CMO vs SEO: How To Balance SEO And B2B Marketing Goals Ep. 556

what the hell well there we go hi welcome to the seo podcast unknown secrets of internet marketing my name is chris burris one of the owners of ewr digital and my name is matthew bertram your seo strategist strategist welcome back to another fun-filled edition of the podcast uh we're excited our article today cmo versus seo the showdown oh wait no that's that's not what is it cmo obviously that's chief marketing officer versus seo how to balance seo and b2b marketing goals this article is by alexander kessler patiff to you before we jump into that article we want to say some nice words about our sponsor um se ranking yes they continue to be a fabulous sponsor continue to provide fabulous tools to our team uh just in short the tool is really good and it's also inexpensive uh it's a professional tool and it's easy to use uh it has a lot of tools like but each one of the tools in the actual se ranking platform uh could be used independently or sold independently you get the benefits of all of them together and by the way you might not have heard about se ranking but it has a lot of industry awards and a superb user rating we use it you should go try it out you want to talk a little bit about se ranking and then i'll well i would just say that that most digital marketers most seos have their go-to tool yeah right and there's other tools that have been a sponsor in the past of our podcast that are very well known and what i would just say is se ranking at least for us is up there with other tools and actually has exceeded it and it is our now go-to tool okay so you every seo out there has a go-to tool and maybe they're on a subscription for something else right i would say try this out and when your subscription starts running out um i don't know i would just tell you we've we've

started to move over to se ranking we're using a few other tools but this is our primary tool and we've been adding seats to more and more people on the team and i would really encourage you to go use it their content tool out there is the the big new one that they're pushing um based on content yeah based on your different tier you get more uh ai content that that helps you with the writing of the tool as well as find topics and keywords and so you should check that out i think with a lot of these tools there's so much that you can do with all of them and you need to figure out what what you like the best but my big point is everybody has their go-to tool especially seos and my go-to tool is se ranking now se ranking uh it's mine too actually uh what you can do to get a 30 day free trial instead of the standard 14 is you can go to best seopodcast.com forward slash se ranking and just click yeah it'll direct you to their site you can see our uh podcast logo and just sign up there yeah so patiff to se ranking go check them out uh let's jump into this article um it's a good article if i can move it around here by the way if i if i seem a little out of sorts i do feel slightly under the weather like i'm not sick you have long but i feel like there we go i feel like i have you know if that were true then i would go well that makes perfect sense because that's just how i can just feel like a little run down and been sleeping a little later in the morning and less inclined like i'm actually my my dentist and a good friend of ours is having his 10-year anniversary tonight and uh i don't i don't know if i'm gonna go like i would normally go no you were you were

saying that we had a bunch of team members in town last week and you know you were you were a little i don't know i don't know i don't i don't know if i want to spread the germs around we had it was fun yeah the the team is a lot of fun they actually got me hooked well we'll talk about this in uh formerly known as the green room all right let's let's jump into this article again by alexander kessler you know despite the benefits of aligning strategies marketing and seo managers don't always have the same goals when it comes to promoting content from what i have observed with clients and partners so you look at an seo and they're focused on just their own kpis you look at a cmo again chief marketing officer they're focused on really kind of brand awareness demand generation those kinds of things and they're not necessarily aligned and this article is for now we're going to talk about actually four step strategies to balance seo and b2b marketing goals well so i would just say that it is absolutely true that if it's a small business owner or it's an enterprise account the kpis that is keyword ranking and a lot of what we're training our account managers as well as our team is we're not being hired to rank them in google they they sometimes the the the the customers think that right like in their mind like i need you guys to get me rank but if you really look at it if you really look at it they're asking you to get a more business they're asking you get more leads and so when people say hey i just need to get you to rank if we get them just to rank and we get them the wrong kind of leads or they're not converting sales or whatever we've had to step more and more into that sales process the like we start setting up call tracking call rail start looking at what your

people are saying okay if we're running an offer you got to get back to people in a certain amount of time so that there's all right we got we're back we're back we got kicked out we got kicked out somebody in spanish yeah yeah so this is set up a little bit differently but but essentially what we were saying is that small business owners um as well as enterprise accounts when they hire seo company they're really hiring you to get more leads they're hiring you to get more business and we have to step more and more into that process it's not just the rankings we got to make sure the keywords are right we got to make sure people are following up the leads appropriately right so if it's an inbound call you're running an offer you got to get back to them quickly um it like we found a lot with like phone service has been been really the big issue and we do do provide consulting there and uh setting up things like call rail or something like that are really interesting for accounts to see how their people are answering so a lot of the kpis bottom line is what i think this article is really going for is that cmos are looking at the total experience right and seos are looking at their kpis and a lot of time the kpis for the seo is relying upon the rest of the marketing company or the rest of the company that's being hired and so it's it's this really like interesting balance between okay i need to do what i need to do but ultimately i'm getting paid for the end result yep and i might not have control over that so how do you balance those things and that's that's really what this article is about so so if i'm reading between the lines here often we get involved in a project and our our our task as assigned by the customer is get us good ranking and then we actually

have to put on our cmo hat for the customer to say okay we got the ranking and we know that you're getting form submissions we know that you're getting phone calls we know this is all happening um now we've got to get involved at the at the marketing level at the at the branding level to make sure that the experience is working for the customer all right chris you keep talking i'm gonna go check and make sure we're actually okay yeah go go make sure that we are live all right so now we're going to talk about four step strategy to balance seo and b2b marketing goals um and number one is create a brand and style guide with seo in mind so to ensure seo and marketing strategies are completely aligned it is important for brand and style guides to consider seo and this is as opposed to having seo being an afterthought it should be a key component in the marketing process we got a thumbs up we got all right um so to maintain an amicable tug of war between cmo and seo goals it is also important for the marketing strategy to allow keywords that rank well but bend grammatical you rules or not use this c suite's preferred language and i love this example he says so top of funnel that's top space of space funnel as an adjective it ranks better for seo than the grammatically correct top dash of dash funnel so there are some situations where the c suite might be saying hey the grammar has to be absolutely perfect and other situations where the seo is like look i need to bring some grammar rules to actually rank well yeah sorry hopefully i didn't distract everybody too too much no but what i would tell you is i know that that's a big that's a big thing okay is and and certainly clients too like there's a balance with if you're talking about small business clients as well is does this keyword right like or we're

trying to rank for how people search right so service slash houston texas yep right seos have a tendency to put that in there where it's not even readable it doesn't even sound right and uh when you're writing content and you're producing content and you're like this target keyword how do you incorporate that keyword like no one talks like that yeah and and that's something that that cmos will say out okay like we're not putting this out right right and so so also what i would tell you as uh from what i've seen is uh if you're dealing with that that specific situation put the keyword at the front of whatever the target services uh houston blank service and it ranks actually pretty well or just as well and you want to use like lsi different different types of combinations of that keyword you don't want to just hit that keyword over and over again especially if it doesn't read well and it's not grammatically correct i believe google's starting to knock that i don't i don't have i i can't point to a algorithm update where they said that they're doing that but i do believe that they're doing that because it affects the readability of it so there's a way um algorithmically to to dampen the effect of people that are doing that or like keyword uh density yeah keyword stuffing right that that word in there and that is something that a couple years ago we were having some conversations with our seos about and with clients and we just moved away from that completely so that's that that's not a best practice of ours is to jam that keyword in there and and i believe that this is really what that section is talking about yep so all right so here are some tips that you should include in your brand and style guides suggested and prohibited seo keyword lists so that managers new hires and freelancers can consult the guide easily to avoid ranking for keywords deemed irrelevant like your competitor

well maybe you want to rank for that yeah so so you got to think about this list yeah you could say like no competitors or yes competitors like that's that's up to you a list of branded terms that can't be adjusted for seo so the cmo and the marketing team don't see their strategy impacted by keywords and branded terms that have been tweaked to rank better for seo i've seen that yeah well yeah and we we've even had like patiff like we've talked about that and how that could be branded and you might want to change that because you know the meaning of it is a good thing and you actually want to brand something that nobody else has ever used in that context before so it's a it's a branding another conversation like where you're built you're building basically inbound marketing for hubspot or ess 60 for my vital c so i would tell you also related to this brand guides are are something that um you have to do yes so we just brought on a publicly traded um enterprise brand and they didn't have a brand guide and then we also had a brand guide where we were doing paid media and they switched the brand and we're like hey we need a new brand guide to make sure that this is on brand and a lot of small businesses don't have brand guides yeah and it's a nice to have for a small business not a need to have until you hire a company that's going to help you grow well if if you're trying to put together ads efficiently or if you're trying to keep on brand to build a brand you need to have a reference point if you're bringing people in yep agency freelancers new people on the team so while i maybe thought in the past maybe like five years ago or something like that a brand guide is a nice to have it's actually saves you time in the long run yeah yeah right like like

it saves you time in the long run and i think to your point if you're looking to grow and you want to do it right you have to have a good foundation um even you want to have defined job roles yeah right like think about this if if you're a business or a department manager out there think about do your people know exactly what they're accountable for and what they need to focus on and do you have a defined job role that they can reference and go is this accurate that's what a brand guide is is to say here's what our brand is and i would even extend that to a mood board and a lot of times with these articles you want to put uh unique articles in there that are custom art that reflect your brand yeah well you need a brand guy to do that so i i think a brand guide is super important yep and the last kind of feature to blend the two or to include seo in it is key content topics define key topics in the guide to advance brand awareness and rake for seo implementing this in the guide makes the content strategy definitive and provides expectations like you were just talking about for seo managers to plan their long-term strategy so yeah i would say like content clustering super important if you want to own a specific area and also creating that content early before anyone else you can start building your authority in that space yep and and you really have to produce content consistently and you need to own that space and they all need to be linked together and so content clustering is what i think the the buzzword is and well and i think i think that that's helpful in this guide to tell people what we're trying to do right you define the key topic and then when you're having the kind of off uh off brand guide conversation with the seo team like hey we've defined that this is

the topic we want to go after how do we cluster around that what's the topic cluster that we put around oh for sure that's that secondary piece yeah oh there's there's a i want to do some training on on uh how to select content topics because a lot of times you need stuff for people also ask uh in gmb like there's there's content is so important content gbp yeah here's a nickel right like so i would say that content is the train that drives seo forward and so if you're not thinking about content and you're just looking at optimizing content you know you you might be able to rank better for whatever it is but you're not moving anywhere and also i would tell you too optimizing bad content is a horrible strategy so i get the content's already bad it may be worth it to rewrite it and there's some best practices around that but not in the scope of this article all right so here we go number two optimize each content asset for seo and marketing goals ideally all content should rank for seo that makes sense planning each piece of content beforehand with a marketing or seo focus helps to determine the kpis for each asset as well as guide the production and promotion of content to meet these goals effectively give me an example i'm giving you an example of optimize each content asset for seo and marketing um what is a good example of that so are we talking about optimizing the images are we talking about what do you think he's speaking about you've got a couple of things so so if you have seo focus content right which isn't really about brand messaging about kind of sharing the culture of the company then that's going to have a particular kpi kpi is going to be rank and then rank right rank position then the next is going to be if you uh are are doing more of marketing if you're doing more of the brand side of

stuff what's the kpi and we'll get into more like what you can do to determine kpis for the branding that's later in this article um but the kpi for the seo focused article is pretty but you should you should have kpis but also i would i would say one of our rules of thumb is every piece of content needs to have a target keyword and an understanding of like what that target goal or kpi is to understand how it fits in right if you're adding content to a website or you're building something out you got to understand how it fits in and you got to also understand what that that target keyword is and i would say that if you're project managing something and there's multiple pieces if you're in-house if you're uh trying to build your company you you got you got to know again the brand guide everything fits together of being able to give the direction to your team on how to do it effectively like the project management component of it and it's important for people to be measured to understand if they're doing a good job or not the target should be to create content that advances brand awareness by also ranking for popular queries right like that's yes that's the ultimate target i would agree all right number three survey your audience did we just oh my gosh like this this i don't know what is going on right now it's like all right we're back if you were watching that hello you should subscribe and hit the notification bell um if you weren't watching you never noticed that we were gone uh survey your audience to measure the impact of seo and marketing so surveying your audience to assess if marketing goals are being met with content um as well as the impact of seo on marketing strategies so let's kind of dig into this a little bit deeper ask questions about the values your audience associates with your brand as well as the top keywords that come

to mind because maybe the values that they associate with your brand are not what your what your cmo is intending right or maybe the keywords that are showing up are not or or the keywords that customers associate with you are not the keywords you want to be targeting that gives you the opportunity to reevaluate right so if the survey results points to values or keywords that are seo driven yet don't meet marketing expectation then it's important to adjust the seo focused content to deliver the intended brand messaging make sense yeah i mean i haven't used surveys in that way like a ton like we do we do surveys with with clients and we do internal surveys of how things are going so i haven't i haven't really used surveys in that way but it does make sense well i think it's it's this is really enterprise level right so we tend to get involved on the enterprise level seo and not as much on hey the cmo has defined what the brand is supposed to mean what values the audience is supposed to associate with the brand and so we don't get pulled into that conversation well as much yet well i would tell you that on the paid side right well you can run a youtube survey you know you guys spend like 20 grand or something like that but we've run a couple of youtube surveys uh asking people about like uh recall that sort of thing so so those type of questions yeah i would say that this is really more maybe internally what what's going on but i i guess we just haven't done a ton of surveys with audiences so um we can really see that though with the analytics if if things are responding well or or something like that but i but i do think that that's something that a lot of businesses are doing and i've been on cross-functional teams where that's the first thing to do they come in they do a survey they assess things

i just do it differently through through paid media but but i i see it has value certainly a b testing in this article it's talking about a b testing stuff that's something we do so and and really to do surveys at whatever level can provide plenty of intel to guide future content creation for your writers yeah i agree with that all right so number four again this is kind of a guide to blending seo and b2b marketing create a content calendar and hold regular meetings between marketing and seo managers so after assessing how your audience views your brand it is time to create a content calendar to address possible unintended brand associations the public has made all while meeting the seo goals chris can you give me an example of a brand that had an unintended consequence or connection oh there are there i'm sure there's a lot out there i think if you look at and nothing pops to mind right well i would say recently um people dropping kanye right where where kanye he's gonna run for vice president is he i i have no i i don't know right but he ran for president didn't he like last time maybe i think so i think he was so i think there's a situation where you've got this kind of brand representative this is a cmo level decision that kanye west is going to help us put forth push forth our brand and then all of a sudden he comes out and says a whole bunch of anti-semitic thing and you're like that's not on brand he's fired right like that's an example of of where it's an unintended representation of the brand yeah yeah i i would say well you know to kind of bring a lightning rod up uh elon musk with twitter right now there there's a lot of people uh beaten up on him i i actually think he's got this like master plan to do what paypal was originally meant to do um right the the focus yeah

like like a payment system yep okay i i i think i i watched the interview and i'm going i'm going off let's save this to the for the okay i'll save my tangents so i don't know what we said earlier but this will be musk will be able to remember um all right so oh so so hold regular meetings between the marketing and seo managers to discuss the metrics and impressions of the campaign as it's going uh social listening tools can assess the impact of content and make adjustments as you go all right so now we're getting going to get into four best practices to maintain common ground between cmo and seo needs so four best practices one onboard writers with marketing and seo do's and don'ts this kind of sounds like part of the brand guide um it is important to create an onboarding yeah sop right standard operating procedure it is important to create an onboarding guide for writers that covers seo do's and don'ts alongside traditional training resources oh concept brief sorry right yeah so typically a new writer will not be familiar with a minutia of the brand he goes into lots of stuff like what's the boilerplate language what a product description this will all provide guidance for them to meet both marketing and seo goals that's onboarding writers with marketing and seo do's and don'ts yeah the next is utilize social listening so combined with the survey feedback this will help you make critical adjustments um an approach for this is to search for your brand name and products on forums and social media channels manually gaining insights from the way your audience comments on your solutions to evaluate if the discourse is aligned with your intended messaging and current seo priorities so i guess you know when we talk about surveys and i know a lot of companies still do surveys it's just kind of like you can go see in the data and these listening tools what's going on yeah right you can post an ad and

you can see how people respond to it at volume right like if like if you if you only have like a couple thousand visitors they're not commenting yeah yeah but when you get to the right volume like if you're an enterprise little brand like all the data is out there yeah like you could go spend a lot of money on surveys and a lot of people do before they get started or product launch and positioning and all that kind of stuff but a lot of that stuff's in the data or you find a similar product and you can really dig into it to figure out at least a baseline and a starting point to get started and then you just iterate based on the data i don't know that's my opinion of it so well i i think that makes perfect sense all right so next develop a detailed content strategy uh let us kind of reiterate have a content calendar i think we say yes you need to have a content calendar regular regular like have a content calendar yeah an example start by defining an innovative thought leadership piece so again this is more of the branding this is more of maybe a cutting edge idea okay that's outside of the norm link this out to supplementary videos short blog posts and podcast episodes and sometimes you may need to make those blog posts those videos and those podcasts repurpose that content oh yeah all right repurpose that content this strategy combined with a consistent publishing cadence for your editorial calendar will ensure that campaigns meet intended marketing and seo outcomes yeah if done successfully this will build long-term demand generation for your business does long-term demand generation sound like something you would like i can tell you that if i look at a business that utilizes seo to grow as like their core foundational strategy and i look at businesses that don't if you look at them in like a year two years always the businesses that leverage seo are winning yeah

i mean it it's just it's like christmas like you just don't know all the intended consequences or positive consequences of of doing seo and the pr associated with it and the long-term brand generation and the brand building like seo started about i think a year or two ago you know i wrote a i wrote a book i saw branding and seo merging like a long time ago build your brand mania yes it's right there in front of us but i i can tell you more than anything else that people about two years ago were like seo is branding yeah like i never like there's branding and there was seo i think in the future okay like in the future seo is just going to be synonymous with marketing and everything's going to be done from a seo focused mentality yep but there might there might be a subject matter expert but i think that information will be disseminated out through everything just understanding how to communicate with the search engines how to understand search all that sort of thing yep so all right here's step four of best practices to maintain common ground between cmo and seo needs establish joint paid media and social media strategies yeah and goals bridge the gap between the cmo and seo by building upon both focuses with complementary paid media and social media goals and strategy the more developed your content strategy and calendar calendar mentioned again uh the better interlinked your content will be facilitating your ability to craft omni-channel campaigns that deliver on all kpis that's a that's kind of a great summary but i like it what is what is the summary here the summary is meeting the demands of both the cmo and seo manager requires a mindful approach that balances ranking and search engine result pages with promoting positive brand awareness by considering content marketing and seo as two sides of the same coin you can better align content creation to feed into each other build an overall positive brand experience for your audience

and therefore leverage the full potential of your marketing efforts to drive demand patiff alexander all right well that wraps up our article again cmo versus seo how to balance seo and b2b marketing goals uh patiff to you alexander yeah we appreciate you guys uh hopefully you appreciate us kind of developing this content adding to it for you uh if you do we'd ask you to do just a couple of things you can connect with us on youtube.com forward slash best seo podcast uh instagram.com forward slash the best seo podcast and finally on tiktok.com forward slash at best seo podcast there are all of those now you're actually going to find uh shorter videos of course short form videos are all the rage we're on top of that where you can get tips and tricks for your seo for your marketing in general uh maybe your cmo needs to tune into these and uh and you can get value so make sure you subscribe and follow on all of those platforms yeah and if you need uh a consultation if you go to bestseopodcast.com uh we have uh a paid consultation it says free consultation oh that well i don't is it does it say oh no that's ewr digital my bad we have a paid consult um where if you have a particular burning need and you want a question answered to it and you can either submit in your question and we can try to answer it on the podcast uh or if you want a one-on-one session um we're doing one-on-one sessions i will probably not be doing one-on-one sessions after uh the new year after the new year um and so i would just encourage you if you uh want to get some consulting we we also do have a fantastic team it continues to grow we have some really experienced experts but if you want to talk to to me directly um i would go ahead and go to bestseo and sign up for one of our profit plans uh or

our paid consulting one-on-one i think it says one-on-one one-on-one consultations yeah and uh we look forward to talking to you i'd love to connect with you i love uh and enjoy connecting with everybody on the team i had a couple people that met through um uh profit plans still still in touch with messaged me today so it's great yeah that's very cool yeah hey and if you would like to grow your business with the largest simplest marketing tool on the planet the internet go to ewr digital for increased revenue in your business once you are at ewrdigital.com go ahead and click in this case it's the free consultation button and you can schedule your time like matt said matt's not going to get assigned to those going into the new year so go ahead and and take advantage of that there's a a reasonable likelihood that you can uh get matt on the phone and help you with um well he's just going to deliver value as as you can tell so uh that's pretty awesome uh anything else to wrap up have we covered i i i'm excited to get into the green room to talk about some few few few things the bobbles heads say yes we are done uh my name is until the next podcast my name is chris burris my name is matt bertram bye bye for now