Winning Search Marketing with SEO Testing

The amount of time and effort that should be put into organic traffic versus paid traffic is a very common debate within organizations. Michael and Neil discuss this today alongside Will Critchlow, Founder & CEO of online marketing agency Distilled.

With a lot of any company’s organic search budget being allocated to SEO, Neil recalls a meeting he attended that involved a search engine builder and an advertiser. The action that the builder kept advocating was to build better content, so Neil shares his opinion that companies often minimize the value of creating new content that users want to see.

Will enters the podcast as Michael questions how to win organically in 2019. Will agrees that building better content is key, but also has a unique perspective on certain subtleties. He says that there are not generic best practices, but rather every industry has specific things that they should be doing.

To improve their optimization processes, Neil says that he wishes companies would run more tests. He reveals what two traits these tests should entail so that they aren’t done just for the sake of testing. Will agrees with this philosophy and is then questioned about a methodology issue that can occur when quick marketing decisions need to be made.

Michael believes that a lot of things will change in digital marketing over the next two or three years, so he asks Will what he thinks the biggest changes will be. Will discusses in-search widgets that discourage click-throughs to webpages and the uncertainty he sees surrounding Facebook. Despite these points, he is positive about the future.

About Will Critchlow

Will Critchlow is CEO of Distilled - a company he founded in 2005 with Duncan Morris. Distilled provides online marketing services from offices in London, New York and Seattle, hosts the SearchLoveconference series in the US and UK, produces the popular online training platform DistilledU, and runs the SEO split-testing platform DistilledODN.