Daniel and I have a shared history in enterprise SEO here in Sydney, do we talk about everything from what his expectations were and how they were different, what he’s enjoyed, and what he’s looking forward to in continuing to grow in the enterprise SEO space.
TRANSCRIPT
AMANDA: This is Amanda your host for this podcast, called engage on Enterprise SEO, where we go, where nobody has gone before and dive deep into the world of Enterprise SEO, from as m fany different angles and viewpoints as we can tackle.
Today, we’re speaking with a fresh face to the Enterprise SEO World whom some of you may already know of Daniel K Chung who is now the APAC SEO manager at Adobe and started agency side in 2018.
Daniel and I have known each other since probably 2019, just barely In the before times and we’ve kept in touch sense plus where ships passing in the night during my tenure at Optus.
So we have a history together and the Sydney digital marketing world for this podcast.
I’ve tried something different and kept a bit more of our conversation, as it was recorded, let me know what you think.
And without further Ado, let’s get into it and hear what Daniels experiences at an Enterprise level have been, like, what was that? What what were the biggest surprises are? The biggest like, oh, shit moments.
You had, when you were starting, like, Enterprise SEO side day one.
DANIEL: Definitely day one because I had joined this big company coming from a small agency first thing after the big biggest.
Oh shit, moment was oh my God, these bathrooms are clean and there’s so many of them.
I know that it’s got nothing to do of SEO but that was an I’m working for a massive legit company now.
Okay. And then the follow on from that.
The other associates to come is not having a – well, you were there at the time, so I had someone to lean on, but there wasn’t really any formal structure. Hmm. And, and coming across like a huge technical issues such as going to the robots.txt.
And I remember pinging you teams on.
Hey, is this normal?
I can you look at this and go, yeah, we are disallowing the entire website, the entire effing website in the robots.txt file and we had launched two weeks ago. This was my first This day and I’m like, okay.
So normally I know how to fix this and who to speak to, but given that this entire new website on a sub, domain was built by a third party.
I don’t know who they are.
My product owner, don’t really know her yet. Don’t know who to ask. What the hell do I do?
That was my baptism by fire.
I wouldn’t say biggest oh shit, but it was a big oh shit on the first day.
And there were many to come.
AMANDA: And how did you end up kind of navigating that that first moment, what did you end up? How did you end up trying to solve for it? Like, what did you do?
DANIEL: Okay, this is me. See, being very honest, because I don’t care anymore because that’s how process of learning is that I’d come from an agency. As I said, moving to a big company and then you have, you know, you want to prove yourself gonna go, “I’m worth the 6 figures, they’re paying me. I want to show them that it was not a bad hire.”
And so you have this mentality of how can I fix as many things as quick as I can?
I don’t care who I shout at to get it done. Well, first problems.
I didn’t even know who to shout out because I don’t know who they are and second of all you don’t shout at people.
Well, not so early in the game and definitely not on the first or second day.
But I remember talking to my products or not and I was like, who do I have to speak to to get shit done on teams and he was like, what do you mean by get shit done.
So I make a mistake.
I had come on to the project being way too keen.
And I think that’s okay. It’s how do you dial that back into the culture?
And I’m using air quotes here because I hate that word.
But how do things get done in the environment that you’re working in?
Is how you need to figure out your shit, either work with it or you create a new process. And those are your only options or you quit that was, I was so close to quitting every single day.
AMANDA: I remember, And I remember we ended up having a conversation about having to kind of lower your expectations in terms of the speed at which you are able to get things done or how long who you need to talk to you.
How long things took, how, how did that mental Readjustment go for you?
How did, how did you feel?
It was a game-changing moment.
DANIEL: Mmm, that part of my career and Enterprise.
And, and I I think I called it my come to Jesus moment and that was it was like on a Monday or Tuesday.
I think it’s a Tuesday back in the office and there were some other people in the wider team that I don’t really work with but quite a senior person and she just threw the shit’s because someone had ruined her entire plan for the day out of a random ad hoc requests.
And I was sitting at my desk and going hey other people’s are struggling to it’s not just me this is the environment this is the system and order to thrive in it to add value, not just the vibe, it add value to the company, you have to figure out where you fit in all this.
You can be the person that everyone hates and get shit done.
Or you can become everyone’s ally.
And for me, I decided, let’s become an ally and the way to do that was to get to know people.
Yeah.
And that means slowing things down.
It meant building a foundation.
Alliances that are strong because people respect people.
When you just adding tickets to other peoples, work load, not not one.
No one likes that.
It’s just a job at the end, the day for me, also a job.
But and this was my, this was what I learned.
And this is how I got it done.
Eventually, it took six months, was to befriend my producer.
Now, I don’t even know what a producer was up until this stage, but apparently there were people who put things on to the website so they’re the people who play with the CMS and they’ll and every enterprise will call them different things, right?
AMANDA: It’s not always producer, but it’s some combination of like, a front-end dev.
DANIEL: Yeah.
And so I became friends with this person so that when it came time to sprint planning, I could nudge those tickets.
He’s away.
Hmm.
Because no one else understood what I was doing.
Nor cared.
Well, they care, but they didn’t care enough to actually get them done.
So, yes.
Become an ally to others, add value to others.
It doesn’t mean solving their problems.
But you could be in a, in tangential way to solve the problem by making the worth life work, life, less horrible.
Yeah.
Yeah.
AMANDA: And if you, if you looked back to kind of, when you were starting Enterprise and what your expectations or from when you, You were coming agency side both in terms of like good and bad or kind of positive and negative what what was the most kind of different?
Where where did you see the most misalignment in terms of how you worked with Enterprise or large companies when you were agency side versus the reality of kind of enterprise?
DANIEL: When you got into it pacing I think it comes down to pacing. At Prosperity of course we worked with a number of Enterprise clients and and working agency side serving a client is very different to being the point of contact added him to prize and you quickly realize when you move into a large organization that everyone’s calendar is just double-booked double-parked everyone is back-to-back meetings.
I don’t know when people actually do any work, maybe that’s the problem, right?
But it’s agency side.
You you kind of a cheaper way, or more efficient way to identify problems and come up with solutions.
Hmm, I think agencies kid themselves into believing that they are the strategist.
No, we are just the sword.
The arm that holds the sword, and we can be replaced at any time, but it was okay.
You get good at technical, you get good at content, good, get good at off-page, you get good at whatever you need to be even client comms.
And then your relayed that to someone, and that someone would have been me in an SEO manager, or SEO specialist role.
And if that organization hired a third party such as an agency, then that would be your point of contact.
And I guess the biggest learning for me, was that someone in my position, your point of contact at an enterprise is so busy.
Not doing SEO, but trying to prioritize SEO, trying to get resources, trying to get someone else to it.
Implement those recommendations.
So when it comes to recommendations you don’t you don’t necessarily write it for the end person.
You don’t even know who that person is.
And I remember working agency side.
We never — we didn’t even ask who would implement these things, who would be the stakeholders who would approve who are the decision makers, who would go through this and do, whatever Matrix rice or whatever to prioritize.
It we didn’t even have these processes in place to figure out where we talking to the right person.
So we will sending a lot of emails.
A lot of reports, a lot of just good stuff that wasn’t getting implemented, and it wasn’t getting read by the people who should have let them because we failed to ask the question.
And so my biggest learning curve was of course, is that pacing.
It’s it’s knowing what ultimately what other things that people are going to judge me on and that is the kpis and for me it’s organic.
What does that mean?
I don’t know.
Could be traffic, the man could be conversions.
I don’t know.
It’s up to you, and whoever hired you to figure that out and then It’s about people.
Hmm.
I cannot. I am not allowed.
Let me rephrase.
I am not allowed to touch the website literally cannot and that was a huge thing that I did not understand as someone who’s worked for myself and for clients that agency.
You know, sometimes I do get log in to the backend just to quickly fix some stuff.
This does not happen enterprise and it should not for a very good reason even though sometimes there is good reason for me to do.
So but checks and balances, right?
AMANDA: Governance
DANIEL: Governance, that’s the right word governance, / politics, but yes, I digress.
It’s it’s knowing that I am the person who makes recommendations to someone else who then implements, that was the hardest thing.
Even though it sounds most basic, it was the hardest thing for me to grasp and that was the one thing that was taking me towards a path of burning out.
Hmm.
And realizing that I can’t, shoulder all this burden because it’s not on me.
It’s the businesses problem.
All I’m supposed to do why I’m getting paid.
What I get paid is to identify: what are the biggest problems aligned to the strategic initiatives by the CEO or by someone else and then align those with that.
Everything else is periphery.
Which is hard to accept, but it is what it is.
AMANDA: What have you really enjoyed about Enterprise?
DANIEL: I think this is a double-edged sword because I remember, Joining Optus, let’s just name it. It’s Optus, big telco, lots to learn because there’s such a breadth of expertise everywhere.
And I remember joining this big marketing meeting and then being in wonderment of how people responded to critique / feedback, and I was like, oh that’s the way you like answer questions about getting personal and conflict but at the same time, nine months.
I was like that’s probably why we so fucked.
AMANDA: Hmm. How do you mean?
DANIEL: It’s that the the actual problem doesn’t get addressed it get spammed off in a nice way to go.
I’ll look at it later or whatever.
And yes there’s politics.
Yes there’s a way to respond to someone who’s very senior like, for pay grades above you, but at the same time is that just I don’t even know what the word is its bureaucracy.
It’s sometimes you just need to tell it how it is.
And I remember in my first week, I got forwarded an email chain from an MD, very a senior person as to why our sub domain could not be found on Google.
And at the time I really realize it was the robots.txt and so I was like why is this person not in the email chain?
Let’s put him back in and then I wrote maybe a to four hundred word essay explaining in objective terms, I wasn’t blaming.
He would just want the problem was and how to solve it.
And that doesn’t always happen because silos because people are protective of their jobs which I understand.
But at the same time then where is this safe space to actually identify critical issues?
I don’t know.
Yeah and so for me it’s a double-edged sword because at one point I learned a lot about how do you communicate in a way that isn’t directly How not to take things personally, how to say, some how to say obvious things.
Like, if you without saying the F you like that, that that is what enterprise teaches you.
It’s not great, but it helps you fit in.
Again, comes out the culture but you know, that, that was cool for me was I was a sitting here with people who are really masters of what they do.
And the way that they responded to different comments was was awesome.
But at the same time, I wish, sometimes we could, just be honest.
No, I understand.
AMANDA: We were technically within the marketing function, right? How do you feel that affected the perception or ability of you to get stuff done as an SEO.
Because there are a lot of folks who have had really good experiences and really strong experience at an Enterprise level when SEO has been under the tech or the it are the dev kind of devops function.
How do you feel that sitting in marketing impacted positively or negatively, SEO?
DANIEL: Just so, before I answer that question, I think I want to preface this by saying Optus has invested in SEO for many years.
The fact that they have four to five full-time, headcount tells me that’s evidence that they respect and want to invest in organic growth as a function of marketing.
Maybe not because marketing is especially if it sits under a CMO.
Now, the traditional CMO now in the next 5 to 10 years that will change because the generation will change.
But the current CMOS are a certain age range typically.
And they come from a, certain background, traditional media.
It’s about buying, it’s about Impressions, it’s about spending the money, because if you don’t spend it, you won’t get to spend it next year.
Hmm.
And that doesn’t really make sense in SEO.
Because it’s not always linear.
And even though we can forecast and project, what is the expected Roi?
It’s not as simple to calculate as an ad platform which is engineered to give you that calculation, was they want you to spend it.
And so, as a function of marketing, what what really confuse me in the beginning was, when I was asked to do a forecast, it wasn’t about conversions.
That’s at with someone else, it was about Demand again are quite demand.
Mmm, demand equals sessions, sessions is not pay bills sessions does not equal to revenue does not equate to the Strategic initiatives that you’ll find in the perspective or a GM or whatever.
Yeah, and so I was like, I don’t understand, but this is the way it’s done, so I will do it.
But I will also add in line items as to what each of these initiatives are and what the projected or ETA doubt, cumple conversion is of all these things.
And so six months in, like, I still didn’t really quite understand what was happening in terms of the marketing sphere.
Because again, silos, everyone does everyone’s busy.
Everyone has a priorities and I get that.
But as a SEO, there was a little, if not no integration into the marketing Tech stack into communicating.
Like I think, two to three months prior to me resigning someone did come on board into the marketing team and they were amazing. They understood the importance of SEO and how that could overlap into paid.
And so things are changing.
There is a change coming, there is positive change, but for the most part of my tenure at Optus, I was just working In my soul silo or the insights that I could have fed to paid a I couldn’t because my time was allotted to my business unit and therefore I had to take it out of my time to speak to them and I’m like at the end of the day that’s not my job, right?
Yeah.
And so that sucked but they could have been so much synergy there and so as a function of marketing I think coming back to your original question there’s no problem with it it comes back to The system and processes in place to ensure that the SEO is contributing overwrought to marketing’s goals, not just demand, not just sessions.
It should be tied into product or into conversions because ultimately, that’s how it will be judged.
AMANDA: Anyway, what is something that you’ve done Enterprise side that you’re particularly proud of that?
Either took a lot to get done or had a big impact that you are able to fully articulate and kind of amplify across the business.
DANIEL: I think I’ll tackle the second one. Was that seems a little bit easy like what am I most proud of in terms of achievement working in an Enterprise setting and that was not the SEO itself, like this sounds really counterintuitive, but I did very, very, very basic level SEO.
I said, Enterprise org, it was more encapsulating all my experience and expertise up until a point where a request came in and I could funnel all that experience into a very quick answer.
Hmm.
And I think that is quite difficult in the early stages of an SEO’s career especially agency.
Because SEO is like to cover our asses, if we’re not saying it depends.
It’s a 4000 word manifesto of why.
And screenshots of everything and when a stakeholder is asking you, what question and I think we had this conversation internally was that don’t overwhelm them, keep it simple. If their question was simple then respond in a similar way and wait for them to prompt if they need further information because maybe they already know, maybe they just need to get get a confirmation.
We don’t know.
And so my obvious answer before having that conversation with you was to just here’s a textbook answer of everything.
And here are four thousand reasons why you should do this and counter-arguments.
AMANDA: Yeah, that that’s a waste of most people’s time when they asking that and when they’re all triple triple booked for meetings, right?
DANIEL: It’s yeah, keep it simple.
But don’t be afraid to inject your opinion in that because that’s why they hired you.
Yeah, you’re the brain, there’s tons of data out there and data are just story points.
It’s how you spend that?
There’s no right or wrong.
I know that’s a hot take but there’s no right or wrong.
What you send back? What you say?
That really is what I when I look back most proud of was whenever people ask me for what is the opportunity for growth in a particular space.
I could turn around in 15 minutes, use ahrefs and just spin those numbers into something that makes sense to me.
And then turn it into something that makes sense to them.
Because speaking in SEO, terms is biggest Achilles heel, no one gives a shit about search volume.
No one gives a shit about rankings.
It’s what do those things mean?
And I think enterprise drummed it into me that I need to stop communicating like a typical SEO and much more at an executive level and that is speaking their type of language.
AMANDA: Is there anything in terms of your assumptions about how Enterprise?
I see you worked in terms of like search results and the whole like brand bias in Google like is there anything that you observed over your time at Enterprise that Was particularly interesting or surprising in terms of that kind of brand effect.
And I mean, that kind of broadly in terms of like just Enterprise impact and entity relationships and stuff like that.
DANIEL: Yeah.
So when it comes to a well-known high-traffic branded website, like I got shoved with a sub domain that was blocking Google and then six months, later IP, filtered, everything outside of a you because of a DNS at a DDOS attack.
So, you know, I had the full array of WTF moment, but being this little sub domain Maine most SEO is like they hate on subdomains, right?
Like I’ll sub folders all the way and, you know, to a certain extent.
I agree.
But sub domains exist for a reason, especially when it’s a different team, different devs, different budget.
Mmm.
And so the assumption is that subdomains don’t perform as well?
Well, first of all, if you block Google, then that’s kind of on you.
But once we resolve that we started ranking now it took a while and it took a whole bunch of other initiatives.
But I can say, for certainty, for a website or root domain that has a lot of authority, that’s established subdomains Rank.
And they rank very, very well and very, very quickly.
But, of course correlation causation.
Yeah, you have to do your own test.
There’s a whole bunch of branded stuff behind that.
Now, the second thing that I observed and Was there a second thing, it can come back to it if — but on your on, your comment around, kind of testing and things.
AMANDA: What what kind of tests were you able to do?
Even, like, small-scale ones and and what, what results did you see, and did anything, surprise you in particular?
Like, did you change the meta descriptions and, you know, things shot right up?Or they did nothing or anything like that?
DANIEL: Testing.
This comes back to that word that you mentioned earlier governance.
And if you really are working at an Enterprise with proper rules, then testing is going to be somewhat limited. And it’s probably not going to be your role, it’s going to be someone else’s role.
Someone in a sales position who has access to A/B Testing that kind of stuff, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t try actually. I Did.
So the first thing was, I was like and this was before I you know, went crazy into Schema. I was back then just you know, I knew FAQ page schemer, very well yeah and I wanted to implement it or at least show from a screenshot using Google’s Rich results tool that we could get these awesome looking things on our pages.
But no no dev resources.
So the next best thing which you know, most devs will say and cringe at is, let’s add it to the GTM container.
Hmm, why not?
I mean, it’s valid, it’s okay, there are reasons why it’s not great documentation, but that was the test, right?
And and I added that container the tag to fire upon one particular page and then of course, I couldn’t push it live, it went to someone else who thankfully understood what I was getting at.
And approved it.
And I could show from the rich results test, at least that we could get these things.
I could expand upon our surprise list eight.
But in reality, those things never came.
I don’t know why, for whatever reason, Google decided we’re not going to show those things.
Okay?
Fine.
So the next test was and this was like everything happened after six months of my tenure 7 or 8 months, when I had figured out, how do I push things forward?
And that was back end dev.
I want a field in the am where I can just dump raw json-ld.
Okay, cool.
Let’s do it.
And then, all I had to do was generate the script, not even the script, it was json-ld and then pass along to a producer who would then copy and paste it into that field.
And that’s how I implemented FAQ page gamer on product pages.
Mmm, and I started with one and then once that started ranking and of course, it took time for that PDP to rank but eventually got there and there it is.
There’s a rich result screen shot.
Send that product owner, give me resources.
I need to get this done and that’s what I did.
So testing is another way of getting things done.
It’s another way of I think you know in start-up terms that mvp.
It’s what is the least amount of resources that you need to spend to.
Show an incremental result, it doesn’t have to be the full picture.
It’s just to show the promise of what actual resources can deliver and that’s SEO testing.
Yes.
Another proof of concept was again this is a entirely new business unit on a Telco completely different.
I think it’s the first e-commerce side of the business and well, how do you build up this concept of topical relevance?
Well, it’s not just through the pdp’s.
You need to have content on these pdp’s, but where does that content come from on pdp’s?
Oh, it’s from the manufacturer.
Okay, great.
How else can build up this topical relevance so that for informational queries or for commercial queries eventually, we can start ranking well, through content, right?
But content costs, a lot of money especially at Enterprise because it’s not just charging someone to write a few hundred thousand words.
There’s governance.
Remember there’s a whole bunch of check and balances to make sure that every single word and punctuation is legally correct.
Is not misconstruing something and then you have all these other things like you have all these other things that you need to make sure are legit.
And that’s what adds to the cost.
So you can say, all this 800 word article, it should take only two hours.
Yes, it can only take two hours to write but to get it live requires, maybe six, other touch points across two weeks that’s going to and you just do the math across X.
Per hour.
It’s a lot of money and that’s why content is put it this way.
Senior people understand the purpose of content, they understand, it’s important but it costs a lot of money.
So back to the proof-of-concept you need to show that you can help.
And for me it wasn’t starting a blog.
That was the end goal.
The first easiest way to test is content going to be relevant in terms of helping us was to come.
Hypothesis.
Like all this testing is always coming up with a hypothesis.
If I add a few more questions and contextual answers maybe bottom of the funnel and a mix of middle and top of the funnel on the PDP, will it in GSC?
Can we see few more relevant queries come across?
That’s probably the easiest way.
Then I hit a bottleneck and that is 0 everything.
On the product detail page, has to be Partner approved.
Oh crappy.
Okay, we’ll get there eventually.
Let’s start with the pages that we own.
Okay, let’s do the collection page.
No one cares about those.
Let’s do that.
And that’s what I did.
And so testing is also about pushing boundaries and finding out what those boundaries are so that you can go over them or find a way to validate your way through them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that they disappear eventually.
Yeah.
Or are they you you get those Milan side because you’ve been able to share the benefit of it.
AMANDA: What else has happened with You kind of Enterprise side that was confusing or surprising, or that you’ve really kind of learnt from Aside from what we’ve talked about around people and understanding governance.
DANIEL: Well, I think to tie this all together, it’s knowing who you are and what you want to contribute because Enterprise jobs don’t tend to be the most stressful until you hit a certain pay grade but up until then it’s pretty cruisy because everyone’s busy and you’re supposed to be busy and so figure out what you want to achieve, what you want to get out of it.
Like, for me coming into Optus was learning about other things, outside of SEO, it was how To conduct an effective meeting.
How do you react?
Or not react to certain feedback during a meeting, especially in a public forum.
These are the things that actually move you up the career ladder knowing your stuff will get you the job.
But to move up and to progress as a more respected and Respected senior, it’s playing the game.
It’s knowing how to communicate and sometimes having a poker face but yeah, that that’s really it.
It’s knowing the people knowing how you can help them.
It can be directly and indirectly related to work.
And you know to tie that all together it’s knowing or understanding what you want to achieve.
There are a lot of things that you can get out of an Enterprise.
Like I’m about to join another of the Enterprise company and and everyone says, the work culture is amazing and I hope it is and I’m sure I’m going to learn other things outside of SEO.
Maybe it’s business development, maybe it’s sales, maybe it’s analytics.
Like, I look back at my time at Optus, I learnt a lot was an SEO but I learned a lot and that will always be with me and I will take that in all the challenges I come across and like, oh yeah, I experienced this adopters and I responded this way and it was not great.
So I’m going to try another way, you know It’s learning someone listening to this
AMANDA: coming into Enterprises as a newbie, like you were, what should they be taking away?
Like, what, how should they kind of prepare themselves for going into Enterprise?
If, if like you, they’re coming from agency side, how should they kind of Reframe their mind or
DANIEL: There’s lots to do and there’s lots to learn and it’s not all on you.
I think that is the biggest takeaway.
Is that you?
You can be proactive in finding issues But the secret is knowing when to announce them and the context of it was you don’t want to do what typical agency does and drop a big spreadsheet of 99 issues where three don’t even exist.
And the rest are just really, really really like what does it mean kind of stuff?
But by all means follow your own checklist, follow your own experiences to find issues so that you can in whatever spare time you have work towards resolving.
Loving them because that people will see and recognize.
But always remember, when you’re joining Enterprise at, there are a lot of priorities, a lot of conflicting priorities and read the room, understand who you really need to report to and keep them happy.
Hmm, because they’re the ones who can approve you staying on getting a bonus.
Yeah, let’s be practical.
AMANDA: Yeah, actually, this is a question because I’m not sure.
Did you work with any kind of externals?
DANIEL: I did not work with external agencies when you are at Optus.
Yeah.
AMANDA: Okay, fair enough.
But I guess in that experience were there moments, where you understood the assumptions that the agency was making and on the other side of the coin, you were like that really fucking annoys.
Me like, why are you doing that?
And what was that assumption?
DANIEL: We tend to have checklist, right?
We go through an order, we find all these problems and one of the biggest things that agencies love to go harp on about is client-side rendering versus server-side rendering.
But when you are making that recommendation to a the wrong person to begin with, and be to an organization with a headcount where it’s probably two to three million dollars.
A few months for just that type of developer.
You are completely out of sync.
You are just sounding like a fucking idiot.
Because what you recommend it does not make any business sense like like, okay, so we totally understand why there are benefits to going away from client.
Well, browser, rendering we get that as ico’s but when you’re looking at the actual actionable take away from that recommendation is so are you saying we fire all other developers and then hire a whole bunch of people even if we could do that, right?
It would take 6 to 12 months.
How much would that cost?
I don’t know, and if you don’t even, can’t even think about that then yeah, good luck.
So agency side again, we’re very good at identifying basic issues.
Easy like after a while you get used to site bulb or screaming frog object opted to police or any of those who should be sponsoring this podcast, you know, the tools Spotify.
Like you get that good at identifying problems and as SEO is we are paid to find them but it’s always.
What do you do with that information afterwards?
That is where your value comes in.
That’s where your professional and personal opinion comes in.
And that is you do your prioritization?
Okay?
So you are using heavily, react, or some other New Age JavaScript language, there’s four new every four hours.
Is that really impacting on the problem?
And at an Enterprise you can usually get that type of information.
Like are we hitting our business goals?
Are we making sales?
Okay.
Do we come up for Branded searches is the bulk of our revenue and profitability from branded searches probably?
So okay, maybe organic isn’t that important, I know heartache, but in terms of new discovery in terms of head terms and all that kind of stuff, maybe it’s not as important.
What are the other things that are impacting and And this is where you bring your expertise.
You can go into Google search console and literally spent nine minutes.
And you’ll know I’m representing my own condo by the way, but you can literally spend very small amount of time to diagnose is Javascript or client-side, rendering in actual problem, and if it is, can you attribute that to a percentage or a cost?
Because that’s what’s going to matter?
Because if you can’t then you won’t get any buy-in.
And for those of you who haven’t worked in agency, The buy-in and stakeholders are terminologies you’ll get really used to.
It just means, will you get anything done?
Will someone who’s making a decision say yes, most of the time you would say no until you can frame that story into something that they care about at that particular time.
AMANDA: Any more, any more hot takes any more kind of things that have like that kind of realization that you’ve had about Enterprise or agency?
Kind of looking back on it In this break that you have between roles.
DANIEL: I think both roles are really, really useful to have under your belt.
I think from your experience, you’ve had both and then you’ve decided to go into your own consultancy.
And I think that’s wise because you need the agency breadth, you need the agency experience and you definitely need to have sat in the hot suit at Enterprise, or in-house to know what actually gets done and how and why.
And that then you can help as an external third party without these experiences you you kind of have blinders on and so it’s easy as I said to find issues, it’s when do you communicate?
Take them and how and then how do you attribute that to a goal?
That makes sense to the person listening having worked agency side and worked with that kind of mid tier business as well.
AMANDA: What’s the biggest kind of Step change between working for like a midsize business and that really kind of national level business blue chip?
DANIEL:That’s a really good question because it’s interesting because if you look at headcount and revenue and then look at, well, we start from, let’s start with headcount, right?
Most are small businesses and that’s up to a certain head count and then suddenly Enterprise, which is a tiny fraction of any economy.
They have huge head count, and it’s really interesting in terms of how much of a difference there is in terms of the SEO work and how things are done and how things will help decisions are made.
When you Up until a certain point.
I think it’s 150 million or was particular headcount it’s relatively easy relatively easy to get things done because it’s very Hands-On.
There is less governance and there is more of an emphasis on let’s solve the problem, but rather for a smaller entity.
So anything that’s not an Enterprise.
You are given more bearth to do things.
You get more ownership of tasks.
There isn’t as much equity.
When siloing of responsibilities, there is expected to expectation of.
If you see a problem you can solve it.
And by all means, please solve it.
You don’t have to have a meeting about the problem that you could have solved in the time of the meeting but once you go to an Enterprise then yes there are different roles different responsibilities and there is a hierarchy of decision-making and you have to follow that and ultimately that is a lesson to be learned.
That’s a whole different experience.
That will either make or break it.
And it doesn’t matter which way because now, you know what you like, and for some people, maybe Enterprises and for them, maybe for some, they love it for me.
I had a love-hate relationship.
AMANDA: What are you hoping to learn and grow and see in your future Enterprise roles?
What, what excites you and and what kind of gives you hope in terms of the things that you’ll be able to learn further along in your Enterprise Journey, Because you mentioned a couple of things like, analytics and data and stuff like that, but whether it’s soft skills or hard skills.
Is there anything in particular, you’re really looking forward to kind of finding a way to pursue.
DANIEL: Yeah, so even though I had a few challenges to overcome in my previous role and I’m moving again to another Enterprise role.
I think, what I’m looking forward to and what keeps me going is this concept of impact.
I want to have a positive impact on my colleagues, on the end user of the product, and as well as fellow industry colleagues, I’ve been a big advocate of Disclosing salaries along the way and encouraging and motivating others to ask for more and I feel as though it’s, I can only do that if I am at the table.
So if I have a position at an Enterprise and I can help those who want to work there by helping them overcome the same challenges that I have.
It’s no.
So it’s not so much the SEO anymore.
Like, if you want to learn SEO, you can’t, you don’t have to work for anyone.
You just work on your own stuff and you can learn Learn and apply it.
What interests me about Adobe?
My next place is the ability same of Optus to learn from others.
And it’s not about SEO, it’s again, Business Development, maybe it’s something else.
I don’t know what that is, but it’s the opportunity and the access.
And this reminded me of that initial conversation that we had that we also record and that was, you know, adopters I could get access to almost anyone.
I remember when I post, Do you?
I said I could access any one, not so true but I could access almost anyone I wanted to and that was refreshing at agency.
Look, Prosperity was very great was great.
I I was invited to all the meetings it was just a choice of did I want to attend them or not but at most agencies is very different.
There is a big hierarchy of seniority and if you don’t have that account it’s not yours.
You’re not part of that conversation.
So effectively, you are gate kept that up but there is gatekeeping in terms of your experience and exposure to other people and added Enterprise.
You don’t was you’re forced to that’s one of their interview criterias, can you work well with others?
And I remember, working at, well, not working, haven’t started, but interviewing for Adobe it was a series of five interviews where the first one was with the hiring managers to know is does Daniel know his shit.
He kind of does.
Okay, cool.
Now, let’s get the people who will work with him on a day-to-day basis because they’re the probably there, that people are going to suffer the most.
And, and that to me was like, oh, this makes sense because they’re the people that I’m going to build a relationship with to get things done.
And ultimately, that excites me, because, as much as I like working alone, I like being connected and noting out on SEO.
And on that business, that means something.
And we spend so much of our actual lives at work, that and sleeping. that, you know, it should matter and you should get some form of fulfillment and that’s what fulfills me is that concept of potential impact whether it’s for the business itself, of course, for myself and for the end users there are because there is that side to, to Enterprise where sometimes you have to Fake urgency to a certain extent.
Oh, I didn’t have to fake anything.
Well, maybe not fake.
You have to like, emphasized the urgency.
And you have to like and I think task for 50 men, catastrophize, the urgency.
There we go.
And definitely for some websites where it’s been performing relatively.
Well, of course there are issues.
It’s how do you convince further optimization which will cost, of course, resources.
I think that’s the difficult part of Enterprise.
It’s When a brand is already performing, okay, how do you eat more and how much is it going to cost and what is the rate of return that as an Enterprise SEO, is probably the biggest challenge for some that’s going to come down to communication for others.
It’s just loading the model.
But yeah, look, every Enterprise is different.
Some are heavily heavily product, and Engineering focused and people at Jamie Indigo, they just blow my mind was like I don’t understand what you’re talking about at all.
It’s like DOM I don’t even know what the DOM stands for! Am I even in SEO?
AMANDA: Document object model?
I want to offer a massive thank you again to Daniel for joining me on, engage on Enterprise Ico and sharing his experiences and learnings, as someone new to the world of Enterprise, if you want to continue the conversation, finally, by my company FLOQ, F-L-O-Q on LinkedIn.
Follow me on Twitter at Amanda EC king or reach out to me directly, if you’re interested in talking about my own strategic Consulting Services, have a lovely day and enjoy listening to the rest of season.