(upbeat music) You're listening to Let's Talk Jobs, where we give you practical insights into jobs and careers. I'm Tim Chen, and today we're talking about search engine optimization, or SEO. Now, dangerous question. What was the last thing you searched for on Google? Mine was, and I'm gonna look at my phone here, can dogs eat grapes?

The answer is no, you should not let your dog eat grapes. They're part of the nightshade family, very poisonous for pups. Now, that answer came from a website, and that top result in Google means that page will likely get the most visits, possibly converting that visit into a sale.

So SEO is the practice of optimizing your webpage so that it is more easily discoverable by search engines like Google or Bing, and your goal is to rank at the top. Simply put, it doesn't matter how beautiful your website is if nobody can find it, right? So how does SEO work?

Imagine you're walking into a library with a specific book in mind. You notice right away that all the books sit on shelves that are neatly organized into rows. Above each row are signage that cleanly label different genres categorized by age group. Each book has a visible title, and in the cover is a short description that gives you a clear idea of what the book is about.

Now, in this analogy, the well-organized library is your website, and you play the role of the search engine. The organized rows represents your site structure, and the hanging signage represents a website's navigation menu and categories. The book's stocked shelves represents your website's content, and the words that make up the title of the book you're looking for, those are the keywords.

So if I'm looking for a book that's about safe diet for dogs, I'm going to zero in on the book title that most closely represents that. Now, the full book title itself and a description represents your page's title tags and meta descriptions. The more optimized all of this is, the easier it is for a search engine to find you, deem you relevant, establish you as an authority, and that pushes you up into search rankings so someone can find you on organic search.

So it's safe to say that search engine optimization, in my opinion, is one of the most important functions of marketing. It also happens to be a job function that is always high in demand, as the ROI can be high when done correctly. So today, we'll be joined by Mike Shaw.

He's an SEO manager at Lego Education. He also comes with years of experience on the agency side of the business, so he has a very broad and deep perspective into the business of SEO. In this video, he's going to cover topics such as how search engine optimization works, how to get your keywords onto page one, and where do companies typically struggle when it comes to SEO?

All right, let's get started. - Hey, guys. Today, we're talking about how to be a search engine marketer. Joining us is Mike Shaw. Mike, how you doing? - Good, how are you, Tim? - Good. Mike, I may be biased. No, that's not true, right? I'm absolutely biased. But SEO, especially for digital marketers, is probably one of the most important disciplines today.

Like, it doesn't matter how wonderful or beautiful your website is, if no one can find it, right? So can you tell us a little bit about what you're doing today and how long you've been doing it? - For sure. So I've been doing SEO for about eight to nine years now.

Kind of hard to keep track. Started back in 2014. Worked at agencies pretty much across the country. And today, I'm working for a fully remote agency that's out of Irvine, California. And they focus mostly on B2B SaaS. That's kind of their niche. So I'm working with a bunch of different clients that are into mobile DevOps.

Some of it is freight and logistics transportation. Just across the gambit, and I've done even more than that into e-commerce. And finance and everything like that in the past. So yeah, that's kind of in a nutshell, the verticals I'm working in, where I'm working at now. Outside of that, just in the day-to-day, trying to get things done.

- That's obvious. So let's just set some kind of foundational work for our viewers. Can you just tell us from your point of view, what is SEO and why should it and why does it matter for businesses? - Absolutely. So I like to, SEO is constantly changing over time.

So I feel like as more things get added in, the definition gets more and more vague. So I was trying to think of a good one before we got on here. And I kind of came up with, it's the art and science of helping websites improve their visibility in online spaces that are accessed through in-brand keyword searches.

If that makes sense. - That's actually really solid. That's good. Tell us about that. - Yeah, I agonized over that one. So essentially just encompasses pretty much the entire concept of, we're trying to get these websites seen by more people in areas that people are already looking for them in, but they might not necessarily be there.

So one good thing, and this is a skill that you'll wanna think about too, if you wanna get into the career, is think about how you'd explain it to your aunt at a Christmas party, which is obviously a real thing that I've had to do multiple times, probably with the same aunt.

So if you wanna break it down into more simple terms, most people understand what Google is. Google has 86% of the market share. So it's not too far off to say, this is what we do anyways. We work mostly in Google, but we're saying, okay, you search for something on the first page of Google and you don't see it.

Are you gonna go to the second page or are you gonna search again? Everyone searches again. No one goes to the second page. So there you're demonstrating the value of, we want people to be on the first page. You wanna help websites get there 'cause if they're not there, they might be down in the other eight pages where they're not getting any visibility.

There's just no value there. So through us helping them improve the quality and optimization of their site through a bunch of different levers, you can help them raise their rank and get to that point. And that is essentially what we're trying to do through SEO. - That's an awesome description.

I've had conversations with probably the same man. So we need to have another conversation with her together, team up on this one. I love how you talk about being art and science. That's absolutely true. So let's maybe focus on maybe the objective piece first. It's like, there's like the discipline if you wanna get really tech, like technical, like there's on-page, there's off-page and there's technical SEO.

Can you maybe break it down for us? Like when you're looking at an SEO strategy that's all encompassing, like what do you need to do? - For sure. So, I mean, I think, you know, when you're starting off and even now I really do like to break things out into pillars like that technical on-page and off-page where, you know, you think of technical, like your site and your content has to be accessible.

The search engine has to be able to see it in order to get into the search results in the first place. So if you don't have that, the other two don't matter. And then after that, it's like, okay, they can see your site and you go to on-page. That's about what's the content in your site.

Does it say the right things that are related to the keywords that you wanna be showing up for? If you don't have that, how are you gonna rank for those keywords you wanna see? And lastly, authority is more of, you know, proprietary search engine Google type thing where we're saying, you know, how much authority do other sites give this site?

And that's essentially external linking. You know, do other sites link to you? Google uses that kind of as like an unofficial voting method say like, all right, you know, these two sites, really good technical, pretty much the same content. One of them has 50,000 linking root domains. The other one has two, 50,000 linking root domains.

Everyone is saying this is more authoritative. We like this best. It helps their robot decide what's the better result when it can't do it on its own. - Yeah, that's a good point. I remember like when you're looking at your back linking strategy, when someone who may be uninformed, they're like, hey, increase our off pay strategy.

And it lists all these websites that link to it. It's like, look, they're not gonna link to us if our content doesn't read right, or if it doesn't have authority, or we don't sound credible. And so a lot of it has to do with coaching our content creators on writing something that's memorable, that's meaningful and actionable to our viewers.

A lot of times I feel like they do the most convenient, right? They just kind of write something out there, maybe it's 500 words, if at all, and they just hope it sticks. And just no one's gonna link to that. I like your analogy where if you're trying to explain to somebody, and if you're trying to refer them to a credible source of article, like you would want to send them somewhere that's meaty, right, that they're actually gonna learn something.

If it's just high level, like no one's gonna read that. And for the same reason, like no one's gonna want to back link to you. So I love that description. Can you tell us a little bit about the on-page keyword kind of strategy piece of it, right? 'Cause there's like, how do you go around identifying the keywords?

How do you prioritize them? And then what does it take to even move up a page when it comes to on-page optimization? - For sure. And I think, especially if we're gonna go back to the real basics here, we can step back and talk really briefly about how do search engines work?

How do they understand there's differences in keywords and stuff like that? So essentially, to get through quickly, say there's a little robot that comes from the search engine, they call them Spiders, and they will crawl all the websites that they can discover through the internet, whether it's links or other ways like that.

And they index the content and basically say like, all right, as far as we can understand it from AI or machine learning, this is what this content is about. They kind of assign it to a general bucket. And within those, there's just more and more buckets that are kind of different topics and keyword related.

So then when you're thinking about keywords for your site, you wanna say like, all right, what is my offering? What am I trying to do here? What do I want people discovering me for? And then you have to look and understand through, there's a couple different metrics here. Like one is search volume, where you can see how many times a month on average does this term get searched?

And you say, all right, this one has high search volume, a lot of people are looking for it, and it's really relevant to my product. And that's kind of how you get to like, all right, this is a particular keyword that I wanna have ranking for on my site, and so on and so forth.

You're obviously gonna have more than one keyword ranking for your site, but that's kind of the general concept around it. In terms of actually getting yourself to rank for that keyword, that's kind of where the art and science of SEO comes in. It's about having specific areas on your site, there's things like title tags, headers, different areas where search engines are predisposed to look for instances of keywords to get a quick like, all right, this is what this is about, and then I'll evaluate the content to see if it's any good.

And then it's also to your point talking about, you want something meaty, it's not just about earning a link like that, the search engine algorithm is able to understand if you're covering a topic completely. Google doesn't wanna show bad results in the higher positions, they want someone to come in and say like, all right, this page completely satisfied the intent of this query, I don't need to go back out and look for a different result.

That's kind of how they maintain their market share by having really high quality results versus being like, why do I never find what I want on the first page? Which no one ever says 'cause Google's pretty good at it. - Yeah, and even adding to that, I think for the part of the science is like you mentioned, looking at average monthly searches, right?

Broadly across the whole internet, you're also looking at competitive score, right? And having good mix of things that aren't super competitive, but have high volume is a kind of a sweet spot to be, right? How do you do that? So let's say you have a keyword, let's say it's 9,000 search volume and above, and let's say SEMrush says the difficulty score is, let's say 85, right?

And let's say within that keyword group, let's say there's 10 keywords that are kind of very closely related of varying degrees of competition. So how do you go about cracking that nut for a high volume, relatively high competitive score keyword? - Well, it depends a lot like that KD, like the keyword difficulty that metric in SEMrush pretty much tells you, you know, there's really big players, the high authority players here.

So if you could take that back roughly to say like, these people have a lot of links and if you don't have a lot of links, it's gonna be a lot more difficult for you to score in that keyword. So it kind of depends on the site that you're coming in on.

Like I've had clients where I've come in and they have this huge backlinking portfolio, they've been around since like 2002. And it's like, we can pretty much rank for whatever we want. The keyword difficulty really doesn't apply to us because we have the authority to back it up versus other sites if you're just starting out and you're saying like, I wanna go after like mesothelioma claims, which is, you know, unrelated like the most expensive keyword you could bid on a paid search.

But that's gonna be like, you know, everyone wants that keyword. There's gonna be a ton of sites going after it and it's gonna be like, we might have to back into that in a different way. And that's gonna be about like, all right, how many of those subtopics like you just talked about do we have that maybe have a lower keyword difficulty that we can try to get in on there?

So you're starting to look from short tail, which is gonna be like, again, I'll do a different example 'cause this is better, shoes. Like, you know, that has huge search volume. There's really generic. It could mean a ton of different things, but then you can get down to like the really nitty gritty stuff like size nine trail running shoes for women with thin sold feet.

You know what I mean? Like the search volume is really low, but the difficulty goes down 'cause there's much fewer results that are talking about that. So you try to build up your relevancy on the long tail, what's most applicable to your product. And then you kind of build up to getting to that more short tail keyword through site hierarchy.

So say we're talking about shoes again. So we wanna say, let's build a page that's just shoes. And it's like, here's all the shoes that we have in categories. We have men's shoes, women's shoes, running shoes, hiking shoes, trail running shoes. And we're linking out from these things to different pages that are all about these different things.

So like what I said before, Google wants a result that satisfies the entire intent of the query of say, shoes. How do we satisfy the entire intent of shoes? We literally have a page that says, here's every single shoe in every category that we have. We link down to it and their whole site hierarchy just keeps going down.

We have more information, more products. We get down to even the most nitty gritty, like what I've made a ridiculous thin sold example. That is kind of how you build up to it. You start with the easier, not so difficult keywords, make the site structure right, build out the right content and just keep building those pages out.

And that's how you're gonna get to that point. Obviously it takes a long time. You have to build authority while you do that, which can obviously happen naturally. And there's other things that you can do to try to influence that. But that is the general sense, if you're coming from kind of a net new site and you want it to build up to play with the big dog, so to speak.

- Yeah, that's really helpful. One thing that I do, and I'm kind of curious if you have your own version of this, 'cause everyone does it a little differently, is when I'm building my keyword strategy, and of course you build that through input from many internal stakeholders, right? So I'm talking to your product, I'm talking to your comms, I'm talking to support and sales, kind of doing a conglomeration of all the relevant keywords.

I usually group them into protect, grow, and expand, right? So protect are ones that we should absolutely be on page one for, and if we're not, what's the plan to get there? Expand are your very relevant keywords that may be a longer tail, or maybe difficulties like maybe 60 and below, right?

And then expand is purely competitors are there, you're not in there at all. It's probably gonna take some kind of investment to break into that. Or you're maybe identifying a trend that may be two years out from now, and you wanna start now and start building and owning that.

So I typically look at it that lens. Is that kind of similar to how you kind of go about kind of advising like a keyword strategy, or is there another way that you look at it? - Not that it's not a valid way of looking at it. You know, it's definitely, if you're taking that difficulty into mind, it's really good in a sense that you're like prioritizing for what can we win on immediately and what can we plan out for, which, you know, a lot of stakeholders, if you're internal or clients, if you're working at an agency really like.

For me, I don't do it so much as that. I really just don't take keyword difficulty into effect, maybe to my detriment, honestly. But I look at it more as like, I like to just map out the entire site. I take like an Excel sheet and it has like row one, basically representing click levels down to four.

So like homepage, solutions page, sub page. So you know what I mean? Like that URL title tag, and then I do up to three keywords for each that either they are kind of ranking for, or I find a competitor that's doing that page better than them and assign that keyword.

And that's kind of how I get to that, you know, I think maybe protect grow, saying this is kind of what we have, this is what we want to grow into. And then for expansions, it's about competitive gap for me. I go in, you know, look at other sites like, okay, what do we just don't have that they have?

And then I build a content strategy around that mostly is what I do. So I guess I kind of do something similar. It's just mine are just more grouped into, you know, what are the different sections of the site and whether it's protect, grow or expand is just, you know, kind of irrelevant as long as the tactic I'm doing to get there, you know, is in place.

That makes sense. - Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And actually, I like how you're thinking in terms of site structure and hierarchy, 'cause to your earlier point, that's how Google is gonna look at as well, right? Like is the structure of a site relevant as a whole, and that kind of all kind of, they all add together in some to like your authority as a site.

How, when you're looking at, let's say optimizing a product page for keyword versus let's say pairing in blogs to supplement that, what's the relationship between those types or even beyond? Like if you're trying to grow a keyword category, like where is like, where should a product page play versus where should a product or even like a glossary page or like a SERP?

Like what are your thoughts on that? - So that's a big thing that I like to call commercial versus editorial keywords. I think it's a direction we can take that where we're saying there are keywords that trigger SERPs, search engine results pages, that have results that are articles, blogs, news, whatever you wanna call it.

We call that editorial, it's more long form, it's kind of informative type content. And then commercial terms are the ones that trigger product category homepages, pages you're gonna wanna convert on. And you'll often find that with product pages, it's like, I'll just stick with shoes 'cause it's easy, like Nike Metcon 2, that's gonna be probably a product page, if not a category page or like by Nike Metcon 2.

Or if you're talking about like, SaaS or something like that, it's usually like mobile DevOps solutions, mobile DevOps software. Whereas if you would just put in mobile DevOps or CICD, whatever it might be, you're probably gonna get a more informative page. So it's about looking at what kind of SERPs are being triggered by those keywords and then you can kind of get an understanding of like, all right, for this, I'm gonna need to write an article for it 'cause I'm not gonna write for it on a product page or something to that effect.

Or you could take, there's plenty of experimental approaches where you can do a quasi editorial product page where it's traditional kind of like e-commerce, picture, price, whatever it might be or whatever that is. And then underneath you have a lot more content that's maybe like an FAQ format, it's tabbed or something like that, where you're saying like, here's why I'm selling this and here's everything you need to know about it on one page.

So it's really about understanding what type of SERP, how does Google understand this as transactional or informational and then making the appropriate piece of content to meet that. - That's awesome. And kind of building upon that and maybe even bringing in a topic you touched on earlier briefly is just, how do you measure efficacy of your SEO program, right?

So like you mentioned earlier, you mentioned like there's elements of it like search keyword volume and your position, your rank on page one. I think those are the obvious ones, but like when you're building a dashboard, whether it's for an executive audience or maybe for a decision-making peer or a content creator, like what kind of dashboards and information or data do you put together that helps tell the story to compel like your desired action from them?

- For sure. So, I mean, there's different levels. You can go pretty basic, which is like the every man's SEO metrics, which are gonna be like keyword rankings and traffic. Like period over period, did we improve rank and did we get more traffic? Like, all right, good. That's good in one sense, but what does that really tell me about like the health of my business?

So then you gotta think like, all right, what's the next level? And that's gonna be conversions. Or if you're in e-commerce, we have revenue metrics, you know, getting into GA here. You can say like, all right, period over period for these new pages we created or pages that we added new content to or made some change to, this is how many more conversions we got through the organic channel specifically.

And that kind of helps say like, look at this is actual business values for customers coming in. That's what we're looking at there. And then there's even like, you know, the really go big level where you're talking like almost a rev ops where you're like actually attributing pipeline revenue to what you're doing on the site.

And that gets into like, you know, lifetime value, customer acquisition costs, where you're legitimately like making a ratio to prove out for every dollar that you're paying me, this is how many dollars I'm making you back through SEO efforts. And that's where you really get into like, you know, the advanced stuff.

And I think that's ultimately where everyone should end up, but you know, getting there is, like I said, pipeline revenue, rev ops, that kind of stuff gets really complicated. Even conversions sometimes can be complicated. If you know, a client or a site, you'd be surprised like big names don't have them set up.

Or they say like, well, we don't have attribution and Salesforce or something to that effect. So, you know, it can be hairy. So I always start from the basics, make sure I have those covered, but try to understand whoever the stakeholder is in your company or whoever the client is, what they really wanna see.

I always say like, what's gonna make you happy at the end of the day? What's gonna be your measure for success? Just emphasize that as much as possible. But I think it's always good to tell that other story underneath as well. - Yeah, absolutely. So for the Holy Grail situation, where you're able to tie like organic activity to revenue or pipeline influence or whatever it is, are you able to do that down to the keyword or are you just looking as a program?

Like my organic program in total, you've spent 80K and this is what it gets you. Like, or is it more granular than that? - No, it's pretty much, I think at the overall level, at that point you're just trying to say like, dollar spent in the program, this is the output you're getting from that, just almost like an ROI type thing.

When you're getting down to keyword stuff, that's kind of the difference between us and someone like paid search. If you look through the evolution of SEO, there was a lot of issues with keyword spam, keyword stuffing and Google's solution for that was to really just cut off keyword level data altogether, not tell you kind of what you're getting at the keyword level 'cause it was just apparently causing issues.

So you really have a hard time doing that. You can do some of it through Google Search Console, but still that data is sampled. So I always tell people to take that with a grain of salt for sure. - In your opinion, where do companies usually fall short when it comes to SEO?

Whether it's not including the best practices, not having rigor or program, or it could be workflow. Because you work with so many clients, what are the general challenges you see out there? - It varies a lot, but I think that a lot of it comes down to like sloppiness, just kind of not keeping up with some of the technical and content quality tasks that you should be.

You always find a bunch of like duplicative pages, things that were indexed from an event they did, however, six, two years ago, and there's like a million of those. It's just a lot of loose ends to clean up that can overall, if your site has all these pages that are dead ending, they're broken links, they're from really old dates, say like you haven't cleaned up your blog content in the last 10 years, but the majority of your content is from four years ago.

The search engine is gonna look at your site and be like, all right, this is irrelevant stuff. These people obviously aren't on top of their game. We're gonna demote you. That kind of content or like sloppy mess or whatever you wanna call it, can actually bring down the quote unquote quality score of your site.

And that's gonna hurt you overall, even if you have a really nice optimized core section, all that fat's gonna drag you down. That's one big thing that encompasses a lot of different tactics and strategies that I think sites don't always do well. - Yeah, I like that 'cause whenever you do any kind of new SEO engagement, the question is always like, what's the lowest hanging fruit?

And people think I need to start writing all this copy, whereas it's like, really, it's like actually, there's some foundational stuff that you did. That's the most, the lowest hanging fruit. And I like your dead end pages as one example, right? And just removing those systematically, it can just by nature, improve your site performance or even like things like improving site speed, right?

That's not dependent on content creation. Yeah, and for me, like I, even from a workflow point of view, it's like there's that systematic foundational stuff. And I think SEO is almost like to me, synonymous with culture as well. Culture meaning like as an organization, does everyone believe in the value of SEO, especially those who are creating content and how willing are they to utilize best practices or SEO or keyword research or whatnot.

And it varies, right? And again, that's not actually a criticism on anyone. It's just like, it's tough when you have time to publication and like if the due diligence is not there, like how do you work that into it? So I think it's got to evolve. It's got to be a part of culture.

It has to be like a part of discussion. Otherwise like you'll systematically or always be fixing things retroactively instead of getting ahead of it. - Yeah, absolutely. That's a really good point of like, they just don't have SEO first or even SEO third approach, if you want to take it from that.

You know what I mean? There's no one inside evangelizing for it. Like you said, everyone has their own schedule to meet, their own weekends they want to get to. And it's like, unless someone's making that obvious for them and they're making it a well-oiled machine, the parts don't work well together and you kind of get that sloppiness.

- Yeah, cool. I got one more question for you and I want to shift to like your career journey and specifically around like skills that people should be considering if they're trying to look into search engine optimization or marketing as a career. So the last technical question I have for you is just around the topic of AI, right?

There's a lot of tools out there. I don't believe using AI to replace search engine marketing is the way to go, but certainly it should augment. And so like, are you using the tools these days to kind of help you out? Or do you see anything, like let's say on the horizon that you think might either change the game or in change, maybe influence our efficacy of creating content or whatnot?

- For sure. I mean, most recently, chat GPT and just generative AI in general definitely changed the game. There is so much you can use it for to augment what you're doing or make your life that much easier. Like you have to take a lot of it with a grain of salt, honestly, especially if you're asking it.

I was reading an article the other day, like certain types of questions, like definites versus like what ifs type questions, like that. But you can use it to generate content ideas. You can use it to do really complex things, like hreflangs, like you can put in like, identify the international alternate and then write the hreflang in an XML sitemap format.

And it's like, spits that out for you, which is crazy. So, it's definitely in that sense, like, okay, this could be a really big help for us. And then in the other sense, there's the stuff that we're seeing going on right now, even like the more macro outside of SEO with like, you know, writers and artists where, you know, they're like, okay, you know, this is kind of ripping off our stuff and we're not really not getting credit for this.

And it's kind of making us obsolete in some senses. And that's definitely, you know, a big concern in the SEO community, especially since Google announced it's, you know, coming out with that, I think it's the SGE, the search generative experience is what it's called. And it's essentially just, you know, if you've ever seen, you search something on Google and it has the answer box before you can even get to click into anything and taking that and just amping it up times 10, you know, like scraping all these sites from their content and then pretty much putting a lot of generative AI at the top of the search results and driving down the traditional search results, which obviously drives down the visibility, the value of the click-through rate.

So, you know, there's a lot of worry right now of what's gonna happen there. And then, yeah, even with like content writing, there are really good uses of it. I've seen it work really well in some cases, you know, if the human edit it's a bit after or whatever.

But right now, you know, there's no like policy at Google against using pure AI content. So, you know, you could have a competitor overnight, rip out, you know, 20 new articles that really match the quality of your content when they couldn't before. And that really changes the level of the playing field.

So it's the wild west. It's hard to say what it's gonna be right now. I love it because it makes my job easier. But again, I'm gonna take my job, I don't know. - Yeah, I agree with you on the last thing you said around like lack of policy, right?

I think the things that everyone should be cautious about is like policies will be put in place eventually, or as Google gets more sophisticated in measuring efficacy of content, like we've seen penalization of keyword stuffing, right? And so it's not far to imagine penalization of AI source content. And there's sniffers out there now, right?

You can detect if it's AI written. So I definitely agree, like you shouldn't use AI to completely author content without a human review. Now things you can do, right? Like you can literally take a article and say, hey, look, rewrite this article, utilizing like these five keywords, X amount of times, and focusing on this world event or whatever it is, and it'll spit something out for you.

But it's up to you to then like reread that and adjust it to fit your tone, voice, review for accuracy, et cetera. 'Cause again, you still wanna come back to a source of where that's not generated by AI. 'Cause again, you don't wanna be punished by plagiarism or whatever that is.

- Yeah. - Cool, so let's kind of shift gears. Like SEO, like how did you kind of come across this? How did you discover this as a field? Like did you have prior experience before doing this or was it kind of out of the blue? - It was kind of out of the blue.

So I had graduated my undergrad in like 2007. It was a music management degree. And at that point, I really wasn't sure what I was gonna do with it. The landscape had really changed since I got into college. Even going back from like Napster just kind of wiped out most of the things you can do with music management as that evolved.

And so I was like, all right, I gotta buy myself more time. I'm gonna go to grad school. So I went to Suffolk here in Boston and got an MBA. And while I was there, I was in a group project with this guy, Victor, who ended up being the VP of analytics at the first agency I worked at.

We were getting a drink afterward. And I just mentioned, I was like, yeah, I gotta figure out something. I think I wanna do marketing. He's like, well, I'm the vice president at a marketing agency. So he got me in for a round of interviews that they had just happened to be doing.

They were looking to fill a bunch of different positions across different types of media, paid media display, whatever it might be. And then for SEO, there was only one guy who did SEO. We got into the interview and we were like, oh my God, we like a lot of the same things.

We're all friends with Victor. And he's like, you seem like a cool dude. As long as you seem like you have some initiative in you, let's give it a shot or give it a try, whatever. And I did come in thinking, I think this one might be cool. I tried to learn a little bit about each thing and just to kind of rattle off things I'd heard online.

And he's like, you're good. So yeah, it really came down to just kind of networking and then personality and gelling. I think that's the truth for a lot of jobs, especially when you're getting in at that low level. It's like, you can't expect anyone to really know much. It's like, you just got to want to learn and be diligent.

- Yeah, that's hilarious. 'Cause that mirrors a lot of my own personal experiences as well, especially as it pertains to the field of SEO in particular, like I didn't have prior experience either. I think that's something you mentioned there, which is really important is like, obviously you want to know the fundamentals of what it is.

Even if you haven't practiced it, you just got to know what it's about generally and what the best practices are so you can say at least speak to it. But the human element is very, very important 'cause it's a very cross-functional discipline, right? If your ability to influence cross-functional stakeholders allows you to, I guess, create a better efficacy of a site as a whole, because you have so many different content creators.

And then that takes a certain individual, right? The one who's more successful at doing that, you're doing less cleanup in the future, right? Retroactively. I also feel like having at least some foundation in analytics is important. Out of the gate, I think as you described earlier, it's not deep analytics.

It's pretty straightforward stuff you can learn. Again, getting used to interfaces like Google Analytics as one example and knowing what to search. Yes, that takes a little time to figure out. It can also be learned on the job, but being willing to look into data to kind of figure that out allows you to do the whole science versus art piece that you talked about.

'Cause a part of the art is discovering things, right? So when I've made hires for SEO in the past, one thing I look for is almost like an entrepreneurial spirit. Do you have that go-getter mentality where you just want to figure something out and you're just naturally questioning things?

'Cause that's the kind of mindset of an optimist, right? When you are looking at making a hire for, let's say, a first-time career, is there anything else that you're looking for? And then conversely, if you're looking to hire someone who's senior, what are you looking for in that individual?

- So you're talking like new hire. I think I look for a lot of personality and I think I base it off of my kind of experience. Did they actually come in prepared to answer some kind of questions about this and display they had some kind of knowledge? And then I do a lot of it based on personality.

You gotta work directly with this person. You're gonna get along with them. So sometimes with new people, it's taking a chance. Looking at a more senior person, that's gonna be a much more, there's gonna be a lot more scrutiny in terms of use, not use cases, case studies almost.

What have you done in this particular situation? What do you think is important for X, Y, Z? A lot of things you've been asking me today, I'd probably ask them the same things and just try to make sure they understand, did they think the same things are important that I think are important?

Obviously that the clients are gonna think important and that kind of stuff. But that's more a stringent type skills interview and then personality, for sure. You can't just hire a guy you like to do something that's gonna be client-facing when they're gonna be all shoulders, like, "I don't know." (laughing) - Yeah, so true.

Well, Mike, this was a very informative meeting, or not meeting, that's so formal, like a conversation. I really enjoyed that. How can people find you if they wanna maybe hit you up for some advice or anything else that you wanna showcase? - I think LinkedIn is probably the best place.

I'm sure we can figure out how to share a link after this and we post this wherever you're gonna do it. And then, yeah, hit me up. My agency is always looking for new opportunities. So if you're in B2B SaaS, we might be able to help you out. - Right, thanks a lot, Mike.

- All right, Tim, talk to you later. - All right, talk to you later. - Bye. (upbeat music) you