Jonathan Becker: observation

Transcript context

…When you were giving your intro, you talked about how you initially started doing SEO, that's where you started, and then you moved to paid growth. Well, how do you think about those two investments as a founder trying to decide which direction to go? What would your advice be of spend your time here versus there if X, Y, Z? When I'm asked a question of should we put money into organic search or paid search? My response is often that they're actually not mutually exclusive to one another. So it's a great idea to do both, and that backs into my strategy of diversification of channels. So don't build up exclusively in one area and create volatility within your marketing mix essentially. SEO is a wonderful marketing capability when it's built out correctly. I think the issues that you run into are cause and effect related. So one of the things that people really like about performance marketing theoretically is that we can spend a certain amount and then if we're modeling things correctly, we can essentially determine how much revenue is generated from the actions that we took. Finance teams love that, C-suite teams love that, they can build projections, they can budget around it. There's some degree of predictability around it if it's done properly. Search engine optimization is different in that the attribution can be tough. It's difficult to determine whether ultimately the actions that you took contributed to a rise in organic traffic. You have to essentially correlate that. And the reason is because when you build clusters of content and it's grouped thematically and you're targeting buckets of keywords, whether they're long tail or head keywords, whatever it may be, you can publish all of that on your website. Google still has to crawl it. They run it through their analysis algorithm, which is comprised of 200 different signals, of which maybe 20 to 30 have been publicly disclosed. So it's a bit of a black box. We don't really know ultimately what ROI comes off of that unless you're very sophisticated, like probably one of your other guests, Ethan, in terms of measurement. Whereas paid, the ROI is still a difficult problem to solve, but there was a lot more of a linear relationship as it relates to attribution. And so paid being tangible was the reason why I leaned heavily into paid and ultimately away from SEO. But I do think that if you do SEO properly, the payoffs are indisputable and it is certainly an important part of a modern media mix. You mentioned this earlier, I've heard this more and more recently that one of the biggest levers these days in paid growth is around creatives. It's not tooling or smarter data, or you tell me if I'm wrong, but it's just getting better creatives. And so I'll let you actually explain, what are creatives? There's a term creatives that people outside the industry don't really necessarily get. And then broadly, what should people be doing to optimize the way they approach creatives?…

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