Chris Burres·00:10

Hi, and welcome to the SEO podcast, known secrets of internet marketing. My name is Chris Burres, one of the owners of EWR digital, 

Matt Bertram·00:16

And my name is Matt Bertram. I’m the lead strategist at EWR Digital. 

Chris Burres·00:20

Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. Can you believe it, Matt? This is podcast 521. 

Matt Bertram·00:30

Wow. That’s pretty solid. 

Chris Burres·00:32

And only 130 of them had bad audio. 

Matt Bertram·00:36

Wow. 

Chris Burres·00:40

We did have some complaints recently and we have upgraded. I’ve actually brought my mic. I was originally trying to keep the mic, like out of the view, you know, in case somebody is watching on YouTube, by the way, if you’re watching on YouTube, you should subscribe and then click the little notification bell. So when you get, so when we launch a new podcast, a notification, 

Matt Bertram·01:01

Because we are not as consistent as we should be. So you just never know when we’re going to do a new one. And so if you want to be the first to hear the information, get it implemented and outrank your competitors, then you gotta have that notification button clicked. So. 

Chris Burres·01:16

Click that notification bell. Yeah. So I decided, Hey, let’s go for a better audio quality. So the mic is close. If you’re watching on YouTube, you can see Matt’s mic. You can see my Mike. 

Matt Bertram·01:29

Well, I mean, I think anytime anybody’s doing podcasts, like you see, Mike’s like it’s acceptable, Chris, don’t worry. It’s exciting. 

Chris Burres·01:39

I was worried about the aesthetic. 

Matt Bertram·01:42

Well, there’s static of my white wall behind me, worse. 

Chris Burres·01:49

Actually. I meant to change my background cause Alyssa has a background that’s EWR and then the faded E web results logo behind it. You probably commissioned that, but I kinda like that. 

Matt Bertram·02:03

Oh, you know, I wanted to hold on to some of the initial founding of the company. You’ll see that in the office furniture that was ordered. So we’re excited about new checkout, our website, new video on our website, new office furniture coming in here shortly, a little delayed with all the shipping issues, but we’ll have a new office furniture set up. I’m pretty excited about, so. 

Chris Burres·02:31

Please remember that Matt and I, we are broadcasting live from Houston, Texas. And are we still the results rebels? 

Matt Bertram·02:39

I feel like we should mature. 

Chris Burres·02:41

We shouldn’t be sure. Okay. So we should be the enterprise SEO. Yeah. Like if somebody could tell us what, give us a title, right? 

Matt Bertram·02:51

Yeah. Give us a couple of titles and the best one that wins. We’ll send some swag to, 

Chris Burres·02:56

Yeah, that’d be good. You know, I, I went to borrow a couple of chairs from the office for the office over here and I picked up a hat and a shirt and I left it on an automation, which we didn’t have room for. And I, so I didn’t go back. So I didn’t even get my hat and shirt. Like, 

Matt Bertram·03:14

No, I, I don’t have my hat near me this answer. I like that. 

Chris Burres·03:19

Yeah. So yeah. Give us a, in a comment or send us a, a form submission from the website, give us a title for a, what we should call it. 

Matt Bertram·03:29

We are taking a wreck. That’s how we work at our company too. We’re always about best in breed, whether it’s a software, whether it’s a process with a service, you got to constantly be evolving and SEO. And so, yeah, we’re looking to mature ourselves in the SEO space. And so we need a new tile. We are, we are rebels inside. Well, we’re a little outside the box. We’re not rebels, Chris. We’re just a little outside the box, but focus on results. 

Chris Burres·03:59

Well, and the article we’re talking about today really is enterprise. And a lot of it is like less of the balance and more of the staying within the conformity of what’s necessary enterprise level SEO. So like, it’s a fitting thing that we’re saying in this podcast, we’d like a title that’s a little more grown up and a little more corporate. 

Matt Bertram·04:24

Yeah. 

Chris Burres·04:25

And the title of the article is the four pillars of enterprise SEO success. It is Jen Matthews Putin to Jen Matthews. And I’m just gonna jump right into it. We, we don’t, oh, maybe before I jump into it, we, we didn’t find a review. So go ahead and go to EDA, please. If you get any value out of these podcasts, one, share them with a friend, like, make sure you share it. If you’re on YouTube, we already said subscribe and click the notification bell. And if you’re getting value, also go to AWR, digital.com forward slash review and leave a review. It’s really easy. Also go to facebook.com forward slash best SEO podcast. And you can leave a review there. That would be very nice. 

Matt Bertram·05:12

Leave us a review. 

Chris Burres·05:13

We’re tired of not having. 

Matt Bertram·05:16

And left us a review and you’ve listened to more than three podcasts. You’ve binge listen to these podcasts. That’s who we’re talking to you out there. Please go leave us a review. We’d very much appreciate it. 

Chris Burres·05:27

And we do know it’s our fault. Like we really do. We know that we got off track. We weren’t doing this on a weekly basis. You know, we got busy. COVID was nuts for all sorts of us, and we’re getting back on track. And that’s one of the reasons we’ve gone three whole episodes without a review. Cause you guys are, you know, maybe just listening to the one that came out three ago. 

Matt Bertram·05:49

Well, we, I mean, we have companies wanting to sponsor us and we got to get our act together. So, 

Chris Burres·05:55

But Hey, we’re on track. Like this is going to continue. All right. So let’s jump into this again. The four pillars of enterprise SEO success, enterprise companies are realizing that to be successful at SEO. They need people who can communicate to executives effectively, as well as with a mix of teams like technical teams, creative teams, someone, some who know SEO and some who have no clue about SEO all in the same room, all at the same time. And just from your stories, man, I feel like that describes your stories. 

Matt Bertram·06:31

No, SEO’s a hard line item to get transmitted across sometimes to executives, as well as even traditional marketing professionals that are very familiar with like traditional ad spend. They may be understand Google or paid social like Facebook, but SEO is a different animal. And SEO takes a lot of like internal coordination to get stuff done because you gotta have access to the website. You got to have access sometimes to sensitive information. So, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of hurdles there, but it really does pay off. We’ve seen, we’ve been able to move the needle really heavily when we get all that coordination together, 

Chris Burres·07:17

All the ducks in a row in addition, companies are looking for more deeper level analytical abilities with expectations of understanding. CQL large data sets the issues that arise from dynamically built sites. And some of the issues that arise from dynamically built sites are duplicate content, thin content products or content coming and going, right? So your product come in exist and then no longer exist user generated content on a massive scale. So those are the things that you’ve got to be aware of. And we’re going to talk about the four pillars of SEO within an enterprise level organization. So our. 

Matt Bertram·07:58

First. 

Chris Burres·07:58

Pillar, SEO, mitigation, error management and technical SEO. And this is where we see a lot of gains, right? Like when you can get the technical, when the technical stuff is wrong and it’s not always wrong, but when it is wrong and you fix it really has some pretty amazing pops. In this particular case. Jen uses the word mitigation because she’s found that there’s a good percentage of SEO managers, time and larger organization has spent identifying issues. And she points out after the product has actually launched. They have to go back to the engineering teams, they request bugs, fixes. And it’s not just, you know, if a project’s going, it’s like if you’ve got multiple teams working on the site, you got some adding a con different types of content. 

Chris Burres·08:47

And each one of those can cause we can call it maybe SEO creep, where you start kind of creeping out of conformity. On top of that, add the fact that Google is changing, you know, the process and changing what the target is. But those are things that you end up doing mitigating what’s going on the website. 

Matt Bertram·09:06

Well, you know, some of the things that you were talking about were like PIM and dam. So like product information management, digital asset management, and really when you get into the website, you should have really a good process. I think a lot of the enterprise level clients we have do operate on like a dev server, right before they push changes live. Even sometimes when you do push changes live, it does break stuff. But also like you’re talking about, there’s usually multiple teams doing different things on the website, right? So there might be the it team doing like some security stuff. There might be, you know, somebody that has maybe lower level access, that’s like uploading images, or there might be somebody else that is creating pages or adding new content. 

Matt Bertram·09:53

All of this has to be coordinated under the umbrella of like SEO strategy. And I’m not sure that happens because people get busy and they’re operating in their different kind of verticals, I guess, and they’re not coordinating. And so it’s important to have those daily or weekly or monthly stand-ups to make sure and have someone in charge who’s driving this and who understands how all those pieces to come together. And when different people hit challenges, they can help resolve those or push those forward with different people in the company. Because, you know, SEO like the SEO creep that you’re talking about is absolutely true. So. 

Chris Burres·10:34

It, it happened. So you’ve got to keep continually, keep an eye on that. Education is also key as those involved, understand the nuances of SEO, maybe not enough to like implement it, but at least enough to know where they need to ask the questions. Hey, I don’t know which is the right way to do it, but I know that it needs to be done the right way and I need to get in contact with the right person or the right team to make sure that gets done. That ultimately is going to save the company time and effort in the long run. 

Matt Bertram·11:06

Oh man. Yeah. Reporting and assumptions reporting on successes. Yeah. That’s just, you know, coming down to a punch list, but this is like tracking the data, right? Understanding, is it working? Are we moving the needle what’s happening? So providing those ongoing reports and really every time showcasing that success and really when it comes to SEO, people are still pretty unconvinced, right? It’s, it’s kind of black box still. I think it’s becoming more accepted, but it’s not as nascent, but people still, a lot of companies don’t understand. And so it’s really important to provide those reportings, to show the movements and then to pull that through and track the success. And sometimes you’re going to have to use multiple teams to do that. 

Matt Bertram·11:59

It’s certainly easier to do it with an e-commerce solution, but if you have a traditional business, you’re going to have to plug into the data to pull that forward, to see how it’s working. Certainly calculating where keywords are versus ranking. Some of these third-party tools do that. There’s some reports out there that will show you if you’re on, say the first 10 pages on Google, how much traffic should be coming to your site. And then you can coordinate that with, okay, we’re on page three or now on page two, we’re on page one. Okay. What has that done to increase the leads that are coming in and start seeing those correlations for yourself? Because, you know, seeing it in the data tells the true story, in my opinion. 

Matt Bertram·12:43

And that’s why I love digital marketing over traditional marketing so much is you can pivot based on what the data’s given you and the data is telling a story and you can make changes based on that. So, 

Chris Burres·12:56

Yeah, and that’s exactly why pillar number two is SEO analysis and reporting because that’s where really the value and understanding the value of the SEO comes from. I mean, I like the calculation that Jen puts out there, organic traffic from Google is X percent of all search traffic and results in X percent of the revenue pull or X, X revenue pulling clicks from Google search console from specific keywords. And then calculating the percentage of all clicks to get the estimated revenue for that keyword will allow you to make better decisions that allow you to understand how your SEO is performing. And this is just a different kind of calculation than Matt was describing, which efforts are working. And where are those effort where there might be some opportunities? 

Matt Bertram·13:41

Well, you know, Chris, this reminds me, I’ve told this story on, I don’t know a past podcast, but I think it’s worth bringing it up. I remember were doing a consulting session for a big plumbing company. Right. And they came in for a PPC audit. Right. And really how we look at accounts is holistically multi omni-channel. How does it all play together and over the two hours? And they had their like internal marketing team there. And I just remember at the end of the call, I was like, you need a rank for plumber Houston. 

Chris Burres·14:18

After two hours. It’s like in the end, the summary is you need to rank for plumber Houston. 

Matt Bertram·14:22

Yeah. We know that. Right. And they came back, we know that I was like, well, you know, you could be doing this, you can be doing this. You could be doing this to get there. And then the owner was like, well, what is it going to cost to have you do that? And then also, can you guarantee, you’ll get me in the first position or what would that cost? And now is the one time that I think I made everybody in the room a little bit nervous because like in marketing, you can’t. 

Chris Burres·14:45

Everybody on our team nervous. 

Matt Bertram·14:47

Oh yeah. Yeah. But, but that’s the thing you can’t guarantee in marketing, but I think that when you do this enough, you understand how the algorithm works and, you know, yeah. I gave him a number. Certainly I, I, that number was higher than if he just did marketing with us to make sure that we could hit it. But I think we hit it in, I don’t know it was like 45 days or it was maybe, I don’t know, 50 days or something like that, but they were on the bottom of the first page. Right. And so I already had some idea over the last two hours with them of what needed to happen, what they were doing, what their capabilities were to be able to get through some of those challenges we talked about in number one. And yeah. 

Matt Bertram·15:37

So I made a promise to them. We delivered, they came on as a full-time client. And I think the last time I talked to them, they were buying a air conditioning company. And so, you know, the reality is SEO and rankings and Google does translate into revenue. And depending on how you calculate it and execution, I think executions probably the number one thing, actually it can move the needle quite a bit for even the largest accompanies. The testimonial on the last podcast was just that was an enterprise level company that we’ve been doing SEO for three years and certainly moved the needle that the marketing team has gotten contacted by actually the higher ups of the company saying that what are y’all doing right? The needle has moved pretty significantly. And, and we credit that Desi. 

Chris Burres·16:38

Oh, and we are working on the SEO pillar. Number three is a SEO project management, determining growth and managing projects for SEO. Again, this is pillars of enterprise SEO success, identifying upward trends in searches and gaps that might be present on current or past efforts for SEO is imperative to the success of the project. A project manager is tasked with initiatives like overhauling design and content on a set of pages, driving initiatives for internal linking plan that affects many aspects of the site, the resulting revenue growth from SEO when the project is managed. Well, just like you said, in that testimonial is appreciable people higher up notice what’s going on. 

Matt Bertram·17:27

Yeah. I think the internal linking plan is something I’ve seen as one of the major issues, mainly with a lot. These companies they’re not interlinking properly where Google likes it or understands the, the architecture when the site was built potentially and the naming conventions of some of the things or issues. And then really a lot of people, you know, from, you know, SMB to enterprise level company, design websites, using the hitters for style when they don’t use it for on page SEO. And then, you know, CRO of how people are interacting with the website, doing some heat mapping tracking what’s going on is incredibly important to understand the customer journey and how that happens. 

Matt Bertram·18:14

And, you know, those are definitely two of the big keys that if you can fix that, you’re certainly going to move the needle and having somebody that’s coordinating with multiple teams, getting things approved project managing correctly is absolutely key. So. 

Chris Burres·18:31

Yep. Pair amount. It’s why it’s one of the four pillars. And all right, let’s jump into the fourth pillar. This is relationship building championing, SEO to stakeholders and other teams. The final piece to the SEO enterprise puzzle is the ability to build and engage in relationships across the organization. By the way, Jen rightly spends a lot of time on this fourth pillar, because if you have to interact with multiple organizations, then this is the thing that is going to Cru is the best predictor of success or failure in that particular project, right? The goal is to build relationships and engineering and creative and legal and public relations. I mean, you just put together engineering and creative and you’re already like, you’re talking about a communication skillset. 

Chris Burres·19:20

That’s, that’s not frankly not normal SEO touches every aspect of the organization and will, at some point require support from one or more of those teams. This is really kind of about what people might lump under politics, having a good, solid relationship with members of those teams. Sometimes you want to build those relationships before you even have to interact with them. If you have the capability that’s, what’s going to lead to success and growth in the company at large. Now Jen covered REI, right? That’s the outdoor sporting a company. And there’s a number of things that they’ve defined core strengths. Every enterprise SEO should have a it’s what 2, 4, 6 of them bear with me. 

Chris Burres·20:02

I thought it was worth going through these one, communicating effectively across channels and teams to evangelizing SEO through education and documentation, three, working with teams to prioritize SEO initiatives for reporting the SEO to key stakeholders and identifying opportunities, five managing vendors, that’s tools, agencies, consultants, et cetera. And then six staying up to date with the latest SEO trends. And it actually kind of falls back on that project management, right? Because you really got to have all of those skills and the project management piece. And just to wrap this up, it seems that some companies have SEO roles and teams that are moving away from marketing and splitting up to subject matter experts, SME roles, or individual contributors coming together to communicate from time to time, they all need to do this. 

Chris Burres·20:56

They all need to get together and communicate from time to time, those subject matter experts, those individual contributors, all under the guise of, or under the control of the project manager. 

Matt Bertram·21:08

Well, I mean, Chris, one of the things that I see a lot is coordination is lacking. And so things that should take, I don’t know, a couple of hours, maybe a couple of days, it could take months could take weeks. And it’s all about dependencies. What are those dependencies to be able to do this step, to get to here, to move the needle forward. And a lot of times that cadence is maybe like once a week and then it’s just like, oh, didn’t get what I needed. Okay. Well, I’m going to work on that this week and then come back next week. And then hopefully we have that. 

Matt Bertram·21:44

And sometimes if someone forgets or someone’s not following up, or someone has to ask somebody else for approval, something, I’ll give you a quick example with one client enterprise level client to put tag manager on the site, it took over a quarter, 

Chris Burres·22:01

Three months. 

Matt Bertram·22:03

There, there was some extraneous circumstances for sure, but I mean, you know, just give us access. It would have taken five minutes, you know? And, and so like the last agency had access to, like, there was just a lot of coordination that had to happen. And so building that coalition to support you, not just the project management of like, okay, I’m going to get this done. And, and the people I’m working with are going to get this done. It’s like a lot of times things that are way outside your control and it’s asking for help or permission or certain things. And so building that coalition, having people understand it, the higher up, you can go at an organization where people understand SEO the better, because then those people can help smooth out whatever needs to happen or get approvals or expedite things. 

Matt Bertram·22:55

But I, you know, I’m on this inter-agency call, I’m on a couple of them, but on this one that, you know, just every week, it’s just roadblock or red tape after red tape. And, you know, these are some of the things that you deal with. And probably some of the people listening that are at enterprise companies understand, and a lot of times we come up with some creative things, certainly getting approvals on content is somewhat of an issue as well. And so there’s a lot of aspects of SEO from technical to OnPage that really, you need that coordination for off page. 

Matt Bertram·23:34

You have a little bit more freedom, but yeah, I think the higher up in the organization, you can go the better and certainly we’re are adapt with decks and different things to help explain or tell the story that’s needed to be told for the next step to happen. And we have a lot of certainly work around that. We’ve worked with a lot of clients to help get things done within their confines. And so if you have one of those issues, maybe set up a strategy call with us and we could help you or structure things. Like I remember the last thing, there was like a company that had 18 different brands and they’re all on different CMS is like some are on WordPress. Some are on Wix, somewhere on.net. Like it was crazy. Okay. 

Matt Bertram·24:20

And it was like, we need an 18 month plan to figure out how one person is going to manage all these different websites and brands. And I was just like, and right now it was just, you know, like it was like spaghetti that gives you a, it needed to be more like waffles, like waffle squares. And it was more like spaghetti. 

Chris Burres·24:41

All over the place. 

Matt Bertram·24:43

Yeah. So yeah, if you’re dealing with some of these enterprise level issues and you’re dealing with some pain, maybe give us a call. We certainly been there and have found ways to get things done. So yeah, 

Chris Burres·24:56

That’s, that’s about being, that’s the engineers being creative to get things done. That’s really good at Putin to Jen. That was a really good article. The four pillars of enterprise SEO success. We’re going to wrap up this podcast here. We are just going to quickly reiterate AWR digital.com forward slash review. And then Matt is since he’s a vampire is about to disintegrate under the heat of the sun shining in his window. 

Matt Bertram·25:25

Yes, no, this is a new location. So still getting set up. So look forward to this weekend, but yeah, I’m getting blinded here where I’m sitting, so let’s go ahead in say our goodbyes. 

Chris Burres·25:40

All right. Well, my name is Chris Burris. 

Matt Bertram·25:43

My name is Matt Bertram. 

Chris Burres·25:44

Bye-bye for now.