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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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