Ayima Insights – AJ Mihalic talks about Managing a Billion…

Boost your digital marketing with expert SEO—get started today!

✔️Here i show you a top rated service: Click Here.

✔️And Here i show you more services.

I am AJ from I EEMA and I found out last week some pretty interesting news that you guys probably found out the same time on the IM accom insights page that i was put into a very exclusive club of the billionaire’s Club managing a billion dollars worth of SEO so that’s true and there’s a lot of things that I’m going to talk about and how to manage an account like that that are very similar to what Johan talked about and some of the things that Lauren was talking about except the scale is much different so to give you some idea of the scope in the scale of enterprise campaign that i’m talking about verizon’s total business made 131 billion dollars in revenue last year in comparison telefonica europe 13.5 billion so 10x difference for another comparison google made 75 billion this is a big company there are multiple lines of business there’s multiple websites and there’s lots of scale but scale isn’t the problem over all right it’s certain types of scale so they are huge companies within verizon they have over two million URLs in the Google index not so much a problem for us they have 75 subdomains pretty typical problem we’re working on it we deal with sites that are companies that are much smaller that have sites that have 40 million URLs right ZocDoc 40 million URLs and index so we have technology that can deal with that the challenge was working with people like this is we can’t just go around and talk to people and ask the questions like y’all and suggested because they hire 188,000 people you can imagine the size the team we have to have to support this account but imagine all the people we talked to right so the important thing for us is communication relationships how can we deal with hundreds of people literally hundreds of people during a given moth talking to us asking for something that’s important to them right another thing I talked to Lauren about is where SEOs so we know a lot about digital marketing so we can answer all of these questions you know we can do almost all the things they ask us to do we could lick their ear if they ask us to which I hope we want it but so right so how do we handle that um yeah that’s when we talk about so we have to stay focused right mate to stay focused on strategy and in particular we have kpi’s you have to meet and I’m gonna tell this story it’s not my story but it is an IMS story and it’s a bit old so you guys might have heard it before but it’s perfect for my decks you’re hearing it again we had this director at verizon that would come to us and always say where’s my hockey stick where’s my hockey stick dave and so we sent him a hockey stick for christmas there’s your hockey stick which was only a relationship we were able to develop because we were able to stay focused and not get drowned by the flood of requests coming in and have systems to deal with that and it was funny because two months before that we gave them this hockey stick right and so the interesting thing about this hockey stick is not like bragging about what we did like yeah there’s one hundred fifty percent increase here and it’s it’s really interesting right because a technical change to a site this is a migration can have a two-week impact of that proportion right you do the right things you work at a company like this that has assets out there you could do really awesome stuff but the interesting thing about this is this is hard to do we did talk to a lot of people to make that happen and we had to talk to them the right way so that’s um that’s what I’m talk about how do we manage externally client relationships and how do we manage our team’s internally so that we can actually support this type of work all right external client engagement we got to start at the beginning right why did they hire us in the first place because clearly we’re the experts and this is a picture of one of our consultants in New York his name Simon panting if you know Simon he has those glasses he’s actually a little bit older and probably more focused than this guy but inside joke sorry um yeah so why do they use an agency right where we’re industry experts where we’re SEO experts like we live and breathe this stuff all we want to do all day is learn more about how to get better at SEO so we’re specialists we also have exposure to data across different industries and we can learn how is the SERP being affected across total industries and how is it being affected within your industry right and we have tools I mean we have free tools like pulse that can show you different industry volatility really cool stuff and we have the ability to have a lot of experts in the field work together and learn a lot right so I’ll talk a little bit more about that internally so the next big thing that we have to do is is we have to make friends right you can imagine all those people trying to get our attention all the things we have to get done all of you that work in SEO know that we don’t really do anything we never get the touch verizon safe so we have to talk to their IT team and we never get to say this is the way you should market so their marketing team and us have to collaborate and their content team has to produce what we want so IT guy here and marketing guy here and executive here are never this friendly so what we do is we learn to speak these different languages and one thing that that’s like really important to understand these relationships is this IT manager right here and this marketing manager right here have totally different KPIs and if you’re a smaller company it’s really easy to be like oh our KPI is making money well you’re a big company it’s a little harder see because your bonus is dependent on I mean what’s this guy’s KPIs could be like number of things that we develop this year number of tickets we service right these are real IDK p is that we hear that sometimes create absurd workflows and projects preserving resources saving costs but the KPI is over here are a little bit more understandable you know maybe reach traffic sales if you’re a performance agency like Verizon sales so how do we get those two people to work together because we do SEO we have to do both of these things ideally we get this guy to like us I think it’s a guy and he he says yeah do what they say they’re experts that’s why we hired him but a lot of times that doesn’t happen right we were talking about that before sometimes the person who hires the agency has no idea what they do it’s pretty common less common now that people have no idea how did you SEO or what it is right and so we have to like flip that around and we have to make friends with this guy we have to make friends with them we have to make them be friends with each other we have to go out two beers after this with all you guys weird to do all those things to make sure that we can make the impact that we had make this guy notice us make this guy be noticed by him get them a promotion and have success on going so how do we do it how do we go like this and have everyone else go like that at the same time right so the IT teams really important one the first thing that we do with them always some time in our engagement and we always have to redo it because they have turnover is education and one of the most important things that we educate them about is not just basic SEO because the biggest problem we have with IT is they always already know SEO we have to teach them that Google is an advertising company and they happen to use a search engine so when they read a matt cutts article that says you don’t need to do SEO they shouldn’t listen to that article because all they want to do is crawl your site and mobile get on is a perfect example of that they hyped up the entire industry got everyone saying we’re going to affect one percent of the searches it didn’t what they wanted to do is they wanted to send ads to mobile because guess what mobiles here everyone’s on mobile and so in April they said you got to change your site for SEO and everyone made their sites mobile friendly and then in July they’re like let’s send a bunch of s to those mobile sites that are friendly now and they made billions of dollars I’ll wait let’s stay on this one so the number two thing that we have to do is speak their language so this is really important and it comes down to really under standing there kpi’s understanding the technology and understanding what they do so if i go to you know an infrastructure team or a resources team that manages the websites like the actual dev ops teams and we say hey you really have to reduce the number of requests you have to block these BOTS and are not reduced request but reduce these errors and reduce the redirect chains they’re gonna be like yeah don’t really know what you’re talking about and Matt Cutts says not to do SEO but if I come in here and I say hey we can really help you guys reduce requests we can help you save money we can make sure that the Akamai requests that Google and all these other bots are actually costing you pennies to that every request are gone then they listen because that’s what they get bonus though right and so we just made friends with this IT team so the other approaches is change your angle so sometimes sometimes you just have to talk about something that they care about maybe it’s not their KPI maybe it’s something else so we’re talking about making sure your experience is consistent across devices making sure you have really good page speed buggy and was talking about making sure that your semantic markup is good but nobody cares because they don’t know what any of that means and they don’t really see the value of it but you talk about user experience people care about user experience I mean that’s why they do their jobs right it’s in their company credo you know customer experiences like the number one thing that they care about whether they do or not it’s up in the air but but we know that they’re going to respond to that because they can say that to the boss and their boss is going to understand one of the more important things and this slide is relevant because of our four-year entertainment cycles or election cycles is you have to understand the political landscape right and a company that big there’s bound to be people that are very difficult to deal with they’re already in a system that’s very hard to navigate and you need to understand how to move the way you’re supposed to talk to the right people for instance in verizon like agencies don’t talk to people above directors only verizon people talk to people of directors so if you go around that you get in a lot of trouble but there’s also there’s also ways to leverage this the other way right so sometimes for instance a few weeks ago something’s happening and we know that we need to make sure that everybody knows about this because part of our long-term strategy is for them to understand migrations have SEO impact and there’s huge potential for a really good migration we want to do down the road and so we make sure the director is going to make the most noise and we know he’s going to make a bunch of noise and run away and watch everybody fight and we may literally be on mute watching them yell at each other is going to make the noise and that’s going to put us in a position just say what we need to about hey you’re going to lose fifteen percent of your traffic if you do this and then we get in front of the audience we need to get in front of and so sometimes you have to know when to rock the boat and know when it’s safe to do that and that takes a lot of experience it takes knowing the people it makes it means you’re friends with everyone and you know what their bosses are going to care about all right keeping with Trump the last last part of communicating external layer with clients is being concise right you have to get to the point I I can tell you that ninety-five percent of the emails that I get from a director or above is one to two sentences lucky if there’s no auto correct spelling errors in it and it has no context right so that’s how much time they have to ask me for what they want so if I deliver them a 25-page audit explaining why they need to do this thing that thing is definitely not going to get read like a hundred percent will not get rid so so how do you how do you communicate concisely it’s a very important skill it’s very important to know who to give the detail to and who to give the high level two and to speak in that KPI language right so if we do deliver a 10-page deck or a 90 page audit there’s an executive summary and it’s short and it’s one page or much much less so that’s the external side on the internal side it’s interesting so we could do a lot of things one of them is just be more efficient right as a technical agency we love using technology to empower people so if we can use technology to empower ourselves we do the key thing that we do is one of the things that most consultants are very resistant to you but we track time because if we can see certain tasks take a certain amount of time certain projects certain things are difficult for us to do we can put our dev resource to that to make a tool to make that really easy another thing that we’re able to automate is reporting sounds pretty obvious and boring but we can save hours and hours of time by automating reporting we we write we basically leverage computers to do as much as of our work as we can so for instance we have to migrate 15,000 news articles from one site to another and a lot of them are similar we’re going to write an algorithm to figure out if they’re similar and just write the redirects for us because we’re not going to read fifteen thousand articles to do that we could do someone asked about international before we can do hreflang matching look an algorithm so you just put it in your site maps without us doing all the work of like this is the german one and this is some reading on all the different languages so some really cool stuff that we can do there is technical agency the next thing is is building a system right so we have to be able to maintain the requests that are coming in and one of the most important things that we do with our clients is is we we have different ways for them to interact with us so in this case this is a form that they can enter their task and we’ll go right into our project management system with our naming convention a weekend report on it we can know immediately if this is a high priority task when it’s due and we can get it assigned out or we can push it off till later one of the most important skills that we have to develop thinking about you know hundreds of requests that we’re not going to do you know we work at an agency like we know we have to go home with stuff we didn’t do we have to be able to tell people know basically say we’re not going to do that but obviously we’re not going to say it like that we’re going to say hey we want to make you millions of dollars over here remember we’re going to focus on this this is the tool that helps us do that and so what we were able to do last year was support the IT team with four hundred twenty six hours of our time 368 tickets tested so that’s like Q aying SEO requirements and making sure that what they launched is actually right there’s a lot of time that goes into that because it’s usually not right when it gets launched and then 39 SEO releases which means we were up between the hours of 11pm and four am depending on your time zone so the middle of the night making sure that the launch the next day was going to meet the SEO requirements okay so the last two things that I want to talk about and this is pretty exclusive to agencies and how we manage it but but we make great consultants and the way we do that is we make sure that we focus on three skills that people have to be experts in a pretty broad way to say it but of course everyone here is a technical SEO so first if you want to be a senior lead on an account like Verizon you have to be one of our best technical SEOs but you also have to be really good at client services right you have to talk to all these people you have to be able talk to an executive you have to be able talk to an IT guy and those are not the same conversations and then the last part is project management you have to be able to manage all these tasks manage your team and make sure that people are not getting overloaded and burned out so being good at all three of those skill sets is kind of what we call the trifecta that’s why I’ve spent more time than I want to interviewing all the time when we have to scale but but that’s how we do it we also train people internally and that’s the last part here so we build a really really positive culture we know that people are going to get overwhelmed with lots of tasks two times we know they’re going to have negative client interactions Trump’s not a client but you could imagine yeah so we make sure that they have the support that they need to be successful we want we want everyone in our organization to see client issues as a good thing right we’re problem solver so I want to make sure that the mentality is always very very positive and strong that’s it Cheers you

Unlock your website’s potential with top-notch SEO—contact us now!

✔️Here i show you a top rated service: Click Here.

✔️And Here i show you more services.