On Wednesday 1st July, two different sets of perspectives and experiences, joined Dixon Jones to discuss how the approach to doing SEO for large enterprise sites differs from doing SEO for small businesses.
Whether you are an agency trying to get further up the food chain, or a large corporate wondering why those agile little startups are running rings around you, this webinar should give everyone something to think about.
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Representing Small Business
Judith Lewis, founder of DeCabbit Consultancy.
Representing the Enterprise Team
Mike King, CEO at iPullRank. Mike last spoke to Majestic in 2014, in an interview with Mel Carson, covering, amongst other subjects, backlink audit & competitor analysis.
And with a foot in both camps
Iman Hamdan, Growth and Organic SEO Manager for Yahoo Small Business.
Transcript
Dixon Jones
Okay, so we’re broadcasting now and we’re in recording mode, so anything you say now will be held against you in a court of public opinion probably. Hi guys, thank you very much for coming in to another Majestic webinar for Old Guard New Blood. We’ve got another diverse crowd again today. Everybody has been in the industry for a fair amount of time. I’m going to put Iman on the young side, and Judith has been around forever, and Mike came in somewhere in the middle over the last 20 years, but the fight today is between the concept of big SEO, enterprise level SEO, and small SME SEO. And I want to explore a little bit the differences between approaches for individuals, approaches for organizations, what’s different in those approaches and what’s the same. And I think the group I’ve got is incredibly well suited for this. So I’m going to let Judith, Mike and Iman introduce themselves. Judith, do you want to start?
Judith Lewis
Okay, sure. I’m Judith Lewis. You can use the search engine of your choice to really dig about what’s out there on me, and yes, that article about the chocoholic cybersex pioneer is about me. I’ve been around for I guess 23, 24 years now, but I got online in the 80s, mid 80s, so I’ve been online for more than half my life and longer than some of you have been alive I’m sure. That just makes me feel so old, because I am.
Judith Lewis
I have my own consultancy. It’s called DeCabbit Consulting. DeCabbit Consultancy, I should say. And you can find it online at decabbit.com, you can find me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, everywhere. And I love what I do, digital marketing. I’m kind of one of those M people, not a T person, so I do a lot of SEO but I do a lot of social media, I do a lot of PPC, I wrote a thesis on social media back in the early 90s back before it was sexy and cool, so I’ve got a lot of deep experience across it and I bring it to all the clients I work with.
Dixon Jones
So it’s all your fault that social media started.
Judith Lewis
Yeah, basically.
Dixon Jones
Mike, tell us about you.
Mike King
Hi, I’m Mike King. I’m the founder and managing director of an agency called iPullRank based here in New York City. You can’t Google me because I have one of the most common names in the world, but you can Google iPullRank. And yeah, I’m similar in that I’m an M shape marketer or whatever, deep knowledge in the development side, deep knowledge in just visual acquisition in general, and then also deep knowledge in the market research stuff as well. We work with a lot of enterprise brands of all size. Well, not all size. I guess all kind.
Dixon Jones
And you’ve just written a book.
Mike King
E-book, not like an actual book.
Dixon Jones
Yeah. But it’s quite an important book for this particular session. What’s your book?
Mike King
It’s the Modern Enterprise SEO Guide or what have your. I didn’t really see anything out there that really spoke to what the process needs to look like today, and so I worked with my team to generate a free e-book that you can download right now.
Dixon Jones
Excellent. We’ll find out at the end. We’ll put a link in the Q and A. Iman, tell us about yourself.
Iman Hamdan
First, it’s Iman.
Dixon Jones
Iman. I’ve only been saying that for six years.
Iman Hamdan
Yes. So I’ve been in the SEO field for like quite a while. It’s been a while. Let’s say it’s 13 years, not like you guys. So I was a web developer knowing exactly how to develop web pages, understanding the structure of that kind of thing, helped me to move forward with my career into SEOs. So as a mother of course I have to work in-house most of the time or small SMBs or SMEs. So small, medium size businesses, but it’s really awesome to work with these things. Understanding these technicalities help me to move forward with my career. Of course, agencies, it’s not my thing because it’s really a lot of diverse projects and I can’t keep up with my kids and work, of course. That’s why I didn’t move into it, but enterprises and small businesses is really quite enough for me.
Dixon Jones
And what’s your association in Yahoo?
Iman Hamdan
So association with Yahoo is really both. It’s like enterprises and small medium size business, so it’s not just only like that. So it never reaches the small business, but it’s small medium now. But it’s based on enterprises, so that’s how it is.
Dixon Jones
I mean, I think the three of you really epitomize that understanding of what happens when you’re trying to do enterprise kind of politics, SEO processes and small business SEO processes and stuff, so I’m pretty hopeful that we’re going to get some pretty juxtapositions or opposite points of view here. But I’ll start off with question number one before I jump into some of the questions from some of the registrants. But if you guys want to ask questions in the audience, I think I’ve got the Q and A system working. Maybe someone can put a question mark in the Q and A and I’ll make sure it’s working. Would be great. But if you do ask some questions, I’ll try and get those out to the guys here. Oh, I see a little question mark, so thank you very much whoever did that. That’s perfect. It wasn’t putting the question where I thought it was, so good thing I asked that.
Dixon Jones
Obviously this is a Majestic sponsored webinar. It’s not about Majestic in any way, but Majestic have got a new product out called Majestic Monitor. If you guys haven’t tried it, it’s at a completely different URL at majesticmonitor.com, and it’s using some of the backbone of Majestic to use a different way to find influences, and I think it’s a pretty interesting looking tool. I hope you’ll give it a try. I hope you play with it, and that’s the advert for Majestic sort of out the way and we’ll carry on moving on. We’ll come back to Majestic later, I’m sure.
Dixon Jones
Guys, I want to start with the obvious question. What is the one thing that you think is fundamentally different between an enterprise approach to SEO and a small business approach to SEO? I’ll start with Iman, if I pronounced that better this time.
Iman Hamdan
So anyhow, so enterprises SEO versus the small medium sizes or small businesses, it’s really two things exactly, justifications and flexibility in the process. That’s mainly the thing between them. SEO, no matter what the business is it’s the same processes, but unfortunately it is justifications and flexibility. Till now I just have a huddle between them, the process, that kind of thing. But it is really a challenge. It’s a beautiful thing, but in order to test and see that it’s a company achievement, it varies between these two businesses.
Dixon Jones
Okay, I’ll come back to that in a bit. I just want to try and get the first things out and I’ll come back with it. Sorry.
Iman Hamdan
No, no.
Mike King
I think in a word it’s scalability. Whether that’s scalability across the organization or scalability in whatever you’re implementing. You can’t just be like, “Oh yeah, let’s do something that works for three pages,” when you’re talking about enterprise. You got to figure out, how can we roll this out either site-wide or across multiple lines of business.
Dixon Jones
Okay. And Judith?
Judith Lewis
One of the things that I do is work across micro businesses as well as SMEs and enterprise, and the big difference as Mike already said is scalability for enterprise, but also as Iman… Did I say it right?
Iman Hamdan
Iman.
Judith Lewis
Iman?
Iman Hamdan
Iman.
Judith Lewis
Sorry.
Dixon Jones
That’s what I said. That’s what I said the first time around.
Judith Lewis
Yeah, because I thought he said Imam, and I was like Imam is a thing.
Iman Hamdan
Iman with a N.
Dixon Jones
Okay. Just say Iman with a N.
Mike King
I’m going to let y’all mess it up.
Iman Hamdan
Thank you, Mike.
Dixon Jones
It’s a good thing no one is watching, really.
Judith Lewis
The lovely youthful woman who has joined me on the panelists today.
Dixon Jones
Let me just turn down the red hue on my contact screen here, until my embarrassment fades. Go on.
Judith Lewis
Also, you have to think about the politics of any organization and I think SMEs and enterprise are the same on politics. The one thing that I find is the biggest difference is in an enterprise client, I will be asked to achieve KPIs I think are the stupidest things I’ve ever encountered in my entire life as far as KPIs, but it’s important for the client because that’s what they’re going to be bonused on. And I’m like, “But this is useless for your SEO,” and he’s like, “But this is what I’m going to get my bonus for achieving.” And I’m like, “Right, if we got to do it, we got to do it.” But SMEs are more bottom line oriented, so clients that are smaller, they really have to link those SEO optimization techniques to a bottom line improvement, whereas I think not always with enterprise. But I’ve experienced it more often than not with enterprise, or they’ll pay me to give them advice, and then not do it, then pay me to tell them why they’ve lost traffic.
Dixon Jones
I’ll come back to those three ideas, actually four ideas, in a little bit and try and drill into them a little bit more, because they’re the ones that you’ve started with before I jump into other questions and stuff. But Monty has asked us a good question, I think, to get into the talk proper. Because pretty much we all probably started with an SME kind of mindset, because we kind of learned our own SEO before. We all started before SEO was a thing on an enterprise level. That kind of came on later. So Monty’s question is, “What’s the single learning that you’ve carried over from SMB or SME, to big enterprise, or the other way around if you were in the big enterprise to start?” So what carries on through from small business mentality to a large business mentality? Mike, do you want to go first on this one?
Mike King
Yeah, I think that working with a smaller business you’re learning how to do more with less, and then you also have to learn how to niche down so you can be effective competing with a lot of these bigger, more entrenched brands. So to that end you really end up looking at the nuances of things in a different way. And then once you get to the point of working with large enterprise and you apply those same concepts, they just work even easier.
Mike King
So as an example, lets say we’re talking about link building tactic. One of the ones that we use a lot is comparing a list of your followers on Twitter versus the linking route domains in your back link profile. So when you’ve got only a couple thousand followers, that’s a cool little tactic to probably get you 100 links. When we’re talking about a brand that has a million followers, well then that becomes a much bigger opportunity. So yeah, being creative and then being able to scale those creative ideas up.
Dixon Jones
Does that mean then that we as SEOs, we become ridiculously efficient money wise for enterprise level, that kind of thing? We’re just cheap then, surely.
Mike King
I mean, we’re already inherently cheap. Think about what is paid for paid search versus what is paid for organic search. We are probably one of the cheapest channels.
Dixon Jones
Iman, you want to jump in?
Iman Hamdan
Yes, well definitely the cheapest, even though they don’t understand what we do. For enterprise is really the challenge is you have to every time explain exactly what you do for PMM or stakeholders, which is really a waste of time, because they want to estimate the worth by dollar and revenue wise, and unfortunately to move forward and make them understand the technicalities, the back linking and the referrals by dollar, it’s not always right for SEO.
Dixon Jones
Do you think that’s the same when you’re justifying putting a banner in an airport for example? Do they not have to do the same kind of justification for each one of those banners, or is that totally not the same?
Iman Hamdan
They do, but unfortunately it’s not the same. It’s not like SEO because they think it is granted relationship for them to get it. Eventually Google will have them there, but that’s what I learned from Bill Hunt that one time. There’s a way. There’s a highway also.
Dixon Jones
As long as they don’t block the bot. Judith, one single thing in the other direction.
Judith Lewis
I think the biggest thing that I’ve taken away from my time between SMEs and enterprise is I once did a calculation of the cost per click on SEO versus PPC, and that is the one way that you can win people over is to demonstrate that if we look at five years worth of time and look at the cost per click on an SEO versus a PPC campaign, that you can instantly win any C-suite or anyone anywhere by just doing that calculation. Or even over a year, the amount of money you spend on an SEO verus the amount you spend per click on PPC, you can easily demonstrate that SEO is a more cost-efficient channel. That’s the thing that I’ve taken away, is some of the data analysis that I’ve done for larger companies, you can actually easily then spin up the algorithms for smaller companies and demonstrate the value you’re bringing.
Dixon Jones
To Iman’s point, can’t that also be argued that to the enterprise people in Iman’s world saying, “Yes, but we should have got the organic traffic anyway whether we’ve got an SEO or not.” Is that not a pushback when you present that data, or just there’s never been a pushback for you?
Judith Lewis
My cheat is I use SEOmonitor that breaks out the brand versus non-brand for me so I don’t have to do any of that, and I can demonstrate their non-branded traffic that they would not have gotten had they not actually optimized somehow for the content that they had. So if they had put it all behind a password protected firewall and hidden it from the world, we can show the difference between the two using that tool. Plus yeah, sure, you can try, but I’ve actually done, weirdly, a data analysis on the number of people driven on organic search or directly to a website based on the underground ads that they placed over Christmas, and we were able to demonstrate that the underground ads were less efficient than the link building campaign we did pound for pound. So tube advertising versus our outreach campaign, our outreach campaign was more cost-effective.
Dixon Jones
And I think if you get people to put in weird URLs, I want one of those from the underground.com and say tracking URL then you can do that fairly effectively can’t you? Okay. So SEO, mega efficient in an enterprise organization. Probably not in everything in SEO, but you can get a lot more bang for your buck, is the main thing. You learn it right in a small business and then take that into a business, if you can get it into a business. But that comes on to our second question, which is Matt… I just won’t pronounce your surname. No, I will. I’ll try. Caramenico.
Mike King
You’re bad at names, Dixon.
Dixon Jones
Yeah, I’m terrible with names, faces, and yeah. Try me speaking a different language. It’s terrible. “Any tips on bringing the organization along for the ride?” So I think this plays to particularly Iman’s point at the start, and I think everyone had that justification you talked about at the start, and politics you mentioned, Judith. So it’s harder to push anything through at an enterprise level.
Mike King
It’s all education. You’ve got to educate at multiple levels. You’ve got to educate with respect to what people care about at those different levels. One of the things that I always try to impress upon my team when we’re creating deliverables is that you’ve got to think about the deliverable that you’re making as though it’s going to somebody in the organization that you’ve never even spoke to, you don’t know what they do, this document is going to come across their desk. So if you’re like, “Hey, you need to fix your tags,” and you don’t explain what the importance of that is or what the context is, you’re never going to get anything through. So it’s all about education, it’s all about meeting the right stakeholders and understanding the workflows and governance models within the organization, otherwise nothing is ever going to happen.
Dixon Jones
That’s interesting. Anyone else want to jump in on that?
Iman Hamdan
Yeah, so it’s like education, the whole organization about it, it’s like different from different kind of businesses. But it’s like the objective of SEO is really a longterm thing. I keep educating that stakeholder or businesses all the time, even though they’re not interesting about it, but they want to hear about it. But it’s kind of documented. I believe they don’t go through it. So moving through that kind of process is going slower from what I have been seeing, that behavior. And I have been seeing that small businesses or SMEs are more agile without educating them. They’re moving forward and trust worthy, that’s why they’re looking for SEOs to help them, even though for short terms, it’s not just a huge terms like in enterprises. But unfortunately, it’s more agile than enterprise to move forward. And the campaign of SEO, it’s really much easier to replicate in their websites.
Dixon Jones
Is it that small businesses are more agile or that you only need to tell one person and that person either gets it or doesn’t get it?
Iman Hamdan
Yes.
Dixon Jones
Whereas in a larger organization, you’ve got to get 10 people to get it at least before it goes anywhere. So it may be that the agility is based on the individual in a small business which can’t transpose over to a large organization.
Mike King
Yeah, but it can certainly be incredibly frustrating. We’ll have a recommendation like, “Hey, make additional subdirectories in Google Search Console,” something that I can physically just do. I have the access to do, but I still got to talk to 10 people before I can press the button, so that can definitely be frustrating.
Judith Lewis
Yeah, there’s a lot of structures in enterprise SEO, I think, that seem to be made to stymie us, that really can trip people up. And each time you step up the ladder it gets more and more difficult, but it can be similar with SMEs. I have two CEOs I deal with. One literally physically grabbed me, like my arm, dragged me to a meeting, and was quite forceful about wanting to use my services absolutely, and another CEO where I happened to meet him at an event, he was incredibly dismissive of SEOs and what we did. He said that we were useless, pointless, we were expensive and we got no results, and so I dug in a little bit. Turned out he had a really bad experience with that in PRs. I talked to him over a number of months, about a year, and after a year he let me show him what SEOs actually do, and he’s still a client now two years later. But it’s not just enterprise where you can get tripped up. It’s also small business.
Mike King
Sure. It’s people.
Dixon Jones
Absolutely. It’s interesting. Slightly aside, there’s a really interesting article on intercom.com. They call it Day Zero. They’re really talking about software as a services technology and saying that if you’ve got something like Salesforce or Google Analytics or software as a service, you can get somebody through the door, but they’re not going to engage until they’ve got the means to integrate. So you can’t change anything until you’ve got the means to make that happen all the way through.
Dixon Jones
I think just little things like CMS systems, before WordPress, SEO was really hard because you couldn’t do any kind of change. Now, I guess enterprise systems are still very hard because you can’t get into the CMS most of the time, but where you can, at least you can write content, for example. So Intercom sort of has this concept that you don’t start measuring success of engagement until you’ve got the ability for the client to actually implement the ideas of the product. And I think it’s an interesting idea, because an enterprise level customer basically shouldn’t start expecting success until the ground rules of permissions and workflow is allowed that will allow something to actually happen. It may not be the best thing that you want, but at least you can do something.
Mike King
Yeah. That really comes down to prioritization. And again, to Iman’s point, that is one of the things that you have to work with the team to develop. This is true in all types of organizations, but they kind of force you to do it in the enterprise organizations. And the information that you collect about what they can actually do is what helps you force prioritize things that you want them to do.
Dixon Jones
And communicating that prioritization is… Sorry, Iman. Go on.
Iman Hamdan
No, I wasn’t.
Dixon Jones
It’s fine. Okay. “Is it wise to give away the farm, so to speak, through content on your blog and other platforms? If and when you’re hired, what’s left to deliver?” The question is, do you want to give away all your secrets before you engage the client? What are your thoughts on that?
Judith Lewis
I have a really good saying in my head all the time in my life. I used to be really reluctant to give things away on stage. I used to not want to tell people everything that I did on stage, because I was worried, what value could I bring to a client if I’ve just given away everything that I do? And the thing I learned is, especially after speaking at the same conference year after year, people don’t even do the simple things I tell them to, like implement Google Search Console, people. I went to a conference, told the audience to do that. Guy comes up to me next year and he said, “You know, the one thing you told us if we do one thing after your talk do this. I haven’t done it yet, but I will after this year.” I’m like, “366 days later dude. Seriously, one thing and you couldn’t do that.”
This is the thing. You can put it on your blog, you can say it on stage, they’re not going to do it. 99% of them won’t. The 1% that do are the innovators and the people who will challenge you in the future. Great. Fabulous. Please do it. I’m over 50 now and I’m tired and old, and I just want to retire soon. So do it. Just do it. But people won’t. So to the person looking at this issue of, do we give away the farm, give away the farm. Don’t give them exact data, but do it. Just do it. They won’t do anything with it. They’ll be like, “Wow, smart person. We should hire that person.”
Mike King
Yip, and I echo that 100%, maybe even more, because I have given away the data, I have given away the actual code, and people still don’t do it. So you ain’t got to worry about that at all. Just put it all out there.
Iman Hamdan
Give it to me.
Dixon Jones
Good. People don’t want to do it. And the truth of the matter is knowing what to do and doing it are two entirely different exercises. We all know that we should get up in the morning, do a 5 mile run before breakfast and make sure that we don’t eat any meat, alcohol, all these things, not good stuff. Yeah. We know this, but we don’t do them. And it’s the same with SEO. You know you could fix that plumbing thing if you really tried, but you could call in a plumber as well, surely. So I agree. You can’t possibly give away too much information, I wouldn’t have thought.
Dixon Jones
On the other side of that, I think there is a fear of giving out information and then it getting eaten up by another SEO slamming it down and you feel personally affronted by something that you’ve put up in good faith and then somebody criticizes it and stuff, and I think that’s just a case of maturity and trying to get to a point where you’re putting something up in a non-confrontational way and then it can be criticized in a non-confrontational way and you’re criticizing the idea, not the person behind it.
Judith Lewis
Yeah, I think people take it too seriously. Sorry, Mike, go ahead.
Mike King
Your biggest concern should be, is Neil Patel going to steal it and put his name on it?
Judith Lewis
Also, I’ve seen the Twitter wars and the fights where people have taken what somebody else has written which was factually incorrect and then really slammed at them about it, because sometimes we all have bad days and we might react to something in a particular way because incorrect information is being sent out there. But I’m the one that gets or other people are the ones that get hired to fix it. So I’ve seen misimplemented Hreflang, I’ve seen badly implemented JSON-LD, I’ve seen all sorts of badly implemented code all over the place that I’ve had to be hired to fix.
Judith Lewis
So even when we give away the farm, people are still screwing it up. And when people do put something out there and it gets attacked, don’t take it personally. I’ve worked in the gambling industry, I’ve worked in porn, not in front of the camera, other side, marketing, and I’ve worked in pharmaceuticals. And if you don’t have a thick skin after that… And I stood on stage 11, 12 years ago when I was the only woman, and if you don’t have a thick skin, you’re not going to be able to put yourself out there and take it. So maybe little steps. Maybe start with Twitter, the bear pit, and then post on a blog.
Dixon Jones
Anyone else? Iman, do you want to jump in with anything, or should I go onto a Q and A, a question from Christopher?
Iman Hamdan
You can go ahead.
Dixon Jones
Okay, guys, anybody that signed up in the last 48 hours, which is quite a lot of people because the newsletter went out 48 hours ago, I may not have written down the questions in advance, so you might want to put them into the system. So Christopher, “I asked this in the Q and A portion of the signup,” well I’m glad you put it up here because I didn’t see it, Christopher. He wanted to ask, “What types of strategies are best for large scale SEO projects where a company serves,” it’s quite a common question actually, “Where a company serves multiple USA states with multiple cities and multiple services. For example, a national home service company serves 45 states and in 1000 cities. How would you create a URL structure? Would you curate your URL structure with domain/service plus city or domain/service/city, or maybe some sort of silo structure? Thank you all.” Who wants a go at that one?
Mike King
I’ll take it, because I’ve worked on a lot of sites like this. So it basically goes one way or the other. Some people will do it reverse option where it’s like here’s the domain and the service and there’s a series of service pages that are based on city state, even going down to zip codes or townships or what have you, or it’s the other way where it’s just like city state and the services are under there. I personally think it’s more easy to manage when it’s the first way, because you have the opportunity to get that specificity, but you also don’t have to worry about a ton of duplication. The biggest thing to know is you’ve got to leverage the people like the services, the people in the service area, to get you the content that’s going to be different enough, otherwise you’re going to have a large duplicate content issue. But either way, both of these tactics are effectively silo structures, it’s just which one does your organization support with the content that they have.
Dixon Jones
Iman, any thoughts?
Iman Hamdan
I agree with Mike with that kind of thing, but as I mentioned, having dedicated URLs for each one that kind of aiming for purposes of that for ranking or things, because URL structures have to be clean. And make sure that he submit it, and of course, I don’t know what he’s trying to do with that kind of URL. If he wants to curate it very easy and implement it for the customers to reach out or the Googlebot to reach out very easily he have to do considering that kind of URL structure to make it very reachable, not deep crawling for that kind of thing. That’s what I think he have to think about.
Dixon Jones
Judith, you want to add anything in there?
Judith Lewis
I think the approach that I take, which is a little bit different, is the customer, what is the way that the customer would best be served? Would it be a city state and then list of services, or would it be a list of services and then the list of the services by city state? So whichever way it goes, what’s the best for the customer? Are they going to take a lot of services by city, or are they going to look for something specific, one service in one area of city, so like tire repair or replace, or is it a furniture shop or-
Dixon Jones
I was going to go similar to that idea, but I was thinking about it from the organizational structure. So if you’re a credit company that sells insurance and loans and credit cards and stuff, then you’ve probably got expertise in mortgages and loans and credit cards, so maybe then you should use that and then go by the states afterwards. Because your organizational expertise, the people that know about credit cards, will need to know all their content and curate and own their content on that side of it, whereas if things are like a delivery company and you’ve got UPS and you’ve got places all around them and they’ve got UPS depots, then maybe it’s more of a, “Well, we need to know our customers locally, so we therefore should have it the other way around.”
I don’t think it matters for Google, but what I do think is the more common problem in that is duplicate content. That’s more likely the issue. When you start trying to scale that, duplicate content can become an issue, because you’ve actually got exactly the same content with, insert city here, and without some variety in there, that can cause some problems. And also, I think the other thing is internally linking concepts together within those across those silos can be very helpful. And particularly topics and idea, if you’ve got a page, if you’ve got plumbing and electricity and utilities at a city level, then maybe you also need to have the best national programs for electricity page that all the systems need to link to. Your content is a problem I guess for bigger organizations, isn’t it? Sorry.
Mike King
Were you asking me?
Dixon Jones
I was just generally throwing it out there, but then I realized I was interrupting Judith. So Judith, you come back on that.
Judith Lewis
I was just thinking, if it’s like you said, plumbing and electricity, if it’s stuff for your home, then if you went by vertical and just went electrician and then went city state, that’s one way you could do it. But what if I don’t just need an electrician in my area? What if I also need a plumber and I also need a paver and a roofer? Then I want all of that available on a city basis, so it would be good to group these specialisms on a city basis. But, you could also have the top level stuff of, “Why is it important to maintain your guttering?” We call it here in the UK. “Why is it important to clear your ivy from the side of your house?” And that can be your top level and then, “Are you looking for a guttering specialist?” And then drop down to the city, and then on the city you could still have all the services together, but have that city as the landing page for all the different services in one place. But you could have your expertise articles at a non-geolocated section of the site.
Mike King
Hey Judith, off topic, how come you don’t do any of those Madonna things? Why don’t you say straight away or anything, because you lived out there for mad long, right?
Judith Lewis
Well, I’ve been here since ’96, so yeah. Totally.
Dixon Jones
When you say out here, we are here. We’ve invited you into our homes.
Judith Lewis
Well, my parents are still in Canada. My little sister and brother are still in Canada, so I’m kind of just here and home is still there and home is here. So it’s a weird juxtaposition. I do sometimes call it a boot, and I’m not talking about something. I’m talking about the trunk of car. But then I’ll call a lorry, which is a truck, I’ll call it a truck to my husband who then has to mentally convert from truck to lorry.
Dixon Jones
I’m just going to draw us back on topic guys, if that’s okay. I want to go back to your first answers, guys. And just to remind you of your answers, the four words that came up in problems for enterprise SEOs were, the major differences are justification, getting that justification through, flexibility within the organizations, scalability as a positive and a negative issue, and politics. And some bad KPIs. That’s five things. When I say four things, that’s five things. Out of those, which of those sounds like the most toxic problem? Politics, being given the wrong KPIs, scalability, flexibility, justification. What’s the most toxic out of those, or can it be any one of those? And on the other side, what’s the big win? We’ve already talked about scalability there as a big win, so what’s the toxic one?
Mike King
I think politics has the most potential to be toxic because it’s like the interpersonal relationship stuff, but I also think KPIs can be toxic as well because it sends people in the wrong directions. To Judith’s earlier point, I feel like, “Oh, well we’ve just got to get rankings,” well, rankings doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to drive changes to the bottom line. So I think it’s either one of those two.
Dixon Jones
Yeah. Okay. Agree with that, guys?
Iman Hamdan
I agree about numbers, yes, because members for SMEs or SMBs, they want to see the KPIs, but the organization as an enterprise, they want to see the OKRs over the KPIs, so that’s important for them. So I totally see that more important than the politics for them.
Judith Lewis
Yeah, I think the political side of things definitely can be the most toxic, because it’s people, and it’s people undermining other people, so even if you’ve been given the right KPRs, you can still be undermined by politics. Even if you achieve everything, even if you knock it out of the park, you can still be undermined by politics, because it’s a people thing.
Dixon Jones
And is that easier or harder if you’re an external agency looking in or whether you’re an internal person? Is it harder for the internal SEO or is it harder for the agency? I suppose emotionally it’s harder for the internal SEO, but again, not necessarily.
Mike King
I think it can go either way. My experience, because I’ve been on both sides and I’m sure a lot of us have, the thing about the politics when you’re in-house is that those politics are ever present, whereas when you’re an agency it’s when you’re dealing with that client specifically. But those politics can hinder your own success on either side, so I think it’s both.
Dixon Jones
Okay.
Iman Hamdan
I agree with that, because really can’t achieve anything faster in both ways, so it’s very into going through these processes and you have to be implementing that and deploying that by taking time.
Judith Lewis
As an external consultant, I’m used to saying to clients at times in large enterprise situations, “If you need to, blame me, because I’m the external agency. I’m the external consultant who’s come in, and you’re the person who has to keep your job.” So I’m just an outside consultant, I’m brought into the client’s environment, but the people who are in-house, it’s their full time job. And you’ll be thrown under the bus sometimes not for anything that you’ve done but because the internal team needs to, because otherwise somebody internally is going to lose their job, and it could be just crazy politics.
Dixon Jones
So you’re saying when you screwed it up it wasn’t really you, Judith.
Judith Lewis
I wish it was. I have screwed up things in my life and I do own up to the penalties I’ve caused.
Dixon Jones
Me as well. For sure. Absolutely. Okay. We’ve got about five minutes left, so I just wanted to have a final question really. We’re a new normal. I think it’s fair to say we’re in a new normal. How would you define that, whether it’s COVID, whether it’s Black Lives Matter, hopefully things are moving, hopefully they’re relaxing on COVID, maybe not in America but in Europe, and Black Lives Matter have definitely gone over the whole world.
We now need to try and look at some of the systemic biases in the system. And I know Judith, there were times when you were the only female presenter in the whole of the conference. Mike, you’ve been the only black guy in the conference, and Iman, you’ve been the only person wearing a scarf at a conference. I’ve met you all in those situations over the years, so our industry ain’t so good. I don’t know if you’ve seen those circle things that are going around Twitter of what your influences are and stuff, of who influences you. You go back and have a look at all the SEO ones there and I was very embarrassed, I couldn’t put mine up. I thought, “That’s just not right.” I can’t find anybody. There’s a lack of diversity in here.
So my question is whether it’s COVID or whether it’s diversity, how can businesses try to remove systemic diversity bias within our systems? I’m going to leave that as the last question for the day. I don’t know who is prepared to jump in first.
Mike King
You got to be proactive about it. I mean, just like anything else, if you want to achieve it, you’ve got to be like, “Let’s come up with a plan and let’s do it.” It’s not enough to be like, “Oh, we’re not attracting people because they’re not applying.” Well, they’re not applying because of a lot of things that you’re not doing. So figure out what those things are and do it. For me, when I started getting involved in SEO and leadership and stuff, it was seeing Wil Reynolds speak to make me think, “I can do this too.” And while he was on stage, I pitched for a conference and I got in and just kind of went from there. So it’s one thing that you’ve got to position more of these people to be visible so that it encourages other people, but you also have to proactively look for these people as well and include them in what you’re trying to do.
Iman Hamdan
I can totally agree with you, Mike. I’m a woman who is working with engineers who mainly are men, men all the time, so they are degraded in the female aspect over there, but I can highlight things from my work aspects. And in charge, like being in charge and that kind of thing, not be like bossing them around or something like that, but I achieve my things by my work and actions. I try to be to their own level, but I can’t, because I’m a female, so most of the time I was integrated also with that kind of male thing. But moving these engineers around is really not easy, but hopefully it will open the mind and accept us as women, that we can make a change and make them understand that we can help them, not bossy them all the time.
Dixon Jones
And Judith, the Native American.
Judith Lewis
Well, there aren’t many Native Americans in the UK, and we get so little sunlight we go kind of pasty, so you can’t tell. It’s a struggle that certainly is real. I think one of the things that I used to do with Girl Geek Dinners is rewrite or help companies rewrite their job adverts, because the inherent bias in the job advert itself excluded women and appealed to men, and that was something companies didn’t realize they were doing, was excluding 80% of women from the job advert before they even got CVs.
Judith Lewis
So you have to be thinking beyond just what you’re doing in your company and also the external image that you’re giving forth. So what are your job adverts saying? Are you making sure that you’re actually diverse in the approach you’re taking towards staff? We had a problem where we were doing parties and we had a summer party during a time of fasting, and there was one member of staff who it particularly hit hard, and no one cared except me. And that’s wrong, and this is what we’re trying to change. You have to think outside of your own head. Don’t have a summer party when 90% of your staff might be able to go, but the 10% that can’t go suddenly feel like other. So it’s thinking outside of your block, like N equals one is the biggest fallacy in our industry and every industry, so just think about that.
Dixon Jones
I think that’s a great point. And all credit to, although I don’t work at Majestic, I know that they’ve made a very big effort to rewrite their job description efforts to be inclusive that way, because things didn’t quite pan out and it was very difficult to see. If you aren’t looking for your bias, you aren’t going to see your own bias.
That happened to me just today. This morning I was in a business self-help kind of group that I’m in, and one of the questions that came up was, “I want to recruit, and before lockdown I used to recruit from friends of friends,” and I said, “Well, this is where your problem starts really. I understand that you want a cultural fit in terms of the culture of the organization, but if you’re going to start with I’m going to recruit from friends of friends because they’ve got a recommendation, then you’re firstly excluding a huge pool of people, and secondly you’re not getting the diversity of ideas and abilities in the system.” So, it’s actually turned into a very bad idea employing a friend of a friend. Recommending somebody is great and you want to do that if your friend has just lost their job, but if you’re not going to recruit on a level playing field then you’ve probably closed the door to improving diversity right at the start, I think.
Judith Lewis
We’re trying to do that in the search awards, so every time I put people forward as judges for the various different search awards, I always make sure to think about who it is that I’m putting forward, how I know them, and how they’re adding to the diversity of the judging panel, so that it’s not just always the same people that we all know and we all get together at conferences and we all drink together. We need other people coming in with other ideas.
Dixon Jones
Sure. Okay, guys, so we’ve got to the end of our time and once again, it’s been lively and fun, and I hope that the audience got some good ideas and thoughts out of it. Before we go, if you want to tell people if they want to get in contact with you how they might do that, and just how you download your ebook and that kind of thing. Iman, how do people get in-
Iman Hamdan
You can reach out to me on LinkedIn, it’s Iman, I-M-A-N. I, then a man next to me. That’s how it is. And you can find me on Linkedin because I’m so connected to a lot of people, so it’s very easy to find me.
Dixon Jones
Very good. Mike.
Mike King
Just go iPullRank. ipullrank.com. I’m iPullRank on Twitter. Mike@ipullrank.com, and also I dropped the link for the e-book in the chat as well.
Dixon Jones
Okay. Fantastic. Put it in there. I’ll try and persuade the guys to put it up somewhere when they put the recording up. Can’t guarantee that. I might get into trouble for that one.
Judith Lewis
You can get a hold of me on Twitter, on Instagram, on Facebook, on LinkedIn. LinkedIn, is probably easiest. Judith Lewis is my LinkedIn URL, so I got in there early. And yeah, I’m all over the place. I’m always open to answering questions from people if you need help of any sort. I have been across almost every industry, so I can usually bring some experience. So yeah, connect. LinkedIn me, follow me on Twitter, criticize my chocolate choices.
Dixon Jones
I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’m going to read out this URL on the thing so it’s in the video anyway. Landing.ipullrank.com/modern-seo-guide, and there it is. So guys, thank you very much. If you haven’t tried Majestic Monitor, it’s majesticmonitor.com, plugged from Majestic obviously. Thank you to Majestic for helping me get this on again, and a big thank you to you guys for coming on. Really appreciate it. I appreciate it takes time and energy and coordination, and your time is really appreciated by us and the guys at Majestic. Thanks very much for your time, and when we cut it off, it’s all going to cut off because that’s what Zoom does. I’ll email you afterwards to say thanks as well.
Judith Lewis
Thank you.
Dixon Jones
Thanks guys.
Iman Hamdan
Thank you.
Mike King
Later.
Judith Lewis
Bye everyone.
Iman Hamdan
Bye.
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