The Importance of Creating a Simple and Explainable SEO Model for Your Client or CEO
Expert Tips for Effective Communication and Presentation in SEO with Tom Critchlow 25 January 2022 at 17 H CET (Paris)
In this clip, Tom Critchlow shares tips and tricks on how to create a simple and explainable model that will help you better present your SEO strategy and predictions to your boss or your client in a way that keeps the on your side.
00:00 Avoid overly complex models
00:55 Accurate, realistic and explainable model
01:23 CEOs don’t need your assumptions
01:40 Kalicube Knowledge Nuggets as example
Transcript from: The Importance of Creating a Simple and Explainable SEO Model for Your Client or CEO
Jason Barnard: I’m getting the numbers up, but we’re making them up on some kind of data. Is it worth explaining? Because I find they just get more and more confused. The more I explain that.
Tom Critchlow: The trick is not to make it overly complex and one of my favorite expressions is that “All models are wrong, but some are useful. “And I think that’s a really good working assumption, which is… when you’re trying to do Revenue Modeling, Revenue Forecasting, that kind of work. You have to create a model that is simple enough that you can walk somebody through it in a couple of minutes in a spreadsheet. That by the time you start getting to say, “well, the first half of the year we’re going to add in these assumptions then we’re going to layer on top seasonality. And then actually we got some assumptions here and I’m going to down weight this month for a particular reason here and I’m going to layer on top this like Regression Analysis I did with the SERPs” you can’t explain that to anyone, right? At that point, what you’re basically saying is: “I have a magic box, and my magic box says this number”. So what you really need to do is to create a model, which is hopefully still accurate or has some bearing on reality, but is explainable, right? if the model is not explainable. It doesn’t work. Especially when you get up to the senior levels of business, you really need to be able to kind of working on two or three assumptions at most. To be able to say these are the assumptions we’re making, based on those assumptions this is the revenue that we want.
Jason Barnard: Right, because the other problem is not only does the CEO not necessarily understand what you’re talking about. They don’t care about the assumptions you’ve made and they don’t have the time to sit and listen to you. They just want three slides to explain it to them and just go, okay, “That’s where we’re going. Now let’s go there”. Right! Just quickly we make Knowledge Nuggets from these, we cut out small clips and just to the team at Kalicube. That was a Knowledge Nugget that Tom just said, starting with that quote. So please do now answer the question.
Tom Critchlow: I was just gonna say the other downside to having an overly complex model, even if the CEO does trust you.
