Garrett Sussman: Is the founder foundation and distribution[.ai], which is actually a really cool software you all should check out. He’s an Amazon best selling author with a mantra, create once, distribute forever, a sushi lover adventure seeker, and a Philadelphia Eagles fan, which is why I am allowed to be friends with him. Ross is always exploring new flavors and cultures around the globe presenting Search AI and UGC navigating the future of Google and Reddit’s influence. Please welcome Ross Simmons.

Ross Simmonds: Hi. Life turns up turned upside down. I’d like to take a minute to sit right there. What’s up y’all? Super excited to be here. So, I wanna do a quick little experiment to create some FOMO because people left. So, I need you guys to help me. We’re gonna pretend that something crazy is going on. I’m not Oprah, I’m not giving away a car, but let’s pretend I am, I’m actually just gonna give away a book. If you guys can make some noise to make a bunch of FOMO so everybody who left feels super bad about leaving, that would be amazing. So, let’s do it. Alright? On the count of three, we’re gonna pretend that I’m giving away cars, you’re gonna go crazy, and let’s see if anybody comes in. And if they do, we’ll give them this gnarly look like it’s a Canadian in America right now. Alright. I’m kidding. Alright. Let’s do it though. One, two, three, make some noise, make some noise. Alright. Who wants a book? Who wants a book? You want a book? Here we go. You get a book. You get a book. Anybody else want a book? You want a book? You want a book? Here you go. You can get a book. Alright. Alright. Alright. Let’s see. Hey. Thank you for coming in. Appreciate you. Alright. 

Capture the flag. Red Rover, Red Rover, called. Rossi right Over, that was my nickname back in the day. Hide and Go Seek. All of those games made up my childhood. And you might be wondering, what in the world does this have to do with anything? I’ll get to that. But essentially, Capture the Flag was without question my favorite game. Anyone play Capture the Flag as a kid? Grow up? Yeah. Capture the Flag. So good. I have this dream that one day I’m gonna set up my entire neighborhood and get a bunch of the kids and me and we’re gonna play Capture the Flag across the entire neighborhood. It’s gonna be absolutely wild. But there’s three things that you have to do to be great at Capture the Flag. I’ve always grown up playing weird games. I was like semi-pro dodgeball player for a long, long time and then I tore my meniscus. Can’t play anymore. I still think I’d be pretty good, but I love weird games. Capture the flag is one of my favorites. 

There’s a three simple step concept to win at capture the flag. Lurk, listen, leap. And that is the same philosophy that you can apply to Reddit and I’m super excited to share it with you today. You have to lurk in the shadows, try to play it cool and like scope out what everybody’s doing, listen to make sure that there’s no quick foot steps coming up behind you to grab the flag, and then you have to leap, grab that flag, and run fast as you can. That’s essentially the concept. And, the same concept applies to Reddit, and that’s what we’re gonna be diving in today. You might be wondering, bro, what’s that got to do with Reddit? Everything. Because in capture the flag, you leap, you grab that flag, you need to get back. You might get tagged, you gotta get back in because on Reddit, you’re gonna probably get banned, but you gotta get back in. Trust me, I’ve been banned like twenty times. I’ve been told where to go and how to get there by a lot of people, including employees that read it. I wrote my first book on Reddit back in 2015. As you can see, people told me to go away. They hated it. They said, get off of the internet. We don’t like you. I even had this guy write a huge essay, and you know that was actually him because AI didn’t exist back then, so he was like sitting in his underwear just writing all this stuff, and like, people were mad at me. It’s okay. I spoke at MozCon, told everybody that I got blocked from Reddit a bunch of times and talked about that, and people gave it love because again, I’ve been in this Reddit world for quite some time. 

Take you back into time, this is what Reddit used to look like, this is what it now looks like, pretty much very similar to what it used to be, still a similar format. But here’s what has changed. Reddit today is absolutely massive. Over a 101 million daily active uniques, 379 million weekly uniques, over 138,000 different communities and subreddits, and in the US, it is the second most popular website in the US. Crazy. Right? Ahrefs just came up with this this month. It is wild. So, for all those people that left and are no longer going to be able to reap the benefits of Reddit, good for you. But for you guys, you’re going to be able to tap in. And you might be wondering why does Reddit matter? What’s so good about Reddit? This is it. The Google relationship that has popped off over the last few years has been absolutely a driving force for why Reddit has gotten over that impostor syndrome where it called itself the front page of the internet for quite some time, but now it actually has done that, and it is truly the front page of the internet. How many of you, since you’ve been in New York, have been on Reddit? Just a quick show of hands. A couple. Some of you might not even know what Reddit is. Don’t worry, we’ll get into that as well.

So, Reddit is going through a moment. There’s no question that there’s a real moment happening on the internet with Reddit. Reddit is having its content scraped left, right, and center from all of the different solutions, all of the AI tools. They’re striking up a lot of partnerships. They’re striking up a lot of deals. In fact, one of their number one drivers for revenue right now is actually from data licensing agreements that they’ve locked in with organizations like Google and beyond. Millions of dollars. That’s not going anywhere anytime soon. In addition to that, for all the SEOs who are thinking on a global scale, you have to recognize that Reddit is finally making a real push internationally. They’re seeing an increase in their actual revenue on an international basis by over 70% and they’re showing up in the SERPs on the international basis more frequently than ever before, along with in different languages and I’ll show you something on that shortly. The folks over at Profound sent me this data and it was mind blowing but also just reassuring to know that what I’m talking about makes sense, and that is that Perplexity on the vast majority of its queries, when you go to Perplexity and you ask it something, it’s using Reddit as a primary source to identify what content it should actually serve up to you. This is showing up time and time again. Reddit recently started to roll out a translation of all of the threads. So, you might be in New York and you’re creating content about a great bagel shop up the street. If somebody in France is actually doing a keyword research in French and they’re looking for a bagel shop in New York because they’re trying to plan their vacation, Reddit has now integrated an LLM that it was translating live that content, automatically adding an extension to the URL and positioning and creating local content, kind of like what Greg was talking about, but at scale directly in that market.

This is taking off across all of the different languages from Brazil, Portuguese, all over German. They’re translating their content and it is resulting in a massive, massive increase in the daily active users. If you happen to be at Carrie’s talk, she talked about yesterday about all of the media sites that were competing with the brands that she wanted to talk about and the brands that they were getting out there. Look at the biggest block there. The biggest block happened to be Reddit. Reddit is taking over the SERP in so many industries, but so many people are sleeping on it. And, there’s a core reason why this is happening. Yes, there is a partnership where Google has a little bit of skin in the game and they see value if Reddit shows up in the SERP. They won’t say it out loud, but we all know they probably got some shares at the IPO.But there’s trust in the online communities like this piece is a key part. People were adding the keyword reddit to so many of their queries that Google had to respond to it. A lot of people for over the last few years have been looking for their mattress and they’ve been being met with a bunch of content that SEOs have been creating, myself, teams included, and they’re reading this content saying, this isn’t good. I know these people never actually laid in these mattresses. I don’t trust them. So, they’re adding Reddit to their queries and they’re getting feedback from people who they actually trust. Social sharing is also in the decline. We used to share so much on social, on Facebook, on X. Now, people are typically going into these platforms with an experience where they actually just want to consume content and not so much actually share. The buyer’s journey on Reddit is so closely connected to transactions, to considerations, to purchase, but for some reason so many brands still sleep on this. People are using Reddit every single day to make business decisions around products no matter if you’re in B2B, B2C, D2C, it doesn’t matter. People are using Reddit to make these decisions and the data doesn’t lie. If you took all of the keywords that Reddit actually ranks for and you cross referenced whether it was commercial and transactional intent, it would be over $204 million worth of PPC traffic that are going to these pages that are ranking in Reddit every single day. 

So, if you’re convinced that maybe you should actually jump into Reddit, I’m excited to share with you what I call the Reddit Operating System of Scale, Ross. Lurk, listen, leap. I just got to make up acronyms. I don’t know. It’s fun. Alright. So, where do you start? First of all, I know some people hate Reddit, but let me tell you, Reddit doesn’t give away always bad advice. This first one’s brilliant. When you sign up for anything online, put the website’s name as your middle name. That way, you receive spam, you know who it was from. That’s gold. Do that. That’s genius. The second tip is also great. Convince your kids to read books. Doesn’t seem like rocket science, but hey, still good advice. Now, I’m not saying that you should use Reddit for any health advice. This is definitely not what I’m saying. I think it’s doing a lot of weird stuff in that regards. However, if we put on our capitalism hat, then let’s ride. Alright. Subreddits exist for every niche, whether you’re an entrepreneurship, VPN, big SEO, technology, you name it, AI. There is a subreddit for you. I don’t care if you’re working in any space. Right? You can work in someone name a weird space. There’s even like HVACs, it’s there. Whatever. You have a niche and you don’t want to say it out loud because it might not be cool, it’s there. I guarantee you, there is a subreddit for you. Filterfloss. Anyone know what Filterfloss is? Me neither. I don’t even know where the query came from, but I did a quick search and Filterfloss is something that people are looking for. I think it goes into like your fish tanks and stuff like that, but you can see there’s 4,000 people who are looking for that every single month, and what’s the number one ranking website? It’s Reddit.

This is showing up time and time again. There are great tools out there like SEMrush that make it easy for you to actually see what URLs are ranking in the SERP from Reddit. You can do this pretty much in all the tools if you’re able to navigate it, but what’s interesting about something that they’ve been working on is that it’ll also show you how often queries associated with the LLMs are actually pulling from Reddit as well. So, I’m a big believer in lurking. So you need to go into these subreddits with the idea of just lurking. Learn. I’m not saying that every single brand should have a presence on Reddit. Fast forward five years from now, I will 100% say, unless Google and Reddit have a falling out and a divorce like Canada and the US, that you should 100 I’m joking. I love you guys. I had to tell my parents I went to Toronto though because they’re having nervous breakdowns. I told them I went to Texas a few weeks ago, mom’s crying and stuff. It was insane. It’s insane. Either way, New York, let’s go. I love this too. Alright. 

So, New York. I was coming here and I was like, I gotta find some pizza. So, I did a search in the New York subreddit and I just typed in pizza. This thread had hundreds of comments, thousands of upvotes. People loved it. If anybody wants to grab pizza tomorrow for lunch, still haven’t gone to any of these, let’s do it. But, you can look at that and you can see the format that people want. That is what I call content market fit. Let’s say I am a food blogger. I look at New York and I type in pizza and I can see what the top content is within that community, now I know what content market these people want. These people want long form content just like a blog post that kind of falls into the categories of Double E where it says that I’ve researched, I’ve tried all of these pizzas, etc. Now, I’m going to go and give that back to these people. You also want to lurk through a bunch of different queries and see how your domain, your industry, your niche is showing up in the LLMs. If you’re in the coffee industry, every single time somebody has a transactional query, I’ve been noticing that Reddit is showing up all the time. So, you need to consider that. Again, there’s a reason why Reddit is showing up more and more. It’s because they have struck these deals left, right, and center and it’s showing no signs of slowing down. If you’re in software, b to b is kind of the play, industry in the world that I grew up in. It has completely changed the way that B2B is done. 

This, if you’re in B2B SaaS, if you’re in software, take this slide and bring it to your team and show them the reality of the SERP. Back in the day, back in like May 2024, Reddit was nowhere to be found in the top three or four queries as it relates to bottom of funnel searches. We took over 100 and/or 1,600 different bottom of funnel queries where people were typing in best CRM, best marketing software, best marketing automation tools, all of the software queries that would be bottom of funnel, and we found that without question, the top players were there. Capterra, G2, TrustRadius, all of those kind of software review sites. But with the rollout of Reddit’s partnership, Reddit has surpassed them all. It is absolutely wild how much traffic Reddit has stolen from these sites and how far their companies have dropped in terms of total organic value. And, it’s crazy because these folks raised a lot of money, so they’re not happy with Reddit but they should have partnered with Google and they would have been laughing. But that’s a lot of money to lose. So, it started with folks like Capterra generating tons and tons of high value traffic, tons of traffic for people who were trying to buy software. Now, that is all going to Reddit. UGC content is showing up in the SERP, but for some reason, software companies are still like, oh, review sites, they always get a line item of our budget for a hundred and twenty five grand a year and Reddit gets $500 and we’re gonna pull that back in a few weeks anyway.

This is what is broken. The industry is not catching up to the reality. If you look at wirecutter[.]com or what was wirecutter[.]com, now New York Times, the number one competitor that it has in the SERP is Reddit. It is Reddit. But we’re all sleeping on Reddit. Reddit’s not for for marketers, we shouldn’t be there. But no matter what queries you think about, people are going to Reddit to find out answers to questions. So what I encourage you to do is do an analysis even at the beginning to understand like how is Reddit showing up in the SERP, what type of content are people looking at, do your own analysis and your research to see like what queries you’re currently ranking for, what keywords you’re targeting, and whether or not Reddit is showing up in the SERP for those queries, and start to lurk in and start to actually show up and start to create content in those. That’s the leap and we’ll talk about that shortly as well.

There’s a great tool called Gummy Search, which is great for lurking to understand the sentiment of your brand on Reddit. What you’re able to do is you’re able to type in your brand queries, it will actually look across all of the different subs for mentions of your business and your brand, it will then cross reference the sentiment of the comments that people are leaving with your words, and you can actually get a snapshot of how your brand compares to others, it’s a beautiful thing. But again, you have to be willing to lurk. You want to lurk and see how else – this was something that I saw on LinkedIn from Chris Long and it ties in nicely with what Will was talking about around like the listicle style content, but listicles are also ultimately being sourced even if they are directly from Reddit. So someone put up a post of his SEO agency recommendations, they talk about all of the sites that Will had along with SEER, which is cool, shout out to Will, and they tipped that and they essentially pulled it right into the LLM and used that to inform the response. So when you’re thinking about your strategy, you should also be thinking about Reddit. If you want to run a quick and easy test, Reddit just launched this new tool called Reddit Answers, which is their way of responding to ChatGPT and all of these tools. It’s on the left hand side. It might be in beta depending on who you are, but if you go to Reddit Answers and you ask it a question, you will see how the Reddit LLM is actually viewing its own content and how it’s translating that into results. So, you can actually say to it, hey, what is the best mattress recommendations? And it’s going to sing King Coil and it’s going to link to a comment that is in Reddit with the most comments and the most upvotes. You can also use a tool like SparkToro, upload your website domain to SparkToro and it’s going to show you the subreddits that your audience is actually spending time on. It cross references who your visitors are, looks at Reddit and matches it up, so you now know which subreddits you should be prioritizing for when you’re not only lurking, but you’re also going to make that leap eventually.

This is gold. This is gold because you can go into these communities like our marketing where your audience might be spending time and say, I now know that my audience is here. If you’re targeting marketers and you don’t think they’re in our marketing, okay, we I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to everybody else. But the marketers who are in that subreddit are probably interested in certain types of content. So, you go into that subreddit and you’re going to sort the content by top post. When you sort the content by top post in the community that your audience is on, what do you see? You see the content that they’ve given up votes to, that they’ve commented on the most, and just like that New York post, you have uncovered content market fit. You now have to distribute, create assets on these topics. For example, if I see the number one post in our marketing is about Duolingo, then maybe as a marketer I can pick up on the idea that marketers care about this brand, they think it’s interesting and I could write some pieces on this brand if I wanted to get some traction. 

Lurk, listen, leap. I’ve lurked and now I’m going to listen to see if there’s any more signals such as on X where people are talking about Duolingo. Okay. Now, I have validated this idea that marketers care about this brand. I should probably write a case study. I should probably write a book, a guide, a resource of some sort on this concept and then distribute it back into that subreddit and guarantee that I’m going to get success. That is the way that you do it. But, you also want to use things like this new tool that Reddit also launched. They’re rolling out a bunch of crazy cool tech to empower people to actually be more active in the organic side where you can add keywords to the back end of Reddit in this feature called Trends and it will cross reference the entire platform and let you know when somebody talks about your brand. So, if you’re Aeropress, it will tell you when there’s conversations happening about your business all the time, give you a notification as well as an email so you can jump in and engage, and I’ll show you how to engage in a second. You can listen and pick up like what subreddits directly from trends have the most members, and again, this will support you in understanding what subreddits you should be active in. I truly believe that the tools like Gummy Search are game changing for SEOs because we’re not just thinking about search from a Google lens, we’re thinking about it holistically at large. And as Greg was mentioning before, about the sentiment, that whole concept of sentiment is really influencing the way things are showing up, even based off of Reddit trends. So, you dive into a tool like Gummy Search and it will actually analyze what are the patterns across subreddits that people are saying when they’re talking about your brand, when they’re talking about coffee machines? You can quickly see that people are thinking about budget friendly coffee machines, best coffee machines for home use. Maybe we need to position our brand more closely around home usage. Maybe we need to start thinking about how we can have more campaigns about a milk frother, all of those different things. Or, you notice that there’s this subreddit that is called Buy It For Life that is constantly talking about how this one coffee machine can last forever, and maybe you need to position yourself as such.

You want to listen for what people are saying at the bare minimum, folks. That would be if anyone left here and they just said, okay, we’re gonna we’re gonna listen and lurk, I’d be so happy. That on its own because you’re now paying attention to the market and your customers who are probably very, very willing to give you authentic and real feedback directly on Reddit than they wouldn’t if you just asked them for an answer to an email or something like that. Here’s the other thing. I know that’s where the fear is. You don’t actually want to know what they’re saying because they’re probably going to tell you where to go and how to get there, but you just you should do it anyway. Simple coffee maker recos, like, you see this type of content on a regular. Ideally, you can start to see what people are saying about you. 

This Mockamaster brand, I don’t know if anybody has it, but they’re crushing it. You’ve got that? You do? Oh, man. I’ve been hearing Well, from Reddit, like, they’re loving this thing. I think I’ve to get one. But it’s all over Reddit, like blowing up. But if I worked at Mockamaster, I’d be like, okay, why does Aeropress have a more positive sentiment than me based off of this? And when you dive deeper, you’ll see that they don’t have a higher brand sentiment, they just have a higher volume of conversations happening about them. So that should be a signal that we need to increase our presence as Mocha Master if we want to be able to compete with the AeroPresses of the world. 

Reddit also has this cool ad analyzer tool. This is something that I don’t think any other ad like marketing social platform has. They’re super transparent about it. It’s kind of weird, but it’s okay. They tell you why people are running ads, it shows you like their entire ad along with the reasons why it works. They tell you what they’re prioritizing with the ad, so it’ll tell you that this ad is optimized for conversion. The format, it tells you how high of a budget people are actually investing in Reddit, kind of weird, but Reddit’s a weird place. How to study the communities? Again, there’s that Mocha master, again, over two forty upvotes on this post with people saying that they love it. This is where you should be if you’re in this space. Gummy search, I’m not going to spend too much more time talking about it. It’s great. If you are to tap into a tool to lurk and listen, this is the one. 

Alright. Now, let’s get into it. Now, it’s time to leap. Grab the flag, run back, don’t get banned. How do you do it? Alright. So, anybody from Ahrefs here? Alright. Good. Okay. So, back in 2015, Ahrefs was going in and they were like, let’s go in on Reddit, and they started to create content. And, it was great. Brilliant strategy. This is exactly what you’re supposed to do. You go into Reddit, you get customer feedback, and they were doing it year after year after year, and they were getting gold. Right? Like, people were responding, they were engaging, they were having these in-depth conversations, people were saying, we want you to have a data studio connector. That would be awesome. People loved it so much, they were saying, I love you guys, but I have some gripes. And look at that feedback. Wouldn’t that be amazing to get like that in-depth level of feedback from people who are using your product? It’s amazing. They kept going. They kept going and they kept going. And then last, a few years ago, people told him where to go and how to get there, and it wasn’t too pretty. They swore at Tim, they were telling Tim all kinds of things, and it turns out that that post got locked, blocked, deleted by. It was wild. So, you have to go in with thick skin. You have to be okay with, yes, it can be lollipops and roses, but if your prices are crazy and you’re doing some crazy stuff, people are gonna tell you what they feel. And I know this, like I’ve been blocked a lot, but I’ve also been on the front page of Reddit hundreds of times. I used to run a coffee company called Hustle and Grind. Grind means coffee grinds, and we were on the front page time and time again, reached millions of people. Our posters, our art sold like bonkers on Reddit. It was crazy. 

So, let’s go one zero one for a second, and then we’ll dive into tactics real quick. There’s a few key things that you need to know about Reddit and how it works. First, there’s a branded subreddit. This is what I would encourage you all to do. If you do not already own your own branded subreddit, r/YourBrandName, go and get it yesterday. Like, go and get that subreddit. You need to have your subreddit because if somebody else creates it, you can’t get it back. It’s really hard to get it back. Twilio, HubSpot, Zapier, ClickUp, they all have set the bar for what these look like in SaaS, but if you want some other examples, can check out RWGU. Supernote is doing a good job. There’s a lot of brands that have set up a great optimized subreddit that I would encourage you to consider. You want to have a great description over on the right hand side that gives you details around like your business. You’ll notice that there’s four little blocks on the right hand side. You can have links going directly from your sub to your website into priority pages that matter to you, or you can let the industry and the people, your customers, your clients create your subreddit, kind of like ChatGPT did, and then have millions of people who are running it, but it’s not you. It’s out of your control. You have no management of it. Not my preferred advice and approach. I think brands should try to run their own sub, but if you can’t, you’re out of luck. Another thing you should do is own the user. 

So, there’s two different types. There’s r, which means community, and /u, which means user. You also want to own your brand’s user account. User accounts are very important. SEMRush has theirs. Brilliant. That’s how it should be. You want to own your own user account and subreddit. The user is the brand representing like the company going into threads, responding, interacting and engaging on a regular basis. There’s a few different approaches that you can take to this. I think there always should be one overarching account for your business that operates as your business’ main account. That account is going to be the mod of your sub just in case employees get wild and you’re going to let them go or something like that, you don’t want them to like take your account and run with it. Make sure that you have a mod that is neutral with a shared login, sort of like what Supernote has done. 

You also can take an approach like Sonos has done, which is also a great Is there Sonos in the house? Are you Keith? No. Oh, I was going to say, you, because Keith is the OG GOAT. Cool. So Sonos, I think, does an amazing job with their subreddit as well. They’ve got all of their teams empowered to be using the sub, and that’s exactly how it’s showing up. These folks are in there responding and communicating. SEMRush is doing their thing too. They’ve got a few folks on there that are no longer at their team, so I don’t know if they’re managing it well anymore, but that’s a whole different conversation. But you should run a subreddit with excellence. And again, Sonos is, in my opinion, one of those ones that is doing that. They don’t own their own subreddit, but they have people who are employees clearly listed on the bottom of their sub and it calls out that this is a sub not owned or run by Sonos, and that is exactly how you do it. If you are empowered to take a subreddit and like become a part of it and you can’t become a mod, becoming a contributor, a responder is the second best place to go. Definitely a great approach. So cool to see you guys here. And this is another great one. So you wanna have personality in your responses on Reddit. This is how it’s done. What can I say except you’re welcome? That’s – anyone know that song? I say that to my kids all the time. They want peanuts? What can I say except you’re welcome? Trophy case, like, this is where This is the goal. This what you want your user accounts to be, to be getting awards. We have a bunch of accounts that we run for our clients, and at first it was weird to be like, you know, we just got a trophy and they’re like, what? What are we what are we talking about? What are we talking about? I’m like, we’re We’ve got like a gilding trophy, we’ve got this consistency trophy, but yeah, either way, they still love us.

That’s the other type. You can create brand users. So, if you do have another type of account, create users. So, it could be Ross from Foundation, mine are just like r/simmonds and other accounts, all this stuff, but I would encourage you to consider all of these different types. Here’s another thing though. If you have a user If somebody has your username and you’re like, I want my username, which you should, there is a way to get it. If it’s a subreddit, not a chance. There’s close to no chance. If somebody has your username, you can go through a trademarking process where you can reach out to me and I can send you the link to do it, or you can just reach out to Reddit and they can hook you up. But you can claim a trademark if you have a trademark for a username that is associated with your brand. If you want to be added to a sub, you can reach out to a sub, to a mod. This is something that we’ve done. There’s my subreddit. That’s my username. So, r/simmonds, I say, hey, do you happen to work at this company or working with this client? They want to get their sub back. I was like, can you give it to me? Then they added me as a mod within a matter of a few days. So, you can reach out. Some people on Reddit are nice, some people not so nice. But I strongly encourage you to set up your accounts because we have another client whose account is set up like this and it’s real messy because somebody is running explicit content on their account.

Reddit’s also big in that world and if that’s your world, then you do you boo boo, that’s you. Alright. Leap. So, marketing. I think you need to jump in but you really gotta stop sounding like marketers, folks. You’re killing yourselves out there on the internet. Going in and putting up posts like this, marketing in the dumps, deploy a chatbot for free, bot deploy dot ai. Hope they’re not here. Be gone. Right? That’s what Reddit will tell you. Be gone. Get that foolishness out of here. They don’t want that. You need to actually go in and respond like a human and be actually interesting and funny. There are a few peak hours in which you can operate on Reddit. Again, all my slides will be shared so you can see this. Here’s another low hanging fruit. You’re not ready to leap. Get this pixel code, install it on your website. Low hanging fruit. We have seen crazy conversion rates on remarketing from Reddit. The brand doesn’t even need to be there. Just run remarketing ads to people who are on your money pages, especially I’m talking to my B2B people. If they’re on a comparison page, if they’re on a pricing page or a solutions page, especially if you’re talking to a highly technical audience, these folks, when they see the remarketing, it’s like magic still and they will come over and start to consume your content.

Reddit also runs a very transparent platform where you can see all of the ads that are showing. I encourage you to study those and then start to boost your top performing posts. You should also, I didn’t have a slide on this, go to the search bar on Reddit, type in the word site:yourwebsitedomain. Hit the enter bar. It’s going to show you any blog post, any article on your domain that has ever been submitted to Reddit. Every week we work with a client, we’re finding these clients who jump in and they’re like, we haven’t been on Reddit. And then we do that search and we find posts that they created back like five years ago that went ridiculously viral. Yes, viral. Like hundreds of shares, thousands of comments sometimes, and they didn’t even know that they like were Reddit famous for a day. Guess what happens? You take that same content from two thousand and fourteen, you give it to people again in 2025, and it’s still gonna resonate. Why?  Because we’re just walking balls of chemicals and we still react the same way we did back then.

So, Redditors still love links. We did this analysis and we found that Redditors love links, don’t be afraid to submit your links. Just make sure that you’re looking at Reddit, analyzing your keywords, studying the threads that are responding and engaging, respond to those that are ranking in the SERP. You should also tap into influencers. If there’s people who are active in subreddits, make friends with them. They might even mention your blog content in the future, which is great because you start to get referral traffic from that. This is another great example, native content, so you can take blog post style content, submit it into subreddits, and add value to the communities. Will you still get banned? Maybe, but at the end of the day, you have to try. Here’s another example. I created a bunch of posts, none of them got me banned, where I was talking about how to grow your Instagram account up to 50,000, how I built my first consultancy, that was many years ago, but how I was able to grow the early days of foundation, all of that stuff. Now, real quick, remember that pizza post that I talked about earlier? I gave this talk when I had no hair on my face called at CTA Conf where I told people that they need to remix their content. If you see something that is great in the internet and is resonating with people, you don’t steal it, but you find inspiration from it and you bring it back into your industry and your space. So, I took that pizza spot and I did it from my hometown, which is Halifax, Nova Scotia. Where is that? Way on the East Coast. So, I created this piece that got over 100 upvotes, 127 comments. We’re not as big as New York, but 40,000 views for just one post in Reddit shows that content market fit is a real concept. I took an idea which was essentially people care about pizza in New York, let me do the same thing in Halifax. You could do that in Atlanta, you could do it in New York, you can do it in Jersey, you can do it in Philly, go birds, all over again, and you are going to win. Folks, if you ask questions, people will comment, people still love images and videos, and we’re going through a ridiculously pivotal time right now. I search X to find out what I should read, I search Reddit to find out what I should watch, I use Facebook to find out what to do, TikTok to find out where I should eat, Instagram to find out what I should wear, even though they would never tell me to wear a coogee sweater, YouTube to find out how to build things.

Folks, search has changed completely and it is going nowhere anytime soon. I dropped as much as I could on you guys because I want you all to win at Reddit. Don’t be afraid of this platform, Embrace the Reddit operating system of scale, and if you’re feeling overwhelmed, it’s okay. I wrote this book called Create Once Distributed Forever, it’s available everywhere, that you can check out that actually breaks down a little bit about Reddit. I wrote it before AI became a real big thing, so it covers Reddit but not too deep. If you have questions about this stuff, check out the book, hit me up, remember to listen, lurk, and then make the leap. Thank you so much. SEO week, you’ve been great. Appreciate you.

Garrett Sussman: Let’s move on to another aspect. We’re gonna get into some enterprise SEO. Reedy. Okay. So first off, Ruth was a contestant on the Wheel of Fortune’s NFL. We partnered with then Seahawks running back, Sean Alexander. When they got to solving the puzzle, she told Sean to run with it, and then he passed. Yeah. It’s a Seattle Seahawks joke. Okay. She has several tattoos despite being terrified of needles and firmly believes that AI is like the microwave. If you wanna know why, you can ask her at the party tonight. Remember, it starts at seven. You don’t know who’s starting, so you should get there on time. Presenting Cultivating Momentum for Large SEO Projects, please welcome Ruth Burr Reedy.

Ruth Burr Reedy: What up everybody? I’m Ruth Burr Reedy and like like you just said, let’s talk about cultivating momentum for large scale SEO projects. Fun fact about me, I lowkey love stock photos. I think they’re a fascinating artifact of our current cultural moment and they just make me laugh. So I’m I’m I’m sticking with the stock photos. I’m not using Gen AI photos because stock photos are so fun to me. So when I gather a carefully multicultural group of my SEO friends and we all point and smile at a laptop together, I’ve noticed that SEOs love to talk about strategy. We love to talk about tactics. I know this also because we’ve all spent the last two and a half days having our minds blasted off by strategy and tactics. There’s one thing that SEOs don’t like to talk about though. Yes. But how? How do we do it? I understand how we get the information. How do we take that and put it on the website? I know you say I can just do this but I actually can’t. I’m not empowered to within my organization. Execution is hard. I didn’t used to do about me slides because conference tells you who I am in this case. I do wanna do an about me slide because I have been doing this for fully 20 years. I’ve been running and hiring and building SEO teams for about 12 years. I ran an agency for over a decade, been in house at places like Moz and Gamehouse which is part of RealNetworks. And until about 2:30pm on Monday, I was the senior SEO manager for House Pro which is House’s B2B SaaS platform. However, on Monday, had to leave the conference early and go back to my hotel to get laid off in a reorg. Yeah. I’m having a weird week. So all of this is to say, if you know somebody who’s hiring, my LinkedIn’s there at the bottom. Holla at you girl. 

But the real reason that I’m Thank you. Thank you. You guys. The real reason that I wanted to include this is because most of what I’m going to talk about here has come from very hard won experience on my part. If you can learn from my mistakes, if I can get my expertise into your brains, that’s what I want to do today. So we’re talking about five different ways SEOs can keep momentum for large projects. First one is connecting inputs to outputs. So many of us, in fact, all of us are marketers and that means that really if you boil it all the way down, what we’re trying to do is help a business make money. What does a business want to do at the end of the day? They want to make money. So revenue is often a North Star metric for us. We’re also probably looking at core revenue drivers like sales or leads or retention or LTV. And the places where SEOs tend to spend a lot of our attention are the metrics that impact that. So that’s things like traffic, for better or for worse, people still want us to talk about rankings, engagements, email sign ups, micro conversions, etc. You guys, you know your metrics. The problem with both of these things is that we are dependent on third parties to make these things happen. When we think about search engine metrics, we think about things like organic traffic, we are dependent on a third party, the search engine and increasingly the AI search bot to send that traffic to us. We are also dependent on the user to click, to take action, to purchase. This means that we are measuring our own success on things that we didn’t do and can’t control.

So I recommend taking a step back when you’re thinking about what you’re doing and how you’re doing it and what you wanna measure, especially when you’re thinking about execution and how to enact and measure that. And use what is sometimes called input metrics. The concept of input metrics is from a book called Working Backwards, which is about how Amazon became Amazon. I can’t say I agree with all of Amazon’s business practices but the book is very interesting. And one of the things that stuck out to me and has stuck with me since reading it is this idea of input metrics. This idea of tracking the things that you do that you can control to impact the things that you can’t and making sure that you’re tracking and reporting on those things and making people aware of them within your organization as you do them. So you’re not only focused on things like traffic which involve people that aren’t you, you’re focused on the things that you actually can control and then those ultimately affect the output. So none of the examples in this slide deck are real and should not be considered advice from me on SEO strategy. These are just examples. What are we gonna do and how are we gonna do it? This is the question that I ask every time I start a new project. What are we gonna do? Well, wanna increase leads by 50%. Increasing leads by 50% is going to take a lot of different things. That’s not just one thing that we’re gonna do. That’d be cool but it’s not. One of the things we might wanna do is try to increase traffic to top converting pages. Bianca gave us a really great way to figure out what those are so we can target them the other day. How are we gonna do that? We’re gonna optimize them. We’re gonna do stuff. What we’re gonna do depends on what’s wrong with them today. But what we’ve done here by going one step farther from increasing traffic into the tactics we’re going to use to actually achieve that traffic is we’re now focusing on the actions that we are taking within our organization in order to make these things happen. 

Another way of thinking that, we’ve got inputs, We’ve got the lagging metrics that come from those inputs. And then the ultimate outputs that we’re going for like revenue. Tom Critchlow is going to talk more about this tomorrow and you should go because his talk is going to be amazing. But once we’ve connected inputs to outputs, it’s time to build relationships. Now again, I’ve been doing SEO for a long ass time. And in my experience, the most important skill in SEO is not being able to code. It’s not even understanding how search engines work. It’s not analytics. It’s not retrieval augmented generation. It is politics. You gotta be Thank you. Like I said, Tom tomorrow is gonna be talking about executive buy in and how to get executive buy in and executive buy in is absolutely crucial. You do need leadership to sign off on what you’re doing but I have found many times that executive buy in is the beginning of the buy in process, not the end. Selling leadership is only the first step. I mean, I’m sure for all of you, every time you do a new project, you make a business case for it, you get leadership buy in, you execute it perfectly with absolutely no roadblocks or pushback or scope creep and then you get results. Right? That’s everyone’s lived experience. Right?  he reality is more like you get buy in and then you gotta get scheduled. Oh, but now other teams are involved. Are new stakeholders. Guess what? You gotta get buy in again. Now you’re starting to execute but oh no, there’s an urgent business problem. Everyone drops your project to work on that. Now you’re delayed. Now there’s scope creep. New people get involved. Guess what? New people are involved. You gotta get buy in again. Now it’s under the microscope. Gee, this is taking a long time. Buy in again. Now you can execute maybe and maybe get results and only if you can stay the course throughout this entire process can you actually do the thing that you wanted to do.

Long term project management requires repeated buy in from multiple parties and continual recontextualizing against other internal priorities. TLDR, you have to be able to get people to do stuff. So let’s do it. Now you know who you need to build relationships with. You know as an SEO who you need to do and especially because you’ve already defined the inputs that you’re going to work on for the outputs you’re targeting, you know who else internally is going to have to make those things happen. It would be great if you could just go in and do it all yourself but you’re probably a small person or you’re probably a regularly sized person but you’re one person, you’re a small team, there’s a lot to do, you may not be empowered. You’d also, even though you have buy in, there’s a limited number of times you can really go tattling to leadership. You’ve got to get it done. So start building relationships with the people that you know you need to build relationships with before you need to ask them for something. Look at these guys. Fantastic. That’s how I feel when I look at a tablet. Start talking to developers. Start talking to social media. Start talking to content. Let them know who you are as a person so that you’re not just somebody who pops up in their email one day demanding that they do something. They have context for you as a person, what you’re trying to do. Learn more about what they’re trying to do, what their goals are, just like talk to people. Now if you’re working in an agency you might think, that’s great. I only have one point of contact with my clients. I’ve got the marketing manager who hired us, I don’t get to talk to those people.

I would say agencies really need to think about building that kind of access to the people who are going to do the work of execution into their contracts upfront. So when I was at an agency, we would often as part of our discovery and proposal process build that in. Okay. Bye. We’ve built that into the the contract so we might say, we need direct communication with your developer team. We might need direct communication with your social team. We need a dedicated Slack channel. We need some way to talk to them on an ongoing basis, not just on calls but we also need you to talk to us on a regular basis and we build that into the contract. You can even using your expertise having done this a time or two, start doing some back in the napkin preliminary scoping of what it’s gonna take from your your clients internal teams because I’ve seen so many agency projects fail because the client has the budget, they kind of think I’m gonna give you $14,000, I won’t have to do anything else and then I will have done SEO. And it’s like actually, we need you to take the recommendations and put them on the website if you would like to have results. Somehow, a lot of clients seem to not have internalized that. So you can do some rough scoping based on your proposed project plan and say, I mean I don’t know your teams but like typically this takes around twenty hours of dev time and you’ll need to plan for that. Some agencies aren’t gonna wanna do that. It can impact your close rate because some clients are like, oh this would be too much work. A lot of clients appreciate the transparency. A lot of clients then get results because they plan for execution. A lot of clients then renew and I think recurring revenue is the best revenue but I can’t run your business for you. I mean I can, holler at me but I’m not currently running your business for you. Your metrics are your problem. Everybody has metrics that nobody else cares about and that’s okay. It’s okay that no one else cares about your metrics, you just gotta own that. You know what’s a metric that some teams don’t care about? Whether or not the company makes money.

It sounds weird, like you all work at the same company, the point of the company is to make money. Surely, the case that you made to execs saying this is going to affect our revenue and here’s how, here’s how we’re gonna grow the business isn’t always gonna work for a team if that team’s performance is not measured on whether or not they grow revenue. If you say to the dev team, we are going to grow our share of voice by 50% doing this project, the dev team says, share of voice is a marketing metric. That’s your problem. I don’t care about that. It doesn’t go into my performance review. So you have to figure out what matters to the people with whom you are building relationships and couch, make a new business case couched in the terms they care about. Your dev team might care about things like removing tech debt. They might care They often get measured on things like improved code efficiency or reducing total lines of code and making the website faster. There are things that you care about. You can make a separate business case to these people once you understand how their performance is being measured. Also, if one of the things that happens is you have to ask them for something a lot, a very compelling business case for building you something that lets you just go in and do it yourself is you stop bothering them. So it’s okay to say, if you build this for me, I will stop bothering you because that can be compelling especially if you’re annoyed. And make it count. The first time you ask somebody for something, it better be for something good. It better be for something that’s gonna achieve results. It better be for something that you can point back and say, Blemethy over here helped us do this project and we saved $100,000. Everybody says, oh, Blemethy, very very impressive. If you ask somebody to do a lot of work for you and you can’t point to what that did for the company or for them, they now think of you as someone who wastes their time and it’s be harder to get them to do things in the future. 

You also have to think about everything you ask somebody to work on, they’re working on instead of something else. Is the thing you’re asking for truly more valuable? Now that you’ve mapped inputs to outputs, you should have an idea of whether or not it will be. You also need to let people tell you how long things are going to take. Don’t ever go to a web developer and say, oh you should just be able to blah blah blah. No, you shouldn’t just. You might think so but you don’t know as much about this as them. They are the experts. Let people tell you with their expertise what it’s gonna take and then help them do it. As you’re asking people for things, you gotta speak their language. You’re not Don Draper. You’re not cool and mysterious and glamorous. You are Chandler Bing. No one knows what you do at work all day. No one knows what your job is. Even the people you work with, even your best friends, they don’t totally understand your job. So if you talk to people in Chandler Bing words, they’re not gonna do what you want. If you go to the content team and you say, we need to improve E E A T. Anybody know what that is? You can instead use terms that are more universally applicable. We need to improve content quality. Okay, great. We know what content quality is. However, how dare you? Our content is fine. What do you mean our content is low quality? Let’s get more specific. Talk about the specific inputs that you want to optimize in order to achieve the outputs of things like traffic and revenue. Make it specific, map it out, make it as concrete as possible so that people can say, yes, we can do this, no, we can’t, here are my questions, here are my concerns. And y’all, bruh, you gotta stop saying it depends. You gotta stop, y’all. It is 2025. I almost checked my watch. I know what year it is. It’s 2025. I know it depends. I know better than anybody. It’s a very nuanced system. There’s almost always more than one way to do what we wanna do and that’s fascinating and no one cares. No one cares. You are the expert. They hired you to do your job because you know what it’s gonna take. It may depend for you, it does not depend for them.

What should we do? Just say it. If they can’t do it, they’ll let you know. Then you can say the next thing. If they want more information, people who want more information will ask for it. If they don’t want more information, just stop talking. Just make your recommendation and let’s just do that. Be the expert. This is all a form of respecting other people’s time. You gotta respect people’s time. It’s, you know, it’s considerate but also if you don’t and they think of you as someone who wastes their time, they’re not gonna help you and this is all about building relationships with people who are gonna help you. If there’s one thing other than stopping saying it depends that I hope that you guys can take with you, it’s that wherever possible, try to avoid creating new workflows for people. It’s very tempting. I know. 

I’ve set up a new tracker document. I’ve created new processes. I’ve had said, okay, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna go in here and then you just find the thing and then once you’re done, you mark it complete. If you’re not someone’s boss, it is really really hard to get them to adopt a new workflow because you can’t make them. If they don’t do it, what happens? Oh, you’re impacted? They’re not impacted. They’re fine. We’ve been talking a lot about how it is difficult to get people to change their behaviors, about how people are wedded to their status quo. You don’t have the political capital almost always within an organization you’re working with to make people adopt a new workflow. So instead, use tools to build yourself into the workflow. This is a fake example but I did do a real project like this where I was working with a client who was using Jira for project management. Now all I wanted this client to do was stop changing the website without telling me. Just stop changing the website without telling me. But they’re never gonna remember to tell me. That’s not part of their current workflow. They’re not like, now I call Ruth. Plus they were applying a lot of value judgments about whether or not it counted enough to call me. So I went into their default Jira ticket opening system and I edited the template with their approval and said, okay, does SEO need to be involved? Check this box if we do. Guess what? No one knows if you need to be involved so you can’t just say should SEO be involved. That’s not their job to decide, that’s your job to decide. So I created these really specific criteria to let people know whether or not they needed to tell me. 

We’ve been talking a lot about automation at this show. If you’re paying attention to Dale’s talk today, you learned everything you need to know to automate a lot of this monitoring. You’re not quite ready for something like Windsurf, I really recommend Zapier Canvas as a way to just start mapping out the automations and the workflows that you want to optimize. But you can use tools, automation tools to build yourself into the loop. Instead of saying, hey, email me every time you change the website, set up a recurring screaming frog crawl and then automatically compare that to the previous crawl and then set an alert that emails you automatically if a given page has changed more than whatever percent you feel comfortable with. If there’s a new page on the website, you get an alert. If a metric rises or drops, very suddenly you get an alert. If there’s a 404 message, all of this stuff until very recently, it was pretty difficult to automate at scale. With the advent of AI agents and AI automation, it has become so easy, you need to know so much less code and you often, because the changes that we make in SEO are almost always customer facing and front end, we don’t necessarily need with the exception of like analytics based alerts, but for a lot of things where we’re just monitoring changes to the website, we don’t actually need anybody else to give us permission to monitor these things. We can set up these crawls, we can set up these alerts, we can also set them up for our competitors if we want, just saying.

But make it easy. Build yourself into the workflow. If you’re going to build new workflows for somebody, it better be yourself. It better be your own team. But you can use these tools to remove the burden of filling out the tracking document from your client, from your internal teams, and return it to you, the person who cares about it. Who’s the MVP? Who’s the MVP? Oh, you’re the MVP. The MVP. What is the MVP? You’re gonna get asked this a lot. You probably already do. What is the minimum viable product? What is the least amount of work that I can do that will make you go away? Is what people wanna know and that’s a valid question. I also wanna know that sometimes when people ask me to do things, I’m very busy. Well not anymore. I’m having such a weird week. Anyway, you gotta know and the MVP is really hard for SEO because the impact of so many things that we do is cumulative. It’s not a one to one if we do this and not that, then it won’t be quite as good. Often the whole is more than the sum of its parts. So take some time and really narrow down what the inputs are that you’re going to be optimizing. Again, cannot recommend if you’ve missed it for some reason, checking out Bianca’s slides from the other day because she talked about a really great useful framework to narrow down what the most important content to optimize is. You can do the same with almost any project. It’s very rare that you really actually do need to make a change to every page on the site unless what you’re actually making the change to is a site wide element, which is one action and not however many pages you have.

So that can be an MVP. Where is the bang for your buck? How much of your project can you whittle down and still achieve some results? Don’t be afraid to do that because as long as you can demonstrate results, you can get the rest done later in a future version. But be careful not to whittle it down so far that you don’t get results because then you will have what? Wasted everyone’s time including your own. Now that you have your inputs, now that you know who’s going to do them, now that you know how much work they’re gonna take and you’ve got the level of effort scoped out, you can create a little tracker and you can automate that tracker and you can share it to everybody and no one will update it but you. But looking at this tracker and updating it regularly, especially when things take longer than people said they were going to, people go out of vacation and they don’t tell you When scope creep happens. When suddenly everything has to stop and we all just focus on something else. Regularly tracking and updating your progress against where you said you were originally going to be and it is a great And tracking those inputs as metrics in and of themselves is a great way to get continued buy in even when you’re bogged down. Even when you haven’t actually made it to the point where things like traffic, things like revenue are starting to come in, you still have an idea of how long it’s gonna be versus what you originally agreed to when you got buy in from the exec team and you can regularly report on that. So track it. Keep track of where you are in relationship to where you thought you would be and be loud about that.

Speaking of being loud, be loud. Be loud about what you’re doing. You’re gonna report, refine, and repeat. So the problem with a lot of SEO reporting is that we report on things that we don’t have control over and we report on things that already happened. If you’re reporting on traffic, if you’re reporting on revenue, if you’re reporting on conversions, you are reporting on the the outcomes of work that you already did. What’s missing? Everything you’re working on right now. If you’re working in a large organization or you’re working with a client that doesn’t have a lot of time for execution, it can take a real long time for those outputs to match the input of how much work you’re doing. That can make it hard to demonstrate value. The thing about reporting is that reporting is how we teach people what to care about. You don’t believe me? I have two words for you, bounce rate. Google Analytics is must be ruing the day that they included bounce rate as a default metric in reports back in like 2012 or whenever that was because they taught people to care about it. They taught people to care about it so much that then when they took it out of GA 4, everyone threw a little tantrum and they had to put it back in even though bounce rate is a bullshit metric. Hashtag just saying. Report But they taught us what to care about by showing us the number. You show people the number. They assume the number is important. So you can teach people within your organizations, within your clients, within your internal organizations what to care about by reporting to them on what you care about. You can do this over time. So if you do wanna be mapping inputs to outputs, you can over time say, look, as our percent of pages updated in the last sixty days, a metric that is fully within our control increased, so did organic traffic. And hey look, leads are starting to increase too. This chart is great because I made it up. This is not real data but this gives you an idea of how you can map your progress again, especially something like we wanna keep our percent of pages updated within the last sixty days up above a certain threshold. We can see how that impacts organic traffic. Now you’ve got this metric going forward. I lost some screenshots when they bricked my work laptop so I built you some fake reports. So you can also report on execution because remember that’s what we’re talking about, execution implementation as a metric in and of itself. What if labor had value? What if work was important? What if doing things was an important part of getting things done? Guess what it is? And you can report on things like your progress to your goal, if we wanna do something to x number of pages, how far along we are, you can report on that as a metric in and of itself. Do you wanna connect that to outputs eventually? Sure, but if you don’t have that output data yet because the project isn’t far enough along, you can report on your progress against it because that’s relevant information to the people from whom you originally got your buy in.

You can show them progress. It’s also a great way of illustrating when you are blocked on something, when something is on hold. No one remembers that your project is blocked except you. So if you want people to know that you’re blocked and that’s gonna mean it takes longer to see results, you have to say that repeatedly enough so that the people who read the reports say, hey, what’s going on with that? How can I help unblock you? And you’re like, I’m so glad you asked. Over time, as you think about the inputs that you are optimizing in order to achieve the outputs that you ultimately want, you’re gonna pick the wrong ones. Everybody has run an SEO test and then like, this is gonna be awesome and that makes no difference at all. And that’s embarrassing. It’s also okay. Over time what you’re going to do is you’re going to refine and retarget your actions to better match your outputs. You’re better equipped to do that now because you’re tracking the things that you do as metrics. So over time you might refine from saying we need to optimize all the pages. We don’t really. Okay. We need to optimize all the pages on this one topic. We don’t really. Okay. We need to optimize all the pages on one topic with a conversion rate of more than one percent. That’s a nice, doable, discrete, understandable task that you can take on. You’ve saved time. You’ve focused effort. You’ve built relationships. Now let’s make some money. Picking the wrong inputs is okay, staying with the wrong inputs isn’t. Give yourself permission to try stuff that doesn’t work. Even when you try stuff that doesn’t work, you still learn something. Learning that didn’t work. And you know, it’s very interesting to dig into why and build theories and all of that.

But what that means is that as soon as you decide, okay this isn’t what we’re doing anymore, you need to pivot and you need to communicate that. As you’re reporting on inputs, as you’re reporting on how those bubble up to outputs, If you optimize an input and it didn’t do anything, say so. Be honest. Own it. Say what what an interesting thing we all learned today and move on. Don’t be afraid to change the report. It’s your report. If the exec team comes back and says, why aren’t you reporting on this metric anymore? You did a great job. You showed them what to care about and now you have an opportunity to help their understanding of what to care about evolve by reporting on what you’re actually doing. And then when you do make so much money because you’re so successful and you’ve built so many relationships and you’re best friends with all your coworkers, make sure you celebrate those successes and make sure you share that data. Remember earlier when we mapped our inputs into the metrics that other people within the organization cared about? Make sure that you actually take the time to get those metrics back out, share them back with the team. Say, hey, Blemethy over here helped us remove a thousand lines of code from the website. That’s a made up example. But make sure that you are taking the time to report back to reinforce the value of collaborating with you so that next time they’re even more likely to collaborate with you because they know you’re good for it.

That’s all my Oh, I got fifteen seconds left. I did such a good job. So yeah, once again if you know anybody who’s hiring in SEO leadership, do holler at me. Also if you just want to chat, I’m really friendly. Thanks everybody, it’s great to be here.

Garrett Sussman: COO of SearchLab. He has 30 different movies tattooed, like, literally 30 different movies tattooed on him. You should ask him to see them. And was the mascot of SMU and is a regular conference speaker who brings flair and humor to SEO talks. Let’s just dive into it. Presenting The Three Dimensions of Local Search. Please welcome Greg Gifford.

Greg Gifford: Does anybody know what movie that’s from? That was Rockstar, by the way. Okay. How many people love to go to the movies? How many people have never seen me speak before? Oh, y’all are in for it. The glasses are not a gimmick. What’s the first thing that happens when the lights go down at a movie theater? You get trailers. Right? So put your glasses on when you have a trailer. Seriously, put them on. Everybody ready? Are we good? Alright, let’s go everybody. 

[Voice Over]: Buzz? Unbelievable. Buzz? This is incredible. Buzz, where the heck are you? 

Right here, buddy. You’ve got to see this. What are you two biggie’s glasses? They let you see into the third dimension. 

What? Let me see the Wow. Here, let me show you. This is like 3D.

Howdy, boys. I’m in 3D. Woah. Woah. What did even know, Woody?

Rex, you’re not in 3D.

Well, of course I’m in 3D. 

Greg Gifford: Oh, this is so embarrassing. So I actually did the first cut of that intro on a couple of gummies last Friday night and it was like three and a half minutes long. And I showed it to my wife and I was like, what do you think, babe? She’s like, that’s kinda long. You’re gonna lose people. So, I am gonna share that online just because I spent hours doing it. But this is The Three Dimensions of Local Search. I am Greg as they already introduced me. I always like to point out that I have a weekly video series between three different agencies. I have now been doing a weekly video series on local SEO for 10 years. And throughout the presentation, I will have links to videos from the series. So, if there’s a slide and there’s a blue link in the bottom corner like that with a thumbnail, that lets you know there’s a video from my series that dives into that con or to that concept or that idea or that problem a little more in-depth. So, when you get the slides later, you’ve got some things to go back and reference. And that’s a fun picture of me speaking at Mozcon pre-COVID, also to the same walkout song. But now I feel like I need to update it because I don’t have tattoos on my fingers or hands or the one – so, it looks really weird. 

But I speak at a ton of conferences. Two years ago, I spoke at 32 conferences in seven different countries. But most of the conferences that I typically do are vertical specific where I’m speaking to get leads, not speaking to help. And a lot of them are pay to play. I’ve paid over $25,000 to speak to 15 people before because I know I’m gonna get leads. But most of the time in the pay to play situation in these vertical conferences, they send salespeople instead of product experts. And the salespeople, let’s face it, they’re not really that great at public speaking. So there’s typically a podium on one side and they stand behind the podium the whole time. They talk really fast in a really quick voice like this. It’s really hard to understand what they’re saying. So that part’s bad.

But even worse, they don’t have any design consideration. They don’t do fun stuff. Like, I do fun stuff in my videos. I shoot in front of a green screen and my not so evil twin comes out and I’ll have conversations with myself. But these guys don’t do fun stuff like that and they don’t use designers. So the background of the slide is plain white. It’s black aerial font, and they pack every slide with bullet points. And that’s no fun to watch. And they’ve done scientific studies that prove that bullet points kill kittens. And we’re not gonna kill any kittens in today’s presentation. And, obviously, I’m obsessed with movies. Every time I do a presentation, there is a movie theme. Typically, I go back and I include one movie for every year in the last 50 years, but 3D has been kind of spotty. So, I have 103 references today, including one 3D film for every single year that 3D films have been released theatrically since like 1953 or ‘52. Sorry. There is attribution to the side so that if you’re curious about a movie or something looks cool, not only will you learn a lot about local search, you’ll have some cool stuff to go back and watch later. Are we excited? Let’s dive in.

Greg and…Greg: Sorry. Where to a point Sorry. This has happened a couple of times. Like Charlene what do I do here? Like I don’t Come on dude. Waiting. Dude it’s the clicker. Why are you wearing the glasses still? Whatever dude. These look cool. Just maybe get going with the presentation man. Okay. Okay. Okay. 

Greg Gifford: So if if you do business with customers face to face then you need local SEO. And there are three primary signals. So the three dimensions, get it? That influence your visibility. That’s your website, your Google Business profile, and your reviews. So that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. And they’re still pretty isolated from AI Overviews and from AI search systems. So with local, we’re still kinda trucking along doing all the things that we’ve always done because local just really isn’t understood by the AI systems yet. So, we don’t have to worry about it as much. We know it’s coming. But today’s gonna be more about what you do now to win now until this eventually gets to local and changes the perspective of what we’re doing. We know it’s coming, probably soon, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore trying to help our clients win today with what we know works today. And they’re releasing all these numbers about how much search is being done on ChatGPT. It’s like 1% of Google. So we don’t wanna worry about it too much. And they’re still gonna need to learn about you in the future. Right? They’re still gonna have to have a way to get this information about your business entity to be able to recommend you if it’s an AI agent or whatever it might be. 

So the three dimensions I’m gonna talk about today, as far as we know, will still be incredibly influential. ChatGPT just started showing some reviews in some tests, and AI Overviews are starting to show reviews for local businesses as well. But I always like to boil things down to simple concepts because you come to this conference, you hear all of these a list speakers, and you write all these notes, you record all these things, you have your AI transcriptions when you go home, and then you’re kind of overwhelmed because it’s like so much to remember. So I boil things down to simple concepts so when you’re digging back through the slides later you’re like oh yeah I remember that. And it’s really important to remember with local search especially that Google is really just an advanced pattern detection system. And so are the AI systems. Right. So it’s all about pattern detection. So we don’t really want to get lost in let’s put a keyword in this spot or let’s make the title tag 70 characters. Forget the basic stuff. Remember the pattern. Right. You’re trying to improve your pattern so that whichever system is trying to learn more about you can easily find that information and see how you’re different from the competition. So you need to pay attention to the annual local search ranking factor study except they didn’t really do one last year. 

But the idea is, let’s say we had the five best SEOs in the world on this stage and we all gave them a homepage and said optimize this page. They’d all do it differently but they’d all touch the same things because we know that the algorithm is looking at the title tag and the H1 and all the other things. So, with this study, they send out a really in-depth survey to all of these top experts. Typically, it’s about 35 to 40. And then they aggregate the answers, and you get a really cool pie chart along with the full data results that show you the signals that matter for showing up in the map pack or in Google Maps. And I dropped the little 3D glasses on there to show how big the chunk is for the three dimensions that we’re talking about today. And then you get another one that shows you the factors that influence localized organic because a lot of people think that local SEO is just the map pack, but it’s a different algorithm. And the ten blue links are also powered by this local algorithm. So, this is a really good guide for what you need to do in the future because we also know that user behavior isn’t, I need a product or service, I get on Google, I do a search, I buy from the first thing that I find. The more expensive your product or service skews, the more research people will do before they purchase. For a very long period of my career, for 12 of my career, I was automotive-specific. Now I’m not specific to auto but I still get a lot of auto clients because I’m very well known in auto. The latest data from Google, which was not really that late, it was like two years ago, but two years ago, the average car buyer in the United States conducts 27 separate sessions of research before they’re far enough down the funnel to give their information through a chat, an email, a form, or showing up at the dealership. So, we know that people are gonna be seeing your competitors regardless of where you rank. So, it’s about improving your pattern so that you stand out. You look better than the competition. And people remember you because of that so that they know, alright. When I’m further down and I’ve figured out more about what I wanna buy, I’m gonna come back to these guys because these guys are awesome. And the three dimensions help you do that. 

So basically, think of it this way. You’re not gonna convert people the first time they come to your site unless you’re selling something really cheap and commoditized. You gotta give people a reason to come back and convert later. They’re not going to convert today. Also, people love to copy what their competition is doing. People have talked about this multiple times this week. If you have the same generic bullshit on your site as everybody else, why would anyone care? Why is anyone going to buy from you? And nobody’s really talked about information gain but this is a really key concept, especially in local because the algorithm works so differently from the traditional algorithm. And this is gonna be huge for the LLMs as well. So you’ve gotta stand out from competitors. How do you do that if you have the same bullshit content that says, hey we sell blue widgets just like everybody else that sells blue widgets. Why would anyone care? It helps you provide better information to customers and to the AI systems in the future when that starts to influence the kinds of leads and customers you’re gonna be getting. And now we all know, sure, there’s a shit ton of bad content, just like the really bad eyes in this movie. Like, it’s horrible bullshit. Right? Information gain is how you win. Everybody else is churning out a bunch of bullshit. So make your bullshit better and actually share information that answers the questions customers are asking. So make sure that your content is actually about your business. Also, it’s really funny that team Jacob was shark boy. Right? Super weird. But most people, their content is not about their business. It’s about what they sell. It’s not about how they sell it. Right? And it’s not about the local area. And there’s a really easy way to test this content. Take the homepage of your website. Change only two things. Every time the business name appears, you change it to a different business. Every time the city that you’re located in appears, you change it to a different city. Could I take a plastic surgeon’s website that’s right here in New York, change the name of the practice in New York to Beverly Hills and the name of a practice in Beverly Hills and put that content on the homepage of that site in Beverly Hills? Would the content still work? If it would, it’s not about that guy’s practice and it’s not about being located in New York. It’s a really easy test to run. 

There’s another test I’d love too. You gotta read your content out loud. The algorithm wants conversational content. The AI systems want conversational content. We have marketing brain. We read keywords and think this is badass. I’m not talking about read through it in your head. I’m talking about you grab a person. You have them sit right next to you and you read the content out loud because then your ear will catch the weird things that your marketing brain says this shit’s awesome. And real people are like, no way. It’s not. 

Greg and…Greg: Oh. Tell them the story about the car dealer. Dude are you gonna keep doing this? Well, I mean I’m already here. 

Greg Gifford: Alright. So this car dealer story is really funny. I was speaking at a conference in Vegas and I used car dealer examples because it was a car dealer conference. The guy says, hey, I’m a Ford dealer in Dallas. That’s the example I always use because Ford is the densest market or Ford in Dallas is the densest market in the world. There are 20 Ford dealerships in the Dallas market. They sell more pickups in North Texas than the rest of the world combined every year. It’s insanely competitive. This guy was like, I’m a Ford dealer. Help me. I wish I had taken a screen capture of this guy’s content, but I was an idiot and I didn’t because he didn’t work with us. His content sounded like this. If you wanna buy a Ford pickup in Dallas, come to our Ford pickup headquarters. So we sell more Ford pickups in Dallas than anybody else that sells Ford pickups in Dallas. So when you’re ready for your next Ford pickup, come to our Ford pickup headquarters in downtown Dallas. We’ll give you a great deal on your Ford pickup. The agency that wrote that for them was like, hey, guess what guys? You’re gonna rank number one for Ford pickups. And every customer that went to the website was like, what the fuck is wrong with these guys? You don’t catch that if you don’t read it out loud. 

So second important simple concept, and this is really hard for the people that have never done local. We don’t have to worry about writing the best content on the Internet. You just need to have or well, first of all, you wanna show up, you gotta have a page about the concept. We all know that. But you don’t have to have the best answer in the world. You just need the best answer in the local area to the question that that person is asking. If you want to have the best answer, again, think information game. Answer some of the questions they’re gonna have after that first question is answered. Make it easy for them to make that decision and push them down the funnel instead of expecting they’re gonna click to the next piece of content. So, this is really important. You gotta have a blog. And a lot of people are like, oh, you don’t need a blog. It’s social fluff. It’s not important. But you gotta have that blog because you – most people are writing extreme bottom of funnel content. You need that mid to upper funnel content. When people are trying to decide what they need, they have a problem but they don’t know what the solution is. That’s where you wanna capture them because the sooner they get eyeballs on your site, the more likely it is you’re gonna capture that customer later on down the road. And this is where a lot of SEOs are gonna freak out because everybody right now, we even had talk about the vector mappings that don’t have the content not related to your core concepts. It’s different in local. If you create local informational posts, it helps build local relevancy and it helps show up before people are looking to buy what you’re selling. It’s like a billboard. Right? It’s that pre-funnel content. So it’s something like, hey, our team loves to go out and grab pizza every Friday for lunch. These are the five best pizza spots in Hell’s Kitchen. That content will show up for people that aren’t looking to buy what you sell but they start to see that you’re really involved in the local neighborhood and the local community. And this is also the kind of content that AI systems love these lists, which means you get citations in the AI systems, which again, potentially leads more customers to see your content before they’re ready to buy. But now they know about you, so it’s awesome. If you need ideas for how to do it, here’s an awesome video. There’s also a transcript if you don’t wanna watch my goofy shit. Ten ideas of localized content that you can use and springboard off of to make your own localized content. Now, I’m not gonna start talking about schema and try to make the argument because everybody’s like, oh it’s really good. And everybody else is like, oh come on, don’t know that yet. Like who knows? But it’s not that fucking hard to do so let’s just add schema to everything. Right? Like why wouldn’t you do the stuff that’s really easy that could potentially really pay off in the future?

Everybody also wants to rank in the cities next door, and they want to get customers from a wider area. And your client’s gonna go, well, I had a customer that drove from two hours away, so why can’t we rank there? Like, okay, because it doesn’t work that way, bro. But you gotta own your backyard first. And what that means, if you don’t have a solid enough optimization foundation that you are showing up well in the city where you’re actually located, you’re not gonna show up in the next city over or two cities over. Google’s smarter than that. So own your backyard first and then you can expand to nearby cities. If there’s not a lot of competition, you can create city pages. This video will walk you through how to do it. I’m not talking about it today because I’m trying to squeeze in a lot and I’m like, not even at – wait. I’m at slide 44 of 121, and I’ve got 12 minutes left. So we’re gonna go fast today. If you’re in a more competitive or metro area, you’re gonna need to be a lot more advanced and use local content silos. This concept’s been around for a long time. The first time I wrote about this on Search Engine Land was 2014. This used to work like gangbusters. I could do this in 2014 and like overnight have results. Now it’s like anywhere from 12 to 18 months. But it still works. It’s awesome. So check it out. And links are different as well when we’re talking about local search. Bro, links aren’t one of the three dimensions. 

Okay. Okay. I forgot. So instead of links, let’s talk about your Google Business Profile. So with the Google Business Profile, there’s been a lot of flux in recent months. Questions and answers just got removed. It’s something we’ve had since 2017 and out of the blue Google’s like, guess what? We’re just not gonna show this thing anymore and even though we’ve been telling you for years and years and years it’s really important to your business. And then last week, Google posts disappeared and everybody lost their mind but we found out it’s a bug and actually as of I think yesterday it has been restored. So hey. But Google’s making a lot of changes. Google’s really trying to fix the spam and local and make it a better product. And, it is your customer’s first impression of your business, not your website. If they find you through a non-branded search, they’re probably gonna find you in the map pack which means they’re gonna see your business profile first. If they do a brand search, they’re gonna see your business profile first. So, it’s gotta be awesome. If you’ve optimized it well, you will show up more often in the map pack. So, you should be bending over backwards, uh-huh, to make sure your profile’s awesome. So, fill out every single thing you can fill out except for the little field that says area served. That is just for service businesses to draw the red line. It has nothing to do with ranking. Make sure you add UTM tracking because attribution is broken. 

Google Analytics will give you a ton of traffic that’s listed as direct, that’s actually organic. We’ve done this and overnight seen a 40% lift in organic traffic. Not from magic SEO but because Google Analytics is that fucking broken. And you want better decisions so you need better data. So make sure you’ve got that in there as long as you’re still getting traffic from Google. It’s really important. As we see the influence of AI changing the way that people search we’re gonna see a lot more brand searches which is all the more reason you’ve gotta have that UTM tracking in there to track what’s going on with those searches. Also, with schema, everybody gets local business schema wrong. It should only be on one page of your site and that’s the page that your Google Business profile points to. So for single location businesses, that’s the home page. For multi-location businesses, that’s the service page or the location page for that individual location. That’s the only place the local business schema should go. Make sure your hours of operation are correct and that they are listed obviously on the site marked up with schema and that they’re up to date. Please don’t listen to Joy’s openness update that says that it’s a ranking factor to be open 24 hours. It’s not. Please just list your actual hours. That is a feature, not a ranking factor. Upload a lot of high quality photos because customers can upload photos with reviews or at your location. The algorithm prefers the high resolution professionally shot photos. So you wanna upload a lot of those so that yours will show first in the gallery before customers. Make sure you select the correct categories. In fact, your primary category, the one that you choose in the first slot, is the most influential factor, not proximity, that controls how you show up. Proximity doesn’t kick in until all of the other ranking factors have sorted the list.

So be strategic. It’s not always the one you think it should be. So watch this video if you’re confused there. Make sure you understand the new reinstatement process that has been rolled out worldwide. I have a podcast that’s a Q & A about local SEO and the running joke on our podcast is that if you move your mouse or breathe on your keyboard, you’re gonna get suspended lately because it’s almost that bad. When you get this email that says you’ve been suspended, it won’t tell you why and it will have a button that says request reinstatement. Don’t fucking click it. Because when you click it, the 60-minute timer of doom starts. Most of the time, you’re an agency. You’re not even near the business. You only have 60 minutes from the time that timer starts to collect all the documentation that you need to prove that you’re that business and to shoot your reverification video that is very specific about what you need. If it’s not done in 60 minutes, that’s your fucking one chance and it’s gone. You get one chance to re-appeal. If you fuck that one up, your business profile is toast and you will never get it back and nobody can help you. It’s really scary. So one appeal and then you’re gone forever. So I did a video that walks through exactly what needs to be in your verification video when you shoot it. So please watch this so you’re familiar with what needs to be there before you get suspended. Or if you get suspended, watch this before you click that button. Now if you’ve got problems with your business profile, do not go to support. They suck. You can go like I have called because I have ways to call that most people can’t. But you go, hey, look. You’re gonna tell me to try a B & C. I’ve already done those.

Let’s skip ahead. This is a bug. Well sir, have you tried A? Yeah bro, I tried A. Next you’re gonna tell me to try B but I’ve already done that. Well have you tried B? They’re awful. Instead, go to the Google Business Profile Community Forum. It’s not staffed by Google staffers but it’s staffed by volunteers like me that know the product that will help you. And once you’re in the program and answering questions while you become a product expert and once you get to gold level or above, you have the ability to escalate a thread directly to the Google Business Profile team and skip support. So this is the way that you really get help if you have problems with your business profile. 

Now reviews, last part of the dimensions we’re gonna talk about. They’ve gained weight. They’ve become more and more important. Google’s really paying attention to all of this user generated content. And review sentiment is going to be very important when people are asking the AI systems for the best insert business type here. So you’ve gotta pay attention to reviews. So you’ve gotta be proactive. Watch this video. This is probably the most important video leading into the future of every video that I had in here because it’s not human nature to leave a good review. If you’re happy, you’re not gonna leave a good review. If you’re pissed off, you’re gonna leave a bad review. So you have to ask every customer for a review actively. And then you have to make it easy for them to leave a review. And that video walks you through multiple ways to do that. Make sure you’re answering every single review as well. Not just the good ones, not just the bad ones, but all of them. Also, I used to edit my own videos. And this one’s fun because I talk about answering a review that’s really bad and the owner’s pissed. So my face turns red and smoke comes out and does a cartoon whistle. It’s really cool. So watch that one. Validate my shitty video editing skills. So – and remember, when you respond to a bad review, the answer is not the person that left the review. It’s for every future potential customer that’s reading your reviews that wants to know how you handled a shitty situation. So answer it correctly. And the number of reviews that you have doesn’t actually matter to Google’s algorithm. What matters is that you have more than your local competitors and a higher score. That’s what’s important to the algorithm. That’s also what’s gonna be important to the AI systems. 

Okay. Here’s a cool thing. You know the default order when you first go to a business profile and you click to look at the reviews and you did not yet click the button to say, I want the newest or I want the best or I want the worst. Everybody’s familiar with this. Right? Joy did some really cool research last year but she didn’t really take it to the next level. If the review has a photo uploaded along with it, it’s stickier and it stays in that default sort for a longer period of time. If a review has more text in it, it’s stickier, stays in the default sort for a longer period of time. That’s a little problematic because bad reviews tend to be a lot longer than good reviews. And you can give a thumbs up to a helpful review. If a review has two or more upvotes I said updates. Sorry. I can’t type. I was doing these last minute. I finished these Sunday morning. I was way too ambitious with my video shit and this to worry about the spelling in my slides apparently. So more thumbs up, stickier, stays longer. That’s where she stopped. I said, what if we combine them all together? If you get a bad review that shows in that default sort, everybody sees it whether they’re trying to see bad reviews or not. So if it happens, reach out to someone who recently left you a good review, ask them to add more context to their story, more text, upload some photos, let you know when it’s done, then you have a couple of people at the office give it a thumbs up and that thing pops to the top of the list. You can bury those bad reviews like within 10 minutes. It’s super awesome. 

So then about a month ago I was at SMX Munich and I was talking about using the user generated content from your reviews and the Q & A section to write better content on your site. And literally a week later, Google got rid of Q & A. So good job on the pointless presentation bro. Yeah. Kinda sucked. But you can still do it with reviews. So we have blinders on. Right? We don’t understand really, most of us, how customers are looking for these solutions. They don’t care about our marketing bullshit. Multiple people have said that this week. They have a problem. You have a solution. That’s the way we have to think about it. And part of the solution that they’re looking for is where they need to buy the solution from. So why wouldn’t we be paying attention to how these people are talking about us. Right? We put this one in for you, Talia. I don’t know where she’s sitting but there you go. See? I told you. So we’ve gotta offer an authentic experience on our website that matches the experience and reality of doing business with that business. More people will find you if this happens. You’ll show up more often in search. So the best way to do it is to look at reviews and use the language that people are using because it’s telling you what these people think about your business and about buying from your business. So analyze your reviews, look for patterns and trends. Do certain phrases continue to pop up over and over again? Do people mention pain points? Talk about things that suck. What are they celebrating? Or are they offering tips to future customers and telling them to order a specific item or talk to a specific salesperson? Use that language on your site. I’m not talking about posting in the review. I’m talking about using the same phrases and the same ideas to talk about what you do instead of all of your marketing bullshit. So, use a tool to download your reviews. For those of you that do local SEO, you’re insane if you don’t have PlacesScout. It is by far the best local SEO tool out there. So, can use a tool like PlacesScout, download all your reviews, drop them into ChatGPT, ask it to sort them into topic buckets and summarize the recurring themes. It’s super awesome. Give them the cool thing bro. 

Okay. I’ll give you the cool thing. I got two minutes left. So we have this thing that we call the local SEO scoring matrix. It’s a small SEO audit that I designed for this really specific kind of small conferences for car dealers. So it’s basically an audit that scores the three dimensions plus links. So it looks at the content on your site and how it’s optimized, your inbound links, your Google business profile and how it’s optimized, and your reviews on Google and Yelp and how you respond to those reviews. Now it’s important to point out that this scores on tactics, not on strategy. Most people use those interchangeably. But strategy is which direction are you going and tactics are the steps that you take to get there. Okay? The reason that we keep it basic tactics is because you can’t argue it. Let’s be honest. What happens when a customer brings you a HubSpot site grader report? What do you say? That’s a piece of shit. It’s generic. It has nothing to do with our strategy. They don’t understand your business. You could ignore it. But this is basic SEO tactics. The first question in this thing is, do you have a city in the title tag? It could be a business across the street. They could put Honolulu, Hawaii. This would still give them full credit because the tactic of having a city in the title tag is all we care about. Not the strategy of, is the right city there? Because it very quickly uncovers bad tactics and strategy won’t matter if your tactics suck. This was a huge game changer. I was just using this at conferences. We started using it for every demo call that we did with potential partners. Overnight. Overnight. Literally. Our close rate more than doubled because now we’ve done an audit before the call and we’re talking in real terms about the problems that we’re seeing. This thing takes 10 minutes to do but it looks like you spent hours. It’s awesome. 

So, the four areas are then weighted to approximate the weight of each area. Get a score anywhere from 0 to 100, although negative points are possible. If there are things that you’re doing that are likely or definitely hurting your visibility, you can lose some points. So, the highest score we’ve ever seen is only an 83.6. It’s effectively impossible to get 100. This is one of our own clients. The highest non-client score was 65. The lowest score was -71. This guy was paying $5,000 a month for SEO. It was really bad. The average score is only 18 out of 100. So I’m gonna share both versions with you. I’ve shared these before in the past. If you’ve seen these links, these are new. This is the Google Sheets version. It’s super badass. We have a version for specific verticals that can dive into things that really have to happen on certain vertical sites. So the generic version will work with any business. And then I’m sharing the auto dealer version just so you can see how I’ve adjusted it. You can make those same changes. This is a Google Sheet. This is gonna make you make a copy so that you can make your own copy. It’s really cool stuff. Come on dude. You can give them more. I’m a little over time. Can I take 30 more seconds? Do you guys care for something really cool?

So I just did a presentation at Brighton SEO two weeks ago about using Google Sheets as an SEO. I created a Google Sheet cheat sheet. Download the Google Sheet cheat sheet right there. It’s super badass because it’s got an app script in there that lets you create an auto updating roll up report. Every time you use that audit sheet to do an audit, you drop a copy into a folder. Every morning at 3am, this script goes and looks at everything in the folder and auto appends everything so you get a big list of all of your results that updates every single day. And then you can get some really cool data out of this thing. So check it out if you have problems figuring out how to configure it. I’ll help you. 

That was it. Thank you so much for joining me today. That’s my that’s my email address. If you ever have questions, I will answer them. I have an open email policy. I will always help people answer questions. You can get the slides from the team. Make sure you check them out if you’re a movie fan because all the movies are listed at the end by order release date. Thank you.

Garrett Sussman: Watching the NBA playoffs. Mr. Will Critchlow is the founder and CEO of Search Pilot. He founded Distilled. He founded SearchLove Conference. He is leading the way in agile changes and innovation solutions for enterprise level websites. Let’s get to it. Presenting Enterprise Scale ECommerce and Retail SEO Lessons from thousands of experiments. Please welcome Will Critchlow.

Will Critchlow: I am hoping, I’m hoping that you all are ready for a presentation that isn’t all about AI. Because even the bit of my presentation that’s about AI is mainly not about AI. So we’re going be talking about some tactics. That’s kind of generally the popular bit of what people want from our data and our work. The what to do about AI, which is mainly not about AI. And some stuff on the business side around how we can get some great results, but also get the credit that we deserve, get the budgets that we’re looking for, and prove the value of our work to the organisations that we’re talking about here today. And I hope it’s going be a really optimistic conversation because I’m optimistic. I’m talking about ways that we can have agency, that we can get results that we’re excited about, that we can get those budgets, and that we can get really great outcomes. But I want to start with the maybe less optimistic end of things. The worst year of my business career. And I hope you don’t mind going with me on this little dark journey. I’ve never told this story in large scale in public before. So I hope you’ll be kind to me.

It’s more than ten years ago. We’re about 2014. And literally, will get on a plane, fly to New York City, get on stage at an SEO conference instead of going to therapy. So 2014, we’d opened up an office here in the city a few years previously. And this was the toughest year. In the intro, Garrett talked about how, before running SearchPilot, I ran a company called Distilled. Distilled was an SEO agency, and by this point had been going for almost 10 years. And we’d had 10 solid years of growing every year. In fact, I thought that’s how business worked. You just get bigger every year, just natural growth. And 2014 was a year where we were struggling with some of our biggest clients, struggling to get some of the results that we wanted, that we expected of ourselves, the things that they expected, and struggling to prove the value of some of that work. And it was the first down year in revenue in Distilled’s history. And revenue is one thing, but if you talk to anybody about what’s the most important thing in their business, they will tell you it’s the team. And we started that year with 51 people in our global team. During the course of that year, 26 of those people decided they didn’t want to work for me anymore. More than half the company. Sure, I screwed up a lot of things. During the course of that year, I think we hired 19 people. So we ended up just a little bit smaller than we’d started. And the energy came back. But the reason I’m telling this story is all of that soul searching, all of that trying to figure out how can we get better results, how can we prove the value of the work that we’re doing, how can we demonstrate that we’re getting the results that we’re hoping for, that was the genesis of what became SearchPilot. So this darkest year was when we formed the R & D team.

Some of the guys who I still work with went over into the R & D team, including my co-founder, and started building the platform that would become SearchPilot, which let us run enterprise scale SEO testing. And this was a confluence of a few things coming together. The decade of consulting experience, the fact that at that point AWS had got to the point that we could actually do some of this stuff technically. And we had this amazing platform. Really quite quickly, you get the first version of these things. And everything was easy from that point onwards. We do this not because it’s easy. We thought it would be easy. It was not easy from this point onwards. It was a lot of grind, a lot of enterprise sales, a lot of RFPs, a lot of ISO 27,001, SOC 2 compliance, and PCI and HIPAA, and all kinds of other exciting things. But the point is that over the next decade since then, we’ve got to work with a whole bunch of really exciting major retailers in particular, but a whole bunch of great brands. Some of them we can these multibillion dollar, multibillion pound e-commerce sites. And some of them we can name. We work with Marks and Spencer, iconic British brand. We work with Petco, for example. And the reason I’m bringing this up is what I want to talk about today, I love stuff that comes from research. I love stuff that comes from surveys. But what we’re presenting is from thousands of tests run with these folks. And I’m really excited be able to move the needle at that scale. And I’m hoping that even if your site’s much smaller than that, or you work with much smaller clients and customers, that there’s hopefully some interesting, useful tips that I can give.

Anyone here collect baseball cards when they were a kid? Or still. That’s fine. No judgment. Well, we’ve got the retail SEO testing pack that you can and I want to turn this into physical swag. So this is popular enough. We’ll get these things printed up in like little foil. You can rip it open and what. But for now, it’s digital and virtual. So there’s a QR code, or you go to bit. Lytesting pack. And there’s going to be a couple of stages through my presentation today where I pull up QR codes And you can obviously snap pictures of those. Feel free to share them. They all open up on links of our resources that will be helpful, useful to you. I will also share the slides. I know they’re going out in the Slack. And if you follow me, I’m willcritchlow on all the social places. I’ll put it out there as well. 

Okay. So 20 cards, 15 winners guaranteed in every pack. And this is far too small to read. I’m not running through this, but this is just the contents page. So in the tactical side, I wanted to talk to a few of what I think are some of the most interesting, some of the most confounding, some of the contradictory results that we’ve had and that I’ve certainly found interesting. So this first one is an interesting one. SEO text. I love things that are called SEO text. Anybody have SEO text on their website? Bonus marks if it’s in div class equals seotext. Right? That’s just yeah, let’s just make this really clear what we’re doing here. It’s probably nice and small, probably in gray. No human has ever read this stuff. We tested removing some of this terrible content from the PLP, from the listing pages on one of our e-commerce customer sites, and saw an uplift from removing that content. In other words, it was hurting the performance of that website. This is not universally true. Your SEO text may be better than theirs. Your competitor’s SEO text may be worse than their competitor’s SEO text. Who knows? But this was a positive result. I included one that was just a very basic title tag test because I think title tags are still the Halliburton SEO tests. That’s underrated for anybody who has been following the MBA this year. No, wait. He’s the overrated one, right? Anyway, moving on. This was just a basic title tag test, a 24% increase in traffic to these pages by removing the comparison reference. And titles are way underrated because they’re one of the very few bits of your website that affect both rankings and click through rate in the search results. And for those of you who are as old as I am, you’ll remember when folks on the ad side used to have it was like a whole part of their job was optimizing adverts for click through rate. Computers do it these days, I think. But writing those adverts was like a whole job. And on the SEO side, we’ve criminally underinvested in having really great and compelling snippets.

Not all of your content is bad. So we’ve repeatedly heard from lots of places that the layout of the page shouldn’t matter whether something is expanded or not by default on mobile. It’s one of those things that apparently isn’t a ranking vector. Well, we’ve repeatedly run tests that show that it does matter. And in fact, on mobile, having content exposed by default, in other words, not collapsed into an accordion or tabs or whatever else, exposing it by default on page load can result in this was a 7.5% uplift in traffic exposing that content. For the geeky SEO types in the room, a canonical tag test, 22% increase from changing the way the canonicalization worked across a bunch of PDPs. So there’s more of these. And you can take your time with them. I’ll just pull out this one. This one’s an interesting one, where on one particular website, we saw a significant traffic increase from removing meta descriptions entirely. And this was surprising and confounding because what Google was doing when there was no meta description was writing its own, and they were terrible. But it turned out they were better than the ones we thought were good because Google has an unfair advantage. We can only write one meta description per page. They can show a different snippet for every query that that page ranks for, and it can be highlighted in bold related to those query terms. So even the kind of not very well written, not very grammatically correct stuff could, in fact, outperform because it was more topically relevant, because it was pulling the bit of the page that was most important. And it turned out that having no meta description forced them to present that. So anyway, tons more of them.

That’s the QR code again, if you want it. That’s the tactics bit. I promised a little bit of AI that isn’t really AI. Well, again, thinking back over that time period that I was talking about of going all the way through from starting Distilled in 2005 through the bad year, that first bit, one thing that happened in the middle of that time is the incredibly fast growth of social media. Do you remember 2007, 2008? Launched the Facebook news feed. Twitter is taking off everywhere. Everybody’s getting a Twitter account. And there was this kind of narrative. This is my lovely hand drawn description of what everybody thought was going to happen, which was search was going to die. Social was going to take over. People weren’t going to Google best Thai restaurant in Midtown. They were going to tweet their friends and say, where shall I go to eat? And this is what was going to happen. Social was going to take off and search was going to crash. This was one of the many predicted deaths of search. Of course, that’s not what happened. Search continued to grow fast and social was incremental on top of that.

And this is my bull case for what’s happening with AI. I think volumes are queries, broadly defined, query volume is exploding, And some of those things are searches. And more and more of those searches are still going to be needed to be fulfilled by things that look more like what we’re used to in a search context. I go deeper into this in a separate presentation, which you can get at SEO Week-AI-SEO. A couple of things that I found interesting as I was pulling this bit of the presentation together. I’m thinking through what do we know about query volumes? What’s Google saying? What do we think we can trust or not? And there’s a couple of quotes that I present these with initially without comment. Obviously, on stage. I’m going to comment. But Sundar, on the Hard Forked podcast, saying that year over year, they’re sending more traffic outside the Google ecosystem than ever before. I don’t know if believe it, but he said that. Liz Reid, head of Google Search, said we see that the links included in AI Overviews get more clicks than ten blue links. Who laughed? Come on! This is a very serious executive giving an on the record statement. 

I suspect there’s various ways that these things are technically true and this is an e-commerce talk. And e-commerce is the area where they are probably most true and it’s most exciting because query volumes are exploding and does this all mean Google and e-commerce are both very, very excited about high commercial intent clicks. Right? That’s where e-commerce lives, but it’s also those queries are where Google makes all of their billions. And neither ChatGPT nor Google nor Perplexity nor any of the others are actually going to ship you stuff. And so at some stage in this technological whirlwind, users are still going to need to reach some variation of a PDP, a product page. And shout out to Aleyda’s talk this morning. We obviously coordinated, but she set me up nicely. She hovered all of that stuff that was amazing. If you didn’t see her talk, get her slides around changes to the search result page, all the stuff around Merchant Center, all of those evolution of Google wanting to be your PLP and the filters and all that kind stuff. I’m not going into any of that, but I’m totally aligned that Aleyda covered that wonderfully earlier on.

And so what should we do? What should e-commerce sites do about AI right now? AI as a discovery channel, mean, not like you can use it in your business, wherever you like. Right now, channels as they exist. Next, be accessible. Finally, extend your experiments there. What do I mean? Right now, channels as they exist. What is your biggest AI channel right now? It’s Google. Google is your biggest AI channel, still. And I don’t just mean AI Overviews. All of the bits of Google that are AI powered, all the regular ranking stuff that’s AI powered. If we’re talking about AI powered discovery, we are overwhelmingly talking about Google. And so when your executives are asking for your AI discovery strategy, your answer should be, here’s our Google strategy. You probably want to change the title to our AI strategy because they like that kind of thing. That’s a pro tip about dealing with executives. 

I do have a couple of specific AI things that I think are very important around accessibility. Again, throwback to 2005 SEO. Robots.txt. was robots.txt a thing in 2005? I can’t remember. Anyway, I love robots.txt. Make sure you’re not blocking the LLM crawlers. This is an e-commerce specific thing. It’s debatable in media or some other places, but if you’re in e-com, much like we just heard, you want the LLMs to learn about you from you.  So you definitely want to be there. I think that’s probably unarguable, but if anybody wants to argue about it, we can have that conversation later. Definitely 2005 SEO. No JavaScript, please. In fact, just generally. Can we just get rid of Port of JavaScript. HTML is where it’s at. But the major LLM crawlers do not use JavaScript. And so if you require JavaScript to render the content on your website, you’re not going to be visible in the LLMs. And eventually, we at SearchPilot and you as e-commerce, either consultants or marketers, are going to want to extend your experiments to them. I believe this is going to be possible. 

Bear with me here. A little convoluted argument. So Jeff Bezos, you probably know him. What he said about Amazon is we’re taking the bet that even over long time periods, users are going to want low prices, fast delivery, a vast selection. That is not going to change. And the big bets that the massive organizations take is what are the things that are not going to change? And I think Google’s equivalent is freshness, completeness, and relevance. Nobody says, I wish I could get last week’s news. Nobody says, can you just miss out some of the sources because I’m not interested in them? And nobody says, show me the crap bit. And where some of the LLM stuff is falling down is specifically in the freshness and completeness part. And I think if we’re going to get to the point that those channels are genuinely competing with Google, they’re showing up in your analytics, and you’re getting sales often at scale, at volume, then they’re also going to have to crack some of this stuff. And if they’re fresh, and if they’re complete, you can run experiments against them in much the same way that we run SEO experiments. And so eventually, we’re going to do that. So my prediction is that by the time AI recommendations get to a scale that they’re meaningful to the business, they will also be testable for these reasons. They’re going to continue sending people to product pages. The need for freshness means that we’ll be able to test to learn what works best.

Okay. That’s kind of the AI bit. So in summary, what I’m saying is essentially for the people to buy from you, the machines have to recommend you. But that’s been the case. That’s all of our job. That’s just Google. And these machine preferences are becoming more human-like. And so we need this hypothesis driven testing. And I think this is going to stay true. I haven’t had a chance to chat to the speaker yesterday who was talking about you have this one VIP customer, and it’s the LLM crawler because my view is actually those preferences are going to stay human-like. So my agent is going to have different preferences to your agent and we’re going to need to test in that world. Okay. But anyway, the end of the AI bit. So a little diversion before we get into the final part of the presentation, which is a section I’m calling stuff CFOs say. And one of the things that’s been quite interesting to me, so I was never brave enough to really specialize in the Distilled era. Some agencies are really great at saying, we specialize in this particular area. SearchPilot’s been much more natural to specialize. So we’ve specialized really closely in e-commerce, for example. And that’s why we have all this data. And one of the unexpected benefits of that is being able to go deeper into those customer organisations. So I have met more CFOs, more non-SEO marketers, the CMOs and the like, more product people, more engineers from e-commerce companies. I’ve met more of them in the last six months than the previous 20 years. And the finance conversations have been some of the most interesting, honestly. Hence the segment. Stuff CFOs say. One finance team told me, we’re still seeing double digit year over year cost per click inflation. Our paid search is getting more and more expensive faster than everything else in the world. And you know what that means? That stops a marketing plan working real quick. You extrapolate that 15% a year inflation out two years, three years, and your marketing plan doesn’t stack up anymore. That was out of the mouth of a finance team, a major e-commerce player. One of them told me 60% of our new customers come from organic search, but we spend 80% of our budget on paid search. Finally, they told me that. They told me that. I was like, I know. I know. 

Mike was talking about why is this? It was you, I think. Yeah, you put out a thing. Why is this? Anyway, finally, I’ve met the people who hold the purse strings and they’re telling me this and they’re saying it’s a problem. Said I know it’s a problem. Let’s do something about it. Give me some of that budget. One of them told me, PPC overspent by an amount larger than the SEO budget. No, actually, no, no. It was worse than this. PPC overspent last month by the entire annual SEO budget. Overspent. I was like, you know what? I have a great plan. I can help you. I can help you with this. From the finance team, organic search is my favorite channel. Not if you do it well. I’m not arguing that it should be free or that it should be cheap. Quite the opposite. But I am saying it can be hugely efficient and you’re building an asset that is going to perform for you over the coming years.

But I heard this from them. For all of these reasons, SEO has to be a big part of the plan. So the final eight minutes today is going to be all aligned with the stuff CFOs say. How do we get better at talking business language? How do we position, pitch, describe, and do our work in a way that it’s legible to the whole business and that it gets the results that they really want to see. So I’ve called this turning SEO into a performance channel. Again, I dive deeper on this at this QR code, SEO week performance on the Bitly link. Okay. What do I mean by performance channel? So a marketing leader looks at a performance channel when they can understand how it works. 

They have a model of how the channel functions and operates. They can understand and prove the value of that channel. And most crucially, they can put more budget in and get more results out. This is fundamentally my main understanding of why paid search is such an amazing channel and why it gets such huge investment, is that lever, right? Or that dial. You put more in and you get more. Obviously, I’m oversimplifying tons around the profitability question and how you actually operationalize that, but that is the fundamental of it. So how do we turn SEO into a performance channel? And I think it really comes down to this question. Do you have a good answer to what you would do with an extra million dollars in your budget? Good. Whoever said that. Great job. Yeah. I hope so, right? I think those finance conversations that I was having, they have actually genuinely led to people starting to say we should be testing what we can do if we really invest much more in these channels. And I’m deliberately talking about millions of dollars here because our budget should be in that scale. This is not $100 here for a tool, $100 there for a tool. Most large organizations are already spending millions, whether you know it or not. Because by the time you look at your headcount, by the time you look at the demands you make on engineering and product, we’re into the millions, if not tens of millions, straight away.

So I think we need to have great answers to these questions. And part of it is about understanding the channel. So this is why I’m still banging on about AI stuff is cool. I’m very excited. But Google, people, organic search, this is anonymized, aggregated, real e-commerce data. Biggest channel, probably no surprise. You don’t get new customers very often from direct and email. Direct, they have to know who you are. Email, they have to have already got on your email list. And on this particular set of anonymized data, about 60% of organic search is unbranded. In other words, people searching for the thing you offer rather than just specifically for you. And that bit of unbranded search is bigger than any other new customer acquisition channels. I don’t think I need to evangelize this to this room, probably, but it’s surprising how much we still do need to evangelise this within the organisations that we work for and that we represent. Showing them the importance of this channel still today. Yes, the AI stuff is exciting, but biggest channel. And part of building that mental model in e-commerce is saying, where does this traffic land on our website? Because it’s mainly not the home page. On this data set, 4% of home page traffic was unbranded, 70% of PLP traffic, and 85% of PDP traffic was unbranded. Again, you probably know this. You’d guess these numbers. But there are marketing executives in your organisation who haven’t internalised how this dynamic works and how this plays out. 

And so we take this kind of thinking, this kind of model, and we say, okay, we want more of this, the unbranded organic search traffic, to our scalable site sections, our PLBs, our PDBs. And we’re going to build a model that explains to you how we’re going to make that investment and models some variations of the results that we’re going to hope to get from that. This sounds terrifying to most SEOs. We’re going to build a model that says how well we’re going to do. It’s good. But I think it’s really important. And a key part of this is understanding the baseline. So I called this SEO depreciation. I talked about you’re building an asset in organic search that lasts for years. But assets depreciate. They get less valuable over time if you don’t maintain them. And again, I dive much deeper in this in the video that you can get at the QR code. But the basic question is, what do you think would happen if you just stopped doing SEO? No SEO team, no agency, no data, no tools, no effort. It would go down, right? Your organic search traffic would go down. I don’t think that’s controversial, but it’s amazing how many models I’ve seen that assume flat year over year baseline. Right? If you’re doing that, you’re doing it wrong. It’s not a flat year over year baseline. You have to invest to stay flat and then invest more to grow. And I’ve validated this with some real data. We’ve got a couple of examples that we’ve seen historically where we happen to know teams were cut, investment was cut off, and then we’ve been able to measure the performance as a result. And sure enough, it might stay there for a year, but then it starts tailing off. I think roughly you should be modeling this as something like a 10% to 20% decline year over year if you did nothing. I published some of this data and some folks shared some other data points with me that kind of backed this up. So this was another example, obviously anonymized -13% a year on average. Another example that was -12% a year on average. So most of these backs up this data point that I’ve seen, like 10% to 20% decline.

And so that should be the starting point for your models. Of course, I’m not saying this is a bad thing for SEO. If you stop spending on paid search, it just turns off. But it should be factored into your model. Now, our game is all about SEO testing. And it’s also tempting to go, every winner we get just compounds up and to the right, hit the sky. I don’t think that’s fair either. Winning changes decay as well. Your competitors copy you, the market shifts, Google makes changes, whatever it might be. All those winning tests you get don’t last forever. So we can’t just go, yay, add 10% lift to 12% lift to 15% lift and we’re hitting the stratosphere. What you have to do is you have to say, Okay, they decay as well. And we built this model of what the winning tests add up to. And so you build a financial model that says, Okay, well we would have been down x% if we did nothing. We’re going to run these tests. They’re going to decay over time. And we add that up and here’s what we think we could achieve. And that’s your year over year number. That’s the number you’re shooting for. Sometimes you’re told that, right? Can you try and hit x% uplift? But your ROI is not that number. Your ROI is how much better you would do with the investment versus without the investment, not this year versus last year.

Crucial. If you take one thing away, start building your models like this, I think. So anyway, I’ve got to hammer through the end of it. So this is the model. I’m not going to talk about the proof of value. That’s what we do at SearchPilot. If you want to know more about check out at searchpilot[.]com how we run these tests. But we get all these data points. And the final part is getting the more budget to get more results. And I’m going to argue that this is basically about saying individual test results, if we could predict them, we wouldn’t need to run the tests. So the way to the results is about managing not the outcome, but the effort and the inputs, which are how many tests are we running, how good are our hypotheses, and how well are we measuring the results that come together. Put those things all intertwined, and we get the model that I was talking about. We get a performance channel where we have a model of how it works, we can prove its value, and we can put more in and get more out.

I’m at time. I’m going to tweet the link and so forth, but I expect you might want this thing again, so I’ll leave that up in the background while we wrap up. Thanks, everyone.