“I think one of the biggest challenges facing SEOs in 2022 is getting an accurate understanding of what’s going on in the search results.” – Kevin Indig
Kevin Indig is currently the director of SEO at Shopify, a global ecommerce brand that really needs no introduction. Throughout his career, he’s helped companies acquire +100M users over the last ten years.
With his specialties including SEO, Growth, Data Analytics, Saas, HTML, CSS, PHP and countless more acronyms, Kevin is also an influential speaker in the SEO community, invited to speak at many conferences in Germany, the US and UK. He takes time out of his busy schedule to have a chat with Russ from Impressive.
Join Russ Macumber as he talks with Kevin Indig about his journey navigating the magic that is SEO.
Born and raised in Germany, Kevin’s pathway to SEO began with a traineeship in a German digital agency in 2008, where he was exposed to huge enterprise clients that had big problems. Here, he developed a lot of practical experience, but also learned how to navigate in-house SEO and work with big companies.
In this podcast, Russ Macumber talks with Kevin about those challenges he faced, his experience at Shopify, and his desire to constantly learn.
“We have to rely more on practical testing and be very, very unattached to our assumptions and theories, and how things work. Test more things, try more things, and measure the results.” – Kevin Indig
Click play to get started!
The conversation covers:
- How Kevin fell into marketing (2:30)
- Why an agency is his preferred start into SEO (4:12)
- The changing environment of SEO over the years (5:00)
- Kevin’s experience in agency vs in-house (9:38)
- Kevin’s career advice (13:22)
- Kevin’s role at Shopify (14:38)
- The team structure at Shopify, influenced by Kevin (17:25)
- What Kevin’s first 90 days at Shopify looked like (19:20)
- Kevin’s levers that he pulled for buy-in (22:50)
- Hurdles in Kevin’s way (28:33)
- Team wins (30:22)
- Non-obvious tools Kevin uses day-to-day to get his job done (35:08)
Quickfire Vox Pop Q&A
Which previous Google algorithm change still keeps you up at night?
Page Quality updates
Gun to your head… which do you prefer: content or links?
Content
What’s the most effective link-building technique you have used?
Links from batches
Is the skyscraper technique still relevant today?
Yes, but most people misunderstand it.
What do you love most about SEO?
The constant change of problems you face, it’s never boring.
How do you apply SEO principles to your daily life?
I think much more about what’s the intention – what’s the goal of this moment? What am I trying to achieve? Is this the best path to the goal?
WFH life or Office life or Hybrid life?
Work from home life
SEMrush or Ahrefs?
I love them both… if I had to go with one, I don’t know, man. I’d have to go with SEMRush – but we’re talking 51 to 49 distribution.
Agency or In-house or Combo?
I’m going with in-house.
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