How to Succeed as an In-House Enterprise Level SEO

Welcome to a new, very special edition of Crawling Mondays. This time we are going to talk about enterprise-level SEO. What do you do when you're an SEO at a big company? And today to talk about this, I have 2 SEOs who I respect a lot, who have had like an amazing journey and have tons of experience leading the SEO programs at big, big, big companies. On one hand, I have Laura Lippi, who at the moment is the SEO director at Comcast. And before, she worked at Netflix, she worked at Yahoo, so she has plenty of enterprise-level experience. On the other hand, I have Martin MacDonald, who right now has his own SEO consultancy tool company that is called Mock Media. But in the past, he He was for 7 years the SEO director at Expedia too. So he has a lot of experience in that front too. So thank you, thank you very much for joining, Laura and Martin. Really appreciate your time.

Thanks for having us, Aleyda.

Likewise, thanks for having us.

So to start the conversation a little bit, if I had to ask you which are those top characteristics that you will say really, really differentiate doing SEO at a big Enterprise or a big company from the agency or smaller type of companies, still from an in-house perspective?

I think that the, you know, being in-house at a bigger company, one thing that's definitely great, which I didn't catch on to for probably 5 or 6 years into it, you know, like back at Yahoo days, is the stock and the salary, and you don't have to do your taxes. There's that at the, like, base layer of it. But I think one of the things that I really like about it the most is that you get to follow through on projects. I mean, you really get to know, like, you know, what's happening here, what do we need to do, and follow through on it long term. Where smaller companies, I think, are— well, I guess you're still following through, but there's just a lot more kind of, you know, turnover and a lot more things going on to build something. And so, it's a little bit more kind of, you know, crazy and sporadic. But, I do enjoy building something structurally in-house at an enterprise where you're working with all these teams, you're educating them as you're doing it, you're building a program and tools and reporting and getting something underway with, you know, a whole bunch of people. And, you learn so much in that aspect. So, there's like a base layer. in-house at a big company is just advantageous for so many reasons. But, you know, there's also this, like, foundation that you're building at a big company, which is really fun, versus, like, the smaller companies, I feel like, are just a little bit more— you know, you've got to have— you got to drink a lot of coffee, I think, you know, keep up with what everyone's doing every day and how it changes so much to, you know, try and build a company.

I totally agree with you on the whole stock options thing. That's certainly one of the big benefits of working for an enterprise company. I think it's kind of important to to recognize that SEO itself doesn't change. You know, whether you're trying to SEO a 4-page affiliate website or a 40-million-page enterprise website, fundamentally, the, you know, the things that need to be done and executed upon to achieve SEO success, they're not radically different. You know, you still need content, you still need appropriate PageRank on an individual page to rank it for a term. But it's just the execution is entirely different. The two kind of modus operandi of actually getting stuff done couldn't be more diametrically opposed. Because when you're looking at enterprise-level SEO, then really, you know, it is the same thing as any other kind of SEO. But in order to get something done, you need to have C-suite buy-in, and that requires one set of skills. You need to get buy-in from product and engineering, that requires another set of skills. You need to interface well with like an analytics team as well, that requires yet another set of skills. And the core difference to me between enterprise and working on smaller sites, whether they be like mom-and-pops or your own sites or affiliate sites or whatever the case may be, is that abstract layer of execution and communication that's needed to actually get stuff done in that environment. Because you could be the best SEO in the world, you could know every single thing there is about technical SEO or link building or digital PR or whatever it is, whatever your specialism is, But if you can't effectively communicate it, but also play the inherent political games that are required to get stuff done in an enterprise environment, then your skill set is going to be wasted in that role. I think for most people, they kind of— graduate's the wrong word, but they'll kind of move from smaller site SEO into bigger site SEO into enterprise SEO. And that's the piece that needs to change as you go through that progress, is how is it that you fundamentally program things to get them done internally versus knowing what it is to do in the first place. So, you know, there is a different skill set, but it's not necessarily a different SEO skill set. It's just a different business mindset skill set, if you like.

I will say a lot of those skills have more to do with soft skills, capacity to influence, capacity to coordinate, align, to get support, buy-in, rather tied to knowing how to do SEO. You might be like an amazing SEO and enjoy doing day-to-day SEO, but potentially you're not so great at those sort of, let's say, bureaucratic processes or aligning or communication. And potentially you may want to develop that side of your skills, but also you might not necessarily be so interested to do so. And that is also completely okay, right? Which you will say are more of those pros and cons that you might find in those scenarios? More of a pro that I can definitely see is that like building links, so easy. They all come to you. That is a non-issue, right? Yes.

I mean, the last time I built a link was before I started working for Expedia. Like it became irrelevant at that point in time because I mean, this is, again, it's similar to any other site, so it's not specific to enterprise-level SEO, but when you are removed from those constraints of having to develop backlinks pointing at a site and you are then looking at how do you effectively pass PageRank internally around a site to get pages indexed and ranking, it's a different subset of the technical SEO skills. So yeah, I mean, link building is something that I will hand on heart say, yep, absolutely, I am not the person to talk to anymore because it's been 10+ years since I've had to do any of that. And I look at other people that are great at attracting links to smaller brands or to smaller websites. And that's a fantastic specialist skill by itself. But I imagine Netflix aren't short of a few backlinks. I know absolutely Expedia brands are not short of backlinks. So therefore, the thing that you need to concentrate then at that point is, is the content for this individual URL matching the right things that we want to rank it for? Is it well linked internally? Does it sit correctly within an information architecture on the site itself? Those inherently become much more valuable skill sets than simply link building. That's not to say that a lot of big brands don't need link building because if you are the 3rd or the 4th biggest brand in a specific vertical, then you probably do need to do things like that. But you're kind of outside of the realms of what we as SEOs would call link building at that point. You are much closer to the PR side of things rather than— old-style link building like I used to engage in many years ago.

I think link building in-house at an enterprise level is very much a PR relationship and a marketing relationship. But I think, you know, if you're working with a smaller company, you're more— you're kind of more involved in the marketing. You're more ingrained in the marketing because you have to. I mean, if you're going to do link building in a way that you're trying to put out things that are popular, that are going to gain popularity. You got to be more involved in the marketing side of things and thinking about like your audiences and what's really going to get them excited at this, you know, when you're working with smaller companies. When you're working with bigger companies, maybe the marketing company will let you in on that, you know, maybe you got to kind of like try and get your way in there, you know, it's a little tougher to affect that directly. But, you know, I think the other thing too is that I think you learn, like, I'm totally into politics now, like real life politics, you know, and I never would have thought I would be. And I think it's because of working in-house at enterprise, because you learn so much from politics.

Yeah.

You know, and I think it's, it's, there's a value in that in, in real life, in business, you know, in learning how to get things to move in-house at enterprise, you know, because you are working with PR and marketing and other teams, entire teams who've got their own things going on. And, you know, you have to kind of knock on the door and be like, hey, I'm the SEO, I'm gonna ask you to do stuff. You know, and so it's very politics-driven, which I think, you know, you have to have the— I wouldn't say, as someone who skews introverted, I wouldn't say that I would, I would ever have thought that I would want to go into any kind of job that where politics was involved. But over time, you learn it. And, and it's really great. And you kind of have to have the the want to do that if you're at enterprise versus, you know, I think if you're in small business, you're scrappy. You know, you got to have the want to be scrappy. And if you want to come up with new ideas and you want to get them heard and you want people to do stuff, you know, I think that's the place to be. If you want to get your stock options, then enterprise is the place to be. You just got to deal with politics.

I think there's been a heck of a progression as well as far as kind of where SEO sits in the overall marketing mix since So I started going from like kind of smaller affiliate sites to enterprise type SEO in about 2007, 2008. And certainly probably through 2012 to 2014, getting buy-in for SEO, like when you go and knock on the door of PR, they didn't want to know, like they didn't care. Because certainly at an enterprise level at that point in time, SEO was still something that basically, you know, someone in the C-suite has heard that, yeah, SEO is important, so we need to have the SEO team or whatever that case may be. But over the last couple of years, getting that buy-in, the political gymnastics that you have to do to be able to get stuff done in large enterprise, I think has got much easier because SEO has become much more recognized, not only a valuable, but a perfectly valid part of the entire marketing mix. Does that kind of match up with your experience as well?

No, I still think it's so difficult. I think it depends on the company. I mean, I don't know. I definitely, I think over the years have learned that next, next time I choose a company or, you know, going forward choosing a company, and I think it's because of just the last couple companies I've been at, I definitely want to be more cognizant of what their in-house— I mean, how they really work together, because some companies really work well together and some companies are just all over the place. And there's a huge difference. So like Netflix is the example. I think I started Netflix about 15 years into doing SEO or so, and I learned so— I've learned more from a couple years at Netflix than I think I've learned at any company, and it's because of the way they work together. And I can't say the same for most other companies. I think a lot of other places are really just— there's a sort of a A fight for resources, a fight for time, a fight for money, a fight for energy, you know. And, um, you know, I mean, not to sort of put that in that kind of negative perspective, but it, it's, uh, it's real. And you have to develop the skills to try to get people to work together across teams, other teams working together and working with you. And I think it's just different at every company in my experience. I wish everybody was like Netflix, man. They're so great. There's just— they work so well. It's difficult to get a good flow going. I think it takes a couple years. And, you know, I think with the small businesses, it takes a couple years to get like ranking mojo. With the larger businesses, it takes a couple years to get just like integrated, you know, and get people moving together in the right ways.

Absolutely, for sure. I mean, I remember when I first started at Expedia, if you, depending on the day of the year that you chose, If you wanted to change a title tag, it could take up to 6 months to change a title tag on a single page. Now, that was if it was a category page and if you chose the wrong day of the year based on release schedules and things like that. But I mean, very much, and that was only, that was less than 10 years ago. That was like 9 years ago, this was true. It is no longer true because things have progressed along greatly. But I mean, I certainly know of other recognized, very popular big brands that are definitely kind of internet-first brands where that's still actually the case. So, you know, I think to Laura's point a moment ago, it is very kind of variable on a company-by-company basis. And I think when you're in an environment that has the fluidity and has the ability to be able to effect change quickly and get buy-in quickly, then working in enterprise can be extremely rewarding. However, when you're not in that environment and you are in somewhere where it takes 6 months to get anything done and you have to get 85 people to sign off on something, it can be an absolute grind. Like, it genuinely can. And, you know, I'm conscious that people might look at, I don't know, enterprise-level SEO and think of that as the goal and think of that as the graduation and think of, you know, hey, I really want to move into being the next head of SEO for Netflix or for whoever it might be. And that it doesn't need to be the case inasmuch that, you know, I think it is ideally suited to some people that are able to work in those environments, but that isn't going to be universally the case, nor should it be your ultimate goal is to be like, oh hey, I want to be head of SEO for a huge brand, because you might individually find it much more fulfilling just working on, you know, lots of smaller sites or in, you know, building something from scratch.

Yeah, or as a consultant consulting to brands to have the sort of flexibility that you may want, or even developing as an overall digital marketer at a broader type of level. That is the beauty that there are so many ways to grow and evolve yourself as a specialist. So it's important to know that indeed, like I can definitely see how there are certain sort of skills that are actually needed, not necessarily you to master, but to actually enjoy, to make it an enjoyable journey. Because otherwise, I cannot imagine how tiring it might If someone comes to you and asks for specific advice and tips to become like a really, really good enterprise SEO specialist who leads the teams, who develops the program from scratch, what would you say are the top dos and don'ts to avoid those mistakes that you have seen happening?

I'll jump in with a couple of don'ts. So kind of don't burn your bridges. You know, if you are aspiring to be an enterprise SEO And harking back to what we were saying earlier, 90% of it is actually getting stuff done. What you need to realize is that you are no longer— you might be the head of SEO, but you are no longer in charge of anything that's related to SEO. You are working in an environment where you absolutely require cooperation across teams, cooperation from other individuals. And the second that you start burning bridges internally is the second that you've basically muted yourself. and your ability to execute upon anything. So, you know, don't burn any bridges. Don't think that SEO itself is in a vacuum because it isn't. You are in an enterprise environment just basically a cog within a much larger organization. As much as we like to think that SEO is the most important thing in the world, the reality is that the business may see things very differently to us SEO people. So consequently, you need to kind of sit back and look at the 30,000-foot view as opposed to, you know, just being myopically focused on just purely SEO-related items. If you can't extract yourself from your role and look at the wider picture on an enterprise basis, then you're also not going to be able to affect the kind of change that you want to do. In the dos column, I think the stuff that we were saying earlier really is key. I mean, you need to, you need to be an effective communicator, but at multiple different layers. You need to have one communication kind of strategy with C-suite executives because they have one set of cares. You need to have a totally different strategy with, for instance, product or engineering and/or marketing, depending on your point a second ago, Aleyda, where SEO sits within any individual organization. You need to understand what is the best way of communicating with those other business units. I have worked in places where SEO is both part of product and part of marketing, and I know it's a contentious issue. I personally think that it should sit in the middle of the two of them and not be attached to either of them particularly, because there are, you know, I mean, SEO sits very much in the middle of that Venn diagram between those two items. So, you know, if you are in product, for instance, Don't ignore the marketing side of SEO. If you are in marketing, you can't ignore the product side of SEO. But this is just a different skill set that isn't— it's not a factor when you're working on smaller sites and/or kind of working externally because you don't have those requirements.

You know, it is funny. Over the years, 20 years doing this, like, I've reported into engineering, I've reported into marketing, I've reported into product. And you still just got to get the job done no matter where you sit. And there have been times where, like, I reported into product but still— but basically sat with engineering or, you know, like, kind of— or side— you know, you have one of those, like, dotted lines, you side report into somebody, you know. And, you know, regardless of where you sit, you still end up having to, you know, influence other people everywhere internally anyway. But I would say there's a couple things in the dos and don'ts. On the don't side, I think you have to be very careful about promising anything. And this is probably true with any SEO, really. Like, you just have to be very careful with promising anything because you need to gain trust. And, you know, I, in the last couple years, I've been approaching SEO internally more like a testing thing, like trying to get everyone to understand this is more of a We gotta test and learn, you know, we've gotta see what works here on this particular site. I compare it to like our personal trainers. A personal trainer might have an 80-year-old woman and an 18-year-old soccer player, and they both wanna get in shape, you know, and you're gonna have different regimens and different things that work for those people. And it's always the same thing with a different site too. So, you know, I always mention never promise anything, cuz the same thing, just like burning bridges. If you promise something and it doesn't work out, you just can't go by best practices. You have to learn what happens, what works for that site.

Caveats and sandbagging. One strategy that I started doing a couple of years ago and I still do it today is I'll come up with an overall kind of SEO roadmap and plan. And when you're trying to get buy-in internally, everything has to be done with numbers attached to it. So you have to say, hey, look, I think if we do this, this will be the output, that will be the difference in ranking, this ultimately is the difference in finance at the end of the year. This is how it maps into the P&L. But when you start looking at an enterprise that might have, I don't know, 20, 30, 40 countries, multiple websites in each country, it becomes an extremely complex thing. So what I started doing years ago now is coming up with a plan that I felt would get accepted whilst sandbagging every possible metric. And then at the end of the presentation, after buy-in has hopefully been gotten, then reveal all of the different ways that I'm sandbagging each one of these numbers, saying, look, I think that, you know, we can generate X amount of additional revenue by doing X, Y, and Z. And by the way, that's only modeled on the current keywords that you're already ranking for. I think if we're doing this, then we're actually going to attract more keywords and we're going to do this and we're going to do that. So again, it's part of political messaging, if you like. But yeah, caveats and sandbags so that you don't fall flat on your face because there's nothing worse than being 12 months into a job and all of the targets that you put down in your first month, none of them have been reached. So you need to—

Or a range. You can use a range too, right? Like on the low side, you know, if we're shooting low, it might be here. If we're shooting high, it might be here. Depends on— I think it depends on who you're talking to. You have to understand your audience internally even just to know, like— but I think that brings up another good point is like, come with data, come with— get comfortable with projections, get comfortable with like knowing Here's what might work for this, or here's what might not work for this based on historical data, or what's in the competitive SERPs. And I think also in that, another way to use data internally is to, when you do have successes, acknowledge the people who helped out because you are always trying to get those teams to work with you. We used to have, like at Yahoo, we used to have SEO ambassadors. You know, that we would, we would have an internal conference and we would, we would give them prizes and things like that, you know. And basically, people, you know, people want to be acknowledged. You're asking them for their time. And, you know, if you acknowledge them and say, here's what these guys have done for the company, even though you really fed them all the stuff, you know, to do it, you know, they're probably going to want to work with you again.

To start wrapping up, I also wanted to ask you, because it has always taken my, my attention, that those certain type of toolset within our industry that is always sold as the enterprise-level one. Funnily enough, like a good part of those tools tend to be like all-in-one SEO suites, which I can imagine for big companies is so much easier to, okay, we spend only in one single vendor rather than splitting across so many different ones. But realistically, Me as an SEO who consults for many enterprise-level companies, it's true that you do want to have like a very powerful cloud-based crawler to be able to crawl 100 million URLs, but also at the same time, do you want a very, very, very powerful rank tracker to be able to compare your market share versus all of the meaningful competitors across, I don't know, 25 countries, things like that, right? So how do you mix? How do you select? Realistically, what is the best mix of toolsets that you have seen and come across until now?

Yeah, I think it also depends on what your situation is, you know, in-house too. You know, some companies just can shell out money for whatever tools you want. And then some companies are like, but you have to give an arm and a leg just to get a tool. And it also depends on like, like, I loved STAT for being able to build things off of it. You know, it was just, you know, you get all your data from that, and you can build your own things off of it. I loved it if you have the the resources internally to build those things. But, you know, I think there's a lot of great tools that— there's so many good tools that do all that. Like, you know, right now we're really jamming on SEMrush. You know, a lot of our stuff is in SEMrush. We're also using SimilarWeb a lot, actually, because we're looking at competition. You know, we're trying to look at this balance between paid and organic, and SimilarWeb just gives you a lot of really great Competitive data, which I've always loved so much. Love Botify for crawling. And then a lot of the side tools like Ahrefs and Screaming Frog and the stuff you just can't ever leave. You know, it doesn't matter where you go, what company you're at, you got to use those. You know?

When I stopped working in enterprise and I started working as a consultant, I was only— my business model has always been to only work with like 2 or 3 companies at the same time and basically be like a virtual VP of search. So each of those companies had pre-existing kind of tool sets that they were already paying for, already in place. A number of my clients are spending over $1 million a year on SEO tools at this point in time. And all of the big players that we're familiar with in the enterprise SEO world. And each tool, I think in my experience, has got some really great outstanding features. However, each of them also try and approach things from an all-in-one type perspective. There isn't really a tool that does everything really well individually. So you end up in the situation where, for instance, search query volumes on Ahrefs are far better than the ones that come from Semrush. However, Semrush has got a greater distribution of competitive keywords for different domains. You start finding nuances like that. And I don't think enterprise should be tied to a specific platform or a specific tool. I think To Laura's point, the most valuable tools out there are the ones that simply provide you with a firehose of data that you then tailor to your own specific needs afterwards. You mentioned STAT. STAT's absolutely fantastic for bulk rank tracking. Great tool, loved it. We used to use Orbit's SEO Clarity as well and loved that because it was able to integrate directly into our tool sets within Orbit. That was, that was an absolutely great suite. And they've all got their advantages and disadvantages. I think the ideal scenario in enterprise though, particularly when you're in the environment where it doesn't matter if you're spending $1 million a year on SEO tools, is the ability to be able to have 3 or 4 of them running simultaneously, but understand the nuance between advantages that each one has got and then leverage the learnings that you get from each one of them in that, you know, in whatever makes the most sense for you rationally at that point. We're building our own SEO tools here internally. I was a programmer before I was in SEO. And what kind of happened was it just organically started because when I started working as a consultant, I hired a couple of the larger tool companies to start running crawls on client domains at that point in time. And I was dissatisfied with the results versus the in-house tools that we had built on top of other people's platforms at my former employers. So I started building my own at that point. And basically, I'm only building on top of what other people have previously built. I am using data from many other SEO companies at this point in time, but putting them together in such a fashion that kind of makes sense to the way that I've always worked for enterprise in the past. And it's an approach that works perfectly well for us now at this point in time. You know, is it worth reinventing the wheel? Probably not. Is it worth picking up the best parts of individual tools and using the data where it's possible through their APIs? Yeah, absolutely. I think that's the best kind of rounded approach to this right now. Because, you know, certain tool companies have got one thing nailed down really well, but then the rest of their tool suite is like, oh guys, like, why are you putting effort into that?

See, the thing I believe that is from where they came from, right? Like the best suite, the all-in-one suite, who's like the stronger in links are the ones who were a link profile or analysis tool in the first place. The one, the one that provides a wealth and much more accurate search volume and keywords data are the ones who were keyword research tool in the first place. They want to grow.

They want to expand.

Then we are pushed to At some point because of budget constraints. I would love to have $1 million every year for sure.

That's for sure.

But very looking forward for your tool, Martin.

At some point over the next couple of months, it will become more public. And at that point in time, I will be insufferable tweeting about it all the time.

Well, thank you very much for your time. I really appreciate you willing to share your journey, your experience. And as you have seen, they have tons, tons, tons of knowledge. So if you have any questions, any doubts, please make sure to leave them below. And if you enjoyed this video, please remember to like it, remember to subscribe to the channel. Thank you very much for your time, Laura and Martin. I really do appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Until the next Rolling Monday, bye-bye!