Thoughts from the SearchPilot team

My guest for Episode 6 is the author of the book ‘Obviously Awesome’ and is the best book I know of on positioning. I know many of you will have read it, and if you haven’t, I highly recommend that you do. April Dunford is a well-known author and consultant. She’s also held senior marketing leadership positions at a range of startups and big well-known companies. She’s done a million interviews about positioning, so I wanted to pick her brains about some different things.

I am excited for you to hear from Brian Provost. Brian has a deep understanding of news and media SEO more than anyone in the world. He worked at Define Media Group with many of the largest media properties globally and then ran search strategy at CBS Interactive and ViacomCBS. Since May 2022, he’s been GM for all of Search and SEO at Yahoo, which is a huge job. But if anyone can do it, he can. The work’s exciting. But as you’ll hear, there are a few areas where I believe Brian is head and shoulders above pretty much everyone.

This webinar replay, presented by Craig Bradford, shared a framework on how CMOs, SEO and marketing leaders can set and achieve their SEO goals. He also shared examples of how to apply this framework for specific teams, such as technical SEOs, SEO testing teams, and agencies.

I’m really looking forward to sharing this new episode (Episode 4) with you where I interview Jes Scholz, who is the group CMO at Ringier. Jes has one of the most complicated CMO jobs I know of with responsibilities spanning verticals, brands, and markets. I’ll let her describe it because I don’t even know the full extent of it all. She has an extremely strong SEO background and has worked her way up to the group leadership level in a large organization.

Broadly speaking, your organic traffic from Google can be affected by a few classes of thing:

1. Something you do
2. Something your competitors do
3. A change in the market
4. A change by Google

In the 3rd episode of the Business Class Lounge, I talked to Cian Weeresinghe. I’ve actually known Cian since college, but it took us a little while to realize we’d both ended up in internet marketing.

He originally got into digital at eBay as one of a cohort of incredibly talented folks in the UK digital industry who are now scattered doing interesting things all around the UK startup scene. He ran growth at The Guardian following their massive domain migration in 2013, was CMO at a cool travel company named Secret Escapes and is now CMO at Wise, previously TransferWise. I guess he just can’t avoid being suckered in by big domain moves.

Craig Bradford presents 10+ Must-Try SEO test ideas for fashion retailers, featuring the websites of Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s.

In Episode 2, I am joined by Lisa Schneider. Lisa and I met when she was Chief Digital Officer at Merriam Webster, and we were lucky enough to run SEO split tests together. These days, she’s a fractional chief product officer and product strategy consultant. She’s currently working on a, just out of stealth, FinTech startup called Cingo, which will bridge the gap between people’s estate plan and the actual execution, which strikes me as a really important mission.

Lisa is one of the best people I know at articulating an organization’s mission and crafting a product vision too. I also wanted to quiz her about her, in her own words, irrational love for the English language.

Will Critchlow interviews Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing at HubSpot.

Kieran started out in SEO, and has deep channel expertise. At HubSpot he has done many things including being part of founding HubSpot’s international business and at times leading a 200-person strong team. He’s now the Senior Vice President of marketing and he’s exactly the kind of person we want to be bringing on this podcast because he has everything from detailed hands-on experience to stories of executive leadership and the understanding of what it takes to report right to the top of a large and successful organisation.

It’s really common for companies that are pushing towards having a more data-aware culture to start asking themselves questions like: Is there a right answer for when to test and when not to?