Episode Transcript
Ashley Segura: So our very first question that I get to ask everybody on the show is when you’re not at your desk and you find yourself in the kitchen, what is your go to dish to cook?
Shelley Fagin: French toast
Ashley Segura: French toast. Really?
Shelley Fagin: breakfast for dinner.
Ashley Segura: Are you putting like fruit and a bunch of toppings on it or
Shelley Fagin: So it evolves and I do love peanut butter on French toast with maple syrup is really yummy. Oh
Ashley Segura: perfect though. I love it. I love it. Okay, so when you’re not having french toast and you’re an SEO, that’s your primary, you’re an in-house, SEO. So can you walk me through from your perspective and your experience as an in-house, SEO, what role does content really play in your day-to-Day work.
Shelley Fagin: Gosh. Honestly, our world revolves around content. Honestly, I think it does at most companies. Some just aren’t as clued into it. I would say we’ve gone through. This process where internally, so I’m a digital ocean. We are in the cloud computing space. We are like, more niche compared to what you would consider like AWS or the hyperscalers. And we built our niche historically really was on creating very valuable. Content that was centered around being brand agnostic. So just in general, back and being helpful no matter who someone was using to build on. And that is really how digital ocean built his brand. And then
I think a lot of years, it really was built with that whole educational aspect. SEO really was never. Even in consideration we are in this space where we are first to market with a lot of topics. And so things just did well. And then what I think has happened with a lot of different brands other companies have got included in the competition and the space has heatened up. It’s also just in general, we’re finding this backlog of content that now is no longer fair. Fully accurate. And so we had this spell that we went through where internally they’re like, ah, is content all that important? We produced a lot. We should be good.
And they backed off and they stopped producing.
And I think it’s really now obvious and it became very clear. That we stepped away from who we were as a company in a way of that way that we gave back to the community, to developers. And we have phenomenal leadership who have recognized. How important that was and we’ve transitioned back to that.
So it’s been very exciting times. And now we’re doing it obviously with the lens of, okay, are we positioning our content to also keep search engines in mind as well as our users we’ve a hundred percent always been users first, and I think that’s why we are posed to do really well is SEO was an afterthought. So I think for the most part we’ve had some really strong engineers, some good people. There’s been obviously like at any company, there’s always those opportunities on the technical side.
We’re going full force in content. And so for me, I’ve been able to come in and stand up a supportive team that works in collaboration with our content team. We are blessed to have a really. Strong group of content writers, but we, because of the pullback temporarily, we didn’t have a lot of technical writers and we’re a very technical company. Yeah. So thankfully we started to bring back on a whole bunch more technical writers that are experts at what we build. And then now we’ve partnered together creating completely new processes for how content is produced working on a creative brief type of system, give guidance and then also going in and, Analyzing our performers. What has decayed, what is still relevant today? Where should we be investing our time where it makes sense? Coming up with a process to do that, not just one and go, but then on a reoccurring basis. So we’ve been making a lot of changes. I hope everyone appreciates me. Definitely. Hurricane. But I think it’s a good thing. We’re seeing some of the fruits of that labor and we were really just getting started.
So It’s very exciting.
Ashley Segura: Yeah, that’s a huge transition to start with content and be able to be like, okay, we’re literally going to create content for our users. We have technical writers who know how to walk the talk. They’re saying the right words. They also have the education behind it. I think it’s really interesting though that you mentioned.
That you always focus on user, not user generated, but user focused content over search engines, like search engines, of course, it’s supported, but I feel like a lot of brands, a lot of SEOs, a lot of content marketers we all say that because we know that’s what we’re supposed to do, but what does that really look like for you guys right now, especially as you’re like going into this rework of strategy and diving back into content, like, how do you create content that’s just directly focused to a user first?
Shelley Fagin: Really trying to get away from the idea of creating based off of keywords and more developing content to solve a problem or provide a solution. I think that is the next kind of evolution. Cause basically if I can go to chat GPT and. Ask it a question and it answers. That’s not the type of content that I really want to be producing. So it’s transitioning the mindset away from, I think, what we traditionally used to do and not to say that was wrong because it worked, it was what worked. That’s how we changed our habits. But I think. I’m lucky in the sense that was definitely not the practice that Occurred where I’m at and so I’m not having to go back and clean up from that standpoint But we are still dealing with versioned Content that just becomes outdated and so we’re still going through this practice of maintenance and what that looks like I Forgot your original
Ashley Segura: On how what, creating content and a content strategy that’s focused on users really looks like and as defined by, because we know that’s what we’re supposed to do. Google says to do that. But then as a brand, like when we’re actually in the works of doing it, what does that look like?
And you killed it with the keyword answer. Like for sure.
Shelley Fagin: Okay, good. I was trying to remember if I was getting to another point and then I like got just my brain, very
Ashley Segura: Yep.
Shelley Fagin: It’s my
superpower, but also my kryptonite.
Ashley Segura: Yes. It is a superpower. I love that. So positive. Okay. Okay. So when. When you’re moving forward on this journey of like totally switching around strategies and you’re like, okay let’s be content focused again, not just from technical perspective, but let’s really hone into our content strategy.
So how do you even begin to create a content strategy that’s focused on driving growth for the company?
Shelley Fagin: So that’s always the challenge there. I think one, it really starts at the top and understanding like what the company’s objectives and goals are. A lot of times there’s not clarity there.
Ashley Segura: Yeah.
Shelley Fagin: Having great connection to your data, I will say we had a disconnect for quite a while and being able to see like where certain actions that you pull or like levers that you would pull, where they affect along the road, essentially the journey, the user’s journey, understanding that then clued in with where your leaders. Want to go
if we have a certain goal each company is a little different. Obviously being in SAS, like we look at like monthly reoccurring revenue and or ARPU or things, metrics like that. But if it’s. It might just be like sales things like that, understanding where we want to hit and we understand where the same thing even with marketers, if we’re running e commerce, where are margins, where do we want to invest in and where do we have a gap in information? Probably my best ways of strategy strategizing for content is talking to our customer service reps
is underrated. Yeah, they’re like a gold mine. What questions are you getting asked that people could not find the answer to?
That’s probably our first clue where we need to invest our time. I think would be a very easy win.
It usually typically always is for us to be able to mine that content. The information that comes in, the questions first before I’d even go to Google or SEMrush or any other people also ask in tools like look internally. The other part is, you are going to have leaders that we have new products that are launching.
We have to support and so might just be going back and looking at, okay, topic coverage, what haven’t we done? That’s typically we are in a space that we’re launching. Going into the AIML side of things. And so there’s a shortage of really useful content in this space because it’s just new.
So reeling people in too, I
think, because they don’t know where to start can get a little overwhelming. It is like a sea of opportunity. Cause there’s just not a lot of it out there, but how do approach it from a way that makes sense. And I think that. Starts with your product and expand out from there. I think key is really like your salespeople as well on top of customer support especially ours. I think they, they are a lot of times that first line. Of having conversations with companies and they understand their pain points.
Also depending on how your company works, if you have offboarding engineers, people who leave or go away, survey those people they stopped buying or they haven’t bought in a while.
Why? And understand that side of things and that not only can help evolve like your products and solve for it, but maybe it’s already been solved for the information isn’t out there and you need better documentation as well.
Ashley Segura: Yeah. I think sometimes we’re afraid to ask we’re afraid to ask those questions, especially if a client or a customer has left or has had a bad experience. We already know there’s a really negative sentiment there. And so to dig into that and be like, what was it? Did you just simply not understand what you bought or you didn’t like a part of what you bought or the experience of it or the customer service of it?
Like what really was that? So I feel like there’s this very strong level of being able to be humble as a marketer and ask these questions and be prepared to get the answers back and then figure out how to create content from that. And like you’re saying, Utilize that as part of your content strategy, whether you’re doing it to help with rankings left or right, or because it’s sales enablement material, or it’s to make sure that you don’t lose a customer for that same reason again.
And so we have to be able to take some bad feedback every once in a while and not take it personally, but take it from a marketing perspective of how can we create new content for it?
Shelley Fagin: You’re dead on and honestly, I always love to tell people on my team. We learn as much from our failures as we do our successes and that’s absolutely true. Definitely don’t be afraid to ask. I’m not going to take it personally. It’s
Ashley Segura: You can’t, you really can’t, whether it’s your own business or your own brand, or you’re a part of a team within a larger company. It’s not something to be taken personally. It’s the strong level of being able to humbly just take some feedback and create some new content to address it. And that could be all sorts of different kind of content, but when you’re, Building out these content strategies or solutions to things.
How do you balance your SEO priorities? Cause at the end of the day, you’re an amazing SEO. So how do you balance SEO priorities while still creating content that supports growth or supports whatever the goal is? Like, where do you find that 50, 50 split or what does that look like?
Shelley Fagin: Yeah, honestly, so that’s where like I have to sit back and think about like practicality standpoint because anything that We invest in I’m making sure everyone understands that we have to maintain it too. And if we’re not willing to put up the time, effort, and resources to do then maybe we need to take a different approach.
And so I think that we always have to keep in mind anything we’re suggesting new, that there’s that burden of maintenance, or at least to understand, go in, don’t go in, assuming there’s not, it’s a one and done thing. Most of the time it’s just not today’s world.
The other side of thing, we also have UGC content on our site.
So we have a really great questions hub. It similar, I would say to like stack overflow, except historically it’s much more specific. Usually to like building on digital ocean, but at the same time, there’s a lot of plenty agnostic questions that come in that aren’t very specific to our brand.
And so that’s 1 of the things that I’ve really been trying to encourage. We get back to the place where that community is thriving again for a while. Again, it just dropped off and realize now how valuable experience and just hands on people talking about what they see and. Especially I think troubleshooting and pain points definitely get that in a UGC question QA page type scenario type format. And so we actually, I use that a lot to drive like some of our content strategy as well. What are the questions that are coming in? But I also have seen it like Google loves this content and for a really good reason. But at the same time it has to be really authentic and it doesn’t do any good to be creating. Like you have to encourage your audience to produce this content and it feels
To be I would say I’ve seen some instances where other companies have really tried to kickstart and you can tell, like things are written by AI.
That is definitely not the case where we are. We have some phenomenal like customer support and it people that.
painstakingly answer every single question. They’re phenomenal and I appreciate them. They do God’s work. I can only imagine how much time it takes to do that and do a wall. And so I think a lot of companies worry about the investment that’s there.
But I think at the same time, we can also encourage our community.
And we’ve been working into Reward users who take the time to answer questions and do so accurately. There’s almost, I don’t want to use the word gamification, but really, truly it is. That’s that reward system that due to the way things were set up internally, the incentive to contribute, if you weren’t. A employee kind of went away. And so you definitely see how that makes a big difference. And so understanding the value. And I think that’s been a lot of our transition in house is understanding how important our community is. And putting them first really drives content for ourselves as well. So it not only does that, but produces content that gets answered and indexed in Google and answers questions for other people running into the same things as well.
So we have a balanced, but if we’re seeing a lot of Issues coming across in questions, then that is our cue to send it over to our content team and maybe our tutorials aren’t super clear here.
Let’s go back and revise and add clarification or oh, we haven’t addressed this topic.
Let’s do that. Again, playing back to what are your customers in your audience saying.
Ashley Segura: Yeah. Aside from when you get signals like that, where it’s like really clear, Hey, we need to update the copy on this for the messaging on this. How often are you putting on the to do list that we need to go back and update content? Or we need to honestly do like a full rewrite. Like, how often are you doing that?
And how are you making those decisions?
Shelley Fagin: Yeah. So I think it really truly depends on the niche and the content type. Ours are a little easier. Not all of them, but we have a lot of tutorials, for instance, that are about Ubuntu and every two years they update new versions. And so it just, it’s very obvious that we have to go through and update certain elements. But. We basically will go through and actually validate and verify that it’s still accurate. We built into a system as well to allow users to report if something’s no longer accurate. And that is very helpful.
If we see things come through, sometimes it’s just maybe the skill level and they don’t know what they don’t know, and the
tutorial’s accurate. But then we have someone who can comment and respond and give a little guidance, or maybe it just we need to clarify and write for multiple levels. And that’s how our content has really evolved. And then it just happens naturally. That stays maintained and updated. Otherwise if it’s a strong performer, we know everything’s accurate.
We either don’t touch it unless we know a new version has come out and needs to be updated, or we watch how it’s performing in search. And if we have that dip, then we’re like, Oh, someone needs to be hands on and make sure this is still accurate and verify it and it might just be that there’s just more like people producing content out there and that tends to happen. We get it all the time with Stack Overflow. They automatically set their questions, the updated date. If someone comments, it fully updates everything, even though it’s a really old question and maybe not even relevant today And so they’ll pop back up above one of our questions and
things like that.
But we have very strict guidelines around the question side of things. We don’t accept answers. Technically the user is, needs to go back and flag if it’s an accepted answer that meets their standards. And so we’re very like strict like that. But we also battle a lot of competing content, not to say anyone else is not doing it that way, but it’s just they’re constantly fluctuating back and forth. And it just really, truly depends. Every type of content is a little different. And so we create. That maintenance kind of calendar for the different types. And that’s really the best that you can do. And then set up the alerts for decaying traffic. So at least someone gets an eye on it.
If it’s at risk, it’s a
Ashley Segura: I love how. Yeah, that is super manual, but like literally every single answer this entire episode, you have so focused the answer based on the user and the user journey or the user experience on something, which is so not traditional SEO. I know that’s the Holy grail of what we’re supposed to do, but you’re really doing it on a regular basis, which is so amazing.
Like you’re not looking at, okay what did we use to rank for? And we aren’t anymore. And we need to go to that first. That’s very. foundational and there’s nothing wrong with that. That is, that’s what we do for sure. But I love that all of the basis of your strategies, your pivots, your to do list for you and the team is based off of what are the users telling us?
What are they not telling us? What are their journeys? How is that changing? Like you’re literally walking that proper talk of what’s going to make content successful. Moving into the future and actually sustainable in the long run.
Shelley Fagin: I didn’t even realize that, but yes,
Ashley Segura: Well done too.
Shelley Fagin: A lot of us, what, four or five years ago really started to be glaringly obvious that we needed to start doing this change, but
not really getting how I guess it just naturally evolves. We’ve grown up.
Ashley Segura: Yes. Yes. And way to do that and not just stay the same and just like rinse and repeat for forever and be like, yeah, I’m changing. No, you’re actually implementing.
Shelley Fagin: Why go into SEO if you just want to be stuck in your ways? It’s not the career path. I think that’s why I’ve always been drawn to it is
the constant change and evolution that’s required to stay at the top of your game for sure.
Ashley Segura: Yeah. Really well said.
Shelley Fagin: ADD brain.
Ashley Segura: Also important to have. As we wrap up, I’d love to hear what is your current secret sauce? Is there a strategy, a book, an article you just wrote, a tool that you love? What’s something that’s really changing the game for you within Work or even productivity what’s your secret sauce?
Shelley Fagin: Okay. So this is weird. So now I am no longer just director of SEO, which is the role that I’ve held in house for the last several years and been very hyper focused. Now I’m head of growth acquisition, which includes multiple channels, including paid
social search paid media. CRO and web experimentation and affiliate stuff.
And I honestly coming from where I was previously, the channels were segmented and verticalized and there was no communication between a lot of the teams, even I’ve seen it historically paid search teams will live in their product and not even communicate with. The other search teams, it mind blowing how much shared data that we can use to leverage and understand what, your customer and your audience is looking for. I think a lot of us have been on the journey to understand that. And it’s not always like a clear cut and we might take stabs at understanding. Who we are trying to write for and who we’re optimizing for and come to learn that oh, that’s not working I think that really is not being afraid to Try new things
fail is my secret sauce having the connection Understanding the data having the ability to really interpret that and not be afraid to say oh that did not work
But why?
And I think that’s the key is I love retros. And really sitting back and not being able to frayed, especially I think in house, it can be very scary or even going to a client. That thing I sold you or told you we needed to invest in did not work. I truly have. Been afraid of that in the past.
And so you tend to avoid it, but I’ve learned in order to really have the best strategies and move forward, it’s embracing that and working together. I honestly having multiple channels underneath me, I now see. Especially I think we have a lot of data attribution loss. And today we don’t really fully understand the drivers. We don’t understand all the touch points. Like we used to be able to and so seeing how even just like our paid campaigns, we had an issue with our data.
And so seeing our direct and unknown go down, not understanding the correlation between the different channels and how they all work together. I think. Really is disservice to not really understand that. And it’s not always like super intuitive and clear. And that’s where testing and discussing what and then verifying and validating and
doing it over again. I think that’s really where the magic happens.
Ashley Segura: Yeah, I love it. You can’t learn if you don’t try. And so you gotta, even regardless of if you have budget, regardless of if you have resources, like there’s still levels that we can all try new things and new strategies. And you can either learn really quick if you have the budget and resources to do or it may take a little while to have this learning curve.
But as long as you can get even a little bit of data of did it hit. Any of the KPIs did we get close to anything that we were trying to aim for? And if so, can you tell the story of what really made it get there? Why, and how you can repeat that process. You definitely got to be open to learning, which I’ve learned so much from you today.
So thank you for being on the show.
Shelley Fagin: me. I always love chatting with you, but especially geeking out about search. I’ll do it every day.
Ashley Segura: Awesome. Thank you so much for being on the show.
