Episode 521: The 4 Pillars of Enterprise SEO Success by Jenn Mathews #521

Hi, and 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 Matt Bertram. I'm the lead strategist at EWR Digital. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. Can you believe it, Matt? This is podcast 521. Wow, that's pretty solid. And only 130 of them had bad audio. Wow, does this one have better? We did have some complaints recently, and we have upgraded. I've actually brought my mic. I was originally trying to keep the mic out of the view in case somebody's watching on YouTube. By the way, if you're watching on YouTube, you should subscribe and then click the little notification bell. So when we launch a new podcast, you'll get a notification. 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've got to have that notification button clicked. Click that notification bell. Yeah, so I decided, hey, let's go for better audio quality. So the mic is close. If you're watching on YouTube, you can see Matt's mic. You can see my mic. Well, I mean, I think anytime anybody's doing a podcast, like you see mics. Like it's acceptable, Chris. Yeah. Don't worry. I was worried about the aesthetic. Oh, well, the aesthetic of my white wall behind me is probably worse than... Actually, I meant to change my background because Alyssa has a background that's EWR and then the faded eWebResults logo behind it. You probably commissioned that, but I kind of like that. Well, 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... Check out 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... Please remember that Matt and I, we are broadcasting live from Houston, Texas. And are we still the results, Rebels? I feel like we should mature. We should mature. Okay. So we should be the enterprise SEO. Yeah. Somebody could tell us what... Give us a title, right? Yeah. Give us a couple titles and the best one that wins, we'll send some swag to. Yeah. That'll be good. You know, 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 ottoman, which we didn't have room for. And so I didn't go back. So I didn't even get my hat and shirt. No, I don't have my hat near me. Those hats are... I like the hats. They're really nice. I like the shirts. Yeah. So yeah, give us a, in a comment or send us a form submission from the website. Give us a title for what we should call ourselves. Recommendations. We are taking... 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, whether it's a service, you got to constantly be evolving in SEO. And so, yeah, we're looking to mature ourselves in the SEO space. And so we need a new tile. 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. 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 would like a title that's a little more grown up and a little more corporate. Yeah. And the title of the article is The Four Pillars of Enterprise SEO

Success. It is Jen Matthews, Patif to Jen Matthews. And I'm just going to jump right into it. We don't... Oh, before I jump into it. 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 EWRdigital.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. Please leave us a review. We're tired of not having... If you haven't left us a review and you've listened to more than three podcasts, you've listened to these podcasts, that's who we're talking to. You out there, please go leave us a review. We would very much appreciate it. 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 because you guys are maybe just listening to the one that came out three ago. Well, I mean, we have companies wanting to sponsor us and we got to get our act together. 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, Matt, I feel like that describes your stories. No,

SEO is 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 maybe 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 got to 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, really heavily when we get all that coordination together. All the ducks in a row. In addition, companies are looking for more deeper level analytical abilities with expectations of understanding SQL, 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, all right, first pillar, SEO mitigation, error management and technical SEO. And this is where we see a lot of gains, right? Like when, 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, 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 is 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 different types of content

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's 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 on the website. 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, 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, uh, doing different things on the website, right? So there might be the IT team doing like some security stuff. There might be, uh, you know, somebody that, 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. Um, all of this has to be coordinated under the umbrella of like SEO strategy. And I'm not sure that that happens because people get busy and they're operating in their different kind of, uh, verticals, I guess, and, and they're not coordinating. And so it's important to have those daily or weekly or monthly standups to make sure and have someone in charge who who's driving this and who understands how all those pieces to come together. And when different people hit challenges, um, they can help resolve those or push those forward with different people in the company. Cause you know, SEO, like the SEO creep that you're talking about is absolutely true. So it, it, it, it happens. So you've got to keep continually keep an eye on that. Uh, 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, uh, is going to save the company time and effort in the, in the long run. Oh man. Um, yeah. Reporting and assumptions, uh, reporting on successes. Yeah. That's just, you know, coming down to a punch list, but this is like tracking the data, right? Understanding it, 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. Um, I think it's becoming more accepted, but, uh, 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, uh, to show the movements and then to pull that through and track to success. And sometimes you're going to have to use multiple teams to do that. Uh, it's certainly easier to do it with the 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. Uh, certainly calculating where keywords are, uh, versus ranking. Some of these third-party tools do do that. Um, 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, we're now on page two or 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. And that's why

I, I love digital marketing over traditional marketing so much is, uh, you can pivot based on what the data is giving you and the data is telling a story and you can make changes based on that. So. Yeah. And that's exactly why the pillar number two is SEO analysis and reporting. Uh, cause 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. Uh, organic traffic from Google is X percent of all search traffic and results in X percent of the revenue, uh, pull our expert 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 those effort where there might be some opportunities. Well, you know, Chris, this reminds me, I I've told this story on, I don't know, a past podcast, but I think it's worth bringing up. I remember we were doing a consulting session for a big plumbing company, right. And, uh, they came in for a PPC audit, right. And really how we look at accounts is holistically multi, uh, omni channel. Uh, how does it all play together? And over the two hours and they had their like internal marketing team there. And, uh, I just, I just remember, uh, at the end of the call, I was like, you need a rank for plumber Houston. After two hours is like, and the end, the summary is you need to rank for plumber Houston. And they're like, yeah, we know that. Right. And they came back. We know that I was like, well, you know, you could be doing this, you could be doing this, you could be doing this to get there. And then the owner was like, well, what is it

going to cost, uh, to, 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 that was the one time that I think I made everybody in the room a little bit nervous because like in marketing, you can't always, you mean everybody on our team nervous? Oh yeah. Yeah. But that's the thing. Um, 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, I gave him a number. Um, certainly, uh, I, 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, the last two hours with them of what needed to happen, what they were doing, what their capabilities were to, to be able to get through some of those challenges we talked about in number one. And, uh, yeah, so I made a promise to them. We delivered, they came on as a full-time client. And, uh, I think the last time, um, I talked to them, they were buying a air conditioning company. Um, and so, you know, the reality is, um, SEO and rankings in Google does translate into revenue and depending on how you calculate it, um, and, and execution, I think executions, uh, probably the number one thing actually, um, it can move the needle quite a bit for even the largest of companies. The testimonial on the last podcast was just that 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? Like the needle has moved pretty significantly. And, um, and we credit that to SEO. Oh, and, 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 and searches and gaps that might be present on current or past efforts for SEO is imperative to the success of the, of the project. A project manager is tasked with initiatives like, uh, overhauling design and content on a set of pages, driving initiatives for internal linking plan that affects many aspects of the site. Uh, the resulting, uh, revenue growth from SEO when the project is managed, uh, well, just like you said, in that testimonial is appreciable people higher up notice what's going on. Yeah. I think the internal linking plan is something I've seen as one of the major issues. Um, mainly with a lot of these companies, they're not interlinking properly where Google likes it or understands the, um, the, the architecture when the site was built potentially and, and the naming conventions of, uh, some of the things or issues. And then really a lot of people, uh, you know, from, uh, you know, SMB, um, to enterprise level company design websites using headers 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. 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, and, and having somebody that's coordinating with multiple teams, getting things approved, uh, project managing correctly is absolutely key. So. Yep. Paramount. Uh, that'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, uh, is the best predictor of success or failure in that particular project, right? The goal is to build relationships in engineering and creative and legal and public relations. I mean, you just, you just put together engineering and creative, and you're already like, you're talking about a communication skill set that's, that's not, frankly, not normal. Um, 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, uh, REI, right? That's the outdoor sporting company. And there's a number of things that they, they've defined core strengths, every enterprise SEO should have. Uh, it's what, two, four, six of them. Bear with me. I thought it was worth going through these. Uh, one, communicating effectively across channels and teams to evangelizing SEO through education and documentation. Three, working with teams to prioritize SEO initiatives. Four, 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. It actually kind of falls back on the project management, right? Cause you really got to have all of those skills in the project management piece. Um, 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. They all need to get together and communicate from time to time. Those subject matter experts, those individual contributors all under, um, under the guise of, or under the control of the project manager. 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 hours, maybe a couple of days could take months could take weeks. And it's all about, uh, 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. Um, and then it's just like, Oh, didn't get what I needed. Okay. Well, um, I'm going to work on that this week and then come back next week. And then hopefully we have that. And sometimes if someone forgets or someone's not following up or someone has to ask somebody else for approval, uh, something, uh, 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. Um, three months there, there was, there was some extraneous circumstances for sure. Uh, but I mean, you know, just give us access. It would have taken five minutes, you know? Uh, and, and so like the last agency had access to like, there was just a lot of coordination that had to happen. And so, uh, 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 organization where people understand SEO, the better, because then those people can help, uh, smooth out whatever needs to happen or get approvals

or expedite things. But I, I, you know, I'm on, I'm on this interagency call. I'm on a couple of them, but on this one that, uh, you know, just every week it's just roadblock or red tape after 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, uh, companies understand. And a lot of times we come up with some creative things, certainly getting approvals, um, on content is, is somewhat of an issue as well. And so there's a lot of aspects of SEO from technical to on page that, uh, really you need that coordination for off page. 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 are adept with decks and different things to, uh, help, 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 workarounds 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, um, 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 were all on different CMSs, like somewhere on WordPress, somewhere on Wix, somewhere on.net. Like it was crazy. Okay. 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, you know, that gives you, it needed to be more like, um, waffles, like waffle squares. And it was more like spaghetti all over the place. Yeah. So, uh, yeah, if you're dealing with some of these, uh, enterprise level issues and you're dealing with some

pain, maybe give us a call. We've certainly, uh, been there and, uh, have found ways to get things done. So, yeah, that's, that's about being, that's the engineers being creative to get things done. That's what was really good. Um, uh, Patif to Jen, uh, that was a really good article, the four pillars of enterprise SEO success. Um, we're going to wrap up this podcast here. We are just going to quickly reiterate, uh, EWR digital.com forward slash review. Uh, and then Matt is, since he's a vampire is about to, to disintegrate, uh, under the, the heat of the sun shining in his window. Yes, no, this is a new, uh, new location. So still getting set up. So look forward to this weekend, but yeah, I'm, I'm getting a blinded here, uh, where I'm sitting. So let's go ahead and, uh, say our goodbyes. All right. Well, my name is Chris Burris. My name is Matt Bertram. Bye-bye for now.