Interview with Melanie Mitchell

Melanie Mitchell is the VP of Marketing at Folio Investments, Inc.

Hi Melanie, good to see you, so why don’t we start off with you telling us how you ended up running the in-house team at Folio Investing?

It is part of what I was hired to do. I have been doing search marketing for ~9 years now. As a side note, I got into search marketing as a fluke. I was at Network Solutions from 2000-2004 and SEO/PPC was something we were getting into early on in my time there and it was handed to me to “learn and day-to-day manage”. I instantly loved it. I love marketing and had loved math/statistics in college and with search marketing you have the trackability and the accountability as well as some of the creativity that goes into it.

What’s involved in running the in-house marketing team at Folio Investing?

Like most companies large and small, it is a cross functional effort. This is the third company where I have managed the in-house SEO with the other two companies being AOL and Network Solutions. So the same tactics and strategies can scale at a smaller company like Folio Investing in a very similar way as they would at a large company like AOL.

As an in-house SEO you have to understand that everyone plays a role in SEO and it is the in-house person’s/people’s job to help the others understand what their role is, what they need to do, when they need to do it and how. Depending on your company’s size, you may want to have a core team of 8-10 people. This would include the search subject-matter experts (SMEs) that provide your base of SEO knowledge. The SMEs understand the ins, the outs, the technical details, the tactical techniques and what you can and can’t control. There may only be 2 or 3 of these folks, but they are key, as they help pull together the SEO perspective of how certain elements/changes affect your SEO efforts. You would also want to have a “systems architect” on your team that helps connect the dots between the different platforms and publishing systems. Then have a “tech lead” that is the bridge between the business requirements and the engineers – although if you are a small company the systems architect and the tech lead may be the same person. Then you have the “front-liners” who are a couple of people from design, content programming (if necessary) and product groups (if necessary). They help you understand how to work best with those teams. Last, but not least, and depending on your size and scope of the effort, you may need a program manager to keep the overall project plan together and a couple of project managers to track individual tasks.

Once you have your team together it is about communication, training, ongoing reporting and ongoing education.

Speaking of ongoing education, how do you keep current with the industry & how do you keep your team current?

I have to thank my network in a large part for that. For those new to the industry who haven’t built up a network yet – I find that twitter helps, but I recommend you look into who you are following and the quality of information they put out there. I find I am introduced to tools and information I might not have otherwise found thanks to the people I follow on Twitter (I am @melaniemitchell if you care to network).

Conferences also help as you meet the vendors, listen/talk to the speakers as well as the many sharp attendees, and attend the networking events where you can bounce ideas off others and soak up all of the good information being shared first-hand. One of the many things I love about the search/digital industry is that most people are open and willing to share with others no matter what their position/title/company is.

What do you feel to be the biggest challenges with having the marketing effort in-house?

That is a tough question. I have had many challenges along the way, which I think most in-house SEOs can say, but these are in some ways company specific challenges. However, in getting the effort going initially, one of the biggest challenges in-house SEOs can face is getting the attention it deserves. Let’s face it – you are competition against others in the company for resources, prioritization, time and sometimes funding. Others may have their own agendas and manipulate data to be what they want it to be so they can get their project prioritized, funded or resourced above your efforts. Sometimes for the right reasons (let’s face it, as a company we are all working towards the same goal), but sometimes not.

By having an outside vendor – whom we assume has no agenda as they are getting paid whether the SEO work gets done or not – the report/data can be viewed as non-biased and therefore more reliable. I know it sounds weird, but that is how it is sometimes where that third party “assessment” can be the catalyst to get your SEO program started.

What do you feel have been the biggest benefits of having the marketing effort in-house?

Yes there are cost and ROI benefits, but I feel the biggest benefit is timing, accountability and speed. In my experience, many SEO consultants are constantly chasing “the fix”. Meaning they aren’t necessarily part of the process as content/products/tools/platforms are being developed. The SEO consultants are not left out on purpose, but the internal employees building/publishing/designing aren’t always thinking about SEO since they have their own tasks/projects to complete. To be clear, that scenario is not always the case with outside SEO consultants as I am sure some have client engagements that work well, but in my personal experience outside vendors have often been forgotten because they don’t have the direct relationships with the engineers, the stakeholders, product people, etc. Nor do they have the direct authority to hold people within the company accountable.

Additionally, because SEO consultants aren’t part of the company or culture, many have the challenge of not having the relationships so they are not as influential when trying to get a company to implement the SEO recommendations. Additionally, they don’t necessarily have ready access to the C-Suite to keep SEO top of mind with the recent “wins” and the importance of keeping SEO momentum going. A big part of being an in-house SEO is being an “influencer” whether it is developing/building relationships, showing how SEO effects the bottom line as well as getting most of the employees — who don’t report into you — do work that you need them to do in order for SEO to be successful.

Have you worked with agencies in the past?

Yes, but not at Folio Investing. I have used agencies mostly for paid search, display, PR, etc. I really believe that within a company, everyone plays a role in SEO from the CEO on down and it is important to help people understand their role, what they need to do, how and why.

Do you have any agency horror stories?

Not that come to mind, but I do have an internal company horror story and it was part of my awaking of the importance of SEO training across the entire company. The marketing UI team for the company I was working for at the time decided to do some testing of the home page where they were serving four different versions of the home page to see which version increased engagement/conversions — sounds innocent enough.

However, the way they were serving it looked like spam as it looked like four different URLs for the same page and Google kicked our web site COMPLETELY out of the index. It took about two months to get back into the index where traffic/rankings were back to previous levels. A complete nightmare and cost the company a fairly large amount in lost revenue and opportunities. That opened my eyes to how important tailored SEO training and education at a tactical level was to a company (back to everyone plays a role in SEO and needs to know the what, when, how). It was a tough lesson to learn and I am happy to say I never made that mistake again.

Are there efforts that you would consider outsourcing rather than taking in-house, and why would that be?

With regards to SEO, possibly the training as it takes a lot of time and effort. At Network Solutions (and Folio) I personally did the training and at AOL I lead the training efforts, but was fortunate to have an internal team of professionals to really help drive it. I worked with our training team that helped develop documentation as well as an online SEO test (which people took once the training was completed). In the development phase we had internal SMEs from SEO, technology, design, programming so that we could tailor the classes for specific groups. Lastly, there were several of us leading training classes around the world so the task didn’t fall on just one or two people.

You came from AOL, so you’ve had experience with leading an in-house marketing effort at much larger organizations, what have been the biggest differences, and what have been the similarities that you’ve encountered?

It is similar, but different for many of the reasons I stated above with regards to organizing the team, tactics and training. The biggest difference is scale. Are you leading a 10 person effort or a 1,000 person effort. How large are the different groups, where are they located, how quickly do they produce content or products? The tactics and many strategies you employ for small or large scale SEO are very similar though.

What advice would you give to someone looking to start up their own in-house marketing effort?

I love this question. I love it because I hope it saves people some time in their in-house efforts. First, you want to start with a few “small wins” to show that SEO is something that can really help the company if more effort and time was spent on it. Once I have that information, I go to my executive and ultimately up to the CEO to walk through why an SEO strategy is something that is important to the company, can contribute to the bottom line (more often than not in a significant way), show them the “small wins”, layout the opportunity, talk through what needs to be done/what you’ll need in order to get there, show them what is in it for them ($$), and ask for their support. Not just the support at that meeting, but the support of them communicating it out to the company that SEO is important to them and the company thus is important to all of the employees.

I have found that getting the top executives’ support makes it much easier to take the SEO strategy, plan and tactics to get to projects moving in the right direction to the rest of the company once other people within the company know that SEO is something that is important to their boss. And their bosses’ boss. And their bosses’ bosses’ boss. You get the picture…