According to growth marketer and former HubSpot manager Alex Birkett, B2B content needs to meet four criteria to rank #1 on Google.
The 44th episode of the DesignRush Podcast explains why you should play a long-term game when it comes to SEO, as well as which indicators to look at when assessing the quality of the content on your website.
Tune in to the show to learn:
- Which four requirements your content needs to meet to rank high on search engines
- Why you should play a long-term game with long-term people when it comes to SEO
- Which SEO indicators is Alex looking at first – he splits them into “leading” and “lagging” groups
Who Is Alex Birkett?
Alex is the co-founder of a content marketing & SEO agency Omniscient Digital. Before starting his agency, he worked on freemium growth at HubSpot where his team invented a new organic strategy called the "surround sound strategy" which led to Semrush building a tool based on this approach. Alex's team drove thousands of net new freemium signups across their product suite.
In 2024, SEO isn't just about topping search results - it's about perfecting user experiences. With 58% of searches coming from mobile devices, the stakes for optimized, engaging content are higher than ever.
Our editor Vianca Meyer discusses with Alex how his agency approaches enabling businesses to scale their organic traffic.
Omniscient usually runs a website through a four-part audit:
- Technical SEO
- Content Inventory
- UX
- Off-Page SEO
LEARN MORE ABOUT SEO: 11 Types Of SEO & How They Can Improve Your Search Engine Ranking
A lot of people think about SEO audits as technical, Alex says.
You pump them through Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Screaming Frog and look at technical issues. That's one dimension we use, but there are four in total.
One's going to be a share of search and your visibility about competitors, topics, and the customer journey keywords – we map these out and give the business a visibility score.
Related to that is the content inventory, which I had mentioned before, and that's gonna be your existing content assets, both the coverage of topics as well as where they fit in the customer journey.
Maybe you're overweighted on top of funnel terms and underweighted on the bottom funnel. Maybe you're overweighted on blog posts and underweighted on landing pages.
It's gonna be an allocation of what kinds of content as well as the quality of the content:
- Is it up to snuff in terms of on-page SEO and Google's EEAT?
- Do you have all these signals that would portray you as a trustworthy source?
Then there's technical and UX.
We lump that into the same category because it's based on the website infrastructure and the readability and findability, Alex notes.
Kosta Hristov, QGP’s founder and SEO lead, also believes that UX plays a major role in the success of modern SEO strategies.
“Here’s how it goes. You acquire links. Then Google gives you a spot on the first page to test your site.
Then it tracks the engagement metrics like CTR, and time on page, i.e. the UX. And if it’s not good enough, it drops you off the first page.
UX is an On-Page SEO factor that needs to be taken care of,” he shares.
Lastly, there's off-page SEO.
So backlinks – how do you appear off-site? What are the off-page signals that show Google that you're a reputable source? Usually, the off-page SEO of large companies is incredible, their technical SEO is off the charts. Sometimes, UX could use some work.
In the case of a recent client, the content they had published was pretty good and ranking – they just needed to publish more.
And that was one case where the solution was very simple.
You don't need an SEO expert to say that if you don't publish content, you're not going to rank or attract visitors and convert them. However, we were able to quantify the largest opportunity and say don't even touch your off-page.
Don't even touch your technical – you can do micro tweaks as you go later on. We brought this client from their current 2/10 SEO score to a 10/10 by making them publish more content.
Don't miss all of these keyword opportunities, Alex concludes.
Focusing Your SEO on the User is the Way to Go
With the latest algo updates, Google emphasizes user-focused content even more to ensure that the quality content that answers user needs ranks as high as possible in the SERPs.
Renowned SEO experts Daniel Foley Carter and Lily Ray previously explained this trend on the DesignRush Podcast.
Alex stresses that all serious businesses should focus their SEO efforts on the long-term game.
We've always indexed on the long game – We even call our podcast 'The Long Game'. Our core principle is to play long-term games with long-term people. As part of that, we always optimize the content for the user.
Many SEO experts chase everything Google says. Alex argues we shouldn't care about this but stick to the SEO basics instead.
Ultimately what Google is trying to do is to align the best content to the user intent and create a good experience that allows users to use their search more, click more ads, and bring Google more revenue.
If you skip the platform, you should wonder what would the users want.
They want information from a trustworthy source – somebody who's done this thing before, an expert. The content needs to be comprehensive and answer the question of the query. There's search intent alignment.
Hopefully, Google will keep improving.
Alex admits there are a bunch of mid-term steps where Google ranks, for example, Forbes for best blenders. However, he still claims focusing on the long-term game is the best way to increase organic traffic in 2024.
If we look at the long game, we're doing the right things that are going to parlay into great outcomes, regardless of what happens with Google updates or if SGE takes over.
Whatever the case is, we're building for that long-term game.
Still, it's often challenging to recognize where the hidden gems lie when it comes to ranking #1 on Google. An experienced SEO agency can assist every brand in doing so.
Measuring SEO Success Is the Hard Part
Concluding the conversation, Vianca asked Alex to explain how his agency measures the results of their SEO success and what's the hardest part when it comes to managing client expectations.
Alex's "simple" answer involves looking at two groups of indicators:
- Leading SEO Indicators
- Lagging SEO Indicators
We've always been in an agency that attributes ourselves to growth outcomes, Alex confirms.
We map toward business outcomes, not just traffic outcomes. The leading indicators in the search-focused content strategy are going to be the number of indexed pages and visibility – impressions in number 1-3 search rankings and traffic. All of these metrics need to be in place to attract the traffic that's going to convert.
An example of a lagging indicator is conversion, a qualified lead. In some cases, we have clients who have very advanced revenue and marketing operations that can help us connect data sources.
We've got our marketing & website analytics with GA4, and then the client might have a CRM or product analytics so we can stitch that together and say: we've attributed this much revenue to the content that we're producing.
Then, we can build that based on whatever attribution model we've agreed on. A lot of the time, last click, sometimes first click, sometimes multi-touch, that's getting into the weeds a little bit.
For more guides on perfecting your SEO game, check the latest trends on DesignRush.
It's not always about revenue, Alex concludes.
Startups typically want revenue. They're very much driven by how much money are they putting into SEO: how much money are they getting out and in what timeframe.
On the other hand, a lot of enterprises have a lot of SEO to do for their market. They're looking at the overall visibility compared to their competitors. That's where the share of search visibility comes into play.
We'll always try to quantify that with an earned media value equivalent – if you were to buy this traffic, how much would that cost? It depends on what goal the client is aiming for, but we always attach it to some meaningful business metric.
If I had to draw some conclusions right now, I'd say the following:
- Enable the long-term growth of your business by sticking to best SEO practices that have always worked
- Establish criteria/metrics that you can turn to often and assess whether your website is going in the right direction
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