 And this is my way to spot the Hungarians in the audience. But otherwise, at least now you heard some Hungarian rap. Look at all of you. I mean, this is amazing. You've all taken the time and the effort to be here and to learn new things, which is incredible, which is why I'd really like to start my talk today with this one word, curiosity. Now, this word is often being mentioned as a trait that's really crucial for SEOs, to be and stay curious throughout learning new things every day, especially here in the last few days, right, as our industry changes, to test new things or all tactics even, we've heard about this. Curiosity is really something that, in my opinion, stays one of the key characteristics of an SEO. And I really consider myself a curious person, which is really what led me to become an in-house SEO in the first place and work as part of some incredible in-house teams and meet the amazing community, the women in tech SEO, and learn so much from them. So, yeah, definitely big cheer and round of applause for them as well. And this is also what made me jump further into that rabbit hole and start to work on the vendor side. So I've been working in SEO software for the last three years. Now, during this time, I worked very closely with sales teams, and that means that I've been involved in the positioning and presenting of the value of organic search to senior decision makers. Fun, right? I mean, I've heard that a lot of you spend a lot of time doing this, but you don't necessarily like it. So hopefully after this talk, I can help you like it a little bit better. Today, I'm going to invite you to join me in a journey as I'm gonna tell you a little story of my own adventures in Buyingland, where I've met the most peculiar processes and the most stubborn stakeholders. So as you follow along, I invite you to stay curious because I'm going to share with you some of the most ludicrous laws of Buyingland. First of which, that you better measure up because size matters here. And when I say measure up, I mean the level of the SEO maturity within your organization. And in order to do that, I'd like to challenge how we currently think about maturity because we often see this represented on a linear scale. So to my example, the immature SEO eggs are the ones where things are being SEO'd after they've been launched, and adding SEO optimization is clearly an afterthought. While the mature SEO butterflies are the ones where SEO is considered as part of the product roadmap, and it's really a crucial part of QA and execution. And we all know that higher SEO maturity leads to better performance. However, while this is a really good way to represent something like the state of the industry, it's not necessarily really helpful when we are trying to understand our positioning within the business, because maturity isn't actually linear. And that's because it's not only about growth. Maturity is a multi-dimensional concept that requires both growing and nurturing. So in the last few years, I've been using something that I named OMG for SEO. And that's an organizational maturity graph that you can download. I will share a link to it in the end. And I'd like to give a huge shout out here to Tori Gray, who's also a member of the Women in Tech SEO community who collaborated with me on this, so we can actually make this into a resource that you can all use. Now, the thing here is, as you can see, there are four pillars, culture efficiency, strategy, and technology. And the reason why you want to understand this, because your energy and efforts on trying to get budget, resource, buying to your ideas will need to be divided between where you are today, between what you need to nurture, versus where you want to go into. Not to mention that different strategies will likely need different stages, sorry, will likely need different strategies. So for example, if your culture or efficiency scores lower, it is much more likely that you need to work on building relationships in the business as it is your technology or strategy, which might mean that you actually need to improve data quality or the tools you are using. Obviously, these all have an impact on each other, but it really helps to understand where you stand. Because trust me on this one, in buying land, things can get a little bit confusing, so it really helps to just know where your business is and where you are. Which leads us to the next thing, that things aren't always as they seem down here. Like when your leadership team says SEO is important, but when it actually comes to prioritizing it, commitment seems to disappear. Which is what I like to call, leads to the buy-in-ish cycle. And there are three key stages to this cycle, and it starts with fake buy-in, which is buy-in that happens, but without actual commitment, which then leads to producing half results as there is no real accountability on an execution level, which then leads to the fact that there is no sort of proof or evidence that you could show next time you're trying to get buy-in. And I'm gonna talk you through two quick examples that I've not only experienced, but often heard them from the community as well. So first of which, when the business wants better organic performance, so you finally convince the developers you've been emailing them for ages and they are like, yes, your tickets are added, it's in the next print, we promise, right. But if there is no actual commitment, your tickets might get de-prioritized or dropped, which means there will be no real impact or results to report on. Or there is another example that often happens to our one-person SEO teams, right, that we really need to hire additional resource to distribute workload and drive better performance. However, if there is no real buy-in, then you can end up with a limited budget, which means you can't hire for the right skills. So now you ended up with more workload because you actually now have to train someone, which means you need even more resource to help with everything you need to do. But as you're struggling to prove how this will drive better performance, again, you're not getting the buy-in you need. And the problem with this cycle, as you might have experienced, is that you really get stuck and it really keeps you from unlocking the real potential for your SEO strategy. If this sounds familiar, I have some good news because the first step to do is to learn to spot fake buy-in. And in order to do that, we need to apply critical thinking, like being skeptical of how are we getting to a yes. Because focusing too much on getting to a yes, which we all really like to hear, can often lead to getting it without commitment. And we actually do this to ourselves because, as I said, we really like to hear saying yes, we like when people agree with us. And we do this by asking questions that give no other real options. So think of the likes of questions. Do we want to increase our organic traffic? Do we want our content to rank and convert better? This is not a question. This is a statement. And we all hate these questions when they come to us as part of an unsolicited LinkedIn DM, right? But even if you have a credible relationship with someone already, questions that from false agreement can be really damaging to these relationships. And what that means is that getting a yes without commitment is actually often worse than just getting a no, especially on the long run, which is why we want to change our goal from getting to a yes to get to the next step instead in the buy-in process. And we can do that by learning to seek healthy conflict and spend time to understand concerns and objections. And I know what you're thinking. I'm actually telling you to have conflict with your leadership. I know that sounds scary, but trust me. So a mindset I like to adapt here is that it is actually better to know that I'm wrong than to think that I'm right. And what this mindset really helps with is to be aware of my own confirmation bias. So let's have a think about an example on how do we actually do research. So I'm gonna share with you a story about when I worked in fashion retail e-commerce. And I wanted to make sure that our local SEO is working properly. We have updated opening hours. We have local content on our store pages so they are not doorway pages as we've heard yesterday. And I wanted to make sure I can get some budget signed off. I was very new to this business. I can get some budget signed off. It was over 200 stores to manage the details so for a tool, for agency. So naturally, the first thing I would do, go to Google, prove how important the local sets are, how many queries have local search intent, how Google drives revenue. All of these are driven by my own confirmation bias. So if I actually want to seek healthy conflict, it really helps to research with the goal to preempt concerns. And if you want to start doing that, you have to ask the questions where what are the reasons that this initiative is not being done already? So in this business, I found that there was a huge communication problem to start with where the store managers were talking to retail ops in the head office via email and various spreadsheets. And then retail ops decided to share that about 80% accurate spreadsheet with the e-commerce team who then updated the website if they had time because that wasn't their priority and then what happened? The marketing team, if they noticed the change, maybe they updated Google Business Profile or Google My Business at the time, but probably no other publishers. So while this is a clearly problematic process, changing it will raise a number of questions. So, you know, people will ask, well, okay, who's going to train the teams if you're investing in a new team who's doing the training? Who's taking ownership of this? Who's going to communicate this to everyone and two of the most sensitive ones? How much is this going to cost? And who's paying for it? I mean, especially as it is with local SEO a lot of times, why is it my budget? I have all the technical SEO and content SEO things to look after. I'm actually just trying to help here. So all very valid and important questions that need to be addressed. And the thing with concerns is that they will eventually lead to objections. And the challenge here is, so these objections can be, well, you said this is a good investment, you have to prove it. And as you would probably know, as with a lot of things in SEO, a lot of these things have a cost that's very difficult to address because they are invisible. So here, for example, no one actually measures how many frustrated customers are not spending their money with us because our hours are not up to date or e-commerce team wasted the time on updating these opening hours that they could be spent on merchandising the site and actually driving revenue, right? But it's not the easiest thing to sort of show. And if you actually want to attach a number to it, you will probably need to do a huge amount of research. So before you start doing that, you can actually address this by asking questions that clarify these objections. So if your leadership says, well, you have to prove this is good investment, you want to clarify, well, what do they mean by good? What is that ROI mean? Is that, you know, 6x, 7x? Also, what are the KPIs? We've heard so much about KPIs today. Are those impressions, clicks? Do we care about footfall? Do we not care about footfall? Do we care about online revenue? You want to understand all of these because they will really make sure that you can actually address these concerns and objections and they will help feel your audience involved, which leads us to the next point. You need to get to know your audience and traditionally, leadership is not the easiest audience to deal with. So this next point might sound obvious, but decision makers are humans. And I know it's shocking and humans are not rational by nature. Therefore, their decision making is also very rational and is strongly biased by unconscious mental processes, which is really just a scientific way to say that our leaderships makes very silly decisions sometimes. So again, I have an example here. I've had the best data that 100% told the business, showed the business that they should definitely not go ahead with a full onsite migration after two weeks I joined, without a proper plan, and especially not a month before Black Friday. Yes, yeah, but the business still decided that they're going to do it. And while you're clearly thinking that this is a bit nuts, which it is, it also has a very reasonable explanation to why someone might still do this. One of which, you know, they might not understand the risks or do not wanna listen to you, but as you can probably tell, that's not a very rational behavior because why sort of anyone, you know, any sort of logic would tell you to listen to the person who's telling you that you are going to lose a minimum of 20% of traffic, which will have a huge revenue impact on Black Friday. Unfortunately, there probably are a lot of emotional reasons behind how we make decisions. And that's because even an illogical decision can seem reasonable when it feels comfortable. And as we know with SEO, a lot of people and a lot of readership might not understand the complexity of it. And what happens when we don't understand something? We probably don't feel as comfortable making decisions on it. So our real question here is, how can we help someone feel comfortable about the uncomfortable? And one thing the community does really well is obviously education. But unfortunately, we don't usually have a three-hour session with leadership to tell them about all the Google algorithms and rankings and how it all works, right? So instead, we can learn to tell a good story. And while a good story should still incorporate all the amazing data we've heard from Jackie yesterday on how you can use storytelling and how you can tell a story with data, we should make sure that this story has a great narrative. So how do you find a great narrative? I'm gonna do a little bit of an exercise here. Think about your business as a hat for a second. And your SEO strategy is this magical one. Now close your eyes and just imagine that you've got the buy-in you need for your SEO strategy. You can open your eyes, what happened. You can pull the bunny out of the hat. You've done your magic trick, right? Let's have a look at an example of what this means. Let's say you have an incredibly content-heavy side and it's buy-and-buy content. Let's say it's a medical paper, right? So you've listened to Lily Ray and you're a good SEO. So you know that you need to focus your strategy on EAT, topic clusters, author pages. You know that this is a very complex strategy that you need to be able to sell. And you need to do this because your brand will become a trusted and authoritative resource for the topics this way. Now, when you're choosing a narrative, it is absolutely crucial that this is what you're communicating and not the idea you have. And I'm not saying you don't mention the idea, but when you're talking to leadership, you want to make sure that the narrative is focused around the outcome. So one way to do this is to leverage use cases that speak your leadership's language. And I would like to give just a quick tip here that actually pretty much any agency or software side, if you look at the case that is there, they will be written in a language that will speak to leadership, which will really help you develop some of these narratives. Now, this last advice here, I think it is really good, but for me, this is one of the most difficult to follow. So this plus one is you can't win every battle. So you don't necessarily want to fight them all. In other words, if everything is important, nothing is. So think about all of your projects. Is it technical SEO, content SEO? You might win your resource. How are you prioritizing this? After these three days, you've learned a number of tactics of how you can prioritize using impact, effort, confidence. I'd also urge you to add probability to all of those sheets as a metric. Probability based on how likely something is to get the buying with the commitment we talked about. Now, I've definitely run out of time here. I'm really sorry, but I will leave you with this one final thought. You need to find the time wasters and let them go. These time wasters, these projects might be ones that sit really close to your heart, but they will only make you less productive. So how do you identify them? Well, remember the cycle we talked about earlier? Hopefully after today, you'll be much better at spotting when you end up in one. And that way, if you actually include that probability metric, you will be able to turn this into the boat in cycles, which means that you will get real commitments, you produce results that meet the expectations, and you will be able to have the success stories you can use next time you want to get buying. Thank you so much, Moscon. You can access all the resources. Thank you.