SEO Agency

This week on the How the F*ck SEO podcast, I asked Kevin Indig for career advice.

I mean, I had to, right?

In his 10 years as an SEO he's been:

Head of technical SEO at Atlassian
VP of SEO & content at G2
Director of SEO at Shopify

Safe to say, he's had an incredible career trajectory for 10 years.

In this week's Premium article, expect to learn Kevin's five bits of advice for SEOs & content leaders earlier on in their careers.

“If you were 8 years earlier in your career, what advice would you want to get from someone further ahead?”

💡 This article is only available for the free tier of How the F*ck. It's free to join. If you aren't already a member, sign up below and refresh this page.

How to build a successful SEO career

Here are five things Kevin would tell his younger self:

1. Make alignment a priority

Alignment can happen on several levels. In essence, you want to make sure everyone is on the same page.

Step one: Alignment with your boss or manager.

Kevin suggests that you ask your manager regularly:

What do you expect from me?
How are we doing?
What problems do you want me to solve?
What’s top of your mind?

Like a flock of starlings moving in formation, success comes from moving in sync with your manager.

Step two: Alignment with the team you manage.

Kevin suggests that you repeatedly make sure your team is in sync with you. Part of that is team meetings and surveys that help you keep an ear to the ground.

Step three: There’s a horizontal plane to this. You also want to stay in sync with your peers.

You must dedicate time to this to achieve alignment and to stay on the same page about problems and opportunities.

After running us through these three planes of alignment, Kevin tells us how to stay aligned.

The most important thing: over-communicate.

Humans are really good at implied meaning—reading what's said between the lines. However, we over-index on how clear that implied message is.

“In essence, we think we communicate clearer than we actually do,” says Kevin “the key to aligning is to treat it like a child, where you just name everything explicitly and want to have a constant stream of communicated information in all three planes I mentioned before.”

💡 Top tip: Beat the drum. Say things three times. Keep bringing things up. How do you know you’re being effective at this? "People get annoyed", says Kevin. They say “oh, here’s Ben saying that again”. That's when you know your job is complete.

The key benefit of alignment and communication: good buy-in. If you don’t have strategic buy-in, you could bring the best data in the world and people won’t back you.

To summarize, the first piece of advice Kevin would give to his younger self is this:

Communicate continuously (up, down, and across)
Align problems to solve and outcomes to achieve
Get buy-in early so you don’t have to oversell later

2. Question things more—think critically

Kevin says that a key lesson he's learned is to really think things through and question them hard.

It's not the stuff like ‘is this the right tactic’ but it’s more on the strategic side. Like ‘are we measuring the right numbers? How could those numbers be misleading? Are we setting the right priorities? Do we have a clear framework for prioritization? Is someone misaligned?’

As a person who manages managers and teams, looking at that team with an objective focus is really important. It makes the machine that you’re building "run smoother".

At G2, Kevin was very organic traffic-focused—tackling broad and high-level keywords. That makes sense for G2 as it correlates with how G2 makes money: more traffic leads to more money for them.

At one point, however, he looked deeper at the traffic to uncover where the traffic was most needed for revenue results.

That session of critical thinking led to G2 developing a new metric that was more closely tied to some of the categories they wanted to go after.

The G2 team still kept organic traffic as a metric, but through critical thinking and asking themselves ‘is this really a good measure of our success?’ they brought in a few other key metrics that were better aligned with the results they wanted to achieve.

That was a big moment for Kevin and the G2 SEO team.

“It was one of those moments where you step back and you ask yourself: are we really doing the right thing? Or can we be honest with ourselves and admit we have gotten smarter in the last 6-12 months and now know this is no longer the best metric.”

This goes hand in hand with a well-known human bias: consistency bias (CB).

Because of CB, even when deep down people know something needs to change, there’s a resistance to it that needs to be overcome if you are to move in a new, smarter direction.

💡 Top tip: Build a reevaluation period into your strategy. Come back and review if it’s working at regular intervals and make tweaks. This is not admitting failure, this is a natural course of continuous optimization and improvement.

Kevin tells us that he advises a young startup on its SEO strategy.

He notes that it’s a lot of guesswork early on but that’s okay. They scheduled a three-month meeting to check on things, see how they went, and take the learnings forward to the next three months—naturally overcoming resistance to change.

This process also helps train their gut and improve decision-making in the future.

3. Sit down with people in a room

If you're a strategic thinker like Kevin, it’s easy to get stuck in that strategic and conceptual mindset. But he recommends that you don’t forget to work things out with the people in the room.

Instead of handing down a framework or concept and saying ‘go out and get it’, Kevin says he now books in an hour and invites people to work it out with him.

This approach aids decision-making faster in the long run and allows innovative thinking to flourish in a more explorative environment.

💡 Top tip: Involvement also leads to engagement and buy-in. Working through problems with your team is a bonding moment and shows your team you care about their growth, too.

I ask Kevin to share his best practice for getting people into a room and leading a session with them. He responds:

A lot of this is about reaching out to people you collaborate with and asking them for 30-60 minutes to work this through. Ask them to be your sounding board or give you feedback. People actually want to do that.

You don’t have to sell it as a ‘lets work on this together’. You can just ask for their thoughts and in most cases people will be happy to help or find another way to give you input.

At Daily Motion, Kevin was the Director of SEO. He would regularly travel to Paris to keep in touch and build relationships.

In one case, Kevin had worked on a roadmap in a silo and had sent it over to the developers. But, he didn’t spend the time to sit them in a room and explain how he got there, his thought processes, and why it mattered.

Taking a siloed approach like this meant:

Kevin missed out on learning opportunities from the developers about the tech stack and technical limitations.
The developer team wasn’t very happy just executing.
The developer team didn’t have enough context to do it really well.

Now, Kevin always takes a different approach. He creates a super scrappy plan and gets into a room with everyone who needs to be involved to hash it out, significantly improving the plan and outcomes.

4. Document more often

Documentation can slow you down if you do too much. But, it can also act as a multiplier of your impact if you get it right.

A great example comes from Shopify. We were working on an infrastructure project which really impact our organic traffic. We were blessed to work with a team that understood the importance of documentation, and now we can almost self-serve this infrastructure functionality. We are dependent on them anymore in the future.

Documentation can help you automate your workflows. This works especially well for onboarding, it can save you so much time to invest upfront in the documentation that helps a new employee self-serve many parts of their onboarding process.

Understanding the balance between slowing down to document and when documentation is critical has been a huge lesson in my career.

💡 Top tip: You would be shocked at how often people leave a company with critical information, often years of earned secrets walk out the door. Documentation combats this.

So, what did Kevin and his Shopify team document?

Team briefs: What’s our roadmap? Our strategic priorities?
Project briefs: What should be done, what success looks like, what outcome we want.
Company-wide: What’s our compensation philosophy? What’s the vision for the company?

Both Kevin and I use Confluence (an Atlassian tool) to create self-serve documentation. For me, we use it to field questions from our sales team that we seem to get again and again.

Kevin makes a great point here, “This comes back to alignment, and alignment decays with time.”

Combat 'decay' by writing things down.

5. Evangelize SEO

Especially for a discipline like SEO, you want to advocate for it throughout a company.

Whether it’s through presentations, education, or explaining how everyone can contribute towards SEO, you want to get people fascinated by the subject.

There are some serious benefits to evangelizing your work:

Helps you demonstrate your expertise
Brings better alignment and energy to your projects
Open all sorts of unexpected doors to help you execute better

Kevin gives an example of when he did this successfully at Atlassian. He recounts when he went on a campaign to educate different teams (designers, writers, developers), presenting and engaging across the company.

The results? It had a huge impact on the search results. Suddenly, everyone at Atlassian started to contribute and they started to see positive signals from the work that they do, feeding a flywheel.

💡 Top tip: Internal marketing is half the job of an effective marketer. Don’t forget to shout about your results, educate others in your company, explain what competitors are doing, and explain why the work is important. If you don’t do this, when budgeting comes around you could see your projects cut.

So, how do you advocate for SEO?

On top of educating teams across your company about how to do SEO, Kevin gives us three methods to share the value of SEO with your organization:

Share revenue impact—Try to find revenue impact from search traffic, and if you can’t try to find another impact metric (leads, clicks, etc) that shows what’s happening.
Show competitor comparisons—show that competitors are far ahead of you.
Share rankings for important keywords—Let the CEO Google words they think are important and find your content. That makes it real for them.