SEO
Top 10 SEO Priorities For Your First Week As A New Marketing Manager
As a new marketing manager, the first week can feel like a whirlwind of attempting to understand the people, processes, technologies, and campaigns under development.
When you couple that with “owning the SEO” side of the department, one may ask themselves, Where do I even start?
Given that SEO isn’t a one-and-done initiative, you’re on the lookout for the highest impact actions you can take to set the foundation for your longer-term SEO success.
The recommendations here are from a marketer’s perspective at a mid-sized, multi-location business.
The most important objectives in the first week are to understand your organizational, departmental, and team goals.
These north stars ensure alignment with your teammates and organizational mission before you can start executing.
Along with getting to know your team and the resources available, here are the systems to prioritize and ensure are providing accurate data.
1. Install Website And Conversion Analytics
It will take you more than a week to audit your analytics systems and ensure that your session and conversion data are 100% accurate. However, having any level of analytics tracking is better than nothing.
At a baseline, make sure Google Analytics tracking is firing on your website, landing pages, and blog.
If your website is hosted on one CMS and your blog on another, you’ll need to check both places to ensure tracking is configured properly.
GTM/GA Debugger is my favorite free browser-based tool for quickly debugging erroneous or duplicative GA and GTM tracking code on site.
Run the debugger on your site to ensure you aren’t seeing multiple pageviews firing on every page. Here are a couple of examples that show that the GA or GA4 tag is only firing a single time on the page.
Screenshot from GTM/GA Debugger, April 2022If you see multiple pageviews firing on each page, you’ll know you have analytics issues to address down the road.
2. Set Up Google Analytics Alerts
After configuring your baseline analytics, it’s time to set up custom alerts in GA. Alerts are a simple way to get notified if your site sees a sudden dip in traffic or conversions.
Feel free to use this alert configuration for your own site, which you can access in admin settings.
Screenshot from Google Analytics, April 20223. Implement Rank Tracking
You’ll likely spend the first few weeks on the job learning about your buyer, products, competitors, marketing channels, and much more.
One of the easiest-to-understand metrics for helping your team track your SEO performance is overall growth for first page, non-branded Google rankings.
Theoretically, as you create content, optimize your site, and grow your backlink portfolio, you should be seeing an increase in first page rankings for non-branded keywords.
During your first week, you can benchmark this value and start to understand what topics/keywords are on the cusp of ranking on the first page of Google.
Consider these keywords as your “low hanging fruit.” If you are looking for a quick win, focus on improving the content on the pages that are about to rank on page one.
Here is an example of a Semrush report tracking these metrics to provide this baseline to your team quickly:
Screenshot from Semrush, April 2022It will likely take you longer than a week to determine the topics you need to build your content and SEO strategy around, but this will at least give you a starting point.
4. Set Up Google Search Console
At a basic level, GSC tracks your ability to get crawled and indexed in Google and highlights potential issues that impact Google’s crawlers from accessing your site.
In your first week, you’ll want to check:
Your sitemaps are submitted, and the volume of pages listed in your sitemaps matches the volume of pages being indexed in Google (as noted in the coverage report).
They will likely never exactly match, but if you see a discrepancy of 50% (of pages in the sitemap vs. valid pages in the coverage report), there could be content quality or technical issues causing Google not to index your site.
You don’t have any manual actions or security issues.
If you’re unsure what your predecessors did from a marketing or CMS security perspective, check these areas to ensure you’re not being impacted.
Any spikes in impressions or clicks data as listed in the ”search results” report.
Pull the last 16 months of data and note any specific timeframes for when your site saw these impacts within search.
Screenshot from Google Search Console, April 20225. Set Up Brand Mentions Listening
The easiest way to generate backlinks to your site is by ensuring that any other site that mentions your brand also links to your site.
If you don’t yet have an SEO tool, Feedly follows industry publications and brand mentions.
However, my favorite SEO-specific tool is Semrush’s brand monitoring tool which allows you to track unlinked brand mentions.
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Screenshot from Semrush, April 2022
6. Verify Google Business Profile Listings
The complexity in your marketing department increases when you are also responsible for the local digital presence of individual branches, franchises or sales offices.
In your first week, make sure each location has a Google Business Profile page with accurate name, address, and phone number information.
As part of this process, start the claims process for verifying your listings. This can take up to a couple of weeks, so you’ll want to get started.
7. Set Up Annotations
If you’re fortunate, your predecessor left records of the most important dates in your company’s marketing history, including website launches, CMS migrations, campaign start/end dates, etc.
Some of these records may be stored in Google Analytics Annotations which allow you to leave detailed notes about any events that may impact your traffic, conversion, or revenue data.
In your first week, if nothing else, review the annotations from the last years and add in the date that you started at the company to show the progress you’ve made once you’ve reached the 90, 180, and 365-day mark at the organization.
8. Install Google Tag Manager
The best configuration for most organizations to manage tracking scripts is through Google Tag Manager.
Proper implementation of GTM allows you to see all of the scripts running on your site and the pages that those scripts are firing on.
If you’re coming into a new role without being given clear tech stack documentation, Google Tag Manager can help you what systems are used on-site for tracking, advertising, and much more.
9. Run A Crawl To Establish Benchmarks
Ideally, by the time you start your new role, you already have a general idea of the web presence of your new organization.
In your first week, run a crawl using ScreamingFrog or another crawling tool to identify the volume of SEO issues to address and get a better sense of your information architecture.
Whatever crawl tool you use, make sure it can crawl all of the subdomains connected to your site, so you can gather a complete picture of all of the web properties you may be working with.
Here is an example of the kind of visuals to help you understand your information architecture.
Screenshot from Screaming Frog, April 202210. Inventory Your MarTech Stack
As spending on SaaS applications continues to rise, your new organization may use between 20 to 150 different applications across the organization.
You don’t need to know the ins and outs of all of them.
If you can document all marketing and sales tools and their respective uses, you’ll better understand what you can start using right away (vs. going through the purchase process of other tools).
Your first week will fly by. If you can tackle this list, you will have the foundation to track, optimize and launch your upcoming campaigns.
More resources:
Featured Image: wear it out/Shutterstock
SEO
8 SEO Hiring Managers Share Their #1 Interview Question
Are you frantically Googling “SEO interview questions” because you’ve got an upcoming interview like… tomorrow? If so, don’t panic—I’ve got you covered.
As research for this article, I’ve asked eight top hiring managers to share the #1 SEO interview question they’re asking candidates right now, so you can understand what types of questions hiring managers are asking.
The hiring managers I talked to came from a range of different backgrounds: agency, in-house, and enterprise businesses.
It’s impossible to prepare for every question ahead of the interview, but it’s important to put yourself in their shoes and diligently do your research.
At a minimum, you should consider:
- What’s important to them and their business?
- Why should they hire you?
- Can you demonstrate a thorough understanding of SEO and bring the receipts to prove it?
Ok, that’s enough from me—let’s see what the hiring managers had to say.
This question comes from Sam Page, Director of SEO, Slack:
A competitor has implemented a new SEO strategy. How do you analyze their strategy and when do you consider implementing something similar?
How to answer
Here’s how Sam would answer this question:
I look at how the competitor uses the strategy to grow keywords, traffic, or engagement. If it makes sense and falls within best practices, I would consider implementing something similar (ideally, finding a way to improve upon it).
I analyze the success of their strategy with SEO tools like Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, and Page Speed Insights (I am open to other tool ideas like GTMetrix).
I also want to consider whether the strategy is appropriate for our customer base.
Tip
As Sam mentioned, you can use Ahrefs to help with this.
I’d suggest checking out the Content changes filter in Site Explorer’s Overview to understand whether the content changes you or your competitors have made have had a positive or negative impact. You can use this information to help inform your SEO and content strategy.
This question came from Jimisha Thakrar, Head of Organic Performance at MG OMD:
“How would you handle a situation where someone in leadership wants immediate SEO results?”
How to answer
Jimisha gave an example of how to answer:
SEO is a long-term strategy, but I understand the pressure for quick wins. In these situations, I would focus on setting clear expectations early on within the business by showing realistic timelines for SEO impact and comparing it to other channels like paid search.
It’s also important to realize how key resource for implementation is going to be and that this is also going to have an impact. There are things you can do, such as identify low-hanging fruit that can provide quicker results, such as optimizing underperforming pages that are ranking on page 2 or fixing technical SEO issues that are limiting visibility (resource dependent).
Next, if leadership is eager for quick traffic due to seasonality/campaign deadlines, I would suggest they leverage paid channels for immediate impact while building on the SEO with a hybrid approach, combining short-term paid search with longer-term SEO efforts. This approach could provide the immediate visibility they seek while SEO efforts lay the groundwork for sustainable, organic traffic growth.
Finally, I would communicate the importance of patience and long-term investment in SEO, perhaps showing examples of how it contributes to sustainable traffic and revenue growth over time and work with them to focus on developing a robust SEO strategy that ensures long-term visibility.
Tip
SEO is usually a long-term marketing strategy, as Jimisha says, and you need to communicate this clearly to stakeholders, but there are a few things you can do to accelerate your SEO results.
Check out my article on Quick SEO, for eight ways to accelerate your results from months to days.
The next question comes courtesy of Fabrizio Ballarini, Organic Growth at Wise:
If you could create any page you want on your current website, what would you create?
How to answer
Often, candidates are blocked by resources and buy-in from stakeholders. I want to assess what they would do if given the freedom to execute.
Sidenote.
In my opinion, it sounds like Fabrizio is keen to find independent, creative thinkers with this type of question. This is a good example of where it is useful to have a personal website so you can say, “This is what I would do—and this is what I have done on my website.”
Even if the website is still relatively small, if the quality of the pages you mention is good, it may catch the attention of the hiring manager.
This question came from Itamar Blauer, Senior SEO Director at StudioHawk:
What do you think the most significant Google update has been in the past two years, and why?
How to answer
Itamar said he’s looking for three things when asking this question:
Firstly, I want to understand whether the candidate keeps up to date with the SEO industry and search landscape.
Secondly, I want to see how the candidate can prioritize and be critical.
Lastly, I want to get an insight into how the candidate sees different SEO areas and their significance.
I’d look for answers around the various Helpful Content Updates over the past year or so, as these have been fairly significant. Mentions of broad core algorithm updates are also fine but (generally) not as significant.
Tip
To answer this, you need to make sure you’re very extremely familiar with all the latest Google algorithm updates and be able to critically evaluate their significance.
You can use Ahrefs’ Site Explorer Google updates overlay to see whether updates correlate to traffic increases or decreases for the website you’re analyzing.
Here’s the question Daniel Foley Carter, Director at SEO Stack, likes to ask candidates:
How would you perform SEO testing, and why is it so important?
How to answer
This is how Daniel would like a prospective candidate to answer it:
SEO testing is important within an SEO strategy because there are so many nuances to ranking and ranking factors that we have to find that “happy medium” by testing.
Testing allows us to scratch under the surface of what our pages need to have in respect of content (including information priority, content coverage, depth, and quality of information) alongside traditional things such as tech compliance, internal & external anchors, and more.
Effectively, testing allows us to find out what’s right on a case-by-case basis – as typically, each page on a domain will be aimed at different queries where, ultimately, ranking factors are likely to vary.
Therefore, sequential and persistent testing would allow us to find what works best to establish rank and drive revenue/traffic.
Tip
You can monitor your performance of SEO tests using the Portfolios feature in Ahrefs.
This question comes from Rachel Walton, Head of SEO at Quirky Digital:
How do you prioritize which SEO work should be completed first?
How to answer
Here’s why Rachel likes asking this question, and what she’s looking for in an answer:
I love this question because the candidate will reveal a lot about both their soft skills (time and resource management) and their hard skills (specific SEO red flags) in the answer.
Candidates who interpret this as a question about their soft skills will often talk about prioritizing work that has the highest impact for the lowest resource input, or they might talk about using the first month to complete work that they know is the most important to the client.
The candidates who approach the question with an answer about their hard skills will usually talk through some key issues that they like to ensure are resolved quickly, such as poor information architecture (IA), poor technical setup, and indexing issues.
I’m always impressed with candidates who demonstrate their understanding of what foundations a client needs to perform well – this usually indicates that they have a great combination of both soft and hard skills.
For example, they realize that it’s going to be a lot easier for us to manage cannibalization issues before we move on to producing new content to save ourselves the hassle of needing to amend tons of internal linking later down the line when we cull useless or duplicated content.
This kind of response shows me that the candidate understands SEO concepts, is a forward thinker, and likely has some practical experience of messing it up once or twice and needing to rectify their mistakes — because the best growth often comes from getting it wrong, but learning from it!
Next up, here’s a question from David Schulhof, Director of Digital at PHA Group:
What should be the main priority for brands investing in SEO today, and why?
How to answer
Here’s why David likes this question and how he expects someone to answer it:
I like this broad question because it highlights what area of SEO the person is focused on and how open-minded they are to the broader SEO spectrum.
It usually ignites a good discussion and talking points to explore experience and knowledge further and also leads to lots of follow up questions.
As with any interview question, I want to hear validation for detail behind the answer, why they think it’s a priority, and how that could vary for different clients.
I would usually follow up with specific sectors or types of brands to see if the answer would change.
Our final (and very big) question comes from Philip Gamble, Head of SEO at Zenith:
What do you think the impact of AI Overviews will be on SEO as a channel?
How to answer
Philip provides an example answer below but interestingly suggests that there isn’t a right answer here.
The question is there to test the candidate’s general understanding of SEO and explore their ability to justify their SEO opinions and communicate them succinctly—essential for working agency-side.
At the moment, AI Overviews have not had a significant impact on most of my clients.
Their presence is fairly minimal compared to the early beta, and I see them predominantly on the upper funnel informational terms, mostly longer question queries.
I’ve seen a few useful AI Overviews, for example, when searching for a grammar-related question. Still, in a few cases, they just seem to duplicate information already in featured snippets. I’ve also seen some examples where the generated result wasn’t helpful.
Final thoughts
If you want to ace the interview, you need to get into the brain of the hiring manager. This is often easier said than done. As you can see from this post, every hiring manager is looking for something slightly different. You can only do this by understanding what’s important to them—and by understanding who they’re looking for.
Are you an SEO hiring manager and want to contribute to this article? If so, share your favorite SEO interview questions here or contact me on LinkedIn.
SEO
Yoast Co-Founder Suggests A WordPress Contributor Board
Joost de Valk, co-founder of the Yoast SEO plugin, published an article calling for more equitable contributions from large WordPress companies, greater financial transparency, and a new board that represents the voices of contributors and companies.
Joost de Valk Supports Matt Mullenweg
Joost de Valk’s article is supportive of WordPress and agrees with Automattic’s CEO Matt Mullenweg that WP Engine should contribute more to WordPress. He praises Mullenweg and Automattic for the amount of contributions they make to WordPress, contrasting Mullenweg’s example against those who are financially benefiting the most from WordPress but don’t contribute on a level that’s reflective of their rewards.
He writes:
“I agree with Matt about his opinion that a big hosting company such as WPEngine should contribute more. It is the right thing to do.”
Joost writes that these aren’t just words to him, that they reflect his values and actions, sharing that his organization contributed so much time to the Gutenberg Project that it was literally at the expense of his own for-profit venture in that, while they “still made a lot of money” their revenue did experience a dip.
He thus envisions creating a board that’s representative of stakeholders as a way to encourage a healthy sustainable open source ecosystem with greater transparency and community representation.
Business Success Informs His Opinion
His idea for cultivating a health self-perpetuating open source community has been his guiding principle and is what he credits for his business success. In a 2013 WordCamp presentation he shared his experience of spending many years contributing to WordPress and creating a wildly popular plugin while not yet making any money. He reached a point where he had a day job to support his WordPress hobby and had to decide how to flip that so that they hobby became his day job.
In that presentation (The Victory Of The Commons) he described two ways of thinking about his situation, one in which he just goes all-in and focuses on doing what’s best for him and another path where he does what’s best for him and the WordPress community.
Joost credits his wife with suggesting to solve his problem by looking at it within the framework of the Tragedy Of The Commons. The Tragedy Of The Commons is a concept of how individuals can decide to either manage a shared resource to create a sustainable living for the community or behave in self-interest and eventually deplete the resource, thus harming the entire community.
He shared the following in that 2013 WordCamp presentation:
“So, if everyone in the WordPress community, if we all looked at it like this, we can make money and make sure that we reinvest that money, we’d grow.”
He said that creating something and giving it away is not necessarily good. He said it’s better for everyone to make “piles and piles of money” with the work but giving some of that back supports you and the community in a self-sustaining circle. He insisted that reinvesting “in the pasture” was paramount to working within the WordPress open source community.
“Reinvest some of that profit into all of our main pasture, WordPress. We all benefit.”
New WordPress Foundation Board
One of the solutions that Joost suggests is the creation of a board that provides representation to those who contribute to WordPress. Joost uses the analogy of taxation with representation as the basis for a WordPress Foundation board so that those who contribute can also be heard as part of the decision making process.
What he envisions isn’t a governing board with decision making power but one that serves in an advisory position that can participate as part of a dialogue within the decision-making structure.
He writes:
“I think this could actually help Matt, as I do understand that it’s very lonely at the top.
With such a group, we could also discuss how to better highlight companies that are contributing and how to encourage others to do so.”
The three main points he makes are:
1. Representation Of Stakeholders
“In my opinion, we all should get a say in how we spend those contributions. I understand that core contributors are very important, but so are the organizers of our (flagship) events, the leadership of hosting companies, etc. We need to find a way to have a group of people who represent the community and the contributing corporations.”
2. Facilitation Of Transparent Discussions
“Now I don’t mean to say that Matt should no longer be project leader. I just think that we should more transparently discuss with a ‘board’ of some sorts, about the roadmap and the future of WordPress as many people and companies depend on it.”
3. Encouragement And Recognition Of Contributions
“With such a group, we could also discuss how to better highlight companies that are contributing and how to encourage others to do so.”
Transparency With Money
One of the points that Joost brings up is somewhat separate from the creation of a contributor board and it’s about the payments made to Automattic for trademark deals. He says that thing mingling of money creates a situation where it’s uncertain how much of it is used by Automattic as contributions to WordPress.
He writes:
“…let everybody see how the money flows.
Currently the way it works is that the money for trademark deals flows to Automattic, but we don’t know how much of the contributions Automattic does are paid for by Newfold, whom we now all know are paying for the use of the trademark. Maybe the money should go directly into the foundation? If not, I think we should at least see how many of the hours contributed by Automattic are actually contributed by Newfold.”
WordPress May Be At A Crossroad
WordPress may be at a historic crossroad that could lead to different outcomes. Joost suggests doubling down on open source by engaging with the entire WordPress community, returning to the ideal of reinvesting in “the pasture” to create a sustainable system that allows everyone to make “piles and piles of money” and achieve the goals users are working toward.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Shutterstock AI Generator
SEO
WordPress Gives WP Engine Users A Reprieve
Matt Mullenweg posted on WordPress.org that WP Engine users have been granted a reprieve from the block on the WordPress plugin and theme repository until October 1st, allowing them to access updates as usual.
WordPress Versus WP Engine
Matt Mullenweg and popular web host WP Engine have been locked in a conflict for the past week over a commercial licensing fee that other web hosts pay but WP Engine does not. The issue between them stems from the frustrations on Mullenweg’s side with the perception that WP Engine is not giving back enough to WordPress in the way that they should. Prominent figures in the WordPress industry like Joost de Valk agree with Mullenweg that companies, including WP Engine, should give back more to WordPress.
WP Engine has offered their side of the story have gone as far as to send a formal cease and desist letter for what they perceive as an unfair attack on their business.
Regardless of who is right or wrong, WordPress users on WP Engine are caught in the middle of this conflict, with their businesses disrupted by Mullenweg’s decision to block WP Engine from accessing the WordPress.org plugin and theme repository, preventing them from updating plugins and themes.
Temporary Reprieve
Mullenweg posted on WordPress.org that he has heard from WordPress users and has decided to give the WordPress users a chance for WP Engine to set up a solution so that they won’t be inconvenienced. WP Engine has until October 1st to engineer a workaround.
He wrote:
“I’ve heard from WP Engine customers that they are frustrated that WP Engine hasn’t been able to make updates, plugin directory, theme directory, and Openverse work on their sites. It saddens me that they’ve been negatively impacted by Silver Lake‘s commercial decisions.
WP Engine was well aware that we could remove access when they chose to ignore our efforts to resolve our differences and enter into a commercial licensing agreement. Heather Brunner, Lee Wittlinger, and their Board chose to take this risk.
…We have lifted the blocks of their servers from accessing ours, until October 1, UTC 00:00. Hopefully this helps them spin up their mirrors of all of WordPress.org’s resources that they were using for free while not paying, and making legal threats against us.”
Read more at WordPress.org:
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Vladimka production
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