Latest / Content, Briefly / Stratabeat: Tom Shapiro & Alexis Trammell on B2B SaaS SEO performance

Transcript

Stratabeat: Tom Shapiro & Alexis Trammell on B2B SaaS SEO performance · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  A lot of clients are, are posting great content, but either they're not taking a close look at SEO or they're posting not such great content, but, like- Mm-hmm... they're over-optimizing, right?
• 0:11
  Like, there's o- Yeah, yeah. There's, like, two big ways you can go. [upbeat music] Hey, and thanks so much for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly.
• 0:21
  Today, we're talking with Tom Shapiro and Alexis Trammell from Stratabeat. Stratabeat is an organic growth agency. They also happen to be Superpath's newest partner. They've been wonderful to work with.
• 0:31
  You'll see some of their ads in our newsletter, and I would encourage folks to go check out some of the services that they offer.
• 0:37
  Most of this conversation is about a report that they recently published about SEO performance among B2B companies from January twenty twenty-three to January twenty twenty-four.
• 0:47
  We talk all about the methodology and some of the findings. Pretty interesting, though.
• 0:51
  I mean, basically what this reveals is the way that the highest performing B2B SaaS sites acquire organic traffic, and so we walk through kind of what those tactics are, some best practices.
• 1:03
  We talk through the difference between pursuing those tactics or not, and how you might be able to forecast traffic based on doing that, et cetera. So anyways, I would encourage you to go check out the report.
• 1:13
  It's in the show notes if you wanna download it. You know, definitely data is often best visualized. Talking through chart is sometimes not as clear as just looking at it, so definitely go download it and check it out.
• 1:23
  It's free, of course. Really appreciate Tom and Alexis coming on. It was great to chat with them. As always, I enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do too. Hey, everybody.
• 1:32
  Jimmy from Superpath here today with another episode of Content Briefly. Very happy to have two folks from the Stratabeat team, Tom Shapiro, founder and CEO, and Alexis Trammell, chief growth officer.
• 1:43
  First, thank you both so much for being here. I think this is actually the first podcast we've done in almost 60 episodes with two guests, so [chuckles] better late than never.
• 1:53
  Maybe first, would you mind each introducing yourself? Tell us a bit about who you are, some of the work you've been up to, and then your role at Stratabeat. Sure. Sure. Happy to. So yeah, Alexis Trammell here.
• 2:02
  I've been with Stratabeat for almost six years now. We work with B2B tech and SaaS companies. We've worked with the gamut, the whole, whole gamut.
• 2:12
  We're an organic growth agency, so our services include SEO, content marketing, conversion rate optimization. We love blogging, we love behavioral science, neuroscience, behavioral analytics.
• 2:25
  And something that's really unique about us too is that we also align ICP fit with the content that we create through IP detection software. So to ensure- Cool...
• 2:36
  that our clients are attracting the correct people to their content and converting the companies that they're looking for in their B2B sector, we will identify which logos and people are on their website, what are they digesting, and where are they converting.
• 2:52
  Okay. I have follow-up questions for you about that, for sure. Okay. [laughs] Great. But, but yeah, maybe first, yeah, Tom, will you please intro yourself too? Yeah. Sure, sure. So I'm Tom Shapiro.
• 3:01
  I'm the founder and CEO of Stratabeat. So yeah, I've been in the digital space forever. The first website that I developed was in nineteen ninety-four, so [laughs] several years before Google even existed.
• 3:13
  That's awesome. So I've seen a lot of evolution through the years, and it's been so much fun going through the whole process.
• 3:19
  Essentially, y-yeah, Alexis has explained everything that Stratabeat is and what we're about and who we serve and all of that good stuff.
• 3:26
  I will say that just personally, I have also written two books, one called "Rethink Your Marketing," another called "Rethink Lead Generation." They're both available in Amazon.
• 3:35
  And it's all about just not just taking a cookie cutter approach, not just copying the competition, not just doing what you've done in the past, but really having a backbone, right?
• 3:45
  And making bold moves, moves that really unleash growth. I have over 70 different case studies in the two books, and in literally every single case, the company was bold in their action.
• 3:56
  They, they pushed their chips into the middle of the table, and they took bold action.
• 4:00
  And so, you know, that's what we're all about with our clients as well, is helping them to move out of their comfort zone, try new things, be innovative, but in a very meaningful, impactful way that's going to influence business results.
• 4:14
  So not just vanity metrics, but business results. Yeah. I love that.
• 4:17
  No better time for companies to be thinking about bold moves than right now, just with all the kind of chaos and disruption that's gone on for the past year or so. Tom, could you give us the origin story of Stratabeat?
• 4:28
  You started the business, I think twelve, 12 years ago, maybe even a little bit longer than that. Yeah, 13 years ago. Yeah. And [chuckles] I started it in my dining room with a laptop and a cell phone, and that was it.
• 4:41
  Nice. Before that, I was at a company called iProspect. I was the 85th employee.
• 4:47
  And on the second day of my job, I was pulled into a conference room with several other people at the company by the CEO, and he shut the door, and he locked it. [laughs] And he said, "We have to fix this problem."
• 5:01
  You know, essentially the-- that agency was not able to make any sales at that time. There were 85 people at the company.
• 5:08
  It was just one location, and it was an SEO and PPC agency at the time, and, uh, really just, just, it couldn't beat the main competitor in the market at that time.
• 5:19
  And so I started asking a lot of questions, started introducing a lot of new ideas, and we collectively as a team launched a lot of new initiatives. We completely changed the way that we-- some of our marketing.
• 5:30
  We changed the way that we did sales. For example, we went from these massive, massive trade shows where you're spending, like, $50,000 a shot to introducing local road shows.
• 5:40
  The local road show actually turned out to be our number one leads driver after that. We went from 85 people, Jimmy, from 85 to over 700 people in five years. Oh, wow. Wow. Five years.
• 5:53
  I experienced that, and then because iProspect really only focused on SEO and PPC at the timeAnd I was having conversations with Fortune 500 CMOs and VPs of marketing that was much broader in nature.
• 6:08
  We would talk about their website, we would talk about their content, we would talk about the design of their website, right? It would be much more than just SEO and just PPC, right?
• 6:17
  And I got the itch to solve bigger problems. And so that's why I decided it was time to move away from iProspect.
• 6:27
  I love the company, love the people, brilliant people, wonderful people, but I just decided it was time to move on and start something fresh where we could be more impactful and not just limited to SEO and PPC solutions, but if we see a CRO problem, go ahead and fix it.
• 6:45
  If we see a web design problem, go ahead and fix it. So just having more tools in the toolbox. Yeah. Yeah. That's really cool. That's really cool.
• 6:53
  I imagine it's been a pretty fascinating journey from 2011 or so [chuckles] to now.
• 7:00
  Are there, like, a couple of things you could, you could point out over that 13-year time span that have either changed dramatically or are exactly the same as when you started Stratabeat? Yeah. Yeah.
• 7:14
  So one thing that dramatically changed for us internally was when, when I started at my dining room table, [chuckles]
• 7:21
  I, it, you know, basically was open to doing business with any type of company, whether it was B2B or B2C.
• 7:28
  Along the journey, we decided to go exclusively B2B, and really today it's evolved where we're B2B for tech and SaaS. Like, that is our audience.
• 7:42
  And by technology, you know, we mean it could be medical technology, it could be sensoring technology, it could be technology for factories, right? It could be green technology.
• 7:54
  And like Alexis mentioned, and like I'm mentioning now, any type of B2B SaaS as well.
• 8:00
  And so it is the full spectrum of technology solutions, whereas again, the contrast with the initial days was, you know, I, I was just open for business with any type of company.
• 8:10
  So that, that internally, that's one of the biggest changes. Another change was when I started, we were both organic and paid growth solutions.
• 8:21
  Today, we are strictly 100% organic growth solutions, so like Alexis mentioned, right? SEO, CRO, content strategy, content development, web design, all of these things where we have to earn the click.
• 8:35
  We have to earn every click, right?
• 8:37
  We look at paid media as really renting an audience and organic growth as earning that audience, and then over time that can com- your results can compound over time, whereas with, you know, paid media, as soon as you stop spending, it literally goes to zero.
• 8:53
  And so yeah, just some of the changes internally, I think that those two were two of the biggest.
• 8:59
  And then in the market, it's been interesting to see that, that there is so much more sophistication today in the market with brands, especially with content strategy and content marketing, and to a certain extent with SEO.
• 9:14
  You know, it's very, very different than it was 13 years ago. Absolutely.
• 9:18
  And we're gonna, we're gonna talk about some of those changes in a second because you all have recently run this survey and put together a report on SEO performance, and I have a bunch of questions about that.
• 9:28
  But Alexis, I wanted to ask you too, you mentioned you've been there for six years. Agencies are notorious for employee turnover, [laughs] and six years is a good long run. What's different about Stratabeat?
• 9:39
  And tell us a little bit about how your role has changed over those six years too. Absolutely. Yeah.
• 9:42
  So starting at Stratabeat I was, you know, mainly an account director, so I was a main point of contact with a lot of our clients, and now I get to be head of strategy for our clients.
• 9:52
  So one, that's a lot more fun for me.
• 9:55
  [chuckles] And then, you know, over the years, you know, from account director, I started taking over operations, and now I'm taking over marketing, and I think that that transition has been really interesting and just fun.
• 10:08
  And I mean, I don't wanna say this in front of Tom, but the truth is that he's literally the best CEO out there. He's the best boss I've ever had.
• 10:14
  So it's hard to leave a place when you know that, you know, your autonomy is respected and your team is, you know, wants to win as much as you want to win, and we just have that genuine care for our clients where, you know, we don't go after, we don't chase every dollar, right?
• 10:32
  We wanna work with people that we really feel like we can make a big impact for, which is why we have such great case studies on our website.
• 10:39
  So I think that just being able to win in those areas is just so exciting and just makes you wanna stay. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. That's awesome. Those are some feel-good vibes. I love that. [laughs] Okay.
• 10:50
  Let's dive into this report. So Stratabeat has recently published a report, B2B SaaS SEO Performance Report. You looked at 250 websites, and you tracked their SEO performance over 12 months.
• 11:03
  Maybe first, why did you do this? [chuckles] And I'll give some context.
• 11:06
  So we at Superpath did a State of Content Report back in the fall, and I wanted to do it because I just felt like I'm hearing so many stories, and I don't know what to make of anything right now. Yeah.
• 11:17
  You know, it's like everyone's using AI-generated content, or, you know, SEO budgets are decreasing, or, you know, teams are shrinking and all these things, and we're like, "We need to get some data to back this stuff up," which was fascinating.
• 11:27
  And I'm curious if this is,
• 11:29
  you know, you're trying to do a similar thing where you're sort of backing up some of the anecdotes you hear from customers and prospects, or is this an annual thing that you put out every year kind of regardless of what else is happening in the greater marketing world?
• 11:42
  The reason why we did it was because, yeah, we were hearing different things, we were reading different things online.
• 11:48
  We're also seeing a lot of generic advice online that, you know, was not specific to B2B technology, right?
• 11:54
  But B2B SaaS and technology companies, you know, are very-- it's a very specific niche, and we wanted to confirm with actual evidence, with actual data what's working and what's not working in Google today.
• 12:07
  Also-This is in parallel with all the many, many changes that Google is introducing, right? And so no one [chuckles] knows what's going on right now.
• 12:15
  No one has a definitive answer for everything in terms of, you know, what it's gonna take to succeed this year in Google. So we just wanted it to be data-based. Mm-hmm.
• 12:25
  And this is something that we just started this year, but we are already deep into the next round of analysis. So in other words, this is going to be a rolling, continuous type of study.
• 12:37
  It's not just a one and done where we're gonna be feeding you data that's a year old a year from now, right?
• 12:43
  Like, every quarter, we are going to be rolling out new data, updated fresh stats so that, again, everything is evidence-based.
• 12:51
  So we can see, all right, so AI overviews just came out this past week, we can see, okay, what is the impact of that in the next study, right? Yeah. That's really cool.
• 13:00
  You know, this is kind of a side note, I think the AI overviews are kinda good. I like them. I mean, [chuckles] I feel like for all the sort of fear around, like, how is AI gonna disrupt search, I...
• 13:11
  I mean, I know this is, like, the first tiniest little iteration, but I think the AI overviews are good, and your links to the citations are still there. I don't know.
• 13:19
  It has me feeling a little bit more [chuckles] optimistic. Yeah. So we actually just went over this with one of our clients this morning, and we were showing them where they were the featured content- Yeah...
• 13:29
  in the AI overview. So there are ways that, that you can win there, but also everyone just needs to realize it's all about providing massive, overwhelming value to your readers. Yeah.
• 13:39
  And the more that you're doing that, the more that you're probably moving into the middle of the funnel, right?
• 13:44
  So you're not so much at the tippy top of the funnel, where AI overviews is going to probably dominate, but the middle of the funnel is where you can talk about your experiences, your expertise.
• 13:55
  It can be more product-led content. It can be more audience segmented content. It can be more sophisticated content, more for experts, right?
• 14:03
  And so we are leaning more and more into the MOFU and the BOFU type of content with the understanding that, yes, over the long term, probably Google and AI overviews or whatever they call it next year [chuckles] Yeah...
• 14:16
  is, is, is probably going to start eating a percentage of the market share there. Yeah, yeah. Got it. That makes sense.
• 14:23
  Could you talk a little bit about the methodology of the survey, just so folks understand where the data comes from and what type of sites it's coming from? Yeah.
• 14:32
  So we selected 250 B2B SaaS websites, so it's all B2B, it's all SaaS, right? And originally we selected 350, but we did whittle that down to 250.
• 14:46
  The methodology that we used was we were looking at websites that had a sufficient sample size of data.
• 14:53
  So in other words, if you were a startup last year, you didn't make the cut because we just didn't have enough data to go with.
• 15:00
  Or let's say that, that you weren't even a startup that-- but maybe you've been around a while, but you just haven't gained a lot of organic traction, then we didn't include that website in the study.
• 15:10
  On the other side of the spectrum, we excluded any website that had more than 10 million organic unique visits in a month. Because we originally had included those websites, but it was skewing all the data.
• 15:23
  It is so different when you look at the websites that have up to, but not over 10 million a month compared to those that are well over 10 million a month.
• 15:33
  And so we just thought that it was a more accurate description of, say, 95% of the market if we just limit it to those websites. Got it. That makes sense. That makes sense. So, like, the data in here is
• 15:46
  these are realistic goals that your average B2B SaaS company could set, right?
• 15:50
  Like, they could use this data to think about, like, "Oh, well, if we increase our content output by X, we could reasonably expect organic traffic would increase by Y," type thing. Exactly. Exactly.
• 16:00
  And what we looked at was Google top 10 rankings, organic traffic, referring domains, backlinks, things like that. Cool. Cool. Let's dive into some of the data. There's some really interesting stuff in here.
• 16:12
  So basically what you did is you looked at the various ways that companies try to capture organic traffic, so content creation, creating free tools, doing original research, white papers, et cetera, and then kind of compared and contrasted the results based on kind of how much they do, how much of that thing that they do, the traffic increase, decrease, et cetera.
• 16:32
  You should download the report. It's free, and we'll have a link to make sure that people can go do it, 'cause sometimes data is obviously best visualized rather than talked about.
• 16:41
  The first thing that stood out to me is the, the first section about increasing the cadence of new content and the correlation there with increased traffic.
• 16:51
  Interestingly, I was just the other day reading this sort of insane [chuckles]
• 16:56
  LinkedIn thread where people were having this debate about quality versus quantity, and I kind of felt like, I feel like we've been doing this for, like, my en- as long as I've worked in marketing.
• 17:07
  Interestingly, there was some very strong arguments for quantity, uh, but not a lot of data to back it up. Now, like, this data does back it up.
• 17:16
  I will just, before asking you guys to provide some additional context, say that, you know, the kind of low cadence versus high cadence that you compared was one to four blog posts a month versus five to eight, so it's not, like, an insane amount.
• 17:28
  It's not 100 blog posts a month. Right. Although I'm wondering- Right... if there were a few in there that fell far outside that five to eight range, which seemed to be a sweet spot for increasing organic traffic.
• 17:39
  For sure. Yeah. We did see some that do fall outside of that range, and those are the ones that we would consider they're dominating.
• 17:46
  But there's, like, this point of equilibrium, right, in terms of, like, effort versus return, and that's something we really wanted to dive deep into. You wanna tell us about those details, Tom? Yeah, yeah.
• 17:56
  So it's really interesting. So the top performers out of the entire 250 websites that we looked at actually were blogging 11 times a month, right? So the, the top 10% were blogging more than eight times.
• 18:10
  They, they were blogging on average 11 times, but it...
• 18:13
  you know, some were blogging f- 15 times a monthWe had one website where they were blogging 22 times a month and they experienced a 182.2% increase in organic traffic, monthly organic traffic- Mm-hmm... year over year.
• 18:28
  And so if we do compare on average those websites that are only blogging one to four times a month versus five to eight times a month, there's a massive, massive difference.
• 18:39
  But we're not saying to limit it to five to eight times a month. We're saying that's the minimum. Yeah. We're saying if you want to maximize your result, really you should be starting at five to eight times a month.
• 18:50
  And what we found was in terms of Google top 10 rankings, those who are blogging five to eight times a month increased their Google top 10 keywords by close to 48%.
• 19:02
  Those who were blogging only one to four times a month, it was under 11%. If we talk about traffic, it's even more drastic of a difference.
• 19:10
  So those who were blogging five to eight times a month increased their organic monthly traffic by 103.3%, and those who were blogging only one to four times a month, it was nearly 12%.
• 19:23
  And so you're talking about an 8.5 times differential.
• 19:28
  And so if you're already blogging, let's say a few times a month, let's say, you know, two or three times a month, it's low-hanging fruit just to increase the cadence. Mm-hmm. Right?
• 19:36
  You already have the infrastructure in place, you have the process in place, you have the technology in place. You're already doing it, all you need to do is increase the frequency.
• 19:43
  So we feel like that is a fantastic place to start.
• 19:47
  If you are, let's say, a B2B technology company and you're looking at, at what's a quick win, what's something that we can do today that's gonna have an, a- an earlier, faster impact, well, right there, if you're already blogging but you're only blogging up to four times a month, just increase the cadence, just increase the frequency.
• 20:04
  Double it to eight times a month and you could increase your impact, you can increase your organic traffic by 8.5 times. I mean, that's a massive ROI on the slightly incremental effort, right?
• 20:15
  And then again, if we go back to the top performers, don't just limit yourself to that.
• 20:19
  As soon as you're ready to publish more, just know that the top performers in the study, the top 10%, on average were blogging 11 times a month.
• 20:28
  Okay, this might not be an easy question to ask, but it, it sounds simpler than [chuckles] I think it really is.
• 20:33
  Okay, so imagine a potential customer comes to you, Alexis, and says, "Okay, we, you know, we blog two times a month, but we wanna be a top performer. What should the other nine posts per month be to get us to 11?"
• 20:47
  You know, like is it...
• 20:48
  Are you all advising people to kinda pour all of this energy into more content specifically for SEO, or are you finding that even if the content output isn't all exclusively focused on SEO, that you're still reaping some of the benefit?
• 21:02
  Yeah. So we're big believers in, you know, SEO. We believe that, you know, you-- the dividends are incredible and, you know, the results compound over time.
• 21:09
  So we almost always will recommend, you know, yeah, let's write great content for SEO purposes.
• 21:15
  But I think that your question really is, you know, are you talking about top of funnel, mid-funnel, bottom of funnel, right? Yeah. And so
• 21:22
  what we love to do is take a look at, okay, so what type of content are you posting today? Is it mostly top of funnel?
• 21:28
  Okay, let's think about some mid-funnel content, like maybe some product-led SEO, product-led content that we can put in there and just get a good mix so that we can pull people through that funnel, that marketing funnel in your blog or, you know, in your resources section.
• 21:44
  We're big fans of, you know, the topic clusters, the hub and spoke model and all of that, so we're, we're finding that a lot of clients are posting great content, but either they're not taking a close look at SEO or they're posting not such great content, but like they're over-optimizing.
• 21:59
  Mm-hmm. Right? Like there's w- Yeah, yeah... there's like two big ways you can go. And so whenever we are talking to a client and they say, "We're only publishing twice a month.
• 22:07
  We know that we should be publishing, you know, five to eight times a month. What should that extra content be?"
• 22:12
  I mean, we've got thousands of ideas for you, but first let's see where you're ranking, let's see where there's some striking distance, and let's see how we can pull people through that sales funnel. Yeah, yeah.
• 22:21
  What do you find are the roadblocks, in your opinion and, and experience, like why doesn't everyone just publish more content? 'Cause it does... Like this is excellent data to back it up. Right.
• 22:31
  Um, and it definitely validates a belief that I think most marketers have, which is that if they do more of this good thing that is already working, that it will probably be better, but then obviously many don't.
• 22:43
  Are there a couple of things that you find prevent people from doing it? I think that one of the biggest factors we see across a lot of clients is, you know, a lot of companies have a, have a lot of red tape, right?
• 22:55
  They have too many cooks in the kitchen. They may have a lot of freelancers, but too many people are trying [chuckles] to edit the content, right? And so getting it published is a huge to-do.
• 23:04
  We recommend limiting that number of people that need to review. Maybe, you know, rather than reviewing the final piece, maybe they can review the content brief instead, you know?
• 23:13
  And just figuring out like where do you actually need people to enter that approval process, or do you even need them in that approval process at all?
• 23:21
  Another hindrance we see is, I mean, we just had one of our clients fire their other freelancers because they loved our content so much. They literally said to us, "Hey, so I was behind. I didn't..."
• 23:35
  [chuckles] What did they say? They said, "So we're late on this deadline.
• 23:38
  We didn't edit it in time literally just because I was not looking forward to editing this content 'cause I was expecting it to suck because all of our other content [chuckles] typically sucks whenever another writer writes it, so we have to write it ourselves most of the time."
• 23:51
  And so find a great agency that writes really well, like really interviews you, interviews subject matter experts, and just really knows what they're doing because this agency, they were like...
• 24:02
  Or this client didn't want to edit it 'cause they were expecting it to suck, and then they read it and they're like, "Oh my gosh, what a breath of fresh air.
• 24:07
  This is actually really good, and now I'm looking forward to editing the content [chuckles] that you send us." Yeah, yeah. And now... And they give us the quickest approvals ever now.
• 24:15
  So-I think that's a big thing is, you know, making sure that the content is solid, you have a great writer, and don't have too many people in the approval process.
• 24:23
  I'm sure there are others you can think of, Tom, too, but those are two huge roadblocks that we come up against.
• 24:29
  Yeah, and I think the, the mentality that a lot of companies have towards content is very outdated, and it's-- they're thinking too small, right?
• 24:39
  Like, content can have a very big business impact, yet you talk to CEOs, you talk to CMOs, and a lot of them don't understand that, right?
• 24:48
  Like, they think, "Oh, well, you know, we wanna get traffic, and, you know, let's create some blogs, let's create some white papers," and things like that. But what we wanna really look at is the business impact, right?
• 25:00
  And so just to give you a couple of examples, like, one company that we started with, they were a hundred and sixty employees when we started. We started cranking out a lot of content.
• 25:09
  It was around fifteen thousand words of content a month for them, in addition to lead magnets. And some of those lead magnets were literally, literally over ninety pages long. Uh-huh.
• 25:19
  Just, you know, we put a lot of the effort into content as a growth driver.
• 25:23
  And they went from a hundred and sixty employees to four hundred and twelve in three years, and they went all the way to four hundred and seventy in four years of working with them. Oh, wow.
• 25:32
  Another company went from fifty employees to two hundred and fifty employees in two years. Another went from seventy-five employees to two hundred and seventy in a few years. And so on and on and on.
• 25:43
  You see where, what I'm getting at with this is that you can use content to drive business growth as opposed to just talking about, oh, how many times are we publishing, you know, as a marketing team, and, oh, like, how many words should we write, and things like that.
• 25:59
  When you start looking at the business impact, it changes the prism, right? It changes everything.
• 26:05
  And instead of just writing content, what you're doing is you're creating a content platform that is really a growth platform, right?
• 26:13
  You have to-- We love behavioral intelligence, and so we're always looking at what exactly are they doing inside of the content. What are they looking at? What are they ignoring and skipping, right?
• 26:24
  What are they clicking on? What are they not clicking on? Where are things placed?
• 26:27
  And really examining it at that type of depth to understand how this drives growth rather than just looking at it on a superficial level, which I fear that a lot of companies are still doing. It's lead generation.
• 26:40
  Yeah, yeah. I feel like too, not enough people are looking at it as demand generation. It is lead generation. Like, this is how you do account-based marketing. This is how you educate your prospects.
• 26:50
  This is-- I mean, it's so powerful on so many levels, so you have to think of it that way as well. Yeah. You know, I think this might be the right time to ask you about audience segmentation.
• 27:01
  Sort of skipping ahead in the report a little bit, but there's a whole section on audience segmentation, and that stood out to me because I don't typically think of audience segmentation and SEO kind of in the same sentence.
• 27:14
  You know, I think of audience segmentation as something that's more closely aligned with, like, paid advertising, for example.
• 27:19
  I guess maybe first, before we talk about some of the data, can you explain, when you think of audience segmentation in the context of SEO, what are we talking about? Yeah.
• 27:27
  We're talking mainly about industry segmentation.
• 27:30
  So for instance, with B2B, oftentimes what you'll find is that the company is targeting either the healthcare sector or financial services or construction or technology or hospitality.
• 27:43
  And so we were looking at whether the company actually segmented the audience and had content supporting segmented audiences in their website versus those who did not segment by industry.
• 27:56
  And so for the more practical people out there, think about longer tail keywords, right?
• 27:59
  So for instance, you know, Stratabeat has B2B marketing strategies for SaaS, B2B marketing strategies for tech, B2B marketing strategies for fintech, and then B2B marketing strategies for green tech.
• 28:11
  Like, things like that, just longer tail things so that people can read this content and realize, "Oh, this is gonna be very specific and tailored to my exact pain points." Got it, got it. Okay.
• 28:22
  I'm just trying to think of, like, an example. Like, say your Greenhouse, the applicant tracking system. Yeah. You know, B2B SaaS, but it-- obviously, everyone needs to hire.
• 28:32
  It's nuanced depending on if you're in hospitality, construction, financial services, et cetera. So you're saying that there would be content created specifically for hiring for construction companies, hiring for- Yes...
• 28:43
  financial services companies, et cetera. Right. Got it. So imagine targeting the keyword, like, best recruiting practices or, or recruiting best practices, something like that.
• 28:52
  Then you can segment that for best recruiting practices in healthcare, right? Recruiting best practices in financial services, recruiting best practices in technology, right? On and on and on.
• 29:04
  And it's actually easier to succeed in SEO when you do this. So there's less competition. It's longer tail, as Alexis said, right? There is lower search volume. There is. You have to expect that.
• 29:16
  And so you're not gonna see massive traffic increases by taking this strategy, but what we found is you will see a massive increase in the number of Google top ten rankings that you achieve, as well as in referring domains as well.
• 29:31
  So on average, those websites in our study who segmented their audience, they saw an increase in Google top ten keywords of close to thirty-two percent. Oh, wow. It's, it-- Yeah, it's pretty significant, right?
• 29:44
  It was two point six times a larger increase than what those websites that were not segmenting the audience experience.
• 29:52
  And for those who did segment the audience and saw an increase, the average increase, the average for those was close to forty-nine percent increase year over year. And so just a massive, massive increase.
• 30:03
  And then if you look at the increase in referring domains, which is all, you know, about backlinks, how many websites are pointing links at you, they saw an increase on average of twenty-nine point three percent-- I'm sorry, a, a growth rate in their referring domains of twenty-nine point three percent o- year over year.
• 30:20
  And so again, that's a pretty significant growth rateWhen you're talking about all the different possibilities of what you could be doing, audience segmentation is really effect- On top of that too, and this is-- you know, we don't know the conversion rates in our study, so this is not in the study.
• 30:34
  But anecdotally, we know too that if you're doing audience segmentation in your content, you're also gonna have higher conversion rates. That's what I wanted to ask you about.
• 30:43
  Yeah, because it-- I could-- If you had told me that the companies who are doing a lot of audience segmentation actually are getting less organic traffic, but they're converting at a much higher rate, I would've been like, "Okay."
• 30:53
  Yeah. "I mean, that makes sense."
• 30:54
  But it-- So I find it fascinating that they're getting actually more organic traffic, and, like, even if the data's not in this report, as you said, Alexis, you could expect that they would be converting at a better rate, too.
• 31:04
  Right. Yeah. That's exactly what we see with our clients because we, we recommend this strategy often, right? We-we're firm believers in the power of audience segmentation. Now we have the data to back it up.
• 31:15
  You know, previously it was just anecdotal that, oh, well, this has worked for us many times in the past. Let's do it again.
• 31:21
  Now we have definitive data showing that, yeah, actually this does work when you compare it against websites that don't do it. But it's something that we've been seeing for years with our clients.
• 31:31
  As Alexis said, we see it for ourselves as well. You know, at the beginning, Alexis, you mentioned using IP detection software to help your customers understand which companies... I don't know exactly how this works.
• 31:42
  I'm assuming that you can track an IP, that some software thing somewhere pulls in the logos, and then your customer can understand, okay, like, this content is reaching people inside of these companies.
• 31:54
  Is that kind of more or less how that works? Yeah. Yeah. So there are tools where you can see exactly which companies are visiting which pages from which source as well.
• 32:03
  So they came from, you know, organic search, or they came from PPC, or they came from social. And so you can see how they entered your website, and then you can see which pages they went to on your website.
• 32:15
  We love using this software because, one, it proves that we're attracting the right audiences, right? That we evaluated search intent and we did our job well.
• 32:24
  On top of that, we love, you know, showing the client, hey, this specific company has a really high intent to buy here pretty soon.
• 32:32
  Like, they were going through all your money pages, your product pages, your contact page, but maybe they didn't submit a form. And most of the time that's the case, is they did not submit a form.
• 32:41
  But you know that they're interested, they're, you know, shopping. So maybe you should send this to your sales team and tell them, "Hey, are you interested in X, Y, and Z?"
• 32:50
  And you know exactly which pages they were on, so you know which products they're interested in. So why don't you just pitch those products to them right away and, you know, they're fairly warm at that point. Yeah. Yeah.
• 33:00
  Definitely. That's fascinating actually [chuckles] because the-- You know, we talk about content attribution constantly. You know, like, this thread comes up in Superpath every single week basically.
• 33:09
  I don't think I've ever heard anyone talk about using software like this to track who's on the site and where do they come from and what do they do.
• 33:16
  Like, what a, what a really cool way to figure out are you reaching the right people or not.
• 33:22
  So I'm kind of, like, surprised at how sort of obvious that is, but I guess maybe I didn't really know there was tools that did that. So I would imagine there's a lot of others too. Yeah.
• 33:30
  So, so Jimmy, think, think of it this way. Ninety-five to, let's say, ninety-nine percent of site visitors for any website, right, are probably not gonna fill out a form. They're not gonna contact the company, right?
• 33:41
  So you don't know who they are. So you do not know who they are. Yeah. So it's an incredible opportunity. This is one of the biggest opportunities.
• 33:50
  Honestly, one of the biggest opportunities for marketers is to identify that ninety-five to ninety-nine percent. Now, the software is not gonna be a hundred percent where, where it captures everyone.
• 34:00
  But it's going to capture a majority of the site visitors.
• 34:04
  And imagine, imagine just having that on a daily basis, knowing which specific companies were on your site, and oh, hey, there were three different people from this one company, which is our ICP, that were looking at this and that and this and that on our site yesterday at the same time, so clearly they were talking to one another.
• 34:22
  Clearly, what a great opportunity for us to start engaging with them, right? Yeah. Yeah. And it baffles us that more marketers are not doing this. Like, we love doing this. We lean into it. We prioritize it.
• 34:32
  It is invaluable.
• 34:34
  And it amazes us that the marketing world doesn't talk about this, doesn't focus on it, and just kind of ignores it and just wants to focus on aggregate data and looks at, like, GA4 data and Adobe Analytics data instead of, hey, this is what our ICP's doing.
• 34:48
  How are we gonna engage with them? Yeah. Yeah. You know, sometimes if it doesn't fit neatly in a spreadsheet, it's not data. Yeah. You know, or at least that's the-- sometimes I, uh, like, uh, what I find.
• 34:58
  I'm gonna, like I said, put a link to the report in the show notes. There's a lot here.
• 35:01
  Like, we're obviously not gonna be able to discuss every single data point, but I would really encourage folks to go check it out 'cause there's a lot of really good stuff in here.
• 35:07
  I'm curious, I was gonna ask you what's the most surprising thing you found, but I, I think a better question is maybe what's the most important thing you found?
• 35:16
  Because it could be that it's not something new that surprised you, but something evergreen that is as important as ever. Uh- Yeah... so I'm just curious, like, where, what is it-- What stands out?
• 35:25
  So what really stood out as being amazingly effective across the board was things like original research and online tools, these, these value-added pieces of content.
• 35:38
  And so I'll just give an example, like original research, so which, you know, is exactly what our study is, right? And we can explain, like- Yeah, totally...
• 35:45
  everything that we're doing with the study and all the different benefits that you get from it. It's not just the traffic that you get in your website. There's so many benefits.
• 35:52
  But if we look at the study and those websites that were offering original research versus those that were not offering original research, there's a big discrepancy, right?
• 36:03
  So what we were finding was that those that offered original research increased their Google top 10 rankings by twenty-five point one percent year over year, which was a two point three X larger growth rate than those who were not offering original research.
• 36:18
  So pretty massive. And then same thing on the referring domains growth. We saw a twenty-eight point five percent increase in referring domains year over year for those websites offering the original research.
• 36:29
  Now, going beyond the study, what we-Can tell you is there's so many other benefits of original research that go far beyond SEO traffic or backlinks or things like that.
• 36:41
  So for example, with Stratabeat, we conducted this study of two hundred and fifty websites.
• 36:46
  We came out with it, and just you can look at all the different marketing that we are able to do and all the different opportunities for us to engage with our audience because we have this unique proprietary data, right?
• 36:58
  We are speaking at multiple industry conferences this year revealing the data, right, at different points during the year. So it'll be different refreshes of the data at different points during the year.
• 37:08
  Podcast interviews like this one, right? You know, blogging opportunities. Also sales opportunities. When we're in- Yeah, I was gonna say... a sales conversation, right? Show the data. Bringing it up. Yeah. Yeah.
• 37:19
  Show the data, share the data, and you would be the only ones with that data in the world, right? Yeah. In addition, lead generation. I can't tell you how powerful it's been on lead generation.
• 37:28
  So just understand that the benefits go so far beyond SEO that we would really encourage everyone listening, if you're not doing original research today, rethink that strategy and consider even if you start small, that's fine, but there, there are so many different benefits to it.
• 37:46
  We would strongly recommend it. Love it. Yeah.
• 37:48
  I find that for almost any company I talk to that is having a little bit of uncertainty about content marketing these days, because I do feel there's been a slight loss of confidence in it over the last year or so, uh, primarily around SEO.
• 38:03
  This data debunks most of that, which I find to be fascinating. But original research is the one thing that most companies aren't doing, which is the most odd.
• 38:10
  They could do, and then that data becomes sort of, as you said, Tom, it's like the atomic unit that can then be repurposed in a hundred different ways.
• 38:19
  In a content, uh, context, but also like you said, sales, lead gen, conferences, speaking, I mean, that, that stuff is, that stuff is invaluable. Difficult to measure. I think of it actually kind of like podcasting.
• 38:30
  You know, it's like these conversations are content in and of themselves, but it's also like my customer research. There's snippets, etc. So great stuff. Original research, do more of that for sure. Cool.
• 38:41
  Tom and Alexis, thank you so much for taking the time. Like I said, link to the report will be in the show notes. Anywhere else we should point people to learn more about Stratabeat and both of you?
• 38:51
  They can certainly come to the main website, stratabeat.com, and, uh, we have a, you know, a wealth of content there as well.
• 38:58
  Uh, also, I would recommend visiting our LinkedIn page, and you can also connect with myself and Alexis on LinkedIn. We're very active there and would love to engage in conversations with everyone. Awesome. Cool.
• 39:10
  Thank you both. Really appreciate the time. Thank you also for doing the research. Just so much value for the community, uh, in g-go-- to taking the effort to, to do it and publish it, so we all appreciate that too.
• 39:21
  Um, and I hope we can do it again sometime. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much, Jimmy- Yeah... for having us. Yeah. Thank you. Take care. [outro music]