How Marketers Become CEOs

“How will this action increase my coverage of important queries within my Pillar Topic network?”

As I previewed in last week’s edition of The Pillar Column, this is the right question you should be asking yourself about anything you do with your SEO and organic content marketing strategy. If you haven’t read that article yet, please take a moment to do so before continuing with this one.

Okay. Good. You now know why even attempting to estimate search volume and, by extension, the organic traffic that you could earn from targeting any given search query is a pointless endeavor. But if you’re anything like I was before I began to understand the mindset shifts of what I call Pillar-Based Marketing, that just leaves you in need of a metric of some kind to evaluate your organic content efforts.

Enter the concept of coverage. Ironically, I’m not positive that this term formally exists anywhere in my brand-new book, Pillar-Based Marketing: A Data-Driven Methodology for SEO and Content That Actually Works, which is AVAILABLE TODAY from Amazon and goes live on March 28 in a lot of other places (like Barnes & Noble).

Can I just pause for a moment and say how good it feels to be able to say that? Wow.?

So, uh, like I was saying. Coverage. In 2023, it’s literally the only metric that matters in SEO. I’ve largely arrived at this conclusion even after writing my book explaining the PBM methodology and how it works, so consider this both an addendum to the book and a teaser for the next step of Pilar-Based Marketing.

Here’s an image I shared in last week’s article that showcases what it looks like in my PBM platform, DemandJump, when you examine the entire network of search behavior surrounding a given Pillar Topic:

I’m working on making that search volume number less prominent, especially because right now I want you instead to focus on the other metric at the top of the screen: 5,852 keywords and questions. The colorful bars below that number show each domain’s rankings for queries that appear on this list of nearly 6,000 queries. The blue portion would be Page One rankings, green Page Two, yellow Page Three, and red Pages Four through Ten.

We present the competitive landscape in this way because, from the point of view of PBM, it’s really the best way to understand the size of the prize for your mission-critical Pillar Topics—and who among you and your competitors are taking the biggest piece of that prize right now.

Here’s another way to frame this information: When you think about search behavior as representative of all of the different ways people search for information on a topic (your Pillar), it’s very easy to identify which queries actually matter. Which ones show up in different journeys. Importantly, you can also identify which ones show up in the most journeys; this is what I talk about when I talk about the connectedness of any given term in a Pillar Topic network.?

With the right analysis of these factors—the total number of queries that search engines identify as being relevant to your core Pillar topic, plus how connected each of those terms is—you have what’s essentially a 2D visualization of what authority on a given topic actually looks like. It’s something like this:

Back to the “SaaS content” example I shared in the first image above. It’s got nearly 6,000 terms all tangled up together in a web like this example about hurricane season. In a perfect world where you have all the resources in the world to write organic content about SaaS content (or hurricane season, or whatever you care about), you’d recreate this network in its entirety through a structured Pillar Strategy that aims to recreate it through interlinked content on your website:

Why? Because the entire game of SEO is to establish your authority on a subject. It’s to show readers, and by extension search engines, that you are an informed, connected, trustworthy, and comprehensive authority on a topic.?

In another earlier edition of The Pillar Column, I broke down why “domain authority” is no longer the primary authority metric you should be concerned with. In its place, I proposed that Topical Authority—or Pillar Authority—is what matters most. If you do a good enough job of creating a network of content around a topic that truly aligns with what search engines know about how users search for information around it, you can outrank sites that have a much higher domain authority than you do.

The concept of coverage comes back to that very idea. The more coverage you have of the most important search queries related to your Pillar Topic, the stronger your network of content will be.?

The TAM, SAM, SOM Analogy

If you’ve worked in a venture-backed startup, a publicly-traded company, an enterprise business, or many other types of method-driven organizations, you’ve probably engaged in activities to define your market (or heard of others in your organizations do the same thing).

It can get really cerebral really fast when you’re talking about things like TAM, SAM, and SOM. And, yet, marketers need a seat at the table for these conversations because understanding the market you’re trying to capture becomes the first step of any go-to-market strategy—and that includes organic content marketing.

So, let’s take a step back from SEO and define these acronyms, because I think they can help with understanding why it’s so important to think about SEO differently.

TAM. Total addressable market. Business leaders start by estimating the entire market for their offering. Throw out any sort of qualification and just answer one question the best way you know how:?

How many people or businesses are spending how much total money on solutions that address what our solution addresses?

How broad or narrow you go with this can vary, but when you’re calculating TAM, you want to think about the absolute size of the prize. Maybe you’re in a business that is designed to serve a specific kind of business, like let’s say it’s SEO agencies. You can find out how many SEO agencies exist. You can find information about how much SEO agencies spend on whatever it is you’re offering; maybe it’s a SaaS workflow tool, or an association membership, or a creative resource.

But it’s a rookie mistake to think that you have the potential to address that entire market. So you work to define SAM, your Serviceable Addressable Market. So you start making decisions about your Ideal Customer Profile; maybe you want to focus on SEO agencies under a certain size. Maybe you want SEO agencies who serve a certain industry your tool is designed around. Or, maybe you’re a business that operates in specific markets where you have brick-and-mortar locations.?

So you whittle that TAM number down to a smaller subset of that number that aligns with your offering, your SAM. But you won’t be able to capture that entire market, either. Not at first. You need to get down to brass tacks and determine what is feasible to obtain. You need to understand your SOM: Serviceable Obtainable Market.

This is where you have to take a closer look at your competition; what is their market share? What are their marketing strategies that drive that market share? What is your competition’s appetite for spending? How can you compete in the market with features people need at a cost that fits the value you can drive??

What is your budget for marketing, and how big is your sales team? What can you actually do if you have an opportunity to reach as many of these people as possible with your offering, and based on some other business principles, how much will it cost you to win a customer in the end?

Put all that together, and you can turn around to your investors and say, “This is our goal. If you give us this much money, we will spend it in these ways, and by doing so, we believe we can drive this much revenue.”

Is this based on some big assumptions? Yes. But it’s informed. More importantly, it helps you think tactically about what you’re going to do as a business to operate within predefined guidelines and go to market. It gives you focus, it gives you stakes, it gives you a clear understanding of who you are and what you are trying to accomplish.

How much further from this kind of methodical process could SEO be? All the keyword list building, the aggregation of search volumes across randomly selected terms, the entirely scattershot approach to capturing organic traffic… It’s not enough to build a strong foundation on top of when it comes to actually going to market. It’s missing the kind of unifying methodology that a business at large would employ when understanding a market.

But here’s the thing: Organic traffic is a market.

Cornering the Market for Your Pillar Topics’ Organic Traffic

Yes, in general, there is a certain amount of traffic that moves through search engines in any given period of time; that's obvious. But when you start thinking about SEO the same way you might think about TAM, SAM and SOM, the similarities become striking.

Because what is an SEO strategy if not an attempt to understand and capture the market of traffic around the topics your business cares about??

Here’s the key difference, though: When you do SEO the way so many of us have been doing it for so long, you skip the TAM step. You skip right towards the end of the SAM step, making judgment calls on a long list of keyword recommendations to determine which ones align with your business. You’re leaping directly into SOM by prioritizing keywords based on your perceived ability to rank highly for them relative to the search volume they can provide and the competition you face to capture that volume.

This means you’re ignoring the actual, real world market for organic traffic around your mission-critical topics… Your Pillars. You’re welcoming human bias to taint your definition of what the market really is and how you can best compete with it. Importantly, you’re eschewing real-world search behavior and instead making decisions based on what you think is the most efficient use of your time and resources by picking the best keywords.?

Imagine if a SaaS startup went into the market without ever determining how many potential customers they could reach? What if they didn’t take the time to think about that, and instead jumped to the subset of the market they think they want to reach, then jump right into category creation work? Just putting their offering out into the market, not thinking contextually about how their ICP behaves in light of everything that happens in the broader marketplace?

Investors don’t fund those kinds of businesses. And even if those businesses can make it for a while, they’ll struggle to differentiate and make any headway in carving out a piece of the market for themselves.

The biggest mindset shift we need to make as marketers who deal in demand generation is to stop thinking that the market for organic traffic around any given topic is unknowable. It actually is quite objective, and when measured properly, can provide the context that’s glaringly missing from modern SEO strategies and turn organic content into a significant element of a winning go-to-market strategy.

That context is coverage.?

If you’re not thinking about what search terms to target in your organic content from the perspective of where those terms fit structurally into the network of search behavior surrounding your broader Pillar Topic, you’re missing the point entirely.?

On the other hand, if you can get an objective measurement of what that network looks like and which terms are most connected within it, every single decision you make about organic content strategy gains some crazy focus.

Q: Which keywords should we focus on targeting with content first?

A: The ones that are the most connected in your Pillar Topic network.

Q: How much content do we need to create in order to effectively drive more organic traffic than our competitors??

A: However much it takes to close the gap and overtake your competitors in terms of Page One coverage for terms in your Pillar Topic network.

Q: Should I create more content around my first Pillar Topic, or start on a new Pillar?

A: It depends on how much coverage your first Pillar Topic has.

Really, these and any other question you could ask yourself about your content strategy come back to The Right Question?:

“How will this action increase my coverage of important queries within my Pillar Topic network?”

If your answer to this question is not clear and affirmative, then the action you’re considering—writing new content, improving content you already have—is a wasted action. Full stop.

That methodology translates to immediate business value. We’ve seen it countless times. And it throws out so much of the SEO baggage that comes with thinking about keyword lists as our own private little markets.

More than that, though, it allows us to confidently include SEO in our go-to-market strategy, and it correlates not only with immediate marketing outcomes like increased traffic from better leads who buy more quickly and confidently, but also with realistic objectives and key results that you can build a GTM strategy on. If you know the specifics of the market of organic traffic around a topic, you can think about your SEO tactics the exact same way you think about a business’s TAM, SAM, and SOM.?

In turn, that investment in content becomes an appreciating asset. In fact, content that’s produced according to Pillar-Based Marketing is the only appreciating asset in marketing.

In other words, you can think like a CEO and look really good while doing it.

And while this all sounds complicated, it couldn’t be simpler. The simple mindset shift combined with broader Pillar-Based Marketing methodology works to create a repeatable, step-by-step process for identifying new organic traffic markets, sizing them up, and working towards their total domination.

When something as previously hazy as organic content can become objective and function in lock-step with a business’s broader go to market strategy… Forget just sounding good to CEOs. That’s how marketers become CEOs.