Kitchen Side: SEO Burpees, Death of Vanity Traffic, and NSM

In this episode of The Long Game Podcast, Alex Birkett and the team discuss critical shifts in SEO and content marketing strategy. They emphasize the importance of moving beyond vanity metrics like traffic and focusing on meaningful business outcomes. Key topics include the concept of North Star KPIs, the dangers of the "traffic trap," and the importance of aligning incentives across teams to achieve shared goals. The conversation highlights how the industry is evolving towards more impactful strategies, offering insights for marketers aiming to drive long-term growth.

Key Takeaways

• The "Traffic Trap" in SEO: Focusing solely on traffic growth can lead to misaligned strategies that fail to deliver meaningful business outcomes like leads or revenue.
• North Star KPIs and Guardrails: Using a North Star metric that aligns with business goals ensures focus on value-driven outcomes. Guardrail metrics prevent gaming the system at the expense of user experience or quality.
• Aligning Incentives Across Teams: Misaligned goals within marketing teams, such as prioritizing traffic over conversions, can hinder overall success. Collaboration and shared KPIs can drive better outcomes.
• Vanity Metrics and Industry Evolution: The shift away from vanity metrics like page views is forcing marketers to prioritize strategies that genuinely impact business performance.
• The "Burpees" Analogy for Inefficient Marketing: Ineffective strategies are compared to burpees—exhausting but ultimately unproductive. The focus should be on intentional, impactful actions that contribute to long-term goals.
• A New Era for SEO: The current paradigm shift in SEO provides a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build scalable customer acquisition channels based on meaningful strategies.

Show Links

• Connect with David Khim on LinkedIn and Twitter
• Connect with Alex Birkett on LinkedIn and Twitter
• Connect with Allie Decker on LinkedIn and Twitter
• Connect with Omniscient Digital on LinkedIn or Twitter

What is Kitchen Side?

One big benefit of running an agency or working at one is you get to see the “kitchen side” of many different businesses; their revenue, their operations, their automations, and their culture.

You understand how things look from the inside and how that differs from the outside.

You understand how the sausage is made. 

As an agency ourselves, we’re working both on growing our clients’ businesses as well as our own. This podcast is one project, but we also blog, make videos, do sales, and have quite a robust portfolio of automations and hacks to run our business.

We want to take you behind the curtain, to the kitchen side of our business, to witness our brainstorms, discussions, and internal dialogues behind the public works that we ship.

Past guests on The Long Game podcast include: Morgan Brown (Shopify), Ryan Law (Animalz), Dan Shure (Evolving SEO), Kaleigh Moore (freelancer), Eric Siu (Clickflow), .css-j9qmi7{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:row;-ms-flex-direction:row;flex-direction:row;font-weight:700;margin-bottom:1rem;margin-top:2.8rem;width:100%;-webkit-box-pack:start;-ms-flex-pack:start;-webkit-justify-content:start;justify-content:start;padding-left:5rem;}@media only screen and (max-width: 599px){.css-j9qmi7{padding-left:0;-webkit-box-pack:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;justify-content:center;}}.css-j9qmi7 svg{fill:#27292D;}.css-j9qmi7 .eagfbvw0{-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;color:#27292D;}