Your traffic is flat, and you don’t have a budget to throw at the problem. What should you test first? And how do you get your boss to approve an experiment when you can’t promise it will work?
I put those questions to Jonathan Berthold, VP of Revenue at Ziff Davis, on The Search Engine Journal podcast. Jonathan is a longtime marketing strategist who works in both SEO and paid media.
We covered where to find bottom-of-funnel opportunities and how to keep a test small enough that it can’t take down a site. We also discussed how long to wait before judging a result, along with a gap he sees in both SEO and paid media: Marketers focus on generating traffic and overlook what happens after a user lands on the site.
[00:45] What To Test When Traffic Is Flat And Budget Is Tight
[02:44] Getting Leadership Buy-In For Experiments
[06:35] Testing Small Before Making Sitewide Changes
[07:37] How Long To Run An SEO Experiment
[09:00] How To Evaluate Paid Media Tests
[10:51] Landing Page And Funnel Tests Marketers Overlook
[13:04] Finding Link Opportunities In AI Citation Data
[14:29] Why Search Intent Matters More Than Volume
When traffic is flat and there’s no budget, Jonathan starts with a full site analysis to find out why traffic stalled. He has inherited sites in that condition before, ranging from B2C SaaS companies to informational lead-generation sites.
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