Episode 4: How to Use a Data-Driven Content Strategy to Drive Customers via Organic Search | With Kevin Gibbons

Full transcript:

David Bain  00:00

How to use a data-driven content strategy to drive customers via organic search - with Kevin Gibbons.

The Strategic Marketing Show is brought to you by Insights For Professionals: providing access to the latest industry insights from trusted brands on a customized, tailored experience. Find out more over at insightsforprofessionals.com.

Hey, it’s David. How can you be more laser-targeted in attracting the right audience from organic search? That's what we're covering today, with a man who founded his first digital marketing agency back in 2006. He is the founder and CEO of specialist eCommerce SEO agency Re:signal. A warm welcome to the Strategic Marketing Show, Kevin Gibbons.

Kevin Gibbons  00:48

Hi, David. Great to be here.

David Bain  00:50

Good to have you here Kevin. You can find Kevin over at resignal.com. So Kevin, why does it all start with understanding your audience?

Kevin Gibbons  00:58

I think for me, I've always found the way that I look at SEO is through a business lens. I've run an agency, like you say, since 2006 so I think I naturally look at this from the perspective of running a business and being an entrepreneur, if you like, in the sense of: where you spend money is to grow. For me, it's understanding your customer. So, understanding the audience that you have.

Understanding the business model is actually the first challenge, quite often, before you go into SEO. You can do SEO without understanding the business model - and you could look at how you get more traffic to a brand, for example - but I feel like someone is going to come along at some point and just ask ‘So what?’. For me, I always start with those ‘So what?’ questions. So, ‘What is the business model?’, ‘What is the customer that you're looking to serve?’

The more that you can understand how that operates - how a brand values and prioritises their business objectives and goals (that may not be revenue, but quite often it is) - I think you then understand: this is what they're targeting, this is what works for them, this is what they want more of.

Then you would go into the different types of customers and product offerings, etc. I think it very much starts with understanding that business model in the first place, because if you can get your head around ‘this is how that business operates and the priorities and decision making behind it’, it's then much easier to help turn it into a strategy to grow against those objectives.

David Bain  02:42

So, as an enterprise marketer, truly understand your business model first of all, then move on to - you mentioned the customer - understanding who the customer is. So, how do you actually find out? How do you define who your audience is? Is it a more qualitative approach? Do you actually have to have conversations with people? Is there software that you can use to do this?

Kevin Gibbons  03:09

There are different ways of doing it. To a certain extent, quite a lot of it - certainly if you're talking about enterprise brands - brands will have personas and target customers that they are aware of and are looking to attract more of. I would certainly say that's useful, in terms of understanding who these people are and what are the common trends.

But that said, from a search perspective, I think quite a lot of this is more data-led. When you're thinking about search (and organic search in particular) these days, it's not quite so easy as it was in the past to get raw keyword data on conversions, for example. Equally, it's still possible to understand what type of content works for you, what the engagement rate is, what the conversion rate is, offer-specific pages, how well does that work with other channels such as paid search, and tracing that back to really understanding - at a product level - what type of products are converting? At a keyword or a topic level - what is it that people are searching for? Then, building that into more of a strategy.

So again, from a customer perspective, you could then overlay that with demographic targeting, and certainly paid search is a good example of that - in terms of the audience that you're trying to reach, maybe retarget to, etc. So, the more that you have in mind: ‘this is your sweet spot of customers’, certainly from a geographical perspective but potentially from age range, etc. (there could be many different demographics).

But, from SEO, I wouldn't say you particularly look at that in too much depth. It’s probably more understanding who it is you're looking to target and what they'd be searching for. It's not like paid advertising, where you obviously have more targeted options on who you can filter in and out. With SEO, it's more based on the keywords and the trends that people are searching for, so I think understanding that customer is very helpful.

Essentially what you want to get down to is: ‘What are the keywords, topics, and pages that are going to drive you customers’ - at different stages of the funnel, of course. Not everyone is going to be a ‘one-click one purchase’ kind of visit. It's likely to be a longer trend and more omnichannel in terms of having multiple touchpoints.

With that said, SEO plays a big role in both the awareness and attraction in the early stages, through to the consideration and conversion towards the latter stages. The more that you can identify with that customer - their different goals and objectives at different stages of that customer journey - the more likely you are to then put yourself in their shoes when you're thinking about content strategy.

David Bain  05:56

Understood, okay. Big picture, I'm just trying to summarise what you've shared, and that is starting with an understanding of the business to begin with (that also includes an understanding of the product), and then building personas that map to the product, and then researching keywords - or brainstorming keywords initially - then researching keywords to map back to the persona. Is that correct?

Kevin Gibbons  06:21

That's correct. Yeah. And there'll be a lot of data that you have already behind that, certainly within your own analytics. Unless you're a startup that hasn't operated until today, there's a good chance you'll have a goldmine worth of data around what has worked for you in the past, and what hasn't worked.

Equally, there might be some tools on the market that can help to understand what that looks like, in terms of the competitor landscape as well. I think it's really, at that stage, trying to take in as much information as he can but, equally, you then want to focus that as you start to narrow down in terms of your strategy and prioritizing by value.

David Bain  07:02

You also mentioned different stages of the customer journey, so that makes me think about demand levels that different keywords have. How do you actually identify some kind of level - or likely level - of demand, of immediate intent, based upon an individual keyword phrase?

Kevin Gibbons  07:22

Some of it has to be trial and error because no one has all of the answers in a research phase. Sometimes it's a controlled experiment. I did quite a lot of Google Ads, probably about 10 years ago (I'm definitely out of touch these days and much more focused on SEO), but I think just having that background - of ‘this is how paid search works’ - has really helped to sharpen how you can look at SEO from a return on investment perspective.

I think there's a lot there that you can get to understand quicker, if you have paid search data, for example. Obviously, you might have organic data as well, which is great.

Let's say you had some theories that people will search for this group of 10 keywords, and when they land there, they're going to turn into customers. That sounds like a great theory, but until you’re ranking in the top five, top three, in Google (where you're getting significant traffic for those terms) it's really difficult to know if that theory is a reality. You don't really want to be waiting six to twelve months, potentially longer, to test that theory.

I would say actually, in the earliest stages, use Google Ads and understand: ‘What are the conversion rates behind that?’. Equally, not all content is created equal, in the sense of it has different purposes. If your purpose is awareness, you shouldn't really be judging that on the direct conversion rate that comes up. If someone's reading an article about how to run a marathon, for example, (which is a topic because I'm just about to run a marathon in three weeks, I should probably read that article myself right now) If you go to read that article, to then say: ‘They didn't buy a pair of trainers, and a running top, and a pair of socks, and something for their sister, etc., etc. It's a failure’, you're judging that the wrong way.

Whereas, actually, if you said, ‘Okay, well, that was a top-of-funnel visit, from which they subscribed to our newsletter’, or it might just simply be: ‘They viewed that page. They liked it. They viewed another one. They came back a week later, and they still might not have purchased products.’ I think it's very much understanding how that content serves a purpose at different stages. Having micro goals, for example - like an email signup capture - could potentially be successful if you can then say, ‘We're building the top-of-funnel, and then we're passing people through that’.

I think is very much understanding what purpose that content serves. Equally, going back to the point around testing and learning, you can fast-track that experiment by using Google Ads. If you want to generate one hundred, or one thousand, clicks - and understand what the conversion rate is, and how well potential customers are going to convert with that landing page or the keyword that it's visited from - then fast-track it through Google Ads. If it's working well for you, then try and build some SEO strength and authority around that topic and rank for it organically as well.

Certainly, I think it's a better, and a stronger, business case if you can say, ‘We've spent X amount (could be low hundreds, it doesn't have to be massive money), but there's an experiment here that shows we make X amount per visit on this page’. If it generates a positive ROI from paid ads, there's a very strong case that you should continue doing that anyway, because it's profitable.

From an SEO perspective, then look at ‘This is how much effort we think it would take to secure those rankings for these terms, that's how much traffic we would expect to get off the back of that forecast, and - based on our experiments for conversion rate, average order value, etc. - this is how much that equivalent amount of traffic would be worth in potential revenue’.

If you can go to the business with that case, and say, ‘This is what we're doing’, there's much more chance you'll get the buy-in to do the SEO. And, when you then secure those rankings on page one of Google, you're then much more confident that it's going to convert into customers once people hit that landing page. I can say that I’ve certainly seen this in analytics a lot: where you might target a high-volume search phrase, but it does absolutely nothing for you. It's got a 98% bounce rate, and no one ever buys anything. From that perspective, is that content serving you beyond looking quite nice in an analytics report? Possibly not.

Kevin Gibbons  12:06

If you're spending a lot of time and effort to achieve that outcome, it is probably not the best use of your time, effort, budget, etc. I think it's very much fast-tracking that experiment in the early days and having some experiments. Not everything's going to work either. You don't need to try and prove a case for absolutely everything and you want it to be a fair test. If the conclusion from this experiment is that it's not worth it, then don't do it. I think that's actually important. You don't want to predefine what you want to do early on. You want the experiments to lead what the best use of your time is - in terms of that effort versus reward.

David Bain  12:45

It’s a great point. It's so important to get paid search and SEO teams to work more closely together. I think in larger organizations it’s often the case where there are large departments of SEOs and paid search, often never speaking to each other. The points that you've highlighted - especially giving SEOs an opportunity to test hypotheses of whether or not keywords are likely to be valuable to a business with paid search teams. There are many other activities where they can assist each other, perhaps with closer alignment with brand phraseology and also with other keywords that are perhaps ranking number one on organic search.

Perhaps there's an opportunity to experiment with testing reducing, or taking out, expenditure and paid search there as well. There are so many ways to work together. But I tell you what, let's dive into the specifics of one of your successes. So, one of your clients, ASICS, you increased their average organic revenue by 122%. How did you go about doing that?

Kevin Gibbons  13:44

It was very much by prioritizing by value. As a case study of this success on our website, resignal.com, what we did is (and this is going back to the very early days, we've been working together for four years now) we understood essentially what we just said - we understand their business model.

How do they make money? Where do they make the most amount of money? What are the most popular products? You'll find that quite often, for eCommerce brands and retailers, there's a bit of an 80/20 rule behind them. 20% of the volume, the traffic, the products - whichever way you want to look at it - will generate 80% of revenue, and it's very similar in this case.

It's no secret that ASICS are very popular in running and, specifically, trainers. For us, we focused around, ‘How do we make sure that they have the best content possible across that journey - for semi-experienced amateur runners through to athletes?’ If we were creating content for them, ‘Let's make sure that, across that journey, you can find an ASICS piece of content that will help you to decide which running trainer is the best fit for you.’

That was done internationally - I think this is across 12 different countries, and I think 11 different languages, across Europe. The way that we approached it was to look at those stages that we've mentioned (awareness, consideration, conversion), and then prioritize by value. So, working backwards, from a conversion perspective, how well do they rank for the core terms?

One thing that I found is, brands quite often don't always rank for their own brand terms – and that sounds a bit crazy when you think about it. This can be an SEO mistake. You can think, ‘That's our brand, we won't even track those keywords’, but if you're ranking number four for one of your most popular products, then that's probably the biggest goldmine you have in terms of conversions.

For example, in this case, (not just using ASICS but any retailer as a positive example) they leveraged marketplaces. Quite often a product that a retailer sells could be listed on Amazon, it could be on eBay, it could be in Argos, John Lewis, etc, etc. There are perfectly legitimate business reasons why you would have third-party retailers selling your products - that makes perfect sense from a distribution and business perspective. From an SEO perspective, you want them to sell your products (that's why they're listed), but you want to be the number one, and you'd want those to be the number two, number three, etc.

One of the earlier things we did was trying to ensure that if you're searching for an ‘ASICS Gel-Kayano running trainer’, for example, we have the best landing page around that content. We are the brand that has produced that product and, from an authority perspective, have a perfectly good reasoning as to why we should be number one in Google. But it's also convincing Google that that product should be number one. So, ensuring that all of those products are ranking for those brand terms, I think is really important.

There's actually a brand that I worked with (this is going back over 10 years ago), MILA, and I remember looking at their analytics, and it was the same type of thing. The way their products were optimized had a space within the product naming structure, so it's different numbers and letters. The way that people were searching didn't include those spaces. I found that, once we changed the naming structure on the website, we started to rank number one - ahead of, in that case, the likes of John Lewis and Argos. We captured a lot more traffic and grew significantly as a result of that.

I think the first step being, ‘Let's rank for brand terms’ is really important. Then there are obviously separate steps that I’m happy to go into, in terms of the consideration and then the awareness top-of-funnel.

Kevin Gibbons  18:28

It is very much trying to work backwards: ‘What are your top converting keywords?’ as the most important question. If you can take that, and if you can improve that traffic even by, say, 20% (in terms of traffic that’s coming through for your top converting keywords) that's a lot of potential extra revenue that is coming through the site.

That certainly is what I would consider. I don't really like the phrase, but the ‘low-hanging fruit’. If you're trying to prioritize your efforts around what's going to work, and what's going to pay off from a business perspective early on, it sounds crazy not to start with your top-converting products and keywords.

David Bain  19:11

There's one element that I’d just like to delve into in a little bit more depth. You obviously did a great job at understanding the business, understanding who the customer was, and understanding what you wanted to achieve (what the goals were, and where you wanted to be in X number of months or years’ time).

How did you break down the milestones from that endpoint and how did you keep them on board, to demonstrate that you are on the right path? I'm thinking that this will also be useful information for internal marketers - marketers in big organizations that actually have to keep decision-makers (corporate executives, etc.) on board with what they're trying to achieve over the long term.

Kevin Gibbons  19:53

Yeah, absolutely. Again, if you think about demystifying SEO for a little bit. SEO is not this black box, dark art, etc., etc., cliché, cliché, in terms of the way that it's approached. Equally, it's not a leap of faith. It's not, ‘Let's just do this and see how it works in two years, and if it's paid off then great, and if it hasn't then let’s bin it.’ It's got to be very much, ‘Let's set expectations.’ and I would absolutely advocate for, ‘Let's have a long-term ambition of where we want to get to’.

But, you have to break that down into milestones to say, ‘This is how we're going to show you a short-term impact.’, ‘This is where we expect to be in three months, six months, nine months, 12 months’, and working backwards. Equally, some things might take longer than 12 months.

It's funny how every forecast is for 12 months, but some of the objectives really are going to take longer than that - in terms of what you're trying to achieve, the competitors you're trying to catch, and the level of effort required to catch up to them and get to that point. I think it's really important and crucial to see what you can expect to achieve. Pay attention to competitors in order to understand the size of the market.

In SEO, you're always one of two things: you're either number one, or you're trying to catch someone. There are different tactics if you're in either of those positions. If you're number one, potentially you're in maintenance, but you need to keep reinventing yourself and improving - and creating quality content that engages with an audience to maintain that place. But if you're number 10, it's a game of, ‘How do we get to number nine? How do we get to number eight?’

The one thing I would counter that with is: don't get too carried away about competition either. Understand what section of the market you want. If you're, let's use ASICS as an example. ASICS will have Amazon as a competitor, in the same way that most retailers and eCommerce stores online will have Amazon as a competitor. But, you don't care about Amazon overall, as a brand and their whole visibility. You care about their organic visibility for running trainers: specifically, the ASICS terms and the non-branded terms. If they're searching for Nike, Adidas, etc, that's not something that (as a sports retailer and a specific brand) you would expect to capture search traffic for.

Understand that segment of the market that you want to capture, and then you can build expectations around it. So, ‘Here's a forecast of where we are today. This is what we think is an optimistic-versus-realistic forecast’, so that you can see a couple of scenarios if things go very well versus if you think you've had potentially a good year, you might even (if you're more pessimistic in nature) want to go down the pessimistic route as well, depending on who you're selling that to. Equally, you want to be able to show what you can achieve, what's possible, and what's possible with different budgets as well so that you can understand how that works.

Very much it's understanding where you are now, where you can get to, and what that looks like as key milestones along the journey. I think one thing that's interesting within SEO is that the results from a business perspective won't always kick in immediately, and the results from an SEO perspective may be sooner than that.

It's showing that progress: ‘We've got onto page two of Google. That's a significant result because three weeks ago, we were on page eight.’ That's really good, you should celebrate those successes, but you know that if you're going to take that to the board of your client, they're not going to care because you're not making the money yet.

It's trying to show them there's progress. ‘This is where we getting to. We're on track, stick with it.’ Give them that confidence that what we're doing is going in the right direction, but understand that there's still a journey that you're on and there's a bit further that you need to take it to tip it over the edge on to page one. Again, I wouldn't particularly look at that as a keyword level, it's more: across the board, where are you getting to? Then the revenue will follow.

It's trying to show that those kinds of rankings turn into traffic, and then traffic turns into revenue. If you can show that along the different stages then it certainly helps, but set some clear expectations from the start.

David Bain  24:33

Let's move on to thinking about more general challenges or the bigger picture. So, what's the biggest marketing trend or challenge for marketers over the coming year?

Kevin Gibbons  24:42

Actually being business-focused around what you're doing is really important. What we were saying earlier, around the different stages of the funnel, is crucial.

One of the things we put quite a bit of time into is understanding the retail sector. For us, we specialize largely in eCommerce brands, and we've produced an eCommerce report. I did a video interview earlier in the summer with the head of retail at KPMG and we looked at the economic results over the last two years, so post-COVID. I actually spoke to him two years ago, so it's kind of a refresher on where we got to and what's happened because, obviously, a lot has changed.

It's also looking at what that means moving forward. Moving forward, from a retail perspective, we're expecting a recession. We are seeing quite a lot of impact from a geopolitical perspective, in terms of inflation, the energy crisis, etc. From an inflation perspective - for businesses in general, but certainly for retailers - they're finding there are supply chain issues, there are price increases, there are changes in the strength of the pound, etc., that means they're getting squeezed in terms of how much buying power they have, or how profitable that would be.

Equally, from a consumer perspective, people are also tighter with their spend. They’re more price-conscious in terms of what they're buying. So, one analogy used is that you might shop at the same supermarket but, rather than buying the premium products, you might buy more of the value items now. It's stuff like that, where people are a bit more conscious on the spend. They're still spending money to a certain extent, but less of it. They're more conscious about their spending.

I think, from an eCommerce perspective, it's understanding: what are those customers thinking? How does that relate to the business that you're working with? And how do you make sure that you're capturing a demand that may be changing and shifting? Maybe people are searching less for luxury items, for example, and more for cheap or value items. Understanding how that search demand is shifting on a temporary basis, as opposed to the overall trends, is really useful.

Equally, I think there's a lot around how retailers have changed. Quite a lot of retailers now - having had stores shut in and out of lockdown during 2020 and 2021 - are now in a new position. They may have closed down stores, but what we're finding is that the brands that are really winning are those that are more hybrid. They have stores (maybe in key destinations and cities), they have a strong brand presence, they invest in that brand. And from an organic search perspective, they're also performing very well because they have that brand strength that helps them to rank - not just for the branded terms but, as a knock-on effect, for the non-branded as well.

Just understanding a little bit about the market trends, the economy, and what that means in terms of the impact is really important. Otherwise, you could be ranking exactly the same as you were last year, you could be getting exactly the same amount of traffic as you were last year, but maybe your messaging is slightly off towards your customers because the environment around you has changed.

Those are really important in order to factor in what you're doing and, again, the demand - in terms of what people are searching for product-wise - may have shifted as well. If it has, be aware of how that has shifted, and make sure that you're jumping on that from a content perspective to capture a potentially new wave of topics or keywords that people are looking to find you for.

David Bain  28:48

Lots to think about. I've been your host, David Bain. You can find Kevin Gibbons over at resignal.com. Kevin, thanks so much for being on the Strategic Marketing Show.

Kevin Gibbons  28:57

Brilliant. Thanks for having me, David. Appreciate it.

David Bain  28:59

And thank you for listening. Here at IFP, our goal is simple: to connect you with the most relevant information, to help solve your business problems all in one place. InsightsForProfessionals.com