Stephanie Briggs

Ryan Mendenhall Feb 13, 2025, 9:00 AM

Welcome Folks to The SEO Community's 4th ever Ask Me Anything.

Today we're joined by the illustrious @Unknown User, who's proven she means business when it comes to understand "What Google Wants." From her to her & @Unknown User' , she brings to the table a wealth of wisdom we can learn from today.

*More About Stephanie*

is an Oregon-based SEO consultant at her company, Briggsby, where she spends her days working on SEO and content strategy with clients. She has 15 years of SEO experience and holds an M.S. in Market Research.

She's known for her *strategic focus on business cases* and *data-driven prioritization*. She has built a reputation for cutting through the noise of lengthy SEO checklists and honing in on the few high-impact opportunities that truly drive growth. Her approach combines forecasting, ROI analysis, and a laser focus on aligning content with user intent.

Whether she’s mapping out product facets for an e-commerce brand or breathing new life into a niche Alaskan travel site, Stephanie excels at *content strategy*, *information architecture*, and *persuasion*. She works closely with her clients—rarely more than two or three at once—to refine site structure, update underperforming pages, and seize new content opportunities. Her hands-on consulting style ensures that both executives and engineering teams understand the “why” behind each recommendation.

________________________

Now the time is yours. Ask away!!

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 9:00 AM

Hi all! I'm excited to be here. Ask me anything about SEO or consulting/freelancing life!

Noah Feb 13, 2025, 9:01 AM

What’s it like partnering with your spouse?

7 replies

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 9:04 AM

It's mostly great with some drawbacks. It allowed for an honesty and vulnerability that you couldn't have with traditional coworkers. It pushed us to create good, creative strategies and decks. Being able to say things like "Honestly that deck isn't your best work. Maybe try restructuring it."

We worked together in a way that most people don't get to - we collaborated on messages, strategies, etc.

Noah Feb 13, 2025, 9:05 AM

Rad. My wife and I would kill each other if we worked closely together.

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 9:06 AM

The downside is that our whole lives were together. If we got annoyed with our coworker, we were annoyed with each other. It helped having an office that was in a separate part of town and, later, a separate part of the house. Now that we're parenting together, too, though, there are benefits to doing work separately. I miss it a lot though!

Ryan Mendenhall Feb 13, 2025, 9:06 AM

Us too @noahlearner. We tried it before and we're both so competitive and like to lead that it's tough.

Noah Feb 13, 2025, 9:06 AM

Too many ALphas in the room.

Ryan Mendenhall Feb 13, 2025, 9:07 AM

@stephanie How recently have you been consulting on your own?

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 11:42 AM

I’ve been solo since 2022, before that we worked together for 7 years. It’s still nice to have another SEO in the house to bounce ideas off of!

Ryan Mendenhall Feb 13, 2025, 9:02 AM

Stephanie, one thing I've always been interested in ever since I read Eli Schwartz's book on the topic is Product-Led SEO. What is it and how do you go about it for a company you're working with?

12 replies

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 9:09 AM

I think of product-led SEO as strategic, revenue-driven SEO. I work mostly with bigger companies who have product and engineering teams. To get on their roadmaps we need a solid business case (with good revenue opportunities) to get things done. So much of my work is planning and persuasion. The execution is, in comparison, the easy part.

When I work with smaller companies, we have limited resources, so we're product-led in those cases, too. I don't want to spend time on projects that won't help the business' bottom line.

Of course that includes creating TOFU content, too, but everything is done from the perspective of "is this serving our business goals?"

Ryan Mendenhall Feb 13, 2025, 9:13 AM

So... @stephanie

1. what does the persuasion entail to get buy in for projects?

2. What does the actual process of execution look like? What kind of content/pages are you building (or not) and does it usually involve some sort of programmatic or scaling content component?

Noah Feb 13, 2025, 9:13 AM

I want to do a Campfire Chat with you on just this:

> To get on their roadmaps we need a solid business case (with good revenue opportunities) to get things done. So much of my work is planning and persuasion.

And if anyone else isn’t subscribed, @stephanie ’s Substack is legit ????

Her last one talked about forecasting and was totally rad:

Noah Feb 13, 2025, 9:14 AM

How are you using NLP / AI in your day to day?

Dorron Feb 13, 2025, 9:24 AM

Love this shift In mindset applied to SEO. Learning marketing triggers and herustics, positioning and persuasion imo is the future for SEO. Clicks and curiosity is earned not given.

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 9:59 AM

If it's just a quick business case for the SEO team, I package it up in a Basecamp message with opportunity and key requirements (like to get this opportunity we need ABC features, if we take XYZ approach this opportunity is not feasible.)

But more often than not, my work is making decks. And I spend a lot of time thinking about what that story needs to be. It starts a lot with setting the tone "The SEO program drives many thousands/millions of visits. It accounts for 30% of our audience."

Then I try to simplify the message so that it feels silly not to do what we're asking, so for example it will often be things like:

• 100K people a month are searching for this product. We have it, but the pages aren't accessible, so we just need to turn them on so Google can see them and customers can find us.

• Topic A is 10X the size of Topic B. Google trusts on this topic, we rank on whatever be publish. Let's lean in.

• 40% of people coming to our site start on a Category page, not our homepage. Let's make it a good experience for them.

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 9:59 AM

• Showing a competitor doing something well, and putting that screenshot side by side with our site.

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 10:00 AM

• Operationally showing that we are spending 70% of our time making posts that drive no long-term traffic (to prioritize creating SEO-driven content.)

Then by the time you throw up the table with the traffic opportunity, it's a clear winner

Ryan Mendenhall Feb 13, 2025, 10:08 AM

Oh man! That's so good! Reminds me of this:

Ryan Mendenhall Feb 13, 2025, 10:10 AM

And this:

Noah Feb 13, 2025, 10:12 AM

> Then by the time you throw up the table with the traffic opportunity, it’s a clear winner

So lots of defining and then resolving of problems in your story telling?

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 11:03 AM

Yes, totally. And a lot of like, we have this data or expertise and these products already, we just need to unlock their potential.

Noah Feb 13, 2025, 9:04 AM

What do you think are some of the reasons you’ve been able to win pitches for new engagements? And what do you think are some elements of a winning pitch?

5 replies

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 9:14 AM

99% of my new business comes from a referral or someone who has seen one of us (me or Justin, before he moved on to Paramount) so they have a good sense of our approach and work ethic. We're really lucky on that front. They come in with an idea of what we're about. Then when it comes to our proposal, I share detailed case studies with strong growth numbers. So I feel like we have the proof to back up our approach.

My selling point is, if you work with me, you're going to get me on your project (not being handed off to a junior SEO like many agencies.) I have a lot of experience and good results. I'm great at content, strategy, analytics, forecasting, and getting things done. If that's what you need, it'll be a great partnership.

I also focus much more energy on retaining than new biz. The question that terrifies me every time I ask it, but I try to ask it a few times a year is "How do you think things are going in our project? Is there anything you'd like to see change?" Most of my engagements last 7+ years (some 10+) and they end because I decide it's no longer a good fit for me, not the other way around.

Noah Feb 13, 2025, 9:16 AM

rad.

Ryan Mendenhall Feb 13, 2025, 9:19 AM

Speaking of...what is "our approach"?

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 10:07 AM

I guess that this is a partnership. There's not a lot of process or standardization. I'm in the trenches with you, working on whatever priorities come up, and working ruthlessly to grow.

Noah Feb 13, 2025, 10:09 AM

> working ruthlessly to grow

:pinched_fingers

Ryan Mendenhall Feb 13, 2025, 9:05 AM

One thing I'm struggling with right now as a freelance consultant is how to organize my time to make sure I'm effective and how to do significant work without a team.

3 replies

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 9:18 AM

My rules are:

• I can't be scheduled out for more than 75% of my available time. I need 25% of my time to be flexible and allow for sick days, burned out days that I just can't be efficient, working on my newsletter, etc.

• My time is divided into half days. I never work on more than two clients in a full day. (One in the morning, one in the afternoon. Sometimes one client all day). That way my time is focused and productive.

• I never have more than 3 clients at a time, so I can stay really involved and never drop the ball on anyone.

• If I'm having an unproductive, wheel spinning day. I take time off and go walk or paint or read. Freelancing is a really creative job, and I find leaning into "artist strategies" really helps.

Ryan Mendenhall Feb 13, 2025, 9:22 AM

That's so helpful! Thanks for sharing those.

So, I guess with rule #3 then, you'd likely have a bar set for the least amount you'd charge?

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 10:05 AM

$5K minimum for smaller sites. That helps exclude super small sites that I'm not a fit for. Most large sites I wouldn't go under $7K minimum each month.

Ryan Mendenhall Feb 13, 2025, 9:10 AM

@jamckiernan asks a couple Qs from the road:

1. What types of projects have you seen repeatedly across clients?

5 replies

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 9:21 AM

1. Menus, whether it's the main nav, a blog nav, or a subnav always come up. Year after year.

2. Someone wants to redesign a page template to be more modern (valid!) and we have to figure out how to approach a new design without losing SEO progress we've made.

3. We hit some sort of wall in performance, and the next step is expanding into a new market. This usually involves a new page type (e-comm, travel, content.) and research about how much opportunity there is and the best approach of how to tackle it.

4. For big sites, businesses cases and prioritization for a ton of different projects.

5. For all sites, monitoring SERP changes and adapting (intent changes, title changes, template changes, etc.)

I'm curious about your answer on this, @jamckiernan

Noah Feb 13, 2025, 9:27 AM

Tell me more about your approach to:

> Monitoring SERP changes and adapting (intent changes, title changes, template changes, etc.)

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 10:06 AM

STAT is a lifesaver for e-comm. Semrush history, too. Then it's a lot of manual review and using the Wayback machine. For larger sites, we also have a change log which is SO IMPORTANT

Noah Feb 13, 2025, 10:09 AM

Love the Changelog.

Jared McKiernan Feb 13, 2025, 6:02 PM

Thanks @stephanie!! I feel like I keep seeing:

Restructure content processes to focus much more on high-intent content, and get away from “what is X” informational content and “topics 1-2 steps away which are intended for some vague topical relevance reasons”

And then similar to your header project, restructuring internal linking to spend much more on high value pages and get rid of crawl traps and unoptimized use of link equity

Ryan Mendenhall Feb 13, 2025, 9:10 AM

2. Do you find search intent is changing with the rise of AI? @Unknown User

2 replies

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 9:26 AM

I haven’t seen AI impact user behavior and change how people are searching yet. (Though I think that could come.) If anyone else has seen this, I'd love to hear about it.

AIOs are crushing short, easy answers. In places where we had #1 ranking (no ads) and an AI overview was added, traffic dropped 40-60%. These are queries that are more slightly more complex than a featured snippet but not deep. Strategy wise, we still target this content, because we want our brands to be a source for GenAI. We want to be part of the conversation. But we set expectations lower for traffic.

Beyond AIOs, Google has turned up the volume on search features that are most definitely powered by AI/ML. If you search on your phone for “things to do in Seattle” you’ll see what I mean. Organic CTR is clearly Google's absolute lowest priority on these queries, lol.

One area I'm watching is health. ChatGPT gives actual medical advice if you ask it to review your lab work or test results. I completely understand why Google and sites like the Mayo Clinic are super vague on their answers (med stuff is an absolute legal landmine.) But I'll be watching whether AI pulls back or continues to provide advice where other companies are more careful. (Finance is another area where I can see it offering more than what Google can.)

Really curious to hear everyone else's thoughts on this and what you're seeing!

Ryan Mendenhall Feb 13, 2025, 9:35 AM

It's DEF changed how I search!

I mean I'm searching for answers to things ALL the time. Whereas Google was nearly 100% of my starting point prior to ChatGPT, it's now probably 15% or less. Even with AIOs, I find that the conversational aspect of Chat biases me to do most of my queries via an LLM.

Every now and then I'll still type questions into Google, but, often just end up copy and pasting the same query into ChatGPT when I don't get what I want there.

Also, I'm MUCH more inclined to just ask what I want, instead of trying to construct a phrase I think will bring back results.

Boris Kuslitskiy Feb 13, 2025, 9:11 AM

How do you manage a consistent stream of revenue with a low number of (presumably big) clients?

8 replies

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 9:32 AM

Good question.

First, a 6 month minimum contract, but we usually renew for 12 months.

In terms of the actual project, I stay very aligned to whatever my contact (usually a SEO manager/director, in small companies the CEO) is working on. I don't have a lot of processes or busy work. If they get asked to make a deck about AI, I'll dive in and put together a draft deck. If engineering wants to A/B test a new menu design, I'll analyze the organic traffic impact of that design.

I make it my job to notice traffic dips before they do. I come to the table with what happened, why, and how we can move forward.

To maintain a pipeline, I try to speak once per year. I have my newsletter and am involved here. When people reach out and I can't take on work, I add them to a waitlist, so if I ever do hit a point of needing new clients, I can reach out to my list.

Boris Kuslitskiy Feb 13, 2025, 9:43 AM

That sounds almost like you're in-house for a few companies, tackling whatever the relevant needs may be.

Boris Kuslitskiy Feb 13, 2025, 9:50 AM

How often do those on your wait list no longer need/remain in thr market for your services by the time your plate frees up?

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 10:03 AM

Yeah, I try to sell myself as essentially a fractional SEO manager or SEO director. The benefit is I have far fewer meetings than most in house folks and can go heads down and get things done (especially meaty projects)

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 10:03 AM

I only had to reach out to my list once, tbh. But they found budget to work with me and eventually fired their other agency that they had worked with in the interim.

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 10:04 AM

If I were to do it today, I think it would be a lot harder for folks that reached out awhile ago to find budgets. It's hard times in SEO for sure.

Boris Kuslitskiy Feb 13, 2025, 10:14 AM

That makes sense. Thank you for your answers! This gave me a new perspective on freelancing.

Boris Kuslitskiy Feb 13, 2025, 10:15 AM

Or rather, connected a few existing thoughts together for a realization.

Jessica Smith Feb 13, 2025, 9:11 AM

How do you analyze underperforming pages?

3 replies

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 9:34 AM

If a page stops performing, I check whether there was a release that changed something on the site and I look at search results to see if there were changes there. (If it's a content or SAAS site, I check SERPs myself or sometimes use Semrush history. If it's ecommerce, STAT is a lifesaver because it tracks PLAs and other shopping features better than anything else I've found.)

This sounds hokey, but the question I ask myself is "Is this the best page on the internet about this?" That involves:

• Does the intent match what users are looking for?

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 9:34 AM

(hit enter too early)

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 9:35 AM

• Is this a brand customers want?

• Is the content/text a better experience than what others have?

If all of that is true and it's still not performing, I look to architecture and technical issues.

Ryan Mendenhall Feb 13, 2025, 9:17 AM

5 replies

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 9:41 AM

For work: I use it to quickly make charts ands occasionally for research. I use it to validate/debug HTML. For my startup client, I will have it throw together a paragraph or two if it's something basic/known. I recently used ChatGPT's deep research to do some competitive analysis - it did not surface anything new, but it ended up being a good primer for new hires at the company I used it for.

Personally: I am really enjoying ChatGPT to ask parenting questions, get recipe ideas, sort out health questions.

I don't trust AI for content creation yet. We tried it for product descriptions, but the hallucinations and errors were a headache. It still needed full human review (we tried many vendors.)

For content creation, when it comes to every post, I believe it's only worth writing one (and can only rank) if you create the best post on the internet about a topic. AI is far, far away from hitting that goal. It can spin out generic, wordy content, but nothing new. Even custom solutions with a lot of brand voice and training/prompts just don't get me what I need.

I think AI will get there, possibly even pretty soon, it's just not good enough yet.

Ryan Mendenhall Feb 13, 2025, 9:45 AM

Oh man! I'd love to talk with you more about what you've tried for product descriptions. I'm working on some workflows to address just that issue.

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 9:53 AM

I feel like I tried a lot of tools and nothing was good tbh. So we mostly moved on from that idea for now. If you end up finding something that works I'd love to hear about it ????

Ryan Mendenhall Feb 13, 2025, 11:54 AM

What tools did you try that weren't hitting the mark?

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 11:59 AM

, Jasper, ChatGPT…. all the mainstream ones and then a few specialty ones. I wasn’t the lead on this project so I can’t recall all we tested.

Noah Feb 13, 2025, 9:21 AM

Do you like speaking? Do you still find it rewarding?

1 reply

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 9:44 AM

I do like speaking. It's a fun challenge and I do find it rewarding. It's also something I feel like I have to do to maintain my personal brand and consulting practice.

But to do it right (make a good, actionable deck and bring something new to the table, have a well-rehearsed talk) - it's a HUGE time commitment. I'm realizing that in this stage of life, I'm only willing to make that commitment once a year. Beyond that, I want to spend my time on family, hobbies, and vacations that aren't tied to work.

Noah Feb 13, 2025, 9:21 AM

Who are you jealous of in SEO?

3 replies

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 9:46 AM

AJ Kohn and Matthew J Brown are SEOs who have maintained excellent reputations and have solid consulting practices. I have never worked with them directly, but I know they're smart and they do really good work. That inspires me.

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 9:46 AM

The two SEOs I love to follow and learn from right now are Mark Williams-Cook and Brodie Clark. They're constantly bringing new and interesting insight to the table, which is hard in such a mature industry.

Noah Feb 13, 2025, 10:13 AM

Boom.

Ryan Mendenhall Feb 13, 2025, 9:27 AM

You've mentioned prioritization a few times. What does your prioritization process look like (research, common places / data sources you start with, etc)?

2 replies

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 9:51 AM

I wrote a newsletter about that yesterday, haha. Here's the link:

My two starting places are really only keyword research or site traffic and applying some sort of percent change. The trick is thinking through all the logical pieces of what is going to be affected and how much (which is usually pulled from experience, sometimes from case studies or competitive data). And then my time is either spent on developing a solid keyword set if I'm doing keyword research and pulling data from analytics specific to a template/timeframe, then packaging it up nicely.

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 9:52 AM

It's usually, what's the traffic/revenue opportunity for this new page type OR what's the percent growth we can see on the affected page type? And it's a straightforward question, but it takes a good chunk of time to put together the data and get the answer.

Ryan Mendenhall Feb 13, 2025, 9:52 AM

Ryan Mendenhall Feb 13, 2025, 10:01 AM

Well, folks, there you have it. We've hit the top of the hour.

Let's give a warm round of applause for @Unknown User who really gave her all to these questions today!

My brain is officially bigger after that.

Kane Jamison Feb 13, 2025, 10:01 AM

One of the things I really like about Stephanie's content over the years is that she often seems to share solid examples of what I would think of as '_block and tackle_' SEO working really well.

Example from : (4) building out internal category structure leading to 6x monthly traffic growth. (5) making incremental changes to an individual page of content, (3) noticing an almost linear relationship between word count and average visits on ecom product pages.

So my question is - could you talk a little bit about your personal process for identifying client opportunities, and whether or not this 'back to the basics' theme is something you intentionally focus on or not?

7 replies

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 10:16 AM

That's to nice, Kane! Thank you!

The "back to the basics" theme is pretty intentional, I think, because it usually works. I remember one year, our talking point with a client was "ferrari with flat tires" - they had so much authority and brand awareness locked up in an old, technically terrible site.

My process for identifying opportunities involves:

• always tracking competitor changes, using wayback machine to figure out when/why they grew

• A trended traffic line (year over year) for every template on a site, so I can quickly figure out when something is taking off (or has a problem)

• Actually taking time every quarter to tediously look through GSC for a ton of different page types and templates (a lot of my best, most successful ideas come from the depths of GSC)

• Taking time every month to manually perform searches on my phone for top queries and noticing new search features and thinking about how I can leverage them

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 10:16 AM

Then finally, when it's annual roadmap time, I purposely think through ideas for different site parts that will leverage different teams. (If we get engineers redesigning a category page, can we work with content on the blog at the same time, or work with IA to restructure the menu.)

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 10:17 AM

I loved Kane's most recent blog post! Everyone go read it:

Kane Jamison Feb 13, 2025, 10:18 AM

Do you go so far as to track competitors by page templates as well?

Kane Jamison Feb 13, 2025, 10:18 AM

"ferrari with flat tires" is gold, btw

Ryan Mendenhall Feb 13, 2025, 10:19 AM

@Unknown User gave a great talk at BrightonSEO that underscores your first point about tracking competitors - really important:

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 10:25 AM

I don’t, but I probably should. I definitely troll the depths of their SEMrush keywords by template type.

In a way we essentially do when we track keyword groups with competitors in STAT

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 10:01 AM

It's a snow day in Oregon, so I'm going to step outside with a 5 year old for a few minutes. I'll be checking in all day if anyone wants to ask something else. DMs are open, too.

I'd love for you to subscribe to my Substack: I publish about once a quarter, and only if I have something useful to say ;-)

Adrienne Kmetz Feb 13, 2025, 10:06 AM

Thank you so much Stephanie for sharing so much of yourself! I know I’m late but if you have time:

Can you speak a little to how you weather the “valley” of being a consultant or freelancer?

I think many people go out on their own and experience what they experience in SEO: that the buildup to critical mass where your personal branding efforts are starting to work takes time and faith. Do you have words of wisdom for those who are wondering if they should keep going or not?

3 replies

Stephanie Briggs Feb 13, 2025, 10:39 AM

I think of freelancing as someone telling you what to do, and consulting as more operating like an agency, directing your own work.

When it comes to beginning to consult, I think the best approach is a “side hustle” until you have enough momentum/income to replace your day job income. The personal brand building that’s needed can be grueling, and it’s not for everyone.

From a practical perspective, I love the flexibility of my hours and schedule right now with consulting. But if I needed to take a long leave (like when I did maternity leave), I have the benefit that we could live fully on my spouse’s income during that time. I’ve also found the insurance I can get as a consultant is SO MUCH WORSE than big employer plans. There’s a lot of benefit to the stability and benefits of in house jobs that freelancers rarely talk about. It’s definitely a trade-off.

I also think that the best consultants have in house experience and understand how big companies work. So I see benefits to going in house for awhile, too.

All of that being said, I’m a consultant. I like consulting. Sometimes I have to give myself little pep talks reminding myself how much money companies have made because of my work and that helps me feel more confident ????

Adrienne Kmetz Feb 13, 2025, 10:57 AM

Haaardddd same on that last line!!! Made a lotta other people v v rich that means i’m successful right LOL

Thank you for the tips ????

Jared McKiernan Feb 14, 2025, 4:47 AM

That's a great distinction between freelancing and consulting!

Ask Me Anything with
Stephanie Briggs

Briggsby

13 Feb 2025 9:00 AM MST

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Briggsby

13 Feb 2025 9:00 AM MST

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Stephanie Briggs

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