Interviews with Rob Hughes of JDWilliams, Lukas Zelezny of USwitch and Mike Briggs of Skyscanner. These experts were kind enough to give me lots of insight into their day to day of running in house teams and how to manage the SEO function inside an organisation.

1. The Secrets of In-House SEO Teams

2. Linkdex CRO
@gincollette
@gincolle)e

4. 9 years
combined
‘in-house’
experience

5. Questions were themed:
✎ SEO representation @ C-Level
✎ Relationships & resource
✎ Prioritize workflow
✎ Monitoring Success
✎ Communication with the business
✎ What goes wrong

6. Playing with the C-Suite

7. C-Suite Representation
ü Newer, digital businesses built from the
ground-up have ‘all things digital’ represented
well
ü SEO must be represented at Director level. CMO,
Marketing Director or ideally Digital Director
ü C-Suite must recognize that SEO is an on-going
requirement, not a project
“(we’re) building a new site, we asked for a quote
with built SEO in, rather than as an after-thought.
That’s real progress”

8. Cri?cal Rela?onships

9. BFF’s
ü Content & Engineering teams
ü Communicate accordingly
“be a communication chameleon”

10. Communica?on

11. Communication
ü Be clear about industry challenges
ü Continually educate
ü Experiments are a great way of engaging
ü Transparency
“make yourself as available as possible.
Even if the request is random, its an opportunity
for education”

12. Resource

13. Who does what?
ü Outsource only commoditized & specialist
tasks
ü Keep multi-skilled team to constantly cross-
skill
ü Ensure right people are involved in the project

14. Monitoring Success

15. KPIs & Reporting
ü Ensuring that the whole organization sees the
same reports
ü Humanize reporting
ü K.I.S.S.
“wherever possible speak, rather than bamboozle
with complicated reporting”

16. Priori?za?on

17. What to-do, today?
ü Autonomy & freedom, in amongst clear team/
individual KPIs
ü Learn patience, things can take a long time
“have a monthly meeting to focus on exactly
what has been achieved”

18. What goes wrong?

19. What goes wrong?
ü Communication. The business has the same
goals, but lack of SEO understanding can mean
that things can happen with SEO team
knowledge
ü Recruiting & retaining the right people
“everything! But that’s ok, because then it gets
fixed!”

20. • Communica?on, communica?on, communica?on
• In-house team need to operate in a consulta?ve
nature and make themselves available
• Although the percep?on of working for a brand
or in-house is that it can be slow, actually the
team needs to be flexible and be able to pivot
and change direc?on as required
• In-house roles provide huge career benefit
deepening business understanding
What did I learn

21. Thank you