When I hold discovery calls with prospective daydream customers, the most important question I ask them is: are you playing to win, or are you playing to participate?

Playing to win means the customer acknowledges that:

1. SEO is either a #1 or #2 priority from a growth marketing perspective.

2. They are ready to commit and act with urgency.

Playing to participate means that the customer:

1. Is typically interested in “testing” SEO as a channel with minimal investment — usually producing a few blog posts per week.

2. Does not have a sense of urgency in executing.

At daydream, we’ll only take on customers who are playing to win. Here’s why 👇🏾

False negatives are prevalent in SEO

Any company that meets the following criteria should be able to succeed in SEO:

1. Has a reasonably high domain authority relative to their competitors.

2. Has a sizable cumulative search opportunity.

When a company checks these boxes but still fails to succeed, it assumes it’s due to a fundamental issue with the fit between SEO and the company, but this is typically indicative of a false negative.

The real problem is that they never had a strategy focused on winning to begin with. In SEO, as with most things in life, great results come from consistent, measured, and focused execution — not half-baked attempts. Playing to participate does not work in SEO because a critical level of focused investment is required before results begin to materialize.

While it’s true that SEO relies on longer-term drivers like an authoritative domain, topical coverage, etc. — all factors that take time to optimize — much of the ambiguity commonly felt in SEO is a result of slow execution. If you’re producing 10-20 blog posts per month (the typical pace for an agency), the number of “shots on goal” you’re taking is slow and will produce slow results.

If you’re producing content at a much faster pace, however, you’ll naturally see a much faster ramp to results. Consider the example of daydream case study customer OpenArt, which scaled to 300,000+ visits per month from daydream content by producing highly tailored pages rapidly, at a pace of around 100 per week

What does it mean to play to win?

Playing to win means that you created a foundation from day 0 (before you’ve started to invest in the channel) to de-risk the chances of failure early on. We accomplish this by weeding out risk in the two places that matter the most:

1. Foundational risk

After a discovery call, we ask every customer to commit to a strategy audit before we take them on. This strategy audit aims to validate five key things:

1. What are the key long-tail search patterns this company should target?

2. What is the cumulative size of those search patterns?

3. What is the competition within each of these respective search patterns?

4. How much content do we need to target each search pattern at scale?

5. What unique data assets does this company have that can help it differentiate its content when targeting each of these search patterns?

The purpose of this audit is to ensure that a potential customer’s engagement is de-risked before they ever sign with us. This is helpful to the customer because they can see the size and shape of their opportunity, as well as our plan for executing against those opportunities before they sign a contract. It’s also helpful for daydream because we don’t want to work with companies that aren’t a good fit for SEO to begin with—we’d rather spend our time on customers that do have a great use case.

2. Execution risk

Execution risk is largely concentrated in the speed and quality of content production for the search terms you’ve selected.

The problem is that most agencies ship content at a relatively slow pace — usually 10-30 blog posts per month. At daydream, we can produce output that is 10-20x faster than a typical agency while maintaining the quality bar that you’d expect of an agency.

Consider the example of daydream case study customer OpenArt, which scaled to 300,000+ visits per month from daydream content by producing pages rapidly, at a pace of around 100 per week. OpenArt has since earned 2X the revenue on its investment in daydream and is pacing for a much higher multiple by the end of the year.

What about quality?

The natural rebuttal to the suggestion above is that quality will suffer if output velocity is increased. Is this actually true?

It certainly could be if each piece of content naturally requires a large body of research work. However, if the content is more straightforward and serves a narrow search intent, this will unlikely be a problem. A good example of this is the data breaches campaign pSEO campaign that we executed for Twingate, a Series B cybersecurity company.

We took a programmatic approach to target all the “[company] data breach” search terms, producing over 600 of these articles without an issue, at the quality expected from a human writer (here’s an example!). This content, along with a few other types by daydream now accounts for 20% of the traffic sent to their sales demo pages.

It’s easier to play to win from the beginning

Before investing in SEO at all, reflect on whether this is the right time to invest — i.e are you playing to win? If you are, ensure that you have a clear plan to eliminate both foundational risk and executional risk. If you do this successfully you’ll have a higher probability of success, an easier time selling to internal stakeholders, and a far smoother ride from the beginning. Without doing so, prepare yourself for unexpected pitfalls, slow performance, and a lethargic pace of progress.

If you’d like to work with us on executing your SEO efforts from end-to-end, email me at thenuka@withdaydream.com and tell me about your use case!