Determining an SEO campaigns Total Addressable Market (TAM) — Garrett Mehrguth // Directive

Quotes

• “We work exclusively with SaaS companies and my very first step when it comes to search is two-fold, one is category. So many of us in search is obsessed with this idea that we can rank and that everything about SEO is ranking websites but it should be about ranking your brands.” -Garrett

• “In other words, youre paying to be discovered organically. That is what I love to do first. How discoverable are you and making sure that you really understand the buying journey at the bottom of the funnel.” -Garrett

• “You have to look at the search engine results page holistically. As an advertiser, I like to map out the total addressable market (TAM).” -Garrett

• “The problem is, you want to make sure that the audience size that you are advertisingto matches what the actual amount of people in that industry are. What I do to map this out is I go to LinkedIn Sales Navigator.” -Garrett

• “The power in all this, if you want to be efficient with your advertisement and customer acquisition, you should know how many customers are already even out there.” -Garrett

• “First off, I love the strategy of thinking about your total addressable market by looking at the actual body count and volume of people. I think a lot of business strategists look at TAM as households, revenue-generated or the existing marketing size and your take is very tangible.” -Ben

• “You can actually be creative. The problem is, sometimes we act like our market is way bigger than it is and so we do this crappy scaled-out tactics and strategies that have a low impact in a noisy space.” -Garrett

• “SEO is not about how much traffic my website has but how much traffic my brand has.” -Garrett

• “Essentially what I do is a reverse funnel. So when I work on an account and when I do demand generation or lead generation for a software company, I first go to their category.” -Garrett

• “Figuring out your TAM helps you understand not only how many people you could target but also who specifically are they.” -Ben

• “The cool part is that it allows you to say, what is my goal? Its not velocity or volume of content but instead the quality of content.” -Garrett

• “The reason why I wanted to talk about SEO from a general marketers perspective, is that the first thing that business and marketing strategists do when they are trying to figure out whether a business opportunity is worth chasing, is they understand how big that opportunity is, who they need toreach and how they are going to dress them.” -Ben

• “And then SEO comes in traditionally down the funnel as an operational tactic. If you are thinking about what SEO strategies you should be implemented, what is effective and you need to communicate that with your organization, understanding TAM can be very important.” -Ben

• “Lets play a scenario here. There are 8,000 people that are in my target market and I am driving 7,000 unique visitors per month. That is a metric that is probably going to be interesting to your CMO. Then the question becomes, well who am I reaching through SEO and am I actually converting them?” -Ben