Chris says: “I think SEOs need to focus on outcomes, not outputs. While best practices are great, I feel the industry has become particularly obsessed with making sure that every page on our website contains every single best practice without any real consideration of what each page is trying to achieve and where the opportunity is.

My feeling is, and this is both on the client side and on the agency side, that we really need to consider what is best for the customer and how we're going to reach new customers with any product or service that we're putting forward.”

What do you mean in practice by focusing on outcomes rather than outputs?

“It's going to vary between exactly what product or service you're putting forward. If we were to take an e-commerce site, the real objective of an e-commerce site is to reach new customers, grow sales, and get more products in front of the consumer, rather than an output, which might be something like your PageSpeed Insights score, or your Core Web Vitals score.

The things that are outputs, like the number of developer tickets that you're putting forward, or the number of best practices that you've met, are really a means to an end. I think that the industry as a whole has lost sight of what we're trying to achieve in SEO, which is to help grow our clients or our businesses through organic search as a channel.”

Are there any particular KPIs that you tend to prefer when focusing on outcomes?

“It's a relatively controversial metric, but I still stand by both reach and visibility as core metrics within SEO. Naturally, there's a lot of external influence that happens within a searchers market. There's seasonality, there's brand demand, there's all of these other factors that come through.

But actually being able to define exactly what your customers are searching, targeting down to those keywords, and then capturing a percentage of that traffic will help be able to determine whether or not over time you're capturing more of the demand against those search terms as your rankings improve, weighted by search volume, weighted by possession, and then moving towards that target over time and combining that with demand metrics to see. Is the product that you considered a priority last year, still the same priority this year?

Being able to scale that up across potentially 1000s of products with 1000s of search terms, and then layering that against overall traffic and revenue targets, rather than focusing purely on SEO rankings.”

How do you define visibility?

“I think it's absolutely changed over the past 10 years from what we've seen with the traditional contemporary rankings and just having an assumed click-through rate in position one, two, three, and four, and it's really moved to actually how much visual content do you have on the search results, including things like Knowledge Graphs, local packs, and this is potentially going to grow significantly, as we start to see search results considerably changed with the introduction of potentially Search Generative Experiences, as well as numerous things that Google are adding into the search results outside of SGE, with product grids, etc.

Being able to use the new tools that are available on the market to see how much of the pixel width you own within a search result, and overlaying that against what you're seeing with click-through rates in Search Console itself, means you are able to derive a meaningful visibility metric to see how visible or how much percentage you capture on the search result itself, weighted by obviously above and below the fold.”

Are clients comfortable with brand visibility as a satisfactory SEO metric and outcome that you're achieving, or are you still looking for traffic?

“Most clients are still looking for traffic and revenue for the type of brands that have brand recognition. If you're working with a small site or a small brand that doesn't have a lot of brand propensity in the market, then pretty much everything you do within SEO is going to be considered incremental growth.

If you're starting from zero and growing to one thousand, for example, then all of that is incremental, but for an established brand, actually being able to say, ‘Okay, here is the difference of the traffic you would have got anyway through your brand searches and through your existing SEO remit’ and how much you've grown on top of that, I think is really, really key.

To be honest, it’s something that a lot of enterprise clients struggle to define internally. So anything agencies can do to help, let’s say, ‘Here's the difference between what your investment and SEO has made versus what you would have achieved without that’.

That then really comes down to being able to say, ‘We focused on these times in these ways, and we grew visibility, this amount’. And therefore, having some summarization of exactly how much that relates to traffic and revenue, in context of their overall marketing effort.

For each client, ideally, you're looking to define a financial value of the traffic that you're driving.”

What does focusing on outcomes mean for the honing of a strategy over a continual basis? How do the metrics influence what you do on a daily basis?

“One of the things when I took over the team at Brave Bison was really to focus on not being an agency that talks about those outputs. So rather than going into a costly business review and say, ‘We've authored 30 pieces of content, we've resolved 25 developer tickets relating to SEO, and we've built 45 links’, for example, which is the way the industry has historically worked a lot of the time, but really to say how much additional traffic did those 30 pieces of content drive, and out of those 30 pieces of content, which are the ones that are responsible for the bulk of that traffic.

After that it’s about really nailing that down to develop your strategy over time. So it might be the case that you threw 30 static pieces of content out into the wild, 5 of them did really well and 25 of them didn't, and then going back and analyzing the 5 that did well to understand why that is.

Did the pieces do well because they targeted terms that the industry hadn't worked out yet and, therefore, are less competitive and we've been able to pick them up easily? Do we just have a stronger authority? What are those 5 pieces of content related to that we can either double down on or consider? What should we do about those 25 pieces of content that didn't perform so that we can boost that up?

Again, that goes across everything from the content itself to your off-site strategy to a technical strategy, whether or not you should be opening-closing facets, all of these kinds of different elements of SEO and really thinking about what's working and what's not working, rather than just exactly what we did in line with Google's best practice.”

You’ve talked about improving content and different technical health aspects. How do you prioritize things like that?

“The best way, in my opinion to do this is to iterate your strategy over time. First, break down exactly what the optimization relates to. We know that some products or some pieces of content or services are going to be bigger in overall search volume than others that can be defined through keyword research. You're also able to balance that against things like Conversion Rate within analytics and Average Order Value to kind of see the overall organic estimate of the overall value that it relates to from just a pure service line level.

But when it comes down to the specific work streams, what I like to do is use an Objective Key Result (OKR) framework, which is popular, but it's kind of slower to reach SEOs community. Within tech and development communities it's been widely adopted, and actually saying, ‘I noticed our goal is to grow at amount within these products or services’.

Next you need to break the key results down if we're saying, for example, one key result against technical when a key result against content one key result against off-site, just on a really basic layer, and actually seeing how much across the quarter we've moved on those key results to those. Then it’s what we think the biggest impact is, then on a three-month basis, re-review that see exactly what's working, what's not working, and then iterate that strategy over time so that we're constantly updating.

If we're seeing in one area have to say we've built a lot of links, but we haven't then seen any movement towards our overall ‘North Star’ objective or those ranking goals, then actually, there's a fair summation to say that that's not the best thing that we should be doing.

In other areas, if we're seeing a technical optimization had a very immediate impact, then we should potentially double down on that. That's obviously going to reach a point of conclusion. We'll have to look at new work streams, but just constantly evaluating your strategy and seeing exactly what we see when we implemented something, when something went live, what the influence it was on rankings, and really getting in detail with the data so that we can really make sure that we're putting forward our best bet at any given point in time.

There's obviously a test and learn against that. But the only way that we can move forward as an industry is to constantly look at the data, make hypotheses, test those hypotheses, and then double down on them.”

When do you actually review whether or not you should shift this North Star that you're talking about there? Also, do you tend to have a larger, more comprehensive review on an annual basis?

“Typically, the North Star will be reviewed on an annual basis, but we will review the work streams that bring us to that North Star on a quarterly basis. So understanding that if we've briefed in at the start of the year, hypothetically 150 pieces of content, actually, if we're getting into the first three months, we've done 25% of those, but actually, that's not performing against our overall objective and we're not moving closer to it than actually spending the next nine months continuing to author content, which potentially isn't the right idea because we're going to get to the end of the year, and we're not going to see the results that we're aiming to see.

We should actually look at what can we do to make that content move closer? Are we actually looking at the wrong strategy here? Are we potentially targeting the wrong turns? Do we not have the right propensity to rank? It's really when we get into the detail of the work streams itself that ultimately the North Star goal will change, but in my opinion, it's better to review that on an annual basis.”

Do SEOs need to work more effectively with other marketing functions?

“One of the biggest things here is understanding exactly what a bidding strategy within paid search is having on overall goals, but also understanding that there's external above the line activity that are going to drive searches, and therefore lift up your SEO traffic. This goes back to my point around what is actually the incremental value of SEO on the investment that's being made.

If you're working with a big enterprise client, and they have series of TV ads, where at the end of the TV ad, it says, Google X, Y and Z, and you suddenly see an increase in traffic for those terms, then it’s probably because of those TV ads and not as a result of anything that we've done within SEO. There are some very immediate things that SEOs should be aware of if they're not currently speaking to their paid media team.

What we've seen over the past sort of three or four years is a lot of clients have gone on pause with their paid search activity, and then naturally, organic is picking up a certain amount of that, because the paid search ads are no longer there. Being aware of when those pauses are happening and being able to quantify what the paid search traffic was and how much that's influencing on organic, I think, is incredibly important. This then means that you are able to put that in your reporting to help keep your SEO team transparent and honest about how much value it's actually bringing.”

What's your opinion of the value of paid search bidding on a brand?

“Back in the day, when it was much easier to control a keyword level within paid search, you could build your own models around exactly what terms you're bidding on. As we've seen, paid search has become more sophisticated with Performance Max, and before that, with things like auction time bidding. I think there’s a lot value in bidding on your brand in order to feed the AI model enough data and enough conversion data for it to then make sense within the generic space.

If you're looking at your paid search strategy and you're saying 90, 95% of your budget is spent on your brand campaigns, potentially considering switch-off tests within a more traditional bidding strategy is completely viable. Then you can integrate with your SEO team to see what the value of that is. This is something that's continuously getting harder, as Google will continue to introduce more sophisticated AI models that are predicated on having good quality conversion data, but it's really situational and I think it depends on the site that you're working with and the client that you're working with.”

What's something that SEO shouldn't be doing in 2024?

“It might be slightly controversial, but I really feel the SEO industry has been focused quite a lot on PageSpeed since essentially, Google announced it as an algorithm ranking factor.

One of the reasons it's so seductive is because it's one of the few elements of SEO, where you can tangibly say, our site was loading on average in five seconds at this point, then we made some optimizations and it's now loading in sub-30 seconds. The reality is doing that is a very easy way to communicate that you have done something within SEO, but actually without knowing and considering, what are we going in? What is the customer going into on that slightly faster page? Have you looked at the content? Have you looked at the onward journey? And it’s breaking out of those silos of business.

A really easy thing for us as an agency or as just as an SEO team is to communicate to our board or to our clients to say something had been done without that wider context. I actually think it’s one of the pitfalls in the industry right now and it's difficult to break out of that mindset, because you want to have really tangible KPIs. But actually, there's so many influences on SEO organic performance at the moment that you need to really be looking at everything in context, rather than just sort of individual metrics in isolation.”

In terms of drilling down into that customer experience, do you look at video recordings? Do you try to have focus groups and face-to-face conversations with customers? Or is looking at metrics inside Search Console or other platforms sufficient?

“I think pulling in customer data is incredibly important. I think it needs to be scalable enough, and I think there are obviously positives and negatives of every route. The positives of looking at KPIs is you can scale up to your entire user base. The problem with focus groups is that you always fall down as it's always slightly a little bit off track of what the actual consumer is doing out in the wild. I think a mixture of both, combining that with some of the things that SEO tends to touch less, like actual on-site experience data and also just looking at that cross channel as well is incredibly important.”

Chris Alderman is head of SEO and DPR at Brave Bison, and you can find him over at BraveBison.com.