← Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Terakeet’s Audience-First Approach To SEO
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- [00:00]
Podcast Announcer
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search Podcast, Tyson Stockton.
- [00:43]
Tyson Stockton
Hey, what's going on? My name is tyson from Previsible I.O. and in today's episode we're going to be discussing audience first approach to SEO. Joining me today is Kevin Koch, who is the SEO director at Terakeet. Terakeet is the preferred owned asset optimization partner for Fortune 500 brands seeking meaningful customer connections and online business growth.
- [01:07]
Podcast Announcer
This podcast is also sponsored by Ahrefs. What if I told you that you could monitor your website's SEO health backlinks and organic rankings at no costs? Sounds too good to be true. Well, it's not, because my friends at Ahrefs just launched Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Ahrefs new Webmaster Tools product quickly helps you improve your site's visibility by pointing solutions to over 100 technical issues that might be holding your search performance down. Plus, AWT monitors for backlinks so you'll know the most linked to pages and how those links are affecting your rankings. And AWT shares what keywords your website ranks for and compares how you stack up against competitors for key metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty, and traffic value. Look, monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools, and now, thanks to Ahrefs, that's not the case anymore because AWT will help you monitor your SEO health, backlinks and keywords for free. And no, it's not one of those 14 day free trial offers. It's a powerful site audit tool that will keep working for you for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.comAWT that's a H R E F S.comAWT.
- [02:25]
Tyson Stockton
So with that, here's my conversation with Kevin Koch, SEO Director at Terakeet. Kevin, welcome to the podcast.
- [02:32]
Kevin Koch
Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.
- [02:34]
Tyson Stockton
So, starting it off like, what do you mean by an audience first approach?
- [02:39]
Kevin Koch
Yeah, it's a good question. So what we mean by audience first is that we really want to focus on who we're targeting besides the keywords, which typically is the way that I've always experienced it with other organizations in the past is more keyword driven besides audience driven. The reason for that is because we definitely want to have a better understanding of what our clients are trying or who our clients are trying to target. Then that way we can identify their key motivations, their moments, their milestones, and then map that back to the business outcomes that they have hired us to tackle and go for. So then that way we can really size the opportunity correctly and really understand our strategy more further of where we can make a custom approach for them. As we start to put this together.
- [03:26]
Tyson Stockton
That makes a lot of sense. So it's almost kind of similar to like a doctor addressing the symptom versus the underlining cause of the symptom. And I feel like in, in your explanation there, the keywords are just happen to be what the audience is searching or is like the mechanism, but it's like at the core of it, it is the audience or like the people that you're going after from like a tactical approach, like what does it mean? Or how do we shift the way that we operate from the more traditional, like you said keyword. First of these are the keywords that we're going after to more of like this is the audience that we're going after.
- [04:09]
Kevin Koch
So from our perspective, we take a ton of different inputs to identify who that core audience would be. We definitely partner closely with our clients to get as much information from them as possible. But there's definitely some gaps typically, but lucky we do have really good partners that have a ton of this information already started to fill in those gaps. We really take a lot of time and energy to ideate who those people are like what are their demographics, what are again some of those main milestones or moments in their lives that are not focused only on the business objectives and really break it down into the person and their environment and then have an overlapping middle part of their moments, those key moments. So that's how we really start it. And there's other tactics and processes that we follow to get some of those inputs, whether it's different tools or stakeholder interviews or UX studies and capabilities there. That way it's just a more comprehensive approach as opposed to just diving again straight into the keyword research process.
- [05:10]
Tyson Stockton
Got it. And you're going through this exercise both with inputs, things that you can gather on your own. Once you're at kind of that stage where you feel like you have a pretty good representation or understanding of the audience that you're going after. And you made the comment of like, the moments. So I'm guessing with that it's like the stages of the buyer's journey, how do you identify kind of those moments to these different audience groups that you might be going after?
- [05:45]
Kevin Koch
It's a lot of collaboration between our own internal disciplines and also with the client as well. Again, we were hired for a reason. We're here to help provide that business value and revenue back to the organization. So that's really the crux of it, is just making sure that we're all in alignment of what those, again, goals are. But what drives into those goals, what are those moments? And then making sure that we brainstorm them, align with the client, and then to start mapping into those specific initiatives that would help feel that visibility to then drive those conversions and create thread experiences for the customers or potential customers to make that leap to become a new conversion or by product or anything like that.
- [06:25]
Tyson Stockton
Interesting. And with this approach, and it's like, you know, a little bit of a paradigm shift that we said already of going from kind of like keyword first, audience first. And I feel like the description that you're giving is giving me kind of like these flashbacks to, like, marketing courses that I took of, like, understanding, like, target markets or target consumer groups and things like that. And so, yeah, it's kind of like bringing back those memories of it. And it feels like in some ways, like we're going, I don't know, resurfacing some of the tools that we, like, we've had within marketing with, like, an SEO application. How do you feel like the end result differs from, like, these two kind of approaches to SEO?
- [07:08]
Kevin Koch
I think what you're touching on is a really important aspect to hit on. So I. I'm glad that you brought it up. I really think as an industry, we need to stop thinking of ourselves mainly as an SEO first, like driver and more of a marketing driver, and especially like performance marketing, organic search. And SEO is a great lever to drive those types of outcomes for any business. And as long as there's that cohesive and holistic strategy assigned to it. So even as you're mentioning, you know, taking your flashbacks to your marketing courses or books and things that you've done there, I think that's great because that is what SEO is. We are marketers. We are trying to identify what is the best way to reach these types of prospective clients or customers and meet them where they are at their journey. So it's less about, again, ranking for one individual keyword or a set of keywords or anything like that, but more identifying what are those key moments and making sure that we have the right experiences there for our clients to be found while people are trying to make that decision that's very authentic and genuine and not going to disrupt their flow throughout their day to day. So it's, I do like that kind of approach. It's, it's a higher level of thinking of that. It's more marketing focused than just search organic focused. Yeah.
- [08:25]
Tyson Stockton
And I was actually just having a conversation with some of like the pre visible team members earlier today and we were talking about kind of this piece of like the main purpose is driving the business value. It's not the activities that we're doing or it's not necessarily even in some cases staying within a strict confines of like our contract said we're going to do X number of content pieces or X number of re optimizations. But it's more of like getting at that source of driving business value. And I feel like that's similarly touching on what you're kind of advocating for here is like it's not just, oh, we do SEO best practices because we do SEO best practices and that's how you do SEO, but it's like getting into the actual brand strategy and the brand objectives for SEOs out there. And it's an area that I've seen where it feels like maybe it doesn't come as second nature to a lot of SEOs to make those connections between SEO tactics and brand strategies or brand goals. Would you have any like recommendations for SEOs to be able to make those connections of how their individual tasks or activities can kind of roll into a greater strategy?
- [09:52]
Kevin Koch
Yeah, learning how to do that was a big part of where I was able to take a huge step in my career. And the reason, especially working with like large enterprises that have to essentially prove what this project's going to be driving for the business because you're sharing resources, you have to get a bunch of people on board. It takes time and energy. And the faster you learn how to do that, the more you'll get done, whether it's at a large company or even at a smaller company. Ultimately the way that I think about it is everything costs money. So if we're going to be doing those best practices, as you mentioned just a couple minutes ago, yes, we can do that. But what is the value that we are driving if we can't confidently and accurately measure that success, which is really hard in today's World as we all know it makes things really challenging to to have the team go fix broken backlinks here and there, or update a keyword on a page, or do all these different types of best practice work. While on the flip side, if we think about it as what are the bigger projects that are going to really move the needle, that are going to drive that business value and going to still require just as much effort, but we need to prioritize those ones first. So from our standpoint what we do with clients is we really rough size all of our estimates out for projects, including some of these best practice work foundational elements. And the reason we do that is that we can start to get that buy in from the team, align with the developers or the resources on their roadmaps as well to make sure that they're still helping us out, get some of that implemented work in place, but also not disrupting all the other projects that a company has going on that they still are working on too. That's driving business value. So it is a lot of bit of collaboration, but by providing those like impact statements or opportunity rough sizes, we're able to then have more of a conversation with them as opposed to just telling them go fix a bunch of long title tags or something like that.
- [11:45]
Tyson Stockton
And what are you including in those impact estimates?
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Kevin Koch
Mainly it is driven by what's the expected revenue and incremental lift that we see from these projects, which is really exciting because it is a little bit of a cat and mouse game of where do you like pick this out of? Is it mainly driven from expertise and past knowledge? Is it driven by improvements when it comes to keyword visibility and anything new there? So we have to blend those two together with our clients and just help them be educated on that deliverable so that they can also go fight for it. But leading with that revenue based metric and value metric is definitely the way to go because that's speaking their language, how they can go get more resources they can get the understanding of is this going to drive an ROI for the business and if so, then it's worthwhile in comparison to all the other 50 things they got going on in their day.
- [12:39]
Podcast Announcer
Time for a one minute break to hear from our sponsor, Pre Visible. So you're looking for SEO help and you got a couple of options. You could start replying to spam from agencies that claim they can get you to rank number one on Google. You can pay an hourly rate for a consultant who will inevitably nickel and dime you with hourly charges, or you can work with a cookie cutter agency to quickly launch a strategy less project with low success rate. None of those sound very good now do they? Well, that's where Pre Visible's integrated consulting model comes in. Pre Visible draws From a collective 40 years of SEO and digital marketing experience to unlock your organic growth opportunities. They build custom solutions that combine strategy, technical expertise, content and reporting to effectively operationalize SEO for your business. Pre Visible's four stage approach ensures that your SEO programs thrive by starting off with a strategy first approach. Then they support you in your efforts to create quality content, help you identify technical issues, and most importantly, they'll work with your cross functional teams to integrate your SEO strategies to make sure that your SEO budget actually drives results, not just your agency's bottom line. So join brands like Yelp, ebay, Canva, Atlassian Square, all who rely on the SEO consultants at Pre Visible. For more information, go to Pre Visible IO that's Pre Visible P R E V I S I B L E I O.
- [14:08]
Tyson Stockton
I feel like that is an area that probably a lot of SEOs listening to this maybe feel a little uncomfortable where I've noticed that because of the nature of SEO and being that there are some elements that may not be controllable. And I mean like just the other day I did an entire podcast with Kathy on the tail two refractors and how it was a similar type work across two different domains, two different categories and segments, totally different response to changing like a backend code base of the website. And so there's this element of SEO that's like, okay, we can't control the entire world. So there's all these variables floating around out there and I think the SEOs or a lot of SEOs out there struggle with the like, well, I think it's going to be this impact but I don't really know like what do you have anything that might kind of comfort those nerves for the SEOs where it's like great, understand why we need to do this. It is and totally agree with you on like, this is like the way to get resources, it's the way to get stuff done in big business essentially. But what recommendations would you have for SEOs that maybe feel like they're, they're not comfortable going out on that limb.
- [15:26]
Kevin Koch
There's a couple things I would start with and definitely my personal take on a lot of this is that first of all, always have a rationale. If you have a really well thought out rationale, plan and approach to like how you're providing those projections or estimates that's where you start immediately and be able to speak to that confidently to the client so that they can also speak to it confidently. So it's a lot of that, like, collaborative efforts to make sure that they're aligned, their understanding of how this is being presented and the why behind it. The other one is you're going to have to start somewhere, you're going to have to just take a stab at it and go for it. Otherwise you're constantly going to just be sitting here trying to send deliverables over where they can't get the resources, and then nothing gets implemented. And we all know SEO takes time. It's only going to take longer than at that point. So it's okay to throw out a guess and understand how it's potentially going to perform as long as you then can come back and measure how close you were or not and then make those different types of assumptions next time to make it a closer and more accurate estimate or projection. So kind of make sure you have a well thought out plan, make it strategic, make sure the client's bought in on that approach before you go do the estimate. Then you provide that estimate and give all that rationale of what the project was, and then you just kind of have to go with it and learn and measure and go from there. And then I would say the third area there that's just kind of the newer trend, I would say, in SEO is the testing portion. What can you do to isolate everything you possibly can to test out some deliverables so that you can get a sample set of data that's still statistically relevant so that you can be confident in the rest of that implementation across a bigger section of the site now.
- [17:04]
Tyson Stockton
And I know we're kind of going down the rabbit hole a little bit from like the audience approach, but I feel like these are really helpful kind of like nuggets of information for SEOs out there. And you said that making, making this shift was like one of the biggest changes or milestones in your own professional, like, development. Was there anything that you felt like made it made the difference for you making that jump? And like, what was that moment that led up to the light bulb of like, okay, this is how I need to position SEO, or this is, you know, really why we're doing the things that we do?
- [17:41]
Kevin Koch
I would say back when I started doing SEO, I was really set on making sure the website was as perfect and clean as possible, especially from the best practice standpoint. I would read all these blogs, be like, okay, you can't have title tags over a certain amount of character limit, you can't have same with the meta description, it has to be within a certain character limit. Don't have any internal broken links, don't have any internal redirecting links, all those like main base, elemental and foundational stuff. So I was very set on that and I thought if that was the case where this website was clean, especially from a technical SEO perspective and relatively optimized for different devices and things like that, the traffic would come. And it did work to some extent. But where I missed out on a ton of opportunities was really focusing on what the business needed to solve for. And really now kind of tying it back to the audience discovery portion or audience first approach is that I wasn't thinking about what was going to drive more revenue. I was thinking about what's going to make the best site. So switching that mindset to be like I need to solve for problems and I need to drive revenue. And there's so many sites that I've seen in my day that aren't actually technically super great, but they drive a ton of revenue because they're fitting a consumer or solving a consumer's problem. So that was a big shift. And also working with large enterprises, those sites are very complex. You have a lot of different resources that are going into that to make the site just work. Typically they're strapped for their time, so they have to be very strategic in their decision making too of what they're going to be spending time on. So it made it very important for me to take a step back and say are they going to care about fixing all these little foundational stuff or should I go ahead and actually implement a different strategy that's going to expose 10 times the visibility and opportunity and it's going to be less resources down the line.
- [19:34]
Tyson Stockton
Absolutely. That's such a, such a valuable takeaway for the SEOs listening to this. And I think like that is one piece that's really common in individual developments where it's like you go from learning the basis but it's kind of like you run the risk of to your point, like making the objective to be no errors or like a clean site in the sense. But you also get to a point where it's a never ending battle on that and then from a prioritization it's just like, yeah, it 10 doesn't tend to make sense in the real world. And I think like that is a huge piece that like the SEOs can take away from this.
- [20:14]
Kevin Koch
Absolutely.
- [20:15]
Tyson Stockton
Coming back into like the Audience first. So I think like we covered really like the justification, like the significance of why this is such a meaningful, like paradigm shift. Again, you like have these moments, like, I assume with it, like you have some like Persona mapping. What's the kind of final like next step on it? Like, how do you set those priorities and kind of reach those audiences?
- [20:40]
Kevin Koch
Yeah, that's the exciting part in my mind and what I love about my job is that we take this massive set of information of who the audience is, what are their motivations, those moments and milestones, then you start breaking it down from there into the kind of total addressable market that is available to the industry or a brand. That way you take like kind of a huge set of information data down to a smaller one. Once you have that total addressable market view, then you can segment it out even further into what are more of the target list that are applicable for this business to have that visibility and exposure to. And once you get to that more segmented view, we can start to associate different value metrics to those topics and themes and opportunities to then create a program strategy off of. So the whole flow of it is just starting again. Where, where this person's at in their journey, how does the business solve for that and what they're trying to help the consumer know and educate them on? And then within there, where are the bigger opportunities for us to more or less double click into, to focus on to drive the most revenue and value for the company as soon as possible?
- [21:54]
Tyson Stockton
All right, Kevin, we're kind of coming up on, on the episode here. Could you give more of like, like a summary? Like if you had to boil this down, like, what is the main message and takeaway you want everyone to walk away with from making this shift towards an audience first approach?
- [22:14]
Kevin Koch
Yeah, I would definitely say start with defining who your audience is first and make sure that you're aligned with your, your client, your team on what that looks like and make sure it's very comprehensive and as exhaustive as possible. Once you have that, distill that down into what is the outcomes and objectives that you're trying to solve for, then that way you can identify what is the really core part of your SEO program that you want to be focused on. And then that way you can start to size out the opportunity, really understand where you're currently sitting at, and then make that strategy as strong as possible so that it's aligned with the client up front as opposed to being more of that keyword first approach.
- [22:57]
Podcast Announcer
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.com AWT that's Ahrefs a h r e f s.com AWT Excellent.
- [23:31]
Tyson Stockton
Well with that, that wraps up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks to Kevin Koch, SEO Director at terakey, for joining us in part two of this conversation, which will be published tomorrow. Kevin and I are going to continue the conversation and discuss how the total addressable market creates biz value. If you can't wait until the next episode and you'd like to learn more about Kevin, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in the show notes or visit his company's website@terakeet.com also, if you didn't get a chance to take notes while listening to the episode, head over to the voiceofsearch.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes, contact information for our guests. You can also send your topic suggestions, SEO questions, and even apply to be a guest speaker on the Voice of Search podcast. You can reach us on social media, where our show handle is voicesofsearch, or you can find me at TysonStockton. And if you haven't subscribed yet and want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast 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 business day. And with that, that wraps up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. We'll see you tomorrow.