When I worked on freemium user acquisition at HubSpot, my team and I came up with the “Surround Sound SEO” strategy.
Here’s the origin story:
I noticed that one blog post converted an order of magnitude higher than the blog average, at least when looking at product signups. It was a product listicle.
I thought, “Huh, maybe I can replicate this.”
So I wrote some more listicles, and they converted at similar levels.
But then I thought more broadly. What is a user actually looking for when they search “best CRM software?”
They’re looking to gather a list of options from which to compare and evaluate, ultimately deciding to purchase one of them. One factor that influences inclusion on that initial comparison table is the ubiquity and sentiment of mentions in a search journey.
In other words, appear zero times on the search results page for “best CRM” and you’re not in the conversation. Appear 1-2 times, and you’re present, but not dominating.
But when every single page that ranks for the query mentions HubSpot as the “best CRM?” You’re the obvious choice. Impossible to ignore.
There’s an old principle behind this in advertising known as frequency.
The more often someone sees an ad, the more awareness, recognition, and action occurs from the ads.
Of course, there’s diminishing marginal utility after a certain number of touchpoints, and potentially even a backfire effect.
Recall the common sales advice that someone needs seven touches before they respond.
At face value, this is obviously overly simplistic, but even assuming that is the average value, you have to know that going past that is likely to be ineffective or even harmful.
If you email me three times, I may thank you for persistence and reminding me of something I wanted to take action on. If you email me 7-10 times, I’m going to hit “spam.”
In any case, this concept that many touchpoints compound on each other is both obvious and broadly applicable.
I’ll show you how it works from a consumer standpoint, but I’ll also walk you through some threshold effects in building SEO programs (and explain why you shouldn’t just dip your toes in the water if you want to see outstanding results).
Real quick, what’s a threshold effect?
A threshold effect is a general concept that refers to the point at which something happens and below which nothing (measurable) happens.
Water remains in its liquid state as temperature increases, but once it reaches 100°C (at sea level), it rapidly transitions to steam. The threshold is the boiling point.
You have to saturate your muscles with creatine for it to work. Can’t just take one scoop.
Snow accumulates on a mountain slope without issue, but once it exceeds a critical weight or is disturbed by a small event, an avalanche can occur. The threshold is the stability limit of the snowpack.
Many networks (e.g., social media platforms or marketplaces) become valuable only after a critical number of users join.
And more germane to this essay, there are threshold effects in advertising that reflect the minimum budget required to see any sort of results.
It Just Takes Some Time
(…hope you sang along)
My co-founder David told us, on our latest podcast, that he had been seeking information on some subject (sorry David, I can’t remember what it was), and that one brand kept popping up on Google when he’d search for different topics.
Eventually, he noticed the brand and signed up for their product.
It works that way quite often.
Very rarely do you read something so brilliant, so idiosyncratic and novel, so sticky that you immediately follow, subscribe, and reach out to the person who wrote it. I can recall only a handful of essays, podcasts, or posts I’ve experienced that with over the years.
Most of the time, our buyer’s journey resembles David’s.
You take an entry level marketing coordinator job and have to learn how to do email marketing, so you end up on HubSpot’s blog. You have to take on their social media accounts, too, so you find yourself on HubSpot’s blog. You’re like, “this brand seems to know a little about a lot!” You learn they have an Academy with a bunch of certifications that seem popular. Now you’re in their orbit. Eventually, you’ll probably use their CRM.
Same thing happens on LinkedIn, or that’s what I tell myself anyway when any given post of mine gets 10 likes.
You see Finn McKenty post some joke about CTAs. Then you see him comment on Peep Laja’s post about messaging frameworks. Then another of Finn’s posts comes up in your feed, this one about how to leverage your existing ideas to build an audience on LinkedIn.
Eventually, you’re following Finn, and like me, paying him to teach you how to do LinkedIn better.
Think of this as a brand awareness threshold, where below a certain point you have no mindshare. It takes several touchpoints to break through even to the point of salience, let alone affinity and action.
That’s why, to build an audience, it takes trust, which is a function of both quality and consistency over time:
SEO Thresholds and Why Escape Velocity Matters
In SEO, especially nowadays with Google combating an absolute flood of garbage content, you need to signal that your site is a trustworthy entity (and that your page is high quality and relevant to the query at hand).
Eric Schmidt once famously said, “Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”
So, we’ll just….build a brand? What does that even mean?
(A subject for another essay perhaps)
Actually, it’s simpler than that. Your website has to display hard to fake signals that it is a trustworthy source on your topic surface area. This is an extreme simplification, but that boils down to:
- Links
- Content
- Technical SEO / UX
Let’s assume the last one is dialed in. Your site is crawlable. No major bugs preventing either searchers or bots from reading it.
The former two are then what you need to focus on. Simplifying again, there’s a threshold of quality and relevant backlinks that, once you hit, makes it exceedingly easier to rank the content you publish.
I know there are many arguments about backlinks and their utility now and in the future. But unless you’ve had the hands on experience of working at HubSpot and seeing content you published today ranking position #1 tomorrow, and you’ve also seen the time delay that happens with most new startups, I’m going to take these strong opinions as mere conjecture.
You can argue about the marginal utility of links, but I think it’s fairly clear that websites with stronger link profiles have a big advantage. They’ve hit “escape velocity,” which gets them in the arena, then free to compete on content quality and relevance and user experience signals.
GrowthMachine wrote up a nice piece about what they call the “Critical Authority Threshold,” describing it as such:
“There are two important variables for crossing the [Critical Authority Threshold]: link building, and patience.
Being patient gives your site more time to get out of Google’s “new site purgatory,” and link building allows you to increase your authority and cross the threshold faster.
You need some combination of both link building and patience, but generally the more link building you do, the quicker you cross the Critical Authority Threshold. And the longer you’re willing to be patient, the less link building you might have to do.”
The other variable is content.
What most people talk about here is topical authority – building a comprehensive library of content around a single topic area, showcasing expertise, experience, and novel information about the topic.
The idea here is that content doesn’t act in isolation; it has interaction effects.
Simple math would dictate that 40 pages has 10X the traffic potential of 4 pages, but SEO math means that each of those pages helps the others rank (assuming, again, smart strategy and internal linking). So there’s a nonlinear reward to producing more content (up to a point – see SEO Heist and other case studies of unnatural content velocity).
It takes a while to build out that content library, though, and in the early days it’s more important to stand out with quality. As you scale, your brand strength and domain authority will let you get away with more mediocre content (hey, Forbes).
I’ve begun thinking about organic growth programs in three horizons: foundations, scale, and category leadership.
To effectively compete and scale your program, you first need to build the foundations that allow you to hit “escape velocity.” The work you’re doing at this stage is very important, even though it may not show up as generating a massive amount of leads yet.
So, Amp It Up!
Quick story. Promise it’s related.
I took Spanish classes in high school and two years of classes in college.
In college, I briefly dated a German woman that spoke German (clearly), French, and English. No Spanish. I could “speak” more Spanish than her.
Except she then moved to Spain, where she was completely immersed in the language.
I visited her three years later and was absolutely baffled that I couldn’t carry simple conversations in Spanish, yet she was completely fluent.
I had merely dipped my toes in the water, learning some grammar and vocabulary, but I hadn’t committed. I didn’t hit the critical threshold that made conversation possible. I could only read newspapers.
So after my Spain trip, I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder, realizing that I had essentially “wasted” those years of Spanish classes. I signed up for 2 private lessons per week, scheduled weekly calls with a friend who was at a similar level, chose a book to read in Spanish, made a daily podcast listening habit, and started a daily Duolingo streak. I was spending ~2 hours a day on Spanish learning, including flash cards and homework for my private classes.
Sure enough, in the span of a year or so, I had hit the level where I could carry conversations with native speakers in Peru.
So many people want to “test” SEO as a channel, but they don’t understand the critical threshold needed to see tangible outcomes. It’s not enough to publish a page or two and see if they bring in leads. There’s a certain level – and it differs by industry, company, topic, etc. – that is required before you can actually SEE what’s working.
That’s why I recommend being ambitious and committing to the channel, but being flexible and data-driven when it comes to the tactics.
Like, with my Spanish example, I could very easily swap in group lessons for private classes, digital courses for flashcards. But ultimately, I needed to be committed to learning the language and spend the requisite time concentrating on doing so.
How do you know it’s working before it works?
“Activation energy is a term I learned from my friend Yuki, a biochemist who grows meat from cell cultures in Petri dishes. It’s “the minimum quantity of energy needed in order to undergo a specified reaction.”
…Consider matching the resources you have available so you can tip the scale and hit the threshold needed. In other words, only start something if you’re going to reach the activation energy of that project.
If you want to start an airline, find out how much money it took for other airlines to start. If you don’t have that, pick another idea (you have plenty of ideas).” – Wes Kao
It’s important to know (and communicate) what to expect at a given stage of organic growth.
In the latter stages, you should almost certainly be measuring the ROI of your program using meaningful business KPIs.
In the early days, however, what I’m looking for are leading indicators of future traffic and conversion cascades. Essentially, enough data to say “we’re heading in the right direction, and if we apply more resources, we can see more results.”
I refer to this as a “minimum viable test.”
We do this with all of our own marketing ideas.
Let’s say, for example, we’re testing outbound sales.
We know it’s not enough to send 10 emails and expect a deal to close.
But what is the minimum time and sample size required? It’s not unlimited. We don’t want to fall into a sunk cost fallacy where we keep pouring resources into a failing initiative on faith alone.
So we set up our time parameters: 3 months. And we set up our outcome expectations: 5 qualified opportunities. And we reverse engineer a growth model that indicates how many emails we would need to send to roughly hit those targets with reasonable conversion rate assumptions.
These are leading indicators, not closed deals. Our assumption is that if we can get qualified contacts on a call, eventually the numbers will work out that we will close some of them. But if no one answers our emails at all? Well, the meaningful business KPIs are dead on arrival.
If this particular campaign does work, then we’ll begin to shift our expectations towards closed deals and revenue
But almost every growth initiative requires a minimum activation energy – a threshold – before it starts paying dividends.
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