SEO Interview – Anna Lewis
Following on from last weeks young SEO interview with Paul Rogers, today we have Anna Lewis talking to us about SEO. I first met Anna at Brighton SEO back in the day when it was just 30 people on the top floor of a pub. Suffice to say, Kelvin has made it a bit bigger since then!
Anna is a Digital Marketing Executive working for Koozai, a digital marketing agency with offices in Southampton and London. You can follow her on Twitter here.
Tell us a bit about your background, how did you get into SEO?
I had no idea what SEO stood for when I went for a job as a Junior Online Marketing Assistant, which in reality was a link building role. During the interview SEO was explained and I knew it was exactly what I wanted to do. I’d touched on search marketing during my degree in Advertising but had no idea you could have a career in it. All I’d done was work on an advertising brief given by a friend at Unicycle.com to improve his website results – this mainly involved working on his AdWords account and suggesting he include keywords in the Meta on his site.
Having an interest in the online world and being techy, analytical and creative managed to get me the job, I was taught some basics but joined Twitter and found it to be an invaluable resource which has enabled me to learn a massive amount and meet some awesome people in the industry.
You are very into Analytics, what is it that makes it such an interesting area for you?
The first time I saw a positive uplift in the traffic statistics for the keywords I’d been targeting was probably a life changing moment for me. Ok, that’s a bit melodramatic, but I’m sure anyone who’s seen traffic or ROI increase as a direct result of something they have done will be familiar with the pride and satisfaction of your hard work. From the first time I clearly saw this I wanted to understand the numbers more, in order to be able to make them increase even more. I started playing around with all the areas in Google Analytics that most people in the office left untouched. I also combined this with Excel and increased my capabilities in order to work with the data more effectively. I also loved that however much I learn and implemented there is always a lot more to learn and try out, working on new ways to get websites to make more money and be more successful.
Soon after I started at Koozai and they found out how enthusiastic I was about spreadsheets and data I was given the role of managing the Analytics for our website and helping others if they ever got stuck with analytics or spreadsheets. For a while I was the geekiest in an office of geeks, until another geek joined and we combined brain power to make clever spreadsheets using the Google Analytics API to save everyone time. Building a report interface with the data you choose and knowing how to pull it all together is something I’m proud of, and I’m sure my parents would be proud too if they understood a word I was saying.
If you could go back in time to the start of your SEO career and tell yourself something you know now, what would it be?
Make the most of every opportunity to learn and meet new people in the industry. Our industry is so fast moving and friendly that you have to stay on your toes and there are so many great people that it’s a very enjoyable industry to work in if you join in actively.
The other advice for myself would be to get over my fear of using the phone sooner, I’m ok with it now but used to really dread it.
Lots of SEOs have the problem of balancing client work and learning new skills and keeping up with blog posts, do you have any tips of making sure you find the right balance?
I often need distractions from big tasks to keep me on track, it sounds strange but my brain can’t do one task for too long without taking in other things. So for me when I start to lose concentration I have a quick look at emails and twitter and open a few links to resources. I often won’t read everything I open, it’s more like building up a library of bookmarks to go through when I have more time later in the day. It doesn’t work for everyone but it keeps me up to date and productive all day long.
Koozai are great in that we have time for development and projects every month, so if I learn something that I want to have a go at implementing but can’t do it on a client initially I know that I can schedule it in to my dev time.
When someone asks you what you do for a job, what do you say?
“I work on websites to help them get better results in the search engines, which involves tweaking the code of my clients sites and identifying other website which might be able to link to my clients.”
If the person I’m talking to nods along with a look of understanding I might even mention the term SEO!
What advice would you give to an SEO who is just getting into the industry?
Never believe everything you read, but make sure you read a lot and ask lots of questions.
Also, always understand what your client wants to get out of the project at every stage, if you don’t know their objective you can’t succeed. Once you do know their objective, it is always important to manage the expectations and explain how your actions will help achieve their objective as there’s a lot of stuff happening between building links and making more money and so many different things a client might want to use to monitor success.
A non(ish) SEO question, what tips do you have for working better with clients?
As above, make sure you know the expectations and objectives of your client and each person you speak to within the company as they will all have slightly different main objectives.
It’s also good to expand on the question Hi How are you?, your clients are human too so it’s good to be friendly before talking business, it only takes a couple of extra words, for people who started their career afraid of the phone it can take a while to get used to, but a bit of small talk goes a long way. I also make sure I speak to every client on the phone at least twice a month, where possible. If you have that target you’ll never get to the stage where you realise you haven’t spoken to them for ages, you’ll always be up to date and they’ll always be reassured that you’re thinking about them. The larger the clients the more you will need to speak to them though, so keep two as your absolute minimum.
Finally, how do you see SEO changing over the next few years? If at all.
More and more people are understanding technology, so SEO is attracting people with more marketing and communication strengths which is helping it converge with full advertising campaigns. I think the increased awareness and interest in the internet and modern technology is helping the industry gain awareness and it’s also creating new opportunities for our clients. Personally, I think it’s an exciting time for our industry and I can see it continuing to grow, I just hope that we can maintain the friendly network that we have now.
Paddy Moogan
Paddy is an SEO Consultant working for Distilled in the London office.
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December 6th, 2011 at 6:52 pm
Very nice interview Anna, I read your post on Koozai. Your post always been on Analytics which I also loved too. There is so much thing in analytics that if you dive in, you’ll get so much gold for your site or your clients.
Nice interview Mr. Paddy Moogan