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A Day In The Life Of An SEO Agency Senior Executive

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A Day In The Life Of An SEO Agency Senior Executive

My journey to becoming an SEO executive has spanned over 14 years, working at leading agencies and optimizing for some of the world’s largest brands. I also spent a few years working as an in-house SEO at some medium-sized businesses.

Today, I work at Acronym as an SVP of SEO. I’ve been at the agency for 7 years and manage the global SEO team, which consists of over 20 SEO professionals in the U.S., London, Singapore, Berlin, and Canada.

Working at an agency can be both challenging and rewarding.

It is my hope that sharing the story of how I got where I am today and what being an SVP of SEO means will help you in your own career journey, as well.

Getting Started In SEO

I first learned about SEO and internet marketing in 2003, when I was getting my Master’s degree in Internet Business from Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, New York.

Prior to that, I worked as a Q.A. specialist in the pharmaceutical industry doing auditing and computer validation. However, I was fascinated by the internet and so decided to go back to school to learn more about the world wide web.

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I started my own pharmaceutical job board in 2006 and needed more traffic, so I reached out to an SEO company for help.

After watching them optimize my site, I  learned how interesting and complex it was. Fascinated to learn more, I was inspired to start doing more of it myself.

I landed a job as an SEO specialist at Digitgrit (now Zeta Interactive), built a successful SEO practice at Havas Media, and the rest is history.

A Typical Day In SEO Leadership

Being a senior leader at the agency, I do a lot of business development – leading pitches, creating strategies, showing how SEO works with other channels, for example.

I manage the team to ensure we have the right tools, resources, staff, processes, and services to manage clients and potential clients, in addition to generating thought leadership materials.

I also read a lot to see what is going on in the industry. It’s important to stay on top of other perspectives and new technology when we’re collaborating with global vendors and international teams.

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My Master’s degree in ecommerce helped me gain the fundamentals of how the internet works. It has changed dramatically over the years, but I’ve learned that understanding the fundamentals will help you get a deeper understanding and appreciation for the history and the backbone of how things are connected.

Being in the industry this long has also taught me a lot, especially about working with both international and domestic clients.

Finally, I’ve also realized you should always do your due diligence and dig deeper. Focus on big-ticket items and strategies that will drive business results.

A lot of agencies offer similar services. Why should a client go with your agency rather than the other 5 to 10 that are in an RFP?

Always differentiate yourself. Listen to your clients and make sure you understand their goals and objectives, challenges, key performance indicators, and what they are hoping to get out of an engagement.

Plan to show who is doing what and set realistic expectations early on so there are no surprises later, i.e., things not being implemented, etc. Build compelling case studies and offer unique perspectives on updates and changes in the SERPs.

Managing The Challenges Of SEO At The Executive Level

Managing SEO at a global agency is no easy task with clients and SEOs across time zones, different languages and multiple search engines in play, and more.

Prioritization, communication, and strong processes are vital for success.

The ability to account for cultural and language differences, as well as determining which countries will offer the best ROI, is essential.

Another challenge for executives, particularly at the enterprise level, is that some clients have incredibly complex needs.

One day you might be dealing with a migration that failed when they worked with a previous agency.

You might have a new client lose a lot of traffic and revenue after being negatively impacted by a core update.

You could be working with limited resources, etc.

I once had a client insist on using a whole bunch of keywords that were used inside the company, but not by their audience. Educating the client on why that was not a good idea was key, and that takes tact and people management skills.

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Working with the web developers that some brands employ, we are often forced to use techniques that run against common SEO wisdom and so workarounds must be found.

SEO in principle has a fundamental approach – but every new client brings their own twist to it.

That’s the beauty of working in an agency with strong leadership and a focus on training and education. It means they frequently encounter challenges and are constantly developing solutions.

Finding Inspiration And Thought Leadership

The person in the SEO community I admire most is Mike Grehan. Mike is a pioneer in the space and a great visionary. He was talking about things 20 years ago that are now coming to fruition.

The other people I look up to in the industry are Brian Dean from Backlinko. They offer amazing content and do impressive research studies.

I also have a lot of respect for Hamlet Batista, who sadly passed away. I learned a lot from him in a short amount of time and we had plans to do some meetups together.

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I am also a major fan of Jim Boykin from Internet Marketing Ninjas.

I advise that every SEO pro stay up with the latest technology. We live in a dynamic world where automation is key. There are some great platforms and solutions out there that are making a lot of noise in the space and really helping to streamline the SEO process, so we can focus more on strategy.

Assess them to see if they can help reach your KPIs internally and externally.

Also, evaluate and test different methodologies to see what’s working to drive overall business goals and objectives and, most important of all, conversions.

If you are not doing that, it is time for you to refocus. SEO is all about bringing qualified traffic to a site that converts into customers.

Don’t be afraid to fail and accept new challenges; that’s part of being innovative and well-rounded.

Do your own research. Try to get as much experience as you can with paid search, programmatic, social, and analytics, but don’t forget to build skills in leading a team, as well. You need to see the bigger picture, as it is all connected at the leadership level.

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Tips For Prospective Leaders In The SEO Industry

To succeed as an SEO executive, you must be able to hire and build a strong team, listen and be receptive to feedback, and motivate those people who have the potential to be your company’s rock stars.

Provide a creative and consultative working environment, and set out a clear path for your employees to advance their careers. Enable them to work on different accounts across various verticals to broaden their experience.

Always be humble and include your team to get their perspectives on each issue, whether that is why they feel traffic may be down, how to improve rankings, how we can win this pitch, etc.

No man is an island. A great leader is only as good as the team he is leading.

Remember, too, that numbers don’t lie. Always show results and continue to bring innovative ideas to clients and prospects, even if they sound outlandish.

If you want to move up the ladder, you have to be able to demonstrate how your leadership translates into business results, too.

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Continue working on that plan to grow new business by 20+% year over year, get incremental revenue from existing clients by offering new services, think creatively – and be ready to prove it.

Also, if you’re lucky enough to write a column for the most prestigious publication in the search industry, definitely go for it.

Being an SEO executive for a leading agency can be a rewarding career. It offers not only longevity but also all of the rewards inherent to helping colleagues grow in their careers and clients reach their key performance indicators year after year.

If you had to choose only a few key areas of focus to drive your career in SEO leadership forward, I would say these are the “secrets” to my success:

  • Always hire the best talent.
  • Collaborate with your team.
  • Never be afraid to try out new ideas.
  • Keep up to date with the latest technology.
  • Test different optimization tactics and strategies out for yourself.
  • Read industry publications and follow thought leaders in the space.
  • Be innovative and strive to set yourself apart from competitors.

More resources:

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Featured image: Shutterstock/Gorodenkoff




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State Of Marketing Data Standards In The AI Era [Webinar]

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State Of Marketing Data Standards In The AI Era [Webinar]

Claravine and Advertiser Perceptions surveyed 140 marketers and agencies to better understand the impact of data standards on marketing data, and they’re ready to present their findings.

Want to learn how you can mitigate privacy risks and boost ROI through data standards?

Watch this on-demand webinar and learn how companies are addressing new privacy laws, taking advantage of AI, and organizing their data to better capture the campaign data they need, as well as how you can implement these findings in your campaigns.

In this webinar, you will:

  • Gain a better understanding of how your marketing data management compares to enterprise advertisers.
  • Get an overview of the current state of data standards and analytics, and how marketers are managing risk while improving the ROI of their programs.
  • Walk away with tactics and best practices that you can use to improve your marketing data now.

Chris Comstock, Chief Growth Officer at Claravine, will show you the marketing data trends of top advertisers and the potential pitfalls that come with poor data standards.

Learn the key ways to level up your data strategy to pinpoint campaign success.

View the slides below or check out the full webinar for all the details.

Join Us For Our Next Webinar!

SaaS Marketing: Expert Paid Media Tips Backed By $150M In Ad Spend

Join us and learn a unique methodology for growth that has driven massive revenue at a lower cost for hundreds of SaaS brands. We’ll dive into case studies backed by real data from over $150 million in SaaS ad spend per year.

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GPT Store Set To Launch In 2024 After ‘Unexpected’ Delays

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GPT Store Set To Launch In 2024 After 'Unexpected' Delays

OpenAI shares its plans for the GPT Store, enhancements to GPT Builder tools, privacy improvements, and updates coming to ChatGPT.

  • OpenAI has scheduled the launch of the GPT Store for early next year, aligning with its ongoing commitment to developing advanced AI technologies.
  • The GPT Builder tools have received substantial updates, including a more intuitive configuration interface and improved file handling capabilities.
  • Anticipation builds for upcoming updates to ChatGPT, highlighting OpenAI’s responsiveness to community feedback and dedication to AI innovation.

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96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here’s How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]

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96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]

It’s no secret that the web is growing by millions, if not billions of pages per day.

Our Content Explorer tool discovers 10 million new pages every 24 hours while being very picky about the pages that qualify for inclusion. The “main” Ahrefs web crawler crawls that number of pages every two minutes. 

But how much of this content gets organic traffic from Google?

To find out, we took the entire database from our Content Explorer tool (around 14 billion pages) and studied how many pages get traffic from organic search and why.

How many web pages get organic search traffic?

96.55% of all pages in our index get zero traffic from Google, and 1.94% get between one and ten monthly visits.

Distribution of pages by traffic from Content Explorer

Before we move on to discussing why the vast majority of pages never get any search traffic from Google (and how to avoid being one of them), it’s important to address two discrepancies with the studied data:

  1. ~14 billion pages may seem like a huge number, but it’s not the most accurate representation of the entire web. Even compared to the size of Site Explorer’s index of 340.8 billion pages, our sample size for this study is quite small and somewhat biased towards the “quality side of the web.”
  2. Our search traffic numbers are estimates. Even though our database of ~651 million keywords in Site Explorer (where our estimates come from) is arguably the largest database of its kind, it doesn’t contain every possible thing people search for in Google. There’s a chance that some of these pages get search traffic from super long-tail keywords that are not popular enough to make it into our database.

That said, these two “inaccuracies” don’t change much in the grand scheme of things: the vast majority of published pages never rank in Google and never get any search traffic. 

But why is this, and how can you be a part of the minority that gets organic search traffic from Google?

Well, there are hundreds of SEO issues that may prevent your pages from ranking well in Google. But if we focus only on the most common scenarios, assuming the page is indexed, there are only three of them.

Reason 1: The topic has no search demand

If nobody is searching for your topic, you won’t get any search traffic—even if you rank #1.

For example, I recently Googled “pull sitemap into google sheets” and clicked the top-ranking page (which solved my problem in seconds, by the way). But if you plug that URL into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, you’ll see that it gets zero estimated organic search traffic:

The top-ranking page for this topic gets no traffic because there's no search demandThe top-ranking page for this topic gets no traffic because there's no search demand

This is because hardly anyone else is searching for this, as data from Keywords Explorer confirms:

Keyword data from Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer confirms that this topic has no search demandKeyword data from Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer confirms that this topic has no search demand

This is why it’s so important to do keyword research. You can’t just assume that people are searching for whatever you want to talk about. You need to check the data.

Our Traffic Potential (TP) metric in Keywords Explorer can help with this. It estimates how much organic search traffic the current top-ranking page for a keyword gets from all the queries it ranks for. This is a good indicator of the total search demand for a topic.

You’ll see this metric for every keyword in Keywords Explorer, and you can even filter for keywords that meet your minimum criteria (e.g., 500+ monthly traffic potential): 

Filtering for keywords with Traffic Potential (TP) in Ahrefs' Keywords ExplorerFiltering for keywords with Traffic Potential (TP) in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Reason 2: The page has no backlinks

Backlinks are one of Google’s top three ranking factors, so it probably comes as no surprise that there’s a clear correlation between the number of websites linking to a page and its traffic.

Pages with more referring domains get more trafficPages with more referring domains get more traffic
Pages with more referring domains get more traffic

Same goes for the correlation between a page’s traffic and keyword rankings:

Pages with more referring domains rank for more keywordsPages with more referring domains rank for more keywords
Pages with more referring domains rank for more keywords

Does any of this data prove that backlinks help you rank higher in Google?

No, because correlation does not imply causation. However, most SEO professionals will tell you that it’s almost impossible to rank on the first page for competitive keywords without backlinks—an observation that aligns with the data above.

The key word there is “competitive.” Plenty of pages get organic traffic while having no backlinks…

Pages with more referring domains get more trafficPages with more referring domains get more traffic
How much traffic pages with no backlinks get

… but from what I can tell, almost all of them are about low-competition topics.

For example, this lyrics page for a Neil Young song gets an estimated 162 monthly visits with no backlinks: 

Example of a page with traffic but no backlinks, via Ahrefs' Content ExplorerExample of a page with traffic but no backlinks, via Ahrefs' Content Explorer

But if we check the keywords it ranks for, they almost all have Keyword Difficulty (KD) scores in the single figures:

Some of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks forSome of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks for

It’s the same story for this page selling upholstered headboards:

Some of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks forSome of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks for

You might have noticed two other things about these pages:

  • Neither of them get that much traffic. This is pretty typical. Our index contains ~20 million pages with no referring domains, yet only 2,997 of them get more than 1K search visits per month. That’s roughly 1 in every 6,671 pages with no backlinks.
  • Both of the sites they’re on have high Domain Rating (DR) scores. This metric shows the relative strength of a website’s backlink profile. Stronger sites like these have more PageRank that they can pass to pages with internal links to help them rank. 

Bottom line? If you want your pages to get search traffic, you really only have two options:

  1. Target uncompetitive topics that you can rank for with few or no backlinks.
  2. Target competitive topics and build backlinks to rank.

If you want to find uncompetitive topics, try this:

  1. Enter a topic into Keywords Explorer
  2. Go to the Matching terms report
  3. Set the Keyword Difficulty (KD) filter to max. 20
  4. Set the Lowest DR filter to your site’s DR (this will show you keywords with at least one of the same or lower DR ranking in the top 5)
Filtering for low-competition keywords in Ahrefs' Keywords ExplorerFiltering for low-competition keywords in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

(Remember to keep an eye on the TP column to make sure they have traffic potential.)

To rank for more competitive topics, you’ll need to earn or build high-quality backlinks to your page. If you’re not sure how to do that, start with the guides below. Keep in mind that it’ll be practically impossible to get links unless your content adds something to the conversation. 

Reason 3. The page doesn’t match search intent

Google wants to give users the most relevant results for a query. That’s why the top organic results for “best yoga mat” are blog posts with recommendations, not product pages. 

It's obviously what searchers want when they search for "best yoga mats"It's obviously what searchers want when they search for "best yoga mats"

Basically, Google knows that searchers are in research mode, not buying mode.

It’s also why this page selling yoga mats doesn’t show up, despite it having backlinks from more than six times more websites than any of the top-ranking pages:

Page selling yoga mats that has lots of backlinksPage selling yoga mats that has lots of backlinks
Number of linking websites to the top-ranking pages for "best yoga mats"Number of linking websites to the top-ranking pages for "best yoga mats"

Luckily, the page ranks for thousands of other more relevant keywords and gets tens of thousands of monthly organic visits. So it’s not such a big deal that it doesn’t rank for “best yoga mats.”

Number of keyword rankings for the page selling yoga matsNumber of keyword rankings for the page selling yoga mats

However, if you have pages with lots of backlinks but no organic traffic—and they already target a keyword with traffic potential—another quick SEO win is to re-optimize them for search intent.

We did this in 2018 with our free backlink checker.

It was originally nothing but a boring landing page explaining the benefits of our product and offering a 7-day trial: 

Original landing page for our free backlink checkerOriginal landing page for our free backlink checker

After analyzing search intent, we soon realized the issue:

People weren’t looking for a landing page, but rather a free tool they could use right away. 

So, in September 2018, we created a free tool and published it under the same URL. It ranked #1 pretty much overnight, and has remained there ever since. 

Our rankings over time for the keyword "backlink checker." You can see when we changed the pageOur rankings over time for the keyword "backlink checker." You can see when we changed the page

Organic traffic went through the roof, too. From ~14K monthly organic visits pre-optimization to almost ~200K today. 

Estimated search traffic over time to our free backlink checkerEstimated search traffic over time to our free backlink checker

TLDR

96.55% of pages get no organic traffic. 

Keep your pages in the other 3.45% by building backlinks, choosing topics with organic traffic potential, and matching search intent.

Ping me on Twitter if you have any questions. 🙂



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