Episode 29: Interview with Ryan Jones

Ryan Jones is manager of SEO and Analytics at SapientNitro. He has a lot of experience in the fields of automotive and international SEO and is working with his team for several Fortune 500 clients.

Andre Alpar: So, today’s OMReport is with Ryan. Ryan, can you please introduce yourself.

Ryan Jones: Yeah, not a problem. My name’s Ryan Jones, I’m manager of SEO and analytics at SapientNitro.

Andre Alpar: All right, so what’s SapientNitro?

Ryan Jones: Oh great question! So we’re a pretty large agency. We’re one of the biggest agencies in the world, actually, with over 10,000 employees worldwide. We’re a full-service agency, our motto is ‘Redefining storytelling for an online world’ – help clients tell the story and, you know, basically a typical agency.

Andre Alpar: So how does it work with the clients that are typically at SapientNitro? They must be huge corporations so probably the things are, you know, for other companies that are probably very online-savvy there are, like self-understood, probably it’s sometimes news you’re bringing to the table, so how do you deal with that? Is your job more, you know, communication and teaching and education and preaching? Or is it really, you know, checking out meta titles and whatever?

Ryan Jones: Definitely, that’s a great question. So most of my clients are Fortune 500 clients – several well-known brands, I won’t go into them. But, so yeah, a lot of what I do is less in the weeds work with title tags and meta descriptions, I mean we do that, my team definitely does that. But the most important part is evangelising SEO and search within the various departments and why it’s important and what it means and how it can help them. Basically getting SEO to move to, you know, instead of being a condiment like a lot of brands think of it as something to sprinkle on afterwards, into ‘how can it be part of the ingredients and part of the soup and baking it from the beginning?’

Andre Alpar: Right, so especially when you’re talking about big brands, if we differentiate within keywords into, let’s say, conquer and defend keywords or brand and non-brand keywords, your clients – do they typically really go off to generic non-brand keywords? Or are they actually having a problem, you know, just managing their brand keywords that one might call online reputation management. So what are typically, you know, the tasks that they have to tackle?

Ryan Jones: Yeah, so generally we start with branded keywords, I mean it’s the easy win, I mean when you have a well-known brand that everybody knows it’s really easy to rank for your keywords and if you’re not ranking for those keywords there’s a big problem, you gotta get there.

Andre Alpar: So does it happen often or are most of the clients – have they figured that out already?

Ryan Jones: Most of them have figured that out, I mean it’s pretty easy. The challenge comes in the non-branded stuff. Most Fortune 500 companies don’t do a very good job of non-branded content. They just don’t have it out there, they don’t think in terms of that…

Andre Alpar: So how do you bring that story? It’s quite news to them. So how do you bring it? Because one is like a push communication that they’re used to and this is kind of a pull communication that they have to, you know, get into thinking-wise. How do you start?

Ryan Jones: Yeah, I’m glad you used those words…

Andre Alpar: Imagine I’m a big brand and you tell me: why should I do that? Why should I, I dunno, I’m Nestle and I have my… or like a… I have my Mars bar and why should I rank for, I dunno, chocolate snack? Why does that make sense to me?

Ryan Jones: Yeah because, you know, that’s a great question, I’m glad you used the word push vs pull because many brands don’t actually think in terms of pull, they’re so used to thinking in terms of push that that’s what they try to approach SEO from a push model to, and as you know it doesn’t work. SEO is a pull model. People are out there looking for information and our job’s simple: just give them what they want, right? It’s easy. And in terms of that with Nestle, yeah it’s because people think in brands. I mean, the general public, they think in terms of brands. When I think, where do I wanna go buy a TV I think of Best Buy or Walmart or Costco, I think of the brand, I don’t think of the small shop. Same thing with chocolate bar, when I think of chocolate bar I think Nestle, I think Hershey’s. That’s what I mean when I say chocolate bar.

Andre Alpar: I’m more the Snickers type, but it’s OK.

Ryan Jones: OK. But… Yeah that’s what I mean, I mean those words, I want the brand, that’s what I view, you know, it comes back to trust, authority, quality, court… as Alan Bleiweiss likes to say: quality, uniqueness, authority, relevance, trust.

Andre Alpar: Right.

Ryan Jones: And brands by definition are that. They are that quality, that trust.

Andre Alpar: But how do you get them to… can you really convince all of the brands that they should go after generic terms? Or do you like… do you like half of the time you know, you can’t get them there, they just don’t see it?

Ryan Jones: It’s not easy. So when we do SEO for brands we often… we don’t talk in terms of keywords as much as other SEOs do. We talk in terms of conversions.

Andre Alpar: Like signing up to a community or a newsletter or something like that?

Ryan Jones: Um, yeah. So I’ll give you an example, one of my…

Andre Alpar: Some engagement…

Ryan Jones: One of my clients is a major auto manufacturer and, you know, when we would do our reporting and our analytics meetings we don’t talk about keywords, we don’t talk about rankings, we don’t talk about any of that. The main question is: am I gonna sell enough cars this month and do I have to put another incentive on there to sell more and am I gonna hit my sales goals? If not, what can I do to change that? And how can you help me from your channel of search? So we look at the big question, we look at the major business KPIs and what the client’s goals are, is I wanna sell more cars. How can you help me sell more cars? And am I gonna hit my budget this month and sell enough cars?

Andre Alpar: But then again, let’s say you’re coming up and you’re trying to convince your car manufacturer client that they should put up a landing page to try to rank for, you know, cool sports car because you figured out that has great search volume and would perfectly fit. And then they see this page. I mean eventually, they sometimes discover ‘Hey Ryan did this magic and then suddenly I rank for this term’ and then they see this page and they’re like ‘whaaat? Is that really something I should be communicating?’ Because they have these push thoughts, and sometimes when they see the pages that are meant for a pull communication they’re, let’s say, confused or have to get introduced to new perspectives. So how do you deal with that? Does it happen, or…?

Ryan Jones: It does! That’s a major part of the job is selling that stuff to the client, is saying ‘Hey…’ you know, I like to take a reverse approach, instead of saying ‘Hey, I wanna rank this stuff for X’ I take the reverse approach and say ‘All right hey, there’s a bunch of people out there looking for this, right? Here’s where they’re going. They’re going to your competitors.’ Or, say, in the case of an auto manufacturer ‘they’re going to your Edmunds or your Kelley Blue Book or your Cars.com or your generic sites and then, you know, we’re buying the leads back from them.’ So I say ‘Hey, rather than buy the leads back from these guys, there’s an audience out there looking for it. Let’s build it, let’s get them to come right to our site where we can control the message.’

Andre Alpar: That’s nice. And that’s usually a story that they will buy in because they can do the math, you know, they know how much they spend for the leads and probably also they know how much they’re worth…

Ryan Jones: Exactly. You just gotta put it in the terms they understand.

Andre Alpar: Right, that’s quite nice. So, you said you’re responsible for search and analytics. That’s like one unit within SapientNitro? Is that… you can’t… you know… Or is that like an accident because you’re a big fan or a big pro in both of them? Or is it just accidentally an overlap in your person?

Ryan Jones: It’s definitely not an accident. A lot of companies like to separate everything into silos, so you’ve got your paid search team, your natural search team, your analytics team, your creative team, right? And what happens with that is you get very siloed thinking, each silo’s got their own goals and their own challenges that they wanna face and they all approach it in their own way. We try to tear down those silos, and my ideal model is… you know, we do things a little different where we have analytics… search is part of the analytics team.

Andre Alpar: OK!?

Ryan Jones: So it’s one team.

Andre Alpar: That’s unusual.

Ryan Jones: It’s very unusual! A lot of agencies, they see search as just this thing you add on after the fact. We build it in with analytics and everything is data-driven. So I have search people that can do analytics as well and analytics people that can do search as well…

Andre Alpar: Is search in your case SEO and PPC, or just SEO?

Ryan Jones: So in my case for some of my clients it’s just SEO, for other clients it’s SEO and PPC, it depends on the client.

Andre Alpar: I was wondering if the other channels they will say ‘Oh no, you know Ryan is faking our numbers because he’s controlling analytics, he’s attributing way too much to his channels’. Does that happen?

Ryan Jones: I’ve seen it happen in clients. I’ve seen it happen in clients and you know, you get… when you have search natural search and paid search run by different channels you see a lot of overlap, and you see a lot of conflicting goals. You know, there’s a lot of cases where if you have totally different channels and they go siloed all the way up, you’re gonna have your paid search team trying to compete with your natural search team, and is it really best for the client?

Andre Alpar: Depends!

Ryan Jones: Depends, sometimes it’s not. I mean, the client just cares about overall numbers, right? They don’t care which channel that visit came from as long as their total visits are going up. They don’t care which channel it’s bucketed in. And by combining the departments we can just look at that total number and then look at each part as one component of that total number instead of siloed and trying to get each one up on its own.

Andre Alpar: So a client can come up and say ‘Ryan, please just do my SEO’ or ‘Ryan, please just do my analytics stuff.’

Ryan Jones: Oh yeah.

Andre Alpar: OK they can.

Ryan Jones: Oh yeah. We’ll do it all. I mean, whatever’s best for that client, whatever that client needs the most is whatever makes sense for them. That’s how we’ll go.

Andre Alpar: Do you work for the clients just in one country, like mostly in the US? Or do you also help clients internationalise?

Ryan Jones: Yeah so we have a lot of US clients, I have a few Canadian clients, our Canadian office is really big and we do a lot of work out of there. But a lot of our clients are international and when you talk about large brands they’re all over the place, so we definitely do some international work with them.

Andre Alpar: Right so do they usually manage all their international efforts from the States and then try to internationalise from there? Or do they give their branches their, I dunno, subsidiaries in the countries, you know, the freedom to decide? And how does that work with you guys?

Ryan Jones: It depends, really. If they’re in a country where we have a team and we have people that speak the language and understand the local country and the local customs, I would prefer that team to do it, because as I’m sure you know keywords and terms vary by region. People say different stuff. I’ll give you a lesson: before I started working with auto clients, you know, I’d do the keyword research but I didn’t know that in the UK people schedule test drives.

Andre Alpar: Yeah.

Ryan Jones: In America just go and…

Andre Alpar: In Germany it’s the same thing.

Ryan Jones: We just go into the store…

Andre Alpar: It’s like a lead.

Ryan Jones: Yes. That doesn’t exist here in the States. We just go into the dealership and say ‘Hey I wanna drive this car.’ In the UK you schedule it, so that opened up a whole new world of keyword research and of new lower funnel activities to put on the site where we actually gotta take this into account, right? In China and India the auto market is very different than it is here.

Andre Alpar: How does it work? They come with cash.

Ryan Jones: Haha yeah. I don’t wanna go into a lot of specifics but you know in India one of the most important aspects of buying a car is seating capacity.

Andre Alpar: How many people you can fit in?

Ryan Jones: Yeah! It’s how many people I can fit…

Andre Alpar: In India they stick… even on the motorbikes I saw like five humans on one little motorbike. It’s very special the way they use their vehicles, so the same as it is for cars probably.

Ryan Jones: It’s different concerns you know, in America we’re all about engine power or MPG or towing or whatever…

Andre Alpar: That’s so American. You’re fitting the clichés there.

Ryan Jones: Yeah! And you learn them when you start doing international SEO, I mean different countries look at different stuff, you know in India it’s all about seating capacity, it’s all about how much storage does it have, how much stuff can I fit? And when you see the cars being produced for the Indian market, they’re amazing! They got all this hidden storage and everything folds up into seats and this really cool technology that we don’t have here but…

Andre Alpar: You have to highlight that in a different way than you would have in another country.

Ryan Jones: Definitely yes!

Andre Alpar: Right. So what have you done before joining SapientNitro?

Ryan Jones: OK yeah so I’ve been at SapientNitro for about two years now. Before that I was at a company called Team Detroit, it’s a WPP owned agency, working with another large auto manufacturer. I think I’ve got most of them under my belt.

Andre Alpar: So you’re really the auto SEO guy.

Ryan Jones: Yeah pretty much. I don’t wanna, you know, typecast myself as auto-SEO but…

Andre Alpar: It just happens.

Ryan Jones: It happens, right? Yeah.

Andre Alpar: What do you actually drive as a private person? Do you have… What’s… What car type do you have?

Ryan Jones: I actually drive a Mercedes.

Andre Alpar: OK, ooo!

Ryan Jones: I also have a Jeep. I love my Wrangler, it’s an old one but it’s a really fun car, I love to drive, but…

Andre Alpar: Sorry for the…

Ryan Jones: No, no it’s cool. I just got the Mercedes, before that I had a Mustang, so… It’s all over the place.

Andre Alpar: OK. So the company was also kind of Fortune 500-oriented company focused on brands and you were basically also doing SEO in a brand context?

Ryan Jones: Yep.

Andre Alpar: Brands usually don’t go for… I mean sometimes they have a problem defining conversion goals, right? For many brands. Because they don’t really have a target, they think of this in terms of reach, you know, building visibility and brand. Do you try to educate them on that too? That there should be some micro conversions or anything?

Ryan Jones: Yeah! Great question.

Andre Alpar: They also think in these… I dunno, like pushes of advertising instead of you know working on a topic continuously. Do you try to educate on these kind of, let’s say, online strategy, market strategies too?

Ryan Jones: Yeah definitely. So with large brands and Fortune 500 companies that we work with it’s really hard to define what a conversion is. A lot of sites sell stuff online and in that case a conversion’s really easy: how many sales did I get?

Andre Alpar: Sure, but that’s the easy case. But the big brands usually don’t do that.

Ryan Jones: Yeah, we don’t sell cars or motorcycles, or other clients that I have… We don’t sell that stuff online. You can’t buy it. You gotta go to a dealer to get it. So how do we measure conversion? It’s a tough challenge and I’ve run the whole gamut of clients through this where we’ve gone with some clients where we’ve literally sat in a room with a whiteboard and said ‘here’s what we can measure’ and I wrote it all down, ‘what’s important to you…’ And that usually starts out with that. We identified the KPIs, key performance indicators, or LFAs, lower funnel activities and what’s important, but at the same time we also do some statistical modelling.

Andre Alpar: What’s the idea behind lower funnel activities? Is it something like micro conversions on the way to the real conversion, or what is that?

Ryan Jones: Yeah, so what we try to do is – and we’ve done statistical modelling and analysis and we had some really smart stats guys that can do this stuff – and examine the sale cycle, examine the touchpoints in the process, and the pages people view and what actions they take online, and find out which actions they take online actually correlate to sales on the offline world.

Andre Alpar: So for example if I have a car configurator, if I do that, that’s kind of like a conversion or low funnel activity?

Ryan Jones: Exactly. When you actually configure your own car and build and price it online that is one of our lower funnel activities that we use.

Andre Alpar: What an accident! How did I guess that!

Ryan Jones: Yeah! That’s one of the things. So we try to statistically correlate what those people are doing and try to relate that to sales. I think we do a pretty good job of it. We’ve got some pretty complex models that I really can’t go into but it’s some good stuff.

Andre Alpar: How’s your team structured? Is half of them analytics and half of them SEO or is every one of them like a mix like you would be?

Ryan Jones: Um, no. So at the management level some of us are a mix. We have some dedicated analytics managers too and some dedicated SEO ones, but in general the team is spread out where we have analytics people and SEO people… they understand the other discipline. If someone got hit by a bus I could throw any of them into there and say ‘All right I need your help on this’, right.

Andre Alpar: Next! Next!

Ryan Jones: Hopefully no one gets hit by a bus, of course.

Andre Alpar: No, no, no of course not.

Ryan Jones: But if that happens I think my team is all well-qualified, but you know it definitely helps to have those specialists. Everybody’s got that one lane they focus on, and they can swim in that lane and be really expert in that one domain.

Andre Alpar: OK so usually if you have a task you get one of your SEO guys along, one of your analytics guys along, and you tackle it together?

Ryan Jones: Oh yeah, as well as a creative guy, and an account guy, and a developer, you know bring the whole team together.

Andre Alpar: And then the bill will be huge!

Ryan Jones: It usually is.

Andre Alpar: But then again it’s brands, they’re OK with, you know… they’d rather be on the safe side and don’t have to be cheap.

Ryan Jones: Right.

Andre Alpar: So it’s the right strategy for them.

Ryan Jones: Yes. Exactly.

Andre Alpar: All right. So thanks so much for your time and for the interview.

Ryan Jones: Hey not a problem, any time, man. I appreciate it.