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- [00:00]
Ben Shapp
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, Tyson Stockton.
- [00:43]
Tyson Stockton
Hey, what's going on? Welcome to the Voice of Search Podcast. My name is tyson from Previsible I.O. and yesterday we talked about managing cross functional teams and today we're going to be going on to talk about digital adoption and SEO. Joining me again is Ratam Gal, who's the head of SEO at WalkMe. WalkMe is the world's first digital adoption platform.
- [01:10]
Ben Shapp
This podcast is also sponsored by ahrefs. What if I told you that you could monitor your website's SEO health backlinks and organic rankings at no costs? Sounds too good to be true. Well, it's not, because my friends at Ahrefs just launched Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Ahrefs new Webmaster Tools product quickly helps you improve your site's visibility by pointing solutions to over 100 technical issues that might be holding your search performance down. Plus, AWT monitors for backlinks so you'll know the most linked to pages and how those links are affecting your rankings. And AWT shares what keywords your website ranks for and compares how you stack up against competitors for key metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty, and traffic value. Look, monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools, and now, thanks to Ahrefs, that's not the case anymore because AWT will help you monitor your SEO, health, backlinks and keywords for free. And no, it's not one of those 14 day free trial offers. It's a powerful site audit tool that will keep working for you for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.comAWT that's a H R E F S.comAWT and.
- [02:29]
Tyson Stockton
With that, here's my conversation with Ratam gal, head of SEO at WalkMe. Ratam. Welcome back to the podcast.
- [02:36]
Ratam Gal
Thank you for having me again, Tyson. How are you?
- [02:39]
Tyson Stockton
I'm doing well, so maybe to just level set with the listeners. What are we meaning by digital adoption?
- [02:48]
Ratam Gal
Cool. So digital adoption, the easiest way to explain it Is how a business can become digital to serve more people and to really step into the future, which is already here. The greatest example we saw during COVID everyone were in lockdown, but we still needed to communicate with banks or supermarkets, buy groceries, deposit money, pay the mortgage, etc. And a lot of businesses who invested in the legacy applications or didn't invest in digital adoptions. Becoming more digital gave a bad customer service and lost a lot of clients. Actually there is a bank in Norway or Scandinavia and that they don't have any physical branch and it kind of like I forgot the name, it kind of swept all of the young people and even some of the people that are not that young that used to go to the bank and said, well, why waste our time, let's move to this digital bank. And this bank saw a huge increase versus some old, I don't know, like 200, 300 years old bank who had all of the big clients suddenly change. So this is basically digital adoption. And one of the biggest issues I think that all of these businesses have, even though that they started to become more and more digital, it's that they are missing a big piece of the puzzle, which is SEO. They are creating application websites, but they are not optimizing themselves for SEO and they lose a lot of traffic. And again it came pretty, pretty big once the Russia and Ukraine war started and the big recession. A lot of marketing budgets were trimmed down, were cut, a lot of paid acquisition. This is the channel that get hit the most because it get most of the budget and SEO kind of like remain the same just because the stuff that you can you make with SEO can be evergreen. And that's evergreen for people who are not familiar with this term. It's a piece of content that will remain for a very long time, positioned well, drive traffic, engagement and conversions.
- [05:21]
Tyson Stockton
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.
- [06:50]
Ratam Gal
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.
- [09:00]
Ben Shapp
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- [10:28]
Tyson Stockton
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.
- [11:29]
Ratam Gal
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.
- [12:59]
Tyson Stockton
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?
- [13:28]
Ratam Gal
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.
- [15:58]
Tyson Stockton
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.
- [16:46]
Ben Shapp
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.