Why SEO Is More Than Driving Traffic...It's Driving Revenue

Summary

Voices of Search Podcast: Episode Summary

Title: Why SEO Is More Than Driving Traffic...It's Driving Revenue
Host: Tyson Stockton, Previsible.io
Guest: Stefan Hederbrandt, CMO and Co-Founder of Dream Data
Release Date: April 3, 2025

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Introduction

In this insightful episode of Voices of Search, host Tyson Stockton engages in an enlightening conversation with Stefan Hederbrandt, the CMO and co-founder of Dream Data. Building upon their previous discussion about aligning SEO with B2B revenue attribution, Tyson and Stefan delve deeper into the pivotal role SEO plays in driving not just traffic, but significant revenue for businesses. The dialogue emphasizes a strategic shift from traditional traffic-centric SEO approaches to those that prioritize revenue generation.

Aligning SEO with Revenue

Tyson opens the conversation by reflecting on their last discussion, noting the transition from identifying high-traffic pages to understanding the pathways that lead to revenue-generating actions.

Tyson Stockton [00:42]:
"Yesterday, Stefan and I talked about how to align SEO with B2B revenue attribution. And today we're continuing the conversation by discussing why SEO is more than driving traffic, it is driving revenue."

Stefan agrees, highlighting the importance of isolating sessions related to actual deals rather than blanket traffic analysis.

Stefan Hederbrandt [02:29]:
"Instead of looking at all the traffic that arrived to your website last year, you can focus and just look at what the accounts that actually end up buying your assigning contracts with you as a B2B company do."
(02:29)

Focusing on Quality Over Quantity Traffic

Stefan underscores that often, it's not the high-traffic URLs that drive significant revenue, but rather niche, low-traffic pages that align closely with the buyer’s decision-making process.

Stefan Hederbrandt [02:29]:
"There’s a bunch of very low traffic URLs that actually matters a lot for people that are actually deciding whether they should buy your product or not."
(02:29)

This perspective shifts the focus from sheer volume to the quality and intent behind the traffic, ensuring that SEO efforts are geared towards attracting potential customers who are more likely to convert.

Identifying High-Impact Pages

Stefan provides specific examples of the types of pages that can significantly influence revenue:

1. Alternative Pages:
   Comparing less-known brands with established ones can capture traffic from users exploring their options.

   Stefan Hederbrandt [03:15]:
   "Alternative pages, established brand and then alternative. Those pages are quite typically always good to get your company mentioned in because people know the category that they're looking for."
   (03:15)

2. Integration Pages:
   Ensuring visibility in searches related to integrations with popular platforms (e.g., HubSpot, Salesforce) targets users deep in the decision process.

   Stefan Hederbrandt [04:02]:
   "Integration pages, so making sure that you are listed up amongst when people are searching for integrations to specific products that could be like CRMs..."
   (04:02)

3. Community Pages:
   Highlighting active user communities (e.g., Slack communities) can build trust and demonstrate active usage, appealing to prospective buyers.

   Stefan Hederbrandt [04:45]:
   "Community pages on companies websites, meaning that do you have a Slack community? Are you able to display that other people are actually using your product?"
   (04:45)

Shifting Organizational Focus

The conversation shifts to the challenges of aligning organizational priorities, particularly when executives are accustomed to traditional traffic metrics.

Tyson Stockton [07:18]:
"And maybe it's a little bit on ourselves for like conditioning some of these executives, but now you have people that are conditioned into asking for how is my traffic performing here? Why is overall Google traffic down."
(07:18)

Stefan suggests that SEOs need to adopt a business-centric mindset, focusing on customer acquisition rather than merely increasing visitor numbers.

Stefan Hederbrandt [07:56]:
"It’s about, as SEOs to think about, think about being a businessman rather than being an SEO. And meaning that let's like you wouldn't if it was your own business, you wouldn't just be optimizing for getting more visitors, you would be optimizing for getting more customers."
(07:56)

Leveraging Sales Data for SEO

Stefan emphasizes the value of integrating sales data, such as transcriptions from sales calls, to identify the specific language and terms used by buyers during their decision-making process.

Stefan Hederbrandt [08:22]:
"If your company has a call recording software, you know, go listen to those calls and study what are the words that they use when they have to express it. Because that's probably also the terms that you want to be ranking for in Google."
(08:22)

This approach ensures that SEO strategies are closely aligned with the actual needs and language of potential customers, enhancing relevance and conversion rates.

Measuring Impact: Statistical Significance

When discussing how to measure the effectiveness of SEO efforts, Stefan introduces a pragmatic approach that balances scientific rigor with business practicality.

Stefan Hederbrandt [10:43]:
"When I'm making decision in terms of business, I'm just looking for something that I'm. I think I can repeat. So that is kind of like the alternative article. One guy, like 20 people came through and two of those people that came through our comparison page ended up booking a demo call. That's like 10%."
(10:43)

He clarifies that while traditional statistical significance might require larger sample sizes, for business purposes, sufficient signals indicating positive or negative trends are adequate to inform SEO strategies.

Stefan Hederbrandt [12:01]:
"A rule of thumb is that if it's above your average conversion rate to something, then it's interesting. If it's below it's probably not super interesting because it says something about that the people that arrive here has relevance or not."
(12:01)

Strategic Recommendations

Summarizing their discussion, Stefan advises focusing SEO resources on strategies and pages that demonstrably impact revenue positively. This involves replicating successful tactics and reallocating efforts from underperforming areas to those that drive meaningful business outcomes.

Stefan Hederbrandt [13:34]:
"I mean in general I would go for whatever looks to be the most to have the biggest impact on revenue. So if you, if you run out of projects in that area, you can look at, you can try to understand what are the things that doesn't. But my general approach is trying to understand kind of what really works. And let's try to do more of that."
(13:34)

Conclusion

Tyson wraps up the episode by reinforcing the key takeaway: leveraging data-driven insights to prioritize SEO efforts that directly contribute to revenue growth. He underscores the importance of strategic focus and encourages listeners to adopt a revenue-centric approach to SEO.

Tyson Stockton [14:03]:
"We've really been banging the drum and hopefully everyone's too picking up on you need to be following the areas that are having the greatest business impact."
(14:03)

Listeners are encouraged to connect with Stefan Hederbrandt via LinkedIn and explore Dream Data’s offerings for enhanced marketing attribution and revenue analytics.

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Key Takeaways

• Shift Focus from Traffic to Revenue: Prioritize SEO strategies that directly impact revenue rather than merely increasing site traffic.
• Identify High-Impact Pages: Focus on alternative pages, integration pages, and community pages that align with the buyer’s decision process.
• Leverage Sales Data: Utilize transcriptions from sales calls to identify and target the language and terms used by potential customers.
• Pragmatic Measurement: Use business-relevant signals to assess the effectiveness of SEO efforts, focusing on significant positive or negative trends.
• Strategic Resource Allocation: Allocate SEO resources to strategies and pages that demonstrate clear revenue impact, and reallocate from underperforming areas.

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This episode offers valuable insights for SEO professionals and marketers looking to align their strategies with business revenue goals. By focusing on the quality and intent behind web traffic and leveraging sales data, organizations can transform their SEO efforts into powerful revenue-driving tools.

Transcript

[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.

Hey, what's going on? My name is tyson from Previsible I.O. and joining me today is Stefan Hederbrandt, who is the CMO and co founder of Dream Data. DreamData provides innovative solutions for data driving market attribution and revenue analytics. Dream Data specializes in helping businesses optimize their marketing strategies and maximize roi. Its platform offers advanced insights and actionable intelligence to drive growth in decision making. Yesterday, Stefan and I talked about how to align SEO with B2B revenue attribution. And today we're continuing the conversation by discussing why SEO is more than driving traffic, it is driving revenue. With that, here's my conversation with Stefan Hederbrandt, co founder and CMO at Dream Data. Stefan, welcome back.

[Stefan Hederbrandt]

Thank you so much, Tyson.

[Tyson Stockton]

No, yesterday I feel like we kind of, we left everyone kind of a little bit of a cliffhanger. We didn't kind of, I feel like complete the conversation, but I mean, we were, we were kind of discussing a similar topic in a day where we were talking about attribution and kind of looking, in your words, at the cheat codes as far as, like, how we're making an impact through our efforts as SEOs, and looking at those pages that were kind of common or driving more of the revenue later in the stage in the sales process, but kind of going beyond that, like, where do we go from looking at the pages into like, maybe like, you know, how people are getting to them and stuff like that. So one page, we're going to have potentially thousands of keywords that could be ranking for it. Like, what's the next step beyond just identifying what those pages are?

[Stefan Hederbrandt]

Yeah, so there's, there's a couple of ideas that comes to mind with when you have technology like we do at our company, but you could pursue at your own company as well. And here we're talking particularly B2B. So one thing is that instead of studying just every single user journey on your website, by having a really solid B2B attribution setup, you'd be able to isolate only the sessions related to the deals that you win in your analysis. So what I'm saying here is that let's say you won a hundred accounts in your company last year. Then instead of looking at all the traffic that arrived to your website last year, you can focus and just look at what the accounts that actually end up buying your assigning contracts with you as a B2B company do. And what you typically find there is there's a bunch of very low traffic URLs that actually matters a lot for people that are actually deciding whether they should buy your product or not. You can call it kind of like what's the due diligence process that people are going through as they decide to buy your product. I can mention a few of the things that typically work when you study just the people that buy. It's an SEO classic, which is the alternative pages, established brand and then alternative. Those pages are quite typically always good to get your your company mentioned in because people know the category that they're looking for. But you have a brand that can do the same, but you're just not as known as the other one. There's a lot of great traffic to catch there. Other things are like integration pages, so making sure that you are listed up amongst when people are searching for integrations to specific products that could be like CRMs, like attribution for HubSpot, attribution for Salesforce, those kind of searches where you're super deep into the decision process, where you're kind of looking for specific integrations to a specific product are always kind of appearing quite high when you look at those kind of SEO analysis. There's also things that have surprised me which is kind of community pages on companies websites, meaning that do you have a Slack community? Are you able to display that other people are actually using your product? When people arrive to websites coming through searches like this, they typically have a high tendency to actually end up buying. But it's not a high volume game because it's like typically for very niche technologies it's not somebody that everybody searches for, but the people that are searching for these are highly relevant for you to speak with. So there's a bunch of things where if you throw away the traffic mindset and think about now I'm trying to do due diligence whether I can trust a vendor within my space. What are the pages that you kind of need to go through?

[Tyson Stockton]

Well, I feel like one thing that kind of jumped out in those Examples too, is at least like the first two of them, very programmatic, SEO friendly.

[Stefan Hederbrandt]

Ah, that's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

[Tyson Stockton]

Like your integration pages, the comparisons, like as an SEO, like, as soon as I hear that, I feel I can't say it's just a feeding frenzy because that's the area that is SEO, especially as you get some more of the enterprise level that you excel in. Because now it's like there's a system, a process identifying what the integrations are, the volume of common data sources that you would need for each. And now you're talking creating hundreds, maybe thousands of pages versus kind of like those one offs.

[Stefan Hederbrandt]

That's very true, Tyson. I think what I'm trying to say to people, instead of just looking at it from looking at a website as how do I get traffic in there? You want to invert how you look at it. And you should study if I'm making a buying decision, what are the things that needs to be ticked off my. The list from my sales buying committee. And let's try to optimize to show up all these places because the intent from winning that traffic will be very likely quality stuff that our sales team can work. But that also takes alignment because if you have a boss that says the traffic number needs to go up, that that's not necessarily what you'll be achieving by optimizing for catching the buying behavior out there.

[Tyson Stockton]

Which I mean that, that brings us to an interesting piece because then it's like on one hand I feel like the executives maybe like if they're listening to those conversations, like probably being like, yes, that's exactly it. Like, I want the focus on the revenue. Like that's what they should be trying to steer the organization towards.

[Stefan Hederbrandt]

Yeah.

[Tyson Stockton]

But then, and maybe it's a little bit on ourselves for like conditioning some of these executives, but now you have people that are conditioned into asking for how is my traffic performing here? Why is overall Google traffic down? And you know, it's like we've almost conditioned people to ask about the wrong thing. Yeah. How do we, how do we alter that? How do we fix that? Like, is it just through having visibility here that then we just start to like recondition the organization into kind of following, you know, what is truly most important?

[Stefan Hederbrandt]

You know, it's a bit the same as we've talked about, it's about, as SEOs to think about, think about being a businessman rather than being an SEO. And meaning that let's like you wouldn't if it was your own business, you wouldn't just be optimizing for getting more visitors, you would be optimizing for getting more customers. And it's that conversation that, you know, it might feel uncomfortable having to go to some high ranking officer in your company saying, no, I won't produce another article to win a random keyword. I'd rather spend a lot of effort on these very niche topics, which we know is exactly the words that people use on sales calls. So you might also, if your company has a call recording software, you know, go listen to those calls and study what are the words that they use when they have to express it. Because that's probably also the terms that you want to be ranking for in Google. Even though they're low volume, it's exactly what the buyers say when they're in there in the sales conversations.

[Tyson Stockton]

I feel like that's a really important almost undertone to the conversation here is like first, clearly it's like having the right map, you know, or having like a more accurate visualization of like what's really going on with like that. But then if we're thinking about this in the right way, I feel like it's almost a little bit of how you're thinking about it because from that to like your last point, you could be thinking more creatively about like mining some of those key topics or keywords or how whatever you want to use. But whether it's through looking at sales calls or interviews with the sales teams or that it's like it feels like you're really getting towards the same thing and it's more of like, yep, those are going to be the more effective kind of seed pieces of information to then build like further upon.

[Stefan Hederbrandt]

Yeah. And even if you're, if you're lazy, you don't have to listen to the sales calls, you can just get all the transcriptions into a data warehouse and you can do your, your mining in the, in the data warehouse and just go a bit by volume there. But again you probably don't want to study all journeys. Maybe just study the journey of the accounts that actually reached the sales pipeline or at best if there's enough volume, study only the accounts that you, you actually want.

[Tyson Stockton]

And what, what kind of volumes typically would you be looking for? Like if you were to advise an SEO that's like looking at that within their, like is there whether it's like, yeah, certain volume of sales users going through like what would be some of like the key thresholds.

[Stefan Hederbrandt]

Yeah. Here the difference between actual science and just good enough for business comes into the picture. So I went to university. I did go to university. And there I know that you need thousands of people to say something statistically valid, but when I'm making decision in terms of business, I'm just looking for something that I'm. I think I can repeat. So that is kind of like the alternative article. One guy, like 20 people came through and two of those people that came through our comparison page ended up booking a demo call. That's like 10%. Okay, that's a pretty high. That's significant enough for me to say, there's something here. Can we try and rank this page or can we go the other way? Can we produce more, as you say, programmatic? Can we take 20 more brands and then replicate that across all the brands? So I'm, I'm just basically just looking for statistical outliers, whether that's like in a negative sense. Thousands of people come in here and nobody books a demo. That's probably, that's very like, that's a good example of a waste of time for an SEO. And then there's the articles that people consume and then with a very high likelihood end up booking a demo afterwards. So it's just statistical significance, whether it's positive or negative, which I feel like.

[Tyson Stockton]

That point is really worth doubling down on for the listeners is because I feel like there's an interest in being specific and exact on it. But your call out of, hey, we're not doing this for true statistical relevance. We're looking for just enough to have that signal that then gives us the confidence of what the right business activities are.

[Stefan Hederbrandt]

Yeah, way to maybe go up. Like a rule of thumb is that if it's, if it's above your average conversion rate to something, then it's interesting. If it's below it's. It's. It's probably not super interesting because it says something about that the people that arrive here has relevance or not.

[Tyson Stockton]

So I guess taking the same philosophy that like we're discussing here, it seems like you could, you could approach it in two different ways. One, the piece where it's like, yeah, look for anything that's above that average because that's going to be an improvement of where you're currently at. So it's almost focusing on the positive. I feel like you could also do the reverse and look at the complete negative of this and like, let's deprioritize or avoid the type of pages or the type of things that are having net zero impact. Like it. It kind of seems like you can, you can kind of avoid the negative or maximize the positive. Like any is that more situational from your perspective or you're like, in general, I would lean people towards that positive. Yeah.

[Stefan Hederbrandt]

I mean in general I would go for whatever looks to be the most to have the biggest impact on revenue. So if you, if you run out of projects in that area, you can look at, you can try to understand what are the things that doesn't. But my general approach is trying to understand kind of what really works. And let's try to do more of that. If you're putting a lot of resources into what doesn't work, then shift those resources over to something that has an impact.

[Tyson Stockton]

100% agree with that. And I feel like across this we've really been banging the drum and hopefully everyone's too picking up on you need to be following the areas that are having the greatest business impact. And it's like at the end of the day, the attribution, as you've said, is kind of the cheat code to telling us where our focus should be. But then it becomes a practice of knowing where the focus is and maximizing and kind of expanding beyond that. And with that, that's going to wrap up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks again to Stefan Hederbrandt from Dream Data for joining us. And if you'd like to get in touch with him, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in the show Notes. Or go on over and be sure to check out his company's website at dreamdata IO.

[Ben Schapp]

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 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 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.