Tyson Stockton (3:44)

And maybe if you could elaborate too, for someone that hasn't worked at the kind of in the enterprise level, what are some of the additional challenges that someone can expect from both execution of SEO from a tactical level as well as just the operational element?

Petra Kirschic (4:03)

Yeah, I think it's just a totally different game and I do this in the course as well and I love giving analogies and stories. Right, so imagine that you're cooking in your own kitchen, you're having some friends over and you've done it a million times. It's like a familiar space. In order to prepare for that, you write a quick shopping list. But if you run out of things, then it's not the end of the world. You can maybe even ask your friends to bring a few things. You can manage that. It's not high stress. But if you're running a kitchen at a five star Michelin restaurant and there is a huge event or a wedding or an awards ceremony, it doesn't matter how many times you cooked in your own kitchen, you can be very experienced in that. But it's a totally different game and you have to delegate things. You have to manage budgets, you have to manage people. You don't know anything about their requirements. And obviously this really well shows scale as well, because I don't know if you're preparing for a restaurant that's really busy and lots of people come in, that's one thing. But I think enterprise is also that you could be cooking in your own kitchen, but a celebrity could be coming over because a friend of you is bringing over someone really important, that changes the whole stakes of the event and that's again kind of going into that enterprise territory. Some of these elements that are just making that usual process or that well prepared Checklist and all of that into something where you have to use the words. It depends. You have to use the words. I don't know. I can't just replicate this same thing because the context is different and you have to actually create systems and processes in instead of trying to just follow the same sort of steps that you've done before.

Tyson Stockton (5:51)

And what are some of those added layers from like scaling efforts? Like, I think one, I love the kitchen analogy because it's like to, yeah, you run out of fish in your home, you can just run to the store and pick up one, but you're not picking up thousands of fish just like kind of on a whim. So like, what are some of those, I guess, illustrations of the activities when it comes to enterprise, that would kind of highlight that like, I mean, content would be an easy kind of like obvious one where you're talking just easy to write three articles, it's difficult to write 3,000. But like, what other things could someone expect?

Petra Kirschic (6:33)

Yeah, I think a lot of it is the planning ahead. And yes, content feels like sort of easy analogy with like, you know, writing a few blog posts versus managing. Managing, I don't know, like thousands of product pages and the copy on them as well as like an enterprise blog that the company has and you know, all the other content that they put out there on socials and things like that. So you have to plan ahead and connect the dots and a lot of that will mean that when you start, you know, if you have to deal with the immediate challenges, you have to balance your time between that and the planning ahead part and trying to prioritize and push for getting things actually executed and implemented. So it becomes this, I guess, yeah, really cool balancing game of trying to navigate the firefighting, if that's what you need to deal with. Being involved in other people's projects as well as kind of looking at your own strategy and trying to plan ahead and trying to understand how the business works, how do they develop the site, how often do they release new code? If you're working with a small site, then it's even likely that you have access to your cms and maybe you can change a few things or you're working with a developer or two and you can kind of discuss things with them and implement changes. That's definitely very different. If you're working at enterprise level and you really need to understand the ways they work and how you can actually get your tickets in and get them prioritized. So things can take a lot longer. Plus you need to Understand how you can, let's say they are working on a project like some sort of migration already. So then how you can come in and support that and not just help those projects to actually execute well, but maybe push in some of your own tickets and priorities that. Oh, if you're changing that template, can we also add schema? Can we also do this? Just some of those little things that prioritization doesn't happen in a silo, it doesn't happen in you evaluating which one of these SEO items would bring the most value, because whatever can get executed will bring the most value. It doesn't matter if something would bring a lot of value. If it's impossible to execute because of an old CMS or because of certain limitations and blockers, you have to let that go for the time being anyway. So those are, I would say, the things that make it so challenging and complex to try to navigate.

Tyson Stockton (9:06)

Yeah, and the first piece of that, I feel like you're kind of hitting on a little bit of like the skill set or personality of someone that's going to be successful in the enterprise arena because you're adding an additional dimension or complexity to the planning process where someone that's working on a smaller website, majority of the strategy is just which items are you taking, when and when are you actually doing them yourself. Whereas true, it's like now with enterprise, you're having to fight for budgets, work off existing roadmaps, all those other elements. So I think you do have to think broader or in a more like a longer vision, because you have to be thinking of when you can get things slotted in, in addition to what needs to actually be done. But I think that type of strategizing and working with given constraints becomes so much more prevalent. And a lot of times those constraints aren't necessarily like what volume you can produce from content, but it's more of like which teams are you getting buy in, are you getting budget, are you getting the means to execute on? Yeah, you hit on a point too though, that I feel like really makes the difference between a good and great enterprise. SEO is that piece of what you can execute on. Because I think most SEOs, once they land that gig at the enterprise level, they're probably pretty solid on identifying what needs to be done. But I think in my experience, the gap oftentimes exists in the execution front. So what advice would you have for someone that's making that jump to then be successful at this level?

Petra Kirschic (11:01)

Yeah, absolutely. I think this is where the people skills element really come in, because you just have to listen first and you just have to understand the state of the business, you have to understand the politics. Who are those teams who are driving change, who are kind of making those decisions. And it's just one of those situations where to give an example, you could be working for enterprise E commerce. So my examples, I worked a lot with enterprise E commerce clients. You could be working for a luxury fashion brand where it doesn't matter how you know how big their website is, it's always going to be the brand team who kind of gives that final sign off. Like if the brand team, or let's say it this way, if the brand team is unhappy, it's just not going to happen. I had situations where it was insanely difficult to prove that we can't have a self playing video on the homepage because it's just terrible for user experience, for page speed, for every like we just don't want that. And the brand team just kept on explaining how that really shows the essence of the brand and it's very important for storytelling and all of that. And none of the other sort of reasons worked and you really had to go in with the user experience from a customer point of view, like explaining how okay, but if I'm a customer and I'm expecting a luxury experience from this luxury brand, then look at my experience. Does this feel luxurious to you? Like kind of that way that you are speaking that team's language. Whereas you could go into still an enterprise e commerce brand and it could still be fashion or any other sort of retail or any other brand where it's product who's driving everything. Because they really focus on the fact that their online business is driving the most sales and actually everything is focused around their agile development and they're organized into their scrum teams and it doesn't matter what you want to get done, you have to put in your tickets, you have to get prioritization approved and then you have to build totally different relationships. They probably still have a brand team but they probably focus on more things like their tone of voice and the content and all of those things. But they more just probably have guidelines for the website rather than making those decisions. So I think you really have to go in, listen and understand yourself who's making the decisions or who's blocking the decisions when it comes to the website. And that's a very crucial element of your people skills and to do that first. And until you do that, don't even start planning of what's wrong. I mean you can have Your little list of like, yeah, why do we have page templates that are like 100 years old at this stage and are totally not user friendly? I see huge company sites where they still have non mobile friendly pages. Like, how is that at this stage? I don't know how is that possible? But actually it happens. And yes, of course as an SEO, you would go in and you would say like, we need to change this, but it might be a very difficult challenge. You have to do that listening piece first and see where you can actually support rather than trying to drive basically.

Tyson Stockton (14:22)

And it's a perfect call out as well. It's like your SEO plan or strategy is just the table stakes in this because that's not going to determine or be what's going to make you successful at the end of the day. But I love that you called out the piece of like almost in a lot of ways, like letting go of the SEO perspective. And that's an area that I feel like some SEOs really struggle with. And I don't know if it comes from like, you know, SEOs historically have struggled to get like the recognition and the spotlight within the organization. So it's like we're almost constantly wanting to justify why SEO or search is so great, but it's like you oftentimes lose the audience whether you're talking to a CEO or CMO when you drop into that like jargon conversation and maybe like, I guess, dogpile on your example. Another great one for E commerce is page speed. It's like you don't have to pitch page speed at an E commerce company as an SEO initiative. Pitch it as a conversion play and you can almost seed it with someone else and they'll fight your battle for you to get that initiative picked up rather than trying to convince someone. While a page speed will help your rankings, it's like that's a much weaker argument than hey, we can improve conversion rate, which is going to achieve the same end result of getting resources allocated to picking up the thing that I wanted. So I love that you called out that example or illustration of you're also thinking like three moves ahead rather than just one move or one interaction or one kind of initiative in play.

Petra Kirschic (16:06)

Yeah, no, absolutely. And just to quickly add to that as well, I think the other, because PageSpeed is such a good example. But the other thing as well on the content side is eeat which people like to reference that and how important that is for Google. But actually eat almost every brand will have like tone of voice guidelines and how they want to be perceived. And a lot of that will already resonate with eat. So why wouldn't you just use the internal, you know what you're talking about, you know that you're talking about eat, but you just use that tone of voice documentation and put it like just layer it on all your recommendations that this is why we need to do it this way, because that's our tone of voice and that's how we want to appear. And it will just make a lot more sense than to try to educate senior decision makers in particular on what.

Tyson Stockton (16:57)

EEAT is, which is yeah, like no one cares. Also what EAT is as far as like a naming convention goes. But yeah, like what is within that is important to the business. But they don't like there's no value for us to be like great. They understand and remember eat.

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Tyson Stockton (18:45)

So we've made the argument where we accept that we're working in a more complex, more challenging arena. We know that our just SEO tasks are the starting point, but we are reliant on how we strategize and plan within the organization or dropping out things like jargon in our vocabulary. What else do you encourage SEOs kind of lean into from Whether it's a personal development or approach perspective piece to enterprise.

Petra Kirschic (19:19)

So one thing that just suddenly came to mind as you asked that was kind of the less is more principle, especially at enterprise and I would say especially if you're working for a large site. So I think as SEOs, we are guilty of thinking that we have to put more content out there. I mean, obviously Evergreen is growing, but I think there are still trends around the programmatic SEO and just creating very specific localized content for all sorts of audiences. But more doesn't always create more traffic, more opportunity, more conversions when it comes to enterprise, where you're managing things like crawl budgets. And it's also very difficult to scale. So I think that less is more and also having a huge list of SEO tasks that you want to get done. Again, less is more. If you are trying to push 20 tickets and none of them get done or two of those get done, versus if you would be really focused on three core initiatives that you can get done within different teams, then your energy would be going towards things that are actually getting executed. So maybe that less is more or the fact that if you prioritize everything, if everything is important, then nothing is important. So you just need to really carefully select those things where you spend your energy on. In terms of pushing internally.

Tyson Stockton (20:50)

Yeah, you're being more selective in when and where you're applying the focus and energy because you can't be everywhere in the organization and if you're trying to be that person that has all those meetings, oftentimes you're going to be, you know, chasing more than you know. To your point, like implementing I oftentimes like describing it to people too is it's like it's as if you're playing cards and you only have so many cards in your hand and so you have to be strategic of when you're playing them. Because if you play something at the wrong time, sometimes it's very difficult to go back on that. If you played that page speed at the wrong planning point in the year, then you lost the interest of the CTO or whoever it was revisiting it. It's going to be a tough kind of go. And so it's like that timing element I feel like is also very critical.

Petra Kirschic (21:47)

Yeah, absolutely. And they need to be results that then you can where people really committed. So it gets implemented in a way that people have taken accountability for it. It's not just like there we go, we've done it, but actually we've implemented hreflang. But actually there are tons of errors in there, let's say then they are saying, oh, we've done it, but they've clearly not committed to. They haven't understood why this is so important. So you can't hold them accountable because they are not taking ownership of that. They say, we've just done what you asked. But let's say you didn't prepare for it correctly and you didn't provide the right guidance, you didn't test it, you didn't approve. There wasn't that process around it. So now it's live, it's broken. It's actually not just not driving results, but maybe even causing more issues. So senior leadership is looking at it as, oh, but they've implemented it, it's not working. Why would we listen to you? So I think be very, very careful with the planning around how you're getting things done and how you're getting to a yes. When you're actually getting something implemented, like, don't get excited about like, yay, they finally put it in the sprint. Like, okay, but is it going to go live in a way that you need it to go live? Cause that's also very important.

Tyson Stockton (23:01)

Yeah, it's like you have to, you know, don't celebrate before the end of the race. Like, you still need to get something live on the site in the way that it fits that criteria. I feel like it kind of leads us a little bit into like some of the even broader, like organizational elements now, I feel like. And it's kind of an interesting overlap because, you know, you're coming off just releasing this free SEO course and I feel like education within enterprise SEO, to me it almost has its own place as being a standalone initiative. And it's not necessarily teaching SEO basics, but depending who the audience is. I feel like we have this ongoing underlining initiative to help people understand and bridge and make it really like search more approachable in that sense. So it's like you are in a lot of cases a teacher or an educator within the organization and you're creating that culture that is either going to support or make SEO like, more difficult. Have you found or is there anything that you'd recommend to SEOs that are either trying to influence that culture around how search is viewed or even just like the general basic fundamentals of search?

Petra Kirschic (24:25)

Yeah, absolutely. And I've personally always been someone who was very big on education, even to internal teams as well, everywhere I worked. So whether you're doing some knowledge sharing sessions, lunch and learns, or monthly updates on what's changing in search, that can be really interesting. And I think those are all great ideas. So it's one thing to keep in mind. If you want to do that, that's great. The other question is, are you just asking people for some additional time to commit to learning? You have to give to get as well. And I think if you're going to do these things, then what are you doing in return in terms of learning about how they work, launch and learns and these weekly or monthly sessions or something, collaborative sessions with UX teams or with devs or with content teams and social teams can be great if that's part of a wider agenda where they also share and they also teach you something and you're also learning something. And you know, that's really a win, win situation. But you don't want to be known as the person who's just kind of coming in and trying to educate everyone about why you know everything about search. And that's great and everyone should know it. Like there has to be something that other people feel like it's worth it for them. And you know, it's kind of that mutual relationship where they learn something about what you do and what's important to you because you are also learning about something on what's important to them. So the mutual goal is really to work better together rather than for them to understand search. Of course, we're likely biased. I also think understanding how search works should be part of general education because we all use Google, but then that's not the case. So we can't change that. Going into an enterprise business with that mindset, we have to focus on that mutual goal of this is really for us to work better together. And you could potentially do that by showing actual examples to, let's say the brand team, like how branded searches help certain things. Like they might not have this data and they might be struggling to show how their branded campaigns affect different things, but you could show how it impacts trends, searches, product pages as well and the volumes around there when they launch a campaign. And that would be something you give to them and would help them. So of course then they say, well, we want to learn about this because it's helping us. And you're telling us that you can actually help us measure this grade. So that's an example how you could bring it in in a way that it's really again, something that you're already giving to them rather than just saying, come sit here for an hour and watch me talk about SEO, which is.

Tyson Stockton (27:16)

Such, I think like key advice, like a couple of Things that jumped out for me is like, one being humble in the approach. So it's like you're not going in thinking, hey, we're special, we're different, we're more important than any other person in the organization or team. So there's like, I feel like a humbleness to the approach that you're advocating for, but then also a respect to it because it's like, yeah, just like an enterprise SEO is probably in meetings for six hours a day and barely has time to do those actual activities. The same thing's true for everyone else that then you're wanting to give overtime. And it's almost like, how would you feel if, you know, the paid search team wanted to teach you about campaign structure and keyword bidding strategies? It's like we're going to kind of push it away in the same way that I think a lot of people kind of disregard search. But it's a very human element. Like, we do that all the time with other stuff, so why would we be any different than that?

Petra Kirschic (28:21)

Yeah.

Tyson Stockton (28:22)

So I love that call out. What else? I would like to kind of come back because I feel like we're not going to obviously be able to cover everything within the course, but maybe if you could kind of just provide for us, like, how did you structure it? What are the big buckets of development opportunities that SEOs have as they're kind of like stepping into the enterprise arena?

Petra Kirschic (28:44)

So I would say the way how the core structure developed is probably a good guidance on, like, what you should focus on to start with. It starts with, like, how you can navigate complexity using your empathy. And that's really around those, you know, politics and people challenges and navigating things like conflict and building influence. And that I would say is 100% a key step. You need to build on those skills in order to excel in enterprise SEO. There is just no way around it. Then the second part of it is really talking about mostly technical SEO, but also it actually goes through the full search journey. I just think technical SEO is such a unique beast for enterprise SEOs that it kind of had its own topic. So that second part is going through the full search journey and that complexity and really not going into detail. So you're not going to learn technical SEO or local SEO or content from that course. But if you kind of already used other resources to learn it, you will understand how you actually change your mindset on applying those learnings into enterprise contexts. And I think that's really the crucial missing piece a lot of the time. And the third element is really on strategy and future proofing your solutions. So like really having processes and here as well. And I worked with the really great Robert Laura from Seeker Digital on some of the resources and Jojo helped a lot from Sidebulb on actually pulling together a lot of these resources as well for the course. So big, big shout out to them for all their support. We have a maturity analysis. So I had a template of maturity analysis and Robert Laura has created GPTs and different AI tools that you can use to actually assess that maturity. Because I think once you have the right mindset, then you have to get into practical action, right? And we've already mentioned this, you know, like implementation and people being in meetings for many hours. You have to understand what the culture of the business is and what their existing strategies, their tool stack, how efficient they are. And that's really part of a maturity analysis to actually go through those questions and pinpoint what's going to be the most difficult. Like some businesses are more efficient than others and you know, have, like, maybe already have a learning culture where you can just become part of that and share, you know, knowledge because they have, I don't know, like get togethers for the different teams to share lessons learned and some won't have that. So you doing that, I think is a great first step to develop your actual process and system on how you're going to work within the business and how are you going to communicate changes that come up in the future as well.

Tyson Stockton (31:33)

You hit on one important piece, I mean, more than one important piece. But like, I feel like the call out that maybe we missed earlier in the conversation is there is no one size fits all plan. And because you're dealing with the uniqueness of a corporate culture or structure or industry that they're in is you're never going to be able to apply the exact same approach to SEO at the enterprise level in a different organization. And I think like leaning into the fact of like, hey, it doesn't matter what your experience was, you're going to have to do things differently if you're taking on a new role is such a key piece that, I mean, in my mind it helps, you know, give you that perspective to then take the step backwards like you mentioned earlier, to like, really listen, understand these teams, see how you can be effective with them versus trying to just implement past known strategies or processes that you've used before.

Petra Kirschic (32:34)

Yeah, absolutely. I think even enterprise SEOs can fall into that trap when they kind of move around businesses within the same vertical and Obviously that gives you a lot of confidence in understanding the vertical and the sector a little bit in terms of how search works. If there are unique challenges in the SERPs, or different feature snippets or different algorithms that apply to you in different ways, but you still have to go in with those, sort of going with an open mindset of understanding how the culture is different because the way how they implement things might work very differently for businesses even within the same sector, even if those two companies are competitors. So I call this sometimes the experience trap. I think as you become more seasoned as an SEO and have lots of successful projects behind you, it can be something where you see something and you say, oh yeah, I've seen something similar before, so I think this would be the right solution. Of course there are elements to that and you should use that experience, but you should always stay curious and ask questions and dive a little bit deeper to really see what the context is here. Because there will always be unique elements to the context.

Tyson Stockton (33:51)

100%. It's like the way I've described it is I can see an issue or an organization, and it's like I'm going to go into it with having a hypothesis of what either the issue is or the solution is. But as I explore further and further, I'm collecting clues that are either going to validate that I did see it the right way, but then I'm not going to hold on to that previous hypothesis if I get evidence that, hey, this will not work or it's not going to play out the way that I'm envisioning it. And I think you have to constantly keep that, like, open mind of like, am I getting any evidence that should counter what my previous hypothesis strategy, whatever was?

Petra Kirschic (34:36)

Yeah.

Tyson Stockton (34:37)

All right, that wraps up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks again to Petra Kirchhej from Chameleon Journal, providing her own freelance consulting. And also be sure to check out her recent enterprise SEO course, which is for free. You can find a link in the Show Notes or also the partners site Bulb, who she worked with on it. If you'd like to contact Petra, you can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in the Show Notes or you can go on over to voiceofsearch.com where we'll have all of her contact information. If you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button on your podcast app or on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed soon. But with that. That's all for today. Thanks for stopping by and we'll see you in the next episode.

Petra Kirschic (35:34)

Sa.