FINITE: B2B Marketing Podcast for Tech, Software & SaaS

#139 - The changing shape of SEO with Erika Varangouli, Head of SEO Branding at Semrush

• Jodi Norris / Erika Varangouli • Season 1 • Episode 139

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The SEO and content landscape is shifting. As marketers we all see it, and feel it.

On this FINITE Podcast, we’ll let you know how to adapt to these shifts, where SEO should fit in the wider business function and how brand gets involved.

We heard from the expert of experts, Erika Varangouli, Head of SEO Branding at Semrush. Semrush is the leading online visibility platform, and Erika leads their SEO community. Suffice to say she knows a lot about the subject. So enjoy!

The FINITE Podcast is made possible by:
- Clarity: the fast growing, global marketing communications agency working with leading technology brands.
- 93x: the leading digital marketing agency for B2B technology, software & SaaS businesses delivering SEO & PPC strategy that drives leads, pipeline & revenue growth.
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Speaker 1:

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Finite Podcast. The topic for today's discussion was supposed to be about the convergence of SEO and brand marketing, but having just finished talking to our guest, I can tell you that's not where it ended up. Part of my job as a host is to keep people on track. I'll admit, but this time I think it went off track for the better. I've just said goodbye to Erica Van gli , who is currently head of SEO branding at SEMrush, and as a leader at SEMrush, the leading online visibility platform, you would think she has some great insights, and you'd be correct <laugh> . Yes. We talked about how SEO is converging with brand, but we also discussed the changing role of SEO at large, how it's shifted and evolved over the decades and using this history to understand where it's going. It's a hard ask that Erica does well, describing the fine intertwinement of how SEO should fit within the marketing and business function to remain effective. Then she goes on to prescribe clear advice for SEOs and other marketers heading into 2024 when the content landscape is being flipped on its head due to technological and consumer shifts. I'm rambling, let me hand it over to Erica . I hope you enjoy.

Speaker 2:

The finite community is supported by clarity, the fast growing global marketing communications agency, working with leading technology brands. We are living through an unprecedented era of change, driven by advancements in technology, technology that has the power to be an impetus for good, and that will drive us towards a healthier, more prosperous, sustainable and equitable future. Clarity exists to tell the stories of these companies blending the science of data, with the art of storytelling to enact measurable marketing and communications campaigns, and deliver results to the bottom line. Visit clarity.global to find out more.

Speaker 1:

Hi Erica . Welcome to the Finite podcast.

Speaker 3:

Hi, Jody . Thank you for inviting me and having me here. It's

Speaker 1:

A pleasure. Well, it's great to have you here. We're talking about a fantastic topic that we haven't discussed in a while, and it's one that most marketers have on their minds. That's SEO and it's super relevant to your role. Now you are head of SEO branding at SEMrush . So there you go. Our listeners are in for a treat . I'll let you describe a little bit more about your background in marketing and then your role now at SEMrush . Mm-Hmm, <affirmative> , before we get into the brunt of the conversation.

Speaker 3:

Oh gosh, that's , uh, <laugh> how I go . Okay. So I've, I've been around SEO for like over 10 years now. My background is in, in journalism, so I started as a journalist, but, you know, I think most people in SEO nowadays did not start at SEO . Uh , so yeah, I've, I've worked both agency and client side from usually my , my roles before joining summers. That's almost like four years ago now. We're more on the content marketing side of things. Tega International, SEO, and then working very closely with PR and creative teams as well for campaigns. And then four years ago, I, I joined Roche . Initially I was their global content strategy , so I was responsible for content strategy gradually then moved on to the director of organic search role. So that was managing our SEO team in-house. And only recently, actually this role now head of SEO branding is like almost two year , two months old now. Uh, two years, no two months. Where my focus is, is more on not our, not STEM brush as SE strategy, but more about the SEO community, the SEO industry, connecting us with them through like useful insights and data building communities around important topics, understanding how the trends are shifting and , um, bringing like educational pieces, but more from the side of like, okay, what are we actually trying all of us to learn how things are progressing now ? So, so yeah, that's, that's been a nutshell. I don't know if I should go on for

Speaker 1:

That . No, no, that's great. It sounds like, you know, a lot of our SEO it's like finite. We're always like, we know loads about B2B or like the , the leader of the SEO community. So you're the perfect person to have talking about this. And it's interesting that you come from a journalist background and you can see that thread, that theme throughout your career of content being content led and kind of read a focus . So yeah,

Speaker 3:

I'll, I'll tell you something. Like when I, 'cause , 'cause me switching to SEO coincided not coincided. I , it , it was what I wanted to do when I moved to the uk and that was also like a little over 10 years ago. And up until that point I was working as a journalist and, and I wanted to learn. I was like, what is this thing, the online marketing and SEO thing that I hear? I think it's, it's going to be big. So I was, I was given the opportunity to work in SEO from, from different roles and capacity. So I got to work like on, on most aspects of it. And what I felt pretty quickly is that coincided with the rise of content marketing as well, right? We're talking about 20 11, 20 12. That's where I felt like I can really enjoy working in this sphere because it's not just the technical side of things that I was hearing about a lot. It's also, I could see that connection between what I was doing previously and where things are going, which is about like content and how, what value you're bringing through content. So yeah, I really, I really loved learning through this process.

Speaker 1:

Fabulous. So you've seen such a massive evolution with SEO and I guess that's why you kind of need to have these communities to kind of learn from each other and really to take a pulse on where the industry is going. And we're gonna talk about where it's going a little bit later, but I think I wanna hone in on this kind of background of SEO's evolution since that its peak in like 2012 , um, when it was just kind of hitting off and it was kind of seen as its own channel, its own thing. Maybe it had its own roles , its own team, and it was very separate from brand. It was perhaps maybe more alongside performance marketing PPC in the digital marketing space. Why do you think that was originally?

Speaker 3:

Hmm , that's an interesting question. So, so even before I joined the SEO lake , I , I think the , the shift had started happening, but it was around that time that , that , you know, with machine learning language models, you know, there's, there's a lot of big, big, big advancements that have happened over the last decade. I think before that, I don't know , my experience back then was that like SEO you're right, was kind of sat in dialogue , I would dare to say not even close to performance. It was like many different channels working separately. And then the reasons vary . Like if I think of SEO back then, it was SEO came from a space of being a highly technical skill, right? Or , um, area of marketing to work. So, so it was a lot about working on the technical side of things . SEO itself means search engine optimization. So the, the typical, like we're doing something so Google finds us, that was kind of of the bulk of what many appeals had to do at the time. And they still have to like, it's super important, but at the same time, you know, creative campaigns had nothing to do with that. It was on their own or pr they , right? And PPC was something entirely different that theoretically was not having many roots to connect. So back then, because the whole system was less sophisticated, SEO was seen more as like, what do we do to get in front of Google? And it involved technical, it involved like buying links. It involved like, to a degree what we now call very , uh, <laugh> techniques. And some of them were also labeled as such back then, but especially now <laugh> . So it was something very specific. And then gradually our, you know, technology changed, Google changed user, the internet changed , like it's expanded massively and things have become more sophisticated from the algorithms right, to what everyone's doing. So now everyone has been doing content for a while . Everyone has been, you know, getting their tech side pretty okay, much more than before. You know, PPC and, and paid is becoming less and less accessible due to costs , right? So there comes a point where, where you have to look into, okay, so what actually differentiates it? Now 10 years ago it was getting somethings right, getting links in however questionable ways. Um , nowadays this doesn't cut it, it even doesn't cut it if your content is pretty decent sometimes, right? It doesn't cut it if you're getting it all right, it doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. It means someone else is doing it better. So now, SEO alongside other channels needs to be much more sophisticated, much more people centric versus search engine centric. And I think that is what's bringing it closer to, to areas like brand. 'cause brand historically has been more about how do we want people to perceive us, right? How do we want our brand to be talked about? Which was not something that FEO was tasked with back then, but now you know that to perform organically, you have to get brand right. You have to get even like your, your your performance and growth strategy, right? So, so it's much more connected in a world where it's , it's gotten much more competitive, it's grown massively, and you get a lot more players entering, like the, the, the entry criteria is much lower now. Like 10, 15, 20 years ago to build a website was a massive cost. Now, not so much, there's more providers to help you do that. You can, you can build your own social media on your own. You don't need to pay like designers to , to build things for you. So yeah, I think, I think those are are things that have led us to today, which I, I find really nice, much more creative and , uh, better way of working in this way.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think that's really interesting how you observed that kind of siloed technical SEO and how it's shifted into someone who kind of encompasses all elements of the business. And that must have been hard with you as being from the kind of more content led space, meeting these more technical, let's chuck a load of keywords on the page, kind of people. And I guess you've kind of, have you been battling that <laugh> since you first entered <laugh> ?

Speaker 3:

Well, okay, well , one for me was, it was super interesting because I wanted to understand how things work, like break it down, you know, learn the technical side of things. It was something like, I had my blog before, but my, my kind of understanding of the technical side of it was, was much mu and limited. So for me, there was no friction necessarily, but just, just because I was entering when I was entering , you would, I don't wanna say never, but you would very rarely see like people from a content background in head of SEO roles, right? Or SEO managers, the agencies I worked at pretty much apart from me, there were no, like SEO managers with SEO with content background, it was all technical. So for me, that was interesting. It was like, I want to understand because I clearly see we must work together a lot and, and have like one strategy, not two strategies . So I was lucky enough to work in environments where, where that was good. That was encouraged. Like I, I always worked really close with my colleagues. I was annoying them all the time with questions. And that built connections. So then it naturally happened that we started working much closer together thing with design, right? So UX for example, or development, we were building assets or pages or websites. And, and I was kinda like, well, but , but what you're building should be informed and should inform what I do and what we do on the SEO side. So, so I think it was a natural progression. It wasn't so hard, just I think because I like breaking things. So <laugh>, <laugh> , I, I was lucky enough to be given things to break, but then what really kind of made it meaningful for me was that going alongside the development of, you know, needing good content, needing to understand audiences, needing to, to perceive SEO as, as part of an overall strategy, not as a, as a standalone thing. Yes, it has its own, you know , roots and things it needs to address, but it works as part of a whole , uh, or it works much better as part of a whole, though I was, I was super happy to see that happening at the right time. The timing was right , I think .

Speaker 1:

Awesome. Yeah, we are seeing that across so many marketing functions now, this kind of elimination of silos and these whole holistic marketing strategies and teams working together. So if we're looking at now, where do you think SEO really fits into a wider marketing strategy now? Is it still its own thing? Is it talking to some teams more than others, or is it really just across everything equally?

Speaker 3:

Hmm . I would, I think I would approach it a bit differently. Yeah , sure. 'cause also, I, you know, I come, I work at <inaudible> , right? So I understand I have, I am lucky enough to work with specialist teams, right? And , and have maybe like a culture of collaboration that that helps us a lot. But a majority of businesses out there probably don't have that. Like, there, there are no smaller teams or experts for every channel in a business. So , so how I see a field fitting in, for me, it's , I'm , I'm usually talking about organic visibility . So if you have an online business, right, and you want to improve its organic visibility, there are some things you, you probably have to look into different industries, different niches, maybe some more than others. And then depending on your size, maybe technical, SEO should come before something else . But, but in terms of how you grow organically, you look at elements like, okay, am I a local business? Should I prioritize being visible locally when people search? Am I an e-commerce store? Should I, should I prioritize like how people find my products? Where do they find them on? And so on. And SEO taps into all of those things. So for me, even for smaller businesses that don't have the ability to have specialist teams or resources to say, okay, we have our performance marketing here, we have our design campaigns, whatever you call it, email, SEO taps into, I think into the prioritization. If you look at it top level, what am I doing to build my, my organic feasibility ? And that sometimes shows you the way as to, okay, now I need to work more on, on resource or, or building resources to build a community on social. And that's okay, that's not a theo mm-Hmm <affirmative> . But it does show you the avenues to how do you grow in terms of looking how you, you, you build that organic presence.

Speaker 1:

Cool. So it's, it fits in with the wider business strategy first and foremost. Yeah,

Speaker 3:

For

Speaker 1:

Sure . And , and it's kind of content led in a way. The finite podcast wouldn't be possible without the support of disclaimer, the leading email signature solution. On average, each of your colleagues sends around 40 external emails every day. Take charge of this opportunity to promote your products, events, campaigns, and content, and grow your business by embedding consistent branded messages into each one. Visit disclaimer.com for more information. How does technical come in now, do you think?

Speaker 3:

Ooh , it's still the basis. I feel like it's, in some cases, you know, you, you're, you may be talking about content and that may be like trying to run before you can walk though . So technical is still the basis, even for small businesses. It's like, unless you get it right, you, you're, you're pretty much non , you can end up being non discoverable. So it doesn't even matter what you do in that sense. So it is super important the more you grow, it becomes more important. 'cause , 'cause websites tend to, to get more complicated on the technical side, but apart from like setting it up properly, so, so search engines find it. The other big impact of technical for me, and , and that's also fuzzy between a few teams, but is also the user experience. So, you know, if you have a fast website, if you have, you know, set up everything correctly in terms of experience on your pages, how are they structured? Like how do they work? Can Google see it ? Then if you cover those two, you have everything you need to start running, and yes, you can definitely walk .

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's a really great description of how everything is quite intricately intertwined and how everything works together as a , as a whole. And there's not really one start . It's kind of like you have to kind of think about all of this if you want to show up and search and, and boost your brand, because that's on social or through content or through your digital experience. Definitely. Great . So we've strayed off the brand piece a little bit, I think. So let's come back to that and let's talk about more of the intertwinement between SEO and brand. How do you think those really work together to bolster each other?

Speaker 3:

So I think the main intersect is into how, how you're being found and perceived by audiences, right? So, so SEO typically geared more towards like non-brand, right? You'll in many, many cases, or maybe majority will be about hiring the funnel, non-brand queries. And at the same time you have historically brand working on creating that awareness level, right? So we're talking about two channels to marketing avenues working for audiences in specific stages. And for some weird reason in my head, never kind of like really working closer together in the past, right? It was, I think it was more like, okay, non-branded is seo . So we get found, and brand is more about building awareness around our brand and what we do. So the , um, I remember always thinking of, of brand people, like the fun people, the people who get to do all the fun stuff, <laugh> and <laugh> as you're like more , okay , what are the needs? What are the educational, informative kind of stuff. So again, what I'm doing now, what I'm working on myself, but I see that happening a lot more is those two coming closer and closer and meeting. Because nowadays like the, it's not just the audience perception, it's also like your , even for, for Google, right? Your relevance, your topical authority, how you are as, as an entity , as the brand is important. And then we also understand that it , the journeys that people take, they're not line ear in any way, right? It's not like I was looking at how to boil an egg and then all of a sudden I'm , I'm gonna buy everything I need to <laugh> . Well, I , it's a bad example because I've probably been looking at that because I wanna make it , the journeys to conversion are, are much more complex than just a line near , so on Google something that watched a video than they went and bought. And similarly, it's not like, oh, here's a brand doing something fun. I bet I need to buy something from them. Now that I like them . It's more about the affinity built over time. So I've found common places between the two is, is how they work together to build a uniform experience for, for users, right? How you talk about non-brand things is not disconnected for what you want your brand to stand for, how you want the brand to be perceived. You can now be providing, you know, mixed messages maybe to your audience. And there's equally things on the brand side that SEO even technical SEO can, can really help amplify. So, so they're definitely meeting and I see that happening more and more in the past few years as well.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Great. So it's not as simple as just a typical marketing funnel. You've got bottom of funnel content that's maybe talking about your product or anything. It's, it's deeper than that. It's entrenching everything within the brand. And that might mean, is that, do you think that's more of like putting it through a brand filter, sending it to someone before you get it off? Or is

Speaker 3:

It more

Speaker 1:

About everyone in the company kind of aligning to that, those brand values and messages?

Speaker 3:

Well, I think yes, every, every company, you know , um, provided it's building a brand, everything should be aligned with brand, right? You o otherwise you're, you're kind of, it's defeating the purpose of building a brand. But SEO to that, yes, it's definitely a , a channel that works together, especially as we see things progressing where , you know, building that authority and relevance is getting increasingly important to , to how you perform organically.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, definitely. There are lots of changes. There are lots of changes going on, including, I don't think we can have this conversation with ignoring ai. It's changing the SEO landscape so much. I don't know how many times, say I've gone to Google how to boil an egg and I've gone through the first five <laugh> pages and it's just the same thing. Like really <laugh> , a little bit reworded. How are you responding to that and how do you think it's changing the SEO landscape?

Speaker 3:

Well, what you just described, by the way, is not even the outcome, right ? <laugh>, it's , um, yeah, it's, it's, here's a , a that and entry into the content world. But yes, today, I don't think we can be talking about, I think marketing without having AI somewhere in that conversation. If people, if marketing teams are not using AI in some form, I think they're falling behind already. So the thing with ai and , and by saying AI just to, I know we, we use it collectively as a term to describe many things, right? But the, the AI we're typically interacting with on a , on a daily basis is more like language models, right? So chat like it , it cannot create new value necessarily, right? It's train on models and create something that, that is very human-like, but it's based on what, what it knows not something it can build from scratch. So, so I think the first thing I see is that it can be extremely valuable in helping teams speed up or scale some aspects of their work, but it also needs to be put in a right dimension in terms of expectations or level of trust that we place in it. Like, what can I do? Can I build all my content? Can I do all my keyword research? Can I build all my code so I can run my website, like it can build , give me a code to build tons of things? And all of that is like probably some of those things. No , it cannot do it . It can appear like it can do them, but no, and others is like, you can, you can get a decent or half decent result, you still need to get involved, right? I was saying this to a friend the other day. It's like, I, I have a 3-year-old, right? She has all the knowledge she can have at this age. She has all the enthusiasm and um , you know, if we were sat together to bake a cake, I would show her how to do it. I would assign some things to her. I wouldn't just give her the ingredients and say, okay, see you in an hour with a cake and let her bake it. Right? I wouldn't , I wouldn't trust her to do that. And she's amazing by the way, but , uh, <laugh> <laugh> . But it's, it's kind of the equivalent of that in a way. It's, it's, you , you need to, to set the expectations because then you can build your processes, your teams , your time, resources properly, right? So I think use it to automate parts that, that manually take you much longer. You can use it to create content, you can work on, on prompting, you can, you can work on training models, even on brand voice , right? But then you need to have that intervention of, of humans to , to shape it into what it , it should actually be to first of all to represent you correctly as a business. And the value is is right there. If you had a team that would spend, I don't know, a day writing something they can , uh, spend, I don't wanna say how long I may start a , but it's okay , an hour building a proper prompt, brief, getting it back and then editing, right? And you need them and adding things that AI cannot add. So maybe like they go and use this time to interview experts and thought leaders in your industry and at this , to the, to the piece of content in the end, which brings tremendous value to that piece of content that you couldn't do before. And that's where I see the, the value line really.

Speaker 1:

Definitely. I think the , that's the way that I've heard most, you know, switched on marketers heading in that direction of AI in practice. And I love the analogy about your daughter with the cake <laugh> , yes , they're kind of delegating a little bit, but they're the head chef for sure. That kind of makes me think about, yes, that's what we are doing in practice, but in terms of the landscape shifting, in terms of the amount of content that can be produced and the amount of, maybe not, not exactly the same as you say, but like similar or tweaked or how do you think that's gonna change your see or do you think Google will just kind of, they always do this, they, they see those kind of black hat strategies and they're like, they tackle it immediately. Do you think that's gonna happen with that kind of content?

Speaker 3:

I'm thinking like recently we, we had a , a few updates even side by side from Google the past two, three months. And uh , there's nothing officially confirmed, right? Technically it's not a spammy actic to use AI to create content. However you have, we all have like, guidelines around what helpful content is and how many of those marks can AI content hit. I'm very dubious , uh, provided we're talking about like AI producing content at scale, which has happened a lot in the last year, right? So, so do we see Google rewarding that? Anecdotally you'll find a lot of this discussions online about, yeah, I built this website, I built all this content with AI and it's ranking fantastically well , and , and it's doing all this for me. You'll also get stories , uh, following the most recent updates. Oh, I , I got hammered. I, you know, I lost all my rankings and a lot of that also has to do with ai, but not just with ai. So I don't know that it's a straight answer. I don't think, I don't think Google is out for ai, if that makes sense. I think Google uses AI like, you know , over more than 10, 15 years now. But it's more about Google is working towards providing the best user experience, right? And, and content is part of that. It's like serving the right content or any kind of need or intent, you know, expressed through a query. Is AI content achieving that? Absolutely not. Like you , you mentioned the , you know, top five, top 10 pages being pretty similar, right? And that was even before ai. Now that is happening at scale. So is that helpful? Not really. I think that is the true nature of what Google is trying to fight is , is how do we do, we serve needs that are expressed in so many different ways by adding unique value. And that point there, the , the marriage to AI is a bit bumpy right now. There are of course, like developments as we move on to the future. But I think the caution I would, I would put out there is each one of us as a creator needs to be thinking about what is the unique value we're bringing in. The less we do that, the harder it will be to, to be there on Google. Like with people being able to find us.

Speaker 1:

That's a really interesting take. So it is kind of a gray area and no one knows where it's gonna lead. It's, it's the future. If we knew where it would lead, then we wouldn't have a future, if, you know what I mean, mean <laugh> . So , um, yeah, so that your advice to marketers and individuals and marketing teams to do the best they can by producing the highest quality, I think that's really good advice and that's what's gonna defend you against all of this, this influx. So thank you for sharing that. We are coming up to the end of the episode now. It's gone really, really quickly. I wanna finish with a final question. I've been tending to do this a lot just 'cause we are coming up to 2024 soon. Everybody's thinking about trends, predictions, benchmarks, what's gonna happen. What do you think marketers should be focusing on in terms of SEO headed into 2024?

Speaker 3:

I would really encourage them to believe in the unique voice they have and to bring it online. It's not a trick to run , it's not easy, but at the same time, it's, it doesn't have to be as hard or as costly as people think it is . So , you know, experience, expertise, authority are, are things that each one of us can bring our unique perspective. I would build on that provided I have like, you know, all my basics under control and everything. Everyone's circumstances are different. But I would say to do that, leverage ai, leverage whatever you can to free up your time for the things you are unique at, right? And then use that time to bring those to surface, because now you can. I

Speaker 1:

Love that <laugh> . Very, a very inspiring note to finish on. Well, thank you so much, Erica. It's been a pleasure to have you.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, amazing. Thank you. It was my pleasure to be here.

Speaker 4:

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