Buy Now: $500

If you purchase before then you’ll still have access to the courses but new signups will be closed.

Much love ❤️,

Tom

As I prepare to put the SEO MBA into hibernation for a little bit, I thought it would be useful to catalog all of the writing over the last 3 years and put it into one place.

Here’s all the stuff I’ve written. The best ones have a ⭐ gold star.

Which piece is your fave? Drop a comment!

Executive-ready Communication

A foundational theme for the SEO MBA is communicating with executives. It’s a skill no one ever really teaches you - you just kind of figure it out by watching and learning (and maybe getting it wrong a few times!).

Some key pieces:

• ⭐ Good slides reduce complexity - foundational skills for executive-ready presentations including my version of the pyramid principle.

• ⭐ Presenting to the CEO in 5 slides - a deep dive into how to put together an actual executive summary (not a table of contents).

• How to write an Amazon-style narrative memo - the underlying logic is the same for presentations and for written memos, in this piece we look specifically at how to quantify and focus your communication.

• How to make an SEO strategy - the key to being strategic is to focus on diagnosis, guiding principle and coherent actions. This will elevate your game to talk big picture.

Communication skills

We used to say at Distilled “communication solves all problems” and well, erm, I’ve never stopped saying it actually. Clear, effective communication is still one of the most important skills SEOs can learn.

Some key pieces:

• ⭐ Managing expectations by finding good comparisons - A great reminder that you can use comparisons to help people understand your recommendations and also make your ideas more believable by grounding them in reality.

• Let’s get rid of the SEO legends (yes we’re talking about charts) - an oldie but a goodie, how you report on data really matters and some simple tweaks make a big difference! (Bonus one - here’s a tweet showing how I make charts look great using Google Sheets and Figma)

• Advocating for expanding your SEO team - A nice reminder about how to build the business case for headcount internally.

• Your boss cares about reporting more than you do - honestly the title kind of says it all here. SEOs chronically under-value reporting as a communication tool and a way of getting buy-in.

• Using surveys to increase executive buy-in - we focus a lot on the data in SEO but often it’s the qualitative data that really wins people over…

Mindset Shifts

One of my personal goals in life is to help people look at things in new ways. So I’ve tried to help reframe SEO in a few different ways in my writing.

Some of the key pieces:

• ⭐ Is SEO worth it? - a mini manifesto for ensuring you’re properly accounting for the full costs of an SEO program, not just the SEO people/agency time.

• ⭐ Input Metrics for SEO - once I learned about input metrics I never looked back. It rally reframed how I think about managing change, reporting and objective setting.

• Mindset shifts for strategic SEO - some simple reframes like thinking in 12 month timeframes and looking at the total addressable market

• Are you making SEO strategically important? - it’s remarkable how large organizations are allergic to talking about SEO at the top levels. Here’s some advice on how to ensure you’re working on strategic projects.

• Pace layers of SEO - It’s really easy to get caught up in short-term impact (and frustrations with lack of resources!) but SEO is a complex system and there are a variety of intervention points..

• Getting buy-in requires executive empathy - a gentle reminder that it’s the CEO’s job to say no, so don’t take it personally (but also don’t stop trying after only one “no”)

• Let’s never talk about SEO audits again - still perhaps my most controversial opinion about SEO is that I never want to hear the words “SEO audit” ever again

SEO Careers

I did a whole series of content about SEO careers - this was a while back so folks might not have seen these pieces. But there’s some good stuff:

• ⭐ The SEO Skills Maturity Matrix - still the all time top post from the SEO MBA. Has a spreadsheet full of potential skill pathways to help you think about levels (for you or for your team)

• Why there are no VP SEO jobs - a long hard look at how high you can get inside an organization with a pure SEO mindset.

• Unbundled & Commoditized: The future of SEO careers? - despite the bland sounding title this one has some key ideas about SEO product management and SEO editors as emerging roles for a changing world.

• Being Mid-Career Sucks: The Context Crisis - this doesn’t actually say anything about SEO but there’s some good advice in here about managing up and managing down (spoiler alert: it’s communication!)

• Navigating an SEO career - this one actually is more about navigating any digital career and a little love letter to blogging

For Agency Owners

A couple of posts focus specifically on SEO agencies and how they operate:

• ⭐ How to turn your agency into the McKinsey of SEO - a lot of agencies like to think of themselves as providing “consulting services” but actual consultancies operate very differently to how most SEO agencies do…

• Agency SEO Careers in a Commoditized Market - despite the title this is actually mostly about agency positioning, not agency careers (though, spoiler alert: being good at positioning will get you a long way inside an agency!)

Misc Faves

These are strictly labeled as “posts that no one else liked but are still near and dear to my heart”:

• Nerding out on Nerdwallet - honestly I wish I’d done more of these earnings report pieces but thankfully Glenn has been doing a great job keeping on top of public companies and their SEO info

• Visual revolution in knowledge work - if you’re not using Figma, honestly how do you even work? I’m not sure everyone thinks this way but I do!

• Look at your fish - a walkthrough of how I use Figma to do qualitative competitor analysis and workshop activities.

• Are you problem solving or capacity building? - honestly perhaps the most important lesson to learn as a consultant.

Once again - the SEO MBA is at a steep discount ($500 for both courses) until Aug 31st after that I’ll close new signups so get it while you can!

Buy the Courses

(Also I posted on LinkedIn about agency licenses for the course. If you want to chat let me know!)

I’ve got a little announcement. Here’s the summary:

I’m going through some career/life transitions and I’ve decided to put the SEO MBA on pause. What that means is this: it’s the last chance to buy the courses in their current format. I’m putting them on steep discount: $500 for both courses (normally $975 combined) valid until August 31st.

After that you will no longer be able to buy the courses (though you’ll continue to have access).

Buy the bundle: $500

Here’s the longer version:

Two courses, Three years and 800 students later…

I started the SEO MBA three years ago because I saw a skills gap in the industry. Too many SEO professionals were missing out on opportunities because they didn’t have the business, communication and strategy skills to influence and lead change inside their organization or inside their clients’ organizations.

I had a hunch this was going to be popular and well received but… damn.

Two courses, Three years, Six cohorts and over 800 students later it’s time to take a pause.

If you haven’t yet enrolled and want to grab the course before I pull it down, you can get both courses bundled together for $500 here (normally $975 combined), on sale until Aug 31st:

Buy the bundle: $500

I’m most proud of the 100s of notes, testimonials and student stories people have shared.

Stories like this one I received last week about getting a new job:

Or stories like this one about building out whole teams:

Or stories like this one about helping freelancers charge more:

Or stories like this one about helping people do more than “just SEO” (and increase ACV):

Or stories like this one about helping people feel more confident:

I’m proud of the courses I built - I really tried hard to build something that was valuable and different than everything else out there.

But - the truth is that juggling this project alongside my consulting business has been challenging… It’s hard to juggle multiple priorities!

Ultimately, I’m sure the SEO MBA will return one day in a new form. (I’m a weirdo who really cares about executive presence and business skills after all!) But for now there’s a different project I’ve gotta go invest my time and energy into - more details on that soon - so I’m pausing new sign ups after August 31st.

Thank You

I want to give a huge, heartfelt thank you to everyone you supported the course, bought the course, promoted the course, gave a testimonial, said something nice or mentioned it on stage at a conference. There’s too many people to thank individually but I want to especially shout out folks who have been on the journey the whole way like Areej and John-Henry who enrolled in some of the very first beta cohorts, gave loving feedback and have been champions and advocates for the courses the whole way.

And of course Will who taught me everything I know about executive presence. ❤️

And of course Erin who painted a canvas for my course background, let me shoot the videos in her art studio, worked some late nights with me, helped transcribe my videos and helped me get this thing out in the world.

Much love, Tom xo.

A few FAQs:

Will I continue to have access to the course after Aug 31st?

Yes - if you have already purchased the course, of if you purchase before Aug 31st you’ll continue to have access indefinitely.

What About Office Hours?

Office hours are pausing. Anyone who purchased the professional tier in the last 3 months will get refunded the difference between pro and regular.

What about my agency account?

Unlimited access agency accounts will continue to have access. The URL may change for you to login and enroll new team members, look out for a separate email.

Executive Presence is the flagship course designed for senior level SEO professionals who want to work more confidently and effectively with senior stakeholders.

The Art of Client Management is designed specifically for agency SEOs who interact with clients and want to improve impact, trust and retention.

Or, buy both courses together for the best value discount.

Enroll & get 10% off today

Over 700 SEOs from all over the world have taken one of my courses. Here’s what people said about the courses in the last few weeks alone:

Enroll today and take your SEO career to the next level.

Reminder: the SEO MBA January sale is ongoing! Get 10% off all courses through the end of January.

Back when I started in SEO, the kinds of things you’d do to improve your rankings were oppositional to the customer experience - things like white text on a white background, anchor text optimized internal linking, crappy directory links, keyword stuffed paragraphs of text etc.

Then - we went through a golden age where the things you do to improve SEO were mostly good (or neutral) for the customer experience - things like improving keyword/page intent matching, writing helpful content and building brand authority.

But as Google’s gotten smarter, and they have relentlessly focused on aligning search performance with things that customers want, we’ve moved from a world where doing things for SEO benefitted the customer experience to a world where doing things for customer experience benefits SEO.

Here’s the problem though - most SEOs are not responsible for “improving customer experience”. They don’t have the authority or cross-functional influence to initiate projects like this.

And, worse, senior executives are often ignorant of quite how deeply the internet has changed user buying behaviors and competitive research - buyers look at three times more of your competitors than they used to:

This fundamentally changes the nature of demonstrating customer value and how your offering demonstrates value to potential customers relative to the competition. Many businesses are stuck thinking that because they have market share they don’t need to invest in excellent customer experience. And as a result, competitors are eating their lunch in SEO.

All of this means that many SEOs are facing an environment where:

1. To get SEO outcomes you need to fundamentally improve the customer experience on your site

2. But you lack the authority and buy-in to initiate these kinds of projects

3. And worse, senior execs are underfunding and neglecting the front end customer experience

So, what to do?

It all starts with some fish.

Look at your fish

There’s a relevant story about fish (originally via Robin Sloan). It goes a bit like this:

It’s the test that Louis Agassiz, the nineteenth-century Harvard naturalist, gave every new student. He would take an odorous old fish out of a jar, set it in a tin pan in front of the student and say, Look at your fish. Then Agassiz would leave. When he came back, he would ask the student what he’d seen. Not very much, they would most often say, and Agassiz would say it again: Look at your fish. This could go on for days. The student would be encouraged to draw the fish but could use no tools for the examination, just hands and eyes. Samuel Scudder, who later became a famous entomologist and expert on grasshoppers, left us the best account of the “ordeal with the fish.” After several days, he still could not see whatever it was Agassiz wanted him to see. But, he said, I see how little I saw before. Then Scudder had a brainstorm and he announced it to Agassiz the next morning: Paired organs, the same on both sides. Of course! Of course! Agassiz said, very pleased. So Scudder naturally asked what he should do next, and Agassiz said, Look at your fish.

Let’s translate this into more simple terms. Many companies are simply not looking at what’s actually in front of them closely enough. They’re not actually looking at their own site, stacked up against the competition to evaluate if they’re really offering a valuable, differentiated customer experience.

Look at your fish (website).

Of course, what we need is not us to look at our fish (we already know the customer experience is subpar), we need the senior stakeholders to look at the fish.

Unfortunately you can’t just storm into the Chief Product Officer’s office, slap a fish on the table and say “look at your website!”....

Don’t Tell Executives What To Do

Part of the problem with the more intangible SEO projects like “improving customer experience” is that there isn’t a single agreed-upon measure and there isn’t a single objective way to improve things.

Which means that there are lots of strong opinions.

Senior leadership is typically filled with type-A egos that don’t like to be told what to do. Instead you need to help them find their own way to the same insight you have.

One way to win over senior execs when talking about the intangibles is to try and quantify something that was previously un-quantified. To measure something previously un-measurable. We looked at using surveys to win over stakeholders in this piece: Using Surveys to Increase Executive Buy-in.

But if you can’t quantify the change - you have to somehow bring the stakeholders around to the same point of view you have. You have to help them realize that there is a gap and that closing it is important.

The “Look at your Fish” Workshop

So this all brings me to the workshop that I’ve run repeatedly with clients. I call it the “look at your fish” workshop.

The basic setup is this:

• Assemble a cross-functional team that includes customer insights, design, product, SEO, paid media and more. Whoever the relevant stakeholders for the front end of the site are.

• Start with a session on insights into the customer journey. Their mindset, demographics, personas, jobs to be done etc. You can either have this as a presentation and read-out or you can run it as a collaborative brainstorming session. This anchors the group to put themselves in the customer’s shoes.

• Run a collaborative workshop to review a specific search result and all the landing pages side by side.

Here’s an example figma file showing how I’d setup the visual comparison of the top players for the keyword [spanish tutor denver]:

This workshop isn’t necessarily the best way to analyze customer experience (things like customer research, JTBD, pain points research etc all go further) but it’s a great way to bring along the necessary stakeholders, giving them a feeling of involvement and investment and to create a variety of realistic improvements big and small.

When I ran this with a client recently we had 69 comments on a single page template!

The key is that improving customer experience isn’t any single department's job - you can’t hand over the list of changes to the product team, it requires a cross functional effort from content, product, engineering, design etc.

You can use this “look at your fish” workshop for any kind of page analysis but I find it’s most effective when you have a consistent page template you can look at. The magic is focusing on wide impact through a consistent template, through looking at the specific case of a single keyword. You have to actually look at the fish.

Three tactical tips for setting up your canvas that I find helpful:

1. Ensure you screenshot the Google SERP page too to provide the realistic context for the user searching and clicking on results (provides insight into poor title tags or missing schema markup etc)

2. Use a tool like site-shot.com to quickly and easily create consistent screenshots (you can just use the web interface, though they do have an API too)

3. Use a Figma plugin like insert big image to insert tall full-size screenshots otherwise Figma pixelates very tall images (of course you can run the same thing in Miro or another canvas based tool)

Exposing Customer Value

Ultimately, what we’re trying to do here is to ensure that the business value you provide to customers is exposed in a way that both new customers and Google can understand.

I find this is a good way to describe SEO to senior executives who are stuck thinking that SEO is about stuffing a 200 word paragraph of unique text on the page.

In ways small and big many businesses simply don’t expose enough of their customer value to search engines - and by extension suffer in SEO. Here’s an example from the Angi CEO (bolding mine):

“We have a lot to work with here. One in seven American households use Angi to care for their home each year, generating approximately 30 million service requests for our engaged and active network of 238,000 service professionals. We have by far the highest brand awareness of any pure player in the category, at least 2x the nearest competitor in Aided and 5x in Unaided, and we generate substantially more revenue. We have the most valuable content in the category for any homeowner searching online for help with a home project: service professional directories and ratings, closed-loop user reviews, real cost data, and the ability to get the job done on our site, all wrapped in a unified brand built for the category. We haven’t yet exposed many of those features to a broad audience with a clean and fast user interface, which could help recover lost ground in search.” source:  IAC Q3 2022 Shareholder Letter 

If you follow along with the quarterly shareholder letters you’ll see this is a long journey that Angi is on to expose more customer value as a bet to improve SEO.

Conclusion

Ok, this isn’t going to solve all your problems but I’m increasingly seeing websites on a long-term downward slide with internal SEO teams feeling powerless to work on the actual things that matter.

Somehow you have to convince the senior leadership of the business that the core customer experience matters. It’s not quick or easy but it is valuable.

And maybe, looking at your fish can help.

While many things changed, there’s one thing that didn’t change - the importance of communicating the value of SEO to senior management.

Here’s my prediction for 2024: There’s going to be more scrutiny, more accountability and more misunderstanding from senior executives than ever before.

Meanwhile, the mission of the SEO MBA is still unchanged: to help SEO professionals learn the skills they need to become more senior, have a bigger impact and work at an executive level.

January Discount!

Since January is when many people invest in their personal development I’m giving 10% off both courses. It’s the only sale or discount I run all year:

Enroll today for 10% off

There are two courses: Executive Presence and The Art of Client Management.

Executive Presence is the flagship course - it’s the most popular and is designed for anyone who wants to advance their career, whether in-house or agency-side. It teaches you how to think strategically, connect SEO investments to business value, create business models and executive-ready presentations and work cross functionally to get things done. Enroll today →

The Art of Client Management is designed specifically for SEO agencies, since dealing with clients is such an important part of the process. Whether you’re working on sales, client management, content or technical SEO this course will help you do better work, become more senior and get paid more. It teaches you how to think about delivering work to clients, how to manage relationships and how to get things done. Enroll today →

(And of course, you can always buy the two-course bundle for the best value)

Over 700 people have enrolled in a course, why not join them in 2024?

What’s ahead for the SEO MBA?

The newsletter slowed down a lot this year - I’m incredibly grateful for everyone who signed up and apologies for not shipping more free content this year. I promise there’s more coming in 2024!

Despite not shipping too many emails, I’m really happy with how Input Metrics for SEO came out - I received a ton of positive feedback on that and I think it’s one of the best pieces I’ve written. If you missed it, check it out and let me know what you think.

One thing I am proud of though - keeping the quality bar high. There’s tremendous pressure as a newsletter writer to ship consistently - and this last year I just didn’t have the bandwidth to write posts that lived up to my quality bar.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t try!

Anyway - I’m going to work hard to finish these posts and get them out to you this year. At least one in January hopefully! But I promise I’ll only do that if they live up to my quality bar. 🙏

In addition, I’m going to experiment with opening up the platform to guest columns - if anyone wants to write about the business and leadership challenges that SEO professionals face, and you think you have something really exceptional to write then drop me a note and we can chat!

(Preference given to alumni of the course 😉)

If you need to pay for a course by invoice, or if you want to enroll in a group for a group discount - just hit reply and we can sort it out.

Much love to you all, I am immensely grateful for the SEO MBA and everyone here.

Tom

This is the first time I’m running a live cohort version and I’m not sure when (or if!) I’ll run one of these again, so don’t miss out and join the program now:

→ Join the Executive Presence cohort

Enrollment ends midnight this Friday 21st April, the cohort kicks off Monday 24th.

Every week there are live sessions, tons of real examples, interactive sessions and a slack group for discussion and peer learning. See all the details here.

Questions?

• Is there a discount if I’ve already purchased the course and want to enroll in the live cohort? Yes! Email me for a discount.

• Need to enroll as a group or pay by invoice? Email me.

Why take the course?

Because the best way to advance your career is to become better at important, but hard to learn skills like “thinking strategically” and “executive communication”. SEO is after all, an industry that requires diplomacy, politics, stakeholder negotiation and clear communication.

But the course isn’t full of theory about “communication skills” - it’s a concrete, tangible step by step process to:

1. Develop stronger SEO strategy

2. Build a financial business case around your strategy

3. Create CEO-level communication and presentations for your strategy

4. Work cross-functionally with an organization to get things done

Who is this for?

Mid-career and senior level SEOs who want to advance their career, get access to more senior roles and have more impact with their work.

Lots of very smart people that I admire have said lots of nice things:

“If you are trying to take your career to the next level, and be able to clearly communicate to both your peers and senior, this course is for you.”
- John-Henry Scherck

“It’s extremely actionable and includes lots of learnings that I embedded in my day to day work. Most importantly, I now feel much more confident presenting my SEO vision to leadership and executive teams.”
- Areej AbuAli

“The course ended last week and it has already helped our entire agency communicate better and close 2 high quality six-figure deals.”
- Leigh Wasson

“I cannot recommend the SEO MBA highly enough. The SEO MBA was a practical course where we could work on real case studies. This is sometimes missing from other courses which makes all the difference when you want to learn and retain the information. I will be using what I learnt for many years to come.”
- SEO Jo Blogs

“Tom's SEO MBA course is exactly what has been missing to take SEOs from channel masters to strategic marketers who can influence the course of a business.”
- Mike King

“Tom’s course reinvigorated my approach to SEO, transformed my approach to business and uplifted my confidence. I was able to reach bigger clients and unlock potential work in entirely new ways.”
- Kate Barlow

This live cohort is going to be fun - I think we’re going to have plenty of time to really get into the weeds and help every single person with their own unique position and situation. Enroll today.

I hope to see you there.

Tom

A lot of CEOs have what I call a “black box” mental model of SEO that looks something like this:

This “black box” mental model is extremely unhelpful for an SEO program. In particular:

1. It implies that the SEO team is the primary input into SEO success, which obscures the dependencies of the SEO program. As we discussed in Is SEO Worth It - SEO is actually a cross-functional program where most of the SEO success comes from activity outside of the SEO team.

2. It’s not measurable - the only accounting here is the unit of “doing SEO” that you do.

In this article let’s explore how we can use input metrics to get buy-in for our work while ensuring executives across the business have a better mental model for how SEO works.

Reporting Reinforces Mental Models

We are often guilty of perpetuating this kind of mental model when all we do is report on outputs and outcomes. A common dashboard view looks like this:

All we’re reporting on is outputs.

Reporting on outputs is measuring what has happened. Measuring what has happened is important, obviously, but it’s a bit like driving a car by only looking in the rear view mirror…

It’s also important to measure what is happening.

Rankings, traffic and revenue are LAGGING indicators of success. They are the results of work done in the past. What we need to find are LEADING indicators - the things that tell us how we’re doing right now, at things that can cause success in the future.

What we need are input metrics:

Introducing Input Metrics

Amazon runs their business not on outputs but on inputs. The book Working Backwards goes into detail and I’d definitely recommend it. Cedric Chin has a nice primer:

The simple answer is that we are not taught to think like this. When people say “be more data driven”, we immediately assume, “oh, we have to measure our business outcomes”. And so we measure things like number of deals closed, or cohort retention rates, or revenue growth, or number of blog visitors. These are all output metrics — and while they are important, they are also not particularly actionable.

Amazon argues that it’s not enough to know your output metrics. In fact, they go even further, and say that you shouldn’t pay much attention to your output metrics; you should pay attention to the controllable input metrics that you know will affect those output metrics. It is a very different thing when, say, your customer support team knows that their performance bonuses are tied to a combination of NPS and ‘% of support tickets closed within 3 days’. If you have clearly demonstrated a link between the former and the latter, then everyone on that team would be incentivised to come up with process improvements to bring that % up!

In essence, output metrics represent outcomes or results while input metrics represent actions.

The more you read about this the more you feel like this is deeply ingrained across Amazon in a way that has shaped the organizational psyche.

Note that input metrics fall into two types:

1. those that are strictly within your control, these are “true” input metrics e.g. “number of pages published this month”.

2. “mini lag metrics” that are not completely controllable, but are directly measurable and change in direct response to our actions. This could be something like # pages crawled in the last 30 days, or # of outreach responses.

Either way, the key is to choose input metrics that are measurable, change in response to our actions, and we believe predict success.

Example SEO Input Metrics

Let’s look at how we might create some input metrics for SEO. Remember the goal here is to demystify the “black box” - so what are the key factors that we can directly control that will result in SEO performance?

The most basic set of input metrics might look something like this:

Links + content = SEO! We’re all pretty familiar with this.

Of course, ideally you want to tailor the metrics to your own specific situation and goals. So for a content program we might do something like this:

There is no one-size-fits-all approach here! Yes there are 1,000s of ranking factors but no you shouldn’t have 1,000s of input metrics. The key is to choose ones that are specific to your situation / business / needs and crucially that align with your plan – what are you going to do? Those activities point the way to input metrics.

Obviously this is just a sampling - you’ll need to think carefully about which ones you choose. 

As we get more sophisticated we can start grouping and chaining these together:

Notice how abstract intentions like “improve content quality” are now measurable - we have something an executive can understand here! We’re starting to demystify the black box of “do some SEO”.

Input Metrics Create Better Mental Models

Reporting on input metrics should enable the senior stakeholders across the business to better understand how SEO works - and all the levers the company can pull to influence success.

Importantly - you can start to map out which teams are responsible for the various input metrics:

By communicating your strategy this way, and making the various inputs measurable it helps executives across the business understand the cross-functional effort required to achieve SEO success.

Input Metrics are Not Neutral!

Something important to understand about input metrics - they are not neutral! There are a ton of things that you could use as input metrics, but by carefully choosing the input metrics you’re communicating to the business that these metrics are the ones that will move the needle.

Input metrics are embedded expertise! You’re supposed to use your SEO experience and judgment to identify the things you think will have the greatest impact on the business. This requires subjective expertise! There are, obviously, a TON of things that could potentially impact SEO performance. The key is to try and build a report that focuses on the key ones - either the ones we are directly trying to influence, or the ones most likely to impact results.

Input metrics are cross-functional! Note how in the above example there are many inputs that might be entirely beyond the control of the SEO team (e.g. # of new products on the site). This is important however because while influencing that input metric might be beyond the control of the SEO team, it absolutely impacts the SEO performance.

Input Metrics are More Measurable

The good news about input metrics is that they allow you to report on progress even if you’re not seeing results yet. This is a key step towards being seen as more credible by senior leadership - instead of saying “it depends” or “we’re not seeing results yet” or “SEO takes time” you can say “we’ve improved our input metric X%!”

The bad news about input metrics is that they often rely on metrics that aren’t readily available in Google Analytics. For example the number of new pages created on the blog might rely on a spreadsheet calculation. Or the number of products with a unique description might require a custom crawl of the website. You’ll notice, however, that coming up with ways to measure these input metrics over time is often very valuable work!

Input Metrics are how you Manage an SEO Program

Once you have the foundational mental model for how the metrics sit together you can start to connect all your initiatives directly to measurable metrics. This is a common methodology in the product world, but rarely talked about in SEO circles.

Daniel Schmidt, CEO of doubleloop has a nice visual in his post Why business intelligence falls flat showing how initiatives, input metrics, north star metric and business KPIs all fit together (the images is an example for how Spotify might connect initiatives, input metrics, north star metric and business KPIs):

Now, not only do we have the mental model for “what levers influence SEO” but also “what levers are we trying to pull right now, and how”. This essentially puts the entire SEO program on one page! Great for executives.

Aside: I really like how Doubleloop is creating visual real-time metric dashboards. See the live example here. And here’s a simple example B2B SAAS template that I created in Doubleloop. 

Input Metrics Should Evolve

Finally, one key aspect of input metrics is that you should be evolving these over time as you get more information. From the book “Working Backwards”:

When we realized that the teams had chosen the wrong input metric—which was revealed via the WBR [weekly business review] process—we changed the metric to reflect consumer demand instead. Over multiple WBR meetings, we asked ourselves, “If we work to change this selection metric, as currently defined, will it result in the desired output?” As we gathered more data and observed the business, this particular selection metric evolved over time from:

• number of detail pages, which we refined to

• number of detail page views (you don't get credit for a new detail page if customers don't view it), which then became

• the percentage of detail page views where the products were in stock (you don't get credit if you add items but can't keep them in stock), which was ultimately finalized as

• the percentage of detail page views where the products were in stock and immediately ready for two-day shipping, which ended up being called 'Fast Track In Stock'.

Let’s imagine that we’re managing SEO for a site like Nerdwallet. One of our input metrics might be something like “number of pages live” - i.e. the more pages we publish the better.

But this is a pretty crude metric - you can easily see how “number of pages live” might not predict SEO success particularly well. So maybe you would evolve the metric like this:

This kind of evolution is essentially starting with a simple, easy to measure metric and gradually iterating over time as we learn which metric is the best predictor of success, and how to measure the more specific, relevant version of the metric.

Importantly, a good input metric serves two purposes. Firstly it helps you predict success - i.e. if we move this metric then results should follow. But secondly, it helps people inside the business know what to do.

This second point is not to be overlooked - a reporting framework is a communication and coordination tool. So, one reason to iterate our input metrics is to better predict success - and another reason is to ensure various teams across the business are doing what you want them to do.

Don’t underestimate this second piece!

In Summary: Executives don’t invest in things they don’t understand and can’t measure

Executives don’t tend to invest in something that they don’t understand and can’t measure. So even though organic revenue is easy to understand and important, SEO is often under-funded and neglected. Input metrics are one way to ensure that we are helping decision makers understand how SEO works AND how they can invest in SEO success.

After all - consider this. If you CAN’T show input metrics, what’s the alternative? You ask for more SEO budget for…. what? A bigger black box?

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Input metrics and reporting to senior stakeholders is just one part of what’s covered in the SEO MBA course on Executive Presence. Enroll in the on-demand course or enroll in the live cohort that starts April 24th.

The live cohort experience is designed to help you become more confident and capable as an SEO professional. Over 500 SEOs have taken the Executive Presence course and the material has been tested and I know it works.

The material will be the same but the experience is different:

• Live video sessions every week (with two time zone options)

• Packed with real examples and case studies from my own work

• A small intimate group of peers to learn with and learn from

• A private Slack group for deeper discussion and support

• Access to the full on-demand video library for the course

• Templates, examples, case studies and more

The cohort starts the week of April 24th but you can enroll today. Places are limited:

Enroll Today

Why am I doing this? Well, for those that have followed the newsletter for a while you’ll know that I really enjoy teaching. And while the self-paced course is a great way to scale access, I miss the thrill of teaching and working directly with students.

The self paced course will still be available and depending on how this goes I might run one or two cohorts every year.

The cohort is designed to maximize interaction, support and designed to help everyone who is enrolled level up their career and increase their impact.

I hope to see you there.

Tom

PS - if you have any questions just hit reply.

PPS - yes I’ll get back to the free email content soon! Putting this cohort together has kept me busy… Watch out for some fresh emails next week.

As you look ahead to 2023, what better way to invest in yourself than taking a course designed to make you more capable and confident in your work.

10% discount on courses expires tomorrow! (Jan 31st at midnight)

→ Enroll today

Thanks,

Tom

PS - not quite convinced? Check out 30+ testimonials here.

In 2004 Jeff Bezos banned powerpoint inside Amazon, and replaced them with 4-page memos (later expanded to 6-page memos). Here’s the email he sent:

“From: Bezos, Jeff

Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 2004 6:02 pm

Subject: Re: No powerpoint presentations from now on at steam

A little more help with the question “why.”

Well structured, narrative text is what we’re after rather than just text. If someone builds a list of bullet points in word, that would be just as bad as powerpoint.

The reason writing a good 4 page memo is harder than “writing” a 20 page powerpoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what’s more important than what, and how things are related.

Powerpoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the interconnectedness of ideas.”

I’ve seen a lot of tech companies try and adopt this same approach. A lot of founders and executives “want to be like Jeff” and mandate some form of narrative writing (usually without going so far as banning powerpoint…)

So it might be the case that you’re suddenly required to present your strategy using a narrative memo format. Where do you begin? How to make it good?

Your company typically will give you some kind of template to work from but this is about as helpful as the standard presentation template your company gives you…. (i.e. not very!)

Writing is supposed to be a natural medium that everyone is familiar with but you should understand that great narratives are incredibly hard to write. Like, almost impossible. Jeff Bezos opens his 2017 shareholder letter with a story about learning how to do a handstand…!

After coaching several executive teams on how to write good narrative memos I’ve seen some common mistakes and thought I’d write up a guide with some advice, because it’s kind of an unnatural format. There are a ton of guides on how to write a 6-page Amazon-style memo but most of them are not very useful - they focus on the formulaic structure and rules rather than how to write an effective narrative.

If you’re just learning about narrative memos I’d suggest reading this: The Anatomy of an Amazon 6-pager. It’s a good primer and overview but still prizes formulaic rule following over the principles that will make a narrative effective.

Ok, so let’s dive in.

Firstly, Business Writing Basics

The first instinct when writing is to use hedging and soft language. Strip that out. You should feel free to weave narrative stories if you want, but when you’re describing business results, be specific and measurable.

So instead of “our brand awareness is increasing” you should write “brand awareness grew 15% during 2022”.

Instead of “Most users don’t use the save article feature” you should write “Only 5% of users use the save article feature”.

Not only is this more objective and clearer for the reader, but it forces you to think clearly - you are forced to quantify and articulate the specific data underlying your assumptions.

So your first goal should be to strip away the fluff, write more directly and add numbers.

How to write a good memo

Ok, so you’ve got the basics of the document structure and writing clearly. But how do you actually make your narrative effective? Here are the four ways that I often see narrative memos trip up:

1. You don’t give enough context for the situation, so people don’t understand correctly what you’re doing, the magnitude of impact or why they should care

2. You bury your asks in paragraphs of text so that the reader can’t distinguish what’s important from the other paragraphs

3. You outline opportunities or asks without situating them in business value so the reader doesn’t care about them

4. You ask for resources without evidence that you’ll be able to use the resources to meet your goals so you fail to convince the reader that it’s a worthwhile use of funds

So let’s break these down into four ways you can strengthen your memo and make it more effective:

#1 Situation & Context

Every narrative memo is supposed to have an introduction and a state of the business section. But despite this, it’s often the weakest part of the narrative.

As we covered in how to make an SEO strategy, good strategy consists of a diagnosis, guiding policy and coherent action. This diagnosis should not be under-estimated - it’s not a simple summary, it’s not a high level snapshot of metrics, it’s not a single chart. It’s a detailed look at the current situation, paired with an expert diagnosis to inform the reader about “what is going on”.

Because the situation tees up the whole strategy, it’s often one of the last sections that I edit - working on this section ensures that whatever strategy you’re proposing actually relates back to the situation.

Let’s look at an example. Imagine you’re working on content marketing and write a situation like this:

Overall, we wrote 280 pieces of content in 2022, driving 2.3m visits
* Evergreen guides: 30
* News articles: 120
* How-to content: 85
* Cost of living pieces: 45

While there’s data here, there’s no diagnosis. Are these numbers good or bad? Are we increasing or decreasing?

Questions to ask yourself about the situation:

• Does this data tie directly back to business value?

• Can I show how this data is changing over time?

• Can I show how this data relates to key competitors or industry benchmarks?

• When I look ahead to the proposed strategy, how can I ensure the situation supports the need for the proposed course of action?

#2 Focus on What’s Important

A long narrative memo can become a wall of text. In my experience, most organizations don’t have Jeff Bezos breathing down their neck forcing them to be quiet and focused at the start of meetings to actually closely read the memo.

According to the strict Amazon style guide you’re not allowed to use bullet points but I think that’s a bit heavy handed. (I’d go so far as to venture that the all-time greatest AND worst narrative memos don’t use bullet points. So think carefully about trying to create a sense of focus and clarity using only paragraphs of text.)

Just because you’re writing a document doesn’t mean you can’t consider structure, formatting and hierarchy of information.

Consider an example like this:

There is a mismatch between the editorial approach to producing content, which is primarily focused on news, editorial and social media and the SEO approach to producing content, which is focused on authority, evergreen rankings and depth. As a result we’re not capturing key evergreen keyword terms - like “best headphones” that can drive ecommerce revenue. We would benefit from taking an “SEO-first” approach - moving content production and oversight into the SEO team for commerce content

This recommendation to move content production into the SEO team is buried at the end of a paragraph at the end of page 5 of a memo. This is no small project however, requiring buy-in and changes across the editorial team and the SEO team, not to mention political challenges persuading the editorial team to give up control of this content. If this is one of the key initiatives being proposed don’t bury it!

Questions to ask yourself about the structure:

• Have I summarized the document by putting the “headline items” at the start of the memo?

• Have I summarized every paragraph by starting with a key phrase that summarizes the key point of the paragraph?

• Have I bolded or called attention to any key items?

• Have I made the most important thing, the most important thing?

#3 Tie to Business Value

We’ve talked about the dangerous phrase “you should” before. This applies in spades for narrative memos - you need to ensure that you’re not venturing ideas, you’re venturing a business case.

Not “you should” but “there is an opportunity to”. Quantify the potential impact of your recommendations.

The narrative structure might look something like this:

2023 Key Priorities - Invest in winning our key rankings
For us to succeed we need to focus on winning the pages that matter most. We should treat these pages like products - separate from the rest of our content. To be specific, these are our category pages and inspiration pages. The page value of a category page is more than that of the next 50 pages in the category combined

Category Pages: 
Key activity #1
Key activity #2
Key activity #3

Inspiration Pages: 
Key activity #1
Key activity #2
Key activity #3

There’s good detail and focus here - it’s easy to read and understand what the key initiatives are. Good! But all the focus is on WHAT needs to be done, not WHY.

Aside from a reference to “worth more than the next 50 pages combined” we don’t quantify the impact on the business.

Instead, see how adding business impact to our recommendations instantly makes it more compelling:

2023 Key Priorities - Invest in winning our key rankings
For us to succeed we need to focus on winning the pages that matter most. We should treat these pages like products - separate from the rest of our content. To be specific, these are our category pages and inspiration pages. The page value of a category page is more than that of the next 50 pages in the category combined

Category Pages: Increase annual revenue from $2m to $4.5m
Key activity #1
Key activity #2
Key activity #3

Inspiration Pages: Increase annual revenue from $1.2m to $3.4m
Key activity #1
Key activity #2
Key activity #3

Even if the data is there in the document for the reader to kind of estimate the size of impact on their own - it’s important to spell it out. This is how you make your strategy compelling - everyone understands money!

Questions to ask yourself about the business case:

• Are you using the language of business impact throughout the memo? I.e. are you talking about revenue and margin instead of clicks and rankings?

• Have you quantified the impact of your proposed initiatives? Using a range is fine, but be sure to create a coherent estimate of impact

• Beyond revenue impact, are you showing how your proposed initiatives align to overall company priorities?

#4 Evidence & Credibility

There’s something about the narrative format that naturally invites speculation and “what if” - perhaps it’s the fact that there’s no need for screenshots or mockups, perhaps it’s because we’re accustomed to writing as the medium of fantasy and imagination.

Whatever the cause - you have to curb your speculation. If you’re proposing a course of action, a strategy or an investment you should be clear-eyed and realistic.

Consider these two separate examples of “proposing a content marketing resource”

We have foundational gaps between the content we create, the audiences we are targeting, and the amplification channels we use to promote our content. Due to the fact that backlinks have primarily been a PR responsibility, this has meant we have only been focusing on a single type of website to amplify our content: the media. As a result we’ve not been focused on using further content marketing tactics to appeal to other types of websites and audiences. We would benefit from taking a content-led SEO approach, with a content marketing strategy and leveraging the SEO factors that influence links and site authority.

With the following example:

1.2. Invest in Content Marketing for RLDs
Organic link building through our 175+ pricing guides have produced around 70% of our RLDs. Currently, the pages are maintained by [name] who will be leaving us soon. The permanent content marketing replacement got caught up in the hiring freeze but now needs to be addressed and this successful initiative built upon. There is also an imperative to keep existing pages up to date. The business case can be seen in this Memo from June 2022 (link).

The second example is clearer and stronger - mostly because it grounds the proposed activity in evidence. It shows that “when we previously did X, we saw Y”. Even if this evidence is anecdotal it is very powerful at convincing executives that if you receive the budget for this project it will actually have the impact you say it will.

Questions to ask yourself about the evidence:

• What leaps of faith are required to believe that this strategy can come to life? How can I present evidence that we’ll overcome these?

• Which data points are most subjective or weakest? How can I pair them with anecdotal stories to give them more weight?

• What dependencies are required to achieve success? Have I elevated these and made this dependency clear?

Tenets are a unique opportunity

Honestly, a lot of this advice applies equally well to presentations as narrative memos! It’s the heart of good, clear strategy. But one of the unique differences between a narrative memo and a presentation is the idea of tenets.

If you’re writing a powerpoint presentation - there isn’t typically room for a section that says “here are my beliefs about the world” or “here’s my mental model for the project”.

But tenets are exactly that - they allow you to articulate a kind of north star and operating principles for the work ahead. This isn’t just a feel-good exercise, it encourages deeper alignment - not on the specific day to day projects but at a deeper level it allows you to get on the same page with the executives about why this work matters, how it should be approached etc.

For SEO work this can be incredibly important for two reasons. Firstly, SEO is a cross-functional initiative and requires other teams to execute your initiatives. So tenets allow you to educate other executives on the underlying ideas you’re building on. Secondly, there are a lot of out-dated or flat-out-wrong idea about SEO, especially with senior executives! So tenets are a good way to properly outline (and justify!) your foundational beliefs and principles for an effective SEO program.

Let’s say that we’re building out that SEO commercial content team for a publisher, we might have tenets that look like:

The following are guiding principles as we build this team:

Content requires updating & maintaining. Commerce content is evergreen and largely unchanging (“best headphones” doesn’t change as a keyword). We’ll need to invest up-front for our content production knowing it’ll have a long payback cycle. Unlike editorial content we’ll need to actively maintain and update this content frequently. For the most competitive keywords competitors are updating content weekly.

Commerce content requires depth. In contrast to our editorial content, we should be aiming for comprehensive content - not speed of publishing. This will require a different approach to planning, researching and publishing content. Our competitors average 3,000+ words on their comparison pages.

Treat content as a product. Commerce content is directly revenue generating and has specific requirements. We will need to work more closely with product than our editorial team typically does to ensure that we are optimizing call to action buttons, integrating schema markup for things like FAQ sections and building modular page sections.

Bylines & authority. Google is very explicit in their guidelines for product reviews and a key ingredient is ensuring we have strong E-EAT signals on the page: demonstrating our hands-on experience, expertise, authority and trust. We will need to review our byline to ensure we have trusted authors for our pages (while simultaneously managing a field of freelance writers and content updaters in the background).

Articulating these foundational beliefs / guiding principles allows us to get deeper alignment than a simple powerpoint would (assuming the executives read our memo…) so don’t forget to think carefully about this section.

Finally, re-write and edit!

Creating an executive-ready narrative memo is hard. Just like creating an executive-ready presentation! It requires research, iteration, feedback from various stakeholders and revision.

Having seen many executives attempt the narrative memo approach, I think this point is crucial (from the 2017 annual Amazon letter by Jeff Bezos):

Here’s what we’ve figured out. Often, when a memo isn’t great, it’s not the writer’s inability to recognize the high standard, but instead a wrong expectation on scope: they mistakenly believe a high-standards, six-page memo can be written in one or two days or even a few hours, when really it might take a week or more! They’re trying to perfect a handstand in just two weeks, and we’re not coaching them right. The great memos are written and re-written, shared with colleagues who are asked to improve the work, set aside for a couple of days, and then edited again with a fresh mind. They simply can’t be done in a day or two.

Ultimately, writing a memo is not an exercise in clear writing, it’s an exercise in clear strategy. If you want to go even further, don’t forget How to make an SEO strategy.

Has your organization tried narrative memos? How did it go? I’d love to hear your experience.

Thanks,

Tom

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Since the start of the year is when many people reflect on their careers and create a plan for personal development, I’m offering a limited time 10% discount on SEO MBA courses, valid until January 31st.

Enroll Today

I want to keep pricing honest and I want to keep things simple - instead of running a series of sales and promotions throughout the year, I run a single discount once a year in January.

The SEO MBA Courses

There are two SEO MBA courses:

Executive Presence

Designed for senior level SEO professionals who are working with senior stakeholders, whether working in-house or agency-side. This course will help you get budget and buy-in for your work. Take the course and learn how to:

• Create buy-in & budget for your work

• Communicate effectively with senior stakeholders

• Build a business case for your projects

• Work cross-functionally to get things done

Enroll in Executive Presence

The Art of Client Management

Designed for agency SEO professionals, whether sales, account managers or consultants. This course will help you build strong client relationships, manage expectations, and retain clients more effectively. Take the course and learn how to:

• Manage client expectations

• Build trusted long-term relationships with clients

• Tie your recommendations to business value

• Retain and upsell clients more effectively

Enroll in The Art of Client Management

Both courses have an “essentials” tier and a “professional” tier. The professional tier is how you get the most out of the courses - in addition to the full course modules, assignments and templates you also get:

• 1:1 feedback on the weekly assignments. These aren’t theory based homework projects, they’re designed to be applied to real work projects and I’ll give you detailed feedback in Google Docs on each week as you build your project.

• Weekly office hours. Every week I offer office hours. It’s typically a small group that joins and we discuss candid real work situations, problems and projects.

For those that enroll in the professional tier and make use of the feedback and office hours you’re essentially getting several hours of my time to personally work with you on any challenges you’re facing, to provide feedback on your work and advise you on your career.

If you’re interested in buying the SEO MBA for your team get in touch for group discounts and agency unlimited license packages.

Look forward to more regularly scheduled emails soon, I’ve got some more emails planned around reporting, forecasting and financial modeling. Stay tuned.

Thanks,

Tom

In 2020 I had a consulting gig helping a large client build out an SEO program. As part of that, I was leading the interview process for a senior management SEO position. Time and time again I met people who knew more about SEO than I did, but they lacked the business skills for me to feel comfortable putting them in front of the CEO.

In short I realized there was a skills gap in the industry - too many talented SEOs were missing executive presence.

And so the SEO MBA was born with a mission to close the skills gap. To help SEO professionals learn the business and communication skills they need, to not only get senior jobs but be effective at securing SEO budgets and managing stakeholders, clients and cross-functional teams.

The first course on Executive Presence launched last November so what follows is a kind of year 1 recap.

Highlights

Here’s the chart of sales over the last year:

Clearly the Executive Presence course has far out-performed The Art of Client Management course. Executive Presence is selling about 80/20 against The Art of Client Management, and about 25% of the revenue of the second course comes from upgrades (people who bought the first course and decided to buy the second as well).

By the end of 2022 over 500 people will have enrolled in one of the SEO MBA courses. Not bad for year 1.

Beyond course sales and revenue however, the true measure of impact is the many testimonials and stories that people share. Stories of people feeling more confident, using the skills in their job, getting new jobs and building executive presence. This warms my heart and gives me faith that I’m doing something useful and meaningful - these stories are what I’m most proud of.

Writing

In addition to the courses, I’ve enjoyed finding a voice and opinion in the newsletter. It hasn’t always been as frequent as I’d like but I’m really pleased with how the content came out and the positive reactions.

Here’s some of my favorite pieces so far:

Strong opinions about the state of the industry. These pieces are where I get most opinionated and perhaps controversial with viewpoints that directly address bad practices I see in the industry. Examples:

• Is SEO worth it? where I take issue with the idea that SEO is a “cheap” investment.

• Let’s never talk about SEO audits again that surfaces how much I dislike “SEO audits” 

How to put an SEO strategy together. These pieces explore some fundamental mindset shifts required to work on strategy not tactics. Examples:

• Mindset shifts for strategic SEO where I look at ways to position an SEO program, not just a one-time project

• How to make an SEO strategy looks at how to “be strategic” in a concrete and tangible way

• Managing expectations by finding good comparisons looks at a core missing piece of most SEO work I see. The ability to add context and benchmarks to your strategy.

The presentation skills series. These are some of my most popular pieces! I love nerding out on effective executive presentations - it’s an important skill for securing buy-in and budget. The series:

• Presenting to the CEO in 5 slides

• Good slides reduce complexity

• Let’s get rid of the legends (yes we’re talking about charts)

The SEO career series. There are very few senior jobs that have SEO in the job title. So what do you do about it? The series:

• Why there are no VP SEO jobs

• Unbundled & Commoditized: The future of SEO careers?

• Agency SEO careers in a commoditized market

• Being mid-career sucks, the context crisis

• Navigating an SEO career

• The SEO Skills Matrix (all time top post so far)

And finally, the two pieces that got absolutely no love but that are two of my personal favorites!

• Nerding out on Nerdwallet - a look at the S-1 filing for a company that built their entire business on SEO

• The consultant’s stance - how important our language is and the role of the expert

Phew! That’s a lot of writing. 

What Worked in Year 1

Ok, here’s some things that I think went well this year:

• Writing the free email built a nice solid audience and was a very effective way to launch the courses. It’s a very simple, crude funnel (step 1: free email, step 2: paid courses) but it’s broadly effective, at least for launching things.

• I’ve kept the technology stack and process layer extremely lean. This makes the whole business very easy to manage which is something I personally value - balancing parenting, consulting work and the SEO MBA would have driven me insane otherwise! The whole thing is just Substack, Podia and Stripe.

• Rejecting the live cohort model early on meant that the courses are more accessible across price points and time zones. It also gave me a lot of time freedom to work on consulting, future course development etc. I think the combination of self-paced video with 1:1 assignment feedback and weekly office hours is a nice blend of learning environment that seems to work well.

• Everyone who purchased a course at the professional tier gets access to the weekly office hours and these have been wonderful! The chance to talk candidly in small groups and everything from careers to management to strategy to freelancing and more. These spaces have been very wholesome!

What Didn’t Work in Year 1

I’m very happy overall with how things went, but there’s still plenty that could have been better:

• The most obvious miss is The Art of Client Management course. I had high expectations for the course - aimed at a clear pain point (client management) for a very specific audience (agency SEOs) - I thought this course would sell much better than it did. The most likely cause is that while client management feels useful, executive presence feels aspirational. Client management prepares you for the job you have, while executive presence prepares you for the job you get next.

• While I’m glad I kept the tech stack lean, I’ve done basically zero email automation, funnels or “marketing” in any deliberate form other than send the free newsletter. Substack + Podia are both great products to use but neither of them allow you to do any notion of segmentation or automation. I’m sure there’s room to get more grown up about this stuff next year.

• Rejecting the cohort model was the right choice I think but the downside is that I probably didn’t spend enough time actually teaching this year. Outside of beta cohorts the only live interaction is the weekly office hours - and I love this time! So I should figure out how to increase my time doing live interactions, as this kind of teaching lights me up.

• Outside of the chart up top there’s another ~15% of revenue that comes from group buys and invoices for corporate purchases. There is an obvious opportunity to do more outreach and nurturing of this sales pipeline - I think group purchases should be at least 50% of the revenue for a business like this. Now, if only I could find a CRM I like…….

So, What’s Ahead in Year 2?

I’m still figuring that out! I enjoy tinkering with the business and trying things out so we’ll see what I rustle up. Some things that might happen:

1. There’s a new course coming soon. It’s a smaller course, designed specifically around executive presentation skills. That said I built the whole thing and scrapped it once already because it wasn’t good enough… So let’s see if I can get it to a place I feel good about.

2. Expanding the course lineup with new teachers feels like an obvious way to grow the business - but most of the people who would want to launch a course are busy launching it under their own brand… If you’re building an SEO course that would fit the SEO MBA brand let me know!

3. I obviously need to grow up a bit and put in place some marketing automation, email flows and such. Maybe I’ll even dabble with some paid acquisition too - I want to make sure I’m setting this up so it’s not a huge time suck though.

4. There’s definitely an opportunity for an SEO MBA jobs board and an SEO MBA community - people ask me directly for them! But I’m a big fan of keeping the business simple. I’m mulling and debating if/when I build these things out. I know how much work it takes to keep a community healthy and high quality so I’m not going to rush into that decision lightly.

5. I’m going to dabble with some kind of more intense live instruction. The weekly office hours aren’t enough to scratch my desire to teach.

6. Keep the email going! I’ve enjoyed writing and that’s not going to dry up. So expect some new emails soon.

(Have an idea for what I should do with year 2? Drop me a note!)

Ultimately, I feel really good that everything I’ve done in year 1 has directly supported the mission. For the people who have been through a course I truly believe that there have been many positive outcomes - new jobs, new confidence, new SEO budgets!

But the skills gap still looms large. There are still too few resources to help SEO professionals learn business skills and learn how to operate at more senior layers of organizations.

So there’s more to be done. Join me in year 2 and we’ll see where this all goes.

Thank you and much love to everyone who has supported and helped along the way.

Tom

That’s why today I’m announcing two of the most requested features:

1. International Parity Pricing for SEO MBA courses

2. Captions for all videos (in English for now)

If you visit one of the course pages from a country with parity pricing enabled you should see a light blue box right by the pricing table:

As a reminder, there are two courses:

Executive Presence is the flagship course for senior SEO professionals, whether you’re in-house, agency-side or freelance. It’s designed for anyone who works with senior executives and wants to get more buy-in and become more confident.

The Art of Client Management is for all agency SEOs. It will teach you how to manage clients more effectively and confidently, helping you become a more senior agency consultant.

Because I sometimes speak quickly, and sometimes mumble my words - I’ve added captions for all course videos:

These captions are in English only for now - if there’s demand I’ll look at translating these into other languages.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which countries have parity pricing enabled?

Countries like US, UK, Canada, Australia, Switzerland & The Netherlands do not receive a discount.

Some countries have a small discount - like Italy, Greece & Portugal

Other countries get a larger discount - like Mexico, Argentina, Brazil & Poland.

I made a spreadsheet showing which countries get a discount here.

How did you choose countries and calculate discounts?

Honestly it’s hard balancing a system that is completely fair against a system that I can manage and maintain as the only person running the SEO MBA without a complicated tech stack or dedicated ops team. I created two discount tiers based on the pricing data in this calculator.

I biased towards something simple. And it’s fairer than what was in place before.

I loaded the page and don’t see the discount?

If you’re browsing via a VPN try disabling that. If that doesn’t work and you still think you should get a discount, drop me an email: tom@seomba.com

My country doesn’t have a parity discount but I really need one!

People’s situations are all different. If you have a tough situation but really want access to the course, drop me an email: tom@seomba.com

Ha, I found your code and can steal your discount codes!

Let’s use the honor system shall we? Again - if you need the discount, just drop me a note.

Have more questions? Just hit reply.

Hope this is helpful for those around the world.

Thanks,

Tom

Reminder: The SEO MBA is designed to help you learn the business and leadership skills you need to become a more confident and effective SEO professional. The flagship course on Executive Presence is a deep dive into strategic thinking and clear communication for both in-house and agency SEOs.

If you want to talk about agency pricing, group discounts and custom training - get in touch.

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Fixing an XML sitemap doesn’t feel very strategic, it’s just a tactic right? But acquiring a competitor's website feels, somehow more like strategy? That’s kind of a wide spectrum though… Where does something stop being tactical and start being strategic?

The trick is to recognize that something isn’t inherently either strategic or tactical. It’s not a binary spectrum. You can’t look at a list of proposed activities and label some as strategic and some as tactical.

Instead, you can think of a strategy as a wrapper for a set of actions. An “SEO strategy” is the communication and framing of a set of proposed actions.

In this post we’ll take a pragmatic step by step approach to putting together an SEO strategy. And it all starts with this quote, from the book Good Strategy / Bad Strategy:

“The kernel of a strategy contains three elements: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action.”

Let’s look at these one by one:

Diagnosis: A combination of situation & cause

Remember that a strategy is about communication and coordination. Typically among senior executives. The first mistake is assuming everyone is on the same page - so you need to quantify and align on the current situation. The second mistake is assuming that numbers alone tell the story, so you have to add an expert opinion on the cause.

A diagnosis is NOT: “Traffic has been declining year over year”

That’s like going to the doctor and them saying “you have chest pain”. Ok. But, why?

A better diagnosis is something like “Traffic has declined 15% year over year, driven by increased competition and our lack of expert content in competitive niches”.

Notice how the diagnosis requires some expert opinion or judgment. It’s not a purely objective read, it’s an expert assessment of the facts. And note that a diagnosis doesn’t need to be focused on a problem, it could also be outlining an opportunity.

If your strategy is focused on an opportunity then you want to quantify the size of the opportunity, combined with an expert opinion of how you’ll capture the opportunity: “There is an opportunity to capture 200k - 400k additional visits / year through expanding our plant care guides, this will require between 200-300 new editorial pages”

 (For more, see the previous newsletter: don’t solve problems, show opportunities).

Guiding Principle: A simple statement that shapes the solution

Ok, so we have a diagnosis - now we need to create a high level framing for how we’re going to tackle the situation. Again, remember that a good strategy is about communication. We need our strategy to be understandable across the organization - so we need to avoid jargon, avoid technical details and focus on the key information.

A good guiding principle gives you enough direction to understand how we’ll tackle the problem/opportunity, but without all the specification and details. 

So if our diagnosis is: “Traffic is down 20% YoY because competitors are out-ranking us for core commercial queries with better pages and faster link velocity”

Then a guiding policy might be something like: “We will invest in improving our core category pages with updated content, and increased link building efforts”

A good test of a guiding policy is to leave room for different initiatives and and different approaches, without changing the guiding policy. So in the above example you could imagine that we might reasonably work on some of these initiatives:

• Improving schema markup for our category pages

• Re-writing content for our category pages (and/or rewriting our content on a regular basis)

• New product photo shoots to add original imagery to our category pages

• Running a pricing survey to add original pricing content to our category pages

• Content marketing based link building

• Manual outreach based link building

• Hiring a content marketing team internally

• Hiring a content marketing agency

All of the above could potentially fit within the guiding principle - in reality we’re almost certainly not going to do all of these, but we might experiment with a few different initiatives depending on resources and results. All without changing the diagnosis or guiding principle. It’s essential that a good strategy leaves room for experimenting and iterating on the exact solution and projects, without having to re-write the whole thing.

A set of coherent actions: “coherent” is the key word here!

Now we get to the actual actions. The exercise here takes our laundry list of proposed actions and groups them into 3-5 distinct initiatives that are coherent with our guiding principle. Note that we’re NOT trying to cram everything we want to get done into our strategy - but to focus deliberately only on those initiatives that meet the diagnosis & guiding principle.

You should focus on making these initiatives clearly defined and distinct from each other. This allows you to discuss them individually, assign budgets to each one etc.

For example, let’s say our diagnosis & guiding principle was something like this:

Diagnosis: “There is an opportunity to capture 200k - 400k additional visits / year through expanding our plant care guides, this will require between 200-300 new editorial pages”

Guiding principle: “Produce 200-300 best in class plant care guides through leveraging our expert knowledge”

Then our key initiatives might be something like:

1. Create editorial content

2. Build new editorial page templates

3. Fix XML sitemaps and schema issues

Ooh. Notice how the third initiative is not strictly related? This is ok, if only if, we believe that the initiative is necessary for success. 

This is the crux of good strategy - it’s building a strategic frame that is easy to communicate, gets buy-in, AND lets us invest into initiatives that we believe will move the needle.

This requires a bit of nuance (and understanding who you’re presenting the strategy to). I’m NOT giving you a green light to jam everything from a site audit into your key initiatives, but you can see how a well crafted strategy is compelling to the business and let us work on initiatives that are not explicit in the guiding principle but are necessary to achieve success.

Build the business case: show me the money

Finally, you can’t talk about strategy without quantifying things. A good strategy has actual figures in the diagnosis to quantify the situation, and a business case attached that outlines how much it’s going to cost and what the return will be.

A business case should come with a full accounting of all the costs (see more about a correct accounting for SEO costs here: is SEO worth it?). And it should come with some projections for return.

I’ll write more in the future about putting together a business case (both SEO MBA courses explore building a business case in depth), but what we’re looking for is essentially an easy to understand model that exposes your assumptions and says if we invest $X then we’ll get $Y in return.

Again - because strategy is designed for communication across various stakeholders, a good business case isn’t too complex and jargon-heavy but focuses on making the assumptions and inputs legible so that everyone can understand how the investment and return are calculated.

This can get complicated depending on the size of your business and size of strategy but in essence you want something like this:

(Don’t look too closely at the numbers, it’s all dummy data)

Of course, estimating impact and return for the various initiatives can be challenging, but without some kind of business case you’re going to have a hard time convincing the organization to invest.

Bonus round: give your strategy more weight

Strategy, a hypothetical concept lacking in gravitational mass, is going to have a hard time having any weight. But regardless, if you want your strategy to have more chance of succeeding then consider the following three bonus ingredients:

Bonus #1: Align your strategy to the company strategy 

Remember that strategy is about coherent action across the organization. So to make your strategy more compelling you should align it with the broader company priorities and strategy.

Read more about how to do that in this email: are you making SEO strategically important?

Bonus #2: Find evidence to back you up

Notice how there are various parts of the strategy that rely on “expert opinion”. That’s fine, but you want to avoid building a big strategy off the back of “I think I’m right” so, where you can, find evidence that your diagnosis is correct and your guiding principle is correct.

One way to do that is running surveys to gather evidence: using surveys to increase executive buy-in.

Bonus #3: Find a believable big number

Your business case should be grounded in the near-term opportunity. What is the return on this investment in year 1 and year 2. But that doesn’t mean we can’t get people excited about the bigger picture. What happens if we extrapolate out a few years? Does this strategy lead somewhere bigger?

Read more about finding a north star and believable big number: managing expectations by finding comparisons.

Strategy Matters

Yes, strategy matters. Sure - putting together a strategy is more work than doing an SEO audit and throwing all the recommendations at the product team. But a lack of strategy - a lack of some cohesive wrapper that communicates the project clearly and with a business case - is why SEO recommendations don’t get prioritized and why SEO teams get marginalized.

Creating a strategy is work. Valuable work. Regardless of whether you’re trying to convince the product, engineering, marketing or editorial teams to allocate resources to your projects - at the end of the day, if you’re not making a compelling case you’re going to get left behind.

This is a somewhat practical interpretation of how to put together a strategy, but defining strategy and “thinking strategically” is a slippery subject. Here’s some further reading that might be of interest:

• A plan is not a strategy (video) by Roger Martin - good for understanding how strategy might come together across multiple teams and disciplines.

• How to think more strategically as an independent consultant by me - good for independent consultants and freelancers who want to be more strategic and do better work for more money.

• The last da vinci by Hannah Smith - good for better understanding what it means to “be strategic”, with some real examples of different kinds of strategies

• How to think strategically at work by Lesley Sim - good if you’ve ever had your boss tell you to “be more strategic”.

Yours strategically,

Tom

It isn’t always clear how to advance in your SEO career. But there’s a consistent theme: if you want to reach senior SEO roles then you need to balance your focus between hard skills and soft skills.

Hard skills are mostly about specific SEO knowledge - direct understanding and application of how SEO works. Down this path leads technical mastery, and high level individual contributor roles.

But without soft skills - things like communication, management and leadership skills - you won’t reach the most senior roles.

Staying on the individual contributor path is fine - if it’s a deliberate choice. But the highest paying SEO roles I’ve ever seen have been management and leadership roles…

That’s why I’ve created this SEO skills matrix, to try and provide a pathway and career development plan for SEO industry professionals.

Note: SEO is a very broad discipline. This skills matrix is designed to be a useful tool but will likely require modification and adaptation to your specific situation.

Agency Salaries

Working at an agency I’d say that the maximum salary you can get riding on hard skills only is about $100k.

Here’s rough visualization:

Maybe there are specific technical specialist roles at very large agencies that allow you to go beyond $100k, but they’re rare. And here’s something I know to be true: your value at an agency is dependent on how much value you provide clients and if you’re not managing clients or managing teams you’re going to hit a salary ceiling.

Agency SEO Skills Matrix

Here’s the spreadsheet that outlines the various skills you need:

View Agency Skills Matrix

Notice how all of the hard skills (green in the spreadsheet) beyond level 3 basically stop contributing to your salary and promotion chances.

It’s not that these skills aren’t useful - but rather they become less valuable (from the agencies perspective). The most valuable skills become managing bigger clients, managing teams and ultimately driving growth directly for the agency by bringing in clients.

It’s those level 4 and level 5 soft skills that really start to elevate your career in an agency. They allow you to directly manage, retain and source larger client projects.

Note how once you reach director / VP level at an agency very little of the green skills are relevant day to day. Of course a grounding in SEO skills is important and it certainly might help you manage and lead teams (and have those teams respect you) but it’s not your day to day.

You day to day is spent broadly speaking in three things:

1. Managing teams

2. Managing process

3. Landing clients

If you want to level up your client management and consulting skills around level 2-4 then the SEO MBA course The Art of Client Management will help.

If you want to level up your consulting and leadership skills from 4-5 then the course on Executive Presence will help.

In-House Salaries

Salaries in-house tend to be higher (in the US). And in particular, you can earn more purely off hard skills in-house. I think with the right situation (i.e. supportive and forgiving leadership) you could perhaps earn $150k-$175k being an advanced technical SEO with a bare minimum of soft skills. But these roles are the exception and you’ll have an easier time leveling up your career building some soft skills.

And if you want to get up to $250k+ (yes, those roles exist) then it’s crucial to develop your soft skills.

In-House Skills Matrix

Here’s the skills matrix for in-house:

View In-House Skills Matrix

Technical skills are important - but most in-house teams are not struggling because they are facing complex advanced SEO issues. Rather they’re struggling because they don’t have buy-in and budget to properly execute their SEO roadmap.

It’s the ability to navigate the organization, get things done and convince stakeholders to give you budget and resources that allow you to build out a team, set up processes and assemble the right tooling for you to be effective.

If you’re looking to develop those important level 4 and level 5 soft skills, then consider the SEO MBA course on Executive Presence.

This skills matrix is still a work in progress, but hopefully it’s useful. Either for charting your own career path or for managing the development of your team. Feel free to adapt, evolve or otherwise repurpose the matrix to suit your needs.

Thanks to everyone who reviewed a draft, especially to Kristy Morrison, Martijn Hoving and Will Critchlow. And thanks to Clay-Parker Jones for the Undercurrent matrix and Postlight for their Leveling framework.

Thanks,

Tom

The Art of Client Management launches today. It’s designed for agency SEOs, whether you’re working as a consultant, account manager or in sales.

After completing the course you will be able to:

• Better manage client expectations

• Communicate more clearly and confidently

• Get buy-in and budget for your recommendations

• Retain and upsell clients more effectively

Enroll Today

Note: if you already purchased the Executive Presence you get a discount on the new course. Upgrade to the two-course bundle here.

It’s taken me five months and two beta programs to put this course together. I’d love to spread the word about this new course, would you help me share it? Here’s my launch announcement on twitter and on LinkedIn.

Thank you! 🙏

Tom

I’ve spent the last 8 years doing consulting work - where you’re aiming for impact at the scale of business. But teaching has an impact on an entirely different scale. It’s a human scale impact - the most rewarding feedback is hearing that someone is more confident dealing with their boss, or got a pay rise or landed a new job.

But…. developing a course is hard! I wrote a bit about this on my blog. From Notes on Teaching and Chairs:

The biggest surprise building the SEO MBA is quite simply how hard teaching is. As a teacher, you really want the process to be as simple as explaining the concepts in a linear fashion. “Sit down everyone, I’ve got some teaching to tell you about”. But unfortunately it’s not nearly so simple.

You see, the goal of teaching is not to get people to simply remember what you said - it’s to be able to apply that learning in context. For teaching to be effective it has to be felt in the bones. You need students to examine, unlearn and relearn concepts. It’s about reshaping mental models of how the world works.

I’m starting to develop a process for how to build a syllabus and a course - going from initial research and surveys to live beta cohorts, then moving to editing and production. One of the most important steps is to go back through every single client project I’ve worked on and extract real stories. These stories serve two important functions:

Firstly, they allow me to add case studies, stories and character to the course. Moving beyond simply a bunch of lessons, there are real examples, emails, slides and situations from my own work.

Secondly, they keep my BS in check. I force myself to validate everything I’m saying in the course by finding at least one real client situation where I used every technique or approach in real life. It’s quite easy when you’re teaching to slip into the uncanny valley, to suggest ideas or approaches that sound nice, but either don’t really work or aren’t that useful in real life. The kind of empty platitude like “pay attention to your client” - like, sure, I’d agree with that I guess? But.. how? when? why?

Grounding the course in my own experience allows me to be more specific, more actionable and ultimately more useful. 

So, Why Client Management?

When I was early in my SEO career, an old colleague of my brother’s ran some training and something he said has stuck with me ever since. He said, when you’re working at an agency you have two ways to grow: you can get close to the problem or close to the client.

Close to the problem means that you’re a technical expert. You understand exactly how SEO works. Close to the client means you understand your client’s organization, understand how clients think and understand the realities of their operations.

Clearly you need elements of both - you need to understand the problem AND clients to do good work. But I see too many people in the SEO industry in particular focusing too much on technical mastery - on understanding the problem, while neglecting to understand clients deeply enough.

As David Maister said, talking about agencies:

“It is ironic that a business in which the serving of clients depends so heavily on interpersonal psychology should be peopled with those who believe in the exclusive power of technical mastery”

This is especially true in the SEO industry. SEO is a cross-functional initiative and we’re often dependent on different teams within the client’s organization to allocate time, resources and budget in service of our goals.

SEO isn’t just about making recommendations - it’s about persuading and convincing clients to actually implement them. And servicing clients is a lot more than just working on the day to day - clients value being listened to, being cared for and being understood.

And that’s why getting close to the client matters.

And that’s why I’ve made the next SEO MBA course - the Art of Client Management. It launches next week.

What is the course about?

I ran a survey earlier this year and gathered a bunch of pain points around client management and client relationships.

From that survey, three common themes emerged:

1. How to manage client expectations

2. How to communicate clearly and demonstrate the business value of SEO

3. How to persuade clients to actually implement our recommendations

So, that’s the course I’ve built! It’s structured around 5 modules that cover everything from building a north star for your project to align with clients to building long term trusted relationships.

It’s my hope that the course will help you do better work for bigger clients, communicating more clearly and ultimately growing and retaining your client accounts. And the feedback from the first beta cohorts has been very positive:

Self Paced + Office Hours

There are going to be two pricing tiers - essentials and professional. The essentials package is all the course videos, resources, homework assignments and templates. But the professional package is the best learning experience - you get all the course materials plus you get two big additional things:

1. I’ll give you 1:1 feedback on your homework assignments. These are designed to be used with real client situations and real projects so typically this functions much like being able to get coaching and feedback directly on things you’re working on

2. You can join the weekly office hours. These are weekly zoom chats where we gather a small group (typically 2-5 people) and talk about questions about the course, or real situations and problems you’re facing at work. In the past we’ve used this time to talk about strategies for nonprofits, or dealing with a new boss, or hiring and managing teams.

I really like this structure - it allows the course to have the biggest impact and be widely available while also providing real 1:1 and small group feedback and interaction.

So, the course is launching next week and I hope you enroll. I’ve poured a lot of myself into this course and I’m excited to share it with you!

See you next week,

Tom

How often have you rolled your eyes at your client?

Here’s a fun reframe. Next time you feel like your client is asking for something unreasonable, or asking for something that doesn’t make sense, or pushing you in the “wrong” direction - stop and consider for a second that they might be right.

The truth is that your client knows their business better than you do - they have context around the health of the business, strategic priorities and internal politics that you don’t have access to.

Instead of trying to push back on your client - when you get an “unreasonable” request your first job is to understand more clearly where that request came from. Chances are there’s something going on that you’re not aware of. Some missing context that will put things in perspective for you.

First understand, then negotiate and push back.

I talk about this idea, and a bunch of other ideas about client management with Ross Hudgens, CEO of Siege Media and I think it came out great! We talk about a bunch of stuff and really get into the weeds of both my own consulting work and how Siege Media operates.

Some key ideas we talk about:

• Why I hate SEO audits - and what to do instead

• How to push back on clients, and why clients are right more often than we think

• Why Siege Media onboards clients in cohorts

• How to upsell clients effectively - by thinking about it as providing a service to the client

Take a watch:

If you’d prefer to listen, podcast links available here.

For those that are interested, here’s my video “studio” (aka small Brooklyn bedroom!):

Thanks to my amazing partner Erin we’ve turned it into something not half bad!

New course coming soon….

Subscribe now

When I worked at Distilled (the SEO agency I worked at from 2008 - 2012, now acquired by Brainlabs) one of the most consistently surprising things was our ability to retain, and even delight clients, without actually generating impressive results.

I’m not saying that we never got results, just that it surprised me when clients stuck around even when results weren’t “up and to the right”.

When I was younger, my working mental model for how agencies worked is that if you’re not getting results, you get fired. Turns out the reality is… a bit more complicated than that.

In fact the same is true of working inside a big company. It’s easy to look around at other teams who don’t immediately contribute value to the organization and think your work matters more than theirs does. But you’d be wrong.

Getting to the bottom of this requires thinking a bit more deeply about value.

Enter, Pace Layers

Stewart Brand created the model of pace layers to describe change inside complex systems. It breaks civilization into 6 layers. The top layers move faster, while the bottom layers move more slowly:

The core idea is that the top layers get all the attention, while the bottom layers hold all the power. From Steward Brand:

“Fast learns, slow remembers.  Fast proposes, slow disposes.  Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous.  Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution.  Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy.  Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power.”

This simple mental model starts to gain some power as we understand not just each layer on its own but also how the layers interact. It’s not a perfect model for understanding organizations with all their bureaucracy, but it’s a good starting point.

Organizational Pace Layers

Clay Parker Jones recently wrote up a great post reconciling various models of organizational pace layers. When you add them up there’s some recurring themes. In particular, I like Alfred Chandler's 1962 definitions of Strategy, Structure, and Tactics:

• Strategy: The plan for the allocation of resources to anticipated demand.

• Structure: The design for putting the enterprise’s existing resources against current demand.

• Tactics: The efficient and steady use of current resources whose allocation had already been decided.

What I like about this mental model for organizations is that it creates a clear sense of pace layers, of how the organization changes at different time scales:

Yadda yadda yadda. This is all theoretical. Why should I care? Ok, hang on, I'm getting there. Here’s one reason you should care:

Slow layers hold all the power

As you get more senior in your career you start to see this notion of pace layers everywhere. Decisions made about quarterly budgets play by different rules than decisions about annual budgets. Decisions on building teams need to be measured and evaluated differently than decisions to onboard a new agency partner.

If you’re reading this newsletter I hope it’s obvious by now that if you want to get budget and buy-in for your work, you need to go where the power lies. This requires engaging with your company or client at deeper pace layers. If you really want to influence the organization you’re working for you need to understand pace layers.

And understanding pace layers requires understanding negative feedback loops.

Negative Feedback Loops

SEO can be a frustrating discipline. Pushing organizations to invest in slow-moving, technical, cross-functional initiatives - often without the formal authority to demand those teams actually assign resources and budget to your initiatives.

Knowing what to do is not enough - the real battle is persuading the organization to get it done. And it’s hard to change organizations.

Many times SEOs struggle with this frustration. It can feel personal. “Am I presenting the right business case?” and “How can I prove the case for investment if I can’t get anything done in the first place?”.

I find it’s reassuring to know that this is how organizations are supposed to work.

The pace layers concept starts to help us - as we gain a mental model not just for the different layers of the organization but how the various layers interact with each other. From Stewart Brand’s model:

The very purpose of the lower layers is to constrain, provide consistency and integrate shocks. To regulate change. To constrain. This feels frustrating if all you’re looking at is the fast layers!

From Stewart Brand:

“the total effect of the pace layers is that they provide many-leveled corrective, stabilizing negative feedback throughout the system. It is precisely in the apparent contradictions of pace that civilization finds its surest health.”

When facing resistance at the fast layers the answer is not always to push harder but to go deeper to understand where the resistance is really coming from. To address deeper pace layers.

Tom, I thought you were done with the theory and you were gonna get somewhere here? Ok, ok, ok. There’s some examples coming! Let’s get specific.

SEO Pace Layers

Now that we have a grounding in pace layers, let’s explore how you might map SEO activities to pace layers. I’m sure there are many ways to do it - here’s one version I made:

Let’s look at the layers one by one:

FASHION: Tests and actions [Timeframe: 1-2 weeks]

This is the fastest layer and where we spend most of our immediate attention. What recommendations are we making right now? Let me write this JIRA ticket. Let me analyze some keywords. Let’s test some title tags.

This layer is most effective when it’s unfettered to try new ideas, to be free to move quickly. We’re moving fast, but not always in the right direction…

COMMERCE: Results [Timeframe: 1-3 months]

This is where the rubber meets the road. How are we driving immediate business value? Obviously not everything we try works, but we always need a close eye on the goals and targets in front of us. How is revenue trending? What is driving value today? How do we optimize and invest behind what’s working?

This layer is most effective when we have rock solid analytics and great analysis of what’s working.

INFRASTRUCTURE: Processes & systems [Timeframe: 6-12 months]

What systems and processes support the above layers? This is where everything from tooling to SEO quality assurance lives. Where does all our data live - can we create a data warehouse? How does content go live on the site, do we have a documented process?

SEO infrastructure is successful when it supports the above two layers with enough resources enabled to get the right things done.

GOVERNANCE: Budgets & Buy-in [Timeframe: 1-2 years]

Just because we have budget today doesn’t mean we’ll have budget tomorrow. Governance is where questions about team size, resource allocation and budgets sit. Are we allocating the right level of resources against SEO? Does SEO sit in the right part of the organization?

Governance is most effective when SEO has clear reporting lines, access to cross functional teams, clear ownership and executive sponsors. 

CULTURE: Internal SEO Culture [Timeframe: 2-5 years]

What if everything else is in place and we’re still having a hard time? Maybe it’s because SEO just isn’t considered a priority. The internal perception of SEO colors everything - from budgets to priorities. Just because everything is in place on paper doesn’t mean that things will actually run smoothly.

This layer is most effective if a wide range of people inside the org understand why SEO is valuable AND understand a simple mental model of what SEO involves, specifically for this organization.

NATURE: Industry SEO Culture [Timeframe: 5-10 years]

How important is SEO to the specific niche and industry that you’re in? How much do competitors invest in SEO? What kind of approach to SEO do similar businesses take? If we hire a new CMO from a competitor what will be their perception and understanding of SEO?

This layer is most effective when we can tell stories, case studies and examples showing how SEO is perceived, and invested in, across similar businesses. (See last email’s note on finding good comparisons for more on this)

We made it through all the layers! Now, let’s look at some real examples.

Consulting Fast & Slow

Here’s two examples, they’re both lightly fictionalized but deeply rooted in real experiences from my own consulting work. Hopefully you’ll recognize some of these.

Worked Example A: Facing resistance

Imagine you’re working with Nordstrom, trying to improve SEO. Unfortunately SEO traffic has been roughly flat for years and your list of SEO recommendations is just sitting on a shelf. No one is prioritizing your work.

What do you do? How can we add value in this situation?

Well, firstly it’s important to note that this is a wrong situation to be in! When we made our recommendations either:

1. They didn’t have resources available to implement our recommendations, in which case, why did we make a bunch of recommendations? Or,

2. They had resources available but after seeing our recommendations decided not to prioritize them, in which case something feels off about how we presented our ideas.

The first way out of this situation is to properly understand what else the teams are working on. If we’re making recommendations to the product team, what else are the product team working on right now? What’s on their roadmap? This will give us a good sense of prioritization and focus.

Once we understand that, there’s broadly two ways to add value. We can try harder to drive our changes through (fast layers) and we can look for deeper change (slow layers).

Fast layers:

• Do you know the 3 most important things to focus on? Does everyone else? Creating focus can help get things moving - or at least ensure that you’re getting the high impact things done.

• How can you better articulate the value of your recommendations? If everyone knows the value of your recommendations they’ll be more likely to implement them. We can’t just recommend things, we have to clearly present the business opportunity (ideally in revenue).

• Can we more clearly explain, visualize or scope our recommendations? Sometimes things stall because there’s a lack of clarity. I’ve found better explanations (e.g. a loom video), better specs (e.g. a JIRA ticket) or better visualizations (e.g. a figma mockup) can all help move things along.

Slow layers:

• How is our reporting and data integrity? Do we have a robust dashboard and reporting setup that allows us to show the value of SEO? Is the report designed in a format that senior stakeholders care about?

• How is our SEO QA process? Do we have robust monitoring setup across the site to prevent future issues and drops?

• Do we have clear, and documented processes for key workflows - e.g. content production, expiring products, new fashion seasons?

• What is the level of education, awareness and buy-in for SEO across the org? Can we design education or training programs for various teams that will allow us to build more allies?

• Is there a clear SEO strategic roadmap? Beyond the immediate changes in front of us do we have a clear 12-18 month plan for investing in SEO? Can we create 

Not being able to get things done is, clearly, frustrating. But there are always alternatives. When you consider the slower pace layers there are always ways to create value, bring clarity and focus to the strategy and ensure that stakeholders are aligned and educated.

Worked Example B: Results without access

Ok, now let’s imagine a kind of opposite situation. You’re working with the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) and you’re getting things done. Working directly with their web development agency you’re shipping changes and seeing results. But, you don’t have much communication with your primary point of contact - in fact, you’ve never met your point of contact’s boss.

How might this relationship end badly? 

Firstly, it’s important to understand that this isn’t immediately a bad situation per se…. It’s great to be getting things done and delivering value! But, it’s important to recognize that the relationship is fragile. If our point of contact quits, or if there’s an algorithm update or some other unexpected situation - our ability to survive is weakened if we don’t have good communication and good access to the organization, even if we’re delivering results.

Here’s two example ways the project could go wrong:

1. Yes, we’re delivering results. But are we providing value for everyone? A client like the AMNH has many different stakeholders - yes they care about ticket sales and visitors to the museum, but they also care about their working scientists, their education program, their donors. Just because we’re increasing rankings and traffic are we truly delivering value?

2. Even if we’re shipping changes and getting things done - what might be looming? When I worked with the AMNH many years ago we were in this exact situation - delivering changes at a fast pace, but without knowing that there was a full website rebuild (new CMS, new content, the works) that we were not involved with. Ouch.

If you find yourself in a situation like this, without enough access and clear lines of communication there are broadly speaking two things to try:

1. Understanding your point of contact. What’s their day to day? What else are they working on? Why is our contact limited? Can we get 1:1 time with them instead of being in group meetings? What are they stressed/nervous/excited about?

2. Understanding the organization more deeply. What are the big 3 strategic priorities right now? Who holds all the power internally? What big initiatives are being worked on?

Essentially you can think of this situation as being unblocked in the fast layers, and blocked in the slow layers. So it’s important to not be complacent and only focus on the immediate - we need to keep pushing to understand and get access to the lower layers.

Honestly, it’s still kind of surprising to me that both these clients are at risk. It constantly amazes me that it’s possible to get a client like Nordstroms to continually extend and renew your contract despite a lack of meaningful results at the top layers, while a client like AMNH might decide to end the contract despite a clear track record of getting things done.

Different players for different layers

This email, despite already being too long(!), isn’t long enough to fully explore the art of client management (or stakeholder management if you’re client side). But it matters.

Let’s return to 2011, I’m working at the SEO agency Distilled. I’m still confused as to why clients renew our contract despite us not seeing great results. 

The key is to realize that retaining clients isn’t just a function of results (the top layers) but it’s a function of clarity and confidence (the bottom layers). Just because your point of contact is likely deeply embedded in the top layers doesn’t mean that’s where the power is…

Different players for different layers. We need to be communicating with and working at ALL layers if we want to be seen as a strategic, valuable partner. And the longer we work with a client the less likely that immediate results matter - and the more likely that it matters how we build a sustainable growing SEO practice, complete with strong culture, infrastructure and governance.

The different layers have real value to organizations, but they’re measured differently with different stakeholders.

In Summary, Onions

Honestly, to survive at senior levels of SEO I think you have to obsess over organizational design, power structures and pace layers. Different kinds of value, the interplay between layers. You learn to see constraints and pushback as natural parts of the lower layers - designed to regulate change.

If you work in-house, paying attention to the lower layers is how you get promoted, expand your head count and secure bigger budgets.

If you work at an agency, paying attention to your client’s lower layers is how you retain, expand and upsell your client and build long term working relationships - able to weather rocky periods and shocks.

Or maybe SEOs (and ogres) are just like onions.

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