THE KNOWLEDGE PANEL PODCAST

What link building strategies work best in 2021? What link building strategies used to work but aren’t a good idea nowadays? Those are just 2 of the questions covered in the Knowledge Panel Show – Episode 14.

Joining Dixon Jones on this month’s show are Judith Lewis from DeCabbit, Jonny Ross from Fleek and Bibi Raven from BibiBuzz.

Sign up to watch live over on our Knowledge Panel Show home page.

---

Sign up below to watch future episodes live…

What does best-practice local SEO look like in 2021? What platforms do you need to be on and how do you maximize the impact of your local search presence today?

Joining Dixon to discuss that on June the 21st at 4pm BST is Greg Gifford, Colan Nielsen, Joy Hawkins and Jason Brown.

Sign up to watch live over on our Knowledge Panel Show home page.

What are the main SEO challenges associated with startups? As a startup, how do you compete with Goliath-sized pre-existing brands that currently dominate the SERP? How do you make an impact when your budget is lower, your team is smaller and your domain is less authoritative? Those are some of the topics that Dixon Jones in episode 10 of the Knowledge Panel with Fabrizio Ballarini from Wise, Hellen Benavides from giffgaff and Kerstin Reichert from Tide.

Want to Read Instead? Here is the Transcript

Dixon: Hi, everyone. Hello, and welcome to The Knowledge Panel episode 10: SEO for Startups. And I’m really pleased to say that the panel I’ve got today, I think, is ideal for this particular topic, SEO for Startups, because we’ve got three really quite well-known challenger brands that have disrupted their industry sectors since they’ve come into the world. And so having SEO managers from those businesses are absolutely great. So we’re gonna dive in and ask these people to introduce themselves and start with…well, I’m just gotta prove guys that I can pronounce names, and then you can laugh at me when I can’t pronounce them. So we have Hellen Benavides, Fabrizio Ballarini and Kerstin Reichert. And if I’ve got those right, you can…if I got those wrong, you can laugh at me. But, you know, why don’t you guys introduce yourself. So Hellen, who you are and where do you come from?

Hellen: Well, I am SEO manager for Giffgaff. I’ve been working for Giffgaff for the last seven years. So pretty much since the start, always on content and now natural move to SEO.

Dixon: And if there are people out there in markets that don’t know Giffgaff it’s disruptive brand in the telephone… So basically a mobile phone provider and completely disrupted the market with non-long term contracts, I think is a fair bit. Fabrizio, who you are and where do you come from, sir?

Fabrizio: Well, I’m obviously Italian, right? I don’t have many options with such a name, and I work at Wise. I’ve been at Wise for the past six years, and I joined as the first SEO-ish to be in the team. So I’ve been seeing a lot of things happening from where we just launched the website to where we are today. So that’s…and I’m still doing that to some extent. So that’s my line…

Dixon: And for those who don’t know Wise, are you allowed to see what it used to be called, or are you banned from saying that loud?

Fabrizio: Actually, I’m forcing myself or, like, trying to not call it TransferWise very odd because, obviously, I have six years’ worth of history on this. Yeah, like, we just rebranded, like, few months ago, from TransferWise to Wise, and, you know, that’s why these days we are Wise, but most of you probably know us as TransferWise, right?

Dixon: And if you haven’t used Wise, or then you know… If you wanna transfer money between countries, I use it all the time, and we use it to pay people around the world, it’s fantastic. So it really disrupted the, you know, FX industry, I’d say. Kerstin, who are you and where do you come from?

Kerstin: Hello, everyone. I am Kerstin. I am originally from Germany, but I’m in the UK now. And I work at Tide as the senior SEO manager or basically as the SEO department. I’ve been there for a little over two years. That’s mainly where the SEO journey started. So I’m really excited to be there and see what else is gonna happen with the company as we’re fairly new still.

Dixon: Yeah, and I’ve got at least two Tide accounts as well. So if you want a bank account, particularly if you’re from abroad, trying to get a bank account in the UK, the interesting thing about Tide is they kind of have really taken prepaid credit cards to its extreme, I’d say. It’s, you know, not quite fully FCS regulated yet but pretty darn close, and the apps and stuff are released to us. So definitely a big disruptor in the market.

Firstly, thank you very much for coming on, guys. You know, your big successes in the startup world, I would say, you know, for most of us that are startups, we can only dream of being, you know, a Tide or a Giffgaff or a Wise. So I wanna start with really the basic question. What are the big SEO challenges associated with startups in general? What things do you think startups…problems startups face that other businesses that have been around for a long time don’t face? So I don’t know who wants to head that one off. I’ll pick on someone then. Fabrizio, you can.

Fabrizio: I can start. I think that, like…

Dixon: Or even Fabrizio, sorry.

Fabrizio: It’s fine. Like, usually people can be Fab so at the third letter, you get it…

Dixon: I will do that now.

Fabrizio: Yeah. So I think the general problem that like is common among all startups, whether you’re a, you know, super well-funded company or whether you’re, like, a company that you’re starting in your bedroom is time, right? And this is…the timing in both sense of figuring out what to do first and what to prioritize and second is time to, you know, the clock ticking or your business becoming an actual business? And I think, like, that’s definitely the thing that we, you know, even though in our case, when we launched the SEO program, the company was already five years in, right? Into the business with…we already had, like, a funding, yet you still have limited time, you know? And I think that’s generally the biggest problem, as in figuring out what to do first, how to measure it, and, like, how to pick up from there.

Because definitely, I guess from, like, established brands, there’s a little bit less luxury of, like, what you can try and wait, right? There’s okay, if in an established brand if for a couple of quarters things don’t move, if you’re in a fast-moving startup, is unlikely that is okay that you spend like months without not much happening, right? So I think this is definitely the biggest challenge. Even though from a resource perspective, you tend to be a bit more agile, right? Like, it’s a bit faster to get things done. But then time and people, right? We should build on that to begin with is definitely the hardest thing to fix.

Dixon: So balancing resource and focus to sum that up is you think, is…

Fabrizio: Yeah, exactly. Even though you have unlimited money, I don’t think that can fix it either in a way that it takes time to hire the right people, to find them, convince them to join, early days to convince someone to actually join us to come in and build the team with us was not an easy thing to do. So, like, the second person that I had was like an ex-colleague, which I texted on WhatsApp. And then from there, I had to spend a lot of time on LinkedIn telling people, we are TransferWise, this is what we do, would you like to join us? This is how we work, as opposed to you know, people wanting to join other brands that is a bit easier to understand what their company is about, you know, it’s a bit less risky as well. So I think that’s definitely important, yeah.

Dixon: Hellen, Kerstin, any other challenges for startups, with small start-ups?

Hellen: Absolutely. I mean, we’re still not in, like, super early stages, but still early stages. So, I agree with Fab there that time is a massive constraint, because there’s so much you can do, which is also a good thing. Because you can be you know, very creative and basically, whatever you want to do, people will trust you and you can do it. So there’s a lot of scope, but that also means you really really have to become very good at prioritizing. Things move incredibly fast. So, yeah, definitely time, then unfortunately, we don’t have unlimited resources, sounded great, what Fab said there. I think in my case, it’s slightly different. So I am quite limited in, you know, other people’s capacity that I need to get things done. And also budget-wise, of course, we are well funded, and there is budget to go around. But I feel like being at a startup is just, you really have to squeeze as much as possible out of every single pound that you spend, whereas when I worked with bigger companies, that was not quite the case. I guess you had a bit more, you know, I guess you have flexibility in your budget.

Hellen: I agree. Yeah, limited resources, limited budget, and competing priorities in the business with especially with SEO are the challenges up till now, I would say. The way the business can be different is how you are going to rank, at least on Google, on the how you can differentiate your business, this differential point will be the key to get some ranking and traffic I believe for startups.

Dixon: So I think that brings naturally onto the next thing, it’s how the heck are we going to compete with Goliaths, like, you know, the Barclays or the Vodafone or, you know, or, whoever may be your competitor in your world. If you’re a startup by definition, there’s probably gonna be an incumbent or many in there that are gonna be hugely more powerful. So how do you go about making that differentiation? You know, how do you pitch your business so that it is different to other people? So you’ve got some chance in SEO at all? Is that done by you guys or is that fed down from top brass or, you know, because a lot of us as SEOs don’t necessarily have a top brass, we are the SEO. We are the CEO.

Fabrizio: Yeah, I think I can probably go again. I think is definitely a challenge when we first look at one of our direct competitor. They are the equivalent of links as Wikipedia, probably. So, it’s probably not a good strategy to try to beat a couple of links and figure out how you can beat them, right? But at the same time, over time, you know, your profile grows and things happen. So on this point, I was watching, like, it was an interview somewhere from like Kevin Indig a while ago, and he was mentioning, like, it wasn’t necessarily related to startups, but I think on this is very important not to take the same approach, like, like-for-like in every company, right?

So, if you work in a startup that is building Facebook v2 or booking v2, probably you just need to focus on getting the technical things right and then the product will scale pages and content and everything, right? If you’re working on a startup, where there’s no actual front-facing product that get indexed and then get searched, probably you have challenging building landing pages content, or maybe, like, do a blog or long-form content. I think different businesses they’ve got different challenges. And I think the most important that’s what eventually we decided early days is not to try to outlink these people, because it’s not possible on day one, even though we are, you know, a relatively popular startup, we get a lot of press coverage, like, we are in the…at some point, when we first launched, we had, like, a lot of coverage, really a lot of coverage, but it was still nowhere near comparable to anything like that.

And so I think in our case, we decided to, you know, become a bigger brand by building a lot of content and pages and at the search presence that would allow you with time to gain authority, but then equally, you know, not all startups they mean to compete with massive site out there, maybe we just focus in on a very narrow set of keywords, and then you want to take a slightly different approach.

I mean, the important thing is not to do, like, you know, by-the-book play, where you say, okay, I do a bit of technical work, a bit of content and a bit of links, and let’s hope that next month, we’ll do the same and they will go well. Because I don’t think it’s likely that all these things can go well, because you don’t have the team to do it, your website is not an authoritative website to do all these things in one go. So I think that’s the I guess, like, biggest challenge if you wanna face big brands. But we did manage to outrank some of them with time, right? So it’s not impossible. It’s just is, you know, like, if you’re relentlessly focusing, it’s not impossible, it’s just short term is right, that you have limited chances to compete or maybe should pick a fight on just one area, right?

Dixon: Hellen and Kerstin, any other ideas for differentiation?

Hellen: I don’t think, not on differentiation, but I do think in some things, you need to go by the book to start with, for example, the technical part of the website to get it right, to build the website on good technical foundations, to be able to scale, to grow, and take into account that your website in some years won’t be a mess. So this, I think is important to get right from the start. And then it’s the differential parts of the business that are creating quality content, comparing to all the other big brands. This will also help.

Kirsten: Yeah. I think also, it’s not necessarily just the big brands or your direct competitors, right? Because from a business point of view, you might have your top three or top five set competitors, but from an SEO point of view, you actually have a lot more competitors, because you’re competing for different areas, you’re competing with content, not only with your core product. And so I think it’s crucial that you don’t I guess try to mimic what everyone else is doing, just focus on what you’re really, really good at and do that very well. And then yeah, again, its short term is difficult, but you have to build it over time.

Fabrizio: If I could add one second from Hellen’s points. Picking the right technical setup to begin with is really crucial in future. I was thinking now, like, we changed domain five, six years into this. If when I joined we wouldn’t have got the right folder structure or a bunch of these things that we would have had to change at some point and then change domain and, like, I think some choices I think you have to remember that you have to stick them on the wall for a long time, and you don’t want to keep changing them, right? Like, at least, you know, the longer they are out and they’re wrong, the painful they’re gonna get, right, with time.

Hellen: Exactly.

Fabrizio: Yeah, I think some of these things definitely you don’t have to forget them because, yeah. When I first joined someone was about to launch countries on subdomains and they were very weird instruction that I had to stop on my first week. So, like, sometimes you have to make these calls and, like, not be popular, but it’s important, right? Because long term, you don’t wanna go down that path, right? Maybe…

Hellen: If possible to start with the right technical foundations if you have resources and budget, I would advise to get the fundamentals correct. For example, we started with our no-contract theme, was our only offer, and now the website’s real. And we have phones and many other offers, and the website should be fit to follow this growth. This will be ideally the thing to do. Yeah.

Dixon: And I think from the point of view of well, yeah, so the technical bit, really, really important, and if you haven’t got the funds, I think WordPress is still a good place to start. Myself, I mean, I think of a lot of businesses can do quite well with WordPress design well. I know a lot of small businesses seem to be jumping over to Wix now as well, but and if you’re a small, small business, I’m not talking about you guys, because you guys have got online, you know, parts that need to go sort of beyond the WordPress as well. But, you know, WordPress still is a hot favorite amongst SEOs for sure as a technology, but it still needs to be set up right and it still needs to be set up properly. So you can disagree as well.

But I wanna…going over to the, to the product differentiation bit, I mean, the way that, you know, InLinks did it was…I mean, we’re competing, theoretically. Say well, we kinda compete with all of your favorite tools guys, say, and all of the Ahrefs and the SEMrushes and all the other tools, but so we had to kind of say, well, I’m not gonna do that, and so entity SEO was our kind of approach. Because that was what was different for our world, and trying to look at the world from a topic point of view instead of from a QR point of view. And we’re kind of getting there now, you know, so entity SEO as a concept is becoming more well known.

And then we’re in a much smaller field, and I’d rather my chances talking, I think I can try to get to the top of entity SEO than anything that SEMrush is gonna fight me with because they’re big and they’ve just gone public. So, they made it and I’m… Okay, guys. So, getting that technical stuff, it’s great. What else can we do to differentiate ourselves from the competition? What about local stuff? Is that a way for a bricks-and-mortar business, perhaps not one of you like yourselves, but, you know, how can we use Google Local or local business, Google My Business, those kinds of things? Does that help a small business stand out and how do we set ourselves up on that path? Fabrizio, do you wanna jump in again?

Fabrizio: Yeah. We don’t have like physical branches, right? We don’t have shops, right? But we do have offices, right? We have our, like, customer partners, not customers, right? But partners and other people come through. Another bit that when people think local, like one part probably if you have a physical business, definitely there is the, you know, the Google My Business part that you can spend time on. The other bit that it’s very easy to, like, scale and, like, is relatively low internal resources is to think about local within your product, right? And figuring out even within your website, which local variants of your product exist, if they exist, and I guess in our case, we deal with currencies between countries, but even in that situation, we have like banks with the branch and chords and a lot of different, like, setup that are still suited to, like, having local landing pages, right?

So it’s not just about…one side you have the My Business part, but on the other side is the local when it comes to, like, more tailored, like, content or landing pages that your customer might be looking at, which is very simple to iterate on. Because the day you find that this type of article works in one city, right? To convert a customer it’s likely that is gonna work in another city. The only difference is you’re gonna reuse the same brief, the same template or the same, like, setup, you’re just gonna tailor the content, right? And customize maybe the offering, right? For that particular city.

Hellen: For Giffgaff, we have a similar story. We don’t have physical stores, but we have our themes offered in partners. And we are just starting to test local searches because we now have a partnership with O2 in some stores in North England, Northwest England, you will be able to find Giffgaff SIMs. So we are starting to try out these local search, and yeah, it will be live soon. So, I will then be able to let you know, and we are driving a footpath to discuss with local search.

Dixon: I think that that sounds an absolutely brilliant approach, Hellen actually. In that, you know, having, even though you’re, you know, you’ve got distribution outlets. So basically anywhere that sells your SIMs, you could probably set up as a Giffgaff redistributor or a Giffgaff reseller and effectively run all of their local marketing. And so you go onto Google, theoretically, and you know, Giffgaff distributors, it suddenly shows everybody that’s selling a Giffgaff SIM. So potentially could be a really, really powerful way of doing that I would guess. So, yeah, I like that idea. So…

Hellen: Sorry.

Dixon: I’m sorry, go on.

Hellen: Just to clarify why we’re on O2 stores is because we run on O2 network, that’s why the partnership.

Dixon: I understand. Nothing’s… Go on.

Fabrizio: So you can be even a bit brave and do local stuff if your competitor has got stores, right? Like, you don’t necessarily have to be local yourself. But if everyone is using a computer service in-store and you want to offer them, like, a web-only experience, you can still build, like, landing pages for your competitor. Obviously, it requires a bunch of legal trickery in between, but it’s not impossible. You’re not going to open Google My Business for them, right? But you can still try to challenge them on your… Even, like, we realize that apart from like a small percentage of users, a majority of the user, if you’re disrupting a business, they are with someone else already. So, you often have this challenge of trying to, like touch on that brand traffic as well, to figure how to promote your brand or even to let them know that you’re an alternative, right? Yeah.

Dixon: Okay. So we’ve got a question popped up there. If we get that question back on the screen again as well. If anybody has any questions, by the way, whether you’re on YouTube or on Facebook, hopefully, someone’s looking out for the questions on Facebook as well and we can get those off as well. But Mauro says, maybe basic, there’s no such thing as a basic question, but how does this local geo SEO work? Okay, so, anyone wanna jump in that? How does local geo SEO work? Or do you want me to do it?

Fabrizio: Up to you.

Dixon: Okay.

Fabrizio: There was actually a John Mueller, like, hangout, like, article a while ago, and they were talking about event companies having landing pages for local, like, cities, right? And I think when it comes to, like, having these approaches is often down to the content of these pages and their uniqueness, right? And whether you can offer a different proposition in one place or another. If you only have one event nationwide, you cannot be in the page for every city, because it’s the same content, is the same page. But there are companies that have different proposition or different, like, tailored version of the same, like, experience by city or by geographic area, and that where you can, you know, without having the exactly same page, you can offer a slightly more tailored intent and it can work, yeah.

Dixon: I think the interesting thing about local is that Google is much better at under…well, often it’s better understanding where the user is that’s doing the search than they are at understanding where the business is at the other end of the thing. So when I type in “pizza nearby,” that’s kind of where you’re starting to get to local, Google understands this is a local search and has a pretty good idea where, especially if it’s on a mobile phone, where the user is at that particular point. The question then is, if you’re a pizza company, should your results appear or not?

And so, you know, if you’re lucky enough to be able to have used Google My Business, and you have a lot of stores, if you’re a PC World, you’ve got lots and lots of stores around the place so you can find or a Pizza Hut, then it’ll show you the local Pizza Hut. So if you’re one Pizza Hut, you’ve gotta compete against that, and that’s where Google My Business comes in because you can just sign up at Google My Business which is free and get yourself at least in your local results pack or the local search pack in SEO to try and answer Mauro’s question there, I think. So, okay, Kerstin, you’ve…I left you outside, out of the loop for a little bit. So let me jump in. What are some of the common mistakes that you think startups make? You know, where do they go wrong, you know, or perhaps… Yes, go on?

Kerstin: Well, I think, probably not prioritizing, right? Sort of what I said earlier. It’s very, very easy to get distracted and to get overwhelmed because you know, you have huge competition and, yeah, it’s a very competitive space. So, I think not getting distracted and really trying to focus on your strength and where you can compete, and then prioritize and not try to do everything at once. So, we really focus on where you do have the best chances, and yeah, just focus.

Dixon: And how do you think SEO and PPC should balance themselves out, particularly in the early days of a startup? Should people be using PPC or just exclusively SEO or…because PPC, of course, cost money right out the box. So, you know, can people use PPC to enforce or to improve their SEO and vice versa? Should, yes, well, as Mauro says, should they be working together?

Kerstin: Yeah. I think it depends probably on your business. But short term, of course, PPC works straightaway, right? So SEO, you have to work, you have to build it over time. So if you have the budget, definitely go in with PPC, and then balance it over time, you will hopefully get into a position where you can start testing and say, you know, where are you getting stronger and stronger with SEO, but in our case, we rely heavily on PPC. Yeah, it’s just very, very fast and shows good results. So if you have the budget, I would definitely use PPC as well.

Dixon: Fabrizio.

Fabrizio: Yeah, but also, the other bit is for testing purposes, right? It takes a lot of time and pain to build the content, then test landing pages. If you can test them pretty quickly with that, often you’re on the right track, right? And it can accelerate a bit your process of figuring out where to focus even on search if your product goes against, you know, established search demand. The challenge that we had, for instance, in our industry, is that been a disruptive new service, people don’t google a lot the classic transactional stuff that you will do PPC on, right? So there are people searching money transfer and those kinds of terms, but it’s not a lot, right? We’re not gonna build such a big business just waiting for people to Google a bit more of that transactional stuff. So in some situation it’s not so helpful to look at paid search, because there is not enough demand from consumer against your product, and that’s where you have to, you know, work with more longer trail queries or, like different intents that you wouldn’t necessarily be done, right, with paid.

Hellen: Now, but there is the temptation, I think, for the startups, because when you pay, you get it. The temptation of forgetting, leaving SEO to the second plan, because it’s easier to get, to sell your product through PPC than working on your website structure and user journey to get more traffic. So yeah, it needs to have a bond.

Kerstin: Yeah, that’s true. You might get hooked on the quick term.

Hellen: Long term…

Fabrizio: Yeah. Back to mistakes. I sometimes spend time with very early-stage funders, and that started literally companies. And the hardest part is probably to set the expectation what you’re doing within SEO and when they have, like, few options within channels that they wanna test they will need to understand really well that, you know, in a month, they will not break the bank by doing a sale, right? They need to understand how they’re gonna invest, what others you’re gonna see within the landscape. And otherwise, they just get burned and then they lose confidence that this is gonna work, right? And obviously, not everyone has got the benefit of, like, spending a lot of resources and time to begin with, but I think the easiest mistake is to compare this to the other channels. After a few months there’s no results and then just turn it off and just do an IR team that set up an SEO program well, and then you just think that doesn’t work, right? And that’s very easy, especially when your company is well funded to just spend money, right? Like, many well-funded companies, they burn a lot of money for that reason, right?

Hellen: I see a lot of these expectations with digital PR. I don’t know, I would be interested in knowing from you guys, but it’s a lot of investment and sometimes we just get no followed links, I think this is the trend now. And this is a bit concerning because there is these expectations in increase the website authority. And yeah, it’s something that to pay attention when you invest in digital PR for external linking.

Dixon: Yeah, I think that external link bit is an interesting challenge for a startup, but also it’s a great opportunity because you are a disruptive business. You have that opportunity to cut through the story. You know, Barclays going out there and trying to get more links are gonna be just the same kind of links as before unless there’s…I mean, they’ve, they’ve got the same ability to come up with a brand new story or a brand new angle, but, you know, do they necessarily want to? Because they’re taking a punt on changing their existing business base.

Whereas, you know, you guys have got, you know, three very different disruptive businesses in your area. And I think Fabrizio mentioned it, I think, using PPC as a testing tool to work out what your SEO strategy might be, might be a very, very good idea and I think that’s an excellent approach, but you all had the problem of starting out with phrases, I suppose, key phrases that no one might want to search for, that no one’s searching. So no contract telephones or, you know, banking without a branch or, you know, transferring money. You know, all of those three things, or transferring money cheaply, or whatever, all of those three things are things that, you know, were not necessarily…there was no obvious phrase that was being used by people in large numbers, certainly not enough to justify the massive expansion, the rapid expansion of your businesses.

So, I mean, obviously, you know, that the business is not solely based around SEO, but how did you guys, you know, get into, you know, how did those businesses become big enough to have SEO managers like yourselves if there wasn’t enough phrase. An innovative business might start out with a product that has no search phrase at all. Brand new product, this is the first one that’s ever, you know, rains from the stars on a blue summery night or I don’t know whatever it may be, and it’s called a, you know, I think it’d be Bob, you know, and no one’s searching for it. How did you expand that marketplace to get enough terms to warrant SEO, organic search traffic? Who wants to go in there?

Fabrizio: We have a ton of these challenges, actually, that’s pretty much the brand that matter what they do, as in, there was actually not much demand to bank on to begin with. And then equally when it comes to things like links, obviously, you get a bit more coverage or because you know, you’re also a bit more brave, right? Barclays, the CEO, didn’t get naked at any point in time soon. But our CEOs many years ago, they got naked, right? And that makes PR right down the street, and then makes little PR. So there are areas where I guess, you know, being more flexible but there are equally areas where you don’t have such demand and that’s where, like, the…I guess the tricky part is to have confidence by talking to your customers, that sooner or later invest in one area.

And that is not necessarily that close to what they meant to do is okay, right? We even write content for people that may use our product 12 months down the line, right? And we still do it if we think that is a good investment within a certain investment appetite just because it’s better than solely relying on these people trying to, you know, search for something. The other bit that I think SEO can really fix is that your product needs to be good enough, and there needs to be enough word of mouth and enough epic customers that they will tell someone else, right?

And then same reason why I don’t think that neither PR can fix that, right? If you’ve got a boring company with a bad product, no matter how much PR you do, you’re still not gonna fix that that easily, right? It’s very difficult to get journalists to, you know, buy into your stuff. So, I think that when, like, sometimes it’s a bit of a function of how good is your product to some extent up to the point that at some point they justify, and there’s enough growth and there is enough spin to invest in building an SEO team, right?

We started, like, an SEO team when we already had a million customers, right? Like, so we weren’t, like, necessarily just a startup. Which is not the same for everyone, right? There are people that start with a bit less customer than that, but there are points at which I think is important to realize, okay, this product is sticking and therefore I’m gonna invest in something long term, which on the long run, it proves to be the best channel that we have, right? We paid back the investment in SEO like 10 times faster than all the other channel, it’s growing the fastest, it’s getting more and more share within marketing. It’s a good idea, but it just takes a bit of confidence and gut if you have a decent product that you can build upon. Otherwise, the risk is that you can try to fix with SEO all the other problem that your product has got and your company has got and that is very hard to do, right? Like, it’s not super simple.

Dixon: Fair enough.

Hellen: I agree. Word of mouth is key for this. Yes.

Kerstin: Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, yeah, if you don’t have the right product, SEO certainly can’t fix that. But if there is not much search demand about your actual product or your product term, you can always think about, you know, what is the need that people have and then try to think along the whole funnel, rather than at the endpoint where you have your product and then get to it that way. So, basically, build your topic universe around that and start very early.

Dixon: So, I mean, on that, Fabrizio said they actually had a million customers before they set up an SEO team. Kerstin, how many business accounts did Tide have before it set up an SEO team? You don’t have to answer, you may not be allowed to answer even if you knew…

Kerstin: Very, very little, I can tell you that.

Dixon: Very few. Okay. All right.

Kierstin: Yes. Very few customers. So definitely grown a lot since then, but I guess…

Dixon: Would you say Tide organic traffic has been a big source of new accounts for Tide or did that come later? Was that right near the start then?

Kerstin: Well, so it did take a while to build up, right? So, like, I said before, we balanced out quite a lot with paid channels with PPC because our I guess issue is not that there was no such demand for business accounts because there is demand for that, it’s more, you know, attracting the right people that are willing to have their account digitally and maybe don’t need a branch. But that’s also depending on how you position yourself, right? Because it doesn’t have to be a primary account. If you still need a branch that you walk into, you can keep your existing account and use this as your digital platform to do all your other business finance. But yeah, growing that customer base, organic, definitely played a big part in that.

Dixon: Sorry, Hellen, anyone want to jump in, or, I mean, how many, you know, Giffgaff must, you know…did you have loads and loads of customers before you became….add an SEO role or do you think Giffgaff also started organically?

Hellen: Yeah, we started organic really well also because of branded searches. So our activation base is a lot of branded searches. So it’s organic, but branded. On the generic, yeah, generic is always the challenge to grow in this area.

Dixon: Of course. So you got people to talk about Giffgaff then. So word of mouth was a big part of your strategy and that fed towards your organic…

Hellen: Exactly.

Dixon: So, which makes absolute sense. So this word of mouth, getting your customers to talk about it, even if they’re not your customers yet, is key, I think to SEO and for a startup. I think it’s a magic way. You know, you got to get your customers to be your salespeople because you can’t afford to do it yourself.

Hellen: Before, we want Giffgaff…we already had the community. So, word of mouth first and then PR, good PR, branding, and the differential of Giffgaff. They all helped a lot with searches.

Dixon: So I wanted to finish up with…we haven’t got very much time left already. But how much does it help if the business has either a flamboyant CEO or a knowledge leader CEO or not necessarily the CEO, but how important is it to a startup to have people in their organization who are already either respected or hated, it doesn’t matter which necessary from a marketing point of view, but they can then create that focus around the sort of the links and the comments you mentioned, you know, your CEO dressing up naked, you know, but, you know, has all of your businesses got somebody in the organization that within their industry sector is seen as a knowledge leader and somebody that’s respected in the field? And do you use them or what would you be worried as a startup that those people then might be too valuable for the business and too valuable for the business to risk as a main plank? Is that…can I go with Kerstin for that? Have you got anybody in the organization that, you know, you use as a content piece, so to speak?

Kerstin: Yeah, I would say it definitely helps. But if you don’t have that person or if your CEO happens to not want to be, like, out there all that much, I think that’s okay as well. But yeah, it definitely helps if you have someone who’s well known in the industry, if you have someone who has like proven thought leadership and you know you can work with that person for your content or PR campaigns and things like that. So I think it’s definitely beneficial. But I think, also doesn’t necessarily only have to be the CEO. If you have more people in your company, yeah, definitely also use them as authorities to speak about certain topics and work with them for PR, you know, content creation and things like that. So yeah, I would not only think about the CEO or just generally, who is there, that is a thought leader and can contribute to just different areas of your work.

Dixon: Hellen, you got anybody in your organization that stands out as a thought leader in your sector?

Hellen: Yes, I do have. And I tried to build up the SEO advocates within the business. So, yeah, this influence to get everyone on board with SEO is a very good point for companies that are not only starting up, but on the growth paths.

Dixon: Guys, we’re nearly to the end of the time. I just wanna finish up with one last question, because it leads into our next one, the next presentation, next month, which I’ll bring David in for it after that. Is there something that big organizations do that small organizations should not attempt to do, that startups should not attempt to do? Where is the, you know…is there something in the world of, you know, big organizations that they can, you know, do things and leverage that smaller businesses are unable to do. I’ve got internal link building comes to mind as a thing, you know, they’ve just gotten so much more content that they can start leveraging that. Any other thoughts in there or, you know…

Fabrizio: I think in terms of, like, not doing is probably even on, like, not doing structure on mistakes in the setup of the teams, right? And then, like, sometimes, it’s not such a good idea to look how these…some of these big organizations are built in terms of team structure and how they operate. And I think these are really important because you have one chance to build the team structure that is gonna scale and would make people happy to come every day to work rather than complaining about developer not shipping, technical changes about the content team not doing things. So, it’s probably your one-off chance to get the ground right.

And back to the probably leaders question as well, I think in our case, more than, like, having leaders that are authority in the space is probably more useful, that leader trust the teams to invest and have the right measurements in place. Otherwise, the risk is that you end up in a very large organization where you have someone making a decision on which keywords you should rank for, right? And this person does not understand much about search, right?

So you shouldn’t make sure that you don’t get to that point, right? And the decision maker, the team in terms of, like, resources, the engineers, everyone, is within your team or at least you have some control within in a smooth way. Otherwise, the bigger it gets, the more painful it gets, up to the point that you have, like, a large organization with SEO teams that are completely unable to move things because it’s blocked by a bunch of people. And luckily when we are in your company, you don’t have this issue because a lot of these people don’t exist yet, right? So you can work out the knots and making sure that they don’t work in that fashion.

I think for us it’s really important because we went from, like, you know, when we started the program, we were, like, a million customers, now we have around 10 million-ish, and then we went from like myself and three engineers to now 50+ people that work around SEO alone. And then in that situation is, yeah, like, the bigger you get the harder it gets. Yeah, it’s not gonna work really well with time.

Dixon: Okay. Well, I also quickly saw that one, that’s a good question to end up on, the sales flags that question came up there. So, let’s say you’ve only got one thing you wanna focus on first because the three experts here today have said, you know, focusing is a really good thing to do. We don’t waste our resources, because we can afford to waste our resources. So sales phrases come up with three really good ways to start developing your SEO. You know, link building, just go and get links to your site, versus writing that killer content, web page content, versus writing a killer PDF and ebook, which is the best for an early stage? Okay, what’s your opinions? Where would you go out of those three if you were gonna focus. And you’re not allowed to say all three now, because you said focus.

Hellen: I would go for killer page, having not only one, your key pages. The thing that startups can do that big ones cannot do because they are too big, is take care, pay attention to each journey, in each page content to build it as good as possible. Because Google is the…I say Google is the most picky user you can have, the most smart user. And if your page is relevant for Google, it’s good enough for Google, it’s good enough for the user. So, you need to make sure your journeys are sleek.

Dixon: Okay. Cool. Kerstin.

Kerstin: It’s a very, very hard question. It depends on your competitors and what you’re starting out with. So I’m slightly torn to pick one. I sort of agree on strong pages., but if I want to maybe collect leads very quickly, if I want to turn, you know, people interested into customers, I might even go with a PDF. It depends on my resources that I have. But yeah, depends what is my situation that I’m starting with and what’s the objective. So I’m leaning towards a PDF to promote, to get leads very early on that I can then market to you later on.

Dixon: Yeah, okay. Good as a lead gen. Okay, good. Fabrizio, what do you wanna go for?

Fabrizio: I mean, you could do lead gen anyway, regardless of the other two, eventually. But if I have to choose between building links and building pages, always pages, right? Like, you can build all the links you want but if you don’t have the pages, there’s no fun happening, right? So I think I would start there first. And then, you know, at some point if the pages don’t rank, maybe links are a problem, but at least you should build the pages first and then see what happens.

Dixon: I think I kind of agree that I think the page building, doing the killer page first allows you…I mean, you could then create an eBook out of that pillar page as well. So that’s okay, so obviously, if they can read it without downloading the book, then you’ve lost the lead maybe but so I guess you do have a fair point. But also, regardless, those are what, you know, if that pillar content is good, that will generate the links, if it’s genuinely good content, knowledge leadership contents.

Kerstin: I think maybe…

Dixon: Guys…

Kerstin: Sorry. I just wanted to say, because we’ve been talking about SEO and SEO only, but maybe, especially for startups that, you know, don’t have all the resources, I think it’s very important to see SEO, not as something that works in silo and always try to work across teams and make the most out of all the channels and work together.

Dixon: And I think the…I can’t remember his name, a guy…the SEO for LinkedIn for ages, he used PDFs almost exclusively as his SEO building tool. And you think LinkedIn, blame me, it’s LinkedIn, but, you know, he definitely used the PDF approach very, very effectively to generate leads and generate links, which, you know, effectively still lead to reasonably pillar page content, which did the whole thing. So, I guess it is, you know, where you are in your journey and what can stand out most is probably a good answer. Guys, thank you ever so much for your time. David, what do we got on next time? So…

David: We’re gonna be broadcasting live on Monday, the 17th of May at 4 p.m. UK time. We’re gonna be zeroing in on SEO for big brands. We’ve already got Turgay Akar from Sony, gonna be appearing on that one, a couple of other people that we’re still talking to about appearing in that one and…but make sure you sign up at theknowledgepanelshow.com so you can watch us live. We broadcast live on YouTube, on Facebook as well, and, of course, we’re available as a podcast to catch the replays on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Dixon: So guys, thank you very much. It just leaves me to say thanks ever so much for coming along today. If anybody wants to contact you guys, are they allowed to? What’s your Twitter handle, how can they get ahold of you, Hellen?

Hellen: Hellen, LinkedIn. Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn, it’s the best way.

Dixon: Kerstin.

Kerstin: Given the name, easiest LinkedIn, my handle is a bit strange though. LinkedIn, yeah.

Dixon: Okay. And Fabrizio, can we find you?

Fabrizio: Yes, same. Google my name or on, like, Twitter my handle is @Pechnet, but yeah, probably Googling me is…

Dixon: Pechnet, how do you spell that?

Fabrizio: P-E-C-H-N-E-T. It’s my video game nickname. So it’s got nothing to do with everything, but I still keep it, yeah. Just being lazy.

Dixon: Guys, thank you ever so much for coming on today. I really do appreciate it. Your experience has been invaluable and so have the tips. So see you next time. Thanks, guys.

Hellen: Thank you.

Dixon: Bye-bye.

Although big brands tend to have bigger budgets, they also tend to have complicated structures and requirements. And this can also mean that other things get prioritised or thought about rather than a specific aspect of technical SEO.

In this episode of the Knowledge Panel, we’ll be discussing which aspects of technical SEO big brands miss and the ramifications that this has on the brand’s overall success.

Joining Dixon to discuss this are Ant Robinson, Keith Goode and Lea Scudamore.

The Knowledge Panel is also available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify.

Want to Read Instead? Here is the Transcript.

Dixon: Hello, everyone, welcome to “The Knowledge Panel Show” episode eight. And today we’re gonna be talking about what aspects of technical SEO do big companies miss. And once again, we’ve got a fantastic panel. Unfortunately, one of them is currently in a…I think it’s a storm or goodness knows what somewhere down in Texas, so we’ll get to him in a minute. But in the meantime, thanks so much for coming on to the show. Whilst we get people sort of coming in on Facebook and YouTube, we’ll sort of go around and have introductions for people.

And before we dive into the subject matter proper, I imagine the price of the conversation might be sort of moving towards processes and things with big companies, but technical SEO and big companies, do they do it right? Do they do it wrong? So, before I go on to the audience, I’m gonna say hello to my producer, David. David are you there?

David: I am, indeed. Hi, Dixon. Good to be here again.

Dixon: So, if Keith can’t go through the whole show, I’ll bring in David considerably more than I otherwise was going to. But why don’t we start by introducing guests, and Lea from Aimclear, why don’t you say hello? Who are you and where do you come from, as they say in the game shows?

Lea: I’m Lea Scudamore. I work at Aimclear out of Duluth, Minnesota in the States.

Dixon: And you got snow on the ground there as well.

Lea: Of course, yes, Minnesota and, you know, Minnesnowta. We hear that a lot. So…

Dixon: Okay, fair enough. And thanks so much for coming on. And you’ve been in Aimclear for 6 years I think, so?

Lea: Yep.

Dixon: A fair well. So that’s great. Thank you very much for coming on today. And, Ant, you’ve been moving around recently. So Ant Robinson, why don’t you introduce yourself? And you’ve got new ventures on the horizon.

Ant: Hi, Dixon. Yeah, thanks for the intro. I’m launching a new digital agency called Black Swans Digital. That’s likely to open its doors officially on March 1st. Kind of a long career, as you know, that you and I have known each other a long time. So hopefully, I think this afternoon should be some good fun because I think we’ve both worked on some fairly large corporate projects too.

Dixon: Yeah. And I think when I met you the first time around, you were working for a very large car brand, I think.

Ant: No, a car retailer, a car brand where you could advertise your car.

Dixon: That’s right. Yeah, absolutely. And huge. And I once tried to get Ant to work for me, and I couldn’t afford him. So, that’s a sign of the times really. Okay, and Keith, who works for some little company. Keith, are you there and can we speak to you? And I know we’ve put you on speaker only.

Keith: Yes, speaker only. I am Keith Goode and I work for a small company known as IBM. They’ve been around for a few years. And yeah, you know, it’s fun. I’m a senior SEO strategist for them based out of CHQ, which is corporate headquarters.

Dixon: So, that’s quite good. We can actually hear you quite well. So why don’t you tell us why we can’t see you today?

Keith: You can’t see me today because we’ve just had a historic winter storm plow through all of Texas. It’s literally frozen all of our wind farms, and it occluded, of course, the sun from being able to power our solar farms. And so, we’re all on coal and natural gas right now. And of course, that’s pressing the grid to its extreme limits. So I’m sitting here in the dark shivering slightly, but I am on the phone with you right now.

Dixon: It’s brilliant isn’t it? Technology is amazing. You can talk to anyone in the world, but you can’t warm up. That’s interesting stuff.

Keith: That’s true. These might be my last words, but I spent them with you, Dixon.

Dixon: Well, it’s more likely to be your last words. If you have a last [inaudible 00:03:45], you would spend it with me. Okay, so guys, thanks very much for coming on, all of you. All of you got a huge amount of experience in…well, certainly in technical SEO and in, you know, big companies as well. And so, I wanted to start with one question. And we’re gonna dive into that very, very specific question. What are the aspects of technical SEO that the big companies miss? But before I just dive in and go winding off. I always like to start with this question so that if anybody, you know, on Facebook or YouTube, you know, hasn’t got time to get to the end of the session, there’s one takeaway right at the top of the thing.

So, if there’s one thing that you think, you know, you’d give big SEO…big companies, obviously, advice or point out that you’ve seen a number of times that you could think they could take away, that they could grab and think about, what would that be? So I don’t know who to pick on first really. I think, well, I’ll pick on Keith on the basis that he’s in a big organization and then has to see this every single day, or something every single day. So can you give us one thing that if people left now, they should go away with, Keith?

Keith: Related to technical SEO, I would say get priority for SEO from the highest levels of the organization. Because you’re going to discover the audits and all sorts of other things, problems, that if you have to wait for budgeting and if you have to wait for priority and resources, you’re basically gonna fall behind. So if you can get an executive on your team and understanding the value of SEO, that will go a very long way with you, as you try to fix things.

Dixon: Okay. I’ll come back to that one. Let’s jump in and see what Ant’s got as an idea.

Ant: So, it’s a really similar chain of thought, actually. And actually, my very first conference that I went to in the U.S. was in New Orleans, and you were there, Dixon. I was from Bill Hunt and I was in the audience listening to him. And one of his pieces of advice was to monetize annually with a finance team a landing pages that you have, and that forces senior finance people to do exactly what Keith just asked, or kind of recommended. Because if you monetize landing pages on an annual basis and then multiply that by the number of landing pages that you have, that’s a significant amount of income and a significant amount of revenue that any FD will not want to lose. And you will get immediate protection for the landing pages and all the kind of funding that you’re kind of going to ask for for the next 12 months.

Dixon: I wanna come back on that one, actually, as well, because I got something that’s a follow-up thought on that from Bill. But before I do that, Lea how about one thing for you?

Lea: After you get buy-in, also, you have to start from the very basis of the platform. It has to be accessible for everybody. You can’t try to retrofit accessibility in sites that have already been built. It doesn’t work, it’s way cost-intensive, and it doesn’t always work the way it should. So you just end up eventually scrapping everything and starting over. So…

Dixon: Oh, okay. I can come back on all of these. And so, let me do that. I mean, surely… And by the way, my job here is to, you know, disagree or argue with anybody. So I’m just tying to pick the holes and create the conversation. But surely, sometimes that’s…and especially with big companies entirely impractical. So many companies have built their technologies with, you know, flash, and, you know, they seem to be the last people to get rid of the bad practices. I mean, do you find that, Lea?

Lea: Yeah, well, also, they’re the biggest targets for lawsuits. So you can do that, but you’re playing with fire. And we know, like, in the States side, we’ve already started to see lawsuits go after big brands. So we really can’t wait on it here our side. Also, since the lawsuits are started here, and everybody is starting to rebuild their websites right now for page experience, because May is coming, right? This is the opportune time to do both. Otherwise, you’re gonna end up building a second site anyway.

So since you’re working on page experience and you’re working to get those speeds up and make sure there’s no content layout shifts, you might as well be building in accessibility from the ground up.

Dixon: So, just before we move in and anyone else who’s jumping on UX as well, but, you know, just so we all know what’s happening in May?

Lea: Google’s launching page experience algorithm that will change the way sites are ranked. They have threatened that they are going to expose brands’ accessibility score in the SERPs. So, like, they’ve done before with, like, mobile-friendly. So, those sort of things are…you know, it’s coming. It’s coming in May. And if you aren’t working on your website to make sure it’s super fast, nothing shifts when people are using it, and that it loads quickly and the parts of the site that load are functional really quickly, that’s all coming here at May.

Dixon: So, I get the feeling that this is a Microsoft Clarity competitor product where they’re coming out with. This is Microsoft’s UX products in there. But I mean, so let me bring UX back in with you, Ant, and say, you know, how important do you think UX is in the UK for big brands at the moment and for SEO?

Ant: I think it’s important for SEO for obvious reasons. It’s less important because we have this brought into law back in ’98 with the Human Rights Act. So a lot of sites have been really, really kind of up on accessibility since I’ve been in the industry. And a lot of this then changed in 2004 where there was an actual legal requirement that your site had to be accessible. So, we had this legislation years ago.

So, it will have less impact in the UK legally. It will have more impact in the UK I think from a user-experience perspective, natural language programming is where we will be key in the UK market.

Dixon: So, Keith, I wanna come back to you on your point, and you feel free to carry on with UX bit. But I wanted to come back on your point of getting buy-in right at the top. And so, that’s not always easy to do, of course. But let me flip that around and say, sometimes you’ve got somebody at the top in a small organization, then it’s quite obvious who’s, you know… At Aimclear, Marty is the face of Aimclear and on the face of inLinks and stuff. And it’s there.

In large organizations, in the massive organizations, you probably have got the Jeff Bezos and Zuckerbergs of this world who are faces, Keith. But aside from the buy-in of someone at the top, you know, a lot of SEO is about sort of influencer marketing. And you’ve got somebody at the top of these organizations, or people at the top of these organizations, who are huge personalities, but they’re highly unlikely to get involved themselves in SEO. How do we go about harnessing that person without making them, you know, become a technical SEO?

Keith: Great question. IBM is not really known for having big personalities in our leadership. So I…[crosstalk 00:11:19]

Dixon: [crosstalk 00:11:18] asking you the question though. I was probably talking to the wrong brand at that particular point.

Keith: But, you know, don’t get me wrong. Brand is absolutely vital in sort of shoring up your organic strength across the site. So, we definitely encourage brand building from our brand teams, our executive teams, and making sure that we really strengthen the brand. Because what we know is that we rank really, really well for our own terms, right? Our own branded terms would do very, very well for. What I have to do as an organic person is I have to talk to the executive and I have to say, “Listen, yes, we’re doing very well from an organic perspective, but look at the keywords that are driving our traffic. It’s us. It’s all our stuff.”

So, you know, when I show them that, okay, sure, we’re driving, you know, I don’t know, 33 million visits a month on our organic terms. But here’s 75 million visits per month we could be driving from non-branded terms. That’s when I can sort of go, “Well, there’s your opportunity. This is money you’re leaving on the table because you’re not either funding something that we’ve asked for or we’re not getting priority from other teams.” So you know, yes, play the brand, but certainly brand is a very small portion of the keyword universe that you could be going for.

Dixon: That’s a very interesting answer to a completely different question, which is great. So I’ll follow up on that one really because it’s sort of what Ant said at the start as well of show them the money. And I get that. And I remember the very first time I saw Bill Hunt myself was in Sweden, I think, and he was still at Global Crossing or GSI before he’d sold that business to Ogilvy, or whoever he sold it to.

And they were talking about this idea of a matrix, a cost matrix. And what they were doing was taking, you know, what the paper click volume said it was supposed to be for any given set of words, then showing them, you know, what the actual traffic from organic was, and then monetizing that and showing, “Look, this is the gap. This is the opportunity missed.” If you were number one for all of the phrases you wanted to be, this would be the amount of traffic that’s coming through.

And I thought that was a fairly effective way of demonstrating a massive, great big hole. I don’t know whether they can do that so well now, because, of course, keyword matching isn’t such an easy thing. But, you know, how easy is it, Ant, to get that kind of monetized, you know, that financial imperative view that you kind of suggested in your introduction?

Ant: Like any part of SEO, it’s a challenge, but it’s a challenge worth doing. And all you need is a mid-level exec who works in the finance team. So, to actually work through, because you have the keyword volume in terms of the search volume. It’s in search console. You have the keyword volume in Google ads campaigns, and you can see what the overall size of the prize is. And then you can monetize what you’re getting now and what the uplift is.

So, once you monetize what you’re getting now, you can protect the asset value of the landing pages that you have, and then explore with finance, “Actually if we can get additional funding for SEO, this is the projected uplift in revenue that we’re gonna get and here’s the evidence.” And if that goes high enough, protecting the asset value is the thing that actually generates revenue for us. Because if you think about an FD, and he has an asset value, and that asset value is at risk by a go-live process not being right. It gives us the support that we need to get things done, but it also gets us the support financially for what we want to do moving forward.

Dixon: Okay, so Keith or Lea, do you wanna jump in? Do you have anything to add?

Lea: Well, I was gonna say if we’re on the hunt for revenue, right, we’re on the hunt for money, and I’m gonna come back to accessibility a little bit. And I know that it’s been a law in the States since 1990, ’94 for the UK. But there’s $249 to $274 billion in discretionary income that people with disabilities have in the UK. Sitemore [SP] did a study and index of your government offices, like your local government offices, only 17% of them are actually up to par where they’re supposed to be.

So, like, if you look…use them as an example for small businesses and businesses that have websites, there’s a lot of money out there and revenue out there. And the biggest thing we hear back from big brands is, “Well, they’re not my audience.” They’re your audience. They eat, they drink, all that.

Dixon: The only thing I’m just going to say facetiously is that most of our government buildings are older than the United States, so that gives us a [inaudible 00:16:07] problem.

Lea: Well, I’m not talking buildings, I’m taking websites, websites not buildings, websites, web properties. It has nothing to do with the physical location.

Dixon: Yeah. I’m sorry. That was being facetious. But I don’t know if you feel… Ant is the only other Brit on here apart from David. But I feel that the government websites have improved over the last 12 to 24 months a lot. They seem to be more user-friendly. You know, there’s a certain more uniformity. And I’m actually, apart from trying to log into my tax system, which has been bloody impossible, but it seems to be getting better. So we’re working on that, Lea, and I take your point, and I think you’re absolutely right.

Ant: Can I quickly jump in?

Dixon: Yeah, please.

Ant: One of the things I think over here as well is that there’s a load of funding for small business for accessibility on websites that doesn’t transfer across to large business in the UK at all. So, if we’re talking about large business, it doesn’t really fit. But definitely small businesses lots of funding available to upgrade websites that are legacy websites into new if you’re a small business.

Dixon: Hey, Keith, you’re sitting right in the middle of big brands. And I know it’s not just IBM. You’ve got lots of other websites that you sit there and manage as well. And of course, I’m sure IBM is perfect. But on the edges, you know, do you think UX is still something that you guys nearly need to work on? Or is it something that you and you think big brands, I’m not trying to pick on IBM specifically, have largely cracked?

Keith: We’ve mastered it. Yes, we have work to do and there’s no question about it. I always reiterate to folks, when they are doing competitive gap analyses and they’re trying to figure out what they need to do with their website compared to their competitors, I tell folks in our UX team, do not look at the Googles, do not look at the Microsofts and the Oracles exclusively. And look at your actual SERP competitor. See what they’re doing very well from a UX perspective and why they’re potentially ranking better than we are, because more often than not, the SEO at Microsoft and Google and Oracle and all of our other big competitors sucks just as bad as ours does.

So, why would we wanna learn from them, right? So, I think that’s a big lesson, especially when it comes to UX. We discovered a while back that we weren’t ranking well for a term that we thought we really should. We looked at the ranking competitor, not Microsoft. And we saw this beautifully thorough and in-depth piece of content on their page that we literally couldn’t put on our page because our template restricted how much content we could put on that page.

So, this was a big learning for us where we could go back to our UX team and ask them, “Where did you pick up these tips from?” And they were like, “We saw it on Google and we saw it on Microsoft.” Well, of course, and they weren’t ranking either. So there you go.

Dixon: Okay. So what you’re saying for a big SEO is what they should be doing is not looking at the big competitor, they should be seeing why that little guy gets into the rankings. That’s a good lesson.

Keith: A hundred percent, yes. And here’s the thing. We have, and of course, we had a big sloughing off of our links last year due to getting rid of some spammy links, but we still have about 450 to 500 million backlinks coming into IBM. Microsoft has, you know, 150 million backlinks, you know, coming into them. Oracle has, I don’t know, 90 million or so. So it’s not links, right? It’s not just links that are powering these things. It’s the little guys who have 48 links coming into their site that are still outranking us. It’s because they do a better job of answering the questions and they really tap into that whole EAT that Lily Ray talks about so much, the expertise, authority, and trustworthiness and the thoroughness of their content. So don’t just learn from the big guys, learn from the little guys, too, and gas.

Dixon: So Ant or Lea, I mean, what do you think stops big brands from doing that out of the box? Surely, surely, they have all the training and stuff to be able to do that. What goes wrong?

Ant: They’re simply just too slow to respond. Sorry, Lea, I didn’t…

Lee: That’s okay. Go ahead, Ant.

Ant: Big brands are just too slow to respond. It’s like getting an oil tanker to change direction. So if you think about over the last, what? Six, eight months, and how much kind of AI and structured data and kind of Google’s aim to be 50% AI by what? 2024, 2028, somewhere between there, and how they’re bridging the gap. Most big brands don’t have any structured data on their website, which are helping to bridge that gap, which is dead simple, dead straightforward. It could go live easy unless you’ve got this leviathan of a CMS that just doesn’t work in exactly they way that Keith just said.

Dixon: Yeah. And of course, this is my advert for inLinks, since inLinks is sponsoring the whole event here today, of course. I mean, the one thing that inLinks does is it just uses one line of JavaScript, and all the schema…well, the content schema anyway, and FAQ schema and internal links can be automated with one line of JavaScript. So, I guess my question on from that then is, obviously inserting a JavaScript is a fairly new thing within SEO, because you couldn’t really do that…until Google started, you know, rendering the DOM, it wasn’t really following JavaScript very well. But now, Martin Splitt and all the guys now, you know, have no problem with rendered JavaScript, haven’t done for some years and things.

So I guess my question is, why is it that we don’t make use of JavaScript more in SEO now? Because, you know, JavaScript can cover your schema. WP schema does that very, very well, or Schema app.

You know, inLinks is doing a pretty good job, you know, including Keith has talked about it. So thank you very much, Keith. So it must work on some big websites. We got some pretty big bands using the thing. But it could be doing so much more to stop that juggernaut of slowness. You know, the fact that the big organization can’t move doesn’t mean to say the people within it can move. And what was holding people up before is the SEOs know what they need to do because they’ve run 20 audits over there last year. But they can’t give them to the developers because the developers are too busy doing something else in the organization.

And so, I guess my question is can JavaScript take that away? And is that something that might develop more and more? Or am I just trying to sing the praises of inLinks and I haven’t got a chance? Anyone wanna jump in with that?

Keith: I’d love to.

Ant: It’s [inaudible 00:23:03] now.

Keith: Yeah, I’d love to speak to that. Because I think part of the reason the adoption of JavaScript hasn’t been there as much as it could be is partially us. It’s partially the SEOs just not knowing…

Ant: We’re just not used to it.

Keith: …it can be implemented. We’re not used to it for one. The second part of that is also us. But it’s because we understand that our developers want to take the easiest way out of developing it. They want to do client-side rendering. And we’re, like, “No, no, you got to do server side.” And they’re like, “But that takes too much work.” “Okay, we’ll do a hybrid.” “Well, that takes even more work.” So, you know, part of it, you know, is really the fact that we don’t trust our developers as much as maybe we could or should. And maybe it’s because they’re not trustworthy enough? I don’t know.

Dixon: Oh, okay. Well, if we’ve got any questions from the audience here, then feel free to jump on in there.

Ant: So I think as well…I think that if you think about most big sites, and a lot of WordPress sites, Google takes a snapshot of the five-second point, and it literally…it renders the JavaScript at five seconds. If your page is loading at 12, then you’re not getting the structured data and everything else put forward. So the reason why I’m really reluctant to kind of use JavaScript in the way you’ve described is because the majority of pages load after five seconds anyway. So it’s not getting a full snapshot of all the content that is on a page.

Dixon: So you’re saying the majority do load or don’t load?

Ant: Don’t load.

Dixon: Don’t load. Okay, so I’d agree with that. If your site hasn’t loaded in five seconds, then you’ve got a speed problem, and that’s kind of like a cliff, I think, for SEO. You know, Google is not all about you have to be faster, faster, faster to write better, better, better, but there’s got to be a cliff, and you’re saying the cliff is five seconds.

Ant: Google’s cliff is there, is there, and it’s there [inaudible 00:25:02].

Lea: I think a lot of brands got burned by Java before, right? We got burned and we ended up losing content or giving up content that we had that we thought was so great because of ranking in Google and all that stuff. So, I think there’s a little bit of a trust issue there. Like, we’ve already dated them, and maybe we’re not ready to jump back into a relationship yet?

Dixon: Possibly, but I think Martin Splitt said Google has done a huge PR job for Google of saying how far they’ve come on and how that’s moved. But back in the early days of JavaScript, it was slow. You know, it’s not now. I mean, you know, so we put defer tag on anyway, so, you know, everything else loads for the customer for the user before our stuff does anyway. But you’re right, you know. It can load in five seconds and, well, you’ve got bigger problems than SEO, I think, possibly.

But to your point, Keith, I mean, I don’t think we as SEOs should be doing everything server-side anymore. It’s not necessarily quicker. And I think we, as SEOs, have probably missed some real opportunities, which we seem to be slowly getting to. But, you know, I’d argue that JavaScript is still the future because it decouples a lot of the problems that large organizations have got.

Okay, let me move on to hreflang, because I can’t really go for too long with big organizations and say hreflang because this is, again, Bill Hunt’s pet peeve. How man big companies seem to get it right? And how often do you see that going wrong? You know, Ant, I don’t know. Lea, I don’t know if your an hreflang person. So I’ll jump in with Ant because I’m sure he’s had his fair share of hreflang problems.

Ant: Yeah, it’s a European problem, isn’t it, right?

Dixon: Yeah, because we have a lot of languages to deal with. Yeah.

Ant: Yeah, I mean, the problem being is that Google wants to be able to kind of group a set of pages together that are delivering the same content just in different languages. And done right, hreflang is the way to do that. It’s kind of…it’s as important as using a canonical tag on duplicate content that you know is duplicate content. The problem being is that implementation is a challenge.

And the reason being is that you’ve got headquarters in every different European city or every different city where a localized language occurs, in every country where there’s localized language. So getting the same content that actually is the different language version of the same content is often a challenge. If you get some data in one country and not in the next and that’s where the challenge arises with hreflang in my experience.

Dixon: Keith, how are you coping with language problems?

Keith: Okay. Okay. I don’t know. All right, no, actually IBM, and I think a lot of companies have a hard time with it in general, simply because the implementation is not always as easy as you would think it would be. Because oftentimes, especially if you’re an organization that has multiple different CMS and different types of content management systems, which is a CMS, never mind, I’ll just say it again. You run into sort of cross-platform issues of getting that hreflang right for one.

Secondly, oftentimes, the content in the other countries is basically just stealing content from other regions. And the need to have a different page altogether is sort of minimum. So, you know, we’re actually taking a language-first approach rather than a country-first approach. And we’re finding that that’s probably going to work out better for us simply as a B2B business.

Now, when it comes to a B2C business, you might absolutely positively need to have a country-first approach because of taxation and different pricing and different, you know, monetary values, etc. But I’m not sure I’ve seen a really, really great example of a very large company doing it extraordinarily well. I think it’s all a bit kludgy. If it works sometimes, it’s just sheer luck.

Dixon: Did he say it’s all a bit Fuji?

Keith: Kludgy. I don’t know if that’s an American word or not, but it just means it’s wonky. Lea, do you have any examples of Minnesotan language for wonky?

Lea: Oh God, if we get into Minnesota language, we’ll be here all day.

Dixon: Minnesnowta is where we got [crosstalk 00:29:44].

Lea: Yeah.

Keith: By the way, Lea, your weather’s down here. Would you please come get it? It got drunk and wound up in our backyard?

Lea: No, it was near 23 when we woke up this morning and that’s without wind. So we would happily take seven degrees back. That’s, like, outside weather. That’s run-around-and-do-stuff weather. We’ll definitely, yeah, send it back home, because we would rather push this stuff north.

Dixon: So let me throw in that whole idea of language back to all three of you and say, “Well, okay, I take your point.” It’s very interesting, Keith, that some countries, or some organizations, are gonna develop, you know, with different businesses in different countries. And so, clearly, you know, they’re not gonna have the same content. They may have started from completely different places, in different countries, because their businesses operate differently that way, and the content is gonna be different.

But by the same token, is there not a real opportunity there if we can only work on that finance piece of demonstrating, you know, where there’s content in one language but isn’t there in another language? So it’s not about hreflang now, it’s just about the fact that, you know, one country has written this massive, great big piece at some university student did as their thesis, and it’s in Spanish and it’s not sitting there in German or English, or Taiwanese, or Chinese.

You know, is there a real opportunity there or is that just going way too far out the comfort zone of SEOs to be able to get that message across and show that opportunity? I don’t know. Lea, do wanna jump in?

Lea: I was gonna say content gap analysis is a content gap analysis, right? You have to look at your audience in the individual areas that you’re going to present products, too. So if you’re missing a page, and you can see that you’re missing it, then you build the page in the right language. So, I think it just comes back to is it actually needed? And you do that by looking at the analysis that you have in front of you.

So, I think you start there versus like saying, “Oh, we have it in Spanish. We should obviously have it in English,” or, “We should obviously have it in German.” I think it honestly has to be by audience.

Dixon: But I mean, it’s not by topic, or if you’re not fighting over the phrase, I don’t know, blue widgets in Germany, because no one’s written a piece of content on blue widgets in Germany. And yet, you know, that blue widgets is money-making in the U.S. or in Canada. Is that not, you know, to your point at the start, Ant, where you said, you know, “Get that monetary value on the table.” And Keith said it as well. You know, can we use that? Shouldn’t we be using that? Or is that too far out the SEOs’ stable?

Ant: It’s absolutely what SEO should be doing. And in Europe, it depends where the corporate headquarters are. In England or the UK, if the corporate headquarters sit in the UK, we’re a little bit arrogant and we don’t really care what’s going on in Europe. And therefore, often hreflang and additional content in different languages, people expect Europeans to read English and English language pages okay. It’s not. It’s eroding traffic. And using that analogy, Dixon, is absolutely the right way to go. It demonstrates clearly at exec level that there’s money being left and somebody else is eating our lunch.

Dixon: Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, I’m only a small business at inLinks, really, but we’ve just launched the knowledge graph in Spanish. And almost the first job I’ve taken on is somebody to start translating all of the pages on the blogs, you know, to go through and start. Before I couldn’t market to the Spanish, but now I can, but I’ve only got my homepage in Spanish, so I’m a long way off being a big company for that kind of reason.

Ant: [crosstalk 00:33:37].

Dixon: Keith anything to add?

Keith: Well, I just think from a page perspective, it’s really a matter of what we’re legally able to sell in certain countries as well. So, it’s not just that we wanna have 180 different versions of the same content out there. Sometimes it’s a matter of us not being able to sell there at all, or we have to go through a government-approved local person to sell these products or services for us. So, you know, it would be lovely if…I don’t know how many countries there are in the world. Is it 182, 184? Somewhere around there? Maybe 220. I could be way off.

Dixon: Yeah. No, there’s more than 200 but maybe not recognized by America, you know.

Keith: And we don’t include the micronations. But it would be lovely if we could have a page, you know, for every single country out there and that would be consistent across the board. It would make doing hreflang so much easier for us, technically speaking. It’s just a matter of, like, legally, can we sell in that country? Legally, can we sell that product in that country as well. So it’s as straightforward as I think the documentation would like to have us believe.

Ant: I think one last point that’s really important, and that’s in including when you are doing translations that you have naturalized people doing those translations. Because writing a piece of content and getting a UK translator who speaks French and is fluent in French isn’t the same as an indigenous French person doing that piece of content automatically and writing that from scratch. It’s so much more effective from an SEO perspective when that occurs rather than kind of using a UK translator whose first language is British. You know, it just doesn’t work as well. It needs that localization, just an intonation of the written language. You know, it changes.

Dixon: I’m loving the sarcasm for a moment. So, yeah, okay. Right. So, Lea, sorry, did you wanna dive in there? Or should I just move on?

Lee: No, I was agreeing with him. It’s just…yeah.

Dixon: I wanna talk a little bit before we go about tiger teams versus SEO teams, and I think the idea about mixing and matching different skill sets. But before I do that, you know, we’re talking about technical SEO. So I think it’s only sensible to ask the question, just because you’re a large organization, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your business overly relies probably increasingly after COVID. But it doesn’t overly rely on everybody coming in. We’re not all Amazons.

We can be a very big organization, but we don’t have to have… You know, I don’t suppose JCB is worrying about a server that has to go over 20 blocks of warehouses and things because their audience is very business-to-business and they could probably operate their site even though they’re a massive organization on the same kind of server that somebody like I could do, if you like.

So I guess when does technical SEO, when does servers become an issue for large organizations? And where does that trouble start happening? Wen that scale problem starts happening? How does a large organization find out? I mean, they probably find out by their site crashing, but what do they have to change? Or do they just carry on relying with, you know, WP Engine server-side hosting, you know? When do you need your own data center then, Keith?

Keith: Great question. Well, for one, you need it when you’re in China, first and foremost, because as you know, we know there’s that great firewall of China that you have to sort of be within in order to do very well there. Secondly, I don’t really deal as much with data centers from an actual data center perspective as much as I do with caching services. We are very much interested in caching services specifically, because, yes, you do need a distributed ability to have fast access to your users across the globe. But you don’t necessarily have to have separate data centers so that you can rely on a caching server for that.

Dixon: Okay, well, I’m caching. So today, we’re talking Cloudflare and Akamai, and these kinds of guys, you know, Cloudfare…

Keith: Exactly, yeah.

Dixon: I mean, because I’m a big crawler, you know, I do find it quite interesting. Cloudflare loves to block anything that they don’t think is human. Do you find that there’s, you know, out-of-the-box Cloudflare actually makes SEO worse? I don’t think that Cloudflare understands, or maybe large organizations don’t understand that saving a little bit of bandwidth is a very cheap way of blocking real people eventually coming to your website.

So I have this argument, and I’ll argue to you, Keith, you know, because I’m sure that IBM does it as well, you know. The blocking bots is not a clever way because it cuts down your marketing channels. What do you say about that? Cloudflare is bad?

Keith: Well, I can’t say that for my former…[crosstalk 00:39:11]

Dixon: For me. No, no, for me.

Keith: Okay, okay. Okay. Yes, I do think that there’s a need to configure outside of what comes in the box for either Cloudflare or Akamai. And we most certainly do that on a regular basis. You know, and there is a need to have a whitelist available for the bots, you know, and so that we can certainly service their needs as well. We don’t block bots until they become malicious in their behavior, generally speaking. So yeah, never take anything out of the box, in my opinion, and just use it as is. You have to configure it especially.

And we have people that do that. I couldn’t do that myself. I couldn’t tell you how to do that. So, that’s why we hire the smart people.

Dixon: Yeah. Lea and Ant, your opinion on bots and big business?

Ant: So yeah, I’ve got a really good example of this actually. So a fairly large corporate that has been one of my clients recently was using a global platform for their E-commerce, and their data centers are all based in one country. And it’s north of where you’re sitting, Lea, somewhere.

Lea: Yeah, it is.

Ant: So that should give you a close to who the platform are. I’m not gonna name them. And literally, they were blocking Googlebot UK, which is not a good thing when we’re trying to do SEO for a company whose main revenue is coming from the UK. So you can imagine the challenges that we got to get a major E-commerce platform to change their firewall settings so that Googlebot UK could go in. But we did, but you can imagine the challenge that that took.

Dixon: I find that really bizarre. I mean, Lea, I mean, what’s your opinion on, you know, blocking bots?

Ant: Crazy.

Lea: I…[crosstalk 00:40:59]

Ant: Sorry.

Lea: No, it’s okay. Blocking bots is not something I’m a fan of just because we have so many times where even our SEO tools are blocked because they’re blocking bots, and so then their clients are looking, or big brands are looking for their reporting, and you’re like, “I’d love to give it to you, but we haven’t been able to do things for…” You know. But when it comes to the big side of that, I’m really lucky I get to lean on Joe Warner, our CTO, and I don’t have to make all those things. I just can say, “It’s broken.” And then he makes everything work. So…

Dixon: I think I found it really interesting for other… I mean, you made the point about Google UK, and that’s obviously huge. But, of course, you know, Google Images has their image bot, you know, or Bing bot or, you know. If the CDN networks or CDNs are going to block bots, by definition, apart from Google and maybe Bing, then they are really by definition forcing the world to go to one of two suppliers. So they’re costing them…what they’re saving in bandwidth, there’s more than costing in advertising revenue, because if there’s only two places where you can go put your advertising dollars, then that price is gonna carry on going up.

And I think that there’s so many different bots that are, especially in a world of entity SEO, you know, where the world is moving towards a topic-based system. And people sort of got this idea of everything being, you know, topic-based rather than page content-based, I think that blocking the bot means you’re not allowing any of those bots, any of those information retrieval systems to scan the content, put it into a machine friendly format, for want of a better phrase, and therefore can’t then reproduce it back.

So you’re not gonna end up in your featured snippets as much as you want, you’re not gonna end up on Google Discover as much as you want, you’re not gonna end up on…you know, if Nokia come out with a new phone or Apple are doing their own crawl, you’re not gonna be [inaudible 00:43:06] seeing if they ever come out with a search engine.

So I think it’s a real problem. And also, on top of that, they’re only blocking the ones that identify themselves as bots, which is just crazy, absolutely crazy. Over half the blocked bot traffic pretends it’s humans, so, yeah, okay, and my pet peeve and then…

Ant: And it only pretends it’s human because it’s blocked otherwise.

Dixon: But Cloudfare and Akamai, you know, make themselves…you know, they stand this up as a USP, but it’s basically saving them pennies and potentially costing them millions, I think, for a custom…

Ant: Yeah, and my take on it is if you look at any kind of analytics of internal traffic, there’s always 10% of your traffic is coming from image search. You know, some of that is…and your audience usually [inaudible 00:43:55] depends on the business that you’re in. But global brands want to have a brand presence, and that is around distributing their imagery that their brand team have produced. And if those brand searches for that imagery are not being found because they’re using a CDN that is being blocked to Google, or any other search engine you can mention, then kind of what’s the point in spending the money on the brand?

Dixon: Yeah. Okay, Keith, feel free to come back on that as well if you want to at the end. But I just wanna cover over the last bit, because we’ve already reached time. And what I want you to finish up with was asking about large organizations and their SEO teams. And I guess I’m gonna ask Keith how big his SEO team is in a second. If you can’t answer, Keith, then that’s absolutely fine. But I guess the reason that I’m asking is, do you think a large organization should have a significant, dedicated SEO team, or do you think they are better off having a tiger team coordinated by an SEO somewhere? So one SEO who then sits there and says, “For this website over here, I’m gonna grab you from UX, you from web design, you from analytics, and you from finance, and get you all into a thing. And you’re going to be my SEO team.” What’s a better approach? And, Keith, I’m gonna throw it over to you.

Keith: Well, it depends. Not really. Actually, it sort of does depend. We have a fairly small team at this point. We lost a couple of our team members going over to a couple of other different companies. And, you know, that sucked. Patrick, you jerk. Anyway.

Dixon: Yeah, he sat next to me at the U.S. Search Awards dinner before I knew, and he was just plugging me for what I was doing before he wandered of and announced it. Thanks, Patrick.

Keith: Yeah, he’s sneaky that way. But I will say that you should have a team in-house if at all possible. I would not rely 100% on agencies. No offense to our agency friends, but I would not 100% rely on them because I think that you have to have someone who has sort of tribal knowledge and can actually work with the internal resources politically to get stuff done.

So, you know, do you need an SEO team of 50 people for a company the size of IBM? Not really. But you can probably get by with a dozen or so ranging from senior to junior SEOs coordinating with a nice agency team, because I definitely do need an agency team to work with 100%. I need somebody to do the grunt work while I’m doing the strategic work.

Dixon: Okay, Ant, do you wanna jump in? You’re on mute. You’re on mute mate.

Ant: Sorry about that. I couldn’t agree more with exactly what Keith just said that internally it does need an SEO team and they should be responsible for managing the agency, because the internal team have the internal working knowledge of the corporate structure and what actually the business is moving towards. I also think that having the expertise in-house that fits strategically, it’s not cost-effective to have that as an external resource, because the cost per hour is just out of the questio, and even large corporates don’t want to spend that with an agency.

And that’s where agencies really do fit well, because we can get that grunt work done quickly and efficiently and change. But what I wanted to say more is, to your original question, the tiger teams I think work really well. So the brand that I used to work with that we started this conversation about had teams that worked in silo. There was an SEO team, there was a mobile team, there was a desktop team, there was a brand team, there was a photography team. And every team sat in silo and no one ever spoke to each other. They just got on with their own jobs.

And the amount of conflict that got created actually caused more problems going back to retrofit what a single conversation would have cured early on. So I think an integrated team with different skill sets in it is much more powerful than managing external agency. That’s where a large corporate gets most of its kind of good work done.

Dixon: Yeah, Lea, do you wanna be the final word?

Lea: Sure, I am. Working with Aimclear, I was embedded in a very large software company’s team for content, and they had eight BU’s, or business units. And each business unit had their own content team. And I was the SEO that led all the content. So I provided strategy and then they did the content and made sure that I was on point for content with the verbiage for the user. And that worked really well and we saw great success that way.

So I don’t know how big of an SEO team you need. But the content to be built off of what SEO provides with strategy was a winner for us.

Dixon: Okay, great. So I’m really grateful for Doc and Ammon for throwing in points there. I didn’t see specific questions. So I’m sorry I didn’t bring you out. And David, if there’s anything I’ve really missed that I should have seen… There is a question. So now you’ve done it right after the 45-minute mark, Ammon, thank you, how much does corporate culture become a limitation?

Ant: It’s huge.

Dixon: Okay, yeah, cool. Yes. Okay. Well, let’s answer that one, then. Yeah. How much does corporate culture become a problem for big organizations? And you’re saying huge. Is it 99% of the problem?

Ant: Yeah, you can’t get things done. If you think of what Keith said right at the start, you need somebody at a senior C-suite level who is gonna champion the SEO campaign. Without that, there isn’t anybody at the board level that can actually make sure that we get the work done that we need to do. And then, the corporate structures that sit in between a senior SEO, for example, or a digital marketing director, there’s probably three layers of people, and never the twain shall meet, you know.

Dixon: I agree. I agree. Keith, do you wanna jump in there?

Keith: A hundred percent I agree. The corporate culture can be quite problematic, especially politically speaking, because executives, I’m not going to say that they’re not smart people, but they are very much like cats in that they are interested in the shiny thing that’s over in the corner that’s getting their attention. And sometimes, that is a very, you know, upwardly mobile and outgoing 20-something-year-old fresh out of MBA school who has an idea and just happens to be in front of them.

The problem with that is is that it can actually distract from really, really higher priorities. So, there’s a corporate culture of getting attention and keeping attention that we can’t always win. And then, added to that, you know, I have to do about 20 hours of mandatory training every year on the exact same material related to harassment and diversity, and all of these other things that really keep me from being able to do my job. Even though, you know, I know it. I know. Yes, I know this, but it’s not to do with the training. So there are all this cooperate limitations [crosstalk 00:51:24]

Dixon: And everybody in your organization should be doing that on SEO, and basically, yeah, your imprint on the world these days as well I think. Yeah.

Keith: Which we really, really need to. Absolutely.

Dixon: Yeah. I think that’s it. And you could use legislation for that. You could sit there and say, “Look, anything I say…” Well, in the UK anyway, you can sit there and say, “Anything I say could be taken as something that the company has said. So therefore, I need to be trained in it and use that as a leverage for SEOs.”

Guys, I’ve got to wrap things up a little bit here. And it’s been a fantastic and fascinating conversation. We’re staying on the big data thing next time round. David, what’s the subject of the next session?

David: So next week it’s going to be how to use big data to scale SEO.

Dixon: Next month. I can’t do this every week. It’s too much work for me.

David: Absolutely, next month. That same date next month, 15th of March.

Dixon: Okay, because we’re not on a leap year. So same time, same date,

David: Same time in the UK, but actually an hour later in the U.S. because that’s a day after the U.S. goes into summertime. So it’s 12:00 p.m. Eastern Time next month, and 4:00 p.m. UK time.

Dixon: That’s never gonna work. I’m gonna run. Good luck. Okay, thank you very much, David. I’m glad you’re ahead of that game because there’s no way I would have got that right.

Ant: I’ve got it [inaudible 00:52:38].

Dixon: And it’s a big data SEO, right? It’s good. Who have we got coming on?

David: So we’ve got Laurence O’Toole from Authoritas . We’ve got Will Reynolds coming on as well. So it should be a great show.

Dixon: Yeah, it should good. Thank you very much. Okay, guys, so it just leads me to let you guys say if people wanna find out more about you, where do they go? And how do they find you, Lea?

Lea: You can find me on Twitter @LeaScudamore.

Dixon: Lea Scudamore.

Lea: Yeah or find me on Aimclear blog too.

Dixon: Okay, Ant?

Ant: Find me @antrobbo at Twitter. Exactly the same.

Dixon: One B or two?

Ant: Two Bs antrobbo two Bs.

Dixon: The you go. Keith, well, obviously we can’t even see you so you’re not allowed to be found or you? You are allowed to answer, Keith. Where do we find you?

Keith: Can’t unmute.

Dixon: Okay, so I’ll tell you how you find Keith. You just go down to somewhere in Austin, Texas and bang on IBM’s door and he’ll be the other side there, and he’ll take your queries in person only. So there you go. Okay guys…[crosstalk 00:53:46]

Ant: Sorry go on.

Dixon: Go on.

Ant: I was just saying you guys are working me overtime.

Dixon: Keith?

Keith: Sorry about that, Dixon. I couldn’t get off mute for some reason, but I am at @keithgoode on Twitter. But maybe not for long I’ve got to go burn some chairs to stay warm, so I may die in a fire so.

Dixon: That’s brilliant. Guys, thank you ever so much for coming along. I’m pretty sure when we press the button here everything goes dead. So we’ll be…okay, Ammon’s pointed out that Keith’s cloaking. He is indeed, but, you know, he’s from Texas, so, you know, they’re gonna have to do that for a while for a few more years. So guys, thank you very much for coming along. I really appreciate it. And see you again soon. David, anything I need to say? Did I miss at all?

Keith: Thank you.

David: No, not at all. Everything doesn’t go dead. Actually, people are still here when we ended the broadcast.

Dixon: That’s fine.

David: We ended the broadcast just now. Bye-bye, everyone.