[MUSIC] And the last area I would say is having knowledge about how to interview, and so I want to share with you some of the really practical tips and categories that I've interviewed my team on, and every new candidate we've brought on board, we've interviewed in these five general areas. So the first one starts with someone who has a strong understanding of marketing and digital marketing in general. So specifically what we look for is we're asking somebody about the SEO strategies that they've implemented. How do they prioritize their tasks? How do they think about aligning to the business objectives? What kinds of failures or challenges have they seen in this industry and how have they learned from from that? We also might be curious about how they've managed project work flow, which is really important from an in-house perspective, and what areas do they enjoy and which are most challenging. Now someone who's coming from basic SEO knowledge can still have a track record in SEO, especially if you take the time and take initiative to develop your own website and develop some learnings from that experience. That will give you a lot of credibility. And hands-on knowledge that you can use in an interview, even if you've never worked in this capacity before. The second area we would ask about is stakeholders. The people that you work with that help you execute and implement the work to get done. How do you align to their business goals? What kinds of localization or global strategy have you helped push forward? And, most importantly, how have you influenced or negotiated change? How have you driven things how you knew were important, based on your knowledge or readings, but maybe that stakeholder didn't understand how did you work through some of those challenges? You could also be asked in an interview, what is most challenging or most interesting about the people you work with. Because in any job, how you work and how well you're liked and respected is critical, not only to being hired but being successful in that role. The third area we would ask about would be keyword research and content strategy. And this is again, really the bread and butter of SEO. How do you understand what key word intent means. How you can understand key word demand. How you can determine the relevance of key words and apply that to the content that is being developed. How do you think about content syndication, in taking the content you have and making it work harder by using it in a blog, or using it in a newsletter. Or publicizing it on third-party websites as well, to make sure that you're developing a name for your brand or the content that you're creating. So keyword research and content strategy is also a key skill and part of the interview process. The fourth that I've covered in a couple other examples is we're looking for data driven marketers. And again, this is really critical in an in-house role. We want someone who's comfortable with data and who's familiar with how they can drive forward KPIs, Key Performance Indicators, that represent the metrics and the results that matter to the business objectives. It's not enough to say, hey I understand SEO and I know how to make changes. You need to be able to translate those changes on the website to business impact. And so when we're asking somebody about how they've taken analysis we want to not only what did they do, why did they do it, and how do they interpret the data that they have accessible to them to drive that forward. We might also ask about their technical SEO understanding, the deeper layers of the website, some of the tools and techniques that they used. The last thing we would get into in an interview is walking through scenarios, because we want to understand case studies, or how they made a business case. And so, we will ask them examples of what did you do in this type of scenario. Perhaps the scenario is content was being reduced on the website and they had to come up with a plan to strategize around something that was going to happen anyway against their wishes. But they had to make a business case for how they could remain consistent with the content they had and not lose too much traffic. Or perhaps they had to face domain migration where you are going from a domain with a certain name, and transferring all of that content over to another domain. And how did they handle that migration from place A to place B, and what were the steps involved in that process. Or perhaps they received an error in a notification, maybe from Google, that said these types of things are going wrong on your website, how did they go about handling that? Because at the end of the day, what SEO is about is making a business case for aligning to corporate objectives, making more money for the company, and making sure that the recommendations you put forward are best practices. So with that understanding of how to find a job, how to interview, how to network, that should give you a little bit more insight into what it takes to find a career in SEO.
