Case Study: Interview with Jörg Wukonig, SEO expert

wukonig.com is an internet agency in Graz, Austria, focusing on search engine optimisation (SEO) and search engine advertising as well as online marketing. For more than 20 years, Jörg Wukonig and his team have been offering far more than web design from their Graz base – namely consulting, conception and marketing of online projects at the highest technical level. We talked to Jörg about the challenges of SEO and about finance and liquidity.

Jörg, you are the owner of wukonig.com. You are specialists in search engine optimisation (SEO), search engine advertising and online marketing in general. An area that has gained enormously in importance, especially in recent years. Can you tell us briefly what your focus areas are?

Personally, I have been there since the birth of the World Wide Web (www) – it was opened to the general public in 1993 – and back then, as a student, I built my first websites. The whole thing developed from a hobby into a side job, and in 1999 we then founded an agency. Back then the focus was still on e-learning, then we worked on multimedia Flash websites. Later, findability became the relevant topic.

I have effectively lived through every evolutionary step of the www, and while at the beginning it was still important just to have a website, later on visibility and performance became more and more important. We developed alongside our customers – in summary, I would sum up our focus areas as follows:

Whether start-up or grown-up – we help you achieve more success on the web! We deliver more visitors, more enquiries and more sales. That way you get more profit.

You could also say: we offer data-driven online marketing, or growth marketing.

Jörg Wukonig

One thing matters to me: it is always about the triad of traffic, enquiries and analysis. Only those who look at the funnel as a whole are successful.

Search engine optimisation alone is not enough.

You have been doing this for a very long time and have built up incredible expertise as a result. What tips can you share with us for the online marketing area?

From a helicopter perspective, acquiring new customers via a website comes down, put simply, to three big questions you should ask yourself:

(1) Do I have sufficient qualified traffic, that is, visitors from a healthy mix of channels (Google Organic, Google Ads, referrals, social media organic & paid)?

(2) Do I manage to turn interested visitors into enquiries or sales?

(3) Can I draw conclusions from correctly recorded data / enquiries?

At the end of the day there is no point bringing the wrong target group to me from the wrong channel. At the end of the day, a number 1 position on Google is only worth something if I can turn that position into a business-relevant goal.

Working out where the biggest bottleneck lies across the steps 1) traffic, 2) enquiries, 3) analysis is the most important tip I can give. It sounds simple, but unfortunately it is not. That, though, is online marketing with a system.

And not sheer activism, playing a channel because you happen to like it yourself, for example Instagram. Without measuring whether it actually gets you anywhere. Online marketing without goals and key figures is like getting into the car and just driving off. Fun, but you do not know where you will end up, or whether you will arrive at all.

For those who want it to be less strategic: get to grips with LinkedIn as a content marketing tool. Depending on your business model, LinkedIn offers exciting options: high organic reach and mostly serious users. LinkedIn marketing will be the next big thing! My tip: here is an exciting talk about profile optimisation on LinkedIn.

Sorry, I simply have to ask. At first glance, your website does not look very attractive. What strategy lies behind that?

Quite honestly: it was never planned that way. We always had, and still have, so much to do that we never had time to make our own site look smart. What matters to us is that our customers are successful on the web. The site was intended as “one page tells it all”. Customers should see at a glance: who we are, who we work for and what we are currently doing.

We do offer a certain amount of information. The site has existed in this form since roughly 2001 and by now it is no longer up to date. But: we have found that – despite a sub-optimal website for effectively 20 years – our customers are satisfied and we are doing good business. Our key figures speak for themselves!

By now the website in this form serves as a “hygiene factor”. Ideally, the customers who get in touch with us are those who have already asked around in the market or who have come across us as a recommendation.

That is not a disadvantage! On the contrary! We have developed a sophisticated system for identifying our B2B customers, and so we know in advance who is going to contact us and why. So you should not underestimate any website; sometimes the logic behind it is the relevant criterion.

But: we want to relaunch our website soon and we are curious to see what effect that will have on the number of enquiries. Even so, allow me the following tip:

The most important thing – in my opinion – is to have a flourishing business; a beautiful website can help with that. But it does not have to. We are the best proof of that.

You have a small team, but you are, so to speak, owner-managed. How do you deal with the subject of finance?

As a small boutique agency for online marketing we cannot afford our own CFO, controller or business analyst. That is the same in many agencies, trades or one-man shows – with just one difference.

I want to have all the financial information in front of me, up to date every day, and to know how the company is doing.

Since we deal with numbers all the time in online and performance marketing, we have no fear of numbers, data and facts. That is why we started relatively early to develop our first dashboards, which give us important data such as the number of enquiries, quotes, sales, incoming and outgoing payments and so on. That already gave us a first rough picture of how the company was doing at any given moment.

Fortunately we never had “management by bank statement”. In the end, controlling and the like are also closely related to online marketing – it comes down to capturing the right data and drawing conclusions from it. Most important of all, though: the view must always be directed forwards, into the future. If my tax adviser explains what I did right or wrong last year or the year before, unfortunately that does not help me at all in the fast-moving world of online marketing. That is why we worked out very early on that finance is a matter for the boss.

I try to cover that in sales, controlling and liquidity. Without a business degree behind me. With common sense and street smartness. I believe that many managing directors know too little about the financial status of their company because they rely too heavily on external service providers. And yet numbers can be fun.

And how important is the subject of liquidity for you in that?

We are owner-managed and self-financed – I am very proud that we have not taken out a single loan since we started. For some that may be unimaginable, but the key lies quite simply in liquidity.

I always put it like this: the tax adviser looks in the rear-view mirror, the controller looks ahead!

Without liquidity I cannot seriously say how long I will last or how far I will get, and nobody would set out on a long journey without knowing whether the tank is full or half full. The concept of liquidity is very simple, but in everyday life there are always umpteen excuses for not dealing with it.

Countless years ago I sat down and, after some research, tried to build a system that was workable. I ended up with Excel. With that, I kept one thing in view for decades: our financial future.

In our conversations you told us that you spent a long time looking for cash flow planning software. How do you use COMMITLY in your company?

By the time I heard about Commitly I had already tried out countless solutions. Most of them had more disadvantages than advantages, so at the end of the day I always ended up back with Excel. With Commitly I thought it would be too good to be true if they could deliver even half of what was promised. I was positively surprised, and today I can say one thing: I no longer use Excel for cash flow planning.

Commitly has replaced Excel and I have finally found a tool for doing my cash flow planning online. Where I used to have to invest 1–2 hours capturing and transferring booking lines in Excel, it now takes a matter of minutes. Error-free, because in Excel you very easily run the risk of entering the wrong things in the wrong places. Follow-on errors are almost inevitable in Excel and, looking at it today, I have to say honestly that it is almost negligent to entrust the most valuable data you have – your financial data – to Excel.

I recently had that confirmed in a talk – the point was that “Excel is probably the most dangerous software in the world”, because it can quickly lead to errors, and much more besides.

My personal liquidity workflow looks like this: the regular emails gently remind me to take a look at Commitly. Then I log in and pull in the latest bank movements, which are correctly categorised within moments.

A quick look at the burndown chart then immediately shows me when liquidity is heading into the red. That way you can take countermeasures in good time, by increasing your income or cutting costs. The lovely thing is the scenarios you can play through, and if you choose a conservative scenario as your plan, you effectively have a safety buffer.

Since I am not a full-time CFO, I only use a fraction of the functions, but that is exactly Commitly’s strength. The software seems made precisely for beginners like me. I can capture all the data in a short space of time and know more than my tax adviser and my bank.

Alongside the burndown chart, the insights are also repeatedly relevant for me – for example, which clients account for which revenues. Here you always have to ask yourself the question: what if I only have very few clients who are responsible for a large share of my revenue? Losing 1–2 such important clients can throw many companies off balance. Unfortunately my bank account does not show me that. Commitly does.

I also regularly take a look at income to find out which services or products have developed particularly well, and of course I also try to see on the cost side whether everything is in order.

As with Google Analytics, the same applies in financial planning: You have to ask the right questions up front, then you can also get the right answers.

And: I know that – since I am not a professional CFO – I am certainly not yet using Commitly to 50% or even 100%, but in my case I am already streets ahead of where I was with my old Excel solution, and while 100% perfectionism is commendable, if the big picture is right then I am happy too. And one thing I can say: even people who still have a certain fear of cash flow planning will enjoy Commitly’s solution. I have tried a great many solutions and I am staying loyal to Commitly, because it is user-friendly, affordable and innovative.

As one of the early COMMITLY customers you have always given us great feedback and thus helped develop our tool. Where do you see the next improvements?

The big plus of Commitly was and is that a lot of time has been taken to gather user feedback and incorporate it. Anyone who deals with financial planning tools will notice that this unfortunately cannot be taken for granted. So I am very pleased that there is an exchange with the Commitly community and that a tool is being developed which solves problems that exist in the market.

I believe the market for cash flow planning in Germany, Austria and Switzerland is enormous. Unfortunately it is not served by banks, tax advisers or accountants, and that is a big opportunity. At the same time I also see 2 large user groups for Commitly: beginners and advanced users, and perhaps it will be possible to pick up beginners and also offer flexibility to advanced users. Not an easy step.

I see the next improvements in Commitly’s dashboard area, and also in Commitly helping me even better to draw the right conclusions from the correctly captured data.

Put differently: Commitly captures a great deal of data, and the next step is to visualise it and to take the necessary steps for everyday business. Experienced controllers see at a glance that unnecessarily high costs are occurring in one area; beginners may overlook that.

As a wish, it would be ideal for me if certain financial routines and optimisation suggestions could also be generated for beginners. That does not always have to be fully automated; as a first step it could also just consist of tips.

Commitly does replace the CFO and controller at some small businesses, and if there were tips here and there, that could be a great relief. In any case I am very glad that Commitly exists and I do not want to put myself through the time before it ever again!

Many thanks for your time!

Credits: Photos by Wukonig