Learn how you can do more with less

Adriana says: “Do more with less. I know a lot of us have felt that across this year, but it’s going to be the number one thing that we have to face in SEO going into 2024.”

Is doing more with less a choice?

“In the marketing world, we are so heavily affected by what happens with the economy and what changes in technology, and all of that comes together to influence the way that we have to work.

In SEO, we wouldn’t necessarily make that choice. We would love to go back to 15 years ago when it was very easy to write keywords and some text, and it worked. It was really that simple. Nowadays, there’s so much more that goes into SEO, not just in a technical sense but also in the pressure to drive impact. That’s what a lot of SEOs are going to increasingly face going forward, even though we’ve had a recession and before that we had COVID. Now, there are new standards. SEOs have to be on the ball to be worthwhile, and that’s going to be a big game changer in 2024.”

Do SEOs need to be more frugal with cash and more efficient with their time to better leverage themselves in the future?

“That’s a lot of it. It’s not necessarily by choice, but it’s the conditions that we work under. Those are going to be the conditions that stakeholders expect and what they expect SEOs to produce. It’s a consequence of the circumstances and there’s not really a way around it.

If you try to do inefficient SEO nowadays, it’s not going to go very far. You have to accept it and go with it, and then try to learn and optimize what you can – especially related to processes. Process efficiency is going to be a major part of that.”

Have these circumstances arisen primarily because of the recession, AI, or other causes?

“Those are two things, and competition and market saturation is a third. We’re under these circumstances where we have the option for technology to make us more efficient. There is a question of whether that really is the case. It depends on how you use the technology – not just AI, but any marketing-related technology, as that is also rapidly changing. There is so much competition as well.

SEOs have done a really good job over the years of informing their audience of how effective SEO can truly be. Now they’ve got this investment, but they need to do something with it. There are a lot of companies that are producing more, especially with AI. With limited budgets and more technology, these things are coming together and you have to find a way to stand out from all of the competition.

As SEOs, we can’t change any of those top-level circumstances. We have to find a way to work within them. That’s the most effective way to prove ourselves in our careers going forward. Even if we suddenly had an economic explosion and everything was positive, the mindset is not going to change because that’s what we’ve become used to.

Stakeholders – CFOs, CEOs, etc. – don’t want to go and waste money. They have seen a lot of problems related to that and they’re trying to condense and optimize. As a CEO myself, I have looked heavily at our technology and our processes, and I wouldn’t suddenly go back just because the economy improved. It was inefficient. I would want to continue being as efficient as possible.”

How does this affect someone in-house versus agency-side?

“At the end of the day, we both have the same pressure. Whether you’re working in an agency, as a freelancer, or in-house, you have the same pressure to drive results.

When you’re working in-house, you might have a bit less time pressure because that’s inherently part of the job. From my experience, there’s a whole lot less time pressure on what an employee can accomplish versus what an agency can accomplish.

If you hire an agency, you expect them to jump in straight away. Our clients expect us to start producing content within the first few weeks, so you have to onboard very quickly. Someone working in-house might take three months to learn about the company, the product or service, and how things work.

There is the same pressure to produce results, but there’s often a lot more pressure on an agency in terms of the amount of time that takes. Ultimately, that’s what they’re hired to do. They’re hired to come in and be very efficient and effective at bringing in results early on.”

What is the difference between SEO in-house and agency-side?

“There are two sides to that. In the past, SEO lacked a lot of conversion-driven efforts – and I say this as someone coming from SEO who has learned a lot about PPC because my agency offers holistic marketing services. I have seen how conversion-driven PPC is. In SEO, we take time to edit, 10 people need to review everything, etc. It takes so much longer, and the processes behind it are traditionally much less efficient, compared to PPC.

An agency can come in and help you understand how to actively and effectively execute SEO. As an agency, you have broader expertise because you have applied it across a lot of different projects. You have more of an overall insight into how to do that effectively. That, in combination with the time pressure that the agencies have, typically means that things get done much faster – simply because, if you don’t do your job, you’re probably not going to have a client anymore.

That’s a big difference between the way our team works and how our clients sometimes work. Some clients can even struggle to keep up with us, but it’s difficult because we know that we have a time expectation for results. You have to move that fast because you don’t want disappointment down the road. You don’t want to find yourself asking why it didn’t work or why there weren’t any conversions. An agency has more experience to drive that forward.

It depends on where you are within your strategy, the level of investment you have in SEO, and the time you have to give to SEO. A combination of both in-house and agency can be the best option.”

Which SEO tasks shouldn’t be sped up too much?

“This may be an unpopular opinion, but using AI for content production should not be rushed. We’ve done a lot of testing with this; I did a whole series for the Wix SEO Hub where I tested using AI for full-length content production across different industries. The quality is just so bad.

I specialise in complex B2B, and I just don’t see where AI can have an in-depth understanding of how to produce full-length content. Writing content from scratch, like a 3,000-word user guide or a case study, takes subject matter expertise.

You can get away with using AI for e-commerce content, SEO-wise, when it’s short and simple. In terms of B2B, though, it just doesn’t work. The time you have to spend figuring out all of your prompts and editing afterwards takes longer than the traditional method. Creating a strategy for a piece, working with a subject matter expert, finding a writer to help draft it out, and then using an editor may sound like a lot of steps, but the quality is so much higher.

Speeding up a piece like that using AI is going to be harmful in the end. If you start pumping out low-quality content, not only is that not helping your audience (they will see right through it) but it’s also a spam indicator.

Some websites are experimenting with producing thousands of pieces of content a day. I talked to someone doing this in the finance industry, and I specifically asked whether any of it was being manually reviewed for accuracy. They said ‘No, it all just goes live.’ I find that truly heartbreaking. They might be finding some short-term gains but, in the long run, that is absolutely not the way to become more efficient and create high-quality content.”

What does doing more with less mean for the SEO team structure? Does it mean having fewer people in your team?

“It can, but it mainly comes down to having very established processes. This stems from an issue that I’ve seen time and time again, and I’ve also heard from a lot of my SEO colleagues. There is a big struggle to simply get content or technical changes live. In the Aira State of Technical SEO Report last year, they mentioned that the average time to get technical changes to go live is six months. That’s insane. Think about the amount that you can improve with SEO in six months.

Rather than just focusing on content editing (which is great, you still need to edit and produce high-quality content), look deeply at your processes and how your team is structured. Does everyone know what they’re supposed to do? Do you have deadlines? Do you have a workflow with steps from A to B? Do you have the resources you need? That’s especially an issue on the dev side, where a lot of the biggest bottlenecks are.

All of this beautiful content is created and then it just sits in the project management tool for six months or longer because there’s no dev resource to put it live. That’s such a tragedy. That content could have been ranking and converting for months already.

Those little things add up and they hinder you. That’s where you can do more with less. Look at the operational background of how your SEO is established, who does what, who makes sure that things go live, and who makes sure things are optimized once they’re up.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2024?

“Look at your operational processes. Do you have too many tasks for one person that could be handled by two people? Do you need to reduce the amount of content you’re creating because people can’t keep up? Maybe produce a bit less content so that you ensure that it goes live.

The same could be true for technical changes. Can you make a couple of technical changes instead of a lot of changes that never go live? Break the project down into little bits and then start to see where you can optimize things.

There may be a place for AI. It can be effective for short-form writing, summaries, content ideation, and things like metadata. If that speeds you up, then great. Make sure that what you’re working on actually goes live and doesn’t take six months of resources with no changes. That’s really ineffective SEO. Try to turn that on its head and do a little bit rather than none at all.

AI is not going to help if you’re using it to produce bad content volume. With so many companies doing SEO nowadays, you have to find a way for your content to stand out. Even if you do use AI in the process, try to personalise the content as much as possible. Talk about real customers, real use cases, and real data. Get subject matter expertise from within your company or industry. If you don’t have someone at your company, add quotes. Those are things that AI can’t pull up.

If you’re using AI to write a blog article for X topic, 2,000 other companies already have the same kind of information. You’ve got to put in some effort to make it a lot more personal, unique, and specific.”

Adriana Stein is Founder and CEO at AS Marketing, and you can find her over at ASMarketingAgency.com.