Matt Bailey was building websites in 1995 and resubmitting pages all night to get rankings in AltaVista, before Google existed. Thirty years later he runs SiteLogic, helped the OMCP define the competencies an SEO has to have, and is working on a master’s degree in digital marketing so he can teach undergraduates. I had him on Unscripted SEO in November 2025 to ask what’s survived every “SEO is dead” cycle. His answer starts with a newspaper page.
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Listen to the full episode, From Newspapers to Neural Networks, on the Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast. Here’s what we covered.
A journalism dropout who built web pages like newspapers
Matt’s journalism background taught him one thing he wanted and one he didn’t. “What it taught me is that I don’t want to do journalism,” he said. “But it also taught me how to lay out a page, headline, subheading, bullet points.”
He was working in real estate in the mid-90s and built websites as an electronic version of a printed page, not realizing that the markup he used for layout was exactly what worked with search engines. When Google arrived, his pages performed, and he worked backward from there to how the content algorithm worked.
Analytics came next, out of a question he couldn’t answer one night: “what can I do on the website that will have the biggest impact?” He learned on WebTrends, where you set it up, let it run for a day and only then find out whether your setup was right. From there he built the SEO and digital marketing departments at two Midwest agencies, mostly for B2B industrial and B2B services clients, and started SiteLogic in 2006. Around 2015 he turned it into a training company.
SEO courses have an 18 to 24 month shelf life
Matt has made courses for LinkedIn, Simplilearn, Udemy, Udacity and others, and he tells each of them up front: “the most amount of shelf life you’re gonna get is probably 18 to 24 months.” If there’s no plan to update the course in that window, it goes stale. He says some SEO education still for sale is “bordering on 10 to 15 years old.”
Academia moves even slower. The intro to marketing textbook for a class he taught “was only a year and a half old, but there was a whole chapter on how the metaverse is going to change marketing.” His bigger complaint is about who writes those books: marketing PhDs “who have never had a marketing job,” who’ve never had to sell an idea internally or settle for six of the 10 things they wanted because IT said no.
I asked because I’d run into it myself, auditing a university marketing class through Ross Jones and Michael McDougald and finding it about eight years behind. Matt’s fix is to bring practitioners into workshops and graduate-style courses so students hear what’s happening in the industry now.
Matt has never liked the name SEO
I asked what’s been true from 1995 to now, and Matt went after the name. “I have never liked the term SEO, search engine optimization, because what are you truly optimizing?” For him it’s the visitor, their conversion and their engagement.
“When people say SEO is dead, I interpret that as the old tactics are dead because writing content, engaging content, content that reaches visitors, that answers our questions, that converts them into customers, those are the evergreen skills.”
Doorway pages and black hat tactics came and went. His B2B clients couldn’t take those risks, so his work was content, PR and links with associated businesses, plus conversion optimization once the traffic arrived. He also shared a finding from OMCP job studies: SEOs have more of a track toward management than people in social, email or paid, because they already have “their fingers in all these different areas.”
LLMs look like search before Google
When I brought up the CEOs cutting SEO budgets for AI, Matt didn’t hesitate: “SEO works. It still works. In fact, SEO works on LLMs.” He thinks today’s chatbots look like early search engines, “almost like pre-Google search right now.”
He’s skeptical of tools that promise to track your visibility in LLMs, because “even if two people on ChatGPT give the same prompt, they’re gonna get different answers.” In his words, that puts us “back to doing rank checking.” He sees “a ton of shiny objects” right now, the same pattern as the metaverse, NFTs and big data. And he sees businesses that want AI to fix their marketing before they have a strategy. One company “didn’t even have a CRM in place.”
He’s not anti-AI. He’s seeing some content get better, more in-depth and focused on the questions people ask. He compares AI to “having a thousand interns,” fast, but still needing somebody to knock off the edges. On a recent site rewrite his team used AI, and still spent 30% of the project on keyword research into how people phrase their questions.
Change your language: the Microsoft payroll lesson
Matt’s client work starts with strategy, not tactics: seven questions, beginning with “who are you, what’s your objective?” From there he moves into audiences, segments, needs and whether the message differentiates you.
His best example comes from five years with Microsoft Worldwide Education. Marketing teams would describe the small business owner’s need as a full-service suite that integrates all their content. Matt stopped them. “What they want is to make payroll. They want to be more efficient and spend less time at the office.” He’s just as hard on “enterprise solutions”: “It’s a nonsense phrase.”
I added my own audit trick: copy a client’s homepage next to a competitor’s, or next to a business in a different industry entirely, and ask which one is theirs. Matt agreed that generalities don’t work. Define what your customer service actually looks like, he said, and “it works great in AI and it works great in Google.”
Where to find Matt Bailey’s coached SEO and analytics courses
Matt is at sitelogic.com and on LinkedIn. His learning site, learn.sitelogic.com, offers coached courses in content marketing, SEO, analytics, presenting analytics, customer research and in-depth keyword research. They’re small on purpose: “I’m not looking to get a thousand people in these courses. I want five.” He personally reviews your hands-on assignments, and you come out with a portfolio. He also wrote about our conversation on the SiteLogic blog.
I wrote two more takes on this episode. For agencies, Matt Bailey’s tactics vs evergreen skills test on SEO Arcade turns his answers into a client-plan checklist. For my personal take on surviving every SEO death notice since 2007, read what Matt Bailey taught me about 30 years of SEO.
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