First and foremost it is such a fun job. We are very busy and there is an underlying pressure to deliver our targets and our numbers - which is great as it drives us and helps us stay motivated. As a business, as well as a team, we tend to take challenges head-on. We've been successful this year in the form of some tremendous numbers, as well as been nominated for three industry awards. It's nice to get recognition from others within the industry. I enjoy my job but it does come with quite a bit of pressure but we make sure that we meet our standards to get those numbers in.

Good question. The team is structured in such a way that individuals have ownership of the performance of key parts of the business. So what that could look like would be one person looking after EE journeys and another person looking after Plusnet journeys. We cover a huge array of templates and journey types, each one of these journeys has a level of complexity, changes, and velocity of activity. Therefore, those people are very focused on delivering consistent and almost daily changes to those parts of the business. I'm a huge fan of the servant leader approach and my primary role in the team is to make sure everyone is set up for success.

When it comes to looking at in-house versus agency, like most things, there is a dichotomy. The benefit of going in-house is being closer to the brand as well as forging stronger personal relationships. On the other hand, one of the benefits of having agency partners is that you get an outside perspective which can be lost when in-house teams are inward-looking. We look at scale and think about how we can deliver more value with less effort. It's a never-ending process.

Someone recently joined the team in a graduate placement, so this is good timing. They joined on a six-month placement to upskill in SEO and business. We had to work out how to approach this new venture as it was the first time we had carried out something like this. We created a tailored training plan that was focused on learning alongside practical tasks that had a material impact on the business, therefore it wasn't just all online learning. We ensured the work was relevant but also gave that person the skills, the theory, and the context to be effective in that role.

We gave the individual a buddy within their team who acted as a coach and mentor, alongside the support they received from the wider team. We ensured the individual felt comfortable to ask questions, utilising our knowledge, experience, and our skills to answer them. I guess the great thing about SEO is that there's so much knowledge readily available on the internet as well as a wide range of resources. I always recommend to anyone getting involved within the industry for the first time both Moz and Google, as they have SEO guides. By reading these, you gain an understanding and strong foundation for what is required to perform some base level optimization.

Absolutely. One of the most exciting things about BT is the scale. A challenge we deal with is the dozens of multidisciplinary squads across the three brands. The work can be complex at times, so we look to simplify where possible and deliver smaller, more consistent iterations of work. We tend to stay away from huge audits and instead break those up into smaller chunks which the teams find easier to digest and act upon. We are ruthless when it comes to prioritisation. If a particular piece is blocked, we move on to the next most important thing. Scaling across the other parts of the business has been very useful in terms of allowing us to gain success faster and effectively.

Yes, absolutely. We are very much focused on agile, it's something that we've done quite well. It's unique to SEO, it's not a typical way that SEO teams would work. However, after seeing the challenge within the business and recognising that often, when we created these long roadmaps, by the time they were complete it was already out of date. Due to the pace of business, we have had to move to a more agile view, this allows us to pivot and not be afraid of change. It's been one of the things that have helped us to drive the success that we've achieved really.

Good question. I think the page experience update is fairly unique. The fact that Google has given the industry plenty of advanced notice and that it's approaching has been beneficial. Usually, things just change without warning and you have to adapt very quickly. This has allowed us to give forward warnings to the business and ensure that the long-term technology decisions take into account our updated list of SEO requirements. In larger businesses, it can take a while for things to happen so we need to make sure that we're getting ahead of the game.

My main tip would be to look at what Google has provided as the base standard, and try to achieve as much of that as possible. Also, benchmark yourselves against competition because it's not always going to be possible to hit everything all the time. You can ensure that you're doing more than your competitors in certain areas.

Yeah, this is something that can be a challenge. I would say that if you're a smaller team, you probably want to reduce the number of tools that you work with. They all have different benefits and they do slightly different things. The challenge that a lot of large teams have is when you have multiple tools that use different data that needs to be updated at different times. Within BT, we have noticed that if something doesn't perform so well, we have to check three or four different tools to understand what's going on.

One thing you can do, apart from reducing the number of tools that you work with, is looking at things like API's which you can port all of the data into a place such as Google Data Studio, or Tableau. This will allow you to make decisions a bit quicker but does come at a development cost as you need to ensure that the API's are updated and maintained.

I'd also suggest getting a really good understanding of the tools you use. Once you have a clear view of the tools and the data that they provide, you can then be much more efficient in extracting the data and also understanding it. To summarise, look at potentially reducing the number of tools used, if there are tools that are doing more than one thing then ensure you switch to these, you can use API's and import the data into a different platform so you get all the analysis in one place.

For the most part, our activities are split into two distinct categories. The first one is enabling the wider business to self-serve when it comes to SEO. We do that through a variety of different methods. One thing that we've worked on is a large library of best practice information that's relevant to our brand, our experiences, and our journeys. We update this in line with changes within the industry or changes within the market. We've also launched various SEO training programmes that can be attended either face-to-face or online. Online Learning Library that you could tap into at any point in the day. That has helped us to educate the wider business team about SEO.

Secondly, we work very closely with teams and groups on projects to ensure that they meet the SEO standards. We do that through our Build, Measure, Learn framework. This is the very core of what we do, and it's not uncommon in the SEO world. We analyse the market, look at what the search market is doing, and what our competitors are doing. We benchmark certain KPIs and metrics and see what improvements can be made on the site using the data that we've collected. Our Build, Measure, Learn framework has been really useful because it allows everyone working on a project to understand what some of the SEO drivers are.

My prediction for 2021 would be to expect more of the same. It's very hard to predict what Google's going to do apart from the fact that it will be unpredictable. We know some big things are coming around the new user experience metrics. We know that PageSpeed is going to be more important. Ultimately, we don't have much foresight around what Google is trying to achieve.

My recommendation would be to ensure that you are flexible and able to respond to these changes as and when they happen. I would start with page speed because it's one of the few metrics that Google and other search engines have confirmed make up a fair collection of ranking signals. It also benefits things like on-page experience so in theory, it reduces bounce rate too. We've seen some great uplift from improving page speed across.