← Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
How To Manage A Cross-Functional Team
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- [00:00]
Podcast Announcer
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast. A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts. Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search podcast, Tyson Stockton.
- [00:43]
Tyson Stockton
Hey, what's going on? Welcome to the Voice of Search Podcast. My name is tyson from Previsible I.O. and today we're going to be chatting about cross functional team management. And joining me today is Ratam Galt, who's the head of SEO at WalkMe. WalkMe is the world's first digital adoption platform.
- [01:03]
Podcast Announcer
This podcast is also sponsored by Ahrefs. What if I told you that you could monitor your website's SEO health backlinks and organic rankings at no costs? Sounds too good to be true. Well, it's not, because my friends at Ahrefs just launched Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Ahrefs new Webmaster Tools product quickly helps you improve your site's visibility by pointing solutions to over 100 technical issues that might be holding your search performance down. Plus, AWT monitors for backlinks so you'll know the most linked to pages and how those links are affecting your rankings. And AWT shares what keywords your website ranks for and compares how you stack up against competitors for key metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty and traffic value. Look, monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools and now, thanks to Ahrefs, that's not the case anymore because AWT will help you monitor your SEO, health, backlinks and keywords for free. And no, it's not one of those 14 day free trial offers. It's a powerful site audit tool that will keep working for you for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.comAWT that's a H R E F S.comAWT and.
- [02:22]
Tyson Stockton
With that, here's my conversation with Ratam Galaxy, head of SEO at WalkMe Ransom. Welcome to the podcast.
- [02:29]
Ratam Galt
Thank you very much for having me, Tyson. Hope you're doing all right.
- [02:32]
Tyson Stockton
Yeah, so I'm kind of a sucker for the topic today. I like to, you know, talk a lot about kind of the some of the soft skills in SEO and how, you know, we are Forced to be able to play with a variety of team members. Like we have the overlap with work from more of like the marketing and content side of an organization, but then we also have the needs and the requirements to be able to work with engineers and developers. So I think SEOs we have kind of this unique challenge where we have to essentially be able to work with and almost indirectly manage a variety of stakeholders that we may not have direct like reporting lines to. And so it has this heightened sense or this heightened need for these soft skills to be able to work with such a variety of stakeholders. Maybe from your perspective, how do you think of the needs in SEO for this kind of cross functional management?
- [03:35]
Ratam Galt
Great. Well, it's a very important topic because from my experience and I've been to SEO for nearly 15 years, you are always working with cross functional team. You're always working with freelancers, much like you said, whether it's content writers, graphic design, dev team, product marketing. And again I'm working for WalkMe which is a B2B company, over 1,000 people and we have people basically everywhere. We have people in the States, I'm based in Israel, we have people in Japan, Europe, uk, France. So it's really a challenge to work with such a big team, but more specifically with SEO. And before I answer that I have to share some experience from my, my past with SEO. So just like I started to answer the question, I've always been working with people from all over the globe and I noticed that, you know, with freelancers or agencies you kind of like pay them their deliverables. You get there once a week, once in two weeks you see it and talk about results and KPIs and they show some nice slides and then you are going to each and separate way. So it's WalkMe. I wanted to do something that it's a little bit different and it's kind of helping me connect the gap between freelancers and people who are working not next to me and giving them a sense of team. So what do I mean by that? Each individual for my team and I manage a team of in total one colleague from Israel and eight people. Right now they are mostly based in the uk but a year back they were all over the world from Asia to UK to Eastern Europe. So it's very all over the place. You know, try to book a conference call and then oh, it's GMT plus 2. But for him it's minus 4. And then you know, when you get everyone on the team like they're all hands, just to see everyone on the zoom slides. It's very fun. So I decided to build plan for those specific team exactly as I would do with my colleague in Israel, where we have weekly meetings or bi weekly meetings where we have goals and KPIs and kind of like give each and every person his own room to express himself to get to know them better, to talk about personal life because they think it's very important, especially if these are people that you have never seen. You know, with COVID 19 people started to work remotely. They fell in love. It's very convenient for people who have family. I myself, I have three small kids and I come to the office twice a week, three times at home and it's very convenient for me. And when I built the team from all over the world, I had a dream, which is spoiler. We all met at Brighton SEO last year in the uk. They all came from all over the globe for kind of like Christmas and stayed until April. And it was the first time we saw each other in real life. But I believe that in order to create a good cross functional team is first of all to have some sort of active channel of communication. Whether It's Slack, Skype, WhatsApp, each one has his own preferred methods and kind of like get the talks going on. So for our group, what work best is WhatsApp. And 90% of the conversations there are about movie recommendations and pictures of cats, pictures of people traveling the world or doing fun during the weekend. Sometimes we would have like professional message. Like those messages are for separate groups, but it's kind of like to get everyone engaged and in communication and kind of like feeling like a team. Because if you work in a silo method and you are in your own home and you've never met anyone, you don't have a sense of a team. Sometimes you might send the deliverables and you won't understand what am I doing, what I'm doing. So I'm also combining everyone, whether it's the graphic designer, the data analyst, to the all hands to talk about the bigger picture and how their job is moving the needle and it's contributing for the entire SEO strategy that we have.
- [08:26]
Tyson Stockton
Excellent. And you hit on a few I think really key components there that I want to just like reiterate or highlight for the listeners. So I think the first piece you know, that you're advocating on is largely around communication. And so I think it's very easy for us to get caught into the more, more serious like work topic communication. But like your example of using WhatsApp, I feel like that has this play on more building like a sense of connection to the individual. And I think a lot of times when people have moved from in an office scenario to working remote or even in the scenarios where you're working with global teams and everyone maybe in an office but different places of the world, like you have this need to just build the sense of community and connection with the individuals. And then obviously you have kind of like the more business workfront piece. And then also I like the component of even though you are in a remote workplace, you're with a diverse team across disciplines as well as geographic locations, having that time or that space for the in person interactions. And I think I'm a believer where it's both are possible in person or remote. And it's not necessarily one is better than the other. One can be easier in certain ways, the other one has certain advantages. But it's more of not trying to recreate the experience of working from an office remotely, but trying to achieve the same objectives. And I think your piece on the WhatsApp group and whether it's in WhatsApp or Slack or Skype, wherever it may be, it's just creating that connection with the individual. So it's not just a name. And they can associate that name with an actual person and have more of that meaningful connection, which then I think makes everything else when it comes to actually executing on the work that much easier. That much kind of just greases the wheel, so to speak. And in, in your explanation you had several different work functions. So you talked about graphic design. There's obviously going to be some more technical folk. Content writers. Yeah, everyone within that group I think tends to almost like speak a slightly different language. And like if I'm talking to SEO to someone in marketing, it might be a little bit different than how I might talk to someone in product or engineering. How do you kind of deal with that kind of relating with people on SEO from such a diverse group and background and they're coming with different levels of experience awareness. Like how do you kind of bridge that to accommodate for people coming from different levels of understanding and experience?
- [11:22]
Ratam Galt
So first of all, I think that it's a combination of hiring people who a lot better than me in certain aspects that kind of like complete me. For example, my, my colleague from Israel, Matan is the technical wizard and he understanding technical SEO like no other SEO that I've met until today. Perhaps my former boss was very into the technical domain, but he's just few levels above Me. So it's kind of like whether it's the simple stuff that I want to understand and go a little bit deeper, but then I know when to stop me. And not to go very down in the rabbit hole because my forte is around content and outreach. This is where I come from, also from pr. This is my background. But when I took this role as the head of SEO, I also started to expand my knowledge with technical SEO. So first of all I will kind of understand what plan do I want to build, but also what kind of person am I looking for in my team. So I always know when to stop myself, even though it's really interesting because lack of time and lack of focus. But every once in a while I will have a session with him where I will go a little bit deeper and then zooming out and looking at the other members of the team. Most of them come from different level of expertise, so I really try to start from the end, show them the results, explain to them how we got to the results. In our case, creating an opportunity with the pipeline and then going backwards, like looking what made this opportunity. Okay, obviously I'm looking only the SEO channel, disregarding the other channels. And then I'm like, okay, this conversion came from an ebook. This ebook was written by this guy. This ebook appears on these pop ups on these landing pages. This content is ranking for this search query. This is the user intent, this is how we built it, and this is how you contributed to the entire pipeline. And then what I think it creates a sense of, first of all, they are very proud we have something that is called Happy Tuesdays, which is basically I'm looking at their work and whoever like made a significant impact, whether by creating new content or update some old piece that made like a huge impact and got to the first page, I would take a screenshot and I would give kudos to the member of the team and they can also see how their work is contributing. Other than that, we have like sometimes one on one professional sessions. I record from time to time short videos. It's really important for me that people will stay really, really focused. And the movies, the tutorials would be very short. Like SEO is such a never ending topic with a lot of stuff to learn. So you can go like down the rabbit hole really easily and lose yourself. And then they miss the KPIs of writing an article. So I try to take like small stuff, break it down into a few components, build to them like a syllabus where they can take each time a component and add them to their work and see how the difference that it makes.
- [15:08]
Podcast Announcer
Time for a one minute break to hear from our sponsor, Pre Visible. So you're looking for SEO help and you got a couple of options. You could start replying to spam from agencies that claim they can get you to rank number one on Google. You can pay an hourly rate for a consultant who will inevitably nickel and dime you with hourly charges. Or you can work with a cookie cutter agency to quickly launch a strategyless project with low success rate. None of those sound very good now do they? Well, that's where Pre Visible's integrated consulting model comes in. Pre Visible draws From a collective 40 years of SEO and digital marketing experience to unlock your organic growth opportunities. They build custom solutions that combine strategy, technical expertise, content and reporting to effectively operationalize SEO for your business. Pre Physical's four stage approach ensures that your SEO programs thrive by starting off with a strategy first approach. Then they support you in your efforts to create quality content, help you identify technical issues, and most importantly, they'll work with your cross functional teams to integrate your SEO strategies to make sure that your SEO budget actually drives results, not just your agency's bottom line. So join brands like Yelp, eBay, Canva, Atlassian Square, all who rely on the SEO consultants at Pre Visible. For more information go to Previsible IO. That's Pre Visible. P R E V I S I B L E I O.
- [16:37]
Tyson Stockton
Such a, such a great point. And I think a lot of us SEOs, like we have a tendency to get into the weeds and get into just the specific tactics or requirements on different assignments, tickets, whatever it may be. But I think that recommendation of taking the extra time to show okay, this is the larger vision or strategy, this is how the work is, aligning or supporting to this different business goals is such a critical aspect because, because not only are you kind of further encouraging that engagement of the individual, but I feel like you're also then giving the opportunity to the individual to also maybe make new contributions that you didn't prescribe. And I think that's like something that's really, really key is a lot of times, especially in the case of working with freelancers like you kind of fall into this. Well, I'm just going to assign them this specific one task and it works in the sense that you'll get that one specific task out of them. But I feel like you're not fully maximizing the potential from the individual because if you're saying, hey, this is what we're doing, this is why we're doing it, this is how it's making an impact. And then you're giving a request for a task to them. They have the opportunity to maybe come with additional ideas of hey, we could actually do this or we could actually add upon it from that. So you give that opportunity for them to apply their specialty knowledge into that overall kind of goal and strategy. Maybe one area, because I feel like in SEO we have these kind of two sides. Like in some cases, if someone's working within maybe like a large enterprise, sometimes these cross functional team members or other internal team members working on other teams. And then there's also the scenario of working with maybe freelancers or contractors that aren't fully like full team members in the sense of they're not like a full time employee, but you know, they are working and being like asked to deliver on the body of work. Have you ran into like any challenges or limitations working with contractors because they may not be, you know, fully committed just to the one company. Like they may have other projects, other clients that they're working with. And also we have limitations in, you know, how we can prescribe work, what requirements we can have. A freelance contractor versus a full time employee. Like how has it worked for you working with more freelancers? And like what challenges have you faced working with freelancers that may not be as present with full time employees?
- [19:37]
Ratam Galt
So first of all, it's a really good question and I will make a distinction between a freelance and an agency. The way that we work with freelancers, at least in my team, the SEO is that the freelancers are full time. Just because I've been to that roadshow where I work with the freelancers, I pay them fair task and then, you know, somebody would offer them more money or they would just want to go on a trip, which totally makes sense for both ways. Like this is the freedom and the beauty about being a freelancer. But on the other hand, the time it would take me to find a new writer, get him on board or test him, then get him on board, get him familiarized. I think that B2B, especially in Israel, where it's very technical, you have FinTech and you have cybersecurity and it's not just writing about like product reviews, which I don't, I don't disrespect, but it takes, I think a longer or onboarding. So the freelancers, they are a part of a team which they are full time. And what do I mean by that? They have the flexibility of working when they want, whenever they want and take on other clients. But they are committed to certain amount of KPIs for me, which we decide on a certain amount of time. And in return what I provide them with is the guidance, the help, the byline on our website if they are meeting certain goals, building a path for their career. So what I'm trying to do is not to look at them as freelancers, just to look at them as a long time team. And I'm happy to say that this model has proven itself. I have a team where I think like the youngest member of the team is working for me for a year and a half, something like that. Most of them work for me two years, almost three years. Like I always had good relationship with freelancers, even if it was one time off. But I think that right now I hit the jack spot. Like if someone here is listening and is writing with freelancer writers, try to build some sort of plan for them for the long run. With KPIs, with goals, with personal development, with free time, with lectures and whatnot, any support that you can give them. And in return you will find someone who is loyal to you and you make a great connection and you actually get to see him level up as they go along. Vence's Agencies I used to be in an agency, so I know how it works. First of all, it really depends. If you're coming to a great agency that they are just starting, you will get 100% focus and effort just because they don't have a lot of clients. The issue starts when the agency is so damn good that they are starting to see a lot of clients and the agency is starting to grow and things fall through the cracks. So you might get a junior account manager or a junior SEO, you might not be the one who's paying them the most. So it's a business. At the end of the day you will get less focused. So I'm very, very careful. If I'm working with agencies and I prefer to work with like the boutique agencies, I wouldn't necessarily go to a 100 person agency that are well known just because I would know that I wouldn't get the same amount of focus that I want from them if I'm looking for it. So hopefully that answers your question.
- [23:40]
Tyson Stockton
No, it's, it's excellent. And I feel like a common theme across like these recommendations is really leaning into like the personal motivation side. And I think regardless of, you know, the recommendation of having an open thread where people can share things that are going on with their life and creating that personal Connection as well as, you know, your last recommendation on spending the extra time for the career development, it's all gain or it's all geared around kind of maximizing the contributions that that individual can make. And I think anytime that you go through a turnover, whether it's like a turnover with a full time employee or a turnover of freelance contracts you're working as, there's that opportunity cost of ramp up period. And I think the recommendations that you're giving is, yeah, you're going to spend some additional time in this and it's not like it's something that's necessarily easy to do. Like, you have to take the time to engage with them on those other channels. You have to take, take the time to create that career plan. You have to take the time to give them the big picture of what the company's trying to do. But I feel like at the end of the day you're going to get back a lot more. And if you're able to reduce or kind of mitigate those risk of turnover and nutrition that happens in running a business, ultimately it's going to save you way more time in the long run. Because every time you have to onboard someone, you, to really set them up for success, you have to put in a lot of time into the individuals. So spending that extra amount of time that they feel like their personal needs are being met, they can see how it's helping them progress and develop as a individual and they can see how it's benefiting their personal career growth, then you ultimately can get a better contribution out of them and you can have a more focused, a more dedicated, a more capable individual working with you from your, from your side. What's, what's been your greatest challenge in working with individuals on, you know, coming from a variety of these backgrounds, like, what's been the hardest challenge for you that either you've come back to or you feel like you're still kind of faced with like, what is the biggest challenge from your eyes?
- [26:12]
Ratam Galt
I think that the biggest challenge is, is making them like again, I would say at the end of the day, live your life, work as much as you want. You get to decide like with me, the KPIs, but then kind of like I want to make them fall in love with SEO. I want to make them like become more passionate and research more and deep dive and come up with like, you know, because I'm very open minded for other perspectives and plans, much like you said. And I think that right now it's really hard to, to motivate people to work more. It really depends where you are in life. But again, I remember the days just when I had one kid or two kids working 12, 14 hours. And obviously I don't expect. I think everything in life should have like a balance, you know what I mean? Like you said about working from home has the benefits, working from the office and it changes according to a person where he is in life. But sometimes I really hope for like people would, would say this is so amazing. I want to deep dive more, I want to spend my free time and just instead of going to the gym during the weekend or the cinemas, I'm going to take a mini project. I'm going to open my own site. I think this is like the biggest challenge in my opinion to make people sound cheesy and corny. But I think that SEO, SEO and content, they are very, they are very fun. It's kind of like solving a mystery without a solution where you keep seeing the light progressing but it's always changing, it's always moving. I think it's really exciting. Especially when you see that a change that you did made an impact and you are moving up the ladder and you see it and you are becoming on the first page and then on the first page on the top three position and then how does it look at the search console? How much more clicks did you made and those clicks, did they turn to opportunities? How much money did you brought in? And I think watching all of this, it's very exciting, at least for me and it's very rewarding. You know, it's like people who are starting to work out, they have like beginners game and they gain a lot of muscle and they will keep coming back but when they will hit a plateau they will kind of have like, okay, I don't want to go to the gym today. Who likes to work out? And then when you, when you are not seeing the results, it's really hard to put the work. So this is obviously my biggest challenge.
- [29:07]
Tyson Stockton
Absolutely. And maybe kind of like similar on that point. I feel like when I interact with people and maybe I'm doing training sessions for a client and you know, like just the other day I was working with one of our clients that's a news and media publisher and so I was doing a training session around SEO on page SEO best practices for some of the content creators. And so these are journalists, reporters, people that aren't necessarily SEOs. And I think with that group in particular, I'm quite, quite aware is like sometimes, you know, writers Will have previous impressions of like, oh, well, SEO is confining or restrictive on the creative process. So they have a negative perspective towards SEO that you're trying to kind of like combat. When you're faced with those kind of challenges where people maybe had a bad experience working with SEOs in the past or bad experience working with an agency in the past. Past. What recommendations would you have to kind of, you know, almost reset? Like, start with a clean slate around SEO? Or like, how do you kind of break down maybe some of those past experiences or past interactions with SEO that maybe weren't as positive?
- [30:29]
Ratam Galt
Do you mean, like, when other people are against SEO? That's an easy one. I would just pull out the search console from previous work and I would say, okay, so you wrote this great article or this great thought leadership, or you had this great idea, but in the past year, how many people read it and why? And then you kind of like, it is a great idea or it's refreshing or new. But SEO, you got to, you got to play by the rules. We didn't make the rules. But if you want exposure and if you want people to enjoy your content and move the needle, you have to be on the search engine. It's like one of the famous jokes. Where is the best place to hide a body? On the second page of Google results. Because if you're not on the first page, nobody will click at your content and nobody would read it. And basically only 20% of even less of a website, it's ranking and you get a traffic and most of the pages, they won't get the traffic. So I mean, if it serves the purpose, if it's super important, especially in B2B companies, something that investors want or something that other clients want. Okay. And I have those interactions with people. Like, this guy wrote this article and he wants to publish it on our blog. What do you think? Listen, I'm not against it. It's everyone's blog. But be aware that we won't receive any traffic from it. But if you want just to post it just for the sake of it, I'm not against it. But if people really come and tell me, rotem, we have this topic and we want to promote it. What should we do? Like, how should we structure the content? What should be the H1? What questions should we answer? How can we contribute from our personal or our professional experience? Then we would sit down and build an outline. But we have to play by the content tools, like all them.
- [32:37]
Tyson Stockton
Fair? Fair. Well, I think the big takeaway for me from this conversation and hopefully everyone listening also takes note of it is the human aspect. And to be spending that extra bit of time to build a team, build a sense of community within the team, a sense of connection, and also give them that opportunity to have their own professional career development and have their own opportunities to progress. And ultimately the payback as far as what you're trying to achieve is going to be so much greater. And with that, that wraps up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks to Ratam Gaul, Head of SEO@walkme, for joining us in part two of this conversation, which we will publish tomorrow. We're going to be talking about digital adoption and SEO. If you can't wait until the next episode and you'd like to learn more about Ratam, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in the show notes or visit his companies@walkme.com okay, thanks.
- [33:46]
Podcast Announcer
To Tyson Stockton, our guest host. If you'd like to get in touch with Tyson, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter where his handle is TysonStockton. Or if your team is interested in SEO consulting or organizational education, you can always head to their company's website, which is Previsible IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O and a special thanks to Ahrefs for sponsoring this podcast. Monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools, but that's not the case anymore. Thanks to Ahrefs because they just launched their Ahrefs Webmaster Tools product which monitors your SEO health, helps you keep track of your backlinks, and gives you the insight into what keywords are performing for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.comAWT that's Ahrefs a h r e f s.comAWT just one more link in our show notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com, where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is Ben jschapp B E N J S H a P. And if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day during the work week. So hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.
- [35:32]
Tyson Stockton
SA.