Fractional Futures

How CMOs Can Use SEO to Show ROI

• Paul Mills • Season 4 • Episode 2

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Fractional Futures is the essential podcast for CEOs, investors, and senior marketing executives looking to unlock the power of fractional marketing leadership. Hosted by Paul Mills, Founder at VCMO, and with special guests, we'll share expert insights, provide actionable strategies and explore real-world success stories to help you leverage fractional marketing leadership for maximum impact.

In this episode

In this episode of Fractional Futures, Paul Mills and Ryan Jones discuss the challenges marketing leaders face in proving the value of SEO to the C-suite. They explore how to connect SEO efforts to business outcomes, the importance of tracking metrics, and the need for SEO to be a part of boardroom conversations. The discussion also covers the complexities of outsourcing SEO, the significance of finding the right agency, and how to effectively communicate SEO performance to stakeholders.

Special Guest

Ryan Jones, Marketing Manager, SEOTesting.com

Special Offer: Listeners of the Fractional Futures Podcast can take advantage of an extended trial to SEOTesting, giving you a 45-day free trial instead of the standard 14-day trial. You can add up to 30 Google Search Console properties with your trial account and you'll have unlimited access to every single one of SEOTesting's featured for that time including testing, site annotations, and their range of pre-built reports designed to make Google Search Console data easier to use. 

Simply click this link for the extended trial.

Takeaways

  • SEO is often the hardest channel to measure compared to PPC.
  • Attribution in SEO is messy and requires a multi-channel approach.
  • Free tools like Google Search Console are effective for beginners.
  • It's crucial to track the work done by SEO agencies monthly.
  • Specialization in the type of SEO work needed is important when choosing an agency.
  • SEO should be included in boardroom discussions to highlight its impact.
  • Budget allocation should be based on what moves the needle for the business.
  • Smaller scale tests can help determine effective strategies.
  • Core updates from Google can impact ongoing SEO tests.
  • Google recognizes efforts to improve user experience through SEO. 

 Sound Bites

 "SEO is one of the hardest channels to measure."

"It doesn't have to be complicated."

"Find a specialist in the type of work you need."

Contact VCMO

Thanks for listening & keep podcasting!

Fractional Marketing Leadership | Marketing Transformed.

Paul Mills (00:01.862)

Hello and welcome back to Fractional Futures, the show where we go deep into the marketing challenges SMEs face with a little help from those who've been in the trenches. I'm your host and today we're picking up where we left off in the last episode where we explored how a robust SEO strategy can guide smarter marketing decisions on a limited budget. In this episode, we're moving up the chain of command. It's one thing to run SEO experiments, it's another thing entirely to use them to prove value with the C-suite. Marketing leaders today are under increasing pressure to justify long-term investments like SEO in a world that favors short-term performance metrics. So how can marketing leaders connect the dots between organic performance and business outcomes? I'm delighted to be joined once again by Ryan Jones, Marketing Manager at SEO Testing, a platform built to help marketers run structured SEO experiments and prove performance. Ryan's experience sits right at the intersection of technical SEO, data analysis and commercial storytelling, which makes him the perfect guest to help us navigate how CMOs can turn SMO, say that bit again, which makes him the perfect guest to help us navigate how CMOs can turn SEO into a boardroom conversation. Hi Ryan, welcome to the show. How are you today?

 

Ryan Jones (01:24.258)

Yeah, I'm good. Thank you. Thank you for having me on again. Excited to chat a bit more.

 

Paul Mills (01:27.654)

Good stuff. And I know you've got a special offer for our listeners. Would you like to share a little bit more about that?

 

Ryan Jones (01:33.334)

Yeah, we do. So anyone listening to the Fractional Futures podcast can take or make use of an extended trial to SEO Testing. So as standard, offer everyone 14-day free trial, but this extended trial will give you 45 days to use the platform.

 

Paul Mills (01:48.304)

Fantastic. And I have tried it myself and it's very useful. So I do recommend you having a look and have a play. It's, it will give us a great insights and really help you dial up your SEO strategy. So thanks for that offer, Ryan. It's really appreciated. So shall we dive into the first topic? You ready? Good stuff. So the first thing I want to look at is kind of the CMO's challenge, SEO versus other channels. 

 

Ryan Jones (02:06.69)

Yeah, let's let's do it.

 

Paul Mills (02:17.828)

SEO could be one of the most cost-effective channels over time. And we explored that in the last episode, but it's often one of the hardest channels to measure, especially compared to something like pay-per-click where the data is immediate. So Ryan, where does SEO often... So I'll start again. Ryan, why does SEO often struggle to prove its ROI in the traditional dashboard? And how can marketing leaders get a better alignment

 

of organic efforts with high level business metrics like revenue, customer acquisition cost and customer lifetime value?

 

Ryan Jones (02:54.55)

I think it comes down to, obviously the difference is in between SEO and PPC for instance is obviously you can see the PPC return on investment almost immediately in the dashboard and that's kind of what it's built for. The difficult thing with SEO is it kind of has an influence across more channels than just search engines. So you might start by creating top of the funnel content for sort of visitors at the informational stage. They'll read a guide.

 

see it's really useful, but they're not quite ready to go to that next stage yet. They're not quite ready to start comparing or purchasing. So they'll often leave. that's one of the metrics that we can see from that is obviously we can look and say, okay, well, a thousand people have seen this guide, but we've not seen any conversions from it. And in that sense, you're not seeing any conversions going from guide to conversion. But I think one of the things that we need to track is who goes from guide to then...

 

maybe they come back through a remarketing channel on social media and something, and then they buy from that. it's all about tracking that, almost like that first click attribution, I think is really useful when it comes to SEO. But also realizing that SEO is one of those, just those channels that the attribution is always going to be slightly messy because it's so long compared to other other marketing disciplines. So I think that needs to factor into the conversation as well.

 

Paul Mills (04:24.726)

And what approaches would you recommend if you're consulting with a client and they're kind of starting from scratch? How do you build that roadmap? How do you map out the attribution? How do you map out the SEO? How do you map out the channels? What is the best approach to consider that?

 

Ryan Jones (04:41.72)

Yeah, I think the first approach is to start talking to your customers a bit more. those people that start, they might contact your business for, it might be classed a lead or a sale straight away. You can have a form in there and just ask where they first heard about you, which is obviously not everyone's going to fill that form in or not everyone's going to give you the right information, but it does help as a kind of top level metric to see or to get an instant and get an inkling to sort of how many people are actually seeing.

 

your site first through Google or Bing or anything like that. But yeah, beyond that, having sort of business friendly dashboards like Chartmogle or a couple of those kinds of things are useful for tracking revenue. But I still think one of the best tools around is GA4. just purely because obviously we have spoken about this with a few people, but...

 

The learning curve is quite steep when it comes to GA4, but once you get around that, the use that you can get from it through tracking events rather than cookies and that kind of thing is you can track people for slightly longer. can see where they came in first and then where they re-entered. and that kind of thing. And that kind of helps get that attribution across the full stage of the funnel.

 

Paul Mills (06:00.41)

And you mentioned cookies there. Obviously, rules around cookies change quite soon. I think it's this summer, isn't it? So how do you approach that challenge there if you can't rely on cookies as much going forwards? Is it more you have to focus on the GA4 events to start tracking attribution and how people are behaving?

 

Ryan Jones (06:20.566)

Yeah, I think that's going to be a big part of it, obviously. And it won't just be GA4 that comes through, there'll be different analytics tools that filter through that use event-based tracking and that kind of thing. So we might well start to see competitors come out. And if anything, it might make the landscape slightly more competitive with everything being more event-based. But yeah, I think that is something we are going to have to get used to.

 

We are already starting to see it. know that more people use browsers in incognito mode. More people are aware of just rejecting cookies in the first time anyway, just out of habit. So we're already starting to see that analytics is a little bit messy in that kind of area. But yeah, I do think once more platforms, more software changes over to this event-based metric tracking, then I do think it will become slightly easier.

 

Paul Mills (07:10.768)

Good stuff. And that's probably a nice segue into the next topic, which is SEO is a performance driven strategy. So we've nicely set the stage there for why SEO deserves a seat at the performance table. the next step is execution. So Ryan, there's a couple of things I want to pick your brains on with this. What SEO metrics should marketing leaders or maybe founders or early stage businesses, what metrics should they be monitoring that drive measurable improvement?

 

And how can platforms like SEO Testing, the Sunday obviously you mentioned as well, how can they be used as a true performance lever?

 

Ryan Jones (07:47.042)

Yeah, I still always think it's useful to track the sort of more traditional SEO metrics. So clicks from organic search, impressions, average position, all that kind of thing. I do think that will maybe change in the sort of near future as we start to see a bigger rollout of AI overviews and that kind of thing, which we talked about in the previous episode. But at the moment, it is still a really valuable process. It's still something that we do just to keep an eye on is to track those top level SEO metrics.

Purely because for a lot of businesses, like if we take us as an example, SEO is still the main attribution or the main acquisition channel that we have. And while we're spending time building up social media and other acquisition channels, SEO is still the main one and we can't forget about that and just move on to the next thing. So I do think it's still important to track those top level metrics. but beyond that, yeah, tracking, I think...

SEO is starting to move into a slightly more sort of multi-channel approach almost as, as behavior changes and people might start using Google less. So I think it might become part of an SEO job description to track brand mentions in obviously different kind of thing. Your brand search volume is, always a big one. And then mentions on social media, mentions on different sort of question and answer platforms like Reddit and Quora and that kind of thing. Not necessarily because the work of an SEO is going to have a direct impact on those channels. But purely because search behavior is changing so much, I think that's something that we need to keep an eye on as well.

 

Paul Mills (09:24.988)

And, and for, uh, businesses that don't have a, a mature marketing function, they might not even have a, you know, a full-time marketer on board. Um, you know, you might have a founder or a co-founder who's kind of tasked with managing the SEO. They might be listening to this thinking, oh my God, this sounds really quite complicated. Does it have to be complicated? You know, what advice would you give to those kind of non-marketers who are tasked with managing a website, trying to do something with SEO, what advice would you give them to, what sort of things should they be looking at, at a very bare minimum?

 

Ryan Jones (10:04.994)

Yeah, it doesn't, it doesn't have to be complicated. think there's a, I think as marketers, we can sometimes get a little bit overwhelmed with the amount of tools that we need to pay for and that kind of thing. But the reality is that free tools will still do almost as good of a job as, as those paid tools and that kind of thing. if you sort of, If you've been tasked with looking at these SEO metrics and you might not necessarily have an idea of where to start the, my best advice and the best place to start is with just simply Google Search Console and Google analytics or GA4, just because they're completely free to use. You might get sort of sample data with Google Search Console, but for most businesses that won't necessarily be an issue. And that'll just be able to give you a top line overview of where your business stands on search. You'll be able to see what keywords are bringing in traffic, where the sort of average position lies and that kind of thing, all without having to pay a penny.

 

And then using those free tools helps you learn a little bit more. when you start to see the value a little bit more, then that's when the conversation can evolve into, can we use just a tool like SEO Testing, for instance, to make better use of this search console data, or do we need to use like an AHREF, a SEMrush kind of software and that kind of thing to make better use of clickstream data and all of that. Or do we need to move into other tools or even a sort of...

 

I want to redo that again. then, yeah, and then move into maybe potentially other tools, like building your own tools out and that kind of thing. And that tends to happen as the marketing discipline within a business becomes ever more mature.

 

Paul Mills (11:33.114)

Yeah.

 

Paul Mills (11:46.682)

And one of the things I think Some of the clients that I work with, and certainly when I'm speaking to prospects who are talking about their marketing challenges and SEO always comes up, they say, we need to do, you we're going to rank high. We need to do something with SEO. We've been using an agency. We don't know what the agency is doing. How, how, you know, From a, an organisational point of view, if you're outsourcing the SEO strategy to an agency,

 

and you don't really know what questions to ask them. You don't really know what the science is. How can you track the performance of that agency? Because I've seen, there's been one or two scrupulous agencies that I've had to cut off because they were just not doing anything. So how can you kind of police what an agency might be doing if they're tasked with managing your SEO?

 

Ryan Jones (12:38.86)

Yeah, I think the first thing to start off is kind of having a top level overview of the work that's been done each month just to keep track of. So with some agencies, they might not necessarily work on a monthly reporting basis and that in most cases, that's absolutely fine. But I still think it's useful to get an overview of what works been done each month. Whether that's... a quick call over zoom or an email that's sent over from the agency to the client and that kind of thing, just explaining the work that's been done. And from then you can go and check yourself as to whether that work has had any kind of impact at all. But yeah, I do think it's important. And this is where testing comes into it as well, because if your agency is doing any form of SEO testing, what they'll be able to do is they'll be able to say, okay, here's the, here's the hypothesis that we had.

 

Here's the work that we did to test it and here's the impact that it had over the course of a month. Not necessarily, You don't necessarily need any tools for that as well, but you just need an overview of when changes happened on the website, when did traffic increase, decrease that kind of thing. And I do still think it's important to remember that not every SEO test is going to lead to an increase in clicks and some tests will fail, but it's then important to learn from that and not necessarily repeat the same mistakes. and that kind of thing. but yeah, I do think it's important to, yeah, just to sum up, to keep an overview of the work that's gone on each month, what tests have happened, what changes have occurred, where have they outreached to for link acquisition, if that's something that you're doing as well, and just have that top level overview. And from there, you can drill down into the sort of finer details.

 

Paul Mills (14:23.408)

Yeah. And when picking an agency, again, if you're an organization, you don't have a very mature marketing capability and you just want to outsource this because you don't have the time or patience to do these tests yourself. if you are looking to an agency, is it important to find an agency that are specialists in your sector, your niche, or is the theory that you can go to any SEO agency and it doesn't matter what sector you're in, they should still do a good job? What are your thoughts around that?

 

Ryan Jones (14:54.242)

I still think it's important to find a specialist, I don't think it necessarily has to be a specialist in your niche. I think it has to be a specialist in the type of work that's going to need to move the needle for you. So if you're a smaller sort of SaaS business like SEO Testing, for instance, then it might be content marketing that moves the needle for you more than anything else. And if that's the case, then you're going to want to contact a sort of a content marketing specialist agency and that kind of thing.

 

Or if you're an e-commerce business, then you might need a SEO agency that's a lot more technical and they've got a lot of technical specialists that can help. Or you might not necessarily need an SEO agency as such, but you might need a digital PR agency to help you build that brand search and get mentioned in press and that kind of thing. So I don't think it necessarily needs to be a specialist in what you do. I think it needs to be a specialist in what you need.

 

Paul Mills (15:48.86)

That's good advice. And that probably brings us nicely into the sort of the final topic for this episode. and that's making SEO a boardroom conversation. And you might think actually is quite a tactical thing to take to the boardroom. But especially if you're investing money, outsourcing this or bringing investment in, maybe you're going to make an important hire for having a full time SEO specialist within the organization. Obviously, that's when the boardroom needs to come in.

 

In terms of translating SEO insights into boardroom language, you've mentioned some sort of language that the boardroom may not understand, the CFO might not understand some of this SEO lingo. So it's really important that marketing leaders or whoever's tasked with managing SEO, they need to show not just activity, but the impact of that activity. So how do we package

 

SEO performance in a way that resonates with the CEO, the CFO and maybe the investors. And how can those insights inform the broader marketing strategy, including paid channels?

 

Ryan Jones (16:59.18)

Yeah, I think I just want to touch on that last point that you made as to why SEO needs to be a conversation in the boardroom. it's because like we spoke about earlier, it's because it can have an impact across the broader spectrum. Like if you're putting out lots of great informational content, someone might see that resonate with it a little bit. And then they might pop up, they might see an ad for that business and then immediately click on that because they resonate.  

That is an important reason why it does need to be included in boardroom discussions. But yeah, in order to make it a more sort of simple process for people to understand and for sort of CFOs and CEOs and that kind of thing to understand, I think it's important to drill down into, I think three things. I think we need to know the budget that's gone into what work has been done. I think we need to know exactly what work has been done and I think we need to know exactly what has happened from that. So it doesn't necessarily need to be, we've spent 10,000 pounds on revamping the entire website. And now we're just waiting to see what happens with that. But it can be sort of like, we've spent 1000 pounds and we've taken this small section of content on the website. We've revamped all of this content and then we've republished it. And now we can see that these pieces of content are really starting to grow.  

On average, it's improved these pieces of content by 50%. And then what that allows you to do is go into those boardroom discussions and say, okay, well, if we had this test and this is what happened. If we spend another 5,000 pounds, for instance, we can kind of get a sort of reading for what will happen once this work has been done. And from there, because of the sort of forecasting tools that we can use, we can then translate that into a conversation of we can spend this money.

And we can kind of say that this is going to happen. because we pretty much know that that's going to happen, as long as it's been executed in the same way, we think we are going to see these revenue gains, these SEO gains. But I do think it's important to start with that top level metric of revenue. And that always needs to be included in the discussion.

 

Paul Mills (19:13.07)

And I guess some of the listeners listening to this episode, they might say, it might be a CEO, it might be a CFO that might say, look, we're happy to invest 10,000 pounds for argument's sake on optimizing stuff, whatever that may be. Some CEOs, some CFOs might say, actually, we'll just blow all that 10K on pay-per-click because it's instant and that's fine. Others might say, well, actually let's just invest that on revamping the website, republishing content, see what happens. That might have a slightly longer runway. Some might say, we'll spend half on paid, half on SEO, see what happens. What's your advice? How would you approach this? Do you put all your eggs in one basket? Should you a bit like in the finance world, distribute your wealth across different portfolios? How would you respond to that?

 

Ryan Jones (20:07.544)

think I have two different answers for this. think If you are sort of early stage business that you've got a budget and you need to grow quickly, I think if that's the case, then you need to find what's working for your business and double down on that. And so in the sense that if it's SEO that's really moving the needle for you, then you should double down on that. If it's paid at the minute that's really moving the needle, then you should double down on that and put not necessarily every single penny of it, but put most of that into what's really moving the needle for you. 

But if you're a more established business with multiple acquisition channels, then I am a big fan of distributing that across different platforms. So it won't just be a case of putting this 10,000 pounds into paid because I mean, we know what we can get from paid advertising if we put 10,000 pounds in, but we can sort of say if we're a more established business, we can say, okay, let's put £5,000 into paid because we know what's going to come from it. We know we'll see positive ROI. And then let's also put £5,000 into SEO activities. It doesn't necessarily need to be a website revamp or it could be a link building activities and that kind of thing. But we can use that budget, run smaller scale tests. We can then understand what work moves the needle the most. And then we can use the rest of the budget to just plough on forward that way.

 

Paul Mills (21:28.762)

So basically we've, we've, yeah, it's just a continued experiment, isn't it? You just have to keep iterating, testing, waiting to see the results. And in terms of that, what, what kind of timeline could anyone expect to run these experiments? So if you're, you've got a website, say, right, we're going to invest some time in revamping this section.

 

How long does it take for those results to come through? Because not only do you have to recraft the content, you've got to tell Google that you've got some, know, the page has been updated, you have to wait for it to be indexed, you have to give it a bit of time. What's the typical timeline to start seeing results? Is it a few days? Is it a few weeks? Is it a month or two?

 

Ryan Jones (22:12.694)

Yeah, I think the, the, the kind of standard advice that we give out to, to our testing customers is we generally say six to eight weeks to run a test. So that would be obviously doing the work, making the changes on the website, asking Google to recrawl those pages and then running the test for six to eight, eight weeks as a kind of benchmark. But there are caveats as to that as to if your website is getting more traffic, so you might be a large e-commerce site for instance, then you'll reach statistical significance a lot quicker. And the likelihood is that you might only need to run that test for two weeks, three weeks. that kind of thing. But if you're on the smaller end, then you might need to run it for longer. It's just, it is just about waiting to get enough clicks to reach that statistically significant result. And then you can really say, okay, well, we can be a lot more confident that this is a causal change and it's not anything that's correlational. it just, it just, yeah, it comes down to waiting just enough to get statistical significance. Just enough, sorry, sorry. I need to get those words out. But just enough to get statistical significance.

 

Paul Mills (23:24.214)

That's good. You mentioned that these experiments could take, you know, six to eight weeks. ideally. Now, you can guarantee it'd be sods law… You'll start one of these experiments, then midway through Google will release a new core update or algorithm change. How do those changes impact that experiment, because you're kind of comparing apples with oranges, aren't you? What happens is it, you just have to suck it up or do you have to maybe rerun the test again once the core updates, you know, embedded down?

 

Ryan Jones (23:58.882)

Yeah, and that's something that we've actually, we've seen ourselves. We've been running lots of tests and then we've had Google release core updates. So it is a problem for sure, but I think what needs to in that sense is wait for the core update to reach its conclusion and then rerun the test. But obviously if you've already done the work and you're just in that results gathering stage, then.

 

I don't think there's much use in reverting that change during the core update only to then do the same change again. So if that kind of stuff has happened, then it is okay to, to leave it, but you might just need to disregard those few, few URLs and retest again, but don't let work go down the drain just because a core update has happened. But yeah, if you're in the process of planning work and a core update happens, it is always a good idea just to pause that and just wait for Google to settle down again and then, and then run the test when we can be more assured that it's causal change and not correlational because of this core update.

 

Paul Mills (24:59.244)

And let's say you do all these experiments, you know, it's not impacted by a core update or anything like that. And the result of that experiment pushes you backwards from your original starting point. So you have to go back and change, and maybe you make some changes and it improves. Does that constant chopping and changing, does that impact your authority on Google at all? Or does Google say, actually, we can see this company, testing the website, they're making iterative changes. Yes, it's going up. Sometimes it's going down. Let's go up again. Does that impact your overall Google performance or how does that work?

 

Ryan Jones (25:37.888)

Yeah. So I mean, this is something that I'm not necessarily a hundred percent sure on it. And I don't think anyone can be a hundred percent sure on it unless they work for Google or have some sort of inside track. But I think from my perspective, Google's smart enough to know now that they can see the changes that happen on a website. They know that it's you improving content or building some internal links out to different site sections and things like that. And I think they're smart enough to understand that you are trying to improve the website.

 

Obviously not, not everything will improve the website and some changes will have the effects, opposite effect in a sense. And you might lose a little bit of traffic, but from, from Google's standpoint, I don't think that will impact your authority or anything at all, because I think they'll be aware that you are making changes to try and benefit the user. And as long as you're not doing anything black hat and that kind of thing, then that then you're, you'll still be in a good standing with Google. think, I do think Google encourages making things more helpful for the users as long as you're testing with that goal in mind, then I don't think you can go wrong.

 

Paul Mills (26:40.828)

Yeah, that's reassuring to know. So Ryan, that's probably a good place to wrap up this episode. So thank you again, Ryan, for once again guiding us through how marketing leaders can leverage platforms like SEO Testing and others, not just to optimize performance, but clearly demonstrate the return on investment and have those important boardroom conversations. As we've heard today, SEO doesn't have to be a black box with the right testing mindset and focus on measurable outcomes. Marketing leaders or even those charged with managing the website can make a compelling case for long-term investment, even if you're in an environment where a short-term result often dominates. In the next episode, we're switching gears and looking forward. And we'll be asking, where is SEO heading in 2025 and beyond? So from AI Search, I'll start a bit again.

 From AI-driven search to changes in user behavior and evolving Google algorithms. Again, got tongue tied. can't say, it's end of the day. From AI-driven search to changes in user behavior and evolving Google algorithms, we'll be exploring what happens in the next phase of SEO, how that looks, and how businesses can prepare now to stay ahead. So look forward to that one.

So until then, thanks for tuning in and Ryan and I will see you in the next episode.

 

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Paul Mills

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