{"id":225184,"date":"2020-05-13T09:24:14","date_gmt":"2020-05-13T03:54:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.qcsglobal.com\/?p=225184"},"modified":"2020-05-13T09:24:14","modified_gmt":"2020-05-13T03:54:14","slug":"mastering-who-with-your-seo-campaigns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qcsglobal.com\/blogs\/mastering-who-with-your-seo-campaigns\/","title":{"rendered":"Mastering &#8220;WHO,&#8221; With Your SEO Campaigns"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div>\n<p><iframe style=\"width: 100%; height: 200px; border: 0 none;\" src=\"https:\/\/art19.com\/shows\/995c2b73-8f19-4a58-8c35-8ee81c7e8543\/episodes\/5b5a90e0-8cb6-401b-bdbc-ce0500bbf930\/embed?theme=light-green\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>Episode Overview:<\/strong> Successfully executing marketing campaigns that target your total addressable market requires understanding the \u201cWho,\u201d factor, namely the companies that comprise it. Join host Ben as he speaks with Garrett Mehrguth, CEO of Directive Consulting, about how to identify specific companies of your TAM using firmographic data.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Summary<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Firmographic data is an essential aspect of TAM and provides insights into a company\u2019s structure and needs.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Firmographic data can consist of knowing a company\u2019s revenue, employee size, headcount, technologies they use, etc.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Standing in the shoes of the customer and experiencing what they see and how they view content can help SEOs create content that directly addresses consumer needs.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>GUESTS &amp; RESOURCES<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><b>Ben:<\/b>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Welcome to the Voices of Search podcast. Today we\u2019re going to discuss thinking about SEO strategy from a general marketing strategy perspective. Joining us today is Garrett Mehrguth, who is the CEO of Directive Consulting, which is a B2B and enterprise search marketing agency that companies trust to scale their business. Directive supports customers with SEO, PPC, content marketing, and social media driven by powerful analytics and a dedicated team of specialists. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yesterday Garrett and I talked about how to determine your totally addressable market for an SEO campaign, and today we\u2019re going to talk about mastering the who with those SEO campaigns<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Okay, on with the show. Here\u2019s the second part of my conversation with Garrett Mehrguth, founder of Directive Consulting.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Ben:<\/b>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Garrett, welcome back to the Voices of Search podcast.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Garrett:<\/b>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Thanks Ben. Glad to be here.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Ben:<\/b>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Great to have you back on the show. Yesterday we talked about setting up a marketing campaign, first by understanding what you\u2019re trying to accomplish. And my takeaway from that conversation was, the first thing you need to figure out is what your totally addressable market is. How many people are you trying to reach with a marketing campaign? And that\u2019s important for SEOs, because a lot of the times we just think about, \u201cWell here\u2019s how much traffic we can generate,\u201d and not necessarily thinking about whether it\u2019s targeted or not. When you start to think about evaluating the traffic that you are generating to figure out whether you\u2019re reaching people that are in or outside of your addressable market. How do you think about evaluating who is actually coming to your web properties through SEO?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Garrett:<\/b>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Oh, that\u2019s a great question Ben. Yeah, I think ego, pride, all the things that SEO just feeds, right? If you go and you do your keyword research and you\u2019re like, \u201cOh man, how many people are searching that.\u201d And unless you offer a low friction, self onboarding, high volume type product \u2026 So at Directive we have a product called Institute. I want to talk about this because I think it\u2019s really important. So we have a product at Directive, a SAS product. We want to kind of practice what we preach, so we have our own SAS product that let\u2019s us I think frankly be better consultants to our SAS clients, because we\u2019ve got skin in the game. And that is a $39 a month product. What that means is that essentially we can market to everyone. See, we had to do this because our retainer fee is more expensive, obviously.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Garrett:<\/b>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Our minimums are $7,000 a month to do SEO or PPC for somebody. So you have high minimums on your retainer, so you really don\u2019t have a huge market, but then you\u2019re still driving traffic like we were talking about. So how do you monetize that traffic if the majority of the people visiting your site don\u2019t fit? So we offered a $39 a month product. And the reason that\u2019s so important is we have two different strategies for content between our services blog and our Institute blog, and we chose to separate and build two separate blogs on the same domain so that we could have two separate categories.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Ben:<\/b>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Okay, so you\u2019ve got this SAS product that helps you understand who is actually being driven by your traffic. Obviously the KPIs for most SEOs are, what\u2019s your visibility? How many impressions are you getting? Are you getting clicks? Are those clicks converting? And what we\u2019re not thinking about is, who are the actual people and are they in your addressable market? T<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">alk to me about some of the tactics and signals that you\u2019re looking for to understand who are the people? What can you learn about them? Let\u2019s talk a little bit about evaluating some of the demographic data that comes in through SEO.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Garrett:<\/b>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yeah, that\u2019s great. I mean you have some native tools like Google Analytics that allows you to do that, but you also then have really special tools like Clearbit where you can use reveal and you can start to see the accounts that are coming in. And what accounts is your website driving? I think what\u2019s happened is a lot of us have got really married to this idea of psychographic data, individual data, but we don\u2019t have any firmographic data. And so it\u2019s hard to say, \u201cOh this is good traffic because it\u2019s a 35 year old who lives in New Hampshire.\u201d But you don\u2019t know where they work, so how do you know that that was essentially a good visitor? And so layering that firmographic data is big.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Ben:<\/b>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Before you go on, talk to me about the difference between demographic, psychographic and firmographic data.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Garrett:<\/b>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yeah, so I don\u2019t necessarily know, demographic to me is like a overarching idea. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Firmographic is essentially employee size, revenue, headcount, technologies used. This is more for at an account level. So this is company data.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Ben:<\/b>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Mm-hmm (affirmative).<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Garrett:<\/b>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And so then psychographic data comes through maybe income, title, age, gender, and this other kind of individual data. So you have individual data and then you have this company data, and you want to essentially blend those two so you know essentially who the people are and if they work for an organization that could theoretically pay you. So you marry those two, and now you have a really good understanding of your audience. And that\u2019s kind of the way I\u2019ve always done about it, is first map out how many accounts exist and then figure out essentially, within the function you\u2019re targeting, engineering, accounting, sales, marketing, finance, whatever that is, how many people exist in that function, that department at those accounts? And now you have your total addressable market.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Garrett:<\/b>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So now when you get into tactics and strategy, this is how it differs, right? So Institute is our SAS product. It teaches you how to do SEO and PPC. It\u2019s $39 a month. Self onboarding, free trial. We have this kind of low friction product. So in March where do we 40 pieces of content for our blog for the Institute, okay? Really great website. Every lesson has a page so we can rank at the bottom of the funnel. So our content strategy for the institute is we\u2019re creating five pieces of content that have essentially the five biggest questions people have around all 40 of our lessons. And so that gets us to essentially our total amount of content we want. We essentially want five pieces of content, all internally linking to one of our 40 lessons. And we got to do that for all 40, okay? So that\u2019s our content strategy for Institute.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Garrett:<\/b>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Simultaneously we have a completely different content strategy. We then have a completely different audience for services. See services needs to be about why our approach to SEO is better than other agencies. Why how we think is better, the proof behind it, the data, while our Institute, it needs to be about how to do link building, how to think about what tools you need for link building, the best resources for link building. And so that\u2019s practitioner how to content, and then we have a consultative approach, theory driven content for our services. You see what I\u2019m saying? That\u2019s why the who matters.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Ben:<\/b>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I understand the idea that you have two different products. You\u2019re targeting two different user bases. You have two different addressable markets. When you\u2019re launching an SEO campaign, how you figure out what your content is, you\u2019re trying to optimize that content for specific keywords. How often are you going back and saying, \u201cOkay, here\u2019s the traffic that were driven from those campaigns.\u201d How are you looking back at your SEO campaigns trying to figure out what traffic came from it and evaluating whether the right traffic is actually coming through?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Garrett:<\/b>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">No, no, no. So I go back a step and I do something that none of us do and I never did well enough now. And then it\u2019s something I really try to do now. <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I read the content first and I ask myself, is it good enough that if my audience read this they would be inspired to take some type of action?<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Whether it\u2019s a low friction action like joining our newsletter or a high friction action like getting a proposal. And as simple as that sounds, it\u2019s like the most critical piece. T<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">he SEOs, we focus so much on ranking for things that frankly a lot of times we haven\u2019t even read through the eyes of our customer to know if it could work. So I want to start there, because I think it\u2019s so critical. If all the SEOs out here never looked at another keyword research tool again and simply interviewed their customers and then wrote content that solved their pain, and that was good enough that if their audience read it they\u2019d want to work with them, they\u2019d make a billion dollars<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Ben:<\/b>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A billion dollars is a lot of money. I think the takeaway here is there\u2019s a piece that SEOs are missing when they\u2019re thinking about the effectiveness of their campaigns. You can understand, \u201cHey, there\u2019s 10,000 people in my addressable market. I\u2019m driving 50,000 impressions and I\u2019m getting 10,000 sessions. I must be reaching the whole addressable market.\u201d If you don\u2019t understand who is actually driving those sessions, you don\u2019t really have a percentage of what percentage of the market you\u2019re reaching. And to me the important thing is, if you take your firmographic data, and your ethnographic data, let\u2019s group that and call it demographic data together. You take that demographic data and you\u2019re saying, \u201cI\u2019m reaching 10,000 men aged 35 to 46 who work at these type of firms with these pieces of technology installed,\u201d you have a better understanding of whether those campaigns are actually working.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Ben:<\/b>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You could really filter out whether that traffic is reaching the right people, and then you know how to adjust your strategy. When you\u2019re looking at your demographic data, when you\u2019re actually figuring out the who with your SEO campaigns. Talk to me about what you think of from a next step perspective. We\u2019re reaching 8,000 out of 10,000 people that we want to reach in our totally addressable market. We\u2019re starting to drive a nice conversion rate. Are there strategies that you run into where you can take the demographic data and help drive conversion rates?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Garrett:<\/b>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yeah, I mean I don\u2019t know if I use the demographic data so much as I start to do clustering. So what I mean by that is I\u2019ll take these pages on my site that I know are driving my ideal customer persona, just because of the keyword, right? So what I mean by that is demand generation is a keyword that\u2019s synonymous with SAS. If your title is like you do demand generation, you are in the SAS space. It\u2019s not like manufacturing has people who do demand gen. It\u2019s very like a title to that industry. So I was trying to find these cues, these triggers, right? So then what I do then is I\u2019ll ask myself, \u201cCool. If someone\u2019s searching for demand generation and I don\u2019t have the access to a keyword research tool, I\u2019ll put into Google demand generation and then I\u2019ll put an underscore.\u201d This is called the wildcard.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Garrett:<\/b>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And then what that\u2019s going to do is it\u2019s going to show me, based on Google\u2019s actual data, what are the top searched things related to demand generation. And now I\u2019m going to use those to create a content cluster at every stage of the funnel around the keywords that are psychographically correlated to my title. And so now that I know that and some pain I solved, right? So let\u2019s say I have my SEO agency page, I\u2019ve been ranking well for that. I\u2019ll put underscore, and then I\u2019ll understand the intent. Oh wow. Hey, a lot of people are localizing their SEO agency query. Cool. I have five locations across the US. I don\u2019t have an SEO page that\u2019s hyperlinked from my Austin page. So right now in Q2 me and my SEO team are building an SEO agency, Austin and PPC agency, Austin page that hyperlinks from our Austin location page because we know that essentially the search intent for what we offer is localized.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Garrett:<\/b>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And so essentially what I try to always do is stay in the surf and not try to get more data than I can. So what I\u2019m trying to say is like, I don\u2019t know if you can use, Ben, perfect demographic data unless you enrich it out of Google analytics to know that you\u2019re reaching your audience right now. But if you\u2019re enriching it, right? So you\u2019re using an ABM platform, and you can see how many hits from your target accounts in Salesforce are also matching essentially cookies on your website, now you can start doing that. If you use a product like Reveal from Clearbit, now you can start doing that. So it\u2019s kind of like, if you\u2019re not enriching your data, you\u2019re stuck here on a lot of the firmographics. But if you could enrich your data, now you can essentially get, at the account level, if you\u2019re targeting the right accounts, and then you can understand the effectiveness of your content strategy.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Ben:<\/b>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And I think that that\u2019s the big takeaway for SEOs, that just driving traffic is not enough, right? <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Understanding who that traffic is and understanding whether they\u2019re converting will help you to continue to optimize your campaigns.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> And so we\u2019re going to talk a little bit about understanding whether you have the right set of tools and technologies in our next episode. And that wraps up this episode of the Voices of Search podcast. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Garrett Mehrguth, founder of Directive Consulting. We\u2019d love to continue the conversation with you, so if you\u2019re interested in contacting Garrett, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter where his handle is GMehrguth, that\u2019s G-M-E-H-R-G-U-T-H or you could visit his company\u2019s website, which is directiveconsulting.com. D-I-R-E-C-T-I-V-E consulting.com.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Ben:<\/b>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Just one more link in our show notes that I\u2019d like to tell you about. If you didn\u2019t have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com, where we have summaries of all of our episodes, contact information for our guests. You can also send us your topic suggestions, your SEO questions, or you can even apply to be a guest speaker on the Voices of Search podcast. Of course, you could always reach out on social media. Our handle is VoicesofSearch on Twitter, and my personal handle is BenJShap, B-E-N-J-S-H-A-P. And if you haven\u2019t subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed in addition to the last part of my conversation with Garrett Mehrguth when discussing how to determine if your search marketing tech stack works, we\u2019re going to publish an episode every day during the work week. So hit the subscribe button in your podcast app and we\u2019ll be back in your feed soon. All right. That\u2019s it for today, but until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/blog.searchmetrics.com\/us\/mastering-who-with-your-seo-campaigns-garrett-mehrguth-directive-consulting\/\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Episode Overview: Successfully executing marketing campaigns that target your total addressable market requires understanding the \u201cWho,\u201d factor, namely the companies that comprise it. Join host Ben as he speaks with Garrett Mehrguth, CEO of Directive Consulting, about how to identify specific companies of your TAM using firmographic data. Summary Firmographic data is an essential aspect [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":225185,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[36,13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qcsglobal.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225184"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qcsglobal.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qcsglobal.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qcsglobal.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qcsglobal.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225184"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/qcsglobal.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":225456,"href":"https:\/\/qcsglobal.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225184\/revisions\/225456"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qcsglobal.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/225185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qcsglobal.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qcsglobal.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qcsglobal.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}