, it probably was... It's one thing to give people like a sugary snack kind of a message that like, you know, is appealing in the short term... and that's different than the kind of message... that continues to resonate for like years or decades at a time. That's going to be good evidence that it probably is authentic if it just keeps working."

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On Google's Helpful Content Update

Jeremy: "Google was being inundated about three or four years ago... there was more and more sites that were programmatic in nature and more and more sites that were ranking that had a bunch of content... And what really shifted is they launched their own LLM-based portion of the search... if your site has a bunch of unhelpful content, then you actually get a negative penalty for the whole site. And if you have a ton of it, it will drag it down a lot. And so it was the return of a site-wide penalty."

Jeremy: "The majority of those that tanked have really never actually been able to recover. I think it's maybe one in a hundred have really come back and many of those are even just partial. Many companies went down entirely. Many travel bloggers are no longer able to do their thing."

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On Google's Use of Click Behavior

Jeremy: "For the longest time Google had lied and said, hey, click behavior doesn't affect rankings. And it's not a direct ranking factor. And that word direct, one of my previous interviewees, Jason Barnard said, that word direct in that sentence always gets you because... they say something that's true, but say it in a way that leads you to believe something that's false."

Adrian: "Like the facts are true, but the narrative is false."

Jeremy: "In reality, the court documents that came out because Google got sued and the antitrust, they had it. You know, it's not just in the algorithm, it's one of the three major components of ranking. It's content, it's links, and it's behavior of how people interact with your brand as they do these searches."

Adrian: "Which I think is good. What better evidence would they have that content is actually helpful and useful to people than looking at the behavior on the site. That seems like a very positive thing."

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On Google's Market Power

Adrian: "Google doesn't even have to be the best search engine. Google hasn't actually needed to be the best search engine for a long time. Just because they're Google, because of their market share, they have too much power. They're the aggregator of information on the internet. And consumer behavior just changes very slowly. Google is synonymous with search still."

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On Selling SEO in the AI Era

Adrian: "I've been focused on SEO entirely in the AI era. And it has been hard to sell SEO during this period because of uncertainty, not because the fundamentals had changed. Maybe the fundamentals are starting to change now three years later. But certainly for the first two years, fundamentals did not change at all. But there was just fear and uncertainty. And that made decision makers just want to invest in channels they had more faith in."

Adrian: "As soon as I kind of made a shift in how I was presenting things and focusing more on AI in about July, so three months ago... I just got a lot more meetings. Like from my existing audience, people wanted to follow up, former clients, people I've been in touch with a long time who'd never bought from us... I think ultimately the greatest reason for that was just that gave them more trust in me that I was able to talk relatively fluently about AI and even if what we ended up working on was mostly traditional SEO website content stuff."

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On the Convergence of Digital PR and SEO

Jeremy: "The adoption of what should have been fantastic bedfellows all along of digital PR and SEO... I'd say that there is a pretty hard break between SEOs and digital PR folk... everybody else is focused on, hey, can I get another guest blog placement?... hardcore focus on if it doesn't have a DR, then it doesn't have any value."

Adrian: "Yeah, I think that's right and they are kind of being forced together now and that's probably a good thing."

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On Shifting Content Strategy

Adrian: "Two things come to mind. One is shifting the kinds of content that we focus on just away from the top of the funnel... Another is just changing how we think about discovery online. And I use an analogy that AI is like a consultant working for your customer, and you're trying to influence how that consultant thinks, which means that everything on the web is kind of relevant."

Adrian: "The old blog tactics where you'd, like, throw up an article defining an industry term, which Ryan Law at Ahrefs calls rehashed Wikipedia content, that was always kind of an awkward phenomenon... it's a much better user experience for AI to just answer the question when someone's just asking for the definition of a term."

Adrian: "So, you know, it's much less helpful to have that top funnel, higher volume keywords, 'what is blah blah blah jargon' that kind of blogging and so much more focus on the bottom of the funnel stuff like all the searches related to people looking for a solution."

On niche technical content: Adrian: "Where an LLM is trained on the internet, it's going to do a good job of synthesizing commonly available information. But for people who are looking for a really niche subject, where there isn't a lot of good content on the web, there's still an opportunity to kind of own that niche, own that long tail, particularly if it's like highly technical."

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On the AI Consultant Analogy

Jeremy (referencing Michael McDougall of Right Thing Agency): "ChatGPT is your least trained customer service representative. So it's detached from you and you kind of have to use a fax machine approach to get new information into it."

Adrian: "I think about it differently... the analogy of a consultant works better for me. It really is working for the customer... they have their own ChatGPT. That's constantly updating more personalized context for them and giving them personalized answers and is really a tool for them as an assistant for all of these decision makers out there."

Adrian: "It's now our job to help an AI that's using the internet to educate itself to think about things our way. So we've got to figure out where this consultant, this AI consultant is formulating its worldview and show up in those places around the web. So if it thinks our way, then it's more likely to recommend our solution."

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On Writing for Robots

Jeremy (referencing Matt Brooks of SEOteric): "For a long time, Google has said, don't write for search engines. Don't write for robots, write for humans. But Matt Brooks of SEOteric just pointed out the other day, you are now writing for robots and in many cases you're using robots to write for robots to write for humans. So it's like this robot sandwich."

Adrian: "Yeah, yeah, it's a little dark. Well, I think one potential vision of the future is that websites are gonna really go down in importance and influence, and just the amount of time that humans spend looking at websites is gonna go way down."

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On New Products and Disruptive Technology

Jeremy: "I'm wondering if that's a good thing or a bad thing for startups or entrepreneurs like Nexen PowerTrack. They're trying to disrupt systems with new products that don't exist... Do you think LLMs are more flexible when it comes to discovering new disruptive technology or is it more challenging because you can't control the inputs as well?"

Adrian: "I've seen quick wins in GEO, particularly in less competitive spaces where you throw up a good article and or like a media and maybe supported with a media interview on a good authoritative site or something and then you just like dominate a niche ChatGPT query."

Adrian: "I think my answer is probably temporal, where it's easier now, probably with AI, and as the whole industry, as basically marketing teams mature and adapt, it's going to get super optimized. And in a few years, in a couple years, it's going to be a lot harder to when the same way that investment grew over time in SEO and it professionalized and became very competitive. I think that will happen, but there maybe will still be a little bit more randomness with AI and unpredictability."

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On the Authority Crisis and Single Data Points

Adrian: "I have been hearing the claim that ChatGPT, the ChatGPT referral traffic to your website from ChatGPT was much more engaged and higher value, higher converting than other sources, particularly Google... I googled that question... And there was one case study... And it was a case study with one data point... that's not a good data set. We don't want to be forming our sense of reality based on a sample of one. But Google ascribed so much authority to this one study."

Jeremy: "One person said it about one thing and what would have been just treated as an anecdote because it gets cited in the LLM results in the AI overview. It's somehow now part of the accepted knowledge graph and it would be very hard for anybody to challenge that going forward because now it will be counterfactual."

Jeremy: "It seems like we're becoming more prone to that as a culture of falling prey to a single data point."

Adrian: "Yeah, I mean maybe this gets into bigger picture challenges like just the amount of information we have access to and that none of us can handle vetting all those sources and figuring out what's credible."

Jeremy: "It used to be very simple in 2005 to tell the difference between, you know, a crackpot site on GeoCities is not a good reference point versus, you know, MIT or Harvard. But now we have diluted authority so much we have, you know, multiple inputs needed to get any particular data point out there, but also it's way easier to fake than ever."

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On Hope for the Future

Adrian: "I'm excited about AI. I mean it's an opportunity for the flexible, the adaptable, to figure out what it means for them, figure out what it means for your world, and learn and adapt."

Adrian: "I'm excited to have the marketing, have GEO as like a subfield, mature, and develop some clearer playbooks. I still feel like it's so experimental... But I'm excited to see more studies come out and to see more hands-on, see more of these virtuous mutually supporting programs of your traditional SEO and your Reddit engagement and your digital PR, of seeing those things come together into like coherent programs and see some of the positive feedback loops that you create among those tactics."

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About Adrian Dahlin

Adrian Dahlin is the founder of Search to Sale, a B2B full-service SEO and GEO agency. The company specializes in data-driven strategy with proprietary software that helps plan and monitor content. Search to Sale offers comprehensive services including traditional SEO, answer engine optimization, Reddit management, and digital PR.

Adrian co-hosts The Shift to Freedom podcast, which focuses on mindset, strategy, and personal growth for small business owners.

Connect with Adrian:

• Website: searchtosale.io
• LinkedIn: Adrian Dahlin
• Podcast: The Shift to Freedom

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About Jeremy Rivera

Jeremy Rivera is the founder of SEO Arcade and host of the Unscripted SEO podcast. With extensive experience in the SEO industry, Jeremy brings a seasoned perspective on how search has evolved over the years.

Connect with Jeremy:

• Website: jeremyriveraseo.com
• LinkedIn: Jeremy Rivera
• Company: SEO Arcade

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Resources Mentioned

• Simon Sinek's "Start With Why" TED Talk
• Jason Barnard of Kalicube - Entity Optimization Interview
• SEO Arcade Blog
• SEOteric (Matt Brooks)
• Right Thing Agency (Michael McDougall)
• Nexen PowerTrack

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Topics Covered

• Data science and creative marketing in SEO
• Google's Helpful Content Update and site-wide penalties
• Click behavior as a ranking factor
• Selling SEO during the AI era
• Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
• The convergence of SEO, digital PR, and Reddit marketing
• Bottom-of-funnel vs. top-of-funnel content strategy
• AI as a consultant for customers
• Writing for robots to write for humans
• Authority dilution in the age of AI
• Single data points and information vetting
• Hope and opportunities in AI-driven marketing