047. How to Use SEO to Increase your Traffic and Conversions

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Hello everyone. This is Emilio Garcia, your host. Welcome to another episode of Demand Gen Studio. Hi Gabby, how are you?

Hi, Emilio. Very fine. How are you?

I'm doing good. We are in a role here. For us, this is, you know, the second episode that we are recording this week. So we are at capacity here. Welcome everyone. I'm really happy to have again the opportunity to share with you some of the things, some of the trends and knowledge that we get from our practice on demand generation for our clients and you know, in general for the industry. As always, we hope that you find this useful. Today we are going to talk about SEO, right? And the importance on driving, how to use it to drive traffic and conversions. So definitely something worth having a thought. Obviously it's a topic that is well known for some of you. Right. So for some of you, we will not be necessarily adding something brand new to the table, but I always want to at least talk about the impact and how it relates to demand generation overall. Strategy, right. Typically for demand generation or demand generation is synonymous with paid. Right? Some actually, I have seen some, you know, practitioners that pretty much what they do is just to manage advertising. So in theory they can call themselves just digital advertisers. That will be the end of it. But, but for me, demand generation encompass, not just advertising, typically encompass, you know, the whole funnel. And also the idea that when you are doing generating demand, you are truly using content and distribution channels to accomplish your goal and organic reach on search engines is one of those distribution channels. And that's why I feel we feel that it's worth having a conversation about it. What do you think, Abby?

I think that is really important to talk about this because in today's digital world era, it's like the main way that, or probably way that people actually find stuff online. Right? It's the, it's the way that we find information online. And I think that it is really important to know how to take advantage of all the, the things that you can actually make to improve your SEO. And not only because like you said, it's something that it's good for like the ads or the campaigns that you're running through because it helps you to actually rediscover all the time the way the, all of the processes that you are running through your website, like the way that you are telling your story as a company, the way that you structure like all the information that you have and how you deliver that message to your, to your audience in different ways. Right. And, and the way that it will help you to make people aware of that. And I guess that there's a lot of things that we can learn through SEO and the, and the ways that we can change, even optimize it. And it is a really important topic for me too, as I reach through that information in these days.

Yeah. And, and again, I know that probably, you know, the 30, 45 minutes that we will have at this conversation will be definitely not enough to even dabble into the, you know, the depths of what SEO in general means and all the things that it has to do. And obviously the other thing is that for a demand generation practitioner, SEO is another tool in the, in, you know, another tool in the tool set. It does not necessarily their expertise like an SEO expert will have it, but still I think it's worth having at least a general understanding of how it works and especially how the different things that you do on the SEO side complement your overall demand generation strategy and can enhance your pay search practice, which is probably for a demand generation practitioner, what mattered the most. Because when we are trying to capture demand, typically paid is a greater source of contacts or people that have more intent. Because typically you would use paid search for terms that have more transactional value. You will use SEO for terms that are up, up in the funnel, still on the problem understanding and maybe solutions searching. So it is not as immediate. But if you happen to be a demand generation practitioner that is either working with a SEO expert or that you have to do some SEO as part of your efforts anyway because your team doesn't have an expert in house or through an agency to solve that, at least it's good that you understand the basics so you can do something about it while you work with someone that has more expertise. So let us start diving into the topic right away. And the other thing I want to say as well is that SEO continues to change tremendously, especially because Google, Google, which is, you know, pretty much the leader here on SEO, you know, on search engines keep changing the way the present results and more and more of the results are not sending people to specific websites. Answers are being provided in feed. Google is transforming is its search engine into more what social media platforms do that try to keep people in the platform rather than let them go. So there's less and less clicks and more answers in feed. That doesn't diminish the value of what search engines can do for you for exposure and brand awareness especially. But you will have to measure it differently. You will have to consider success in a different way. And that's something definitely worth understanding. So Let us start with the first one will be keyword research for targeted traffic. And again I will keep contrasting this with what you will do on the pay side. Right. So obviously the first thing that you want to do is to understand who is your buyer. Always start with your buyer. Right. So who is the ideal client profile or what is your ideal client profile? Icp. And within that, what is your buying committee? Right, the, the group of people that influence the purchase of your product, especially if you are a B2B. And typically when you understand that and if you, and if you know how they search for solutions and how they, they typically research for problem solving, then you will have an idea of the topics that they search. And as we were saying, you can break down those into keywords or terms or phrases that have high intent and phrases that don't have a lot of intent but are more in the research mode. You need to create a list of that. And typically tools like the search term or keyword planner and Google Ad will allow you to understand what is overall the volume that people, you know, the volume of people that are searching for specific terms, a specific location. Obviously there are tools that you can use for free or paid and the most popular ones are Semrush, Semraj or spyfu. So those are tools that are quite, quite helpful to at least help you understand where are the keywords. My general recommendation here is that the balance that you're, the trade off you are trying to accomplish here is between volume and quality or relevancy. Right. So I use all the time this example that is very silly but of the, of the dress shoes, black dress shoes. Right. So if you want to sell that a specific product, then the challenge is that you go something super broad like shoes. Then yeah, you will have a ton of traffic, but you have no idea of the more specific intent is men's shoes, woman's shoes. It's different color, you know, a different color sizes, right. Style. So shoes is so generic that ranking for that keyword is almost meaningless. Right. Unless you happen to be a shoe company in that sense. Yeah, definitely you want to rank that for that your overall home web page. But if you're trying to rank a specific page or for a specific product, for example, or solvers, you want to be more relevant, but obviously you don't want to go to the other side. The other important thing for you to remember is that search traffic is something that you don't control. The volume itself is not up to you necessarily unless you have a very strong demand creation effort. Where you are making popular something through brand awareness. Therefore there are going to be certain keywords or topics that are relevant to your brand that are not well known that not a lot of people are searching for. And so your volume is going to be very small. So that is the other trick. And because it technically costs the same to rank for a high volume keyword than for a low key one in terms of effort, right. Maybe not in terms of the impact that you will have. Maybe for high volume keywords you will have a lot of competition and so even if you do a great job, you will struggle to rank. And for very low volume keywords, typically there's lower competition and so your efforts will yield a better result. But at the end of the day, if you are measuring success in the form of traffic, right. That eventually becomes conversions, you need to be mindful of that threshold, right? And obviously what the general recommendations is that you diversify your investment in some way, if you want to call it that way, right? So yes, you want to dedicate some of your effort for top of the funnel keywords or phrases that are like helping people understand the problems you solve. You also want to invest some time on the mid funnel where you help them understand the solutions and how your solutions fit the overall concept. And finally you want to dedicate some effort to rank for keywords or phrases that are definitely for someone that has it is showing intent now which is the ones that are going to yield the most impact in terms of business for, you know, the short term. Even if the ones that you're doing at the top of the funnel will yield an impact later on, right. And will give you overall impact on traffic. So that's generally what I would recommend for you to explore or understand as you do that keyword research. I don't know if there. Gabby, you have any comments?

Yeah, you should mention something that you said that these tools are actually always evolving, right. And Google is always looking for improvements for their. Even though the analytics side or the way that they offer solutions for people that are searching stuff online and something that will never change. And that's a fact. It's the user intent and that's the thing that you have to focus on because it doesn't matter if, if your tools or the way that people are searching, it's changing the user intent itself. Like the way that people are actually trying to find a solution for their problems is not going to change. And something that I do sometimes too when, when I am using like the Google Keyword Planner or tools that are actually helped me to discover this. These keywords are going to make improvements on our SEO. It's doing it manually and not, not even though using tools. It's just that you can easily just go for a search and those, the keywords that you think are going to have relevance or they're aligned to your, to your campaigns and just, just type it in any search engine you want or search. Yeah, a place where you go for a search and you'll see the results and the ones that pop up and the ones are on top and you'll see which ones are having best results and why. You go for that page and you'll see why it's having that rank or why, you know, like crawlers are actually indexing that information into, into the best results or the top results. And just another tip for, for when you don't have or you don't know how to use those tools, you can actually do it manually and it will give you results too. You have an idea of how to search for a good keyword or have an idea if your keywords are actually having that results online.

Yeah, that's a fantastic recommendation and applies greatly to paid advertising as well. Right? It is that I, I always say don't fight the algorithm. Right? Don't, don't. If you have an idea for a keyword and you think that is some intent behind it and you go to search results and you find that most of the results are for a different intent. What you have, you know, the first 10 or 20 pages, then probably you need to find another topic rather than trying to rank for that because the selection of pages are showing up on that result page are the result of the algorithm trying out, showing different results and seeing what people do with it. And that's the best selection that I have found. I have found that is relevant to, to the, to the searcher. And you know, just try terms that mean two things at the same time and you will see the meaning. Right. If you, if you type in something like Apple or, you know, you will find that the most popular intent of a search like that and you will be amazed for some of the keywords. So yeah, definitely not just the traffic. Go and see search engines. And I love what you're saying there, Gabby, that the tools that we will use to do search will change and continue to change. Right. We are using search engines mostly right now, but it's not the only mean, you know, traffic, you know, virtual assistants like Alexa or Siri are in the rise and obviously nowadays chatgpt people are start asking stuff to it. So the format and the ways that we search will change and evolve. We will use maybe more boys, maybe we'll ask robots to do it for us. But what will not change will be the intent, what you are describing, right? And new channels will be built organically and in paid to answer questions, but they will continue to be present across, across the digital world for sure. So that's, that's fantastic. Now obviously once you have done that research, then you want to create content that answer the question. This is the other part where rather than telling you, you know very specific things about how to, you know, trick the algorithm or something like that, we always have to get back to what you were saying about the intent and being relevant and really helping a human rather than trying to just please the spider that is crawling our content, right? While it's true that SEO focus on trying to improve the chances that you will rank and in that sense it's a tool that helps you to optimize for this distribution channel, which is search engine results. And at the end of the day you are trying to solve for the customer. And so most of the recommendations for on page optimization are not super complicated, they are just common sense, right? If someone is searching for a specific topic going back to that black dress shoes size 9, then your content should as much as possible be the answer to that. So that means of course that the page is typically dedicated mostly to the keyword that you are trying to rank for and that all the complementary data about it, both the ones that humans can see and the ones that crawlers can see, matches that intent and make it relevant. So some of the key, key components of that good experience, obviously for first one, to be honest, has nothing to do with content and it's a speed, right? Just think about your own experience that you will say, well, if I'm searching for something, I click on the result and the page takes 1012 seconds to load. Maybe I would lost interest and do something else. So, so the first thing is your pages and therefore your website has to be as fast as possible, right? Meaning you just load as much information as you need to show the answer or to answer, you know, to be relevant, but not more. And that doesn't mean that you cannot use videos, that you cannot use images, mostly means that you optimize them. So pay attention to the hosting website that you use or the hosting service that you use, to the size of the images, to the use of video, to the use of scripts, which usually slow down website speed to the priority that you give to them, right? If you have a lot, a lot of scripts that are measuring stuff that are not required to show the answer and load the page, load them later, right? Obviously that's the part where you will need someone that has expertise understanding what is a speedy website and what is the proper size of your images and when it makes sense to use video and where you will host it and what will be the appropriate amount of scripts and the order where you will load them. But in general, you want to make sure that you have something going on to make sure that especially the pages that you have the most traffic load fast, right? That's one big, big bucket of recommendations. And the second one has to do with the way that you structure that website, right? So again, going back to you want to be meaningful to humans, it means that the title of the page, the description of the page and the most important pieces of content are structured in a way that people quickly understand the content and get answers. So that's why you get these recommendations on meta tags and headlines and descriptions. In the past it used to be that you could use, you know, the keyword and sprinkle all over the place and kind of like trick the algorithm to show your page because you were, you were showing exactly the page or the, the keyword that you were using. Nowadays that doesn't work that well. And for a good example, think about ChatGPT, right? Think about language models. They, you know, you can misspell, you can put the words in the wrong order or be grammatically wrong and it still will answer something to you because it understand intent what you're asking. So the same is going on nowadays with pages on results. Your description might not use exactly the same keyword. Your headline might not have exactly the same keyword. But if you have the relevant, a relevant piece of content that answers the question or is relevant to it, it will show in any way, right? Even if you don't use that keyword at all, it still has some influence, but it's not super, super required anymore. But so in general, you want to make sure that it's a structure in a way that humans can read it right away. And obviously you also want to make it easy to read for the crawlers, right? That's the part where you have that structure because unfortunately machines steel need to understand the structure of the website. They don't necessarily know as well as us yet, right? When something is an image or a video or where a piece of text is more important than another, that's where you use your H1s, H2s where you mark your images with some descriptions so crawlers can understand what is the intent behind of that image. Where you put extra information on transcript or videos and obviously in general you have clean code to present the content as as fast as possible. Again for both humans and crawlers. Again here this is where if you do the basics, most of the CMS content tools will help you to get a best practice. You know, you can maybe accomplish 80% of your on page SEO optimization using a good CMS to be honest, without an expert. Meaning if you use something like HubSpot or even Wix or any other of the content building tools. WordPress have some good themes that have some plugins. If you follow their recommendations, you will get 80% of the impact with 20% of the effort. If it's just miss, you know, mission critical or, or you really want to leverage every single piece of improvement to outrank your competition, then definitely you need, you need SEO help right. In the form of an expert either in house or externally. But that's, that's. Those are some of the general recommendations and again tying these to demand generation. Think in the same way that you think about landing pages for paid search efforts, right? It's exactly the same thing. What's behind the quality score on Google Ads for how the landing page experience impact? The overall quality score is the same thing or the same idea that is behind on what is a good page that answer the query for SEO or for in this case for organic results.

I totally agree on that and actually I was comparing that to what we do right. Our work because of the meta descriptions and descriptions are like the main thing about SEO. You know, like the way that you're gonna answer that question for someone that. That is looking for. Yeah. A solution on. On that their matters or their problems. And I see it as if, if. If you structure a website in a way that it not all the answers that out the main problem or the main question that the person is actually asking for, but you actually give additional or in value information about that matter. It helps you to gain more. It says authority right. On the website and in your. In your company. And not only you're given the main result or the main problem solved, but you actually are giving value information to that person. And that gives you like you retain more customers and you gain more engaged on that matter for that kind of thing, right?

Yeah. Now the thing where you start linking together the impact that traffic have to potential business and conversions is that if you have accomplished the first two hurdles, which is being relevant enough to rank and being fast enough and reliable enough that people actually consume the content and get an answer for what they're looking for. Now it will be ideal to build a progression path or conversion path for your visitors now that you have them on your website, right? And this is again the the the an area where you want to be mindful of your buyer experience just like you would like to have a great experience yourself, right? You don't want to get into a page and on top of being slowed popping up with a lot of suggestions for subscribe to this new letter and contact us and there's a chat Bob there and you know everything getting in the way of getting your answer just because you want to convert one of those visitors that will not be a good experience and will hurt you even if you improve your conversion rates. What you truly want to do is to offer subtle but relevant conversion paths depending on the warmness of that visitor to you. So for example, if some of your content is about answering questions very top of funnel for problems that your buyers are experiences experiencing, then probably your best conversion path at this point will be to subscribe for example to a newsletter or to download a piece of premium content if that makes sense. Or to offer some events where you go in depth on your knowledge and expertise to continue the education path for them, if that makes sense. Right? So you always want to have your main offer, which typically for B2B will be a conversation with sales or a demo or a free trial depending on the business model that you have. But still it will be helpful to offer in page on page the next logical offer that makes sense for you, as subtle as possible, right? And also consider the format if you are showing up something on desktop, right? Where you have more real estate, it makes more sense to show some pop ups to use some of the real estate to combine two or three offers at the same time, giving some timing and all that mobile will be different because there the real estate is smaller, the user cannot interact as well as you can do on desktop. So you will you want to be more specific there and maybe reduce the amount or just offer one thing that stay on page. So I'm not discouraging you from getting conversions because definitely that's part of the reason you do this. But at the same time think about the experience for the user, right? Definitely. If you have someone that is looking for pricing or similar things, then definitely your offer has to be, you know, you want to have a conversation with sales. Not everybody Most actually will not act on that. But if you improve the chance, if you have an offer, you improve the chances that some will do and that will, you know, improve the conversion rate and obviously the impact that your company will have with your SEO efforts. Right? So that's obviously the part where you want to include some action there to, to make it happen. Now, on page is one leg of the things that you can do to improve the chances of ranking, but the other leg is off page, right? It happens outside. And again, the logic behind it is common sense and you can improve your chances but be wary that you don't want to do this just because and go into a pad where you are getting links just to get a number and not getting quality. So the common sense piece of it is very similar to how you know, the scientific community works. When you are creating a, a document or a piece of research, typically you reference the work of other people, ideally people that has also authority and recognition for va, you know, experts on the field. So typically what happens on the web and, and Google uses, Google and most search engines use that as a signal is that when you are building pages and you are referencing content from other sources to reinforce what you are saying, you are giving authority to those other pieces of content because you are referencing them. And ideally, if it's a lot of other companies and people reference that content, then it gets more authority for that specific page and overall for the website, if he's getting references from a lot of places. So that's in essence what you are trying to do with link building. But truly what should happen is that people find your content, they find it super helpful and they on their own reference your content because it was helpful to them and they believe that will be a good source for their own audiences. Right? So that's the natural way that you have and that's the way that you get those links. Obviously, if you want to improve the chances of your content ranking, you can be more proactive instead of being passive about it and waiting for someone to link and reach out. And for relevant websites, start asking or having conversations to discover if they will find your content helpful. So there's some areas where you can get that happen, but what you don't want to do is to just plainly go and get any link available. Because the whole point is that the link base that you have matters or is relevant to your audience as well and is related to your content. Right. If you are in the SaaS world for a project management tool, for example, you probably want references from other Websites that cater to the project managing tool, project management community, right. For example, the PMI or similar institutions where, you know, project managers gather around. Not just because those links will be valuable and relevant compared, you know, the quality and the authority of those websites will be higher for Google, but mostly because the overall reason you want those links is that people will visit your website from there and therefore they will be qualified. Right? If you're, if you're getting links and therefore traffic and visits from project managers from the Project Management Institute and you have a project management tool, that's great, your chances of getting qualified traffic and opportunities and conversions improve. If you are getting links from, I will say something silly, a clothing company, then it's not worthless, but it doesn't worth as much, right? And that's where you want to use that common sense. Especially because I feel that on page SEO is something that owners and CMOs and, you know, marketing managers, but especially demand generation experts or practitioners will understand pretty well, right? They will see it, it will, they will feel it. But I feel link building is one of those dark areas of SEO where it's not very clear how it work, how it work, and where you run the risk of getting the help of someone that is not, you know, is not using good practices. And I'm not even worried about being penalized. That's actually beyond the point because again, from my perspective, the activities that you're doing for marketing are to earn and retain the attention of your prospect hires and to create opportunities. So even if you don't get penalized, what will be the point of having a ton of links of irrelevant websites that are bringing traffic from a marketplace that you don't sell to, right? Imagine that you are marketing for Latam or the US and you are getting traffic from, I don't know, I'm going to say something like Finland, right? You might sell something there, but probably you won't because you don't have the sales presence, you don't have the marketing presence, you are not local to the market. So, so what will be the point of getting traffic from there? Right? So that's probably the biggest highlight of link building that. Not ideally, but at minimum, if you're creating great content, that link building will happen on, on its own. People will find it helpful and will start referencing on social media, for example, even when those don't necessarily bring you a lot of, you know, link quality and authority, but it will happen on its own. You can be proactive and go to a specific places where you can leverage your current Relationships and you can hire experts that will help you to facilitate that process. Just be mindful of your overall goal, right? Which is quality traffic and relevant links, not just the number. That's I think the most important part. So now finally, obviously after you are kind of like summarizing here, you understand your buyer, you understand the keywords, you have a good mix of top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom of funnel, topics you create, your content is relevant, you have fast website and a great structure for crawlers. And as much as possible, you get links from relevant sources. How do you measure impact? Right? That will be the, the great question here. And just like we, we said for other types of efforts on marketing, I really like the idea of having a combination of leading and lagging indicators, right? So your leading indicators will be proxies for impact that are not necessarily binary metrics, but are considered sometimes by executive as not relevant because they are not impacting business. But you need them because your own sales cycle and the buyer journey will not be days or weeks, sometimes it can be months. So because of that, and especially because the path of the buyer is not a linear thing. It's not like they're going to see the result on one of your keywords on search, they're going to click that page, fill that form and buy tomorrow. It happens from time to time, but most of the time it doesn't. And if you want proof of that, look at your own behavior, right? How many touches do you need to have with a product or service that you have not heard before, before you actually pull the trigger and buy from a company and without even considering the fact that you will probably ask around, right, with friends and colleagues about the tool and have some initial conversation. So yes, SEO will be part of that, or organic result will be part of that, but it will not be the only thing that you will need to do to get that. So therefore, you cannot just use simple models of attribution or the overall, you know, the final impact of revenue on that and some good approximations. Obviously that makes sense. You want to be very close to the, to the tool itself or to the distribution channel itself will be the first. I always like the idea of the activity itself. So for example, if the way that you are distributing this content is because you are creating content in the form of blog pages, then what is the volume of pages that you are creating and what is the coverage that you have for the topics, right? Are you covering all the keywords that you have or you're covering, you know, 50%? What is the progress that you have on a monthly basis to coverage for those keywords that you have set yourself to rank for next stage is obviously positions overall, right at the beginning. Unfortunately, that's the only thing that you know is are my pages ranking high enough that I can get some visibility and exposure? Because if your pages are ranking on, you know, page 10 or 20, the probability of someone seeing it is very low. So obviously you want to see that the ranking itself improve, but not because that's out of itself the goal. It's just because visibility or exposure allows you to start getting some traffic, which is the next stage on those leading indicators, right? So what eventually should happen as you rank up on the, on the search engine is that you start getting some traffic coming from organic sources, ideally for the keywords or topics that you are ranking for. And tools like Search Engine Console will help you to understand that. Once you have traffic, obviously, and if you have the right CTAs, the right call to actions, then you can expect to see some conversions in the form of forms or chat conversations or premium content download or people subscribing to your events, depending on where the CTA is that you have. And finally you want to have those coveted, right? Marketing and sales qualified leads that become opportunities and eventually customers. So that will be the, like the ramp of analytics. And obviously every case will be different. You will find the metrics that matter to you, but overall the recommendation will be divide them into leading and lagging indicators. If this is an effort that you are doing for the first time, you don't have reliable data on your own data, which is the best approach, right? To set up some goals, to use your own data to set up something realistic as a goal. If you don't have that, then you can use benchmark data, right? There's available tools, tools available for data on your competition or at least your industry. You can even guess you, you can even just guess some numbers and that's fine. The overall point of the goal is to have something to walk toward, not necessarily to, to meet the goal all the time. Time, right? And typically what will happen is that you will have a plan and during implementation that you will discover stuff and you will change your plan and your goal would shift and that's fine. But as long as you have a metric that you can use and a goal that you can have a conversation with so executives know what is your overall objective. Um, so that will be kind of like the best recommendation that I have for metrics. Don't get too heavy on attribution models. Right. And try as much as possible to have that combination for you. Right. So I think with that I have covered at least from my end, I have covered most of the things that I feel are important for demand generation practitioners to understand about SEO in general. I don't know if you Gavi, have any comments to wrap it up.

Just, just one by the continuous improvement on the analytics on on SEO which is don't forget the A B testing right. Just comparing your website to making changes. Just make sure you. You have different elements that you can compare to or different versions of your website and their elements or the copy so you can actually see which ones improve or perform better. So that's another one that I can add to the improvements for SEO which are important. Right. Because they that will make an idea of what you can track on use for the user's behavior and how can actually lead to conversion.

Yeah, I completely agree. Very well. Well, I think we can wrap it up for today. Gavi, as always, thank you for helping me setting up this for you guys. Listening or watching this later. Thank you for your support and we look forward for the next episode. As always, we hope you have find them helpful. Don't miss the next one. Get notified at Demand Gen Studio at our website Boundify IO and until the next one. Have a great day.

Have a great day everyone. Have a great day. Emilio.

Bye bye.