Demystifying SEO For B2B Marketers In 2022

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This episode of the Exit 5 podcast is brought to you by Demandwell. Demandwell is the best SEO solution for B2B SaaS marketers. They've helped customers like lessonly drive 40% of their revenue from Organic Search and they help Terminus make Organic search their number one source of demos. Here's how it works. Number one is results. DemandWell is built for driving the outcomes that B2B marketers care about demand traffic, leads and revenue. Number two is ease and control. Junior team members can follow recommended steps right in the platform, while experts can customize and maintain full control over their work. Number three is speed. With everything in one platform, DemandWell helps you crank out content that ranks and drives leads in minutes rather than hours. SEO expert or not, you can give DemandWell a try and listeners of the Exit 5 podcast can get a free competitive SEO audit to see just how you're ranking relative to the competition. Go to demandwell.com FOMO that's F O M O. And you can get a free SEO consultation today. Right from DemandWell. That's demandwell.com FOMO FOMO. And you'll get a free SEO consultation today. 1, 2, 3, 4.

Exit, exit, exit.

My guest on this episode is Mitch Cassie. He's founder and CEO of DemandWell. I'm back. I'm back, I'm back. We're here. Perfect. We'll let people roll. Yes, people are here. Hello. Okay. Nicole's from Indianapolis, obviously. Are you in Indianapolis right now?

I am.

Okay. What's up, Andrew? Amy's here from Austin, Texas. My wife's going to Austin next week. Two weeks. Cleveland, Ohio. I'm in Vermont.

Oh, nice.

Tonto's here. She made this happen. Thank you. Okay, look, I want to shout everybody out, but we're going to cover a lot. We could talk forever. Mitch and I are now fully onboarded with Gold Cast. We will not screw this up today for everybody watching. We will be recording this. Yes, we will be recording this. I'm going to interview Mitch. I have a lot of questions I want to ask, and selfishly, I think that I'm going to try to speak on behalf of a lot of marketers that I've been part of in the community and other places because I wanted to do a session on, like, demystifying SEO for B2B. You and I were just talking backstage about, like, I've made mistakes in the past where I've under invested in SEO or thought about it wrong or thought I was in too crowded of a market. But you've seen time and time again that this is a fundamental piece of a modern B2B marketing strategy. And I think that's why there's so many people that showed up for this. We had this idea to partner on it, but I didn't expect to have over a thousand people registered. So I think this is a hot topic. I want to dive into that. You can put all your questions in. There's a Q and A. You can put text Q and A. Mitch and I are going to pause every now and then and take some questions as they come up. But I'd also love to give you the opportunity, if you took the time out of your day to be here today, you can also do a video Q and A. So if you raise your hand, we'll pull you up on stage and I'd love to hear from you directly. So, Mitch, that said, thanks for doing this give us some quick background on you. From the first marketing person at Lessonle to now founder of a SaaS company, what's your backstory?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks for having me Dave. Stoked to be here and thank you all for showing up. Hopefully we can be helpful today. So background on me. You know actually my personal mission statement is to help others grow. So days like today is like just fantastic in my mind and that just so happens to be our company mission statement as well is to help others grow. But yeah, so you know I've been doing SEO since I was in college. I was just not satisfied at all with the level of digital marketing education going on when I was going through school and so started doing SEO kind of nights and weekends during college. But fast forward to lessonly I joined as the third employee overall but first marketing hire and built out that whole marketing program. I actually tried to completely avoid SEO at lastly. I don't know if I've told you that Dave, but I didn't want to be viewed as this one trick pony kind of thing and so I tried to completely do everything but SEO.

Even though that was your background?

Even though that was my background, you.

Silly young marketing person. It's like you need all the advantages that you can get and let's just throw away the channel that I actually know how to use and let's come up with something brand new.

Awesome. Exactly. Exactly. That was me and learned quickly. So I, I was like mid doing all these other things and then published one download with a form at the time. We did end up ungating it eventually but it was in vogue at the time. It was pre you Dave.

People can't say the word form around. I don't like the drift thing is is in the past now it's okay. We, you know people say the word like they're like we used an F on the website and I'm like what? They're like a form?

Exactly. So you know I launched our first downloadable asset on a Monday and by Friday we had over 100 people who had downloaded it. And so you know we realized that market was really good for organic search and so grew that out a lot. We did invest a lot in organic search and that is still their number one channel as a single channel to drive growth today. But after five years of working at Lessonly sad the time of my life but had this long term dream of starting my own agency. So I did that was February of 2019. Started Just Me just doing services for about 18 months. Had a great time doing that. But I was just, I was holding our customers back because it was me plus a spreadsheet and that has only so much scale. So I decided to actually turn this into a software company. And that's what we are today.

It's amazing. So wait, just. The goal of this is not to make it like, for those listening to, not to make it a full demand well story, But I'm just curious, so I'm going to ask. So we're going to get into the SEO stuff.

Yeah, yeah.

What part of the human agency part does demand well, replace?

Yeah, absolutely. So we like to say it's the best of both worlds of what exists today. So you've got agencies that can have really high customization, but really low scale. And then on the other side, you've got data dump tools like Semrush that provide nearly infinite scale but almost no customization. And so we've found this balance between the two where we've created a platform that can be very scalable but also customized to each individual customer.

Awesome. Okay, so let's talk about SEO. As a marketing leader marketer at a B2B SaaS company today, building out a marketing strategy, where does SEO fit?

I think it fits in a marketing mix. It is not a silver bullet. And I know some people are shocked when I say something like that. Like, we actually find that folks that are doing well in many channels do better in organic search than those who say, I'm going to abandon everything else.

Just actually, can I. Can I. Can we take this back even further? Yeah, let's start like this. Who owns SEO? Like, where does SEO sit in a modern marketing team? Who owns it and what is the job that that role should be playing?

Yeah, yeah, totally love that. So I would argue if teams are split between brand and demand, you know, I think it lives in the demand side. I think SEO often gets plugged into the brand side because it's involved with and tangential to content, and content typically lives on brand. But I actually view SEO as a distribution channel along the same exact lines as email paid, you know, ads, you know, all that.

Okay, so you're talking about you have a content team and you have demand gen team. I would say most companies here have that.

Yep.

You're actually basically splitting parts of the function. And so I like this approach also because I think I've kind of also found that, like, oftentimes, if you want to hire good writers, you need to hire good writers who want to write. They don't want to do the things that you might need content to do, like grow, traffic, convert at this clip, you know, rank for these keywords. It's very rare is that same personality type. And so when you split them out, you can actually achieve those things. But how do those two functions, like, work together? Because I've seen it kind of like content team has one set of goals. SEO team within Demand Gen has another set of goals. What are like the rules of engagement?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, one thing on how to find those people, a question I love to ask in interviews for that kind of role is do you identify as a writer who can market or a marketer who can write? And marketers who can write are probably better fit for the SEO performance side. Writers who can market probably better on the brand side. But yeah, I think it totally depends on the team culture and team leadership in terms of how those two parts are working together. There's a lot of opinions around this stuff. And where things go south is when demand has a very strong opinion that it needs to be only SEO and only distribution. And brand is, let's never say the word, you know, algorithm ever again in our life. And like, when. When that's the culture, it's very difficult for them to work together. But, yeah, if we can all be on the same page that, you know, we're in business to drive growth, it's not an art project. It's not a writing competition. It is, you know, a business. If you can align around that, then I think you can find that balance.

Well, it's like, also, it's not binary in that, like, just because you're doing SEO doesn't mean you can't also write a short blog post about your podcast in a way that is meaningful or write something else creative. I think you can pick and choose your spots. You do them both. So, all right, if Demand Gen owns SEO, what do you like to see from a goal standpoint? How do you measure that channel? How do you set a goal for it? Demand Gen is responsible for bringing in, creating $10 million in pipeline. How does SEO fit into that puzzle? How do you set measurable goals around SEO?

So, as you know, having been in the marketing seat, I am really not ever satisfied with goals that are less than revenue, than revenue sourced. You know, if I were. If I were in that seat again today and, you know, had someone focused on SEO reporting to me, I would hold them to revenue sourced from that. There's a couple problems with that, though. One is we find a lot of marketers today still have a really difficult time Attributing revenue, especially to organic channels, you know, it's, it's a lot easier when you can have your UTM codes and that's pretty clear. But you know, when you're falling through the cracks, you know that that can be really difficult. But I would, I would challenge everyone on the call to figure it out. There are ways to figure it out and you can and would definitely recommend that you do that.

And so, so that's kind of like you're just overall like first, first principle thinking. Like whether, whether I own SEO or content or events or social media, my number one thing that I want to try to figure out is revenue source from that channel.

Exactly. Yeah.

And it doesn't have to be perfect. You're not going to have perfect attribution, but it's like starting to solve the puzzle and having like kind of proxies for just starting to think like that.

Right, exactly. And it takes a lot of work to do it. You know, when we were at lessonly we used visible and I'm a huge fan of that tool, but it took probably nine months before we started to trust it. Yeah, you know, it takes a lot of work. The other part is, you know, when you think about getting revenue and this, this applies to all channels, but in organic in particular, time to go from I'm starting this channel to I have revenue coming in from this channel. It's always a lot longer than people think. And one of the things that I think is contributing to that is most folks forget about deal cycle time. If you decide to start paid search or organic search or anything today and you have a 60 day sales cycle, you shouldn't evaluate it 30 days from now. And I see people doing that all the time. You know, you should be evaluating it, you know, 90, 120 days out, that kind of thing. Like let your sales deal cycle actually flow through. But in the case of organic search, you know, it's very non binary in terms of are you doing well or not. Yes, you should be getting revenue. I would say you should be getting revenue definitely within the first year, if not for six months to some degree. But when it becomes a truly repeatable source of revenue for you, that can take a little bit of time. And so showing those milestones along the way is really important.

Can you go a level deeper on this? A question from Krista, which is great, which I was going to follow up on. Okay, so obviously overall goal revenue source from that channel, but like, let's go a layer deeper and say what are the two to three KPIs that you as like CMO Mitch or whatever marketing leader Mitch is, wants to get out of SEO or if you're the demand gen leader, what are Those couple of KPIs that are more specific?

Yeah, absolutely. So you know, backing out of revenue. I want to know meetings or deals.

Okay, so meetings, meetings or deals from search.

Yeah. So are we actually talking to humans? And of course PLG world, that may not happen, but are you getting deals? Is it real business opportunity? However you measure that and then taking a step back from there is what's the inflow of those? So whether you call those leads or first touches or whatever, how many of those are happening actually on your site? At the meta, we have reporting that takes it beyond that to look at Google Search console and see like, where are you today? Where could you be that you're not even? So like, we definitely go further. But if I'm putting on CMO hat, I want to know are we making money? Are we getting at bats to make money? And then what's the highest level inflow? And then I ideally like to look at the conversions between those as well.

There's a lot of nuance in there though, right? Because like, it's not as easy as just like, well, how many meanings did we get from organic search? Because so much of that content might not even be conversion focused. It might be an article that your company wrote like three years ago. How does that factor in to this?

Yeah, I think it's important to figure out your rules and stay consistent. And if you're looking at this, if you have it defined well and you all agree that that is your definition and stick to that definition over time. That's how I've gotten around it. That's probably not perfect at all, but that is how I've done it in the past.

So you could take a more macro view and say that we're going to look at revenue from organic as an overall channel. So of all the traffic that comes to our website, the slice of it that is organic, we own that in some way. Obviously there's some things you can't always control. So you're looking at that as a source and then from there you can drill down into. Okay. Of that organic traffic. What are the keywords? What are the landing pages and articles? Right. How are those converting? What are the. What are the opportunities? Where's that? Where's high volume low conversion or high conversion, low volume? What levers do we have to move each of these needles as? Then it Ultimately drives meetings.

Absolutely.

If you're hiring a new. You're hiring me. I'm new SEO person on. On your team. What goal do I have coming in? Because one thing that I've. One mistake that I've made with SEO is like either hiring for it or hiring an agency for it. You're like, hey, Mitch, your goal is to grow traffic 30% this year, over the year. And that is just like, not. It's a terrible goal. Like, it's not a real thing. So, like, what do you want that person to actually come in and do? What do you do in the first month, the first three months? How do you break that down into weekly and monthly rhythms? Like, what does that person. What should they be working on and what are their goals?

Well, one really tactical thing that I love to do is I like someone in this role hitting a publish button on day one. So literally day one, I will challenge that person. Hey, get a blog post out today, period. Because one of the kind of principles we've found to be true is that our most productive customers are always our most successful customers. The folks that are just getting after it and not waiting around. That leads to tremendous success. But that's one very tactical thing, I'd say. Overall, the most important thing for the first month, in my opinion, is audience, audience, audience. Understanding who the people are that your company is trying to attract, understanding their brain we can tap into. I like to say Google is the single largest social experiment that has ever happened from a data perspective, because they get like 6 to 8 billion data points every single day. 15% of which keywords typed in actually have never been typed into Google before. So it's just massive and it's always changing. So being able to tap into that through the keyword planner in Google Ads and understanding your audience through the lens of what they're searching in Google, I think is absolutely critical.

Okay, so.

And then you get to production.

Sarah says, is your SEO person responsible for actually posting Normally, I haven't heard that before. I would probably say that in most teams, most startups, they. They might be. You might have to also do content creation. Like, I've had it where I had a writer and the SEO person, the SEO person actually owned kind of like posting in HubSpot, managing all that stuff. But I also think, like, to Mitch's point, even if the SEO person is not doing the writing, to have them hop in and like, let's go, let's update some old content on your first day, I think that's what you can mean by publishing a post?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Check something off a list that first day.

I want to go back to this and then we're going to go to Andrew Krista said in chat. Also, do you have any real example of when SEO delivered or didn't deliver your new goal or your revenue goal? Sorry?

Oh yeah, I've got tons on both sides. You want me to answer now?

Yeah. Give me one or two examples from your career.

Yeah, yeah. So I'll give you a couple from the lessonly world. That one that I shared, that we got 100 downloads within that first week. We I think closed one customer ever from that. And we had, you know, we had thousands and thousands of leads that had come in from that but they never got to revenue. And that's why I'm so passionate about holding to revenue because you can get so many leads all day long from organic. But if they're not converting then was that really actually valuable? Actually it's probably negative because you just wasted a bunch of salespeople time. On the flip side though, if you were to search for online training software, that's a very, you know, non exciting keyword but it is absolutely critical to their strategy and has led to many, many dollars of revenue coming in the door from that.

I'll give you another example. I early days of drift for me, we were trying to build this category of conversational marketing. We didn't have a ton of content on live chat. I missed out on a ton of qualified conversations because we didn't want to be seen as live chat. And so we didn't have an SEO strategy around live chat. Where the reality of it is I should have been fishing in that pond and then telling people about here's how we think about it and doing it a different way. And so I think I missed out on a huge slice of revenue. Okay, Andrew, go to you so people don't have to just Today's episode is.

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No, it's just, you're just on camera in front of everybody sitting there trying to hang out. I should have my actual T shirts on for this. Consistently the top. Andrew's consistently the top commenter or contributor, so I love to see this. Go ahead Andrew. You got, you got the mic.

Thanks Dave. Mitch, good to see you.

Can you talk about link building? I always thought about SEO as kind of like brushing your teeth, but like link building is like the flossing like that people don't actually do. But your doctor's always asking you like, hey, are you actually doing that every day? Can you talk about how that's changed over time. I mean, we got to the point where we're literally putting this on priority, putting a quota on them of how many outreaches are you doing, domain authority and stuff like that. But I've been out of that game for a few months. I want to know what the latest is.

Well, link building is definitely the like ugly underbelly of SEO, past, present and future. I think I got a couple link.

Building emails this morning to build some links on my website. If anybody would like, I could forward them to you.

Yeah, I'm sure you did. I'm sure you did. And the reason why it is so targeted, we don't have people emailing us every day saying, hey, here's some really great free content for you. The reason why people really focus on link building is because it's the tiebreaker. It is the most impactful part of the algorithm. If all other things are equal, that is going to break the tie. That's why it's viewed as so important. But Google absolutely rewards anything that is more effort. So the more effort of the type of link, the more likely it will actually have that impact. So Google's really good at knowing. Yeah, people are getting emails every single day from all of these companies, you know, and they have lists, they have literal lists of websites that they know that are being pitched from those companies. And so they know that the level of effort there is almost nothing. Whereas getting published in TechCrunch, that's really difficult. And so that's, that's always gonna be better. So yeah, at the end of the day, my take on link building is if you would be doing it anyways, you know, if you were doing fill in the blank thing anyways, I would do that, but filter it with how can I get links from this? So if you're doing pr, I would not have a quota of links for pr, but I would say you should be doing PR and you could scale PR for the sake of pr, but then along with that actually, you know, have that filter of links as well.

Well, isn't it also like chicken and the egg? Like, it's like, isn't the best link building strategy, wouldn't it be great content? Because ideally you're not emailing people saying, hi, we wrote this article, can you link to it? It's like you created this amazing piece of content that everyone in your niche is talking about and they linking to it and sharing it around and that's how you build links.

Like, that's absolutely.

I'm not an SEO expert, but obviously I talk about every topic like I am an expert. I just can't see a world where you have someone in your team reaching out for the sake of backlinks. I just. That feels like a decade ago tactic that today is just like, maybe you'll get a meaningful link from that, but like, there's just no way that that's going to be worth anybody's time. And then the only way to do it is to automate it, which is the really, you know, spammy, junky way of doing it. And so it's just like, is that really worth it? Or like, maybe if your content team is doing like one killer pillar piece of content every month, maybe you send out a couple outreach emails with that, not asking to link to it, but maybe like I used to always hit up, like our VC firms, partners, investors, advisors, asking them to share content like that. We did. And so I also think it, like, can speak to this pillar content approach, which is like, you can't promote content every single day, but if you create one pillar piece a month or two a quarter, you can do it, like, during these occasions.

Yeah, exactly. That is definitely the best way to truly scale. Because a lot of times when you look at the deficit of yourself versus a competitor, you're not talking like two or three links. It's usually an order of magnitude larger, whether it's 1,000 or 10,000 links. And to think of conversion rates of email to links, I mean, you're gonna have to send out a million emails just to get that level of link. So why not take that same amount of time, do what you should be doing, be a part of the conversations on the Internet and, you know, forums and Quora, like all those places that you should be anyway, and then also add a link while you're there.

All right, I want to go to this question in the Q and A from Cameron and I would love to do another video Q and A if you're out there. Although I just got this message, mouse battery very low. And this is the worst. If you have this mouse, like, once it's out, you're like, you're not working for hours because you got to plug it in. It's the worst thing. So, Mitch, you might have to drive later.

Okay, perfect.

How do you think about the growing. This is from Cameron. How do you think about the growing challenges that privacy, lack of tracking ability present for the attribution and SEO, specifically the fact that you are not able to track all of the visits?

Yeah, absolutely. I think that goes back to what I said earlier about just staying consistent. And I know people don't really want to hear that, but the end of the day, there was never a point in time when it was exact. There was never a point in time. Google Analytics, not a lot of people know this. When you get a report from Google Analytics, it is not real data. It is a sample that they have extrapolated. Unless you're paying for the 360 suite, even that is technically not accurate. So, you know, there's this misconception that there has been a better time in history. It's really not to me. There's always been holes all through our measured marketing, but yet just have to be comfortable with that margin of error. And if you have it defined and everyone bought in from the top down, everyone bought in of the definition of what you're tracking and stay consistent with it, I think that is the best result. Never ever try to get accuracy to be the primary concern.

What would happen if there was no Google search data? Could you still have an SEO function?

I think so. If there was none, I would then rely on third parties more than I do now. Like, I really like we use exclusively Google APIs in our reporting because it's from the horse's mouth. If they cut that in the future, you know, third parties would be what we would lean on.

I was just thinking like, yeah, obviously all the searches happening on Google, but there's so much value in that knowing. Even take out the keywords, like which pages are getting organic traffic, which are converting, you could still maybe come up with proxies in some way.

Yeah, because it's all observational, you know, like.

But that's interesting to hear you say that. It's interesting to hear you say that. That, you know, Google data is not perfect also. And so it's just like another reminder to like use it directionally. But ultimately you got to be able to take it as an input and then go make a decision.

Exactly.

Okay, here's another one for you. This from Andy. Can we get Mitch's perspective on in house verse outsourcing SEO? A bunch of people upvoted this one.

Yeah, for sure. So it all depends on your team, in my opinion, and your goals and what you're trying to do. You know, there are so many different ways to slice this cake, but my personal opinion is that the strategy and management of SEO should be internal. You should have someone who is tied to that as part of their personal KPIs.

In demand gen.

In demand gen. Yeah. From A content production perspective within organic search, which I talk a lot about content because, you know, the way that I break search down is into three buckets. We've already talked about two of them, but one we haven't yet. So we call it. We have an acronym called ice. So it stands for infrastructure, Content and endorsements. Infrastructures. The technical stuff that, you know, a lot of people equate SEO to the technical stuff as well. Totally disagree with that. It is such a small part of it, especially these days. It can be impactful if done wrong, but it's never going to be the reason that you win. And so that's like check the box and move the heck on. Then you get into content, which is there's so much room in the content world to grow and to create revenue. And then there's endorsements as well, which we talked about that we call links or backlinks. We call those endorsements.

Okay, hold on. Well, let's pause on this. And so, yeah, so this is your kind of overarching SEO framework. It has three pieces in it. The infrastructure, the content, and the endorsements on the infrastructure. Let's just briefly talk about what's in that bucket.

Yeah.

Because I don't know, does it just mean the website? What does that mean?

Yeah, so technical things. Yeah. Related to website stuff. So things like URL structure, URL consistency. Everyone on the call, I would recommend going to your website and see if both the trailing version of your URLs and non trailing slash version of your URLs are rendering. If so, that's actually a canonical problem. I won't go into more detail, but take a look at that. Things like that. So like how's your URL structured? What's your page speed? You know, that kind of stuff.

Okay, great. Second one is content. That one I think is obvious, which is how do you execute? What's the actual creative, what's the content? Articles, videos, content on the site. And then what's endorsements?

So endorsements is links. Yeah.

Cool. You could almost think of measuring the SEO role by this framework. Right. It's like, hey, Dave, you're our new SEO person. The three things that you own are infrastructure, content, and endorsements. And there's goals around each, like infrastructure. We need to complete XYZ project by this date. Content. Do this by this date. Endorsements, set a goal of building X number of links. This is great. People like this. And if you didn't know, chat people really liked your framework.

Oh, good, good.

So, okay, sorry, I wanted to get you to explain each one of those. And I'm coming back to this. I take a lot of notes and whatever. So in house versus agency really depends on if that's what SEO is supposed to do. Infrastructure, content, endorsements. You're going to hire in house first, agency based on who's on your team today, current expertise today, what's available in the market. Don't you think it's hard to just say in house versus agency? Because like, what if you want to hire in house but you actually can't? You cannot find an SEO manager that you're going to pay 120 grand or whatever. You can't find that person. So then you only have one choice. Right. It's very challenging to say, oh yeah.

It is for sure. And yeah, I'm glad we went through that framework because that is how I would think. It's like, do you want in house or agency for infrastructure? You want in house your agency for content. You want to in house your agency for endorsements and just acknowledging that they don't all have to be the same. And frankly, a lot of times my preference would be that they're not all the same. Someone who's really good at creating relationships and community management, like whoever's running your social media, that should be the person who's doing the endorsements. Totally different thought process than the person who nerds out about making sure that your trailing slash is your canonical source. Very different people.

Right. Wait, so how does social media own the endorsements?

Yeah, so I think that the person who's going to be good at social is a similar personality type of someone who is going to be good at endorsements as well. Because it's all relationship building. You know, the things that you should be doing is having conversations that are, you know, externally facing, like what a social media person would be doing.

Yeah. And it's like a natural extension. And you're not going to carve out a separate headcount person just for that one thing.

Right.

Okay. So I was going to say, like infrastructure, you could definitely hire an agency.

Yeah.

Content feels like a more challenging one. But I also see a lot of SaaS companies that have a content team and also a content agency, so they can just do more at scale. Right?

Yeah. So that's what I was going to say was my. Because I think the question was, what's my preference? My personal preference is to have someone on the team dedicated to managing content, but not have them create much content. I love to see, you know, a lot of freelance work I love to see a lot of, you know, industry subject matter experts. I love to see taking other employees from the team and, you know, subject matter experts from the team and having them engaged in content creation as well. So I personally like when that person on the team who's the content manager is genuinely managing the flow, managing the strategy, but not necessarily typing in the words.

I think to me that's like the dream hire for, like, who owns SEO. It's not just the super technical person. It's like, I'm going to hire Mitch, Mitch's content manager. That is not content producer. He's not creating content. He owns the pipeline of content and that. So not only does he own the pipeline, but he's managing all the sources like you mentioned. I think that's great advice. But he also owns the infrastructure, his team owns it. I think that's the best way to separate it out. That's great. And just a mindset. The content manager versus producer.

Yeah, exactly. And the biggest benefit, I think there's a lot logically that makes sense there, but in practice, the biggest benefit is burnout or lack thereof. If you've got one person and they've got a quota to crank out content, that person will burn out. No matter how much they love writing, they will burn out. So I love to distribute that load across as many people as possible so that every piece of content is fresh and not just a stressful exercise for the person creating it.

Well, it should be like a team thing. Like, so ideally you have somebody who manages content and somebody who creates content. And the content person is just like, I'm a writer. She's like, I love writing. Let's talk about what topics are. And those are. It's not just like the writer is just coming up with topics on her own. She's working with the content manager who's giving her a list of like, here's some things that we need content about. Then you have these two completely separate roles, like, exactly. Okay, we had another question in chat that I want to get to. This is from Carl. Could you talk to the different types of content and search types and the alignment needed, if at all, would be good to get an overview? Great question.

Yeah, absolutely. So Google over time, over the past two decades has gone from a single algorithm to what they call it universal search, which contains so many sub algorithms. You know, I watch, I actually watch a ton of YouTube. I'm big into like off roading, so like I'll skip Netflix all day long and watch YouTube. YouTube, obviously, probably the most popular and common example of that. But you know, video content is a separate one for image, there's a separate one for maps. Now we've got podcasts in the mix as well as a separate index and a separate ranking and all that stuff. And then when it's jammed together, that's where you get universal search. And so I think a question I get around this a lot is what should I do for image search? Or what should I do for video search and things like that. And my advice is don't start with the media type first. Start with what keyword you're trying to attack first. Because if you can understand and in order to find that, understand your audience first. So if you can understand your audience, you can understand their mindset from that giant social experiment that is Google, you can understand what they're looking for. It's as easy as going in, typing that into Google and seeing what shows up. If there are images there, you better believe you should be dominating that image search result. If there are videos there, you should have all four or five videos in that carousel. But if there's none of those there, don't worry about them. Just focus on the keywords that you're trying to tackle and focus on doing the best that you can for each of those. Not necessarily starting from media type and going from there.

I also think he's talking about different types of content and search types. Well, this could be one, so who knows. But I'm also there might be. Isn't there like another or a different layer which is understanding your buyer's journey and what different types of searches. So if someone's going to buy lessonly or whatever, how do you work backwards? And so like, do you have a framework for making sure that those things are kind of mapped out?

Yes, absolutely. So we actually have a lot of that baked into demand. Well, when we're prioritizing keywords like that's literally how we have mapped out our prioritization formula. And essentially what I would say, we work with SaaS companies mostly, so apologies for those who that doesn't apply to. But in that world, in the SaaS world, keywords that contain subwords like software solutions, comparisons, alternatives, those kind of things that are just so indicative of someone who's lower funnel, that to me is, you know, much higher priority to tackle those first. I always like to start with as low in the funnel as possible and work your way up. So that's kind of our low tier. The middle tier is where we talk about things like that. Say you Know templates and guides, examples and samples, you know, that kind of thing where it's clearly someone who's in the loop and they're looking to do a better job of what they're trying to do, you know, at their job. And then the third bucket, kind of the tofu idea, top of funnel user searching would be things like, what is fill in the blank? Or why is fill in the blank important? And that kind of thing. I am a huge believer that you should have content across all three of those buckets. But I personally would start with lower funnel and then work towards mid and then work towards top.

It's great, great advice. I hope people caught that. Just like to be able to come out of this session today and just hit pause on like, hold on if you don't know that. Because most companies are just cranking out content, new blog articles, new this, new that, new website content. But if you don't first have this mapped out from bottom to mid to top, why go create more blog posts when you don't have examples, you don't have guides, you don't have templates, you don't have how to map all those things out. Could be an hour at the whiteboard, you know, map all those things out and figure out maybe we have some pages that already exist, what other content. I love that even just like the simple philosophy of like, how much do you think about your funnel? And you're coming to your website as cold traffic, warm traffic and hot traffic, there's going to be different search terms that get people there. Also, I think not only is starting at the bottom of the funnel smart from a conversion and revenue perspective, but for most companies, that's going to be a more specific keyword. And so like, if you sell marketing automation software and you want to get someone to join, you know, it's going to be hard to do that writing very, very top of the funnel, 15 marketing quotes, you know, as your piece of content, it grounds you in that bottom of the funnel. Product marketing content.

Exactly. And going back to timing of success, it is so critical to start at the bottom because to that point, let's say whether you are interested in demand, well, at all, ever or not. If you're doing any SEO and you're starting SEO today, and you think, I'm going to create a blog post, this incredibly high funnel blog post, the reality is the people that are searching for that are going to be months away from being interested in any kind of actual sales opportunity. So what you've just done is taken all Your time to create this piece of content, you plug it in and then at the soonest you should expect three to six months later and then you've got your deal cycle and then it's going to be potentially revenue or not. Whereas if you start low funnel and that person's ready to buy in the next two weeks, those are the kind of people that you can start to really crank out revenue from organic search way faster than if you just kind of let it be.

Well, that's great advice. Well, I mean you at least, you at least need that foundation. Yeah, it also kind of sets the bar for like you can do top of the funnel stuff but it can't be average because the goal of top of the funnel stuff should be to increase name of awareness of demand. Well, we're going to do this top of the funnel article and yeah, maybe it's nine months away from a sales cycle but because we want to drive more awareness. And so you do this top of the funnel article, you do this top of the funnel campaign, all of a sudden now, two months later, 20% more organic traffic to demand. Well that's how these two things work together. You have to be able to think about them separately because if you try to do them, because if you just take this advice, you're like, well then we're never going to create any top of the funnel content. So Mitch, do you hate top of the funnel? It's like, no, no, they're just, you have to be able to do both in different places. Okay, we got a bunch of different questions and I got follow ups. I want to follow up quick one for you before we go back to questions. You mentioned YouTube. Should the SEO, given how the rise of video content on mobile, all that like, is YouTube a channel that this SEO person also needs to own? It's not just blog content today I.

Think again it goes back to the audience, you know, and the keywords are searching. If by and large you know you can find that there's videos throughout your industry, heck yeah, you should be on it. But otherwise I would not.

Yeah, because I see a lot of B2B companies make the mistake. They just kind of like take videos that they did and upload them to YouTube. But that's not going to work versus like what you're talking about is like, oh, there's clearly a niche of off roading YouTube content. How are we going to get into that conversation by creating unique content for that.

Exactly.

Good advice. This is from Spencer. Would love your perspective on selling the SEO investment Internally to executive audience who puts high value on typical sales slash in person tactics. I'll add one more like just short time to value direct response tactics. How do you sell SEO?

It's difficult. It is. You know, we are all creatures of impatience. We all want more and we all want it right now. So it is difficult because, because you are having that battle, you know, at that kind of like soul level. So I'll acknowledge it's difficult. What I like to think about though is one of my beefs right now, which again, I, you know, I am a huge fan of every channel. You know, I do not think SEO is the only, and I don't necessarily think it's the best. You know, it just depends on your audience. But one of my big beefs right now is the difference in investment in paid search versus organic search. You know, we talk to folks all the time who are spending 10 times on paid search, what they are on organic search and making a return of call it one and a half times or so. It's like, okay, you're making money on it, but you're spending a lot to get that.

Yeah, but do you know why CFOs love that channel? Because I, I can tell them, okay, if you give me 50 grand, we're going to give you X. It's harder to do that with SEO. And so it's one not the right strategy. But like, yeah, once you realize that this is how decisions get made at the executive level, it's not, it's actually not a battle about SEO or not. They don't care if you call one green skittles or blue skittles, they just like that. It's very easy to measure and predictable.

Yes, yes, absolutely. And so what's bizarre to me, you know, over time organic search has gotten this wrap of being free, which is so far from the truth. But at the same time it's got the lowest customer acquisition cost. And so it's so interesting because that CFO is going to see low customer acquisition cost and think, I don't want to invest more in that because we're getting so much out of it per dollar without considering, well, if you could 10x, if you 10x your investment in it, you would get 10x the results. So to me, it's just this very backwards thinking where this extremely low cac, high potential channel, which is SEO, is getting a tenth of the investment of a very high cac, low potential. And if you turn it off, it goes away channel paid search. But that doesn't really answer this question.

I think what you said is important, which is like, ultimately SEO can be an amazing channel, but it first starts with your business. And so if your business, if traffic is important to your business and it's different to every view, sell to, you know, super enterprise, it might be way different. But like, if you can tell any story, Mitch, I'm talking out of my, you know, you know what? Right. Like, I'm just making this up, but like, just tell me if this logic is wrong, but this is how I would think about it. Like, if we can. Ultimately, the goal of SEO is to drive revenue, but how does it actually do that? Well, improving SEO means more traffic to our website, period. That's all that matters, more traffic to our website. Can we tell a story that if we grew traffic to our website X, that that would lead to Y in revenue? Right. And so if you're in an industry where the website is important and you're talking about conversion and website metrics and traffic, then I would ground it in that story. Like, hey, I'm going to show the cfo, hey, we're going to spend X on this investment in SEO. Here's what it means. Because I've talked to CFOs about this and they actually, once they understand it, they actually love it. They're like, oh yeah, because when you talk about it, paid, they're like, I've literally had to show a CFO like, no, no, the paid stuff is.

See these?

The one, he's like, oh, I never click on those. Exactly. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to get on the, you know, this first three search results and if we can do that across the board and with these search, you know, with this intent, we think that we can grow website traffic 30% in the next year. Privy was a company that I was at, for example, where they had a free trial motion and website traffic was one of the number one signals for new trials. And so we could very clearly show if we grow website traffic 50% in the next two years, that will equal this many more trials. Here's how this is going to cost. And so I think you got to be able to come at it from that perspective. But there's definitely businesses where website traffic is not as important, Right?

Absolutely. And I'm glad you said the word like, here's what it looks like over two years. That's what I was going to say is my biggest advice on when you're selling it is sell the long term vision. It is a long term Channel, not just because it takes a long time to ramp, but once ramped, it sticks around. We like to say that SEO is compounding.

Well, I've been like, man, if I made that SEO investment two years ago, I wouldn't be banging my head against the wall so hard trying to hit our number now, because I would. You know, the website traffic baseline would have been 40% higher. So I've always felt it in reverse, like, I wish I did this two years ago.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So if you can internally pitch three years from now, here's how much traffic we could be getting. Because it compounds over time, it's additive over time, and it sticks around. You know, if you can pitch that, you're going to have much better luck. But your company and those you know in charge may not care about the long term and may want to just nail this quarter. And if that's the case, you know, no matter how you slice it, SEO is going to be difficult to sell in that situation. And, you know, I think that's okay. But if you can convince folks to think of a bit longer term, it becomes very obvious very quickly that it's the right call.

I was going to ask you about and this kind of came up in this, but seems like one of the best fits for SEO is a company like Canva, for example, right. Where what does Canva do? They make a free design tool. And I don't know if anybody's ever seen this, but what's amazing about their marketing strategy is they basically every search term for like, how to edit Instagram post or you know, images for Twitter banner dimensions. They own every search result for that. But it's not just a blog post on how to do it. They actually drop you right into the Canva editor and all of a sudden you're going from Google search for the thing that I was searching for to I'm actually doing it. That's like the ultimate recipe. But oftentimes the further you move up the funnel because of marketing, like, the more enterprise you might be, Obviously they're selling to small businesses. It's a much different motion. It gets much harder. But like, don't you think, isn't something like Canva an amazing example of that where, like, that's a company that is invested in SEO, it's not just a blog strategy?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, if you're. Is your assumption here that like SMB markets are more likely to get value out of search than enterprise, I would.

Say it's my bias and I wanted to hear your. Your opinion on it. My bias is that like if I was a CMO at that type of company versus a much more enterprise, I'm struggling to see how I would articulate like here's why we're going to do SEO in the enterprise. So I would love to hear your, your like thoughts on that.

Yeah, yeah, so I've got a lot of thoughts on that and I've helped a lot of enterprise companies with SEO in my background. You know, I've helped FedEx with theirs, Sears and Kmart. This is about 10 years ago with Sears and Kmart. You know, a bunch of different folks. And I always like to say enterprise people are people too. You know, you think about the 6 billion to 8 billion searches that happen in Google every day. Enterprise folks are using that and you know, I'll just share back from Lessonly days. You know, Nike came to Lessonly through the exact same downloadable piece of content that your standard SMB person would come through. I believe actually T Mobile even came through a similar download when I was working with FedEx back in the day. They were some of my favorite people I have ever worked with. But interestingly, the person that I was working with on SEO who ran SEO for FedEx, she was an intern three months earlier and knew nothing about SEO virtually. And that's FedEx, you know, and our goal was to outrank UPS for the word shipping. That was the goal and that company. And you know, and I think it's great because FedEx is huge about like hiring from within. But they had someone in place who was not, you know, fully capable of doing that and needed help to do that. So I would not assume that enterprise folks always use some sort of back channel forester for every decision.

Your point is good, which is like they're still using the Internet but it's going to require a different approach than Canva would because you're not driving to some, you know, necessarily driving to some conversion point. You might measure it differently even in that like the attribution funnel might be different, which is like maybe they've read pieces of content. Because I just think you try to get, when it, when you try to make it too. Like, well, they're going to read this article and then click book a meeting with sales. That's not how it's going to happen. But it's like, you know, they've been coming to our website for three months and they read these four articles and then reached out like, don't you have to, you have to kind of piece it a little bit Together more to tell a story than you can in like the Canva model. Right.

For sure. The actual deal cycle is way longer. Actual, you know, website life cycle is way longer as well.

Are you okay with like measuring like content, like influence then in that, in that world?

For sure. Yeah. I think you have to.

Okay. We could do a hundred more questions, but there's one more in chat and then we'll wrap it up. Mitch, this has been amazing. You provide a ton of value. Obviously. I think people have a million questions. They will go to the demand, well, website and reach out to you for some reason or another. But let's end on. I want to end on this one. This is from Amy. Question. Hey, Mitch, question. From a writer's perspective, could you talk about what happens to a piece of content like a blog post, let's say once the SEO persons gets in front of it, like, what's the handoff? There's a. What are they doing differently?

Yeah, absolutely.

So how do you SEO ify it?

Yeah, the SEO ifying. I like that. I like that. What we like to do and you know, the way we built our product because that's how we did it offline before it was a product. I think the writer should know that SEO is important and valuable to the company and be bought in on it and be empowered with the, you know, words that should be included. So I like, you know, it says like, you know, from a brief with no keywords. I think right there you've got it wrong. Every content brief should have keywords in it if the intention is for it to rank in organic search. And I think the writer should be the one who's actually integrating those in. It is such a waste of time if you do it the way that's described here in my opinion. If you have the writer doing their thing and then you pass it to SEO and it's just so siloed and it takes that SEO person forever to fit it in because it wasn't the intent. But if you, as the writer can see, here are all these words that I should include and we absolutely always are of the mindset that we're going to give you a bunch of words, but you don't need to use a hundred percent of them. If there's one that just doesn't work out, don't use it. But you should at least know what those words are. And the reason for that is because it is again, going back to the social experiment of Google, it's understanding your audience. So isn't it great if you could write something for someone knowing what they want to read before you've even written it.

That's great advice. Having briefs also would be helpful, but, like, ultimately, it's gotta be some collaborative process where, like, you're each meeting weekly or twice a month about the editorial calendar together and strategizing around what content you're gonna create and then why.

Absolutely.

Mitch, this was awesome. Do you have any parting words or parting thoughts before we get out of here?

Yes, I do. I have a quick thing I'd like to point folks to. If you're interested in.

Please do it.

Yeah. So obviously, if you're interested in demo, check out demandowell.com It's a pretty standard conversion path there, but we also have this really cool thing that we call the Share of Search Report. And we also call it the FOMO Report because it essentially allows you to quickly understand how you compare to your top three competitors and help you understand what are you missing out on. It shows you your essentially your total addressable search market, your market share of that and how much you're leaving on the table. So if you want to check that out, it's demandwell.com FOMO F O M O and we'd love to chat. And as Dave said, you know, if anyone wants to reach out with additional questions, you know, personal mission statement, I am here to help others grow. That is what I'm all about. So would love to help you all as much as I can.

Awesome. And instead of just sending people to your website, just a meta marketing lesson like create a great. Create an asset like that actually gives value. I mean, this is like back to like HubSpot website grader. This is a great idea, Mitch. Thank you so much. I'll see you backstage for two seconds and then we'll. And then we'll carry on with our days. Everybody listening, watching, wherever you are, live in the future, sometime on Demand. Thank you. Check out Demand. Well, go look up Mitchell Kazi on LinkedIn and make sure you connect and we will see you on a future episode. I think this was a really good one. Thanks, Mitch. 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 and want to connect with your peers or just starting to 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 B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your 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 take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

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