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3 Things I Wish I Knew Before Becoming an Enterprise SEO Video and Podcast Transcript

[This transcript has been lightly edited to ensure readability]

Dave Dougherty: Who wants to kick it off? 

Ruthi Corcoran: Wait what is the topic? 

Dave Dougherty: Alex, you brought up the topic. You can introduce the topic? Do you want me to MC it or do you want to jump in? 

Alex Pokorny: I can just jump in. So the idea, so the topic for today was three things that I wish I knew before getting into Enterprise SEO.

So this could range from anything from skills and things that you've kind of learned all in a role or things from like outside of it saying like, you know, from prior to being in an enterprise SEO, these are some things that I kind of, I wish I had. You know, picked up or learned about or something like that.

So I've got kind of two sets of three depending on which direction we take it. Um, but I was kind of thinking that we could just go around, uh, just do one each, and then once you say you're one, we'll discuss it for a little bit and then we'll move on to the next person, and just kind of keep going around.

So, does that sound good to you guys? 

Dave Dougherty: Absolutely. Go ahead. You start. 

Ruthi Corcoran: That sounds amazing. 

The Importance of Internal Networking for SEO

Alex Pokorny: Okay. The first one that I was going to pick was basically from an inside kind of a role and it's probably one that you guys are going to pick too. Um, but internal networking, I really underestimated how much internal networking was significant and really made basically anything happen.

One of the big things I think just from my background in agencies and freelancing is there was always a point of contact between the client and me. So there was some kind of, you know, client success manager or you know, you name the phrase or salesperson or project manager or something who basically played that, that card. You know, who was the one, who was the, the personal connections who kind of made everything flow during meetings and all that kind of stuff. And then for me, I was just the technical know-how guy who you know, was told by the P.M.: "Hey, and now Alex is going to say something." You know, 

Dave Dougherty: Don't you love that in the client meetings? It's like “Establish the relationship…Alex talks now.” 

Alex Pokorny: Exactly. Bullet point one, talk, be jovial, and have fun. Bullet point two: Alex does something boring. Bullet point three: Try to make it not so boring. Bullet point four: Smile. 

Dave Dougherty: Smile, smile, smile. 

Alex Pokorny: But that was, I mean, that was pretty largely true from SEO, you're such a technical know-how kind of individual. And you're such a specialist, generally speaking, you're not really in a big team or something like that. You're kind of a solo operator or a small team operator. Once you're inside that organization, you've really gotta make those relationships and get to know who does what.

And their job title doesn't always line up with what they really do. And you know, sometimes there are five people with the same title and one of them is the one who's in charge of domain names or something. 

Ruthi Corcoran: Well, it occurs to me too that, well you guys just described sort of that building relationships, but then you've also got the sort of tech person in the room who's maybe dulling the mood, so to speak.

That's what we deal with IT all the time. We need to be the translator to say, okay, this is what this guy's saying we can and we can't do, and here's how we need to work with that. And then translate that to everyone in the organization. 

Dave Dougherty: Although it's never really a good feeling when you're the guy in Office Space that goes, "I take the sheets from this team and I go to that team. I have people skills!"

Alex Pokorny: Yep. That's basically my number one bullet point for my three: Have people skills damn it. 

Change Management for Improved SEO 

Ruthi Corcoran: Well that was my number one, was change management, which is related, you know, you need the internal networking. 

Alex Pokorny: Yeah, change management. Just to kind of add to that a little bit. So, uh, organizational change management, OCM, is a little bit different than just change management. Super difficult because everybody, every little team inside of a company always has their priorities and you're trying to basically tell them to not do that, instead do what you want to do.

 And. Building off of that kind of like, yes, you need the relationships, but then yeah, absolutely. You need to kind of have a plan in place of how are we actually going to do this, and how are we actually going to convince people to do this, and who do we actually need to convince? Those are really tough questions for any project.

Um, but yeah, internal SEO, I mean yeah, you're, you're always hitting that. So, Ruthi, that's a really good one. And there's a 

Ruthi Corcoran: A lot of political bargaining that goes on, right? You've got all the projects you want to work on and we need this project, so we're going to trade, right? Got some good public choice there going on. 

Dave Dougherty: Yeah. We won't get a hundred percent of what we want, but if we can get above 60. We'll call it good. Which, you know, it's such a depressing number in terms of a ratio, but it, you know, it's just the way it is. For sure. 

My first one is very similar to what you guys said, um, before, and I think coming into a large organization, the first one, and coming up with recommendations...I really underestimated how the organization is actually structured internally. Right? So I mean, it's not just the change management, it's not just the whatever, but actually the hierarchy of, you know, is the organization actually set up via its structures and command and controls and all that to support this activity.

Alex Pokorny: Do they have the right kind of skills or do you mean if there's the right kind of skills? 

Dave Dougherty: Skills. Leadership. You know, like we talked about the political bargaining and whatever else. But like if you have a particular leader that views search as more of an IT activity because they've only come, or you know, they've only ever heard of it because through the backend or like page speed or JavaScript or something scary.

Then it's immediately dismissed. Right? Because you're not, you're not printing cash for the organization. So "No." But if you actually take a nuanced view and you actually look at your data, you'll find that it's doing wonders for you. Right? 

But if you have a culture where people are bought in digitally. They're bought into the fact that you look at every industry benchmark and, you know, organic search and paid search are main drivers every year when institutions like Salesforce or you know, Social Media Marketing Examiner or any of those, you know, organizations that do annual studies.

It always plays a significant role in, their marketing budgets. But you know, if you don't have the support structures there, like an IT person who knows a little bit of marketing to say yes to it, the marketing people who know a little bit about the technology side to be able to speak to one another, to do it right, to have the culture of bought in.

If you only have a culture of sales or um, old-school analog marketing, then it's a much tougher lift. Right. 

Alex Pokorny: Yeah, absolutely. 

Ruthi Corcoran: You know, it occurs to me about the symptoms of that. People are very excited about SEO. They always are, but they don't know and they don't necessarily have the culture. And so you get one of those strange circumstances where you have higher-up management talking about canonicals. And how we have to fix the canonicals with no idea what a canonical is. And when you start hearing those buzzwords, that's, that's a good clue of like, we're missing a piece here. We have the excitement, but we don't have the infrastructure. 

Dave Dougherty: I'm always reminded of how it’s like when lead singers, they're doing a show and somebody hands them a slip of paper and they say some phrase in the language of the country they're in. And it turns out to be like some horrible phrase that they shouted loud and proud from the stage. 

It's like, that's how I feel sometimes when the execs are throwing around these technical terms. Again, unless it's normal for the organizational culture, yeah, it's always kind of cringe-worthy. Just because you're afraid of what's going to happen next.

Alex Pokorny: Oh my gosh. I'm just, sorry, that just really reminded me. There's a show I once went to, it was in Maplewood, the suburb of St. Paul. And people really identify as being east siders or you know, St. Paul. And the singer's like, "Hello Minneapolis!" And everybody just looks at each other like, “What?” It was just dead silent to a whole bunch of people just staring at each other. 

Ruthi Corcoran: Know your audience.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. I'm sure on the t-shirt it said Minneapolis as a tour stop, but no, and you're off far enough to make people kind of alienate them, so it was a rough start to a show. 

Ruthi Corcoran: That's true though. I mean that sits across all the networking, the change management, if we're sending the wrong message.

You're dead in the water. How many presentations do we create for a bajillion different groups with all slightly different versions? Because they had totally different knowledge sets skillsets and the things they cared about. 

Alex Pokorny: Absolutely. 

Dave Dougherty: It was interesting, I was listening to the Search Off the Record podcast, you know the Google relations team?

And they were talking about leveling up some kind of bug. I think I shared the podcast with you guys. But internally, whoever it was leveled up some bug about the site map being too big and the internal developers of Google decreased the level of importance on the ticket because, you know, "Well it seems to be working, so that's just not going to be a priority."

It's like, come on, you, you wrote the rule book. You are literally writing the rule book that all of us have to follow and you can't. You have the same problems we all do. On the one hand that's really comforting to know that everybody has similar problems when you're doing enterprise stuff. But, it's also a little disappointing that not even Google can get a development ticketing thing to work. But anyway…

The Importance of an SEO Champion

 Dave Dougherty: All right. Hard, hard transition. Alex, what's your number two? 

Alex Pokorny: Yeah, I've, I got two that go kind of in different directions. One that I wanted to add in today was, uh, in an internal champion. So this is something you can either ask about during an interview process when you kind of get to the hiring manager stage by saying, you know, what does senior leadership think of SEO?

And if you can get a good answer that the VPs are all bought into digital marketing and we've got one CMO who's our boss's boss's boss, and they're the one who grew this entire department and they're kind of making waves or something. That's a fantastic answer. 

If you get a fly by the night, we've got one guy who kind is pushing it, or one person who's kind of pushing it, that's a little more hesitancy. I know a couple of organizations that have gone through some massive transitions because there was one VP, one EVP, one CMO, and one person who basically built up digital marketing and then left the company after things basically stalled out. And then everybody underneath them either got laid off or job change, or basically, the priority of the projects got shut down to nothing. So they're just working on kind of pointless work. 

That internal champion at a high level is so important. And if you're coming again from that agency or freelance world, you're used to the client already being sold by the time you show up as an SEO. Or you're maybe a part of the first sales call, but somebody was interested and already is looking for you, is already looking for your talent.

That's a whole different situation than an internal enterprise SEO role where you need that person to be that champion who is sold and bought in, and who is like the evangelist. Or you have to become that person that's the heart of their alternative. 

Dave Dougherty: Right? And depending on how they phrase the role, you very well. Maybe what they're looking for, you know? To be that. So that is definitely a follow-up question in that, that interview for sure. Say, wait a second. So am I going to have to be the guy who is martyred for SEO in this organization? 

Ruthi Corcoran: And is it one guy? Do I just get to be the guy who goes around talking about SEO by myself?

Alex Pokorny: Yep. Trying to hope that your education method or your communication method is just the perfect one for that person. 

Marketers' Longevity in Roles Tied to the Success of Your SEO Project

Dave Dougherty: Right. Right. Actually, so speaking of that one of my, one of my other ones is related to that, and that's just like that, I didn't think of the tenure of people in their roles as much.

Because we know with the benchmark stuff, any kind of content play is going to be 18 to 24 months. Right? If you do it really well. Unless you buy an organization or buy a media property or something, right? But the average tenure of most marketers in a role is two or three years.

So if you're coming into that internal champion who's already 18 months into their new role. Do you have the actual runway to implement these things? To try these things? Or are you going to spend all of your political capital, you know, doing other things? 

Alex Pokorny: That's an excellent point. There's a study that just came out talking about how CMOs are the shortest tenure of the C-suite.

They switch all the time and marketing gets thrown under the bus a lot, or it's seen as an unnecessary extra cost when you already have, you know, long-term contracts or repeat contracts, annual, you know, signups and stuff like that already working. You know, you're just filling the new pipeline. So it seems expendable, even though of course it's a terrible idea to think of it that way.

Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. I mean, if you don't have that. If you don't have that timeline, especially with how slow SEO can take, I think that kind of plays across a number of the things that we've already talked about already. I mean, we've talked about internal networking, we've talked about having those, um, kind of understanding the organization and who the teams are and about that change management.

All of that takes time. And as an enterprise SEO, you're starting at the, you know, day zero. If it takes you 90 days to, you know, get to know the team, you know that, um, there's an excellent book out there that's called The First 90 Days. It’s fantastic. And recommended for anybody, even if you're already in a role, it kind of re-restarts you on what you need to be doing and kind of move things along.

But yeah, you're right. I mean, that runway can be by the time the project launches. It might be six months in. It could be actually a really, really short period of time that you have to suddenly try to pull this whole thing off before the quarter ends, or the champion moves, or your boss switches directions, or acquisition happens and it takes over priority. 

Ruthi Corcoran: I think that just emphasizes the importance of quick wins, right? If you can get quick wins, the organization, sometimes can work in your favor, right? The organization is moving so slowly that by the time you get a chance to talk about your quick wins, Some of the SEO value has started to actually show up. Right? 

Long-Term Success and Short-Term Excitement

Alex Pokorny: Right. Yeah, that was one of my next ones actually. 

Ruthi Corcoran: Um, there we go. 

Alex Pokorny: That is, uh, long-term success and short-term excitement. So as an SEO you always have a focus kind of on a longer-term scale. Um, but if you kind of look at your past year's analytics last couple of years, try to figure out kind of what the average increase or decrease is and then plot yourself out for a couple of years.

And say, okay, this is my internal benchmark. I'm not going to tell my boss this, but internally I really want to beat this number. Um, you know, if we have any increase at all, I'm going to tell my boss, Hey, we got an increase. Even though, you know, we've been moving up 5% every year or 10% every year, you always want that 12%.

You know, something to kind of prove yourself. You created an uptick. Um, Again, that length of time, you're absolutely right. I mean, you got the short-term excitement, the shiny ball syndrome, you know, you get that spotlight on you. Your projects get along and moved along even if people don't understand what work canonical means.

Yeah. Dave, what's your next one? 

Dave Dougherty: What was it? Actually, let's go with Ruthi because I did the tenure, but. I'm going to see what she says for my third. 

It's Hard to Anticipate the Scale of Enterprise SEO Before You Become One 

Ruthi Corcoran: Look, going into my first enterprise SEO role, I had no sense of scale. None whatsoever. You know, I had been working on sort of small websites, you know, maybe a handful of domains. Maybe a dozen at most.

Okay. This is easy. This is, you know, this is fine. And you get into an enterprise SEO role and the scale just...sometimes you even have to uncover how many domains there are, let alone how many pages there are within each domain. And then you start multiplying that by the number of countries and things.

I think I was in for sort of quite a shock, the first and the first role I had. That was, that was definitely the eye opener and then to figure out, okay. Um, you know, Let's say we optimize this one site. Good for you now. Now you've got every other language around the world. How are you going to go about those?

Totally different teams. Totally different groups, and different languages sometimes. Do you have a system that allows it to cascade, or do you have to individually update every single one? At which point, are the ones that are going to be most valuable? The focus on? 

Dave Dougherty: And all of your regions, all of your countries or however your company is set up have all the same organizational issues that we touched on first. 

Ruthi Corcoran: Yep. Oh. And they might not have the same tools. Surprise. Right. 

Alex Pokorny: That's a great conversation internally though, to have with your management of, "I've got this giant list. What's the priority?" like you said it for me, if you're the one who's going to be judging my success, what do you want me to work on and what do you want to focus on? 

I think. It becomes overwhelming so fast, especially when you just start crawling in, start seeing data come in, or the analytics data, which is just as messy as all can get out, or just massive. That's really hard to work with.

Dave Dougherty: Yeah, we're all living, reliving some PTSD here.

Job Responsibilities for Enterprise SEOs May Seem Strange 

Alex Pokorny: Yeah, a little bit. Actually, there's another one kind of based off of that of scale, uh, kind of Dave, to your point of the roles. That was another one that was kind of a shock to me the job responsibility splits. And what I mean by that is, um, small organization, you might have one person in charge of the website and that's it.

They do the edits, the developments, you know, the approvals, whatever. Or maybe there's one person above them or a small team, you know, one graphic designer maybe or not. And then instead, big organization, it's, "Oh, this person, they work on this part of the header. This person works on the dropdowns that are in the header. It's like, my gosh, how many people is this that I need to do one edit? 

Dave Dougherty: And the last time they spoke to each other was a retreat 12 weeks ago, or 12 years ago.

Ruthi Corcoran: And sometimes it's teams that work on the headers. 

Alex Pokorny: Right. And you have to convince each one of them who has their own ideas on how things should roll. I think that's a... 

Dave Dougherty: And they're still injecting content.

Alex Pokorny: And there's that one person who just will not let it die on Flash. It will come back. Flash will come back.

No. Stop trying. 

Development Requests Are Feedback on the Quality of Someone Else's Work

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. You mentioned about like the IT kind of like, um, in terms of like the, the site map problem that Google had, I, I think that's one of the things that I commonly overlook. Is what I'm asking a developer to edit a page, really what I'm asking them to do is redo their work and I'm critiquing their work. And no one likes that. 

And to ask them to go back to something that technically loads, it technically works technically, you know, you can click around on it, but it just takes four and a half minutes to load, which is my problem that I'm trying to ask them to fix. I'm asking them to revisit work and take that the priority for them.

That's. That's pretty awful. I mean, I, I, I don't think I, I give that enough credit for how what I'm really asking when I ask for those edits. 

Dave Dougherty: Well, and on top of that too we're always doing 16 requests at any given time. Right. So it's like churning out the requests so you're not necessarily thinking about their feelings.

You know, to your point when you're doing it, it's just like, Hey, change this. This is broken. You need to fix it. Yeah. Wow. Okay. 

Ruthi Corcoran: And I think there's that approach of like, here, fix this one thing. It's broken, versus some of the successful things I've seen as well. Working with dev teams is the same. Hey, here are the tools that allow us to see what the Googles are seeing, right?

Here's what they're seeing. Here's how your page looks to a bot, and then you have the eye-opener. Oh. Easy fix or I, I know how to solve that, which is a totally different mindset than, that's wrong. Fix that, or That's crappy. Go and fix it. It all of a sudden empowered the dev teams to go, okay, all right, now we can look at this and we can work with this differently. 

The Importance of Narrative and Data for SEO

Dave Dougherty: Yeah, interesting. Because along those lines, one of my go-to ones for this, when I was brainstorming on your topic idea, Alex, was the idea of narrative. I've always been the content guy, but I will say that the practice of editing other people's work came in handy with my writing degree.

Because you knew that whatever you put on the page, you would have to sit around a table on Thursday, you know, while they read the critique and everybody discusses the story, you know, or discusses the poem on how, you know, whether it was good, where it fell flat. You flex those muscles real quick in terms of, you know, how do you say something nice?

And honestly not just like, "Hey, this is crap," but "You're not reaching your potential yet." Right? Do a couple more drafts. Figure either this is what's coming across as the point of this particular work. Um, and in order to do that, here's what I recommend doing. 

Ruthi Corcoran: I'm laughing to myself because of all the emails I sent back to Dave that were just basically red pen throughout being like, no, no, no. Rewrite this here. 

Dave Dougherty: Yes, the economist and the artist. That's the difference. There's no utility in feelings. What are you doing? 

Alex Pokorny: The Midwestern just cringes every time I have to do that. I had a direct report once and he wrote this kind of SharePoint page. Honestly, his, um, thoughts and his ideas were spot on. The writing was atrocious, and I was basically, as a Midwesterner, I used the, the Hemingway app and I was like, you need it to just pass through the Hemingway app and then I'll, then I'll approve it. It's not me. It's, it's the app. 

Ruthi Corcoran: Get rid of the red. 

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. Never got it back. Never was sent back A second draft. Definitely a skill I need to work on. 

Dave Dougherty: Well, but you know, so with that, I think one of the things that I have seen a lot of SEOs, um, I mean, and even a lot of marketers more generally struggle with, um, Is, what is the story you're telling, right? Like it's one thing to collect all the data and to have all the data, which always seems to be, uh, an enterprise focus is we have this data lake.

In fact, it's so much data. We have to call it a lake because we flooded the shed that we had, you know, to house all the things. And, um, yeah, so, but it doesn't matter really because. As soon as you have that data, you are going to make it sing. Um, depending on how good your culture is to, you know, whatever political things you have to, or whatever boss you're presenting to, like on the most altruistic side, you know, you'll, you'll be doing good work and, and you'll hit your 12% growth, you know, year over year and, you know, you did it through good means. But if you do some creative accounting because you have a crap culture... 

Ruthi Corcoran: You can torture it into singing. 

Dave Dougherty: Exactly. You can make it scream instead of sing. Um, But you know, it's, it's a, it's about the, Hey, we did this, you know, we did this organization, organizational change management, we got this increased productivity, we're able to do, um, you know, we can stop cutting headcount because we can see these, you know, improvements.

Um, And we know where we need more people because if we want to, you know, uh, squeeze this for all the juice that's available, we need to have more people in these, in these roles, um, or in this particular priority country, right? Um, crafting the narrative to align it to the business goals and not just to have. You know, I'm the marketer. I, I got more traffic. Yay. Or God forbid, you're in the unfortunate position to say, I fixed 50,000 errors last quarter. And?

Ruthi Corcoran: I, I think that's huge too because you can fix all the pages you want or even have all the pages you want, but if at the end of the day, they're not aligned to what the organization is trying to do. You might be better off showing up at a conference and shaking people's hands, like just being part of the sales, what value are you adding to this that couldn't already be added throughout the rest of the organization? 

Dave Dougherty: And that, that, for me at least, is where like, as much as I love listening to a lot of them, the search content that's out there. There are a lot of really smart people tackling some really hard problems. But it is, it, you know, we are a very insular group of people.

You know, we like to talk about the technical things and, you know, we, we found a problem and we fixed it rather than, Okay. Yeah. Any, like, I think back to when JavaScript became the first thing, right? Where it's like, well, they seem to be developing it and we know it goes against best practice, but we can't convince them to stop, so I guess we'll just put up with it.

 Right. And, um, there are better ways of, of, of handling that, you know, in retrospect. Um, and I think we can provide more value as experts, as specialists, um, or even as a, a damn good marketer who knows multitudes of, of practices, right? Because at least in my mind, it's a craft more than it is, uh, um, particular specialization.

So anyway, I'm rambling. Um, I lost my point a while ago, so I'll stop. 

The Importance of Understanding the Relationship Between Sales and Marketing for Strong SEO

Alex Pokorny: Well, there's the kind of work off of that. There's kind of the big picture, little picture mentality of trying to understand that big picture, the little picture, and then trying to tie the two together. Um, I'm trying to make that impactful presentation by wrangling that data, which is all about the little picture to try to somehow make a big picture statement out.

That's, that's a skill, and that can be a difficult skill. I was going to do a bonus. Fourth one. Um, just this took a while in an organization to understand it. The importance of it. Which is the marketing sales relationship. In a lot of enterprise SEO, especially by volume, you're really working on top of funnel fill the pipe sales pipeline kind of activities.

Where does it go from there and does it actually hand off at some point to somebody in sales? Or is it uh, e-commerce click and you gotta buy button and make its customer service that is getting pinged like crazy because what your terms are showing up for, isn't quite what the product does or something, you know, there's a mismatch or description errors or who knows size problems and stuff like that, which I've definitely seen on sites where the, you know, increments that were used were entirely off. So if you bought it based upon the webpage, that's not actually what you receive. Like little things like that, which are big. 

Dave Dougherty: To, to that point. I've had, you know, one particular project where we did amazing work. We had a lot of zeros behind the, uh, the outcome. But then we found that we only had a half-time salesperson on it. Yeah. So all of the leads that we had in, in the CRM just did not matter because we didn't have anybody to call on any of them. So all the leads just, you know, rotted. 

Ruthi Corcoran: Yeah. Or on the flip side, some of the better projects that have worked on were situations in.

You know, we didn't have all the big numbers, but the infrastructure was set up in a good way so that anything we were doing was ultimately successful, such that we could scale down the road. But if you don't start with that, that connection first, yeah, you're going to have a lot of leads and nothing to do on the backend.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah, well just also that language, like the more you can understand from the sales, like the profit side of it, basically. The better you can position your SEO activity, your tool purchase, and your request for site map edit, you can use the right language of saying, you know, we converted a 3% rate from organic search. I think that if we change this, it could definitely increase the size of our pipeline by a bit. Um, but you know, 3% of that is going to be sales. So anything helps. 

Suddenly that becomes a lot more important. The site map, edit request, or what kind of language do you use about...Dave, we had a prior chat once and you were talking about commodity products.

And then there's kind of like the long-term sales, interpersonal relationship kind of built products, which are the kind of those big ticket items or really complex purchase deals between two organizations. Yeah. Especially B2B stuff. Those ones are so different and a commodity purchase versus one of those handoffs to maybe an ABM kind of style campaign or maybe go straight into a salesperson's, uh, kind of queue to follow up on or work off of.

That's such a different situation. And if you're talking about one versus the other, or you are used to an organization that does one versus the other, you really gotta relearn it and figure out what this organization does. 

Dave Dougherty: Yeah. Right. Well, and to your point earlier of the change management and finding out where the org is going, you know, so many of the old school businesses that you find in, you know, the, the Dow or, um, you know, I mean, you know, which kind of works.

I'm talking about the transition to a direct-to-consumer model from a traditional B2B model, you know, generally, no. That is a really painful thing because you have all of this workforce that's stuck using, you know, um, not stuck, but are more familiar using channel partners, the relationships mm-hmm. The handshakes that they've established for years and years and years.

There's the whole legal, uh, side of things you have to talk about as well, um, with your contract. Because, you know, I, I was explaining to a guy the other day, when you go from doing sort of a traditional relationship marketing thing into online, all of a sudden everybody becomes a frienemy right? You might have a really good relationship with so-and-so at, you know, competitor X, but when you're trying to rank for the same keyword, that drives 80% of your revenue.

I don't care how nice they are or how good the lasagna is, their wife makes it when you have dinner with them. Like, forget it, you're going to try to take 'em down. Um, yeah. So it's a, it is a different mindset for sure. 

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. And then even deep into the sales piece, if you really get to know the actual sales team and individuals, there's a, a pretty big difference between pipeline volume kind of an argument versus is kind of an account based management, single, um, kind of high profile client, uh, win. Because they might be looking at, and there are some organizations that they get this one-fourth quarter, very last kind of hail Mary kind of sale, and that makes their entire year so they don't care about basically 364 days.

They care about that one last final day who finally made it, and they finally got the signature done because there was the whale of a client that they cared about, which is tough from the SEO standpoint because a lot of this stuff we're really talking about is pipeline volume and filling up that, that top of that pipeline to bring down that marketing funnel.

Thinking about it in that picture, yeah, you fill the top, you get the bottom. The bottom is this consistent. The flow of new client information or contact form fills or webinar signups or whatever the heck you're actually kind of pushing for. That's such a different argument to say all saying that we're going to give you five, 15 leads, 50 leads, a hundred leads a day. They don't care. They want one. Just one per guy. 

Ruthi Corcoran: I remember a couple of conversations about that particular situation where the purpose of your site and what you're doing with SEO are completely different in those circumstances. You're not filling the pipeline. That's not what you're doing. You're there so that when somebody talks to the sales guy, they go Google, they go find out more information, you're there with a fantastic experience. You're reaffirming with the sales and you're providing confidence. It's, yes, you should trust us, or, yes, you should reenlist, or you should re-sign your contract because we're still the best and we're here for you. Regardless of whether it's you calling the salesperson or you searching online looking for information, we've got it for you. We're we, we have the answer. 

Alex Pokorny: Yeah, kind of moving back, uh, with you, to your point about change management, that's, there's almost a version of that's within just marketing and sales. That's almost always present. Whenever you have a traditional sales, uh, organization kind of added into your, your overall client or org that you're with, there's always some kind of.

Kind of push and pull between the two because both of 'em are always trying to look for budget and both of 'em are always claiming the same sales and profit as their win. I mean, yeah, it's kind of tense. We're like, yeah, we, we did this. And we were like, well, yeah, but they also flew out there six times and they almost went south and then finally got a VP signature last minute to approve a change. kind of was, yours kind of wasn't right. 

Dave Dougherty: Yeah, that, that brings it, it back full circle. I think that, uh, it's actually a nice way to wrap up. Um, because it is, everything is just so interconnected, you know? And that was my takeaway of, um, When I first started at my first big org, walking the hallways and realizing that the population of the workforce was about the same as my, uh, um, the town I grew up in.

I'm just like, oh my God, I'm working for the local government. That's, that's my role here. I'm like the wastewater guy. 

Alex Pokorny: When you see like floors of just cubicle walls and you're like, my gosh. 

Dave Dougherty: Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah. So yeah, figuring out how to navigate that, coming up with creative solutions that actually drive the impact and, and doing, you know, any number of buzzwordy sentence structures.

Um, You know, in order to, to have the day job. Um, but as always, I think I've enjoyed our conversation together, and, um, I think if you guys don't have any final words, we can, uh, say adieu and. See everybody in the next episode. 

Alex Pokorny: Sounds good.