Today’s interview is with technical and local SEO Andrew Martin. He has worked for large international corporates, as well as small national companies including a price comparison site, an international publisher, charities, and in the print industry.
- Tell us something about yourself or something that people doesn’t know yet about you.
- How did you get into SEO?
- Can you share the importance of SEO and how it relates to User Experience?
- What’s it like working as SEO Specialist? Have you worked with UX Designer before? What’s your process like?
- What does your workspace look like? Can you send me a photo of your workspace and a photo of yourself?
- What tools or devices are you using when working on a project?
- Why did you decide to become an SEO Specialist?
- Where do you find ideas or inspiration for your work these days?
- What project/s are you working on now?
- Share one or two projects that you are proud of and how you made it
- What do you do to step outside your comfort zone?
- Who’s your SEO hero or someone you look up to? Why? What works did you like?
- What are the challenges that you are facing & how do you overcome them?
- What can you tell those people who are doubtful of learning or exploring their skills as a professional?
- What skills does one need to have to survive in the creative industry?
- What advice can you give to people who aspire to become an SEO specialist?
I’ve spent more than 20 years finding dead people in archives. Not literally, but through the trail of evidence found in UK archives, databases, card indexes, digitised online repositories, Wills, and parish records. I’ve taken these pieces of evidence and used them to breathe air back into the lives of those long forgotten in a bid to tell their stories and connect with others who research them.
I’ve come from a background of coding HTML/CSS and web project offices, and when I moved into fundraising and marketing, I became exposed to analytics too. This gave me a really fascinating insight into how the sites that I was building, were being found and used by users. The more I wanted to get better at creating websites, the more intrinsically linked with SEO it became, so SEO was my next step.
Over the last few years SEO and User Experience have become increasingly entwined, and the boundaries are blurring a bit. Search Engines want to deliver the ‘best’ result in the fastest possible time, whilst users expect search engines to deliver the ‘best’ result every time. What does ‘best’ mean? To search it means the most authoritatively written answer to a user’s query, the fastest loading, the most device-agnostic, and many more. There are many facets in each of those that cross over with UX, but so much of the work undertaken in UX is fits into the remit of how to rank better in search.
SEO changes all the time, and this keeps me learning and motivated. One of the biggest search engines, Google, updates its algorithm at least twice a day in a bid to serve its users better. SEO has to change to meet the new requirements of user behaviour, and the behaviour imposed by devices. I’ve worked with UX Designers in the past to explore how best to serve users. Usually this puts me in an Agile Scrum environment where we can work together on detailed tickets, but there’s always an element of post-its on walls and problem solving. A UX Designer has the human user’s behaviour covered, and I have the search engine user’s behaviour covered.
Today, it’s messy. Lots of post-its for notes and ideas, underneath my iMac screen there’s a plastic dinosaur called Ralph that i won at a fair, a stack of 1930s photographs to scan, a paint tester pot for the wall behind my computer (i still can’t decide what colour to paint it), and a huge cup of tea.
As an SEO, there’s loads of tools available for crunching data, monitoring trends, and researching user queries that you might want to focus on. My main tools include paid solutions like ScreamingFrog, Ahrefs, SEOmonitor, SEMrush, Whitespark, and MOZ, and free stuff like Google Search Console, and Bing Webmasters.
I fell into it. I was in a role in a marketing team, where I’d been for a few years. I didn’t want to become a ‘generic’ marketing manager, where I’d spend most of my days fighting inter-department politics, or people managing. I really liked how SEO was always moving, and would let me continually learn something new that could have such a huge impact if you ran with it, or if you ignored it. My background, and my marketing work, had led me right up to SEO, but without a clear path to becoming one of those (the company had no history of ever having anything like it), I took the opportunity to suggest one to my boss. She totally ‘got it’, and helped me to become their first SEO Manager.
I read a lot of blogs and case studies, look at lots of different people’s HTML, and follow what search engines aim for! I also take part in scheduled Twitter chats, attend twice-yearly SEO conferences, and occasionally get up and do talks myself.
One of the projects I’m working on is for an air conditioning company who want to have more visibility in their vicinity in the UK. It’s been really hot here in the UK, so I’m behind them 100%!
I worked on a charity website that was already funding community development programmes in Haiti when it was devastated by an earthquake and aftershocks. I worked for 14 consecutive days with my colleagues in PR, and project partners on the ground to produce a run days of news articles and updates, including photographs and video content. This content ranked highly in search, partly because of the lack of material coming out of the country, and it caught the attention of the BBC, and our fundraising for our programmes, and additional earthquake relief measures were really boosted. That was a very personally satisfying campaign.
SEO is pretty transferrable, so it’s not often that you can step outside of your comfort zone. Sometimes an established site is quite daunting, because not only does it come with a current level of SEO that the business will expect to maintain, but you’ll need to pick it to bits to find the parts to improve. Of course, it could easily drop, if only for a bit.
I think my SEO hero is Emily Mace. We worked together for a bit on a project that looked at search engine behaviour in China – and I absolutely found it fascinating. I learnt loads from her about SEO in China, and differences in user behaviour, and perhaps this was my moment of realisation that I needed to learn more about what the user wants, than what the search engine wants. At the end of the day, a search engine desperately wants to be human, so that it can give that ‘best’ result.
One of the challenges of SEO is getting SEO in at the point of a project’s conception. All too often, it gets pulled in as a sugar coating right at the end, or months after launch. This means you have to spend months (or even years in some cases) trying to work around or to undo the SEO ‘debt’ that has risen out of decisions made about a website’s structure, design etc early on. An SEO should be involved from day 1 of a web project, just like a UX team.
Find yourself a pet project/hobby and work on it to see how you can affect it. If you’re trying to make it in an industry, you need to have a ‘sandbox’ to help you gain experience. I did this when i was learning to code, and 20yrs later I’ve optimised that much-evolved website for search engines. That’s easily transferrable to UX too. If you enjoy it, keep running with it.
Being able to talk, collaborate, and listen in equal measure. Having some coding skills, I was able to talk with technically superior developers who were often curious/suspicious of SEO, and I was able to find ways to collaborate with them, or fight their corner when we had common needs. The same with UX and Analytics – collaboration is key in getting creative projects done.
Be prepared to do lots of reading, explaining, waiting, and reporting. You need to be able to clearly explain what you’re doing, and why, and how it affects a business. If you can connect all that up, then decision makers might just let you loose on their project. Also, befriend some developers, network administrators, marketers, information architects, and UX designers – you need them, and they need you, so stick together and help each other out.