Owned Asset Optimization With Jonas Sickler

Jeremy Rivera: Welcome to the unscripted SEO podcast with Jeremy Rivera. My special guest today is Jonas Sickler of Terakeet. There's no script, there’s no preplanned talking points. We're just going to have a conversation. I've known Jonas for a few years and we'll get into that, but don't expect anything super planned.

But I love these conversations in SEO because people's experiences can go so deep and so wide. So let's start out with just kind of a fundamental, who are you? And what is it mostly that you do?

Jonas Sickler: Hey, good to be on the show and right before a nice long vacation. So we're all kind of unwound and relaxed already.

And it's kind of waiting into the waters of the 4th of July. So I have [00:01:00] been I had it just like everyone else in search, had a really wacky journey to get here. Did not go to school for that. Obviously started off as a children's book illustrator and worked my way through the illustration business as it went from analog to digital, and then started to think about getting into something that was a bit more fixed and less sporadic. The illustration in the book industry can be very sort of go with the flow and I needed something a little more anchored. And so I already was, I had a website for a portfolio and I was writing blog content, doing a lot of the things that I would normally do as an SEO.

And so I kind of fell into that career and it made sense. And I was able to exercise a lot of the same things that I loved as an illustrator, which was sort of problem solving, connecting with audiences and telling stories as, as an as an SEO, and then moving through my journey as an SEO, I did a little bit of everything from early days of link building into content, [00:02:00] writing into content strategy and planning strategies.

It's got the technical side of things, but mostly on like on page and internal linking and anchor tax and all that stuff never really got too deep into the super technical things. I always feel like that gets more towards a developer away from an SEO and there are some SEOs Who are phenomenal at doing that and, and just get it and they get all the patents and everything, but I kind of stayed more of the on page and the content side.

And then now I've kind of pushed myself into a digital marketing analyst role, where I kind of am more focused on understanding the holistic impact of search, all of the different things that SEO impacts beyond organic and how can we better report on that. How can we understand it? And how can we get brands on board with the idea that SEO is more than a single channel strategy?

Jeremy Rivera: I think that's huge. First off, I do want to know, do you have any books out there for my kids that I should, [00:03:00] I should grab off the shelf first?

Jonas Sickler: There, you know, I did the ones that I did were baby books and they're part of this line of books called the indestructibles. Which are sort of a they, they have like a Tyvek material feel to them.

So you can like put them in the dishwasher and somebody invented the concept and I came along with some art and they were like, oh, you can do our next series. And there was a nursery rhyme series. So my books have no words. They're. Just they were like, do Mary had a little lamb and Humpty Dumpty and Hey, diddle diddle.

And, and there are six of them all together and like, just do whatever you want, as long as you can kind of, you know, convince us that what your art is doing is going to be in conjunction with the rhymes that people are going to tell. So I didn't have to worry about the writing. But they, they were good.

They, it was, it was a hit. And for anybody who's got little babies and stuff, they've, they've sold millions and millions of copies around the world. So a cool, a cool accomplishment, but then it was time to move on.

Jeremy Rivera: Yeah. I, and I feel like, you know, there are clients I have where [00:04:00] some need just pictures to tell them the story. 

 

And I think that's an interesting aspect of SEO is, is communicating The value that we're bringing and also trying to move as an industry away from, you know, hyper focusing on I'm an SEO and so I change rankings and so all I care about is these keywords and did they go up in depth. And moving from, you know, where I was at Raven tools as an SEO analyst and providing rank tracking, like we're like trying to move people away from myopically just trying to, you know, what are, what's our position changes and get them to look at a bigger picture.
It was very expensive for Raven tools. Lost their rank tracking capability due to Google Armageddon for several SEO tools at the time, but I think as an industry, I feel like we [00:05:00] have started to move. Away from just, you know, reporting impressions and click positions. What are the conversations you're having?

That's connecting SEO as like a bigger discipline as part of the bigger picture in those larger values. What, what does that look like at your agency or in your department?

Jonas Sickler: Yeah. And Tarrakeet was doing enterprise SEO for disruptive brands for quite a long time. And then we started moving up from there into like the fortune 1000, really more established brands.
And when we did that, we were realizing that that we were creating content that was performing outside of the organic search channel and having bigger impact, whether it was on the brand or on conversions and transactions. And. We weren't really capturing that full value. So we ended up taking a step back and thinking like, how can we flip [00:06:00] marketing on its head? How can we redefine what we're doing and what the industry like where there are smart people that are doing some of this stuff already, but there wasn't a name for it. And so we said, well, let's launch a new category. And that category was owned asset optimization. And we did that about a year ago.

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And what the, the main point of it is instead of being a channel first strategy, like SEO is, owned asset optimization says let's take an asset first approach. And so considering all of the things that you create for your website as an asset, and then how can you use search data to understand your audience's needs to create those assets. Like, like we do a lot in SEO, we say, well, what are the keywords? What is the intent behind those keywords? How can we create a piece of content that solves that intent, but then also focusing on the broader user experience for that piece of content and the conversion rate optimization for it, and then taking into account all the different ways that traffic will come to that [00:07:00] asset that you created, and then measuring the value of it that way. And thinking about it more in terms of like long term equity that it drives. And that the fact that you might be running paid ads to it. Even. And so if you created, they created it as an asset for your brand, and now you're getting organic traffic, you're running paid to it.

Maybe you're running doing some social promotion for it and you're atomizing it in all these different ways. Then you should be, you should be tracking the value that that assets providing all the conversions from it from all the different places that traffic arrives because you, you created it for to solve the intent.

So that was kind of like the, sort of the main crux behind it. And then we can pause to talk about that. And then we can also talk about some of the measurements and things that we do beyond the normal SEO measurements.

Jeremy Rivera: Yeah. I'd love to talk more about metrics next, but I am, I have been thinking since the, you know, algorithm leak, one of the things that jumped out to me is kind of a reinforcement that [00:08:00] brand, you know, in click behavior are both, you know, individual drivers. Like if you are doing things separately, that increase the, the number of people that are searching for your brand that has, you know, there's always been kind of this idea or I've had a workflow first, I'm guilty of it, of like I would go into the search console and say, oh, these are branded queries.
We want to optimize non branded queries, you know, and get more of those, but it's almost like, you know, a representation of your strength and authority and perception of your authority and relevance in the marketplace in general is actually reflected in the diversity depth and strength of those branded clicks right, so it makes sense to. Look at what your assets are and where they're positioned and think about how to strengthen, you know, not just from a, Oh, I got a hype, I got a hyperlink. So I rank [00:09:00] better perspective, but from a, a bigger holistic picture, right.

Jonas Sickler: Yeah. I, and I love that you kind of brought in that branded versus non branded because we do often get shoved in the corner and said, well, we already were, you know, people already knew about our brand. So we're already getting branded clicks. But if you're taking the asset first approach, you could, then you, then you're armed and you can say, well, that asset. That's getting branded traffic didn't exist before we created it. So yes, it's getting non branded and it's getting branded traffic. But it didn't exist before our work.

So we claim a hundred percent of the value from that. Now, you know, you're doing other stuff elsewhere, you know, we're not going to claim the branded traffic to the homepage because that already existed, but if you were to do conversion rate optimization on the homepage and you boosted two or three X in a conversion percentage, then you should be claiming some of that value.

And that's sort of where like, SEO has always tiptoed into the idea of revenue and conversions [00:10:00] where it's been like, you know, we don't, we don't measure traffic, we don't measure rankings. We, we measure real hard business metrics like revenue, but user experience is generally gated around only the things that impact search performance and not things that might make the page a better overall experience beyond the search or it, you know, conversion rate optimization is layered on sometimes by some people if, if it's a, you know, if the agency specializes in that, but it's usually not considered like wrapped up in the search.

In SEO, it's more like, well, we're going to put a CTA on the page, but there isn't the traditional testing that goes into improving conversions and doing X, Y, and Z to make sure that that worked and testing it. It's more focused on testing around things that will improve search performance and get more traffic.

Jeremy Rivera: So let's close that circle and come to metrics. I love the idea of metrics. And I've also been in an organization where we wasted [00:11:00] literal months coming up with these. Okay. Ours and spent so much time and energy to try to communicate this information to meet these. Fictionalize OKRs that we're supposed to represent this business.

And it was just all a phantom, you know it was a huge waste of time and effort. So how do you look at metrics? What are the measurements and signals and how do you get them deployed and bring those fishing nets separate the catch and say, ta da, to the client in a way that actually impacts?

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Jonas Sickler: Yeah, it's the easiest thing in the world, and it's also the hardest thing in the world at the same time. And I say that because I think the best metrics to use are the ones that are familiar to marketers and that are measurable across different channels and strategies. So, if you're using similar metrics to show paid performance and SEO performance, it's okay that they're doing completely different things, but in order to measure sort of like the highest level outputs on those, I think it's good to use things that are like key performance indicators.

You know, you say we've got rankings moving this way and impressions moving that way, but those are just sort of like internal "good to know for us" metrics, not reportable metrics. They're more like, you know, are we doing things that are moving the needle in the right direction? But when it comes to the actual metrics, I think the OKRs should be centered on things that can actually drive business results. I like to use ROAS. So return on ad spend. And that is something that can be seen as a paid PPC metric, as well as an SEO metric, if there's, you know, fees going out to buy the placement based on the CPC and also if there's agency fees involved, total fees, and then the total revenue generated from them. Same thing if you're working with an SEO partner: what are all the fees that you're paying in a monthly contract? And then what is the revenue coming out of that? You can calculate the return on ad spend from that without having to worry about the intricacies of, you know, how much time went into creating this asset or that asset.

It's kind of a little tricky if the agency partner is more like, "Here's an outline, go write the piece of content." And then you as a business have to put in a lot more time and effort and work to actually create the content. So I think that argument works better if you're the type of an SEO partner that says, "We're going to hand you a fully developed written piece of content, you just have to paste it in and connect the links and you're kind of done."
So it depends on how the partnership works, but ROAS is one. And then cost per acquisition (CPA) is another one. So that's an easily transferable "how do you, you know, how much are you paying to get a customer across all of your marketing efforts where you're measuring it?" And then same thing with your SEO partnership. Are you doing it that way? I think those are the two metrics that are most impactful across, you know, can use those across channels.

The tricky part is as a business, you have to know what your lifetime customer value is because you can't just say, well, they came in and they bought, let's say a pair of contacts. If somebody comes to your website and buys a contact subscription, that first month is maybe 35 bucks. Well, you have to bake into that the lifetime value of that. And they're probably not buying one pair of contacts or probably subscribing. So how are you then attributing that monthly bill? How long are they with you as a customer? How much money do they spend in the future?

It's harder with stuff like, you know, your target store and somebody is going to buy stuff more randomly than it is with a subscription model. It makes it a lot easier, but you have to know those, you know, the lifetime value of the customer and the number of conversions and the cost of traffic. And once you get all those numbers put together in a spreadsheet, then you can start playing with the data and making all these different calculations and collecting the same data from different sources so that you can compare each channel.

Jeremy Rivera: I think that's so important because when you're doing conversion optimization, when you're doing even simple SEO forecasting, there's a temptation of like, "Oh, I've got this many keywords, it's this much traffic, it could convert at this percentage and this product is $10." But if you know, that's agnostic of like, okay, do we have any data to say if they buy from us once, you know, that actually represents four or five purchases over their lifetime or how long does a subscription last, you know, or are there multiple products that are usually cross-sellable or upsellable.

So I think that a lot of SEOs aren't having those conversations, aren't thinking through, and they're just looking at, "Oh, I've got an e-commerce client. Okay. Well, you know, that's a $10 conversion" and not viewing you know, not even recognizing, okay, well, if we have their email and they go into a list, what is the percentage of email list users that end up making a purchase? And how much is that average purchase over a lifetime? Like all of those are additional metrics that you need to have a more, a deeper conversation with the client to understand.

You know, and also understanding the business model at hand. Just this morning did a consultation and we'd been creating content. They were hospitalists and they provided staffing for hospitals. And so everything we wrote was to get hospitals to contact them. And in this morning's conversation, the CEO is like, "Well, we don't even make our money from the hospitals. We actually make it from the physicians who we provide, and we partner with them to provide the services," like, wait, we've been focusing on getting the attention and group of people that aren't even actually the ones that you make the money off of. We've totally missed on all of the, you know, not exactly like, cause they still need hospitals to agree to that job, you know, to give those jobs to those physicians, but that's a totally different marketing campaign to target the physicians involved versus targeting the hospitals who want to hire those physicians. So understanding the business model is so important.

Jonas Sickler: Yeah, and I think that's where it makes sense to have those decision makers in the room when these things are being hashed out. Sometimes I think a lot of times what happens is like information gets filtered down to somebody who's like, you know, at some point, some business objective gets filtered to the point where they're like, "Hey, we need traffic," because in my head, I know that if I have traffic and it does this stuff, then it means revenue. So then that person goes out, well, how do I get traffic? I get, go to an SEO person to get the traffic and they might, you know, it might've gotten lost in translation as far as what the real goal was.

And so there's a lot of speculation and exactly that happens where you know, the person, the CFO or the CEO is like, "Well, wait a minute. Like, how are we profitable on this?" And usually what happens is the person who signs up and wants to bring on the SEO person, it's like, "We don't care about revenue. Like it just needs traffic," but somebody does care about it somewhere. It's usually the person who's like the main point of contact that might not realize that there are other ways to kind of build the program out to be profitable.

If the right people get in the room from the very, very beginning, and it's your point earlier too like it's, it can be really hard to understand what the value of a customer even is. I mean, in some models where you've got in a streaming industry, you've got your, I signed up and I pay a monthly subscription fee to get the streaming content. But then what about all the advertising revenue? If you're, if they're on a like a lower cost ad model where they're starting to see ads, well, now somebody is paying to get their ads in front of that person. And the streamer is making more money off of the customer potentially even than the subscription fee was, so that has to get factored in. And that's another, how do you even figure out what the average dollar value attributable to a customer is for advertising revenue. Like that's, it's just, and that might even cross over to websites like Target and Walmart that do those like, "Oh, well, we didn't have what you're looking for, but here's some more stuff you can get from another website." I mean, those are ads as well. So that stuff's really hard to track.

Jeremy Rivera: Yeah. So as far as best practices for SEOs who are wanting to take it to that next level, like what's an action item today for SEO? You know, their client in front of them. Let's do it in-house. What's your advice for an in-house person? What's your advice for agency slash freelance person? So let's say if you're hired to do SEO in-house, what's your action item, your SOP for connecting those dots?

Jonas Sickler: I think the in-house teams have one advantage and a drawback. Their advantage is that they have access to probably a lot of the data and the information that normally a partner might not gain access to for confidentiality reasons, especially with really big companies. Publicly traded companies, there might be some heavier restrictions. Internal teams can get all a lot of that data. Maybe all of it, but they're also often hamstrung and short you know, short-staffed to be able to scale things to the level needed. But they're able to collect all the data to be able to make the case.

And I think because of that, if they're able to assemble all those data points and start thinking like a business analyst before they start thinking like an SEO, how can I, you know, what are all the data points that I need in order to make the case for SEO? And I see like in Slack chats and channels all over the place in the SEO community, there's a lot of people that are like, "How do I convince the CEO? How do I convince, you know, my boss, that we need to do this?" And they always come back to just, "No, no, we don't want to launch a blog. We just want more traffic to this page." And I think that there's sort of a misunderstanding about how traffic actually works sometimes where it's not just like an SEO can't create demand and interest out of nothing. There has to be, it has to exist and there has to be enough keywords and search volume.

So I think the more data that you can come armed with and say, here's the total addressable market we have before us. And here's the sections of the website that we can get traffic to, and here's how much it'll cost. And if you're able to build out strong business models using like Google Sheets or whatever, Excel say Tom Critchlow has really good information about that. And his SEO MBA course, definitely check that stuff out. Cause he walks through the idea of how do you build a model that says like, if our conversion rate is this and our traffic is this, our leads are this, what is the value of a conversion at each point, you know, you might, if you're a lead gen site, it might be, well, you're generating leads at 5%, but then only 5 percent of those actually convert into a sale. So you have to account for all those that you can build that into your model and then be able to calculate out what's possible.

And then once you know what's possible, then you can kind of make the case and say, well, here's what it looks like in condition one and condition two, if we invest in SEO versus a paid channel, and how can we bring some more efficiency to the paid channel and then move some of those investments over to SEO. So that way you can have one channel that is sustainable and can continue to run while the other one can be turned on and off if budget needs are tightened up.

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Jeremy Rivera: So what's your experience with, cause I've done two sides of like the concept of forecasting and one model looks at, "Oh, hey, this is the existing traffic and how we're doing here." Can you model out and create a sheet that increased that shows what a, you know, 5 percent increase or a 10 percent increase would mean versus looking at those opportunity universes of, like, taking a cluster of keywords that shows the search volume and then based off of organic click-through rate, making an estimate of potential traffic and then trying to quantify.

 

Okay. Out of that universe of potential traffic that means this many conversions, that means this many sales, that means this much revenue, what are, you know, how do you quantify once you, if you do build that universe, how do you keep that within the realm of sanity of like, okay, out of that cluster of keywords, how can I predict or project accurately of how much of that pie I get to eat versus the more sustainable? Like, "Oh, well, you know, this is what it would look like. If we got a 10 percent increase let's go for that." You know, there are two different ROI predictions. How do you handle those differentials when it comes to building these assets?

Jonas Sickler: Well, I'm glad you said pie, first of all, because 4th of July is a pie holiday for me anyways. Yeah, it is actually super, super hard to do with accuracy. And I think that's why there aren't tools out there that are like, "Oh, I built this model. Here you go. It's free. Go use it" because, there's a, we built one and it took a load of time. And what went into it was way to build an algorithm that was trained on our historical five year, five years of our historical performance as an SEO partner for our customers.

So how did we perform personally using our strategies on our customers? And then it takes into account I don't remember that maybe it's like 6 months. I think of that cost that potential customers historical performance from the domain perspective. So before we start working with them, did they, how were they projected to grow? How were they growing? Did they get hit by algorithms if, you know, if yes or no, then that gets factored into the model because you know, that means it's harder to get lift if they are getting clobbered by algorithms, and if they weren't growing very well versus somebody that already is growing well.

So all those things have to get factored in and I think there's. It always ends up like, I think you can build it in a simpler way that says like based on the history of my own work, I know that I will be likely to produce you know, a certain percentage of, of either. If you're doing a traffic model, or if you're going to do a conversion model I can produce X percent of the total traffic value.

You know, you might say if, if we, even if we ranked number one, we're not going to get 30 percent click-through on every single keyword we target. That's just impossible. You probably will never rank number one for every keyword. Correct. So you have to figure out what that governor is and say, like, here's the entire pool of everything. And based on this entire pool of opportunity, we think we're going to get like 2% at the most, which is still, if your pool is big enough, that's still a really big number on the output. Then the harder part is kind of building that out and saying, when like building that curve that says in 12 months, you're going to be here in, in, in 12, in six months and 18 months.
Like, what is the trajectory that you can expect? And when will you break even on contract pricing? And then the cumulative contract pricing that adds up versus the cumulative revenue that stacks up, like, when do those lines cross each other? And so that you say, this is when you become profitable. And then here's where you 2x, 3x, and 4x the contract pricing and that's long term cause it really SEO is the long term game. And it will continue to grow and continue to build equity. That's the beauty of it so that you can kind of, the nice thing about those lines is that you can, with PPC, you kind of hit a plateau where you just can't.

If you get more traffic, your conversions go down because you're buying inefficient traffic, but with search you continue to see the traffic growth and you continue to see sort of the Delta between the contract price and the value of the traffic grow. And at some point, you know, the program just becomes so efficient that it outstrips outpaces everything else.

Jeremy Rivera: That's, that's great. Let's just say that that's great. A great way to look at it because there is that, you know, I also, you know, have set up and I'm setting up PPC campaigns here and there and, you know, I'm like, there's a lot of extra steps. I got an hour of conversation just to map out. Okay, well, what is your focus? Profit margin for this set of, you know, products and services. So that when we do that goal cost per acquisition, you know, we're not overspending to acquire any one specific lead and how are, how many leads does it take to actually convert that, that person that's going to, you know, pay to restrip the airport that you wanted to, you know, we're going to ask all day, but the, it seems like those conversations are less, a lot less likely to happen on the SEO side.

You know, there's just like, "Oh, well, you know, we got a services page. We'll make a service page." Okay. Well, out of that service, like how, how big, what is the follow through of those additional like next steps? Like thinking about those pieces just seems to fall to the wayside. I think contrasting those two and thinking about like comparing the instant input, instant output of PPC versus the long term upscale potential of SEO. It is kind of the Holy Grail, right? Like we want to be able to do that, but I think, I think those things that you've been pointing to as solid metrics, we need to get there as an industry more.

Jonas Sickler: Yeah. And I, you know, there's always this sort of, it's like a battle between the PPC and the SEO teams, because I, if it's really bad, if there's an external agency running the PPC program, because they're often paid by the size of the budget. And so they want to grow that as big as possible, as long as it stays positive ROI. And the SEO team, if we can work together, especially with an internal PPC team and really coordinate on what keywords are being purchased and it needs the, I think the overall mindset needs to shift away from like, what conversions are the SEO team responsible for versus what conversions are the PPC team responsible for and start thinking, how can we collectively work together to get the most value deliver the most customers and the most revenue at the lowest CPA possible.

And do that by coordinating, like we're, it's going to take us six months to get to a traffic driving position on this keyword, run PPC to that, if it's a valuable keyword, when we get to that position, when we get to like two, one, two, three, that's when then pull back that PPC investment on it. Even if it's your most valuable, you know, paid keyword, it's okay. Because now we're going to be getting that traffic through organic. Now let's, but what else do you have? What else can you run the PPC on? And also like, do you really need to be buying branded keywords? And you know, if you're already ranking and if it's a, especially if it's like, you know, a branded thing, that's going to return your homepage with sitelinks.

If those are, if you've got good sitelinks and your money pages are pulled into the sitelinks, then don't buy those branded keywords, put the money somewhere else, but if your sitelinks are not pulling in, you know, your get a quote page or something, or you don't like the way Google's changing the word. There's nothing you can do to make it better. And to make it better, then you might justify buying the keywords to get the, you know, the better wording, the better pages pulled in. So it's really a discussion. And I think a collaboration between the paid and the SEO teams to kind of work together, be agile, move budget in and out, and always think about efficiently driving leads together as a performance arm of the company.

Jeremy Rivera: So wrapping it up what's your one thing that somebody should step away close this podcast and go do immediately?

Jonas Sickler: I think if there's one thing that I would love folks to do, that would be to start at least thinking about, and maybe even start trying to articulate the value of each of your assets on your website, your customer's website, and think about it in terms of an asset. And rather than a channel you know, so that you're not just locked into the idea of SEO, non-branded organic traffic, but rather here's an asset we created to solve a need. And what are all the keywords that are driving to it? Branded and non-branded PPC, social media, email, organic search, whatever, however, people are getting to that.

If you created it because you were trying to meet a need through organic search, then claim all that value. And calculate the revenue and the conversions off of it. And, you know, and don't be, don't be shy. Don't be afraid to say, well, I can only report on the organic stuff. I think we need to step forward and work together to change the mindset of the industry and start thinking bigger about the value that SEO provides.

And that also includes the branded side in the search results as well, especially in that, in the AI world where the you know, generative AI is going to return results based on what it discovers. So the more optimizing we can do, and the more thinking through it, through the lens of SEO and optimizing everything that you've got online, either on your website or on other websites and business profiles, think about it all together collectively so that we can kind of elevate the influence that SEOs have in the industry and marketing.

Jeremy Rivera: I love that. Thank you so much for your time. That's fantastic conversation. If there's anything you want to pitch, what are you working on? What do you want people to go discover and find?
 

Jonas Sickler: I'd say go, go check out owned asset optimization search that poke around. There's a lot of good information out there. I think it'll, I think it'll make a difference and go eat some pie and enjoy the fourth or, or I hope you already had some, if this comes out long afterwards.

Jeremy Rivera: Definitely. All right. Thank you so much, Jonas. See you later.
 

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