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Accidental SEO Manager with Ash Nallawalla
49 Plays7 months ago
In this episode, host Andrew Laws is joined by SEO consultant and author Ash Nallawalla. They discuss the evolving field of SEO and Ash's experiences and insights, particularly focusing on his book, "The Accidental SEO Manager."
Buy the book https://yeseo.io/go/accidental-seo-manager
Key Points:
- About the Book: "The Accidental SEO Manager" offers strategic advice for SEO management rather than technical SEO skills.
- SEO in Business: Challenges of getting SEO projects approved within large companies and the importance of demonstrating their financial benefit.
- Future of SEO: Discussion on the need for industry standards and the difficulties in establishing them.
What You’ll Learn:
- SEO Management: How to approach SEO from a managerial perspective to make strategic decisions.
- Advocating for SEO: Techniques for securing organisational support and funding for SEO initiatives.
- Evolving SEO Practices: The need for ongoing learning and adaptation in the field.
Recommended For:
Anyone interested in SEO, especially professionals looking to understand its strategic impact on business.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, welcome back to the Untitled SEO podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Laws. I'm the founder of Yesseo. I started this season, season three, with the intention to go out and find interesting people in SEO that I've never met before. And certainly we did some of that and I called it LAN, live action networking.
00:00:18
Speaker
And then something really interesting started happening. Some people started coming to me, and I love it when that happens, especially when they're interesting people like our guest today. So honored guest, would you like to introduce yourself, please? Hello, Andrew, and our viewers, listeners. My name's Ash Nalawalla. I'm an enterprise SEO most of the time. These days I'm more of a consultant.
00:00:48
Speaker
And I live in Melbourne, Australia. Excellent. So I'm very grateful for you doing this because this is inter-family time for you. We're recording here in the UK. It's half 10. But for you, Ash, it's downtime. It's evening time. So I really appreciate you joining us today. Yeah, not a problem. This is early for me. So I've done podcasts close to midnight.
00:01:18
Speaker
Okay, so not too bad. Because it's so hard to talk to people, especially East Coast, North America, that's the worst window.
The Purpose of 'Accidental SEO Manager'
00:01:30
Speaker
So the reason I'm keen to speak to you today, Ash, is you're an author. And there's not that many books about SEO about. I wrote one many, many years ago that was absolutely awful,
00:01:44
Speaker
But I've always been surprised there's not that many about compared to other parts of the marketing world. And I think it might be because the world of SEO moves on quite quickly, but caught my attention with your book.
00:01:58
Speaker
is that it doesn't deal with a specific point in time in the world of SEO, and it's not a specific guide to how to do SEO as such. You've come at it from a really interesting angle, but rather than me trying to summarize it, would you like to explain? First of all, I haven't mentioned the title of your book. First of all, could you kindly give us the title? The title is Accidental SEO Manager. There it is. Thank you for buying it. It's really interesting.
00:02:27
Speaker
Yeah. I can tell you why I wrote the book. It's one of three books. It wasn't meant to be three books, but I went to a literary agent in America. And amongst other feedback, the main thing he said is one of your audiences,
00:02:57
Speaker
is the C-suite and CEOs and the boards of companies. If they see the word SEO on the cover, they're not even going to touch it in the bookshop. So you need to find a way to separate that information. And then the second bit of feedback was it might be too technical for managers as well.
00:03:26
Speaker
Here I am thinking, okay, so I'm not writing this for SEO operators. That's a key differentiator. So it's not a book about what is Google from a beginner SEO's viewpoint. And although I do cover some of these things at a high level, I'm not trying to turn the reader into
00:03:53
Speaker
an SEO operator, so it's not the kind of 900-page manual that a few other people have done excellent work with. And the second point is I've tried not to date it too much because, as we know, Google is changing things almost on a daily basis. And sometimes it's not just Google,
00:04:21
Speaker
I reference other social platforms in it. And they changed their mode of operation, again, almost on a weekly basis. So I split that original manuscript into three books. So the first book has been out for more than a year. It's now in the second edition. And I
00:04:47
Speaker
decided to write the first one for managers because I was thinking of several managers that I've worked for and almost all of them had no SEO background. They were middle managers in companies that had maybe two or three departments to look after and SEO was just one of them.
Challenges in SEO Investment
00:05:10
Speaker
So in a way it's a reaction to
00:05:17
Speaker
writing something that would have made their work easier. If they'd bothered to read my book, which is always going to be a challenge for me. But the point is, if the book is out there, then someone can point them to my book. And these are SEO operators that I appeal to. Your manager may not walk into a bookshop and walk out with my book.
00:05:45
Speaker
Perhaps if you encounter a situation where the manager isn't getting something. Ideally, all three books should have been out at the same time because there are certain things that are in book three that you may need today. And as an example, an actual challenge that had been given to my manager was
00:06:16
Speaker
We needed some funding for some initiative. And we got a peculiar question from a senior leader, higher up the food chain. And they said, how much money will we make? How much additional money would we make if we do this thing that you want? And it's the first time I'd ever been asked that.
00:06:43
Speaker
a question, so it's a reasonable question because it's not like paid search where you can say that, well, if we get X number of clicks, then we could convert so many customers and we're likely to make so much profit based on past performance. With SEO, as many people know, it can take a while for the returns to manifest themselves.
00:07:15
Speaker
I won't go into the details of it, but basically I said that, well, this is six, seven years ago when you still had 10 clean links on a page. And so I said, well, there are studies that say 33% of searches click the first result, 19% click the second result, then it dropped sharply down to almost 1% at the bottom of the page.
00:07:44
Speaker
I'd done the calculation based on, well, if we go from the third position to the second position, that represents so many more customers because you are more likely to click a higher result. I'd calculated the value of a visit because if you had a million visits a month, not all one million would necessarily
00:08:13
Speaker
purchase, but you'd have a percentage of what percentage converts every month out of every million, what revenue do you make in a month, and then you divide by that and say, okay, based on our product, we might make $1 or $2 per visitor if we averaged it out. So I only needed to choose one product out of several that we had
00:08:42
Speaker
I only used one keyword because you can have thousands of possible keywords that will convert. I just used one. And that was good enough for that situation because I'd shown a way of doing a calculation and the senior person whom I never actually found out who that was either, but we got the money. So I've written the book to address situations like that where the SEO is
00:09:13
Speaker
struggling to get some buy-in from higher ups or even the immediate manager. And hopefully the manager who reads my book will understand some of the things that are happening around them. I've covered things like how to hire staff. So your SEO staff for in-house work or how to hire a consultant or how to hire an agency.
00:09:42
Speaker
how to write the RFP, how to select a shortlist and so on. So I've really tried to think of the situation from that manager's viewpoint and that's essentially what you get in book one.
Strategic Role of SEO in Companies
00:10:01
Speaker
It's an interesting angle because as you say, there's a lot of instruction out there on how to do SEO and that changes
00:10:09
Speaker
on a very swift basis, although I always raise my hand and say it's always about amplifying excellence, not conjuring nonsense. But there is no how to do the job in a larger company. It's something I don't have experience of myself, but I like the fact that you're not selling a product. All other advice around this
00:10:30
Speaker
is written by really good people like SEMrush, but the answer is always pay for SEMrush. There's always that kind of, here's how to be a greater SEO, but you need to give us money, otherwise you can't do it. Whereas your book is selling SEO as a whole to people who might not understand it. It's a bit like one of those little, when I was at school, we got French English, English French dictionaries, sort of like, here's what
00:10:57
Speaker
Here's what your management might understand and be motivated by, but here's the language that you use among your peers. So it's kind of like a nice, it's like a big supportive big brother or like a peer support thing. And I think that's something that's been sorely lacking in the world of SEO. Yeah, so book two is really a continuation of book one.
00:11:25
Speaker
But it does get slightly more technical, so I can cover things like Core Web Vitals. I cover performance-related topics. So the problem that the original person left me with is when I split the book into three, then you're left with two fragments that still need to stand alone as freestanding books.
00:11:55
Speaker
So I'm now at that point of putting some words around those two fragments and trying to create some logical sequence. Therefore, book three is fairly easy because book three is firmly covering governance and why it's important to have these good structures in place, how to have a hierarchy of
00:12:24
Speaker
corporate leadership as far as SEO goes or the whole web infrastructure goes. And one of my dreams, because it's likely to remain a dream, is to see the SEO function positioned higher up in the hierarchy. In a perfect world, I'd like them to sit in the C-suite and be called a chief something, whether it's a chief
00:12:54
Speaker
web success officer, chief webmaster, whatever title fits that company. Even if you don't use the word chief there, that's okay as long as this person has the ear of the board and can speak up when they have to speak up. One of the difficulties in large corporations is that
00:13:25
Speaker
No two companies are structured identically. And when you think about a website, the different components of it are shared by different departments. For example, the network infrastructure person might have some unusual, not unusual, but they don't have a marketing title. They're more likely to be called network manager or whatever.
00:13:56
Speaker
but they physically control the people who manage all the components that make up your website. And then look after other hardware that looks after the operation of the company itself. If it's a bank, then it's a huge department running all the machines that run the banking facility. And the website might be just like a sideline for them, which can be an issue if you're an SEO and you're trying to get their attention
00:14:25
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Do you think the lack of, sorry. Go on. I was just going to say, do you think the lack of seniority, the lack of the high level presence of SEO is because we're still using the excuse that it's a new industry? Or do you think it is a lack of understanding from the people who build company structure? I'd say because it's a new industry.
00:14:55
Speaker
I started formal paid SEO in 2002. And even in 2005, we still had to educate customers as to what is SEO and why is it important to you. I was working for an agency initially. Today, I think almost everyone who works in an office that has a website has heard of SEO.
00:15:26
Speaker
whether they've got the right impression or not is a different matter. But I'd say that most people know about SEO, but they don't know where to put it. Australia is different. If you talk to someone from America, you'll find that they put their SEO in the marketing team.
00:15:51
Speaker
In a way it makes sense because we are such marketers. Therefore it makes sense to be part of marketing and not part of IT, which can be another possibility. Very few SEOs sit in the IT hierarchy. However, in Australia, it's quite rare to find SEOs hanging off the marketing branches.
00:16:20
Speaker
We tend to be part of product, whatever you call product. So for example, I worked in banks where they would have a team called online banking and SEO would be plugged into online banking. That's really surprising to me, but carry on. I want to know more about this. Yeah. And the last company I worked for until last year,
00:16:49
Speaker
was a big car platform. So I reported to a manager that looked after product management and SEO. So again, every company being structured differently. But I can go back 10, 15 years. And in each case, I was never part of marketing. Sometimes it was a historical fact that
00:17:19
Speaker
The role used to report to marketing, but that was before I got there. Those battles had been fought and then product or online had acquired the responsibility and I was always not part of marketing. It can be a good thing sometimes. I mostly think it's a bad thing because
00:17:48
Speaker
Marketing tends to be given large sums of money to spend.
Communication and Alignment in SEO
00:17:54
Speaker
They might get millions of dollars a year for paid search and other forms of online advertising. I think it would be easy for a CEO to say, hey, can I have a million dollars out of that? Whereas on the product side, I've always found it hard to get
00:18:15
Speaker
funding even for little tools that like I've never managed to get Ahrefs or SEMrush partly because someone before me might have subscribed us to another tool for five years or a three-year contract and I was told okay just use that we can't spend an extra two or three thousand dollars a year whatever it was and you're thinking
00:18:45
Speaker
Marketing's got millions for paid search. How come I can't get a few hundred dollars a month or whatever it is? So perceptions are quite important. SEO might be perceived by some managers that are just a matter of putting some keywords in meta tags and whatever they've heard somewhere. That doesn't need money.
00:19:15
Speaker
I really wish more of these middle managers read my book and they'd understand why. SEO needs to be positioned higher up. And a very common example I've seen is someone decides to buy a new domain for whatever reason. And the SEO team finds out after the fact that
00:19:44
Speaker
Oh, we've just launched a new domain for something and no one consulted SEO. I've seen it many times and you wish that there was better communication. So this is where I feel that if you were sitting higher up at one of those meetings where you heard someone from the marketing side mention the forthcoming campaign and that would be the time for your representative to say,
00:20:14
Speaker
or does it involve a new domain or are we hosting it just as a folder somewhere on our own website? If it's a new domain, then do you want us to create a whole SEO campaign or a strategy around that? As many people would know that it's a lot easier if it were done as a folder. And it's easy to understand why marketing has gone to an agency
00:20:44
Speaker
the agency has provided a package solution. And part of the package is to host it on that agency server. Because they'll just say, oh, we don't need to involve your company's IT department because it'll be too hard. It'll take too long. We'll just host it. It's a separate domain anyway. So more than once, I've had to educate these
00:21:13
Speaker
the agency side that, okay, come and talk to our IT people, you can do something called a reverse proxy. A reverse proxy, if you got the facility and if we've got the facility, we can talk to each other and we can make your subdomain or your domain appear to be a folder on us website. And sometimes it doesn't work because they've written all the collateral and they've publicized
00:21:42
Speaker
that other domain, so it's too late. And this is why it would be great if the SEO hierarchy heard about some of these things before they happened. Yeah, it's all absolutely an education thing, isn't it? And whether people have an appetite to learn, I guess, is dictated by how much skin they've got in the game. What's their stake?
00:22:10
Speaker
So somebody, you might get people who are very risk averse, their company at senior level, but you might also get the people who will just say, yeah, let's go for it. It is a budget, but one of the things I find really interesting about your book is the section about managing agencies, because certainly in the UK and in my experience, and I started in SEO in 98 and started my own company in 2000, but obviously,
00:22:36
Speaker
been, you know, it was pretty much just me until a few years ago, which I'm very transparent about. But I've never met anyone, any of our clients who actually knows how to manage an SEO agency.
Agency Management and Industry Challenges
00:22:50
Speaker
So that's the section of this book I'm finding really interesting because you put you put in here, not quite so much red flags, but you know, a few things that it's well worth looking out for. And this again goes back to that thing of
00:23:03
Speaker
I'm interested in your message because you're not selling anything. Well, apart from the book, but once somebody's bought the book, there might be another, well, there will be other books, but why do you, who do you think is led? I'm not sure what I'm trying to ask you here, Ash. I do apologize. Every SEO agency presents themselves in a completely different way.
00:23:25
Speaker
And you mentioned there about how an SEO agency might say, oh, no, you need to move everything over to our servers. So that'll be a new domain, or that might be what the developer says. Do you think they will come and we'll get kind of a core standard? Because if you work in insurance, or if you work in a lot of other industries, there are professional bodies that say, this is the way we operate. This is the standard that we attain to keep our qualification. Do you see that coming for SEO agencies?
00:23:55
Speaker
I don't, especially in America, they've tried to create bodies. There was a body called Sempo. I think it was search engine marketing, professional organization, or something like that. And they had to shut down because I don't know all the reasons, but speaking from the outside,
00:24:23
Speaker
For a start, sitting outside the United States, I felt, okay, it's just something being done in another country. And we in Australia are not important enough. And I think this was like 15 years ago. So the number of SEOs were also smaller than they are today. So there wasn't much confidence in
00:24:50
Speaker
this body that only saw the world as the United States because in order to control everyone like a code of conduct or ethics or you need a charter as the chartered accountants in several countries, they have a charter.
00:25:15
Speaker
They have to abide by that. Doctors live by a co-dentists and so on. However, anyone can call themselves an SEO and it goes back to the lack of a agreed training standard simply because there is no university degree that I'm aware of that gives out a bachelor of SEO.
00:25:43
Speaker
And even if they did, because there are some universities offering fragments of SEO or units, we can learn about SEO, but not a full blown bachelor of search engine optimization. I don't think it exists. And from that point onwards, if you can't even agree on a common training package, then you can't say that this person is not doing SEO.
00:26:12
Speaker
They're doing something and they're selling something called SEO, but it's completely different to another agency's approach. And this is why I don't see any agreement between agencies or even between agencies in different countries. So I don't hold any high hope of anything happening on that front.
00:26:42
Speaker
Sadly, I agree with you. I can't see how it could happen unless the world changes significantly because in my experience, what one person calls doing SEO is completely alien to what somebody else does. For some people, doing SEO is just following on-site audit recommendations from Screaming Frog or SEMrush or Ahrefs or whatever.
00:27:08
Speaker
It's my opinion that's a part of it, but it's not strategic. It's not moving towards a goal. Until we get to that point, I agree with you, but that still makes it very difficult for people to know how to hire the right SEO agency or consultant. I thought it was interesting. I'm waving podcast lists. I'm waving Asher's book around.
00:27:30
Speaker
and holding it up to emphasize the point. But something I read in here that I've not seen expressed in such a clear way is how you describe the differences between different sizes of agencies and what you can expect. And I picked it up. And one of the first bits I read in this section was a small boutique, I'm not quoting here, the small boutique agency will be one person and a small team and maybe some freelancers.
00:27:57
Speaker
And I suddenly went, that's me. He's like hit the nail on the head because here in Ipswich in the UK, not Ipswich, Queensland, which constantly comes up whenever we put our place name in Google things. If you search for SEO agencies, I come up against people I know are just a one-man freelancer. And I come up against huge agencies, really, really big agencies that do amazing things.
00:28:24
Speaker
But the buying public and the people in industry haven't got any way of knowing what the difference is. Well, the one way to find out is to be honest with your budget. Because one of the questions the agency will ask you is, what is your budget for SEO? And if you
00:28:52
Speaker
gave a small number, so in Australia it could be $1,000 a month, you will lose maybe 70% of possible agencies. Most agencies I've come across won't talk to you for less than $4,000 or $5,000 a month, and ideally more than $10,000 a month. And that immediately tells you
00:29:22
Speaker
the size of the agency simply from the fees that they're charging. Yes, I think there could be people who will do work for you for a lot less. You may get someone who does it for a thousand a month, but that should also ring some alarm bells because it depends on what they're offering for that thousand dollars a month. It could be extremely low touch and they're completely honest about it. They might simply give you
00:29:52
Speaker
a quick audit and an update every month. And then that might represent one day's work or half a day's work, and they'll tell you that that's what you're getting. Whereas someone else might say, oh, we'll do everything, which includes writing content and doing all these things that today the better agencies will not do, namely,
00:30:20
Speaker
Write articles, submit to article directories or social bookmarking and some of those horrible things that people are still selling. So that's the red flag that if they're offering to do everything for a small sum of money, that's a small agency.
Consultants vs Agencies for Long-term Results
00:30:41
Speaker
And sometimes it might be better that you simply get a consultant who gives you the big picture
00:30:49
Speaker
tells you what is needed, and often it's the business that needs to provide a lot of the content. And as an example, there are several different types of businesses where I've said, oh, okay, you seem to go out to customers a lot and you do things on site. So you might be an industrial type of a business in your building,
00:31:17
Speaker
widgets on customer premises, so why not take a video and plan to take the video before you start as you go on and then you finish, because then you've created a deliverable, well, for SEO purposes, namely, then you can host it on YouTube, which may be great for, not just for future customers who can see what you do,
00:31:46
Speaker
Google likes some of these things. So a consultant can come in and tell you to do all these things. They don't do it themselves because they don't know your business. But they can give you a few pointers. And that small investment might be better than just sending $500 a month or $1,000 a month. And all you're getting is automated tool-generated reports every month.
00:32:14
Speaker
nothing has actually changed for your conversions. Yeah, it's a very good point. It's pretty SEO, we call it. And pretty SEO isn't necessarily effective SEO. Ash, I think I could probably quite happily carry on this conversation for a really long time with you. But you've packed an awful lot of value into just the half an hour conversation we've had. I'm going to
00:32:43
Speaker
I'm probably going to do a slightly longer review of your book for my blog and for YouTube. And I'm saying that during the recording because that means I have to do it. I can't back out of it. But I just want to say, first of all, to celebrate the name of your book, the accidental SEO manager. I think that is a genius title. It speaks to something that
00:33:10
Speaker
We've done marketing towards for some of our clients. I've got a client who are HR consultancy. And I came up with the phrase, which I'm going to adapt for this purpose of some people are born into SEO and some people have SEO thrust upon them. Because we've identified it in other industries, say, HR, especially where somebody just gets a tap on the shoulder and says, right, now you're responsible for SEO. And I think that person might have a marketing degree that might be incredibly
00:33:39
Speaker
experienced, but knowing how to take that first step is such a challenge because, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of the people that might appear to be your peers probably want to sell you something. So yeah, accidental SEO manager, which is available worldwide. Through Amazon. Through Amazon, yeah. That's the only place you can buy it. Well, I'm in the UK and I bought it and it arrived in
00:34:09
Speaker
Well, about 14 hours actually. It was incredibly quick. So, Ash, whoever you've got working for you, dealing with your Amazon warehousing, it's working your treat. And I recommend, if you're new to SEO especially, I recommend you read it. I'm gonna recommend it also to people who have worked in SEO for a long time because it brings things back down to business basics. Yes, it's a book about SEO, but it's also a book about
00:34:39
Speaker
how to show your value to your clients. And it's also a book with just some really good suggestions because speaking personally as someone who runs an SEO agency, no one tells you how to do it.
Final Thoughts and Encouragement
00:34:55
Speaker
So this is quite a good blueprint I think for also giving thought to how you might be understood and how to sell SEO in the first place.
00:35:04
Speaker
So Ash, thank you very much for joining me. I really appreciate your time, especially considering the time difference we have here. Before we go, what's the one thing you would want somebody who reads the accidental SEO management to take away? I'd like them to ask for a promotion within their company, if they're working in a large company, because that has been my ultimate dream.
00:35:34
Speaker
I need more support for SEO, no matter what size the company is, more budgets for SEO teams. Fantastic. Okay. Well, thank you very much, Ash. It just remains for me to say goodbye. Would you like to say goodbye? Goodbye. And I hope to hear from you again. I'm looking forward to the review.