I overcorrected.
After spending years at my first company working on our SEO strategy, continuously monitoring and optimizing pages to show up on Google for specific keywords, I saw a lot of self-reported attribution data the past few years that “showed” SEO isn’t as impactful as we thought it was.
And while it is true that SEO doesn’t pack the same punch it did 10-15 years ago, a conversation I had with my CEO last week had me realize he was completely right in wanting me to have our team do more to increase our visibility in the organic results of Google.
The culprit?
Confirmation bias
A little background
At Refine Labs, we came across a huge insight that we came to champion broadly across B2B marketing. The insight? Attribution is flawed. Most of what’s attributed to Organic Search as the channel that drove a lead isn’t from SEO work, but from having a strong/memorable brand presence.
This came to light with the rise of self-reported attribution being embraced by B2B organizations (long used by B2C organizations). The “attribution” channel would show that the lead came from Organic Search, meanwhile when asked “how did you hear about us?” the lead would often say things like “LinkedIn,” “Heard you on a podcast,” “A friend recommended you,” “Slack community,” etc.
And when digging into the back-end data to reconcile this discrepancy, it held true. Hubspot would show the first page the lead visited was the homepage.
Not an article written for SEO purposes
Not a product page ranking for a specific keyword
Not a customer story from the industry the lead is in
They came straight to the homepage. So that means they were more likely than not searching for the company name, scrolling to find that page on Google, then clicking on it to go on to take the desired action.
From here, the takeaway became that we need to focus on the response the lead gave us in their self-reported attribution and that SEO is over-credited.
Confirmation bias
The tendency to process information by looking for, or interpreting, information that is consistent with one’s existing beliefs
britannica.com
Let me know if this sounds familiar:
We started running ads on a new channel
We started seeing more self-reported attribution crediting said channel as how they heard about us
We used this data to prove the channel is working and we should push harder into it
Healthy assumptions, right? Right.
Unless you over-corrected like I did and de-prioritized SEO as a whole.
So, how did this happen? Simple: confirmation bias.
My belief became that “Organic Search” attribution wasn’t from SEO efforts, but was from creating demand in the market for your company/product/service and prospects finding you by searching for you specifically within Google.
The realization I’d overcorrected
My CEO cracks me up. One of the nicest people you’ve ever met. Knows his strengths. Knows his weaknesses. Trusts his team more than any other leader I’ve seen in the areas he’s self-admittedly weaker in (like marketing).
But I can always tell when he has a strong feeling about something that he normally trusts us to handle. He’ll drop it in conversation. He’ll share a few articles around the topic. He’ll share examples of it showing up in our customer journey. And he’ll continue doing this to lead us to the insight ourselves (prime leadership example right there - should be a future post in itself someday). He does this intentionally because he knows that if he orders us to do something, we’ll do it, but won’t necessarily understand why we’re doing it other than because “the CEO told us to.”
One of these strong feelings he’s had lately has been around our SEO presence. It was something that was focused on heavily before I joined the team, but quickly fell off as I prioritized other items ahead of it (and had the self-reported attribution “data” to support why this was ok).
So he did what he does best. He led me to the insight. He’d share clips from recorded calls where a prospect said they started their evaluation by googling something like “best ATS software”. He’d give me the background on why he emphasized SEO before I was here. And he was patient while he waited for the realization to hit me.
And it did.
I made the mistake of writing off SEO almost entirely. I said we’re showing up in other ways, the organic rankings aren’t as important, etc. Our handraiser + pipeline numbers were consistently growing, so everything was fine.
And that’s where the confirmation bias really started to come in.
Started seeing more and more of the channels we were pushing heavily showing up in our self-reported attribution numbers and seeing less and less of “Google” or “I was searching for ATS software” responses.
I’d created a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I’d made the mistake of thinking it was an either/or between them, not realizing I could have both.
Bet you can now guess what I’m focusing on rebuilding this quarter 😉
One LinkedIn post I bookmarked this week
LabsVerse is still an experiment, a long-term experiment. The first part of this experiment was publishing the reports, the second part is distribution (this is where we are now), and the third part is ensuring that this data is being used regularly.
So I decided to support this long-term experiment with some short-term experiments. As we are in the second phase of this experiment, these short-term efforts should have been geared towards distribution - and this distribution needed to be authentic.
I thought, "what about an album?" like an actual album... Songs about LabsVerse, made by AI, specifically tailored for for some of our favorite people on Linkedin. For some people, I had to stalk hard; for others, I used my imagination.
We’ve said it before + we’ll say it again: marketing is NOT like the movie Field of Dreams. Just because you build it, it doesn’t mean they’ll come.
That’s why I’m in love with Canberk’s experiment-within-an-experiment here. Fully recognizing that distribution + getting people to look into LabsVerse, he could’ve taken the same boring approach that most of us see every day on LinkedIn that goes something like, “We’re thrilled to announce blah blah blah…” Instead, he got CREATIVE.
Wanted to go 1:1 to his perfect-fit ICPs
Researched who those would be + who have an active presence online
Further stalked researched these people to come up with a custom song just for them that’s part of this larger album.
10/10 creativity
10/10 execution
One podcast episode I enjoyed this week
I have a 12-hour road trip coming up soon. I’ve been queuing up podcasts and stashing them for what I know will be an ever-so-exciting day of driving.
So no podcast episode this week, BUT I would love to get some recommendations from you all on good episodes or shows you’ve listened to recently so I can give them a listen while driving. Send me your best ones!
And for anyone interested, here’s the playlist I add to each week with some of my favorite podcast episodes:
See you next Saturday,
Sam
I've been amazed at how many people still Google "best xyz" when searching for a product and place a lot of trust in the articles and lists that show up in SERPs.
It's easy as a marketer to develop (well-deserved) skepticism for that method of product research and attribute that same skepticism to your buyers. But unless you're selling to other marketers, this may not be true.
It was only listening to calls where BDRs asked this question and the buyer actually explained their product research process that this hit home for me.
Great article.
Daniel-san, I love to hate when these moments occur! Now hopefully your CEO doesn’t think they “know” marketing after that, as this is the type of collaboration I crave.
In terms of SEO, I agree it’s not like it was being a huge driver 10-15 years ago, however, with the rise of the ChatGPT’s and other AI tools people are now using them similarly to Google asking “what’s the best tool for X?” or “who are the competitors of X?” which is why I believe SEO still is valuable. This is also cool in terms of education because when you put content out on certain topics, that gets ingested and even suggested in articles when trying to learn. Happened to me in the observability space where although we weren’t the most popular, ChatGPT suggested our tool when asking telemetry questions.