Introducing Kristina Azarenko, a renowned figure in the world of SEO and an exceptional digital marketing strategist. With a wealth of experience and a keen eye for optimizing online performance, Kristina is dedicated to helping businesses achieve their full potential in the digital realm.
As the founder of MarketingSyrup, an acclaimed SEO consultancy, Kristina has successfully guided numerous clients towards achieving outstanding search engine visibility and remarkable organic growth. Her expertise extends to various facets of SEO, including technical optimization, on-page strategies, content marketing, and link building.
Kristina’s relentless pursuit of excellence has earned her a stellar reputation within the industry. She is highly regarded for her comprehensive knowledge, meticulous approach, and unwavering commitment to delivering exceptional results. Through her insightful blog posts, industry contributions, and speaking engagements at prominent SEO conferences, Kristina shares her expertise and empowers others to enhance their digital marketing strategies.
With a genuine passion for continuous learning and staying ahead of industry trends, Kristina remains at the forefront of SEO innovation. She thrives on exploring cutting-edge techniques, leveraging emerging technologies, and unraveling the complexities of search engine algorithms. Kristina’s relentless curiosity and dedication to ongoing improvement make her an invaluable asset to any organization seeking to optimize its online presence.
Join us on our SEO journey as we tap into Kristina Azarenko’s wealth of knowledge, uncovering valuable insights and actionable strategies to elevate your SEO game to new heights. Get ready to unlock the full potential of your digital marketing efforts under the guidance of this exceptional SEO expert.
Kristina can be reached on Twitter @azarchick or via LinkedIn.
Recent Shows with Kristina Azarenko
445 | Continued SEO Education and Personal Value with Kristina AzarenkoInterview / podcastA Blended Mindset
The John Mueller tweet can be considered a defining moment for technical SEOs and can be taken as a guiding star. The tweet said that all SEO tools would spit out recommendations, but most will not be relevant. You need to find the items that make sense to work with and the ability to do so takes experience.
A lot of auditing tools are used to look through several different lenses, but when you look at an audit and try to create an action list, there can sometimes be so many things that don’t matter in the eyes of Google. If you don’t have the right amount of industry experience and your site does not have the right amount of experience, then you may not be leaning into what’s essential for your website.
The John Mueller tweet that should be heard around the SEO world. SEO audit tools create “Hundreds of Recommendations. Most of these are not going to be relevant to your sites”
Do we need to shield our clients from spam notifications of SEO issues?
Lack of Structure is your enemy.
SEO knowledge structure should be like shelves.
How do you keep learning a priority, in an agency or organization.
Bringing value to yourself, not just the company you work for.
Finding the Experience
It’s important to know the industry and gain a good level of experience. For example, Google Search Console sends out alerts, which, if you don’t have the right amount of experience, could cause significant overreactions. Clients will freak out, and SEOs can sometimes find themselves freaking out. This is where experience and good communication skills come into play. You need to be able to take these alerts, communicate the important ones, and put them into a strategy that can be flexible.
While shielding the client from these alerts may be appealing, part of the industry is trying to solicit business. Sometimes clients will come back to SEOs with these alerts without realizing that they’ve already been resolved. Part of the client’s responsibility is to want to be guided. There also needs to be a maturity to the company not to be led astray, like when you receive a scam call and know it’s a scam but still have a reaction.
Strong Communication
Communication is a huge part of this. Just as John’s tweet points out: there is always a soft spot to be picked out of a report to make a client uneasy. It’s your job as the technical SEO to know the soft spots and recognize that there’s never going to be a fully fortified website because things are constantly changing, and Google is always changing what it’s looking at.
The game shifts over time, so we must be aware of the shifting and need to arm the client with information that doesn’t create additional worry—the ability to explain the issues and outlay what’s important and what’s not comes with experience. Our role as technical SEOs is to discipline ourselves and communicate to our clients to show that we know what the priority is.
Lack of Structure and Establishing Priorities
You can establish priorities by continuously learning and gaining the practical experience you need to understand. You’ll know there’s always something new if you’re paying attention to the information, stories, and news. If you don’t know how to process all of the information with your strategies, it can be challenging. The SEO industry is noisy.
The main reason it is so challenging is because of the lack of structure in knowledge. If you don’t structure all your knowledge and can’t talk through processes, you can easily fall victim to imposter syndrome. If you don’t have the structure of how things work, you don’t realize what you don’t know, and you also aren’t confident in what you do know. You begin to question your knowledge when you don’t have a structure set in your mind.
Sense of Truth
In the SEO industry, we are challenged with so much information, even more subtopics and nuances, and so on. You must avail yourself to those who do the deep dives of analysis so you can know how to speak, how to process what’s going on, and give yourself the foundation to push back. You should have the ability to push back and challenge what is being said, which requires a level of confidence in your knowledge. There is a natural fear of not having all the right data, but you can learn to defend yourself and proactively share your data.
Imagine a structure of knowledge as shelves. These shelves are being filled with books containing your understanding. At the same time, you can switch out certain books with other ones that contain new knowledge. This structure and confident mindset don’t mean you need to know everything, but it enables you to understand why something is not working. It’s a necessary discipline of continued learning.
Prioritizing Your Education
For an SEO new to the industry, it’s easy to lessen the priority of learning more. You could be working inside your organization or company, and keeping yourself regularly educated in the space can be marginalized. To counter this, always try to keep yourself educated to a certain point. You’ll go crazy if you try to stay on top of everything, and it’s so easy to have FOMO when you aren’t staying on top of it all.
Whether you work for an agency or are part of an in-house marketing team, your job is to maximize efforts to benefit the client. You must know that the investment of time going into educating yourself is going to pay off. Getting specialized in talents and expanding your working experience will turn into better value for the client base.
Education in the SEO industry is important because search engine rules change, search habits change, markets change, and competition changes. You need to be able to watch everything that’s happening and understand it. Client goals are important, and you need to meet those goals.
Value Yourself
While you need to bring value to clients and the company you work for, you, more importantly, need to find the value within yourself. You need to keep the value of your knowledge and skills for yourself. Doing something for somebody doesn’t help in the long run; you need to have a personal interest. As an SEO, your value stays with you.
When you start with the right mindset and can educate yourself, and have a continual learning process, discipline, and regimen, you must keep yourself fed in the SEO space. Your skills and knowledge are not your employer’s intellectual property; your learning and gaining experience will bring more to your career overall and in the future.
The SEO Challenging Course
Kristina Azarenko‘s course trains people to arm themselves with the ability to discern small priorities from large ones. Technical SEO is the biggest part of the course, which helps people understand how things work. The course goes from the beginning, from the content to the intent, and gives the exact processes for each. It can be challenging to get over-the-shoulder training, so the SEO course is very hands-on.
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August 29, 2021- 443 | Dismantling SEO Perfectionism with Kristina AzarenkoInterview / podcastWho is Kristina Azarenko?
Kristina Azarenko is a talented SEO who mainly focuses on eCommerce and technical SEO. She founded MarketingSyrup Digital Inc. and helped small and medium-sized businesses gain more traffic. Kristina is an active part of the SEO community, offering online SEO courses to SEOs and non-SEOs. She has produced hours of video training, created a VIP slack community, offered homework checklists for her SEO Challenge course, built templates and helpful SEO documents, in addition to her full SEO online course.
Kristina’s journey to being named one of the top 13 women shaping the SEO industry by Search Engine Land has been long and exciting. Kristina knows how hard it can be to start in the industry and be confident in what you’re doing. Having been in SEO for 10+ years, she has been through her fair share of ups and downs. What she had thought being in the industry would be like is different from how she sees it now.
Starting SEO with the right mindset.
Is there a particular attitude that we should have while performing SEO?
Obsession can be a good thing at times, but “out-of-context” panic on technical SEO issues are harmful
Reactive SEO – Is it worse that FOMO?
Agency SEO starts with communication and a deeper understanding.
Setting SEO priorities.
The SEO Mindset
There is a mindset of needing everything to be tied down to accomplish correct SEO. Kristina’s course starts with having those taking the course try to set up a website. Doing something hands-on like this gives a fuller understanding of how things work. It’s also always good to have your site to play with. It’s a place that allows you to test technical SEO before rolling anything out to clients.
Starting at the beginning helps give a knowledge gap filler, offering a balance of knowledge at your disposal. It’s about the research of intent, understanding intent, and reducing friction to getting content to be as valuable as possible for the user. Sometimes technical SEOs don’t know how to recognize the user experience.
Breaking Down Perfectionism
When Kristina first started in SEO, she thought that she needed to fix everything. However, she knows you don’t need to obsess over one thing, always attempting to get it right because you may be missing the whole picture. It’s easy to go down the rabbit hole as SEOs always want to go deep, but there needs to be an endpoint to see the bigger picture. When looking at an SEO audit, there are so many checklists and factors, but if the content isn’t valuable to the user or the business, you’re not fulfilling that bigger picture.
The Right Attitude and the Scientific Mindset
The right mindset for SEO also constitutes the attitude going into a project. For example, core web vitals are essential, but they are part of the UX, and the quality of content is part of the UX, as well. The content itself will influence the user decision, and when a company is obsessing over the core web vitals, it can create some panic if the foundation is not there. This refers to reactive SEO, which occurs when something new comes out, and SEOs obsess and jump into it without thinking about the bigger picture.
This prioritization is like a scientific mindset. You have to have contextual knowledge of the importance of something being put into the ecosystem and know how to measure the effect you’re trying to create and what you’re paying attention to. If you only look at the metrics without the behavior, you’re just working down a sheet. The scientific mindset is about setting a hypothesis, knowing what to measure, watching the changes, and then learning from the behavior.
Meeting Business Goals
There’s a fine line between doing a good job and bringing real results with value. Sometimes an increase in traffic is traffic that does not convert. You must ask: does it help meet the business goals? Technical SEOs need to understand the marketing aspect of things. They need to know what the target audience is and whether the content is answering those questions. Google wants you to know what you’re talking about. For this, you must understand your audience and know the mechanic’s side of things.
Keys to Success
Sometimes people are afraid to talk to the clients. This could create a distance between the content being produced and the client’s content to concentrate on. Communication and a deeper understanding help you to be more successful.
The right mentality goes beyond skills. You don’t need to attend to everything, and you need to understand the prioritization of issues. Some of the bigger factors necessary to pay attention to are indexability, crawlability, and the content. Indexability is about making sure Google can index what you want it to. Crawlability is about making sure Google can crawl the website and pages you want it to.
It’s not just about having the right content or words on the page; it’s about having all the pages you want Google to see created. This factor is about finding ways to make sure the content exists to be indexed. Ecommerce stores find an issue with this because sometimes they have filters that are not indexable but are still something people are searching for. You should make sure that the filters are indexable to find your way to fulfill the user’s needs.
The threshold for the industry is low, but success requires so many more skills than just the technical aspects. It’s a combination of intent research, technical SEO knowledge, and the creation of the destination page through development. Success is the nexus of technical SEO, marketing SEO, and development. If you only focus on the technical or get overwhelmed by the technical SEO report, you’re not going to see the larger picture. SEO is not just SEO; you need to be a marketer as well. The skills required to go beyond SEO to marketing and communication and much more.
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August 20, 2021
- 374 & 375 | Old SEO Tactics: What Not to Do in SEO with Kristina AzarenkoInterview / podcastIn Part 1 of episode 374, Kristina Azarenko joins the EDGE to discuss old SEO techniques and tactics that don’t hold water any more. Some techniques covered: PR bombing, DMOZ, link directories, and much more. This is an important show to listen to if you are hiring SEO talent. Listen to the list and make sure they aren’t doing ANY of these bad SEO tactics, on the EDGE.
In Part 2 of episode 375, Kristina Azarenko provides us with an insight into the new SEO professional mindset. Specifically, we discuss why it’s important to participate in the SEO community, sharing information, and how we have changed our engagement during COVID. How valuable is it to speak with your SEO colleagues? Is there a fear of reprisal if you share insight or observation on social media when you are an SEO professional? Kristina shares some of her journey through her career, and the feedback and challenges she has experienced in SEO.
What are some of the tactics that an SEO should have? Listen to the list of core skills that an SEO should bank on!
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November 20, 2020
