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- [00:00]
Tyson Stockton
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]
One of the most challenging times as an SEO is when your website's hit by an algorithm update. You have a sudden drop in performance and you're scrambling to understand what has happened. And at the same time, you have executives demanding answers that they may or may not fully understand. As an SEO, this is a stressful time and yet it's all too common, as many of us have faced this multiple times throughout our career. According to Moz's State of Search 2024, 65% of businesses experience an unexpected traffic decline within the last 12 months. Traffic drops have a variety of causes and each requiring a different recovery strategy. So getting to the real source of the issue is vital to implementing the right SEO strategy. This is the Voice of Search, and my name's Tyson. And joining us today is Sam Torres, Chief Digital Officer at Gray Co. Gray Co helps businesses create innovative SEO solutions. And today Sam's going to walk us through Framework for diagnosing changes in Organic Search Performance. With that, Sam, welcome to the podcast.
- [01:42]
Sam Torres
Thanks so much for having me.
- [01:44]
Tyson Stockton
Now, we were talking kind of before this, and I think one of the interesting things that you kind of called out is you know what it looks like when clients come to you. And I think most of us have. If we've been in the industry for a while, we've kind of been through these situations. It's a pressure cooker. So you're getting kind of just bombarded with questions. And so maybe if you could kind of just first, like walk us through. Like, what does it look like when you have someone kind of coming to you, maybe for the first time, and they're experiencing this traffic drop, like, what are some kind of, like the common characteristics that you see?
- [02:18]
Sam Torres
So I think you hit the nail on the head. It's a pressure cooker. Timing is everything. They want answers or they need answers almost immediately. Usually what has happened as far as there's really kind of two scenarios where someone comes to us. One, they've had a really sudden traffic drop, and so they are just absolutely in panic mode. And again, it's the. I need to find answers as soon as possible. Usually their executive team is also breathing down their neck. So we've even had times where, like, the executive team is the one reaching out to us, and you can tell that their team is actually already working on it. Yeah. So that's one of the scenarios. The other is where it's been a steady decline, maybe over nine months to 12 months. And so they've been trying to spin their wheels internally, whether it's an internal marketing team or other agencies that they work with, but they're not really figuring out what to do to reverse that trend or haven't even really found the actual source. So that's when sometimes they'll look for a little bit more help. But, yeah, either way, it's never really a super happy intro conversation. Right. Something has happened that has not gone well for them to actually call us. So it usually is a pretty weighty, weighty conversation to start.
- [03:30]
Tyson Stockton
Yeah. And it sounds like there's some level of panic, whether it's coming from the executives or from within the SEO team if they're not sure what's going on. But it's like someone in the conversation is panicking and concerned.
- [03:45]
Sam Torres
Yes, yes, someone's panicking. Because I think also with what has been going on with search, there are still, we see plenty of executive teams that haven't really accepted, I guess, the work that SEO takes. They just take it for granted. And so suddenly when that is declining and the sales are declining, they can't understand or they don't understand why this suddenly went away. So, yeah, it can get panicky. And, well, people are learning not to take us for granted.
- [04:14]
Tyson Stockton
Yeah. Which is like, also, I always try to, like, advocate, like, don't just be talking about SEO when something like horrible or great happens. Like, you have to be consistent in messaging within the organization. Because it's like if all of a sudden you're having to explain, like, fundamental basics of, like, how search works and why search, you can't just, you know, toggle on and off the light switch to, you know, have the leads come through. Right. It feels like then you're always, like, at that disadvantage because then you're spending so much effort to just get on the same page versus actually getting to the root of what's going on.
- [04:51]
Sam Torres
Yeah. And I think you touched on something really, really quality there of. There's also times people call us and they're in a Panic because they're seeing declines, but it hasn't actually affected the bottom line. And so usually that is where someone is maybe not educated, the being able to communicate up. Maybe you've got blockers or things like that. So we have seen those too, where it's like, hey, my traffic's going down, but my conversions haven't actually been affected. We're like, okay, that's like, probably fine, but we can still investigate. Like, let's figure out why. But yeah, so I think absolutely, it always needs to come back to what is the business actually trying to do. And I think that's something that SEOs as an industry, we're trying to get more and more into. Like, you're seeing it with the shift to product SEO or SEO product management. But yeah, it's always got to go back to that bottom line because that's ultimately what's going to determine the budget you could get and decision makers. That is their North Star. That's what they have to make their decisions based on. So, yeah, but that's typically. It is a little bit panicky when they come to us. Yeah, that's a really long way to say that fair.
- [06:02]
Tyson Stockton
And so, I mean, you touched on the piece though, on, you know, there's been, you know, clients that will come to you. Maybe they had a big hit in traffic, but it's not really hitting like their bottom line. Like, I'm guessing that that's kind of like, maybe more of like that starting point of the analysis of what's going on. Like, how would you kind of frame up, like the starting point for kind of your approach to this type of investigation?
- [06:29]
Sam Torres
That is exactly where we start of just validating. Is this actually a problem? Because like I said, we have had scenarios where someone came to us and their conversions weren't affected. And so going through and realizing that, hey, yeah, you've lost a lot of impressions and site clicks, but it was all for irrelevant terms. Or I had one customer who was a bank and it's one of those banks that's just like some letters. And so they were ranking for the search term T. So literally just the letter T they had been ranking for prior to. And they stopped ranking for it. And so like, for them, they're like, our impressions are way down and all these things. And it's like, yeah, because like, so, so sometimes we do have to have those conversations and also to start quantifying, you know, on the flip side, if we are seeing it affect the business, whether it's leads or conversions or Transactions, what have you. What is the impact? Is it at the same rate that we're seeing traffic decline? Because you know, of course a lot of people like to talk about traffic is just a vanity metric. Yes. Not true for all businesses. Right. If you're a media publisher, then your ad revenue is entirely based on eyeballs, but they are indicators. Right? It's part of that funnel that if you start seeing traffic increase, then ideally you would also see conversions increase or else there's something else wrong with your funnel. So yes, that first step is just us validating that. Is this actually an issue? How big of an issue is it? How does it, how do all the pieces of the funnel actually relate to one another? We've also had times where it's just somebody's tracking was broken. Actually that's happened quite a few times where just the Google Analytics implementation was broken. So suddenly that just really changes the conversation. So we always want to validate that this is actually something worth digging into because once we know that, hey, there's actually a problem here now there's really a lot of different areas that we have to go that we need to go look in. And every single one of them might be a journey to Wonderland. Right. Like, we never know what hole we're going to fall down because it just, it could be a few different things because, you know, is there something wrong with the site internally? Is there a technical problem? Is it your content? Is there something external happening? Are your competitors engaging in like a black hat SEO attack? Is it something that Google did as a change? Is it something that Bing did as a change? So yeah, so suddenly there's just like I say, a lot of rabbit holes to, to go down.
- [08:50]
Tyson Stockton
Well, it's a, I think it's a great call out though of really getting to the source of like how it's impacting a business. And I think one of the things that I've been trying to advocate with other SEOs is like, don't get too single threaded on like one metric where you're like conditioning the organization to just care about traffic or just care about even revenue in some cases. It's like, I agree, can I almost use the analogy of like you have so many cards in your hand and it's like if you have a few, you have multiple plays, multiple things that you can do depending on the situation. Whereas if you are just, you know, kind of single threaded or married to one KPI, it's your all, it's all or nothing on that one piece of what the impression within the org is.
- [09:34]
Sam Torres
I wholeheartedly agree. Yeah, I don't think a single metric should tell the whole story because it can't, right? Because even if you're just measuring transactions or revenue, what about average order value, right? Like, what about number of items? What about is it return customers or is it new customers? Like, those tell really powerful stories and yet looking at a single metric in a silo, you would miss that otherwise. But yes. So once we've identified that and really verified that, okay, something is happening, like I said, that's where we have the different rabbit holes. We'll also. So this is where, well, not really LLM so much, but machine learning and AI assisted programs really start coming into play because we can feed it the data sets and start looking for are there patterns in the traffic declines? Right. Is it happening on a certain subset of pages or a subfolder? You know, the kinds of investigations that we used to do by hand, but now we can automate a lot of it. So yeah, we'll start looking for what are kind of what are the symptoms. So where is it happening? Where does it hurt? Are we seeing anything in line with that? Is it happening on a specific page template? That tells me it's probably a technical problem. Is it happening within a specific topic? That tells us you probably have a content problem. So once we validate it, it's looking at, can the data tell us already where the problems are so that we can continue digging and isolate where the issue is. So with those internal causes, it is, do we need to look at the content? How are we doing? Do we need to do a competitive analysis? One of my favorite things to do is actually go on to Reddit and YouTube and actually start looking at what are people talking about, how are they engaging, what are the questions or the really biggest pain points that they're talking about, or frustrations and are we answering those questions? Does our content actually appease that, that need? There's actually a really great tool I love for this. I am not like, they don't pay us at all for this, so this is just free publicity for them. But that's how much I love the product. It's called Gummy Search and it actually allows you to look at Reddit, look at specific subreddits, pull in audiences, and basically anytime you want to get what are those pain points or big frustrations that people are feeling right now? So usually those are the steps we take if it's a content issue. We are a tech SEO agency, so we will dig really deep into the technical items. Right. Is something coded poorly? Are you a JavaScript based site? We need to talk about what signals are you giving to Google to say is it worth the rendering? All that kind of stuff. So those are usually the next steps is where we start looking internally.
- [12:16]
Tyson Stockton
I think that's a great piece and maybe I'm like, I'll be oversimplifying a little bit, but it's like essentially you have the start of the investigation and you're peeling back, looking under the hood, being like, okay, what's really the extent of this? And then you're looking to kind of narrow in on where the drop is occurring. So you mentioned whether it's specific page templates or types of pages or even like categories of topics. So you're looking for some sort of commonality and you mentioned using, you know, AI assistance like for that. Are you ingesting from like the clients, you know, data from gsc, keyword ranking, tracking tools, analytics, and then kind of compiling it into one repository and then that's what you're using like pre existing kind of bots that you've created specifically for this or are you tweaking it for each client?
- [13:16]
Sam Torres
There's always some tweaking that needs to be involved, just depending on what level of data we have. So yes, we're definitely pulling in the GSC data. For large enterprise sites it does get interesting because then we start running into the 50,000 rows per day limit. So sometimes it might be like, hey, I need two weeks just to get all the data. But in that time we might be using the GSC front end and just kind of manually investigating to see if something sticks out. This is also where if clients already have BigQuery set up, then I can just hook up straight into that with GA4. Yes, we're using that data as much as we have it. Most businesses were encountering maybe a year's worth of data in GA4 and then usually it's it was really bad for the first six months. So when I say bad like the data, you couldn't trust it. So that one gets a little bit more interesting. Thankfully we also have a number of clients who left GA4 or Google Analytics and have something else. We'll also use their own CRM data if we have access. There's definitely some industries where I'm like, I don't want it, don't give it to me. I don't want data to put my pay grade. Yeah, so, so we'll pull that all in together. A lot of times I will use BigQuery as just kind of my single repository for all data, regardless of whether there's a connection or not. That's just kind of where the playground, if you will. There are some clients where we do it in Snowflake instead, but from there you can access, especially if you're using BigQuery, you're already in the Google Cloud console. You can start accessing all these machine learning like learning models that they have to help identify those patterns. And I especially like it because then you can actually start looking at like if you're looking for specific topics, are you seeing declines in using the GSC data? Like let's keyword cluster all the keywords are there declines specific to these clusters. And using something like a BERT topic, which is a free to use model, it really starts to put in that natural language processing. It's very similar, it's based on bert. So it is what at least one of the things we know that Google uses. So it just, it makes it really rich and easy to play with if you're already in BigQuery. But yeah, usually there's some adjustments because there might be. Do we have data limitations? What's the scale of the data set we're looking at? Right. It's a very different look and feel for a site that's got 50,000 pages versus 8 million URLs. So it just kind of depends on how much data are we talking because then how much sampling am I having to deal with as well?
- [15:50]
Tyson Stockton
Fair, fair. And I think like that, that application of AI in the sense, I think makes a ton of sense. And I guess too often we're thinking just in terms of content, but especially in the sense of clustering keywords because sure, it's relatively easy to spot if a decline is happening in a specific directory or page template. That's all using some shared element in the URL, but clustering into like specific categories or themes. I could see that being a huge advantage for it. Yes. Now moving forward, we've zeroed in. We're looking at more specifically where the issue is. And then you kind of mentioned earlier that it almost sounds like you're looking at it as three primary like sources or like areas that it's coming from. First being technical, then content or let's see, like relevancy of content or quality even. And then also like potential external factors. Are those kind of like the core ones or do you. Are there any other ones maybe kind of outliers in that group as well?
- [17:01]
Sam Torres
I think that sums it up. We May stumble upon them here in a second. Just in case one escaped my thought. Yeah, typically that's what we're looking at. You know, the content strategy. Is your site technical, technically sound? Is it crawlable? Can search engines understand it? And then, yeah, external. The external can also, you know, is it, is Google doing something? Has your reputation taken a nosedive on Reddit? Actually, I've absolutely had this. Locksmiths are brutal. So they will absolutely do like negative SEO plays to each other. That is the one industry. I've seen it happen many times. But. And maybe it's just Atlanta locksmiths, but yeah, I used to have a locksmith client and apparently they also all went to the same church. So they would just like on Sunday be like, hey, did you see what I did to you? And it'd be like, what is going on?
- [17:53]
Tyson Stockton
That's funny.
- [17:54]
Sam Torres
Being their SEO manager was very stressful. So usually there's a few different, you know, as far as the external, like I said, we're looking at, is it a change from Google, is it something based on like your reputation or brand management, which of course plays into SEO, but then is usually way out of our control or influence to then are there bad actors? Or from the flip side, are your competitors suddenly pulling way ahead because they're doing much better or like they're putting out really quality work? Are they engaging in a, you know, a multi million dollar brand awareness play, all that kind of stuff. So yeah, those, those are usually the, the places where we have to look. And honestly, these projects are super fun because what I was talking about earlier of falling down the rabbit hole, it is just kind of like, oh, let me, let me peel this. What I find. But yeah, it just, it's, to me it's fun because it's never, it's never exactly what you think it's going to be. There's always something different. So it's a fun challenge.
- [18:53]
Tyson Stockton
Maybe going out on a limb, I'm going to guess that you're also kind of a problem solver at heart and you're kind of looking at these like, you know, like little cases that need to be solved and you're following kind of the clues along the way, trying to.
- [19:10]
Sam Torres
Yes, absolutely. In my personal relationships, I give up. I get called out for giving unsolicited advice. So I have to work on it because I just want to fix everything.
- [19:19]
Tyson Stockton
Familiar with that?
- [19:20]
Sam Torres
Yeah, I'm much better than I used to be. But it was rough in my 20s. But it's always rough in your 20s, right? So, yeah, and it's just fun because, you know, I love technical SEO. We do a lot of JavaScript work, but once you've written a guide on how it should render, like that doesn't change dramatically from one guide to the next, right? So like these projects, it is, it is that whole like, oh, it's something new. We're figuring something out. It has been fun. Sometimes you'll find those technical problems and you're like, I don't even know how they did that. That's fun. It's a problem, but that's fun.
- [19:56]
Tyson Stockton
I just learned something new with someone. Like the technical problems, like, I assume good chunk of those have some sort of relationship to indexation. Are like crawl logs, something that you're regularly looking at, or do you need something to kind of trigger you of like, hey, we need to, we need to dig into this. Like, would that be a default data set that you go after or only like when warranted?
- [20:25]
Sam Torres
I would love for that to be a default data set. But I would say the clients who actually have log files that we can get access to, they are the exception. So I do see that that's really just a big miss. Even with our enterprise clients that, I mean, they are 8 million 64 million URLs, log files are not a thing or any kind of monitoring that they have. So I think that's something that a lot of companies are not doing. And what's funny to me about that is it's not actually that hard to set up if you do it kind of in the beginning, like when you're setting up a server or building a website. But it's really, it's often hard to kind of build that in retroactively. And then even the tools to do log file analysis are extremely cost effective. I do see some of the tools like Botify and things like that, they do it, it's less cost effective, but it's also Spotify, they do great stuff. So all that to say, if I had access to log files, usually these things could go quite a bit faster, especially for some of those issues like the crawled, not indexed. But it is rare that clients have it or have it in a way that the SEO team can actually get access to. So I've also seen plenty of times where the engineers have log files, but they are not, they won't release them, they're just not going to let them go. You know, you just have to live in the world of the real and say, well, okay, well, that, that's going to limit what I can find, but. Or it might take longer, but let's keep going. So, yeah, we just do the best that we can. But to actually get log files is super rare. I feel like it's something that people don't do much anymore or talk about.
- [22:09]
Tyson Stockton
I agree with you and I think it's, it seems, seems very odd like, because especially at the enterprise level, it's like, yeah, if you're, you know, smaller website, I feel like it's, you know, easier to get by without. But once you're, you know, at a certain point, it's like, yeah, you kind of need to know those things. Yeah. When you, when you're entering into these, like, how much repetition do you see? Like you're, you're applying like a similar, like, approach or framework to each case that you come across. But like, do you feel like a lot of it is, you know, like similar playbooks, similar scripts that you're running, or is it just like, yeah, every single one, at least half of the work that you're doing, you're finding it being kind of like net new.
- [22:56]
Sam Torres
Oh, what a good question. So I would say the similarities usually go based on tech, stack and industry. So I see the consistently same problems on like a next JS website versus if somebody comes to me on their own WordPress, I'm like, I know exactly the four places that I'm looking and we don't do many WordPress. To be, to be completely transparent, we do mostly JavaScript base sites. So yes, tech stacks, I would say I can usually find some similarities and that may make the technical validation and piece go quite a bit faster for industry. And when I say industry, I mean like E commerce. We typically see some of the same problems. Right. Like suddenly everybody using the same product descriptions is catching up to them. It's almost like we told them that five years ago as an SEO industry.
- [23:47]
Tyson Stockton
But that's fine.
- [23:49]
Sam Torres
We're not upset.
- [23:50]
Tyson Stockton
Yeah. Over indexation on facet search pages.
- [23:54]
Sam Torres
Yeah, yeah. To then see how you say E commerce, there's usually some things that I'm just like, all right, we're obviously going to find this, but after that I would say it's usually pretty client specific. I've also often found that at least the internal marketing team, they already know, but they need, they almost need the validation from an outside source to sell it to their executive team. Right. And it might even be like within the internal marketing team, like half the team has no idea and is panicking and arms are in the air. And then there's like Those one or two people who are like, I think it might be this. Now I've definitely run into that guy who's like, oh, it's definitely this. And then we're like, it's definitely not, but all right, you do you bro. So I mean, does that happen too? But yeah, usually it does end up being. It's interesting how the dynamics of an internal team, it usually just ends up like we need to play the role of hero and voice of reason to support what their internal team is already trying to do. Especially the larger the client, the more likely that's to be true.
- [25:06]
Tyson Stockton
I couldn't agree more on that. And I feel like it's such a, like sometimes you look at it and it's like I get why internal SEOs get frustrated by it, where it's like, you know, they might have been like, I've been preaching this for the last six months and no one wanted to listen. And now all of a sudden someone comes in from the outside. But it's like I, whenever I'm like, face in that situation, I kind of just try to like play them. It's like, hey, like it is what it is. And I almost feel like sometimes too, it's almost like an excuse for the executive teams where they're like, oh, well now we heard it from someone else, so now we can take action towards this. And it's. I always as like quickly as possible try to show to like the in house SEOs of like, hey, I'm not trying to compete with you. Like, I'm not trying to have this like, exactly jockeying of strategies and like, whatever. It's more of like, where are you guys up? How can we continue from that? Or like have some sort of like collaboration point. But all too often there seems to be that like I feel like, yeah, too often you see a clash potentially between agencies and in house teams when I feel like if the agency is doing their job and doing it well, it should be in support and in extension of that team, not in a who's trying to get credit for what type scenario.
- [26:31]
Sam Torres
Could not agree more. Yeah, I do think our job as an and at Gray Dot, we actually specialize in working with embedded teams. So we are like, we can do all the things, but honestly, for our clients, for us to do most of the SEO execution, it doesn't make sense. We're very expensive for that. That's just kind of silly. And like I say we'll do it if that's what the client wants, but we're really there as guardrails most of the time. Consultation. You want to pilot something new, right? So, yes, I do see it as our role as an agency is to make the internal team look better. That's our role. But it is, I do think a lot of internal people have unfortunately been burned by agencies who are trying to either grow the relationship or, you know, they just haven't learned how to play in the sandbox with others yet. Whatever it may be, since we are still a really young industry that, yeah, it actually ends up being one of our biggest selling points is that we do work with internal teams and there isn't an ego. And it's one of those things where there's, there's many times we go into sales meetings or even meetings with our clients that the clients are like, I can tell that you're women owned. And we're like, yes, very little ego. Which, you know, nothing against the, the mail run and, and owned agencies. But yeah, we, we very much come in as like, I, I am here to figure out how to give you the platform to do the things that you want to do, to support you, and basically to go work on the hard problems that maybe you don't want to or you're just too busy doing 40 other people's jobs that you don't have time for.
- [28:06]
Tyson Stockton
Yeah. And it's like so often they're kind of not, I don't want to say battling, but it's like they're more consumed in like the stakeholder management aspects within, like an enterprise agency to sometimes dig maybe as deep as they would like to if they, you know, weren't spending 32 hours a week just in meetings with other partners.
- [28:29]
Sam Torres
Exactly.
- [28:29]
Tyson Stockton
But I feel like it's so refreshing to hear that perspective or that take, because I think, I don't know, as also like a fellow agency owner. It's like, it's so nice hearing that because there's so many times that you enter a conversation and it's like you can tell that the, you know, the prospect or the client on the other side has had a terrible experience and then you're having to kind of like prove or go over why it can be in a different way. And I feel like as an industry, if it's more collectively like this, it will just put a better, I guess, stigma towards SEO. Instead of this, hey, we're just going to sell you an SEO tech audit and then be on our way and we're going to charge some ungodly amount of money for it.
- [29:18]
Sam Torres
Yeah, we're going to Write five blog articles per month that are crap. Yeah. There's so many times. And you, you may feel this too, where I'm just like, who hurt you? Like, how do we get past this?
- [29:31]
Tyson Stockton
Yeah, you're like, okay, let's, let's take the next few sessions. We'll do like, you know, little kind of like kitchen therapy, get through this together.
- [29:40]
Sam Torres
Like yes, that is exactly it. Which I mean, I do think it's part of the client relationship these days where, where it is at. I mean we're also to the point where we've got like book clubs with some of our clients and things like that. So we obviously we, we like the relationship building quite a bit. But yeah, SEO is growing up. It's still a pretty new agency or industry. We're still pretty young. Right. We're going through growing pains. So hopefully it'll continue getting better.
- [30:06]
Tyson Stockton
Yeah, I mean, and I'm optimistic on it. I think like, overall it's like, it's a small industry for the most part. People are very collaborative and willing to like, you know, I don't, I don't get the sense that it, at its core it's not this, I don't know, kind of cutthroat, like.
- [30:24]
Sam Torres
Agreed.
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Tyson Stockton
Yeah. Anyways, but so moving on from that.
- [30:27]
Sam Torres
Yeah. And it's gotten much better than it was 10 years ago. But yes, true. Back to investigation.
- [30:31]
Tyson Stockton
So we've gone through, we validated it, we found where in the site, maybe even we identified whether it is technical content. Last piece. And obviously then the plan for it is going to be dependent on what type of issues the website's facing. But would you have any kind of like overarching recommendations for maybe it's agencies or the internal SEOs that are just going about this themselves. Like as far as that positioning then to like upper management?
- [31:04]
Sam Torres
Yeah. So at that point it's all about setting expectations and then educating so that you can get what you want to do. One of the things we'll do here is we do build a roadmap of. Here are all the things that we want to do. Now we may not go into the level of detail of like These are the 1000 articles that we need to improve. No, that would take a lot of time and I'm going to let somebody else do that who's way more content minded and probably on their own team, but we will build that roadmap of just like, here are the items that we've identified, here's what we think the impact would be. And I will say this is where you know, start looking at, if you, if you haven't already, start trying to approach it with that SEO, product management mindset or even a project manager. So looking at what is the estimated level of effort, you know, just T shirt size, it even just how, how big are you, how big a change are you asking for, how much work, what do you think the impact will be? T shirt size, that another thing I really love to do is also put what are the metrics that we think will impact this? Or at least show that it's moving in the direction that we want it to. That also makes it really a lot easier for you three to six months later when you're trying to analyze how successful was it, you don't have to try to think of that again. It's already documented. But basically by going ahead and putting together like what's the level of effort, what do we think the overall impact is going to be? That can of course help you prioritize. What do you tackle first. But then that can also end up being a lot of help for selling in the resources that you need to do it. So let's say it is a technical problem and you're going to need engineering to do it. Everybody wants more engineering, right? Like everybody wants more engineering tickets. So you need to be able to put together the documentation to show that this is why you need it. There's also really great models for being able to forecast some of the changes. So I've seen a lot of times with executives, even if I do like a fan chart and there's like a 20% swing putting something like that, that's a data backed visual in front of an executive of like, hey, if I get this, if I get these resources, this is probably what will produce if you give me these resources, like this next level where I get three times as much engineering time, this is what we can achieve. And suddenly you're talking, you know, you're talking like an executive. You're putting it in a language that they really want to receive. And you know, always include your caveats, right? That is the one thing about forecasts. And I know there are some SEOs who absolutely hate on forecasts and I get it because it is like the, well, Google might change their mind and you know what, we are at their mercy. That could happen. So put in your caveats, right? You're also assuming there's no catastrophic server outages for your site during that time, right? Like there are some obvious things that it's just like this needs to stay up but also, sometimes that can be really great ways to cya, because if you put the documentation of, like, we had one client that we were actually doing things like this for, but their engineering team would constantly remove the H1 from the homepage. And it was an E commerce site. They did a very niche product. So, like the H just for fun. Well, no, they would just be like, no, we're gonna, we're just gonna get rid of this. We don't need this. And so it was just like, you have to stop doing, like, your number one keyword that y'all are like, super laser focused on. Your engineering team keeps getting rid of it. And, like, I'm introducing all these ideas to increase your visibility and things like that. But if they keep doing that to me, like, you're limiting what I can get done. And once we put that in the assumptions, sure enough, it got added as a QA step. So that was really fun. But yes, putting together that documentation. And like I say these, these forecasts, you know, sometimes it isn't going to be accurate, but if you're starting to think about what is the impact, what is likely going to happen, then suddenly you are talking in the terms of a product manager of an executive, and it's much easier to get that buy in. So I would say look those up. We actually offer a. On our website, we have a product roadmap, like an SEO product roadmap template that's free, and it includes all the things that you would need to do to start, like being able to put what we call a weighted use case. So you start looking at, like I say, taking that, what's the level of effort, what's the estimated impact and all that good stuff to put and timeline. And it helps prioritize from there and figure out what really you should tackle first.
- [35:27]
Tyson Stockton
Yeah, I like how you kind of framed it in the sense of this is what you can expect with X amount of resources than the other. Because I feel like then naturally the conversation goes into, well, why is there this swing between the two options, which is a huge win, because you're already talking about two things that you'd want to be the case rather than just putting out one option. Now the conversation is likely to go more into like, well, what assumptions did you make? Or what was your logic in getting to these outcomes? So I think there's like a really nice subtle play of like, hey, we already agree we're doing something about this. Do we want to go big or are we going kind of small? But I think, like, that minor kind of shift in presentation can be so impactful in what the end outcome is. And I completely agree that it's like SEOs do not shy away from forecasts. Yes, they can be off, but it's similar to any other discipline in business. Maybe we have some more external factors that we won't control, but it's like no one's forecast is usually that perfect.
- [36:40]
Sam Torres
Exactly.
- [36:41]
Tyson Stockton
So it's just something that you have to embrace. The awkwardness. All right, so that wraps up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks to Sam Torres from Gray Co for joining us. And if you'd like to contact Sam, you can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in the show Notes. And you can always go over and get more information about her and her company@thegrey.com and if you haven't subscribed yet and you'd like a daily stream of SEO and content marketing knowledge in your podcast feed, hit that subscribe button in your podcast app or like and subscribe on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed the following day. So that's all for today. Thanks again for stopping by the Voice of Search podcast, and we'll see you in the next episode.