Searching Higher Up The Funnel - SearchLove 2015

So I love my day job. I get to tackle really big complex SEO challenges with huge datasets, tens of thousands of rankings, and work with big brands who have really kind of big challenging problems. People like Microsoft, who the visibility of their domain and their partners and their advertisers and how much traffic they get influences high-level brand strategy and product strategy. So they're using, they're using search data to design the future of their brand. Or people like Money Supermarket who rank first for all of the keywords they care about. So their view of SEO moves, moves from how do we get more traffic and how do we do better to how do we avoid risk and how do we generate demand? How do we get more people searching? How do we move SEO from demand fulfillment to demand creation? Or people like Lenovo who have 40-something websites in 40-something languages in 40-something territories, each with dozens of subdomains, etc., etc. Hugely complex. How do you build an effective SEO strategy that manages that ecosystem rather than just chipping away at tactics? So thinking about these and the kind of problems I encounter and the things we're working on at LinkDex, I thought there's something in this idea of How are these big enterprise brands different? What is it that makes them interesting? What is it that makes them unique? And what are they doing behind the scenes that makes it interesting? So I pitched this idea to Will that we'd talk about what are they doing well, what are they doing badly, and he said that it might alienate some of the audience, that it's only relevant to people who work with those kinds of brands and everyone actually here is working in the real world of proper companies and facing real-world challenges. So he shot me down. Really depressing. So I start to think, okay, what do we— how do I tweak this? And actually, what's really interesting is where these brands cock up, where they fail, because all of the big brands all around the world all of the time are really terrible at SEO. They have broken links and 404s, and they forget to archive campaign microsites, and it's all disjointed and disconnected. So I thought, let's have a look and identify some of these challenges. We can poke holes in it. We can all have a bit of a laugh and feel smug and then go home. As I started to dig into it, I realized very quickly that actually the kinds of problems they face and the challenges they have are the same ones that we have. And it's challenges of breaking down silos and getting budget and sign-off and achieving things that make a meaningful difference. And I thought, this sounds really familiar. This is exactly the same fight that we're having. Maybe this isn't unique to big brands. So I thought a bit more, and I came to the realization that of all the talks I'd ever seen at Searcher, the ones that had really stuck with me and influenced me kind of circled around this idea that there's this challenge of getting things done, getting things bought into, weaving it into a comprehensive strategy, and somehow making that fit with the complex world and reality of brands and politics and decision-making. I think there's something in the middle here that we're all missing. I think there's, I think there's an idea and a way of thinking and a concept that that binds these challenges, that we're all talking around something really big and important, but we've not quite worked out what it is. What's our future? Where are we going? What's it mean? I think some of the stuff that we've been doing has started to touch on a new way of thinking about SEO and a new way of seeing the world. And I wanna take you on the journey that I've gone through to come to this realization and start to think about what it means for the future. So very quickly, very quickly, when you are 6 or 7 in the UK, your education in the sciences steps up to, I think, Key Stage 2, and you start learning about physics as a discrete subject. One of the first things you learn is this concept, that the world and the universe around us is comprised of particles which form 3 types of matter, and depending on how those particles vibrate and their energy levels, they're either solids, liquids, or gases. It's a great, really good way for understanding how to get people to Mars, how to microwave potatoes, and to understand why you don't fall through your chair. The problem is, The problem is it's a radical oversimplification. It breaks down as soon as you start to learn about things like plasma and custard and all sorts of weird things that don't quite fit the rules. And actually, the reality is much more nuanced. When you look at Wikipedia for types of matter, there are 28 distinct types, some of which are so abstract they don't even have pages yet. These are a much more— a much more complex, in-depth explanation of the way that the world works. This is the information that you need to understand in order to get to Mars, to bake potatoes, to understand why you don't fall through your chair. Whilst this model is true, it's not the truth, and to pretend that it is and to behave in that way is hugely dangerous when you want to achieve anything. So why don't we teach it? Why isn't this common knowledge? It's because it's impractical to impart this level and depth of knowledge all at once. If we tried to teach children the way the universe really works, they would never leave school, and their heads would explode before they got anywhere near it. We oversimplify in order to make it digestible. and then we gradually reveal subsequent layers of truth which override the previous knowledge. This is a concept called lies to children that was popularized by Terry Pratchett. You oversimplify, you peel back and reveal. My concern is that everything we know about SEO is an oversimplification, that in order for us to understand it, to keep up with a world where Google changes the rules, to explain it to our clients, our peers, our bosses, to get buy-in, to understand and measure it, we have oversimplified it. And this oversimplification is why we are struggling. It's why we're stuck as an industry, stuck as the poor cousin to paid search, stuck getting buy-in for things where we can evidently see there is opportunity to make money and to generate success. It's why we're going through an identity crisis where every other day SEO is either dead or it's alive or it's changed its name again and we're not sure whether what we're doing is content marketing or inbound or SEO or marketing or if we're growth hackers or what is this? What is this? We're at one of the most prestigious conferences in our industry and we are not sure what to call ourselves. How ridiculous is that? It's why we struggle to achieve our ambitions that day in, day out all of us can look at a website, can look at a brand and say, here is how you make more money. And yet then nothing happens. We're not making that more money. There's a huge disconnect. It's why we struggle if you're in-house to get emotional or financial buy-in to make impactful changes. If you're in agency where you're KPI'd on the wrong things and stuck on a monthly cycle of generating reports rather than generating revenue. If you're stuck freelancing where the educational barrier to achieve anything is insurmountably high, which is why we're culpable for everyone else's failures. Why when SEO only works when it's bigger than SEO and more comprehensive, that when the PR team don't talk to us or when the CEO won't give something a level of budget or when the product is a bit naff or when you're You're more expensive than your competitors, why it's our fault that then things don't work. And this is getting harder. This has always been the case, but as SEO gets more complex, more integrated, this barrier to achieving anything and getting by and winning gets harder and harder. Knowing SEO is no longer enough. We've all known SEO for a decade. We've been talking, have a good website, have a good brand, get some people talking about you, bingo. There's no new knowledge though. There's no new information. My thing then, my point is that success now and moving forwards is actually very much about how you think, not what you know. So I want to try and pitch this vision of, I think, what SEO might look like over the next couple of years and how we might think about it differently to solve some of these problems. As part of that, I want to tackle some of the technical challenges with achieving that. I want to touch on the world of business and politics and also think Think about people a little bit. So the first lie that we learn in SEO, again it's all about oversimplification, is that SEO is tactical. It's about having an understanding of how the machine works and then picking which bits and pieces you want to do in order to affect success. So there are— I'll skip through this because it's all very, very 101— there's a trillion searches a year and people have predictable behavior. They want to buy a thing, so they go to Google and they type in, I want to buy a thing. Google gives Google gives us lots of nice data on how many people do that and what flavors and variations there are, and then we as marketers understand that there is a certain propensity to click through to a certain result based on its position. If I'm ranking at the top, I get more visits than the bottom. And you go away and you build something that looks like this. You list all of your keywords and you say, here's the average, here's the ranking, here's the competition, here's the traffic, therefore we should pick this one and this one and this one. And then your CEO or your stakeholder or your client says, find me the most profitable niche. So you boil down all that depth of work you've done to your 10 favorite keywords. You find the ones that look like they've got the best intersect of opportunity, etc., and then you go to Moz's 2011 list of tactics and you pick the ones that apply best. So you say, okay, we'll do a bit of content creation, we'll do a bit of community management, and then we'll expect to get some results. And then this happens. Where are my results? Because there aren't any. Because it's not that simple. Because you can't just pick and choose these bits in isolation. This is where a lot of brands and a lot of companies are. It's how they view SEO. It's very, it's very, very kind of basic and quite remedial. The problem is it creates very reactive cultures where when you've got to that point where you've picked your 10 or 100 favorite keywords that look like they've got the best opportunity, you don't consider that for every piece of research you've done, there is somebody like you in your competitors' companies and your competitors' companies doing the same research, having the same conversation, finding the same results. You're all chasing each other's tail for the same perfect 10 keywords. You're KPI'd on the wrong behavior. You are KPI'd on get these rankings and maintain these visits and traffic, which just— people who are KPI'd on things which are outside of their control don't do their best work. It all goes wrong. And everything that everybody is doing is very fear-driven and very transient. As soon as a ranking drops overnight, the CEO gets on the phone, you drop your strategy, you change tactics, you try and recover things, you're never truly building equity and moving forwards. So we're moving past that as an industry, very good news. The second lie then is that SEO is strategic. So once every month somebody logs on to Ferrari's web— logs on to— goes to ferrari.co.uk on a mobile device, finds a car, hits add to basket, and checks out and purchases it on their phone. A tactical world doesn't allow for that behaviour to happen. It doesn't explain what's going on. We know that actually purchase decision and search behavior is driven by much more complex things like brand affinity and awareness and reputation and values and all sorts of other complicated things, which is something Google tried really hard and did a really bad job of explaining with the concept of zero moment of truth. They had this idea that historically if you were going to purchase something, you would walk into a store, talk to a sales guy, and he would either convince you that it was worth doing or you'd fail. What happens now is you do that research yourself. You pre-qualify your purchase behavior. You have already researched. You've already spoken to your friends. You've evaluated reviews. You've been on social media. You've seen TV ads. The point where you purchase, you've already decided that you're going to make that purchase. This makes content marketing make sense. It's why we have inbound marketing as a concept. You've got to build up trust and value higher up the funnel to influence people's behavior later down the line. The problem is not all searches have obvious commercial intent or obvious commercial outcomes. So I recently bought a TV, and this was the phrase that I typed into Google and then went and purchased something. However, a week before, I did a bit of research because I didn't know which TV I was gonna buy. And actually, a fortnight before that, on my phone, I did a bit of category research because I didn't understand the technology and my options. So I typed in, what's the best TV for me? It all started 6 months before with that term, fuzzy sound on TV. I wasn't sure whether I needed a new TV or not, whether I could repair my current one. That is the keyword that generated that eventual sale, or certainly influenced my subsequent behavior. There is only one brand present in that SERP. It's Sony, kind of accidentally, with an FAQ page. All the rest are awful eHow-type articles forums and stuff from 2011. Where are the people trying to shape my behavior? If the ZMOT principle holds true, that my purchase will be informed by the brands that I care about and the, the places I've been and the things I've seen and read and heard, why, why are they not competing in that space? Why is my subsequent action left to chance? I think nobody is actually doing content marketing. I think that we're stuck in this trap where we look at our keyword list, we find the 10 most profitable intersects, the same one everyone else is looking at, and then we write some content that may or may not be great or awful. Nobody is looking at this. Nobody is here because it doesn't generate a direct sale. Nobody's analytics package is ever going to say, yes, we sold a TV from Fuzzy San on TV. But if there'd been one bad review in that space that said, just had a terrible experience with an LG customer support guy, or a really great review or a piece of content saying, you know what, actually look at this particular model. Again, I might not have bought, but my behavior and that whole chain of events could have unfolded differently. This is an opportunity to get right in at the beginning and influence what happens next. You don't sell from here, but you definitely affect the outcome. So everybody starts thinking about attribution. How do we tie all this together if it is this complex and people are moving around? How do we account for that? How do we create metrics and dashboards that help us visualize this world. The problem is you can't. So there are 100 providers out there who will say, we have a proprietary sexy black box algorithm that helps you understand which order things happen in and which channels will influence which other channels and how much you should actually be spending. And all any of them do is take your data and slice it up in a different direction and show you different interpretations of the truth. They never solve for the problem that actually People are influenced by stuff that happens offline. People search on multiple devices. There are so many scenarios outside of where did they click and where did they go that you need in order to understand what the value of each stage was that true attribution is fundamentally impossible. Actually, what makes a lot more sense conceptually is to take each of those individual moments and to analyze what happens and whether or not you succeeded. To take fuzzy sound on TV, where was my brand? Did I win? Did I lose? How influential was I? what happened next. Not to try and stitch it all together into some complex journey, but to look at each individual piece and to give each its own success criteria. There's a really cheesy video from Google that I'd like to play, maybe, if we can. Yeah. So, this is a video from Google. Did that work? If you hear a clicking or a grinding sound when you So this is how we search. Yet all of our activities and all of our metrics look for that last-click final. Did they buy? Didn't they? What was our conversion rate? Where did we rank? You've got two very different disparate realities that don't fit together fit together very well. And yeah, this is cheesy as hell, and obviously it's a massive push from Google to promote buying ads on YouTube and AdSense AdWords even. We as SEOs don't have access to the ability to throw money at targeted audiences. It's a nice picture. It's much nicer than Zedmont as a concept for understanding how the world works, but yet we're doing something slightly different. I think as a concept, this, apart from being really cheesy, feels like the right way to view search behavior and the right way to think about what people do. It's much more sophisticated than a funnel where you get, here's our audience, here's the number of people who've converted, here's our sales, which doesn't reflect the complexities of things like buying a Ferrari on your mobile device or brand preference being really important. I think if we're gonna start to try and work this way, then we need to turn this idea of moments into a framework. So first we need a better definition. So we've spent a long time thinking about how do we do this. Moments are behaviors or psychological states. They're not a step in a funnel. They're not a process that people go through. They are what's going through the mind of a person when they search and what do they want to achieve. Part of the challenge is all we've got are keywords. So we know from Google Ad Planner that there are certain amounts of searches for certain phrases. We can look at those phrases and we can start to infer the moment. So we can say best LCD TV has a very different expectation of a landing page, of a brand experience, of content than compare 32-inch TVs. So best LCD TV would suggest that I'm looking to cut through the process of manually building a consideration set. To get to a top 3 or top 5 that I can select from, whereas compare cheap 32-inch TVs is quite specific, but the intent is a broad category page that has lots of different options that I can compare and contrast. Now depending on which one of those I've searched for and depending on what content I hit, I'm gonna get a better or worse experience. Ideally you would want very different content for each of those 2 options. So to start to utilize this, you've got to research all of the keywords in your market. This is a Huge amount of work, and there's no shortcut here. So the challenge with having keyword not provided is you don't know what search terms people have come to your website on. However, if you've already researched all of the possible terms they might have, so you've gone through the Ad Planner and extracted everything in there, you've done surveying, you've watched Rand's talk from last year, a whole bunch of other talks including Mike King has a very good talk about keyword research, you've understood every possible term then you can start to classify them and do some interesting stuff. Why is this important? Typical SEO will look at a phrase like young drivers insurance as a keyword and say there are 6,500 people searching for it each month. It's not a big deal if you're in the insurance space. That SERP is incredibly competitive. The big players are there, the Avivas, the GoCompares, all the big boys. If you look at the topic of young drivers insurance, of which there are 266 distinct keywords, so those are plural synonyms, variants, concepts that mean the same thing that are worded differently. You look at all the behavior of people who want young drivers' car insurance rather than the one keyword, you find very quickly that overall the sites that are in the top pole position have very little content and very few visits. In fact, the site that is second overall is tiny, and its primary page has 121 words of content, no links, and no social. To win on the phrase young drivers car insurance is incredibly competitive. To win on the topic is incredibly easy. If you start thinking about groups of keywords and behaviors and intent, you can start to shift it. So how does this work? You need to define topic rules for all of your keywords. Start to slice and dice them and understand exactly what the person wanted. This is really hard with broad keywords, but as soon as you get into the longer tail and look at entire topics, it becomes much easier. Best is a modifier about quality. It also suggests that I'm wanting a list. LCD suggests that I know a little bit about the sector. So if I just searched TV, there's no evidence that I'm an expert. If I'd searched plasma, it would have told me something slightly different. Plural versus singular is particularly interesting. TVs is show me some. Best LCD TV would have been maybe a tech review radar of the current best one in the market. You can infer a huge amount of information. You're not gonna get it always right, but you're gonna get it better than if you just treated all of your keywords generically. You can infer all sorts. There is a shortcut to doing this. This is a huge amount of work. There is a Labs tool on LinkDex which I built about a year ago, which is somewhat discontinued but might still be useful. Take your thousands of keywords that you've researched and drop them into this, and it will try and categorize them a bit. So it'll say, this is a question, this is about cheeseburgers, this is about cars. It'll do a little bit of sorting. This is brand, this is non-brand. You can spit that out, and it's a starting point for building some of these types of rules. That allows you to do things like this. So you can say, actually, I want to understand the entire marketplace in terms of search behavior rather than keywords and rankings. And I understand that if I'm in the TV space, next-generation tech is really important. People are searching for what's coming next. And actually, most people's search behavior It tends to be based on the features of the TVs rather than looking for specific brands. Now that's fairly self-evident when you consider the TVs market, but these rules vary by marketplace. There's lots of interesting nuances you can take to understand how do people research, because if you want to influence the experience they have whilst they're researching, you need to know where they are and what they're doing. So you can evolve this. This is the really clever bit. You go from topics to then another layer of rules where you start building moments. So you know that best LCD TVs, because it's a list and because it's plural, is about comparing, whereas best LCD TV is about evaluating. Now that's a subtle difference, but again, the content you would expect to see that you would want to experience and peruse is very, very different. And you would not necessarily expect somebody to convert on either of these. You're gonna have potentially high bounce rates, you're gonna have low conversion rates, but that's because these aren't moments where people are purchasing. They're moments where people are building preference sets and developing brand affinity and looking at different options. Again, this is about influencing what happens next and changing the whole cascade of subsequent events. So you can take this classification approach and turn it inwards rather than outwards and say, okay, if I understand all of the possible keywords that people might use to find me, and I've rank-checked them and classified them and categorized them and sliced them up. What's my share of market compared to the overall market? And you spot things like, if this were my domain— so we've got a huge complicated wibbly-wobbly graph, but what it shows is that we know that the list building phase is particularly important in TVs, and I have very low share of market on UHD, ultra-high definition TVs. You can compare the market size to your market share and spot where you're missing people. To use this kind of thinking effectively, you need to do it at scale. So for every LCD TV, best LCD TVs, every one of those variants, you need to consider what's the moment, what's the content that people are expecting, how optimized is my site, how am I doing versus the share of market at scale, and it's enormous. You're talking about thousands of keywords and potential landing pages and content work. Problem is you can't get near this. It's too big. It's too scary. It's high-level brand strategy. It's high-level content strategy that's probably above everybody's pay grade except the CEO, and the scale of it is just daunting and terrifying. Commercial models, so either in agency world or in-house, they don't allow for this kind of depth of research to happen. If you're an agency, you're tasked with fast results and monthly cycles. If you're in-house, you're under-resourced. You can't say, I'm gonna spend 3 weeks researching our market. It's really hard to get to this level of depth of content. Retailers and brands can't be a neutral opinion. They can't compare other providers' content. So as an end retailer, how do you provide a page which adequately answers to comparing behavior, for example? Because you're only going to talk about you, and no one's going to believe what you say about you. Really hard to position brands in other spaces. And where does responsibility start or stop? If success in this world is the culmination of the brand, the content, the user experience, that you're reliant on other teams to help execute this, that you need to understand the market and your consumers deeply, how do you even begin to affect that? So here's where it starts to get interesting. The 3rd lie is that SEO is strategic integrated digital marketing. This is the point where the fire alarm may well go off, we'll see. Imagine you're responsible for SEO at Argos. If I Google 42-inch LCD TV, I rank first. All of my reporting metrics, all of my analytics, all of my targets, my KPIs, my salary, my bonus say tick, job done. Except in position 3, there's a somewhat negative review. And as a searcher, I'm sure as hell going to open both of those. Now, I might not do it in the same session, I might not do it on the same day. I might open it in a second tab at the same time. None of our attribution and analytics processes allow us to understand this. I'm probably actually also going to look at that one as well in case that review is biased. We tend to look at search volume and think there are this many searches, this many searches. It's just this many searches. There's no reason why a whole bunch of that search volume isn't the same people refining and exploring and viewing different content. Probably gonna look at these as well because there's a secondhand market. And actually, before you know it, my search has resulted in me browsing pretty much all of the results in that SERP. That world of if I rank first, first I get 30-something percent is nonsense. It's a radical oversimplification. It's lies to children. This is the way we search and behave. Sure, we search and engage with content more sophisticatedly than people who aren't in the SEO space, but people look, they browse, they explore, they multi-tab, they multi-device. ZMOT is a radical oversimplification. This blob in the middle of online is actually opening 20 websites on 3 devices over a week. It's not as simple as people are influenced by the stuff they see. It's hugely miasmic, and the idea of a funnel that people progress through just doesn't work. People hop between phases, they draw conclusions, they evaluate and think about brands. And whether you rank first— if you rank first, it's no guarantee that you get the click, that you get the conversion, because people form opinions way before they get to that stage. People are opening 10 tabs on devices over time in different places and it's all hyper-localized. The thing is this happens anywhere where I'm not an expert. Anywhere where I have to research, where I have to form an opinion to evaluate products. I open 10 different tabs and I identify brands and I build a preference. Doesn't matter where I rank, doesn't matter what my content's like, I'm part of a much wider mix. So you win this behavior by managing the ecosystem and the opinions that people form based on the things that they see. To do this, you have to match their intentions. You have to understand what they're looking for, identify the topics, and then beat their expectations and that of your competitors. So, practical example. Imagine you're responsible for selling more TVs at Samsung, their SEO strategy. You've researched the market and you know that there are 8,500 different keywords which represent all of the places where there are volume and commercial opportunity, every single keyword in the TVs market. That's actually reasonably accurate. It's 3.5 million searches a month. Within that, there are nearly 100 different topics which range from LCD to 3D to 4D to things like, this is a question, or this is a topic about a specific size, or this is about screen resolution. 100 different topics. And then within those, they span 9 different moments. So people who are considering, people who are risk-reducing, people who are cost-reducing, people who are looking for brand support. Within that space, the list-building moment is particularly impactful. People who are researching TVs, the behavior they exhibit is to compare multiple brands, which are to compare multiple features, which makes sense. People go this or this, or show me the best ones of these, and then they narrow it down. Where the game starts to change is when you realize that when there are 3.5 million searches in the list building phase, Samsung's website accounts for 2% of that traffic. If I'm responsible for SEO at Samsung, only 70,000 of those people ever come to my website. Your domain and your content is a tiny part of the journey that your consumers see and have and experience. Almost insignificant. 3.5 million people and only 70,000 of them come to your domain. What are the other 3.4-ish million people doing? What are they seeing? They're forming opinions. They're purchasing TVs. They are seeing brands. They're reading reviews. They're thinking about the content they consume And they're forming purchase decisions that you're not involved in. Your website is meaningless, almost. If you're SEO at Samsung, you want to be thinking about, how do I influence people over there and over there and elsewhere on the web? It's hugely amorphous, but that's what you need to do to manage your sales. So how do you do this? Well, who's winning? Who are these websites that they're seeing? And it turns out that it's Currys, and it's Argos, and it's Tesco. Why? And within that, they're talking about smart TVs and LED TVs. Interestingly, retailers can only rank for what they sell. If you're reliant on a large e-commerce site, how tied down do you want your SEO success to be to the number of products that you sell? All of their ranking content is based on their retail pages. If their suppliers and the brands they work with change their lines or consolidate ranges or retire stuff, Their SEO is going to take a dip. Interesting. TechRadar is an interesting outlier. All of their content is on ultra-high definition because they're talking about next-generation tech. You start to get a feel for who are the consumers that are in this space seeing and where are they forming opinions. The people who are seeing the content about smart TVs or UHD stuff on TechRadar are then subsequently buying TVs, at least some of them. The content they see is informing their preference. So how do we use this? Argos. All of that traffic that hits Argos hits one page. 100,000 people who are list building for TVs see this page. That's more people than see the entirety of Samsung.com when you're Samsung trying to sell TVs. Now, if there's a Samsung product on that page versus if there isn't versus if it's got bad reviews or if it ranks higher or lower, that is going to have a significant impact on my subsequent purchase decision. As an SEO for Samsung, I need to influence what's on this page. And interestingly, when you dig into it, their sort order for products is heavily influenced by number of reviews. My SEO strategy for selling more TVs should be to influence that sort order. I will negotiate a deal with Currys to sell either a dedicated deal or £100 off so that I generate more reviews. Now, is that SEO at this stage? I've used search data and keyword research and search metrics to identify what people are seeing when they search, and then I've taken action that has sold more TVs. Not built any links, not generated any content, not done any outreach, not changed my website at all in any way, shape, or form, but I've achieved my objectives. SEO is content, links, rankings are all a means to an end to success, to generate more revenue, to sell more things, to build equity. If I've done that without doing conventional SEO, is it still relevant? TechRadar. So people higher up the funnel in the list building phase when they are doing very early research, when they are building their first opinions, all hit TechRadar because these are the guys who shepherd people's subsequent decisions. These have 100 articles about, or thousands of articles about different tech and different options. They're all written by one guy. None of your social media tools will pick him up. He's got a Klout score of 40-something and only a couple of thousand followers and generally tweets off topic. Except that that one article alone that he wrote generates 18,000 visits a month. 18,000 people who are specifically researching TVs hit that one article. The content and the words on that webpage inform whether they purchase a TV from you or one of your competitors. As an SEO, my strategy is to wine and dine him and to influence what he subsequently writes. Again, no content, nothing on my domain, nothing's changed. I'm not trying to get links. I'm trying to make sure that the words that he puts on pages that my consumers see are positive about me. It's a different way of thinking about search. So your site is still important. People still come to the end of the funnel. They still need to make a purchase decision. Where you rank has some value. It's still a significant piece. You can use this kind of thinking to really turbocharge content marketing and take it up to the next level. So big spreadsheet, all of your keywords, all of the ranking pages, search volume, and estimated visits, with a caveat that I know that CTR is bullshit, but make up your own rules. Use best guesses, take averages from Webmaster Tools, use other tools, guesstimate. This is all about patterns and trend spotting, and then do something like this. So pivot on page rather than keywords and say, show me all of my pages and then show me how many keywords they're ranking for, which again you've got because you've researched them all and you've rank-checked it, how many topics that represents and how many moments those topics represent, and then how much traffic is it getting, what's the bounce rate, what's my conversion rate, and you can very quickly see where have I got pages that are trying to both educate and sell, where have I got pages that are trying to shepherd people but aren't working. You can see where you've got stuff that is too thin or too dense. There's an age-old question in SEO, should I make this 1 page or 2 pages? What's the split between pages and topic alignments? This process goes a long way to answering that because it's about meeting people's intents and hopefully exceeding them. There is a risk that this is a massive trap. A lot of the reason we struggle and we have problems with SEO is because we've oversold our accountability, our measurability. We've said, We've got all these KPIs, laugh at the PR world because they do woolly, woolly nonsense and we're all very, very data-driven. So we've trapped ourselves in providing ranking reports and all sorts of metrics. I think there's a risk that you don't wanna end up just replacing one set of spreadsheets and metrics with another. Go back to basics, understand what you're trying to achieve. This is all about getting the right results to the right person in the right context. Thank you. We started playing with the idea of surveying on SERP results. So let's say for a topic there are 30 or 40 significant pages that we know that our consumers are seeing. Run a survey, put it on oDesk, Upwork, or ask your colleagues, or outsource it somewhere, and evaluate the quality of the content on those pages. Take some inspiration from the Google Panda checklist. And ask things like, what's the depth of content like? Is this trustworthy? What's the design and the feel like? Is it emotive? Is this informational? Use people to evaluate these pages and to ask, is this any good? You have visited this page looking to buy a TV with this keyword or this topic. You can start to use people to understand whether it aligned or not. And then you can feed this back into your spreadsheet and say, okay, okay, give me that idea of which pages are working too hard or not hard enough But then also add, is this page any good? Stop trying to chase the algorithm and understand what works, but actually just ask people, is this a good page? And do that at scale. There's a link to this template. You can use it. It's all set up to magically do very clever things. It pulls in your keywords if you import them, and then you can do the surveying bit and spit out, where should I start looking at my content in order to affect more subsequent behaviors? Very quickly, top secret, I'm not allowed to talk about this, but I will add sentiment analysis into this. So if you're already doing surveying mechanisms, It's not much more of a leap to say to the people who are serving, also evaluate whether this page is positive or negative about my product, my product or my brand or both or whatever entity, and then add that into your spreadsheet and you get something like this but also says good, bad, indifferent. So easy then to do content marketing and to get buy-in. You can say, we have a bit of a shit page which isn't quite as good as the competitors that has an opportunity to get more visits. Such an easy business case. So this doesn't just apply to enterprise SEO. This applies to anywhere where people are thinking and making decisions. When you start to evaluate keywords, the only bit that is enterprise-ish is the kind of scale of keyword research that you need to do, but if you're not doing large-scale keyword research anyway, then your strategies are missing things and it's a bit half-baked. You have to put the work in upfront, but this methodology applies to small sites, big sites, Anything you want. This allows you to turn content marketing into a real thing rather than just an amorphous phrase. It lets you think about and talk about market share rather than rankings, which is a really nice conversation to have. Fundamentally, it allows you to capture consumers higher up the funnel. Capture does not mean convert. It does not mean sell. It does not mean get more basket adds. It means influence the subsequent steps they take. And each of those subsequent steps is also a moment. That you will track and have your own tactics for. This is about moving people through the process. You can actively steal competitor market share by working out where they're weak and sniping consumers one step before they build brand preference. You can use other people to fill in the gaps. So if there are places that you can't or don't want to compete, you can layer in other channels to fill in those moments. You kind of start to peel away this oversimplification to get to the truth, which is that The only thing that matters is that somebody has searched, and the things that they see, the content that they consume, informs the decisions they make. And in our world where we've been targeting last click and optimizing for conversion rate and trying to generate more sales, we've forgotten that actually it's a much more complicated process, and the emotions people feel and the things they consume and the process of coming to decisions is where the money is actually made. Good SEO. Or content marketing or digital marketing or inbound or growth hacking, whatever we want to call it, is when you manage the experience that people have and the opinions they form when they search. So people don't do this because the data is too shallow. You have to research thousands of keywords, which is a big ask, but it's worth it. Is it or isn't it SEO or is it something else? It doesn't matter because you're trying to generate success and sales, and if this is a route to it, then so be it. Actually, maybe the problem is we've overcomplicated it. Rather than oversimplified it. And we've all been lost talking about metrics and rankings and keywords, and that's our own fault. Nobody ever asked for that. When this industry evolved, we started presenting that as we've got all these metrics. We've dug our own grave. This elevates SEO from being a channel to being a digital marketing intelligence process, and it gets budget, it gets buy-in, it gets success. Or does it? It's a nice dream, but it's different and it's new and it's complicated, and people don't like new and different and complicated things. And CEOs get scared very easily and in-house teams don't like change. That's absolutely fine. I think we've done those bits but we struggle with these. So very, very quickly, getting buy-in in 60 seconds. There is a link to a framework. I'm not gonna talk about this in much depth but the principle is really sound. You need to build a strategy off the back of this data. So understand the market, understand the consumers, understand the opportunities. Don't forget that as SEOs we're really, really good at building strategies. We understand markets. We understand websites and consumers. The intersect between understanding content and market research and how people behave and sites work is unique to our discipline. We are better at devising market strategies than anybody else, and we forget that sometimes. Build an awesome strategy. The only rules are that it must increase revenue, decrease cost, and increase brand. If you can tick those 3 boxes, you get sign-off very easily from senior people. You need to account for the fact that the best strategy isn't always the right strategy, and that you need to understand that the limitations of budget and people and psychology, etc., need to be factored in. So you've got to compromise iteratively till you reach something. We've started doing something quite interesting, which is surveying our clients. So there's 2 phases to this. One is, rather than saying, tell us everything about your website and tell us what you're doing, tell us what you're good at, tell us what you're bad at, There's 2 phases. One is to role-play and to say, rather than saying, tell me what your technical roadmap is, say, your website goes down at 3 AM and your technical director's on holiday. What happens? It elicits an awful amount of insight into what are their processes, what's their HR policies, where are they strong, where are they weak, and therefore what should or shouldn't you be recommending as part of a strategy. You can use the nuggets that fall out of that to shape your vision. 2 is then do psychometric testing. And say, from easy to hard, how easy is it to add content to your website, or to engage with a blogger, or to change your product descriptions? Start to evaluate where they're strong and weak. Go especially for things that challenge their organizational perceptions. So things like, what is the gap between your budget and your ambition? And ask different people. You'll get a very different answer from the CEO than you will from the execs doing the work. You can start to understand where there's dysfunction and again factor that back into your strategy. There's a framework, I won't dwell on it, but you can take all of this and turn it into KPIs and goals and objectives. This is really, really powerful for getting buy-in, for pulling together multiple teams, and there is a link to a Bitly thing. Use this, get people in a room, get them to commit to definitions of success. You've built your strategy, you've understood the market and people's behavior, write it down in a framework and you will almost guarantee buy-in. This is so powerful. So that's the business bit. People are really hard. A couple of tricks: you've got to understand motivations and anticipate objections and give yourself permission to be the expert. You have a whole bunch of people in the room who will find ways to object to different ways of thinking, who will challenge the fact that you've not got an attribution model, who won't like that you're not talking about rankings and KPIs. Get them on board. There's a link to a framework. They all have different responsibilities and different superpowers, and you can use that to play them off against each other. Really interesting psychological tricks. Finally, I remember a really inspiring talk by Will at the last LinkLove where he talked about the power of the T-shaped marketer and how success for us as individuals looks like being a broad person with knowledge across all sorts of spaces and then very, very deep sector-specific knowledge. I think that's not enough. I think where this is going and the idea of SEO being reliant on being more than SEO and being multichannel and being integrated and tackling the psychology and the processes of business and playing nicely with the PR team and thinking about reach and market requires much more than just the T-shape. I think we need to be aspiring to move to N-shaped-ish and M-shaped-ish and becoming multidisciplinary. I think the idea of being very, very good at tech and okay at everything else or very, very good at link building and okay at everything else isn't sufficient to operate in this world. I think we need to aspire higher. I don't know what the process for getting there is. I think things like Distilled U are really good, but there's a long way to go in terms of us educating ourselves to allow this ability to happen. That is indeed all that we have time for. However, some thoughts to leave you with. One is this kind of thinking is actively disrupting industries right now. So we're doing this today with a whole bunch of companies. We are doing broad-scale research of their markets. And then identifying the behaviors that people exhibit before they purchase. Where are they going? Where are they going? What are they seeing in these different moments? And then the difference between we should advertise on this site versus this site, or we should talk to this blogger rather than this blogger, or we should write this content rather than this content, is going completely unnoticed by their competitors. But their market share is growing. They're sniping people higher up the funnel. They're behaving almost like the marketing world does before we turned it into metrics and numbers. They're thinking about share of mind and reputation and brand preference in a way that we never have. And it's making a huge impact on visits and sales downstream. This is a seismic shift for organizations, for teams. It's going to be really, really hard to change this way of thinking. You can do it really small. You can start in pieces. You can deploy moments and moment-type thinking to isolated campaigns and set KPIs for success for influencing people and surveying the quality of content and watching sentiment increase. You can do this in small pieces and get buy-in. We only work the way we do and we only struggle with the things we do today because that's the way they work. Because nobody's changed it. We struggle to get buy-in and we struggle to get brand and we struggle to get around the grown-up table for things like PPC budgets and impactful change. But that's because that's where we positioned ourselves. We put ourselves in a little corner and said, we're high and mighty, we've got all of our metrics, This is an opportunity to work our way back into that fold. So just to leave you with, I think there is definitely a problem here. I think the fact that that is the only brand in that space is hugely concerning. I think we've all been talking about content marketing for years and how important brand is and how important it is that we engage consumers higher up the funnel and that we do good content and good marketing. Yet, yet when I search fuzzy sound on TV, Absolute drivel because we're all doing content marketing at the end of the funnel. I think this is evidence that there is a problem here, that we have to change things and that we have to do bigger, better, more sophisticated marketing because the bigger brands are doing this offline. They're doing really well. They're doing billboards and TV and advertising and getting people's buy-in. But we're missing it entirely. Take this and win like a rainbow unicorn kitty. It is hugely impactful. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thanks, Jono. I found that really, really persuasive and a really good— something I've had at the back of my mind and articulated really well. I think that's amazing. What I found interesting towards the end there was when you're talking about budget versus other disciplines. Do you think part of the reason paid search, television advertising, billboards, all of that type of thing successful is because of the simplicity of the story. Yes. Yes. This is a much simpler story. But, but I, I feel that like with some of that, there's kind of an almost paralyzing level of complexity in the marketplace there. And it feels like you kind of need to have the final output rather, you know, you know, you get the end game, but trying to explain that, I think that might be difficult. Do you think? Yeah. Yeah. And I think the conversation, the story needs to sound much more like a PR story that it's about influencing people. and getting awareness and attention for the right people in the right forums. It's essentially the PR story, but with the added value that it's more trackable. You avoid the whole world of trying to do the attribution funnel, and the story is as simple as people are searching, we're not there, or what's there is drivel, or we're less persuasive than our competitor. And you simplify it all into how well are we represented, and then it's just reputation management and PR. I'll ask you one quick one. What's the MVP for this look like? Because this is, this is too big for me. This is too big. And I, I, I feel like you stopped a bit too, a bit too early, although actually 2 minutes 35 seconds too late. A bit too late, yeah, that's right. Where do you actually start? So, like, assume that right, right now I don't have sign-off to go and do, like you say, 3 weeks worth of work. I was getting interested when you're like, Just these little bits we're going to introduce. What would be the first thing you would do? So my end goal is eventually to do all this work. What's the first thing I should do? Pick a topic around a campaign. So everybody's already got campaign ideas and stuff in the pipeline. Expand that out to a whole topic area. So if it's the TVs market, pick 3D TVs. There are probably only 1,000 keywords in 3D TVs, which is still a lot, but 1,000 is maybe half half a day's work to research exhaustively, to categorize, to start to build— excuse me— to start to build rules and then moment classifications. Definitely isolate it. And then you can tie it into the success metrics of the campaign. So you can say rather than success being generating leads and sales, you can expand that to say, and also building awareness in these moments. Great. Great. Cool. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Cheers.