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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 Previsible IO, and joining me today is Will Critchlow, who is the CEO at SearchPilot. SearchPilot specializes in SEO, AB testing and optimizations for websites, helping businesses improve their online presence and user experience. Their innovative solutions ensure that clients see significant improvements in their website performance and search engine rankings. Today, Will and I are going to be discussing making organic search into a performance channel.
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Tyson Stockton
With that, here's my conversation with Will Critchlow, CEO at SearchPilot. Will, welcome back.
Will Critchlow
Great to be here. Thanks for having me back.
Tyson Stockton
Yeah, and last time, if I remember correctly, we did kind of like a full week on SEO testing, so we kind of took a different part of the conversation Each day today we're kind of, you know, shifting gears a little bit, and we're talking more about kind of like the channel. And managing SEO is like a channel, in particular, like performance channel. Here maybe you could kind of start off with the listeners of like, what are kind of like the key, I guess, perspective shifts in looking at SEO as a performance channel versus like, maybe tactics.
Will Critchlow
Yeah. As you said last time, we got really into the details of how tests work and how to analyze them. And that was obviously, that's my happy place. That's super fun. And I love geeking out about all of those kinds of things. What I have been thinking about a lot since then is how we. How we kind of communicate what we're doing to the wider organization, particularly to leadership. And this language around SEO as a performance channel is kind of grown out of that. So at SearchPilot, we really specialize in working with very large organizations. Most of our customers are large enterprises, very large websites, and where most of our work these days is in retail, e commerce, that kind of space. So we're working with these very large organizations, and the SEO teams who we're collaborating with directly have to explain what they're doing, have to obviously get the budget for what they're doing, have to communicate the results of their work all around the organization. And that's to marketing leadership, but also to general managers and folks who are thinking more in P and L terms. It's also in over to folks in product and engineering. And these tensions exist, I think, in all organizations, but they're especially acute in that kind of, you know, corporate America kind of style setup. And I spent a lot of time speaking to those kind of senior leaders. Right. Whether they're marketers or not, or whether they're P and L owners, general managers, understanding, like, what. What are their big frustrations? What. What do they wish they could see from SEO teams, SEO specialists, SEO outcomes. And they were always using this language. To me, they were always talking about their performance channels, their roas in paid search, their spend on affiliates, whatever it might be. And it occurred to me that rather than kind of trying to educate all of them on how SEO works, we should be trying to go to them a little bit, meet them where they are, and use their language. And this has been what's been in my mind ever since is, yeah, like, how can we talk about SEO in those ways? How can we fit the concepts we understand into their way of thinking and be more flexible in meeting them with the metrics that they need to understand? If that makes sense. So I can go deeper into all of that. But that's kind of the, that's the concept, that's the background.
Tyson Stockton
Yeah, no, I mean that totally makes sense. And it's like, I mean, I feel like there's some fundamental principles there that are just like, good for ensuring that like you're connecting or like relaying information well to the other audience. It's like essentially you're bringing up like, know your audience, adjust the message to the audience. And it's like, I don't think those are necessarily like unique challenges necessarily from like SEO. It's like those are best practices you should be doing no matter what, across the board. What are like, what does that kind of translate into as far as like, what is the language then that you're using? Or how are you kind of like recommending that people present SEO than within the organization?
Will Critchlow
Yeah. So step one was I started thinking, well, what does it mean for something to be a performance channel? And I'm coming at this obviously as an SEO practitioner expert. That's my background. And so I'm going to kind of stay in SEO language quite often. But what I think it meant and what's been missing too often in SEO in my career is first of all, it means that we have a mental model of how it works. I think that's kind of the first thing is these performance channels, they have a concept of what they're buying, what they're getting for the money they're spending, and how those things hang together. So that's the first thing. There's some kind of mental model. There's a, It's a channel that has built in proof of its value. It is no surprise that performance channels are the ones that get the lion's share of the budget. I was speaking to someone the other day who said, I think it was 70% of their new customer acquisition was organic search, but 80% of their budget was paid search. And you know, we see that time and time again and we can beat our heads against this wall. We can get frustrated about it. We can, you know, kind of have existential crises about why nobody's spending money on the thing. But I think the reality is that there's this, there's a proof point. You're buying a very tangible, you're buying that click when you, when you pay per click. So it's got built in proof of its value. Admittedly that we'll come back to this probably later, but there's some threats to those channels there in the inflation of that cost and trends and the fact that basically Google wants your margin. But we'll come back to that. But I think the really critical thing is that more budget equals more results. And this may or may not turn out to actually be true. Right? There's plenty of times where people, it's easy to waste money in performance channels, but there's certainly this concept that you have a lever, you have a dial you can push and things happen. It's fairly responsive. You put more budget in and you start getting those results. So that's what I wanted us to be able to frame things in terms of for SEO is give a concept of not at the micro level. So when I talk about the mental model, I don't mean explaining how SEO works. I'm not talking about explaining HTML changes or information retrieval theory or any of this kind of all the stuff that, as I say, I love geeking out on. I mean more how SEO activity pays off. So specifically relating back to testing, how we approach things is when you're building an SEO experimentation program in a large organization, what you're trying to build is a program that could be run according to program metrics. And what I mean by that is success looks like running more tests, getting a better win rate, having more of your winners have a higher uplift. And those program metrics, those are not SEO metrics. Those are metrics of your organizational competence. Are we running enough tests? Are we running more tests this quarter than we ran this time last year? Is our pipeline of test ideas good? Are we hitting our benchmark win rates and are we getting the uplifts we expect from those things? And you can assign budget to those. So you can say it cost us x hundred thousand dollars to run however many dozen tests. And you can kind of quantify by putting a dollar value on both sides, you get to quantify. This test resulted in us making this much more money and our testing program costs us this much money. And there are some differences still. So I'm not trying to claim that we're getting as far as cost per click for good and bad reasons. The best bit about SEO is that it's benefits sustain. And so you could, you could completely cease your SEO efforts today and your organic traffic would obviously not go to zero tomorrow. In the same way that if you completely ceased your paid search spend, your paid search traffic would very quickly drop to literally to zero. And that's, that's the strength of obviously SEO as a channel, but when we're talking about the activities, so the spend that you're putting into things. We're trying to connect the, connect the levers and show that they're connected and build that proof point so that executives can say, I want more of this. And you have an answer of what you can do. I think one of the weakest things that has really bothered me in some organizations is when the organization comes and says, here's a substantial budget increase, what are you going to do? And the answer is a kind of wishy washy thing that doesn't really explain to the person holding those purse strings why that's going to work. And it's really that difference between organic search the channel and SEO the activity. And another conversation I had the other day, someone said, SEO is a dirty word in our organization. And they were talking about in engineering, in product, and whatever else. And I said, that's really, really interesting. What does the CFO think? And they said, oh no, the CFO loves organic search. The CFO hates the fact that paid search is this huge line item spend that we're completely over the barrel for. We have no pricing power. We just have to take whatever Google gives us. And that disconnect, that's what we're trying to navigate, is kind of get back in, join those dots so that the power of the channel, which everyone loves, everyone loves getting organic search traffic, can be joined to the activity so that people love SEO as well.
Tyson Stockton
Which makes a lot of sense in some ways. I think the piece of like, hey, SEO doesn't just fall off if you turn it off the same way if you turn off like an AdWords campaign. But it's like that is still a sunk cost in the sense of you're only needing to measure what is that uplift. And essentially your spend resulted in the uplift. I feel like a lot of SEOs out there are probably getting a little uncomfortable and kind of moving around their chair a little bit, being like, yeah, but how do you account for the uncontrollable factors like algorithm updates or how do you combat things like the time to value in SEO versus paid? So, like, some of those inherent characteristics of the industry, like, are you getting in front and setting expectations with those other members in the organization? Are you kind of like, let's not get hung up on the minutiae and like details like, how would you advise SEOs to think about approaching those characteristics?
Will Critchlow
Yeah, so I think everything we do around trying to run, as I say, these experimentation programs, the SEO testing that we talked about in our previous conversations is designed to address the confounding variables, Right. So all that stuff you were talking about. Google algorithm updates, your competitors do things. It's seasonality, the weather's different this week, somebody ran a Super bowl advert. Our own advertising is up or down or whatever it might be. There's all kinds of things that are going on in the background that mean that your actual week over week, month over month, year over year, performance can fluctuate. What we're trying to say is let's measure the performance versus the counterfactual, the performance versus what would have happened if we'd done nothing. And I think half the answer is down that angle of let's control for what we can control and let's measure. And by, by control, for, I don't mean influence whether they happen, I mean measure. Take into account in our measurement. So we're trying to measure. When we say a test is an 8% uplift, we don't mean that traffic is 8% higher this week than last week. Traffic could be up or down, depending on what seasonality has happened or what your competitors have done or whatever else might have gone on. The point is this change means that we're 8% better off this week than we would have been if we hadn't made that change. And that is a concept that I think is quite well understood by general managers. You know, they're always trying to operate in this realm of the controllable things, and they know that you speak to a trading manager or someone with P and L responsibilities, and they know there's all kinds of stuff outside their control. They know that inflation can happen or that Putin can invade Ukraine or that, you know, it can rain. There's always things outside your control. All you can possibly do is operate well within the effective bounds of control. And so that I'm actually not too worried about. And I think we do get too hung up on it as SEOs who want to explain everything and who see we're so susceptible to that ebb and flow of Google's whims that we live and die by it. But I think actually a sophisticated organization is perfectly capable of understanding that there are things that Google might do that we can't predict, don't know in advance and are utterly outside our control, just the same way that the weather is outside our control. And all we can do is make good decisions, knowing what we can do. We can make good forecasts and we can operate that way. So, on the one hand, let's measure well so that we're not fooling ourselves. I think There is a bit of a tendency, human tendency, but certainly a tendency in SEO to take credit for every uptick and blame every downtick on Google. And I think we need to be more intellectually honest than that and say we're running these controlled experiments. This one's a winner, this one wasn't. We're up here, we're down here, this one's flat, whatever it might be. So part of it is let's get better at measurement and actually tell true stories. And part of it is accepting the reality that every single channel faces these exact difficulties and this same kind or analogous argument with all kinds of different teams in different contexts. So engineering teams are legendary for saying you can't really. It's hard to do forecasting in engineering. It's hard to say how long a feature is going to take to build. This is a classically very hard problem in engineering. And it's like, okay, yes, that's true. But it's true in other spaces as well. It's true in marketing. It's hard to forecast how many visitors will get to a webinar or how many leads will come as a result of a particular campaign. It's true in sales. Sales forecasts are critically important in obviously every sales driven organization. They're always wrong. That big deal that you hope is going to close by the end of the quarter slips into next quarter or whatever it might be. There's always uncertainty, there's always things outside your control. And all these things ever are is a framework for decision making and that kind of structure. And I think there's always a little bit of grass is greener. And again, this is human nature. It's very easy for us on the organic side to look at paid and say, well, they have it easy, they just press the money button. And every time they spend money they get clicks. And that relationship is so straightforward, they have variables outside their control as well. What the competitors are bidding affects how much it costs you to get a click. Obviously Google is making changes to those algorithms as well, and the page layouts and of all the seasonality and everything. There is no guarantee that the improvements you made to your paid search campaign this week are going to pay off in more clicks, cheaper clicks, more business next week. And I think there's a big element to which we in the SEO side need to grow up on the business side and realize forecasts and accountability are not impossible. They're hard in the same way that they're hard in every field of human endeavor. But they're not uniquely difficult in SEO and the fact that there's things outside our control, that's true in every space. And so yeah, I think to answer your question, it's part we need to get better at our measurement and our storytelling. And it's part we need to accept that we should fit into those same accountability structures that other channels have to do. And what accountability means is explaining when things change. It doesn't necessarily mean preventing them changing or making sure they only change in your favor because that's literally impossible.
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Tyson Stockton
In some regards it kind of has this like feeling like as SEOs, we think we're very different and very unique. And yeah, sure there are some elements that are different if you compare apples to apples, but in the larger scheme of things it's like, okay, maybe we're not that special, maybe we're not that different and we face some of the similar challenges that everyone kind of meets to. And I think in the same way that you're advocating for this, I've also kind of said to or thought about it in the sense of most of the time like you're needing to convince value or explain SEO to someone that's not familiar with the practice that well, or at least they're only familiar with it from afar, from a distance. And so if you're already needing to close that gap on like unfamiliar or new information, then you should try to hold consistent as many other factors or elements as possible.
Will Critchlow
100% agree.
Tyson Stockton
And so if you're using that same like, business model, business logic, sure, there's always going to be assumptions to this. Like anyone that's gone through doing a forecast plan or budget planning knows that it's like only as good as long as those assumptions hold true. But yeah, it's like, I think this is something that really forces kind of like the SEOs to, you know, in some ways be honest with ourselves of where this fits into the ecosystem of the business. But something else that I feel like you've, you've touched on in a few different ways by talking about like the activities and like creating a program of testing within an organization. It sounds like there's a little bit of a shift in there of, hey, let's not just report on these lagging metrics, whether it's clicks, traffic, whatever. But it's like the leading variables are kind of like the activities that go into it, which in your case you're saying test, but it's like I would assume you can also throw in things like number of links to a page or whatever predictor variable versus the lagging.
Will Critchlow
Content creation is another kind of classic one. Right. It depends on the organization. But if you're, if you're a media organization, you're going to be looking at amount of content produced, amount of content refreshed. Those might be your leading metrics. Yeah. So I'm kind of talking more from a, say, e commerce and retail standpoint where most of our improvement, most of our work is on product listing pages and product detail pages and those kinds of enhancements. But yeah, you're absolutely right. And that move to leading metrics, again is one that business people understand, understand this idea that you can't just optimize the dollars, you optimize the process, you optimize the activities. And there are assumptions back to that bets essentially that have to pay off. We bet that if we implement this new software system that routes our delivery trucks better, then we'll make happier customers, save delivery costs and save fuel costs or whatever. And any project like that has some forecaster payoff, some uncertainties and unknowables in there and some kind of embedded bets, I guess. Like the bet in that case would be our customers like it when the stuff we deliver shows up sooner and more predictably and famously. Bezos talked about making this bet, didn't he? Said there's lots of things that we think are changing, but we're building Amazon. I'm massively paraphrasing. We're building Amazon around the things that we think will continue to be true in decades to come, which is people want large selection, low prices and fast delivery. Nobody is going to want smaller choice, slower delivery and higher prices. So that's kind of the strategic bet, if you like. But you can make tactical bets as well, like you say. And we're often in the situation of saying the tactical bets we're taking are if we continually have a pipeline of ideas of improvements to the product detail pages and we implement those as tests as fast as we can over the course of the next three quarters, we're betting that that is going to pay off in improved performance because we're only going to roll out the ones that turn out to be winners. I think that's quite a good bet. I'm certainly on the taking side of that bet, but you can see that there are leaps of faith, there are kind of intellectual steps that you have to go through. But again, I feel like the business leaders do understand that because they're always in the boat of being asked to put budget behind things that have uncertain payoffs. And we're not special snowflakes in SEO when it comes to that. And I definitely make this mistake. We too often conflate the fact that it can be hard to explain at a technical level what we're doing and why to a non specialist. You could imagine giving a day long seminar on why you want to update the canonical link on this page or whatever it might be. The fact that that is specialist doesn't change the fact that it's not particularly specialist to say here's how we're going to allocate the budget to our efforts. Here's the metrics that we're going to use to measure if we're going fast enough at making those improvements. Here's the data that we're going to use to hold ourselves accountable for the results at the other end. That's only technical in a very general manager sense.
Tyson Stockton
And I think that's also true in looking at other departments, because we do, as SEOs always seem, or more often than not seem to drift into the weeds of talking about little nuances and speaking in our own jargon and language. But it's in the same way that we're not particularly interested in hearing about bidding Strategy within a particular AdWords campaign, it's like, great. You have a strategy in doing it. Go. I understand you're working on a bidding optimization. If you're an executive, that's probably as far as you need to go in that. And you don't really need to learn everything about this. I feel like for myself too, your piece on the activities and doing this, I almost like visualize it as like cards in your hand. And it's like each conversation and each like kind of stakeholder that you're working with, you're kind of like playing different cards at different moments. And by giving yourself and baking into the focus of the conversation being the activities which are the controllable factors, you're already like shifting the narrative into an area that you have more control. And like, if it's just in these like uncontrollable SEO landscape environments, like what AIO is going to do to traffic.
Will Critchlow
We'Re up, we're down. Google did this, Google did that. Yeah, whatever it might be.
Tyson Stockton
Yeah, it's like you've already lost the hand.
Will Critchlow
That's a really, really good analogy. And I think there's something also to the second order effects of what happens when you do that over time is you become a trusted partner, you become a, a capable operator. And this was again, I was speaking to someone the other day at a public company, so the kind of organization that has to give a profit warning if numbers are not going to be where they were supposed to be. And this organization recently had to do that. They recently were trading a few percentage points below the numbers that they previously told the market. And they had to go to the market and say next quarter is not going to be where we said it was going to be. And that was largely because of things outside their control. It was actually to do with market shifts and demand and whatever. And it was interesting that the sentiment was that the stock price was not too dramatically impacted because the market understood that this particular company was well run, well operated, capable of noticing when it was ahead and behind, had a plan, was already shifting in response to the changing demands in the market. And the difference between that of saying here's the numbers we hold ourselves accountable to, those numbers aren't what we want them to be. Here's why, here's what we're doing about it. Share price is fine. The difference between that and publishing your quarterly results and going we missed, which would have had a kind of catastrophic impact on the share price is I think that that's true within organizations as well. Departments Individuals, teams get a reputation for being capable operators. Doesn't mean they always hit their numbers. It means they understand the numbers. It means they understand what's affected, what's gone on. It means they can explain their plan. It means they've shifted their plan if it's not working. But it doesn't necessarily mean they're never subject to bad luck or adverse trading conditions or whatever else it might be. I think building up that reputation for competence, and particularly operational competence, is so valuable in any corporate environment, but especially such a multidisciplinary environment as SEO, where you need engineering to trust you, need product to trust you, you need brand to trust you, you need leadership and finance. All of these different things feed in to both being successful and being recognized for the success that you drive. And I think one of my favorite stories around this is the origin of the word accountability, which I only learned relatively late in my career, was I always thought it meant basically as a synonym for consequences, right? So to hold someone accountable is to, you know, they don't get their bonus or they get fired or whatever. Like that's what accountability means. And I relatively recently learned that it comes from the. It literally means to give an account of. So it literally means to explain. And so holding somebody to account means requiring that they explain what happened. And it comes from the kind of parliamentary systems, right? The system of accountability of being called in front of like a Senate committee or whatever it might be, or a parliamentary committee in the uk, and often those accountability sessions don't have any ability to fine you or put you in jail or any of these kinds of things. What they do have is the ability to force you to answer questions in public. And that can be just as bad. But that is literally what accountability means. And I think focusing on accountability over consequences is another really powerful organizational play.
Tyson Stockton
That's such a good piece of advice because I think, especially for newer SEOs, maybe listening to this, it's like this sounds. It's a lot of work, it's difficult, it's not easy to do all these things and do it consistently. But I think the last piece that you shared there is the key or like the area that really makes it that much more manageable, where it's like, step by step, you're building that confidence, you're building that trust, like you're building that reputation in the organization, which essentially is just greasing the wheels for, like that next ask, that next request. And I think that, especially in the enterprise world, becomes so much more of, I guess, the characteristics of a successful SEO versus maybe the most talented is you can be the most talented in the world, but if you're not able to foster this confidence and this trust, it's like your, your success rate is only going to go so far.
Will Critchlow
I mean, this is not unique to SEO, incidentally. I think it's another one where we all have had experiences of yet the most talented or the smartest person is not necessarily the most successful individual at different things. Tenacity, reliability. There's many things that can beat talent and iq. And it's shocking how high up the percentiles of all corporate employees you become just by being the kind of person who does what you said you were going to do when you said you were going to do it, and communicates appropriately and like that, that shouldn't put you in the top 10%. Like it's, it's probably not far off.
Tyson Stockton
Yeah, and it's like the. I'll probably mess up the expression a little bit, but showing up becomes like half the battle in that sense where it's like, yeah, it's not always like what you do. It's just the consistency of showing up and being kind of present. And there is oftentimes going to be something that has such a lasting impact. But with that, that's going to wrap up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks again to will Critchlow from SearchPilot for joining us in part two of this conversation, which will be published tomorrow. Will and I are going to be discussing the depreciation of SEO. If you can't wait until the next episode and you'd like to learn more about Will, you can find a link to their LinkedIn profile in the show notes. Or go on over and check out his company's website@searchpilot.com also be sure to check out their SEO Test Results newsletter, which goes out every two weeks. So under the Resources tab in the navigation you can find a place to sign up.
Podcast Announcer
Okay. Thanks to Tyson Stockton, our guest host. If you'd like to get in touch with Tyson, you can 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 suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our hands handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is Ben Jayshaph 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. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Episode: Making Organic Search Into A Performance Channel
Release Date: March 12, 2025
Host: Tyson Stockton
Guest: Will Critchlow, CEO at SearchPilot
In the episode titled "Making Organic Search Into A Performance Channel," Tyson Stockton, host of the Voices of Search Podcast, welcomes Will Critchlow, CEO of SearchPilot, to delve into transforming organic search from a set of tactics into a structured performance channel within organizations. The conversation aims to provide actionable strategies for SEO professionals to effectively demonstrate the value of SEO to stakeholders and secure necessary budgets.
Will Critchlow begins by distinguishing between traditional SEO tactics and viewing SEO as a performance channel. He emphasizes the importance of aligning SEO efforts with organizational language and metrics to gain leadership support.
"[...] instead of trying to educate all of them on how SEO works, we should be trying to go to them a little bit, meet them where they are, and use their language."
— Will Critchlow [03:38]
Key Insights:
Will Critchlow outlines the challenges SEO teams face in securing budgets compared to paid search channels, which often have more straightforward ROI metrics.
"More budget equals more results. And this may or may not turn out to actually be true."
— Will Critchlow [05:50]
Key Insights:
The discussion shifts to the inherent challenges within SEO, such as algorithm updates and external market conditions.
"Let's measure the performance versus the counterfactual, the performance versus what would have happened if we'd done nothing."
— Will Critchlow [13:20]
Key Insights:
Will Critchlow emphasizes the importance of building a reputation for competence and reliability within the organization.
"Holding somebody to account means requiring that they explain what happened."
— Will Critchlow [29:10]
Key Insights:
The conversation explores the distinction between leading and lagging metrics in SEO performance evaluation.
"The move to leading metrics, again, is one that business people understand, understand this idea that you can't just optimize the dollars, you optimize the process, you optimize the activities."
— Will Critchlow [22:30]
Key Insights:
Tyson Stockton and Will Critchlow conclude the episode by reinforcing the necessity of aligning SEO strategies with broader business objectives and maintaining consistent, reliable communication with stakeholders.
"Showing up becomes like half the battle in that sense where it's like, yeah, it's not always like what you do. It's just the consistency of showing up and being kind of present."
— Tyson Stockton [31:06]
Key Takeaways:
Will Critchlow [03:38]: "Instead of trying to educate all of them on how SEO works, we should be trying to go to them a little bit, meet them where they are, and use their language."
Will Critchlow [05:50]: "More budget equals more results. And this may or may not turn out to actually be true."
Will Critchlow [13:20]: "Let's measure the performance versus the counterfactual, the performance versus what would have happened if we'd done nothing."
Will Critchlow [29:10]: "Holding somebody to account means requiring that they explain what happened."
Will Critchlow [22:30]: "The move to leading metrics is one that business people understand, understand this idea that you can't just optimize the dollars, you optimize the process, you optimize the activities."
Tyson Stockton [31:06]: "Showing up becomes like half the battle in that sense where it's like, yeah, it's not always like what you do. It's just the consistency of showing up and being kind of present."
In "Making Organic Search Into A Performance Channel," Will Critchlow provides valuable insights into redefining SEO within organizations. By framing SEO as a performance channel and aligning it with business metrics and accountability structures, SEO professionals can better communicate their value, secure necessary budgets, and contribute significantly to their organization's growth and success.
For more information on Will Critchlow and SearchPilot, listeners are encouraged to visit searchpilot.com and subscribe to their SEO Test Results newsletter.
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This summary is based on the transcript provided and aims to capture the essence and key points of the podcast episode for listeners and those interested in SEO and content marketing strategies.