Career Development in SEO — Craig Harkins // CoStar

Craig Harkins, Director of SEO and Content at CoStar, discusses the evolution of SEO career development. We’ve gotten to the point where we know that SEO has to be a part of product management. However, unlocking SEO growth on enterprise sites requires matrix management skills as it involves working with various partners across the organization to prioritize SEO. Today, Craig dives into career development in SEO.
About the speaker

Craig Harkins

CoStar

- CoStar

Craig is Director of SEO and Content at CoStar

Show Notes

  • 02:41
    How Craig started a career in SEO
    When building a personal website, Craig had to hone in on and develop critical SEO skills. Those skills were applied to helping others with SEO best practices when publishing a website.
  • 05:15
    Using side projects to refine and develop SEO skills
    For eCommerce sites, in addition to using SEO to build up traffic, youre also a business owner. So, you end up learning about supply chains, payroll, employee management, etc.
  • 08:07
    Transitioning into an enterprise in
    At the enterprise level, this involves talking with all the players to bring priorities to your ideas. Because, it isnt a case where one just one team is involved, so influencing skills are key.
  • 10:34
    The importance of soft skills and hard skills in SEO
    Each team has their own metrics and requirements. So, the aim should really be integrating SEO goals into supporting the goals of other teams for higher prioritization of SEO.
  • 13:19
    The link between UX design and SEO
    When product and content team goals are unified with SEO, this positively impacts how SEO works. These partnerships help to advance strategies and help enterprise sites go after a larger market.
  • 16:18
    What being a Director of SEO and Content involves
    It creates the opportunity for SEO to influence product, content, technical and marketing team strategies. And this enables integration at the core of the products for the apartments marketplaces.

Quotes

  • "I built an eCommerce site and ran that for a while and used SEO to build traffic to it." -Craig Harkins, Director of SEO & Content, CoStar

  • "On an enterprise site, one team doesn't own any page. It's probably like five different teams that can own different aspects of it." -Craig Harkins, Director of SEO & Content, CoStar

  • "It's a lot of translation of how my metrics translate into your metrics so that we can have partnerships going through, not just me preaching that this is an SEO requirement." -Craig Harkins, Director of SEO & Content, CoStar

  • "There's a quote, what got you here, won't get you there. We have to look at not just redoing the same tactics that have worked in the past. But, keep an eye on what Google is changing." -Craig Harkins, Director of SEO & Content, CoStar

  • "We've added on UX writing into our content team because words matter, content matters. And, there are a lot of integration points with good microcopy, good page headings, to how SEO works." -Craig Harkins, Director of SEO & Content, CoStar

  • "My first few months here we're really just auditing where we are today, seeing where we're going directionally and identifying those areas of opportunities." -Craig Harkins, Director of SEO & Content, CoStar

  • "Just like any product management process, we launch features, we measure it, see how it's performing, then come back with our next iterations of features to start developing and refining." -Craig Harkins, Director of SEO & Content, CoStar

About the speaker

Craig Harkins

CoStar

- CoStar

Craig is Director of SEO and Content at CoStar

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