Podcast - What Makes a Good Strategy

LISTEN: 20:45 mins

AUTHOR: Chris Simmance

Brighton SEO is coming up on September 8th 2021 and our very own Chris Simmance and Gareth Healey are running the Digital Agency Directors Forum: “What the high-performing agencies do differently from the rest.”

 Grab your tickets here.

Transcription:

Calvin Newman  00:12 

Hi, my name is Calvin Newman and welcome to the Brighton SEO podcast, where we share talks from one of the world's most popular search marketing conferences. The event started out as a few people meeting in an upstairs room with a pub, and is now attended by over 3000 people from all over the world. This episode is a recording of one of the speakers at a recent event. 

Chris Simmance  00:43 

Thanks very much for sticking with me. It's it's my first time so be gentle. Please. Before we start, do you mind if I take a selfie? Can you smile and stuff? Fantastic. Thank you. So I'm Chris Simmance. I am the the MD of optics digital. And we are also part of the product advisory board of SEO monitor. And thanks very much for sticking with me last session of the day. So I promise no more participation. Thanks, Andy, for that one. So who am I just told you, Chris, I absolutely love SEO. It's a passion which turned into a business which actually is got me here today. I run up to digital again, you know that. I've worked with some great brands, I used to work with three mobile, Tesco Bank, Domino's Pizza, etc. Working with some great brands teaches you an awful lot about strategy, but also teaches you an awful lot about some of the stresses of dealing with brands that don't give you information or even image assets or something like that. I have a technology addiction. I am seeing someone about it. It has almost bankrupted me several times. I can't help myself. And I have an awesome dog, if you follow us on Twitter, or if you see us on Facebook. So this is Steven with a PH. He's he comes to the office every day, he sits on my feet in under my desk, and he generally keeps everyone happy and honest in the business. So what we're going to cover today is mainly theoretical. But there's some SEO in there. I'm gonna talk about what strategy actually is because I feel that a lot of people mistake certain things for strategy when they actually aren't really strategy. What are some of the common mistakes that can be made, how to avoid them. And also some of the key strategy building blocks, as well as then finally fitting it all together for SEO. And we'll be at the pub before you know it. So before I tell you what strategy is, and there's obviously a lot of opinion based as well, I'm sure, it's probably better to tell you what strategy absolutely isn't. So strategy is not goal setting. For example, we want to sell 10 more products by the end of the year, or we want we aim to sell 100 more tickets than we did last year to the event. That's a goal. That's not a strategy. It's also not having an idea, we want to be the the number one brand or the go to brands that's that's again, not a strategy. And then having a plan, we plan to sell more stuff, that's again, not a strategy. My strategy is to increase Website Conversions by 50%. Again, that's a result of a strategy that isn't a strategy in of itself. So strategy actually is having a clear result in mind. And that does bring us back to here, the result being we want to do something. Making a clear diagnosis of all of the challenges is is the integral part of any strategy, you need to know what the challenges are. And in order to do that, you need to put some time in planning a coherent set of actions. If you don't have a coherent set of actions, you don't have a strategy, you've just got a plan or a goal. And then measurement and refining of those actions as you go. I apologise I've just realised that this is mostly bullet points. So sorry. So my strategy is to do these several things within a certain time period to get the end result being more sales and more conversions or something along those lines. So this is a quote from a book which I pretty much changed the way I view my own business, but also life in general actually sounds quite profound. The core of any strategy work is the same and this is across SEO, everything, everything entirely. You need to discover the critical factors in the situation, design a way of coordinating and focusing those actions to deal with those factors. That In a nutshell, is all a strategy. It's all you need to know. So should we go. 

Chris Simmance  05:07 

So, there are some common strategy mistakes. And this does boil back down to what is what strategy isn't, and cat's natural enemy of dogs, which is why that's got a bad strategy. So confusing strategy with individual activities like link building or article creation. If one of your challenges to successful, increasing visibility for a client is authority, then creating better backlinks or creating authoritative content is an action in order to meet that stretch to meet that goal. That those are individual things, you might have an actual strategy for link building. But that's a sub strategy as it were, if you skip things, or rush through things, you are definitely going to fail in your strategy, you won't end up having the right result. Because skipping things altogether, you're probably not going to meet any of the challenges, skipping rushing things through, you probably won't be doing things quite right. And then at the end of it, you don't have the result in mind, you might have to then adjust it. If you don't properly diagnose the challenges that you face, absolutely the same situation. If you don't know what your if your if your end goal is to be 100% more visible year on year, but you don't realise that your site speed is the kill is the killer factor that is that is causing your strategy not to to end in the right result. If you don't know, if you don't put the time in, you're not going to know and then not having a clear enough set of actions to follow. If you don't have a clear enough set of actions, you're never gonna get anywhere. So the building blocks to any key at any strategy are you need to put the time in you need to research and diagnose the challenges you need to you absolutely need to this is the bit of strategy, the reason you need to make to get anywhere, you need to know where you're coming from, what are the challenges where where do I want to be in three years with this business? Where am I now? And what do I need to be doing in two years, one year, six months, you need to know where you're going to be, you need to then research what the issues are the challenges even sorry, you need to define a coherent set of actions that will work to overcome those challenges. Many strategies will involve multiple people, if your actions aren't coherent enough, and not everyone understands what the what the plan is, the actions are, then things aren't going to get done right things are gonna get missed, things are gonna get skipped, someone's gonna miss a point. Ensuring all the key players understand this is again, very, very important. And this comes back to the to that first point there. If someone within the content marketing department doesn't understand the challenges faced by the tech guys, then then you're going to have things missing. And then take action in the proposed order. This is probably more of an opinion. But if you have a strategy and a plan, if you follow it in order, you might want to adjust it occasionally. But if you don't follow it in order, then things might well get missed or forgotten about. And then measure things as you go. Because your client is probably going to ask you, where are we now? Where are we going? If you're measuring that you've completed certain actions, they're gonna want to know if you've met if you've completed an action, and you've got a result to it, they're going to want to know, so you want to measure as you go. How do we turn this into SEO? Hopefully, it's now really obvious. So you need to define the clear result with the client. And this takes time you need to do they want to rank better for a specific topic? Is it overall visibility conversion rate? What is it if you have a specific goal specific result, then you then you know where you're looking for diagnosing the challenges this? This is the like I said that one of the key factors in any strategy piece. You need to know a lot about the business, the client, the competitors, have they got internal issues, which might mean resources are difficult. Is there anything that you might have to overcome in your own business to in order to get the result that they looking they're looking for? Are there in any other SERP features, you know, you might have ads, news, images, videos to compete against before you even get to your organic results. So is there is there a big challenge with that as well. The current set of actions again, like I said, it's really important to have a coherent set of actions however, 

Chris Simmance  09:38 

you need everyone within the business to know what actions will be undertaken to overcome the challenges. Is there a priority or an order? Does someone know that my action is contingent on their action? And how do I how do I make sure that we're timing this all appropriately? And then who is the key player for each individual action? If The tech guys don't converse with the content guys or, or the content guy doesn't converse with the on page guy, then you're not going to have a coherent set of actions that then get followed. And then measuring the results. If you don't measure, the client doesn't know, if you don't measure you don't learn yourself as well. What you doing as well when a result of an action isn't favourable, you've improved site speed, but nothing's happened. So what have you learned from that? Is there something that you can turn that around to? Is there an action you haven't been able to, to, to make because you don't have access to something? Can you do something cool in GTM, for example, that that will do a roundabout version of what you want to do for the client. diagnosing the challenges is key, one of our clients, neighbour they do loans through through payroll for from for employers and employees, sorry, one of the key challenges that we've seen with these guys is that for 12,100 searches per month per keyword, they're actually only getting less than 1% of the traffic through, when you actually look at that as 22% year on year growth. That's fantastic. But they're actually competing with four different individual SERP features, which is meaning that, you know, they may as well be in 100 position. By the way, this is SEO monitor. So if you want to have a demo or anything that downstairs, this is the SEO tool from my point of view. It gets around the not provided GA issues. And it also has an awful lot of features which which I'll come on to as we go. If you've got multiple SERP features compete with you, you might as well not turn up. Within SEO monitor, you've got like a top 10 difficulty as opposed to the difficulty overall of the competition overall. The reason for this is actually quite good because it can form a lot of your strategy. As you hover over it, it actually says things like there's high authority sites in the top 10. That's why it's difficult. And those is that a challenge for you to face? Are you one of those top 10. There's a high volume of websites with the exact match keyword in the title. There's a big website in the top 10 like Wikipedia, or BBC or something like that. So you know that these are challenges you can you need to face. If a site has a really slow, low time, that's a potentially huge challenge. Anything over two seconds makes me feel physically sick. Hopefully all of you agree and we we should all work for for better than that. But 6.9 seconds on a 1.4 or five Meg and 50 requests is intolerable. So that's a challenge. But is there sections within that? Is it is it a case of time to first byte is there something that's wrong with the hosting, there's individual challenges to overcome before you even say, okay, site speed or load time is, is the is the factor that you're going after, in order to improve conversion rate or something. If the site has an inefficient, cruel, and it's a huge site, then you're going to be losing people. So there's, there's huge opportunities or challenges potentially there. A tool we use, again, in house and house is deep crawl, helps you find things like this. So if you've got a massive site with duplicate pages internally, or broken links, or paginated pages that are unlinked, you could potentially be causing yourself an awful lot of issues. But that's another challenge to overcome, you might find that there's no internal content authority, if there's no authority internally, then they're never going to rank. So that's a challenge to overcome, create some authoritative content, fix duplications, etc. And once you overcome that, then the next steps will follow. To plan these coherent actions, you need to you need to research as I said, there's topic explorer, which we use. It checks through about a billion semantic queries every every every day. So for loan calculator, for example, there's actually that's really bad, isn't it? Can't see any of that. Sorry, it's all on SlideShare. 

Chris Simmance  14:22 

So there's about 90,000 searches a month for loan calculator. But year on year, the demand is actually down. There's other other keywords within that topic, which might be more valuable to go after. So properly researching means you can yield some some opportunities here, which you hadn't already noticed if you if they have a loan calculator that isn't necessarily the term or the or the phrase or the topic you might need want to go after for them there might be other things. So by researching, you can then plan your actions we are going to go after these terms. We are going to then do this content, etc. We're going to create these pages Can you plan potentially to get into one of the SERP features. So if you write great content and create a good structure, you might end up having that coveted sort of p 01. authority at what sorry? What? What is giving the competition their authority? So, you might look at some of the competitors and go: Well, they've got shitloads of links. Or you might go:They've got really great content hub, is there something that we can poach or use from them? Or is there something that's at risk that they're at risk of that you know, is going to hurt them in the long term? By researching the competitors, and looking at what they're doing, you might then also have some actions which you can undertake as well. Can we improve the load time? Always? The answer is yes, absolutely. Yes, every single time, every single website, you might see here, for example, there's some images which can be compressed, you can, you can combine some scripts, that will then get the load time down those individual tasks, individual actions, which will then yield a challenge being overcome and a result. Then you look at the content, you know that there's stuff that needs doing. So with all of this in mind, you've then got your plans, you've got your actions, and then know obviously, in advance what the results are. And then you create a strategy phase one. So in this instance, using a Sana, we then set up the individual tasks, the individual actions, and then each person follows their action in the right time. So we have enrolled, for example, the technical SEO audit, shane backflushing, is at the back, he will then work on the fixing of those technical issues. At the same time as that Joey will then work on keyword research competent content audits and page targeting. And then Jade will start writing some authority content, create an Outreach Programme, and then all the while Vicki's then measuring results and changing things as we go depending on what we're learning, but also making sure that everyone stays honest to the structure. And then we can measure everything as we go. Measuring the results. Again, as I've said, it's quite important to measure the results anyway. But your clients are always going to not want to know where their money's going and what they're what you're getting for it. You can use, for example, the annotation feature in Google Analytics, we like to, to use, again, SEO monitor, because of this, this feature that they have here is fantastic. So say, for example, we improve the load time by four seconds, that's probably not gonna have more of an impact on on visibility score than it's going to have on traffic so we can annotate accordingly. And then we create a little timeline within the tool that then you can measure visibility changes on desktop and mobile versus previous time on what you've done. This is the timeline I was just talking about. So for example, on the first of August, here, you can see they were 20 positions increase. And then on the seventh of August, a new link was found. And they increased another seven positions for same topic. So it means it's an awful lot more accountable for the client. Also, if you see something that's happened, and then the visibility or the ranking for a certain keyword or topic or a landing page goes down, then you've learned something in the future. Is that something we need to do? Is that something we need to stop doing? Is there if there's Do you have a backup plan? Basically, if you don't have an action completed? Or do you can if you have a partial completion of an action? Is there a backup plan for completing it or getting the same result? If you don't have FTP access to add some coding? Can you inject it through GTM? If you don't have access to being able to create the content? Can you create a content strategy with the client for them to follow? If you don't have a backup plan, you might have to skip an action, just skip an action, you probably aren't going to get the end result. What are the next steps if you finish everything within your strategy that isn't the end, you then revise the strategy and start effectively from scratch looking at what the next set of challenges are down the road. Can you then apply any of this for other clients, other strategies, life in general? Always optimising everyone. So what did we cover? Hopefully, really nice and quickly before we'll head off. 

Chris Simmance  19:24 

So what strategy is what it isn't? I love this gift, by the way. What are some of the common strategy mistakes, some of the key strategy elements and then how we fit it all together for SEO. I know that was really, really whistlestop there is an awful lot to this. So I really recommend at least if you read any of these two books, good strategy / bad strategy by Richard Rumelt. It changed the way I look at how we do our business, but it also changed the way I look at how we I manage my life in many ways, which is a bit sad. And then competitive advantage by Michael Porter, a little less on the strategy a little bit more on on leveraging that strategy. And there's the link to SlideShare if you want the, to relive the magic, please do. And it'd be really good if you all followed us on Twitter. Thank you. 

Calvin Newman  20:25 

This was originally recorded at a Brighton SEO conference. If you want to listen to more episodes or find out about the conference itself, you can do at Brightonseo.com