Kevin Indig has made a significant impact in helping companies acquire over 100 million users during his extensive 10-year career. Currently serving as the VP of SEO & CONTENT at G2, Kevin also dedicates his time as a Growth mentor at GermanAccelerator. Previously, he held prominent roles as the head of SEO at Atlassian and Dailymotion. His expertise lies in user acquisition, brand building, and user retention, where he consistently delivers exceptional results.
Kevin’s passion for SEO extends deep into the technical aspects of the field, making him a trusted authority in the industry. He generously shares his wealth of knowledge and experience through various channels, including social media, insightful blog content, and articles. Recognized as a captivating speaker, Kevin has graced the stages of numerous SEO conferences, engaging audiences with his expertise and thought leadership. Additionally, he hosts the Tech Bound Podcast, where he delves into the intricacies of SEO and related topics.
What truly excites Kevin is the realization that ranking signals extend beyond the traditional focus on content and links. Embracing the evolving landscape of SEO, he eagerly explores the multifaceted factors that contribute to online visibility and success. With an unwavering commitment to staying at the forefront of industry trends, Kevin empowers businesses to harness the full potential of their online presence and drive impactful results.
Kevin can be reached on Tiwtter @Kevin_Indig or via LinkedIn
Recent Shows with Kevin Indig
574 | Goals, Strategies, and Tactics w/ Kevin IndigInterview / podcastDo SEOs Know How to Communicate to the C-Suite?
In this episode of EDGEtalk, Kevin Indig, a renowned SEO expert and executive consultant, shares his insights on developing effective strategies for businesses. Throughout the episode, he emphasizes the importance of staying focused on objectives, and shares tips on how to measure and communicate KPIs both upwards and downwards in an organization.
Kevin also stresses the need for getting buy-in from top-level executives, setting SMART goals, and taking pride in SEO efforts. He shares his own framework for achieving success in the ever-changing landscape of digital marketing.
Erin Sparks and Kevin Indig dive deep into goal setting and more on the EDGE!
Reintroducing Kevin Indig
Ignored Country: Strategy
Sun Tzu – The Art of War
Stay in the Lane
The GOST Framework
How to Orient to Objective Measurements
The Importance of Communicating KPIs Up & Down
Getting Buy-in from the C-suite
Making SMART Goals
SEO Pride
Your Number One Priority [...]
March 3, 2023- 572 | Generative AI Content w/ Kevin IndigInterview / podcastSuspect AI Content is on Loose Ground
Kevin Indig stops by the EDGE studios virtually to have a conversation about generative AI content with Erin Sparks on this episode of EDGEtalk. Can AI satisfy Google’s E-E-A-T? Are AI content tools disrupting the SEO industry? If AI intentionally makes a mistake is it really a mistake?
He is a growth advisor and consultant at Kevin-Indig.com where he advises startups, PEs and VCs in strategic SEO.
Together, they tackle the above questions and more on the EDGE!
Introducing Kevin Indig
AI Generated Content
What is the Expertise, Authority, and Trust of AI?
Machines Don’t Have Judgment
Suspect AI Content is on Loose Ground
Generative AI Disruption in the Ecosystem
Detecting Generative AI Content
If AI Intentionally Makes a Mistake is it a Mistake?
The Turing Test
Three Actionable Takeaways for Generative AI Content
Generative AI Content Bias
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February 27, 2023
- 403 | SEO Testing Methodologies with Kevin IndigInterview / podcast
For episode 403 of the award-winning EDGE of the Web podcast we continued a conversation with special guest Kevin Indig, Director of SEO at Shopify. Host Erin Sparks spoke with Kevin about the scientific methodology and mindset necessary for SEO improvements as Google evolves. Here’s what we learned:
00:03:50
The Rise of User Intent Above Keywords
The reason SEOs need to be looking way beyond mere keyword rankings has to do with Google’s evolution around understanding user intent. Kevin recently wrote an article about his own journey to understanding user intent and what it means (see Optimizing for User Intent with Content-Tuning). Optimizing a page of content for a handful of keywords isn’t wrong, but it’s also not right. I used to think about topics but what I was really thinking about was user intent. And the thing to keep in mind about Google is that it’s not about understanding or grouping things by topic, it’s all about satisfying user intent. When you optimize for a just a few keywords, you’re missing out on all the other keywords any given page could also rank for if what you get right is the user intent. And Google does all sorts of things with SERP features when it thinks it understands user intent, such as a Google Map pack, the “People also ask” box, an image carousel, related news stories, and so on.
If there’s a transactional intent (like where to order or buy dog food on), then Google will surface results and SERP features to satisfy that intent. Same thing if the query intent is informational (such as wanting to know more about dog breeds) where the SERP features might be knowledge panels and “People also ask” boxes and things like that. By extracting what SERP features Google surfaces for a query, those can be used to understand user intent at scale.
Those different SERP features are also important indicators of how well Google understands any given topic. And Google’s understanding of topics is always changing and evolving. It’s the same way our understanding of things changes over time, the COVID-19 pandemic being a case in point to see how our understanding changed and evolved over the course of 2020.
Part of Google’s evolution has been from understanding entities to a broader understanding of topics, which can be surprisingly tricky to achieve because they can be more abstract than entities. The knowledge graphs now from Google are more topic-based than entity-based. And when Google has a breakthrough in understanding, then there’s a core algorithm update and sites see their traffic tank or increase. AI and natural language processing have really been the main focus of Google, and by extension SEO, for the past five years.
00:13:03
Ditch the SEO Checklist and Start Testing
There was a time when you could go online and just find the latest big checklist of a hundred different SEO things you could do and get pages to rank. Those days are long gone. It’s not that simple these days. You need a more evidence-driven approach.
We have the big-picture elements down we know are important: content, user experience (core web vitals), title tags and so forth. But that’s just a fraction of what we need to know. Searching for information about finances or insurance and Google will put more weight on https as a signal. Search on travel topics and Google might surface more images. Google is adjusting its signals this way on such a granular level beyond what we can comprehend that we just can’t understand with certainty what ranking signals are really going to apply to a query.
The only hope you have of gaining real SEO insights is by testing using rigorous and meticulous methods like any scientist would use. Rolling out a change and seeing traffic increase and calling it a day isn’t good enough, and it’s certainly not a test. You have to reverse it and falsify it to know it’s real and that the change you made cause the result and not something else. SEOs should be doing way more testing than most are doing now. The checklist or blueprint approach is more than just outdated, it’s dangerous. You get your foundational SEO practices in place, as previously mentioned, but from there you have to experiment and test. And there are tools out there to help with that. SEMrush has an A/B test tool called SplitSignal. There’s another one at Trustpilot as well, among others.
There are cases where you don’t have to revert a change to verify what’s happening. If you can group a bunch of pages that use a similar template, you can do more of the classic A/B style of test. If what you’re working on is a more content-driven site, then you have to revert changes to fully understand their impact because you don’t have any kind of control group to test against. But the whole area of SEO testing is rapidly changing and evolving. But you’ll still never be able to say with 100% confidence these are reasons that caused the outcomes. Just like with the COVID vaccines. There are so many other factors at play you can only say with some reasonable amount of confidence that you can expect the results to come out a certain way.
We have to acknowledge the limits of the SEO tests themselves. But the more you do, the better you get at it and the more confidence you’ll have about the results in your vertical. And when you do find something that works and can verify why it works, then you roll it out as quickly as possible.
It’s time to give up on the idea that SEOs are like mechanics. There’s more to it than that. SEOs have to be more like doctors, or product developers, or engineers. SEOs come to the table with bold asks and predictions for outcomes, but when the c-suite asks for the evidence on which SEOs are basing their conclusions, the SEOs get all mad and defensive. SEOs have to take a higher road, do better, and level up.
If you really want to weed out the toxic, bad SEOs, all you have to do is hold them accountable for revenue. Evaluate their success based on how much their work contributes to the company’s revenues. SEOs who pitch a company and insist they be evaluated or paid based on organic traffic or keyword rankings should be considered a red flag. It’s not good enough. Rankings and traffic mean nothing if visitors don’t convert into leads. And leads mean nothing if they don’t convert into purchases. Revenue has to become the SEO’s north star. [...]
March 22, 2021
- 401 | The ROI of SEO with Kevin Indig, Director of SEO at ShopifyInterview / podcast
Our special guest for episode 401 of the award-winning EDGE of the Web podcast was Kevin Indig, Director of SEO at Shopify. Host Erin Sparks spoke with Kevin about a better understanding of the ROI of SEO by moving away from linear models and transaction-based success goals lead in favor of behavioral modeling. Here’s what we learned:
00:04:27
Kevin Indig: His Background and Experience
Kevin Indig is Director of SEO at Shopify. He has helped companies acquire more than one hundred million users over the past ten years. Previously he was a Mentor for Growth at German Accelerator, VP of SEO and Content at G2, and ran SEO at Atlassian and Dailymotion. His specialty is user acquisition, brand building, and user retention. Kevin is in the trenches on the topic of SEO and even on the technical SEO front. He shares a lot of his knowledge and experience on social media and through blog content and articles. He has also been a speaker at many SEO conferences over the years and has an SEO podcast as well, Tech Bound Podcast.
Kevin’s entry into the industry was through online video gaming. When he was a teenager and broadband internet became available in Germany, he wanted to play in video game tournaments, but you had to have a website in order to do that. He taught himself how to build a website, which naturally led him into figuring out SEO as well. He soon found himself acting as an independent SEO consultant and then moved into doing in-house SEO for various companies.
00:07:24
Directing SEO at Shopify During a Pandemic
Every team at Shopify is focused on the common goal of growth. Kevin leads a team of 20 SEOs distributed across a number of sub-teams whose primary objective is to bring new merchants into Shopify and to keep them happy so they stay. Another piece he is responsible for is raising the awareness of SEO within the company, which includes working with the product team to develop new features that make the product more SEO-friendly. This empowers merchants to compete better by gaining more visibility in search results, which is a serious undertaking when you’re trying to compete with aggregators like Amazon.
There have been SEOs at Shopify for at least six years, but the position of Director of SEO is a brand-new one. It was needed in order to focus on building a machine of specialist teams who can really go after the different levers available to the company regarding SEO. Shopify is huge because there’s more than just Shopify.com, there are many other businesses and sites and domains they work on, and most people don’t realize that. It’s probably one of the largest SEO teams out there and Kevin may grow his team even more. Very few platforms have been making this kind of long-term investment in SEO capacity. In part, this is because Shopify is deeply committed to a growth mindset. The company sees the opportunities out there and has reached a place where Shopify is on the radar screens of more people than ever before.
Some of that has been driven by the COVID-19 pandemic and the rush to digital transformation. Like many platforms, the pandemic catapulted Shopify a good ten years into the future. It made us focus on not just helping merchants troubleshoot in moments of crisis, but to also look at the product and change it in ways to help merchants make the right choices without even needing to speak to customer service. The product goal is to make it as adaptable, flexible, and helpful as possible without needing to speak to anyone that merchants can easily see how to acquire customers through various channels. This includes new onboarding content, tutorials, courses, and more to help merchants achieve growth even when they’re new to the platform.
00:15:50
The ROI of SEO: Calculating and Predicting
CEOs often approach investing in SEO with skepticism. They want to know what kind of return on investment (ROI) they’re going to get. SEO gets put into the ROI hot seat much more than other channels such as social media content related to brand and engagement. Kevin talked about four main drivers of why this is the case:
SEOs tend to have needs and high demands. Content creators, designers, engineers, and so on come to the table with “asks” and changes that are seen as an investment in those digital assets. But with SEO, so much of it is somewhat out of your hands in terms of control. PPC, on the other hand, is totally in your control if you’re ready and willing to pay for it. SEOs have to settle for making educated predictions rather than promises about what will happen.
The sheer variety of factors that all come into play at the same time with SEO are a challenge, including building links, creating content, creating a good user experience, and more. The multiplicity of factors makes things “fuzzy.” When SEOs ask for developers to get involved in solving an SEO problem or implementing redirects, then suddenly people start asking what they’re going to get out of it and why to invest in that instead of something like a new product feature. When SEOs don’t know how to “speak dollars,” these conversations are tricky to navigate and often don’t work out in favor of SEO.
Much of the work done for PPC, content marketing, social media marketing, and so on are done on other platforms to either engage the customer right there or point them back to the company website/platform.
The complexity and difficulty of SEO have skyrocketed. Back in the early days, it was much simpler. You could see much clearer a direct line from implementing various SEO tactics and the impact. Now if you want to figure out what actually works you have to do all kinds of testing and planning that represents much more of an up-front investment just to figure out what to do, and that raises all those questions about ROI.
00:20:32
The Need for SEO Adaptability
It’s hard enough to convince a CEO or other key stakeholder to wear the “gardening hat” of viewing SEO as a slow-burn, long-term investment. It’s even harder to ask them to wear another hat, the “mad scientist hat” they need to put on to invest in the kind of testing and experimentation required to even figure out what has a chance of working. The key stakeholders simply aren’t used to wearing those hats. Below are Kevin’s tips for addressing this challenge:
Start Small, Show Results: Rather than saying you need to overhaul 100,000 pages of content or change page titles on 100,000 pages. Pose it as seeing what happens if you make xyz changes to five or ten pages. Get some results and show them, which will create trust between the SEO and the stakeholders. If the SEO can prove results on a small scale, then it sets the stage for rolling it out on a larger scale.
Build a Better Case: What many SEOs fail to do is show the potential of the opportunity by building out a reliable model. This should go much deeper than just identifying the most important keywords and CPCs for those, and it has to be as directly related to the business model of the company as possible. Really lay out in detail the opportunity.
Educate: There is still much more SEOs must do around educating stakeholders on what SEO is and how it works. There is still a good deal of “black box” mystique and misinformation around this that’s simply not helpful in getting stakeholders to invest in SEO. You have to be an effective SEO advocate with key stakeholders right up to the c-suite.
00:24:18
SEO Project Setup with TAM (Total Addressable Market) in Mind
The key to laying out the incredible opportunity (total addressable market or TAM) to stakeholders has to be done by utilizing the right tools. It doesn’t matter so much what the specific tool is, whether SEMRush, MOZ, Ahrefs, STAT, and so on. Kevin says what matters more is how you set your projects up in those tools. And while it’s important to go deeper than just keyword rankings, a lot of the methodologies are still based on keywords. But you can bring more order to that by grouping keywords by intent, by a focused topic, and so on.
Then you have to show the total volume opportunity and how that can convert to the specific business based on an understanding of the customers for that type of business. Yes, it starts with keywords, volumes, and topics, but it doesn’t end there. Many SEOs, however, do end right there. You have to be able to model out what impact the rankings are going to have on the business according to its business goals and the bottom line of the company. The tool is just a means to this end.
It’s also important to let go of the idea that there’s just a single goal for each visitor to your website. For example, if you get ranking on a blog article for a short-hand keyword, you have to understand that people search that short-hand keyword with different intentions. There is going to be some ambiguity around what people are really looking for. Any given person might come to the site with a slightly different intention than a majority of people searching that keyword.
Instead of just assuming the goal is to channel everyone into the same type of conversion process, think about what else might be helpful to that visitor if their intent is different. This is when you might want to have any number of “micro-conversions” that aren’t directly related to your main conversion goal. It could be newsletter signups or clicking on related articles, or clicking through to other areas of your site. When you examine traffic in this way, you start to see patterns and can begin optimizing for those patterns. This can help increase hard and soft or macro and micro conversions because you’re creating more paths that can serve a variety of intentions of visitors.
You don’t need a whole team of data scientists to do this. Much of it can be done with basic tools such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and the underestimated Clarity tool from Microsoft Bing. Optimizing for micro-conversions can have a huge payoff, especially the more sales-driven a company is. The new school of SEO is driven by mapping and modeling the behavior of site visitors and a deeper understanding of the variety of intent they bring when visiting. Open your mind to truly learning and understanding what users want and follow it. [...]
March 11, 2021
