Transitioning from Agency to In-House SEO — Sebastian Edgar // Square

Show Notes

• Speaker 1: (00:00)Bridge toll California customer service number highway miles to the gallon Ford focus, high wind cave rescue operation. What is schema F best wine bars in San Carlos, California, best Western hotels, our oldest Rinaldo. What happened with big grub tips for a wedding? Should I send down the first series Imam Imam on other email clients identify fonts from where to find them or Speaker 2: (00:30)Into the voices of search podcast. I'm your host Benjamin Shapiro. And today we're going to talk about SEO for your life and your money. Joining us today is a former search metrics employee and a personal friend, Sebastian Edgar, who is the newly minted SEO lead at square square builds common business tools in unconventional ways. So people can start, run and grow their businesses. And Square's business tool kit of both hardware and software products include square capital square terminal, square payroll. And of course their cute little credit card reader. And today Sebastian and I are going to talk about going from an agency or consulting role to being an in house SEL. Okay. On with the show. Here is my conversation with Sebastian Edgar SEO lead at square. Sebastian. Welcome back to the voices of search podcast. Hey man. First of all, thanks for having me and great to see you and hear from you again. Speaker 2: (01:23)Uh, yeah, this should be fun for people that are new to the podcast. Sebastian was a regular guest and was a member of the search metrics team back in the day when this was like a consulting project that I worked on for search metrics, not my own personal SEO content archive, Sebastian, it's great to reco ect. And Hey, congratulations on the new gig. You're like the head of SEO, the lead of SEO in a huge company. Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy because I still feel like I'm new over at square, but I realized that time flies and I've been there for more than six months. It's a little weird. I mean, obviously this year has been pretty strange, but yeah, six months flies by, but yeah, it was a search metrics for, Oh geez. I think four and a half years that again, flew by. So, so you've been in SEO for a long time. Speaker 2: (02:13)You worked at search metrics in a consulting role or what you weren't a consultant, but your role was to be an advisor for search metrics clients to help them more on the technical side of SEO. And now you're doing it in house. Let's talk a little bit about what that transition was like. What's the difference for you moving from a role where you're an advisor and a consultant for companies talking about their SEO strategies to actually being responsible for it yourself? Yeah, absolutely. And you know, like you said, my role search metrics, you know, in the last few years I had the chance to lead the consulting team and really the way that I can lead the team into work that we were doing was very technical based. So that's one thing it's like really focused on the technical part of SEO and a lot of people who require really agency Speaker 3: (03:00)Help and to work with agencies are folks on the large scale, you can say like the big e-commerce folks that was like one of the big thing that we work with that search metrics. And a lot of the work that we did was, you know, you provide the recommendations, you provide the recommendations and then you kind of hope that they get implemented. And that's something that at search metrics we notice just doesn't really work. And so the type of consulting we did over there, it's like, okay, let's try to find a way to do more on almost like the implementation you can say doing more like helping them implement. But at the end of the day, even though I really do think that my team and like the current team has, um, you know, really phenomenal job there at the end of the day, you're still an external party. And that was always a challenge. Speaker 2: (03:46)There's only so much you can push and cajole and suggest and advise that doesn't actually get code pushed lab the site. Speaker 3: (03:56)Exactly. And as an external party, you know, that is the challenge. There's only so much you can do, but you're never going to have like full access to everything. And that was probably one of the most interesting things that I've noticed is going in house. You're responsible for the entire flow, obviously from the research flow all the way to that implementation and getting resources, you know, you don't have the excuse. So it'd be like, well that wasn't donuts then all the time, because we couldn't get resources. No, that is a responsibility that is your accountability to speak with the right stakeholders to figure that out and just to get it done and consulting, you can say, if there are any consultants listening, you know, yeah. That is a bit of an event it's like, well, our client can get the resources, so we'll keep giving recommendations, but in house that's not an excuse. And I don't take it as an excuse it's you get to drive it to the end. Speaker 2: (04:45)So, you know, the buck stops with you when it comes to SEO and you're responsible for not only getting the resources, but you're also responsible for the results. Yeah. Talk to me about some of the different metrics that you think about now that you're in house, as opposed to, you know, when you were outhouse, when you were consulting and advising, Speaker 3: (05:06)Let's just say in house a lot more metrics that you can't a hundred percent control with SEO. That for me was one of the things that in a consulting space, you're going to be looking a lot more, let's say, you know, at SEO visibility, because, you know, back in the day it was SEO through consulting, through search metrics. So, you know, you tried to push some of the search metrics metrics. So you looked a lot at very specific, very detailed SEO metrics, position, spread, actual rankings, SEO visibility in general. And obviously you want to, when you're in house, you still want to push these and you want to make sure that some of these very detailed SEO metrics parts, so nebulous. So actually when I first got to square, I tried to introduce more metrics around organic market share, which was a great way to kind of look at SEO in a way that it's not so geeky, but it has some like business valleys. Speaker 3: (06:01)So as soon as you introduced the term market share, you know, people are like, Oh, wait a minute, let me, let me listen up. What are they talking about? So that would be one advice I would have just for newly in house is like, talk about SEO from a business perspective and market share market share wise because it does help. And he helps you as well get an understanding of the landscape. But then going back to your original question, you know, in house, you're going to be looking at a lot less and these very nitty gritty SEO metrics, these are more going to be what I would call health metrics. You're, you know, from the old carer perspective, your cocaine are going to be like your internal metrics that SEO, maybe can't influence that much, very conversion, derivative metrics, I should say. Speaker 2: (06:40)So what I'm hearing is that the way that you're talking about SEO, infers, that you're talking about SEO to non SEO is now more than you were as a consultant. And so what you're doing is essentially translating the language of SEO to be, let's just call it regular business, speak, talking about market share instead of search visibility, talking about instead of ranking or rank positioning, you're talking about how you stack up against your competitors. Speaker 3: (07:11)Exactly. Exactly. There's a lot more competitive analysis in general, and there's a lot more of like referencing to the competitors. You talk a lot more about like the landscape in general. And this I think was actually quite fascinating because when I started back at square or even say, I would say even like in general, even in my consulting, I noticed that SEO, it's always the sort of like geeky term. It's not, let's be honest. It's not very sexy Speaker 2: (07:34)Size of the beholder. It's a technical field. People think of SDOs as the geeks in the corner. Right? Speaker 3: (07:40)Exactly. I don't know if that's always the norm on me. It's not marketed very well. One of the things that, you know, I obviously still need to do a better job at, but I think a lot of SEOs do is it's not even naming it SEO internally and see you at the end of the day, it's a subset of organic cha el growth. Ultimately that's where you're trying to go. You're trying to grow a specific to organic cha el. How do you go about this? Well, one of the ways you go about this is through specific search engine optimization. Another way you go about this is through analytics. And another way you go about this is through project management site structure. So then you have the different subsets of organic cha el growth and people start understanding a little bit better because SEO, I had an SEO training the other day, someone asked me, he's like, Hey, what does SEO stand for a hundred percent true. A hundred percent true. What was your answer? I, you know, I gave some clever upon, I wish I remembered it and I don't remember it so I can sound clever right now. Speaker 2: (08:34)So you said search engine optimization and you moved on? Speaker 3: (08:37)No, no. I had that serious. I had something I don't remember. I have set search experience optimization quite a few times as well. I will be honest. I would have said that because I think it sounds nice. However, one thing though that I have been saying quite a bit and I've been trying to sell it that way because it is a type of work that we're doing is as CEO in the common sense of search engine optimization, you could make a good point that it's a little antiquated. I would almost go as far as saying that the type of SEO that we do in that a lot of folks do probably outside of eCommerce, eCommerce being a bit of an exception because of the scale, but you're doing more intent optimization. Most of the work that we're doing is we're figuring out the intent. We're trying to understand what exactly is Google expecting from these queries that you're trying to rank for from these topics that you're trying to rank for and what types of pages should you surface for Google. And so lot of the work that we do really is almost like intent, reverse engineering. And that is that sort of like new phase of SEO that we're doing. And again, people understand that a little bit better. Speaker 2: (09:43)What you're doing is communicating not only in business speak, not SEO speak, right? You're not working directly with SEOs all the time. You're also repositioning really what SEO is and talking more about organic growth. Talk to me about some of the skills that you've had to develop or some of the lessons that you've learned going from, you know, a relatively small and a couple of hundred people working in an agency search metrics as a platform, obviously as well to working for square, which is a much bigger organization. It's gotta be politics and all sorts of fun stuff that you have to go through to get your resources, to get your work done. What have you learned on that side of the business? Speaker 3: (10:28)You know, at the end of the day in consulting, you're going to be working with a specific set of people. It's your clients. And occasionally, if you do a good job, then they invite you at their headquarters and you do a meeting with a bunch of other people that happens. But it's not always the case here, organization like square. You're going to be meeting with folks that you've never met. And so there is like, you have to do a good job at communication. You have to improve your communication skills a lot more. And I think this is where consulting anyone who's in house. I would certainly recommend, or a junior person who's figuring out. Should I go in the house that I go consulting? I would say, yeah, you should start with consulting because the skills are going to learn that consulting are absolutely valuable for in house, knowing how to sell things, knowing how to speak things at a little bit high level and going into detail and getting kind of like out of your comfort zone a little bit. Speaker 3: (11:20)And this is something that I've had to do a lot more is selling a lot of my initiatives and just working a lot more like on the politics. I thought I'd be a lot of like political work at search metrics, not even close, not even close. And that I think has been quite interesting. And actually it has been very enjoyable. That's also where you think it sounds unenjoyable, but no, because you get to work with so many different people with so many different teams and you're always trying to align how SEO can help them. You're always trying to align your initiatives with their initiatives and then you get the other to be like, Oh, wait a minute. I actually didn't know that SEO could help me here. I didn't know that SEO could actually impact this sort of piece. So it's like slowly but surely you're building out this web of people realizing SEO needs and understanding SQL a little bit more. But all that starts with is you doing a good job at having a core set of initiatives that you're trying to work for them. So creating clarity on what you're trying to achieve. I know it sounds like high level and like very conceptual, but you have to put that kind of stuff in practice. And it starts with like a very clear roadmap of five set initiatives and going from there, Speaker 2: (12:32)It's really interesting to hear how, you know, used to be selling, to earn revenue. And now it's selling and hopefully educating as well to earn essentially internal currency, right? To get your resources, get your projects done. Last question I have for you today. My thought was when you go from being a consultant or an advisor in SEO to being in house, that the real difference is not just okay, you make recommendations, but you're there for a long time, very infrequently. Are you going to have, you know, consulting clients and SEO agency relationships that last for multiple years, you can go into a different level of depth when you're an in house SEO, have you got to get deeper than you would have? Had you been an advisor or a consultant for square? Are you able to get into more depth now that you own SEO for the company? What's the level of sophistication you're able to get into? Is it different than when you were a consultant? Speaker 3: (13:38)I think just the fact that you have access to a lot more internal data just allows you to go a lot deeper into specific analysis. Also, you understand the product a lot better, and this is something that as consultants, I know we did most of the consultants, they don't work on like your own product and your own domain all the time. So, which is normal. So they're never going to have the same amount of knowledge of narrative or like rhetoric they're trying to bring out or how each of the page is like. So for example, you look at the internal linking structure. We know exactly why that structure is that way and what we need to improve our consultants, not so much. So they're never able to provide like the right recommendations for that role is, has to come in and be like, well, yeah, your analysis is correct. However, you need to add in this layer, this layer, that layer. And that's just information that we know from internal. So I would say, yes, you are able to play with, with a lot more data outside of like data, you know, that you just have to like the tool, especially for a company like square, where it's like, it is tough to be able to share external data. So a lot of my consultants you're spending we'll have access to our own internal, like BI tools and things like that Speaker 2: (14:46)Data and his historical context. Speaker 3: (14:49)Exactly. Exactly. Okay. Speaker 2: (14:52)So that wraps up this episode of the voices of search podcast. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Sebastian Edgar SEO lead at square. We'd love to continue this conversation with you. So if you're interested in contacting Sebastian, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes, or you can visit his personal website, SEO, SEM, SEO, stb.com. Just one more link in our show notes. I'd like to tell you about give you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voices of search.com, where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also send us your topic suggestions or your SEO questions. You can even apply to be a guest speaker on the voices of search podcast. Of course you could always reach out on social media. Our handle is voices of search on Twitter. And my personal handle is Ben J Shap, B E N J S H a P. And if you haven't subscribed yet, and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish episodes every day during the workweek. So hit the subscribe button in your podcast app, and we'll be back in your feed soon. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, remember the answers are always in the day Speaker 4: (15:57)[inaudible].