Yvie Ansari says that her insight for SEO is “Making sure that you are integrating SEO into the broader marketing mix and not just focusing on the SEO in a silo, but integrating it into your broader channel selection.”

How do you integrate SEO into the broader marketing mix?

“The way to do that is essentially through data. And I think there are many missing data points from many businesses. And things like, for example, your social media engagement and the content that people are engaging with on social media can be really useful to understand where to focus your content efforts on SEO. You have the SEO data to tell you what people are searching for and the content they want to see. But then you don't have the additional insights into what people engage with. So it's almost like cross pollution of data sharing, where the SEOs can share their data with the social media team

You can share your paid search data with the SEO team to hone in a bit more on their keyword research and not just data but also your optimizations. So, for example, if you have an E-commerce brand, and your paid search strategy is focused on key category pages, you want to make sure that they're optimized from an SEO perspective because that will increase your quality score, which will increase your relevancy towards what you're bidding on and decrease CPCs. It's essentially making sure, on a very broad level, to share data across teams and cross-educate. Many teams don’t do that, and SEO is seen as a dark art. And I think SEOs tend not to understand how media works, how budgets work, how to distribute those budgets, where to distribute them, etc. That kind of cross-education is really important to get more out of the data from all channels and have teams working together and integrating essentially.”

Regarding social media, what kind of data should SEOs be looking for? Certain topics are discussed on social media, and there may be certain trends about topics before obvious search volume and the various search tools. Is that what you're thinking of?

“It's a few different things. One of the things people don't use in social media, especially on channels that are pretty customer-driven and customer service-driven, is the FAQs. If you look at E-commerce brands, you get so many FAQs around shipping, where's my product, what is the product made of, and all that sort of stuff that you can use within the FAQ section of your website. Every platform has insights into how many likes, comments, shares, etc., your content gets. And understanding what content themes get most of that engagement to help hone in on those themes on your website to create a streamlined journey because otherwise, you got these two channels that weren't quite siloed. If you're looking at all of your channels, taking that data, and translating it onto your website, that's a much more user-friendly experience for a user who knows you've got the content on your social and website. And it's a lot more helpful to find that content, and other users will also be searching for that content.”

So what can SEOs learn from social? And what can social learn from SEO?

“What's interesting around social media is, there are many things like community management, and much branding involved and tone of voice and essentially creating a personality to the brand, which we as SEOs don't tend to do like we're very data-driven and very technical. Even when pulling out content ideas and planning content, it's still very data-driven unless we're doing link-building campaigns. A lot of the time, we have less sort of 'foot in the creative area.’ And learning from social media is very useful because the social media team is quite creative. They are on the pulse of what's happening in the broader landscape, like competitors' actions. What sorts of not just organic social media but paid social media as well? What sorts of creativity have they got, and what kind of content, again, works well, as all of that data we don't have goes beyond just the keyword research data we have or the competitive landscape from tools like Majestic or Semrush.

And I think vice versa. Their social team can learn a lot about how to use those other tools to help them with content creation because a lot of the time if you look at a content team overall, which will have social media experts and content strategists. They won’t always look at the data to create a content strategy or plan. It will often be off the cuff or very much like its summer season, so we'll create something related to summer, but it's not necessarily related to search behaviours. There's much training that can happen to help teams use different tools to get the insights out of those tools for their specific channel, rather than having to go and ask that channel expert every time.”

Do we still have to measure the value of each channel if we want to keep calling it that separately? Or are we moving towards a stage where we're just considering marketing as a whole, and the value of the customer journey, and SEO was part of that social as part of that as well? Still, it could be more valuable to measure them separately.

“I think it depends on who you're speaking to. If you are within the marketing department, internally at business, say it's an E-commerce brand. You report to the marketing director. You aren't going to report on separate channels because the marketing director wants to know which channels are pulling their weight and which channels they can increase or pull back on what channels are working well. However, as the marketing director, that person is going to report on marketing as a whole to the MD CEO, whoever is the head of the company because that person isn't going to be so in detail on each channel. And it doesn't make sense to try and give that person a whole massive picture of how everything's going because all they're going to be caring about is what revenue is marketing driving essentially. So I think when it comes to reporting, I recommend to my clients that you have your separate in-channel tabs within a marketing report that you have a tab that shows marketing as a whole, with all the key business KPIs so that you're not just trying to report on tiny things that the key stakeholders aren't going to care about.”

One of the challenges is that channels are used at different touch points in the journey and are not necessarily equally weighted. And is it the case that a marketing director is looking for as much revenue as possible from a channel? Or are they quite comfortable that SEO may be an early-stage touchpoint? The user may go to social media to discover more about the brand and what people say about it and revisit the website in an SEO form towards the end of the journey. Is there an understanding and appreciation of where the various channels fit into the journey?

“I think it depends on the maturity of the business. So channel attribution is very well understood for those businesses that are mature and have very established marketing departments. And I think there is a real appetite to get the attribution right because the standard set of attribution isn't always correct. So a lot of attribution modelling goes into it, and understanding how the customer interacts with the brand. And as you say, that touchpoint across the different stages of the marketing funnel varies by channel. But I think where our business is less mature, there is a bit more appetite to bring in and grow the revenue. And there's a lot more focus on that, as opposed to the kind of broader 'which channel brings in which kind of percentage of revenue' essentially, it depends on the kind of business that you're working with.”

Is there a standard attribution model that you tend to favour initially, or is each business different, and you have to build one that is bespoke depending on what customers do and how they interact for that particular business?

“I am a big fan of different attribution models for different businesses because it's just like with everything else in marketing, you don't go after the same target audiences, other businesses, you don't go after the same content, you don't create the same strategy. Everything's so specific to every business. As a recommendation, if you can have your own attribution model, it makes a lot more sense because it gives you much more accurate data. I think a standard attribution model, like Last-Click, can work for less mature businesses. It can give them, obviously, some data and an understanding of how their channels work together. But if you want to understand how your customers are interacting with your brand, and when they're purchasing and through which channels, then a specific, bespoke attribution model makes a lot more sense.”

You've shared what SEOs should be doing in 2023. So now, let's talk about what SEO shouldn't be doing. So what's something that's seductive in terms of time but ultimately counterproductive? What's something that SEO shouldn't be doing in 2023?

“So this relates to content production. I think there is a lot of appetite for content production. We've all heard the phrase ‘content is key.’ Everyone talks about it all the time. And I think it's really important to do set content production. But I think the ambition behind it can be quite a lot. Sometimes, what will end up happening is that an SEO will recommend a content plan, and it will look at anything and everything you could create in terms of content around a brand. And in my opinion, it creates quite a time suck because you're looking at this huge keyword research to pull out every single topic that you could create content on, which takes days and days to really categorize everything and really understand everything and then start churning out content. So rather than doing that, it's much more important to understand that keyword universe but really understand what part of that universe is relevant to the brand you want to create that content for. Because otherwise, it starts to create this relevancy of content on the website. And it becomes less performant because the content is less engaging. It's kind of bog standard, and loads of other websites have got the same content, and it's just churning out content for content’s sake. So it's really important to do all the research but hone in on what is going to be relevant to the brand.”

Yvie Ansari is the founder and director at yva media, and you can find her over at yvamedia.com.