Understanding the Issue:
Causes and Effects: Discuss the underlying causes of the problem and how it impacts the reader’s life or work.
Believe it or not, any project or marketing effort producing URLs or web pages, especially ones that are indexable completely falls within the scope of SEO.
That being said, keeping efforts focused and getting real results takes absolute precision. The right focus can save teams valuable time and clarify the viability of a strategy.
Define the Problem: Clearly articulate the issue the book aims to address.
What Companies Will Truly Benefit From Outsourcing SEO and Marketing Analysis?
When a company hires or pays for SEO work there is a set number of reason’s possible for that job posting or professional on retainer:
Most Marketing Teams Hate SEO Management
- They have a marketing team or some professionals who handle various aspects of SEO implementations or reporting but no one who really owns the strategy overall. Could be a CMO or a marketing director with some knowledge but none of them have time to handle SEO completely or really do the work it takes to win. Sometimes the marketing team is literally trying to manage a website to it’s own demise without the help of an SEO. When you know what targets are important and who your competitors are you can end up outsourcing the work it takes to manage complicated aspects of things like reporting, analytics, link-building, session analysis, keyword research and so forth.
- They have a large website they purchased and even though they can manage it they don’t have a technical SEO. There are some kinds of problems that most companies run into because they don’t need a website that large. When you have an enterprise level site with complicated aspects of Technical SEO or international SEO it becomes a different subject altogether. Rather than focusing primarily on content you may have harder problems that impact SEO. Problems that are hard would be ones you can’t automate, ones that require a bit of thinking time and real analysis. Eventually a lack of understanding and planning regarding the technical aspects of search engines will hurt any company’s domain in some way. Whatever progress made from years of successful efforts will be diluted without examining what’s going on under the hood.
- They have an industry that is complicated in of itself and keywords take specialized knowledge to understand what they are aside from specialized information needed in SEO the sheer size or mixed intent from keywords alone when trying to rank for complicated subjects or phrases are countless. None the less you can be overwhelmed just how fast organic traffic can shrivel up from simple things such as deleting pages or removing URLS without a strategy.
- They maybe understand the ballpark of keywords that are valuable but aren’t sure how they win them in a reasonable amount of time. They see competitors ranking for more keywords than them or they are doing SEO campaigns that can’t beat them.
- They used to get a lot of organic traffic or they suddenly lost it and they need to regain it fast as possible. I think this one is self explanatory but essentially if you had a lot of traffic and keywords ranking and one day you woke up and it was gone you would think you want to get it back. The truth is that important projects such as website migrations and design updates can have extremely negative SEO impact. Just find an expert you can call upon anytime you see alarming changes in organic traffic you can’t explain, you will be better off for it almost every time. Since SEO website migrations were the start of my career let me just warn anyone reading this that the pressure to regain lost rankings or traffic can be slow at first but eventually come on like a whirlwind for businesses.
- They aren’t seeing an increase anymore from their regular efforts, they can’t mail in their strategy anymore due to “changes in algorithms” or the industry is more competitive. So across the aisle of companies that grow so large they have technical SEO worries you have the companies that are essentially forced to compete due to changes in the market place or expectations from customers. As most companies will be forced to have very responsive websites and Search Engines get better at serving results you will most likely see this kind of scenario unfold all the time. You may look over reports one month and you realize that your once successful efforts are no longer relevant, rather than creating a blog and optimizing you need something that is beyond your capability to plan. The industry may change or maybe everyone got better and caught up with you so your SEO just isn’t as valuable without a pivot in strategy that takes the latest and greatest tactics from a company that is ready to go to war.
- They don’t really understand SEO or care to organize efforts and audit “what is working or not working.”
- They don’t have the real time, resources, or experience to do the work that really matters or a system for analysis. They have a desire to do ongoing SEo and to get lasting results but many teams are overwhelmed by the number of options for tools and terminology alone. Beyond understanding basic SEO processes or clarifying context around terms like domain authority and keyword scores you have some companies who hire or pay for services who just know their competitors do it so they jump in the race which is actually a great approach to start with if you have basic knowledge.
Real-Life Examples: Share relatable anecdotes or case studies to illustrate the problem’s impact.
What Kinds of Mistakes Do Companies Make When Paying An SEO Agency?
Without having a clear direction of why SEO is important and what results they need to see for impact they never actually focus or allow themselves to identify what is really needed to win. Many companies will make crucial mistakes or want answers for campaigns that SEO can’t really accomplish.
Most of these companies not making progress fall into one of these three categories:
Over optimizing a blog or updating old content with no real direction:
They continue to optimize old content to try and make use of things that should really just be deleted.
Either they have a blog that has way too many pages that they built with no understanding of what works or doesn’t or they literally just have too much content and they believe it’s all worth keeping since they paid for it.
Why this is bad:
Many companies pay agencies or experts for SEO services without really buying into their expertise or questioning what is really important. They give them or you a login and try to manipulate whatever on page data they can to try and “win the most keywords possible with the pages they already have from their last SEO company.”
What ends up happening after a few months:
They are so concerned with getting the most out of everything rather than just finding what works. They max out their requests, meetings, and use you to optimize stuff because “that’s what they pay you to do.” You optimize pages that really aren’t good pages to begin with because they won’t delete them or they are obsessed with finding blogs and directing your attention to terrible pages that they for some reason think would be great if people could find them.
This isn’t a bad thing exclusively, why would you not want to make use of things you have on your site to win more traffic right? Wrong, growing organic traffic without really qualifying if it’s the right traffic is usually a recipe for disaster. If you are a master at work, making routine changes to blogs and winning more traffic to consistently improve rankings isn’t really all that necessary and not all keywords are equal.
Knowing what needs to be won at all costs and what is more of a secondary target to lockdown main targets is essential for long term success and impacting sales.
Paying for service without measuring and securing internally what impact is really needed:
Like I said before, if the company doesn’t have the time, resources to complete without help. They maybe have some tools in house that they pay for to track keywords but they aren’t sure what to focus on entirely to win what they need.
From there they never really discuss who they think they are up against or start asking questions that don’t measure real impact, rather they desperately are trying to use SEO to satisfy other goals that SEO can’t fix.
Why this is bad:
They operate based on FOMO and would rather just pay money to make sure they don’t miss out on what they see as a viable source of traffic for their brand, services, or products.
Overanalyzing a plan, based on limited context or having a cynical attitude about organic traffic’s ability to convert to sales.
Sometimes you have a company that is struggling to make sense of a good plan and would rather do the easy things because they read somewhere that was what it took to win. They want to take the time to understand the strategy or what they need to do for success but they don’t have the capacity or patience to listen.
You are always needing to be weary about 2 things whenever the situation arises with a client.
1. Clients that don’t want to educate themselves or read 3 articles and essentially make-believe that SEO is easier than it really is.
2. A client or company that mistakes your ability to acquire organic traffic with their organizations ability to magically fix their sales issues.
The worst situations to be in are ones where you are updating on progress and getting growing clicks directly from Google just to have them question what you are actually doing or stating that the work is not impacting their impact their bottom line fast enough.
An inexperienced marketing manager putting in countless requests for content optimizations while questioning your expert opinion on strategy is absolutely a lose-lose.
Why this is a bad thing:
Having someone be excited to get some help on additional efforts is never a bad thing, what is a bad thing would be substituting these requests for a real strategy or understanding of how to beat competition.
Having a business focus on the details is kind of like mistaking a really good set of plays a football team has for the actual understanding of what play needs to be called at what times.
Businesses overly focused on one specific metric for too long and not the relationship of all metrics considered can never grasp how agile the SEO market is and how to stay competitive:
Over 70% of businesses struggle to equate marketing activity with revenue and SEO is by far a universal culprit. Before I dive deep into attribution model comparison I will share that this is really more of a selling problem than a marketing problem.
Many brands or companies with some experience in digital marketing typically over-report and over focus on specific KPI’s without thinking critically of what influences reporting overall
Step back and ask yourself if you are just ranking for keywords rather than providing value by educating customers before they start the real shopping.
Knowing what it takes to win and all the ways you could win are different aspects of an SEO strategy:
How do we match up to these competitors in our industry and use what we do best to create an online experience that actually inspires action?
How do we go beyond what everyone is doing and create our websites landing pages, blog content, and other influencing efforts to move forward in a way that tools can’t tell us?
Who is owning the strategy and looking out for what the user needs to see on every key SEO landing page?
This is where it gets hard for those who really just want easy results fast with no understanding if they are the right results:
What does it matter if we have the keyword on the page enough times or added some text to help influence the search engine?
It means that we show our page to move users and get more visibility but are we really making the right first impression?
Why are we so in a rush to answer this question for users?
Is it really a valid touch point for those getting more familiar with our industry, products, or services?
Why does it matter if we acquire 3 links for this page to rank if the page isn’t useful to begin with? If this page can’t generate its own links over time when will it be need to get links again?
How to start turning the page on your competition:
What happens when SEO content is so effective that user’s return without asking them?
What happens when you now understand the user’s interest for every keyword possibility so well that many previous targets or competitor rankings don’t make sense?
The truth hurts but many SEO efforts when you become an expert transform from options to becoming outright a waste of time, money, effort, or a dead end from the start.
Before we continue, this is the most important thing when it comes to effective SEO.
Going far beyond what SEO tools or keyword difficulty scores can tell you and figuring out how your company’s experience can truly serve the interest of users in a way Google can clearly recognize.
This means analyzing and imagining not just what you could win but knowing what you can create to out maneuver your competitors who are doing the easy work or generating pages faster.
Doubling down on the hard work and learning how to best convey your expertise in a topic is slower but when done correctly and authentically is a sure path to dominating the imitators using common methods without any true grit.
