10 things I wish I knew / SEO Edition

Welcome back to The Red Pill.

First of all I want to thank everybody for reading this newsletter.

I consider the amount of people following this as a vote to say to continue. As I grow older I tend to weigh votes, rather than counting them. So I had a look at how is actually a follower and it's terrific to see how many outstanding "heavyweights" are there. Great marketers, CMOs, amazing specialists I met over the course of my life, event CEOs of public companies, and obviously great friends and acquaintances too. Thank you ??

Let's now start with a quote:

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SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a bit like the hard core tech development world: you are either in it, or out of it. A strong line divides who has professional experience in it from who doesn't have it.

SEO, like many things in marketing, isn't often linear nor highly predictable. Principles are clear, with great work ethic and consistent practice over the long haul you can understand how to make your inputs and outputs more highly correlated. However, by having had a look into it for quite a long time myself and having seen some of the best professionals in the world (the likes that run SEO for Expedia across 50 countries and have a whole team of SEO Managers, or Ebay, even online newspapers and many other businesses that are alive thanks to SEO) I can say that once you know it, 70% of it is pretty much simple to understand. Like the picture in the header, the world is actually clean, simple, almost two-tone. However, if you pick the "ignorance glasses" obviously everything looks very complicated.

This is article is aimed at those who aren't SEO practitioners: marketers, marketing managers, CEOs and CMOs who have never been SEO managers themselves.

Luckily, I saw this topic from several angles: I was once a SEO Manager (2012, Rocket Internet), as a CMO I needed to choose and work with SEO managers and SEO agencies, as a Co-Founder of a marketing firm I needed to scout SEO agencies and freelancers too.

Here's 10 things I wish I knew from the beginning:

1) SEO has always been important, no matter how many doomsayers say it is dead.

Many doomsayers said that SEO was almost dead and this made some top managers make some expensive mistakes. Even if its role varies largely by industry, today as a marketing channel still brings about 30%+ of the visitors to most online properties (news websites, e-commerce, apps, etc.) so it's more like a primary way of how people access brands digitally, not a dying one.

A fun fact is that doomsayers repeat their mistakes too, mostly confusing interesting trends with absolute changes.

Until 2010 SEO was applied to Search Engines alone (Google, Yandex, etc.), so when Amazon came around and people started searching on Amazon lots of people freaked out and said SEO was dead. SEO wasn't dead. Search volumes were moving well above search engines and to multiple platforms, so the practice of optimizing companies access to people's search intent (i.e. SEO) simply needed evolve.

Then App stores attracted search volumes. Then social networks like Facebook attracted people searches. Still today (2022) after more than 10 years newspapers just need 1 random market research saying that Gen Z declared in a survey to use more TikTok to search and everybody shouts that SEO is dead. This is funny, but also give us another learning: so many people judge SEO, while being complete amateurs.

2) SEO key principles have been the same for a long time, but what provides results changed substantially.

There are lots of funny stories on how it was possible to trick the Google Search algorithm in 2005 or even in 2010, but overtime it got more and more complicated to win with hacks over Google.

Some time ago you could play a lot and rank massively with gibberish words, just by copying content and produce content en masse in a dumb way. Now you can't do it so easily.

3) Watch out from anybody saying "SEO can't provide results within 6 months"

I personally don't trust anybody that says so.

And that's because I saw this type of results and I did it myself (and/or with my team) multiple times.

I guess whoever says so either hasn't got the right experience, or lazy, or is exaggerating.

Nonetheless, it is true that in very competitive markets it's unlikely that you can substantially impact a company's overall business results by SEO alone within 6 months.

This is true because important markets are competitive and often have companies that worked 10+ years to get where they are in the first page. If you are the last of the pack and you want to get quickly to the top, you need to do in 6 months what others did in years and probably do it better too. You often need to invest in talent, experience and lots of execution. Still doable, but many companies aren't willing to do it. Many companies would be willing to do it because their business needs it, but struggle to create a clear business case, so they don't do it either. Anyway..

The good news is that you can achieve faster results in several cases. For example if you are in a nascent industry things are going to be easier (like when I worked in online grocery pre-pandemic with an Instacart-like business model in Europe). In other cases you are fine in getting visibility on search terms that have relatively low search volumes and are overlooked by the competition, this is another easier SEO case.

4) The best SEO professionals are like diamonds.

Diamonds come out of a lot of pressure, and so the best talents.

There are many good people doing SEO, but if they didn't have the chance to go through some high-stake pressure room is unlikely they are the best.

I generally ask these questions below to a SEO professional to have a quick glimpse on what type of professional he/she is and how good might be.

Did you deal with a bad website migration that heavily damaged a business based on SEO traffic? Did you every need to catchup with giant competitors in 1/10 of the time they had to build their SEO moat? Did you create a content team or needed to almost create one to win in your SEO sector? Did you ever manage for a business to get in one year dozens of top-quality links from reputable newspapers?

5) If you need to go to Mars, don't look for a bicycle.

This is a mistake I see making over and over again: a manager needs to move the needle in SEO, so they work with somebody that gives a presentation with some decent tips on how to improve SEO.

That's okay, but by following this approach you might need 10 years to move the needle. That's what very, very few SEOs are going to tell you. Unfortunately as a manager if you don't know this you are missing the forest for the trees.

Practical tip that gives you some perspective: identify the single most important keyword in your business, look at the first 3 search results. That's your competition.

Do they have hundreds of pages with hand-written content on their website? Do they have hundreds of links (check here https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker).

That's a good share of what you need to get.

Now, if you are you a marketer with more SEO background you can do more due diligence. You can start to understand and ponder their pages/links quality, determine how much of that you actually need to move the needle and so forth. If you don't have any SEO background, look at the big picture and assume that's the kind of game you need to play.

So if your competitors are on Mars, don't try to get there with a bicycle.

6) If your website is brand new, be patient.

Everything you improve on your new website is going to get a slow recognition for the first several months. Don't worry.

7) "You can't get multiple results on the first page". This is another lie.

Been there, done that.

8) SEO is divided between Brand and Unbrand. Your SEO professionals don't distinguish between them? Run.

SEO Brand is the visibility and traffic you get on your own branded search terms. If you are Prada a search term like "Prada shoes" is SEO Brand. Doing SEO well on these search terms is going to be a walk in the park in most cases. Don't focus on this when you judge your SEO efforts, focus on SEO Unbrand instead.

Lots of professionals convey what they do in terms of work and results by not dividing between these two categories. Sometimes they do this to conceal how much SEO is truly important for your business or to conceal how much it is truly improving.

9) "SEO Brand and SEO Unbrand can't be separated". Another lie.

See previous point.

How you divide traffic between them is not going to be as clear as black and white, but there are plenty of good methodologies to do this.

10) Before you spend 1€ in doing SEO, spend 1€ to get to that same keyword with SEM.

Lots of SEO professionals after being briefed by you will assume a keyword in your industry is important to you, but this is not always true. So you end up with good professionals zeroing in on impressions and rankings, when perhaps some keywords are never going to bring you any actual business. As a manager you don't want to discover this after 2 years and plenty of focus and resources spent on SEO.

Also, working on SEO is a journey in any case. Before your start the journey, try at least to double check that your goal of landing on Mars is really valuable to you and not only a shiny but arid red desert.

SEM obviously allows you to test many keywords in a matter of days, you get top visibility for some bucks and you can check whether and how much these keywords are valuable to you because they bring you actual business. As a good rule of thumb, never do any SEO before having finished some SEM tests.

PS. Yes, you need to have a good technical SEO in place to be great at SEO, but this article was for non-technical people. We left the technical stuff for another article. ??