Mike King: You know, early in my SEO thought leadership career, he was putting my name in the rooms that I wasn’t in, and he was like the second person to put me on stage, and it all kind of snowballed from there. He’s also kind of my neighbor. We live in the same neighborhood, but I see him like once every four years.

Tom Critchlow is the Executive Vice President of Audience Growth at Raptive, building SEO, content and product strategies that scale and trusted by Google, New York Times, Atlassian and more to unlock growth and launch high impact programs. Tom is known as the CEO whisperer for his ability to translate complex ideas into clear actionable strategies, but really that’s just the English accent. Presenting Executive Presence: How To Get Buy In and Budget For SEO, please welcome Tom Critchlow.

Tom Critchlow: Thank you, Mike. Wow. I see a week. Let’s give it up for Mike, the iPullRank team, the event staff. Damn. This has been a week. I think this is the best SEO conference I’ve been to in like ten years. Also the, also the only SEO conference I’ve been to in ten years.

See, here’s the here’s the truth. I don’t care that much about SEO anymore. That might be a little bit controversial, but the number one challenge that organizations face getting SEO outcomes is not SEO knowledge. The number one challenge organizations face getting SEO outcomes is getting organizational buy in and budget, getting respect from senior leadership, and knowing how to get things done. You see this in industry surveys, all the time. But, yeah, but time and time again, the number one challenge is just getting things done. We talked about the long road map, how long it takes to get things done inside enterprise organizations. That’s what I’ve spent the last ten years working on.

I want to start with a little story. I was a consultant before I joined Raptive for about ten years, working for myself. And I was working on a client engagement, and they had an SEO team of, like, two people. And they had a new leadership come in, and the leadership said, I think we need to do SEO, a bit better, a bit more. What would it take? And so I worked with them to put together a plan, and a budget. And we ended up with an org chart of, you know, 20 product people, six SEO people, 17 editorial staff. I think the whole P&L for that team was, like, $7 million, something like that. We took that to the board, got approval for the budget, and then, I was like, great. There’s my consulting job, done. And my client was like, hold on a second. You gotta go find the person to lead this team. You gotta go find the VP of SEO role, which is not a common role. There aren’t very many VP of SEO roles in the industry. You gotta go find this person. So I spent about six months interviewing basically any senior SEO person I could find. And I found lots of people who were very good at SEO and very few people that I could put in front of the CEO, very few people that could understand how to run a program, speak the executive language, know how to get budget and buy in to get things done.

And it was during that process that I decided to build and launch the SEO MBA, which some of you may have heard of. A lot of people in the room have taken the course. Thank you very much. And that course really was designed to help SEO professionals not get better at SEO, but get better at the number one challenge, which is getting things done, getting budget and buy in, and executive sponsorship. So I launched the SEO MBA a couple years ago. It was a course and a platform, to train SEOs. The dirty secret of the SEO MBA was that it didn’t really help you get better at your job. It actually helped people get better jobs, which was an unexpected surprise. A lot of people took the course and then instantly quit and got a better job somewhere else. And that was great. Like, I was really happy with the outcome. It was a really nice surprise from the SEO MBA. Okay. So I’m gonna try and translate a little bit about the the ideas of the SEO MBA into this talk today. I don’t have too long, so it’s gonna be quite condensed, but, I’m gonna try and focus in on one, kind of specific component.

Hands up. Who manages the team? Oh, wow. Almost everyone. Damn. Okay. Okay. Keep your hands up. Hands up. Everyone, hands up. Okay. Hands up who manages the team. Keep your hand up if you care more about reporting than the people that report to you. Couple hands went down. Couple hands went down. Okay. 

This is true universally. If you think you care more about reporting than the people that report to you, your boss cares more about reporting than you do. This is true in every organization I’ve been into. Your boss cares more about reporting than you do. I don’t care how much you think you care about reporting. Your boss cares more. And reporting is critical. And so I’m gonna talk a little bit about how to make reporting better.

You know, most SEO reporting that I see – almost all SEO reporting that I see, and I’ve seen a lot over the years in my consulting work – it’s basically a bunch of charts and data points showing, here’s what happened to organic revenue. Here’s some keywords. Here’s some traffic. Hey. Here’s the traffic to this site section. Here’s the revenue from these pages. Here’s what happened over time. Maybe benchmarked against competitors. That’s fine. You need that. Right? Everyone needs to talk about revenue. It’s good. If you’re still talking about keywords, you’re probably gonna get fired. Sorry. But if you’re talking about revenue, maybe you’re gonna keep your job, but you’re not gonna get promoted. 

What gets you promoted is turning reporting into a thing that helps senior leadership understand, where did my money go? Right? You’ve got an SEO team, an SEO budget. Things are happening. Where did my money go? Right? What are we doing? You know, Will, my brother, who spoke yesterday, by this great phrase that he’s drilled into me for, I don’t know, over a decade now, which is, you know, what would you do with an extra million dollars? Your reporting, the thing that you you give up to senior leadership every month, your reporting has to answer that question. It’s not about showing what has happened. Right? Ruth mentioned this yesterday. You know, showing organic revenue and traffic and keywords is trying to drive by looking in the rearview mirror. You’re trying to make decisions about the future based on what has happened. What we need to do is translate reporting into what is going to happen and what are we doing right now. So I want you all to close your eyes.

Everyone close your eyes. That’s a lot to ask on on morning after Busta Rhymes on day 4 of a, conference. Close your eyes. Visualize the reporting that you send every month. Visualize that report. Does it answer the question, how would I spend an extra million dollars on this channel? And if it doesn’t, you need to make it better. And you’ve got 30 days, 14 hours, 23 minutes, and 58 seconds to figure out how to do that by the end of May. It’s May 1st in case that joke didn’t didn’t work. I mean, you could do it for April too, but the the clock is even worse on that one. So you haven’t got long. Right? Reporting is, is important.

So how do we do this? Right? When I look at a lot of reporting that goes out, what often happens is, as I described, you’ll have some kind of chart or maybe it’s a Looker Studio report, something that says, here’s what happens to revenue, here’s what happens to traffic. And then there’ll be, like, an email or a document that goes with it that’s, like, a kind of narrativization of what’s being worked on, what we did this month, like, what the various work streams are, blah blah blah blah blah blah. You need to flip that, and you need to make the the narrativization, the the understanding of what is being worked on, you need to turn that into concrete operational metrics that you can report on just like you report on page views and revenue.

That might sound like a strange idea. It might sound like something that’s kind of abstract or hard to do. But there is an entire body of work and research about how to do this called input metrics. And I know that Ruth mentioned this yesterday. I’m gonna dive a little bit deeper into this, but input metrics is this idea that was popularized by Amazon but actually goes way, way back. It started in a field called statistical process control, which is all about management theory to understand, how do we understand what’s going on in the business, not about lagging indicators, right, like traffic and revenue and rankings, but leading indicators, things that we are doing now that we think will lead to future success. Now, Jeff Bezos talked about input metrics, controllable input metrics in, 2009, a shareholder letter to Wall Street. Isn’t that kind of amazing? Like, a shareholder letter to Wall Street, He’s talking about how they manage their metrics. He’s talking about input metrics as a key driver of their success. Okay?

And there’s a book called Working Backwards, that you can get that goes into more detail. There’s a specific chapter all about input metrics. You can also Google SEO input metrics, and I have an article that ranks, right there for you, that goes into more detail. But input metrics really is this idea that we can choose to report on metrics that are not lagging indicators. We can choose leading indicators to report on. Right? So you have this kind of spectrum. Like, imagine the spectrum. Right? Your lagging indicator is, like, revenue over here. Right? Like, traffic, revenue, rankings. Right? These are the things that have happened. Right? And then all the way on the other hand, you’ve got pure input metrics. So these are purely controllable things that we control, which is things like, did we publish a page of content maybe, or, did we write a title tag?

Things that are completely within our control that we can report on. And there’s a spectrum. Right? So when we talk about input metrics, it isn’t about pure, controllable input metrics, but it’s about choosing metrics that sit somewhere, not all the way to the right. Right? And so, this might be, for example, if you’re in a content publisher. Right? You may say, how many articles did we publish? It’s a pure input metric. How many how many articles did we publish that got more than five thousand page views in the first 90 days? Now you’re in the middle. Right? You’re in a we didn’t we can’t fully control the page views in the first 90 days, but we can control how many articles we published. And it’s more predictive.

It’s more predictive of what we’re working on and what we think future success looks like than just reporting on our entire blog, our entire resource center where we’re publishing content got x traffic and x revenue. Don’t get me wrong. Revenue and traffic is important to to report on, but it is, is not the whole picture. 

So, some other examples of things that you can do with input metrics, things like if you’re working on technical content. Right? You could say, how many pages have the correct schema. Right? Or you could measure core web vitals. You could say how many pay how many pages are passing core web vitals. And these are metrics that, actually, we’re all well versed in. Right? I think if any one of us in this room sat down and looked at a site, we would probably come up with, like, a list, right, like a checklist or an SEO audit, which I really hate, like a one time thing. And we’d be like, you should fix Core Web Vitals. You should fix your schema. You should write little title tags. You should add more content to your category pages, whatever the things are that you think will make a difference to the website. And then we deliver that in a report, and we say, you should go do these things.

Well, you know what you can also do is you can also make your monthly reporting say the same thing every single month. And you could say, this is a percentage of pages that are passing core web vitals. This is a percentage of pages that are passing schema. This is a number of pieces of content we published that meet all of various criteria. And the challenge here is you have to try and take everything that you think is your expertise and your insights, and you have to translate it into operational metrics.

Okay? Now, operational metrics sounds, scary. It might sound hard. Right? But it’s all the same things that we know how to do. It’s just embedding it in a framework of monthly reporting, right, to to go all the way up to executive leadership so they can answer the question, where did my money go? Right? The problem is, like, leadership, you know, CEOs, executive teams, they have, like, a black box mental model of SEO. Right? Every CEO that I speak to, they’re like, yeah, I have an SEO team or some kind of SEO budget, and, you know, some, you know, organic revenue comes out the other side, but I don’t really know what goes on in the middle. Right? And I think, actually, a lot of people in the SEO industry kind of take pride in that a little bit. There’s a little bit of, like, oh, yeah. We have all the secrets. Right? We have all the we know the magic. We know the dark arts to do all of the all of the the SEO things. It’s complicated. SEO is complicated. There’s a lot of things that go into SEO, a lot of ranking factors, a lot of science, blah blah blah blah blah blah. That ain’t gonna work. Right? That black box mental model of SEO isn’t going to help you get budget and buy in for things you want to do.

So these operational metrics that you want to work on, the trick is to choose them carefully. Right? Again, SEO audit, SEO checklist gives you a ton of things that you could do to a website. The trick with input metrics is to choose them using your expertise. Right? Input metrics are not neutral. Things like page views, things like revenue, things like rankings, these are metrics that come right out of the tools. Right? Search Console, GA, etc., etc., etc. They’re metrics that are easy to grab, and they’re easy to understand.

But input metrics, operational metrics, should be exactly unique to your situation, unique to the industry, unique to the site, unique to the projects that you think matter. Right? The key here is is that reporting is a channel to go up to the executive team to say, this is what’s important. This is what we’re working on. This is where we think investment should go, and this is what’s important. And so you have to choose them. Right? And so they’re not neutral. Right? The the the the idea that, metrics that come right out of the tools, they are neutral. Like, you didn’t choose them. Right? But input metrics are not neutral. You need to choose them wisely. You need to use your expertise to translate whatever you think is the right thing to work on into an operational metric.

I think Ruth mentioned this example a little bit yesterday, but, you can think of content quality. There’s a really great one here. I was like, we should improve our content quality. Content’s not good enough. Hands up. Who’s given that kind of recommendation before? Anyone? Yeah. I know. I know. I come on. I’ve done it too. I’ve done it. Everyone’s done it. We’ve all we’ve all been there. It’s, content’s not good enough. That’s a terrible recommendation. Right? It doesn’t help the the the organization understand, well, how do we make content quality better? Even if you accept the premise that content quality is lacking somehow, you have to translate your expertise into a set of operational metrics. Now it might be things like, you know, freshness. Right? So, like, when did we last update the page? It might be things like, does it have a unique hero image? It might be things like, was it reviewed by an expert? Does it have citations? What is the word count of the article? Right? Does it have links to the correct category pages or product pages that we think is, important?

Whatever those tangible things are, the qualities that we think makes content quality better, you can translate every single one of those into input metrics. And what that looks like, simply and plainly, you can just make a spreadsheet and track those things over time. And you can say, you know, this is our, a category, on our website, a category of content. In that category, we have x number of pages. Of those, x percentage have been reviewed by an expert or have a unique hero image. It’s not rocket science, but it does take work. And those metrics don’t come right out of analytics. Right? So so you can’t just rely on an export from some tools. Right? You have to make your own metrics.

Right? And I love this phrase, which is, you don’t want to run your business on somebody else’s metrics. Right? And that’s basically what we’re all doing. When we’re reporting on revenue, rankings, keywords, all of those things, they’re somebody else’s metrics. Even things like SEMrush, right, like a score and those other things, they’re all somebody else’s metrics. You’ve got to make your own metrics that really embed your expertise of what you think moves the needle.

Now, the, the other component of input metrics is that they should evolve over time. There’s a great example in the book Working Backwards from Amazon, where, you know, originally, they were like, well, let’s report on page views to product pages, which actually is a lagging indicator. Right? Page views to product pages. And then they were like, well, that’s not quite right. There’s a lot of different kinds of product pages. We should report on page views to product pages that are in stock, because page views to products that are out of stock are not that useful to us. Okay. And they started reporting on that. And then they realized that, eventually, after a bunch of iteration, they realized that the metric they should be reporting on is page views to products that are in stock and available for two day shipping. And they call that map that metric Fastrack. Fastrack products, I think, or something like that. They made their own metric. Right? Fastrack products is now a thing they can report on that is their own operational metric that helps them understand how to move the how to how to move the needle.

And then, you know, the the interesting thing about input metrics is that if you start doing this over time, you start to actually learn what works and what doesn’t work. Right? So you start to be able to see in the data, hey, this segment of our site has 400 pages. Previously, 30% of them had the correct schema on. We did a project. We moved the schema to 65%. What happened to page views? Right? 

So there’s now this connective tissue of demystifying the black box, not just for yourself, but also for, the executive leadership inside the company. What is the connective tissue between inputs, the things you actually worked on, right, where the money went, the money you spent on the SEO team and the SEO work. Where did it go? And what happened? Right? And so, again, in the in the book Working Backwards, you’ll you’ll you’ll read, this this process is very iterative. Right? It’s about choosing the metrics, trying to figure out, is this the right representative metric? How should it evolve over time? When we move that metric, does it move page views? Right? And I think, honestly, if a lot of us have sat here in the room, this whole idea of input metrics sounds nice. Then you put it in practice, and it’s like, oh, suddenly there’s a spreadsheet that shows if they did the thing that I told them to do, did it work? And it doesn’t always work. Right?

We’re in a wild SEO world where we don’t always know what works, and my brother presented a bunch of case studies yesterday, showing how all these tests, like, you have to run them on a very specific kind of site. Adding text works. Removing text works. Depends on website. Depends on keyword. Depends on ranking. Right? And so we don’t always know what works, and this is a process through which you can learn over time to get better at allocating resources against things that move the needle for the business. 

And that ultimately is what happens. So, I’ll I’ll take a little story from, from my day job at Raptive. We’ve just spent the last nine months actually operationalizing input metrics inside the organization. I know I’ve got 30 days, 14 hours, 11 minutes, and 48 seconds countdown timer, but it took us nine months. So give yourself a little brace.

This is long and hard. You gotta get all the metrics and all the data, in all all the right ways in order to be able to do this, but we got to a point where we’re now reporting on input metrics. And for those who don’t know, Raptive is a business that powers advertising for almost 6,000 sites across the web. So we have 6,000 different properties that we’re reporting across, and we now have input metrics for every single site in the network, showing a variety of things that we believe, as the SEO team inside of AppDev, we believe are the things that if we move the needle on, right, the the the inputs, the leading indicators, if those things change, we believe page views, will increase on the other side.

And here’s the funny thing about input metrics. So we just had a meeting on Tuesday about this. We presented some input metrics, and we said, Okay, great. This is the data, blah blah blah. And my CEO turned to me, and he was like, Okay. We have a column in there, which is content freshness. Right? So we have a column in there, which is how many updates are these creators making across these 6,000 sites every month. And it was like, okay, order of magnitude, 30,000 or 40,000, right, every month. How do we make that number go up? This is the CEO coming to me and saying, I think we should put more money in column f in this spreadsheet. What do you think? Right? This isn’t me going to the CEO and being like, I think we should spend more money on SEO. SEO is great. We’re gonna get SEO outcomes. We’re gonna do blah blah blah blah. This is the CEO coming to me and saying, you have you have demystified the black box sufficiently for me to look at these metrics and say, how do we move that metric? And how many page views would I get if we put more more money in that column? Right?

Now in Raptive’s case, it’s a little more complicated because we actually don’t control or operate any of those 6,000 websites. And so we actually have a this is gonna get slightly, technical, but we actually have two layers of input metrics. We have what we call creator input metrics, which are the things that the sites in our network, the leading indicators for those sites. And then there are actually our internal wrapped up operational input metrics, which are the things that we actually fully control. Right? So on that spectrum, right, things that Raptive controls, right, which is a recommendation was made to a publisher or, we we suggested some kind of action. There’s things that the sites in our network can do. So this is like making a a page update or producing more content. And then, obviously, you have page views all the way over the on the other end of the spectrum.

So, you know, if you only take one thing away from this talk, it’s that reporting is this incredible communication channel up to senior executives. It is not, hey. Here’s a PDF. Read it if you want. It’s gonna tell you a bunch of numbers about what has happened. Right? I think a lot of SEO teams that I’ve worked with over the years have been frustrated that their reporting doesn’t get looked at, and that is a vicious cycle because they say, well, nobody looked at reporting. Why should we make it better? Like like, nobody cares. Right? What are we what are we doing here? Right? Well, nobody cares because you’re not telling them anything about the black box. You’re not telling them anything about what is actually going on. All you’re reporting on is what has happened. And I’ve been in a lot of leadership, executive meetings over the years. You know, being a consultant gives you a wonderful view into all kinds of different organizations. And every single executive leadership meeting that I’ve been in, they spend more time looking at the operational metrics than the output metrics. They look at the revenue. Right? They look at the traffic.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s like, yeah. Great. Okay. What happened? Let’s talk about that. Let’s look at that. Okay. Now let’s talk about what are we doing about it? What are we gonna do next? Right? You can really simplify the entire executive function as simply a question of resource allocation. Where are we putting our resources next in order to drive the outcomes that we want? And if your reporting is not speaking to the question of where do the resources go next, it’s not going to get opened, it’s not going to get looked at, and you’re not going to get the budget, and you’re not going to get the buy in that you want.

So input metrics are important. Again, like I said, there is a whole body of work about them out there. So if you’re thinking, okay, how do I take this idea how do I actually put it into practice? You can start with the article that I wrote, SEO input metrics. You can Google it, but you can also just look for input metrics generally. You know, the dirty little secret is, everyone makes fun in the SEO industry of, like, it depends. Right? Like, is this gonna work? It depends. Is this investment gonna pay or pay off? It depends. Right? I I spent enough time in other disciplines, in, products, in technology, in brand marketing. You know what’s also a meme in all those industries? It depends. Right? It’s not unique to us, everybody. Right? It depends is a meme in every single industry because we don’t know. We’re doing business, not science here. Right? It’s another favorite phrase of my brothers. We’re doing business, not science.

There are many situations where we need to find the best metrics we can and make the best decisions we can about resource allocation, and we need to do things. We don’t need to spend six months trying to do SEO studies, correlation analysis, etcetera. Most teams don’t have time or bandwidth or budget for that. It’s too slow. Right? And so what we need to do is we need to find a way to have enough operational metrics to make some kind of decision about how to do resource allocation. And if you can get involved in that conversation, then you can get a better job. That’s my pitch. 

One last thing. I launched the SEO MBA a few years ago, and I took it down when I took my full time job to focus on the job, but hasn’t stopped people asking me every single week when it’s gonna wait. How can I buy the course? When’s it gonna go live? And so, I’m putting it back live today. You can go to seomba[.]com. None of the office hours and kind of, like, hands on work is there, but the self-serve courses are both there at discount price, and you can buy them right now. You get all the videos. You get all the workbooks. You get all the assignments. You can work through all yourself.

And, so that’s all I got. Thank you very much.