Leeds SEO

For our first SEO.BIO of 2010 I though I’d turn to another in-house SEO friend of mine, Robert Nicholson. Rob works for Easynet Connect and can often be found where other London-based SEOs gather (SES/SMX London, LondonSEO, etc). He’s a really great bloke with interesting experience working in mainly B2B SEO.

Before we go any further, can we clear up something… what’s all this Bothan business? Something to do with a former cricketer?

Ha, wondered when that would come up… Ok so when I first started learning SEO everyone had their avatar, and no-one really joined forums etc with their “real name” (yes I’m looking at evilgreenmonkey and rishil here!). So when I signed up to be a pro member at SEOmoz I thought, well Rob.. and Bothan came from a Star Wars race – the ones who steal the plans to the Death Star. Thus RobBothan suitably geeky I thought! So at some point I do need to move across to RobNicholson.

OK, next thing to clear up… what the hell is a “Digital Customer Experience Analyst”?

Well I won a competition to have the longest job title… no really it addresses the fact that I look at everything on the customer experience side at Easynet Connect – from SEO to Usability and how the CRM system deals with them.

Final thing to clarify, who are Easynet Connect? Aren’t they just Easynet (Sky’s ISP)? What’s the difference?

Easynet Connect is part of the Easynet Group, established in 1994 and now owned by BSkyB. Easynet Connect is one of the leading providers of quality connectivity and internet access for small to medium size businesses, such as leased lines, SDSL and 100Mbps Fibre.

With those things sorted out, tell us a bit about how you got into SEO.

Well it was in the days of optimizing per keyword, and I was running an ecommerce website. As part of the site launch we looked at expanding the marketing for it. As such the web design agency said “we’re learning about this thing called SEO – and it’s £500 per keyword per month” – at which point I started thinking l’d learn about it as we couldn’t afford the budget.. and got hooked! I still have that RFP lurking around somewhere! Since then I’ve moved across e-commerce, to enterprise level travel & government sites & now onto the B2B telecoms world.

On your SEOmoz profile you say SEO is so fascinating you have bored people to death about it. Have there been any recent fatalities?

I’ve persuaded a British Olympic rowing team member to not use the internet… due to a discussion at a fancy dinner party revolving around “so what is SEO” – and I guess I scared them with the concepts of analytics everywhere & manipulation of data on the internet!

You helped organise a News Corp SEO conference last year with me. What did you get out of the session?

Well that was quite a conference – first off I became intimately involved in how global videoconferencing solutions work! Getting New York, Los Angeles, San Fransisco and London hooked up on a live HD video conference took some doing.

It was a great conference to learn from people like Drew Broomhall at the Times and yourself at LocateTV on subjects I’ve often not had the opportunity to look into – like enterprise level news SEO. I think it also pulled together the widespread SEO’s in Newscorp to allow us to chat on a more casual basis on tips and tactics – I’d recommend this to any large organistion!

You often tweet about Sandhurst Military Academy, what’s the connection?

I used to be in the TA at university, so I’ve a lot of friends who are now either in Sandhurst training or deployed with the British Army. Great guys and amazing talking with them, even though I’ve been know to discuss how the project management & presentation skills I’ve learned in my career are useful to them.

If you were a character in a Disney movie, which would you be?

Disney movie… Wall-e? hmm too easy… and not scary – I’d go for Maximilian from the first Disney movie not to have a U rating, the Black Hole – as most Disney robots are a little too cute and cuddly – and I’d want to be a bit of a scary robot (more fun ) (can you tell I’ve watched scifi films?)

Tea or coffee?

Coffee is essential in the mornings. I actually can’t function without it.

What advice do you have for other in-house SEOs?

I’d say patience is key for SEOs, get a full knowledge of your company from end-to-end, from customer service to the product teams – as you’ll find some surprising allies and ideas lurking around there with people keen to help out. Then really sort out your analytics so that you can measure and produce dashboards for your key stakeholders. Its no good saying “trust me” – they need to be shown proof & a plan to succeed. That’s one of the key first things to do, once you’ve done that yes you can look at the fun things in SEO – but you need to be getting the basics right and making sure elements like PR are providing the best input from the very beginning.

I guess one of the key things to establish as an in-house SEO is whether you’ll be on your own, or have a team with you, as then you can delegate tasks, such as analytics, to specific people. Otherwise if your on your own you’ll have to spend some time at the beginning automating or liasing within your company so that your time isn’t drained by regular tasks such as monthly reporting, or press release checking.

Additionally, manage your stakeholders well, I’ve often found conflict between marketing & dev teams can lead to unnecessary delays – and an in-house SEO is perfectly placed to be the go-between to help out those parties and add value to their projects. Those people, such as PR, might not understand SEO – but when you explain it helps them get more publicity they quickly become fans!

If you had a FlashForward to 6 months from now, what would you like to see?

6 months from now? Hopefully I’d see something I do love that FlashForward series (ST: Rob added the link, not me). What would I like to see, I’d like to see some more regulation in the SEO industry, both in regulating the search engines as well as the professionals in agencies & inhouse roles. I definitely feel that whilst our market is constantly shifting, from Social Media to new platforms such as mobiles and tablets – we’re a maturing industry and need to act like it. On that point, I think I’d also like to see a little less hysteria and negativity in both the UK start-up community and also in the SEO industry at large.

I guess I’d like to see on a personal side I’d like to see some B2B sales cycle research I’m doing completed, and my attempts to setup ChromeOS on Ubuntu on VMware on a mac…

Thanks Rob for a great SEO.BIO. If you aren’t already, you can get to know Rob even more by following him on Twitter.