Make SEO Part of Your Growth Strategy

Transcription

Siobhan 0:05

I'm your host Siobhan and this is Marketing and today we discuss how to unfuck your SEO with my boss Cifuentes let's do this. Hi, Maya thanks for being here. Tell me how do we unpack SEO.

Maeva 0:18

So SEO is pretty fucked

Siobhan 0:26

let's get real

Maeva 0:32

as a general marketing concept these days you know, it's it's pretty fucked up. So the way that we can unfuck it, I think is seeing it as an actual if you're gonna do SEO, then make it a part of your business strategy make it a part of your actual growth strategy. Rather than just another box that you're going to check. Because if it's another box that you're going to check, then you're going to keep getting all of this SEO content that people are thinking this stuff really sucks. Why does

Siobhan 1:06

it like those logs that were the same words over and over again? Yeah, so do you I want to check a box

Maeva 1:15

a lot. Yeah. But the thing is, is that people don't really understand what it is they say I just need to do SEO to the website. But it's not about doing SEO. It's about making it a part of your growth strategy. And that actually changes all of the way the ways that people are setting their KPIs. It changes the way that you build because actually what SEO is it's building assets. It's building a moat around your website to make it a place that drives traffic, and that drives conversion that drives business. But people just think it's a thing that you do to the website as an afterthought. And then obviously, if you do it that way, it's not going to bring you any meaningful results.

Siobhan 2:00

You see, I get this a lot so obviously I don't work in SEO, but people tell me Oh, do you know someone who does SEO? Can you recommend someone who does SEO and they do it 10 years into being around already? So are you essentially suggesting that we start with SEO in mind when we build a business or?

Maeva 2:17

That's a good question. So I don't think that SEO is right at the beginning of every company, actually. And it depends how you want to do it. So some companies SEO might not even work very well for them. So you do have to analyze I'm not saying that every company has to be built around SEO, but I'm saying if you are going to do SEO, make it a vital part of the growth strategy. So say this is how we're actually going to grow. When you start from the beginning. Now obviously, you have to think about your product market fit, you have to think about some other things, but you can actually build a product that's built well for SEO, Amazon, Airbnb, there's so many websites that are built so well the whole product is built around SEO that they don't even have to do any SEO right now. And actually if they Airbnb, for example, is built so well for SEO in the within the product itself, that actually they were in 2020 they were able to stop all performance marketing, you know when that big thing happened Coronavirus and it didn't affect it didn't affect them. They were still getting as much traffic.

Siobhan 3:30

Okay, so then I need to I think I'm gonna ask you a really basic and pocket Polly stupid question. Can you define SEO for us the way you would define it to somebody?

Maeva 3:40

Yeah, SEO is the practice of making your website findable on search. So there's, I mean, that's the one sentence explanation of it.

Siobhan 3:51

Harrah's, Airbnb doing that by its product.

Maeva 3:55

Well, it's Airbnb. Its product is on. It's on his website. So it's open to all of the users like you use it and it's online. And Airbnb has it embedded in its product because if basically it's the structure is created in such a way to where you have your locations you know, you have your locations you have like hot tub but it's like categorized into you have your Cal San Diego hot tub, all your Keywords Everywhere. Yeah, it's just built really well into the product and they I don't know if they thought about a while as they were building the product, but it kind of seems like they were because it's completely embedded into it in such a way that actually in the short term rental industry. It's very difficult to compete against Airbnb. When it comes to those kinds of keywords. You have to get really creative now because they've kind of dominated that space.

Siobhan 4:47

Alright, got it. I needed to get clarification on that because people are always like search engine optimization. Okay.

Maeva 4:54

Yeah, I mean, it's a little, it's not that hard. But it is there's so many different parts of it. The reason it's hard to understand it's because it's very holistic and there's just a lot of parts. It's like, I like to make this analogy, where if your website is doing us yield your website is like practicing healthy behaviors as a human so as a human, you want to live a fulfilling life, but you have a lot of different areas that you would need to pay attention to you have your physical health, you have your emotional health, you have your spiritual health, and you have a social life. So all of those have their own different aspects to them. You have to do different things to get all of those up. And if I were to only pay attention to one of them, like if I only went to the gym, you know ate healthy food all the time and I ignored all of the other things I still would not be a fulfilled person, I would not feel my best. So doing SEO to a website is the same in your physical health. You have the architecture, the communication, this this loading speed, those kinds of things. You have your mental health, which would be the thoroughness of the research and your content. You know how well connected the ideas are your spiritual sorry, your social health, which is how well connected are you to the other websites around that are in similar topics, how many people are linking back to you, and then your spiritual health which would be how well aligned is everything that I'm doing here? How well aligned is it with my overall business goals? And that's the way that that you should look at it.

Siobhan 6:25

Alright, so it's a more holistic thing. And you said it's not necessarily something that we start with, but it's something that will happen early point in somewhere in a company's growth. I'm assuming once it starts growing is probably important to consider this. But you also mentioned that is not for everyone that there are companies that don't even benefit from SEO. Can you tell us who maybe what why.

Maeva 6:47

So there are some companies that might benefit better from other marketing channels, especially in early stages. There's just either they might need too much education or just the purchasing, the way that people are purchasing. It just doesn't go that way. And you have to just understand how people are buying your product. So sometimes it might be either far too niche, or people might really, really not be aware of the problem at all. So then it's just makes the buying cycle really, really long. But if you have a long runway, and you don't mind, so if you take your reader a year to get educated and then a sales cycle another year, like if you have that kind of time, then it's you know, it's it's good because you can still get found higher up in the funnel, but there are just some products that people are not searching for, and it's just a much longer time investment to be able to to profit from that. Yeah.

Siobhan 7:48

Okay. What's the ideal company that benefits from SEO? Like, is it like, is it ecommerce, b2b Tech? Are there some that are like really ideal for the situation just because of the way they're structured? Or?

Maeva 8:01

I think a lot of E commerce is really good. Yeah, to have SEO done. b2b is a little complex because there's some b2b that for example, is still pretty has a fast sales cycle is self serve self serve ones work really well. With SEO. Some have, like enterprise was really long sales cycle. You know, you need to be able to be patient for a long time because if it's like I said, it's the same thing if it's super niche, and if your sales cycle is already one year long, or six months long. You're going to be looking at a long time before you see ROI from that kind of investment. And the it's going to make you nervous because a lot of a lot of times in this kind of very niche space, the search volumes for the keywords that are going to be relevant to you, they're going to be really, really small, because there's only going to be you know, there's going to be it's a very niche space and the only people you're trying to target are CEOs. So how many CEOs are there in this very niche space? Probably not that many. So you know, only a few people are gonna be looked at so you're gonna be nervous. If you can hold on to it for a while it will pay off but the ones that benefit the most I would say are Yeah, some that it's hard to say SAS self serve some a lot of sales lead SAS as well. can work well. But I would say more mid mid level kind of companies. We're specialized in b2b SaaS. So that's I know that that works really well for kind of mid level companies, or that sell to mid level companies and also that sell to small businesses. That works really, really, really well. And then I'm sure there's you know, there's so many industries that as to conserve wood, I mean, any industry it's really, it's just can you build a search around it? Are people aware how aware are they of the problem and can you build a journey around their problem, their journey? Can you build pages that cover every part of the journey from becoming aware of the problem to making the purchase of the solution, and beyond as well?

Siobhan 9:59

So now that we've clarified that, I want to go back to one thing that you mentioned, which is ultimately what you started with, which is you said that SEO is fucked. But you said as it is known, so Okay, maybe not all the way and you keep on mentioning as a holistic concept. Can you just dig deeper into that a little bit as to why is it and why should we be approaching it more as a business strategy instead of just doing as Yeah.

Maeva 10:27

So SEO, is fogged because, well, there's so many consultants and agencies out there that are kind of hiding behind this black box of this is too complex for you to understand. So I'm not going to explain it to you. And people are like yeah, okay, okay, I just do the thing. So then they kind of get screwed over and basically what a lot of these is either Blackhat techniques, so buying inappropriate links, creating shitty content? I mean, that happens a lot. They just say, I heard a company saying we're gonna produce 20 articles a month for you for like 1000 bucks, which is I don't know how and people are like, Oh yeah, great, that's gonna help us grow faster. How? You know that because they're thinking, the more that we publish, the more traffic they'll get, which might be true in the short term, but they're not really thinking about the end goal and this is where thinking about the business strategy comes in is, when you think about it as a business strategy. You think about the end goal. How does what we're doing here? How does that tie into the impact that I wanted to have on the overall business? So I'm going to start thinking about revenue. I'm going to start thinking about demo requests and how those demo requests convert into actual opportunities, how they actually those actually convert into paying customers. These are the kind of metrics that I would want to be looking at and when you're only looking at backlinks built or deliverables, or how many pieces am I going to publish per month and you're not actually following a framework that starts with an end goal in mind. Then the KPIs you started looking at are going to be just rankings or just traffic? And those should be leading indicators. Those shouldn't be the main things that you're tracking, because then you're gonna get I talked to a lot of people who say we've been doing SEO, we get a lot of traffic. It doesn't convert well. And that's not because SEO is not working for them. It's because they gave the KPIs of just focusing on traffic, just focusing on rankings. And when you do that, you don't care about what kind of content you're publishing.

Siobhan 12:27

You know, how are you measuring for the end goal because so this is my specialty, right? And I get a lot of people saying how's our SEO performing? Now I see the shitty SEO a lot so I can see that. But then if you're focusing towards the end goal, which is a great concept, right and revenue, etc. How are you really bringing that back together? Like how are you saying that this had an effect on your revenue? How are you measuring this the width for these KPIs?

Maeva 12:53

is So this is one reason why it's also easier with self serve the metrics are tend to be a little bit easier than working with like a sales lead organization where you have to track it back to the CRM because there are attribution vendors you know, that you can use and of course, you have your open text fields. For example, how did you hear about us? So obviously, attribution is complex and a topic for a whole episode probably. But you can still get an indication of how much it's helped. You can use some attribution vendors to see last touch first touch those kinds of things and you can see that it's played a role as SEO also plays a lot a big role in assisting system conversions. So maybe they had found you on a webinar, or maybe they found you somewhere else. And of course, it's difficult to exactly paint the whole multi, multi touch attribution story, but you can track a lot of it and you can see what is making an impact and what isn't.

Siobhan 13:52

Is there something that you're doing when you're providing services for your companies, or is that something you're expecting the company to do?

Maeva 13:58

We work with an attribution vendor, we monitor and report we do like we're not going to unfuck their CRM for example. Of course, we need them

Siobhan 14:10

that's a whole nother story. Okay, so big picture, you're focusing on revenue, you're focusing on sales. In this case, why would b2b Maybe, how are you going about that? Like where's the start with research using big picture? So I'm thinking you're researching, you're doing a whole lot of things. You're not just creating articles. Right,

Maeva 14:29

right. Yeah, of course. So the way that we start, we actually have a framework called we call it the FGS framework for foundations growth and scale. So what we want to do first is make sure all the foundations are in place. So we're taking benchmarks, we're looking at historical data. Ideally, we're working with companies that already have done some SEO so that we have some historical data and we can see what are the things that we need to fix before we start creating new things. So we we assess all of that we look at benchmarks we say okay, what actually, we look at five different pillars. So we have technical SEO, competitive like competitive standing, where do you stand against competitors, not only direct competitors, as in people who are selling to the same customers as you but indirect competitors, who's competing for your attention for your audience's attention on search? And then we want to look at UX the user experience, which is a huge part of SEO, we want to look at conversions. So how well is the current content converting? What's the benchmark here and then we also look at content so there are five different pillars that we look at, and then that helps us prioritize what needs to get addressed first, in what order and so we want to make sure the foundations are set and then we can start scaling that so we don't want to scale something if it's not working to begin with. So we identify all of that. And then we also do a lot of market research. We have to interview customers persona, like or persona lookalikes if we can't get a hold of the customers, people who are using tools like that, and we actually need to map out the journey and understand what are the steps in this person's journey from becoming problem aware to purchasing and maybe even beyond that, just being the customer. And then after all that, so we do a lot of internet scraping, we build the voice of customer research, a customer desire mapping, so we understand their hopes, barriers, the pain points, those kind of things. And then we start to do keyword research from there. And so we do very, very in depth keyword research and we start mapping it from there to see what are we going to do so this is for the content for the keywords. There's also a lot of technical things that we do, depending on what needs to get done bigger websites are gonna need a lot more technical work than newer websites because you can, there hasn't been so much done from there.

Siobhan 16:43

It's just funny because like you you're talking about the whole process and the first two steps of that process sound like almost what every marketer has to do or should be doing right it's what every content marketer should be doing every optimizer every anything should be doing is their research and understanding the personas etc. Voice of Customer research is essential. So it's it's quite funny how like everyone needs to do that, including you and then what everyone considers SEO is when people start talking about keywords right?

Maeva 17:11

Yeah. Yeah, it's funny because that's what's something people don't get about doing. SEO is there sometimes surprised? Like, why do you need to talk to my customers? Can't you just look up keywords? It's like doing SEO is not just giving you a list of keywords. How am I going to know if they're relevant or not?

Siobhan 17:28

Yeah, exactly. So what is the most important part do you think for SEO, in the whole process?

Maeva 17:33

The most important part, well, it depends.

Siobhan 17:36

It always depends.

Maeva 17:39

I want I mean I want I mean, this whole process, doing this research, understanding the customer's journey is the most important part. And then there's a lot of other things that are really important. So when it comes to content is very important. Content is the life it's the assets that you're actually building and you're trying to get everything else all the other stuff that you're doing is you're trying to make sure that this content is working for you. So building topical authority, so deciding I'm going to be the authority on these handful of topics instead of writing a bunch of random topics, and just having this kind of long term vision, rather than every month sitting around a table and being like, okay, what are we going to write about this month because that's not doing SEO. I mean, that's just doing it without an end goal. And in today's economy, you don't want to do things without an end goal. You want to understand what it is you're trying to build. It's kind of like when you have when you're doing SEO, imagine you're building a building. And you know, you know, I'm gonna need to build these structures. I'm gonna need to build these walls, etc. And you have a plan beforehand, where a lot of people are coming at it like, Oh, I'm gonna build one wall over here today, okay, tomorrow. I don't know what I'm gonna do tomorrow, but you arrived tomorrow and then say, well now we're going to build another wall, you're never gonna get this building done. You're never gonna get it. The people inside start selling or start operating it or whatever. So I think the most important thing is, yeah, building with an end goal.

Siobhan 19:05

So it's essentially what you were saying this needs to be part of the business strategy. So it needs Yeah, part of the foundation of the company, essentially, that you need to build those pillars and along with everything else that's going on.

Maeva 19:16

Yeah, I mean, you want to think about we're gonna grow this company, organically and website, our website. We are choosing that our website is going to be our greatest sales. person, I guess. Yeah, we have sales reps, but everything is done digitally. People find your website before they talk to your sales rep. So are you going to make more people find your website? Are you going to make Are you going to take advantage of the website or are you not going to so that's kind of the choice that you're making?

Siobhan 19:45

So then that comes down to the content? And are you focusing mostly on creating, let's say, blog posts? Are you also creating content for the site, like does a site evolve as you come up with more keyword information or

Maeva 19:57

it's quite a mix? Of course, it depends on the industry as well. But since we work in b2b SaaS, there's a lot of education to do so a lot of it does end up being blog posts and, and thought leadership, those kinds of things, how to informational articles, but oftentimes, we need a lot of the landing pages or different permutations of feature pages. So for example, if you have a feature that's like email marketing, you wouldn't want to only create one feature page for email marketing. We like to think what is every possible way that somebody could try to find this and we want to create a page for it. So email marketing is a feature that is very industry agnostic. Let's say anybody could be trying to look for this and there's so many different kinds of companies that are looking for it. So you could have email marketing for small businesses, email marketing for healthcare, email marketing for law firms, even marketing for churches event and you could create a page for all of those different variations so that those specific people who will have specific needs can also find your page and that just provides a creates a lot more opportunities to get found. So we create actually landing pages for all of these different kinds of permutations as a part of the part of the foundation's part of the framework, just to make sure that we're finding all of the what we call longtail opportunities.

Siobhan 21:16

Okay, so you're ultimately creating like copies of the same landing pages geared towards specific people. Like I'm not saying copies because obviously, the content is quite different, right? Because you're addressing a different need. But you have an email marketing landing page instead of like most companies, they just have one. You're saying you might have 20 Yeah, just the different needs that people can find.

Maeva 21:35

Yeah, you should see SEO. So some people don't like that. They're like we already created a page. It's almost the same thing on it. Why are we creating another one? And actually, the thing about SEO is that you want to create a page for every possible opportunity and people are not reading your website as a publication from start to finish. There. If you're optimizing it for SEO, there's different people who are finding it from different ways and you just want to make sure that you have a path for each of them.

Siobhan 22:01

And not like an entry point. Yeah. So you don't have to like change the whole site, right? It's just the landing page and then they feel like okay, this is what I'm looking for. And then yeah, into the site. And then, so and then you said that live, it's also content and blogs, and you keep on saying that's mostly educational. So it's not just like writing random, you're trying to build the authority or educate the user. Yeah. And

Maeva 22:23

so there's, there's few different intents, there's, you know, educational, there's execution So education is how I want to learn how to do this. There's execution, I want to actually do this thing. There's navigational, I'm trying to get to this place like you type in. I always type if I want to go to Google Analytics. For example. Instead of typing in the URL, I always type google analytics into Google and I click the link

Siobhan 22:47

and I haven't bookmarked and I still do it. A lot

Maeva 22:49

of people doing those kinds of things. But, you know, that's called a navigational search. So there's a lot of different kinds of intent. And but a lot of it in b2b is educational because people are trying to learn how to do their jobs better. Yeah. So this needs this is really important to approach this in the right way. And this is where a lot of SEOs fall short is they are a lot of companies trying to do SEO fall short is they say, let's just get a writer on Fiverr. And then they write. I mean, even if you're a good writer, you don't have that kind of knowledge. Sometimes, you know, you don't know what it's like to be in the shoes of this VP of sales that you're trying to write for, you just don't know. So even if you're really good writer, what we do is work with subject matter experts. So we approach it with a journalistic approach, conduct interviews, liaise with the internal experts at on the client side and we just read, you know, write it with a journalistic perspective and not just a single person's perspective. So we don't expect the writers to just do some Google searches and figure it out on their own.

Siobhan 23:50

So then it's like, so do you ever get this kind of battle between copywriter and the company and yourself? Is there is there that does that happen? Because the moment you said that you're also playing with the landing pages? That's like what I was thinking like, I know copywriters I've worked with for my clients. I also know some really cool copywriters but some of my clients copywriters do like but that's my job. Don't like okay, sorry. It's, uh, do you get that a lot like Yeah, are you doing

Maeva 24:17

sometimes there are people who are just very, like, we have some clients who they're so protective of the design, for example. So we're like, we're gonna create all these pages and they're like, Well, we have to design the pages. So you know, we'll work with whatever. And yeah, some clients are a lot more opinionated about how things needed to be expressed. And others we had a client who was so particular about their tone of voice, and it just takes some time to you know, get to know that and, and we have we give them the dedicated editors, so they start to build that relationship. But yeah, sometimes it's a it's a battle

Siobhan 24:53

What's the biggest pushback you get when you're like, when you're talking to, let's say, a potential client, or any marketer out there when you're trying to explain to them that SEO needs to be considered a more holistic thing and not just as keywords thing and cheap content? What's the biggest pushback you get?

Maeva 25:08

This is a good question. I mean, if I explain it, and most people are usually like, Oh, yeah. That makes sense. I think it's just they have experience working with other contractors who look at things totally differently. I've worked with people who just say, you know, you don't need to do all of this thing. For content. This has taken up too much time or, you know, the investments too high. So they just want to get cheaper content out there and publish more frequently, and I guess they're not. The pushback is the mindset, really, at the end of the day, and understanding it. I mean, other pushback that I get on client calls is obviously like pricing and those kinds of things. But if it's just on the day to day with, with the certain people trying to get them to buy into this holistic way of looking at SEO, it's just mindset. Its former experience and probably just misunderstanding of how SEO is supposed to work as a as a growth channel.

Siobhan 26:10

Okay, got it. So there's not actually once you get your point across people are usually on board.

Maeva 26:15

A lot of times Yeah, I think I don't really get I think people like that way of thinking about SEO.

Siobhan 26:24

Yeah, I'm just struggling because like, you know, as I'm thinking about it, we see so much SEO badly done. Then what is holding everyone back from doing it the right way?

Maeva 26:37

That's true. I mean, it's like so yeah, I mean, people is lack of education. So people really think that backlinks is the only way so they say we just got to build backlinks. I know SEO agencies who say they do SEO, all they do is build backlinks, they don't even create any content or provide any content briefs. And that's not the way and that's just the way that they know how to do it. And it's also just the long term vision. So they're doing that it is driving some kind of numbers up. That's all that they care about. And others they'll only produce content. This was me for a while I was so I was really only producing content all the time and I did drive the needle. We saw incredible results that way. But until I started looking at it holistically and saying actually we have all of these other things to address and until we started doing this framework that we were following. The results now are insane. Like we had a client we just started FGS with them to the framework and before we even published a single page of content, we just fix some of the technical issues that they had on there that we saw we were like, Okay, we need to prioritize this first. And within before two months, we already increased paid signups by like 125% without publishing single piece of content. So just understanding where to prioritize and looking at all of the different aspects. It just has crazy results and it's really the fastest way to get into these end goals, but she needs to know what you're trying to get to.

Siobhan 27:56

I love that. I think we're gonna end on that. Thank you so much. And I really appreciate you coming on. Thanks, Shawn. Thank you, Maya. And thank you for listening to marketing and fun. Make sure to check out my first podcast, the FCM podcast. Link will be in the show notes or resources mentioned in today's show. You can also find in the show notes, like the show, leave us a review or send me some feedback. See you in two weeks.

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