Executive Presence: How To Get Buy In and Budget For SEO Featuring Tom Critchlow

Garrett: Okay, everyone, welcome back to The Next Chapter of Search. I’m Garrett Sussman. This is hosted by SEO Week and iPullRank. If you haven’t already gotten tickets, we’re talking the end of April, the 28th to May 1st. We’ve got 35+ amazing speakers across SEO, AI, business, digital strategy, content, you name it. It’s going to be a jam-packed, highly valuable event. So get your tickets at seoweek.org.

Today I am joined by Tom Critchlow. Tom is the EVP of Audience Growth at Raptive. Thank you for joining me today, Tom. How you doing, man?

Tom: Yeah, thanks for having me here. It’s good to chat.

Garrett: I’m excited. I’m really excited for your presentation. But before we dive into that, the big talk is right now, the last 24 months of SEO has been disruptive fundamentally. From your perspective, where do we stand in the current state of SEO?            

Tom: It’s like how long we got? We got a couple of hours of talks! I think the number one feature for me is the rise of AI. And obviously there’s a number of different ways to skin that. AI is changing our workflows, it’s changing fundamentally the way that we do our jobs day to day. But I think specifically around SEO, the rise of AI content is just completely upended the dynamics of the web. Where before low-quality content, auto-generated content was somehow kind of like throttled or kind of bottlenecked by this kind of quality filter. And then AI came along and what we call AI today is really like large language models that enable content that was finally good enough, right? Finally passed some floor of like, you can’t actually quite tell whether a human or a computer wrote this.

And I think you can trace all the helpful content updates, all of the big core algorithm updates from Google over the last couple of years, all the way back to that kind of like just train wreck of under the hood. Google systems just almost overnight just suddenly stopped working. Their ability to be like, “Oh, we know what’s good content, we know what’s bad content.” And then suddenly it was just like flooding the zone with all of this terrible, terrible content. In some ways, although the helpful content updates have been a train wreck, in some ways they got handed to Google that I think they reacted quickly, right? And early, right when I think it wasn’t necessarily prevalent in the mainstream conversation around AI content and all of the kind of like scale that it was at. I think Google saw the writing on the wall earlier than most and kind of like tried to get in front of that.

As we’ve seen though, rebuilding your ranking system fairly fundamentally has like not come without its challenges, right? We’ve seen all the helpful content updates and stuff the last couple of years is just people that didn’t deserve to have had their livelihoods taken away. Sites that have no business ranking and would never have ranked and kind of classic Google kind of terms all over the SERPs. I think Lily Ray in particular has done a great job just kind of like highlighting and articulating the degree to which everyday search results are just demonstrably worse than they used to be in a variety of ways. So yeah, I don’t think you can talk about the state of search without talking about just kind of AI content.

Garrett: Yeah, and it’s funny because it’s like not funny, but like with Raptive, like that’s a whole big part of your mission statement is like, creator first, making sure that content is authentic, like not anti-AI, but also not necessarily like let slop take over. What do you think, you know, does good content, a good Google search product look like?

Tom: Yeah, yeah. I think that the fundamental unit of good quality content is less about the actual content itself, right, which I think is increasingly becoming in some sense of the commodity is certainly for certain kinds of searches and certain kinds of content, and more about the connection that you have with that content, right. And so whether it is the author or the creator or the influencer or the brand that created it, or whether it’s the engagement you have with it, commenting, rating, discussing, sharing, and so on. And I think that what we see with AI content is it doesn’t really meet either of those needs, like you’re not engaging with it, and you don’t care who made it.

Now that’s fine for certain kinds of queries, right? Like what time is the Super Bowl? You know, classically, it’s kind of a, you know, canary in the coal mine. It’s like, I don’t need a publisher to write that piece of content. It’s fine, Google can just answer that. I don’t think anyone really has a problem with that. But you know, certainly talking about my day job, right, working at Raptive, we work with a lot of creators, a lot of food creators in particular. Recipe search is a great example where I think on the face of it, you could argue that just give me the recipe, right? Just give me the ingredients list. But when you look at creative, when you look at user behavior, and when you look at what people actually want and what they actually engage with, it’s the step-by-step photos. It’s the author’s kind of like brand and personality and tone of voice. It’s the ability to comment and share and like, you know, engage with the recipe. And AI can replace certain parts of the kind of the pure information needs, but it isn’t doing a very good job of replacing the other piece.

And so, to answer your question more directly that you already asked about, like, what does a good search result look like is, in my mind, I think AI should be doing a better job of surfacing the right voices that meet your query rather than trying to answer it for you. Now, again, that’s not in all cases, there are some situations like what’s happened at the Super Bowl, just answer the question. But I think in many cases, Google has, I mean, everyone has, but Google in particular has kind of conflated those two need states of like, information efficiency isn’t the only game for many, many queries.

Now I will give Google a little bit of credit. I actually think that if folks here are kind of paying attention to the recipe space in particular, recipes and shopping are two of the only verticals that have the new AI-organized search results kind of view. And I actually think that’s like, not a – like a kind of positive step in the right direction in some senses, right? It’s not without its flaws. But the idea that AI can say, oh, you want to find taco recipes? If you look on desktop stills for taco recipes, you only see beef tacos, right? It’s like, they’re all just beef tacos. If you look on mobile and you get the AI organized, it’s like, what do you want? Fish tacos, veggie tacos, beef tacos, like, it actually gives you a range of options. But it’s pointing you to individual recipes, individual creators that you might know and recognize and so on. I think that’s kind of like in my mind where I hope things go more in that direction. As we increasingly have some of those like, raw information needs met by AI, at the same time, at the same time, AI should be surfacing and connecting you to diverse voices, a broad range of things and that kind of like, the ability to find what you want, which is again, Google’s mission, kind of more easily.

Garrett: Yeah, and it’s an unfair question on my end too, because it’s like, we always try to generalize or simplify the world of SEO, but every industry, every type of query is different. And it’s much more complex of a question. I think you give a really great perspective on what is valuable across the board while not like undercutting the nuance of how difficult it is across different SEO teams for individual companies, which kind of leads me into your talk, which is the business side of SEO. Can you really speak to what you plan on presenting at SEO week that people are going to get excited about?

Tom: Yeah, for sure. I believe this with every fiber of my being that the number one challenge that every SEO professional faces is not AI, it is not how to crawl websites or web pages at scale, it is not keywords, it is not which software tool to use, it is how do you gain confidence in SEO as a channel with the executives of your organization, right?

Executive communication is a skill set that is hard to learn. Nobody teaches you and is fiercely valuable, right? And so I’ve kind of been on a bit of a mission over the last, I mean, I guess, honestly, kind of my whole career in some senses, but specifically since I launched the SEO MBA back in, what if that was 2021, my mission has been about connecting the dots between what happens behind closed doors in the executive team and how SEO teams and SEO professionals can better prepare themselves and advocate for their own work. And I saw that working for myself as a consultant for 10 years, I got a peek into so many different teams and organizations and setups and often was kind of the person that straddled both worlds where I was in the executive team in those meetings, but also working with the SEO team and kind of like just understanding that disconnect, just the vast, vast disconnect of language, metrics, of strategy, of the way that these SEO teams are trying to advocate for themselves and just the failure of that communication up to the executive team.

And so what I want to talk about at SEO Week is both some kind of concrete tactical things, but also a bit of a philosophical approach that you can take to, how do we turn SEO into a more measurable channel? How do you turn SEO into a thing that executive stakeholders can understand and have confidence within? And ultimately, how can you get a better job? Because that’s what it really comes down to is like, if you can advocate for yourself and for the channel at the executive levels, then surprise, that’s the gateway to senior roles, right? And so, by far and away, the most popular post I ever wrote on the SEO MBA newsletter was this kind of, like, career kind of roadmap and like the skillset that you need for different careers. And you just can’t get to those senior roles without executive communication skills. And so that’s kind of the piece that I want to evangelize and get real nerdy about at SEO week. And I don’t know why I get so passionate about this, but it really lights me up. And I think it’s the thing that, again, I’ve just seen so many SEO professionals just, it’s difficult to learn, right? And nobody will sit you down and teach you to, right? It’s one of those kind of arcane skills that feels like black magic from the outside, a little bit like SEO, ironically, to folks that aren’t practitioners. And so my goal, my aim is to try to demystify that and try to help folks out.

Garrett: It’s one of the presentations I’m most excited about. I think it’s one of the most critically important conversations that SEOs need to think career-wise in this economic situation that we’re in with so much uncertainty going forward across corporations. Like if there’s one skill set beyond the hard skills is the soft skills that can save your career, save your family going forward.

You mentioned a bunch of practical takeaways. What’s one that someone can start doing right now if they’re in that spot thinking about their presence in these executive rooms?

Tom: Yeah, I mean, two very, very immediate concrete things that I’d suggest. One is –  care more about your reporting, right? One of my favorite subject lines that I wrote as part of the SEO MBA was, “Your boss cares more about reporting than you do.” No matter how much you care about it, your boss cares more. Reporting is your gateway to behavior change, advocacy, buy-in, budget, getting stakeholders on your side. Everything is downstream of having good reporting. And so, no matter how much you think you’ve worked on reporting or no matter how much you think it’s in a good spot, make it better, care more about it. And that isn’t just caring about the data in it, but also the presentation, the communication, et cetera.

And as part of that reporting suite, my second kind of concrete practical tip is fall down a rabbit hole learning about input metrics. That’s actually going to be a kind of, I think, a big part of the talk that I give at SEO Week is, you’ve got to radically reframe from reporting on things that have happened, which is like page views and rankings and clicks and traffic, and shifting to reporting on things that are changing behavior. So it’s like, “We have done this. We have done this.” And we believe those things will lead to future growth. And what you learn as you get kind of higher up inside organizations is that reporting on what has happened is like, it’s kind of table stakes, but it’s not very valuable. It’s like, “Sure, you need to know that.” But it has zero predictive power for what’s going to happen next. And the more time you spend executively, the more you understand that.

What executives want to understand is what are we doing now that drives future growth? What are we doing now that drives future performance? And if you don’t have a point of view on that in your reporting, if your reporting is only reporting on what has happened, you’re basically already dead in the water. You’re basically already sidelined as far as the executive team goes. So anyway, I told you I’d get excited about it. I’ll talk more about that at SEO Week. So, come watch my presentation if you’re into it.

Garrett: No, I’m excited. And it segues perfectly into, we were talking earlier about this changing nature of search, the input of AI. And as you’re trying to steer, be a steward of your organization in the right direction, reporting accurately with these inputs, you have to be paying attention to the direction that we’re going and how consumer behavior is changing. What’s your perspective on what’s next in terms of SEO, search, AI going forward?

Tom: I think Google said it best, right? Buckle up. I think…I don’t have a crystal ball, I can’t tell you what’s next…I think we’re in for a year of pretty dramatic change on Google’s side in particular. They’re facing pressures left, right, and center, not least from ChatGPT. If I had to pontificate or make some wild conjectures, I think that we’ll see a lot more AI-organized search results. Getting us out of the mold of just thinking about AI overviews, like a thing that is at the top of the page, but I think we’ll see much more radical full page AI takeovers in whatever that means for different kinds of queries.

I also think that at some point in 2025, there will be a fundamental shift in the UX of a follow-up question. I think honestly one of the biggest innovations for ChatGPT is that you could just ask a follow-up. You can just say, “Well, I asked for a certain piece of information. I did some research and now I want to know more. I want to go further. I want to go sideways.” Search as a UX paradigm fundamentally doesn’t let you do that. I think the very early versions of AI overviews had that embedded in them with a chat interface, but I think that we’ll see Google try and innovate again around that follow-up question and persistent thread of follow-through.

Just to give a little background for fun context. I worked at Google over a decade ago now. When I was there last time around, I was involved in a project where we were trying to understand whether we could actually understand what the user’s intent was across multiple queries. The answer was no. There was basically this massive research project that I was only lightly involved in, but I was there for the readout and the TL;DR was a bunch of smart Google engineers spent a bunch of time trying to figure out if they could understand the intent of a user across multiple queries and the answer was no. The answer now is yes. That is a pretty fundamental change to the way that search just works under the hood of query response. If I had to guess the 2025, it’s obviously more AI and something more conversational, I think, is coming.

Garrett: Oh my gosh. Thanks so much. I’m so excited. You should definitely get your tickets if you haven’t already. To that point, it’s really hard to have this conversation with someone who, when we both geek out about this, because I want to go and talk for half an hour about everything that you just said. Yeah, check it out, SEOweek.org. Tom Critchlow will be talking all about the inputs and everything that you can do to upscale your career as an SEO and so much more. I mean, we’ll be able to all have conversations at this intimate gathering. Thank you so much for joining me, Tom. This is going to be awesome.

Tom: Appreciate it, Garrett.

Garrett: It’s been a lot of fun. My name is Garrett. I’m brought to you by SEO Week and iPullRank. We will see you in April, I hope. Fingers crossed.