Podcast Guest: Predicting SEO Success Using AI on The Simple and Smart SEO Show

I had the pleasure of joining Crystal Daigle on The Simple and Smart SEO Show to talk about one of my favorite topics: using AI and data science to predict SEO success.

Listen to the Episode

What We Covered

In this episode, we dove into:

• Why predictive SEO matters — Moving beyond guesswork to data-driven content decisions
• The limitations of keyword difficulty scores — Why traditional metrics often fail to predict actual ranking success
• Building predictive models — How to use machine learning to forecast which content will actually rank
• Practical applications of AI in SEO — Real-world ways to implement data science in your SEO workflow
• The future of SEO and AI — Where the industry is headed and how to stay ahead

About The Simple and Smart SEO Show

The Simple and Smart SEO Show, hosted by Crystal Daigle, breaks down SEO concepts into actionable insights for marketers and business owners. Each episode features industry experts sharing practical strategies you can implement right away.

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Transcript

Here is the transcription of the audio file provided.

How I Got Started in SEO: From Intern to Big Tech

Nicolas Garfinkel: ...hard trends and companies in the past. What is—? It's one of those things where it's hard to justify up front initially, but if you trust the process and you give it enough time, like, you start to see the rewards.

Crystal Waddell: Welcome to the third season of the Simple and Smart SEO Show. The podcast dedicated to empathy-driven, brand-building SEO. I'm your host, Crystal Waddell. I leverage my obsession with user experience to help business owners just like you optimize your website with confidence. Thank you so much for being here. Let's jump into another great episode.

Crystal Waddell: Welcome back to the Simple and Smart SEO Show podcast. I'm here with Nicolas Garfinkel and we are talking about all sorts of things today with SEO. looking inside of analytics and how things work and how things are going to work in the future. You definitely are going to want to check this out. But Nick, thank you so much for joining us today. Tell me about your relationship with SEO. How you got into this universe?

Nicolas Garfinkel: Yeah. It was a little bit of a rebound. I started my career actually as an internship for the Franklin Mint, which I don't know if you've heard of it before. It was really big back in like the 80s and 90s.

Crystal Waddell: Yeah.

Nicolas Garfinkel: Yeah, they sold coins and cars and things like that. And so I came on as just an intern helping them out on day-to-day marketing stuff and ended up realizing there was a huge SEO opportunity. Read SEO Moz like every single day and every single article I could and would read things and apply it and read things and apply it. And it was just—it was a blast. throughout my career there, there was opportunities to apply, to use SEO, I did. And over time I shifted into big tech. I spent about 15 years between Vimeo and Amazon and eBay and Microsoft doing anything from analytics to product to marketing. And then about a year and a half ago, decided it was time to start my own venture and started this agency and got back into SEO and paid search and all the other things. And just, I find it so fascinating. I've been reading about it ever since. And being an analytics person, I felt there's a lot of data that's missing from the SEO community so I'm trying to find ways to inject that back into the community. So yeah, there's stuff we're building and there's stuff that I'm going to be working on over the next couple of months as it relates to SEO to try to provide data and analytics to what's going on in life out there.

Learning SEO Through Experimentation

Crystal Waddell: Okay, so I gotta back you way up. Okay, like your second sentence, you said that you were working for the Franklin Mint and you saw an SEO opportunity. What does that even mean? Did you know about SEO? Were you working in SEO or was your job something different?

Nicolas Garfinkel: So it was something different. I don't think anyone expected me to come in and do SEO at any level. At that stage in your career, all you're doing is trying to learn as much as possible and have an impact. I think it's like everyone starts like, "I just want to do good. I want to do good." And so I think I stumbled across some articles about how to rank higher in Google. And I was like, "Oh, that's really cool. That sounds like that'd be really valuable." And they came around at that point asking, "How do we do this?" And they were like, "Sure, let's do it." And so read a bunch of articles, realized, oh, like all the—there's no—all the page titles and meta descriptions, they're all—they're not optimized. And basically spent like two, three weeks just updating page titles manually one by one and rankings improved and organic traffic started going up. I'm like, "This is really cool. This is really cool." And so that's kind of how it started. And from there, I was hooked.

Crystal Waddell: Yeah. And what did your bosses say when that started to happen?

Nicolas Garfinkel: They thought it was cool too. They ask, "How do we do more of this? How does it go—how do we do better?" Like at 15, 20 years ago.

Why SEO Data is Missing from Current Tools

Crystal Waddell: That's like the best feeling in the world though. It was like, how do we do more of this? That's when you know you've really done well. Okay. And then you said that there's lots of data missing from like current SEO tools. And what are you talking about there?

Nicolas Garfinkel: So I think as a—as an industry, we have to rely a lot on what Google tells us. And so Google, I remember just a few months ago, Google came out and was like, "Links aren't the number one thing anymore." And it led to a rash of people saying, "Links don't matter! Links don't matter!" And there was articles everywhere about that and it was a whole big thing. That's subsided now, but we're at the mercy of Google, right? If we don't know what's important and what to work on and should we improve site speed? How much of a business impact is that going to have? Or should we fix our internal link structure first? It's really hard to answer those questions because we're just going off guidance and our own general intuition. With Google's algorithm changing so often, it's even if—like your intuition and experience about stuff that happened five years ago for a site you helped, that may not even be relevant anymore. So there's a lot of kind of doing all the right things, knowing it will eventually work. But there's not a lot of like data driven... statistically, if I do this, I know the impact is going to be this. And so therefore I should do it. I've seen some studies that have come out that have kind of helped infer some of those things, but I would just love to continue to see more.

How Machine Learning Can Predict SEO Rankings

Crystal Waddell: Yeah, so I totally agree with you. Everything kind of seems like falls under the best practice umbrella. And eventually you'll see some sort of uplift or whatever. But is this what you've done with your tool? Is create something that actually provides data insights to what's working?

Nicolas Garfinkel: Exactly. So what we've done is we actually train machine learning models on your data, your website, competitors, all the rank games. And so we're able to start to predict some of that stuff. And so what we do is it can predict things like, if this changes on your site, then this will be the impact in Google. So we've almost reverse engineered Google in a way. And so now with our clients, what we can do is we can say, "Okay, you want to improve site speed? This is where you're at. Here's some benchmarks. And if we hit it, this is what our predicted impact will be to all your keywords and all your rank games." Or even like internal link structure, right? If you make these changes and generate these additional internal links to these web pages, this is what impact it—or won't impact it, right? That's what we've seen as well. "Okay, we want to make this change, but the data suggests that actually we shouldn't. And so we're just not going to make it right now. We know it's a good thing to do and we will do it eventually, but there's other things that we predict will actually have an impact."

Calculating SEO ROI: Predicting Revenue from Organic Traffic

Crystal Waddell: Wow. So that is so helpful like with prioritization. Like to actually know, okay, this is what we should focus on now to get the most movement forward. Now, have you guys got into the point where you can actually predict revenue increases? Like what's going to actually increase conversions and money in the bank?

Nicolas Garfinkel: Yeah, so we—there's a few different ways we can approach that. But the way we've approached that is we do two things. So if we can predict where you're going to rank, we can predict how much you're going to get. Because we can say if you're ranked first, you're going to get 33% of the clicks or if you're ranked ninth, maybe you're getting half a percent click. So once we're able to estimate the total amount of traffic, we can figure out how much that traffic is worth. And the way we do it is we look at paid search as a proxy to say, if my competitor is going to pay five dollars a click for that, then I'm going to—then I'm going to claim that traffic is worth five dollars a click. So now we can tie back to real business value and say, "Hey, this is a $70,000 opportunity here. If you're a more sophisticated brand or you have a huge paid search budget, you can use your conversion rates and revenue numbers from paid search to figure out how much that traffic is worth on the organic side." We've even had a conversation with one company—Fortune 500 company—what they wanted to do was they said, "Hey, we have all this money we're spending on paid search. Tell us which of these keywords you predict we can rank in the top three so we can stop paying Google every day for that and just get it organically." So there's a lot of really cool things that people can do with this once you put the data behind it to understand what can—where do you rank and how do you rank.

Optimizing for Google AI Overviews and Featured Snippets

Crystal Waddell: Yeah, I love how you reverse engineered that because that's another question: what is the SEO value? What is the value of this work that we're doing here? But to, like you said, tie it back to PPC, it's super smart and a really fun way to look at it and something that people already know. So you attach it to like their prior understanding of how PPC works and then give SEO its value too. So I think that's pretty cool. What about with the AI Overviews though now? So there's been this impact in the last few years of like featured snippets and those showing up higher in rankings. Like how does this take into consideration like all the other SERP features?

Nicolas Garfinkel: So that's going to be the next frontier for us. I don't think anyone really knows for a while. It feels like the direction Google is going. We work to track how exactly they're going to implement it. And I think it's a mixed bag in terms of, like, the globe—less than how happy people are with it. But I think for us that's—that's the next stage is not just predicting where you're going to rank, but also starting to help you understand how you can actually show up in the AI summaries and what you can do to—to improve your chances there. I mean my team over the course of the next month are going to be doing tons of statistical analysis to figure out, "Yeah, what's even happening in that space?" Yeah, because the SERPs are always an evolving, changing thing.

Crystal Waddell: I think that's going to be neat. If your company can come up with a way to share with people how to show up there and have the statistical stuff to back it up, that's going to be pretty sweet. It will. It's a colossal undertaking. We may not even be successful, but I think that's the next place where we can provide a ton of value in a giant ocean of unknown right now. Yeah. So did you become a developer? Is that what you consider yourself now? What kind of technical title do you have?

Nicolas Garfinkel: I think throughout my career I've worn a lot of hats. So I can code. I love analytics, doing a bunch of data science work myself. I love the product side of things. My previous role, I led the product organization at a data insights startup. On the marketing side of things, so I'm a little bit of a "I can do it all," which is a good thing but also a bad thing because it's hard to keep focused. But that lack of focus helped me develop Kixely and a number of other really cool initiatives inside my company.

Best Data Analytics Tools for SEO: From Excel to Python

Crystal Waddell: Yeah. So when you do the data analytics and stuff, are there certain tools that are available to the average Joe that you can use to analyze data?

Nicolas Garfinkel: Yeah, so there's varying levels of complexity obviously. You can get really far with just Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, depending on which house you support. But just that alone will get you really far. As you get more sophisticated, you're probably doing things in SQL or at least using SQL to summarize the data. And then doing a bunch of the last mile work of analysis in Excel and visualization. Eventually, you'll upgrade to something like Python or R if you're doing it more of a programming language and that gives you a lot more access to some of the more rigorous statistical packages to help you do that at a higher scale. But I started my career just with Excel and SQL and you can do a lot of incredible things with just curiosity and some time.

E-commerce Analytics: Improving Conversion Rates with Data

Crystal Waddell: Tell me something incredible that I could do statistically as my Shopify store. What would be a common e-commerce data analytics thing I can do?

Nicolas Garfinkel: Yeah, I think one of the things you could do is look at first conversion rate by different products and try and understand there's certain products where people are visiting it but conversion rates are really low, they're not adding to the cart. And maybe that's a good indication that you should spend some time improving the descriptions or product titles. You can search for your products, see what else shows up, create a spreadsheet of all the pricing and then you can also start to visualize everyone's pricing versus your pricing alongside the conversion rate and get a sense if maybe that's driving some of your conversion down. You can look at things like from an SEO perspective, look at all the landing pages and which products are natural landing pages and which ones are not and try to figure out why those are performing well and they aren't. Maybe spend time analyzing audits before doing well to figure out, okay, what can I do from an SEO perspective? Is it the product title that I need to fix? Things like that. There's so much fun stuff from an email perspective. I'm assuming abandoned cart emails and things like that. Starting to run A/B experiments with subject lines to see, hey, which subject line leads to the best open rate or the best click-through rate, things like that. And then if you want to get really sophisticated, you can start cohorting your users and say, "Oh, here's my—my repeat customers. These are my new customers." When I send this email to my repeaters, I see this open rate, but when I send it to the new ones, I see this open rate. Start to figure out how do you treat each one of those populations differently? Because as a marketer, you need to talk to people the way they want to be talked to at the right time. So those are a few things I would think about.

Crystal Waddell: Yeah, that's interesting. With the backend of Shopify actually has cohorts and I never knew what that was. I got the gist of it, it was like a group of people that purchase a product during a certain period of time. But I sell a product that's more of a one-time thing. Let's say you have a son who graduated from high school. That mother or father might purchase my product for that son or daughter when they're graduating high school. They may come back a few years later for the next child. But for the most part, it's like the one and done type situation. Is there any analytics that can match up with something like that where it's not—I don't have that lifetime customer value that I'm shooting for as much as I am just that initial cart value?

Nicolas Garfinkel: Yeah, so I think in a scenario like that, probably the first thing I would do is go install one of those click trackers, whether it's Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar, the hundreds of other ones that are out there. And just watch what people do. Because I find that is so invaluable to understand like, "Why didn't they—why did they bounce off my page immediately?" "Where did they stop viewing my page?" start to figure out like where are people falling off? And generate a bunch of hypotheses on right now. I think this, and then try and run small tests to validate or experiment against those. So you might have a hypothesis that people don't really understand what I do. So maybe you try changing the hero image or text there at the top to a little bit more of what you're doing and why you're doing it. And then go watch the videos again and see, did people actually get past that and now they're dropping off the page and falling off and then go fix the next part. I think that could be a really helpful venture for you as you're trying to improve your conversion rate and make traffic more valuable.

Crystal Waddell: Yeah, absolutely. And incorporating storytelling has just been a huge part of what I've learned over the last year when we talked about on the podcast. And so just understanding what the customer is trying to do has really helped me understand like how to tell the story of our business. So we had somebody come on and talk about Microsoft Clarity. Those tools, it seems so helpful, but at the same time, I haven't dove into them either. It seems like there's just so many little strings that you can pull on with SEO and related stuff.

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Nicolas Garfinkel: Yeah, it's just incredible. There's so many opportunities to connect with your customers and understand how to tell that story better. Whether it's using Hotjar and watching them move around your site. Whether it's emailing all your previous customers and asking them for 15, 20 minutes of their time to interview so you can learn a little bit about why they made those decisions. Surveys, like any bit of information you can get from your customers or prospects is just gold.

Finding Low-Difficulty Keywords That Drive Traffic

Crystal Waddell: Yeah, for sure. Okay. So let's get back to keywords. So we were talking about, I'm so glad that we did talk about that because on this show, SEO is just one part of a bigger picture. And so I'm glad that we're tying it into business outcomes, our customers, their journey, all that type of stuff. What actually gets them on the page is like keywords, right? To a certain extent. Like it's not all about keywords, but keywords do still play a role. How do brands find keywords to write content that actually ranks and drives the traffic that they need?

Nicolas Garfinkel: So it's hard right now. I think the tools out there give you some indication of what's going to be hard to rank for and what's not. And that's what I always do with my clients is I'll actually create a spreadsheet and one axis is these keyword difficulty scores you can get at any of the SEO tools out there, whether it's Ahrefs or Moz or Semrush or what have you. And then on the other axis, I use basically a combination of traffic and CPC to predict traffic value. What I'm looking for is valuable keywords where the keyword difficulty is low. And that's typically one way to start that process. There's a lot of talk in the SEO community about things like keyword clusters and semantic search and things like that and that's all really important. But sometimes as a business you just need to get to the basics and say, "Hey, that's low hanging fruit. I'm going to go tackle it." So I would say that's one of the best and easiest ways is generate a big list, figure out where the keyword difficulty scores low and go from there. As you get more advanced, start thinking about how do I build entire topical clusters of content that are all interlinked with each other to improve my chances. But sometimes again, you just got to start at the foundation and really focus on what are the easy wins to just take them.

Crystal Waddell: Yeah. And one thing I was thought about too, is there a tool that does that for you where you identify the low hanging fruit, but then it tells you, okay, these are your internal linking instructions? Is there—has anybody created anything like that?

Nicolas Garfinkel: There's a lot of really cool content tools out there that do stuff like that. And they help you understand, "Hey, all your everyone who ranks in the top ten, all their contents, a thousand words or 1500 words and they all talk about these topics and things like that." So there's a lot of good tools out there. There's none I think I'd recommend on your podcast for people. If you go search for something like that, you'll definitely find some things. But I think there's different levels of SEO and sometimes looking at those tools can almost be overwhelming for most people. Good content, unique content. You write well for your customers and the people reading it and you'll get rewarded.

Enterprise SEO vs Small Business: What "At Scale" Really Means

Crystal Waddell: Yeah, Jamar Ramos, who was on the show, he talked about customer optimization. And we were talking about the fact that like you could have an increase in revenue and an increase in traffic and then also have a decrease in like the domain authority metric. But he's like, "How is that possible? Like if you're doing everything you're supposed to be doing technically or whatever." And then all of a sudden your income goes up and your authority on the internet goes down. And he called that like the customer authority effect. Like you're doing right by your customers and that's why you're still winning even though some of these internet measurements say something different. What about difference between like how keyword research is approached by small businesses, which are the entrepreneurs that you just spoke to in terms of just keeping it simple versus large enterprises? Because I always hear people talking about this thing "at scale". And I'm like, what is at scale? What does that even mean? Is there like a minimum requirement for it to be at scale? I just haven't lived in that world so I was just wondering if you could share that with us.

Nicolas Garfinkel: Yeah, there's a huge advantage for enterprise businesses in the SEO world. One from just the domain authority perspective. Google tends to favor larger brands because I think the risk of showing low quality or low quality content is probably content is much lower. But also they just have so much data. There's so much data there for them to be really data driven about what keywords to go after. They understand how they rank and where they rank and what type of keywords they can rank for because of that huge advantage where they can apply statistical modeling to figure out what—how they rank for. So that—that's what Kixely was predicated on was this notion of, "Hey, I can build this model to predict where we're going to rank because I have all this data behind it." So I think for that, it's—it's just a different game, right? It's how do I go from rank five to rank four, rank three to this term of the search millions of times a month and worth a million dollars, ten million dollars a year in search traffic. I think back in there that's when you start thinking about semantic search and related terms and things like that trying to figure out how do I optimize this one piece of content because moving one position is going to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars for my business.

Crystal Waddell: Wow. That's crazy. I wish moving one position would generate hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Nicolas Garfinkel: Yeah, we're all in the same boat here.

How to Do Competitive Keyword Research with SEO Tools

Crystal Waddell: So here's—here's a thing that I was wondering. You were talking about competitors. And I don't quite understand like competitive research or competitive keyword research. Like, how can we do that? What do you look for when you're analyzing like what's the most important thing to look for? And then what are the kind of the mistakes to avoid?

Nicolas Garfinkel: So I think the easiest—there's a lot of great tools out there. I always talk about Moz, Semrush, and Ahrefs because they're the three big ones in the space. But there's a lot of other tools that do it. But they basically crawl the internet trying to figure out who's linking to who and what web pages exist. And so they do a really good job at estimating what keywords, what sites are getting, what traffic they're getting. So I think the easiest thing to do is go plug in your competitors to those tools and look at what keywords are they ranking for that you don't rank for. Because if they're in the same space as you and they're driving that traffic and these are competitors where you rank at similar rankings on other terms, you could probably rank similar terms they rank for. So that's a good opportunity to find keywords where maybe you're not ranking. So that's one way to do it. The other thing is go search some of the terms that are more valuable to you where they rank ahead of you and try and compare your content to their content. What are they doing that you're not doing? Again, take that hypothesis based approach: "What are these ideas you have? What are reasons you think this is happening?" And then go test them. Like, "Okay, I'm going to—this month it looks like my competitor has all their category pages, like a three paragraph description of what this topic is and why it's important under all their products. So maybe I should test that and see if that helps." So go and do that. And then wait a month or two and see, hey, did the numbers move? And while waiting, I'm going to go run another test on another part of my site. I think just like trying to find people who are doing it better than you in your own space and trying to emulate some of their work to see if that helps move the needle.

Category Pages vs Product Pages: Internal Linking for SEO

Crystal Waddell: Okay, is when you think about like product pages versus category pages, is there some sort of best practice in terms of which one you want to rank or focus on ranking? Or is one more likely to rank than the other? Because I've seen some stuff lately about category pages that I was like, I didn't really know that before.

Nicolas Garfinkel: I just think that the—the nature of category pages from an internal link perspective, right? You're going to have all your high-level pages like your home page is always going to point to all your like core service pages or category pages. And then those category pages are going to be linked out to products. And so if you think about your page authority, domain authority, the home page is linked to by every single page on your site. That's going to be, who usually has the most powerful page you have. And then all the category pages you have, again, they're all in the navigation bar. So every single product you have is going to be linking to those pages. While a product page, like you really just have maybe category pages, maybe a few other products linking back to it. So I think like this notion of internal link structure is really critical and category pages have the benefit of getting a lot more of those internal links. That said, it depends on the search term and how your website is set up. So it's not a one size fits all best practice I would say. But that's how I think of it.

Crystal Waddell: What about like Mega Menus? And if we just look at e-commerce, if you've got these huge menus on your home page, does—how does Google know which has like a higher link authority when there's just so much on that page?

Nicolas Garfinkel: So that's an area where I don't think there's enough like research in the SEO community about that. So there's a bunch of hunches people have, right? And there's this idea of years ago was about keyword density, right? Like how many keywords can you stuff on the page? I think it's something along those same lines there where if you have a page linking to a thousand different pages, it's not going to—it's not going to pass as much link equity as a page linking to ten pages or five pages. So that's how I see it a little bit. There's also a lot of things that Google's doing around how they're able to detect what's in the nav bar, what's in the footer versus headers. Now they're saying you don't even need to use H1 or H2 for your headers. They can understand what the bigger text is and infer the importance of the page relative to that. So take anyone's answer to that without the data probably shoot from the hip a little bit, but I think that does echo communities will read it in a lot of places.

Local SEO Strategy: Google Business Profile and Reviews

Crystal Waddell: Okay, that's really interesting. Okay, how can local businesses optimize their keyword strategy for local SEO? And do you think it's as important for local businesses to focus on this versus businesses who might sell nationwide or globally?

Nicolas Garfinkel: Yeah, I think there's a huge advantage for local businesses in the SEO world, especially if you're in the service business or something like that. Find an attic insulation company near me or company in Maple Valley or whatnot. I think Google does do a good job at identifying local businesses near you and trying to surface them in Google Maps and things like that. I think the biggest thing they can do is one is make sure their Google profile, business profile is updated. It's targeting the right terms, getting your customers to leave five-star reviews. I think that's a really strong signal for Google in terms of trust signals. Because we have—if I was a product manager at Google and I was thinking about, "How would I know if this random service company has a lot of authority and trust?" You look at reviews is probably first and foremost. You can barely look at who's linking to them because there's how many small business owners or random service companies are trying to get links on the internet to their site? It just doesn't happen. So I think available links to the Google profile. Another one is making sure your address is on your website so Google understands where you are and linking your Google profile to your website is obviously a big one. So I think those are the easiest things people can do. Outside that is—is a few hours once a week just writing blog posts about your craft. If you're a person who does fireplaces, maybe it's something like how to keep your chimney clean or top five reasons to smoke comes back into your house or whatever those might be. Just write some content there because Google needs to find ways to trust you, right? And if you're a one page site that just talks about what you do, things like that, like there's not going to be a lot of trust there. Not a lot of signals of that term of trust. So you might be writing this content and never rank for those specific terms, but you'll be building all this quality content that's linking back to your home page. And so now when people search "HVAC company near me," Google sees you as more of an authority in the space. It's one of those things where it's hard to justify up front initially. But if you trust the process and you give it enough time, like you start to see the rewards.

The Future of SEO: Predictive Models and Machine Learning

Crystal Waddell: Yeah, based on the data that you guys have at your company and your experience from working with so many large brands and companies in the past, what do you see is going to be—what do you think is going to be part of the future of this optimization life?

Nicolas Garfinkel: I don't want this to be like a self-serving comment, but I think it's starting to use more machine learning predictive models to help inform what decisions we need to make as SEO professionals. I think if if Nike hired me tomorrow to go do their SEO for them, the first thing I'm going to do is come up with a plan of, "Hey, here's all the things we're going to do and these are the months we're going to do them," as any SEO person would. And then the hard part is trying to understand which of these things actually move the needle. And we don't really know. We're guessing, right? And it gets really hard when they say, "I need engineering resources." And they say, "You want me to take away my engineering resources from this product or feature thing to build, what's going to be the impact of, you know, that one specific thing?" A lot of people can't answer that. So I think people starting to use more models and things like that to predict what might happen feels like the future for me. And so that that's the path we took our product down because we just feel that really is the next frontier.

Crystal Waddell: Yeah, so your product then, are you B2B and work with companies to figure this type of stuff out or do you work with SEOs who are working to figure this stuff out?

Nicolas Garfinkel: So our company right now works with other businesses to help them internally, but we're building this product now, Kixely, to open it up to the SEO community people in-house or agencies. We have a provisional patent on this because we really think something that we think is unique. And so we're excited to get it out and I think we're a few weeks away from actually launching some of our beta stuff.

Crystal Waddell: Awesome. Okay, so just to clarify, can you tell everybody about Kixely and who it's for and how to get in and just that type of information? Because I know you said it's not going to be available for a couple weeks or few weeks, but by the time this podcast goes live, it may be out there. So who should run and get it if it is available?

Nicolas Garfinkel: So what we call is Kixely is the world's first and only predictive SEO product. If there's another predictive SEO product out there, there is, someone shout me, let me know. Give me a shell. Anyone who's doing SEO at a company that has over 100,000 visits a year or can contribute at least $100,000 in value to their SEO traffic, I think is—it's a slam dunk. It just makes too much sense for them, right? Because at that scale, this model is able to identify 3% wins, 5% wins, 10% wins that are meaningful to the business. As it gets smaller, it's a little bit harder to justify the cost because it is really expensive on our side to run. I would say anyone who's working on a big website who's trying to figure out, you know, what the next step is to optimizing their website or growth leaders or CMOs who are trying to figure out, "Is this SEO investment worth it? Should we be spending $300,000 a year on SEO or $500,000 or $800,000?" But they're not able to forecast this stuff because nobody really has sophisticated models that can do stuff that that we're doing.

Crystal Waddell: Yeah, I love the models and I'm loving like Chat GPT. And there's a Python expert GPT that I've been using. And so I'm trying to build my own thing for Pinterest. I've been thinking about it for years that there's always been like these steps of the process that I couldn't quite bring all together. But now with these large language models, it's possible. So I think it's so neat that you're doing that. Where can people find you?

Nicolas Garfinkel: Yeah, so they can go to Kixely.com. Right now it's just a splash page over the next weekend, half that's going to be changing. So they can go to Kixely.com to check that out. They can reach out to me on LinkedIn, Nicolas Garfinkel. There'll be a link in the podcast or something. Otherwise they can email me at [email protected]. I'll be happy to respond there as well.

Crystal Waddell: And so what's mindful conversion.com?

Nicolas Garfinkel: So we first started an agency about a year and a half ago to help fund a lot of the product development that we've been doing. And so that's all these products were building are under the umbrella of Mindful Conversion. And it's largely just a digital marketing agency and analytics agency that does paid search, SEO, conversion rate optimization and whatever else our clients need us to be.

Crystal Waddell: Yeah, I love it. It's such an interesting holistic picture. And I think that's just so important. That's what we talk about here is just like this holistic nature of optimization that is no longer just SEO or CRO or PPC or whatever and social media, all that stuff. It's really an integrated effort. So I just love talking to people who really have a hand in all of those things with a pulse on where things are going. So thank you so much, Nicholas. I appreciate you joining us today and we'll see you next time.

Nicolas Garfinkel: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. This was a blast.