SEO Works When You Measure The Right Things With Maggie Swift

We get brutally honest about why traffic is a vanity metric and how SEO only earns budget when it ties to real business outcomes. We lay out the data and reporting foundation you need to walk into the C-suite with confidence, even when attribution is messy and timelines are long. 

• separating vanity metrics from revenue-driving KPIs 
• building the business case for SEO with CFO-ready numbers 
• fixing data quality in Google Analytics and conversion tracking 
• enforcing CRM hygiene so leads can become pipeline and revenue 
• choosing KPIs for lead generation vs ecommerce models 
• setting expectations with leading vs lagging indicators for SEO 
• funding the messy middle and mapping the full buying funnel 
• aligning sales and marketing to improve lead quality and content 

Guest Contact Information: 

Website: unframeddigital.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/magsswift

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With over 5 million downloads, The Best SEO Podcast has been the go-to show for digital marketers, business owners, and entrepreneurs wanting real-world strategies to grow online. 

Now, host Matthew Bertram — creator of the LLM Visibility Stack™, and Lead Strategist at EWR Digital — takes the conversation beyond traditional SEO into the AI era of discoverability. 

Each week, Matthew dives into the tactics, frameworks, and insights that matter most in a world where search engines, large language models, and answer engines are reshaping how people find, trust, and choose businesses. From SEO and AI-driven marketing to executive-level growth strategy, you’ll hear expert interviews, deep-dive discussions, and actionable strategies to help you stay ahead of the curve. 

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Transcript

Welcome Back And Why SEO Now

SPEAKER_00 0:02

This is the unknown secrets of internet marketing. Your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential. Let's get started.

SPEAKER_01 0:16

Audi, welcome back to another fun-filled episode of The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I'm your host, Matthew Bertram. Uh I uh haven't been doing podcasts in a while, guys. I apologize. There's been a lot of things happening. I'm actually going to uh we were talking about Maggie and I. Maggie Swift's here with me from Unframed Digital out of Denver. Maggie, hello.

SPEAKER_03 0:38

Hi. Hi, Matt. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 0:42

Yeah, but uh yeah, so I've been in the process of acquiring a few brands. I've been selling uh different kinds of assets. Uh and so yeah, I have a meeting later today. So there's been a lot of stuff going on. There's a lot of stuff moving in the AI world. I got some really great guests lined up. We are still thinking about changing the name of the podcast, but it's very hard when you look at the entity and the last 17 years of this podcast. So it's hard to change the name.

SPEAKER_03 1:12

Um my gosh, congratulations on 17 years. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_01 1:18

Thank you. It was also an acquired asset uh that I took over about eight years ago.

SPEAKER_03 1:22

It still is great.

SPEAKER_01 1:23

But uh yeah, so uh I hope everybody is enjoying the

Stop Worshiping Traffic Metrics

SPEAKER_01 1:28

direction we're taking the conversation. Um it's fast and furious with AI, but I thought I would slow it down and let's really talk about what is SEO and like how it ties to business outcomes. Because I think that one of the things Maggie, you and I were talking about too is you know, when when you need to be able to talk to uh the the C-suite and you're talking to the CFO and they're everybody's looking at numbers, how to justify uh SEO. Paid ads, really easy. You got attribution, and that's why people dump money into it, but it's not always the best solution. And now kind of optimize everywhere. Um what's going on? SEO is like fanned out, like now it's involved in social media, just how AI is sucking in um all the data, right? And evaluating yourself, your brand, uh, your company. Uh, SEO is even more important and uh how your company is getting represented online. And I think for a lot of digital marketers as well as companies, they don't know how to evaluate is SEO working if you're a company, if you're someone offering those services, how to have those conversations, what are those measured results? Because it's not traffic, right? It's not traffic anymore. It never was, but scream it from the rooftops. Oh man, that's that's for for all you listening, you know, like traffic has been the gold standard of what everything has been measured in. And it doesn't really mean much if it doesn't convert to sales, it's just a vanity metric. So, Maggie, I would love to hear kind of your framework for you to set the table of kind of how you view uh like the business case for SEO, I guess.

SPEAKER_02 3:24

Yeah, um it's something that actually we're we're dealing with right now with a client. Um and I think that a lot of business leaders are really into the vanity metrics because they think that that's what's important. Vanity metrics meaning traffic, um, even engagement rate, right? Um but what we're seeing is that marketers really need to be uh strong enough almost to have a deeper conversation with leadership to really be able to tie the business outcomes to any marketing channel, um including SEO. Um budgets are getting tighter and tighter, especially as we see private equity firms uh come in with injections of investment. Their expectations are high. Marketing teams' expectations are also so high, they're the first to go. They're I call it the least respected position in a business, which is so ironic compared to knowing that marketing is some of the most important pieces of a business. And so when you're a marketer, you feel this extra pressure to also prove that the strategies that you've implemented and added to your growth strategy are actually working. So when it comes to analytics, I think what we really need to do as marketers is to dive so much deeper than we have, really prioritize the education around analytics and metrics, and really prioritize telling the story to leadership. Um, because and really coaching them, right, on what's important and what's not. Um, so that's sort of my like super high level of why this is important. Um and I think everybody feels that, probably that's listening. Um with SEO, I think one thing that's super surprising, especially on the brand side and and people that are not actual SEOs, is that SEO is like 70% data analysis. So oftentimes you are you are comparing paid ads, ROAS, to SEO returns, and you're sort of thinking, how do I tell this story of success? I mean, there's so many different ways. That's what makes it challenging at the same time, is there are so many ways and so many layers that you have to peel back to uncover those stories of success sometimes. Um but you know, the data is there, and so if you have the right partner behind you and if you are prioritizing the data storytelling of it, then um you can find ways to make the board of directors happy, make the ownership happy.

SPEAKER_01 6:08

So, Maggie, it's it's funny, like the the way that a lot of the conversations used to go when I'm talking to business owners specifically, like not when you're getting into enterprises, but like specifically with business owners, the conversations like it seems like it's working. They're like, they're like, I can feel it, I can feel it. So, like you look at all the metrics and you're like, this should be driving leads, right? Like this should be driving leads. And then the business owner's like, yeah, it's working or it's not working. And then that's where the conversations get into like, okay, well, let's look at the CRM. And it's funny because even if you look at the data, you're like, okay, well, you got this many more leads than you were getting before. And then like you've closed this many more deals. And sometimes if you don't have those revenue numbers and that CRM's not working, the client's like, Oh, I I don't, I don't really, I it doesn't really like feel like it's working. And it's like, but revenue's up by 40%. Like, what do you think? What else did you do? What else could it be? Yeah, like it could like it. No, it's not the SEO. That's just you know, the the visibility. And so, like, there's always been like these connections, but attribution becomes really hard. Like, when you dig down into like KPIs, like what are what are you wanting to look for? What are you looking for from a KPI standpoint when you're having these conversations today of like, here's the things we need to measure that transition

Data Hygiene In Analytics And CRM

SPEAKER_01 7:42

into this, and then where are you pulling that data from?

SPEAKER_02 7:45

Yeah, so I mean, it kind of changes between lead generation business models and e-commerce business models, right? Um, and really, I think the biggest disconnect that's going on besides data quality, 100% of our clients come in and do not have the proper conversions, the proper tracking set up in Google Analytics. They do not have uh good data quality, 100% of our clients. So if you are out there and feeling really unconfident in your marketing data, you are absolutely not alone. But besides that, um, I think really what we have to call out is that leadership is not giving visibility to marketing teams with those metrics that tell the story of success and help attribute, or at least for a lead generation model, um, help forecast the attribution from anything. So what we want to see is we want to see metrics, and this trickles down, right, from the leadership giving that visibility to the marketing team. We want to see things like average order value, customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value. We get asked all the time, well, what's the return on investment? And it's like, well, how do we know without customer lifetime value? And 99% of the time, actually, probably more like 100% of the time, even the business owner cannot tell us that answer. Um, and they have to go through who jump through hoops in order to get that. So that is one of the biggest gaps in attribution, starting from the top down. Um, you can measure all the data you want, but if you don't know those business metrics, you're not gonna be able to say to answer the question of what is the ROI and what is this doing for my bottom line. The second is like the data health, right? So you've got data health that needs to be addressed in Google Analytics from a professional, not from your marketing manager that can get in and set up your lead conversion. It needs to be addressed throughout the entire Google Analytics environment. But then you also have to look at your CRM and what you're how you're managing that. If your sales team in a lead generation business model is not actively uh managing and maintaining the hygiene of that CRM, well, we can't tell how many people we've put in the pipeline from specific marketing channels. So it's about building that foundation first, getting buy-in from the entire team to maintain the hygiene of all of those technologies and data uh connections. And then once that happens, then we want to look at things like the increases and improvements of customer lifetime value, the increases and improvements of average order value. If you're lead generation, obviously you've got the leads coming in the at the bottom of the funnel that you want to come in, contact us, talk to sales, uh, speak to a dealer, whatever it is, right? Um, and so those are usually already set up and they're pretty obvious. And so with average order value, with customer lifetime value, we can with like your sales close rate, we can actually go ahead and forecast how much revenue we are driving from the leads that we're driving in through SEO. So, again, even with lead generation business models, there's not this like necessarily a gray area. Maybe you could call it a gray area, but it's more of like we just need to put the pieces together. And unfortunately, you have to be satisfied with a forecast and not actual attribution unless you are maintaining it and your sort of technology environment does, you know, close clients, puts in the right the actual number of the deal, etc. Um, when we're thinking about e-commerce, we want to see those growths and average order value. E-commerce is so much easier to track ROI, of course. Even with SEO, we can see the checkouts, we can see the completion rates, we can see uh the revenue, and even Google Analytics has the ability to capture average order value and track that. Um, we can't see customer lifetime value, but at the very minimum, we can see the average order value, how that's improving, because that goes after your customer lifetime value, right? The more um, the more, the higher the order value is, your customer lifetime value is going to grow. So we definitely want to see that when it comes to like measuring the business's bottom line. On the other uh area of the funnel that we want to use too is going to be your middle of the funnel. How are we building pipeline? How are those people behaving in that pipeline? Are we driving the warm leads to the door through the door to the sales team? And then how are they moving to Allstate to end up as a client? On the e-commerce side, of course, it's going to be a lot of activity. It's going to be favorite lists, it's going to be uh adding to cart, those types of actions. And so if we are, if we have the data set up correctly and we see, okay, the completion rate of from add to cart to checkout is 30%. What do we need to do to make that 50 to 70%? Um, so again, it's clarity around all stages of the buying funnel that actually go towards the bottom line, but then using those top most important business metrics that you get from leadership, CEO, CFO, the owner of the company, um, that you can also track to actually attribute those business wins and how they impact the bottom line.

SPEAKER_01 13:24

Absolutely. So a couple thoughts that I have around that is um certainly when someone is pitching SEO. Now with private equity, it's a little bit different, but uh typically how it's been is if you're pitching on the enterprise side, you're may or may not be talking to the C-suite, you may be talking to like marketing or something like that. I don't know if they have all the numbers that they need to be able to give you that stuff. One, so there's potential internal barriers, may not they may not have a lot of people. That's the problem, right? And then when you have the small business owners, they may not even know their numbers, right? So now you're trying to push SEO from the way up, trying to get these numbers that it actually needs to be coming from the way down. And then in the funnel process, if e-commerce, I love e-commerce because everything's online. Excuse me, everything is online. You can see everything that's happening. And I think that that's the direction that most uh most of the internet is going. Like where as much of the process online as possible, e-commerce is a great model, but if you're talking about a lead gen business, um well, you're producing leads that need to be scored. Okay. You need to know if these are good leads or bad leads, because like even when you're running paid ads, like there's a lot of spam. There's a lot of people that fill out forms that shouldn't. And absolutely you get you get you get uh you're like, oh, we we just produced like 125 leads uh for you, and they're like, and three of them converted. And you're like there there's a discrepancy too of what the client thinks a success is, and what you think a success is, and what you're talking about about data hygiene is incredibly important to understand how how to understand the data that you're looking at is and what those metrics are. So I almost think SEO is downstream, right? SEO is downstream of business operations, and it and the way that I think private equity is looking at it

KPIs For Lead Gen Vs Ecommerce

SPEAKER_01 15:40

is a little bit more accurate because I'm gonna I'm gonna put money in this thing, and this is what I want to get out of it. And you can get comps and you can kind of see, but unless you have historical business data, and unless you have the numbers that you're managing to, like marketers have a hard time or SEOs have a hard time because we got to come in, we got to put together all the analytics, like not to mention, you know, universal analytics is almost on every site we bring on now. It's still on there. There's two or three uh, you know, uh tags, tags still on there. Like you got to get that all cleaned up. You got to figure out how to import the data, you got to learn the client's business, you got to be able to put it together and explain it to the client. And then also whatever you're doing, it's gonna take like a quarter probably to impact, right? Like it's gonna take 45 days, 60 days to impact. So then you're looking backwards, right? You're not looking um like real time of what's happening because it takes a while. There's all these different factors that you've got to really understand the the business acumen to be able to have a conversation with the client to have them like wanna wanna develop that long-term relationship. And then, right, what I'm seeing, I I just went to uh like an agency conference, and it was like people are expecting results now in 90 days. Oh, it's crazy. It's just like there's a lot of things stacked against the world right now, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:14

Yeah, and to your point, I think you know what private equity is doing differently than a lot of a lot of other business owners is that they're they they expect a return, they're keeping track of that. Where a lot of owners or even marketing people, when they come to us uh for a proposal to make a change, they hadn't even known their KPIs and goals that they were trying to reach. So that's what private equity is definitely doing right in their expectations, and and but what they're doing wrong is private equity is just as impatient as me, and they want to see results so quickly, they are really it's hard to communicate the leading KPIs and the lagging KPIs with a long-term strategy like SEO. And so when we think about SEO and talking about it, expectations are so important, um, not only for your SEO agency to accurately communicate, but for you to communicate with your boards, with everybody else that you're reporting to, that in the first six months, these are going to be leading KPIs, they're going to be success indicators. They are not going to, they're not meant to drive results. This is a long-term strategy play. Um, and so the KPIs that you really want to look at in the first six months are are going to be different than measuring success after that first year.

SPEAKER_04 18:38

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 18:38

Um, and certainly year three is like the year of the magic. That's like we're good.

SPEAKER_01 18:45

Yeah, well, it's funny. We've been we've done a couple of remediation issues. There's been a lot of like crazy stuff that people are like trying to get fixed, and they'll come to us and we'll we'll fix them. And we've been doing like three-month like remediation deals where we can solve the problem, but they want the problem solved and they want the business to have grown, right?

SPEAKER_02 19:08

Yeah, that's literally what we're dealing with right now.

SPEAKER_01 19:13

And and so it's like, no, we're gonna remediate the issue and then we're gonna focus on the growth. And you know, it's it's funny because um we went into a couple of six-month agreements, and then we we cycled down to three month agreements, and we've done a couple three-month agreements, and I'm kind of like, okay, if we're gonna date, right? If we're gonna date, then like I get it. You don't want to sign a year agreement out of the gate. I get it. Like you've been burned before, like, I get it. Everybody has their baggage. But if we do an awesome job, we absolutely crush the numbers, then like like you know how we work, we know how you work, like we've got through like the get to know each other, how to report, like what are is important to you. Now we understand your business. Now let's get into a long-term agreement. And um, and it's it's just been funny. Uh, my sales team has been doing these like six-month agreements that rolled into three months. And I'm like, how about six months that roll into year agreements? And then, and then what happens is we're uh, you know, we're we're we're coming to the end of the agreement, and then we're actually having to resell and resign the whole agreement. And and it's it's not it's not been ideal for operations because we've skipped, like it's taken a month to close, like or a couple weeks to close. So then the agreement ends, and then that's a couple months to close. And we're trying to look at long-term revenue, right? We're trying to project out, like, you know, not just a 13-week, but like we're trying to project revenue. We had five accounts that kind of came up due at the same time that were we were like renewing. Um, and it took like all different levels to like renew. So we had this really nice dip in get uh revenue gap uh that I had to like talk to the whole sales team and say, like, guys, like uh we got to look at when we have contracts, when they're gonna fall off, and when they're gonna renew. And we need to like think about this a little bit more. That wasn't something that wasn't a KPI for us, Maggie, that we were yeah, we were looking for. And it's a it's a real thing. Like, you gotta know your numbers, you got to have dashboards, and you got to look at like what are the things that are important for you. But the better someone understands their business, like the more I think they'll love SEO because the uplift on it and the impact, when you can really track that data, is better than anything else you're gonna get. And it's like you're owning real estate versus uh versus like paid ads. And we certainly use a lot of paid ads, but you know, SEO should be that core driver, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_03 22:00

Yeah, a hundred percent.

SPEAKER_02 22:02

I mean, I can confidently say for probably 90% of businesses, maybe even more, that SEO will become your highest source of leads, your highest source of visitors, your highest source of sales if done correctly and if invested in for the long term. There's no doubt about it. And it compounds. Um, and so yeah, uh it's incredible how many people don't believe in it. But frankly, and Matt, you probably get this a lot from your prospects that there's so many bad players in SEO land. Like they've been sold these super small packages, or they've been sold something that they don't quite understand. Maybe they've purchased one aspect of SEO, thinking that the team does all aspects of SEO. And so there's a lot of PTSD in the market in SEO land. And I get it, you know, I get it. It's like hiring general contractors or electricians, right? There's a lot of bad people out there, and then there's a lot of like really good options that do really great work.

SPEAKER_01 23:02

Well, you know, it's funny you say contractors. Um, a lot of my friends recently have been building houses. Um, and I never want to build a house. I don't know if you've ever built a house, but if anybody is listening that's built in house, um, it's a second job really to manage your right now. Yeah. Your contractor team, and and you know, knowing somebody that is really good at what they do makes the process really smooth. But there's a lot of decisions, there's a lot that's on you to build a house. And you know, you got to have a really good general contractor, you gotta like trust they know what they're doing. Like the digital space is the same way,

SEO Timelines And Private Equity Pressure

SPEAKER_01 23:45

you're building digital infrastructure. And now with the like agentic workflows and automation and everything else, it's a whole nother level of what you're trying to do. And you know, frankly, I think that you know, podcasts like this, like we're trying to provide more education on how you should approach these things so you know what you're getting yourself into. Because I think what we've found, Maggie, is like, okay, like we we've we've we've been doing this a while, a long time. I think EWR is 25 years old. Like in the last nine years, like even in the last nine years, we have changed as I guess the customer changes on what they need to see in the proposals, right? So, like if we list out here are all the proposals, right? Here's all the stuff you want, right? Um, they don't know what that is, but guess what? Like contract time come, they're like, Well, did I get all this stuff? And I was like, Yeah, you you did get all that stuff. That's a productize service, right? Or they think they're in a retainer, right? And they're like, Well, can you do this? Can you do that? And then you're like, oh, well, here's an invoice for all that stuff. They're like, Whoa, I'm paying you money. Like, I thought you were gonna do all that stuff. Well, like there, there's a lot of like um getting on the same page with the client contractually, um, from a scope of work standpoint, like from an engagement standpoint, like how you're like you're what I think the big downfall is with SEO is people are hiring SEOs to run their business for them and grow their business. Like they're not they're not paying for traffic, they're not paying for so there's there's a different level of financial education that I feel like SEOs need to have, and also to be able to have those conversations with the C-suite or the owners or whatever, but also you need to be working with clients that are on your level. Does that make sense? Because there's gonna be friction if someone's speaking one language here and someone's not speaking the same language here, or you're kind of like two boats missing each other in the night. So it's really about finding the right partner that can communicate and understands what you need are. And I think that that happens over the long term. Like I think that you find a partner, you get to know what they're looking for, you understand how their business runs, and you figure out how you can add value and help them. And then those services like expand. But everybody should be focused on kind of going back to what you were saying in the beginning. They need to be focused on the same set of KPIs. Like everybody needs to know what good looks like and what we're working towards to be successful.

SPEAKER_02 26:31

100%. And like even thinking about the lack of transparency, yeah, there's most marketers aren't given those business metrics from ownership. And I find that I'm I know people probably a lot of owners that disagree with this, but I find that to be completely unacceptable. You don't hire an accountant and not give them numbers, you don't hire a sales director and not give them numbers. Why on earth would you hire somebody to help you grow if you're not gonna give them numbers? It's crazy. Crazy town.

SPEAKER_01 27:03

Well, yeah, you know, there are some areas, right? If you're a doctor or a lawyer or something like that, like there's there's patient confidentiality, but you can strip out the names. But like, I think like some people, like you gotta, if you're gonna hire a marketer, you've got to be honest. Like, like, depending on the marketer you're hire, like if you're hiring a contractor and you're like, I'm gonna direct this person to do it, but if you're hiring somebody to come in and fix it, the solution, you gotta let them see the data. Like a lot of times we have to recreate the data for the client to say, here's the baseline that we're creating, because either you don't have one or or or you won't share it. Like, and I think it falls somewhere in the middle, but I think that there's like this level of trust to like giving people the keys to the kingdom and you know, all that. But I I think depending again, what type of client, what type of industry, there's there's certain levels of permissioning that need to be provided and certain amount of access to also understand like that engagement. But I think that that's been the biggest offset that I've seen over the years is what you need to be successful and what the client's willing to give you, or what the client has access to to put all that together in like a compressed time frame, which you're stepping into a business that you're trying to fix, like that they've been working on for however many years it is. Like you want me in six months to come in and understand your business and fix your business when I don't even understand how it operates. Like, and so a lot of what I've had to do, Maggie, is I I typically go in as a fractional, depending on the client, and like understand like what is going on in the business. And then I help kind of get the parts wired in to our team, right? And I'll build the pod and I'll figure out what they need and we'll have discussions about like, okay, like, do you want to hire this? Do you want this managed internally or do you want this external? Or like what do you need to do? But it it it quickly bridges that gap, which I had not as much comfort with early on of becoming a business consultant, right? Because like marketing is integral into like how everything is flowing, how everything customer retention, right? Right, you got some drip emails. Uh, maybe you got a customer list, you got a newsletter, you were talking about the messy middle. Like, there's so many different factors that fit in that typically nothing's already prepared, and they're like, here are all the tools, here's all the KPIs, here's everything you need. Get started. I would love that actually, but um, it doesn't always happen that way.

SPEAKER_03 29:51

It doesn't, it doesn't.

SPEAKER_02 29:53

And um, yeah, it can be, it's I mean, to everybody's defense, it's gotten so convoluted. Everybody's stressed, like the tariffs are crazy, the cost of running a business is crazy, the cost of employing people, and the especially obviously in the United States is insane. Um, and so I, you know, I get that everybody's, you know, as an entrepreneur and you're an entrepreneur, we both showed up and we're like, oh my God, everything's been going so fast. So I totally get it, but it's something that definitely needs to prior be prioritized if they want to take their growth seriously, if they want to feel confident in their decisions and if they want to feel confident in their forecasting.

SPEAKER_01 30:35

Absolutely. So in this discussion, we've we've covered a number of different things from like metrics to like the mess middle, from e-commerce to like lead gen businesses. Um, you know, I think that, and we and we've also talked about kind of the expectation with when you're either working with an agency or you're uh a contractor or your uh agency talking to a client of you got to get on that same page with that same vocabulary. Um, what else do you think, Maggie, would be helpful to this discussion for people that are listening to this to know? I hope you can edit this long pause out. Oh, I think it's great. I think we should keep it in.

SPEAKER_03 31:31

I mean, I feel like there's like hundreds of things, right?

SPEAKER_01 31:36

Um so like what what has been the biggest secret to success then? What has been the biggest secret to success when dealing with this?

SPEAKER_02 31:45

Well, I just I just found an answer to your initial question. Oh wow, let me let me let me get into that. And it goes into the messy middle, right? Because

Scope Clarity And Trust With Clients

SPEAKER_02 31:55

you get a you get a prospect or you get a client in the door, they've got their one conversion set up, purchase or contact us. The leadership only wants to invest in what's going to drive ROI. So not only is your middle a mess, but it's totally underinvested in. And even you see brand awareness totally underinvested in. And so I think part of the conversation, in addition to all of the things we talked about, is really breaking out the plan by the funnel stages of the funnel, really making sure that you're allocating enough for each stage of the funnel. Because ultimately, when you come to us and you've had really unsuccessful paid ads, most of the time we're finding either the investment isn't right, the person running it wasn't competent, or you're not driving people effectively through all stages of the buying funnel. You're just trying to go after the leads generated, right? So I think like as we come into 2027 planning, there's some refinement that you can do. Asking, let's break it down to what we've discussed so far, asking leadership for those business metrics that matter the most to the bottom line, uh, prioritizing hiring an expert, hire a freaking expert to go into your Google Analytics and your HubSpot CRM, whatever it is, making sure that your data infrastructure is sound, making sure that people are keeping it hygienic. And then next, making sure that in your plan, you're mapping out all stages of the buying funnel. So you get buy-in from the leadership, you set their expectations right out the gate, but then you're not coming in after quarter one, realizing that you just totally underinvested it in the middle of the funnel. So, and also the middle of the funnel is typically where we find the most conversion opportunities when it comes to a website that haven't been acted on, right? You've got so many assets that are already there that aren't set up as conversions or aren't gated or aren't even considered for middle of the funnel users. So definitely don't forget about that middle of the funnel, don't forget about the top of the funnel as you go after that lagging KPI, the beautiful sale, the new client, etc.

SPEAKER_01 34:16

So I love what you said there. And and what registered for me the most was we started this conversation about the KPIs for SEO, and your answer included analytics, uh business strategy, content creation, um, paid ads. I might have said that before, but I I heard like seven or eight different things. Like that that when we talk about SEO, I don't think people know what it is, at least my experience, which I it sounds like very similar to yours, is it's SEO is make my business work better, fix it all. Okay, like that's like get me leads with the bow on it and grow my business and do it all with as little amount of my effort as possible. And I think that that's the wrong frame. I really do. I think that's the wrong frame. And if you're gonna be bringing in a digital marketer or an SEO to help fix that piece of the business, they're all interconnected. Like you got to like system think about how all these things impact those other things, and you need to be able to elevate whoever you bring in to being part of your executive team. Like they need to have a voice in the room, or whoever is in that room, that person needs to make that person look like a champion and needs to be able to provide them all the information they have to be able to go to the CFO and say, this was helpful. It was funny. We were working with this publicly traded company, and um, we did a three-month engagement. We fixed everything they needed. They had a kind of a content flow issue that they needed to get stuff published. And, you know, going back to like get the second engagement, like we're still in the process of that. And it's been two months because you know, things take a while, they're still talking to us. In the two months that we've not done anything, but we set the trajectory. I I still are tracking the results. They're first for they're first for everything. Okay, they're absolutely first, but like it took like it didn't happen, it didn't happen immediately. Does that make sense? Like, oh, absolutely not, yeah. And then there was internal dependencies that they needed to get figured out, and like they were stacked up, you know, and they're like, hey, like we got to get this figured out before we like engage. And so there's been a lot of these conversations, but it's almost like you know, you're you gotta you gotta look in the rears of what we did last quarter is impacting this quarter because you know, from the conversation we have, they haven't done anything. It's just all this stuff that started to catch and started to pop, and then that drives like other big business cases. But yeah, I mean, you're you're not just dealing with SEO. Like if you're dealing with the enterprise company, you can't touch their website, right? Or you're dealing with IT, or you're dealing with their internal content approval team or investor team.

SPEAKER_03 37:29

Yeah, it's the biggest struggle.

SPEAKER_02 37:31

Um, and and the team, the IT team and the website team, I mean, it is they are not engineers, right? So you've got these people that are putting not only not prioritizing the SEO implementation, but they're also taking double the time to implement because they're trying to figure out what we're talking about. So that's definitely a huge struggle that a lot of our clients that where they don't want us to touch the website. That's like one of the biggest things for sure. For sure. Um

Fund The Messy Middle And Align Sales

SPEAKER_02 38:08

yeah, I think there's something else I wanted to say, but well, if you think of it, definitely.

SPEAKER_01 38:16

Um, I would love to hear from from you. Um, what are the most common uh like patches, like dependencies that you're running up against with when when you're when you're trying to get to this like numbers driven uh SEO economy that you're you're trying to build that that culture with the client of like here are the things we need to look at, here's the tracking, here's how you talk to your people and saying, you know, these are the things we need to be focused on because it's it's really the business use case of SEO, not the vanity metric use case. Like, where are you getting, where is your team getting stuck, and what have you done to overcome those things?

SPEAKER_02 39:00

I mean, I think just like naturally, just the client not having the right data, the sales team not utilizing the CRM, um, those are definitely the biggest roadblocks to actually getting the data that they want. Um and just the ROI stuff, like we talked about before.

SPEAKER_03 39:22

Like that just is that the question you were thinking that you were asking?

SPEAKER_01 39:25

Well, I like where you're going with uh bringing in the sales team. How do you think a sales team views SEO? And what is, you know, your view of like the marketing qualified lead and the sales qualified lead conversation?

SPEAKER_02 39:40

We make sales teams very happy, Matt. I feel like you can agree. Um I mean, ultimately, what we find to be the biggest barrier in the leads that we generate, producing and tracking, producing that ROI and the tracking and all that is the sales team basically not having their shit together, right? You've got salespeople that are not are very anti-CRM. Fire them immediately. They should not be on your team in this day and age. I'm sorry, but every salesperson you hire should be actively involved and excited about utilizing technology in a CRM. Um, they might not be doing any type of like CRM cleanup, they might not be effectively moving the lead from one stage of the deal to the next. So that's more on the management side, I think, is making sure not only is that buy-in there, not only is um are all of our hires technology focused, but they're also managing the hygiene as well, and that in the way that they need in order to get the reporting that they need. Um, the other aspect to this is there's that natural silo, that natural separation between sales and marketing, which is totally, totally outdated in this day and age. So sales and marketing need to talk. The marketing team can provide insights to the sales team, the sales team can tell the marketing team what are the most common objections, where where are you getting questions from, what are the most common questions that are being answered, because then this marketing team can apply those insights to their content and vice versa, and right content for the sales team. So we need to have marketing and sales also connected and working together to really bring about this like huge impact. So I think sales can be really, really happy. I think sales directors don't know most many of them, most of them that I talk to, VPs of sales, sales directors, most of them don't know um much about marketing, which I think um they probably should get to know it slightly when it comes to inbound leads, managing those, how to, how to sort of like ask for that, how to ask for the optimization of that. Um, but they certainly need to be meeting with the marketing team regularly because there's so much impact that the two departments can have when they come together.

SPEAKER_01 42:15

I I like that yeah, oh yeah.

SPEAKER_02 42:18

I'm a New Yorker, Matt. I'm a New Yorker. But you know what, Matt, too, is I don't think people realize how much data um can be utilized from marketing and from SEO across many departments, right? Like for product brands, you've got data on what people are searching for the most when you've got specific products or aesthetics, you've got trending topics, you've got your top pages. Um, there's so much data across the entire company that can be utilized from the SEO data that we get. And so that's also important to kind of note like where are things dropping off? What direction should we go in for product development? What should our messaging be? Um, what should our focus be?

SPEAKER_01 43:08

I think that SEOs have more data. Uh, and uh the more time I'm like cross-functional teams, uh, usually the our our team is the one providing all the analytics to the radio ads or the TV ads, like they the the marketing hasn't been data driven till digital marketing, and then really like SEO, you have to dig into it, like you said earlier. Like, like it's mostly data analysis, right? And it's math and algorithms. Um, I gotta get out of here, Maggie. I got a hard stop. Um, no, Matt, no, I gotta go. I gotta go. And so, but I think that we've had a great discussion. I want to give you the opportunity uh to share uh with everyone listening if they want to follow

Where To Follow Maggie Swift

SPEAKER_01 43:55

you, they want to find out more, they want to hire you. How do they best do that, Maggie Swift?

SPEAKER_03 44:00

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 44:00

Yeah, so uh follow me on LinkedIn for sure. We put a lot of great videos out, or so I heard, we put a lot of fun videos out when it comes to SEO. We are speaking to people who want to learn more about SEO, uh, not necessarily speaking to all of the other SEOs out there. So we're really wanting to bring content that's digestible, that you understand, that your ownership understands. Um, it'd be great if you followed me and kept in touch. Um, reach out to me anytime. You can hit me up on Maggie at unframedigital.com. My company name is Unframed Digital. We are a performance-driven search marketing agency um that specializes in building demand through Google and through AI and capturing demand through user experience and conversion strategies.

SPEAKER_01 44:49

Well, if y'all want that fire, all right, and and to get your data hygiene cleaned up, it's something that's important. Reach out to Maggie Swift uh at Unframe. So we'll put all your links in the show notes, Maggie. Thanks so much for coming on. Um, if you want to grow your business with the largest, most powerful planet on the internet, you should keep listening to this podcast. So uh until the next time, my name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for now.