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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.
Tyson Stockton
Hey, what's going on? My name is Tyson from Freevisible IO and in this episode we're going to be discussing gaining SEO Buy in. Joining me today is Sharon Perdue, who's the Director of SEO and Content Performance at Autodesk. Autodesk is the global leader in design and make technology, empowering architects, builders, Engineers, designers, manufacturers, 3D artists and production teams. So, as I mentioned, today we're going to be talking about gaining SEO Buy in and in particular within the large enterprises.
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Tyson Stockton
With that, here's my conversation with Sharon Perdue, Director of SEO and Content Performance at Autodesk. Sharon, welcome to the podcast.
Sharon Perdue
Thanks for having me.
Tyson Stockton
No, I feel like this is a little bit of the Age old SEO question. And at least like one of the most common frustration points that I hear amongst SEOs is getting buy in. Getting resources, budget, whatever it may be, but getting the tools and the means to achieve what they want to on it. And I think anytime we're talking within like a large enterprise, it adds a layer of complexity to that. So I'm really looking forward to kind of hearing, you know, what you can share with our listeners as far as how to navigate that space. And to start off maybe from your perspective or your experience, what's the biggest challenge to get that buy in within a large enterprise?
Sharon Perdue
Yeah, great question. And I think the challenge is it's the same anywhere you go from a large enterprise to a startup to an agency dealing with clients of different sizes. I think first and foremost SEO is pretty misunderstood. It's often seen as a very technical channel, very nerdy. They're working with the engineers and especially with executives. They just don't know how to really grasp what it does. And I think what surprised me, and I've worked at Autodesk for over nine years, it's a very large enterprise and we sometimes have the same, if not more difficult challenges than sometimes very small companies that maybe only have one or two SEOs, or an agency where they are working with smaller clients. It's just harder at times to get that buy in achieved because the company is so matrixed or siloed and so large. So I think the biggest challenge is people don't understand it and I don't think they necessarily need to. I don't think they need to know the inner workings of the tactics and the technical and the different strategies that you're going to employ wearing many hats. I think what's most important is they understand what they're going to get from it. And that's been probably the biggest learning I've had over the last many, many years. Especially as I've kind of worked my way up through leadership to now. The role that I'm in is really the people that have the ability to give you the buy in. Not only the buy in, but the resources to do what you need to do. They just need to know the bottom line. And so a lot of how we've changed and shifted over the last few years is we've really tried to be conscious of stopping, not using the language that we use as SEOs. Right. And we can get really in the weeds, very, very tactical with all the different terms that we have. And you just, you see it in conversation with teams at different levels, leaders at different levels, it just goes over their head or it glazes over. And so really starting to adapt the language that they're using, the broader marketing terms, the broader business terms is where I think we've been a little bit more successful.
Tyson Stockton
That's such a good recommendation. And I was going to kind of just immediately follow up with that is I feel like our second nature as SEOs is to always jump into the weeds. We tend to use a lot of jargon that's kind of unique to our discipline. How do you strip that away when having the conversations with the executives or other parts of the business? Or how do you kind of coach your team to kind of break that habit of falling into kind of that familiarity zone?
Sharon Perdue
Yeah, I think it starts with a mindset because I think we're always kind of the underdog, right? People don't understand SEO. They don't understand the greater impact. We also struggle compared to other channels trying to show that direct attribution where it's not as easy for SEO to show the attribution like you can with paid media. We can't always show every step of the journey. And with some things that are especially more technical, it's hard to show, like, hey, these improvements I made around core web vitals maybe had a direct impact on revenue. So I think the mindset shift is first and foremost what needs to happen. Because I think we're always trying to prove ourselves right. We've always kind of been the underdog. We're always trying to get more resources, more headcount, more budget. And with that is just we've been through the grinder and we think, you know, we're going to have to explain ourselves, we're going to have to explain the tactics, why we've made these decisions, why we're doing what we're doing. And again, at kind of those leadership levels, they don't need to hear it. They frankly just don't have the time. They're so busy, they're going from meeting to meeting to meeting. They really, again, want to know, what's the bottom line? What, what are you going to do for me and how is it going to drive these larger strategic goals? So I think mindset first, understanding, hey, we don't need to prove ourselves by getting super tactical in the weeds. And then I think slowly starting to listen to the people that you work with and what are the words that they're using. And it really can change. In marketing organizations when you're working with someone, teams in demand generation for example, or you're working with teams that are product marketers or industry marketers. When you're working with engineers, they're using different language. And that is the key is recognizing the words they use, what's important to them, and how do I maybe change the words I'm using to make it more akin to what they're using. So, for example, we had a recent great collaboration with our brand team. They are creating a new brand and they were looking at metrics, and one of the things that they wanted to do to track some of their progress was share voice. So they wanted to look at share voice with earned media, social and search. And so first and foremost, I'm like, oh, this is amazing. They're recognizing search. Sometimes you don't even make it to the table. Right? So great. They want to measure share voice. Let me sit down. And we had a conversation and here are the different metrics that I can bring to the table to talk about how we can help track the demand that you're maybe creating on the brand side and the performance. How are we on the SEO side helping to capture that demand? And so one of the ones that you may all have thought of that might come straight to mind is msv, right? Google Monthly Search volume. To me, it's a very clear connection to demand being generated. But we don't use that phrase when we're talking to our internal partners. Instead, we'll just use the broad term demand. This is the demand, the search demand that's being created. And then we will maybe go through some other metrics. Maybe there's a market share metric that a certain, you know, keyword ranking tool can, can share with us. And, and we'll just try and kind of rebrand some of these metrics that make sense to them. So I think for us, where we've had some success is let's not use our words, let's use their words. What are the things that are very jargony for us that we all know as SEOs, and we speak the same language, but the sheer amount of time it takes to educate, train people on these metrics, it's just not worth doing. Let's instead adapt to the language that they're using.
Tyson Stockton
As you were saying that, I literally just earlier today was looking at a report and it had msv. And immediately I was like, okay, we gotta, we gotta change this. Because anyone outside of SEO that gets this, like, I have no idea what MSV is. So I think that's a really acute kind of call out for it and one of the elements that I want to dig a little bit deeper into is you kind of started off by saying like, you know, we've all kind of been through the grinder and had this kind of like underdog mentality. And it sounds to me like in addition to focusing on the outcomes, there's almost like a coming to the table with a level of confidence in that. And I feel like that needing to prove ourselves, it's like coming with that confidence of like, yep, nope, we can achieve whatever this kind of goal, this target would be. But it kind of sounds like the way you describe that, that it's like fighting that kind of instinct of justification to it and leaning more into, just as you mentioned, like the outcomes, what recommendations would you have for the listeners on like how far is too far in those conversations or how do you come across in those high level conversations with confidence and just leave it at like, yeah, we can achieve this. You.
Sharon Perdue
Yeah. Two things came to mind. The first one is, and this will probably be a theme as we talk is data is a powerful commodity and the more you have of it, the more you can crunch it and come up with these kind of bite size elevator pitches, if you will, the better you're going to be able to overcome some of these challenges. Right? So for us, what we do every year is we go through data, we go through our web analytics, we look at search console, we look at different metrics and different tools related to opportunity, addressable market and we like to kind of just level set with our internal partners every year. Here's how we landed this year and here's how. And as much of those really higher level strategic KPIs that you can gather. And so one of the exercises we'll do is we'll just look at all of our major web properties and we look at what percentage of the traffic to those websites, including our kind of e commerce sites, maybe our support, maybe other types of sites or blogs. What percentage does organic even drive? And it's always really high. And we know that, right? As SEOs, we know organic drives the lion's share of traffic across the Internet. And it's different based on if your startup might look a little different. But for these really bigger established brands, especially organic, it usually is there and should be there. So we like to remind people like, hey, and we don't hesitate to kind of name drop that percentage in any conversation. Organic drives x percent of traffic. And I even have a better phrase I like to use. It's a bit more branding Is organic is the number one way our customers discover Autodesk. And I can say that with confidence because I've pulled the data and I know that no other digital marketing effort or channel can even rival the sheer amount of users that organic touches every year. So I can be very confident, say, organic is the number one way customers discover Autodesk. And that's something I could say to a CEO and he would understand, and I could say that to an intern and they would understand. So you've got to have kind of these elevator pitches, if you will, these sound bites that make sense. Again, we're not using our jargon, we're using their jargon. And we do that not just at the traffic level, but then with the partners that we work with. One of the exercises we're actually doing right now is we do kind of annual retrospectives where we want to sit down with the partners we work with on a kind of a higher scale basis. And we want to understand, get their feedback, what's working, what's not working right, what do we need to adjust, what do we need to celebrate? And when we do that, what we want to do is also sit down and kind of benchmark and show them and kind of pat ourselves on the back a little bit with, okay, your area of focus or your product. We're going to gather the data on all the different kind of web properties that they have, maybe their product pages, their campaigns, their solutions pages, their community. And again, we go through that same exercise, but a drill down with here's where organic, what it drives. And then we also bring the other channels. So we'll bring paid media, we bring direct. We know we're the winner here, right? We're, we're happy to remind them because if it's out of sight, it's out of mind. You know, if they're not kind of regularly reminded that like, hey, organic is a beast here and we're really driving a lot for. And then I think the next step is, well, what, what is important to them that we're driving? It may not be that traffic is important. Maybe it's some other KPI, maybe they're trying to generate leads. Maybe it's about brand awareness. So I think really understanding your audience and how you bring that confidence.
Tyson Stockton
I like that piece where it's like, as you're saying that, I feel like I'm seeing some common elements of almost like an agency model there, where it's like you're having those high level, high level conversations and it's almost like a QBR or something that would be going on. So by having those high level conversations and showing with the different stakeholders of the magnitude or the overall driving impact of SEO, you're kind of increasing that top of mind awareness. You're learning from them what's important. So maybe like areas that you can touch on when it comes down to maybe a more like initiative level piece, what recommendations would you have for the listeners of like when they're pitching an initiative, whether it's, you know, to a marketing team or to the product Org, like what recommendations would you have on the initiative level to get a project picked up?
Sharon Perdue
Yeah, and it's funny that you mentioned the agency piece because I'm not sure if you knew this or not, but we actually, part of our engagement model internally is we actually do act as an agency. So some of our engagements, we're very much, even though we're in a brand and we're in house, we act as an agency, we build, you know, proposals for work and we work with these teams at a much higher scale than maybe some of our other efforts. And I think because of that model, I mean, whether you needed to or not, I think there's very much something there around the agency mindset that should really drive all of, you know, what we do, whether we're in, you know, a one person team or we're in, you know, a large team and a large enterprise. Because with agencies, if you're not getting the job done, you're going to get fired. Right. And they're going to and the client will go and hire someone else. So if the client doesn't understand the impact that you're driving, your job is on the line. And I think sometimes internally we may not necessarily be on the hook for that, but we should. Right? We should have that mindset that if I'm not driving the results for these different initiatives, then maybe I should be a little concerned. Right. So when it comes to small tactics or very large projects, I think the number one thing to think about is what are the goals and objectives of what you're trying to do. And if you're working with a different team, it is critically important that you are very versed in what their goals and objectives are for the year and what are their KPIs. So for example, we are in the marketing division and our engineering and platform teams are in a different division. And we've had times over the years where we were very misaligned in goals and very misaligned in KPIs. And what generally Happens there is. We don't get the things done that we need to get done to keep up with the algorithm. So the better you can understand those goals and objectives and find a common alignment. And I know that sounds so cheesy. You hear that from a lot of brand people, like find a goal, find a KPI you can align on. But it really does work. So if you're pitching something as simple as like, hey, I need to, I need to go and optimize your page because you know, it needs to, the rankings need to improve up to a very, very large project. Really try and meet with that person, understand what they're trying to do and you know, sometimes I just start the conversation off with them as like, you know, asking them about their pain point because sometimes, you know, especially with teams that are newer to SEO, maybe we haven't worked with them as much as, as we have in the past and they're kind of emerging and they may not understand what we do and we don't necessarily understand what they do. The common language can often be what are your pain points? What are your biggest challenges? What keeps you up at night is a common question here amongst our company. What keeps you up at night? And really try and better understand their products and their audience and you will find that common goal. So I think if you can start from that mindset of what's their objective and how are they going to measure it and if you can find something that links between the two, you'll definitely be more successful with Buy in.
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Tyson Stockton
And the piece that you gave on kind of marketing versus the product org, I think that's a really common one that I've seen a lot of too. And it's usually from my experience one of my favorite questions when I'm talking to a potential new client or new prospect is understanding where their SEO sits within the organization. Because of that kind of challenge that you mentioned between being on the marketing org and having that alignment with product. I think that's a really common one. Or you see it the other way around where maybe SEO is sitting within product and that alignment with marketing can be also I think that that cross functional alignment is a great call out. And two, on like a lot of the initiatives, I feel like there's ways of also bundling these initiatives that isn't solely SEO and I think that's a trap. Sometimes that I see SEOs fall into is they're only pitching an initiative from an SEO lens versus the brand lens. And one of my favorite examples for this is around like page speed. It's like if you're pitching a page speed improvement or task, whatever it is, having that is just SEO is going to be so much more limiting. Where I've seen the ones that are more successful in being picked up is more of a conversion rate. Hey, if we improve page speed, we're going to improve conversion rate by X, Y and Z. And so it doesn't have to be just an SEO initiative, but it also can be more of, you know, in your words, like aligning to those teams metrics that may or may not even say SEO as long as like achieving the same thing.
Sharon Perdue
Yeah, and I think you had you had asked how people can be successful with the buy in and one of the things I wanted to add and I think it's very relevant to these kind of more technical requests and technical needs that we have when we have to bring something to platform engineering and like hey, we need to do for a reason example is core web vitals. We wanted to work on core vitals and really improve that and I think the more that we can forecast the impact, which is something that we're just starting to do and we really want to get better at this we want to look at different tools that are available or if we've got a higher resources to do this for us is really trying to forecast traffic and if possible revenue. Revenue is kind of always that gold star, right? If we can show revenue or pipeline being created that opens doors, you would not believe right up to the highest levels of leadership, you know, that is the bottom line. How are we driving revenue? How are we driving new leads? And so in any way possible, if you can forecast, hey, if I do this, here's what I to achieve. And I think that's really surprising thing for me has been when I've partnered with engineering on these things, they just want the forecast even if we know that it's not going to be perfect. And I really got tripped up on this early on because, you know, part of me is like, I want it to be as good as possible, I have integrity, I want my forecast to be really meaningful. But there's so many nuances to the algorithm and we can't nearly predict everything that's going to happen. So I think as long as you can give your best effort and really kind of explain your reasoning. A really recent example was we had had this long standing bug, I won't even say how long it's been, but a bug, a known bug in our navigation and it is client side JavaScript rendered and we just, oh, when it came out, I'm not thrilled about it, you know, harder for search engines to read and we had to put some pre rendering in place to kind of make up for it. But we've been asking, begging, pleading, please make this, you know, server side so that you know, all of the search engines, not just Google, will have an easier time finding our navigation, right? Such a critical element to SEO. And it finally, finally got into the roadmap and they were spinning it up. But I still had leadership from engineering, like what is this going to get us? And I, you know, as difficult as that is, because sometimes you're like, oh, they just can't they trust us, right? Can't they trust us to know that this is really important? I think the mindset shift is they're willing to ask us, right? They're willing, they are trusting us, if you look at it from that perspective. And they want, they're trusting us to bring a forecast. And so really celebrating that, like they haven't said no, they just said can you help us? Can you help us understand what this is going to get us? And so we sat down and did a lot of different number crunching. We were looking at different tools, crawling tools, we were looking at ahrefs. We were trying to find ways to kind of forecast, well, if these links were server side and better, crawlable and discoverable by all search engines, what might come from it and how might traffic be improved. And we put a lot of thought into the logic. At the end of the day, it's really a best guess, right? It's really a best guess on how impactful this will be. But, you know, I felt really confident, I felt really good about the attempt that we did, the logic that we put into it. We were able to take it and explain the logic to our partners and kind of the work we had done and pulling all the data. And I immediately got an email back from the senior director who was just so thankful. She said, thank you for this. This has immediately been. It had kind of already been prioritized, but they were just kind of getting a little pushback from the VPs. And she said this immediately, kind of quelled that we're good to go and thank you for this. And I actually shared that with my entire team. And I said, look, sometimes this little extra work we can do can really go a long way. And I understand, like, we can't always do that for everything, but I think the thing we're really trying to change this year and for future years is how, how much more can we do that?
Tyson Stockton
That's such a good illustration of that point. And I really like your mindset focus of, you know, looking at it as the opportunity is. They're already giving you the trust because it is challenging. And I think a lot of SEOs struggle with the forecasting element because, yes, there's elements that we cannot control, there's elements that we may not know entirely, but it's like, at the end of the day, even though there's maybe some additional challenges that SEO has in that way, all parts of the business are having to make these educated guesses and that everyone is making assumptions at some capacity. And the more familiar, the more comfortable we can get as SEOs in that process, I think will ultimately open a lot more doors for SEOs, especially from like a career development and, you know, just where they can elevate themselves within an organization.
Sharon Perdue
Yeah. And I've had to check myself, and I still do these days. Right. It's when you are generally the single largest channel that drives traffic and even revenue and other conversions, there's always that mindset that, like, people should just recognize how amazing SEO is and invest. Right. And for me, it's been really challenging because that's not the case. And you kind of have to swallow that ego and do that work. And when that mindset shifted and I, and I really started to embrace that, it's amazing. The doors that will start to open or the windows maybe the windows that start to open, it's still incredibly hard. It's still an uphill battle to get the resources and even the visibility. I think sometimes the visibility is more important around the work that you're doing and the impact that you're making. But you kind of have to swallow it and be like, yeah, we are massive channel. But that still doesn't necessarily translate to leadership and understanding the kind of the year over year or the quarterly efforts that we're doing, those really impactful tidbits that they need to hear because again, they just expect it's free. You know, this is the free channel. We turned it on already. We paid the nerds. I think, I think I heard that one of your previous podcasts made me laugh. We paid the nerds and things will be great. And that's not necessarily the case.
Tyson Stockton
That's so true. And I feel like this, this conversation has been really important for SEOs that maybe are struggling with getting that buy in, but I think it's also particularly important for the SEO managers, the team leads, the directors of SEO out there. Because at the enterprise level, it seems like so much more of your time becomes being this evangelist for your team and for the channel as a whole and the extra time that you're allocating towards making SEO visible and, you know, it's not just for your own work, but I think it's, it's also for your team's work. And being that kind of evangelist for the channel within the organization becomes such a critical part of the job of anyone that's managing an SEO team at the enterprise level. Because there are so many silos, so many stakeholders, so many people that are going to come from these different backgrounds and everyone's not going to have the same understanding level that you may have.
Sharon Perdue
Yeah, I love that you pointed this out. It's something that I wanted to talk about was when you're a team leader and you've committed to driving impact and showing impact. Right. I think it's really important to recognize and something that I've learned over the years is especially with your newer SEOs, maybe they don't have the years of experience that you do, the ones that are maybe just getting started out, especially the ones that haven't done other types of marketing is, it's not an easy skill. It's not a skill that people come with to know that like if I do X I'm going to get yeah, why? And they have to be trained, taught. And I would say it's not, it's not an easy thing. It takes time. So one of the things that we did recently that I'm excited about was knowing, you know, this whole last year we did a lot, a lot of work. We, we helped so many internal stakeholders both through kind of we have an intake model where we kind of help anyone that we can with different needs. And then we have our agency model where we're working, doing really high scale work for products and industry partners. We also have a model where we directly work with our engineering and platform teams for these big web experiences that scale. And we did a lot of work. But it was really hard at the end of the day because we did so many things right. It's hard at the end of the day to say like what was the impact on all of these things? And instead the way that we're shifting is I think this year we're intentionally trying to do a little bit less. And so unfortunately we may have to say no or not right now to some people for their ask because we're trying to do less. And with that time that we've created, we are committing to better measuring the impact of what we're doing. And that requires a lot of discipline because you know, when you, when you're pitching different strategies and tactics, the direction I want my team to go in is we're already stating up front, here are the KPIs and even if we can forecasting, here's the traffic or the leads or the different conversions that we're expecting to achieve with these initiatives. Here's our measurement plan, here's, here's the timeframe. We're gonna come back and look at these things. Cause different tactics take different amounts of time, but they don't necessarily, it's not something that they just know you have to train them. So we recently did what we called a measurement impact training. And my leadership team and I, we sat down and we before this training we looked at all the different tactics that we do. We, you know, creating landing pages, optimizing pages, doing analysis, doing technical and as many of these things we listed and then we thought about what are some good, better best metrics KPIs to measure these tactics, these activities. And it was an interesting exercise. It wasn't easy. We had to do several Passes. And I would say it's not perfect, but based on something. For example, an easy one is like maybe a team member updated 20 browser titles in bulk because we just needed, you know, more exciting browser titles to capture interest. How would we measure that? And you know, outside of revenue, traffic or conversions and we call those gold star metrics because at any time we should always try and achieve and measure revenue, traffic and conversions. But if we cannot show that, if it's too early, if it's too complex or it might take some time, what are our good, better, best metrics? And so a best in this one might be. Well, we increased click through rate. Very easy to measure. We can go into search console and we can see the click through rate. Did it get better? Did it get worse? And so what we did, we created this list, we documented it as a cheat sheet, as a guide for the team. And then we sat down and we hadn't revealed the list yet. We sat down, we did some training and in that training we broke people off into teams and we gave them just a scenario tactics that they do every day. Hey, you created, you're going to create two new landing pages or you're going to consult with a team that needs to migrate their blog onto our global website. And what we told them to do is come up with very quickly. We kept it very time bound. Talk about this tactic. Don't get into the weeds of the tactic, that's unimportant. But instead I want you to come back. What are the business outcomes you're trying to drive? What are the KPIs that you're going to use to measure and what's your measurement plan? Like, what's the time frame? Is it 30, 69? Date 90? Is it a week? Is it six months? And we broke them off into pairs, they came back and we did this. I have a global team, so we did it with an EMEA timeframe, we did it with our APAC team, gave them the same scenarios and you would be surprised at how their responses were so different. And these are, you know, the average time, the medium time of experience on my team is like four or five years. So these are not brand new SEOs and they were very, very varied. And I think the biggest thing they struggled with and what I'm trying to help them understand is what is a business outcome and what is a KPI and how are they different? And the business outcome to me is these larger things we're trying to achieve in business. That's that language that everybody speaks that we talked about in the beginning. What's the jargon? So if I'm trying to create a new organic landing page around a set of keywords that, that we have no visibility, no share of market on, okay. The business outcome is I'm creating brand awareness for my company and we're trying to earn share of market. Right. I'm trying to drive traffic. And then the KPI might be maybe something around market share, maybe something around keywords earned in a certain amount of time, maybe some impressions, because we know it might take several months to get these pages going. And so it, you know, even with these experienced SEOs that have been doing this for a long time and globally, it just wasn't at the level that I wanted it to be. But it was a great exercise and, you know, bringing them together, pairing them up. I think they enjoyed that, but we've got to keep doing it. So we're going to commit to continuing this training. And then we gave them the cheat sheet and, you know, that's for them to use as they will. They may not even agree. They may think like, oh, your good metric here should be your best metric here. But that's okay. It's a start and it's really helping them align and rally on what are these common outcomes and common KPIs. And let's do a better job making sure we set these in the beginning and we come back around and we measure them at the end.
Tyson Stockton
So, so refreshing to hear that, that focus on team development. And I think, one, I, yeah, I applaud kind of like that approach. But two, it sounds like not only is that that time or that effort on that type of training going to help with each of their interaction points, but I feel like on the individual level, it's also such a valuable time because I almost guarantee that just going through those exercises that you described is again, going to probably help each of them with their own personal career development as well, because it is so critical of, you know, one just progressing within SEO or even if the individual wants to pivot into like another discipline. Those are pretty universal elements in like the line of work that we're in of like, career growth that it does help in, you know, getting the buy in for it, but then I think it also can open up so many other opportunities for them down the road.
Sharon Perdue
Yeah, absolutely.
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Tyson Stockton
So that wraps up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks to Sharon Perdue, Director of SEO and Content Performance at Autodesk, for joining us in part two of this conversation, which will be published tomorrow. Sharon and I are going to continue the conversation and discuss illustrating SEO impact to executives. If you can't wait until the next episode and like to learn more about Sharon, you can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in our show Notes or visit her company's website@autodesk.com if you didn't get a chance to take notes while listening to this podcast, just head over to voiceofsearch.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes, contact information for our guests, and you can also send your topic suggestions or apply to be a guest speaker on the Voice of Search pod. You can always reach us on our social media handle, where our handle is at Voices of Search, or you can find me at TysonStockton. LinkedIn's a better one to reach me. And if you haven't subscribed yet and want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your product feed, we're going to publish a new episode every workday. So hit the subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed in the next following business day. With that, thanks for listening to the podcast and we'll see you in the next.
Episode: Gaining SEO Buy-In Within Large Enterprises
Release Date: January 16, 2025
Host: Tyson Stockton
Guest: Sharon Perdue, Director of SEO and Content Performance at Autodesk
In this episode of the Voices of Search podcast, hosted by Tyson Stockton, the focus is on the challenges and strategies associated with gaining SEO buy-in within large enterprises. Sharon Perdue, the Director of SEO and Content Performance at Autodesk, joins Tyson to share her extensive experience and insights on navigating the complexities of securing support and resources for SEO initiatives in a corporate environment.
Sharon Perdue begins the conversation by addressing the universal challenge of gaining buy-in for SEO efforts, irrespective of the company size.
"SEO is often misunderstood. It's seen as a very technical channel, very nerdy... executives just don't know how to really grasp what it does."
— Sharon Perdue [03:33]
She highlights that in large, matrixed organizations like Autodesk, obtaining buy-in is particularly challenging due to siloed departments and a general lack of understanding of SEO's value beyond its technical aspects. The key issue is not necessarily the scale but the complexity and the need to communicate SEO's benefits in terms that resonate with different stakeholders.
Tyson Stockton emphasizes the tendency of SEOs to delve into technical jargon, which can alienate non-technical stakeholders. Sharon agrees and suggests strategies to mitigate this.
"We’ve really tried to be conscious of stopping, not using the language that we use as SEOs... instead adapt to the language that they're using."
— Sharon Perdue [05:40]
Sharon discusses the importance of translating SEO metrics into broader business terms. For instance, rather than using "MSV" (Monthly Search Volume), framing it as "demand" makes the concept more accessible to executives and other departments.
Sharon delves into the psychological aspect of SEO advocacy within organizations. She notes the prevalent "underdog" mentality among SEOs, who often feel the need to prove their worth continuously.
"We’re always the underdog, trying to prove ourselves... they just want to know, what’s the bottom line?"
— Sharon Perdue [06:14]
Sharon advocates for a mindset shift where SEOs focus on the outcomes and strategic benefits of their work rather than getting bogged down in technical justifications. This approach builds confidence and positions SEO as a crucial contributor to the company's overarching goals.
A significant portion of the discussion centers around the importance of data in securing buy-in. Sharon explains how Autodesk leverages data to demonstrate SEO's impact effectively.
"Data is a powerful commodity... the more you have of it, the more you can crunch it and come up with these kind of bite-size elevator pitches."
— Sharon Perdue [11:15]
She shares an example where forecasting the impact of technical improvements, like enhancing core web vitals, led to successful project prioritization. By presenting data-driven forecasts, Autodesk was able to secure support from engineering and leadership.
Sharon highlights the crucial role of team development in maintaining and increasing SEO buy-in. She describes an initiative at Autodesk where the SEO team underwent training to align their metrics with business outcomes.
"We created a cheat sheet... we want to better align on what are these common outcomes and common KPIs."
— Sharon Perdue [30:04]
This training helps team members articulate the business value of their SEO activities, bridging the gap between technical efforts and business objectives. It fosters a unified approach to measuring and communicating SEO's impact.
Effective collaboration across different departments is essential for SEO success in large enterprises. Sharon emphasizes understanding and aligning with the goals of various teams, such as marketing and engineering.
"What are your pain points? What are your biggest challenges? What keeps you up at night?"
— Sharon Perdue [15:51]
By identifying and addressing the specific needs and objectives of other departments, SEOs can position their initiatives as integral to achieving shared goals, thereby enhancing cross-functional support and cooperation.
Tyson Stockton wraps up the conversation by underscoring the importance of SEO leaders acting as evangelists within their organizations. He acknowledges the additional responsibilities of SEO managers in large enterprises to advocate for their teams and the channel effectively.
Sharon echoes this sentiment, noting the persistent challenges of gaining visibility and resources but also recognizing the progress made through strategic communication and team development.
"Sometimes the visibility is more important around the work that you're doing and the impact that you're making... we have to swallow that ego and do that work."
— Sharon Perdue [27:35]
The conversation is set to continue in the next episode, where Tyson and Sharon will discuss Illustrating SEO Impact to Executives. Listeners are encouraged to subscribe and tune in for further insights on elevating SEO within large organizations.
For more detailed information on Sharon Perdue, listeners can visit her LinkedIn profile or Autodesk’s website.
This episode provides valuable strategies for SEOs operating in large enterprises, emphasizing the need for clear communication, data-driven advocacy, and continuous team development to secure and maintain buy-in from various stakeholders.