Six months ago, I told you we were partnering with YOYABA for SEO. I was nervous about it. Not so much because of them, but because I’ve seen + been a part of so many SEO partnerships that turn into expensive keyword chasing exercises that drive traffic, but not pipeline or revenue.
This week, YOYABA published our case study on their website + reading it made me realize how much my thinking about SEO has evolved over the past 6 months. So for anyone getting started on their SEO journey, or are in “always iterating” mode with it, here are some of the things I’ve learned this year:
Sponsor: HockeyStack
You just closed a $150k deal. The prospect had their badge scanned at an event, saw 94 ads, got 5 calls/emails from a BDR, and read 3 blog posts. Now the CEO asks: “Who gets credit for this deal?”
But what if I told you that isn’t the question we should be asking?
For years, this was the question I was trying to answer because for years I operated with the “additive” mindset. What happens if we hire 3 more BDRs? What happens if we add $15k more ad spend? And then I would simply map out the anticipated ROI of that effort through our funnel and add it to our current expected outcomes. Hence “additive.”
And then the lightbulb went off. We weren’t successful because of one of those specific channels. We were successful because of how we leveraged the interplay between them.
I’ve had multiple chats with Emir Atli at HockeyStack over the past year about this subject, and this is exactly what they’re helping marketers and GTM leaders solve for.
Aligning on what actually matters
For many recruiters, the biggest challenge with implementing a new SEO strategy is getting leadership buy-in and understanding that it’s a long-term play.
For me personally, the biggest challenge was unlearning 95% of what I had “known” about SEO. It wasn’t that what I knew was wrong, it was simply that it was dated - that it was an “old” playbook. (and you know how I feel about this as a firm believer in channels don’t die, playbooks do)
What I expected: We’d find new keywords to target, create/update content, and watch our organic traffic grow.
What actually happened: We cut some of our “highest-performing” keywords, spent months exclusively on the technical side of SEO, and focused obsessively on handraiser + pipeline trends instead of traffic metrics.
The moment I knew we were onto something different was when Lex and I were having a conversation a handful of months ago with Oliver + Gvido at YOYABA where we were reviewing a traditional keyword report, looking at which keywords drove the most traffic, sorted from most to least.
In terms of traditional SEO metrics, we had some great keywords as they were driving a ton of traffic to our website.
But in terms of common sense + mapping these keywords to who we serve + what our platform does, we knew these “great” keywords were actually…worthless.
These were keywords driving thousands of monthly visits - the kind of traffic that makes SEO reports look great.
But they weren’t driving pipeline. At all.
Most agencies would have doubled down on those keywords because they were “working.” But after discussion, YOYABA agreed with us to cut them from our focus + focus on lower-volume searches that actually aligned with our buyer’s journey.
The 3 pillars we’ve based execution on
The case study YOYABA wrote breaks down our collaboration into three pillars, but let me break down what each meant from my perspective:
Jobs-to-be-done >>> keyword volume
Instead of starting with keyword research tools, we started with our customers. What jobs are they looking for our platform to help them with? What problems are they trying to solve? How does this translate to their search inputs?
This led us to build what YOYABA calls a “bottom-up keyword & intent map focused on jobs-to-be-done in agency recruiting.” (I know, it’s a mouthful)
But in practice, it’s actually super simple.
Instead of targeting high-volume, broad keywords like “recruiting software,” it meant targeting lower-volume, longer-tail searches like “best ATS for recruitment agencies.” Even though the former has 10-50x more search volume, the latter has 100x more intent + those are the people we want to be getting in front of.
Our content engine: from random to methodical
Before this partnership, our content strategy was “write helpful blog posts, record podcast episodes, share videos, + hope they rank.” Very sophisticated, I know.
YOYABA leveled us up + helped build what they call an “agile, SEO-led content engine.” They recognized that we had a solid content engine in place, it just needed a little direction + SEO strategy. It wasn’t about creating new content - it was about updating underperforming + well-performing content to be more discoverable/crawlable, creating parent categories for topic clustering, and repeatable workflows for our already built content engine.
One example: they helped us extract + optimize our core thought leadership + POV content from our podcast that is now optimized as written content as well. Or as the old saying goes, 2 birds with 1 stone.
Technical SEO: the unsexy work that drives results
This was the part I knew we needed the most help with. Lex + I had a working knowledge of the content + on-page aspects of SEO, but when it came to technical SEO, we were out of our league.
The funny thing about all of this technical work - fixing 404s, cleaning up our sitemap, generating countless data schemas - was that it had a near immediate impact. Not just on search rankings, but on how easy it became for prospects to find relevant content once they were on our site. As someone who’s used to SEO being a long-game + not even expecting results for at least 1-2 quarters, this was honestly a (welcome) shock.
And where YOYABA really helped us out was with the structured data work. While most companies are still optimizing for traditional search results, YOYABA prepared us for AI search by making our content more discoverable to LLMs.
Challenging SEO beliefs
Working with YOYABA challenged two pieces of conventional SEO wisdom:
Conventional wisdom:
More traffic is always better
Our experience:
We deliberately cut high-traffic keywords that weren’t driving pipeline. Our organic traffic actually decreased in some areas, but pipeline influence increased significantly as we invested more time into underserved, lower-volume-but-higher-impact, keywords.
Conventional wisdom:
SEO success is measured by traffic + rankings
Our experience:
Yes, we look at traffic + rankings, but they’re just indicators. When assessing if we were on the right path, we’re looking at handraiser + pipeline volume changes over time. We tracked what changes we’ve been making and how those variables impacted the 2 core metrics we assess our SEO performance on.
And this connects back to something I’ve written about before - the difference between being data-driven vs. data-informed. Traditional SEO metrics would have told us to keep optimizing for those high-traffic keywords. But looking at the data through a revenue lens told a completely different story.
TL;DR to my younger self
When you dive into the SEO world, begin here:
Start with your buyers, not with keywords. The highest-volume searches aren’t necessarily the most valuable for your business.
Measure handraiser + pipeline impact, not just traffic. This requires more sophisticated tracking (or less as it’s connecting dots that technology doesn’t connect well), but it’s the only way to know if your SEO strategy + execution is actually working.
Don’t skip the technical foundation. The unsexy technical work often has more immediate impact than the content work everyone wants to focus on. It’s much easier to know what to do technically + build that into your workflow than to go back + edit every piece of content retroactively.
Find an agency that thinks like a business partner, not just an SEO vendor. YOYABA told me “no” when I wanted to move faster in ways that wouldn’t work. They pushed back on our assumptions about what success looked like. That’s what you want in a partner.
The next 6 months
Six months in, I’m more bullish on SEO than ever, but only when it’s done with the same revenue-first, ecosystem thinking we apply to the rest of our marketing.
We’re now preparing for the next evolution: optimizing not just for traditional search, but for AI-powered search experiences.
What’s your experience been with SEO? Any lessons learned you’d add to this list? Hit reply and let me know - always curious to hear what’s worked (or hasn’t) for others.
Book quote of the week
“The vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.”
- Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
See you next Saturday,
Sam
P.S. if you liked today’s newsletter or have enjoyed some of the earlier ones, forward this along to a marketer you think would like it as well 🙂 This newsletter grows by word of mouth + I can see which weeks resonate more/less with you all based on how many people do (or don’t 😅) subscribe after reading.
P.P.S This is part 5 of my SEO series as I share in real-time what I’m learning + what we’re seeing as we continue to push harder into the world of SEO here at Loxo. In case you missed the earlier editions:
Part 1: SEO isn’t dead
Part 2: They told me “no”
Part 3: “Is it working?”
Part 4: The “Alligator Effect”