Garrett Sussman: My goodness. Dawn Anderson, ladies and gentlemen. Dawn is the managing director at Bertey and international SEO consultant helping enterprise brands like GSK, Skyscanner, and Madeline scale organic growth. She’s a lecturer at Manchester Met and a search awards judge with deep expertise in site migrations, audits, and cross channel strategy. Dawn shared her SEO insights across the UK, US, and Australia. We’ve gone super international SEO week, and is always ready for a good whiskey or gin. I’m so excited. She is the coolest person and so fun to talk to. Presenting, From Villains to Heroes. Please welcome Dawn Anderson.

Dawn Anderson: Hey, everybody. Thank you for staying. And I dispute the thing about whiskey and gin. I barely drank in February, and I did dry January. You go, ignore that bit. It’s definitely the lie. Okay. So thank you for having me. I appreciate the invitation. So what I’m going to talk about is some of you have heard a little bit about it today. At the heart of web search is the field of information retrieval. It’s an academic field. It’s the field that Sergey Brin and Larry Page studied whilst they were building BackRub, their search engine back in the day. It’s been going for decades and decades and decades longer than the web. And I became interested in it when I was taking a Master of Science in Digital Strategy. Back in 2015, I started to go and look at papers around crawling. I was a little bit obsessed around crawling and indexing. And I just became a bit obsessed by it then. So I’m going to be talking about this field and tell you about some of the things it’s going through at the moment. 

I cannot stress enough that how important this field is. Obviously, it’s everything. It’s everything behind search. It’s everything behind any website that has a search field, any search engine and so forth. But it’s going through some challenges at the moment. So what am I gonna be covering today? I’m gonna be talking about the outdated perception of SEO by the IR field as an academic or research industry. Why the search results in my view have gotten so bad. How the IR field is trying to resolve this. And how SEO is stepping up in this brave new world of search and IR to some extent. That’s me. Been doing SEO for a long time. And I used to speak at a lot of conferences, not so much just recently. Kind of went into my cage a little bit. Cage, hutch, whatever, cave. And then I had a nice invitation from Mike. So here I am. I decided to come out of my cave. And obviously, if anybody does know me, they’ll know I’ve got two fabulous Pomeranians. Whenever you travel and you’re a dog lover, I find myself talking to any random dog that I see on the street. I went running this morning in Central Park. I was stopping to speak to all the dogs, and I am into running as well. I ran a marathon on Sunday. So there you go. Thank you. 

Right. So let’s get back to it. Even before the day the term adversarial information retrieval was coined by a very, very distinguished engineer from Google, Andre Broder. You may not think you know who he is, but you will know his work. He was at the time at Alta Vista back in the day, and he coined this term adversarial information retrieval. Kind of talking about how SEOs are the enemy. Now, Andrea Broder is very famous for something called the taxonomy of the web. Now you’ll have heard of this because you know, everybody knows in SEO, the notion of informational, transactional and navigational queries. Well, he’s the guy behind that. And many other things, as I say, he’s a distinguished engineer, he’s been there for decades. But aka, spam fighting. Now also, if you saw Andre Ricardo this morning, who I’ve known also since 2016 seventeen where I met him at an information retrieval conference and he came up to me and said, who are you? I’m an SEO. He said, so you’re guessing then? It’s like But anyway, yeah, they are actually a very, very welcoming community. So as I say, aka spam fighting is really what adversarial information retrieval means. But really when it comes down to it, it’s kind of SEO bashing. It’s kind of been the norm, hasn’t it, for a long time. SEO bashing is kind of a bit the norm really for search and for the IR field and so on and so forth. Not as people individually. As I said, they’re very welcoming, but we’re not particularly popular amongst them. We’re kind of the enemy.

You know, many, many years ago, we talked about the Google dance and it was written up about the Google dance. Was like people were coined as those sneaky internet entrepreneurs. How dare they? How very dare they want to actually make money off the internet. Yeah. Even though we’re providing all this content and helping people to provide content which feeds search and so forth, how very dare they actually want something back from it. I remember reading a blog post on Matt Cutts’s personal blog that talked about how his engineers were actually really scared of all the SEOs. They were really petrified of like talking to us too much in case we ask them questions. Yeah. And I think even though we love Gary and John and Danny and so forth, there’s almost like that little bit of a you know, they’re kind of a bit scared of saying too much to us. And Martin New York, who’s a huge search engineer, still with Google, has been a research engineer in the team and generally across lots and lots of research teams. He’s huge in the IR field. He said back in 2006, the conflicting goals of search and content providers are adversarial, and that’s where it came from. It’s like, hey, these are the enemy. We do not share common goals. We want the truth. They wanna make money, you know? And I think to some extent, that kind of view, I think it’s moved on a bit, but I still think there’s a little bit of that about, you know, IR field generally and SEOs. It’s a bit outdated in my view. This was a track that they actually had that was about adversarial web search, the enemy. And it ran for a few years. It was literally looking at the very many ways in which SEOs were doing things to take advantage and inflate search results. And obviously, we have this ridiculous thing that after all of these years, we’re still seen as like comedic characters with various colored hats. You know, I think we’ve been likened a few times to like people sat in their underpants in the basement. I’m sure I’ve seen that in a few different write ups. I don’t literally I personally don’t sit in the basement in my underpants, but there you go, each their own. 

Yeah, I think it’s an outdated view. We’ve moved on. There are many, many professional people in the SEO world. We’re really not just the same old spammers. And actually, despite spamming search supposedly being an endless battle, having said that, the vast majority of it now, I would say is pretty much they’ve picked up the patterns. When you’ve got machine learning going on and you look at enough paid blog posts, you kind of know what a paid blog post looks like. When you’ve looked at –  there’s papers for instance in the IR field, one in particular is pretty famous, it’s quite old now, it’s called Do Not Crawl in the Dust. And that was like learning how to swerve really crappy content and thin content and so forth and learn kind of build it into crawling schedules and so forth. So there are a lot of these elements of machine learning now in search that means that they do avoid the vast majority spam automatically. And like I say, is Danny just very recently saying, even though 50% of what we find from the open web is spam, 99% of it actually doesn’t get into web search anymore. So in a way, that’s kind of a big huge win for them. But as I say, much of it now will be done by machine learning. Still that said, Google is supposedly getting worse. I was at an IR conference back last year in Glasgow. And as I said, it’s an academic There are always academic conferences. Very hard to actually get into. Lots and lots of papers get submitted. It’s an academic research conference and they have reviewers and so forth. So I was surprised to see an actual talk about SEO in there as such. But it was basically this German institute that looked and they’ve done quite a longitudinal study about SEO and web search and how Google was actually still ranking SEO optimized pages. And it actually made them national press and many, many It made Search Engine Land and Search Roundtable. Actually, academically, it only had 32 citations. So it wasn’t massively respected in that field, but it did make the national press. And it’s this study. And actually, I was sat there watching the guy doing the delivery of this paper, and he showed this website and actually, I would say that the vast majority of the pages that he showed were things that we’ve come to see as commonplace for ranking for reviews. So I would say it probably wasn’t that spammy. Was kind of, you know, there’s a lot of this best of stuff and so forth. Not great, but I wouldn’t call it spam. And I would say probably, those researchers, no offense, but I didn’t think they really knew SEO. They would talk about links out of the page, whereas most SEOs are kind of talking about links into a page, for instance. So it kind of felt as though, again, you know, it was we’re kind of getting dragged into this as SEOs rather than it being about the search engines and such.

And obviously, it’s gone on to become part of wider, the wider mainstream. We’re ruining the web. We’re hated. The alligator party and the content goblins and so forth. And there’s a veil of suspicion that completely surrounds us. And this is a paper just done just not long ago actually, saying that actually SEOs, we kind of keep everything to ourselves and the vast majority of the time nobody knows what we do. So he’s bashing us, bashing us again, SEO bashing. And but actually, it all seems to take a turn for the worse around 2023. It was the dawn of Generative Information Retrieval. And that’s actually a term that’s been coined in the IR field. It’s going through a huge but reluctant transition, I would say. They don’t necessarily want to change, but they’re kind of being forced to. And obviously, the dawn of Generative Information Retrieval is not like all the other shifts in Google. It’s – you cannot underestimate how huge this is. It’s bigger – and actually this is quite interesting. Funny enough, somebody shared a deck that Jeff Dean had done years ago actually, talked about the many, many times in which Google literally rebuilds their index and nobody notices. They literally just keep re-engineering everything and just kind of doing a cotton shot on the index, just re-engineering this whole thing as it gets bigger and bigger. And you know, it just nobody nobody notices whatsoever. But it’s bigger than that. It’s bigger than Google just rebuilding everything from scratch over and over. 

It’s a total paradigm shift to Generative Information Retrieval, a change to fundamentals of information retrieval as an industry. And it goes back really to the days of library science, to indexing, back to post war times actually. So huge. See, what happened is over the many many years, search has really just had this the same fundamental system. The search is undertaken, results are presented and prior to search engines, this was predominantly in libraries or organisational systems. But this is huge. In classic IR, it’s always been very modular, bits and pieces all connected together. Over time, it’s evolved somewhat. This was actually a paper that was shared by a huge IR researcher, massively respected. He was doing a workshop last year on generative IR and looking at the way that it’s changing in the industry, and showed the transition of the years of the way search engines have evolved. And ultimately shows that over time, it has become quite modular with lots and lots of bits and pieces that take different efficiencies, move at different paces and so forth, run possibly by different teams. This was shared by Martin Bjork from Google last year’s or the year before SIG IR 2023 in a keynote. And he’s talking about this is the typical system. Yeah. Obviously, you have your front door, which is the search interface. The offline, which is where the index is stored, and then obviously everything in the middle. But machine learning has been part of Google search for years already. We have re-ranking and late stage ranking where a recall fetches everything and then there’s an element of personalization, localization and so forth that goes into the machine learned heavy lifting part, which is quite expensive. That’s called re-ranking and late stage cascading ranking. And obviously, mentioned crawl scheduling and so forth, importance prediction, again, learn patterns through machine learning. Pair wise, point wise and list wise rankings, learning to rank processes and index pruning, they have now dynamic index pruning. Even the other week, I think it was Martin Split was talking about how if you don’t have interaction with web pages, pages just get de-indexed and so forth. And that will be part of dynamic pruning because you can’t just keep making things grow more and more and more.

But of course, there are evolutions as well to semantic IR. And this again, shared by Martin Bjork, search is becoming more and more of a hybrid system, not just necessarily your classic IR, but more building in the semantic elements to it. And as I said, it’s been really a traditional pipeline. Index, retrieve, rank. That’s been the pipeline for decades, decades and decades and decades. But now, the Generative IR vision is completely different. What it means is this I mean, it’s quite hard to explain really. I’ll show you on the next slide. A sequence to sequence model is trained to directly map a query to its relevant document identifiers. Basically, it means pulling everything in together without going off into an index and finding the various parts. Just literally generating everything on the fly. It’s huge. It’s a paradigm shift, as I said, that consolidates all information within a corpus in a single model. So it looks like this, yeah. This again was shared during SIGIR Generative IR Workshop. SIGIR is, as I say, a huge IR conference, one of the largest annually that they hold. But ultimately means that the whole of search is changing. Cannot stress how big this is. May not be fully today, but it’s happening right now. It’s literally happening all the while. It’s literally going to change the whole of just the whole model, everything. And to kind of reiterate here and reinforce it, this was only shared by John Mueller a couple of weeks ago here in New York. Talks about how AI could fit in here. Kind of looks very much like I mean, that middle bit, that’s it. That is the whole of search ultimately. As I said, the rest of it is the front door, the search interface, the index is stored elsewhere, and potentially, it’s the whole system. It literally is everything. 

So yeah, that’s it. Literally, it’s just gonna change everything entirely. And whilst this change is underway, what’s happening, ultimately everything’s on fire. It’s like just up in flames. The search results have been kind of, you know, a bit not that great. But instead of SEO fashion, it kind of feels like we should ask if information retrieval as a whole is getting worse because this is bigger than Google. This is bigger than This is like their whole industry, bigger than Google. Just everybody is kind of getting on board with having to change things. So it’s not you as an SEO. It’s not us. It’s them. Yeah. It’s them. It’s them that’s making Everything’s kind of a bit of a shit show at the moment because of them, not us. 

Yeah. So why the rush to Generative Information Retrieval? Well, one might describe this as the information retrieval’s existential crisis. Is at the end for classic information retrieval. So as in SEO, where we have like people who are specialists in local SEO or technical SEO or digital PR, link building, whatever. They also have in the IR field, people who are also specialists in in various areas of research and in academia and industry, natural language processing, recommender systems. Obviously, Discover is a recommender system and Spotify, Netflix and so on, which is also part of IR is recommender systems. Classic IR, ethics and fairness and responsible AI. Ricardo is an absolute mean, Ricardo is an absolute expert in everything in IR. But it’s an area he’s focusing on, ethics and responsible AI. Medical IR, huge because of the unbalanced data that is in that industry, and obviously the very great deal of good that it can bring, and the knowledge graphs as well. But the NLP crew, when Bert came around a few years ago now, they actually were blazing hot. They have all these leaderboards, I was competing with each other one on, they were literally on fire. They took IR forward, you know, thirty years in five years. The same old fashioned industry had been the same for decades. And all of a sudden, VirTra came, literally rocketed everything forward. And now all of a sudden, this massive like overflow of like huge amounts of different models came through. We know some of these, the various BERTs and the GPTs and all the stuff that OpenAI did and the bings and so forth. Yeah, absolutely huge, just one after the other. Just absolute cascade.

And it could be in the classic IR mind, Well, could it be that we don’t really need classic IR anymore? Can search rely just on NLP and large language models and so forth? And then if you remember, I wrote this a few years ago for Search Engine Land. They started talking about how actually search engines no longer need humans quality raters, they’re going to use large language models instead. The guy who was one of the researchers, Charles Clark, he does – he’s an IR researcher professor in Canada. He did a talk at SIGIR a couple of years ago and it was incredibly unpopular in the IR community. He was basically saying, hey, we don’t need humans anymore to do evaluation and to be quality rated in search, large language models can do it. 

So basically, everything seems to be going against classic IR. Is it dead? But actually, turns out that NLP and language models are not actually that good on their own, unchecked. They’re hallucinating, as we know. They are not faithful, they’re not faithful to results, they are not factual, unfortunately. So, know, for an example here, you know, there was I don’t know whether you’ve come across this, but there was a really quite famous example of a lawyer that literally cited lots and lots of cases that he’d come across, past, present and so forth, went to court, turned out none of them were true. None of them had actually happened. So there is you know, it’s just pretty disastrous really. You know, we all remember the cheese not sticking to pizza. And I believe that the classic IR and knowledge graph crew were probably chuckling their heads off of what was happening as these were all being rolled out. Yay, classical IR is not dead.

Welcome to the world of SEO. I mean, we’re constantly having to dispute that SEO is dead. Hey, we’re getting the gang gang back together. I was gonna put on something from the Blues Brothers, but then was like, will anybody actually know what the Blues Brothers is? Because maybe I’m too old and you know, yeah, you know. Does anybody actually know what the Blues Brothers is? Okay, yeah. Fine. Okay, well, now I feel like I’ve failed. Okay. So and actually, this is the major reason why obviously they’ve had to rush because ChatGPT and our large language models were literally threatening search. That was it. They’ve had to like save their whole skin as an industry. Also started to get philosophical and Mike touched on this the other day. Back to Andre Broader, here he comes again. Whenever Andre Broader starts talking about concepts, search changes, literally, that’s it. He brought out this paper 2023, talking about the notion of Delphic costs, saying ultimately, search needs to change because instead of us sending people to go off and search through websites, there is this cost to the searcher called a Delphic cost about the search for knowledge. Really, it’s an expense to the searcher because they’re wasting their time. Why we send them to results that are not that great? It’s effort and so forth. And that is the disadvantage we have against ChatGPT and large language models and so forth. So we have to basically bring the knowledge to them. Hence, the AI overviews and the generative IR. And that’s gonna get bigger and bigger and bigger. Ultimately, search is not free to the user. There’s a notion of effort, especially with these next generations coming through. This is Broadus point. So bring the knowledge to the user, reduce the friction. Instead of sending the user to research themselves, hey, we do the work for them and bring it bring it to them in AI overviews or whatever, whatever method. 

And basically, and we’ve seen this. Only a few weeks ago here at Search Live New York, I was like, hey, I recognize that. Making search effortless, Broader paper. Yeah, making search more effortless than ever. You are gonna see this be talked about more and more and more. This is gonna be justification over and over again for AI Overviews. So goal is our goal is to make search effortless by synthesizing multiple related queries into one clear personalized response. That’s it. Yeah, regardless of how bad it is at the minute. And also there has been push back in their own space. It’s not just us saying that these are not great experiences. Their own the IR space itself has been pushed back against generative IR, generally speaking for a while. There was this paper that Google submitted, rethinking search making domain experts out of dilettantes. This was the second paper that they submitted. The first one talked about, you know, we’re gonna make domain experts out instead of librarians. Well, the IR field was very offended because in actual fact, they thought that they were insulting librarians and obviously the origins of search is in library science. There was real push back. People were saying, hey, it’s like people actually do love to search. There’s been a real huge push back. And Charles Clark, again, finally came back and said, by the way humans, there’s still hope for humans now as quality raters rather than just AI. As I said, Shar and Bender, they were the ones who were like, hey, people love to search and also there’s this toxicity in in generative IR. There’s been a huge whole in their industry. So also Google has been playing catch up. This was only on Wired a couple of weeks ago saying that they’ve raised, they’ve lowered the bar. They’ve they’ve had to like take a they’ve had to do a lot of cut and shut jobs basically. They’ve lowered their standards. In the meantime, minimum viable product. And as we’ve seen, it’s not robust. As soon as you start to extend it to out of distribution, because there is this notion of closed book and open book in generative IR, we start seeing things like this, the rocker day and the health benefits of running with scissors. And because the reason is generative AI is not based on facts, it’s based on patterns. That’s it. You know, you can’t kinda make facts. It’s just regurgitating patterns over and over again. I’ve got a lot of slides, I’ve got to get through these.

Okay, so we know, we saw this the other week as well. AI search is wrong more often than it’s right at the moment. It is going to get better. It’s like a dodgy photocopier. Keeps like, and it’s not just me saying, well it isn’t me saying this. I saw this though, I just put the picture of the copy on there. It’s the National Cyber Security Service that literally said, it’s like a photocopy that just gets worse and worse and worse the more you repeat it. So it’s that downward cycle. And it’s kind of the new Guess SEO. Guess SEO. Yeah. This Joy Hawkins talked about the terrible local results that generative AI produces. It’s not robust with news. Bloomberg has to keep repeating like summaries and putting out apologies because it’s just regurgitating nonsense. The problem is we are back to disambiguating that probability in search. But this time, instead of it being featured snippets like it was a few years ago, it’s now for generative IR, where search engines basically assign equal probabilities to outcomes when they are judged to be possible. i.e., when two options are available, which one’s the likeliest? Because you’re just picking up on patents. Probability determination. 

This one, is from years ago, from a deck I did, well, five years ago, six years ago maybe. Talk about why feature snippets used to pull pictures from one thing and words from another. It was literally this notion of equipossibility where it’s like, well, we’re not quite sure, so we’ll pull that picture and we’ll pull these words. I mean, was the best one I remember. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles becomes a work of art. Michelangelo, there you go. That was years ago. But we’re kind of back to that again and that’s what’s happening. The problem is none of this works where the stability of a reliable index is stable memory. We’ve seen ChatGPT talk about memory as it grows now. They’re gonna try and build a memory of the individual user and so forth. And obviously that relies on consistency. So how are they looking to resolve it at the minute? Well, they’re doing a huge amount of ferocious research. They have their own like field now. Generative IR is literally just the second year of this. They’re saying, look, is this just a trend or is it as some claim a paradigm shift for IR? It is paradigm shift. I think they’ve kind of agreed on that now. They talked about the hero of generative AI. Yeah. So it’s a brave new world. Years ago, 2017, I went to the European Summer School for information retrieval. It was all about all the things we know and love, crawling, indexing and so forth. This last summer I went again. It was literally everything that we know from IR, from search, sorry, web search was all shopped into one session. Forty two things you didn’t know about IR. The rest of it was all about machine learning, AI, recommender systems, totally different. So it’s changed. And as I said, everything now is around the notion of Gen IR.

And we have two parts to it, open book and closed book. Closed book is basically where the model just literally pulls from what it has built into the model tends to be out of date and so forth. And now, it’s extending to open book, which is being augmented with other knowledge. And hence, we have RAG. Hence we have the classic IR field is now back in the game. It’s back in the game. The gang is back together. They have a job again. Yeah? Grounding. We have to like reinforce what large language models are saying because they just make nonsense up. So this is why grounding and RAG are really feels where the classic IR people can come back in. For connecting the AI model to verifiable source of information and reducing hallucination. And again, Google is starting to talk about this a little bit and I did notice that on LinkedIn, they started to talk about they’re gonna be doing another search summit where they’re gonna go deep and stuff. So maybe they’re gonna start telling us more and more and more about this stuff at some of their their search summits. So they’re touching on this. A lot of it, as I said, is being tested in Gemini and so forth. That’s kind of almost like word the grounding is being reinforced. And obviously, we know that in some cases, grounding is not required where it’s really obvious, but there is a temperature apparently with these things. Sometimes it’s needed, so we’ll have to adjust our strategies accordingly. Pro tip, if you do block block Google extended, you can’t appear in anything to do with Gemini. But at least and also now, as we enter this field of retrieval augmented generation where classic IR and LLMs are working together, it’s again like the old Bert, where Bert started with just one and then it became absolutely tons of tons of Berts and lots and lots of models. They have twelve different types of RAG that are going around. I particularly like the golden retriever RAG. Great for me if you’re a dog lover. 

Now, this other approach is also being taken. Knowledge augmented generation, cash augmented generation. This one stores knowledge in the cash, not the knowledge augmented generation pulls in knowledge graphs together. So it’s all lots of different approaches trying to like make this a lot more efficient and so forth. This, Andrea shared this and I spotted it. This is something that Microsoft are doing, who are huge, absolutely huge engine, huge and fantastic engineers. This is an approach that’s being taken which is much more efficient than some of the other retrieval augmented generation approaches, has really good legs on this. And it’s around the attention here. The attention is really what drives a lot of the large language models. This is much more efficient due to its linear approach rather than this notion of quadratic dependency which makes it too expensive.

And this was again something by Google. This is called the Exalta framework. This is where they’re trying to understand what happens in news. Why news hallucinating as badly as it is? This is a paper again by Martin a joke. And much of this, this is my point really, much of this requires assistance from SEOs. We still have a big job to play here. We have to assist with equity probability disambiguation. We have to recommend different approaches to schema and building knowledge graphs and so forth. Whether you agree with LLM’s text or not, we have to weigh up the pros and cons. We have to monitor for Bing indexing because you can’t get into ChatGPT if you’re not indexing Bing. That’s fact. Yeah. There’s lots and lots of things we need to do still as an industry. All these, yeah. We have to be big advocates for extreme consistency because the bottom line is consistency will be king or queen or whatever with this new generative IR field. Google are telling us, you know, we need further context. Well, who’s gonna recommend that further context? Well, it’s us. It’s us as the SEO field, the SEO world, because of imputation where there’s too many gaps basically in the in the data.

And that’s not going to change anytime soon. So basically, things like clustering goes a long way to adding extra content in unsupervised learning. Who’s going to recommend the clustering? Building the keyword clusters and the content clustering. SEO heroes, that’s who. We’re the bridge. We’re the bridge between developers, between data scientists, between the companies, the CA, CO’s, the marketers. We hold everything together. So we still have a huge part to play in all of this. So yeah, know, we need you’ve got to give us content. It’s a two way street there. How dare how very dare we want actually to be part of this? Well, we do. So we may be a necessary evil, but we are necessary. So sending traffic to us is definitely something you’ve got to do. We are the SEOs in the middle, helping them to get through their existential crisis as they muddle through. And you know, I love Fabrice, Canal and Bing, but you know, it’s true. They need our help. We’re not villains, we’re heroes.

And as Lily said in her great deck that she did on Brighton the other week, I thought that’s amazing. That’s exactly the slide I won. SEOs are the internet army. That’s what we are. Yeah. So we’re kind of their annoying sidekick that they just cannot shake off. Rather than is SEO dead, we should always ask is information retrieval dead? Well, no it’s not, says Martin the jock. There’s plenty still for all of us to do, and that’s the point. 

And my last two thoughts on this, I’m seeing a lot of like, hey, is it GEO, is it SEO, Is it AI? Whatever seo? Who cares? You know, who cares? I mean, bottom line is please let’s not waste our time on things that are kind of pointless discussions. We don’t want to end up in a subfolder versus subdirectory discussion for the next decade and let get left behind. Whatever. Keep calm and SEO on. So thank you for your time and for hanging around. Thank you.

Garrett Sussman: Talia Wolf is a keynote speaker, author, and the founder and CEO of Get Uplift. You ready to have your emotions tweaked to tap into it to get very emotional? Because she’s done some nuts things. She’s jumped out of a a plane over 1,000 times. I’ve I’ve never jumped out of a plane, and I don’t think my wife will let me at this point. She’s a comic book nerd who grew up reading comics and was obsessed with anything to do with Marvel or DC, team Marvel, and she once participated in a reality TV show with fellow skydivers called the Human Tetris, in which her team had to somehow fit through cutouts in a large 13 feet by 7.5e feet Styrofoam wall moving towards them as they fell. You are nuts. Okay. She’s pretty cool too. Presenting Stop Chasing Conversions. Win more customers with an Emotion-first CRO strategy That Actually Works, please welcome Talia Wolf.

Talia Wolf: Hello. I want to tell you that about ten years ago, I stood on stage at a search conference and did a similar talk to what I’m going to be doing today. And the feedback was, this is irrelevant to SEO. I’m going to teach it today because it is irrelevant and important and we all have to stop chasing traffic. And that’s why we’re gonna be breaking up with the different things that we’ve been doing for so long and learn a new system. I’m gonna be talking about conversion optimization, which is my favorite topic. And I’m gonna start by talking about the process.

What does conversion optimization usually look like? We start by finding the leak in the funnel. So most of us can use GA 4, kind of, sucks, but we can find the leak in the funnel. We know if it is the product page, if it’s a landing page, if it’s our home page. Then we need to create a new variation. This does not work. There we go. We need to create a new variation that will increase conversions. We move into launching a test and experiment, and we analyze the test. Right? That is the go to process of conversion optimization. Now finding the leak in the funnel, pretty simple. Launching an experiment, if you have the right tools, the right software, the right developers, you can do that. And also, when it comes to analyzing a test, that is also quite easy. But knowing what changes to make on a freaking page that will actually increase conversions, that’s the biggest black box that there is in CRO. No one actually knows. No one tells us. Okay. Great. The product page is underperforming. It’s a landing page. How do I know what to change? Now what we do, because we have no idea how to test what is going on, We start collecting data. We know their age, their geographical location. We look at browsers. We look at devices. We are collecting data like they’re Pokemons. And then we stare at our reports and we’re like, I have no idea what to do. In fact, 82% percent of this is not working. Where am I pointing at? Nope. It doesn’t wanna tell me. Okay. 82% of marketers just feel that they can’t analyze their results, can’t pull any insights because we’re just pulling numbers. We’re not actually generating any insights. And what happens is because we have no idea what to test, we end up running these random AB tests that are basically just taking a page, duplicating it, and changing one element on the page. And we’re like, okay, hopefully a blue button will increase our conversions. And that doesn’t really work. Right? You’re Okay. Great. It increased conversions. Now what? Am I gonna am I gonna just change everything to blue on the website? Probably not. 

So what happens is we end up on what I like to call the deadly hamster wheel of optimization. It starts, you know, in a basic way where we’re like, okay, let’s Google some best practices. What am I gonna test? I will Google some stuff. I’ll listen to the neighbor. Maybe my manager knows what to do. We’re just kind of looking at LinkedIn influencers, maybe they know what to do, and someone says, reduce form fields because that’s going to work. And we test a bunch of random stuff, and we’re spending a lot of time doing that, and we get zero results. And even if we increase conversions, there’s nothing to learn from it. There’s nothing to be able to do with it. So after we’ve spent a lot of time testing random stuff, we move into what everyone does. Copying competitors. Now, we are convinced that our competitors know what they’re doing, so we just start copying everything that they do. And what ends up happening is everyone sounds the same. And here’s the thing. I want you guys to be super kind of honest with yourself. If you took your own logo today and switched it out with your competitors, would anyone know the difference? Probably not. Because we’re all copying each other and we’re all trying to be in this rat race of just getting there. So once we have tested best practices, we’re copying competitors, we’re sounding like everyone else, along comes the great, great solution, tools. Tools are going to save us. We will spend so much money on actually onboarding tools and paying money and spending time and getting everyone on the team on board with this tool. You’ve got a fancy new landing page builder, or you have a lovely A/B testing tool, or an automation, or personalization tool, and then it’s set up and you’re ready to go, and you’re like, now what? What am I going to test on the landing page? Oh, I know.

Random stuff because we don’t have any strategy. Now, if we want to increase conversions and if we really want to drive meaningful results, it’s time for us to go to the foundation, back to what really, really matters, and that is understanding what are conversions. The root of every conversion is a decision. If we can understand how our customers make decisions, we’ll be able to understand what they care about and how to create a better experience for them. Now, we’ve all been trained to think that this is how people make decisions. We go for this elaborate process of pros and cons and thinking logically and making a decision of, does this make sense? It doesn’t make sense. I should do this. I shouldn’t. I will now buy this product. This is not how people make decisions in life. In fact, neuroscientists, psychologists, and the biggest brands in the world will tell you that this isn’t how. This is how people make decisions in life. Every single decision in life is based on emotion. Yes, we will rationalize it later, but there’s a primary emotion in there. In fact, there are studies that prove that without emotion, we lack the ability to make any kind of decision. Antonio Di Macio is a fantastic neurologist who ran a scientist who ran an incredible study a few years ago on people that have very specific brain damage. These people could not feel any emotion. And what he found is that they could go around their lives and do everything just like everyone else, but the one thing they couldn’t do is make any decisions. They were unable to even decide what sandwich they were going to eat. It was crazy because without emotion, we lack the ability to make any decisions. Now if you’re sitting in here right now and you’re like, Talia, I get this. Like, of course, if I’m buying a watch, if I’m buying a car, it’s emotional. But in B2B, that’s not the thing. Let me just tell you, it is even more important in b to b to leverage emotion. To tap into your customer’s emotions.

Because actually, there is so much research out there showing you that buying a solution for your team or for your business is even more emotional than a personal decision. In fact, think what Google found that that B2B purchases are 50% more likely to buy a product if they see personal value for themselves. And they’re eight times more likely to buy a product if they see personal value, and it will be even if it’s more expensive, they will buy it. It matters. Emotion really matters. But so many companies are ignoring this. No one’s really paying attention. So when I ask people, hey, why do you who are you selling to? Who are your customers? I get a long list of this generic persona of like, oh, we know their age, their location, their job title, we know their gender, and we know the browser and device that they’re using. It’s all very shallow. And then I ask, okay, fine. Why do people buy from you? And the answers are all about the product. Well, you know, it’s our AI, it’s our technology, we have these incredible features, it’s our pricing. Nothing about the person behind the screen. It’s all about the product, its technology, and how it works. And what ends up happening is that we end up talking to the building instead of the person inside. Okay. But some of you might say, look, Talia, we’re it’s AI. We can use AI to write high converting landing pages. We’ll get everything that we need. Cool. No problem. So I went into ChatGPT and I said, hey, I have this incredible product. It’s a soda and everyone loves it. Everyone is my target audience. This is their gender. This is their age. By the way, I need this landing page to have all the best practices. 

I want you to have a great title, a great call to action. Don’t forget that we only cost $14 and we come in a variety of different ways that you can buy us, and we’re a 140 calories, whatever. Tell me what landing page I should create. Chat’s like, oh, great product, man. Here’s what you should do. Use a headline. Use these great things. Don’t forget to say, order now. Get 24 cans for just $14. I’m like, thanks, AI. You just made my job so much easier. Will you ever see a landing page like this from Coca Cola? No. You will never see anything like this from Coca Cola but we’re all doing it. We’re all like, we’re number one. We’re powered by AI. No one cares. We’re all doing this. And the funny thing is, every single search online is filled with emotion. I don’t have to tell you this. Also, us shows you this so easily. You go in, you put in the number one keyword that people use to actually get to your website. I have no idea with SEO. I’m a CRO person and I use this tool daily. Hey, what other keywords are people using to get to my website? This is all emotional. It’s all about, can I do this by myself? Am I okay? Do I have to hire someone? Do I need this? Is it going to be super expensive? This is what people are searching for. These are the landing pages. All your business on one platform. Automate your invoice management today and the number one UK’s favorite tax filing software. Thank you. Thank you so much. That was very very helpful. You’ve got people on one side saying, can I do this myself? Can I stop worrying about this? How do I know this is for me? And companies on the other side going, we’re number one. It’s an all in one platform. We’re powered by AI. It’s driving me nuts. Like, we don’t even care about the people behind the screen. We’re treating them like robots.

Now, let’s get to it. Okay? There are 223 emotional triggers that I have found that impact buying decisions. But don’t worry, there are two clusters of emotions you should all be focusing on. Okay? These are the two most common emotions that impact your customer’s decisions, so pay attention. Cluster number one, self image. This is how people want to feel about themselves after finding a solution. I want to feel effective. I want to feel hopeful. I want to feel that I love myself more. I want to feel confident. I want to feel good. I just want to feel better about myself. Your customers, your prospects are coming to your website and they’re asking themselves, how will I feel about myself after I purchase this product? Okay. Great. This is important. Shopify doesn’t actually sell you software, it sells a possibility. The dream of becoming an entrepreneur. Great. Self image, super important. The second one which I would argue is actually even more common is social image. How do I want other people to think about me after I buy a solution? You know, we care. We can tell ourselves that we don’t care, but everyone cares. How do I want to feel? I want to be looked up to. I want to be appreciated. I want to be the go to person in my office. I want to feel that I’m meaningful. I want to feel that I have an impact. And you know, in B2B or in B2C, this matters. There is a risk to making a decision when you’re buying something for your company. You have to think about that. In the 70s, there was a really cool saying, nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. I mean, yeah, they understood. You need to de riskify, or if that’s a word, the actual decision that you’re making. And Intel doesn’t talk about what they’re actually selling, they’re talking about, hey, we have you covered. Everything’s here.

This is probably my favorite B2B ad of all times. If you don’t know this, you’re too young. This is the epic split. Jeez. I really hope you guys know this. Okay. Listen. This company spent $4 million getting Van Dam to do the split. I mean, epic. The this company is selling trucks or lorries depending on where you’re from. Okay? Trucks. You know how much money they made from this ad that has nothing to do with their tracks? With their trucks? $270 million. They spent $4 million. That sounds like good ROI to me using emotion. Okay. So you’re not actually speaking to this person. Your customers have loads and loads of questions. Will people see me as the go to? Will I feel more confident? Will I get the career advancement that I want? Will I get this promotion? Will I finally stop worrying about this? Will I feel better about myself? So how do we actually start tapping into these emotions? And how can we go from just writing generic stuff and creating generic content, and actually making it about our customers? The framework that I’m going to walk you through is called emotional targeting. And it is the framework that I’ve been using to help optimize brands, hundreds of brands really, and increase their conversions. And really what it is is it takes you from this process which we discussed at the top. Right? Finding a leak in the funnel, kind of struggling to figure out, hey, okay, let’s create a variation quickly. What should I do? Let me Google this. Launch an experiment. If it fails, you’re like, damn, this failed. And if it succeeds, you’re like, yay, conversions. This framework that I want to teach you is about actually doing it in a different way. 

So you start with customer first research. You start by identifying the real why. Why are people buying from me? Then you go to your website and you’re like, I know all this stuff about my customers now. Let me read through everything and see. Am I actually serving people? Am I actually doing the right stuff? Oh, no. Here’s the problem. I’m not using I’m not actually speaking to the self image of people that they really care about. Then you launch an experiment. And you’re like, great. Cool. I increased conversions. Yes. Amazing. I decreased conversions. It did not increase conversions. Still a success because we’re learning. When you test meaningfully, when you run meaningful tests, it doesn’t actually matter if you increase conversions or not because you’re learning from every single test that you run. Okay. So you start with the research. What does that actually look like? You want to uncover the real why. What are the real motives and why do people buy from you? 

Well, there’s a few questions you want to be asking yourself. Number one is you want to identify the top three challenges and pains that people feel before converting. You can ask a question like, hey, what was going on in your life today that made you come to our website? Not, hey, why are you here? But actually thinking about the pain point. What brought people to your website? What are the top three desired outcomes? How do people want to feel after finding a solution? A great question, by the way, to figure that out is to ask people, if you could no longer use our product, what would you miss the most? Not, hey, how are our features? Which is our favorite feature? If I took this thing from you today, what’s the number one thing you missed? That’s your value. That’s what people love. It’s that pain. It’s that little thing that you helped them achieve or reduced for them. That is your value and that’s what you should be talking about. And lastly, you wanna figure out the top hesitations and concerns. You wanna fill out Figure out those roadblocks. What is stopping people from converting? Because if you figure that out, you can actually use real social proof to dismantle their problems. You can say, hey, I know you were worried about doing this yourself but we have a team that does this for you and you can show a testimonial that does that. So you start creating content people actually care about. So you start with meaningful research. Now when you do meaningful research, it takes you from these kinds of answers of like, hey, you add all the features, we had to switch a tool or it came down to pricing and technology. We needed one place to do it all. These are the usual answers you will see when you conduct a survey or an interview. But when you do real research and you ask meaningful questions about their intent, you get answers that are so much deeper. We have used platforms in the past and a lot of them are not designed for professional service like we are. We had trouble finding technology that understood the way we worked.

Or if this comes up, I had previously worked with this competitor, but nothing that I thought was perfect a perfect fit for an agency. This competitor was too rigid. I knew I was going to have to start paying more. Or I saw people like us using it and talking about it. It gave me the confidence that I needed to know that this will work for me. Now, this is the research that we ran for teamwork dot com which is a project management solution which is in a very saturated market. We all know how many brands there are out there that you can use for project management. Think Monday, ClickUp, Asana. Teamwork is right in there in the middle. And when we started working with them, one of the biggest ideas was how do we tap into these emotions? And look, they’re saying that the most generic things that everyone is saying. This is not a dig at Teamwork. This is what everyone is saying like, easy to use project management, the one thing you know, the one thing you can do. What we understood is at the end of the day, the people behind the screen, the people that they were serving were client service teams. People that were doing actual client works. Think about agencies or law firms or creative teams. And that meant that we needed to change the whole script. 

We needed to make it about the agency owner. The person who can finally manage resources clearly, that they can figure out what is actually happening on in my agency and am I spending money the right way. So we created a new landing page, a new homepage for them and tested it against the existing one. Just really focusing on the fact of who these customers are, what they’re trying to achieve was what helped us increase their conversions. And I’ll show you some more examples along the way of other pages that we did for them. But taking the conversation away from the product and making it about the customer is what actually increased our conversions. Okay. We’ve done our research. We’ve done interviews. We’ve done customer surveys. We’ve done review mining. We’ve done social listening on LinkedIn, on Reddit, on Quora. We’re seeing these conversations happening. People are talking about what they care about, what they hate, what they love, and we’re now using it. What would be the next step? The next step is running a strategic CRO audit. When people think about a CRO audit, they immediately think, okay, heuristic analysis. Let’s do a UX analysis. Let me make sure that I don’t have two call to action buttons or that I have a carousel. Let me make sure that all the standard best practices are there. This is not it. This is a strategic CRO audit that’s focused on asking important questions to uncover what’s not working. Because when you are armed with the insights that your customers care about the most, then you can create beautiful experiences. Then you can say, oh, I am just speaking about things people don’t care about. I’m talking about the stuff that people don’t resonate with. And here’s some questions that you can ask yourself. You wanna ask, are you making it about yourself or your customer? Are you describing the real challenges and obstacles? Can people immediately see the why? What’s in it for them? Are you using the words and descriptions prospects relate to? What aren’t you saying that people need to see or hear or feel? And are you including the social proof that people care about?

One of my favorite examples is Strata Identity. Strata Identity is an identity orchestration company, super complex. I barely understand half of it but super cool. And they have a brilliant product and an amazing team that’s dedicated to helping their customers. But the sheer technicality of this product makes it so hard to understand what they do and who they’re speaking to and why they should buy from them or not the biggest competitors in the market. One of the things that we understood with this company is that their customers are actually identity heroes. They are the they are the people that are protecting their company, that are making it safe. And what we did is we decided to focus on that. The hero the hero that reduces tech debt and modernizes all these apps without accepting risks. Now, you don’t have to understand what this means just to see the difference. Right? Between saying the identity orchestration company and make modern identity work everywhere. Or asking them, hey, does this work for you? What are you looking to do? What are you trying to achieve? What’s interesting here is that when we took the conversation away from the product, we were able to increase conversions. And again, it’s not just on landing pages. Their ads used to be multi cloud identity fragmentation or what else did they have? Let’s see. Identity orchestration makes multi cloud work or make identity secure on any cloud. These are very specific and generic visuals and words that people were using. Instead, we said, okay, securing nonstandard apps is easier than you think or win today’s identity battles and become the hero your company needs. We actually even did this on a billboard if I oh, there we are. Just taking the conversation away from the product and making it about them. We were not We wouldn’t be able to do this if we didn’t do that emotional audit. If we didn’t look and ask ourselves the strategic questions that no one actually asks. 

Okay. Number one, we did the research. Number two, we then audited our website and our customer journey on an emotional level. And then we start running meaningful experiments. What does meaningful experiments mean? It means that you’re not focused on velocity and a b testing tools and AI and whatever things all those LinkedIn gurus are talking about. What you really care about with CRO is three things. That you’re answering critical business and customer questions, that you’re running experiments that inform your entire marketing strategy. I don’t know how to tell you this but CRO isn’t a tactic. It’s not PPC, SEO, CRO. No. CRO should be actually embodying everything. It should bring everyone to the table. Growth and SEO and and PPC. Everyone should be sitting in the same room running these experiments together and aligning on the strategy. That’s what real meaningful CRO does. And it should be breaking those silos between marketing and sales and product that we all know exist. When I talk about meaningful experiments, I think it’s important to say that, you know, when I say emotional targeting, a lot of the times people kind of mistake what that means. They think, oh, fluffy headlines and beautiful images. But emotional targeting is more about weaving those emotions and acknowledging your customer in every step of the way. One of my favorite examples is just testing a menu. Navigation. Think about your website’s navigation. Teamwork used to have the regular thing, know, here’s the overview of our product. Here are all the features and our platform add ons. But we wanted to create something a lot more conversational. Something that when a client working team arrived on the page, they would say, oh, this is for me. Oh, I can find the content that I care about most. I’m not trying to get them to sign up to a free trial.

I want them to actually get their questions answered. So we changed the entire format of their menu. Everyone in SEO was like, oh, okay. Everything you need to know and the features you need to run client work, we actually focused on the specific features. And next to each one of these, we showed a specific case study that was like, and here’s how this company is using it. Then we said, look, we know you’re comparing us. Anyone who comes to this website is comparing us to Monday to click up to Asana. We’re not gonna let you go to Google and look for it or find Reddit. Here you are. We’ve got a you. There’s the comparison. It’s in the freaking menu. Just click and read the whole thing. We’ll tell you everything and we won’t hold back and I’ll show you an example in a second. And we did this with everything. So every single piece of our menu became about the customers. And yes, we increased conversions but that wasn’t the goal. It really was about driving more people to the places that they care about and getting them to go down that rabbit hole and read the information they care about most.

This is just an example of what we did for their comparison page. So usually when you look at a comparison page, you’re like, oh, here’s why choose this company over the other. Here’s a table with all the features. What we did is something different. We directly called out like, hey, no constant upsells. Here’s all the stuff that we do for client work. Then we went even deeper and we said, look, we give you the full financial picture. Wrike doesn’t and we get into the information about it and what Teamwork actually does. Then we said, features matter. Great. Let’s talk about pricing. Let’s talk about the actual results of these features and how they work. Not just, oh, we have board views and we have portfolios. But hey, if you’re trying to see challenges before they cause problems, here are the different actual features you can use and you can leverage. So it’s just changing the narrative. Okay.

Finally, I’m gonna show you two emotion based tests that you can run this month. Actually, it’s the end of April, so in May, that you can start running. Okay. Test number one is current pain versus desired emotional outcome. What are people feeling right now before they find a solution? How do they wanna feel? You don’t have to do a whole, you know, homepage test or a landing page test even in your emails. Send one email that’s specific about the pain that they’re feeling right now. Send another email the next day about how they could feel after finding a solution. What resonates more? Do it in your ads. Super simple.

Next, you can do a solution focus versus customer focus. This is very relevant if you feel like, oh, everything Talia is saying here is right and we’re super we’re super solution focused. We’re only talking about ourselves. This is a great test you can run just making it about the customer, taking one piece. We did this with Upright, is a brilliant product for helping you improve your posture. Usually, when I say this, everyone just kind of sits up. Yep. There you go. We’re all like we’re all sitting in front of our desks for hours, all thinking about, ugh, my back hurts, my knees hurt, everything hurts. How can I increase? How can I improve my posture? And what we found out is that people feel very, very guilty about not being able to improve their posture. And ultimately, they do nothing about it. So we took that guilt away and said, look, your poor posture isn’t your fault but there is something you can do about it. So just by really just saying, okay, solution focused versus customer focused, what can I test in an ad, in a landing page, in a blog post to see what resonates more? Finally, conversion optimization isn’t about changing elements on the page.

It really is about solving people’s problems. And the last thing I will say is that reality really fucking sucks. And it is our job to help people get the results that they want. And if you do it right, you can increase conversions because they will be achieving their goals and so will you. Thank you very much.

Garrett Sussman: Rock on. Brie is the founder of Beast Analytics, helping businesses harness the power of data to skyrocket their ROI. She’s over a decade of experience consulting for top brands and speaking at global events to empower others with digital marketing knowledge. She actually specializes in turning Google Analytics four and marketing data into actionable insights that drive results for companies everywhere, presenting your most valuable asset, why you’re not using it, and how to fix that. Please welcome Brie Anderson.

Brie Anderson: Alright. We’re getting close to the end of the day. Let’s do a big round of applause here, so mostly so we can remind all of them that there’s still something happening in here. Okay? Whoo. Let’s do it. Sorry, audio team. I just screamed in your ear. My bad. Okay. Listen. We’re gonna talk about what everybody loves to talk about, and that’s data. Data is, in fact, your most valuable asset. I mean, you can find this anywhere in the media. Data is extremely valuable. But mostly because of what we do with it, right? With data, we’re able to predict trends. We’re able to mitigate risk. We’re able to improve our products. Let’s see what else we do. We could create new revenue streams. There are tons and tons of things we can do with data. Most recently, something that’s been talked about in every talk so far, is the fact that we were able to use data to build LLMs and AI and all this cool stuff. But the reality of it is that’s only done if we actually use our data. Okay? So we have to have good data and we have to actually use it. As marketers, as SEOs, it’s not that we don’t have data. Right? You build a website, a CMS gives you a really good shot at giving you their version of analytics. We get a little bit savvier. We put Google Analytics on the site. We’re SEOs. Of course, we’re gonna have Search Console. We work in local because Greg works in local and that’s really cool. So we work in local. We set up our Google Business Profiles and we have all of the data. Right? We’re like, yep, set that up. Third party tools, SEMrush, Ahrefs. I got them. I did it. Done. Thank you. The data’s done. And then we go back when we have to, we cherry pick a couple metrics and we say we’re doing exactly what we’re supposed to do.

But we can do better than that. I know we can do better than that. It and it’s 2025 and the economy is shit. We have to do better than that. Okay? We have to actually use this data that we’re given. And I think this starts at the very beginning of the entire process. I’ve written dozens of marketing plans, I’ve read hundreds of marketing plans, and even the ones that I’ve written, they were all missing the same thing. Okay? I’m guilty as charged here. A tracking plan. How in the world are we going to prove the value of what we have done? Okay? We have to have a tracking plan. And it all starts with this very simple question. What does success look like? And I know what you’re thinking, you’re like, Brianna, I’m 17 steps ahead of you. Have you heard of a SMART goal? Yeah. Actually, I have. Most of us have.

But I’ll tell you what, when the going gets tough and a CEO is looking at their bottom line, a 10% increase in unbranded traffic over the last 90 days, they’re not really going to care because they’re mostly, again, worried about their bottom line. So of course, we need to understand what success looks like for our client, right? So whomever is hiring us, whether it’s the actual client, whether it’s an agency that you’re white labeling for, or whatever that might look like. We need to know what success looks like for their client. But we also need to consider what success looks like for their boss, whomever they’re reporting to. If they’re reporting to a manager, a CEO, if they’re a CEO and they’re reporting to stakeholders or their spouse, whoever they’re reporting to. I’ll tell you what, if you’re in a good position to make your clients look good, they’re going to keep you around longer. So we need to make sure that we’re staying a step ahead and going, what questions are you asked all the time and how can I help you gather that information so that you’re in position to answer those questions? Okay. So what does success look like for a client? What does it look like for their boss? And then also, what does it look like for you? As an SEO, what does success look like? Does it look like speeding up your pages? Does it look like ranking for x keyword or whatever that might look like? Right? Okay. So we have to have all of these things.

And then once we have all of these, which are generally like your ultimate goals, most people it’s going to be like purchases, revenue, form smiths, things of that nature. But then we have to consider also what affects whether or not the users that come to our site complete these goals. Okay? Are there other events that they are going to have to complete or like other steps they have to take before they can complete the overall event? Are there different ways they could get to the site, different things that they could interact with in order to enhance their conversion journey? Right? Like, we have filters? Do we know how people are interacting with those filters? What they’re selecting? What they’re doing? How many times are they filtering things before they find what they need? Right? These are all things we can track. Something I will I will give you to you as a question just to ponder for a while is if I could jump into analytics and I could see anything, what would I want to see? More times than not, you can actually track it. Sometimes you can’t, but most of the time you can. All right? So we need to be thinking about what affects whether or not we reach this idea of success. And then we need to think about, how am I trying to make success happen?

So we are SEOs, right? We have a lot of different tactics that we tend to deploy in order to try and reach success. And right now, it looks like even more because our scope just tends to I was talking to someone, I can’t remember who it was. It’s like, our scope just tends to get bigger and bigger over time. It’s like, oh, well, we wrote blogs. Can you show how many people visit a blog and then become a user, right? Or they convert. Or maybe we manage all the Google Business Profile listings. Can you show which ones of those are sending people to your website and which ones have the most active users, which ones have the users that convert the most, right? You have to have a good UTM plan for that. Same thing if you’re using YouTube, which you absolutely should be using YouTube as an SEO strategy. Just my two cents there. Can you see which videos, specific videos, are sending people to your website and then they’re ultimately converting? Sometimes this looks like having to create custom audiences, like I already mentioned, UTM plans. We have to have a way to splice and dice our data so we can show exactly the impact that we’ve made. Okay? And then you have to take all of this big list of things where you’re like, success looks like this, these are all the things they can do on the website that they can interact with, that we have the ability to change. I’m going to put that caveat out there. I understand that there’s a lot of red tape a lot of the time. And there are only so many things that we actually have the ability to change. So keep that in mind. But make your list. What things are being done on the website? What’s going to affect whether or not people are doing those things, what questions are we going to get asked over and over again, and ask yourself, am I tracking that? And then, ask yourself if you’re tracking that correctly. How many of you have tested all of your events in the last 90 days? Jori, that’s why you’re my kind of people.

Okay? We need to go I cannot tell you how many times I’ve jumped into an analytics account and gone, uh-oh, you’re double firing this. Uh-oh, that’s actually not firing at all. Or, this is doing something completely different than what you just explained to me. Okay? We have to be auditing our setups over and over again because things on the website change. Right? Only every once in a while. So make sure you’re tracking it correctly. Okay. So step one, gather the data that you actually need and make sure you’re doing it correctly. Okay? Create a tracking plan and test it. All right. So now, we’ve got a tracking plan, we’ve got everything going into analytics, and we have this table of data. Hell yeah, everybody loves a table of data. Okay. Well, not everybody. Most people don’t like tables of data. That’s totally fine. But that’s generally how data is presented. Once it’s collected, it’s put into a beautiful table, right, especially today’s analytics tools.

Our job now, in order if we want people to actually use data, including ourselves, let’s be fair, we have to make it accessible. And when I say we have to make our data accessible, I mean two things. One, it needs to be easy to find and get to, or else you’re not going to go to it, let’s be honest. And two, it needs to be easy to understand. We need it to be set up in a way that we can quickly make assumptions about what’s going on. Okay? So step one is to make it accessible. Now, heads up, all of my clients use GA4 because in my mind, it’s the most accessible at the very low price point of free. Okay? So everyone can use it. So we use Google Analytics 4. You don’t have to tell me how you feel about Google Analytics 4. I’ve been talking about it for four years. I know exactly how you feel about Google Analytics 4. But the reality of it is, actually, it is highly customizable, which means we can make the information that we need pretty accessible. See, if you jump into Google Analytics four and you go to the report section, which is where most everyone’s going to hang out, you’re going to see something called the library. And the library is actually what makes up the navigation. Okay? So it’s a library of all the reports and then you can put the reports in these places and then it shows up in your navigation. Right? So if you go into the library at the top, there’s something called collections. And if you look really hard at the collections, you’re going to be like, Brianna, that looks really familiar. That’s because the collections are actually what make up the navigation. Okay? So you can go into a collection, you can rename the collection, you can add reports to the collection, you can get rid of reports in the collection. Okay? So this is where you change all your navigation stuff. In the library, you can also customize reports. Or if there’s a report already built in GA four and you’re like, that’s pretty damn close, but not quite what I need, you can go into that report. In the top right corner, there’s a little pencil icon. If you click on the pencil, it opens up the report editor, which allows you to choose which dimensions are available and select a default dimension. You can select which metrics are available, change the order of them, change how it’s sorted. You can even choose your visuals. I say that, but really they only give you three different options. You get a bar chart, a line chart, or a scatter plot.You can show both of them, none of them. It’s really up to you. 

Okay. So all of that’s nice. But where the real power comes in is the fact that you can actually save filters reports when you customize them. And when you do this, you get access. You can filter by most dimensions. Yes, now you can actually even filter by event name. Thank God, took them long enough. So you can filter by most dimensions. You can have up to five different conditions that have to be met. And you can use includes, excludes, regex, and then all of the negatives of those and so on. Okay? So again, make your data accessible. I have a client. They just went through a website redesign, and their client is always asking them about the product page. What’s happening on our product pages now? How is it impacting the user journey? Well, easy enough. We created a report. I filtered it to only show their product pages. And now we have all of their product pages and all of the events that are happening on their product pages. And super easy. They just jump into GA4, click on Reports, click on this report. Boom. They can now answer the question very, very quickly. Making their lives a little bit easier.

Now, obviously, the easiest way to make data accessible is to put it into Looker Studio. Totally get it. Most people are bypassing GA 4 completely at this point. Do you, boo? Okay. So we can put our data in Looker Studio. That’s great. The reason that I love Looker Studio so much is because it does make data a little bit easier to understand. Right? You are able to rename your metrics if you did not know that. That is sick because nobody cares about a key event. Right? Not sure why we went down that rabbit hole, but alas, you can rename your metrics. You can use visual cues. Green means good, red means bad, up arrow, down arrow. You can use these cutesy little icons. It’s really sick, right? But a little bit of issue with this is, again, we’re cherry picking metrics, but alas, we’ll get into that later on. But this is just giving us a snapshot. Again, we want to analyze data, hopefully, using Looker. We want to make it accessible. We want to make it so easy, a very cute toddler could do it. So this is my two year old son, Grayson. He is the cutest and the coolest, and you cannot fight me on that. And right now, at home, we are working on a fundamental pre-math skill. My wife was an early childhood education person, so yeah. We’re working on a pre math skill, which means at two years old, we’re working on this, which means I’m very confident all of you can do this. Right? So this is what the skill kind of looks like. We have red, white, red, white, red.

Uh-oh. Oh my goodness. Half my sides are missing. Where did they go? Okay. Well, whatever. So there’s supposed to be a pattern there. I don’t know what happened. I obviously didn’t do a very good job. But basically, it’s identifying patterns. Right? Okay. Most all of you can identify your pattern. That’s great. Visualizing your data allows you to identify patterns quickly. Okay. So we’re just going to spend a little more time on this. This is the other side of that. Right? So if the pre math skill is identifying patterns, this is the other half of that. Does anybody remember the Sesame Street song? One of these things just doesn’t belong here. Right? This is all about identifying the odd one out. In this case, it’s a Yellow circle. Yellow circle. Right. Perfect. You guys are very good at this. So you just told me that you can identify outliers. Right? I always say analytics comes down to two things. It comes down to trends and it comes down to outliers. So if you can identify a pattern and you can identify an outlier, you can analyze your own data. Okay? I believe that. I truly believe that. 

So this is a very extreme example. For one of my clients, we were looking at number of products purchased over time by product name, and we can see here that there are three massive spikes of purchases in this one product, and I’m like, damn, how do we have more days like that? I want more people to be buying that much product. And I could have looked at the source where they were coming from or whatever. I’ll I’ll tell you, I looked at that, there wasn’t a huge like correlation. Instead, I was like, wait, how many people purchased? And when I put these two things together, you could see there’s not a relationship at all. It actually just turns out that there was one person that needed a fuck ton of that product. I don’t know why they needed so much of it. My guess is they’re probably wholesale, like selling it themselves. But once we identify this just goes to show that once you identify the trend or you identify the outlier, that’s what you need to look into. Right? And that’s how you get to these kind of hypotheses. Oh, the reason that this happened is because of x, right? It’s a hypothesis. Correlation does not equal causation, I’m not saying that, but it’s a hypothesis that we’ll get to later on. Okay. There are lots of different ways to visualize data. I don’t have to explain them to you, But this is just another way of identifying the outliers. We can do that pretty quickly here. Right? This is something we use a lot using a pie chart to show category type. In this instance, we can see and quickly make the assumption that, oh, most people are searching our site on desktop. That’s good to know. Can use something like this. This is two visuals kind of layered over each other. I know it can probably it might be a little bit hard to see here, but right away, I can see, ah, Nashville. People love us in Tennessee. And that’s great. Right? So this is the city level, but if we zoom out a little bit more, we also have the state level, and it turns out people really love us in Iowa too. I’m pretty sure that’s Iowa. I’m a military brat, I went to a lot of schools. I’m pretty sure that’s Iowa. I don’t know. Alas, so people love us in Tennessee, and they love us in Iowa. Right? That’s sick. You might be thinking, oh, well, are some times that I need to have a table of data. I agree.

Listen, I love a table of data. Sometimes you have a lot of metrics, you’ve to show it, alas. But you can use visuals here too. These are things that we want to draw people’s eyes to. In this instance, we are using heat mapping to show that Long Beach ranks for the most keywords, Portland had the most impressions, and West Seattle had the best click through rate. Right? And so then again, these are things that we would research. And listen, I didn’t have time to do the research for all of this data. Sometimes you just got to do it yourself. Okay. So alas. But this, what I’m trying to show you is that there are ways to easily draw your eyes in a direction that’s going to help you make an assumption. Right? Oh, that’s why. So here is the patterns. Okay. So if we have red, white, red, white, red, white, the next thing is going to be Red. Red. Perfect. Yeah. So that’s a trend. This is a pattern. Right? This is a pattern most people are going to see on their sites. So this is for SEOjobs[.]com. Shout out Nick for always letting me use his data. And you can see a very obvious trend here that most people see. For Nick, people don’t apply to jobs on Saturdays and Sundays. Makes sense. Right? And and that’s a very quick assumption that we can make. Now, on the other hand, there’s another trend here that there’s always peaks on Mondays. The mo we get the most applications on Mondays. Why is that? Well, we could make any assumption that on Mondays people get to their jobs and hate it, or Mondays people get to their jobs and realize they don’t have a job, and so then they they go and search for it alas. So I’m like, are people coming from search? Like, are they really searching that much on Mondays? So I pulled up the traffic, I did a stacked bar chart, And so the Mondays are, again, the outliers here.

And what I noticed very quickly, the search doesn’t change a ton. Right? The organic search and the direct traffic, it doesn’t change a ton. What does change is now all of a sudden, have this really big section that we don’t see on all the other days, and that’s actually from email. And it turns out Nick just writes bomb ass emails every Monday, sends them out, and people are like, I could use a new job. Right? And so then they click on the applications or click on the links in emails, and they go and they apply for these jobs. Okay? So again, the trends and the outliers, that’s really all it comes down to, I promise. You identify a trend, you identify an outlier, you look into it a little bit, and you make a hypothesis. Okay? So one, you capture all the data you need, make sure you’re capturing it correctly. Two, you make the data easy to find. And three, you make it so easy to understand, a very cute toddler could do it. And easy to understand just means that it’s easy to identify trends and identify outliers. Alright.

Let’s get back to Looker Studio. Who here loves Looker Studio? Woo. Wow. SEOs. Y’all are haters for real. Okay. Fine. I love Looker Studio. Most of us love Looker Studio because it can do really cool things. We’re like, oh, I can input this data. Oh, I can merge my Google Business Profile data with my website data or my Search Console data with my GA4 data, like Jori said, because we’re all going to start being actionable with the things we see at conferences. Right? We put it all in one place, and then we have like 17 different reports in this one report, and we build all these tools, and I’m like, this is really cool. I can show you how many times your keywords were shown in your Google Business Profile comments. Right? And oh, here’s this other thing. We’re looking at branded and unbranded traffic, and I built this filter, and so you’re definitely going to want to see that, and you’re totally going to want to see all of your Google Business Profiles and how they’re working, and oh, with those page clusters we worked on, I put that in a report too, and you see this really cool lift, and then we’re like, why aren’t they looking at that really cool lift? It’s on page seven, and it’s so sick, and and we were working on those location pages and it bumped, and the whole time, the client’s just like, yo, I care about two things. Did I make money and how much of that product did I sell? That’s it. That’s all they care about. They’re going, get to the point. You give them a 17-page report and they’re going, please just get to the point. Right? The problem is everybody should have two sets of reports. I firmly believe this. I will die on this hill. Unfortunately, we’re all sharing what should be considered internal reports. These are reports you look at. Okay? The internal reports have all of the information. It is our responsibility to analyze this information and make decisions on this information. Okay? We are service professionals being hired to do a service. Okay? Part of our service in 2025 with a shit economy is to do the analysis. Okay? And make data backed decisions. And that’s what you do with the internal reports. Okay? External reports are your like give a bow reports here. Right? 

So in journalism, they use something called an inverted pyramid where they say, get to the point right away. Give the most important information first, then show the supporting details, and everything else, that’s what you throw at the end. We should be mimicking this in our reports. Right away, show them the information that they care about, make it easy to understand, so easy that they can do it at a glance. Okay? Because this is what they’re looking for. Regardless of what you’re saying, this is what the client is looking for. And you might be looking at that and going, damn Brie, that’s rough because their revenue’s down. Listen. The foundation of a good relationship is trust. Trust comes from being transparent. They’re going to find out. They’re like moms. Clients are like moms. They’ll find out. Okay? They always find out. So give it to them straight up. In his sales book called They Ask You Answer, Marcus Sheridan talks about this tactic called disarmament where you come in and you you address the objections right away because what it does is it takes the power away from the client and actually gives it to you. I know we’re not salespeople in here, but it gives you the power. Right? And again, it builds trust. It says, hey, I know we have these flaws, but x, y, and z. And that’s what the next section should do. It should give them the supporting facts, tell them why whatever happened happened. Right? And then the last part, you can put whatever here, whatever information they ask for all the time, whatever information you think might be helpful. Okay? So, please, please, for the love of God, create two sets of reports. Okay? 

Now, there is something I did miss that should go in all of those reports and it’s Will Reynolds’ favorite question question, which is, so fucking what? So what? What am I going to do with this? Right? What? All this data and information you just told me, what are we going to do with it? You have to come up with some sort of strategy. I use this very simple framework, it’s two questions. Some sort of strategy to look at all of these hypotheses and evaluate how you’re going to move forward with them. The first question is, was the return greater than the investment? Right? Investment meaning time, money, resources, so on and so forth. If the answer is no, you can’t keep doing it. Okay? We’re going to break some hearts here. We can’t keep doing it. If we’re writing shit tons of blogs and we’re not getting any revenue from those blogs, we can’t keep doing it. Now, that doesn’t mean we can’t keep writing blogs. I’m not saying that. Don’t freak out. Instead, we’re going pull a little bit of a Ross Geller, right? We’re going to pivot. We can’t keep doing it the exact same way we’ve been doing it. If we’re writing an index of all of the different jargon in different industries, and nobody’s coming to that and they’re not converting, maybe we pick a new topic. Okay? Hey, hear me out. Maybe we try something else. Or if we’re writing these really long case studies and nobody’s reading them, maybe we break them up with media. We just have to change something because what we’re doing right now, it’s not working. Okay?

The second question is, did I mean to do that? Was that on purpose? Whatever I just found, did I mean to do that? Because there are plenty of happy accidents in this world. I know that because you’re looking at one. Okay? So plenty of happy accidents. If the answer is yes, you really did mean to do that, congratulations, you found something that you could potentially scale. If the blogs are working, can we create more of those blogs? Can we boost them on social media, right, and put some ad spend behind them? If we – one time I had a client, we found out that that like 50% of all their free sign ups were coming from some influencer they had never talked to, you can bet your ass we reached out to that influencer. Right? Again, like Carrie said, we’re tapping into the people that are already taking the attention. Right? Work with them, not against them. If the answer is no, you didn’t really mean to do that, again, create a strategy for it. That’s what I was actually talking about, alas, with the with the free trials. Right? So if you find something you didn’t really mean to do, create a strategy to leverage it. Right? So next time you look at your reports, I want you to look at it and go, so fucking what? Right? And instead, every report should have a section that explains the findings so that the client doesn’t have to come up with them. You tell them, hey, I saw that email. We backed off on email last month.

I think that’s kind of what affected our revenue because that’s where return users come from, and average orders are really higher. Our product optimization is working. We’re getting a lift on organic, but we’re not seeing a lot of revenue yet. And also, was an influencers blog post that sent some traffic. Great. And then you’re going to pick one of them. Just one. Okay? Science 101. If you’re going to run a test, change one thing. Okay? Because if we change too many, we won’t know what the effect came from, right? So we’re going to pick one thing, and that’s what we’re going to test. And those are going to be our next steps. Again, this should be in your reports. You should always have your findings and your next steps. So in here, says, hey, let’s do the email thing again. That really worked. We’re just going to keep doing the same pace for organic as well. Now, what this means is you can’t schedule pre-built reports and send them to your clients because if you’re sending the same report over and over again, it’s just a dashboard. And they’re going to look at it and go, don’t care. Or they’re going to look at it and go, so fucking what? Right? We don’t want to be in that position. We want to tell them what’s happening here. Okay? Again, that’s our jobs. And then you’re going to get approval, obviously, because you’re awesome, and you’re going to run the test after you create a tracking plan and double check your setup. Okay? So you’re going to run the test. So step five is to create a system that allows people to test so that you can always be testing. In a market that’s always changing, we have to always be testing. That’s the only way we’re going to keep up.

In my consultancy, I use this, which is selfishly branded. Benchmark, collect the data, explore, collect all of the data around it. So how are we doing today? Collect all the data around it. Analyze it. Look for the trends and outliers. Pick a strategy, which is basically like what’s going to have the most impact with the smallest change. Right? And then you’re going to run the test and track it. We have to create a culture of innovation within our organizations in order to win moving forward. Okay? So we’re testing hypotheses which means they might not always be right, which means we might not always win and that is totally okay. Alright?

Alright. Please go out there and use your most valuable asset which is data. Thanks for letting me pretend I’m a rock star and have a good SEO week.

Garrett Sussman: Well, next up we got Carrie Rose. I am excited. Carrie is on the billboard. Sorry, Devin. Carrie is the CEO and founder of Rise at Seven, a search first creative agency based in England. She once worked on SEO with the Kardashians. Not a big deal. Nice flex. And her first ever viral piece of content was photoshopping a politician half naked for a general election. What the? Yeah. She once optimized a brand site to position one that resulted in her receiving a legal letter from Dwayne The Rock Johnson presenting – deep breath because this is a long title – The Ten Lessons I Haven’t Shared on LinkedIn From Off-Site SEO Earning Over 50k Links Through Content Marketing. Please welcome Carrie Rose.

Carrie Rose: Hello everybody. Hello everybody. It was funny because I got an email a couple of weeks ago saying we want some free fun facts. I just sent free fun facts about being sued by The Rock and things like that. But yeah, I don’t know if everybody else included the same. So I’m actually going to start with a little bit of a story. So all over social media at the minute, everyone’s talking about brand is the new SEO and most people in the industry are like, fuck. We’re fucked. We’re SEOs. What can we do about brand? Right? There’s about four thousand two hundred posts on LinkedIn today. So I literally looked this morning to look at the update. There’s 4,200 posts that state that brand is the new SEO. And actually, there’s a 147,000 posts saying SEO is dead. So literally people are scared. People are thinking what the hell is going on. I’m going to actually tell you why I actually don’t think brand is the new SEO or why SEO isn’t dead and why that is slightly kind of incorrect.

So I’m going to tell you a story. Three months ago, I am insanely proud to say that my agency got appointed as the SEO agency for Red Bull. But I’m going to tell you it’s one of the most iconic moments of my life. I was very proud of the team. But actually the brief, when it landed on my desk, it was the most interesting brief I think I’ve ever seen. It came from the board of Red Bull. It was the C-suite of Red Bull. And essentially what they said is, we have one of the biggest brands in the world. They have 99 global fame. Most people in the world know who Red Bull are. Well, they have a really bad brand consideration problem within the energy drink category. Monster, Celsius, Prime, Lucas Ade, they’ve all came over and stole their lunch money essentially. And they’re shitting themselves and they think SEO is the way to solve this. And I was like mind blown and we got chosen to be the agency to kind of help them. So let’s take a look at this. So we had a look at their playgrounds. So the way that Red Bull is structured is they have seven different playgrounds. Their playgrounds is essentially their keyword buckets that they wanna play in. One of them might be gaming. One of them might be Formula One which is one of their biggest sponsored events. It might be things like dance and music. 

And what we looked at was 29,000 monthly searches around energy drink related terms within the gaming sector. So people actually drink Red Bull when they’re about to have a gaming session because they want fast reaction times, they want to stay up all night, etc., etc. And by the way, Red Bull were nowhere to be seen. Like literally nowhere. Top ten roundups, blue links, gaming reviews on social, products in consideration. Red Bull had zero visibility within the gaming space. And actually there’s people within Red Bull who are KPI’d on sharer’s shelf. So there’s people that go in their little cars and they sell Red Bull to get as much sharer’s shelf in any retail store, and they’ve achieved 50% by the way. So Red Bull has 50% share of shelf right now. So it’s majorly available in any supermarket store. But when it comes to Google, their share of search is 0.05%. There’s just nowhere to be seen. And that’s why brand is not enough to rank. Brand is not the new SEO. It doesn’t mean you have the biggest brand in the world like Red Bull spending literally millions if not billions on marketing building one of the biggest brands. It doesn’t mean Google’s gonna rank you. So much that when we won them, the first thing we did is we put redbull[.]com into SEO monitor to find out who are their competitors. Who does Google think their competitors are? We thought a few energy drink brands might come up but it weren’t. It was GamesRadar. It was PC Gamer. Was gamerant[.]com. Google did not think Red Bull is an energy drink brand. So we knew that was the problem. 

 

And it was the exact same for Ninja. So Ninja started working with us about three years ago. Ninja again, the biggest brand in the world when it comes to air fryers. You saw that whole air fryer trend on TikTok and things like that. That was literally driven by Ninja themselves. You know, Ninja air fryer recipes, content, pushing products, creators. It was literally the drivers behind that. But when they came to us, their average rank was 15 by the way. They couldn’t get past page two and they just really struggled with it. And we got them to position one in those two years. But really why that is, is because Google isn’t looking for brand signals. Google is actually looking for category signals. 

You know Red Bull? Red Bull didn’t come up in the energy drink category. Ninja really struggled in the air fry category. So Google is actually looking for brand + category signals. And why is that? Why is Google looking for that? Because that’s what people are looking for. We as humans, I studied psychology by the way, so before I got into marketing that’s what I studied. I studied people. I was obsessed with brains. And really we’re quite simple humans. We want to understand what is it I can buy from you? Really simply, what would I go to you for? And that’s why Dyson are trying to own the category for cordless vacuums. Ring doorbell, Ooni pizza oven, HubSpot, inbound marketing, they’re owning their category. And in the UK, when I pulled this data, if I typed in any of these non brand terms by the way, so cordless vacuum, doorbell, pizza oven, every single one of these brands ranked number one. And that’s not literally a coincidence. It’s because they own their category. They’re giving category signals to both users and the internet. 

So as marketers, what our role is to do is to train. It’s to train the internet and our audience to associate their brand with category terms. That’s ultimately what we’re trying to do. And really the role of that is then to drive brand salience. So if anybody doesn’t know what brand salience is, brand salience is So say if you guys decide you want a pizza tonight and you’re thinking which brand do I wanna go for, the brand that comes to mind first and you go and buy is brand salience. It’s the brand that comes to mind when you decide to go and buy. And we have a role in that when it comes to SEO and I’m gonna tell you how. Because as search marketers, I believe we can engineer it. I think we can engineer category signals in the brain. So Google talks about this a lot. So when it comes to humans trying to understand and remember people, so it’s all about memory. Right? We’re trying to remember brands and we’re trying to remember what is it they sell. Our memories aren’t that good. So I don’t know about you guys but I’ve been here for the last two days and so many people have come up to me. I’ve got, my god, Carrie, follow you on LinkedIn. We met a couple of years ago and I’m looking at them thinking, shit, who are they? I’m like I can’t even remember their name. We’re really, really bad at remembering things by the way. Google came up with this concept called the 7, 11 and 4. And essentially what this is, is this is how you get remembered. You need to spend 7 hours with somebody, 11 interactions across 4 platforms. That’s how you become remembered. So that’s how you become remembered within your category. You need 7 hours, 11 interactions across 4 different platforms. And that’s why multi channel search isn’t just a search volume thing. It isn’t just a platform thing. It’s a human thing. It’s a psychology thing.

And when I talk about category signals and brand signals, it’s not just about generating more branded search. It’s not about getting more people to search for Ninja air fryer. It’s about things like this. It’s training Google and people with off-site category signals. So it’s things like links into your category pages. It’s keyword mentions alongside our brand in high traffic media sites. It’s keyword mentions on UG social. It’s positive category signals in reviews. And these are the things that we can engineer and I’m gonna tell you exactly how we do it at Rise at Seven. And that means the traditional pillars of SEO are now redundant. If you go to any conference, everyone talks about the three pillars of SEO but really all they do is serve the website. Technical SEO, on-site content, and links. It’s no longer about links anymore and that’s crazy for me to say because I’ve literally built an agency that makes $8 million a year off links like it’s crazy. But what we’re talking about now is technical has always remained kind of the same. Right? Content is now about experience and relevancy. And off page isn’t just about links anymore, it’s about signals. Authority signals, trust signals, category signals, and discovery. So that’s the role of off-site. And just to give you context, when we did the pitch for Red Bull, we told them if you ignore off-site, you’re ignoring 60% of the SEO opportunity. That’s how big it is for Red Bull. It’s fucking crazy.

So who am I? I didn’t even introduce myself. I went straight into this. So my name is Carrie. So I’m the CEO and founder of UK and USA SEO agency called Rise at Seven. And what we do is we create category leaders. It’s all about category leaders. And we’re doing it for these sort of brands. So,SIXT, who’s in the audience? I’ve just seen him. Hello. So SIXT is one of our clients, been our client for the last couple of years. What they want to do is lead the category in car rental. Take Kroger. Right now, we’re going after the gift card category. Bumble is all about dating. So what they’re trying to build is category leaders and we can do that with SEO. And in this talk, what I’m going to be talking about is lessons that I haven’t shared on LinkedIn. So anyone that follows me, I share a lot of LinkedIn by the way. I share building an agency, you know, the things that are up and down. I’m talking about the successes and the falls of building SEO for many of these brands. And I give away my tips and tricks. But I’m actually gonna tell you guys some of the things that I haven’t shared on social media. Some of the tactics and lessons that I’ve learned I guess by doing this for twelve plus years. And I’m gonna break it down into three lessons. Strategic lessons, creative lessons, and executional lessons.

So when we start with strategic lessons, I think the whole industry when it comes to SEO and especially link building, they focus too much about where links are coming from. It’s all about high DA websites. Right? I can buy you links on high DA sites, things like that. But I think the industry is losing sight of where we’re actually pointing links to. And I’ll tell you an example. Most clients when they come to us, when we’d audit their backlink profile, I’d say a good 90% of that backlink profile usually points to the homepage or the blog. That’s a problem. Take this one as an example. So this is Dojo. In this case study example, I’ve chose Dojo for a reason because most people in this room probably have never heard of them. They’re a B2B card machine provider. We’ve been doing SEO for them for about six years. And the reason I’m using this one as an example is because I wanna prove the point that they haven’t got a big brand but it is possible to increase rankings because of this. When we did the backlink audit of Dojo, essentially what we found is around 16.5% of the links that they had pointed to their category pages. So hardly any of them. It weren’t the majority. Hardly any of those links were pointing to the category pages. And their top three core categories actually only had maximum of three links. Most of the links that they had was pointing to the homepage and the blog. This is a problem. We need to get links into our money pages. That’s where we make we literally make money. So the way that we structure this at Rise at Seven, I’m giving away all these tips and tricks is like this. So take the card machine category. That’s one of their number one revenue providers, traffic drivers. So the card machine category for Dojo, what we do is we look at building links directly into that URL. So it’ll be Dojo forward slash card machine. We want links into that. Under that URL, we would then expand it into the card machine forward slash report. What we do is then build a digital PR campaign under that to build deeper level links and then close the content around that, and that will be category signals to Google that we are trying to build category signals, category leaders in the card machine.

So I kind of break it down. So there’s two ways of doing this. We want category links and we want campaign page links. So when we do this, there’s always massive differences. So if you’re building links into campaign pages, there’s massive difference because often when with a campaign page, you have content on the website. Right? You have a small bit of content that you push out to the media. So here’s some really interesting data, and you have a lot of content back on your website because you want to position as a resource. You want to get links as a resource. These kind of resources that you build is usually evergreen. They last you know two to three years. They’re building links consistently. And these campaign pages are really useful for evergreen growth. When it comes to category pages, there’s not a lot you can do to change that, right? So take Ninja air fryer. We couldn’t add content onto the category page. There’s not a lot you can do on there because they’re very protective over what those products are. So you can’t put any new content on there. So the content that you do create, you have to give to journalists. You have to add value to their stories. So we’re giving content to the media, and as a result of them, we’re getting not a resource link, we get a credit link because we’re being valuable to those journalists. 

These category page links are often fast. We need them fast and often they’re small bursts of activity. So they’re not kind of long evergreen but they’re small bursts of activity. And I’m literally gonna break you down an example of it. So in order to build links into category pages, we need to be fast. And what we do is I’ve built my agency and there’s a team called Rise Live and essentially what they’re doing is they’re watching the news so you guys don’t have to. They’re staying up to date with culture all the time to look at stories that they can apply to your to your brands essentially. And let’s take the card machine category for Dojo. A lot of clients come to us and they have a product that they want to push. They have a message that they want to push. And often I have to tell clients, listen I can’t exactly push that to the press because I’m just going be honest with you, no one gives a shit. No one cares about these new product features or that you’ve got a new CEO. Like literally nobody cares. What you have to do is find something that people do care about. So take Dojo, they have this card machine, and they actually have this new part of it. So it’s a new service where you – and it was called the Dojo Seat Booker. So with the Dojo Seat Booker, you could literally go to a restaurant, you could pre-book your table, you can choose your seat. So if you wanna sit near the window or anything like that, you can pre-book your meal and you can pay before you even go. So this is a new service that they wanted to push. But I had to kind of tell them no one cares. No one cares about this pre-book. It’s not PR-worthy in order to get links into that page. We need to think of a hook that where to make them to make them interested. And the way to do that is injecting yourself into culture and your customer’s interest because the thing on the left hand side is what you as a brand are interested in, and the thing on the right hand side is what your customers are interested in. What you need to do is find a sweet kind of spot in the middle. And I’ll give you an example. So it was God, I can’t remember how long ago, maybe about seven months ago or something like that. There was a viral TikTok of this guy who took I think it took him like eight months to get into this exclusive restaurant in London. He basically did a mini-TikTok about it where, oh my god, it took me eight months to get into this restaurant and here’s a review about it. It went viral. I think it got like 1.3 million views or something like So this was a media moment. A media moment where somebody waited so long to get into this exclusive restaurant. And everybody in the comments was talking about, oh my god I’ve been trying to get in there too. It takes months. Oh my god you need to try this other restaurant. It takes six months, three months, whatever it is. So there’s all this content talking about all these exclusive restaurants and how long it takes to get in. So what we did is we compiled a list. Obviously, we’re trying to promote this seat booker kind of feature of our card machines and was like, here is all the restaurants in London and here’s how long it takes you to get into these restaurants. We pushed out to the media of viral TikTok reveals that it takes eight months to get into this. Here’s a list of how long it takes to get into the rest of them. We pushed it out to the media. And this was in literally two hours. We pulled this kind of list really, really fast and we pushed it out to the media and it landed on ITV, it landed on Telegraph, The Times, Lad Bible, things like that. And what we did is we built 54 links into that category. Because remember, what I’ve done is I’ve gave journalists a really valuable piece of content. A list of restaurants that are really exclusive to get into and this is how long it takes to kind of get there. I haven’t got any content on my website because I need category links, remember. But I’ve provided all of that to the journalists and asked for a credit link. 54 of them did. 54 people at press, all high authority linked into the card machine category.

So then step number two, I wanted to build deeper level pages, deeper level links. And what we created is a campaign. So again, the client came to us and said, okay, you guys are doing some good stuff. There’s this other thing what we wanna promote is around data security. We’re really secure around data. And I was like, no one cares. No one cares that Dojo takes data security seriously. It’s not something I can promote and build links into. But they’re like, but we want our product, our card machines to rank for secure payment terms. I said, okay, we need to go find a hook. We need to go find a story. Something that people are actually interested in. And what we notice is password hacking and credit card breaches and things like that. Every single Christmas spikes. Basically, people are stealing your passwords to hack and try steal data and money and all that sort of stuff. It happens every single Christmas. So, we knew this was an evergreen thing. It happens every single year and this is a story that we wanna tap into. So we created a report and it was the most hacked passwords. So if any of you guys have got your dog as know, Alfie123 or if you have your kid’s name or your old place of work or anything like that, they’re the most hacked passwords. We put them all into a list and revealed it out to the media. And, it got a shit ton of media. It’s such an impressive. It was on TechRadar, Lad Bible again, Whales Online, Yahoo, The Sun, Mail Online. It got picked up everywhere of these are the passwords that most people have and the most hackable kind of passwords. And if you can see, this is a screenshot of the email that we sent to these media. Basically said recent research from us, the card machine providers from Dojo have found all these passwords that are the most easy to hack and by the way you should change it. So this is just a screenshot example of a category signal. We didn’t link from Dojo, we linked into the card machine. That’s what we wanted. And we built 107 links with that report because everybody was like, oh my god, I keep my passwords keep getting hacked and we got 107 links back into that. So to kind of summarize this, we got 54 into the card machine. We got 107 links into that digital PR campaign. We built some closer content all around date security and as a result, machine traffic went up 152%. Because again, what we’re doing is we’re engineering links to go into your categories to say this is the category that we want to be known for. So I think it’s less about getting links from high DA publications. Yes, there was high DA, know, ITV, Telegraph, The Times, things like that. But actually the most important thing was where the links were pointing to. We increased their backlink profile by new referring domains into the card machine category and got massive massive increase in traffic. 

So I guess the summary of that is we need to be the source. We need to be the source that people cite and that’s how you’ll win. And I don’t think enough agencies or enough SEOs are creating really good resources anymore. I don’t think that’s what we’re doing. And just kind of like a second little tip on that. There’s a huge reason why these stories, you know the trending viral TikTok stories. There’s a huge reason why these links are actually more valuable than any other. And it’s because often when there’s a viral breaking news trending story, they’re often getting pulled into top stories. Journalists by the way, a KPI to get into top stories because they get more visibility in the Google SERP. That’s ultimately what journalists are KPI’d on. How do I get into those top stories? And top stories is often driven by reactive breaking news, trending news, and often they’re driven by TikTok. TikTok is the biggest place to understand where people are going viral. What stories are they creating? And just to kind of give context, top stories is now triggered for 23 million keywords in the US alone. It’s been triggered quite a lot when it comes to these sort of topics. So when you’ll get more visibility in top stories, they’re getting a shit ton of traffic. And links on high traffic pages by the way are more valuable than any other page. That’s what you want. You want high traffic pages. That’s what you want. 

So secondly, creative lessons. This is where we’re going to get regarding your roles as SEOs. I think there’s a lot of pressure to start being brand marketers. Right? But actually, I’m going to kind of go against this a little bit. I don’t know if you guys saw this, but this was a study by Tom Capper. Tom Capper is an absolute genius. I love his work. Follow him on social media. I’m obsessed with his work from – He actually works at Mars. And he basically was looking at the helpful content update in 2023 to 2024. And he said, there’s something interesting about this helpful content update. I don’t think there’s anything to do with helpful content at all. He said, I’ve looked at 1.8 million URLs and I’ve found something. And this is where this brand authority thing came from. He basically said, if you have loads of links pointing to your website, high quality links and a high DA, but you don’t have high brand authority signals, you are negatively impacted during the helpful content update. If you have high domain authority, so really good links, at the same time of building high brand authority, they’re positively impacted by the helpful content update. So he’s basically saying that you need to be building links and brand at the same time in order to be rewarded. That’s basically what the helpful content was all about. He didn’t think it was actually anything to do with helpful content. He thought it was to do with brand.

And in the latest Google algorithm leak, which I believe Mike leaked, was Google It said Google uses brand related signals such as brand mentions in top news outlets and branded search volume as key ranking factors. And this is true as well for AI Overviews. So we went and tested this. So one of our clients is Pooky. Again, a really, really small brand that not many people have heard about. And essentially what they sell is lighting. And one of their key categories that they wanted to kind of generate demand for, we wanted to test whether branded search volume, whether branded search volume and demand plus links at the same time is actually enough to increase organic non brand search. So the category we chose to create demand for was rechargeable lights. So the strategy was create off-site branded category signals and links in tandem to drive on-site growth. Let’s go test this. Let’s go be cheeky and let’s go test this. They spent £20,000 by the way, just £20,000 doing a big test with creators, PR, SEO to build this kind of demand. The goal was to get as many people to search for Pooky rechargeable lights so that when it comes to rechargeable lights as a non-brand category, they rank. That was the test. So what we did is we worked with social creators. Social creators, we wanted to steal their audience. We wanted to steal their visibility. And what the role of the SEO is to do is to provide the social media team with insight. I don’t think you guys need to learn how to create content and optimize on social search. That’s not your role. You’re not there gonna get out your iPhones and start creating 15-second videos. I don’t think that’s the role you guys are gonna play. The role that you guys are gonna play is that top kind of bar. You’re gonna give them an SEO brief. You’re gonna tell them what platforms people are searching on you’re gonna get that data from keyword[.]tool. That’s where you get search volumes for social platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest. And what you can see is that in the lighting keyword group for this brand, Google TikTok was actually searched for more as in like search volumes on TikTok were higher than Google itself. So we knew straight away TikTok was the place to go to create branded branded search. The keywords is the keyword research that every SEO does and that’s what we provided to the social media team. We want you guys to include lighting, living room lighting, Pooky’s rechargeable lights. These are the keywords we want you to include within your social content. The intent is people are exploring. They’re in purchase mode and they’re evaluating. And what we gave is optimization suggestions. So we want to make sure that these keywords are mentioned in the first five seconds of voice over. By the way, voice over on social search is higher impact of rankings than written.

So that’s just a little bit of a tip of a ranking factor. If you guys are interested in social search by the way, just Google TikTok SEO. We rank number one I think for it. And there’s a guide of how to optimise social content at both TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, anything like that. And it’s literally It tells you exactly how to do it. So it might be useful. And then what we The last thing we do as an SEO is we look at well who’s got the most visibility? It was this girl called Ruby’s Cottage Renovation. She basically bought a cottage and renovated it. But what we found is that her content actually ranked for 17 keywords around rechargeable lights. So rather than going and trying to get Pooky to rank, we just used her visibility and actually got Pooky to rank within her content. It was a lot faster. Was a lot easier. 

So that’s the role of the SEO. It’s not to go and create optimized content on TikTok. It’s to actually give them insight to go create content on TikTok. So we went ahead and did it. We got 25 creators and these aren’t massive influencers and spent about £10,000 by the way for 25 in total. So he’s not spending a shit ton of money. And we got them to create content, optimize around social, using those keywords, showing the product in place. We built links into the rechargeable light section. It was things like I don’t know if you saw this on TikTok, but it was like the trend around us females never use the big light. It’s always a sidelight, right, in our living rooms. We created that trend. The big light debate basically on TikTok, and how to use lighting to make your space feel bigger. We built links into that rechargeable category. And what happened is because we were building links and we were creating demand on social through those creators, is searches for Pooky rechargeable lights went up 4,496%. More and more people were searching for Pooky rechargeable lights. Not just rechargeable lights, they wanted Pooky rechargeable lights because we were creating these demand moments. This is what happened to traffic and links. We built links into that category and traffic went up. And just to give you context, they ranked nowhere on Google. Literally, didn’t even rank on like page 10 or page 15. They had zero visibility for the rechargeable like keyword. Within four weeks, we got them to position four. We didn’t do anything on-site, not one thing. All we did is off-site brand signals and built links and we got to position four. I actually googled it last week and we ranked number two now. 

So this is what I mean. Google is not looking for brand signals, it’s looking for category signals. Rechargeable lights, push that. And so much that the rechargeable lights search volume went from 7,400 to down 9,000 searches a month. So we’re building demand for the category. Right? That’s what it’s all about. And because we ranked number four, we’re getting more traffic. As a result of that, we had massive brand salience and revenue went up 23% that year. It was a really, really successful case to do just for twenty thousand pounds like crazy.

So the last lesson is executional. I have three and a half minutes. I think I’m gonna do it. So when it comes to links and PR, digital PR, there’s a new version of parasite SEO. People calling it this fake version of parasite SEO. If you Google anything like best air fryers, best beauty products for moisturizers for dry skin, or even if you Google best sex toys, mostly it’s the media that rank. Right? And when we looked at this for Red Bull, it weren’t Monster that came up, it weren’t Celsius or Prime, it was actually wired[.]com, Business Insider, USA Today and Men’s Health. They were stealing the visibility in the SERP when it comes to energy drink related-search. And my mom taught me something. My mom taught me if you can’t beat them, join them. So it’s no longer about getting links. Right? It’s no longer about getting links from wired[.]com but we wanna be featured in them. We want to get that visibility because we’re never gonna beat wired[.]com. We’re never gonna beat Business Insider when it comes to those rankings. But what we can do is get real estate from them.

So what we did is we – this is for a beauty brand called Revolution Beauty. We analyzed 757 best beauty product keywords, and the combined volume was 650,000, and we looked at which publications have the highest visibility for those keywords. And it came out Cosmo Magazine, Glamour Magazine, Allure, Elle, Good Housekeeping. We looked at all the keywords that these rank for. So clearly these are optimizing their news articles for these keywords. And what we did is we reached out to them. So a little bit of a tip. You know how Google likes fresh content? Well, journalists have clicked on to that and what they do is they update their articles all the time. And that’s why you’ll see odd numbers like 13 face moisturizers or 27 best SPFs. It’s because what journalists are doing is updating their articles all the time and adding new products. And what they’re dying for is I need more products. Shit. I’ve done an article about 12 of the best beauty products. I need another to update it because I need to update it in the next hour. What we do is we go to them and say, hey, we’ve no issue. I haven’t updated the article in the last three days. By the way, I’ve got Elemis. Elemis is a really good SPF to use every single day. Do you wanna feature it within their article? And they’re like, yeah, thank you so much. I needed something like this. All of a sudden it went from 12 to 13. So that’s what journalists are looking for. They’re looking for fresh content. Their SEO is just like us. And what we’re doing is we’re stealing their visibility. Cosmo articles, remember, they have the highest visibility. So this article itself for face moisturizers, SPF, it’s position one for over 55 keywords. And we by the way, my client was Look Fantastic. You can see the very first link, LMS, was Look Fantastic. It’s not about getting a link from them, it’s about getting real estate. That’s what we want as SEO is real estate. The second one again was independent. It ranks for 689 total keywords and it ranks number one in the UK by the way for best sun cream UK, best sun cream, best sunscreen, and best body SPF. And again, we got Look Fantastic Place in there because we knew journalists wanted to update those articles. We did it again with eye creams. So Glamour, remember Glamour was one of the most highest visibility. Was, okay, let’s go and send them some of our eye creams. Again, it went from 12 best products to 13 best eye creams. And essentially, what we did is we got 16 stories covering best moisturizers, about 31 across the 90s lipstick trend by the way. Best night creams across five. What we did is we created more discoverability because rather than trying to beat them, just joined them. We went and got our client featured in them and installed real estate.

But one of the things I’m gonna tell you is there’s a high chance of these being affiliate links. And I know the SEOs in the room are, I want a follow link. I don’t want an affiliate link. Well, guess what? Affiliate links are on the rise. What’s happening is publishers are moving to affiliate-driven, SEO driven powerhouses. That’s what’s happening. And just to give you context, this is the last slide. I’ve got another slide after this but this is a screenshot of market in the digital PR space. In the UK, by the way, there’s now just an 11% chance of a followed link because the media is clocked on to how they can make money. They’re literally making everything an affiliate program kind of powerhouse. In the US actually, slightly behind. So 86% chance of a followed link in the US. They haven’t clocked on to it yet. I think some have, some in the mass media, but actually it’s a lot easier to get followed links in the US. Germany is really difficult. Spain, Italy, feel free to take a screenshot. I’m going to be sharing these on my social media. But it’s really useful just to understand how difficult it is in each market in order to get follow links because I know the SEOs in the room are like, I really just want follow links. Of course we do. Don’t we all want follow links? It’s no longer about follow links anymore. It’s all about signals. It’s all about real estate. 

This is the last slide. If anybody in this room is thinking, okay, I need my PR team to get on board with this because I’m an SEO. I need my PR team to buy into this. I’m actually hosting a training session completely free. Next Tuesday morning, I think it’s in Manhattan. Yeah. It’s at 8:30am. Completely free for in-house brands and I’m gonna be training how to turn headlines into dollars because I think the PR teams within your brands, they need to understand SEO. I think they need to understand the role of SEO, role of AI Overviews, the role of the way that Google is changing. So I’m hosting a training session. If you think you either wanna be there or your PR team or anything like that, it’s completely free. Drop me a DM and we’ll get you on it. Thank you very much.

Garrett Sussman: Oh, man. This person who’s coming up next, she is infectious. She has the best personality. Way back in the day, I I almost worked with her. I was a little too expensive at the time. But she is the former CEO of Animals. Devin Bramhall was tripling revenue to nearly $12 million in two years while leading the top content marketing agency for B2B SaaS. She’s a storytelling expert, TEDx speaker, creator of the popular generally Assembly workshop. She has a book coming out. Like, she’s about to do the book tour. So if you wanna meet, like, a super famous person, go make friends with Devin, like, right after this presentation. Coming up, presenting Stop Doing Marketing, please welcome Devin Bramhall.

Devin Bramhall: Oops. Hold on. This thing just oh, it does just turn on. Wow. True to my actual presentation, I’m very analog in my presentation, so I’m gonna have both holding the mic and the remote at the same time. Cool. Hi. So, right. I’ve spent my entire career in content marketing and then I led a content marketing agency and I made a lot of money off of it. And so everything that I say next is going to completely surprise you. Get ready. All right.

So do you know how the simplest questions sometimes become the hardest ones to answer? This actually happened to me one time in a really embarrassing way. So I was out to dinner with my dad and this is after I had left Animals and I was starting to consult and I was new to consulting. And so I’m telling him about some client, I’m doing some fractional CMO shit, I don’t even remember, and I’m trying to explain it to him and he’s like, Hold on a second, hold on. He’s like, Can you just remind me, what is content marketing? And I was like, as a content marketer, I was like, well, let me tell you, we love a good what is question, right? I was getting all ready, prepared to get on stage right there at this random bar in a suburban restaurant outside of Boston, right? And when I started to explain what content marketing was, I realized that it was too difficult, right? Like I had trouble actually explaining it. So I took a step back and I was like, okay, what is marketing? Let me set the context for what content marketing is. So I literally took a napkin out and was drying this out. I’m like, okay, what is marketing?

And I broke it in two buckets. It’s like organic, you attract people to you and then you’ve got paid and it’s like you have people delivered. So you got your little Uber Eats for company growth, right? And I’m like, here are all the little, like, here’s some tactics in between to kind of explain what this all means, right? And my dad looked at it and he paused for a second and he was like, so it’s just marketing then. You do marketing. And at the time I kind of laughed because I was like, Dad, way to be cheeky, very cute. But I’ve actually didn’t stop thinking about it ever since then. Especially when I got to starting writing this book about B2B content marketing strategy, something really started to bother me. And truthfully, it’s the same thing that all of us in the marketing industry kind of like have as our Achilles heel, right? It’s like we spend all this time talking about search and quality content and we go on LinkedIn and we develop brands around doing it better, right? And we make companies. Like, I made millions of dollars for somebody else which, PS, I’ll never do that again. But like all on the back of content marketing, right? And we do this because we want to help other businesses do content marketing or do marketing better.

But the problem with all of that is that while you’re focusing on doing marketing better, you’re missing something really important. Marketing isn’t even always the best solution to growth. And I experienced that firsthand running a content marketing agency, right? And when I started, I was like, this is great. I get on a sales call and the first thing, the same exact two things at every single company, whether it was Google, Amazon or Ramp before it was cool, right, they were just coming out, they’re like, we need marketing. It’s time for marketing. And my first question that I always ask them, I was like, to what end? What are the outcomes you’re looking for? This is mine, okay? But for them, they were always their goal was ultimately to grow their business, right? And so as I start as I left Animals, right, out of this bubble of like I run a content marketing agency, I provide content marketing solutions for growth, right, and I start consulting and I’m talking to agency owners, I’m talking to SaaS companies, right? And They all come to me and they’re like, I want you to help me grow, right? And I realized a lot of times the first one to three things I recommend they do aren’t marketing activities at all.

And this is when I started to realize, when I really looked honestly back at my career and what I had done to grow companies, there are so many other ways that I’ve deployed to help these companies grow. So when I first started freelancing, had or consulting or whatever you call it, I don’t know. And they were like, okay, Cisco, we knew them, they were former client or someone, POC, former client, whatever, she reaches out and she’s like, I need your help doing marketing, right? It’s like they have this amazing team actually of really, really talented marketers from all different paid marketing, SEO, they have this really amazing team and they’re really capable at executing. Their problem was the corporate density of the process was so confusing and required the skill that none of them had, which was actually kind of like corporate politics and creating – how to create a strategy to work around the slowdown that they were getting from the company. So I came in and I just implemented a new process. That was it. And guess what? They were producing more content. They were finally starting to see results against their KPIs.

Second, I worked for this growth marketing agency last year or I consulted for them. You can tell I really love being a consultant because I just keep on the side of my mouth. And so there’s growth marketing agency and the owner’s like, I wanna grow. I wanna get to $5 million a year. Every agency owner wants to get to $5 million a year. It’s like, they all come in, This is really important. I’m like, Okay, whatever. And they have this year one goal to get there. And when I came in, he’s like, So come in and do marketing for me. Grow this company. Get me to $5 million. Great. So I came in and I looked around and I was like, Listen, man. Your biggest opportunity is not marketing. I’m like, Your margins are effed and your structure is totally wrong. And so what I did was come in and I was like, first of all, I fired three people and then I hired a ton more because they were actually short staffed. They just had these three people leading departments who were doing a shit job and shouldn’t have been there anymore. Then I said OKRs, I put together these processes. You know what I did was I started listening to the team who had really good ideas that the CEO was ignoring. And guess what? By the end in less than a quarter, we were comfortably on target to hit our annual revenue goal and I had hit their gross margin target, their end of year gross margin target by the end of one quarter and I started almost halfway through.

That’s growing companies. And I wasn’t gonna talk about this but I have to put it in there because they’re here and we’re all friends, hopefully. When I tell the story about growing animals, I take all this credit, I was like, okay, I joined VP of Marketing, it was like $1.8 million, got up to $12.5 by 2022 when I left. And I take credit for that, but when I’m talking to other CEOs and other marketers, I’m like, listen y’all, let me tell you something. First of all, all I did was create process and set us up to scale in the first two years before I was CEO. Then when I took over, guess what it was? I took over March 2020 after losing, I think it was like $100k in MRR in six weeks. Then we had this content renaissance where all of a sudden everybody wanted our shit. And so, if I were to look back and point to the thing that helped me grow Animals, helped us double revenue year over year, two years in a row, it wasn’t marketing. It was capitalizing on a moment in time. It was all the process that I built before to be able to accommodate that demand, which is a big problem that a lot of agencies experience is scaling.

Right? And here’s the crazy thing. Speaking of fans, Wil, we didn’t do any marketing. We were literally a content marketing agency and we based our content marketing strategy on doing SEO, right, like organic traffic. We didn’t deploy an organic traffic strategy at all. Our posts were not designed to rank in search. In fact, one of them did by accident. It’s called Bluff and it was just because it was a totally random thing that happened and it didn’t do anything for our business. That is literally how I grew the company, as a content marketer who had no business being CEO but actually turns out ended up being the best It’s because I didn’t just follow along with all the activities that everybody’s already doing and that were part of this playbook that we somehow adopted.

This is a recent example. My friend Emily Epstein works at Sigma. She just signed on last year as the Director of Marketing? Yes. Okay. And she went about growing the company using existing tactics that weren’t actually marketing tactics. They were advertising. So, they were getting a ton of organic traffic already. The problem that she faced was nobody was taking action once they got there. And she looked at it and she’s like, well, we’re putting the same freaking CTA on every piece of content across the site, no matter how the person came in or what the topic was. She’s like, this isn’t relevant. Why would they follow along and do the next step? And so she thought about how she could solve it and she’s like, listen, I can’t manually update all of these CTAs across the entire site. That actually, it’s not scalable. She can’t do it. So, thought back to her time being a journalist where they’re serving ads across the site and she’s like, what if I could build my own programmatic ad server, right, using our own customized content? So instead of going to her any tried and true content marketing tactics, no. She went to her head of web and was like, dude, can you do this? And he built her a plugin where she can programmatically – they have four ad spots. I think you can see that, yeah. Throughout each piece of content that they can change in the plugin itself without having to do it manually so they can test things a lot faster, see what works. Right? This isn’t and it did work. Right? Her internal ad network, their what was it? Their time on-site went up by 118%. Their pages per session went up by 13%. And this is in less than a year, mind you. This is in like a couple of months. And their influence pipeline increased as a direct result of what they were doing. Okay? And so when I think about doing marketing and all these other tactics that I or all these other strategies that I just mentioned, the big difference is that me and Emily and other folks who are doing stuff like this, we’re focused on the outcomes. We’re not focused on the activities. Are these content marketing activities? Does this count as content marketing or marketing or whatever it is? We’re looking at the constraints of the company and our team and we’re looking at the unique advantages we have. Maybe we’ve got some people who are really, you know, already influencers in the industry who have big followings, right? We’re leveraging them. And what we’re doing is we’re creating a strategy that will produce outsized impact in the shortest amount of time. 

And so while you’re sitting here listening to me and you’re like, okay, this bitch is supposed to be talking about content marketing and she isn’t talking about marketing at all. And I’m like, yes, that’s the point. Right? It’s like, we shouldn’t be talking about marketing at all. And the thing that content marketers are guilty of, and I have to like, and you guys have seen this for a long time because I’ve worked with, SEOs have always been my people that helped me actually hit my goals, and you guys are always really creative, and you’re always thinking about the latest changes as a form of opportunity, right? Content marketers are like, is this content marketing? Is this quality? What’s this AI doing to the quality of our blog posts? And I’m like, this isn’t that’s not strategy. None of it matters. Who cares? Think about content marketing to begin with. This is a whole strategy that evolved out of us little community managers adapting Twitter to have these company profiles before they even accommodated business accounts. You’ve got SEOs being brilliant and they’re like, oh, it doesn’t have to be keyword stuffing, right? You can do this in a nice, write good content kind of way. And all of a sudden, content marketing is born. And then HubSpot, they get into it and they’re like, they grow their entire empire off of naming content marketing and creating a playbook that guess what? We all follow dutifully. Right? Talk about followers. We’re the wrong kind. And we’ve been going on and on doing this and it’s like, yay, okay, whatever. But at the end of the day, content marketing was just made up. It was a made up solution to solve a problem at a time when B2B SaaS companies were coming up and they had longer sales cycles and they couldn’t follow the kind of consumer type of marketing activities to grow. Except now, guess what? How’s marketing doing these days? Well, guess what? We’re all sitting here following it along and it’s not a strategy anymore because we’re all doing it. If everyone is using the same tools, following the same playbooks, that’s not strategy.

Let me take a breath. I want to go back to this wonderful woman who’s like, breathe, breathe. I’m like, yes. Yes. Okay. So how is marketing doing these days? Okay. So I do want to take a look, right, and I want to start with my favorite thing which is the customer journey because marketers totally fucked it up. So here we are. You’ve got marketing and marketers are like, okay, we have this place that we want our customers to go. Right? There’s the end point. And we’re like, cool. And so to get them to go there, we created this map, right? And it’s a linear map with these squiggly lines going up and down for some reason. I actually, there’s a lot about the customer journey I will never understand. And if you can get from one end to the other, you win the game. Yay for you. And to verify that you’re on that path and where you’re at and where to take you next, we create these milestones and we call them touch points. Okay? Physical touch points. And we wonder why there is so much struggle in how things happen in the workplace. We, marketers, created a map in which there are physical touch points. And we basically created this path with these touch points to help companies know how well you know them, how much you like them and whether we’ve touched you enough times in enough ways that you will move to the next step. It’s freaking gross, right? And this, marketers, we did this, right? This journey with these physical icky touch points was us. And so, as we were making all this right, we’re making these touching campaigns and we’re supposed to motivate people to like stay on the path until the end when what, we’re all winners? Like, this creepy customer journey, we’ve been following this just as we’ve been following these same playbooks. Right? Like HubSpot is literally going to the bank on getting you to follow these playbooks. They are the strategists. You’re the followers. Right? And so, if you look at something like the customer journey, right, and you look at it from like just a blank slate, don’t look at it through the lens of marketing, what I saw, not only was it not linear, it wasn’t a path at all. It looks kind of like this. And yes, this is as good as I can draw. It doesn’t get any better than this. 

And so I was like, alright, this is chaos and it doesn’t work. And so I thought about it some more. I was like, I can’t come up with a strategy on chaos, so let me think of it differently. And so I started thinking about it like a subway map. Right? And basically, my friend Ashley has a similar concept. It’s like the content playground, right? Where it’s like basically there’s all available journeys and types and lengths and entry points and they all exist on this thing, right? And you can travel through them in any which way. And I was like, okay, this is better, but honestly, it still isn’t real because guess what? Subways have conductors. They have control rooms. They have all these things that help them run on time. Life is not like that. Okay? Life is chaotic and crazy. Whatever that like, life is what happens when you’re making other plans, like, that is literally us. We are marketers making plans while life is happening all around us and we’re sitting here wondering like, why isn’t this working? What’s going on? And so when you try to put, like, map a customer journey of human beings with all these complicated scenarios in their specific environments and in their industry, etc., to expect those decisions to follow this linear path or any path at all, It actually isn’t logical. It’s not only bad strategy. It literally isn’t logic. And so when I think about like how’s doing marketing going these days, I’m like, not great. 

And here’s why. We shouldn’t be doing marketing in the first place. We should be building businesses. And when we think about growth from that standpoint, we move ourselves in the shackles of like, we’re doing marketing, we’re doing SEO, right? It’s like, no. When you think about it from the perspective of what does the business need to grow? You open up your mind to more and different ways to grow the business. You have more options, Right? It’s just as simple as a mindset. And so, when I think about, like, here, these are just some of the examples. These are only the ones that I had a story for. So, you know, things like firing customers and pricing strategy, that was immediately how Haley and I added a million a year incrementally at Animals, the first two years. We were like, all right. It turns out that early stage start ups, really tough to satisfy. Right? It’s like we were undercharging. And so we added a million each year, the first two years, just doing that. M & A, listen, that’s not just for big corporations. The first thing I did when I came in to Animals and I was the CEO is there was this other agency that we really liked and respected and the guy was talking about how he wanted to sell and I was like, hey, we talked about acquiring him. Right? And similar with community building. It’s like the first thing I did when I went into animal or to Help Scout, rather, customer service software. All of our customer service people were in this random Slack group for customer support people participating. And so my solution, it’s like instead of trying to build a community from scratch, I went in and I was like, how can we support this community? And you want to know what I didn’t do? I didn’t try to slap logos on things. I didn’t start with merch, although I ended up with a merch strategy that worked really well. What I started off by doing was supporting the programming that they were already doing. They were having these customer support events. Guess what I got our CEO to do? Pay for them to get or pay to get a higher level speaker to come in and talk at these conferences for them. They couldn’t afford it. And that was how we were in – we, at the end, looked like darlings. Right? 

These are just a couple examples. This whole content as revenue things, I was talking to Ross Hudgens about this yesterday and he’s a friend of mine and I was like, I saw his face. You know when your friend looks at you and they’re like, sus, girl, sus. Prove it. This is a wild thing to me is that we’re in this creator era where people are making money off of content. Why the fuck aren’t we doing this at companies too? All those early stage startups that were impossible for us to serve, right? They have these really amazing founders and people working there, right, who have audiences on their own. Why aren’t we building newsletters for them, funding our own department when there is no money for it and starting to get the company growing that way. And, let me tell you something. If you’re a company that ends up wanting to, if you’re trying to get acquired or whatever and you’re trying to sell, this adds value to your company in more than one way cause now you’re not just building audiences and getting more people in the funnel. You’re literally increasing the amount of revenue the money makes. And even though, fine, it’s not gonna be the thing that breaks the bank, right? But, it does add value and that is something that will make you get a better deal at the end of it. I get really sweaty and anyone wonders why.

So look, at the risk of sounding like another marketer who’s just trying to give another name for the same exact thing, right, because I am so obsessed about that, right? You’re like, Devin, you’re really just talking about the same exact thing and you’re calling it something else, you know? And the answer is no, I’m not, and let me show you how. Over the years, I think I was really lucky because I never knew how to do any of the jobs I was doing, yet somebody always let me do them for some reason. I’m very convincing. And so I got to be both CEO of a company and a content marketer and kind of play both, be in both roles. And now I’m doing a consultant and I’m seeing it all at scale, right? And there’s two kinds of principles that came out of it, that I realized I’ve been following the entire time. It’s like, look, a growth strategy needs to be grounded in this idea that you’re doing the fewest amount of actions necessary to reach your outcomes and that you’re pursuing tactics that you can logically, or outcomes that you can logically achieve, right? You’re doing things that could actually happen, right? Because it doesn’t make sense to have if you have this great strategy and you can’t implement it because you know you can’t get buy in or you know you don’t have the resources or whatever, that’s not it doesn’t count, right? So it’s like it has to be able to work. And anyone who reads Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, this is the one business book I ever read and it’s heavily this had a big impact in my career. 

And so there’s an example of this from very early in my career before I actually knew what I was doing, and it’s this event called the Master Slam, and I was working for this personal organization app in Boston. It was like 2013 and they were looking to grow their presence locally. I can’t remember why. And so I was a bait. It was my first content marketing job. No idea how to do it. Came from customer support. And I started going to all these networking events. And I was like, cool. It was freaking exhausting. After a month, was so tired. And that wasn’t my only goal I was going after. I had other goals. I had a day job. And so I was like, how can I make the same or more impact but do less? And that’s where I came up with this idea, where I was like, okay, all these events that I go to, they’re either a panel discussion or a speaker and networking. And I’m like, if I want to bring people to a brand that nobody really knows, and no one knows me either, I’m like a nobody, I have no friends, I had spent the past year and a half in Bali, no friends in the marketing or SaaS space Boston. And so I was like, really need a hook to get people to go here in the first place. And so, I’m like, look, there’s this boring format that everybody does. What if I iterated on that? What if I did something different? Well, I’m also a stand up storyteller at the time and so I’m like, hey, I’m going make this a game. I’m going to make it a competition. It’s going be a story slam style debate. I’m going to give everybody this super divisive topic. I think the first one was Android versus iOS, which one do you develop for first? Because yes, this is 2013. Let’s take it back. And I’ve got this really cool idea, right? So good, fine, cool format. But the format of this thing requires six competitors and six judges. Again, I’m nobody. So, what do I do? I go, I look within my company, I leverage my existing resources, my CMO is like, I know this guy, Mark O’Toole, he heads up this really awesome, he made this great PR agency in Boston, everybody knows him and loves him. He’s like, I can connect you with him. Great. I pitched Mark O’Toole on this and never We’re on the phone too. I don’t even do it face to face. I’m like, listen. And I will never forget, I finished and it was silent for a minute and I’m like, oh my God. And he was like, Devin, I don’t really understand what this is, but it sounds really cool. I’m in. Right? And so now I’ve got these things, I’ve got this event, we’re putting it out there, and the format itself is also built to fill the room because we’ve got these people, twelve participants in the format alone. They’re all bringing people to the event. It works. It sells out from the beginning. Boston Globe tries to copy it. Everybody knows about us. They’re all like, yay, SpringPad, you’re so awesome. Blah blah blah. Right? And so, look.

I’m not trying to say that marketing is dead. I’m not even trying to say that content marketing is dead. What I’m trying to say is that content isn’t in fact king. Okay? Because think about it, kings can be conquered, kings die, empires. You didn’t put me on the billboard. Just saying. I mean, if you think about it, literally empires are conquered from within. And so when I think back to this original phrase, we need content, which used to really excite me when I was running a content marketing agency. Now it makes my hair stand on end. I’m like, do you? And then I quickly look behind me and I’m like, oh, King Content’s back there. He’s kind of haunting me from the back. I’m like, oh, don’t hurt me. And again, I am not saying that content marketing is dead. But I do think it’s worth considering. Do you want to be the hoodwink king of content? Or would you rather be the kid standing on the side of the road recognizing that you’re just a dumbass guy walking down the street with no clothes on? Right? 

Oh, I have to wrap up, you guys. I didn’t practice the time. Okay. So, marketing isn’t dead. What it is, and this is the dirty little secret, marketing is just a really small piece of a company’s growth strategy. All these other departments are working on growing the company and they’re doing all these other things. Your little marketing department, it’s just one tiny part. And so when you think about, and content marketers, right, we sit here thinking, look, you guys will relate to this. We think we’re hot shit. We’re always like, oh, look at us. We’re content marketers. Quality content. We’re so great. And you’re like, shut up. I remember joining Healthscout and the first thing that we did, I was like, I had to add like 125Ks in new users or something. I don’t know. This was back in the traffic days, the doldrums. And I remember the thing that we did, I had nine months to do it. The first thing I did was follow along with this plan that our SEO team had come up with and they were like, look, if you just refresh these posts, you’re be fine. And they were right and I did it. And even still, SpringPad, we had this I remember one time, they used to call this growth hacking, where it’s like, oh, okay, you’ve got a – there was a competitor who was going, another personal organization app was going out of business and my co founder who was this product engineering guy, he’s like, hey, do you He’s like, what if we made a tool to help export their data from there and bring it into Springpad? We got a ton of new users that week, and the question that us content marketers will be asking is like, well, is that product or is that marketing? And I’m like, what if it’s just a good idea for growing a company? And shouldn’t that be the things that we’re focusing on?

And so these are the things that I developed. This is like the what do I actually do. This is how I prove to you that I’m not just like some theorist up here being like, this a new thing. And you’re like, it’s still a pig, bitch. It’s still a pig. No. These things actually work, right? And so, you need to stop focusing on the best practices and you just stop looking around at what everyone else is doing. Think, reason from your own facts. Think about what you have available, what you think is best and make that point. You don’t need a data study. The founder of Animals, this used to drive me nuts until I realized it was brilliant. I’d be like, well, look, this other company is doing this and blah blah blah and try to prove that what I was doing was right. He’s like, Devin, I don’t give a fuck what anyone else is doing. What do you think is the smartest action and prove to me? Do the math yourself for me from your own brain. Right? It doesn’t matter what it’s called, doesn’t matter where it comes from. Okay? Same thing, internal blockers. It is crazy to me how many times we have these talks about getting buy in as a separate thing from strategy. And, I’m like, if you’re a marketer and you can’t get buy in, that’s part of your strategic plan. It has to be. Right? Otherwise, you’re not gonna be able to do it in the first place. Unique advantages, there’s tons of those, you guys get that. It’s like you’ve to focus on the outcomes first and this whole thing, you have to really think about including the measurable and immeasurable things too because that’s where you’re going to start focusing on what actually matters, not just what you can track, right? And if you’re already counting the fact that buy in’s going be really fucking hard and everyone’s going to question you, it’s like you’ve got that taken care of. You actually can end up doing that, right? You have to be experimenting all the time, is not something I have to educate SEOs on because you already get it. And the most important thing in all of this is that strategy is not about fairness. It is about results.

And in fact, a good strategist isn’t worried about fairness at all. They’re trying to create unfair advantage for their company instead. And when you think about it from that objective mindset, right, now you can use it to your advantage. So now, if my dabber asked me again, what is content marketing? I’d be like, listen, guys, it’s a strategic growth plan. You’re capitalizing on what you have and you’re trying to make maximum impact with a minimal amount of effort. And I’m going to pull a Wil because he did this already and I’ve already gone over time. I’m so sorry. I had everything I needed to succeed. 

So I’ll leave you with this: Marketers are sitting here focusing on change as if it’s challenging the way things currently are, as if the way things currently are were made by God when he invented the world or whatever, if you believe that narrative, whatever it is, the creator thing, it’s like, oh my God, content marketing is these things. But what I’m saying is it’s not. And I remember this time, was like a couple years ago when this kind of moment came to me. I was at this store, local bookstore, and they were like, I had like four fiction books in my hand or whatever and I’m, you know, okay, I only read fiction, by the way, except for Richard Rumelt apparently. And I passed by this book and it really caught my eye. It was called The Book of Eels. But it wasn’t the title that caught my eye. It was the statement on the jacket and it’s like, the most mysterious creatures in the whole world. And I was like, I definitely want to know about that. So, I picked it up and I’m reading about eels and it turns out they live this really migratory lifestyle. They start out with these little squiggly things in the ocean and the gulf stream takes them along, they grow a millimeter at a time, they turn a glass eel and they go back to the stream and they hang out there for fifteen years, turn color to yellow and they go back to the sea, change color a few more times, they lay eggs and then they die. Right? There’s no peak eel in there. They’re just going along their life constantly changing and they’re an example of how change is a way that they thrive. Right? They are constantly adapting to this changing reality and using that change to their advantage. 

So, reacting to it like us content marketers do because we’re so obsessed, we’re so obsessed with content marketing and what it’s called and how you do it, right? We’re going start leveraging it to our own advantage using all the things I just said. I’m so over you guys. I can’t even end this. Thank you so much.