Tyson Stockton (5:20)

And I think it's a great call out that when we're talking about digital adoption, it's not just hey, we're creating a website for our business or like hey, I have a restaurant, I'm going to create, you know, a website for it. It's beyond having a website and in your examples it's more of how do businesses adopt or lean into the advantages and capabilities in the digital space and being able to do things that more leverage some of those benefits or capabilities of digital versus just like yeah, no, I'm running my business same as I've always done for the last, whatever hundreds of years situation. Now I just have a website that's kind of like a digital business card. It's more of how businesses are leaning into being like a digital first brand and then those services that would come with it. Obviously I'm going to be a little biased and I'm going to lean on this SEO side of it. But I feel like SEO has a ton to offer in this, not just from like the acquisition channel, but also just understanding like consumer demand and consumer interest. So how are you able to kind of pull on some of the, some of the advantages or assets that SEO might have to support digital adoption beyond just hey, we can bring traffic to the website.

Ratam Gal (6:49)

So first of all, just like you said, once a site is created, you simply go to, I think one of the most, you don't hear a lot of conversation about it. Maybe it's because the UX is so bad, but the search console and I spend most of my time in the search console which is basically looking under the hood and watching again what search queries drive people to the website, what kind of content are they consuming, what pages are performing good, what pages are not performing good. And then by that you can have a lot of insights about stuff that you might not knew just because you thought that you will promoting with this product. But then people find you in a completely different way. So this is also something that I think that companies are missing gone because yeah, we have a website, but do we have someone who can read Google Search Console? And if we have someone who can read Google Search console, do we know what people are looking for when they are coming to our website? Do we know by looking at analytics, how much time are they spending on our website and where do we know what pages we are getting conversions from and why? I think that a lot of people thinking that digital adoption is merely creating an application or a website and that's it. Okay, if we are online, if we have Instagram, if we have TikTok, we are fully digital and that's it. And no, it's again, it's a never ending, I wouldn't call it competition. It's like running in a never ending maze. You can always optimize more channel, you can always test new stuff and it really depends on two factors, manpower that will do it and the people above it and their creativity. Like do they want to experiment, how much budget do they put in mind, allocate for experiments, etc.

Ben Shapp (9:00)

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Tyson Stockton (10:28)

Absolutely. It is such a key piece and I feel like, I mean, hopefully anyone that's listening to this podcast leans into the same aspect where it's like SEO is never, is never an industry or a job that's completely done. There's always more to be done. There's always new ways of expanding the reach of a website. There's always new ways of further improving, further understanding how Google's understanding the changes that we're making. And so I think that notion that hey, our job is Never done as SEOs, we can always kind of be doing more to further progress and kind of drive more value through SEO. But I'd be interested to know like, what are some characteristics that you've seen from companies as like a best practice of how they approach digital adoption? Like, what are the key characteristics that you see in companies that are successful in doing this or maybe companies that are not so successful in doing this.

Ratam Gal (11:28)

So I think successful companies, they do two things in parallel. First of all, they come up with a strategy and like defined goals that they can measure. And the second thing is that they are not afraid to hit the start button and start doing those changes because they understand that change will take time. And the further you you wait with the change, the more the environment change. So let's say for example, if you make plans and you wait one month, two months to start them, the Environment already changed because it's SEO, it's the digital world. Like social channels are up and down and trends are going up and down and even what happened in the world, like politics and crisis, everything is changing. So there won't be a perfect timing for execution. But if you have a plan, stick to it, start it. No matter like what's going on, you have to start and prepare to optimize it as you go. Like, don't be naive that you will stay with this same plane plan, especially if it's a digital one and it will work for you for even, you know, even for two quarters. Prepare to change and be, be very agile when it comes.

Tyson Stockton (12:59)

Absolutely. Now, as SEOs, and maybe we're in house working with companies that are kind of going through this digital adoption, or it could be from the outside of working at an agency or a freelancer, do you have any recommendations for SEOs of how we can further contribute to this kind of transformation of companies that are going through digital adoption?

Ratam Gal (13:28)

Absolutely. I think the biggest one is the website. Okay. Learn the website from A to Z. Put a lot of. First of all, do a competitor competitive landscape research. Like if you are trying to operate in a specific niche and you see that the first five results of your competitors kind of like look and feel the same, it's pretty straight damn straightforward that if you try to reinvent the wheel or come up with something different, you might not be there. Okay, you kind of have to like copy them, but make it better. And then there is the plan, how to make it better. How do I stand out from my competition? Is it a UX UI perspective? Is it graphics? Is it something that I have? And it's usually usually within what does my business do better than the competitors? This is something I would lean on and then plan your website, but plan everything. Okay. For example, if you operate in a very technical niche, is it good to create a glossary or kind of like a dictionary? Does your competitors doing it? If not, it doesn't mean that it's not good, especially if you have a very technical jargon. But really try to think about the website as best as you can. Obviously it's hard to cover all of those things, but you can get pretty specific into details. Like, this is how my website will look like. This is the blog section, this is the product section, this is the glossary. The glossary will tie to the blog section. The blog section will lead to the product pages. And if you plan it really well, then you will reap the dividends in the future if you will not invest in the planning and you will cut corners and say, you know what, let's get this plugin, but let's just get the free one because it looks good. When you would want to scale in the future, you would have to catch a lot of stuff that you would be sorry you didn't do. Do it in the beginning. Okay. So when you decide to go to the digital transformation and to adopt and become more digital and I think for SEO is the best place to affect it's obviously the website. Take it very seriously. Very, very seriously.

Tyson Stockton (15:57)

Excellent. Such a good advice for us to lean into is and I think this could be the case for like most SEO initiatives, but especially in this regard, the approach should be not just what are the needs of today, but what are the needs going to be and what are we going to need to grow into and to have that longer term vision that goes into your day to day decisions. It's a huge piece that not only is going to help you again with today, but it's also going to make your life so much easier in the long run. But with that. That wraps up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks again to Ransom Gaul, head of SEO at WalkMe, for joining us. If you'd like to get in touch with Rossim, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or visit his company's website@walkme.com okay.

Ben Shapp (16:46)

Thanks to Tyson Stockton, our guest host. If you'd like to get in touch with Tyson, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes, you can contact him on Twitter where his handle is TysonStockton. Or if your team is interested in SEO consulting or organizational education, you can always head to their company's website which is Previsible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O. And a special thanks to Ahrefs for sponsoring this podcast. Monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools, but that's not the case anymore. Thanks to Ahrefs because they just launched their Ahrefs Webmaster Tools product which monitors your SEO health, helps you keep track of your backlinks, and gives you the insight into what keywords are performing for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.comAWT that's Ahrefs a h r e f s.comAWT 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 list 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 benjschapp. B E N J S H A P 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. Morning. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, remember the answers are always in the data.