GE 271: SEO Expert Kevin Indig Spills the Secret to Skyrocketing Your Google Ranking (podcast)

kevin indig

Hey everyone! In today’s episode, I share the mic with Kevin Indig, the SEO Manager at Atlassian, which is responsible for a lot of great sites, apps and tools, including Trello. 

Tune in to hear Kevin spill the secrets to effectively optimize your blog posts, discuss growth strategies using various SEO tools, and share how he uses Google Features to reverse engineer what the user intent is. 

Time-Stamped Show Notes:

  • [01:06] Before we jump into today’s interview, please leave a review and rating and subscribe to the Growth Everywhere Podcast!
  • [01:55] Today will be more about SEO and Growth Marketing.
  • [02:10] Kevin runs SEO at Atlassian, but he also serves as a mentor at a German accelerator.
  • [02:50] He started his career in growth marketing in SEO, on the tech side of things.
  • [03:10] Eventually, he got into enterprise consulting.
  • [03:45] Working in Silicon Valley opened him up to more SEO and growth marketing opportunities.
  • [04:20] His biggest success involved scaling up the Ebay and improving user experience.
  • [04:52] He did something similar for Pinterest.
  • [06:50] Right now the big buzz is around content.
  • [07:00] What’s often overlooked are the technical aspects.
  • [07:15] Look at your log files to understand how Google crawls your site.
  • [07:40] When you write an article you should link to other articles as well, but you can go deeper.
  • [08:01] Topic clusters are sets of pages that revolve around the same content and all link to each other.
  • [09:10] Create a map from the logs/links to quantify your efforts with topic clusters.
  • [09:30] Kevin uses Screaming Frog to crawl his site.
  • [12:20] Atlassian is constantly adding new articles and content. It’s important to keep the site fresh.
  • [13:10] Kevin makes sure their topic clusters are constantly up to date, especially when it comes to technical topics.
  • [14:22] Keeping content fresh can run into the thousands, because of the various factors, including man power, that play into creating fresh content.
  • [14:56] Kevin thinks the ROI is underestimated.
  • [15:55] Some of the pages rank for hundreds of thousands of keywords, which is hard to predict when you are starting out.
  • [17:15] Along the user journey, people discover the topicc cluster, don’t immediately sign up, but come back some time later and convert.
  • [19:20] Atlassian updates their articles quite often.
  • [19:33] They use Google Search Console and see how they rank and for which keywords.
  • [19:51] The impressions gives you an idea of what else Google has tried to rank your page for.
  • [21:25] Tracking competitors can get exhausting.
  • [21:35] Atlassian has a set of core keywords they refer to often.
  • [21:51] They try to prioritize tracking impressions for these keywords.
  • [22:30] How do you know when the query you rank for needs to be freshened up a bit?
  • [22:45] Look at Google Features to reverse engineer what the user intent is.
  • [23:35] Take your keywords and put them in something like SEMRush.
  • [24:15] Atlassian tries to track keywords and freshen content on a weekly basis.
  • [26:25] Kevin consumes  a lot of content about data analysis, design thinking, engineering thinking. He spends his time focusing on growth marketing.
  • [26:46] Growth marketing is a very data-driven discipline.
  • [27:02] Kevin loves Ben Thompsons tech blog.
  • [27:28] He also reads Casey Winter, Justin Briggs, and others.
  • [27:52] Google “Tech Bound” to find Kevin’s newsletter.
  • [28:08] Kevin recommends the book Zero to One.
  • [28:57] Kevin likes thel Chrome and Firefox developer consoles.

Resources from the interview:

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About Eric Siu

Eric Siu (@ericosiu) is the CEO at Single Grain, a digital marketing agency that focuses on paid advertising and content marketing. He contributes regularly to Entrepreneur Magazine, Fast Company, Forbes and more.

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