 What's up, Mozcon? So good to be back. Where's the shoes of Mozcon guy? I just want you to get a good look at this right here. Come on up, come on up. I'm going to do this while you take a beautiful photo of my oxfords. So my name is Heather Fizziak. I am the director of the Discoverability Group at VML. We are a global agency with more than 3,000 VMLers and 33 offices around the world. Pretty amazing. We have some friends in town from Kansas City, where I'm from. And then my colleague from Bogota made it to Mozcon. So that's pretty awesome from Colombia. So these are a few of the clients that we have the good fortune of being on a journey with. Today, we're going to talk about what that journey is like for some of these clients. And we're going to help build your red tape toolkit to overcome obstacles and get your best work done for your clients. Now, just because a client signed a contract with you does not mean that they're bought in. And I know that it seemingly defies logic that the work that they bought doesn't go live. It can be this slow, arduous, painful process to get even the smallest projects pushed through. And with the size of the clients, the more complex and difficult these problems become. And when your work doesn't get used, it sucks. It leads to you or your team becoming impatient, fed up, discouraged, frustrated, jaded, burned out. And all the while, your client is still like, where are those SEO results I paid for? I think I have experienced this literally everywhere I have ever worked. I think everybody in this room has experienced this at some point. So I knew that we weren't alone in this. And I set out to figure out why this is. I surveyed a bunch of colleagues in our industry to learn more about this common experience that we all share and tried to uncover what the root causes were. But more importantly, how do we overcome it? So I surveyed about 140 colleagues. Thank you so much, everybody who participated in that. Roughly 1 third of the survey participants were in-house marketers who were providing services for their own brands. And roughly 2 thirds were external marketers. People who were providing services for clients. And the respondents ranged from the in-house SEOs to those who were embedded in multi-service agencies, content marketing shops, consulting firms, and those who were self-employed. So it truly ran the gamut of the industry. And we asked about obstacles that fell into four main categories. The first was the low understanding of search. So that could be your client's understanding of search or your own colleagues inside the shops' understanding of search. The second was prioritization and buy-in for the work. The next was corporate bureaucracy. So that could mean red tape, slow approvals, lack of advocacy, high turnover. And then finally, resource limitations, like did they scope appropriately for search or do they even have developers or people to write the stuff that we need written? Now when you break it out by agency side, the biggest complaint for the agency folks was low client understanding of search. But when you ask the in-house SEOs, they said technical resource limitations for developers like a full backlog. Interesting. And some people took in the time to write even more blockers, workflow bottlenecks, over complicated process, lack of ownership, internal politics, shifting budgets and priorities. My God, there are so many people, so many smart people in this room and in this community and all of these things are stopping us from getting our work done. It sucks. It hurts, right in the feelings. And when we get frustrated, we tend to blame clients, right? It's the client that hung up the project or if only the client had listened to us or it's a problem with the client's business, but I don't buy it. And neither should you. It is a cop-out. Sometimes the problem is the system. Sometimes the problem is the people, but my friends, sometimes the problem is you. We are not perfect. When we start working in search, we are trained how to execute SEO best practices. And when we come to these conferences, we're learning these amazing, advanced, cutting-edge SEO techniques. We are good about talking about the work, but what we are not good at is talking about how we talk about the work. We do not focus on the soft skills that are needed to sustain and grow the work, to break down barriers, to get buy-in and get shit done. But fortunately, we are all optimizers. Everybody in this room inherently believes that things could be just a little bit better. We refuse to believe that this is just the way things are and there is nothing we can do about it. So when I did the survey, I did not just ask about the problems. I asked about the solutions. And after analyzing the responses, these seven tools came the most highly recommended overcome the most common obstacles that stop us from doing our best search work. The first is to diagnose your client's maturity, not emotional maturity. That is a talk for another day. This is maturity as it pertains to search. So that could be SEO capabilities or the organizational search maturity. So you can recommend the right work and speak to them in the right way that is appropriate for where they are in their journey. So we often make the mistake of assuming that a client is super knowledgeable and they're bought in and they're motivated to execute search work because they agreed to pay us to do it. So we go trucking full speed ahead. We are dumping recommendations in their lap and then we're shocked when nothing goes live. And that is where a maturity model can help. So maturity models were originally developed for the Department of Defense, but their core purpose is to measure the ability of an organization to continuously evolve in a practice. So you can diagnose how mature the client is today and then identify where you need to go next to make change. It helps you to meet the client where they are. So I built a maturity model. So this is for SEO capabilities, the technical ability to do the work. And we set up eight criteria against six different phases. In my model, I used analytics or how data-driven the search program is, collaboration and integration with other channels, content, technical, on-page, off-page mobility and new technology. And this visual actually shows the maturity curve, the six different phases. This is a little unconventional for a maturity model because I have a six phase, which is zero. Because we know in search that you can actually do more harm than good. So that phase is for clients that are engaging in harmful, spammy, outdated practices. From there, they could be in the absent or non-existent phase. So this means there's no strategy, no SEO implementation. Search is an all-new program. Phase two is tactical. So they're doing SEO basic best practices, but nothing earth-shattering. We're talking titles and metas here. From there, they could be strategic. So they're aligned to the value of SEO. They're making an effort to dedicate resources and improve their SEO implementation. It's becoming more thorough. It's starting to get baked into key initiatives. After that, it is a practice. So inclusion of SEO is an expectation for their marketing initiatives. It's not just best practices. They're actively testing and iterating new search techniques and cutting-edge stuff that's starting to come out of these conferences. They're starting to future-proof their program a little bit. They're getting smarter, right? And then stage five, we'll call this the enlightenment of SEO capabilities. SEO is always included, and they're always aiming to maximize the utmost in SEO best practices of the day. They are truly future-proofing their SEO program, and they're evolving with industry standards. So for example, if a client is on the low end of this scale, like they're struggling to get titles and metas done, it may not be appropriate to chase after them with an AMP recommendation. It's not the right time. So how do we know where your client falls? All right, don't freak out, nobody panic. This is a scorecard used to evaluate the client against these SEO capabilities. This was peer-reviewed by a number of really smart colleagues in our industry, but it's intended to be a living document that evolves as our industry does. And this can actually be repurposed into a survey of questions. I'll tell you more about that in a minute. And at the bottom of every slide is a link where you can download this and read it and use it for yourself. But for funsies, let's break a couple of these out of here. So if we were looking at content, how mature is the client as it pertains to content in SEO? On the lowest end of the scale, maybe they're putting out thin, weak, duplicative, and spun and over-optimized content. And in the middle of the scale, they're implementing SEO for their content, at least the basics, but they tend to do it during or after publishing, you're retrofitting. But at the high end of the evolution for content in SEO, they're using search data to drive their editorial calendar and even better, they're probably integrating search insights with web analytics and social listening to make smarter marketing decisions. How about for mobility? On the low end, you may have a brand that has zero mobile experience whatsoever. In the middle, you have a brand who has a fully responsive site. It is technically mobile friendly, but no special attention to mobile optimization. They're not continuing to iterate. And then on the high end of the scale, you have a brand with an entirely mobile-first mindset. They're continuously optimizing against usability and speed and content. Maybe they're even dabbling in app store optimization. How about new technology? Kind of a fun one. So on the low end, you've got a client who has zero focus or understanding on new technology. They don't care, they don't have an appetite for it. They don't even see how it pertains to search. In the middle, you have the clients who have an appetite for new technology, but they're the ones who chase the shiny objects with very little strategy or focus on the end goals. And all the way up to enlightenment, they're actively implementing and testing new technology that impacts search, and it makes sense for their brand. They're making hard choices about which things to pursue. So that's an awesome tool, if I do say so myself, to start picking projects and where to start, but it doesn't get to the heart of why our work isn't getting implemented. The real challenges tend to be organizational. These are people, process, integration problems. And then if we do a search maturity assessment of the organization, it can open our eyes to the problems that need to be solved internally before the search work can get done. So here's a different scorecard for a second maturity model. This is about the organic search programs maturity in the organization. So this addresses things like process, resources, skills, prioritization, planning. And the goal is to find the strengths that a brand can capitalize on. The stuff that's pretty good, but could be amazing with a little bit of work and the weaknesses they have to improve upon to move forward. So from the top process, does a documented repeatable process exist and is it continuously improving? And when I say this, I am not talking about step-by-step instructions on how to write a title tag guys. We know this by now. I'm talking about the inclusion of a search expert at the right moments with the right projects. For personnel, is this brand providing the necessary talent at the organization or within their scope to get the work done? Knowledge and learning. Is this client or is the team working for this client knowledgeable about search? But even more importantly, are they committed to learning more? Because this stuff keeps changing. Means capacity and capabilities. Is the organization budgeting appropriately for the work? Are they prioritizing organic search enough to where it's actually getting done? And finally, planning and preparation. Is the search work aligned to the company, the brand, the campaign goals, and is it proactively planned? So here is what the maturity model looks like for the organization. On the low end, limited, disjointed, entirely new, repeatable, they're doing some basic search work. They're documenting their process and standards. They're more proactive, strategic, goal-oriented. They're doing some good work here, but it's still very siloed. At the managed phase, they've defined their processes. They're improving their standards for quality. They're more savvy, more strategic. They're more flexible and adaptable in the face of change. So when they detect process and implementation problems, they're able to quickly refine. They have dedicated staff, they are committed, and search is starting to become a way of life. And then optimize. Search is part of this company's DNA. It is baked into their marketing practice. It is integrated across the organization. They are proactively iterating and improving and innovating. These organizations may be the market leaders. They are aware that their work is never done. So you grade a client against these criteria, which helps to determine where you want to start tackling change together. Because if you don't solve the underlying problems, like knowledge, capacity, personnel first, you're gonna struggle to get buy-in and to get resources to get the work done. So it doesn't matter what SEO projects you recommend. So for this, a client on the low end, let's say they scored very low against all of the criteria. That means they haven't connected the dots. They don't have the talent. They don't have the knowledge. They don't have the process. And that is your job to help them solve for that first. But what if you have a client who's advanced in a few areas? Say they're really good at process, planning and capacity. But they're weaker in others like knowledge and personnel. That should tell you that you need to focus on an education campaign and you need to help them staff up with the right talent. So this is not just punching numbers in a spreadsheet, people. This is not a one-sided assessment where the agency gives the brand a grade. This is so critical that you are asking multiple relevant stakeholders at multiple levels on the client side and the agency side to participate in this exercise too. And then you need to follow this up with a dialogue, like a real human dialogue. Imagine a workshop where you have the outcomes of this maturity assessment as a starting point where you can unlock the really useful insights, their pain points, what it's like inside their organization, the problems and things that they run into that are gonna be blockers if you guys don't solve for them. To know how to get where you are going, you need to know where you are. And having multiple perspectives on this is so critical to building an accurate picture of where they stand. And if everyone works together on the assessment, we agree where we are, we agree where we're going together, that's critical early buy-in and alignment to actually get shit done together. And a maturity model is a continuum. You have to evolve from one step to the next. Skipping levels is not an option, and nor should it be the goal. So I would say most of our clients, when they first come to us, they start in that repeatable phase where they've dabbled a bit in SEO, but there's no formality to their knowledge or their execution, and that's where they've brought us in to help. The goal is not to turn them into a Moz caliber SEO machine overnight, that is completely unrealistic. The goal is to help them make iterative improvements to move from one phase to the next. And the gap between each phase of the curve may grow wider as they move up the scale. So after conducting a search maturity assessment with the client, we may all agree that we're in the repeatable phase today. And in year two, we wanna get to managed, I'm sorry, into defined, and then perhaps year, I totally messed that up, let's start over. Let's say we start in repeatable, we may agree that in year one, we wanna get to defined, and then year two, we wanna get to managed, and then maybe year four or five, we wanna get to optimized. But we still know our work is never done. Okay, the number two tool to put in your toolkit is to speak their language. We often find ourselves, we forget. We forget that we are talking to busy CEOs and CMOs, not our fellow SEOs. So we need to learn to read, write, listen, and speak their corporate language. They care about ROI and EPS and operational costs. And meanwhile, we're over here talking about SSL encryption and HTTPS and canonicalization. But we're forgetting, we need to be mindful that we are coming from different places and meet our clients in the middle. I know that we are passionate about what we do. I think everybody in this room is passionate about what you do, or you wouldn't be here. We love being in the weeds every day. But when you live in the weeds, when you are communicating about search to your clients, you are losing their attention fast. So unless your client is a technical mind or they have a lot of experience with search, it is in your best interest to lift up and stay at about 30,000 feet. Use layperson's language. Use analogies that they can relate to in the real world. Show, don't tell. Use smart data visualizations and visual examples that tell the story of search better than your words ever could. And remember, the goal is not to teach the client how to do search. They pay you to know that. Focus on what's in it for them. Focus on the benefits. Is it brand visibility? Is it conquesting your competitors? Is it making more money? They don't always need to know the granular technical steps to get there. What they care about is how much is it gonna cost me? How long is it gonna take? And what action items do you need from me to get the outcome you're promising me? The third tool in your toolkit is to seek greater perspective. Let's face it, y'all. Clients don't care about organic search as much as we do. So they may love what we can do for them, but rarely is SEO the only thing on their minds or even a sizable thing on their minds. So a lot of times our direct clients aren't dedicated to search. Sometimes they're not even dedicated to digital. They have much bigger fish to fry. They have to think about the entire marketing mix and how it's working for the entire brand. Or if they're a small business owner, they're running their business right now. And SEO is just one tiny, tiny part of that. And more and more clients are moving toward this integrated agency model because they wanna get more bang for their buck and they believe that they can maximize the impact of these channels when they work together. So instead of operating in this completely separate lane, we have to ladder SEO up to the big picture. We have to support the larger marketing initiatives and brain goals. This seems so obvious when you say it out loud, but we're not doing it. So I want you to take a moment and soak this up. Otherwise, we are operating in a separate track that no one cares about. I actually have an example of this. So we were working on a CPG client and we got the contract signed and we spent all of year one frantically running down this path to check all these SEO best practices boxes, but nothing was getting implemented and it felt like no one cared. Well, they didn't. But in year two, the contract was actually restructured to where SEO was required to ladder up to the campaigns that were planned for the year. Is this the search work we thought we would be doing? No. Is this necessarily what we would have prioritized first? No. But is great search work finally getting implemented? Yes. And I find that SEOs, we often obsess over rankings and traffic and traditional SEO KPIs because SEO. But recommendations should be connected to their real business, the real brand and campaign goals, not what we think their goals should be. Fourth tool in your toolkit is not to stay in your lane. Brands hire SEO experts alongside other services almost every time. They do this with the expectation that we are all gonna drive in the same direction toward a common destination. And that means that we need alignment across the board, across these disciplines to be bought into SEO recommendations early on. One of the best pieces of advice that came out of this survey was to treat all SEO projects as products that require a full product team. So you need your developer, you need your SEO, you need your project manager, your business side of the business folks. The number one complaint I hear from SEOs in all my interviews is I wasn't included at the right time. Newsflash, that's the same complaint as everybody else in every other discipline I've ever interviewed. We cannot be hypocrites. We have to respect the expertise of the other teams and include them early and often just like we would want. And that gets the buy-in that can make or break this project. So there's two kinds of buy-in. The first is horizontal. We're often dependent on others to get work implemented, our copywriters, our developers. So we need to take responsibility for breaking down the barriers, breaking down the silos and getting buy-in across those practices, which means we have to stop swimming in separate swim lanes. That means no more setting goals by yourselves. That means no more failing to partner with your colleagues and other channels. And it means collaborating early and aligning on a unified recommendation for your client. And then there's vertical buy-in. So buy-in usually happens beyond your immediate day-to-day client contact. So it's your job to understand their role in the organization and give them the tools and the voice they need to sell it internally. Our recommendations have to support what the C level cares about just as much as what our day-to-day client contact cares about and that buy-in we got from our colleagues horizontally is gonna help us bring a smarter, stronger, better vetted recommendation to the client together. So help the client understand the benefits and the outcomes, the cost and the opportunity cost, how this is gonna get them results, achieve their goals and make them look like a hero inside their office. The fifth tool, build a bulletproof plan. So it starts with simplifying the process. We have to take ownership of making it stupid easy for everybody to do their part. So clearly outline the requirements of the project, the steps to get there, who owns what. Do the due diligence, do your job and do the due diligence to create the simple step-by-step plan. Show how easy it is and the low level of effort it can take to get it done. So my colleague Chris wanted to recommend AMP for location pages on his B2B automotive client. He thought it was a great fit. So we worked closely internally with the developers and designers to make a mock-up of what the pages could look like on mobile. He reviewed case studies, he projected ROI, he calculated the level of effort and the time to complete the project. By the time it went to the client, it was like, all we gotta do is squish this, move that, change some code and voila, we've got AMP. It was no brainer. It took seconds for this client to approve and the work is getting implemented right now. Second, use case studies to sell the ideas. This came up again and again and again in the survey. Case studies are one of the leading ways to get buy-in for your work. They explain the outcomes of the project in a clear way. They show that you have the chops to do the work and they did the work using someone else's money. So it reduces the perceived risk in the mind of the client. Every time you get a win for the client, you should be creating a case study. It should talk about the problem you were solving for, the solution and the results you got. That way you have an arsenal of proof when you need it most. Even if you don't have your own case study for a certain type of project, everybody else is publishing great case studies online. Go online, look at what other people are doing and use that to help estimate the impact. Next, think about the opportunity cost. Every decision a CMO makes is a risk. There is a time and there is a cost associated with it and each is an opportunity cost for something else they could be doing. You have to understand that they have competing priorities, limited budgets and help them to navigate that. That is your job. One way to do that is to forecast ROI. I think a lot of times we are hesitant to forecast potential outcomes due to the sheer volume of unknowns. We find it very hard to commit to things that are uncertain, but that is every forecast and that is search. We live in a world of theory, but you have to know why you are recommending this over other projects. There is a wealth of information out there to come up with even conservative estimates with tons of caveats, even ballpark figures and wide ranges are better than offering your client zero sense of return. They have to know how to weigh one project against the next. Just be sure to be transparent about your sources and how you arrived at your numbers. Exercise, hope you're good at math. JK, you don't need math. So, pretend that case studies for AMP projects suggest a conversion rate increased from 10% to 50%. So, if the client averages 750 leads a month today, a 50% ambitious increase in conversion rate would get them 375 more, 35% conversion rate from lead to sale, $900 per sale, we could net them $118,000 extra dollars per month. This is based on a real thing, by the way. Conservative, so let's just say we only get the 10% bump, right? So, that could net them $23,000 per month. Let's say the project cost $30,000, including SEO, QA, designers, developers. So, if we get the 10% increase, it takes six weeks to break even. If we get the 50% increase, it takes one week to break even. I even ran an ultra-conservative estimate of 1%, and it would take 14 months, a very long horizon, but it still reduces the risk. Keep that in your back pocket. If I'm a client, this is a no-brainer. And sometimes, forecasting the opportunity for growth isn't always enough to light a fire under the client. Sometimes we have to demonstrate the negative impact or incorrect act of incorrect or no action at all. And a lot of times, I find that the biggest risk is not that my client is going to make the wrong move, it's that they're gonna make no move at all. So, we used a tool like this, which you saw at MozCon last year, to show the difference between if the client invests, if they maintain, or if they stop. And we use this to illustrate that it's not just about what they're doing in SEO, it's what everyone else is doing as well. So, if they stop, they're gonna get passed up. Sixth tool in your toolkit. You have to help the client focus on what's really important, and there's two main ways to accomplish this. If you're anything like me, you love it when the SEO list of action items is like two miles long, but let's be honest, people are super shitty multitaskers. They need help prioritizing. So, empower them to focus on one big thing at a time. What is the most important thing the client should be caring about right now? You do a disservice to yourself and your client when you push every recommendation at once. They get bombarded, overwhelmed, they tune out. Nothing to grab on to means nothing gets done. I know it seems counter-intuitive that you're gonna get more done by requesting less, but it works. The second way is to make it memorable by giving them sound bites that they can repeat to their bosses and their colleagues because they have to sell it internally. Help them do this with catchy headlines, taglines, sound bites. We use this slide for a 2018 client strategy deck. We knew that the biggest opportunity for this client was content this year. So, we put it at the top of the deck. It was the biggest section. All other priorities fell after. We emphasized that if they did nothing else in our entire strategy, this is where we would put our money. And then long afterward, we kept hearing the client say the same thing, unsolicited and almost verbatim in strategy and status calls. The message was clear and it may as well have been their idea. The final tool in your toolkit. Patience, persistence, parallel path. Where possible, you should be building parallel paths. You start those high impact, time consuming projects early because you know it takes time to get approval and buy in to push them through. And simultaneously, what are the other lower obstacle tasks that you can be owning and running with? Having several irons in the fire increases the likelihood of getting stuff done. So, while the client is focused on the one big move you recommended, you can keep trucking on smaller things and get wins that get them excited and build momentum. So I'm gonna close with this. Getting your work implemented is a balance of communication, follow up, patience, persistence. So you have to approach your client with empathy and understanding that they have a lot of moving pieces at play, but come with a strong point of view and confidence that you know the right recommendations to make. Above all else that our peers recommended is to stay strong. Thank you. Close peeps. And those guys. Woohoo!