Friday, Oct 14, 2022 • 30min
Executing your SEO Strategies -- Brandon Schakola //Overstock
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Brandon Schakola, Sr. Director of SEO at Overstock, talks about executing an SEO strategy.
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(3)
Brandon Schakola
Tyson Stockman
Benjamin Shapiro
Transcript
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Break
00:39
Welcome to the Voices Of Search podcast and I hear everything production. In this podcast we'll share the news knowledge and strategies. You need to navigate the ever changing world of
SEO
.Share
00:52
Ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts? Sit back, relax and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Jere's today's host of the Voices Of Search podcast. Benjamin Shapiro.
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Benjamin Shapiro
01:06
Welcome to the Voices Of Search podcast. My name is Benjamin Shapiro and I'm the executive producer of the Voices Of Search podcast.
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01:13
And today we've got a special episode for you, which is gonna be guest hosted by our friend Tyson Stockton who is the co-founder and educational partner at pre visible which is an
SEO
consulting, an education company that helps support enterprise businesses, scale organic search traffic and educate their organizations.Share
Break
Benjamin Shapiro
02:51
Alright, here's an episode of the Voices Of Search podcast guest hosted by Tyson Stockman from Previsible.
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Tyson Stockman
02:58
Hey, my name's Tyson Stockton from previsible.io, and today we're wrapping up our conversation around
SEO
strategy. Returning today is Brandon Schakola, senior director of SEO at Overstock
.Share
03:10
So far this week. Brandon and I have talked about building an
SEO
strategy, the groundwork of the framework required to create that strategy. And today we're wrapping up the conversation discussing executing on that strategy.Share
03:23
Alright, here's my conversation with Brandon, senior director of SEO at
Overstock
. Brandon, welcome back.Share
Brandon Schakola
03:29
Thank you, how are you today?
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Tyson Stockman
03:30
I'm doing good. Looking forward to kind of like recapping or kind of getting to more of the action or the implementation side of the conversation today.
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03:41
So I think we covered a lot of ground on the preparation, the framing, how you're presenting or kind of like organizing the strategy. And today we want to dive into more of like, great, we went through the exercises where we feel confident in our strategy, we've created it, but now, how do we kind of mobilize within that?
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04:04
So, to start off maybe how do you think about communicating an SEO strategy within an organization? So not just to your team that's gonna be executing on it, but the cross-functional teams, the leadership team, the organization at large, how do you present and how do you communicate that strategy?
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Brandon Schakola
04:25
So, display when most people think it's not like it's not like executing an SEO strategies, it's like, okay, we plan everything now, I gotta go do it. You're kind of already starting to do these things as you're developing, right?
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04:37
So one of the key components I think for is that as you're generating your digging in the ideas were already starting to share in the community. And the reason you want to do this because you want to buy it and oftentimes CEOs and organizations, you just kind of seen as the people that jam up your
Jira
logs, right?Share
04:56
So you constantly have to be communicating the why, why do we want to do this work? What's the upside? We need to get people to see and believe in the data behind the opportunities that carries around.
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05:13
So I think, you know, that comes down to just being kind of a organization and constantly having cross functional 1/1s, doing skip level meetings, meaning like you with your boss's boss outside of them, you know?
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05:27
Just like holding data movements, holding office out, doing those types of things so that we're constantly communicating where you are, what they're digging into, what the insights are, why that might mean something for what you're trying to build and by doing that, what you're doing is you're getting people excited at this level of SEO especially kind of local enterprises, you have to get people excited.
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05:52
And most people at this level want to be excited about something and that's something is usually growth, like, hey, I was given an okay, are I was given a number and oh my gosh, you're talking about is gonna blow right past that.
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06:05
And actually, that's what I'm gonna blow right past that, it's going to do that for a couple of years because of the capabilities just built that kind of communication is what we need to be building and it's, it's not a maybe put this presentation together for you, here you go, that will be part of it. But the deepest part of it is, it's actually like, hey, we're operating in 6/8 time and you just got to feel the triplet keep going that way, until like everyone's kind of feeling that rhythm.
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06:35
That's kind of how you communicate the strategy itself, doing it as you're building it and you're bringing people into the conversation. So they feel that they're part of it, once you do that, you can pretty much like execute anything because everyone's there on the line with like, they're going to try to not let anything now in the implementation of things, we know that the real world these are perfect.
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06:57
I think Bruce Clay is still like to say, you know, there's no such thing as a perfect website, but our job is to make the least imperfect it can be, and the same thing, works in implementation, different teams have different capabilities that will be paying attention to different things. Their systems are sometimes not meant to do what you're trying to do, and they won't find out until they push the go button.
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07:21
That's and that's where you just have to be ready. That's where kind of situational awareness comes into play as SEO we have to see the forest and the trees and the insects and they have abundance, you know, and doing that takes time. I just want to pause that. I feel like you have a question - I can't see the telepathically question.
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Tyson Stockman
07:48
Absolutely. I mean, I think you hit on a lot of key elements there and I think one of the big takeaways from this is that constant and repetitious communication within the organization. So it's not a one time presentation, you present it to the C-suite and now it's on the rest of the organization falls in line and everyone's on board, everyone's happy.
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08:12
And so I think the point of you're not just doing like a for final presentation of this, but you're giving pieces as you're going along, you're having those constant touch points to build the excitement or the groundswell on it within kind of some of the cross-functional and we know within SEO, we're not working with just one team, we have components of our strategy that might fall more towards a devon product side of the work, and some components that might fall towards marketing and content.
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08:43
And what's kind of like the balance for you on like involvement slash kind of like direction that you're giving and it's like, I know depending on which level in the organization, there's times where I'll use more of like an involvement approach by trying to bring people in early to then get input so that I'm better able to kind of navigate around that.
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09:07
And then there's other situations where it's expressing leadership, it's showing vision, strategy, the direction to it. So how do you kind of balance involvement versus, hey, this is how it's gonna be with like some of those different stakeholder groups do it?
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Brandon Schakola
09:24
Well, you've made everyone feel involved while you kind of, so I think the times where you have to bring in, you know, your team, your folks, you have to bring in your peers and make them feel like they are equally part of the conversation and that's regardless of whether they merchandizing and marketing versus engineering, bedding products, you're playing both sides of that because they both have equal parts to play in the situation with merchandizing and marketing their way more focused on, say, the audience, right?
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10:11
And they're focused on the experience of the page or the pages or module or whatever you're gonna build, they're really focused on that, whereas the dev team is going to go okay and building this thing. How can I repurpose it and scale this across, not just one category for this merchandise. How can I scale this across like all the categories that I'm gonna have to manage is this relevant part? Of their thinking is the testing part of it, right?
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10:40
And all it's important. You need them to believe that it's not breaking something, you need the devs and engineers inside to know that when it launches, it's actually going to have an effect. So the balance is understanding like these people are thinking of to the market or total remaining market that they want to capture these people over here are like, what percentage, what am I getting or is this breaking conversion, right?
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11:08
And I think that that's, that's also part of the challenge about balances on the marketing side. You're like sometimes this is an sdo, I'm not caring much about conversion. Sometimes I'm caring about did I ramp up the impressions because to create that feedback loop through
Google
, but people coming are getting a long clip versus a short clip, right? Which is saying Google
, that's, that's a strong signal to Google
that okay, this is a good experience of people they're gonna get left out of this.Share
11:36
So I think that's where the balance is understanding what those doing priorities are between devon engineering and product and engineering and then like the merchandizing marketing inside because they may have conflicting metrics and knowing when to say which metric is really gonna make your success happen because if someone just saying, well it's not converting, it's not really helpful, right?
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12:04
Like hey, we just put up like 1000 pages of content. Well, they're not complaining. Well, content in and of itself is meant to be viewed. Are we looking at impressions, right? Are we looking at click through in the content? Because again, attribution signals things like that. Like hey, they could come back in 15 days and that article so helpful, they actually bought everything in there. Right?
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Tyson Stockman
12:27
You hit on a couple like key points that double down on for the audience and I think one of those is understanding the differences of these different stakeholder groups and you kind of alluded to almost speaking a different language to each of these groups, knowing that their interest is going to be a little different, their experience, their knowledge of SEO is going to be a little different and and then also you're you're bringing them in early, you're showing kind of like the net positive.
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12:57
So we're going back into building that kind of like a business case that we're discussing earlier in the episodes and I think, you know, that really can go a long way and goes back to building relationships and how well the business partner, we can be to these other groups as well, when we get into more of kind of like the execution and implementation phases of this, being that we're working with different stakeholder groups, we could have, you know, our core pillars of our strategy but obviously some are going to have dependencies on one part of the business, some would have dependencies on another.
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13:32
How do you go about kind of that prioritization and also triage of like what initiatives can be in flight at the same time because they're on different work streams versus initiatives that may be falling on the same team. So obviously you only can kind of pick up one at a time, like how do you go about kind of that organization of workflows?
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Brandon Schakola
13:56
So I think you're always going for the biggest impact first or you have your quick wins, if you're just kind of starting on an organization.
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14:05
Oftentimes the quick wins, help to build confidence and so, you know, don't worry about those first, you have that confidence built and so in those cases you always want to go with the bigger impact, even if it takes more time, you know, your objective is focused on this, this, this bigger piece, like we're making progress on this big piece, so you're kind of showing them a shiny on the progress of the shiny underneath of it.
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14:26
What you're doing is you're getting self cloud cover for a bunch of other things that you can have other wins along the way to build yourself momentum. Should anything mess up in the big shiny, so that's that's kind of a quick way of thinking about it, but essentially you want to at least to like kind of t shirt sizing exercise, right?
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14:46
That's kind of part of the way you're thinking through your, your initiatives and the methods and the methods that have fallen under that some of them just have to be a concept hump right?
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14:57
There's like, there's your break fix part of technical
SEO
there's your there's your run the business part of merchandizing, where you're always gonna have a holiday, you're optimizing for, right, depending on what kind of site for running and then there's like the big things that you thought through, whether it's building on a new module page day, whether it's completely changing the way the internal linking on the site already functions, whether it's doing taxonomy work or you're doing completely revamping the way that you define, how merchandizing can, can change the entirety of the page, maybe how you're working with search to handle problems with recall and so when the page. All of the pretty much like any - So it's the big thing first is the way I would typically prioritize.Share
Tyson Stockman
15:51
Well, I think that's, it also brings up the point that it is, it is almost like a more complex game that we're talking through here and yeah, you have, in most cases you're gonna go after kind of like the bigger, more kind of like sure bet wins, but then brought in also having that understanding and awareness of the organization.
Share
16:13
And do you need something to show results quickly? Do you have the team and everybody bought in that you have that time to kind of push through like a larger launch or something. And so I think it really highlights that although there is a typical rule of thumb, best case, but we're also needing to kind of tie in those organizational elements that could be unique on the situation.
Share
16:36
Like what's the historical appetite around SEO, is their frustration and kind of they've been going through a few years declined, or is it something that's more of like things have been going really well, the companies bought in everyone's on board?
Share
16:51
And so I think like that brings in a lot of like the more realities and it comes back a little bit to the annoying
SEO
answer of well it depends, but I think this also kind of highlights that it's like you can have your starting point for that, but you should always keep that open mind and be willing to adjust accordingly given the kind of human or like organizational side of our practice.Share
Brandon Schakola
17:17
Yeah. And I guess that the other important thing about this prioritization, everything like you're never gonna be able to do everything you want right in reality, like you've done all this and you built all of this and then you kind of like saying, well what happens if I'm only with like an only actually accomplished 50% of this this year, right?
Share
17:38
Because inevitably at some point you're gonna have to deal with some of the finance or you know, the president or you know, the CMO and you know, out of the blue, like traffic could be declining, things could be happening in this the world.
Share
17:52
And so we kind of need to still have a buffer because you could end up with two weeks like this week, right? Where you know, think about in the past month we have a helpful content update.
Share
18:02
We have a whole core algo update rolling out, oh and by the way, hey, we're just throwing in a product of use updating right on top of the, you know, because you need to give yourself the space to also be able to communicate in the middle of your strategy by the way, they're changes here. And we did build this into the walk of like how we get from this from this, you always have to have that like 30 to 40% like
Google
can do something that changes how we get there right?Share
18:33
I think most executives at least understand, but some of that is a black box, but like, like we know when we can sense and we're like looking at the numbers and you kind of got our video about this. But you know, I think, you know, you have to always have that in mind that somewhere like coming in the background, some of it's not in your control right, There are things you can do after you see the impact or the positive and negative, but you have to own both.
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Break
Tyson Stockman
19:57
I feel like that that brings us to maybe a good kind of closure question to the segment, it's always easy to communicate the good news and so when our initiatives go live or showing positive signs, obviously that's great.
Share
20:12
But whether it's an algorithm update or maybe some advances from a competitor or maybe you put through initiative and you didn't get the signal or the response that you're looking to for that signal. What recommendations or how would you advise people in doing the bad news communication.
Share
20:31
Like when things, when you're negatively impacted or when things don't go according to plan, when you have delays or your certain launches don't go live. Like once the communication best practice then of when maybe it's not, hey, we're up 20% prep your coffee.
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Brandon Schakola
20:54
The first you need a lot of people know, hey, we're seeing, we're seeing some pressure. We're digging in. You want to communicate the severity if you know it.
Share
21:03
And at that point like you're on the clock right? Like that clock is ticking, you know, so we need to assemble the team fast. We drop everything and we dive in the oftentimes the problem there is understanding how it's showing up as it's slow pressure, right?
Share
21:18
Is it just like, hey, things are kind of on a, you know, there are like 2% decline and if it's a slow momentum versus like hey, we had a stuffed right? I think those are two different scenarios and knowing which one that you're in is a good thing. Step functions usually need like all hands on deck, like given, given how crazy the algo has been for the last year, you can see those changes before me.
Share
21:44
So you have to also understand like, you know, two data points doesn't make a trend like you need a couple. But if it's a step function like that's pretty immediate you, you see it so those are two different kind of communication strategies. One is, hey, we're seeing pressure or hey, we had a step function, we're digging in there, everything changed.
Share
22:03
So like making sure you have a change log comes in play right? Like somewhere there's a record of, of someone wants something or you know, there's a secret out of that sitting that's not confirmed your communication that you need to come data that is verifiable.
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22:19
And this is where if you built all those good strong relationships and whatnot in building your strategy, you can also leverage them in being part of this because oftentimes you don't want to communicate the hey, we hit a step function until like you have a chance to dig in, you know, which problem you're dealing with some of them for a text file, Someone changed the configuration and you know, a comma that accidentally blew up the white list for which box are gonna not like there are all these kinds of things that can happen.
Share
22:50
And so if you had all of them in on the work that you're doing, they're going to be more likely to want to work if you can come in and say, hey, we did some thinking, you think this, this is the, this is the problem. Can you, can you take 10 minutes to take a look at it. You know, there are, because we will also come into contact with folks can say product or engineering and be like, no, it wasn't us. We didn't do anything.
Share
23:13
Like you have to be buckled in and you have to know your data, you have to own your numbers. So that's that I think is part of it. So again, those communications are different, different things. It's, hey, we think something changed over here. Here's the data behind it. Here's the impact.
Share
23:29
Here's, here's what we're looking at the game back from and we think this is a P zero or P one meaning P0 is like someone like the whole site, what happened? Like, you know, versus like, hey, hey, all of our images are broken. The communicating about this, the executives is more, hey, you know what, I was looking through or hey, we broke something. You know, we were working with the team responsible.
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23:58
This is the day they're gonna have to fix in place and we'll be monitoring and measuring in the meantime and here's, here's the impact on the business. It's, it's to base percentage points or whatever. Hopefully that's, but there's also also negative news, even positive things.
Share
24:15
You know, let's say you're doing a massive site migration or like you've rebuilt part of attacks on, on your site, you still need to communicate things like, hey, even if we get all of these pieces right, we're still gonna take, you know, some kind of tax on Traffic while the search engines come in and really figure out this whole section site. And I've seen that take is, you know, I've seen it take like two days, two weeks.
Share
24:37
I've also seen it take nine months. So you need to at least communicate like it's going to take time for this thing to break in. But it's a like kind of a good rule of thumb is you want to look at impact even in small testing, like over kind of like a 4-6 weeks because you never know what, what I'll go update, you're kind of in and what's going to them.
Share
24:58
So I think at the end of the day it's kind of like, as in, you're always communicating whether it's good or bad, you just, you know, you're being as open and honest as you can about the numbers, that one builds up a sense of integrity than the team and it also eventually with the new organization eventually actually makes it easier.
Share
25:18
When you really do have that like, hey, remember this, all these things that have been sitting on the backlog for years that just dip prioritized because I don't know, someone wanted to build a virtual reality view of the living room.
Share
25:32
Well, you know,
Google
, let us skate free for a while, they didn't have time, you know like so we're pulling resources off of these projects that timeline is getting pushed back and we're now going to implement these things over this period instead, which is kind of typically how it works or we may get overwritten and we say no we're still gonna go build the crazy VR thing and you're just gonna have to bid and bargain to get the the remaining fixed. So it's not always easy but you're always dancing the fair.Share
Tyson Stockman
26:07
And then what I'm hearing kind of from that too is you have a couple best practices that may take different forms but are kind of consistent throughout the scenarios is you have back to the constant communication where you're not just communicating the rich good news or the really bad news and you have those touch points along the way and then through your preparation by understanding the numbers, being able to dig into the why and the explanation of what's going on.
Share
26:38
You're increasing the credibility or kind of like the integrity of the SEO function and through that you're getting the trust, the transparency, but also kind of throughout this it has that that element of filtering in kind of education points along the way to not just move in isolation but to move kind of like with the organization, bring the organization with SEO, and then through that you're able to not just celebrate the winds, but also talk about the bad things and then talk about what it needs, what needs to happen to really move the needle and make an impact.
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Brandon Schakola
27:18
Yeah. And I think with that it's like understanding that, you know, portion of your role as an SEO even in getting implementation and getting by and by in front of the teams is constantly educating them, you know, even if it doesn't immediately apply, right?
Share
27:36
You can also this, you know, that are coming and you're like, hey, this doesn't immediately apply, but we're gonna need to make this.
Share
27:42
Then we've seen that with like, you know, mobile-first indexing and things like that, right https, there's always kind of a legal not into and go, hey, it's kind of great if you did this to go, we told you we needed to do this by this date, you know, like, and the reason I say that is, is this educational piece in this communication piece, I think So important.
Share
28:03
It keeps you off the ledge that as soon as we can sometimes get ourselves into where you're always gonna have this sort of sort of like MBAC level, exactly who thinks they know us.
Share
28:14
You know, we always get the lovely question of why don't I write, execute kind of thing. Those are always gonna join you, right? You know? And sometimes that's the appropriate question.
Share
28:24
But I would say 99.9 percent of the time typically not aligned with the strategy you're even a strategy of the company, but there are other times when you may be communicating and doing like an education session and they're just gonna come out of an I like out of left field and you're kind of gonna be standing and it's not what I was talking about at all, but it's important to them, right?
Share
28:47
So those are cases where like you want to say, hey I'm gonna icebox this so that we can do a separate session on whatever that is because you want to make sure that they feel heard you want them to make sure that they feel, you know, as intelligent as they are for bringing up whatever that crazy was because some of those, they could be actually like a really potent thing, They were just talking about it at a point in the talk that made no connection, right?
Share
29:11
And so you have to kind of back out and go how did they get there, you know, and then figure out how to meet them and and say okay we're gonna push this in a different way, but let's spend some time and discovery on this, you know, and then go find a part of this, you can break without blowing up your other strategy, right?
Share
29:34
That's all, it's kind of a fun fun curve ball toss them But if you're doing more than education keeps you out of those hot spots typically and you just have to figure out like who's who's the person in my order that's going to do that curveball.
Share
29:47
Oftentimes it's kind of like a president, or CMO that tends to happen there and it's oftentimes because they're not being committed to enough in a way that they can digest.
Share
29:60
Understanding these people digest like information today and is like we we tend to be information junkies on our own but like not at that level but constantly digested and multiple inputs and pressures. So figuring out how to educate on different levels of different planes at the same time is also part of the job.
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Tyson Stockman
30:22
Absolutely. And I think that that probably leaves us with a nice teaser for hopefully our next conversation on The Voice Of Search where we can dig into that topic a little bit more which obviously is one of my favorite ones around esso education and building kind of those resources and solutions for it.
Share
30:42
But I feel like that's gonna lead us down to a whole nother series of episodes that hopefully will have in the near future with you.
Share
30:51
But that wraps up this episode of The Voice Of Search podcast. Thanks to Brandon, she cola senior director of
SEO
At Overstock
. And if you can't wait until the next episode would like to learn more about Brandon you can find a link to his linkedin profile on our show notes or visit his company's website at Overstock.com.Share
Benjamin Shapiro
31:09
Okay, thanks to Tyson Stockton, our guest host. If you'd like to get in touch with Tyson, you can find a link to his linkedin profile in our show notes. You can contact him on
Twitter
where his handle is Tyson underscore Stockton or if your team is interested in SEO consulting or organizational education, you can always head to their company's website which is previsible.io That's P R E V I S I B L E.io.Share
Break
Benjamin Shapiro
32:31
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. And over the coicesofsearch.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests.
Share
32:42
You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions which will answer live on our show. Of course you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on linkedin Twitter Instagram Facebook. Or you can contact me directly. My handle is Ben J. Shap: B E N J S H A P.
Share
32:60
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 gonna publish an episode every day during the work week. So hit that subscribe button on your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time. Remember the answers are always in the data.Share
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Benjamin Shapiro
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