#58: SEO - Exit Five Live - Ask Us Anything About SEO (Betsy Koliba, Mitch Briggs from Demandwell)

This episode is brought to you by Zttle. We're halfway through 2025 and one thing's clear. We've been feeling this firsthand for sure. Events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking, breakfasts. Everyone's all in. Everyone's leaning into in person events have become a core part of our playbook here at Exit 5. So far we've hosted two virtual sessions. We do them twice a month. We do one large virtual event, sometimes two a year. One in person meetup and we're deep in the trenches right now planning drive our annual conference coming back to Vermont in September. We use Zuttle to help us run a smarter event strategy. They help us with driving registrations, managing invites, automating, communications, reminders, analytics, tracking. They do it all. They have a salesforce integration that also makes it easy and simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without having to pull an op so you'd know exactly how your events performed. On top of that, the differentiator with ZTTL is how their team is insanely good at supporting us.

They always go above and beyond for.

Us and that's how we've been able to keep the momentum going with 12 events this year already and just a small little team here at exit 5. So if events are a part of your marketing strategy like they are ours, you should check out Zuttle to see how Companies like Zillow, CrowdStrike and Iterable are using the top event platform for business events in 2025. Head over to zuttle.com exit5 that's z-u- dash dash-l.com exit5 to learn more.

This episode of the Exit 5 podcast is brought to you by Jasper. Unlock your best ideas with the help of AI companies like HubSpot, Zillow, the home Depot and Zoom. Trust Jasper to help their teams create original content 10 times faster. Jasper offers a wide range of use cases like optimizing and testing ad copy variations, generating marketing and sales content that converts writing long form blog posts that are optimized for search and creating royalty free AI images. Jasper's underlying technology includes models that are trained on marketing best practices. That means that you can spend more time on marketing strategy and less time creating copy. You can get your first month free using Jasper by visiting Jasper AI Exit 5. That's Jasper AI forward slash Exit 5 and start making your writing easier with Jasper today. Exit Exit we're going to spend about an hour doing a deep dive talking about SEO specifically and before we get to my guests here today. Just want to just shout out to people. If you're in the chat right now, I would just want to see where people are writing in from. It's one of my favorite parts. So put it in. I'm going to go first. I'm in dumb Dave. I'm in Vermont. Todd's also got that cold weather in Jersey. Monterey, California. Vancouver. Dallas. Fort Worth, Maine, France. Ottawa. Indianapolis. Queens, New York. Standup. Indianapolis. Baltimore, Maryland. Helsinki, D.C. rio de Janeiro, Ontario. Come on, this is amazing. San Francisco, Germany. Mystic, Connecticut.

Atlanta.

Earth. Brian's on earth. Great shout out to you, Brian. Thanks for. Thanks for being here. Anna's in Bend, Oregon. Nina's in Copenhagen. That sounds nice. Steven's in Irving, Texas with the Spanish spelling upstate New York. This is great. We got people from all over. The people are here and now it's time to talk about SEO. So first let's kick it off. I'm Dave. I run Exit 5, former CMO startup marketer. Now I'm really just the man behind the scenes making Exit 5 happen. And our goal is to help get you smarter, make you smarter about B2B marketing. And every now and then we do these sessions and this first session that we're doing, we haven't done one in a while, is with our friends at Demand. Well, we have Betsy here, we have Mitch here. I'm going to kick it over. We'll do really quick intro and then we're going to, we're going to talk a lot about SEO. What's happening in 2023. I know people want to talk about AI. What do AI copywriters mean for the future of SEO? What about YouTube shorts and TikTok? What does that mean for SEO? We'll talk about all that stuff today. But Betsy, why don't you kick it off? Quick overview of Demand. Well and quick overview of who you are and what you do.

There's.

Yeah.

Hi everybody. I'm Betsy. Yeah, I work at DemandWell and we are a SEO solution. Really what we do is just help folks create content, help them create a, you know, put their website together in a way that's gonna drive traffic. I head up the customer growth team here and so that's really the post sales side of things. And so our success folks report up to me and our content production reports up to me. And a little bit about me. I've been doing SEO and digital marketing for about 16 years. I think at this point in time. The years keep adding on as time goes by. But so I, you Know, I feel like I've seen a lot of change in the industry and a lot of evolution as time has gone by. You know, I don't think that when I first started doing this that a huge topic of conversation would have been AI. And I think we'll probably talk quite a bit about some of that today. So, really excited to be here, really excited to talk about some of this super geeky stuff. Cause I love it.

Love it.

Good to see you, Mitch.

What's up?

Tell us about your background. Who are you?

I'm Mitch Briggs. I'm also with Demand well and working on Betsy's team. One of the unique things about Demand well is we get. We have a piece of software that helps, but also consultants and experts like myself to go along with that, provide services and consulting and guidance along the way. So I'm, I'm the one there working with a lot of customers on a daily basis to meet with them, understand strategy, do's and don'ts, all the best practices that come with SEO and then ultimately getting them to use the software and see success. So been doing this about the same time as Betsy, about 15, 16 years. We've worked together at previous agencies and other things, so we've known each other quite a while. So great.

So we have some actual SEO experience on the call today and we're going to tap into it. We have a bunch of questions prepared that we've gotten from the Exit 5 community that we've put together ourselves. But in the chat, chat, we will take questions, put them in the Q and A for me, because my staff and I here, which is just me, we'll have to organize them. So put your questions in the Q and A as they come up and we'll try to get to them. First question I want to ask is, actually, we didn't talk about this before, but I'm going to ask you anyway since you both have deep SEO experience. I talked about in even promoting this event, I talked about how as a marketing leader twice in my career, I made the mistake of not investing in SEO early enough and got to a point later down the road where we're behind on the number, everybody's under pressure, we're trying to find new tactics, new channels. And a couple times it became like, well, actually, if our organic traffic was growing, was 30% higher than it was now, we'd be in a better position. And the real answer was, well, how would we fix that? Well, the best answer was we should have invested in SEO 12 months ago. However, one problem that you're under, as a marketing leaders, you're under a lot of pressure to hit the number now. And anytime you come around SEO, you are often pitched like this is going to take time, this is going to take years. And so I'm just curious to hear how you would each handle. Handle that. Objection. Obviously, I've been burned twice and I know that you have to build the right foundation moving forward. It's like not having attribution or analytics or the right marketing ops foundation. But I'm just curious to hear how you would, how you'd handle that. Objection. And just your response to that.

I will say that the ones I like to work with the most are those fresh startups that they just have a homepage and about us and they're ready to go because it's so much easier to kind of start and plan and just build that foundation and see that thing grow from 0 to 100, you know, over time, versus kind of untangling, you know, people that have a history of legacy content, they've changed and pivoted and trying to untangle something. But I will say it's never too late. Right? It really starts with good keyword research. You have to really understand all the different ways your audience is searching for all the different things that you can, all the problems you can solve and finding those gaps. So you might have some content that is ranking well, but where are you not? And really just prioritizing that list based on the intent, not necessarily volume. I think people fall in love with the volume and say, I got to go after this big giant category that everybody's searching for. Try to find those niches because you can get some good wins early on. Not everything takes six to 12 months to really start ranking and going well. If you can really find some of those keywords with the good intent, it's the right audience might be a little bit smaller in terms of actual traffic and search volume. But you can start to win easier, right? Especially if you already have been around for a couple years. You still have that domain authority, you still have some of the other signals that count, you have backlinks, you have some things that are going your way. You might just be missing some of that key content and going after some of those key key keywords that you've missed over the, over the years that you can start filling in those gaps and seeing things move the needle a little bit.

Bets. Do you have anything to add to that?

Yeah, one. One thing that I would add is just that progress is performance. When it comes to SEO. So, you know, I think that a big thing that folks think is, oh, we have to have the leads right out of the gate and there are going to be short term campaigns that you're going to be able to run that are going to drive drive leads right out of the gate. SEO is just not going to be one of those. And so, you know, starting from the top and saying, all right, well, what is the metric that we want to look at right away? If we publish a bunch of content, we make a bunch of updates to our website, what's the first thing that we're going to see? And then like a domino effect, you're going to start to see some of those other things happen in turn. After that, it's just a matter of understanding that those dominoes need to fall in the right order and reporting on the progress as your performance for SEO, knowing that in the future you're going to see that that last domino of leads and conversions fall with it. But it's just going to take some time.

You mentioned website as part of this. One thing that I see and I run into, and I'm sure in the early stages is different, what should be home based for SEO? Because I see, and I've been in the middle of this where we have our website content, but we kind of also have our blog and we write articles and it's like, which do we want to rank? And then, hey, we have this blog post that ranks for this keyword, but it's not at all a conversion driven piece. And so it brings in a lot of traffic, but it doesn't do any anything. And then it's like, okay, well then we come back to this question, well, why have a blog at all? Why not just have exit5.com, whatever and have each piece of content in that example, be there. Mitch, what's your response to that?

The website's going to be your number one magnet, right? And, and when you talk about making an investment, kind of what Betsy was saying, putting that progress, putting all that energy into something, if you want something to compound and grow over time, it should be something that you own, right? Your own domain, your own website. I think blog is a way that people naturally go towards to say, like, this is how I'm going to produce content. Because that's just naturally where they go to first. But what we're actually seeing is building kind of a library of articles that Interconnect is performing better often than a blog. Right? Because blogs are something that, like you said, they're More, less conversion focused. They're more just straight text. Whereas what you might need is more just helpful guides, articles, explainers, whatever you want to call them.

Do you even need to have a blog? Couldn't you just have, hey, we want to have content on our, like throw out the term. Why not just have helpful articles that are just on your website and that becomes your SEO strategy? I feel like it becomes like this internal thing. Well, we have a team and this person manages the blog. And I feel like if the three of us were building a company from the start, we would say we don't have a blog, we just have content on the website.

Yeah, you're trying to explain that you have expertise in a certain topic or set of topics. A blog is one way to do that, but that's not the only way to do that. Right. It's actually, you know, Wikipedia is not a blog. It's just a bunch of connected articles. A blog is really just a sequential time based series of pages that usually automatically just get linked together by some sort of software. So again, it's why I like starting it from the beginning on a lot of customers because you can kind of steer them in a different direction and try to. Instead of just continuing to blog and blog and blog.

Brian says in the chat, trying to understand blog has a negative connotation. Now, it's not that blog has a negative connotation. I've just see, at least in, in startups and companies that I see today, I think just calling it a blog on its own, it's like, well, the blog has to have a strategy where forget if it's a blog or if it's whatever. Just as a company, we need to put out helpful content that people will find about things that they care about and we want to funnel them to our website. And I've just seen that typically you have a website and you have a blog and you have, you end up kind of splitting one good thing in half and you're sending some traffic to the blog and some traff to the website and you have to, you have to redo it. Okay, so of course, as you would as a marketer, we've prepared a bajillion questions in a Google Doc just in case nobody had any questions, you know, out of fear like, oh my gosh, what if nobody shows up? And we have a million questions in the, in the Q and A already. But before we get to them, I just want to give the group this question. So I want to talk about two of the biggest trends at least I think in SEO right now, number one is AI content and number two is short form video. We've heard a lot about how. I don't know what the generation is, but there's a group of people who are now searching TikTok or YouTube more than they are going to search for articles. I want to talk about that in a second. But first, what's your perspective about how is AI content going to impact or change or alter anything for SEO? What's your perspective on that?

I think that AI is having a real moment right now and it is a huge topic. I will say that I think there's still a lot of work to be done with AI for it to be something that almost even frustrating to use. But with that said, I do think that there's some opportunity for digital marketers and folks who are responsible for SEO to take advantage of it to alleviate some of the pressure of how time consuming SEO can often be. So I think that people feel like, oh, SEO, just not only is it going to take forever for me to see results, but it takes a lot of my time to create this much content. I'm being told I need to create content, so much content, do so much for my website. And I think that we should absolutely start looking into taking advantage of automations that are produced by AI to kind of alleviate some of those things. But I don't think that we're in a place where we can receive artificially written content and feel comfortable or confident enough to put it on her websites yet.

Yeah, I'll just say, yeah, I think AI is going to be our new intern, not our replacement. Right. It's not coming for a job. It's going to make our job easier. All those things that take a lot of time, take a lot of research, take a lot of gathering information, putting data sets together. I think it'll evolve to be where we're just interacting with an AI to say, tell me how these keywords could be clustered together. What's the search volume for this? What's related to these terms? Could you put together an outline that describes a good blog post for this topic and then use those types of things to inform, you know, ultimately we even say with our own set of tools at demand. Well, of like we want the machines to do the work for us and then we want the humans to decide what to do next. Don't just let the machine run. I think the danger with AI is people think, I can just plug my website in, bunch of keywords, churn out blog posts, I won't look at it. Next thing you know, I have 10,000 pages on my site and I'm ranking for things. So that's not going to work. And that's not where. I don't think Google wants anyone doing something like that, which is just letting loose AI to just generate long form content and autumn automatically publish it onto your site. But I think there's all these. There's so many tedious little tasks when it comes to SEO and there's so many things you can gather and look at and I think AI is going to help you be able to do that also.

You need to win with good content. This is not the early days of inbound marketing of Google, where just having an article about X topic is going to rank. Like, I'm going through a thing right now and I'm working with a group and we're working on some content together and we put together the first draft of an outline and I was like, this article, like, I get that we're trying to rank for this keyword, but this is just the generic same stuff that everyone writes about as it relates to this topic. There is still that element of like, how can we make ours better? How can we make it deeper, have more original research, have more interesting things? Maybe it's a better design, a better layout, a better hook, a different interview subject. I think that it's great to be able to use AI to get that as a jumping off point, but still to win with SEO, it's not just like, hey, we picked a keyword, we had a robot make some copy for it and we're going to rank. There has to be some, how are we going to win with this type of content? Okay, let's get over to the chat. The number one, this has been the number one upvoted question so far. What's the biggest gap between what people are doing in SEO and what people should be doing? Betsy, why don't you kick us off on that one?

One thing that I would say, the first thing that came to mind is just the way that folks do keyword research. I think they do it as a sec. They do it sort of second in their process. They determine, hey, we're going to write about these things. And then they then do some keyword research and try to fill in the gaps in their content with that keyword research. And I think people need to think more about keyword research as being audience research and determine what the pains are and the problems are that your audience has, what solutions you offer them. And really figure out what they're talking about, the topics that are relevant to them, and then use that keyword research to then put together your content plan to create that content, as opposed to writing a blog and saying, okay, now we've written this blog, let's go find 10 keywords that we need to just kind of like plug in here and there.

So it's got to be foundational, it's got to be done from the beginning. Mitch, you have a follow up to that?

Yeah, I think folks tend to open on the oh part right, which is optimization. And they think, okay, I have my site, I have content on it, I have some blogs, I have some resources. Why isn't it ranking? I need it to start ranking now. So I'm going to go do optimization tactics and, and a lot of times that takes form in doing an SEO audit, tweaking existing pages, maybe some internal linking. All of those things matter and are good exercises to do. But you're missing the big chunk which is continuing to publish. Kind of what Betsy said is understanding all those search terms, where are the gaps? And continue to publish good content that matches well with how people search. So if you're not producing net new content and you're focusing too much on the O of optimizing what you have, we've just seen that the ones that grow the most are the ones that are consistently publishing on a weekly, daily basis new, relevant content, continuing to add to that heap of authoritative, good content that all links well together to kind of build that nice library of information.

So my question as a follow up for either of you on that is if you're saying start with keyword research first, how do you push strategically, how do you push the team? Or how do you, how do you create a strategy that I feel like it's very easy to go for the high volume, high level keywords. Like, wouldn't you recommend, like, hey, before you even go for these, these high volume keywords, like, let's first prove out, like let's pick three to five, you know, long tail articles for, you know, keywords that we can really rank. You know what I'm trying to get it, like, I just feel like, for example, like if I was going to do an SEO Strategy for Exit 5, am I going to go right off the bat and try to rank for B2B marketing? No, that would be a waste of time. But there's got to be something two or three layers down. Would you push people to start at that, you know, second or third layer?

Yeah, I definitely Would, I think what we prioritize intent over kind of volume and it does still kind of go into that kind of pillar strategy or cluster strategy. You know, B2B marketing might be that very, very core center of what you're doing, but there's going to be all of these things, kind of satellites around there that are going to be more relevant and more, you know, conversion focused. Commercial intent, whatever you want to say of that individual searcher that's going to identify them as more likely to be in your audience, more likely to be in a commercial mindset, more likely to be ready to convert. And it's going to be different for every single website, every single audience, but really understanding those and looking at giving basically more points to those words and trying to balance that out with volume and say, you know, yeah, I'm not going to rank for CRM software, but I might rank for CRM software for manufacturing, if that's what I do. And going after that instead of trying to go after something big.

This is an add on from Danny in the chat. How much would you focus on new content for a given keyword versus adding, slash, updating existing content for that keyword?

I'd say it depends on where you rank today, right? If you were ranking like 12th and you had a great piece of content and it's, you know, less than a year old and it's something that's been out there and you're sitting there right off first, the first page, I would focus first on trying to get that optimized, see what we could do. Maybe it's adding additional content, maybe it's including, you know, some FAQs or something. Maybe it's an internal linking strategy to just get that more visibility and more relevance on your site. Get that boosted onto the first page. And then the other way to do that is to think again about what are those satellites, what are those related pieces of content that you need to produce. And when you do produce those, you're linking to it as well. So you're kind of filling out the cluster over time, getting more of those authoritative signals you're demonstrating to users and to Google. Hey, not only do I have this.

Great piece of content that today's episode is brought to you by ahrefs. You probably know Ahrefs as an SEO tool, right? I've been using Ahrefs personally for over a decade to see how we rank and see what's driving traffic to our site. Content marketing has always been a big part of the playbook. I use their product at Drift at Privy and now we're using it at exit 5. But over that time, Ahrefs has evolved a lot. And they're not actually just an SEO tool anymore. They're a full on marketing platform built for marketers like you and me who want to grow traffic, understand our audiences and make smarter business decisions in the AI search world. Their marketing intelligence lets you see what's driving traffic to your site, to your competitors, understand top performing content, paid keywords, backlinks. You can even understand how much your organic traffic would be worth. Put a actual dollar amount to all that organic traffic that you're driving. They've also got tools for AI powered content and keyword research. 24, 7 Site monitoring, real time analytics, backlink tracking, brand mentions, you name it, you can do it all in one place. With Ahrefs, it's really a marketer's dream. If you're a marketing nerd like myself, one of the coolest features in my opinion is their new brand radar tool which allows you to explore what people and AI says about brand, topic or niche. You can do this to do amazing research to help understand what's actually happening in AI search today and just what the conversations are online about your brand. Plus you can try their free analytics tool to show you how many visitors you're getting from AI search like Chat GPT or Perplexity. And look, as a firsthand user of this, so much easier to use than.

Something like Google Analytics. I love it.

We use it on our site. I've used it for Exit 5 and we just found out that over the past 30 days we've got 105 visitors to Exit 5 from AI search. 95% of that was from ChatGPT, 5% of that was from Perplexity. But it's really cool to understand and this is the way that search is going and shifting. So Ahrefs not just an SEO tool anymore. It's a legit marketing platform for anyone serious about growth in today's AI driven search world. If you do any type of content marketing at all, you gotta go check them out. Go visit ahrefs.com that's a href r e f s.com today.

Go check them out tackles this subject. I also have all of this other great content that is related and that's what Google's going to reward and that's what users are going to see as beneficial as well. If you ranked like 80th and you know you're just like not even on the board, it's time to Start over. Yep.

All right. Obviously demand well is going to be the tool of Choice for the B2B SaaS. B2B marketing companies out there that have a budget. Do you have any, any quick tools that you could recommend? Amanda got a couple upvotes in the chat. Is there a budget conscious keyword research tool that somebody could use?

Yeah, a hundred percent. Google Keyword Planner. You know, I know they don't give you all the ad the data unless you're paying for the ads, but it's a great place to get some ideation and get started with keyword research. I know Semrush, they have some free calls you can make. That's a great place to do competitive research. We still use that internally. Right. To just look up like, you know, what are your competitors ranking for? They have such great data hrefs. Same thing. Great database of information to go after. I'm trying to think of like smaller or other little tools.

I'll give you one. I haven't, I haven't been in the early stage in a minute but one, one thing that I used to do was just this is separate from keyword research but just going to incognito in your browser and searching for coming up with a topic that you think and seeing which content this is seeing which content is on there today and you're like man, this piece of crap blog post ranks second for this keyword. Like we could definitely make something better than. I think it's great to see what the output from the keyword research tools is. But I also think like there's also another element of like creatively and gut like oh, I bet we could make a better, a better piece of this. And so, so I think also like if you have no budget at all, those are free tools. That's great. You can kind of go and figure this stuff out based on like what are you searching for and what's Google showing you on your own? Look at this. This is. See I'm a hacker myself. Alex says those are called manual page one audits. That's what I've been doing my whole career. I'm a big manual page one auditor. Okay, this question is in the Q and A most upvotes by far right now. How does video on our site impact SEO?

I mean I, I would say quite a bit. I think that. So the way that I think about content in general is, you know, you want to have a lot of different content types. Not everyone is consum. Prefers to consume content in the same ways. So on paper I could be have the exact same background as someone else, but they prefer to consume content by reading it than they're read write learners. I am very much like a visual learner or someone who prefers kinesthetic type learning. So I want to see pictures, I want bullet points. Long form content is really, really hard for me. If someone gives me a really, really long email, it probably sits on red for quite a while before I get to it. So I think that as marketers we have to produce a lot of different content on our site in a lot of different ways to appease lots of different learning styles so that you're not just, you know, creating one type of content for a specific user. So I do think that we have to think about video content in the same way that we think about long form content in that, you know, is the topic. I do think that the transcripts and the long form content will help Google. But I think one of the biggest things is that Google is looking to give a really great experience to a searcher. And if you have someone like me land on a page, they're, they're going to pay attention to whether or not, you know, how am I, how am I engaging with the content that exists on that site?

Yeah. If you think about just from an algorithm standpoint and are you checking a lot of the boxes like has video, doesn't have video dwell time and you know, they do take into account the statistics of how long people are on the site. Are they bouncing and are they searching again? Are they likely to come back to that page? You know, those are the types of things that video can help do.

Right.

And then the conversion part of it. Right. Adding video can help people convert. So it's definitely one of those like small factors I would say matter to help you rank higher. And then there's video search. So Google Search Console just introduced like a video indexation. So they now tell you if they found a video and whether they like it. You know, there's some signals that having video versus not having video, you know, peppered throughout the site is going to help your ability to rank. But you must have the long form text. If you just had a page with just a video on it, it's going to be tough to get that to.

Rank, which is kind of what I see a lot. It's the default like let's put the video up and then there's, there's no text with it. Does it matter where the video is hosted?

I would host it with YouTube if it were me. I mean, you Gotta think of who. Where things are owned. So I would say YouTube's definitely a good place to start.

Even on your site. Even specifically on the. On the website, you'd use the YouTube embed as opposed to using something like natively embedding it into your website.

Yeah, I think I would too. Just for site speed. And the only thing I would say is if you want to get metrics on how like. And own those metrics. Is it Wistia, Is that the. You can like, see how that is kind of nice. And there's other tools like that where you can actually get more statistics and engagement metrics from the actual video itself. But yeah, I'm, I'm kind of with Betsy, I'm with a little. It's a little tinfoil hat. But I think the fact that Google owns YouTube and you're using their tools might give you a little bit of a advantage.

Purely talking SEO, I would just. I'd play in the same playground.

All right, what are key metrics? This is from Alex Miller. I love. I'm here for some tinfoil hats. So if you got more tinfoil hat stuff, bring it on out. Bring it on out.

As we're 30, we won't talk about paid search then and its relation to SEO. Yeah. Oh, no.

Now that you brought it up, is there one? Tell me what do I need to know? What is it?

There is no direct correlation, but let's just say I've seen when people start advertising that they somehow get a little bit of a organic boost as well.

Interesting. I have one experience with that anecdotally, and I'm not good at any of this stuff, but when I was at Drift, the company was initially named. They initially named the company D R I F T T. And there was two T's. And because they didn't have the domain at the time. And so that was a nightmare for search because people didn't know if it was like drift with two Fs, drift with two Ts, with two eyes. There's a lot of weird startup spellings. Then we finally get the domain and then we try to rank for Drift, which is marketing software. But Drift is a very, very broad term. And there was just millions of search results for. For drifting cars and a whole, you know, just completely unrelated garbage. And it took forever. It took months to get. If someone went to Drift in the browser, it took months to get Drift on page one. So then I think we did read something that was like, oh, actually we should. Well, no, we started bidding on our own branded name because we wanted people to show up quickly after that, and it was very cheap to rank for that. Quickly after that, all of a sudden the website organically did start to rank, and so we ended up switching the paid off because now the organic was lifted. So there you go. Put that hat on. Interesting how that works, huh? Yeah. All right. Okay, this is. So this question from Alex. What are the key metrics to track to truly know whether your SEO strategy, slash, content, is working or not working? I'll put that one up on the screen so we can, we can reread it again.

I think that you probably want to start with the first metric that you're going to see pop up, which is going to be you're going to get rankings, right? And then you're going to get impressions, and then you're going to see traffic, and then you're going to see conversions. And so looking at it sort of in that order of knowing just what I said earlier, around the dominoes and how they fall, if you're, you know, if you, if you start producing content right out of the gate, you're going to see rankings first. You're, you know, you may get lucky and you may see, you may see traffic and conversions right out of the gate, but first things you're going to see is ranking and then impressions and then traffic and conversions. So at its simplest form, if you're tracking, if you're tracking those things, those would be the metrics that I would look at first.

And that's good because that gives you an order. Because obviously if you're going to present this to like, the management team or a board or something, you might not always be able to show the revenue right out of the gate, but you have, you can show them the funnel of like, hey, here's how we expect this stuff. This is a good leading indicator here.

Yeah, it's, it makes sense just with, you know, how the process works. You have to publish it. Google has to find it, crawl it, index it. It's going to get you kind of on the board. And like Betsy said, you could either be high on the board or low on the board. But and it's usually not just for one or two keywords. You know, every page that you publish, you're going to start ranking for 30, 40, 50 variations of the keyword. And so using something like Google Search Console to understand when did that page get indexed? What are the keywords that it's starting to rank for? What are those positions? And then impressions and clicks, are those Starting to move over time.

Cool.

It's a great one. This could be related. I almost missed it. This one's from Anna. What metrics should you be tracking and leveraging to get ELT buy in for additional SEO budget? ELT is executive leadership team inside of the company. So what metrics should you be tracking to get buy in to further invest in SEO? Same thing. Is it that list and proving it out and starting to show some kind of funnel math on, hey, we did this. Here's what, here's what this roughly looks like over a quarter. Here's what we think it could be. How would you approach that?

I'm finding more and more that like executive buy in and C suite really understand the value of owning a topic and when you can kind of show almost like a share of search of around that topic. So that's where you have to kind of show almost individual keywords and show here's the cluster of keywords around this topic that we play in this market and before we started, we did not have any visibility in this market. The number of impressions among these keywords was say 100amonth or something like that. As we've invested in SEO, as I produce content and publish these things out, we now have visibility and get traffic from this cluster of keywords. And we now are, you don't have to do the individual rankings, but I think doing it more of like a, a bulk, almost like an old school market visibility and saying, you know, before we were here and now we sat out to own this topic through content and we produced these pieces of content. And now because of that effort, we are now getting visibility and traffic for those that are searching for this topic and kind of just getting leadership to buy in that like there's tremendous value in being an owner of a topic and when people Google something or look something up, you show up. I think people get often caught in like we rank number one for this, number one for that, which is great. But I think when you start to show it as a map or like a visual cluster of ownership of a topic that starts to really click with, oh wow, that's really valuable as a business, right? That we have ownership and we get to talk to people that are looking for those types of solutions, I've found.

It'S been one of the actually easier marketing topics to talk to with the CFO or the CEO because you're like, instead of some like, well, yeah, we're doing this webinar and here it's like, hey, go to your phone and type the thing that you, that we do and it's going to show up there like on the first page. They're like sweet. Now picture that for all of the related terms, I think it's one of the best ways to actually demonstrate like, hey, see this, this is how people search.

I think showcasing intention as well. So setting out with a specific strategy and saying, like Mitch said, we want to own more of the real estate around this topic, around this space and then being really intentional about the work that you do for that. So when, when you spend a lot of time creating content around a specific topical area, it works. You do start to see those metrics show up, the ranking impressions, clicks and traffic and conversions. And I think that also showcasing to your executive team that this is the area that we need to go after because we've done the research, this is what our intention was, this is what we believe is going to happen once we start doing the work. And here's what did happen when we did do the work. And I think being intentional about that and showcasing that is really helpful as well.

This is a great add on in the chat from Alice, showing how organic traffic converts to revenue is key in my opinion. The leadership team doesn't always care about keyword ranking. They want to see the money. So I couldn't agree more with that. Do not stand up in front of the leadership team with a 15 slide presentation about this keyword and that keyword. Be like, here's how having this strategy is helping us generate revenue and here's what we want to do. I think this is the, sometimes this is the challenge and also fun part about marketing is you're not going to have perfect data and so you need to be able to make the case of, hey, we've done this just with this one cluster for six months now. We think it could be this. We want to increase our investment in SEO from spending no money to we want to spend 20 grand and now we want to spend 200 grand. And you're going to keep, you're going to have to keep, you know, using some data and some gut feeling to get yourself there. All right, I want to go to this doc because I want to give some preference to the Exit 5 community people who added in some questions. This one is a little bit more of a career question. If you haven't gone down an SEO specialization path, what's the best way to get practical experience with it in order to satisfy requirements for more senior marketing positions? So I'm assuming that this is more of a somebody who's trying to get a more senior marketing position. You need to have a little bit of experience in each area. How, how do you think you would approach that?

I'll say most senior marketers that I work with or have worked with don't have a lot of technical knowledge or I wouldn't say they're SEO experts at all. They understand the channel, they understand its relation, but that's why, you know, they rely on a lot of specialists to come in and, and start doing that. I think though, the best way to get experience is there's just so much information out there that, you know, can kind of get overwhelming. Is really just focusing on the relationship between content and keywords. The technical stuff is kind of its own thing as well. There's a lot there that matters from a best practice standpoint, but that is more of like for web dev. But think about more of the best practices around content and websites and user experience and good content, how it all should link together. Like those are the things that I think are easier to learn and ultimately are going to be more important to you as a leader because you're going to be the one directing and helping people to build a really great 24. 7 salesperson in the form of your website.

Yeah, just double down on that. I think that a lot of marketers think of SEO as being this incredibly challenging technical thing that is confusing and they don't necessarily understand. But the reality is, is that SEO is just another tactic to help get your target audience to your site to, you know, engage with your brand and hopefully, you know, schedule a demo. It. It is just another marketing tactic to get people to see you. So thinking of it in that way is. Is really important. Just understand that keyword research is audience research and that what you're doing is creating content for your website so that your target audience gets there. You're building that net to get them to your site.

Great. Yeah. I think your point about it being a channel in the overall approaches is an important one. A lot of love for the demand well 100 organic shirt. Not to put Chantel and the rest of the team on the spot, but I would be willing to bet that if you purchased a Demand well subscription, they would be. They would, they would for sure find a way to mail you a 22 + shipping and handling shirt in the mail. So go and buy Demand well get it. Buy Buy Demand well. And we're going to making this offer on the spot. They will send you. I'll send it to you 100% organic shirt. You could have long sleeves. The best part about when you get a long sleeve shirt, you can also cut it and make it a short sleeve shirt. You can make it a tank top. It's actually three in one and they.

Are actually 100% organic cotton. So they're actually organic shirts.

It's great. Well, you have to buy demand. Well, and prove it. And you check, check the label. Okay, here's a good one. Well, these are. I say that every time. That's like, wow, man. When I do a podcast interview and then someone's like, good question, Dave. I'm like, don't say that. It's a crutch. Then I just did it to myself. Here's a good one. Of course. How do you handle search intent for your homepage? Where niche B2B SaaS whose homepage currently ranks for both branded and core product category terms. As more competition enters the category, we don't want to lose rankings for our product category to a competitor's page. We can better match search intent. How would you go about handling a situation like this?

I think in general, marketers rely really heavily on their homepage to do a lot of the lifting. And my recommendation would be to create a wider net through other content on your site to drive a lot of traffic. So I know that's not really answering the question around what would you do with your homepage, but my recommendation would be to not worry as much about your homepage.

Yeah, I think your homepage has a lot of jobs to do and you can have other pages whose job it is to rank. Well, if you are ranking, you know, like, let's just say you're number one and number two or something like that for this category. Definitely don't try to like change Google to, you know, index something else instead, like enjoy that ranking. And I think what Betsy says is now that just becomes the center pillar for that category and you're going to surround it with related terms and related resources that link to it as the center of that pillar. There might be other categories that you need to create a new pillar and center around, but for the most part, if you're really, really ranking well, I wouldn't try to change Google's mind, so to speak. I'd keep that momentum. But to protect it over time, as more competitors come in, you have to be answering more questions, creating more helpful long form content. And that's all going to help support and build authority over time.

Yeah, you could probably do both.

Right.

Because if this is a niche company, if this is a niche offering. People are going to associate your brand with that niche offering anyway. It's not like you're a HubSpot, for example, where they now have 20 different products and you're going to have different, you know, people are going to come to your homepage, then go elsewhere. Let's see what else, what others do I like. Here's a good one. Just, just because there's always a WordPress question, we are using a WordPress theme that we bought in 2016. Will this have an impact on our SEO?

I mean I think it really would depend. I'd probably, I mean I probably want to dig into it just to see if there were some elements inside of the theme that you wouldn't be able to change that might impact your search performance. But the best practices are going to stay true no matter what theme you're using. You know, so you're going to want to pay attention from a structured standpoint to your title tags, your meta descriptions, your H1s. All of the same. You know, you're going to make sure you don't broken links. You're going to want to make sure you have a good page on page experience. All the same best practices stay true regardless of the theme. I think the biggest thing I would look into is just make sure that there aren't things that you can't change inside of that theme that might negatively impact you just based on some of those SEO best practices.

Let's go to next one I want to skip. Let's go to this one's from Michelle. I've heard all URLs should build off of the primary but I also had and there's I have this in the doc. So all URLs should build off the primary website.com blog but I've also heard you can build via secondary blog.website.com and it should make no difference to SEO. Depending on who I talk to in the SEO world, some would vehemently, vehemently great word, disagree and say it does impact SEO. So this is the classic subdomain versus subfolder discussion. You both have been in the SEO world for 15 years. You probably answered this a million times.

So what's the latest subfolder Thousand percent.

Can you explain that? Because they didn't use that term in the. In the question. So just explain it like in.

In.

In a. To a non SEO person like using a website example.

I think the quick answer is Google sees those as somewhat separate in terms of authority. So if you have a subdomain and a Regular domain, you're essentially cutting your site and page rank authority into. Into half.

So you, you'd want to have the first one, which is exit5.com blog is going to rank better than blog.exit5.com and.

It'S not necessarily that one can outrank the other. Right. It's certainly possible to have a subdomain and that subdomain rank really well. What you're doing over time though is kind of creating separate spheres of influence and authority instead of having one that you're kind of building on and building on and building on. So I don't want it to say like if you have a subdomain, it can't rank like that. Definitely can. It's just more about are you investing all of your authority and all of your content into one domain that can get, when it gets a backlink will spread out the page rank among that domain without it being separate. So it gets a little technical there. But it's, it's essentially like I just want to invest all in one property versus trying to split it into like a duplex.

Yeah. Just consolidate your authority and I think that you'll be rewarded. I love what Jonathan just said about Google recently made the change from maps.google.com to google.com maps they did.

So there you go. Follow it. But get your hat on if they said it all right, here's a good one, really good one in the, in the Q and A. And I mean this one for real. My company, because I feel you, girl. Aaron Lewis. My company wants to switch marketing site to a new domain. We understand that there will be immediate and potentially dramatic loss in traffic. Big hit to organic, man. This is the part that hurts me. After spending six months investing in SEO, does all that work go to waste? What's. It's like you do all this work and the CEOs like, we're renaming the company. You're like, are you kidding me? After spending six months investing in SEO, does all that work go to waste? What steps can you take to mitigate that drop and build back up post switch? What most influences that recovery of organic traffic? Great question, man.

I've done so many of these in my career that the migration of content, I think where you have a case where all you're doing is maybe changing the domain and maybe reskinning it or something like that. If all the content essentially stays the same. So say you had a thousand blog posts and five other core pages, you're going to have the same five core pages, the same thousand blog posts and they all interlinked the same. The less actual change that's happening, the least likely there's actually going to be any kind of dramatic drop. So if you're really, truly migrating and actually keeping everything you have and you're doing 1 to 1, 301 redirects. So you're saying, okay, Google end users, the content that you used to love here is now over here. If you do that correctly and you map everything correctly and everything is that you can actually see an increase because you're maybe you're improving something about the theme or your page loads better on the new domain. You do kind of cut a little bit every time you redirect something. There's just a little bit of loss in page rank. But overall I think there's usually really good steps to take to mitigate that. If you're keeping everything the same and just doing 301 redirects, you should be, you know, in the good graces for the long term. If you're changing everything like, you know, we're not even porting everything over and we're just going to start the new and we're not going to redirect anything. That's where you can get like serious, serious hits and then you are actually wasting that previous content and effort.

So do it right. 301 redirect. Rosie wants to know, is it still the case that if you post an article on your website but also elsewhere like Medium, it's detrimental to your SEO?

Yeah.

And Mediums had to make some changes so that you can canonical back. There is a piece of code called a canonical tag which is basically telling. It allows both URLs to load. It's not like a redirect, but it acts like a redirect to a crawler. It says, hey, I know that you're reading this content on this page, but the source of that information is over here. So best practice would be to, if you do post to both of those, have the, the Medium URL canonicalize back to the URL that you published on your site. And that way you can get the added visibility of being a part of like the medium ecosystem. But the page that's going to rank in search is actually the one on your domain.

Yeah, Google's going to be looking for original content and if they see the same content in two different places, they are not going to necessarily know that it's it is yours unless you send them that signal.

I've also just found like from a pure traffic and audience building standpoint kind of like, any channel. The way to really grow within a channel, whether that's Medium or TikTok or LinkedIn or YouTube, is to create dedicated original content for that platform. And I think that's somewhat related to that advice too. Like, if you're just taking your blog content and kind of like replicating on Medium, who's going to go and follow that as opposed to, like, we're creating something dedicated and new. This is a question from Justin that we got in our Google document. What's the biggest difference between a content marketing strategy and a thought leadership content strategy in regard to the SEO strategy? Let me take a crack at answering that and I'll see what you two have to say about that. They're not the same, but I would say that thought leadership to me is nested under the content marketing strategy. To me, it's like, as a brand, it starts with this fundamental belief, like, as a brand, we want to create content. We believe that if we create content, that will help us attract our dream customers to our website and know about us. Okay, great. How are we going to do that? One of those tracks is thought leadership. I still believe that. If what you both said in the beginning, which is, comes back to like, what are my dream customers searching for and how can we show up for those things? I think it's no different with thought leadership. If you're, if you're writing about thought leadership, that has nothing to do with your business, it's going to be completely misaligned. The thought leadership has to be about your business anyway. So let's talk about demand. Well, as an example, right, if your CEO Mitch, is writing thought leadership content about something, that his thought leadership content should be about SEO and should be about the future of SEO and what's happening in the market and where the world is going. Am I in the ballpark with that answer?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the best visual that you have there is that your thought leadership content that you create is a part of your content strategy, but it doesn't make up the entire strategy.

Yeah, I think push versus pull as well. Like, thought leadership is something you create and then you push out into the world, whether that's through paid or through social or through other email or channels. Whereas the other part of that content strategy is, is your poll, which is, I know people are looking for this information. I know people are typing this in. I want to be there when they do. So having a good combination of both is a way to kind of pull them in with your more informational and helpful content and maybe direct them to your thought leadership as more of a conversion point. And then same with, you know, if you have that piece of content pushing it out into the world.

Yeah. And they can work in both ways. Your thought leadership could be an original report and you, you interviewed, you know, you broke down 50 high converting B2B SaaS websites and explained like what's working, what's not and where this is going. They can all, they can all work together. So I don't think you can make them different things. Okay, here's a good one. This is from Jonathan. What are the biggest lifts low hanging fruit you see regularly that folks can do for their, for their sites for SEO? So I'm going to rephrase this. It's like what's one obvious thing that if you were to look at 10 companies websites like 9 out of 10 of them are like not doing that. What could they go do?

One thing that comes to mind would be to create an HTML site map. I think that there's been a lot of debate over the years as to whether or not that matters. But I think what you're doing there is creating a really great resource for Google to come and find a clickable link to every relevant piece of content on your site and kind of a map, literally a site map of the content that's on your site.

It's pretty clear who's kind of developed like a pillar page style of content, an article style and who hasn't. And I think those that are creating those truly long form contents that are about individual topics that they play in versus maybe just doing thought leadership or blog pieces. An example might be if you want to rank for B2B SEO tools instead of creating a blog that's like these are the best SEO tools for B2B to utilize in 2023. That's what they're trying to produce to rank for that keyword. Instead of just creating a large article about B2B SEO tools that has 2000 words on it and comprehensive and helpful and having that be the pillar page that everything links to. So that's kind of that quick win of like instead of, it's kind of what we're talking about with the blogs. It's not always have to be a blog. Start thinking of different types of content that can, you can kind of put that stake in the ground of like this is my number one pillar for this topic.

Awesome. All right, there's, there's 600 questions still out there. We would never get to them. We could Be here all day. Betsy, Mitch, thank you so much for doing this. I learned a bunch during the session. I know this will be exciting. This will be valuable for people. For those listening, we'll have the recording, we'll send that out. If you're in the Exit 5 community, it'll also be in there. And this will also be on the Exit 5 podcast in a little bit. Do me a favor, if you got anything from this session, go check out Demand. Well, they're OG sponsors of Exit 5 and I'm lucky to be to be working with them again. So we can do insightful sessions like this as demandwell.com maybe you'll get 100% organic shirt and you can really tell us if the material is organic or not. This was great. We got SEO strategy, tinfoil hat, Google AI. We got, we talked about a lot of stuff. I hope this was valuable for people. Betsy, Mitch, good to see you. Thank you for doing this. Thanks everybody for participating. Great job in the chat. The unsung hero of this is always the people in the chat, especially when it comes to SEO. There's always good people in there. So thank you. We'll see you all later. You can get a free tin foil hat. You have to buy three shirts every, every. Every three shirts you get a tinfoil hat. Okay, goodbye. Enjoy the rest of your day.

Thanks, everybody.

Okay, bye.

Bye.

Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com. We've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates. Plus we have a community. A community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about. Get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list. There you can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2BE Marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make Sure. I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's Hatch fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do. And they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you got to do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

Today's episode is also brought to you by Paramark. It's July 2nd half of the year is here and hey, before you know it, 2026 planning and everything's going to be here. But let's be real, most teams are still guessing when it comes to what's actually working in marketing today, which channels to double down on, which campaigns are worth running again or not and what's just noise, what's actually contributing to pipeline and what's not. It's Messy. This is B2B marketing and that's exactly where Paramark comes in. Paramark is a marketing attribution platform that shows you what's working and what's not so you know exactly where to invest your next dollar. They use marketing mix modeling and incrementality testing to give you a full picture of performance across every channel, tactic and region. And it's built by a marketer made for marketers. And right now they're hosting a special office hours on helping you with your second half of the year. Planning, forecasting and putting your best foot forward for the rest of this year and into 2026. It's not a sales pitch from them, but this is your chance to get real help from their experts that are at the intersection of marketing and planning. Bring your data, bring your questions, your roadmap and the Paramark team is going to help you figure out what's driving results, where to cut and where to invest moving forward. So stop guessing and you can plan smarter right now with the team at.

Paramark and but you got to grab.

An office hour spot. I highly recommend doing this. Pranav is awesome. The rest of their team is great. They totally get this space. You should go check them out. Go to paramark.com office hours. That's paramark.com office hours.