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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 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. Yesterday, Will and I talked about making organic search into a performance channel and some of the best practices around managing SEO within an organization. And today we're going to continue the conversation by discussing the depreciation of SEO.
- [01:22]
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 so.
- [02:41]
Tyson Stockton
With that, here's my conversation with Will Critchlow, CEO at SearchPilot. Will, welcome back.
- [02:47]
Will Critchlow
Hey, good to be back.
- [02:48]
Tyson Stockton
So I Mean, as I was, I guess in the outtakes of this, like butchering the title of the episode, maybe kind of just set the stage for the listeners. Like, what's the, what's the connection here? Like why, why are you looking at SEO as like a depreciating value?
- [03:05]
Will Critchlow
Yeah. So the word depreciation comes, is a financial concept, comes from the idea of an asset that is, that gradually loses its value over time, certainly if you don't maintain it. And that is the angle that I'm kind of coming at here is so yesterday we were talking about communicating with business stakeholders and thinking in the, or thinking and talking in the language of a general manager or someone who's managing multiple channels and thinking about the flow of money through the organization. And I'm extending that concept a little bit here to an idea that I think is very valuable, very important when it comes to forecasting, when it comes to budgeting and when it comes to measuring return on investment, which is this idea that at its heart, the simplest question is what do you think would happen to your organic search if you just did nothing to the website for years? And there are certainly some instances where you're like, it'd be fine, we're on a rocket ship. I published a one page website and the demand is just going up so fast that it's going to do better and better and better. My argument is for most organizations that is not the case. Certainly in a kind of mature website, mature space, what you would expect to happen if you did nothing is organic search would decline year over year organic search to your website. So that was where I started from, was asking that question, what do you think would happen? And the reason was I see so many organizations measuring the return on investment of their SEO activities by looking at year over year change. So how much organic search traffic did we get last year? How much organic search traffic did we get this year? And looking at that, hopefully uplift and comparing it to the spend on SEO, that only makes sense if you think this asset is completely flat in value if you do nothing. So if you'd done nothing, would it have been flat? If yes, then it makes sense to say, well, we're up 10% year over year and we spent x hundred thousand dollars. How do these numbers compare? If you think that it would have gone down if we'd done nothing? You need to compare the return on investment. The return, sorry, you need to compare what it cost you to not only the increase, but the amount it took you to get back to zero in the first place. And there are certainly some industries, some declining brands, some spaces where staying flat year over year would be a huge win actually. And the default expectation might be quite a steeper drop. And so you might be prepared to spend significant amounts of money to get the same amount of traffic you got last year. And this is related to the stuff we talked about yesterday, but not exactly the same in the sense that in paid search, for example, we talked about how if you stop spending, you stop getting right, your traffic just goes away. I'm not talking about that concept exactly here. It's not like if you don't spend on SEO, your traffic's going to go to zero and you're going to not rank for anything. I'm more talking about that gradual drop off. And so what a couple of things with this one is we tried to do a little bit of data analysis. So it's a hard one to analyze because people don't generally do this. People don't just leave their websites to decay and rot, deliberately do nothing. Or if they do, there's a lot of other things complicating the situation. Right. It's a business in trouble, it's brand value is declining, it's in an industry that's declining, there's always these kind of confounding things. We found a couple of instances where we felt like we knew that they laid off the SEO team and cut the agency spend or whatever. And that wasn't necessarily public data, but we could put that together with public data around traffic and rankings and so forth. And from doing this across a handful of websites and sense checking, to be fair, with gut feel of ourselves and some other experts, I think this number is somewhere in the 10 to 20% range on average. Right. If you did nothing, most large established websites might expect to lose 10 to 20% of their organic traffic year over year. And that's for a combination of Google changing the algorithm and you're not keeping up, you're losing freshness, you're not staying up to date with the latest search features, you're not rolling out the latest structured data, any of these kind of things. Your competitors copy everything that you do that works. They're innovating, they're doing new things. There's a lot going into this. But that's my kind of sense check of how much are we talking about here is I don't think we're talking about losing 50%, but I don't think we're talking about losing 1% either on average in most cases. And yeah, that Then just has consequences for how we think about modeling, forecasting, measuring return.
- [07:46]
Tyson Stockton
Well, I feel like the SEOs listening to this are just like this music to our ears. We're like, great, we're getting recognition now for 10 to 20% more impact. Like, and it totally makes sense. And I would agree, like, I mean, it seems extremely difficult to like, quantify depending on size of the website industry, all these other things, but regardless, it's like there's a factor there that I think would be universal in the space. How do you advocate that SEOs use this, do you think? Like what we were talking about yesterday. A lot of us in SEO, we struggle already to make these kind of business arguments, forecasting, adding in an additional complexity like this. How can you make that, I guess, achievable for the SEOs to use?
- [08:38]
Will Critchlow
This is the, I was going to say million dollar question, probably billion dollar question for the industry, right? Can we do this? Well, there's a reason we're talking about this second and yesterday's stuff was much more thought, much more fully fleshed out and thought through. I think where I'm going with this, and I'm still experimenting with this in my conversations with folks, is step one is building for the right leader, for the right general manager, using some of the language that helps them grasp the differences. So yesterday we were talking about showing the similarities between channels, right? The similarities between how you can measure roas and how you can measure return on SEO spend. For example, what I'm talking about today is actually a little bit more highlighting the differences, but not in a practical operational nature, but more in a financial nature. So in very broad brushstrokes, it's about talking to that financial leadership about how SEO is an investment and organic search is an asset where paid search is an immediate return and paid search spend is much more like an expense, right? So you spend your paid search budget this month, this quarter, you get a thing you bought this month, this quarter, and there's relatively little in the way of asset build. There's some brand value, there's some lifetime value of customers. It's not zero, but it's not designed to be capitalized in quite the same way. Side note, if anyone's listening, who actually capitalizes SEO spend, in other words, your CFO actually counts it as a true investment in an intangible asset. I would love to hear from you because I really want to. That's where I'm like, that's the end goal of some of this stuff, is thinking it through, of could this Stuff end up on the balance sheet. That would be pretty wild. Anyway, that's me geeking out on a financial direction. So if anyone is listening, do hit me up if you're in that boat.
- [10:30]
Tyson Stockton
I feel like there's something there though, especially to the point where you said yesterday, like CFOs love organic search as a channel.
- [10:37]
Will Critchlow
Imagine how much they would love it if they could capitalize the spend. This would be like. That would be amazing. So anyway, just like any intangible, like any asset, but certainly like any intangible asset, it can be impaired, it can depreciate, it can grow, it can increase in value. Right. So third parties can do things that change the value of your assets. I think that's fairly uncontroversial. That could be in a really detrimental way. Right. You had a warehouse, somebody set it on fire. Now you don't have as valuable a warehouse anymore. It could be in a more intangible sense of like, I don't know, you had a warehouse that was super well connected and changes to the neighborhood have meant that it's not as well connected to things anymore. And you can't sell that warehouse to anyone because it used to be, I don't know, near a well connected train line and now it's not. Whatever. That's a very hypothetical example. But there are non malicious things that people can do that can impair or improve the value of your assets. And that's true of any kind of asset. As we start to think in that mindset and we think, okay, the level of our organic search visibility is an asset, Google can impair that asset. Right. Google can make a unilateral change that isn't necessarily malicious, they're not necessarily targeting your organization. They're just saying for our own business reasons, we're making this change. And I was going to say we're very sorry that it's impaired your visibility. I don't think they are sorry, but it's like, okay, bit of collateral damage somewhere over there. So the mindset that I'm kind of feeling my way towards is saying if we think of our visibility as an asset that can, yes, it can fluctuate in value just like any asset can and it can be impaired or improved outside of our control. But also we can invest in this asset so we can put paint on the walls, we can fix the problems, we can keep out the damp, we can, whatever. I'm obviously no maintenance expert, but there are definitely things that we can do that stop our asset declining in value as well. As things that we can do that add to that asset pile or even just buy more of it. And the example of building more content would be an example of growing the asset in a way that we like we went out and bought some stuff and now that's in our pile of our asset. And realizing that thinking in this way that it's an asset that probably depreciates over time if we do nothing, we need to both maintain it and we want to enhance it and grow it and develop it leads to some really interesting kind of ways of thinking in the long run. I think there's all kinds of stuff. If you truly buy into this, you can advertise your spend, you can put the, you can capitalize the investment. Like there's, there's lots of kind of genuinely interesting financial. I say genuinely interesting, interesting if you're a financial nerd, things that, that could be done. But the, the most practical thing is the conversations I've been having. Leadership does get this concept. If you said to, if you say to most lead, most kind of marketing leaders or most budget holders, what do you think would happen if we did nothing? Their answer is not oh, it would stay flat. Their answer is it would probably decline. So step one, get them bought into that idea. The exact size of the decline, that's obviously like you say, much more up for debate and nuance and analysis. What I like to do here is I just like to build it into the model. And when you're forecasting or when you're reporting, I like to have inputs in the Excel that the leader can put their own numbers in. Like here you go boss, you put in what you think. What downside do you think we're protecting against? They might put in 5% where you would have put 10%, but that's okay. So they say, okay, maybe we'd have been down 5% if we did nothing. And you fill in all of those kind of details and then you could model it out and you could say, well in that case, if you think we'd have been down 5% and in fact we end up up 8%, then if it costs this much that this is this many dollars, blah blah, blah, we can tease out the something that looks very much like a ROAS or a turn on ad spend and is true kind of roi. Final point on this, bonus points. Do it over multiple years is the best way to capture the ongoing value of SEO is think about this, think about the return over three years instead of the return over three months. And that doesn't mean again, like we were saying yesterday, it's not like you can be certain what the future holds. It's not like you're committing to saying this is definitely what we're going to be doing at the back end of year three, businesses know that plans change and the planning is the valuable part rather than the plan being the valuable part. But if you can make this coherent argument that says here's how this is all going to play out, then that's when you get to pull those budget levers and really own your destiny and get the reputation as the kind of smart operator who can manage their division. And the final point I'll make on that is when we're thinking about this in a testing landscape is we think of each individual winning test as its own mini depreciating asset. So when we're building a business case for, say, a large retailer or whoever, we'll say we think we can run this many tests a quarter. We think this many of those tests will be positive. We think the average uplift will be this. And we think the average length of time that that uplift will persist for is however many months before it gets competed away or lost in the noise, or before your competitors copy you or Google makes it irrelevant or whatever it might be. And again, by that being a variable, the business leader can say, I don't quite buy that these results are going to last for nine months on average. I think our competition is smarter than that. I'm going to say these last for six months on average. And they can put those numbers in and that affects the ROI calculation. And you can build an honest picture or at least an honest framework for having valuable conversations around this stuff.
- [16:25]
Podcast Announcer
Time for a one minute break to hear from our sponsor, Pre Visible. So you're looking for SEO help. Then 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 could pay an hourly rate for a consultant who will inevitably nickel and dime you with hourly charges. Or you could work with a cookie cutter agency to quickly launch a strategyless 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 Physical'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 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 Previsible IO that's previsible P R E V I S I B L E I.
- [17:53]
Tyson Stockton
That'S such a beautifully simple piece of advice I think is super powerful for the listeners is that little act of asking for their involvement or their peace. It's like you're subconsciously making them a part of the plan so they feel like it's their like if they're arguing against it, they're arguing against themselves. So it's like you've made like you've already just baked that person in and you've also shift the focus of whether or not there is this declining or depreciation of return and you've already been like yeah, no we've already agreed to that. Let's just talk about the focal point of how much is it. And so you've already I think just kind of leapfrogged a few plays in that and I completely agree. It's like for us as SEOs we're thinking like oh that's a crazy like assumption to make but it's not in the business world and it just comes down to how are you using your KPIs, how are you reporting this, how are you adding to it? And I think being that forecasting such a uncomfortable category for a lot of SEOs having that piece and I've used it before of like recommending to have that baseline of like this is as if we do nothing. And that in itself I feel like can give a lot of assurance or comfort to the SEOs when you're not having to report just one number of like this is exactly what we're going to do. It's one line like I love having the kind of the baseline show the decline there. This is if we do you know half the items or something and then this could be the best case like planets alignment.
- [19:37]
Will Critchlow
Yeah we often talk about conservative on track, on target. You can have different I think of this stuff much more in scenario planning than in a scenario is much more interesting than a forecast. A forecast is just a central scenario or like a best guess scenario. But actually of course there's a range of scenarios. And of course some of it depends what you do. And so I think people are always scared about being on the hook for these things and I think they worry about that too much. Not that that's not a problem and not a thing. It is a thing. But being on the hook for nothing is not a safe place to be either. And the thing that is safe but delivering no value is subject to a lot of budget cuts in my experience. And the more that you can tell that long term story, as I say, you're getting that reputation for being a capable operator. And even if the world turns against you, even if inflation and cost of living means search traffic drops and Google changes mean that visibility drops and all these bad things, bad luck happen to you, you're in a position where you can explain the variance against plan, you're in a position to explain how the plan is now changing and the impact that that has on your forward looking numbers. Is a radically different world than the world where you didn't do that. That kind of communication upfront, I mean.
- [21:00]
Tyson Stockton
I guess within the veins you're able to be accountable for the channel and to be able to explain which is the dream.
- [21:08]
Will Critchlow
And that is what companies want. That's what the everyone from the CEO on down wants people to step up and take that accountability so that they can be accountable. In turn, they can be accountable and say, you know, across the portfolio of channels that I manage, this channel is facing headwinds. This channel is operating ahead of plan through. Good luck. You know, this one's operating ahead of plan through because everything's paid off. And yeah, you know, here's the changes we're making as a result. And it's just about, it's about that.
- [21:37]
Tyson Stockton
Explanation and I think like everyone wins in that scenario. Like the businesses, business leaders want that from SEO, SEOs want to do that and essentially for the business leader, they want that so then they can manage the rest of the channels as if you would manage anything else. And so I think by having that confidence, that reliability, the consistency then allows whoever's in that executive, that board position to make better choices and decisions which we're all working towards. 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. And if you'd like to get in touch with Will, you can find a link to their LinkedIn profile in their show notes or go on over and check out his company's website at SearchPil.
- [22:27]
Podcast Announcer
Okay. Thanks to Tyson Stockton, our guest host. If you'd like to get in touch with Tyson, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show Notes. You can contact him on Twitter where his handle is TysonStockton. Or if your team is interested in SEO consulting or organizational education, you can always head to their company's website, which is Previsible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O and a special thanks to Ahrefs for sponsoring this podcast. Monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools, but that's not the case anymore, thanks to Ahrefs because they just launched their Ahrefs Webmaster Tools product, which monitors your SEO health, helps you keep track of your backlinks, and gives you the insight into what keywords are performing for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.comAWT that's Ahrefs a h r e f s.comAWT just one more link in our show Notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is as Ben jschapp 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.