Usually I’m the one asking the questions, but when Sara & Nik invited me to their SEO Podcast I was excited.
Mostly because I followed them, and my friend Antonis Dimitriou talked so well about them, I wanted to meet them.
They invited me on to talk SEO, growth, in-house politics, attribution, and AI.
We went long. Close to an hour.
And, enjoyed a chill talk between long-time professionals.
About the Hosts
Sara Taher is an in-house SEO lead, newsletter writer, and course creator. She teaches Python for SEO and runs her own newsletter where she writes because she wants to, not because she’s trying to sell something.
Nick Vujic runs a growth agency focused on organic marketing for early-stage B2B startups (zero to ten million ARR is his sweet spot). He’s the agency voice in most of our exchanges.
Two of us are in-house. One is agency.
In This Episode, You Will Hear
Why I moved from SEO to Head of Demand (and why it never was just about SEO)
How to survive in-house politics when your 30-page audit gets 3% accepted
Why technical founders are the hardest founders to sell SEO to
The case for email marketing over almost every other channel for early-stage B2B
Why I think attribution is dying and why that’s fine
The side project rule: why in-house marketers need something with no limitations
An honest AI take from a skeptic (and the Claude moment that changed my mind)
Why I Chose Growth Over SEO
I get bored.
If I’m forced to do one thing, I lose interest. Always, my role was about growth… people knew me because I talked about SEO.
At LearnWorlds, even when my title said Head of SEO, SEO was only about 30% to 50% of my actual job.
I was opening channels. Facebook and remarketing in 2017 before most B2B companies were spending that much there. Affiliates. PPC. Email. I was doing inbound sales with the CEO until we hired for it.
» Then I moved on to the next channel.
Channel agnostic is the right frame.
SEO was a massive lever for me, but it was one lever. If the channel that works for your business this year is paid social, do paid social.
If it’s email, do email. The goal is pipeline. Not proving SEO is the best channel.
🏆 Author’s note: Email marketing is still my favorite. Almost every early-stage B2B SaaS I’ve consulted for never emailed their database once. A basic newsletter activates a base you already paid to acquire.
The Survival Guide for In-House Politics
In-house marketing is 60% doing the work and 40% defending it. I am lucky in my current role that’s less the case, but it’s still part of the job. While, I heard horror cases with marketers spending 90% of their time defending their work.
If you want to survive long enough to ship anything, you have to play with the politics, it’s unavoidable as companies grow.
Pick your fights
I don’t fight the brand team for the homepage H1.
That’s their baby. I ask for one or two dedicated SEO pages where I have full control. They keep their brand positioning. I get my traffic. Everyone wins.
Learn the language of the person in front of you
CFOs want revenue numbers.
Developers want clear, concise instructions.
If you tell a developer “make the site fast,” they’ll ship you a JavaScript-heavy site that’s technically fast but Googlebot can’t crawl. Be specific.
Find the gap
I waited one and a half years for a simple WordPress checkbox fix. I caught a developer on a Friday when he had some downtime. He fixed it in 4 hours.
Rapport, patience, and building relationships with the right people wins battles.
Author’s note: Sara made a great point here that I want to reinforce. When a stakeholder blocks a small thing today, your next suggestion gets harder. Technical SEO debt compounds. So does political debt. Get the small wins early. Earn the capital. Then spend it on the bigger fights.
Why Most Founders Shouldn’t Start with SEO
There are three kinds of founders.
The technical one, who only thinks about product and numbers.
The seller, who goes out and closes deals.
And the promoter, who understands marketing.
The third one is rare in tech. When you find one, they usually grow their companies fast.
Technical founders love numbers. But SEO gives them uncertainty in the short term, and they don’t like uncertainty.
So they default to product.
Features over pipeline.
Every time.
If I’m walking into an early-stage B2B SaaS cold, I usually tell the founder don’t start with SEO.
Start with direct sales.
Hit doors.
Go to events.
Send LinkedIn messages.
Build an email list.
Run a newsletter.
Get ten customers who can tell you what they actually want. Then think about scaling a channel.
Nik Vujik said his agency has built attribution models around SEO that tie back to pipeline, and for B2C and small B2B that absolutely works. But for enterprise B2B with 50 to 150 touches per deal, trying to attribute a sale to one SEO page is a fool’s errand.
Which leads to the next point.
The Death of Attribution
Here’s my controversial take.
Attribution is dying, and I’m fine with it.
Between GDPR, cookie blocking, the messy middle of the buyer journey, and enterprise sales cycles that hit 150 touches, pinning a closed-won deal to one channel is a fiction you sell to a CFO so you don’t get your budget cut.
The reality:
Self-attributed data is honest. When we surveyed Cyberbit customers, most said “I found you on the internet” or “I googled you.” Not helpful for a dashboard. Very helpful for understanding reality.
Multi-touch attribution models are a defense mechanism. If 95% of your energy goes to defending every dollar you spend, 5% goes to actual marketing. That’s not growth. That’s survival.
Fundamentals work. Write good content. Send good emails. Show up at the right events. Talk to customers. The basics outperform most attribution dashboards.
Do the work. Trust the fundamentals. Stop trying to prove every click.
Executing fast will get you the wins needed to grow.
Author’s note: There’s nuance here. If you’re in B2C or small B2B with short cycles and few touchpoints, attribution is doable and useful. Nick’s Zapier-based touchpoint tracking for his ten-to-twenty-thousand-visits-per-month clients sounds genuinely useful. I’m not anti-measurement. I’m anti-wasting-your-life measuring the unmeasurable.
The Side Project Rule
Every in-house marketer needs a side project with no limitations.
In corporate, product says no. The CEO says no.
You can’t get budget for link building.
You can’t test that tool.
You can’t publish that piece.
You stop learning because someone upstream decided you shouldn’t.
A side project fixes this.
Newsletter — Help grow this one ;) it’s my side-project.
Personal website.
Chrome extension.
Whatever. It forces you to stay sharp and keeps you learning at a pace the corporate job can’t.
My side projects are the newsletter you’re reading right now, my LinkedIn presence, marketingexpertshub.com, and LibrarIn (a Chrome extension for saving and categorizing LinkedIn posts, currently in review for the next version).
Sara has her courses and her own newsletter.
Nick has his agency and is pushing into building his own product.
The pattern is the same. In-house gives you the real-world problem set. The side project gives you the sandbox to figure out how to solve it.
An AI Take from a Skeptic
I’m an AI skeptic. I’m also a Claude user.
These two things aren’t contradictory.
I don’t think AI is replacing marketers.
I think it’s Zapier on steroids.
A productivity tool that saves me a few hours a week.
I use it to write regex for Search Console, fix code snippets, draft first versions of emails, and build small tools with Lovable.
For months I stayed on Gemini because I was already paying for Google. Then I went to Greece, talked to a bunch of people who wouldn’t shut up about Claude, and finally tested it.
Four hours in, Claude fixed a Chrome extension I’d been fighting with Lovable on for two weeks.
Author’s note: Sara made the right cautionary point here. AI is great until you stop checking its output. I’ve seen people ship work with obvious hallucinations because they trusted the first draft. AI is a productivity tool. It is not a replacement for thinking. Treat it like a very fast, very confident junior.
The Takeaway
Three things stuck with me from this conversation.
In-house politics
If you work in-house, you’re going to lose fights. Pick the ones worth winning. Drop the rest. Build enough rapport and wins that when the important one comes, you have the political capital to take it.
No attribution is perfect
Stop waiting for perfect attribution. Do the work. Trust the fundamentals. Measure what you can, ignore what you can’t, and spend your energy on marketing instead of defending marketing.
Side-projects are the best learning experiences
Have a side project. One with no limitations. It’s the only way to keep learning when the corporate world says no.
What’s one fight you’ve decided to stop picking with your product team to save your sanity?
Let me know in the comments.
