Driving Real Revenue with SEO: Unpacking Demand Generation, Attribution & AI

Lewis:

We’re talking about SEO and PPC, but there are lots of other channels to distribute content and engage your buyer. And that engagement’s key. You could use media partners and use some of the things that they’re doing and magazines and online trade, whatever you want to do there, to just distribute your content and your message. Always lead with value and just, if there’s something unique that you can get out there, do it. Do not overlook distribution when it comes to that.

Andrew:
Hello and welcome to SE Ranking’s DoFollow Podcast. Here we hold regular talks with SEO and digital marketing experts to discuss hot SEO topics and share actionable information with the SEO community. So subscribe to stay on top of everything going on in SEO. 

Today, we’re talking about driving real revenue with SEO, unpacking demand generation, attribution, and AI. To help us explore this topic in depth, I’m thrilled to be joined by Lewis Rennison, who is the marketing director at edays, an HR absence management software. Welcome to the DoFollow Podcast, Lewis. Thank you for coming on!

Lewis:

Thanks for having me Andrew!

Andrew:

If you don’t mind, just want to jump right in and ask you to tell us a bit more about your journey in SEO, how you got to focus on SEO as a direct revenue driver.

Lewis:

Yeah, 13 years now is how long I’ve been doing this for. My sort of journey began with university and then, you know, working for small businesses and marketing executives, and through that I’ve, sort of, worked my way up into the marketing director position. Mainly work with B2B companies, a very tech digital focused. A lot of the businesses I’ve worked with are in the SaaS landscape.

And SEO has always been, I guess, a love-hate relationship. It’s always been really important to every business that I’ve worked in. It’s always been key to driving revenue. And so I’ve always been heavily involved in it and very interested in it.

Andrew:

Well, finding out the best revenue channel is crucial. Sometimes it’s Bing over Google, sometimes it’s PPC over organic or vice versa. And how did you discover which channels drive the most revenue to your business?

Lewis:

This is an incredibly important question. I think that as marketers, we’ve got to get under the hood of what the attribution model looks like or what the attribution actually is for revenue. And so, how I sort of start with this is I just try and understand what does good look like or what do we think is good. And good is usually what’s driving revenue, especially in software. 

And working back from that, you can then start to find what’s the golden channel, what’s the best channel for you. Is it PPC? If it’s PPC, is it Bing? Is it Google? Is it organic? Where are good leads coming from that actually convert and drive revenue? 

And that’s always been my starting position for most businesses. It’s actually looking at lists from a top down, where’s the revenue? And then what follows from that? Where did that actually come from? And that means that your attribution needs to be really, really strong. You got to understand where their leads are coming from and do that analysis. And that’s, that’s the first piece of work, I think, as a marketer.

Andrew:

I realize that big companies have a lot of budget, with regard to small teams and a small team environment, we have to prioritize high intent keywords and they can oftentimes make a huge difference. 

Can you walk us through the process of why you focus on a handful of commercial keywords and how they impact your overall SEO strategy? Is that even the case for you? Or do you mix and match? You have different strategies for targeting those big words, but does the main driving force behind your success come down to targeting these commercial keywords?

Lewis:

Right now it is. Absolutely. And that’s really because we benefit from an in-market audience. So if you’ve got an in-market audience where there’s an existing category, it’s likely that there’s a handful of commercial keywords that are going to drive revenue very quickly. So you’ve got buyers that are almost ready. And that is actually where we are right now. We focus an awful lot on that. 

And it’s simply about understanding, you know, the first entry pages, what those keywords are, what’s driving those MQLs and those leads, then through to the closed one. We focus on a handful of keywords that drive the vast, vast majority of our SEO based revenue. And so that might be, you know, 25 keywords that we class as high priority. And it can be as simple as, you know, X software. So, you know, it might be ‘SEO software’ could be one of the main drivers for you guys. And that’s a mainstay in our SEO strategy.

There’s other things that we do that aren’t as commercially focused that are more top-of-funnel, out-of-market, kind of demand gen, SEO-keyword focused. But to be honest with you, that stuff is so early and so top-of-funnel, it doesn’t drive anywhere near as much revenue for us. 

If you’ve got a business or a product that’s less reliant on in-market audiences, it’s definitely a little bit more challenging for you because you’re going to need to focus on top-of-funnel keywords, and content marketing is going to need to be more educational based, and blogs, and templates, and all that kind of stuff. 

If, like us, you’re in an established category, like for example, HR software where people are searching for this and they’re ready to buy—almost—then you can benefit from that. But you’ve got to then focus heavily on that and understand that of those 20, 25 keywords, which are the ones that you really need to be putting your spend and resource behind? 

So that’s kind of how it works for us. And to be honest with you, if you are in market, that’s a good place to start. So if you’ve got an in market product, you know, how are you showing up on those keywords that’s got the most volume for something that’s commercial or transactional, that would be a really good starting point.

Andrew:

You mentioned a couple of channels like content marketing, PPC, SEO, obviously, and demand generation often involves all these channels, and they have to work in unison to provide the best result possible. What advice do you have for aligning these channels so that they collectively push the potential customer down the funnel?

Lewis:

Again, I think this is around the attribution of what are those channels doing for you and what’s driving the revenue. So, you know, paid and SEO, they work together a lot of the times that I see a lead come through. We measure first click and last click. And what we find is that the first click might be paid and the last click could be organic. And so it’s about understanding those two, first and foremost, and those two touch points within the journey of the prospect.

Once you’ve kind of got that, then you can see where your content strategy would fit in. Now, PPC and SEO for me is predominantly in market, and the content marketing is more middle- and bottom-of-funnel kind of stuff. So it’s educational once someone’s on the page, you know, it’s about tools and resources and guides, white papers, reports, that kind of stuff. We also use that for our out of market demand gen stuff. 

So if we were doing anything that’s maybe outbound or with media partners, we’ll be using those white papers and that content marketing for that as well. And that’s then basically how the whole whole flywheel works for us. It’s, you know, it’s in market SEO PPC, and then the content marketing is very out of market, educational, get the very top funnel prospects, perhaps, six, 12 months before they’re even ready to start thinking about booking a demo, buying your product, starting a free trial, that kind of thing. 

I think that’s really important to align them as well. So it’s understanding: what does content marketing really need to do for you? You know, if you’re in market, content marketing can be more out-of-market focus and that’s excellent because you’re then finding buyers that aren’t quite ready or you’re going to capture them first, which is, you know, it’s a really good place to be.

If you’ve got just out-of-market buyers, then your content marketing needs to be heavily focused on educational topics like how to do this and all the kind of takeaway-style blogs that you’d expect to see.

Andrew:

I want to talk about PPC and SEO a bit, because sometimes they are viewed as competitors for the budget. You say that they complement each other. Could you explain how they work together in the buying journey and how you measure their combined impact on revenue? Just like maybe you can have a specific case where you push something, promote something online just using both methods.

Lewis:

I mean, yeah, I love this because I think, you know, as demand generation, sometimes the two, they fight for budget and, depending on the size of your team, you know, you got to attribute, okay, well, last click came from SEO and first click came from paid. You know, who gets it, who gets the budget, which ones do you attribute it to? 

You know, I always look at first click mainly for this because I think that’s what captured them first and then what converted them is the last click. But, you know, it’s about knowing, our journey online requires multiple touch points. And so, you’ve got to look at PPC and SEO as complementary. 

And there’s a specific example that I would give, which is, for example, lead management software, which is one of our, one of our, you know, our main keywords that we go after. We actually rank incredibly highly for that. But then we also go after the paid as well. And the reason why we also then go after the paid, even though we might arguably be ranking number one most of the time, is because there is still an element of people that are looking on either the mobile phones or the desktops very quickly and they’re still just clicking the top ads. And they want an easy solution right then and there when they’re feeling that pain. 

There’s still an element of people that are clicking the page without even realizing that it’s paid, to be honest, especially with Bing. Because Bing’s quite good at hiding the fact that it’s a paid ad. Now that means that we’ve captured them and that’s excellent and we probably wouldn’t have captured them with our number one organic position. And so that’s, you know, that’s important to understand.

It’s a little bit painful as a marketer because you would rather not be spending the money, but you know, the world that we live in now with how many ads are visible, on search, this is organic. It’s something that we’ve got to live with. 

And so I guess that’s a specific example. And just try and understand what the touch points are that your prospect is actually taking. And that’s all about getting your marketing tech stack correct. And, you know, digging into GA4. Digging into anything else that you’ve got from an analytics perspective and just understanding as much as you can about your buyers and about their journey online. Cause that will really help you then go, okay, we need to spend a bit more on paid or actually we can sacrifice some paid spend and we can, you know, we can start pumping more into SEO efforts.

Andrew:

I realize that you already sort of touched on this, you mentioned the last click a couple of times with regard to attribution, but I really wanted to get an understanding of your process. 

Maybe you could go back a couple of years when this was the first time you thought about this and how you understood that, okay, I’m going to look at the last click because it’s more important or I’m going to look at the first click or I’m going to look at the entire journey like spanning a six-month period before they sort of converted. Could you maybe just recap how that experience went for you? So that maybe our listeners can get a better understanding of what they need to look out for, or maybe they need to understand that, okay, I need to look out for everything with regard to just the journey.

Lewis:

It’s a good question. I mean, this is about what data I could get hold of. And I think having a really good analytics suite or being able to dig into the data is incredibly important for understanding this. Up until three, four years ago, I probably couldn’t get the level of data that I wanted to get. And now I can with certain plugins and advancements in the analytics. And so I can get first click and last click. And there are tools out there that do it very, very well. 

Getting that information means that I can start to build a picture of when it’s first click, you know, how quickly does the last click then get impacted into conversion. And so how long is the time between first click and last click? 

Then you sort of build that picture and say, well, the evidence here or the data here is suggesting that it’s first click that’s really getting the audience and last click is just doing the last 10%. And so first click is how we’re going to start to measure our ROI. 

I actually look at both to be honest with you. And I will build a first click report and a last click report. Or you can do something more linear. There might be touch points in between that you can measure and then you start to sort of go like this, say there’s 10 touch points, you might just give like 0.1 to each and then you can start modeling it that way. 

It depends on what analytics you can get hold of. There’s some amazing tools out there that give you some very good out-of-box reports that will give you first click and last click. Naming a few, so, you know, I use Salesforce with GA Connector. That helps me an awful lot. 

My preference is HubSpot. HubSpot is excellent when it comes to being a, you know, a marketer. You get that data. It’s very accessible right in front of you. 

And so if you can get that, then that’s a good starting point to start digging and then use that data to then go, okay, first click is actually where we’re at or last clicks where we’re at, depending on your buyer’s journey, I think.

Andrew:

Thanks for not just saying it depends. I realize that you just mentioned that somewhere in there, but you gave us a really, really great answer, I think.

Lewis:

The data, I think. So, get the data, then make that judgement. But you know the more data that you can get—don’t drown yourself in it too much—but the more data you can get, the more rounded your knowledge is going to be of what that journey is for your buyer.

Andrew:

For brands that rely heavily on organic search, do you see top-of-the-funnel content like blog templates or free downloads as a direct influencer on revenue or do you have an experience that a few commercial landing pages really take care of the main heavy lifting and do the conversion work for you?

Lewis:

If you’re in market, if you’ve got an in market audience and it’s established category, then it’s going to be the commercial keywords that are going to drive a lot of this, especially when it comes to driving revenue. You know, those guys, they already, they’re in market. They’re probably going to book a demo fairly quickly. 

If you’re not in market, and it’s out of market style audiences, then yeah, you’re going to definitely need to do templates and tools and calculators and downloads and whatever else you can that’s extremely top-of-funnel just to capture those people before they’re actually in the market. 

And so what I see, you know, with most of the businesses I’ve worked with, they’ve got that established category and so it’s in market and it’s commercial landing pages that are doing that heavy lifting.

Again, you know, dig into analytics and data on this. Look at GA4, you know, what’s your first entry page, and then how does that flow across to whatever your conversion is. So your conversion might be ‘book a demo’ or ‘talk to sales’. Just follow that through and just understand that a little bit more. And you can get some nice reports that are pretty much out of the box for GA4 that will give you that.

Andrew:

I’ve noticed that from SE Ranking’s work that I’ve been doing and the stuff that I’ve seen, so we’ve had free tools, think maybe like three, four years ago we’ve been pushing free tools just to get a lot more people, cast a wider net. And now we’re really actually focusing on these landing pages. 

But what really sort of helps us stand apart right now is doing unique research. Because you can’t write blogs on like top-of-the-funnel, general topics all the time. So we just understood, well, we understood it a while back, but now we have finally the capability to have a team to do this research that will sort of stand out in search as a unique, expertise point. 

So it’s really good that it reflects what you just said. It’s a natural continuation of the journey. I was wondering, maybe there’s like a next step. Is there anything that works better than like top commercial landing pages that really do the heavy lifting or is this the final point?

Lewis:

I think it’s excellent that you’re doing that. And for me, that blends into the brand as well. So, you know, how’s SE Ranking showing up online and, you know, your thought leadership stuff, you know, you can get analytics and data that other people aren’t and that sort of sets you apart. 

And I try and do that as much as I possibly can. And just to sort of go into that a little bit more, the way I would always do it is if there’s someone that’s established, you know, there’s a lot of research papers out there and, you know, they come out ONS or whoever it is. If they say something and you’ve got some data that either compliments that or counters that, then it’s really good for you to push that out there at the same time. And we’ve done that a few times and we get a lot of top of funnel traffic activity from that. And I always put that in the category of the brand and the thought leadership and how’s our company showing up online. What are we known for? 

And how you would sort of push that further. It’s tough, I guess. If you’re in a really competitive market, you’re going to be spending a lot of your time on those commercial landing pages and those few keywords. And it’s hard because there might just be those 20 keywords that you’re constantly focusing on. 

If you are, let’s say in an amazing world, you are number one for everything and you’ve topped it out as much as you can, then you do need to start looking elsewhere to get more of those potential buyers into your website and into that, whatever your funnel may look like.

That is kind of more reliant on you as a marketer to think about your buyer and what information can you offer them that’s not out there. So if there’s something unique like your data or research or something else that’s maybe not been thought of that you think your buyer or your prospects would be interested in, then get that out there and use as many channels as you can to then propagate that. 

Distribution is massively overlooked. You we’re talking about SEO and PPC, but there are lots of other channels to distribute content and engage your buyer. And that engagement is key. You could use media partners and you can use some of the things that they’re doing and magazines and online trade—whatever you want to do there—to distribute your content and your message. Always lead with value and if there’s something unique that you can get out there, do it.

Do not overlook distribution when it comes to that, because SEO and PPC, they got a finite audience. There’s only a certain amount of people searching for some things and you can’t always rely on that to then give you the revenue that you want to drive. A lot of businesses, they every year want to drive more and more revenue.

A lot of those guys in demand generation, they rely on us to try and drive that revenue. And if the audience is kind of topping out and let’s say one month there’s 500 searches and the next month there’s 400 searches, you’re not going to get to the kind of number that the business wants you to. And so you do need to diversify channels and you do need to look at other ways of distributing your message.

Andrew:

Yeah, there’s even like branding stuff involved. When we attend offline events, we see like a surge in people looking for our brand then. So it also another factor that helps us because this is one of the things that we do is we attend events, sponsor events, do research and always show up every day. This is the main key factor. Like even if you’re not doing the best possible work, if you’re doing it every day, you’re still gonna see the results. 

You mentioned helping people find you online and we have a new revenue, well not a revenue stream, but a new sort of search landscape appearing with AI, Google’s AI Overviews, search snippets, AI-driven comparisons, all sorts of things, not only on Google, in ChatGPT, on Bing, everyone has their own. And I just wanted to get your thoughts on how this might impact brand perception in organic search.

Lewis:

I think this is massive to be honest. I mean, if we date stamp this, this is the end of March. And what I’ve seen this year so far already is, has changed our SEO strategy massively. 

The way that your brand is showing up online is changing because AI Overviews is scraping, you know, top, top, very top level information about your brand. And, you know, for us guys, we’ve seen reviews and you know, what was traditionally marketplace stuff get knocked down the search rankings and in place of that is an AI Overview. 

And sometimes our competitors have been getting scraped for stuff where it says, you know, X versus X. And that’s the problem. So we’ve had to address that very, very quickly. And I think the first thing for anyone to do as a takeaway is just to look at how AI Overview is portraying your brand and you understand those kinds of searches that a prospect might be making top-of-funnel. 

So it might be like SE Ranking reviews as an example. Or SE Ranking versus X or my product would be X HR software versus X HR software. 

You know, what’s getting scraped and what’s getting presented back, you know, to a prospect, to that traffic source? Is it, you know, is it your competitor’s comparison blog where they’re saying that your product is absolutely awful and they’ve actually got your reviews, your features completely wrong or is it something else? That’s what we’ve had to do. 

We’ve moved very quickly on this and what we’ve found is actually new sources of information are getting scraped much more. So if we were to write X versus X, so like X competitor versus X being us, it ranked very quickly in AI Overviews, you know, as quick as the next day. And then started to get pulled through. 

And so we’ve done that a lot this year so far. And we’ve started to really show up an awful lot in AI Overview. And our brand now, hopefully our perception is increasing and benefiting from this, but our brand is showing up online, you know, way better than it was at the back end of last year where some of our competitors were getting their blog scrapped. 

So it’s massive. And I think this has the potential for me to change things an awful lot for top-of-funnel buyers or anybody that’s, you know, even just thinking about the category that we sell in, they’re going to probably do at least the initial part of research and thinking, maybe just using AI Overviews. Whereas previously that journey would have gone into marketplaces and reviews and they’d have looked at our sites and other sites. 

Now they’re potentially just getting this scrape, whatever overview, whether it’s ChatGPT or Google’s or Bing’s, whatever that is. And then they’re making a judgment very quickly, shortlisting, and then maybe they’ll look back next week and, and then just go directly to that, to that traffic source. And I’m definitely seeing that.

Andrew:

You also said that, for example, if you Google your brand, obviously you’re going to get some result in an AI Overview. But what if you Google HR software? Does edays always come up as an answer or was there a situation where you had to sort of do some work to help push it in there? And if you did do some work, what kind of work was it? Because everybody’s trying to figure out what was the best approach to getting featured in these AI Overviews or a similar chatbot.

Lewis:

This is such an important question and I think it’s probably different for everybody. But for us, so ‘HR software’ is the broader category for us, but it’s actually ‘absence and leave management’ that we want to be showing up for. 

So absence management, you know, our competitor was showing up for that as the best absence management. And we had to then write a new blog and our comparison blog that then started to get scraped within it. And that happened really quickly. And that’s how we counted it. 

And it’s actually really simple. We literally just wrote ‘what is the best absence management software in the UK’, for example. And that started to get scraped, you know, as of today’s date that’s in there, but it’s still also scraping our competitor and giving that as an option. It’s just now much more favorable to us and we’re showing up first. 

And so I think you’ve got to just look at those categories. How are you showing up? How’s your brand being portrayed? And then what can you write that’s very clear and concise almost for the AI Overview? 

I mean, we talk about schema and we talk about the structure of your blogs and all that kind of stuff. Question and Answers. Yeah, that’s all stuff that kind of, you know, as marketers and SEOs have been doing that now. So just apply those same principles to a fresh article and then see if you can get into that. 

And actually, if it’s already scraping an old article of yours, but it’s not as good, get it updated and see if you can start to maybe not manipulate it, but get it into a better position. It’s very, very difficult. And I think because they are all still in test phases, you know, the AI Overviews are still very early, they’re getting a lot of this wrong. 

I haven’t seen anything consistently to suggest, okay, doing it this way would work. But the way we’ve been doing it is the fresh content and kind of writing back for the question and answer. And the fresh content’s been getting scraped. Even if we’ve got old articles that are historically ranked number one, it’s actually the fresh content that’s getting scraped and put into AI Overviews. And then maybe the old article is still number one. But then obviously that’s below the AI Overview. 

That’s been working for us, whether or not that’s going to work in the future, everyone’s going to have to start doing their testing and seeing what they can achieve result wise just by testing.

Andrew:

We’ve been looking at different results that we get from AI Overviews and from Bing, for example, and one of the things that we’ve noticed is that Bing prefers newer sites as sources and Google prefers sites that are like 15 years old. But obviously it changes. 

So I would definitely suggest to our listeners, don’t just focus on one thing, put everything in the basket of AI Overviews. Look at everything at once. Either way, you’re not doing specifically work for AI Overviews, you’re just optimizing, doing the best possible branding work to your company. So definitely make sure to check other AI services once you’re doing that just to see the results in there. 

And one of the questions is like a more takeaway question. If a company wants to optimize SEO for revenue growth—so basically it’s like a takeaway, the main points with regard to AI and everything going on—what are the first crucial steps or maybe best practices you recommend businesses adopt today to get this organized properly so they don’t mix anything up, start off on the right foot with regard to a source for revenue growth?

Lewis:

I think I would always look at what’s happening currently to drive revenue. So I would look, you know, specifically at SEO and organic from a revenue driving perspective. What does that look like in your business right now? And what’s driving that revenue? Is it those commercial landing pages? Is it a certain amount of keywords? Is that starting to drop off because of AI Overview? Is that journey a little bit different? Is it out-of-market or in-market? 

And just look at all those things, just really understanding, our organic presence is now driving X amount in revenue. Where’s that really coming from? 

But the most important thing for me here is: how’s your brand showing up online? So if you do, for example, have AI Overviews starting to creep into some of that top-of-funnel activity, what’s it saying about your brand? You know, what reviews are being pulled through into that? What’s the AIO saying about your comparisons and are you best for X, are you best for Y? 

Understand that as much as you can. And it might not even be, you know, your SEO that’s showing up here. This might be a marketplace or it might be a review site. It could be other things. And, you know, that’s even more challenging naturally because you’ve got to work even harder to try and influence that. But if you can understand that, know how your brand is showing up online, and you can understand where the revenue is actually coming from, from an SEO perspective, then you’re going to very quickly have the answers to where you should focus and what your sort of first step should be. 

So your first steps might be, okay, you know, we’re ranking highly for these keywords, but not for these other keywords that are also commercial. Let’s look at them first before we look at AI Overviews, because we think that more commercial opportunity in that than there is the AI Overview stuff. Or both if you’ve got a big enough team.

So yeah, hopefully that’s not too top-level and that gives people a bit of a takeaway because that was quite a top-level answer. It is very dependent on your business, but that’s where I always start. What’s actually driving revenue from an SEO perspective now, then where’s the opportunity and how is your brand showing up online.

Andrew:

Yeah, from a business perspective, I wish there was a quick answer to this, but from a marketing perspective, I love the challenge, I love just taking on these new things, figuring out what works best. How can our listeners find you, Lewis?

Lewis:

And yeah, so follow my LinkedIn. If you just find me, Lewis Rennison, on LinkedIn. You should hopefully see me there. But I’ve also got a website, is Lewis-Scott.com. And if anyone wants to make an inquiry through that, you can do, there’s a form on there. I also consult for businesses that are having exactly the same challenge that we’ve discussed today.

Andrew:

Great. So I’m going to do the outro and say that today, Lewis Rennison shared with us his insights on driving real growth with SEO. I hope our listeners are inspired and are already coming up with ideas on how to capitalize on these insights. Thank you, Lewis, for making the time to be here and sharing your knowledge with our community. And to our listeners, thank you for tuning in. Be sure to subscribe to the DoFollow Podcast and we’ll see you in the next episode.