The One Where We Discuss Making Technical SEO "Make Sense" With Giovanna Angulo

WTSPodcast

In this week's episode, we chat with Giovanna Angulo, Associate SEO Director at Mediahub Global, about making technical SEO "make sense".

Where to find Giovanna:

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Twitter

Website

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Episode Sponsor:

This season is sponsored by Screaming Frog. Screaming Frog develop crawling and log file analysis software for the SEO industry, and wanted to support the WTSPodcast as listeners to the show. They’ve just released version 16 of their SEO Spider software, which includes - improved JavaScript crawling to help you identify dependencies, such as JavaScript content and links, automated crawl reports for Data Studio integration, advanced search and filtering, and the app is now available in Spanish, French, German and Italian. You can check out the latest version at Screaming Frog's website (screamingfrog.co.uk).

Where to find Screaming Frog:

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Episode Transcript:

Areej AbuAli: Hey, everyone. Welcome to a new episode of the Women in Tech SEO Podcast. I'm Areej AbuAli, and I'm the founder of Women In Tech SEO and your host today. Today's episode is all about making technical SEO make sense. Joining me is the brilliant Giovanna Angulo who is the SEO Director at Mediahub Global. Hey, Giovanna.

Giovanna Angulo: Hello. How are you?

Areej: I'm great. Thanks. It's so good to have you here with us.

Giovanna: I'm so excited to have this topic talked about.

Areej: I know. I loved how specific your pitch was. I was like, "Oh, my God, we have to have you in. This is amazing."

Giovanna: Great.

Areej: Do you want to start off by just telling us a little bit about you, and how you got into the world of SEO?

Giovanna: My name is Giovanna Angulo. I've been an SEO for about six years now. Shockingly, it's been my only career, so I'm very lucky in that perspective. I think a lot of people fall into SEO later, or they do other digital marketing and then get into it. What's interesting, I'm now the national director out of a New York agency, at Mediahub Global.

The way that I got into SEO was very interesting. I graduated with an Ad/PR degree. There was one SEO class at the time because it was still new, and we had to take it. I remember just hating that class. The woman, who taught it all talked about this agency that she had and her clients and thinks how proud she was. I was like, "I don't care about any of this." I said, "I don't know what I'm doing," but it's definitely not that.

Then, I got bamboozled by an email talking about outreach and doing all these things. I said, "Oh, I've done that." My college job was as a leasing assistant. That sounds normal. I can build relationships. It turned out to be an entirely link-building-prospecting job. I ended up falling in love, and I understood why she had so much pride in this client work because you get that pride from when you do the SEO behind it. After a while, hindsight was 2020. At the moment, I was not thinking that was going to be my path.

Areej: Wow. I've never even heard about an SEO course in university until this day. That's so interesting that you had to study it.

Giovanna: It was new and something that I'm really proud that we were in is a very specific program at the University of Central Florida, which I give a lot of credit to. A lot of people don't usually, but I do.

Areej: What advice would you give women who are considering just starting their SEO career today?

Giovanna: I think the biggest thing, I would say, is to remember that your voice matters. That sounds really simple, but it really is. I think women and women in the tech industry or in the digital marketing industry have a perspective. Remember that the things that you've had to go through in your perspective in life do bring value that others don't have. A lot of the time, we think, "Oh, it's just a silly concept," or it's too much, or it's too little but really that does bring so much value. You can create conversations with others. That's what I would recommend, is just always put your voice forward and see what comes out of it.

Areej: I love that. I think that's really important. Have you always worked agency side or have you previously worked client-side as well?

Giovanna: Actually, that first job out of college, that was more in-house, but that was about a year. Then, I've actually been with Mediahub Global for four and a half years, so that's been my entire agency lifestyle of being able to grow through there. It's been really interesting because you wear so many different hats and get to experience so many different things. For the experience of that, I would recommend an agency if you really want to get your hands dirty.

Areej: I fully agree with that, especially, with anyone who's just starting out, agency side makes so much sense, because, as you said, you wear so many hats and you work with such a diverse number of clients. There's so much to learn.

Giovanna: So, so much, to this point where I'm still learning.

Areej: Definitely. I loved, I loved, I loved when I read your pitch form about how you wanted to talk about making technical SEO make sense. I just want to start off by knowing why you picked that topic.

Giovanna: Similar to the advice that I give to women starting out is that your voice matters is to say there's been a lot of people, who I've worked within the past or so, that just want to make themselves sound smarter in every situation. That, sometimes, is just regurgitating the same articles that we're all reading and just saying it to somebody who might not know as much to make yourself seem more intimidating.

I personally have never found that to be, one, very productive or, two, very admirable in terms of team growth and things like that. I thought it would be a good perspective for people who are also getting into the agency lifestyle, asking questions on having people further explain it to see if they even really know what they're talking about, or also just to learn how to build your own voice in the industry.

Areej: Also, I can imagine, because you work agency side, it's more important than ever to be the way you communicate, and you talk to your clients on a daily basis.

Giovanna: Oh, yes. That's really one of the most important things that I've learned is when you work with a client where they understand you, and they start applying the best practices themselves before it comes to you, then we're all working together, and it's working out so much easier for everybody.

I think a lot of people, on the agency side, want to make things really difficult so that they're always a valuable resource. I don't think that that value goes away when you just start to build off of those best practices together. Still, as we know, SEO has an umbrella that's never going to be understood by everyone at all times. We still have our value, but if we share the best practices, and we understand where we're all coming from, then it just makes everything better. We get to understand why we recommend the things that we do for clients

Areej: With technical SEO being something that can be full of a lot of jargon, a lot of terminologies, what are some ways we can start off making it feel more understandable and more digestible?

Giovanna: I think I've really liked learning analogies. The oddest ones are the ones that I find really interesting. One of my favourites is one that I recently started thinking about, which is the movie Minority Report with Tom Cruise and just that movie I remember growing up and the way that I describe Google bots and Google crawlers and the crawl budget and things like that, is I say, "Remember those little spider dog things that go around in Minority Report, scanning every person, predicting the future of that person, that's, basically, a Google crawler but for every site imaginable on the internet.

We want to make sure that they're predicting the best opportunities for our pages, predicting the best for that, and having our things prepared for when they do start to scan you that you're there." Things like that, I think, are the most fun way to understand SEO and the digestible parts of it, because if you start getting into robots and sitemaps and crawlers and bots and all these things that are so different, it can become a whirlwind to your own team, and then a whirlwind to your clients. It just spirals into that sounds cool, but I don't really get it. I think getting it to that point is important.

Areej: Oh, I love that. It got me thinking, you should really think about starting a website or a blog that features all of these different analogies.

Giovanna: I love that.

Areej: I think that would be so cool.

Giovanna: I love that. I could definitely add that too. I've started a website of my own just as practice in WordPress and things like that as we all should or probably have. That would be a great idea. I would love to create something like that.

Areej: You're so right. I remember the first time I was hosting an intro to SEO type of training to my team when I was agency side, and it was so tricky. We have such a thing called the curse of knowledge where we know this, and we just assume that everyone else knows this, but that's not going to be the case.

Giovanna: Even, I remember, I think it just started from when I started my SEO journey, my manager at the time, because it was a link building job, told me my first analogy, which was to think of an empty bathtub as your website. You have a rubber duck at the bottom of the tub, and then the backlinks and the anchor text techs and the things that you get are the water that fills that tub and brings the rubber ducky to the top. Therefore, that's our rankings. I was like, "Oh, that makes sense when you put it that way."

I still use that to this day. I try to put it into jeopardy perspective and all these things because it just makes it-- I think anybody in any industry, even in the media, buying a TV, things like that, if anybody just puts things in their own perspective to help others, it just makes things make sense. It also helps when you talk to your parents, and your parents say, "What do you do for a living?"

That's really the biggest practice that I've learned, is if I can get my mother to remember what I do and explain it to her friends, then I know that I've done a good job. That's where it's coming from. Practice with your parents. Let them know if they can understand it, then you know you've done a good job in creating an analogy that works.

Areej: Oh, I love that. Such a good idea. I love the bathtub one as well. It's not what I've heard before. If people continue speaking in their own technical SEO language, what do you think some of the challenges they might face would be?

Giovanna: I think the challenge is you don't build a connection. If you're just springing out deliverables and work and sending them over, where is the added value from yourself? I think in a world of SEO that is becoming a lot more competitive, and that's where I also understand where they want to have this ego of sorts in the SEO world is to say so many more LinkedIn titles have SEO in them, so you have to prove that you are this expert in the industry.

I think that expertise comes in the form of building that relationship and speaks more volumes to it than anybody else can just by saying the same technical jargon. I think some of the challenges there will be, you won't have a connection with your team and you won't have a connection with your clients, or you won't have a connection with your internal teams when you are trying to get investments for these tools, for these applications, for things like that. I think it can be only valuable to build off of that expertise of making it make sense. That's not even just for technical, it's about the content things that we do and all of the connections and building with the social teams. It just I've personally found the best responses there.

Areej: How do you feel we can translate some of this thinking in terms of delivering technical audits and technical recommendations. What would be some of your advice on if we were to go ahead and present that to a head of marketing who doesn't necessarily know too much about SEO? How can we try to simplify some of the jargon in that?

Giovanna: Yes, and I think that's the beauty in each of our SEO expertise, and that's where I would really lean forward for managers and for people who are at a higher level in leadership to push your younger and your more junior staff to put their own voice into it. I will try to create an environment with my team where we always share at least an article a week, each of us, about something that's happening in the marketing world.

A lot of the time I'll ask for just like a little blurb and say how do you, what are you taking from this article? A lot of the time it's just copied and pasted from there. It really takes away from that critical thinking and that understanding, I understand you read the article, but what are you taking from it? The biggest thing I would recommend is, one, establish that thinking beforehand, have it really practised, make sure you're pushing people to build off of that critical thinking.

I think it's really easy to say, "Oh, well, they are still new in the environment. I understand that if they don't understand every topic of it, but I think when they don't understand and people have those questions, it builds, again, your repertoire to say, "Okay, let me help explain this to you." Therefore, builds your the imposter syndrome side of it, and then it also builds their confidence to better understand it, and then they start writing that way and it just becomes a snowball effect.

Then that translates down to the marketing teams and the executives and building your own point of view, writing one to two-page white papers is something that I really like to push for my team if something happens, even if it's not as timely as possible, still building that opportunity to how can we write what we know and translate it to that world. I think it's, it's a skill that people have to develop and it's not easy.

It's the same as public speaking and putting decks together. Those things are things that you have to build off of. I'm not saying this is inherent in any of us to be able to explain what a robots.txt file does immediately offhand and in a jargon that we understand, but it is something that we can practice and grow for it. I would just recommend always pushing for people's perspectives. Try not to stay in a box of this is how I would explain it, and therefore, you should explain it that way too.

Really be open to listening, to pushing that narrative, that you are a talent in this force and that you have that expertise and to keep practising it and get it to a level where you feel comfortable.

Areej: How can this be something that we actually-- You're a director. I can imagine there's quite a lot of people who report to you. How do you train for that skill? How do you train for it to be something that junior members in the team can think of and consider, specifically when they speak to other in-house teams or they're liaising directly with clients?

Giovanna: Yes, that's definitely the tougher part. It comes across sometimes probably a little dry on my end, but a lot of the time, I will straight up say, "Okay, so what does that mean? I'll say, you wrote this insight down and I see that you pulled the data for it, but what does that mean? What does that mean for the site? What does that mean for the client?"

They get taken aback because a lot of what we do is just reporting on the numbers and the rankings and things like that, but we're not looking, or at least sometimes-- it's not always seen as the bigger picture. I will bring it back to that and just say, "Where's the bigger picture here? If we are reporting on this data, why aren't we reporting on that? Questioning that and making it a little uncomfortable to say, "If I don't understand, if I was somebody who didn't understand this topic, how would you explain it? How would you verbalize that in a different way?"

I think that pushes people and I've had them say, "This was really helpful because it brought me into why I'm also writing it. I don't think necessarily when we have these templates of deliverables or monthly reports that go out every single time and they're following a template, a lot of people get trapped into, "Okay, I can just really put in the same information." Obviously, it's important for SEO to review your site map and to review these things. If there are no blocks resources, then technically that means it should be fine.

Or if Search Console does say there are blocked resources, and then it's automatically a problem, but maybe those blocked resources aren't really blocking something significant, put that into perspective for the client as opposed to creating a bigger issue or just creating an alarm. If there is a jarring number, explain why it is jarring or if it's not. I think it's really about pushing your team members and building their confidence through that push to not say that something is incorrect but also gear them into the lane that they can pull from it without answering it for them.

I think that's also a really tough part of being in a managerial status is to say, "I could do these on my own, or the feedback doesn't necessarily need to be as detailed," but I'm a big believer in providing as much detail as possible so that they build their confidence to be able to answer those questions and to confidently say, "This is why I put this insight in," or to be able to recognize and say, "You know what, you're right that insight, wasn't the best. I took it out and I switched it for this one because I found that there was added value in there."

Just constantly, don't settle for them to have that answer or just to regurgitate and refill the same information, really push to say, "Why did you add that?" I think it creates an uncomfortable environment that ends up being a lot more confident.

Areej: Yes, I completely agree. I feel like everything...