We sat down with Eli Schwartz, Arpana Tiwari, and Todd Friesen to learn about the journey of an SEO through the past decade of search, the essential skills SEOs need to develop at the moment, and what the future of Search could look like.
Danny Allen: [00:00:00] I'm danny. I'm the VP of marketing at 97th floor. We're an enterprise digital marketing agency. We have Eli Schwartz with us, growth advisor and SEO strategic consultant, also author of Product Led SEO, the book. Uh, we have Arpana Tiwari, who is the director of organic growth at Eventbrite. Uh, used to be at Adobe, Google, Facebook, Walmart, Apple, everywhere. I'm sure I missed a couple others. And then we have Todd Friesen as well. Uh, at, uh, well, you're a free agent right now. Formerly at Vimeo and then previously at Salesforce for, for just about 10 years. Correct. Incredible to have all three of you. Thanks for jumping on. I actually gathered all of you together because, uh, we work with a lot of Like top notch SEOs, top notch digital marketing leaders, and a lot of them are kind of coming to us with these questions about the role of organic right now with so much influx.
They're kind of re evaluating where this fits, does it fit? Obviously it still fits, but to what degree? What they should be thinking [00:01:00] about? All that kind of stuff. I just attended MozCon, and there's just a lot of those questions floating around, like, you know, what should we be expecting of ourselves right now?
And, uh, with all the change coming, right? So, with each of you having Uh, over a decade of experience, plus, uh, working at the highest levels of SEO, I think you have a really important perspective that you can share, and I want to kind of pull that out of you. So, uh, just to kind of kick this off, though, maybe kind of for fun, I was thinking about, let's all think back a little about 10 years ago, 10 to 15 years ago, where, where you were, what you were facing, and we're going to bring it up to, to what we're dealing with right now.
But, for fun, I did a couple, like, searches on Google from back in like 2008, 2012. Trying to understand what people were searching for. This was kind of a funny one. Uh, I found a Search Engine Land article that said this. It was citing a study. It said, 64 percent of companies said finding an SEO specialist was more difficult than finding other skilled employees.
The whole point of this article was that there's like a shortage of SEO people. We need more SEO people. This thing is This thing is growing like crazy. Um, in the same study it says, companies with a significant SEM [00:02:00] spend, and then they put in parenthesis, over 25k a month. Which is kind of, which is kind of funny, right?
That 25k a month was a significant SEM spend. But it says, uh, those companies ranked, um, hiring skilled SEO staff on par with other technical or implementation based SEO challenges. Basically just finding people was, was the, the challenge. Another kind of funny nugget was a article from Moz in 2012. And it listed some of the top skills that SEOs needed.
It said, uh, number one, be the best person to work with at the office. Uh, number two, always talk about SEO from the perspective of people, not robots. Number three, don't rely on data to tell your story for you. Number four, help your colleagues meet their goals before asking them to support yours. Number five, go agile from a project management perspective.
I thought some of this stuff was funny, just thinking back, like, and I was really young in my career at that point, but I still remember this feeling of like, no one will give us The, the time of day. How do I get anyone to believe in SEO? And, and even though now SEO and organic as a channel is, is huge everywhere, I still [00:03:00] feel like some of these things still apply.
Some of these challenges are still felt. Everyone kind of still says the same thing. I can't get buy in. I can't. Anyway, I don't want to spend the majority of our time together talking about the past, but I do want to like ask you, feel free to speak when, you know, but what were, what were your, what are your memories from those days?
I don't know if you want to kick it off, Eli.
Eli Schwartz: So we go back like 10, 11, 12 years. There was those. I think that's an SEO change. That's when like smart SEO died because Google took away all the tricks like between Panda and penguin, like Panda was the algo update that got rid of all the thin content and it's, it's baked into the algo today.
So like the whole idea, like we're, it's Panda applies today when we talk about gen AI. So if you think about. There was a plugin, Todd and Arp and I remember this, it was called caffeinated content on WordPress. That was gen AI. What it did was you took RSS feeds and it from different sites and then it used like, I don't know, some sort of synonym matching, but it wasn't that smart because it operated in your own server and your own WordPress instance, [00:04:00] do synonym matching and just replaced words and merged all together and created other crap, like non readable crap, but it had keywords in it.
You even put your keyword in and it sprinkled your keyword in that's. Like 20, that's 2008 version of gen AI and we've gone today. So that whole concept stopped existing after Panda. When like Google looked at the value and quality and quantity of content and penalize sites. Now it doesn't penalize sites for Panda, just penalizes content.
So, you know, the whole gen AI question is like, Oh, can you get away with it? Well, if you figure out how to write a lot of good content at scale that readers like, then yes, but if you create crap, no. And then penguin. I guess in 2012 that like neutralized all the bad shady linking. So there's still a lot of shady linking, but it is, you have to put way more effort and you have to like plant the link and real content and you can't just use plugins and all that.
So that's what I think about like going back to that, like SEO used to be fun and creative and you come up with hacks and like. We had all these secrets and we were talking earlier about like going to conferences. That's when you shared all the secrets. Like someone, I probably learned about caffeinated content at a conference [00:05:00] and then like I couldn't wait to like install it.
I probably did in my hotel room and now you go to conference and like there aren't those secrets. Like there's nothing you'll learn at a conference that you wouldn't read on search engine land or search engine roundtable. So SEO was a lot more fun back then. Uh, I think it's better for users that it's, it's less fun.
More, not as much fun for us,
Danny Allen: not as fun for you on a day to day basis.
Todd Friesen: All right. Yeah, I fully agree with that. It became, you know, much more like, like we were talking earlier, like project management and coming up with the list of the things that need to be done. And then waiting your turn in line with all of the other engineering projects that needed to go to the front end team or to the backend team, if it was a deep enough technical problem.
And you just, and you, and you go, okay, well, let's move to agile and be part of engineering and get in sync with that, uh, and, and get into, and then measurement became a much bigger thing. Like, we actually became much more concerned with the whole funnel than we get with [00:06:00] being number one for the vanity set of key terms that the, that the CEO had.
I mean, when I, 10, you go back to 2012, for example, Eli, as you mentioned, that was, that was when I moved from agency to in house and started at Salesforce. And we spent an inordinate amount of time chasing the number one ranking for CRM, which, I mean, let's be honest, great keyword, tons of traffic, very much vanity.
Like it was, it was so far up the funnel that it produced very little in the way of going down the funnel. But that became a big thing, you know, of course, when, when Google took away the keyword level, uh, referral data. And you're like, so all of a sudden you're like, well. And even to this day, like how, how long ago was that?
Was that 2000, was that eight, eight, nine years? That was almost 10 years ago. Now they took away that referral data. And to this day we still deal with people going, well, Google gives you that. And like, no, they haven't for 10 years. And I think that's the bigger thing that we're still dealing with over the last 10 years is [00:07:00] outside of the SEO world.
It's still this weird black box and it's still this pile of misinformation. It seems to be about 10 years old that, you know, CEOs and CMOs and a lot of the leadership sort of have that, that it never evolved, I think, is where sort of where I'm sitting at this point.
Arpana Tiwari: Yeah, I think from my standpoint, similar to what Eli and Todd have shared, the simplicity is lost.
Uh, if I was to think about 10 or 15 years back, you walk in, you look at a site and immediately things pop out at you in terms of, you know, these are very clear ways you can serve the customer better, you can serve the business, you can bring the two together. And fast forward to today, it's become more of a business of managing SEO, especially at enterprises.
There's so much that comes along with it that is, I think, administrative from the standpoint of, uh, what kind of tools do you want to use? There's, uh, there were probably five really solid, good tools we used to be able to use in the past. And now, you know, every week somebody's [00:08:00] pitching a new tool. And so, like, how do you Can I keep that at bay?
And then, um, the team, um, then all of the work, no site is, I would say, untouched. Uh, and 10, 15 years back, you would come into a site where nobody had touched SEO on it. And now it's probably, you know, you're cycling through, maybe there's a lot of experts prior who've done it, who've tried it. Um, and you're going into a system where you have to pitch a lot more versus in the past, you'd try something, it would work.
Now there's. A lot of tech debt associated with things. Um, so I think all that additional complexity, um, has made it much more rigorous process, um, which takes out some of the creativity in my
Eli Schwartz: view. I think, I think it's good. I mean, I, I think the internet used to be like the wild west where, you know, Let's say, let's say, let's say something standard, like e commerce, you searched an e commerce query in 2005 on one thing, you'd see Amazon and another, you'd see eBay and another, you'd see Walmart, right?
And now [00:09:00] it's very, it's standardized. Like these are the e commerce, these are the commerce players. For apparel, for example, it's it's Macy's. It's Nordstrom. It's, you know, it's those brands. So those brands dominate search. And I know like people will complain. Oh, Google favors brands. And that's because users favor brands.
You don't go into the mall and go to the brand new store that you never heard of and spend all your money. You go to the brands and you trust the brands. We buy clothes that come from brands. So Google is a representation of that. And I think we're living in a world where the algo has figured out how to catch up to that and surface brands because that's what keeps people coming back to Google.
And I think that's where it. Bing maybe suffers a little bit because you don't see being, you see more random sites and that's maybe off putting users like, well, I was just searched like iPhone case and you're, you're showing me something I never heard before. I don't know if I could trust your results and go to Google and like this looks standard.
No matter what query I search, it's standard. These are the brands that trust, you know, some sometimes number one, sometimes number three, but like it looks, it looks the way I expect it to. So I think it's, it's a good industry
Todd Friesen: change. Well, [00:10:00] and that's, I mean, that's a piece that we used to talk about all the time is.
Everybody wants it to be this completely, um, like 100 percent unbiased ranking algorithm that you can tick the boxes and get to be number one or number two on the front page. And it completely leaves out that Google's user experience is a driving force for Google in its entirety. And just to echo exactly what you said, if people show up and they don't like the search results They're going to, you know, either not click an ad or like whatever they're going to not do.
They want to like those search results and that's, we can't as SEOs really approximate that level of user satisfaction with a site that doesn't meet that criteria. Like that, that's outside of what we can do as SEOs or as, as marketers to a large degree.
Arpana Tiwari: And I think what's exciting about now is that SEO seems to be going back full circle into marketing.
I think we started out [00:11:00] with, it's a channel to market where there's value, bring users and businesses together. And then it got into a lot of automation and scaling and you're trying to be everything to everybody. Uh, and you're trying to just maximize the traffic. And I think now it's coming back to where is the value.
And I think SEOs should really think beyond search and they should be thinking of any surface. Where people are looking, so it really goes back into organic. It could be organic search, because people are searching on almost every surface. So you really want to go back into organic. Where are your users, uh, and what are they looking for, versus one search engine.
Yes, it gets most of the traffic, but sometimes you lose the insights if you're just looking at that one. If you split it into more of the niche engines, you're going to start to see insights that can actually help you on the big one too.
Eli Schwartz: Yeah, well that,
Todd Friesen: I mean that was. And that and then things like when you talk about service like the app stores and things like that fall into that bucket.
I was uh, scrolling [00:12:00] job listings on LinkedIn the other day and just, you know, seeing what's out there. And, and I came across one that was a, it was SEO related and digital, I had all this stuff in it. And one of the criteria that it called out, which I hadn't seen in a job description in a long, long time was.
Um, expert knowledge in app stores and app deep linking and like it was very very like somebody had very specifically written out this part and it was a mobile related company, but it was very specific around apps and links to apps and deep linking from apps out to sites and vice versa and stuff like that, which is.
I mean, that's a very specialized part of SEO that very few SEOs have really gotten into.
Eli Schwartz: And I think there's one thing, and I always tell this to potential clients that people don't realize, which is a very, very high percentage of websites in the entire world don't do SEO because they don't know it exists.
I'd put that as high as 90%. Like whatever the IRS of some country, like there's 180 countries in the world. Most of those countries, the governments don't know how to do SEO. So Google [00:13:00] has to compensate for the fact. That 90 percent of the world is not doing SEO. So if you search for the IRS of Congo, how do you find that?
You're looking for the parliament of some small country. How do you find the parliament and make sure you're not finding like some fake website that represents parliament, or if again, like, like, um, if you're in. I don't know, Papua New Guinea and you're searching some health query. How do you find the right health site or like a correct health site in whatever language you need?
So Google has to compensate for all that. And that's what Google is doing. So they're not going to give that like extra advantage to some site that knows SEO and knows how to get links and knows how to optimize content. Google covers that. And I like, I like Arpana's point around other search engines. I always tell any potential client to really think of the user in search and that they're arriving from a search engine at some point in time.
Like I always, I predicted two years ago, I was like, Oh, we'll see another search engine. I didn't think it would be chat GPT, right? Chat GPT is kind of becoming that other search engine and it's rivaling Google, which is why Google is freaking out. But like. One day decide that they no longer want to send spotlight over to Google and they'll do [00:14:00] search.
Like, okay. Search is not that hard, like great search. Like Google is pretty hard, but like, okay. Enough search, like duck, duck, go does okay. Enough search. And like a lot of search engines. So Apple could do it. Facebook could do it. Amazon could do it. You know. There are other products that could just decide that they were Firefox could do it again.
They will not have a huge market share, but they could just do their own search and not send it to Google. So is, uh, is, you know, right now as SEO, we only think of Google with 95 percent plus market share, but there could be a world where like Google has 70 percent market share and you need to figure out that other 30%.
And you do that not by understanding the algo, but by understanding the
Todd Friesen: user. Well, and that's a, I mean, that starts to throw you back to the, you know, the really old days of. You know, Web Crawler, Excite, HotBot, InfoSeek, Lycos, InfoSearch, like just, and that was, I mean, that was a fun world. I would like to go back to that, to a certain extent, just to get some diversity in traffic, to have some opportunity where, if you're not on the first page of Google, it's so business impacting.
And I used to say all the time, like, when [00:15:00] Google would do the updates, back in the days of monthly updates, and you'd get these stories at conferences and stuff like that, or something like that, Google wiped out my entire business and I had to lay four people off because they, they updated and they kicked my site out and I wasn't doing anything black hat and so on and so forth.
And we used to always say, well, you're an absolute, it's foolish to base your entire business and to hire people based on where you rank on Google. But fast forward, you know, 15 years and we're, we're there. Like there is absolutely businesses that exist entirely based on search rankings. I might be overstating that a little bit.
I mean, The Amazons of the world and stuff, they get, you know, a boatload from that, but they're also destination sites. So you have to throw those out of that mix.
Danny Allen: Yeah. Well, and Google's coming for their lunch as well. Um, so yeah, I mean it's as an agency ourselves, right? We, we started an SEO, we started as an SEO agency 18 years ago and that's like, that's all we would think about.
But, but in the last 10 years or so, we had to [00:16:00] realize ourselves that. That's a rough train to hook yourself to, uh, if, if things change, right? And so that's where most of our clients now, we have, we, we try wherever possible to include advertising, to include other forms of content, to include all of it, because we didn't want to be, I think a lot of people are actually just Google specialists.
They're not even SEO specialists, right? They've become so attached to Google, and they're just like, I'm an expert in Google. Uh, and then what you're suggesting, it seems like, all of you, is you SEO specialist anymore. You've got to be. Um, and then you've got to be a marketer really, you've got to be thinking about every other aspect of, of, of how to reach somebody and no searches place in that, but it's not as big as it used to be, um, or at least that that's shifting, right?
So with, with, I know Eli, you've been posting a lot about SGE, about everything that's changing on the SERP and there's some things that would be very concerning to people who are like attached to Google and only Google. Uh, but I mean, I guess what, how are those conversations impacting your. How are those changes impacting your conversations with leadership right now?[00:17:00]
What are, what are you currently hearing? Are people freaking out? Are they kind of pretending it doesn't exist? How's that
Eli Schwartz: going? They're not aware. I mean, we live in, in SEO, we live in a bubble. And we think everyone knows everything. And, and like the word S G E, only we know it. You know, regular people don't watch Google I O.
Regular people don't read search blogs. Regular people don't look at SEO on Twitter. So they have no idea. And it's, it's whoever's looking at SEO. For a company or at an agency, they're the ones that are responsible to be telling leadership there is this nuclear bomb hiding in the corner and it could destroy everything.
And I think the big, a big problem right now in the SEO industry and to call out some people in the SEO industry is that they're trying to pretend it's nothing. And mostly because they're scared of their own jobs and it's, it's scary, but I don't think saying it's nothing is helpful to anybody because when it blows up, like.
Google is huge, right? Like Google could do things and mess everything up and then fix it six months later, not really impact their revenue, but it will mess everything up for SEO, mess everything up for the users there. And you know, [00:18:00] what are you going to do? So they may, I actually think Google is about to launch it very, very soon from what I hear.
The Google may not launch it till the beginning of the year. Whenever they launch it, it will cause a lot of chaos. So pretending it doesn't exist, or I heard someone say, Oh, it's a beta thing. Google's never going to launch it. I mean, you don't know that Google could, it could be a beta thing and they'll still launch it and still ruin everything.
So I think business leaders don't really know what's out there and it's our job to tell them it's out there. The second thing is just to, uh, you know, to anyone's horn that is looking for a job or that isn't consulting, this is going to be the greatest thing ever for the SEO industry because it's going to create so much turmoil.
And for everyone that has not been warned, they're one day going to just watch everything flip and they're going to be desperate. So turmoil is good for us. Uh, turmoil will make, you know, the phones ring off the hook. Let's say the range is, let's say even a company loses 5 percent of their traffic or 10 percent of the traffic.
It's a big deal. I mean, you go to wall street and you say, we lost 5 percent of revenue, 10 percent of revenue. Your stock goes down 30%. I think it's going to be for informational companies. It could be as [00:19:00] close to 50 percent of traffic. So when they lose that, they'll be really desperate to keep the 50 that's left.
I mean, I was at a company that lost 60 percent of the traffic the morning that Panda launched. And there were a lot of tears, right? So, like, this is going to be global, actually, maybe not global, right? I think Google is going to be restricted to launching SGE only in the U. S. first, because the E. U. is very litigious.
Uh, so they'll launch it in, like, the U. S. and Canada and, like, maybe Latin America. But they're not going to do E. U. Whatever it is, it's going to be hugely impactful. And, uh, I, my prediction will be that you will hear references to it in earnings updates from public companies within, you know,
Todd Friesen: three months of when they launch it.
Oh, 100%. Bing's already playing with something similar. Like, I, I, I've got, I've used the Edge browser just out of spite, you know. And, uh, and I, so I have built in Bing search, which for the most part, you know, it works fine. It gets me through anything I want to, I want to find, whether it's shopping or whatever.
Every now and again I'll actually go to Google to, [00:20:00] to get a more refined search. But over the last just couple weeks, I've noticed like I type in my search and I get this full Bing GPT and it's it's awful. It's completely unusable. The UX is terrible and and I can't figure out how to get out of it Which is sort of the biggest thing, but you're trapped You're you're just you're in it and you got a it sits there for a minute and you start scrolling and then eventually scrolls up But it's a full screen takeover And there's nothing there.
There's, there's no results to click on, there's just refinements to come. And, I mean, I find it super annoying, but there's gonna be a whole swath of the world that just rolls with it. And, and then they get those refinements and you wind up with one result at the end. It's gonna be really, really, really interesting to see what happens there.
Arpana Tiwari: I think compared to any other time, this is the time where the group mindset is going to really surface. Because when things change, it's going to go back to me. What do we do now? Like, where do we start? Um, and from the initial labs data that I'm seeing, [00:21:00] um, again, there may not be tools right out the gate where you can look at this at scale, so it is going to go back to the basics of, as a user, for my site, for, you know, the queries that my users are typing in, what am I seeing in, in real time?
So somebody who's willing to, you know, um, Get into the weeds, go and be in the trenches and start to look at the journeys for the users and like, start from scratch. Um, and you had initially brought up, how does that work with connections within the company? I think that credibility, if you've built that initially, which is not just based on tactics or tools, but you're actually thinking about the user and you've built those connections where you can go back now and say, This is what we need to do, and I think for all the teams out there, monitoring right now is going to be so key, because even if it's not live for everybody, there are a lot of signals that you can start seeing, uh, and for somebody who's been in search or has that training to know what to look for, you're going to start to pick up on things, which if you add to your roadmap, [00:22:00] um, can get you, like, will help you, set you up better than, um, others will come out of the gate and then be figuring
Danny Allen: out what to do now.
Yeah, it seems like this is the time to, we're going to see what everyone's really made of. And, and also, it's not to say that it's too late, but everything that you've done, all the goodwill that you've built, is going to be coming, coming to help you or hurt you, uh, depending on where you left off. So, Arpanay, you brought up a couple things that we can do, some, some, a lot more on the monitoring side, a lot more on, on gaining that credibility, and, and Eli, you also talked about bringing it up to leadership, being the ones to introduce it before the bomb drops, right?
Uh, kind of to close this up, what would you say are going to be the skills that SEOs need to be focusing on in the next, I mean, six months, but in the next couple years as well? What should they be, maybe they're listening and they're saying they're kind of freaking out because everyone's freaking out about a thing that could impact our job, right?
And it could take away from maybe our comfort or whatever we're settled into. Uh, so where should they be putting their time? [00:23:00] as far as their skill set.
Arpana Tiwari: I can go. I think, um, know your business, know your user, and then be confident in your search abilities because those are the three that are going to surface.
And don't worry about, you know, what has been taken away, but feel the confidence of where is it going? And if you know your user, and you're looking at the results, you can back into what, um, could be causing that. And I think the last thing is diversification. Uh, think growth and think overall marketing versus just search marketing.
And it's totally okay to be a team player and say for the short term, we might see a dent. And during that time, I want to give you a heads up to go invest in other channels till we can get back up. So it's okay to be, you know, everybody talks about like being vulnerable and being a team player, but this is the time also to do that.
Um, sharing that you don't know what exactly it is going to be because nobody knows [00:24:00] how it is going to impact different businesses. So, prepping the teams, I think, will also increase the credibility.
Todd Friesen: Yeah, I'd agree with that. I mean, it depends a little bit too on where you want to go as an SEO and what you want to do with your career.
Like, if you want to, like, I know some people that want to just, like, they're SEOs and they want to stay, they're happy to be pigeonholed as the SEO guy. Which Personally, I hate being pigeonholed as the SEO guy because they're like, I can do all these other things. They're like, yeah, but you're just, you're the SEO guy.
And they sort of leave you out of those, those higher level conversations. But I mean, if you, if you want to grow your career and you want to move up the ladder and add different titles to your name, director, senior director, VP, and those sorts of things, you have to do the other things. You have to know how to hire and run an engineering team, typically front end when, when it comes to SEO.
You have to understand UX. You have to know user research. You have to know analytics. If you're going to build out a proper SEO team itself, it needs to have engineering resources. It needs to have analytics resources. It needs to [00:25:00] have an operations person. It needs to have a program manager. Like, you need to be almost a mini company within a larger marketing organization to get done what you need to do across that.
So if you want to just stay in SEO, that's great. You're going to need to be You're going to need to know SGE. You're going to need to know all these things. You're going to need to be the clear expert. If you want to climb the ladder in the marketing world, you need to add these other disciplines to what you're doing.
And running an engineering team is a really, really interesting challenge that a lot of people aren't ready to take on. But that will put a massive, that one thing alone is a massive feather in your cap if you want to
Eli Schwartz: grow. And I completely agree with both Arvind and Todd. Those are definitely things you need.
And like Todd said, like, if you want to grow, you've got to learn other things. But I think you can't. Rest on your laurels and SEO anymore because I think the rules are about to change. So I, I think that links don't matter nearly as much as everyone thinks they do. And they're going to matter even less with SG because you don't see them really taken into account.
I think that keywords don't matter. Like keywords hardly matter now, but [00:26:00] they're going to matter so much less rankings of course go away. So the typical SEO skills now completely. Flip and they're gone. So the big thing I think anyone's needs to focus on, of course, like what Todd and Arpana said, really even beyond that to think big picture, like how do you move the ball forward in growing organic traffic?
What do you need to create? So really like some sort of product mindset. And the last thing that I think not enough SEO people really focus on and should learn and like take classes on it or take courses, you know, or get coached is communication. So there's always this natural thing, especially in agencies to do like CYA, like, and avoid the bad news and sell the good news.
Like who you CYA for your CYA for Google. Like you don't work for Google. So like dump on them, like say like Google is about to destroy us blame Google. Cause it's not you and over communicate. And, you know, if the hurricane doesn't happen, great, like at least you warned that it could happen. So I, I'd say like SEO needs to do a way better job of communicating what's happening, what could happen, what will happen, all of those things and learn those, those things.
Like I, [00:27:00] an example I always use on communication, which is like probably one of the best things ever happened in my career is I was being called into a meeting with the CEO. We were about to lose budget for SEO and because they wanted to prove it didn't work. And this CEO was like a huge sports fanatic.
And I explained what SEO was to the CEO. Why? Using a GIF on a PowerPoint of a basketball player doing an assist, like grab, like catching the ball, bouncing it, and then passing it over to someone who dunked. And it just does this one second GIF over and over and over again playing while I explained that SEO was an assist.
And when I walked out of that meeting, I had an extra head count. I was about to lose my team and I got more because. I communicated what I was doing. Like I was being judged like SEO doesn't make us any money. You're failing. There's no revenue. And I explained that I was not failing. I was doing better.
They just were looking in the wrong place. So SEO needs to communicate and over communicate and blame Google, blame whoever you want, but communicate and just say what's happening and like how you'll fix it.
Danny Allen: Wow. Incredible advice, right? We gotta look, we [00:28:00] gotta look at our leaders or those who we're answering to as our peers and say, here's my real advice, like, this is where I'm coming from.
I love what you said, Arpana, about being vulnerable and saying, here's what I don't know, here's what I do, and being really confident in what SEO does do, what organic does do, like you said, Eli. All of you, I feel like I just had an incredible, Out of body experience, no. Having all three of you though in the same room, hearing from your experiences is incredible.
Um, and, uh, I, you know, you can find all three of these incredible people on social media. Reach out to them, ask them questions. Uh, Todd is a catch. Uh, wherever he ends up, it's going to be an incredible, uh, you know, ad to their team. And, um, thank you all for jumping on today. It's been really great. Thank you for having
Eli Schwartz: us.
Arpana Tiwari: I appreciate it.
Eli Schwartz: Thanks.
4 Lessons from The Internet's Giants
SEO’s never been a very simple game—there’s a reason most small-to-medium sized companies outsource the bulk of it. But what about the largest sites in the world? The ones with millions of pages and hundreds of developers. Simply put, these sites only get more complex with their size.
We’ve interviewed the SEO experts managing these behemoths to uncover the strategies specific to them. This is not your tips-n-tricks, “how to growth-hack your site” kind of article—let’s dive in.
Questions we’re answering:
"There are more people and constant change at a large organization, so we’re always educating and building our credibility. Just as you find things running well with one team, they’ll reorganize. Figuring out how to best work with other teams will always be part of the business."
- John Crockett, Director of SEO at Ancestry
Credibility with other departments will be the foundation for all future efforts—when working on large-scale websites, an SEO leader will often act more as a salesperson pitching SEO strategies internally, than a roll-up-your-sleeves practitioner. It’s no surprise that a large organization has frequent turnover, but don’t let that constant change deter you from building and rebuilding relationships with other teams.
As you have these conversations, consider the following:
Pro Tip: Always be on the lookout for contacts in other departments that champion your work. These are your evangelizers and will help immensely when you’re trying to get your projects prioritized.
Questions we’re answering:
A deep understanding of top leadership’s goals is critical. For many leaders, SEO by nature is not on their agenda, so it is your responsibility to connect how SEO supports the goals they already do have. Crockett says, “At the end of the day, we need to translate those metrics into what’s of greatest concern to those teams.”
Pro Tip: Take the goals of the executive team and articulate how you’ve aligned your SEO KPIs with those in language that’s meaningful to THEM. Educate them so SEO can become a common priority.
Kaleb Gilliland is the Director of Development at Pro Athlete. Pro Athlete manages 4 sporting goods websites that together have over 6.5 million pages to manage. Gilliland shares, “Sometimes SEO isn’t deemed valuable from a business standpoint because you can’t see tangible results immediately.” John Crockett adds that “SEO is measured bets on what’s going to work and what’s not going to work. We’re only one part of that. We have to worry about how Google’s going to interpret new initiatives. We also have to worry about what our industry competitors are doing. We have to worry about what our search competitors are doing. So sometimes it makes it harder to make the case that SEO should be prioritized from a resource standpoint.”
How can you prove the payoff? Crockett shares “Sometimes, you have to iterate your way into things. Don’t jump right into the huge thing that’s going to cost millions of dollars and take half our development resources for the year. You know that’s not going to be feasible. So it's finding ways to step into this until it proves itself, then you can open the floodgates because you’ve proven the value in smaller ways.”
Start with low-risk opportunities and work your way into bigger projects. Document successes and failures along the way. Use whatever analytics you’ve got because, with a website of massive scale, just a 5% increase in organic traffic can easily translate to massive revenue increases. These numbers will show that the ROI for SEO is worth the patience it takes to get to those results.
Pro Tip: Crockett shares, “Anybody can understand the value of getting free traffic, (free meaning there’s not a per-impression expense) and that this traffic has longevity. Show how traffic is leading to revenue.”
A tool like Ahrefs allows you to pull the traffic value for your website. That essentially takes what you are organically ranking for and compares it to how much you would have to spend via ads to show up in those same SERPs. Airbnb saved an estimated $4.8 million this last month. People.com saved an estimated $12.2 million this last month. These numbers are a powerful illustration of how SEO can translate into saving money and making money.
Questions we’re answering:
“SEO should create a partnership with development…It’s not just a business handoff of requirements. It’s not two separate teams. It’s one team doing different things to accomplish the same goal.”
-John Crockett, Director of SEO at Ancestry
If your SEO-development relationship feels strained, you’re not alone. Frequently SEOs will find themselves in these scenarios:
From the perspective of the development team, they may have had new SEO leaders every few years, each with a laundry list of “urgent” changes they need to be fixed. Alternatively, they could have the same SEO leaders consistently for years but due to algorithm/industry changes, the strategy changes frequently. It can be exhausting for them.
Building a partnership with development will require education. Developers may not know why duplicate content is a problem or how impactful mobile speed can be on a site’s ability to rank. Trent Howard, Head of SEO at 97th Floor, suggests, “Consider making a list of all the different areas development touches SEO, then educate your dev team on why they are important. This will help alleviate the pain point of development feeling like SEO comes to them with a new priority every week. This doesn’t replace the importance of ongoing education, but it does demonstrate how vast SEO’s responsibilities are.”
But SEOs need to get educated, too. Crockett advises, “Understand a developer’s world enough to talk to them intelligently.” Research possibilities and find examples to share. Crockett continues, “I don’t get too much into the solution with them, but I do know enough coding and engineering to be prepared in those meetings with an idea of how we’d accomplish it. Doing the research has taken projects from being labeled as impossible to being done.” Be respectful of the developer’s expertise. Don’t over solve it, but come speaking their language to collaborate about new ways to approach the problem.
Pro Athlete Inc has found major success in getting SEO projects prioritized because of its unique team structure. Kristina Kuska, Head of Organic Search at Pro Athlete, shares, “One of our major successes at Pro Athlete is having development on the marketing team. Having developers who understand SEO changes, agree with them, and implement quickly has been invaluable.” Pro Athlete’s structure is heavily influenced by one of their founders who was a big advocate for SEO. Now SEO is baked into everything they do. Gilliard shares, “Development prioritizes projects that are going to keep SEO at the forefront of what we do. If people can’t find us, we’re going to have a hard time no matter what we’re selling or doing.”
Pro Tip: Find creative ways to link the development team closely with the SEO team. Maybe you can’t restructure your org, but try for a monthly collaboration meeting with all the decision-makers present. Set goals that encourage partnership and that lead to mutual benefits.
Whether development is on your team or not, a true partnership can be made if you can learn to speak their language and invest time educating on the benefits of prioritizing SEO.
Questions we’re answering:
39% of people will stop engaging with a website if images won’t load or take too long to load (Hubspot), so don’t underestimate the power of chipping away at the mountain of SEO fixes you may find yourself with. Develop a system to be consistent with your SEO optimizations. John Crockett shares that he stays on top of SEO by considering three things:
Make sure SEO is considered for all future content creation. If SEO can be considered during creation, less of your time is eaten up going back and making fixes. Gilliland shares a counter point, “Don’t ignore the technical aspects of SEO with the sole focus on content. You can produce the greatest content in the world, but if someone can’t load it, what good is it?”
Pro Tip: For many large sites, pages are scaled programmatically, so in that process of automatically building pages, can SEO optimization be built in? Kuska shares that with their webpage generation “everything is structured to best SEO practices, but then we can also go in and optimize pages individually.” Pro Athlete was able to set up this structure to help them remove the chaos of needing bulk changes done to web pages.
When you have millions of pages on your website, it’s going to be impossible to rank for every page. Gilliland says, “You don’t have to have every page on your site ranking and Google crawling it all the time. You’ve got to define the things you want to rank for and make it clear what you want Google to choose for those keywords.” Rely on data to direct your decisions for what to prioritize. Then when you get the question of, “why aren’t we ranking for…[insert keyword]” you can confidently explain the strategy of targeting what’s most important.
Pro Tip: Remember that SEO is an ever-changing industry. Crockett shares, “What was best-practice in SEO 15, 10, even five years ago needs to be revamped, cleaned up, fixed, removed or redirected.” Don’t be afraid to go back and redo things, and to have the conversations explaining to other departments why it has to be fixed again.
You know what’s at stake—the potential for massive revenue, massive brand exposure, improved user experience…the list goes on. But it’s highly unlikely that your organization understands, and unfortunately, we see many enterprise-level SEOs bounce from company to company seeking that perfect landing spot. Take these lessons and proactively build a culture of SEO priority within your org—align your goals to theirs, build up your interpersonal relationships, explore the full impact of SEO on their workload, and ease into a cycle of organic success.
Vivint Solar is a brand that needs no introduction — mostly because they’ve been introducing themselves from our doorways for years. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that they are a multi-billion dollar, door knocking solar juggernaut, but it wasn’t always this way.
Their street presence had never been stronger, they came to 97th Floor with an online presence that was lackluster. Their success in the neighborhoods had left smaller shops eating their digital lunch. They’d seen the gap in their strategy and had a desire to translate their success from the streets to the internet — and in the process, open the door to the even wider audience to be found online.
At the start, we had hardly anything to go on. Vivint Solar hadn’t put a deep SEO plan in place before, and while they organically dominated branded searches, they hadn’t turned any attention to non-branded search terms. So, we began from square one. Not that we minded, we always love painting on a blank canvas.
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Vivint Solar needed a clear, intentional SEO strategy. And, because all SEO measures take time to bring in results, it also needed to be enacted soon so that they could establish themselves. With that in mind, we got right to work.
We began as we always do, with market research to reveal the strengths and weaknesses in the strategies of Vivint Solar’s competitors. This kind of research is essential because it identifies gaps that our client can fill — as well as places where they can step up their game in order to keep up.
In Vivint Solar’s case, we discovered that many of their competitors’ ranking pages had great domain authority, and they had already targeted many non-branded terms. With this information, we were armed to take the next step and conduct informed keyword research.
Our keyword research revealed crystal-clear opportunities for optimization and new content. As Vivint Solar was already a known brand — and already bringing in traffic from branded searches — we focused all attention to increase our share of voice via non-branded terms. Our keyword research quickly uncovered non-branded keyword opportunities that would aid consumers along their buyer’s journey. We launched a comprehensive blogging strategy with the intent of attracting inbound traffic through these non-branded terms and increasing on-page conversion through compelling CTAs and copy.
As we mentioned, time was of the essence. We needed to get Vivint Solar’s new blog pages ranking quickly, and link building was an essential part of that race against time. Links build the authority of a page in little time, allowing the page to rank much more quickly than it would on its own.
Our strategy didn’t end there. While our ultimate goal was to increase Vivint Solar’s presence online so they would not be totally reliant on door-knocking, what if there was a way to take advantage of those prolific efforts? Using localized SEO, we launched pages for every locale where Vivint Solar is active, over 100 (but we’ll get to that later). This provided pages tailored to the needs and offers of various states and cities, connecting door-knockers and potential customers quickly and effectively.
With these strategies in place, and a thorough technical audit completed, we put our plans into action — starting with content creation. Together with the Vivint Solar team, we researched, outlined, and produced over 200 articles targeting our various non-branded keywords.
Once article creation was underway, we turned our focus to link building. Our competitive research informed this strategy from the beginning, including the frequency of our backlinks and their quality. After the first month of outreach, we were able to gain over 30 backlinks each month to the Vivint Solar site, each one obtained naturally on quality websites. Not to mention, each link was optimized for a specific page and corresponding keyword. This aided our content in ranking quickly for our intended keywords.
Additionally, we helped Vivint Solar build out robust versions of their local pages, which at the time included 23 states with additional locales within each state. By the time we were done, we had over 100. We built out and optimized local pages and search terms in each of these respective markets.
While the above components are critical to any digital transformation, we knew it was important to look even deeper into Vivint Solar’s funnel than simply awareness-level content. We analyzed the conversion path for Vivint Solar, and identified potential weaknesses or misalignment of message. We then added resources to optimize the user’s experience once they’d entered the funnel, and throughout their journey. We fully audited and optimized email messaging, and created valuable content by breaking down complex industry topics and making them more digestible through quality UX design.
Here at 97th Floor, we love working with remarkable partners like Vivint Solar. Together we moved quickly to not only meet, but exceed the goals we set at the onset of the project.
Before 97th Floor began working with Vivint Solar, only 5% of their organic traffic was non-branded, and today 33% of all visitors are coming from non-branded keywords. Additionally, total organic traffic has increased by an incredible 45% year over year. This was accompanied by a comparable rise in revenue, and a 40% increase in new users. This increase in traffic and conversions has manifested in hundreds of thousands of dollars in recurring revenue brought in from digital channels.
Today Vivint Solar has a shining reputation in residential solar on the streets and on the web — a true physical to digital transformation. Their prospective customers used to have to wait to be found. Now they are able to find Vivint Solar on their own. Through our combined efforts the two methods work together, making Vivint Solar an unstoppable force with a good reputation on the streets and online.
Keyword research is a necessary step that you do to understand your market, and plan your SEO strategy. But what if you could use it to learn about user intent, restructure a whole site, and increase conversions as well as traffic? That’s exactly what we did with this client.
CBD American Shaman is a health company that sells CBD oils. While it’s a competitive market, their products have an edge on the competition because they’re water soluble. Despite this, they were struggling to capitalize on their great product with the kind of SEO traffic that it warrants.
Yet the potential was there: An audit revealed that the more specific SERPs previously targeted for the product had a pretty small search demand — but the right strategy could capture a large amount of traffic. Think “CBD oil” with 1 million searches versus “water soluble CBD oil” with only 1,300.
97th Floor was brought in with a clear business question to address: How do we capitalize on this great demand and become a breakout CBD shop?
Like much of SEO, the solution starts on the site-level. The CBD American Shaman site was hosted on a custom CMS (rather than WordPress, Shopify, or Hubspot, etc.), which always complicates technical SEO solutions. Their CMS was completely done by hand. The site organization was also done by hand, and more subject to human error.
They had a wide list of products, but their site wasn’t utilizing this wide variety to capture organic search. Their site’s architecture was flat, lacking the intuitive hierarchy that both Google and the user need to easily navigate and understand a site. In the beginning, there were only three categories on the CBD Shaman site: wellness, pets, and beauty. This organization made sense at the conception of the site, when the company offered few products. However, as their business scaled and expanded, that category structure no longer made sense, and in fact, felt difficult to navigate and drastically out of date.
It soon became clear that a total overhaul of the site’s organization was necessary. Any SEO tactics would yield mitigated returns unless the site was a complete, SEO-driven overhaul.
Just as a doctor treats a whole patient rather than a symptom, we chose to stop looking at each individual problem, and instead gather it all into one place and focus on the most essential and basic purpose of the site. In this process, keyword research and mapping were essential in understanding how to treat the site as a whole — curing all of its symptoms, rather than just hitting one at a time.
Keyword research is important, but like any data, it means nothing on its own. It’s what you do with the insights gleaned from research that matters. So — while sometimes all you need from your keyword research is a handful of new keywords to tackle — for CBD American Shaman, keyword research would go on to guide the entire reconstruction of their site.
We used our keyword mapping to guide the new site’s entire structure. By using keyword research as the foundation of the site, we captured more authority, and redistributed that authority back to the site’s most relevant and converting pages.
For example, the category page for /cbd-oils now houses all of the CBD oil products, allowing for more weight to target that high-volume keyword as well as an ease for the user in browsing the different oils available. In the previous version of the site, the following page was trying to rank for “CBD oil,” /vg-cloud-terpene-rich-cbd-oil-tincture. See the problem? Yes, it was a CBD oil product, but its strength was wasted in attempting to rank for “cbd oil” and it was poorly optimized for a user from coming form a Google SERP.
With the knowledge that these new category pages were much more likely to rank in Google SERPs, we followed our keyword research further. We used it to map and reorganize the entire site, categorically moving pages to align with relevant category pages rather than stand on their own. By connecting these further pages to those authoritative category pages, it allows us to pick up additional traffic from newly targeted keywords.
Evaluating the keyword landscape — which keywords ranked for which landing pages, and which keywords should be combined moving forward — was a BIG project. Pulling all of our ranking keywords, separating them by landing page, and creating new keyword groups took us a full month.
We had to determine what keywords should rank for a single landing page versus separate landing pages, which allowed us to find instances of keyword cannibalization. We also had to cross-reference each keyword within the designated SERP to identify whether a category page or an individual product page was needed to best fit the ranking criteria for that SERP. It was a lot of work, and a lot of detail, but it paid off.
Under the “shop” menu on the homepage, we added sixteen new categories, all based on newly selected high-potential keywords. It turned out that not only did search engine bots like this kind of layout, but users did too. Within weeks, CBD American Shaman saw a 13% increase in organic traffic, not only that, we saw an unexpected radical bump in conversion rates. Which makes sense when you consider how this also drastically improved navigation and the user experience.
CBD Shaman has an extensive product offering that is always being added to. With all of these choices, the shopping experience was previously overwhelming to users. Products were difficult to locate, and customers had no clear understanding of where to find certain products, or even what products were offered. Instead, the site was set up in such a way that they'd have to endlessly scroll through lists of product after product, without the ability to filter based on product type or use. It was hurting their sales, and alienating their customer base. So we knew it had to change.
They are constantly evolving their product catalog. With their previous strategy, a single product page may have built up a lot of authority over time, only to be taken down, and that authority would then be redirected to an unoptimized page or lost completely. With our new category-centric strategy, the business’s evolution is supported. No matter which products are added or taken away, the authority will remain in the category pages. These pages stay consistent in a constantly changing website, allowing users to always find their way.
The result is an SEO framework that not only worked on the onset, but it’s proven effective even a year later. This keyword mapping system has paved the way to double organic traffic for CBD American Shaman.
We’re at the home stretch of 2020, and as much as we’d like to live these last few weeks in comfort, Google had other plans for SEOs. Say happy holidays to the December 2020 Core Update.
It seems like awkward timing. However it’s better than it happening one week earlier, possibly disrupting Black Friday and Cyber Monday online sales. So I suppose there was some level of kindness baked into this release.
The update appears to have begun rolling out on 1pm ET December 3rd (about two and a half hours after Google’s announcement), but it’s likely we’ll see the rollout affecting SERPs for the next week or two, as is typical with these core algorithm updates from Google. However many online, and within 97th Floor's clients have seen fluctuations happening earlier this week, possibly indicating a soft rollout earlier than the official announcement.
Granted it’s been only 24 hours since the results started rolling in, but even still, there are some trends to make note of.
First and foremost, E-A-T (expertise, authority, and trust) has come out as a prevailing set of metrics that determine a positive outcome for sites during this unforeseen update. It’s worth taking a second to remember the May 2020 Core Update, which was a larger than average update, negatively affecting many sites that were not prioritizing E-A-T. It seems that authoritative backlink profiles are a major factor, as they were in the May update.
When reading between the lines on all the forms online concerning the update, it’s possible to infer that many old-school (AKA blatant black-hat) SEOs are feeling the burn of decreased rankings and traffic right now. Much of the May 2020 Core Update also systematically penalized these kinds of sites as well, and it seems that sites that continued to avoid holistic SEO fixes are feeling the heat today.
Ever since the infamous Medic Update of August 2018, many are looking for specific industries hit by these updates, which hasn’t been the case in the same severe way the Medic update was. However, the auto industry seems to be taking more than its share of shake ups today. I would also note that legal sites (and heavily regulated industries in general) are seeing fluctuations.
As helpful as it is to hear Google say, “Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before,” I want to provide more specifics.
First and foremost, make E-A-T a priority for your site in every aspect, especially link acquisition. A number of big brands are gaining valuable ground on their SERPs, which in itself is very insightful. However, when looking at these brand’s backlink profiles, we’re seeing big link wins in the past 6 months. Double down on real link-building, the kind that passes authority, is indexed, and respected by Google. This can be done by leaning on things like guest post link building and branded link mention reclamation campaigns
Make sure you are accurately documenting your site's success or failure during this update. This update is terribly hard to diagnose with recent traffic, given that last week was a major holiday in the US. So when looking at your position, trust keyword positions over traffic for the time being.
As always, be sure to report this information to your team members and managers with a link and some screenshots from your own ranking and traffic numbers. Explain what E-A-T is and then devise an action plan of what E-A-T means for your site and brand, it will likely involve better content and links.
Reach out to me on Twitter @Joe_Robledo_ with any questions or updates.
COVID-19 cancelled a lot of plans in 2020. Teachers. Doctors. CEOs. Politicians. Parents. Children. Travelers. They’ve all had to adapt to The New Normal. With Black Friday approaching, we’ll add retailers to that list.
Most retailers rely on Black Friday doorbusters to make their year profitable, and this year Black Friday is even more important to many retailers as they’ve suffered with shutdowns, lockdowns, and letdowns.
97th Floor has helped hundreds of brands find success during their holiday marketing push, but we’ve never done it in a year as unique as 2020. We wanted to know how shoppers would react to these changing times, so we commissioned an independent research study of 1,000 US shoppers to understand their hopes, fears, and behaviors when it comes to crowded malls, bustling stores, and online shopping this holiday season.
We’ve put together some of the most interesting insights in this article, but all the data can be seen in the PDF download attached to this article.
It’s true that this has been a difficult year for business. However, there are steps that you can take to safeguard your own sales as the holiday season approaches. Our advice? Focus your efforts online. 97th Floor will be releasing a small series of in-depth articles covering these topics deeper.
Sign up for our monthly newsletter to make sure you don’t miss one.
Some SEO tactics take months to see results, but the holiday shopping season is already upon us. So, this year we’d recommend finding that sweet spot between SEO that works for ecommerce sites and the SEO practices that yield results quickly. A few “quick wins” you should look at to increase the readability and user-friendliness of your site are product schema markup, proper rel=canonical for duplicate product pages (for holiday special prices for example), appropriate redirects, claim unlinked brand mentions, strategic internal links, and title tag adjustments.
Many brands can expect an influx of traffic during the next two months, so this could be a good time to roll out some testing in order to capture revenue from as much of that traffic as possible. Small changes can make a big difference on your site — one of our clients saw a 29% increase in revenue in just 18 days, without any increase in traffic at all. Imagine the possibilities as traffic does increase this holiday season. Our advice? Get started testing as quickly as you can. That way, when traffic really starts to peak, you know you’re getting that traffic to the most optimized versions of your pages.
It’s difficult to predict what will happen with ad auctions and CPCs during the holidays, but it’s certain prices will go up. Perhaps more this year than any other year since so many brands are hoping to make up for poor performance in previous quarters. Work to get more traffic right now, so that you can form remarketing campaigns later, which will be cheaper and more effective than cold ads. This might mean getting ads out the door earlier than you may have planned. Additionally, get all of the pixels you can active on your site. Even if you are only running Facebook Ads right now, still include pixels for Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google if appropriate. Doing this will allow you to quickly pilot to new platforms if rising prices caused by holiday influxes on your platform of choice push you out. This will help you keep a steady ROAS.
Keep in mind that people are more likely to try a new product or business during the holidays, so if gaining new customers is a focus for your business, this is your time to shine. Monitor all of your channels closely, as well as CPM and CPC. Become hyper-aware so that you don’t end up paying more than you’d like per ad. Also, build your remarketing pool earlier and be ready to pivot.
Email is a channel that deserves more attention this holiday season. Work on more specific segmentation, increase your email frequency. A greater volume of emails is much more acceptable by most users this time of year, so it’s a great time to show them all the value you can), and be sure to keep it personal. There are little things you can do to add personalization to your emails, such as personalization in both copy and context, that make a big difference to those on the receiving end. Email your contacts based on their interactions with you, as well as the information you already know about them. When the situation is more specific, your emails are more likely to be effective.
There is no doubt that this holiday season will look different than any that has preceded it. Yet, even in 2020, there is still room for success when you plan strategically. Strive to work with the times rather than against them. The data collected in this study can be used to help tell a more accurate story this holiday season. And, taking to heart these suggestions, you can be armed to take this challenge head on — and hopefully see incredible results in the process. We’re going to be dropping more specific articles on our blog throughout this season, so be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our newsletter so you don’t miss a thing!
Political campaigns are some of the most visible, wide-reaching, and polarizing marketing campaigns. They operate off of enormous budgets with highly condensed timelines, and digital strategy has become an increasing priority as audiences shift online. But even Presidential marketing has its oversights and faux pas.
At 97th Floor, we were curious about how these two campaigns were tackling digital, so we decided to utilize our expertise in performing large-scale audits for both the Biden and Trump 2020 campaigns. We have the best specialists in all of these fields, and we asked our teams to treat these campaigns just as they would a client, auditing every inch that they could.
After pulling thousands of digital ads, reviewing millions of dollars in ad spend, pouring over scores of website pages, reading hundreds of emails, and scouring mobile apps and social media accounts, we found hoards of fascinating insights. It’s a drama-- massive oversights, well-timed reactions, wasted dollars-- but I’ll step aside and let the data tell the story.
After combing through both audits we cherry-picked and pulled the most engrossing snippets into the final version on GetThatVote.com. Read ahead here to see just a few of those highlights.
On a grand scale, the Trump campaign acts as one might expect: big budgets, pushy messaging, and dated tactics. But, while wasted budget is never a pro, the Trump campaign seems to understand its core audience. The campaign’s focus and budget, as well as messaging, are highly targeted to dyed in the wool, red “Patriots.” Team Trump’s digital tactics mirror that of the entire campaign — braggadocious — largely catering to those who are already his fans. Additionally, the Trump campaign presses much harder for donations, which could be one explanation for its ability to outspend the Biden campaign at every turn.
In contrast, Biden’s team hones in on the fringes and the undecided — those who have been historically election-determining, an obvious audience for this (and every) election. This showcases itself in a strong focus on swing states with budget, and a somewhat-humble focus on “togetherness” and “unity” in messaging. The Biden campaign also pushes for a professionalism and issue-based copy that Trump has largely overlooked. A little surprising is the consistently smaller budget from the Biden side, however it’s possible that Team Biden is holding back to increase spending when it matters most, that last month.
Overall, each site caters to the strengths of its candidate. The Biden site emphasizes unity in diversity, with photos of Biden with others rather than alone, and copy that includes words like “together.” Trump’s site leans into the fame of Trump himself. Mentions of specific goals or stances are overtaken by Trump-focused photos and messaging.
As far as general user experience and intuitive flow, Trump’s site takes the cake. Biden’s site overlooks clear messaging in conveying how to volunteer or get involved, and funneling every user into a narrow set of options. The Trump site uses very clear “get involved” messaging in their header, and gives various actions a user could take in order to show support for the campaign. Additionally, Biden’s website feels busy, and lacks an easily navigable hierarchical structure. Trump’s site is well structured, pushing users to either shop or donate.
We also couldn’t help ourselves in looking at the 404 pages. Both perfectly represent their target audience: Biden’s responsible mask-wearers, and Trump’s anti-Bidens.
Neither campaign is leaning into search advertising heavily, with text-based search ads accounting for 11.48% and 10.09% of the Biden and Trump campaign’s Google Ad’s budgets respectively. They both make good use of the video elements of Google’s platforms, which may be based on the fact that video is a more immersive experience for the viewer, however it is unusual to see so little budget devoted to image ads given their ability for cheap, but effective remarketing.
The biggest misstep? The Trump campaign paid for the keyword “how to impeach trump.” One might think that this strategy is fascinating, and indeed it could have been, if paired with the right landing page. But when you look at other terms that received significant clicks, you’ll also find terms like, “speedo swim trunks,” “men’s xxl swim trunks,” “trump is a disaster,” and “trump fraud.” The Trump team was apparently not looking at their own search terms report. This oversight is easily fixable by adding negative search terms to their strategy.
Another key difference in strategy is that Biden’s team is using search to prioritize issues, while Trump’s team is here to sell hats (and other merch). Overall, team Biden is performing better in the Google Ads game. However, this is largely due to the fact that they’ve made fewer obvious blunders rather than their own strength on the platform.
I wasn’t impressed by the Trump campaign’s email strategy. The subject lines are flashy, even misleading, resorting to bait and switch tactics. Trump’s email team is pushing hard for donations. Ironically, however, the Trump campaign falters big time when it neglects to add emails entered into the footer of the website into any sort of followup email funnel.
With an average of 2.7 emails sent per day, one has to wonder about unsubscribe rates on the Trump campaign’s emails. The intended strategy may be to hit the audience hard to get recurring donations before they unsubscribe due to email fatigue.
The Biden campaign, on the other hand, seems to want to turn subscribers into advocates, only occasionally asking for donations. His campaign sends significantly fewer emails than Trump’s, with an average of one email every other day. The Biden campaign keeps the issues of their campaign central, and their subject lines helpful and professional. Overall, Biden’s email strategy has a clear advantage over Trump’s in its use of best practices.
Both candidates are running predictable and moderate social media campaigns. Biden is more active on Instagram than Trump, but it’s still surprising that neither candidate makes greater use of Instagram, considering the app’s large demographic of young, often swing voters.
The campaigns’ followers describe themselves in predictable ways: “she/her,” “feminist,” “activist,” and “liberal” for Biden and “KAG,” “patriot,” “conservative,” and “retired” for Trump. However, with only 1.3% of crossover between followers of these accounts, users are essentially tweeting into a political echochamber. It’s also interesting to note that in an analysis of how Biden and Trump advocates speak on social media found that Trump site visitors are twice as likely to talk about the opposing party compared to Biden site visitors.
The most creative social media push from either the campaigns is the Biden campaign’s podcast. This is new territory for presidential campaigns, and while its success has been mostly negligible (it seems Biden supporters are more likely to engage on other channels) it was a creative effort.
The Trump campaign uses divisive ads, intending to both sow distrust in leaders of the democratic party, and raising funds. These ads often include asking users to take a one-sided survey with titles such as: “Official Democrat Corruption Accountability Survey.” These tactics might be duplicitous, but we’d also give them some credit for stepping outside of the box. Both candidates ask for donations, just with a different focus. It seems likely that Trump is receiving more funds from his tactics, but Biden is likely creating more “ownership” from those who do support him by focusing on specific issues and local state battles.
Both campaigns run well-timed ad campaigns with a focus on state-driven ads, a smart strategy for their specific aims. The Trump team consistently spends more but the Biden team places a greater priority on swing states. The Biden campaign spends more in three of the five top contested states, while Florida gets the most attention from both budgets. And, while the Trump team consistently spends more, the Biden team is moving fast, increasing their spending quickly over the past three months.
Many know that SEO is renowned for its lengthy timeline to see results. So, with a fast-paced campaign like the presidential elections, SEO is, and really should be, a lower priority. However, both campaigns are making some pretty simple SEO mistakes that could be avoided with a simple two-hour audit. And, no matter the priority, easy fixes like that are always worth it.
Currently, the Trump team leads in gross organic searches. This is likely due to the fact that their top keyword “trump” has a 10X lead on the Biden team’s “joe biden.” However, the Biden site has the barebones of a non-branded strategy, with pages for terms like “gun safety” and “immigration.” They also make fewer elementary mistakes (homepage errors, missing H1 and H2 tags, the absence of canonical links, poor meta descriptions). While the Trump site carries more weight at the moment, if the campaign were to run for years rather than months, we’d put our money on the Biden site faring better over time.
A candidate’s logo is the centerpiece of the entire campaign. It reflects the values and strengths of a candidate. Logo design goes to Biden for its ability to be transferred to different colors and backgrounds, but Trump makes better use of logo variations for different subgroups. Their campaign colors match their demographic targets. The Biden team chose a bright navy and candy apple red, imbuing a lively, youthful energy, while the Trump team opts for a dark, rich navy and deep, crimson red to suggest seriousness, and an established foundation.
Looking to the campaign sites as a whole, the Trump site is more intuitively designed. Biden focuses on the human element, with copy like “chip in” and a casual, friendly lifestyle video. Trump’s site makes use of a full-screen design, maximizing on-page real estate and making mobile transition easier.
On the Biden site, the navigation is less intuitive, with a nearly overlapping “menu” title. Trump’s site navigation is more intuitive, and the white text allows for a nice eye flow. However, sometimes the white text runs into readability issues when photographs aren’t dark enough to create proper contrast.
The Trump app is a conversion machine, while the Biden app feels like a bit of an afterthought. Trump’s app holds the hand of the user throughout the entire app experience, with easy navigation, clear calls to action, and incentives for those who donate. Biden uses his app to share his vision, conveying a sense of togetherness and altruicity.
While not an essential part of a campaign, superfans will certainly download and use the campaign apps, so it’s definitely not an avenue to ignore. Both apps could definitely use some attention, but overall, the Trump app makes better use of the unique app format by giving benefits that are only available in the app.
Commercial strategy might be the greatest failing in the Trump team’s digital campaign. Their strategy is largely national, with little attention to specific state markets, including swing states. For example Florida, the state that has the most money going into it from both candidate’s Facebook and Google Ads, is being completely ignored by the Trump campaign. This is hardly strategic, seems more like an oversight.
It’s a situation many marketers are familiar with: a great product in a stagnant market. A brand deserving more recognition, fighting for a slice of market share.
This story was certainly relatable for eFileCabinet. But with big marketing goals and a team open to creative solutions, they were ready to implement a strategy that would cement their foothold in the market.
After implementing a multi-pronged campaign — holistic SEO, advertising, content, and email marketing, all wrapped around a creative and expertly executed conference — they were not just seeing results, they were seeing stars.
eFileCabinet makes the champion of document management software. They aim to take the pain out of complex filing and digitizing processes.
While their product was ahead of the curve, they woke up one day to find smaller competitors coming to steal their market share. eFileCabinet needed digital marketing expertise, they needed new approaches, and they needed a team that could ramp up and execute quickly. They found it all with their partnership with 97th Floor.
Our efforts culminated in a campaign so exciting that it not only won multiple awards (and the attention of the press), but also brought in the largest influx of leads eFileCabinet had ever seen.
While it’s fun to smash a few printers, the excitement and attention of a campaign fades, and without the foundation of a well-oiled lead machine, the true potential of that campaign won’t be realized.
In this article I’m covering the ins and outs of this campaign, but if you want to jump to a specific section, go for it!
If you’ve read any similar articles on our blog, highlighting real life marketing wins, you know the first step is typically customer research with the intent to create buyer personas. Audience insights, usually housed in buyer personas, are a critical element necessary before engaging in any campaign. But many marketers (even savvy marketers) underestimate the power of persona creation. Personas are especially crucial when working with an agency. Armed with the insight that only comes via detailed personas you can begin to create marvelous work.
eFileCabinet’s software could serve nearly any business (we all need to organize documents, don’t we?) but when we identified specific audiences that would benefit the most immediately, we were able to refine our customer personas to the most important ones.
The first step in creating personas is always basic market research. eFileCabinet already knew that many of their best customers worked jobs that needed constant document organization. We narrowed down the four most common fields to: HR, accountancy, insurance, and legal.
With four focus audiences in place, we took it one step further, delving deeper into what made these people tick. What were the biggest pain points they encountered in their jobs? Why would they come looking for eFileCabinet?
eFileCabinet introduced their team at 97th Floor to a handful of customers, thus giving us a direct line of communication with our target audience. These in-depth interviews helped shape the final touches on our persona development. Not to mention these interviews made for exceptional case studies down the line.
During the persona discovery process, it became clear to eFileCabinet as well as 97th Floor that our four audiences were not solely document filing drones, but people.
So, instead of marketing to people that live to digitize documents, eFileCabinet changed their strategy to market to humans.
We did a 38-point technical audit and discovered a number of things that were dragging down our rankings. The site was fine, but we were able to clean it up and really make it shine. After all, technical SEO really does lay a foundation for holistic SEO strategy. With a site humming along from a search engine perspective, SEOs could turn their attention to rankings.
Keyword research is an important piece of any SEO campaign, but without personas, keyword research will always be a weak final product. The personas guided the SEOs at 97th Floor in running the keyword research and keyword selection process. We had four different personas, which called for four specific rounds of keyword research. The strategy was to capture these audiences through awareness- and consideration-level keywords specific to their industries.
A collection of product- and market-focused keywords were selected to spearhead the campaign. Originally, eFileCabinet only ranked for about 10,000 keywords, but today they double that, and which contributes to nearly double increase in month over month organic traffic.
Today eFileCabinet ranks for a host of relative market keywords in varying stages of the buyer’s journey, from “going paperless,” to “office management systems,” to “wet signature,” to, “document manager,” to, “hr document filing.” Today, eFileCabinet has effectively transformed into an entirely new SEO force to be reckoned with, picking up 281% more organic leads than the previous year.
Digital advertising can capture an entirely different set of prospects than organic SEO. With our personas in mind, we created a segmented series of campaigns spanning across three platforms: Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google Ads.
Facebook Ads’ detailed demographic targeting gave us the freedom to launch ads that reached a wide but tailored audience. We created targeted ads to those who act like past purchasers, which attracted a new audience of people who behaved like our existing audience. Or in other words, they actually followed through on our CTAs. Facebook is also where we focused retargeting efforts, reminding those who had visited eFileCabinet before what they had left behind.
LinkedIn was instrumental in pinpointing audiences based on job position and industry, which was absolutely critical for our advertising campaign. This allowed us to pinpoint exactly who we wanted to market to, and align that with our constructed personas. Because the targeting was so precise, we were able to build unique ads, copy, landing pages, and lead magnets that were directly tied to any one of our audiences. For example, accountants would see ads about accounting document filing software, while legal assistants would see ads about legal document filing software.
Google Ads allowed us to market to an intent-based audience via keyword targeting. This let us reach people at their stage in the journey, including those with serious intent to buy. Google Ads also worked hand in hand with the SEO strategy. Together with eFileCabinet, we found high-converting keywords, we took that info to our SEO team members and — bringing in the benefits of paid through organic — saving a lot of money in the process.
Testing multiple ad variants was essential in ensuring the different campaigns were attracting the right audiences, and pivoting the ad copy if they were not. In total, hundreds of ad campaigns, with thousands of ad variants were created across the three platforms.
These campaigns brought extraordinary results. We had over 400 MQLs, increased conversion rates on Google Ads by 131% (.54% → 1.25%), with click through rates almost tripling (1.35% → 3.97%). All by simply focusing on the real people behind the job titles, rather than just the jobs themselves.
The secret to great email marketing is a good workflow and customer-centric logic in place. Again, it’s about the people. Email automation platforms, by themselves, lack logic and intelligence. It takes an experienced hand to turn a list of subscribers into leads, leads into customers, and, if you’re lucky, customers into raving fans. The first step, then, is to take full advantage of the email platform and create strategic workflows for each customer persona at each stage of the buyer journey.
Because eFileCabinet’s platform audit uncovered a series of misfiring workflows, overlapping data points, and repetitive offers, the first step in their email marketing strategy was to restructure the entire setup, including campaigns and workflows for each audience.
By creating a dedicated lead nurture experience that hinged on the user’s industry and stage in the customer journey, eFileCabinet could best meet the needs of their users within this channel.
Here’s the thing, everyone talks about the funnel as if it were actually a funnel. Even we are guilty of it. But today’s customers are so savvy that they don’t often progress down the funnel in the direct, linear fashion we want. So having built-in logic to your email campaigns that intelligently delivers what they want (which may not be the next step in the funnel) is imperative to properly nurturing a large and growing list. That’s what we accomplished with eFileCabinet.
I can be honest here, right? Document management software isn’t the most exciting industry in the world. Because of this fact, content needed to be fresh, unique, insightful, and just maybe, a little exciting too.
With the traditional content channels, our efforts encompassed a broad range including ad copy, articles, ebooks, case studies, and email copy. We created four different content campaigns, each pertaining to one of our buyer personas.
The following assets were produced to support the content journey of each of these campaigns:
Sounds like a lot right? It is. That’s the point. Shortcuts in content marketing don't exist. There is only efficiency and experience and, eventually, expertise.
These assets, executed well, and delivered at the right time have created a near-flawless content flywheel, which contributes to perfect adherence to lead nurture goals quarter after quarter.
Squeaky clean SEO, targeted PPC, segmented emails, and persona-driven content left eFileCabinet well on their way to becoming the leading figure in the industry. This would be the time when most brands would queue the fist pumps and pop open the champagne bottles to celebrate.
But eFileCabinet was only getting started. Now was time for the fun stuff.
Everything was humming along nicely digitally, but eFileCabinet had a long-time challenge they wanted to tackle next: Trade shows. Quite a different world than the digital marketing landscape they’d just conquered.
Trade show sponsorships had been lackluster in the past, but they believed there was opportunity still on the table. Together, we dreamed up many ways to get more out of upcoming trade shows. We did countless brainstorming sessions and built decks describing options. It was a battle royale of creativity. When the smoke cleared, one idea stood out as the clear winner: the Rage Cage.
Key takeaways
Holistic SEO is a unified approach to search optimization that treats a website as a connected system rather than a collection of isolated tactics. Instead of focusing on single levers like keywords or links, holistic SEO aligns user experience, content quality, authority signals, and technical performance to support long-term growth. At 97th Floor, holistic SEO is operationalized through the XACT framework, ensuring every optimization supports both search engines and real users.
Traditional SEO is often executed in isolation. Holistic SEO is designed to work as a connected system that compounds over time.
When people ask what is holistic SEO, the simplest answer is this: it’s SEO designed to survive algorithm changes by improving the entire system, not just one part of it.
At 97th Floor, holistic SEO is executed through the XACT framework, which organizes strategy into four core pillars: UX, Authority, Content, and Technical. Together, these components support semantic SEO, topical authority, and sustained organic growth.
Good UX keeps users engaged, which reinforces relevance and performance signals across search.
Authority helps search engines determine who deserves to rank when content quality is similar.
Strong content frameworks allow sites to own topics rather than compete page by page.
Without a strong technical foundation, even great content and authority underperform.
Together, these four pillars create a system where improvements compound over time—the defining characteristic of effective holistic SEO.
Holistic SEO only works when each of these pillars is treated as part of a larger system. Focusing too heavily on one area (content, links, or technical fixes) can create short-term gains. That looks good in reports, but it rarely produces sustainable growth on its own.
That’s because SEO isn’t a monolith. It can’t be painted with a broad brush. A truly comprehensive strategy will act like a flywheel where progress in one area supports others, and over time, results compound.
Or, to put it another way, more SEO doesn’t necessarily lead to proportionally more results. What matters is where those efforts are applied, and how well they work together.
This is the origin of the 6 Disciplines of SEO framework. Designed by 97th Floor, this framework exists to help move teams from doing more SEO, to doing holistic SEO.
As Google’s algorithm has matured, there have been ground breaking updates which have improved overall user experience.
Much of how the industry views SEO today is because of these wide reaching (and sometimes earth-shattering) updates. For over a decade the theme has been Google making changes, and SEOs trying to intuit the signals with moderate success.
Today, we see that Google is releasing frequent broad core updates aimed at improving the algorithm from a holistic perspective. Google has clarified that for each of these updates the advice they give comes down to making great content that is high quality, expertly written, trustworthy, unique, and valuable to the user.
We suggest focusing on ensuring you’re offering the best content you can. That’s what our algorithms seek to reward.
While this advice is good, it isn’t enough. Optimizing for users over bots makes Google an ally rather than an enigma, as you both work towards the same goal: a better experience for the people behind the searches.
Enter the holistic strategy any SEO can adapt: The 6 Disciplines of SEO.
A note on our naming convention: we get that a lot of these words sound made up, but we chose to name the disciplines with a focus on the the ability derived from each. Yes, they are weird. That’s by design; weird things are easier to remember.
Here are some examples of what execution can look like within each of these disciplines.
The SEO industry has a wide and comprehensive list of recommended best practices. And, luckily, Google has provided fairly explicit guidance on what websites can do to be compliant with their guidelines. In addition, we’ve executed internal strategies which have yielded results which challenge previous assumptions and best practices.
Armed with all of this knowledge, you can make sure your site is properly aligned and thereby maximize your SEO efforts.
One client came to 97th Floor with stalled SEO efforts, despite their best efforts. Some digging during our onboarding site audit uncovered that they were unaware a manual action penalty had been placed on their site. Google Search Console revealed that structured data was being misapplied to a specific segment of the site's blog pages.
In the past, this site’s posts had included a comments section. But over time the comments became too much to moderate and they ultimately decided to disable comments for the site. In doing this, however, they forgot to disable the structured data on the backend that called out the recently disabled blog comments.
Once this was discovered, it was imperative that all of the residual structured data was removed from those pages. Doing that reassured Google that the client’s site wasn’t claiming to have something on-page that they didn’t actually have. It was a relatively easy fix, but not an obvious find for the untrained eye.
Fixes were applied. The next step was to put together a reconsideration request and submit it to Google. Once the reconsideration request was filed, the penalty was lifted within a week and the site saw significant increases in organic traffic from that point on.
Google isn’t outright about much of their algorithm. This is why the latest user-experience based algorithm update Page Experience, is getting so much attention. This update and the trends in recent updates pay particular attention to the Usability discipline, which ensures the overall SEO strategy is UX based.
Improved user experience is important to have baked into any SEO strategy from the beginning, because it has the potential to aid both your SEO-focused goals and your bottom line business goals like conversions.
An ecommerce business came to 97th Floor with a dilemma: users were reaching their product pages, but not converting. Hypotheses were formed and ranked as to what site changes might have the greatest impact on UX, but even the most intuitive hypotheses aren’t a place to end.
Multi-variant testing showed which variations brought in the most conversions and new revenue. This was a luxury ecommerce business, even small upticks in conversion rates can show significant increases in revenue, which means they stood to gain quite a bit. In this case, almost every variant showed a positive increase in both conversions and revenue. Overall, implementing these changes led to a 29% increase in revenue over just a few weeks.
In prioritizing the usability, our client gained tangible and actionable information about what their customers like to see on their site, which in this case was removing the financing option from their checkout.
Readability in this sense refers to the ease of reading your site for bots, not humans. Readability in this sense should not be confused with user-focused readability scores that measure the sophistication and ease of reading of your copy.
Cleaning up your site’s readability can play a significant role in its ability to rank, because metadata are an important way bots analyze the content on your pages.
Improving the metadata that adorn a site’s pages is an essential way to signal to Google the relevance of the on-page content to the target focus keyword.
The most critical ways to improve readability include:
A new client approached us with hopes to increase their blog’s organic traffic. They had been blogging for years, but they weren’t seeing the traffic increases they were hoping for. An audit revealed that they were misusing H1 and H2 tags throughout their blog, at the fault of the customer template they were using. They’d chosen to use more H1 tags as H2 tags, effectively using multiple H1 tags per page. But that looked most attractive on their template, so they unknowingly were shooting their blog’s readability in the foot.
They had no idea they were defying Google’s guidelines. And while their use of H1 tags might have been easier on the eyes, it wasn’t helping them win Google’s favor. Once the H tag errors were resolved, our client saw an immediate jump in traffic. These simple readability changes brought in a golden age of SEO for their site that is still going strong.
A healthy backlink profile has always been a major part of a site’s rankability. A healthy backlink profile requires various tactics to not only increase backlinks; including branded links, anchor text distribution, link velocity, and more. Not only external links, but internal linking structure is a critical (and often overlooked) part of the linkability of a site.
Here are a couple ways you can do this:
Our client was stalled ranking in position 5 on their chosen SERP, and needed to move up to gain the visibility they desired. An analysis of their site revealed they had several pages that all concerned the same topic, which can create confusion for Google. In addition, most of their pages were four links from the homepage, while few were just one or two links away.
By creating a map for Google’s bots using internal linking (using just 7 new links), the site jumped in ranking from position 5 to position 1.
This keyword had an average month search volume of 15,000 searches, which means moving from spot 5 to spot 1 generated an average of 3,300 additional clicks to the client’s webpage per month for just this keyword alone.
Indexability is how well Google is able to crawl and index a site. Google indexes sites similar to how books are indexed in a library, collecting relevant information about your site and making it easier for users to find. So, it’s in your best interest to be sure Google can easily index your site, and that it’s getting the relevant information from your site that it needs.
While readability deals exclusively with metadata, indexability is a bigger umbrella that deals with the indexability of your entire site.
If Google can’t access and process your website’s content effectively, it won’t rank your site’s URLs very well. If part of your site is unindexed or poorly indexed, Google won’t know what your website is all about. This leads to missing pages, poor rankings, and overall less traffic. Once you discover symptoms of crawlability or indexability issues on your site, you’ll need to investigate further to uncover the source.
These areas of investigation often include:
In a technical site audit for a client, we discovered some irregularities in their indexation. Further digging uncovered pages missing from the overall coverage of the site, which is a common symptom of an indexability error.
The execution of a log file analysis directed our efforts in improving indexability. The analysis revealed several actions that could be taken to fix the indexing issues the site was experiencing, including: clearing a number of redundant subfiles that Google was crawling, broken pages that needed to be redirected, and other folders Google was crawling that didn’t play a role in the overall SEO strategy.
A strategic clean up of the site’s indexability issues resulted in not only immediately more traffic, but an increase in organic revenue for our client. In the 30 days immediately following the rollout of these changes, Google organic transactions increased by 25.86%.
At 97th Floor we have about a dozen platforms to track our campaign’s performance but most commonly we use Ahrefs, Google Analytics, and Stat. You can decide what platforms and strategies are most effective for your company, however, no matter what platforms you decide to use, it’s important that you’re accurately tracking the progress of your campaigns.
The most crucial part of this data mix is making sure that the deployment and configuration of Google Analytics is not only correct but that it’s tracking the right conversions as they relate to our SEO strategy and client business goals.
Below are some ways that we do this:
You can’t make informed decisions if you aren’t tracking relevant data. Our teams consistently identify goals and values for clients in order to better track the impact of the ongoing SEO strategy in place for them.
As we continue to iterate on what is driving the most conversions to the site, we’re able to focus the strategy efforts into the parts of the site that are making the most difference for the client’s bottom line.
Holistic SEO requires visibility across the entire system. That means using tools that help teams understand how content, UX, technical performance, authority, and indexing work together.
There is no single “holistic SEO tool.” Instead, effective teams assemble a stack based on their maturity, goals, and internal capabilities.
Below are common tool categories that support holistic SEO execution:
As teams mature, the goal is not to add more tools, but to ensure the data they provide is actionable and aligned with business outcomes. Tool selection should always be driven by what decisions need to be made, not by feature checklists.
Holistic SEO is best understood in practice. The following examples show how aligning multiple disciplines leads to sustainable ranking improvements, traffic growth, and measurable business impact.
National Funding is a leading financial services company providing tailored financing solutions for small and medium-sized businesses.
The challenge
After a Google algorithm update, National Funding lost rankings for high-value keywords such as “bad credit business loans.” These rankings were critical to lead generation, and isolated fixes were not producing results.
The strategy
97th Floor implemented a holistic SEO strategy focused on restoring trust, relevance, and structural clarity across the site. This included:
The results
This systemwide approach restored and strengthened keyword visibility, leading to:
Rather than overcorrecting in one area, the holistic strategy allowed improvements to reinforce each other.
Gigamon is a network analytics vendor providing hybrid cloud infrastructure, security, and observability solutions for enterprise organizations.
The challenge
Gigamon was investing heavily in SEO but could not break into the top rankings for the highly competitive keyword “network security.” Despite doing many things right, progress had stalled.
The strategy
97th Floor took a counterintuitive, holistic approach. Instead of forcing incremental gains on the primary keyword, we:
The results
The strategy produced rapid and compounding gains:
Today, this page remains the top driver of organic traffic for Gigamon, a clear example of how holistic SEO can unlock competitive keywords by strengthening the system as a whole.
Each of these six disciplines is aimed at taking into account the various aspects of an SEO strategy. When built and executed properly, these six disciplines will positively impact the bottom line and delight your visitors.
Knowing when to reexamine each of these 6 areas of SEO will come down to knowing the symptoms of issues relating to each discipline. This goes beyond just seeing a decline in ranking or traffic. In fact, it’s knowing the specific symptoms and how to treat them that can make your SEO strategy powerful.
As you grow to understand each of these 6 realms you’ll be able to build effective. Just remember: you will get more out of strategies that are flexible and produce the greatest yields long-term.
As more time is spent mastering each of the six disciplines, your SEO strategy evolves from a collection of tactics into a cohesive system—one that compounds over time, driving lasting growth and resilience in the face of every algorithm update.
Maybe SEO was once a mysterious field, where no one but industry professionals knew exactly what went on, but no longer. In this day and age, every business needs to be informed and prioritizing SEO to truly thrive.
Oversimplified, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the fine-tuning of sites and pages with content and links to allow for visibility and clickability on search engine pages. But good SEO practitioners know that it’s so much more than that.
SEO marketing should be user-focused: a means of getting relevant content in front of interested people.
While most other marketing channels’ usefulness varies based on industry, it's rare indeed to find a business that wouldn’t benefit from including SEO as a key piece of their marketing strategy.
We’ve created this guide to help you understand how SEO functions in a business and how it can help drive traffic from Google to your pages and raise the bottom line of your own business.
So, how does SEO function in a business setting?
Well, first off, organic search accounts for more than half of all web traffic out there. Think of the last time you had a question about something-- chances are, you Googled it. And you’re not alone.
There are a lot of people using search engines to find the information they need online every single day, billions, in fact, but there are also a lot of sites trying to get in front of those users.
SEO in marketing is the strategy a business builds to make sure their content reaches the searchers to whom it will be most helpful and relevant.
Unlike some channels, Search Engine Optimization has the benefit of being able to meet these searches wherever they are in the marketing funnel. One big misconception about SEO is that it only focuses on top-of-funnel content, when a good SEO marketing strategy should meet the customer wherever they are in their journey.
Users often don’t follow the nice proportional funnel we’re used to talking about. Have you heard the old marketing adage that it takes encountering your brand about seven times in order to convert? The idea might be outdated, but the process of repetition certainly isn’t.
Think of your own behavior. When you made your last big purchase did you visit several different sites in your search for the most fairly priced, best quality option? Did you phrase your searches differently when you were in different stages of the funnel? Most likely your answer to these questions is a resounding yes. Most users, like you, consume what they want when they want. Their conversion journeys aren’t a straight line.
So, when they are ready to jump into research mode, for consideration or even decision stage content, you’d better hope you have pages that rank for those terms.
It’s unfortunately common to put SEO strategy in a low-priority position. Businesses might have gotten away with this ten years ago, even five years ago, but today it just won’t fly. The remarkable visibility and conversion rates possible through organic search can no longer be ignored.
Here are a few things your business can do to make SEO in marketing a higher priority today:
The first thing you can do to make SEO a priority is to decide to make it a priority. Seems simple enough, right? But it’s easier said than done. With that decision must come a commitment to see that the correct prioritization actually happens.
Vivint Solar built an enterprise by knocking doors across the US. And while they were knocking, their smaller competitors were beefing up their digital arm. Vivint Solar was losing potential customers to much smaller competitors who had a larger presence online. After recognizing the incredible potential for reaching new customers by taking advantage of high search engine traffic (specifically Google) with non-branded searches, they made the choice to prioritize SEO in marketing and began seeing immediate gains, including 6.6X increase in non-branded organic traffic.
It’s always important to have metrics, but if you aren’t choosing the right metrics to focus on, you might be overlooking significant results.
There is a mindset among marketing leaders that the proper metrics to use in measuring SEO are things like search engine traffic, links, and ranking. While there’s no question that these metrics are useful and important, you also need to track SEO in marketing with metrics like conversions and revenue that directly contribute to the bottom line and drive the business forward.
The belief that SEO can’t be measured by conversions is a misconception that needs to change.
The tactics shift with every new platform — the objective never does. This video short breaks down the game that's stayed the same since AltaVista.
Business and marketing leaders should push to keep SEOs accountable, and if that isn’t happening then SEOs should push for accountability. If the correct metrics aren’t tracked, SEOs won’t get the credit they deserve, or receive the resources they need to earn success.
In order to invest your resources efficiently, you need to know where you can make the greatest impact. That knowledge will allow you to allocate resources in a smart and successful way.
Work with the SEO specialists in your company to determine your baselines on links, content, ranking keywords, etc. and where you’re falling short of meeting your goals. Then form a strategy to tackle the places where you find your company is lacking. With this strategy in place, you will be able to make budget and hiring/vendor decisions with confidence.
There’s many reasons to hire an agency, but perhaps none is more critical than this: you want accelerated and measurable growth that doesn’t tap out your internal team.
A common misconception that companies believe is that they don’t need an agency because they already have an in-house SEO. In reality, the best clients are already doing a great job at SEO marketing, but are finding that one person (or just a few people) can’t build a castle on their own.
Hiring an agency allows businesses to work with an entire team of SEO professionals without accruing the cost of hiring their own.
When vetting agencies be sure to ask them the following:
Many believe that SEO starts with keyword research. And true, keyword research is a foundational step, but before keyword research is effective, you’ll need audience insights. Marketing leaders and SEO need to know who they are trying to reach. This is where personas come in.
Collecting demographic and psychographic information is a great place to begin, but creating a concrete story for your personas is essential in getting to know who your ideal customers are and why they act the way they do.
Once you know who your customers are, you need to know where they are. Look at the assisted conversion funnel to see where your customers are landing, and analyze what you can do to elevate these pages better within the SERPs.
Now that you know who your customers are, and where they are, look at their unique needs and how your product/service solves those needs. Figure out how you can meet their needs online in a way that outshines anything your competitors currently offer.
Further optimize by examining your highest converting pages and determine how you can help those types of pages make it in front of more customers.
It’s a common misconception that SEO work can rank an entire site. Of course, well-ranking pages will organically increase user access to the rest of your site, but it is pages that rank in SERPs, not sites.
Don’t forget this when formulating your keyword-driven content strategy. Be tactical when creating or optimizing pages by pairing them to the keywords that you want to rank for. Strive to know your target keywords (and their matching personas) like the back of your hand.
Optimize your site by keeping consistency between pages, easy internal navigation, and user-friendly design. When the internal flow of a site works well, customers will have a greater ease of conversion.
Every seasoned SEO knows that link acquisition is a necessary part of any holistic SEO strategy. Many believe that link-building is only necessary for weak and non authoritative websites, but this is simply not true. I’ve worked with many large brands who erroneously believe that link-building don’t need to be included in the SEO strategy because they think that their reputation alone will carry their success. Remember what we learned above? Search engines rank pages, not entire sites. Great content, on powerful sites, may require a few extra links to get it off to a good start.
And not all links come from outside your site. Internal links are a valuable part of using your own authority to strengthen new or striking distance content. Make no mistake, link-building should be part of any SEO campaign.
Frequent SEO reporting on metrics that affect the bottom line is critical. Metrics such as ranking and search engine traffic are important too, but also be sure you can track your SEO efforts directly to conversions and revenue.
Maximize your efforts by not isolating SEO in it’s own department. Without seamless interaction between content, web development, and other marketing channels, SEO won’t be as effective. The best SEO teams and agencies integrate their departments because it can influence so many disciplines.
SEO in marketing is a vital part of any business strategy. Because SEO is so important, especially in current times, businesses would do well to respect what SEO can do. It’s time to see marketing leaders fight for SEO resources, and align their SEO metrics to hold teams accountable for driving business success, not just traffic.
Generic ad copy and keyword-stuffed blog posts won’t get you far. The key to effective marketing is intentionality. Every piece of your holistic marketing strategy should be fine-tuned to target the niche of people who are most likely to convert and provide business value. A holistic marketing strategy optimized with detail is marketing worth investing in.
So what does intentionality in a holistic marketing strategy mean?
Be specific about the goals, knowledgeable about the audience, and create every bit of content with the audience and specific goals in mind.
Algorithmia provides a machine learning infrastructure that allows enterprises to be more successful in their machine learning efforts. They came to us because they are in a competitive market, up against companies like Amazon and Microsoft in both SEO and digital advertising. As a relatively young company, they knew they would need to be intentional in their strategy in order to succeed in that competitive space.
With their goals for organic traffic and leads in mind, we performed thorough site, keyword, and content audits in order to better understand where Algorithmia’s SEO stood. They had been producing content, but not at scale, and were missing the opportunity to increase their domain authority by targeting top-of-funnel keywords with new and optimized articles.
This kind of content shows potential customers and Google that Algorithmia is an authority on all things machine learning.
We also conducted audits of their previous ad strategies and took a deep dive into our target audiences to determine the best way to get the right people to convert on our ads.
After gathering data on their audience and previous marketing strategies, we put a strategy into action. While we did add new top-of-funnel content to the SEO strategy, we didn’t forget about users further down the funnel. We continued to create content that serves the needs of more qualified audiences as well. A holistic approach is key to intentional marketing.
As for digital advertising, we honed in on very specific job titles, such as VP of Engineering, Senior Data Engineers, etc. We did days of research to truly understand who our audience personas are on a human level. This research included spending time on sites and social media pages that our audience spends time on and gaining a thorough understanding of their roles, responsibilities, pain points, and sense of humor. This information allows us to truly connect with users by mentioning familiar problems they face and other aspects of their daily lives, making our ads feel less like ads. Once we understood those target customers better, we created ad copy messaging and design that was tailored just for them.
We chose LinkedIn as our main ad platform, since it is where those ideal customers were most likely to be found and easiest to target. LinkedIn’s Lead Gen Forms allow users to convert directly on LinkedIn, which provides a more direct path to conversion and simplifies the user experience. We knew that our audiences were marketing-averse and sensitive to user experience, so we were pleased to see this ad feature more than double our conversion rate.
Tracking the right metrics is just as important as selecting the right strategy. For Algorithmia’s SEO, we created a dashboard of every piece of content published, and tracked performance metrics on a micro scale. Because Algorithmia’s goals were tied to the success of the content we were creating, it was important that their teams could see the results of each piece of content in real-time.
The content we produced for Algorithmia has proved itself to be an evergreen source of organic traffic to the site. We spent the first 4 months creating content, and an additional 4 months building links, and within that time our content earned over 10,000 organic visits from Google.
For digital advertising, understanding the quality of each lead, rather than just the quantity, was critical to understanding the ROI. So, we made a point to personally document the quality of every single lead that came in. We made sure we knew where the greatest number of high-quality leads were coming from, so that we could fine-tune our strategy even more as we got more performance data.
When we implemented the highly detailed ad targeting for our personas, we achieved a 48% increase in qualified leads month-over-month and a 187% increase in weekly percentage of quality leads over 9 weeks.
The final step in an intentional strategy is to consistently follow through. In marketing, you can’t just set it and forget it. You have to continually watch for changes in performance and reevaluate results.
We continuously track and monitor keyword rankings to keep up with Google’s ever-changing SERPs and continually optimize our ad targeting, always looking for new ways to connect with our audience. Another thing to keep in mind is that digital advertising audiences get fatigued quickly, requiring ad copy and creative to be refreshed often. This also allows for testing and refining the messaging and tone of the ads.
Holistic marketing strategy should have a singular goal, serving the customer. Staying on top of changes in performance will allow you to help your company shift and change with the tides of digital marketing and bring in the best results over time.
Every business serves real people, not algorithms. And people want to feel understood.
Sure, you could employ a cookie-cutter digital marketing strategy that works for a few months, call it a success, and move on. But cookie-cutter strategies won’t get you results. Stay customer focused, stay holistic, stay intentional.
Last week, Google announced a new set of metrics that will play an integral part in the future of Google’s algorithm called, Core Web Vitals. Google is giving a whopping 6+ months head’s up for SEOs and webmasters, and it looks like we’re going to need it.
This update will not take effect until 2021.
From Google, “The ranking changes described… will not happen before next year, and we will provide at least six months notice before they’re rolled out.”
I’ll go into it in detail later on the Core Web Vitals, but they are essentially an organized set of loadability metrics Google believes contribute to positive user experience. These contribute to the encompassing term from Google, page experience, which is core to this upcoming update.
At a glance, page experience is a set of signals that measure how users interact with a web page beyond its strictly informative elements. It includes Core Web Vitals, which is a set of metrics that measure real-world user experience for loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of the page. Once this update rolls out, Google will be combining the Core Web Vitals ranking signals with the existing Search signals of mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS, and intrusive interstitial guidelines in order to create a more complete and measurable picture of the user’s on-page experience.
The focus on page experience seems to be a signal from Google that holistic SEO matters more now than ever. It’s clear that content or links alone don’t determine the ranking of a given webpage, although Google has made it clear that content still plays a vital role in the future of the core algorithm.
A good page experience doesn’t override having great, relevant content. However, in cases where there are multiple pages that have similar content, page experience becomes much more important for visibility in Search.
Content still tops the list when optimizing a page or site, but it seems page experience can solve tie-breaker situations.
Core Web Vitals are encompassed within Google’s definition of page experience. At this time, it appears that three vitals will be measured when this core update launches:
Google has made it clear that this list is not set in stone, and there could be new metrics added to this group down the line. 97th Floor will continue to give updates on Core Web Vitals as more information is made known, and we have more time to test.
SEOs have long been able to use tools provided by Google like Page Speed Insights, Google Search Console, and Chrome User Experience Report. As of last week, they have each been updated with new elements pertaining to the Core Web Vitals.
Marketing leaders need to ensure that their SEOs and development team members are properly integrated to ensure the testing, and execution of these improvements take place.
The world has at least 7 months before this rolls out, but that’s no reason to sit until that time comes. Because much of what will go into page experience will require web developers to optimize, it’s critical that SEOs begin having those conversations now to ensure they have the bandwidth for technical fixes in the months to come.
Curious SEOs have already started digging into the tools provided by Google to see how their site’s fare:
Effective immediately 97th Floor is including LCP, FID, and CLS into our site audits for all clients. Of course, Google has mentioned that the effects of these fixes will not directly help sites until the update officially rolls out in 2021, but some sites could see longer runways to rollout than others, and henceforth will require ample time to execute fixes. We recommend SEOs begin utilizing their Google testing tool of choice.
For the next six months double down on content that cuts to the heart of the user’s questions. I suggest SEOs review high traffic pages and ensure that new content conveys clear messaging and gives users a reason to stay on the page.
For example, if your web page has a chart that lists out the qualifying times for the Boston Marathon, turn that into a calculator, provide graphics that illustrate training regimens, and link to your existing articles about the Boston Marathon.
One way that you can identify the pages that could use the most attention would be to hop into Google Analytics and filter down to Google / organic pages that have a session duration that is below the average session duration for your site. This list could then be sorted by the ones that have been getting the most conversions in order to ensure you’re prioritizing the pages that will drive the most return for your site going forward.
I’d also add one last plug for SEOs to continue optimizing sites for the areas Google has called out in previous updates like mobile-friendliness, safe browsing, HTTPS security, and intrusive interstitials so that once the update goes live, you’ll be ahead of the curve on those areas as well.
As a whole, SEOs should take time with each initiative they undertake to ask themselves, “is this creating a better user experience?” Gone are the days when SEO was only concerned with acquiring links, and creating good title tags. SEOs need to appeal to the human algorithm more and more, which means they need to understand their unique audience and create an experience tailored to their needs.
