"Is it working?"
3 months into our SEO journey + what we're seeing
Contrary to popular belief, SEO isn’t dead.
It’s simply evolving beyond the traditional search engine results page (SERP) and instead of being able to look at cause/effect in a singular channel, we now have to think more strategically about how, what, and where we’re saying things online.
As promised, each month I’m dropping in here to share an update about our SEO journey to share what I’m learning as we go. Last month, I shared the story about why YOYABA (our SEO agency) told me “NO” when I asked if we could spend more to move faster.
It’s been over 3 months since we first started working with them. So today I’m here to talk about the question every single marketing leader is either asking or getting from their leadership team - “Is it working?”
Sponsor:
It took me two hours to assemble a "simple" princess castle for my daughter last weekend.
One-sheet instructions? Check.
YouTube video? Check.
Website for missing parts? Check.
Still way too much trial and error.
Software often feels the same. A “simple” issue should be easy to fix, but:
Docs don’t exist.
Docs don’t answer the question.
Docs are too complicated.
Or the fix just…doesn’t work.
Ask any support rep - they’re answering the same 3-5 questions all day. The root cause? Help center docs that aren’t clear or helpful enough.
I’m a visual learner. I need to see how to do something. That’s why we’re building customer support use cases with Storylane - step‑by‑step interactive demos to handle FAQs and common issues.
Instead of vague articles, we’ll attach Storylane demos to help pages or preload them into chatbots so customers see exactly how to fix the issue.
Defining “is it working”
If I had a dollar for every time I got the question “Is X working?” I’d be a rich man.
Well, maybe not rich, but it could certainly cover my daughter’s newfound love of ice cream + treating her to a weekly ice cream date on the dime of this question.
Anyway, back to the question at hand. With SEO, or any marketing initiative for that matter, while this question is well-intended, it’s far too vague to be answered on the spot. We need to map it to a specific goal or desired outcome.
In SEO, this could be a few different things:
Are we driving more traffic?
Are we driving more of the right traffic?
Are we building stronger brand awareness over time?
Are the people hitting our website learning?
Are the people hitting our website converting?
Are the people who converted progressing through the deal cycle faster or at higher win rates?
The list could go on and on, but you can see where I’m going with this.
So when it comes down to our specific use case and goals, there are two core results that I’m after:
Drive more of the right traffic
Increase the number of people who convert after finding us via online research (Google, GPTs, etc.)
Now that we have these two goals, we can start to drill into what “working” means.
Driving more of the right traffic
Now we get to go a layer deeper here. Right traffic. What the heck does that mean? Human vs bot traffic? Region 1 vs region 2 traffic? Company size A vs company size B traffic?
These are all of the questions we need to answer. And it ultimately boils down to working back from your ideal customer profile (ICP). Who are they at the company level and persona level? THEN getting into their psychology to understand what they search for online and how they go about querying that.
For example, we sell to agency recruiters. More specifically, agency recruiters who are looking for help with the various jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) of their daily efforts. This includes things like finding the right candidates, engaging with said candidates, tracking them in a system of record, etc.
Now we have some things to go off of to define the “right” traffic…
Who: Agency recruiters
Where: global
What: content related to their various JTBDs
…and start mapping out what keywords this audience uses so we can help answer those questions.
Increasing conversions
This is most likely the area many default to when asked “is it working?” Is [channel] driving more interest for our product/services, which should hypothetically drive more revenue for us as well.
One thing we want to be mindful of here though is that not all traffic is the same. We need to recognize that a linear increase in traffic does not mean the same linear increase in conversions. In our example, yes, we absolutely want to be showing up more for the long-tail, high-intent keywords. But we also want to show up for more educational/early-funnel keywords so that the prospect mentally associates us with that problem/solution and comes to us when they’re ready to buy.
This also feeds in to how B2B buying journeys actually occur. They’re messy. They’re long. There are multiple people involved. 99.9999999% of the time, someone doesn’t go from never having heard of you to clicking on a blog post to your page to submitting a demo request to signing a deal in the same day. I’d love it if that did happen, but not realistic. This is why looking at your marketing efforts as an interconnected ecosystem vs. siloed channels is important to keep in mind.
Looking at the journey to see how these keywords + related blog posts tie into the overarching purchase timeline. Which keywords/posts/videos show up more in closed won deals? Which ones show up more in closed lost deals? Then working backward from those insights to make sure we’re using these as force multipliers that increase our likelihood of converting + winning these prospects over time.
So back to increasing conversions, we’ll want to look at this holistically and over time. Showing up for more top of funnel, educational keywords isn’t going to drive more conversions early on. But what should happen is that we see a lagging correlation where a few months or a few quarters later, we see an increase in conversions on the website and/or an increase in branded traffic for our company/product name. This demonstrates that we’ve successfully made the association we were hoping for early on in the research/education phase and are winning the long game.
So, what’s working?
Now that we have those definitions in place, let’s go through how I’m measuring + evaluating how our SEO efforts are working 🤓
Driving more of the right traffic
Question: Are we getting in front of the right people?
Metric: Non-branded search impressions + non-branded search clicks
Expected outcome: We should see an increase in both if we’ve been making the right SEO optimizations
Note: the increase in AI Overview responses on platforms like Google has reduced the number of clicks as the answer no longer needs to be clicked into to be found, but is surfaced directly on the search engine results page. Impressions + clicks used to have a strong, positive correlation, but that correlation has weakened with this change.
Our actual outcome:
62% growth in non-branded search impressions
26% drop in non-branded search clicks
I’m very happy with that first outcome. It’s exactly what I’d hope to see.
The second outcome should have me more disappointed than I am, but in our scenario, this was expected. We had a handful of legacy blog posts that got a ton of clicks, but were zero percent related to the product we actually sold. People clicked and they either weren’t the right audience for us nor was it a selling prop for us, so we removed those articles.
Increasing conversions
Question: Are we getting more handraisers for our product/service?
Metric: Demo requests (or new trials if PLG) + pipeline from organic search
Note: this is where attribution is helpful. I triangulate responses here to get the fullest sense of how SEO has helped by gathering data from 3 places:
Marketing automation standard attribution (i.e. Hubspot’s last/first-touch model). Look for anything marked as Organic Search
Self-reported attribution. Ask on the demo request or trial form “How did you hear about us?”. Bucket responses looking for anything like “Google,” “blog post,” etc.
Sales discovery call insights. If you have calls recorded, comb through the transcripts searching for specific keywords like those mentioned in #2. Better yet, partner with your sales team and ask them to include this question during their discovery calls to flesh out the journey more fully for you.
Expected outcome: We should see an increase in the nearish-term if we’re showcasing an answer to a high-intent keyword, and an increase in these over the long-term if we’re getting the right people on the website + aware of us so when they do have a problem/need, they come to us
Our actual outcome:
33% increase in the count of SQOs generated stemming from search (based on the triangulations above)
126% increase in the value of SQO pipeline generated stemming from search (based on the triangulations above)
This insight was HUGE for us. A 33% increase in SQOs compared to the previous period is already a massive win and signals that we’re picking up some quick wins here. But the BIGGER insight came from the increase in the pipeline value generated from these being 126% compared to the previous period. The key takeaway here is that we’re driving bigger, qualified deals because we’re showing up in the places and for the keywords our core ICP is seeking answers for/education about.
Conclusion: SEO is working and we’re only getting started.
Book quote of the week
“A sense of urgency is the ultimate distinction between those who win and those who watch others win.”
- W1nning, by Tim Grover
See you next Saturday,
Sam
P.S. What are your other favorite Substacks or newsletters? I need to add some new POVs to my regular reads. Reply back with your favorites - they come directly to my personal inbox :)