Introducing Garrett Sussman, an enthusiastic SEO professional who is thrilled by the growing diversity within the SEO community. He recognizes and celebrates the emergence of new experts who have flourished through inclusive movements and communities like Women In Tech SEO. Garrett is passionate about the accessibility that the remote work paradigm shift during the pandemic has brought to everyone, enabling individuals from diverse backgrounds to contribute their unique perspectives to the field of SEO.
With years of experience in search engine optimization, Garrett has witnessed firsthand how the industry has evolved to embrace and empower individuals from various backgrounds. He finds inspiration in the collective knowledge and experiences that a diverse community brings, fostering innovation and driving positive change within the SEO landscape.
Garrett understands the value of inclusive communities and has actively contributed to the growth and support of aspiring SEO professionals. He recognizes the importance of providing equal opportunities and resources to help individuals excel in their SEO careers, regardless of their background or circumstances. Garrett believes that by embracing diversity and creating a supportive environment, the SEO industry can thrive and reach new heights.
Garrett can be reached on Twitter @garrettsussman or via LinkedIn.
Recent Shows with Garrett Sussman
435 | Pivoting Clients Towards Their Evolving Customer Personas with Garrett SussmanInterview / podcastGarret’s experience in mining subject matter knowledge from clients to flesh out the Buyer’s Journey
The changing user behavior and subsequent content needs
Leveraging an event to pivot a hard-headed client’s understanding of their consumer’s content needs
Areas to avoid for first-time clients doing the User Persona / Buyer’s Journey exercise
How to know when a client starts looking at other agencies
What Garrett learned from his 100 episode podcast run in one year
Garrett Sussman’s perspective on getting clients on board with the Buyer’s Journey and creating content with them through the process as the client’s persona evolves. He dives into what to avoid through the process and how to keep a client from losing trust in an agency, as well as what he has learned through his podcast.
The Buyer’s Journey and its Effect on the Agency/Client Relationship
With the evolution of a customer person and buyer persona, several challenges are met. An agency must identify the customer persona and encourage the client to participate in the Buyer’s Journey. It can test an agency’s relationship with the client, as well as the content creation process. An agency must nurture a relationship with a client through exceptional account management.
Challenges in Creating Content with Clients
There are challenges in creating content with clients, specifically the Buyer’s Journey. The Buyer’s Journey includes awareness content, consideration content, and decision-making content, and it is the process of extracting that information from clients. Through Sussman’s experience working with clients and mining the useful but ubiquitous, Buyer’s Journey content, he has found that different stages are gone through. One crucial aspect is the first stage: identifying personas. Personas have fallen out of favor in marketing, but they aggregate all different data that a client can pull together. This data relates to who the customers are, what their needs are, what they want, and where they are on the funnel of discovering who the client is. Once the client understands that, the agency and client can create content that resonates with the customers. Creating content can be a lot of guesswork, and if the client is putting out content that they think the customers want, they haven’t gone through the formula or discovery process.
Encouraging the Client to Participate in the Journey
The clients are the source of truth for audience research. It’s important to talk it through with the client to find the point where the client has understood what the customer wants. Personas have changed and continue to change, but this point in time is an excellent opportunity to move clients into discovering the Buyer’s Journey by positioning it as an opportunity. Agencies can start with the client and their customers. Generate those conversations through tools like surveys or send out market research firms to do research with focus groups and identify where customers are hanging out online and how they’re finding you. If the client is driving a ton of organic traffic that isn’t resulting in new customers, is that helpful? If there is a whole new customer persona and the client is not marketing them, it is just preventing growth. There is a lot of value in re-auditing the persona or auditing it for the first time because revenue can be driven there, impacting the whole marketing strategy.
Areas to Avoid on Agency/Client Discovery Procedure
When getting to the deeper areas of content on the discovery journey with a client, the agency needs to be collaborative and not just tell clients what they should know. The agency is an educator but is also working with the client through the discovery process. If the agency removes itself from the process, then comes back with results, it’s not going to get the same buy-in as an agency that is along for the journey and showing results along the way. It’s crucial to identify touchpoints to keep clients in the process. This will lead to more success and a better relationship with the client.
Buyer’s Journey Content Process
When it comes down to clients understanding the Buyer’s Journey content metrics, they sometimes struggle to see a direct line of sight ROI, especially if they haven’t gone through the process before. The agency can communicate the value of the Buyer’s Journey by having specific metrics they want the client to hit along the journey. The journey is a funnel, and depending on how deep an agency is going into the services offered to a client, the agency should make sure that the funnel isn’t broken as they move through the funnel. A broken funnel can prevent the client from driving revenue which is the final goal.
The agency can train clients on the metrics. The metrics is ultimately not an exact science, and an agency being transparent with the client is necessary. Marketers struggle with attribution in general, and technology is only making it more difficult. It’s becoming challenging to tie metrics to eventual revenue KPIs and customer KPIs. The journey is a long game, and with the customer base being as digitally savvy as ever, the agency needs to be involved in the process and conversation.
The Importance of Account Management
With everything changing and evolving, it’s not always linear. This is where trust and the agency/client relationship become important. Agencies know the reality that certain content won’t always do as well as they thought, and other content will do much better than anticipated. When things aren’t working out immediately, clients can sometimes feel like they need to bail. An agency can’t expect the client to be on the same page as them; therefore, they must have an internal barometer. The relationship with the client must be constantly honed. Otherwise, they may begin to look at other agencies. Account management is pertinent to gauge how the agency is doing and how they can do certain things better for the client. Larger businesses find it harder to move from one agency to another, but there are signs for when a client is considering a move. Part of an agency’s own Buyer’s Journey is developing loyalty and a solid line of communication with the client.
What Sussman Has Learned Through His Podcast
Sussman has plowed through a lot of content on his podcast in the last year. He has learned that there are so many voices that deserve the opportunity to share what they think about SEO and their perspective on marketing. The SEO industry has a history of having the same speakers at conferences, and while they are all brilliant, there are new voices in the world. Sussman reached out to his Twitter network to ask who he needed to talk to. He wanted to bring in people with different voices, experiences, backgrounds, and demographics because those people bring in different perspectives. Conversations with women and people of color in the industry were about the nature of the sector and strategies it also about discovering other people’s stories. People have interesting stories, and Sussman enjoys sharing them with the community through a creative outlet. [...]
July 19, 2021- 433 | The Agency/Client Relationship with Garrett SussmanInterview / podcastWhat is your Client’s Love Language?
100 podcast episodes in a year! How did Garrett stay sane through that?
Garrett’s history – coming from teaching to the start-up culture.
Hiring internal SEOs. The challenges of the industry
The evolving nature of the target: Google. A completely different paradigm.
Supplementing your in-house with agency talent
Experience matters in the Agency/Client relationship. Broken trust is the major pitfall
What are the key breakdowns inside of the agency, client relationship?
What are the SEO love languages, and how does it affect the client/agency relationship? Garrett Sussman discusses digital marketing agencies within the SEO industry and how to make client/agency relationships work.
A Look at Garrett Sussman
Garrett Sussman is the Demand Generation Manager at iPullRank. He has ten years of experience in digital marketing. He has previously worked as the Head of Marketing at a development firm and an Affiliate Marketing Manager. He has worked with a reputation management service for agencies to monitor client’s reviews. Sussman has had a long run in developing resources for agencies. He has also contributed to thought leadership with his podcast, Agency Ahead by Traject, where he has had 100 episodes in just a year with several well-known figures as guests.
After college, Sussman joined Teach for America and was teaching in Louisiana when Hurricane Katrine hit. After that, he felt a bit burned out and found himself obsessed with startup culture. After heading to San Francisco, he stumbled upon 99designs, a graphic design marketplace. Sussman started focusing on agencies and became interested in how agencies could get graphic design work done for clients. He began to learn about what agencies were looking for and their needs and ability to match requirements.
Sussman and His Sanity Through 100 Podcast Episodes
For Sussman, his podcast is easy to create because it’s a guilty pleasure for him. It’s an opportunity to geek out over marketing channels and strategies with respected people in the industry. His podcast has led to his current position at iPullRank after having spoken with many tech SEOs. Sussman always found tech SEO fascinating regarding its influence on ranking. He’s found that SEOs need analytic skills to understand concepts but also need creative skills. He’s been able to explore dimensions of how digital marketing agencies need to engage in these skillsets while also learning the discipline and considering relationships with clients.
The Challenges of Client Relationships
It’s been found that companies prefer hiring an agency rather than hire an in-house marketing employee for SEO. Part of the challenge with SEO is the skillsets needed. A lot of people are trying to hire in-house due to the industry evolving. However, there aren’t many academic programs for SEO or standalone certifications. The industry doesn’t have the workforce that companies are looking for. It’s tricky to break into the SEO industry, but it is accessible to everyone. SEO is inherently edgy and constantly trying to experiment to learn what is and isn’t working. Google is also evolving, so SEOs question where to invest their time to rank for certain types of content. There is an ever-changing nature of search intent, and Google makes things even harder for the SEO industry. A marriage of SEO skills and content skills is becoming more of a requirement for in-house SEO positions.
The State of Understanding SEO and Its Complexities
SEO today is not just technical; it is contextual. If a company hires someone for an in-house role in the SEO market, how can the company know whether they have contemporary skills instead of the technical skills from ten years ago? The client doesn’t know the difference between the past market and the modern market. Therefore it can be more beneficial to hire an agency for its supplemental efforts. The larger a website, the larger the enterprise, the more there is to do. For example, with the surge of Core Web Vitals, it can be difficult for an in-house team or individual to handle. The agency can offer supplemental skills, whether from insights or to execution implementation. This hybrid model can give an additional set of eyes, as well as insurance. The agency can ensure that the internal resources are being presented with contemporary knowledge. Clients may not understand that taking an individual out of the competitive waters to optimize content for their website specifically, they are unplugged from the learning experience in all vertical markets and industries. The ability to couple the individual with the agency model is ensuring longevity and skills for that individual. In addition, when elements of nuances between industries or types of businesses are added, the productivity and value an agency brings are amplified. Integration can be beneficial in many ways.
Potential Pitfalls of the Agency/Client Hybrid Model
When a company brings in an agency, there will always be a chance of issues. The client/agency relationship is all about trust and dependability. Suppose trust is broken early on, whether due to false information or technical mistakes, trust is lost, which is a significant pitfall. This can make it hard to recover trust for that agency and all future agencies that the client works with because a company is likely to try multiple agencies.
Poor communication and lack of understanding on the client’s part can also cause issues. There are so many opportunities for discovery between agencies and clients. Therefore it is critical to determine expectations early on. These expectations could regard communication style or what the client expects the agency to provide. The agency may need to act as an educator. Agencies should continue to reflect on their communication, value, and how they interact with the client. Different clients need different solutions, and there is a continual evolution of the relationship with clients.
Key Breakdowns of Agency/Client Relationship
One critical breakdown, according to Sussman, is the setting of expectations, specifically within the contract regarding a set scope and the contingencies if the project exceeds the scope. Communication is also a major breakdown. All clients have different communication styles or SEO love languages. The client can become upset if the agency is not on the same page as them. On the other side, agencies should set boundaries for themselves. Agencies want to go above and beyond, but it is fair to set boundaries and response time expectations. This also includes stepping back if the agency cannot meet the client’s needs and expectations. When you have these sorts of conversations initially, it can save a lot of headaches in the long run.
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July 12, 2021
