Leading SEO in a Regulated Industry — 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. How old is Rinaldo? What happened with big brother 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: (00:29)Welcome to 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 toolkit of both hardware and software products include square capital square terminal, square payroll. And of course their cute little credit card reader yesterday. Sebastian and I talked about his move from working in a consulting capacity to being an in house SEO. And today we're going to talk about the nuances of SEO and a highly regulated industry. Okay. Onto the show. Here's my conversation with Sebastian Edgar, the SEO lead at square. Sebastian. Welcome back to the voices of search podcast, man. Speaker 2: (01:21)Thanks for having me again, excited to have you back on the show yesterday, we talked about you making the big move jumping from working as a consultant at search metrics to being an in house SEO. And one of the things that's interesting to me about your transition was you went from working with primarily eCommerce brands, and now you're working in a pretty regulated industry. Talk to me about not necessarily Square's SEO practices. Obviously that's going to be pretty proprietary, but what you've run into in terms of dealing with legal and privacy and some of the other restrictions around working in finance. Yeah, absolutely. I mean a lot of the work and that's just in general in SEO is content optimization. So it's figuring out with our internal partners. So internal copywriters, internal and vertical owners on effectively figuring out what can, and can't be said based on the recommendations that you're bringing out there. Speaker 2: (02:16)So, as I mentioned, most of the work, we do a lot of content optimization, making sure content is holistic. It's targeting the topic. Occasionally actually quite often we were going to have a recommendation on, Hey, we want to mention this specific topic in that way, unfortunately, legal, they will come back to us and be like, that's unfortunately not possible. So we need to find occasionally like either we can't mention it at all or needs to be said and written in a very specific way. So you just, you have to find like just little trickeries and little work around so that it fits the legal narrative as well as the SQR narrative, the intent narrative and just the overall like patient that narrative. So it's a nice little dance. So you mentioned that, you know, you have a content partner and an internal team that is actually doing the content production. I'm assuming that they're on the hook for what's written and you're just doing the optimization and suggestions on what's going to help them rank. Speaker 3: (03:12)Or you could, you could say that they're on the hook, but again, like a lot of the work is at the forefront of a lot of our initiatives. So we have just a very good if there's a lot of the recommendations, oftentimes people know that it's for an SEO factors is due to an SEO reason that we're trying to put out there. Speaker 2: (03:31)So you mentioned yesterday, one of the things that you were focused on was reverse engineering intent. Yeah. And it seems like, you know, in the financial industry, a lot of the intent, isn't something that people necessarily make very clear people. Aren't going to say, you know, Oh my God, I'm about to go bankrupt. Or I want a loan with under 3%, they're going to research different terms. How do you actually figure out intent? And mostly who's in the market and who's not. Speaker 3: (03:59)Yeah, absolutely. The first thing you got to do is you got to classify your types of pages. You got to classify which ones are informational. So what I mean by informational, you also want to get the definitions, right? So informational is long for is something that answers like a specific Cory's specific questions. So like blog content, that's a great example of something that's like purely informational. And then you have something that's closer to navigational. Now, again, I use the term fairly loosely, but navigational decor intent, a reasoning behind navigational is something closer to like a product page. You have a specific solution. And that solution quote unquote solution page basically navigates you to an array of different products that square has. And then you have transactional, which is the actual transactional piece of like an athlete piece of hardware. You can say where you literally buy that product by that service on that landing page. Speaker 3: (04:52)But you want to get that clarification and definition done on your site. First, once you have that done, you obviously have like a full list of topics. You want to classify each of these topics. Now you can use a tool to do that, but again, you also want to do some, I don't wa a say you want to do some like manual labor a little bit, but you want to use like tools and you want to look yourself to understand, okay, well, what's their share of websites like Investipedia or Wikipedia or blogs out there versus like direct competitors. And it's never going to be a hundred percent informational hundred percent navigational, a hundred percent transactional. What you want to do is you want to figure out the ratio is the ratio of more closely around product pages, ranking, or more closely around like blog rankings, or is it occasion where you actually buy from there and within the payments industry, there's a lot of differences between each of these. Speaker 2: (05:41)I think of this as the Jordan Cooney methodology for intent is understanding, you know, is the query navigational is it's a, you know, a product page, you know, what is somebody actually trying to accomplish? He is, I don't remember off the top of my head what they are, but the four basically segments of intent and maybe Jordan doesn't get credit for it, but he's told it to me. There's also multiple different types of buyers. You know, I know at square there are consumer products, there are lending products meant for small, medium sized businesses. How much, when you're thinking about intent, are you also thinking about what class of user is conducting the query? You know, is each page designed for a specific, you know, segment, the SMB is the enterprises or the end consumers, you know, a consumer product, or are you really just thinking about query and intent? Speaker 3: (06:36)Obviously, definitely the former quite a bit. We have like internal partners that specifically work on that or understanding that piece, uh, you know, different personas for that specific landing page, but ultimately what the SEO team. And as soon as a square one to bring to the table is telling them like, look, this is what Google expects from this query. And that right there is more of the key things is like, Hey, based on our research or competitive research, our serve research and our intent research, Google expects at page that is more navigational than informational. So, you know, you guys wanted to block those to rank for this query. That's not going to happen. We will not be able to have that because Google doesn't expect it pays like that to rank blog post. Isn't a good example. It'd be more like a transactional navigational page. Sure. So Google doesn't express that, then you have to make that clear to people because there is, and that's the difference between like how Google views, the intent of inquiry versus internally, how people do that. So then you have to figure out what the right balance is there. Speaker 2: (07:37)Yeah. It goes back to our conversation yesterday when you're making the transition from being a consultant, to being an in house SEO. A lot of what you're doing is working with people who don't speak fluent SEO, to try to educate them on what your strategy should be or to get them to understand really how SEO works. And part of it is it's nice that you want this blog post to rank a blog. Post is never going to rank because Google only wants, you know, product pages here. So let's go create a product page. Speaker 3: (08:08)Exactly. But I actually, one thing I should say, one of the beautiful things is once you figure that out is almost going back to our conversation yesterday of like distilling SEO to business practices and internal metrics is teaching people that SEO data and SEO information should not be used in isolation should not be used in a silo. So it's not because you have information about SEO. They should just be used for ranking on Google, that intent research and intent conversation we're having right now, that data should be used for web strategy practices to also define their personas. They'd be like, wait a minute, Google expects this query in this page to be more informational. Okay, wait a minute. That should say a lot about a persona. So one of the things that, you know, I would everyone to do is make sure that the Ester data you're not using, whether it's like search volume market share or anything like that is used for other practices, because Google is a canvas that is literally the only place that user literally types in with having their head out there. It's crazy. And people will just keep using it just for SEO. It's nonsensical. Speaker 2: (09:15)Yeah. You know, I will use an example on, I hope I don't get you in any hot water here with the legal department, the example of, you know, small business loans. If Google is expecting the keyword small business loans to be informational, not transactional, right? It doesn't matter if square is putting up the world's greatest product page. That's just designed for optimal conversions. No, one's going to see it because the consumer is still thinking about the research phase. Now, whatever the keyword is, I'm using that as an example, and I know nothing about how Google or square might consider their pages to be valuable, but, you know, I think that's the important part where Google is saying, Hey, square. When somebody is looking for a small business loans, they're still doing research well, that's valuable data for the marketing team as well, Speaker 3: (10:05)Actually in that spot on that is absolutely spot on one of the things when I first arrived is there was a specific term. I don't want to say a term, but like an actual topics that historically yeah, five years ago, you have the product page ranking for in 2020, the landscape and Google was completely different that the product page, they didn't rank for that term at all anymore. And believe it or not, people internally thought we had zero visibility for that topic, but that wasn't the case. We just had a guide page, a sort of like informational page ranking for that topic. But that didn't translate into the internal KPIs because it was in a completely different landscape and a complete different vertical. And people just, they tried to create the best bond to pay for that topic. But the reality was that Google, they didn't want a product page. Speaker 3: (10:50)They didn't want a navigational page. They wanted a guide. They wanted research exactly informational paste. It's these types of things that are, firstly, you were at the mercy of Google. It gives you that information. It's like, no, I want an informational paste. And then it's your job as an SEO. If you're like, I'm going to create the best damn informational page there is. And that's what I'm going to do. And I'm going to link from that gap page to my navigational page for the users. And you create that flow yourself. But ultimately you got to understand what Google expects you to keep track of it. Things are going to change three years ago. It looked completely different. So there's a little bit of reactivity involved. I'm not going to lie. It's like, I'd love to say, it's like, we have to be a hundred percent proactive. You can't always be a hundred percent productive if you are at the mercy of Google a little bit. But if you keep track of it, that reactivity, it can become practice fairly quickly. Speaker 2: (11:33)Yeah. Now Sebastian you've, you know, as a consultant or whether it's in house, I've worked in a commerce, worked on media and publishing. Now you're in the financial sector, obviously one is more regulated to the other. What are some of the unique challenges that you find working in a more regulated industry? You know, what's the fun part of that type of business, as opposed to e-commerce or media and publishing where you can really kind of get away with everything. Yeah, Speaker 3: (12:02)Let's see. I can start with the challenges of heavily regulated. It is hard to get, I ca ot put it like third party data. If you want to get external tools that do a great job at like, you know, data analysis or like law files or anything like that, it's practically impossible because of internal regulations that you can't share that out. Speaker 2: (12:26)So the metaphor going through my head is it's really hard to get a security camera in the vault. Speaker 3: (12:33)Oh, a hundred percent. That's exactly. And it's something that NSA my team, it is an issue. I would say that's more of an issue than any sort of like legal terminology, because you could technically work around that and we do, and that's fine. But getting that twice as getting like additional piece of information from external tools is very, very hard, unfortunately. Speaker 2: (12:53)Yeah, I get it. That's the hard part is you can't work with every vendor. You have to be very concerned about privacy and security. Tell me the good stuff. Yeah, Speaker 3: (13:03)Absolutely. I mean the good stuff is like the type of SEO that you do for something like that. And I would say for website, that could almost be a general statement for a website. That's not, e-commerce, that's very driven around a specific course that a topic is the type of SEO that you do is very different. You know, almost it's fu y because I had this moment when I started, where I almost thought back of Marcus Tobers ranking factors like verticalized ranking factors were, I don't know if you remember, like he came out with those like a few years ago where it's like, here are the, your travel ranking factors here, your e-commerce ranking factors here, your so on and so forth. And I found myself almost going back to that and be like, wait a minute. I need to think about it as two completely differently in e-commerce you're going to create an issues that are based on like crawl bandwidth, crawl efficiency, internal linking, because Google has less access to that sort of like unique content. Speaker 3: (13:51)It has to rely on additional factors, a lot more internal linking crawl bandwidth, figuring out the quality of these pages based on these factors, but a little bit less on content with a website, you know, like these sort of payment websites, interests, it's completely the other way around. So what's interesting is like, you're able to kind of like game-ify SEO a little bit more. You're able to game-ify it with content optimization and increasing kind of like just your content score in general, your overall like topic coverage and create like really cool processes without focusing on that nitty gritty technical. Oh, I need to make sure that it's like, I have X amount of pages they're being crawled or indexed. Speaker 2: (14:31)The metaphor that comes to my mind is you're thinking about how many shots are you taking that go in? Not how many shots can I get up? Yeah, that's exactly right. I think that's a basketball metaphor. Sorry. I didn't hang with that one. Well, Sebastian, I'm super excited for you. Square's a great company. It's sad not to see around the office at Searchmetrics when I'm there on the flip side, nobody's in the office anywhere. So at least we got to get together and hang out. It's good to reco ect and thanks for being our guest. Thanks again for having me on right. Come back anytime. And 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 can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes, or you can visit his personal website. Speaker 2: (15:22)Sebastian hit, it needs an update. SEO, SEM, SEO, seb.com. Sorry to throw you under the bus. Just one more link in our show notes. I'd like to tell you about, if you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to the 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 into your feed soon. All right. That's it for today. But until next time, remember the answers are always right. Speaker 4: (16:13)[inaudible].