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- [00:00]
Ben Shapp
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.
- [00:27]
Catherine Watier Ong
Podcast Network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts.
- [00:32]
Ben Shapp
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? My name is Tyson from Pre Visible and joining me today is Catherine Watier Ong, who is the founder at WO Strategies. WO Strategies is organic traffic Marketing partner and trainer to science based organizations. They collaborate with you and your team to ensure that you have the skills and strategy necessary to grow your organic traffic, with the goal of getting scientific answers into the hands of your customers.
- [01:12]
Ben Shapp
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 yesterday.
- [02:31]
Tyson Stockton
Catherine and I talked about training clients on using AI in their content workflows. And today we're kind of switching gears and pickering up where we left off yesterday to talk about SEO for academic journals. With that, here's my conversation with Catherine Watier Ong, the founder at WO Strategies. Catherine, welcome back.
- [02:53]
Catherine Watier Ong
Hey, yeah it's great to be back.
- [02:56]
Tyson Stockton
I love digging into these kind of like niche facets because I feel like you always uncover like little unique challenges and things, whether it's in like the operational elements of SEO or it's in the actual technical challenges they have. But today we're talking about academic journals and we were just touching on the subject. We were talking about kind of how some of these journals were like actually being monetized or having this business value, but from a broad, I guess, spectrum. What would you say is kind of like the greatest challenge that most academic journals have in maximizing their search visibility?
- [03:42]
Catherine Watier Ong
With a few exceptions, because there are a few where I can tell they have some SEO help, but most of them are absolutely brand new to SEO and they assume that the platform they're on and the developers that are hired by that platform are handling it and that they will magically be found because they have high authority. And I will tell you, I've worked with three federal agencies and now four academic journals which are, well, like all of them are names. You know, there's no magic to appearing just because you have decent brand authority. You still have to write something that is actually related to somebody's burning question, a la keyword research. You know, you still have to match those two things. Like, I remember, and this is not academic journals, but I remember when I was working with fisheries, it's the most government thing ever. They shipped me their whole list of acronyms asking if any of them should be optimized for. And the one that still makes me laugh is they had ACL on the list, which to them means something to do with the fish. And I was like, we are not optimizing for that. That is definitely related to knees, not related to whatever fish committee you're talking about.
- [04:52]
Tyson Stockton
But the search volume's there.
- [04:55]
Catherine Watier Ong
I know it is the most government thing ever. But I mean, that's the thing. They've got very smart people. They're creating stuff that's either paid for by our tax dollars but is not being found because they don't have an SEO. And I've had people in forums too, that are like, well, why are you helping out our federal website? I'm like, because I helped build HealthIT.gov from the beginning. And I will tell you, we got sandbox for six months. We had to build links. It took a while to build traffic. Just like any other brand new website. There's no magic.gov fairy dust that happens. It builds more links because it's a federal agency, naturally. But it doesn't have any magic. And same with academic journals. They've been around for a long time. They originally were in paper, they're now online. One of the ones that I helped migrate had 18 different subdomains were migrating into one domain. And one of them has been publishing the beginning part of the century, 1903. And all of that's been digitized, right? I mean, there's big websites. You can see the technical part. So, like, I have a case study on. My website was actually the first journal I worked with where as I was digging into the audit, I discovered the bane of my existence. So they had relative links and they did not have a 404 getting triggered. And it was part of the search function, so it kept generating extra folders onto the URL. So these URLs became longer and longer and longer with all these fake folders. And it was just a crawl trap. Googlebot was literally getting nowhere and the developers were contentious with the client as well as me, and they did not want to make any changes. I said, listen, out of the entire audit, do this one thing, fix this one problem. Within a month, 40,000 more keywords on Google, 1500 on Google page one. Just because of fixing the curl trap. Yeah, right. There are these things that like totally get in their way and they have no idea. They have no idea. So I usually come in and fix those things, right? We get a little bit of a lift and they're like, wow, Katherine got this great fix going, whatever. And then we work on the harder things, which is, okay, all of you, because these are big organizations. What do you want to appear for and what are you willing to track in rank tracking tool? And that is so hard. I'm on year five with one. I think next year we're finally going to tackle it. You're six.
- [07:08]
Tyson Stockton
Interesting.
- [07:09]
Catherine Watier Ong
It's really hard because it's like it was hard with the feds too. You got all these people with all these missions and all the different teams, and none of them have been held accountable for any of this either because, you know, once you track it, then somebody might actually get in trouble if something happens with that ranking. Right? And so it's just this radical change for them. Everybody I'm working with is brand new to SEO. And so all of this has a lot of change management pieces to it. You know, we talk about how to adjust people's job descriptions so that they're supporting the overall new SEO focus kind of thing. And what would be the carrot and the stick and yeah, that kind of stuff on top of, let's maybe hire you somebody internally or train the person I'm working with directly so that they have got the knowledge.
- [07:55]
Tyson Stockton
Yeah. And I feel like from that too, it sounds like, you know, you hear some SEOs kind of talking about how, you know, certain journalists or reporters could have an adverse impression of SEO of confining or constraining their creative process. It feels like probably in this area that that is kind of a big challenge in the just kind of navigating through bureaucracy and internal politics.
- [08:24]
Catherine Watier Ong
I mean, a little bit. This is why I usually do the training directly with those people. And it's like two different trainings, 3ish hours kind of stuff. Right. So we go slow. I give them all the data for them to follow me. Because, yes, I have to rework how they're writing. And they might think what they're writing is poetry. Great, but it's not found. Right. So there's a problem because the idea is not to write something no one's going to find. The idea is to write something that's actually going to be shared and distributed, regardless of whether it's the, you know, federal agency or the academic journal. Now with the academic journal, they have a unique challenge in that they have to follow Google Scholar's regulations. And if they're on a platform, there's a bunch of platforms that are partnered with Google Scholar and most of that is handled the platform itself handles the direct link to Google Scholar. But they hire me because they're having trouble with Google Search, the big Google where they get most of their traffic from. So yeah, they have a Google Scholar audience, but it's tiny. And this big Google search audience is the one that they're usually challenged by. But some of the regulations, particularly around site maps, are different. So Scholar asks for one thing and it absolutely conflicts with what would be best for a big Google search. And I've had conversations with John Mueller directly on some of the Slack channels. Not able to solve it. We're trying, but it's still a known problem. The other known problem is that they do a call for papers and it's usually strategic. Right. So it's like, I want to know more about gain of function for H1N1, right. That kind of thing. And they don't give much more guidance than that. And then they don't edit much when it arrives. Like they have an editing process, but it's not an SEO. It's not possible to SEO edit what's been submitted. Right. Maybe, maybe, maybe they could tweak a meta description and that's probably about it. So for some of the journals, it's also about like, what is something that you own that could be more evergreen, that we could strategically create and maintain that would help your overall mission? Is it a collection page, is it a podcast, is it blog post stuff you're doing? And if you don't have any of that, you probably need a little bit of that because otherwise your traffic is up and down depending on the popularity of the thing. So one of my journals was publishing a lot of COVID research and was doing really well until Google switched the algorithm there in the middle where it was only who cdc. Do you remember those days where like that was a managed, like only these websites that Google has picked is showing for Covid stuff and that hit them because their stuff was not getting shown anymore, even though it was high authority stuff. They just weren't on the list that Google was showing.
- [11:00]
Tyson Stockton
Yeah. And you also, you have like. And it total makes sense where it's like you have such a variety of authors, whether it's, you know, people within academia, you have grad students, so you have wide range of writers. And so it's more of how do we showcase and highlight this other complete work that we're not able to touch. And as you were saying that too, my mind immediately went into collections was like the first thing that.
- [11:28]
Catherine Watier Ong
Right, Collection landing pages. Right. Yeah. Which are harder to rank for. But if you want to follow a journal that clearly has got some SEO help, nature does some really innovative stuff where I'm like, you can just tell as an SEO, you're like, that was optimized strategically. Right. So they're doing some great stuff along that lines. But. But one of my journals just doesn't. Even when they rolled out their design, they don't really have much. They don't have the resources to support something that like, honestly, a blog or a podcast would be great. And they don't have either. They literally just have these collection landing pages they can play with, which makes it very limited.
- [12:05]
Tyson Stockton
Interesting now like kind of switching over to the more technical side. And I think you touched on these a little bit. But I would go out on a limb and guess that some of the, let's call them maybe like the big three problems or opportunity areas is in indexation, crawl efficiency and internal linking.
- [12:29]
Catherine Watier Ong
Yes, yes. And their internal linking is usually not strategic. The platforms don't understand the signals that big Google search uses for canonicalization, unfortunately. So they're not linking to the canonical URL or they're linking to all of the four, which is not helpful.
- [12:46]
Tyson Stockton
So really quickly, just because you made a reference to the four kind of before we jumped on for the listeners, can you give that kind of context?
- [12:55]
Catherine Watier Ong
Yeah. So what happens is they usually publish an abstract first, which is like a little summary, and then they roll out the full page. And then when they roll out the full page there's always a PDF and then oftentimes there's like an online readable PDF thing that we block so only humans can use it. But technically 4ish copies of the same thing. And the rules for Scholar and search are conflicting. And I can see in Google Search console that, you know, these URLs just fight it out. One surges and then the other one surges. And it's a huge, huge challenge, one that I've not solved yet. I'm still working on. But yeah, indexation, like everyone in the industry is like, you know, Google doesn't index everything anymore. I'm like, yes, they don't. And I've got high authority stuff written by an expert that's not getting indexed. I think there's a little tiny line where Google says it needs to have search demand. Like they only index things they think people are searching for. And I kind of wonder sometimes if that's hitting some of these articles because they're pretty niche. I work with a microbiology, you know, association and you know, for a certain audience that's important stuff to find. But general public, probably not. So I kind of wonder. But yes, indexation is a huge, huge problem. And the platforms, like I said, they just don't understand the signals that help indexation and canonicalization and how important those two are together. And so like, you know, making sure all the URLs are in the site map is usually an ongoing problem. And, and then one of the clients I worked with this last year was actually not on any of the platforms, which is an option too. Fisheries has a journal and was not on any of these platforms. And then they have their own problems because they need to get into Scholar on their own and all sorts of things can go haywire. Particularly this one had just a whoever developer, not a platform. And I just love that. It's like, what's 2024? Right? The end of 2024. And I found hidden text and hidden navigation in 2024. What year is it?
- [14:57]
Tyson Stockton
That's a fun throwback.
- [14:59]
Catherine Watier Ong
I know, it was great this year. Clearly I'm a search geek because I'm giggling about it. But yeah, so there's always technical stuff they're not aware of. Which is why I highly recommend every journal that works with me that I train one person on technical SEO. And that's a longer training because I cover all of the basics basically so that you can start troubleshooting stuff on your own. But I think it's super important now.
- [15:24]
Tyson Stockton
A while back I did an episode and I apologize to who he was because I can't recall his name on the spot here, so I'll have to dig it up and give you a shout out on LinkedIn. But he was an SEO working for a university in California, Cal Poly. And so it's where I went to grad school. So I was like, oh cool. Like familiar with these guys.
- [15:45]
Catherine Watier Ong
Yeah.
- [15:46]
Tyson Stockton
And in talking with him about kind of again, him working on SEO in this kind of like his niche of. For a university, he was calling out and going into like how governance was such a key kind of lever for him because he said, you know, you're herding cats with all these different content sources and creators within the university, whether it's teachers or faculty or students or whatever. And so I think it was like a year or so into his tenure there, he kind of switched his focus from doing the cleanup work to governance laws to kind of prevent them.
- [16:30]
Catherine Watier Ong
Right.
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Tyson Stockton
Is that something that you've seen come up in the academic journals or is it more similar to like a.
- [16:36]
Catherine Watier Ong
It's something I'm constantly trying to get them to do with the editor staff. Yeah, it's. It's something I'm constantly. Because they have a workflow flow. When you submit an academic journal, there's other stuff they ask for. Right. You can't just willy nilly create whatever. And there's an opportunity I think there to add in SEO elements. Right. Or allow the journal staff to edit your. The stuff that becomes the snippet, the title and the description. Right. At the very least either one or the two. But you know, the journal that I'm here on year six of last year, we finally started talking to the editors. Year five.
- [17:11]
Tyson Stockton
Oh, wow. So that's. Yeah. You have like elements of.
- [17:14]
Catherine Watier Ong
They move slow.
- [17:16]
Tyson Stockton
Yeah. Like government infrastructures.
- [17:19]
Catherine Watier Ong
Yeah. And they particularly have their own fiefdoms. That one in particular has historically it created all these different. Again, paper. Right. All 18 different paper journals and they independently did their own call for papers and some of like from my perspective, if I don't particularly know the science per se, I know the journals are competing against each other on the same topic in the same organization.
- [17:45]
Tyson Stockton
Yeah, well, I feel like too, I mean, going to that point is with any type of like academic journal or article that's like a peer reviewed article is you're going to have multiple variations of a similar topic on purpose because you are trying to disprove these previously established hypotheses.
- [18:08]
Catherine Watier Ong
Yeah.
- [18:08]
Tyson Stockton
So the competition between articles has to be. And I mean, and I guess too, if you're looking at legacy, you're probably having more backlinks to those older articles, which then probably leaves you with the challenge of how do you elevate newer articles? Like, is that something that you also kind of run into.
- [18:29]
Catherine Watier Ong
We don't even get there because we're so stuck on all the other stuff. Right. Because like I said, it's year six and we're finally maybe going to pick some topics. Right. Topics for the evergreen stuff. I mean, because there was a lot of technical. All of these people I migrated, so there was a lot of technical reclaiming, some backlinks, whatever. And so finally we're moving toward. Yeah, I mean this is also one where my point of contact moved on to another association, as she should. She was there for 15 years. But so like there was also kind of that stuff going on and they had a restructure and a new CEO and whatever. So there's like other factors going on. But I'm stoked that we're actually going to attempt to tackle this strategically. What do you want to appear for and what can you actually rank for? Because as, as I talked to my point of contact, they had developed all these pages over this last year without talking to me and because we had a very small retainer doing other stuff, mostly analytics. And I was like, huh, fascinating. I know for sure that topic you're not going to rank for like one of those big ones that has websites that do nothing but talk about the topic. Right. Like how are you as your. You know, this is a microbiology association and I know that it's important to them, but it's literally a topic that full websites cover, you know, which was similar to National Cancer Institute. So they never did competitor analysis and they were initially targeting the big cancer types. And I did an analysis in the breast cancer space and I actually said, don't target that, it's too competitive. You've covered 260 cancer types. Start with the least popular, where you could actually rank because their competitors are people like healthline with the nine people on the SEO team and WebMDs that's been doing SEO since before Google. And here they are barely have an in house SEO right kind of beginning. I'm like, whoa, let's take the liver disease and the breast cancer off the off the plate and let's put in glioblastoma.
- [20:19]
Ben Shapp
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- [21:47]
Tyson Stockton
Interesting. So a common I guess perspective that you've been hearing more and more within the industry is preference towards different I guess strategies in content and before. And Bernard Wong has been on this. Like, I mean I know he's talked about this a few times before. You had kind of like the legacy and I think he termed it as like skyscraper content where you have your table of contents and you're covering everything about that topic to show that you're holistically addressing it. And you know, he's advocating more for firsthand experiences net new things that you're adding to the knowledge graph or the database on whatever entities you're touching on. Academic journals by nature have a component of that where they should in theory all be either adding something net new to the community. Do you feel like, like are you optimistic on the what the future can hold for academic journals or are you.
- [22:55]
Catherine Watier Ong
Kind of like, I mean there's so much opportunity to strategically not. I don't think this is actually happening. But if you've got a couple articles that are going to launch in the next month and you know there's a larger interest in them beyond like a tiny scientific community. Right. And if you wanted to, you could also, you could watch them, make sure they get indexed, which is not happening now, but when it publishes, make sure it's in the index. And two, strategically promote them. So you could do things like embargoes and social media campaigns and paid social search and social media promotion strategically around an article launch. And then you get a wonderful snowball effect and hopefully your server stays up, because I've lost three websites in my history by doing this approach. But there is that opportunity. So if they're going to launch a new, I don't know, like, what if it's the sterilizing COVID vaccine? Right. There's some sexy stuff that's coming out. Or I think it's sexy. Some dork. I like science. But there's, you know, like for instance, I just shared on Blue sky the other day, they of developing, I think it's. University of Virginia is working on a test to measure whether or not Covid is hanging in the air. So I could like walk into a coffee shop and know whether or not I was walking into a cloud of COVID That's kind of wild. That's cool and fascinating.
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Tyson Stockton
Yeah.
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Catherine Watier Ong
And how much more visibility would that get if somebody launched that strategically versus just publishing it now? There's probably rules around publish pushing some authors versus not authors. There's some politics there. It has to do with their author agreements. So we're talking about reorganizing their rules of operation a bit. But it's a huge opportunity and it.
- [24:34]
Tyson Stockton
Wouldn'T be such a terrible thing to get a little more academic journals in social media instead of the standard clickbait. So that would be a win. Win.
- [24:46]
Catherine Watier Ong
Yeah. Which is why they're all on Blue Sky. Because on Blue sky, they don't suppress the links. So if you're all SEOs, you're not on Blue Sky. She's not a Blue Sky. So if you've been paying attention on every other social platform, if you put a post out there with a link, your post does not get a lot of visibility. If you put a post out without the link, you get more visibility. Right. Because they suppress the ones with the links. Except for Blue Sky.
- [25:08]
Tyson Stockton
Interesting.
- [25:10]
Catherine Watier Ong
So, yeah, there was an. Actually one of the journals, I forgot which one wasn't like New York Times, it was like Fortune or something. And they were talking about how much more traffic they're now getting from Blue sky than they ever got from Twitter because the links are not getting suppressed. You're going to see a lot more journalists wandering over to Blue Sky. And delightfully, you're also seeing cutting edge news happening like it used to on Twitter. And that was the thing I liked on Twitter. So, you know, you've got the North Korea, South Korea thing that was just happening today and yesterday and it's barely covered anywhere except on Blue Sky. You actually get the commentary and you can understand the conflict and stuff.
- [25:44]
Tyson Stockton
That's super fascinating.
- [25:46]
Catherine Watier Ong
But all SEOs should go to Blue sky because of the link thing.
- [25:49]
Tyson Stockton
Yeah, for sure, for sure. Last, last question I want to throw at you and it's gonna be a hard pivot. Okay, you mentioned a little bit back kind of we're not there yet with this client and you mentioned some of the kind of, hey, we're just getting to this point after year six. So for me that automatically kind of flags one, a positive of just like longevity with clients. But then it also shows you're playing the long game. And I think a common frustration from SEOs out there are not being able to get things done because maybe it's organizational blockers, budget demands, whatever it may be, but it feels like just kind of through some of your comments that you're looking at it as the long game and you're kind of working through that. Would you have any tips for the listeners out there? Kind of, maybe some of the younger SEOs of how do you have that focus on the long game? How do you keep motivation, persistence, like how. How do you have that right mindset to then be going down that I.
- [26:58]
Catherine Watier Ong
Have a lot of tolerance. So I just mentioned I spent five years at a PR firm. So I started there because I met my future boss elsewhere and I wanted to work for him. So that's. I started moonlighting as a consultant, help them write this proposal that helped them win the business promoting electronic health records. And I built out healthit.gov and the digital strategy and helped build the website and stuff. But what I didn't realize I was doing because I was really just focused on working with him because I'm very fond of him, was I was putting myself in a place where generally to work at a PR firm. You start as an intern coming from PR education, right? So you got PR at school, you do an intern and then you build your way up. There's a few people that are hired externally at the senior level for the most part. That's the feeding for everybody in pr, which means I went to school for marketing, of which PR is an arm, right? But there's like all these arms and just PR is one of them. These kids have never got that background. This took me three years to figure out. So here I am. I was the first hire doing digital marketing and analytics. For the first year, I was it globally for SEO or analytics. I touched 65 clients my first year. And every conversation I was like, who's the target audience? What's the goal? And I got deer in the headlights. They were like, we don't even know what you're talking about. We just want to generate impressions. Wait, wait, wait. I want to put analytics in there and direct the conversion. They're like, what? What's a conversion? I mean, the whole conversation. So what I ended up doing, because I eventually built a team of nine, is I took a calendar on the wall and every time we had a tiny little movement from another team that seemed like they were starting to get it, we wrote it on the calendar. Because every conversation was challenging. It was a slog. Because you're doing change management, you're trying to change the environment of the organization. And now I work with clients that are similar. They've been doing this stuff this way for a long time. And I'm coming in usually because somebody high up, like the CFO or CTO has brought me on board because they want to make sure that they're not losing traffic. Either they've lost traffic or they're going to move or whatever. Right. Usually they've had a moment of crisis. So I've got from up high, I've got support for what I'm doing, but it's changing their workflow, it's changing their entire focus of what they're doing. And that's tough. I've been through some change management when I worked internally. I know what that's like as an employee. It's slow, it's tough. You need to keep working with upper management to rework the job descriptions and what people get rewarded for and all that kind of stuff. And that takes time, you know, takes a long time to put all that kind of stuff in place. It's not, it's not quick. I'm not walking into an Internet first business. These were not Internet first businesses. Right. They were paper first.
- [29:46]
Tyson Stockton
That's such a good call out too. Where it's like, for especially some of the people that have been at these companies for so long and given the nature, I would say it's probably not uncommon to come across people, you know, working for these journals for 10, 15, 20 years, that it's like their world is changing and they're having to adjust and update and whatnot, which over time sometimes get more difficult.
- [30:13]
Catherine Watier Ong
Which is why I try to train them, because I don't want them to feel like they're gonna lose their job. And I will say now that I've trained a ton of people because I trained a lot of people. Catch them. Trained the team. Seven of the team of nine. So seven were straight from college. So I trained a lot of folks in my career. And I will say, based on my ketchum experience, not everyone's trainable. There are some people where it's like a lost cause, but I would say that more like three quarters of the people are trainable. Like, if they have the desire, if they have the interest, if they're curious. Obviously, as an SEO, you have to be curious. You could maneuver and train people like. I had one of my first clients when I first started my current business. I'd met at a search show. This is dating me. It was SES Chicago. So it was like forever ago. But she sat next to me and she was panicked because she was a social media person, like, cute cat, social media type person. And she was told she was working at a big ag publisher, millions of pages. She was told that she was supposed to do SEO, and she was there, panicked about how to figure this out. So I told her, since Bruce Clay was there, I said, no, I started with Bruce Clay's training. That would be a great place to start. So she did that. But then she came back to me and she's like, I actually want you to help me, Catherine. I honestly was there to save her job. And so we worked together on a technical audit, and I trained her and coached her for a year, but she's still employed there. She's now in the development department, still doing SEO. And the last time I talked to her, she was like, deploying schema using Google tag manager. See, that's the stuff I love. I actually saved her job. Right. She's still there. She's thriving.
- [31:47]
Tyson Stockton
Yeah.
- [31:47]
Catherine Watier Ong
So my focus is to just. The Internet's not going away. You know what I mean? Like. Like, I know these people started from print, but come with me. It's not that hard. I have a formula of training you on SEO where you will get it, I promise.
- [32:00]
Tyson Stockton
And it's such a to that piece too. It's also such a rewarding element to then help someone else. Either I Mean, in your situation, save a job or get a promotion, that sort of just like progression that you can see in those individuals. And I feel like I've been a broken record on this subject, but I feel like. And this is being on a soapbox a little bit, but it's like I am a huge proponent in pushing kind of SEOs to embrace and lean further into empathy. And oftentimes it's like, Too often as SEOs, we're always frustrated of how engineering won't pick up this ticket. But it's always in the sense of like, I get it. So why don't they get it? They should just listen to me on it. But it's. Maybe there's an understanding of it. Maybe you didn't make your business case clear enough. Like, maybe there's also a problem in how it's being presented to them. But I think both what you're saying, it starts with that, like, okay, where is this person coming from? How can I meet them?
- [33:04]
Catherine Watier Ong
Yes, I was floored at catching because I just told you these kids come from school and an intern and then they're like some associate level, right? So they've never done anything on the outside. And I was director of marketing at an organization, right. And I hired consultants and I was actually at a startup inside the Points of Light Foundation. I was hired number one. So I know what it's like to attempt to manage all of the marketing and sales by yourself. And like, your life is just bonkers. And when a consultant calls you, you have to like, triage that amongst everything else you've got going on. Anyway, I would walk around and see, see both. See it on email and phone that these PR kids, if the client didn't call them back, they were trained to harass them. Basically, they would, like, keep calling and emailing and whatever. And I'm like, have you ever thought about what they're doing with their day? Oh, it was aggressive. I mean, I would get it too. They would try to track me down in the same way because it was like part of the culture there. But I was like, wow, yeah, that's tough. Have some empathy for your client. They. They have to go to their own internal meetings and then the HR thing that everyone's required to go to. And you know what it's like when you stack your day working it somewhere, right. And you do not have infinite time to answer phone calls from all your consultants.
- [34:15]
Tyson Stockton
Especially the cold calls. Yeah, there's nothing worse than the cold calls.
- [34:20]
Catherine Watier Ong
Unbelievable. Anyway, yeah, that was striking to me because I was the opposite. I was like, okay, I have a feeling, I have, I have a sense of what you're doing. I'm one of many, many things you're trying to balance at the moment. Right. Let's be respectful of your time too.
- [34:34]
Tyson Stockton
Couldn't agree more. And I think in general I share a lot of your same kind of, I guess, fundamental philosophies and how to approach this, how you lean into the education aspect. I think again, more and more that we can advocate that the better for the industry and the community at large.
- [34:54]
Catherine Watier Ong
Also, there's a need for more well trained SEOs in the industry, I would argue. I don't think we're saturated yet. I still think there, there could be.
- [35:03]
Tyson Stockton
More, more training, more education and SEOs out there. Don't forget to lean into empathy because it's something we don't do enough.
- [35:12]
Catherine Watier Ong
Exactly. And related to that, I cover soft skills on my podcast. You have a perfect lead into that. So feel free to check out the podcast on my website. You can just find it@digitalmarketingvictories.com but we cover, or we're attempting to cover all of the soft skills that are critical for you to be successful as a digital marketer.
- [35:31]
Tyson Stockton
Absolutely. And again, be sure to check out that. We'll actually go ahead and throw that into the show notes too, so you can have a reference there. But with that, that's going to wrap up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks again to Katherine from WO Strategies for joining us. And again, if you'd like to get in touch with her, you can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in the show notes. You can find her on Blue Sky. You can also check out her company's website@wostrategies.com and again, be sure to check out her podcast for some of those soft skills in SEO.
- [36:07]
Ben Shapp
Okay. Thanks 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, 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 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 will answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is benjschapp 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.