How to Modernize Your SEO Strategy for Audience Development
The death of SEO has been greatly exaggerated – but the truth is that things have certainly gotten harder. We need to expand our understanding of SEO from a linear path to revenue, and into an important rented channel for audience development. In this workshop, John-Henry Scherck, Founder & CEO of Growth Plays, goes in depth on how to modernize our approach to SEO.
Hey everybody.
So, gonna start, I guess.
We're on just a little late 'cause of lunch,
but it's kind of a long one,
so I'm just gonna dive into it right now.
My name is John Henry Shirk.
I'm the CEO and founder of Growth Plays
where a B2B content strategy agency.
We typically work with like mid-stage
and late-stage SaaS companies and venture capital firms
to use SEO and content as a platform
for product marketing and demand gen and audience creation.
So, I am here to talk about SEO,
but I think when we think about SEO,
when we talk to content teams that are doing SEO,
they're not generally that excited about it.
They think the channel's pretty boring, pretty tactical.
It's not like, when you ask a content team,
like, what are you most excited about working on in this year?
They're not like, oh, keywords and meta tags.
Like, that is the last thing that they want to work in.
Generally, these companies view it as like a means to an end.
They want more traffic.
They know search has traffic,
so they're like, let's execute on the channel.
And I'd say, a lot of companies think the channel is antiquated,
and some folks would say that it's dying,
but I think if you view the channel as antiquated,
there's also getting from it aren't what they used to be.
It's more that the mindset and the approach
that you're taking to the channel is antiquated.
I want to go over sort of a new mindset shift
that we're seeing in search.
So, the one thing I can say about the channel is
that I think it's pretty risky.
Like, SEO does use own media,
but the distribution for SEO is 100% algorithmic,
and when you're playing on someone else's land,
there's inherent platform risk.
And this is a view of a website that was using generative AI
to spin up just a ton of content.
It was garbage.
It wasn't actually helpful.
Google figured out what they were doing,
and they turned their traffic off,
which was just under half a million visits a month,
pretty much overnight.
So, there is just inherent risk in the channel,
especially if you approach it with an older mindset
of just trying to sort of beat the system
instead of actually doing something that helps your buyer.
So, I got my start in SEO probably around like 2009.
I got into B2B SAS around like 2013, 2014,
and it was just a different game back then.
Then it was pretty easy to execute
because the expectations around content quality
were much lower, and it was a lot easier to win market share,
because there was just less companies competing
for the terms that we're all going for.
And it led to the system of like really predictable inputs
that led to measurable predictable outcomes.
Like, if we publish this article, we will get this traffic.
If we optimize this page, we will improve our ranking.
And it led to really like a cost benefit analysis
and direct attribution of what do we do
and what do we get out of it.
And it was also really effective at just ripping demos
out of the internet.
There was not as much SAS as there is today.
People were actively searching for solutions,
and I think the internet was less fragmented.
Like, there was less attention on social at this point in time.
And really, for any company looking to do SEO,
it was foolish to not invest in it.
I'd say every company I worked in
from executives to the board wanted to do better
and organic search, understood its value,
and knew it could be high ROI.
But I think a lot has changed.
So if we look at like where B2B SEO has been over the last decade,
in 2014, it was like, let's start it out.
We're seeing some progress.
And then a few years later, it's like, let's double down.
We're having a record-breaking year.
And then say, 2019's coming around.
More and more people are switching to SAS solutions.
And you're seeing record amounts of traffic each and every month.
And then 2020 happens.
And we're pretty much locked indoors.
But there's a lot of budget.
There's a lot of people looking to buy.
There's a ton of people in market.
And everyone is getting information online.
There's less in-person events.
So a lot more budget went to digital
and a lot more pipeline was created via digital.
And then 2022 happened.
And the traffic didn't go away, but the pipeline that usually
followed that traffic did.
And I'd say just the overall channel became less efficient
because there was reduction in budget, reduction in force.
There was contracts that contracted.
That was a little bit of a double speak.
But really, I think now we're looking at what's next.
What do we do?
How do we get back to where we were with the SEO channel?
And I think that there is a way to get back to where
we are with SEO.
But it's not going to be by doing more of the same tactics
that got us to where we are today.
We're kind of scratching our heads.
I think the future of SEO is really
using it to build an owned audience
so you can cut out the algorithm and just go direct.
So first, I just want to lay down some ground facts,
or some truths around SEO.
I do think we've kind of gotten greedy when it comes
to organic search.
And the reason why is because a lot of the folks that
want to invest in organic search way up in the company,
they're not in the trenches doing the work.
And they still view it in this like 2014 lens
of how content was cheap, acquiring traffic was cheap,
and converting it was fairly easy.
The cost of a paid click has gone way up for the same term
over the last 10 years.
Cost of ads through meta or LinkedIn, they've all gone up.
But we're all kind of viewing SEO as this nearly free
or almost free channel where we can do very minimal content
marketing and get a lot of traffic to convert it.
And this post from John Miller--
this is a really valuable post.
If you haven't read it, I'd check it out.
I may a little bitly link for it.
It basically talks about how the old playbook--
and it's something that AKI talked about on stage.
I think probably a lot of folks have talked about today--
the old playbook doesn't work anymore.
But there's a really interesting stat in here
from a think tank that basically,
out of your TAM, 5% of companies are in market.
And I think with your SEO traffic,
it's honestly like 5% of it is potentially looking to buy.
And that leaves the other 95% that
doesn't want to be converted into a sales cycle.
And most companies that we talk to before we start
working with them, they are typically viewing as just
a way to harvest hand-raisers.
And they ignore all the folks that aren't ready to talk to sales.
So some other things just to get out of the way,
if you are operating in an established market,
you need to be an established business.
The channel is too saturated to go after big competitive terms
now if you are a newer business.
This is a look at the search results for the term project
management software.
And the right is the amount of links
that point to those individual pages.
So the amount of links pointed to those pages--
I don't think there's anything under 220 on there--
that's more than most seed stage and some Series A companies
have pointing to their website entirely.
The idea of that you're going to catch up
to these saturated markets, it's not the right play.
It's not the right channel to attack.
We often tell companies to wait longer until they're more
mature, and they can layer on this type of performance
marketing onto a stronger brand.
However, if you're creating a new category
or operating an emerging market, SEO definitely still
makes sense.
This is a term internal developer portal.
It's like a Gartner paper that came out a year ago that literally
category was just created.
And if you look, there's a few outliers in there,
but there's things with one or two links pointed to the page.
That's something where you could take over that entire topic.
So there's still a lot of room for search,
but going after these established markets
doesn't really make sense.
And I think just the state of where SEO is today,
Google currently rewards content that
is similar to what already exists.
And it's also rewards brands that it already trusts.
It doesn't really like taking chances
on new ideas or new brands.
And it also likes giving people exactly what they want.
It doesn't like challenging the user
in time to think about something in a different way.
It's very big into instant gratification, feeding bias.
And the other thing that I'd say is just kind of a truth
about SEO is we're seeing less traffic for certain terms
that we've helped brands own year over year.
So the search results, the layout has changed.
There's less clicks coming to organic.
And this really goes to the mindset shift
that the value of a visit needs to go way up.
I think we're very cool with letting 98% of the traffic
bounce after not after getting their answer.
And we need to treat that traffic just as value
valueably as we treat a cost per click traffic from AdWords
or Meta or LinkedIn.
And this is a tool, talking about how it rewards everything
that's the same.
It's a tool called Clear Scope.
We use it a ton.
It's a great tool.
What I'll do is I'll go out and grab the first 30 articles
that rank in search, and it'll run them
through some really basic AI.
And it'll tell you the ideas that actually
exist in those top 30 articles.
And if you include those ideas in your content,
you will rank better because Google doesn't like taking
chances on new ideas.
And the thing is, though, is this
creates the C of same-ness problem,
where everything in the search results
looks the exact same.
And if you use this tool, it'll actually be like, hey,
you left some stuff out.
You've got to work this in.
So it is going to push you to create kind of like a carbon
copy of what else is out there.
And this is what's led to people basically being
dissatisfied with Google Search.
And I think that quote-- I'm not going to read it word
for word-- but it's basically about Google being
like a dying mall.
And how you go there, you don't know why you went there,
you're not getting what you want.
This is a post from Dimitri Breitani.
He talks about how he appends like Reddit or Stack Overflow
to the end of his search so he can go to a site he actually
trusts.
So I'm going to Google clearly read that post because now
we're seeing this discussions and forums thing pop up, which
mainly features Reddit, very high up in the search results.
So this is why we can't really have tools like ClearScope
because they push us to just do the lowest amount of investment
possible to get the maximum ROI at the stake of alienating
the user.
So my bet-- and where I'm kind of gearing my companies--
there's going to be a steady decline in the effectiveness
of traditional SEO.
And when I talk about traditional SEO,
I mean literally making a mishmash of whatever's
on the first page of Google, trying to carbon copy it,
and not really thinking about how can we help the user,
how can we help the buyer, how can we change how they think.
And I also think we're going to see less traditional SEO
traffic.
AI is absolutely going to change the way we all search.
And I think it will send less traffic to our sites over time.
And again, that's why I'm saying the value of the visit
is going to go up because the people who actually come
through to our websites are going to be much more engaged
than the folks who just want a quick definition.
So this is a look at traffic to OpenAI.
They did 1.8 billion visits according to similar web last month.
It's still really early for these tools.
Google did $85.5 billion.
So it's about 45x of the traffic right now,
longer time on site.
And Google is definitely sending more traffic.
I think OpenAI is working on sending more traffic.
They're not really there yet.
But regardless of how much traffic Google has,
if we're number one on a list of 10 blue links that all say
the same things, it's going to have diminishing returns
very quickly.
And consumers and buyers are going to get sick of it.
So if your content is the same as everyone else's,
it's not going to generate meaningful results for your business
because it's not meaningfully differentiated.
The amount of times that I've sat in a room talking
about messaging and positioning and how we can differentiate
from competitors, hours and hours of my life,
the amount of time we've thought about how
to differentiate content is maybe like a 15-minute conversation
brands have on their own.
So we are all competing in a channel that
does reward sameness.
Google doesn't like taking chances
on wildly different ideas.
And because of that, we're afraid to stand out
and invest more in the channel.
We want to just do the lowest amount of investment possible
to get the highest ROI possible.
Guy used to work for, really an SEO.
Will Reynolds has this post on the C of sameness problem.
It is a phenomenal post.
I recommend you all read it if you are trying to execute on search.
They had a post that ranked for SEO RFP questions.
And Will looked at it.
And he's like, this is bullshit content.
And he changed the entire thing.
He made it about a post-AI world.
And he made it much better.
And they lost some rankings.
But the people who actually went and engaged with that content
were much more attracted to their brand,
interested in working with this company.
And they did actually get the rankings back.
They bucked the trend of just copying
else what is the search results, really thought about it
from a first principles perspective,
and made meaningfully better content that now stands out,
and does get more clicks, which is interesting,
kind of bucks the trend of everything being the same.
And there's a question that Will asks in his posts.
In his post, excuse me.
If you deleted your brand's SEO content from the web,
would anyone miss it?
And if the answer is no, you should really
think about why you're investing in the channel
and how much you're spending on it
and what you expect to get out of it.
Because if the same it everyone else is,
how are you going to benefit from it?
Modern buyers, they don't really want content written
by generalists and juniors.
And for some reason, whenever we start talking with a company
and we ask them, OK, who's going to start working on this content?
Who's going to own the channel?
We just hired this new person.
They know nothing about our industry.
We think this is a great thing for them to get trained up on.
And that's the exact opposite approach,
because I don't think you all want
to be reading things from generalists and juniors either.
You want to be learning from experts.
People want real firsthand experience
of how to operate and how to think about their market
and what to buy.
They don't want to hear basically cobbled together
search results from someone with an English degree
who's a year out of school.
So this is a post from a company based here in New York
called SuperBlox.
And they compete with a company called Retool.
And if you look at this post, if you actually read it,
the nuance and the understanding of the space is so clear.
And they have this competitive sort of grid.
And if you look at it, it's like not what's on G2 crowd.
It's not what's on software advice.
It's written by someone like Build API Endpoints with Workflows,
an intuitive visual builder for business logic.
It's someone who deeply knows the space.
Jesse, their product manager, actually wrote that post.
So it's the guy building the product who wrote that.
And this is what people actually want.
If you do search Retool alternative,
it ranks very highly for the post.
It is by far the best thing out there.
And it kind of blows everything else in the search results away.
So the thing that was SEO, I view it as a landing pad.
And if all you can do is send people to more SEO content,
like what is articles and best practices and listicles,
I don't think the channel is going to work for you very well.
There's this concept called barbecue content.
And I kind of view the two as complimentary, but very different.
So barbecue contents, like if you were at a barbecue
with a bunch of other marketers,
what would you actually be talking about?
And I'm guessing it's not like what is marketing,
or like marketing best practices.
It is like nuanced, complex ideas that don't align
to like a single keyword.
They're vague and complex and they need to be hashed out.
That's that barbecue content
which can't get algorithmic distribution.
So you can use SEO to get people into this stuff,
the sticky stuff, the stuff people actually want to be reading
by harnessing algorithms.
But it's the SEO traffic on its own
is probably not going to close deals for you.
And the thing that I've realized after probably working with,
I'd say we probably worked with 150 SaaS companies
over the years, there is not,
specifically in high ACV accounts,
that's usually who we're helping work with,
or usually who we're working with.
For high ACV industries,
there typically are enough hand-raisers
for you to hit your number through organic search.
There's not enough people in market to make it work.
And even if you try and like jump-start it,
like if you're using a tool like Clearbit
and then outbound email everyone who touched
your high intent pages,
people are somewhat immune to these like demand-gen tactics
that are tried and true.
Like just like the effectiveness of outbound has gone way down.
I think the effectiveness of like standard DG tactics,
I've also gone way down across the board.
And if you're trying to squeeze demos
out of your top of funnel traffic right now,
it could work, but I don't think it's going to work much longer.
Like I really think things are changing.
And people just don't want to get in sales cycles.
Buyers want to remain anonymous longer and longer.
And if all you can do on your website
is either demo or bounce, people are going to bounce.
Like I, if I sign up to go on a demo
for anything for our company,
I know I'm going to buy it already.
I'm not like feeling it out.
I've done a ton of research online.
In the time I engage sales, I'm pretty much closed one.
Audience development can get you in front of your buyer
before they even know that they're problem aware.
And I want to talk about a company, Fanoa.
Fanoa is, it's possibly in the driest space
we've ever worked in.
Fanoa is indirect tax automation.
So if you are Uber and you've got drivers all over the world,
or if you're like any kind of marketplace really,
you have to send a bunch of forms
to the different countries that you're operating in
so they can tax the people appropriately.
Fanoa's content strategy is not boring though.
They harness sort of like three prongs.
They have breaking news, evergreen resources,
and they have a meme guy.
And the meme guy kind of like, he ties it all together.
So the breaking news, it's tax space, highly regulated,
new regulations come out.
So whenever there's something new,
like Romania, PostPones, it's e-invoicing fines,
or Belgian e-invoicing mandates,
set to go live at a certain date,
they publish that as quickly as possible.
They kind of operate,
not like a news organization,
but just like a feed of updates around tax regulations.
And they've got really good evergreen content
like this guide to doing business,
if you have for businesses with customers in Austria,
it goes over like the different rates,
the things they need to be accountable for,
the different like file formats,
they need to send the taxing information through.
They also have some like, I'd say more standard,
but legitimately helpful SEO content.
And one thing about Fanoa,
their actual tax experts wrote all the content.
So they have a team of tax experts
who are speaking about this stuff from first-hand knowledge,
and actually having to file these forms
and deal with these regulations
instead of just getting like farmed out to a junior.
And then they got Aiko.
And Aiko is a really cool dude.
He used to run tax technology at Uber.
He's now the director of tax technology at Fanoa.
And the thing about Aiko is he's legitimately funny.
And so I haven't seen Dune,
so I can't really tie this one together.
But if you look at his memes,
like they are so niche.
And yeah, it's like 140 engagements,
which is not like the most ever,
but they're Tamm is small.
And they are targeting a very specific audience
of indirect tax managers.
And if you look at what's in the comments,
it is like exactly the people they wanna be getting
in front of, and they love his memes.
They like, that is good.
Like head of the indirect tax director
at Activision Blizzard, Dream Account,
Wayfair, Dream Account.
And the other thing that he does is he distributes
the SEO content through his memes.
Love 40 Old Virgin, it's a great movie.
But he is able to use his audience to distribute content,
which I think is a lot more valuable
if you're familiar with SEO and like link building,
then like reaching out to someone and be like,
hey, I saw you wrote a blog and I've got a blog too.
And could you mention your blog and my blog?
This is way more modern.
And this is getting the content in front of the people
that they actually want to read it.
And this leads to kind of a flywheel
of their content getting amplified by the people
that they actually want reading it.
And all of this leads back to a newsletter
that ships out that newsworthy content.
So whenever there's a regulation change,
they let you know immediately.
So they get it out in search.
It does, so an example right here
about a rate change from Malaysia.
When they publish it, it ends up ranking pretty well
'cause they're usually first to market.
And the sites that they're competing with
are like a Malaysian government site
that's publishing on a PDF.
So the experience is much better.
But all of this leads to people signing up
for their newsletter and to unsubscribe from it,
they lose a really valuable news source
'cause the Malaysian government
does not have a newsletter about this.
So for subscribing to FANOA
and being a part of FANOA's audience
literally lets you be better at your job.
And that's the kind of value that we need to be creating.
So FANOA is using rented channels,
Search and Social, to build an audience of own tax professional.
Or excuse me, to build an owned audience
of indirect tax professionals.
And this is what I think the future of SEO really will be.
It's about leveraging a channel to build an owed audience
so you can skip the algorithm altogether
and just go direct and send them whatever you want.
Send them your barbecue content.
Send them your video content.
And not be reliant every month
on the algorithm not changing.
I firmly believe if the tax technology company can do this
that anyone can do this.
Tax is by far the most boring space I've worked in
and they are making it fun and interesting.
Some caveats though.
I think if you have to have something to say in order to do this,
like Aiko is very opinionated.
He knows the space, he is legit.
He's not just the mean guy.
He's also the director of tax technology.
And you also have someone say, like I don't think this approach
would have been effective.
It was the Fanoa brand account publishing all this.
Like it's a guy that you can relate with,
spend time with, build a pair of social relationships.
He has followers right now.
I don't think people really want to follow brands anymore.
I think you also need to have a library of own content
that isn't just SEO articles and gated webinars
and Gartner white papers.
There needs to be that barbecue content
that people can hang out with and enjoy and engage with and share.
And the other thing is like you have to be comfortable
not just immediately trying to get people that have signed up
for your newsletter into a sales cycle.
You have to let them chill out, marinade, hang out at the barbecue.
This isn't the death of SEO content,
no matter how many people online are saying it right now.
And I don't think it's the death of content at all.
But for content to get real engagement,
it needs to be worth your buyer's time.
And I think that is what Fanoa is doing.
Like they are actually making something
that people want to spend time with.
Because if they don't have it, they feel like they're missing out
and they feel like they're at risk.
And to stand out, I think we need to focus on a few things,
mainly authenticity and the tactical and the tactile.
I'll go with what that means in a second.
So it's really about actionable content.
So less of this, what is this concept?
And more like change how your audience operates
and how they go about their job, give them process.
And the ability to actually follow something end to end
to improve how their business is running.
Lean into firsthand experience from people
who really know what they're talking about
versus farming it out to those junior person on the team.
I also left this out of here, but tools.
Things that actually help people analyze, assess,
get information for free, and then entertain and inform.
And I think there's some misconceptions
about how modern buyers search.
And I realize not everyone and every company
would be cool with this.
But I would recommend if you are selling into a buyer like
yourself, like you if you are selling Martec,
go through your Chrome for the last 30 days
and look at what you search for.
If you're selling it into accounting professionals,
look at what the finance team is searching for.
So this is a look at some searches from my search history.
So I was trying to turn a transcript into a text file.
Old Google Analytics data is getting deleted,
so I was looking for how to save it down.
I was working on some indexations stuff,
so I wanted to test robots.txt file.
I was looking at accessibility issues.
I wanted a checklist for small business tax deductions.
And I was trying to set up user ID tracking
and web flow with GA4.
Like that is very jobs to be done.
It's not like what is marketing or link building best
practices.
It's like how do I actually do the work?
And there are some things that I've
searched for that are more informational.
And it's things that are in emerging categories,
like rag versus context window or model poisoning,
which are two-generative AI ideas.
Or what is a WABN, which is a way
to do taxation with international contractors.
So those are things like if there was a newsletter
around how marketers can harness AI
or how to better manage freelancers across the globe,
or how to better manage company IT
because I do that as well, that's all stuff
that I'm not ready to buy.
I'm not looking to buy at all, but if someone can consistently
provide value, I will follow along with them for the long term.
And triples is best.
But does this matter if Google is going
to shift to a generative AI interface?
Or let's say Google loses market share
to open AI in perplexity.
Those models still have to feed off of original content.
They're not publishers.
They're not creating their own stuff.
And if you are willing to be meaningfully different,
if you are willing to have your own ideas,
if you're willing to buck the trend,
the model is not just going to regurgitate it and not cite you
because the models don't want to take risk.
They want to point back to where they're going.
They're working on it right now.
They're citing more links.
But the idea that all of our ideas are going to be taken,
it's just fear-mongering, at least in my opinion.
So if we answer questions differently,
if we create meaningfully different content,
Google's not going to be comfortable copying our ideas.
And I think what is really at risk--
I remember when I was a director of sales
at a former SEO agency, we got a call one day from a company,
and Google had started putting time zones.
What time is it in this city when it's this time in this city?
And they were like, how do we get this back?
Like, we are not.
Like, we are done.
And I think for anything where it's just very deterministic,
where it's like, how do you boil an egg?
How do you tie a tie?
That is stuff that I do think is at risk.
I do think Google will own those results
because it's very obvious how to do those things.
But for anything like how to staff for a GTM function,
or how to fix things in Marketo, or how to unfuck sales force,
that is stuff that Google's not going to feel comfortable doing
because it's complex and it's probabilistic.
So I think for a lot of the actual meaningful content,
not just the definition of content, we're safe.
So there is going to be a new bar for B2B content.
And it's that it's going to have to be so damn good
that it encourages a cult-like following of people
who want to subscribe to you and follow you
because they get value out of what you provide.
And they will keep coming to you direct versus going back
to search to answer all of their questions.
Thank you all.
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