Welcome to my summer rerun series for the Simple and Smart SEO Show Podcast. First up, we've got Andrew Holland of JBH. You can find the full episode in the season three, episode 84 podcast with Andrew Holland. Enjoy the clip!

The Concept of Performance SEO

Crystal Waddell: You talk about performance seo like that's part of your your title.

What's different about performance seo than just regular seo? I think you're kind of alluding to it. 

Andrew Holland: so it's very easy. 

As you've actually alluded to yourself. 

You were getting 10, 000 visitors a month.

But you know, you wouldn't necessarily get in the revenue that you wanted from 10, 000.

10, 000 visitors.

It's a heck of a lot of traffic. That's 10, 000 people go to your websites, but why aren't they buying? 

The Importance of Sales in SEO

Andrew Holland: So performance SEO is actually really about, about that. About we want sales. So sales is the goal. 

Brands grow through sales. 

And SEO should help a brand to increase its sales. 

Publisher SEO slightly different.

I'm always talking about brand SEO in terms of, you know, someone sells something. And, and, um, when you're, uh, A performance SEO is about making those sales happen as best as you can. 

And capturing those sales and doing so in a rationally optimistic manner, you know, based on logic and sense. And, uh, and also having sensible conversations about SEO as a channel.

So it's about helping, um, sales to happen. 

And also, we know we're mostly a demand capture [00:01:00] the channel. So, um, you know, and performance SEO is ultimately about turnover. It's about helping brands to grow their turnover. 

The Epidemic of Traffic Focus in SEO

Andrew Holland: And there's sadly an epidemic in SEO, which talks about traffic. 

I listened to the story about this traffic and stuff.

And, and I think that doesn't follow logic because not all traffic is relevant. 

And it doesn't even stand up to a tiny bit of scrutiny in relation to how people buy. 

And how sales occur. And the use of human memory and things like that.

And brand principles. It doesn't. So, you know, just because. 

For example, I'll give you a case, not my case study. But I know there's a very popular case study out there in the SEO world.

And when you break it down, mostly it's. Excel formulas and related to a software that sells some kind of replacement for, um, websites, and not web analytics. 

But like data and data management and spreadsheets. 

The idea being that you need an Excel formula and then, then to go from that to actually replacing your entire company's use of sheets or Excel or something like that for this new data store. 

They [00:02:00] are miles apart. They aren't on the same page. You can have 800, 000 visitors a month looking for Excel formulas. 

That does not mean that, the idea that a tiny percent of them might be looking actually into moving their whole data and system over to this new system or platform. 

Whatever it is. And, and that's 800, 000 visitors of waste. 

No matter how much that 800, 000 visitors cost to build that traffic. 

That is nowhere near a productive use of, um, SEO resources. Or even business project makes a great case study for traffic.

It isn't going to do anything for sales. I mean, but don't be wrong. 

People can twist it and say, Oh, look we've got all this traffic. And now look at our revenue growth and things like that. 

But it won't be, it won't be, that's just the way people try and twist things around. 

But there's loads of case studies like that.

And I've experienced it where, you know, where we've worked on businesses and we've got that traffic up. And then reality is it didn't increase their revenue. 

So we actually did work on pages that did increase their revenue. 

Traffic went tiny, 1 percent up. 

[00:03:00] But their revenue went from 1 million to 3 million, you know, so it's, it's about focusing what matters rather than, uh, thinking of traffic.

Traffic has to be earned. 

But traffic has to be valuable to a business. And it has to have a business case for that value.

Crystal Waddell: Absolutely. Um, and that was one reason why I don't like that term. Um, like conversion rate. 

First it was like, go on social media and build your business.

And I was like, wow, that doesn't work. Okay, did that didn't work. Um, or at least that's not the place you want to build it. Just like you don't want to build it on Etsy. 

You want to build it on your own website. And then it was like, get more traffic. 

And then, like you said, everything you just said, that's what I thought.

And so I started thinking about what I consider like profit rate optimization. And I'm kind of curious, like, what did you do? Um, do you remember like any kind of tidbits of what you guys did to those pages or how you found your focus? For those pages to truly optimize it for profit? 

Andrew Holland: Oh, right. Yeah I mean, it wasn't really with that that client that i'm just talking about.

I mean, that's a few years ago. 

But in truth, We we created content and that content. Um Was very top of funnel. 

And that top of funnel content was massive.

[00:04:00] But reality is the client was very, very strong minded and, and, and very commercially driven.

So nah. it's not really working for us. That isn't, we need to change tact. 

Go do me a strategy that makes me money, not traffic. So, you know, 

I went back and looked at everything and we created a huge process where we had a 24 hour a day content system working on pages. 

Which are basically like product pages is best way to describe them.

And they are so high purchase intent. It's ridiculous. But every page is ridiculously low traffic. 

You would only go to those pages if you were buying or selling that particular item. And it's so unique. 

So we did that at scale as a scale as you can, and you can do it with AI now.

And yeah, the business dramatically increased turnover and they built their own internal team to replace the agency usage.

And, I'm still in touch with the client now. He's somebody I can have a good conversation with. 

And I'm sure we'll end up working together in the future. But yeah, and that's the thing, though, what that would go against every kind of traditional SEO with traffic versus, right?

It's got to be the traffic's got to be meaningful. Not meaningless. 

And it's got to be [00:05:00] commercially focused. 

If you were to look at that website and strip away all the informational content. 

There is barely a lift in traffic. 

Barely a lift, but that lift. 

That little, like maybe 1 percent lift, is worth a millions.

And that's, I think that's the key generally with, with, you know, with that kind of approach to performance SEO. 

And that kind of shaped my sort of vision moving forward in the future. So we have to make, we have to move the needle for clients at all costs. And it has to be revenue focused. 

Crystal Waddell: So are you saying that you, um, do you guys focus then on optimizing their product pages more for that?

Andrew Holland: Yeah. It's all bottom of the funnel. 

The Power of Organic Reach in SEO

Andrew Holland: It's all, you know, cause if you think about it, so the idea of what happens online is, um, essentially. 

It's like a supermarket aisle. 

When somebody goes into the supermarket aisle, they're, they're in the market for whatever you sell.

And you pick up a package you put, put it down, things like that.

That's what goes on. 

And with buyers. 

They're in the, the aisle and they're gonna buy today, you know, it doesn't always happens sometimes, you know, it, it because of the way it did digitally. We don't always buy there and then. 

We go on the research mission. 

But [00:06:00] when you're in the mode to buy, you are in the aisle.

and eventually you will put in your basket and check out. And, um, it's a case of you just want to catch more of those people. 

So sales growth occurs by what they call light category buyers. And these are the people that don't buy on or heavy buyers. So, you know, so the people that buy from, um, a certain type of website come there direct, you know, every, every time.

So, you know, that's great. People who buy from Amazon go to Amazon for everything, don't they? They do. And, um, you know, Amazon will grow by getting the likes of my mother and father to choose to buy from Amazon who have never purchased anything from Amazon in their life. 

But if you think about Amazon growth, there's a huge section of society that has never purchased from Amazon. 

And if it encourages those people just to buy maybe one or two more things a year from them than they have done before. 

Suddenly Amazon's growth is even through the roof. 

And it's the same model that applies to your business. My employer's business, it's the same model.

If we can get more people to try us once. 

You know, or try your services once, then what happens that, that actually equates to [00:07:00] growth overall. You know, it's. It's getting more people. Catching more of today's buyers as possible. 

And if you maybe increase someone's chances, just literally go from one in 300 to two and 300, you double potential sales.

And, and that's the thing with SEO and that's why organic reach is so powerful. 

Because you reach more people who are ready to buy. 

And you capture them as they're just about to.

And it's, if you think about it, whenever you buy. And you break down your own behavior when you go online.

And it's like, sometimes you'll search for the person directly. Sometimes you'll look at a broad keyword. 

But you're ready to buy. And then even at the last minute, you'll click on a few links before you actually purchase to decide, what are we going to do? What are we going to do? What am I going to do? We come back and forward and back and forward.

And eventually you try, try something. 

And it's the tiniest nudge at the end of that. Can move you from one to another. And that report that we shared on Google the other day is all about that, really. 

It's about like nudging somebody. 

All we do in SEO is create online nudges for people. 

But unless you're ranked, you can't be in that party and you have to pay to be there.

And [00:08:00] that's an expensive game. Because every click is expensive. And every click does not convert. 

And then even then, when they're ready to buy and you can convert, the organic traffic is reaching more people.

More people are clicking through organic listings. 

Because we, we kind of, we know that they're paid listings.

And there's almost like what they call Google gullibility.

We rely on Google to filter the best results for us. So we can assume that when you search for something, anything on positions, one, two, three, or four is probably going to be the best for you. 

Because They've had to fight their way up there and Google's gotten there.

So performance SEO is all about, um, brand performance and business performance and sales performance.

It's, it's, it's nothing about traffic or rankings. And that's why like, yeah, you know, I love seeing traffic graphs cause they're interesting, but. 

Very rarely do we get the story behind that in terms of revenue. And all that kind of stuff. 

It's very just, just hey look. We grew all this traffic. Fantastic.

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