Using an SEO Test Budget to Earn C-Suite Investment ft Mark A Preston

Mark Preston: Well, I’ll give you an example. So maybe you know the value you can bring. You know that you can get from here right up here. You know the path. But the HR team are really struggling to recruit people. So you can’t actually service new customers. So what you have to then do is rather than having the focus on driving new customers in, you have to change your focus on helping the HR team get more exposure online to recruit people and get CVs in. And that’s the sort of scenario, one scenario of many, where the SEO team can help. You know, it’s about understanding the challenges, but saying, well, how can I help them make a difference? Because until they solve their bit and get people within the business to service more and more customers, all I’m going to do is create a massive headache for this CEO.

Garrett Sussman: Right. No, and that makes so much sense. Whether it’s like HR, whether it’s like the advertising PPC department, or even just engineering, we’re trying to identify ways to help them in mutually beneficial projects that ultimately get you that much closer to your point, removing headaches for the C-suite where across the board, wherever they are.

Mark Preston: Yeah, yeah, it is. It’s really understanding and going into a business and not being afraid to talk to people. Yeah, you know, yeah. Not being afraid to just say, “Oh, you’re to the CEO. Have you got 10 minutes? Can we just sit down and chat?” You know, it’s not being afraid, it’s understanding. And it’s not going in like a bull in a china shop saying, “Oh, I’m this big name and I’m this and I’m that and I can get you from this to this and all that.” Forget that. You go in as though you know absolutely nothing about that business. Right? Because perception kills everything.

Garrett Sussman: Yeah. Because everybody has a perception of a brand or a company or a business they’re not involved in. Well, you need to go in there, removing that perception to get a clear understanding of what actually is happening. Because marketing teams, their job is, PR teams, their job is to build a perception of that business that they want you to think about. It might not be the real challenges.

Mark Preston: Yeah, no, I mean, that brings us back to what makes me think about Wix, where it’s like, you know, they had this perception for the longest time and it was a real challenge of whether or not it was a good product for SEO. And then I can imagine with all the investment in building out the product to continue to make it better for SEO, then there was the process of changing that perception where the product matches the general brand. And now I feel like more and more people are using the product. Now I can imagine that is going to be a challenge, the bigger the organization. There are different levels, especially depending on where you’re at.

Garrett Sussman: Do you think that CMOs… So like CMOs specifically, has their perception of SEO change, especially with the, you know, what we were talking about, a lot of it takes time, right? And one common thing you hear in the world of CMOs is they don’t have time. So how do you balance kind of the hourglass running out of sand sooner than you want and needing to get like actual wins versus the reality that some of these transformational changes don’t happen overnight?

Mark Preston: Quick wins. That is the answer. Quick wins. It’s about going into this with the CMO and saying, okay, before we start on this 12-month, two-year trajectory, let’s see what we already have. Let’s work together on making the audience we already have better. Let’s work on our existing estate rather than pumping money into producing new things. Let’s tweak what we already have and make it work better for us. Let’s improve the quality of the visitors we get. Yes, we might reduce the overall number of visitors, but the quality of those visitors will improve. Now, it’s better to improve the quality of those visitors and the conversion rate. And if you as an SEO help within the first three, six months to do that, I mean, and the CFO can see money rolling in because you’ve tweaked it and the conversion rate has gone from 2% to 5% to whatever it is, I mean, they’re going to love you. Instance, then you can then go in and they’ll give you whatever you need because you’ve built, you’ve done the quick wins, you’ve proved and I find a lot of people in SEO team, they go in immediately trying to build more and more. They go in and say, build more and more, let’s write all this content, let’s do digital PR, let’s go out there, let’s do all this and that. But then you look at what they already have and well, all they’re doing is driving an audience they’re not really targeting. As an example, I work with a big brand and when I went in and looked at everything from a perspective point of view, only 3.2% of all the traffic was their target audience, people who were genuinely going to be interested in purchasing their product or service. These are the sorts of things that you can do initially to actually solve that issue.

Garrett Sussman: I think to that point, to tie it back to the economic environment that we’re in, a lot of businesses as opposed to finding reasons to spend more money do tighten up in general and it’s the most successful, I feel like organizations in a time of an economic drawback is to find efficiencies and find improvements internally with what you already have. Whether you’re new to an organization or you’ve been there for a while, there’s never been a better case to probably revisit your existing resources and just make them better, to your point.

Mark Preston: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of streamlining that can be done within many organizations and many teams. I think over the past few years and the increase in the industry and everything and everyone and anyone were just taking people on and because the job market was so vast and opportunities were out there, people were often being offered silly money for doing the role they’re in. I find then now we’re suddenly in an economic challenging time and you think, oh dear, right? Well, yes. Well, who are our customers? We are selling Prada handbags here and is our audience going to change or whatever it is. I was looking at that, but it’s about streamlining things, making efficiencies within the processes you’ve got. I’m not talking about streamlining and sacking everybody. Although that’s happening. Which is going on obviously in the industry, but that’s happening because they haven’t thought about the future, they haven’t thought about streamlining things. All they’ve done is thought, well, we’ve got more and more people to service. Let’s just bring people in, chuck money at them, let’s get them through the door without initially helping to streamline these processes along the way.

Garrett Sussman: Yeah, you see it so much in you see it so much in big tech or just in times of economic growth, that that’s the whole thought process, especially in VCs, it’s like growth, growth, growth. Sometimes you really just are shooting yourself in the foot by trying to get too big too fast. Then to your point, it’s like you’re not actually addressing an audience that cares about your product. Mark, this is such great stuff. I feel like I could talk to you for a while about so many things, let alone the business of SEO, but I want to dive into our rapid fire rankings.