In this week's episode, we chat with Giovanna Angulo, Associate SEO Director at Mediahub Global, about making technical SEO "make sense".

Where to find Giovanna:

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Twitter

Website

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Episode Sponsor:

This season is sponsored by Screaming Frog. Screaming Frog develop crawling and log file analysis software for the SEO industry, and wanted to support the WTSPodcast as listeners to the show. They’ve just released version 16 of their SEO Spider software, which includes - improved JavaScript crawling to help you identify dependencies, such as JavaScript content and links, automated crawl reports for Data Studio integration, advanced search and filtering, and the app is now available in Spanish, French, German and Italian. You can check out the latest version at Screaming Frog's website (screamingfrog.co.uk).

Where to find Screaming Frog:

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Episode Transcript:

Areej AbuAli: Hey, everyone. Welcome to a new episode of the Women in Tech SEO Podcast. I'm Areej AbuAli, and I'm the founder of Women In Tech SEO and your host today. Today's episode is all about making technical SEO make sense. Joining me is the brilliant Giovanna Angulo who is the SEO Director at Mediahub Global. Hey, Giovanna.

Giovanna Angulo: Hello. How are you?

Areej: I'm great. Thanks. It's so good to have you here with us.

Giovanna: I'm so excited to have this topic talked about.

Areej: I know. I loved how specific your pitch was. I was like, "Oh, my God, we have to have you in. This is amazing."

Giovanna: Great.

Areej: Do you want to start off by just telling us a little bit about you, and how you got into the world of SEO?

Giovanna: My name is Giovanna Angulo. I've been an SEO for about six years now. Shockingly, it's been my only career, so I'm very lucky in that perspective. I think a lot of people fall into SEO later, or they do other digital marketing and then get into it. What's interesting, I'm now the national director out of a New York agency, at Mediahub Global.

The way that I got into SEO was very interesting. I graduated with an Ad/PR degree. There was one SEO class at the time because it was still new, and we had to take it. I remember just hating that class. The woman, who taught it all talked about this agency that she had and her clients and thinks how proud she was. I was like, "I don't care about any of this." I said, "I don't know what I'm doing," but it's definitely not that.

Then, I got bamboozled by an email talking about outreach and doing all these things. I said, "Oh, I've done that." My college job was as a leasing assistant. That sounds normal. I can build relationships. It turned out to be an entirely link-building-prospecting job. I ended up falling in love, and I understood why she had so much pride in this client work because you get that pride from when you do the SEO behind it. After a while, hindsight was 2020. At the moment, I was not thinking that was going to be my path.

Areej: Wow. I've never even heard about an SEO course in university until this day. That's so interesting that you had to study it.

Giovanna: It was new and something that I'm really proud that we were in is a very specific program at the University of Central Florida, which I give a lot of credit to. A lot of people don't usually, but I do.

Areej: What advice would you give women who are considering just starting their SEO career today?

Giovanna: I think the biggest thing, I would say, is to remember that your voice matters. That sounds really simple, but it really is. I think women and women in the tech industry or in the digital marketing industry have a perspective. Remember that the things that you've had to go through in your perspective in life do bring value that others don't have. A lot of the time, we think, "Oh, it's just a silly concept," or it's too much, or it's too little but really that does bring so much value. You can create conversations with others. That's what I would recommend, is just always put your voice forward and see what comes out of it.

Areej: I love that. I think that's really important. Have you always worked agency side or have you previously worked client-side as well?

Giovanna: Actually, that first job out of college, that was more in-house, but that was about a year. Then, I've actually been with Mediahub Global for four and a half years, so that's been my entire agency lifestyle of being able to grow through there. It's been really interesting because you wear so many different hats and get to experience so many different things. For the experience of that, I would recommend an agency if you really want to get your hands dirty.

Areej: I fully agree with that, especially, with anyone who's just starting out, agency side makes so much sense, because, as you said, you wear so many hats and you work with such a diverse number of clients. There's so much to learn.

Giovanna: So, so much, to this point where I'm still learning.

Areej: Definitely. I loved, I loved, I loved when I read your pitch form about how you wanted to talk about making technical SEO make sense. I just want to start off by knowing why you picked that topic.

Giovanna: Similar to the advice that I give to women starting out is that your voice matters is to say there's been a lot of people, who I've worked within the past or so, that just want to make themselves sound smarter in every situation. That, sometimes, is just regurgitating the same articles that we're all reading and just saying it to somebody who might not know as much to make yourself seem more intimidating.

I personally have never found that to be, one, very productive or, two, very admirable in terms of team growth and things like that. I thought it would be a good perspective for people who are also getting into the agency lifestyle, asking questions on having people further explain it to see if they even really know what they're talking about, or also just to learn how to build your own voice in the industry.

Areej: Also, I can imagine, because you work agency side, it's more important than ever to be the way you communicate, and you talk to your clients on a daily basis.

Giovanna: Oh, yes. That's really one of the most important things that I've learned is when you work with a client where they understand you, and they start applying the best practices themselves before it comes to you, then we're all working together, and it's working out so much easier for everybody.

I think a lot of people, on the agency side, want to make things really difficult so that they're always a valuable resource. I don't think that that value goes away when you just start to build off of those best practices together. Still, as we know, SEO has an umbrella that's never going to be understood by everyone at all times. We still have our value, but if we share the best practices, and we understand where we're all coming from, then it just makes everything better. We get to understand why we recommend the things that we do for clients

Areej: With technical SEO being something that can be full of a lot of jargon, a lot of terminologies, what are some ways we can start off making it feel more understandable and more digestible?

Giovanna: I think I've really liked learning analogies. The oddest ones are the ones that I find really interesting. One of my favourites is one that I recently started thinking about, which is the movie Minority Report with Tom Cruise and just that movie I remember growing up and the way that I describe Google bots and Google crawlers and the crawl budget and things like that, is I say, "Remember those little spider dog things that go around in Minority Report, scanning every person, predicting the future of that person, that's, basically, a Google crawler but for every site imaginable on the internet.

We want to make sure that they're predicting the best opportunities for our pages, predicting the best for that, and having our things prepared for when they do start to scan you that you're there." Things like that, I think, are the most fun way to understand SEO and the digestible parts of it, because if you start getting into robots and sitemaps and crawlers and bots and all these things that are so different, it can become a whirlwind to your own team, and then a whirlwind to your clients. It just spirals into that sounds cool, but I don't really get it. I think getting it to that point is important.

Areej: Oh, I love that. It go