← Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
5 things growth marketers need to understand about SEO
00:21:56
Loading summary
Transcript29 lines
- [00:00]
Podcast Announcer
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search podcast, Jordan Cooney.
- [00:43]
Jordan Cooney
Hello SEOs. My name is Jordan Cooney from Pre Visible and this week we're going to discuss SEO for Growth Marketing. Joining me is Jason Shafton, who is the founder and CEO of Winston Francois, which is a growth consulting firm working with brands to provide strategic guidance across product growth, market marketing and organizational design to support sustainable value creation. Today, Jason and I are going to discuss five things growth marketers need to understand about SEO. Okay, here's my conversation with Jason Shafton, the founder and CEO of Winston Francois. Jason, welcome to the Voice of Search podcast.
- [01:21]
Jason Shafton
Great to be here. Thanks, Jordan.
- [01:22]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, so it's great to have someone with such a diverse background. You've been at a variety of different healthcare startups, you've worked in various different roles. From the intro you share with me, I'd love to get just a little bit background on yourself for our listeners, how you got into the SEO space and then maybe we can dive into our core topic today.
- [01:41]
Jason Shafton
Yeah, absolutely. As a 20 year growth marketing veteran, I couldn't have avoided SEO. Right. It's a critical part of a growth and marketing strategy. And so over the course of my career for from Google to a number of startups to Big Entertainment Network in New York, I just had to understand and utilize all the tools in the toolbox to grow and help the various brands, products and services that I've marketed grow. So I've been very fortunate to work with some of the brightest and sharpest SEOs out there and I'm excited to share some of the things I've learned from them with your listeners.
- [02:15]
Jordan Cooney
Awesome. Great. And before we dive in here, tell us a little bit about Winston Francois, how you guys help brands and what you guys do there and then maybe some successes that you guys have seen in SEO.
- [02:28]
Jason Shafton
Yeah, absolutely. So Winston Francois is a growth consultancy. It's a little bit different than a traditional kind of marketing agency or a consulting firm. Our approach is to come in and provide fractional growth and marketing leadership at the kind of like head of growth, head of marketing level in partnership with the leadership team and investors board members. We work with a lot of high growth tech startups mid to later stage and we come in and we provide that strategic point of view and help shape the strategy. And then we actually have operators that can actually execute on that strategy and bring their talents across a variety of disciplines including SEO to the business. So we have teams that think about product marketing, lifecycle marketing, performance marketing, SEO and content marketing, PR and communications, brand marketing, including creative direction, design, copywriting. So we bring really a whole marketing and growth team in a box that we can drop into a company and help them scale their operations. And then the way we're different is we actually will help set up the internal process infrastructure and systems to scale that effort beyond our engagement with the company. So over the course of 6 to 18 months we'll build the systems and build the team and then we'll actually move on to the next company that we're going to help and we help the company establish their own internal marketing and growth team. And a couple of successes just quickly from my career pre Winston Francois, when I was at Headspace we grew or organic traffic from SEO and our content strategy 400% year over year. A number of the folks that I work with at Headspace now work with us at Winston Francois and for our, for our clients that we work with now, we've, we've been very fortunate to work with a number of really cool leading brands, one of which is Kajabi. It's a creator economy brand that helps them build and scale their creator businesses. So if you have online courses or kind of a big list of folks that you want to market to and sell various products and services online, Kajabi helps facilitate that. They're a client of ours that we help scale their traffic, reduce their cost per acquisition through a combination of organic and paid efforts. And another more recent company that we started working with is called Doorloop. They work in the property tech space. They're software for landlords to help them manage their tenant relationships and their tenants in their various properties. We've helped them dramatically reduce their cost of acquisition and scale up effectively through our approaches across performance marketing, paid search as well as organic search across the various SEO strategies and content marketing stuff we've implemented for them. So really exciting to be here and to talk about some of the things we've learned. I think SEO has changed a lot in the advent of the AI boom that we're all experiencing and so I'm sure there's a lot of folks that and a lot of conversations that you've been having about that.
- [05:09]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah. So maybe I'll start with a controversial question. Before we go into the five things that growth marketers should know, let's talk about what a growth marketer is. You know, I think for a lot of our listeners, growth marketers is a nice facade. For someone who just pays money for advertising, you're just a paid marketer. So I'd love to get your perspective on that, because candidly, I think for our listeners who are predominantly SEOs and content marketers, that's usually the perspective that they get is someone who says they're a growth marker. They come in. But candidly, it's just really someone who is a good paid marketer.
- [05:44]
Jason Shafton
Yeah, There's a big difference in my opinion between somebody who's a media buyer and buys ads and someone who is a growth marketer. So from my perspective, a growth marketer. And just so we're clear, growth is the intersection of product and marketing. Right? So growth marketers are people who are data driven in their decision making and are going to leverage all of the channels available to them at their disposal to, to launch and scale products, services, campaigns, businesses, and in doing so, they're going to build growth experimentation programs. They're going to prioritize different experiments that they'd like to run. There's a framework I like to use called rice, which is reach, impact, confidence and effort. And these growth marketers who are truly growth marketers and not just paid, paid media buyers, to your point, are people that are actually thinking about all the different levers that they can pull to drive growth and the way that they're going to measure that growth and do attribution, whether that's kind of less sophisticated last click or multi channel, multi touch attribution, where they're looking at how different channels influence the journey that the user or the customer goes before they transact or purchase.
- [06:45]
Jordan Cooney
Awesome. No, I fully agree. I think a true genuine growth marketer is someone who is genuinely a product person, understands how a product can integrate with a customer, and then, like you said, uses data to truly identify that lever in that acquisition channel or that traffic channel. So let's lean into our conversation today on some of these tips that growth marketers should know about SEO. So what are some of those areas that you've learned and maybe some experiences that you've gathered about SEO that growth marketers should know and understand?
- [07:19]
Jason Shafton
Yeah, absolutely. So there are five things that I think are must know for growth marketers to really understand SEO. First is that great SEO requires and ultimately creates a great user experience. Second is technical. SEO is the foundation which a successful SEO program is built, but not a ticket to success on its own. Three, Good SEO isn't free to the point you just made. 4. Content quality matters. There's a huge misconception about how content just for SEO doesn't need to be great. And five, SEO is not an immediate growth channel. But with the right investment, big results can happen over time. I'm happy to dive into each of those if there's a particular one you want to start with.
- [07:55]
Jordan Cooney
Well, let's start with the last one. It's probably one of my favorite conversations with and without SEOs, because at the end of the day, right, whether you're a growth marketer, you're an SEO, you're a content writer, you're a junior associate listening to this podcast, and you're just getting your first job at an agency or consulting firm. The reality is that you hear everyone say that SEO is going to take time, but what does that mean? My parents told me that things took time. Right. And so the reality is, I think there's a real adverse reaction when you hear that. And so how do we set that expectation and how do we manage the time that it takes SEO for SEO to mature and develop in an organization?
- [08:40]
Jason Shafton
Yeah, it's a great question. I love the reference to parents. We have a three and a half, almost four year old daughter and she says about my wife's pregnant, she says about meeting her little baby sister. It's too long to wait, dad. So waiting is hard, right? SEO isn't immediate. It requires the right investment and patience to get the results that happen over time. You know, it takes a very different timeline than more traditional immediate response growth channels. You know, you mentioned kind of like the, the growth marketer that is, is really just a paid media buyer. People that come in and just buy, you know, Google or meta ads are going to try to get immediate results and sometimes that's what you need and you just got to go do that. But if you're looking to build a strong organic profile over time, you know, flexing up the investment that you make in SEO and its initiatives will yield those results. But the timeline for those results, there's no like magic trick or hack to expedite them. So I like to Compare SEO&SEM Search engine marketing to help folks kind of understand this distinction. So the SEO strategies involve, you know, on page optimization Link building, content creation and technical improvements. And unlike SEM, SEO, it doesn't involve direct payment to search engines for visibility, but it relies on organic methods to improve rankings. Whereas with SEM and other paid channels, advertisers can just pay search engines or display ad networks to show their ads prominently in the search results or on their on their pages to drive traffic more frequently and immediately or near immediately versus, you know, over time, and I've seen this with the companies that I've worked with over the years, that if you make the right investments in great content and you build the right technical SEO infrastructure, the organic traffic is compounding, it grows over time. Whereas, you know, performance marketing, you put a dollar in and you get a dollar worth of ad traffic out, SEO, you put a dollar into SEO, it might yield nothing back in the first month, but you know, two, three months down the line, that compounding effect, you could have many, many dollars worth of worth of output.
- [10:42]
Jordan Cooney
And so one thing that'd be interesting, Jason, to get your perspective on is in that period of time that it is that you start to see the return, right? Which is what most businesses and marketers want, is they want the return. But there's so much that SEO offers in terms of understanding your progression towards a return. How do we better manage those expectations as SEOs or as growth marketers, that time in between and what KPIs or what data should we be thinking about or looking at?
- [11:15]
Jason Shafton
Well, I know we're going to talk about the KPIs in another episode, but I'll hint at them just to say there's a lot of leading indicators, right? As we think about the impact of SEO in the short term, while it might not be that I'm getting that return on investment in terms of actual dollars back into the business, I might be seeing things like improving the traffic, the quality of the traffic, reducing the bounce rate. You know, the bounce rate is going down, more people are sticking around because the content is more relevant based on what they're looking for. The ranking on search engine results pages is going up. There's a number of ways that we can see in the data that hey, this is directionally moving us towards that return. And then as those, as those factors all kind of come, that's when the compounding return on investment, I start to see that. So let's say you're not ranking on the first page results for your top keywords and queries that you care about. And then after making the right investments in content and technical SEO infrastructure, you start to improve. Okay. We had none of our top keywords ranking. Now two or three of them ranking now, oh, 10, 20 of them. We're getting in the first page of search results and we're starting to see real traffic from that. And that traffic is starting to convert. Oh, and now we're actually making money.
- [12:20]
Jordan Cooney
Absolutely. And I think one of the key variables in the success of the time component of SEO is really setting that expectation early of what those KPIs are going to be in that in between phase. Right. And I think that helps a lot. It helps with parenting. I have three children. If you tell a kid what's going to come and what's going to happen, they're going to be far more patient than just telling them. Wait, that never works. So giving those leading KPIs in advance and setting that expectation is super key in managing the outcome of SEO.
- [12:55]
Jason Shafton
Agreed. Are you familiar with the marshmallow experiment with the kids that they did years ago?
- [12:59]
Jordan Cooney
Yes.
- [13:01]
Jason Shafton
They give the kid one marshmallow on a plate and they're waiting in a room and they say, okay, I'm going to be right back. And if you don't eat that, you can have the second marshmallow. And delay gratification is hard. SEOs like that. SEO is delayed gratification. SEO is waiting for the second marshmallow and not eating it. Most kids are just going to. As soon as you turn your back, that marshmallow is in their mouth. But a great SEO and a great, frankly, a great leadership team and a business that understands how to make long term bets and investments. You know, they get to have all the marshmallows.
- [13:30]
Jordan Cooney
That's right. That's right, Absolutely. So let's, let's transition to another one of your five points. Content quality. You know, especially right now, I mean, we're recording here in March, Google's in the middle of a major update, a spam update, as well as a core update. And you know, at least what Google tells us is that this is all about quality. And they tell us that with very little information or data to back it up. But anyway, that's another story for another day and another podcast episode. But in terms of content quality, what is your perspective on that? And I really want to dive into this question from the viewpoint of the growth marketer versus the SEO versus the content writer. And this is in organizations that are a little bit larger, you have these different roles. You have growth marketers in an organization, you have SEO departments and teams, and you have writers, editors, content contributors, and there's usually a lot of debate between those three groups as to what is content quality.
- [14:30]
Jason Shafton
Yeah, I mean, the growth marketer is probably clamoring. I want as much content as possible. I just need traffic. I got to get my numbers up.
- [14:36]
Jordan Cooney
Give it to me now.
- [14:37]
Jason Shafton
Yeah, the SEO is saying, well, we've got to make sure that we're not going to get dinged in terms of content quality and we want to have really great stuff on the, on the site and drive high quality, relevant traffic that converts well. And the content writer is probably saying, you know, leave me alone, just let me write something good. Like stop, you know, stop yelling in both of my ears, the two of you, like, just, I'm going to go, I'm going to go write some things. And the other folks are like, come on, let's, can we get, can you hurry it up? Like, give me the, give me the written content. And then, you know, they walk their way over to chat GPT on their keyboard and they want to, they want to just spit something out quickly that's, that's not very good. Right. So I think there's, there's definitely that tension between those different constituents as you mentioned. And then I think the thing that's prevalent across the industry right now is this misconception that content quality doesn't matter for SEO. I just want traffic. Right. But it turns into this, well, let's just lean on AI generated content or thin content or bad content to drive the bulk of that SEO content on a given site. And it just couldn't be further from the truth. With SEO, content quality is paramount. And to your point about the updates that Google's making, like this is even more paramount. And they're going to continue to ding bad actors and folks that are misbehaving and they're being intentionally vague with the things that they do because they don't want to hand the playbook to the adversaries. Right. So we have to be white hat here. We have to do the right thing, which is creating valuable, relevant and high quality content that drives engagement and that is well written and informative, that has this high converting, that's targeting the keywords that we care about and that helps us build domain authority and position the brand the way that we want to. There's a ton of additional signals I could go into, but I'll pause there. That's the stuff that I think really matters.
- [16:15]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah. And at the end of the day, a big part of it is defining the voice of the company. Right. And not losing what your identity as an organization and company is and who you're trying to reach. Your audience, your customer, your end user. And that's the crazy part about content quality. It's probably why Google doesn't give us a lot of direction as to what it is. I mean, at least they think that they do. But whenever you read one of the documents, it's more confusing than the Constitution and Bible put together. It is that, candidly, content quality is hundreds, if not thousands of different signals and factors and inputs, and organizations need to be really mindful that all those signals and factors don't add up to a single formula. There's a lot of different formulas in testing and evaluating those formulas to ensure you're reaching your customer. That's. That's really the goal of a growth marketer and good SEO.
- [17:08]
Jason Shafton
Yep. I totally agree. Just to hammer home the point that you're making, that the frequent updates, the algorithms means that it's just not worth it to try to game the system, but rather it's the best thing you can do as a great SEO strategist is to genuinely build great content that creates real user engagement that's designed to provide value and share information in a way that sends the right signals back to those algorithms. Oh, they stayed on the site a long time. They, you know, they're. The links are being shared on social. There's a bunch of good signal to the search engines that this stuff is high quality, 100%.
- [17:45]
Jordan Cooney
So I know we're running short on time here for this episode, but I do want to ask you a really important question because it's so special to have such an expert growth marketer on our show who can help our listeners learn about growth marketing. One of the challenges we often see or witness as SEOs is this debate between growth marketing and product marketing about what's happening. We can call it CRO, we can call it lead attribution, lead tracking, but essentially it's all about is the experience we have on the page delivering the outcome that we want in the company once we have that traffic. Right. So we're now no longer having this discussion today about, like, how do we get more visits? How do we get higher rankings? Like, yes, that's already happening. But now we're in this world where, you know, the boss comes into the SEO's office and says, you're not giving me enough leads. And the SEO goes, but I gave you 200% more traffic. And so how, as a growth marketer, do you think about that challenge and how do you build A coalition with those Experts like the SEOs and content folks to ensure that you're getting the right outcome for the business.
- [18:59]
Jason Shafton
Yeah, and I think it actually ties to the first point, which is great. SEO requires and creates a great user experience. So if you build great content and to your point about conversion rate optimization and designing a website that is seamless and frictionless and makes it easy for the user to convert as you throw more traffic at it, if it's high quality traffic, the additional users should convert. Right. And if they don't, then there's either issues on the quality of the traffic side or there's issues with the way that the site performs. So when we think about, like our SEO landing pages, you know, that is the first experience that a user will have at the site. So it's a, it's a critical step in providing a great first impression for the brand and also making sure that you're just following great kind of product design best practices, set up your site effectively. You know, use best practices for where you place your CTA buttons and colors that you use high contrast and, you know, things that we, that we know to be true for technical SEO and accessibility are also good for user experience. Right. And so when we start to build a great user experience, we'll see that, you know, that team that is shouting like, hey, you know, I need more leads. Well, Here are the 10 things that are wrong on the site right now that need to be fixed. And it, you know, it's always my position that, like, product trumps all. Like, you have to give a great product and a great product and user experience before you can go throw a bunch of traffic at it. Because if it's a, if it's a crappy product, if it's a bad experience, it doesn't matter how much traffic we send, people are not going to stick around, they're not going to purchase transact, become a user, a subscriber, be an engaged part of that experience.
- [20:24]
Jordan Cooney
100%. That's a great place for us to wrap up this episode of the Voice to Search podcast. Thank you to Jason Shafton, founder and CEO of Winston Francois, for joining us. In part two of this interview, which we'll publish tomorrow, Jason and I are going to discuss the best way to effectively measure SEO. If you can't wait until our next episode and would like to learn more about Jason, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can also contact him on Twitter where his handle is Jason Shafton, or visit his company website WinstonFrancois.com okay, thanks.
- [20:58]
Ben Schab
To Jordan Cooney, the founder of Pre Visible. If you'd like to get in touch with Jordan, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter. His handle is J.T. cooney. That's J T K O E N E. Or you can visit his company's website, which is Previsible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O. Just one more link in our show Notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is benjschab. B E N J S H A B and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day during the work week, so hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.