Digital Marketing Victories

Can you be more persuasive as an SEO Product Manager?

Gus Pelogia - SEO Product Manager at Indeed Season 2 Episode 1

About This Episode

Gus Pelogia is a journalist turned SEO, conference speaker, and once-in-a-while blogger. He is currently an SEO Product Manager at Indeed, the #1 job site in the world, with over 250 million unique visitors every month. Gus has worked in-house and at digital agencies in Argentina, the Netherlands, and Ireland. He spent five years as an Account Manager and Team Lead at agencies such as Spark Foundry (Core) and Wolfgang Digital, working with clients from travel, e-commerce, and professional services, winning several industry awards such as Digital Media Awards, The Drum Search Awards, and Irish Content Marketing Awards. Currently, Gus is also a judge for the EU Search Awards.

This episode is for you if you’re curious about the following:

  1. How thinking like a product manager could help your developer relationships.
  2. Tips for pivoting your career toward product management.
  3. How to tell your story effectively to sell through your SEO tests.
  4. How to present your story effectively to win awards.

"The idea of putting stars together, it's something that you take with you as a journalist, no matter what you do." - Gus Pelogia

Join us as we delve into an enlightening conversation with Gus Pelogia, the SEO Product Manager at Indeed, who brings his journalistic background to bear on his current role. Gus shares his wisdom on how adopting a product manager's mindset can align people effectively with a marketing strategy and how transitioning to product management can be a game-changer in your career. A wealth of tips and insights from Gus await you in this episode.

Tune in for a captivating conversation with Gus Pelogia!


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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Digital Marketing Victories podcast, a monthly show where we celebrate and learn from the change makers in digital marketing. Great digital marketers understand that people are the most challenging part of doing their jobs, and this show focuses on the people part of digital marketing wins what tactics or skills the guests use to align people with their marketing strategy. I'm your host, catherine Watzie-Yong, the owner of WO Strategies LLC. We focus on increasing organic discovery for enterprise-sized, science-focused clients. Thank you for joining me. Let's get into it and celebrate our victories.

Speaker 1:

So today we're joined by Gus Palosia. He's a journalist, turned SEO conference speaker, once-in-a-while blogger. He's currently an SEO product manager at Indeed, which is, as you know, the number one job site in the world. He with over 250 million unique visitors every month. Gus has worked both in-house and at digital agencies in various spots around the world Argentina, the Netherlands, ireland. He spent five years as an account manager and team lead at agencies such as Spark Foundry, wolfgang Digital, working with clients from travel, e-commerce, professional services, and he's won several industry awards, such as the Digital Marketing Awards, the Drum Search Awards, the Irish Content Marketing Awards, and currently he's a judge for the EU Search Awards. So this episode is going to be perfect for you if you're curious about the following how would I think like a project manager and how that might help your developer relationships, how you could pivot your career toward product management, how to tell your story effectively through the SEO test you're running. And how to present your story effectively to one awards. So, gus, welcome to the show.

Speaker 2:

Thank you very much for having me. I'm excited to have this conversation.

Speaker 1:

Great thanks for being on. So why don't we get started by telling a little bit more to the listeners about your background, how you got started in SEO and how you did the switch to product management?

Speaker 2:

Sure, so I started SEO back in Argentina in 2012. Even though I'm from Brazil, I had to move countries to discover a new profession that I took on and changed my life, and before that I was actually a journalist. I went to journalists school. I published a couple of books. I worked for big news portals doing a bit of everything, mostly entertainment. I loved writing about music, so I would try to get any freelance gig. Sometimes I would just work for free for the same publication that I was working full-time but doing other types of journalism Because I always wanted to find a way to put my passion there as well and develop that. And when I moved to Argentina, I got a job at a Spanish school and someone introduced me to SEO. I was very lucky that the owner of the school knew some other people that we went to play football one day and he was like, hey, this is the guy that I was talking about. So after a soccer match, I got a job interview at one of the biggest online travel agencies in South America at the time.

Speaker 2:

Got a job and that's how I actually started doing SEO professionally, full-time. It was a combination of the two things that I had studied in my life Journalists it was the side of how to pitch stories to journalists how can I explain something on an interesting way and find this to get backlinks. And on the other side, in high school I also had done some IT studies, so I knew very little about computer hardware and HTML building websites. It was very basic from what we do now, but essentially at that time, the first time, I was reading the Moz guide to SEO and they started talking about so here's how you look at the HTML code and it's like wait a minute, I know this. So it was an easy start. It was a profession that combined the two things I knew and I somehow just stumbled upon of it. That's awesome.

Speaker 1:

So I have a couple not related SEO questions actually. So the first one is so, what are the books that you've written?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so my graduation project from college was a book called Giado Di Paoco, like a stage diary, something like that, and it was 10 interviews with musicians and music label owners and that kind of people more or less like a Rolling Stone style, kind of going on detail about who they are and trying to frame something about their day. So someone one musician, I went on a trip with the other one. I picked him up and at his house and we took the subway together, went to his full-time job on that it was on the side of heavy band and that kind of stuff and the other one I was already living in Argentina and a Brazilian band was going to play there for three, four days and I just joined them on on this trip, used this as an opportunity to discover a few new places in the country and I turned that into a story.

Speaker 1:

That's awesome. So one of the previous members of my team at Ketchum actually he was singing at the Apollo and now he well, for a moment there he's working as the digital marketing manager at Sony Music Entertainment, but now he's off at YouTube Music, so I have a history of connecting to people that are doing music stuff. I'm also a band groupie, as some people, some listeners, might know. My husband plays in the president's own Marine Band at the White House.

Speaker 2:

So I'm a bit of a music groupie. Okay, yeah, you have an interesting world around you, so.

Speaker 1:

I'm curious about this reporter background, though, because not all SEOs kind of end up there with such a strong writing background, so is there any bit of that that you think you're currently using?

Speaker 2:

I know you're doing product management, but I think I use a lot of this and I use throughout my career the idea of, like, putting stars together. It's something that you take with you as a journalist, no matter what you do. So if I'm pitching something to a client, it has to make sense for them. Or if they ask me something, or if I have a big meeting, I will naturally just look at okay, so this is what we discussed, I'm gonna work on this, you're gonna work on this. Unless this part is done by person A, none of this can happen. So you have to turn anything into a cohesive story and to do that, as a journalist, I think it's. You use those skills in SEO and digital marketing as well. So, yeah, I think putting stars together make sure that it's clear for everyone what has to be done, what we are expecting from them was something that I had to do before and I still do it now.

Speaker 1:

So can you describe to the listeners the difference between the product management mindset and an SEO manager approach?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so I think something that changed a lot for me before. I would just put a list of things and say, okay, we can, we do an audit, we see what's wrong and we start working on to fix a lot of things on the website and we would just hope that some of these things will work. Some of them usually work and you start getting results for the client. But there was never an approach before to say is this happening because of this project or because of that project? We are just running a lot of things at the same time and hoping those results will help the client. You can have some directions, say, we spent a lot of time putting nice links this month so we can see that those pages are growing, but we can't really measure necessarily. Was this growing more than the website, that the pages that we didn't build any links to, or is this actually what is driving results or not? And I think, as a product manager now, you think a little bit different.

Speaker 2:

First, I'm not just fixing problems. I'm spending most of my time building new things. In fact, if I have to spend time, fixing a problem is a bit disappointing. You have to do. We all have bugs and stuff, but fixing a bug won't bring me closer to actually bring more results. It might fix other things.

Speaker 2:

Let's say, if something's not looking nice on the website, of course users will be happier that this is working again. Or if there's a problem, the CMS that the editors can't do something, I'm solving their problem, but I'm not bringing more traffic or bringing more results because of that. So I tend to spend most of my time building new things and also comparing what should be done first, because before we would kind of ballpark oh this seems easy, we'll just do this month, but because now we do projects that are a lot longer, a lot more complex, you will need to find ways to compare is it worth doing this versus that one? So having that mindset into comparing projects and testing things and releasing an MVP to see if things actually is working the way we intended is actually bringing results before you go full on and spend six months developing something. I think all of these things are part of the product mindset that I started adopting after I started working on this role.

Speaker 1:

But that's helpful. So are there any other tips that you have about how to pick the project, sell through that project, to do a test, that kind of stuff?

Speaker 2:

So I start everything with a PRD product requirements document and at first I was doing those because I needed to pitch this idea to someone else and make sure that they would have their buy-in, but over time I realized that often they would help me to clarify my idea as well. So a PRD will be a long form text document where you're gonna explain this the background from a project. This is what we wanna do, these are the results we expect to get. These is the technical depth, those are teams that need to be involved and everything that surrounds it. Those are the deadlines. We wanna release this on this day. We expect to test results after four weeks, six weeks and so on.

Speaker 2:

And this document usually gives me a lot of confidence and clarification on what I'm actually building, because it's very easy to get out of the direction.

Speaker 2:

The developer might understand that something is different, or it might be in a way that does not allow the second thing you wanna do, but maybe you never mentioned this before, so the clarity is not there. So I get very excited when I have to write a PRD, because I spend days and weeks doing research, looking at different types of websites and looking at the potential problems this might cause, and kind of putting a very strong idea together before I bring it to other people and they might say this doesn't work or we can only do A and B and that kind of stuff. So I think that really helps me clarify the idea and get the buy-in from other people, because as much as I can say that I have great ideas, they are compared to ideas from different teams and different people. So if the UX is not on board, if the editor is not on board, if the engineers are not on board, the idea might just not never become a reality.

Speaker 1:

So do you have an example of a PRD for the listeners that never played?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so this is one that I'm going to present at Brighton SEO actually. So it's not a completely re-occased of something that we did, but I think you can get the idea from it. So, let's say, you want to build an automated link module, so you want to. Every time there is a mention to a specific word in an article or in a page, you want that phrase to link to another page. So let's say, every time that you mention digital marketing, victors podcast, you want that link to, ultimately to create that link. So that's very simple on paper, but once you start doing it, you might realize do you have enough mentions of this phrase in different articles? Maybe you only have five mentions, so you don't need to build a tool for this.

Speaker 2:

Do you have already manually linked to this page throughout your content? So you need to find your feature, must read the content and see if there's already a link there. Are you putting too many links next to each other? Are they disturbing what the user should be doing on this page? Maybe they start clicking on this link instead of doing what they actually want to do on this page, so you're actually causing a problem to do this, if that makes sense. So putting all those things together and also the impact right, why you're doing this. You want to build a feature that might take three to six months to be done. And how are you going to prove the impact? Because we all like to do shiny things and it's very exciting to build things in SEO, but everything that I do in a few months down the line I have to justify if that was successful or not. And if it was not, can we still make changes and make it successful? Have you learned from this? How can we solve this?

Speaker 1:

I like your explanation of how much time this might take to pull together. So when you're finding I'm assuming there's some case studies and some other stuff because you mentioned, like what happens if this goes wrong, kind of thing so do you have places that you go for the case studies? And, in relation to the impact on other people's work, do you talk to folks before you finish up your PRD? Do you like literally talk to folks internally?

Speaker 2:

Yes. So the first question about the impact If you already have something that we've done internally, that's usually my reference. If I don't have that, I can look at an external case. If I don't have that, I can just say this is the amount of traffic we are traffic or conversions that we are trying to surface with this. So what is the very best case scenario? And then, with that in mind, you can say, okay, we forget all of this. This is the number we would get. Let's see. Are we at 10% of this, 20% of the best case, and you try to see which is an acceptable number for what you're trying to do and for what the business expect as well. And then the second question was about if you talk with other stakeholders. Absolutely yes.

Speaker 2:

So before the PRD is done or once you have a good, decent amount of information there, I also have a question, a section that is about open questions. So at that point I'm going to bring all the stakeholders to see does this make sense for you? Does this fit your timeline as well, because maybe I was doing something with editors last year and I would need a lot of have lifting from them to talk with different people in the company to make sure that we have all the information we needed about people that were writing articles about how to get a job, and I could create the feature. It exists on the CMS, it exists on our analytics, but if the editors do not have the time or if they don't believe in the project to say, okay, I can't hunt all of this. Hundreds of people to get their biographies and pictures in there, thumbs up to put this new information on the page, then your PRD doesn't make any sense because you're not going to achieve what you're always going to achieve.

Speaker 2:

So I do bring everyone on board. I let them critique my documents. There are lots of questions that you will think oh, this is very clear. It's not clear because they're coming from a different perspective and they will look at things for a different reason. So you need to make things very, very clear as well.

Speaker 2:

One classic example that I've been playing with is on internal links, and every time that we get outside of SEO and say present something about an internal link strategy, they will say okay, so we want to know how many people are clicking on these links. That's how we're going to measure the impact, and I say not necessarily if people are clicking, great, but we might be doing it for a different reason. So you want to make sure that certain pages do get visibility across the website, or they have internal links so they can rank better, and that's a balance that you need to find. So, as an SEO, I would think everybody knows why we do internal links, but people that do not live on our bubble they will not know that, and making it clear will help them to do the things that the way you expect as well.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that makes tons of sense. So, okay, so you're leaning heavily on an internal team to kind of validate your PRD before you even present it to say, like the dev team, so it becomes part of the queue. So how did you go about building those relationships? Did you have them when you were an SEO manager? Did you start building them then, and do you have any tips about how to build these cross-functional team relationships?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I started building once I took the role. I was at Indeed for a few months and the person who was doing this job decided to leave and they offered me to take it over and, to be very honest, at first I thought I was just going to do technical SEO and fix bugs and after a few weeks I realized that I found something a lot more exciting and I've been loving the job since then. It's by far the best job I've ever had and I think that goes part of that is also because of the relationships that have been built in there. So you have to find your way. So working, being part of the engineering landscape, I would say, is very important.

Speaker 2:

I sit in marketing, but I'm on daily stand absolute engineers. I'm on the triage meetings, I'm on the sprint planning meetings, so I understand to some extent what they're doing and how much space we have for SEO. Let's say, if they have to do some platform improvements, I already know that before it happens and I can go back and say, okay, we all have space for this number of tickets, what can we do with this print? So I will play around and bring something that is reasonable for them as well and, I think being part of the daily stand-ups it's being very helpful because it's a limited amount of time but it helps you to build a bit of those relationships, and I always try to find who are the friendliest people around, and there are a few engineers that are very nice. So one of them, I think even in my first week, I remember asking do we only need to update this thing for this new future to go live?

Speaker 2:

I said, yeah, doesn't this just take five minutes? Yeah, can you show me how to do it? And he goes yeah, sure. So we jumped on a call and he explained me how to do it and something that maybe would sit on the backlog for several weeks or a few sprints, because people are are doing different things and they don't know that this is necessarily a priority for SEO, and me just starting on the position would take a while to figure that out as well.

Speaker 2:

So noticing like those are where the people that will be open for you to come in and ask you know the, the non-technical questions or a common language. That is like I have no idea what a nestry bucket is, but can you explain me how we can do this? Do I need a nestry bucket to get this done? Oh, yeah, you need. Okay, so how can we do this ticket? How you know? And then you start developing those. I try to be as friendly and as open as I can. We do a on daily stand up. We have a question of the day. I'm sure plenty of other teams do that, but that's an opportunity to kind of discover different things about people as well. So I try to develop those relationships outside the transactional moment and I find that those things are very helpful to you to build a good relationship.

Speaker 1:

Do you think maybe your job is a little bit easier because you're working on a website that probably has web traffic as part of its DNA? And I mentioned that because I tend to work with big websites that are like, what's SEO? And then they come to me they're like oh, we need web traffic. But you know, indeed, it was like the mission is for people to find jobs online. Right, that's part of the DNA of the business.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it is definitely easier because people have this mindset and they know why we're doing these things, so it is easier to sell than it was on different moments.

Speaker 2:

But I do look back at my career when I was at the agency side in different roles, and if I had this experience that I have now, or if one day I have to, you know, go back I'm not, indeed, indeed, anymore, for whatever reason, and I go back to my previous agency or anything, I would still bring a lot of those, those learnings, and, you know, try to frame things the way that I frame now, and especially when you work with clients that also have agencies on the other side, I feel that things like a PRD or some type of testing that you can do will bring them on my side and explain okay, this is exactly what we want to do, and I think things will be will be different. As you know, with any job that you get more experience and once you go to a new place, you bring that with you as well and you try to to do things better.

Speaker 1:

Do you really think the PRD has really helped you be more persuasive currently in your current role and would and would help you if you I don't know you used it as a consultant or something.

Speaker 2:

Yes, oh, big time, big time. I think before I would just have things on. We want to do this for a certain reasons and that would not be clear enough or a few urgent enough and by for a CMO or a director or even an engineer to say, oh okay, we have to really have to do this because I wouldn't. I would be very afraid to put numbers behind it or to estimate actual potential on things, and this is a different way to look at things, and I actually asked on on LinkedIn this week if people spend more time pitching things on slides or on written documents and the polls to running.

Speaker 2:

But most people and do those slides from what we can see both in-house and on the agency side, and I used to do that as well, but now I realize that I probably would spend half of the time just making these slides pretty, which is it's important to sell the idea. But having having the ideas actually written down, it kind of makes it easier for you to form a full idea. It lives less space to hide into, you know, something visual and fancy that people might not fully understand, but it looks interesting, so they will, they will go for it. So actually forgot what was the question?

Speaker 1:

but that's okay you you provided this perfect opening for me to plug the new AI thing I've discovered that I try to tell everybody because I think it's the hottest thing ever. So you can take a written document, because I also default to a lot of written documents to feds like those, like those. So you know a written document, you can upload it to Microsoft 365 online and then you can export it as PowerPoint and it will create slides for you with graphics that is very interesting.

Speaker 2:

That is, that is actually very good timing, because I literally just paid for PowerPoint today oh see, there you go.

Speaker 1:

So there's a little AI tip for today. I just have a yearly plan.

Speaker 2:

So I will, I'll give it a try yeah, it works relatively well.

Speaker 1:

I've used it for one. So we have talked about this prd, but we the bit of it is clearly measuring ROI, so let's pivot and talk about the testing you've been doing. So what is your testing process look like? And, for other people that want to start testing, what are your suggestions?

Speaker 2:

yeah, so we do testing using this methodology called call zone analysis, and I'm not a data scientist or or a mathematician, but I will do my best to explain how it works from the way I learned from from these people. You basically look back six months or a year in traffic and you're gonna have a test group, which are the pages that you're applying a change. So, let's say, if you are doing a page title change, so you want to see if adding the year on the title actually helps people to click on it or not, so you're gonna do this test on a thousand pages. That is your test group and through this methodology you're gonna go back six months, a year in traffic and you're gonna find a control group that's being performing on the same level as your test group, so they don't need to have exactly the same traffic, but they need to move up and down together. So that's how you know that those groups are equivalent. And then you have your, your test date. So that's when you released all of these changes on your titles and then you can see over two weeks, three weeks a month, how much did one group grow more than the other, because you know both groups could just grow and you would say, oh, we got results because we made this change.

Speaker 2:

But you're not looking in the whole picture because maybe you know you, one competitor, did something wrong and they lost their traffic, or there was an algorithm update that is happening now and your whole website got benefited from it, or something else out of your control happened and it wasn't really a consequence of the test that you do.

Speaker 2:

So you go there and say we're gonna update all the tiles now and you don't get the same result. So that is kind of how how we do things, and there are a few tools that I haven't tested myself. Search pilot I've seen in action looks very interesting, but we didn't sign up for it and because we already have a team that does this, so we don't necessarily need an external team to or an external company to come in and do that work for us. But I think split signal is another one, seo testing is another one, so I haven't tested those myself. I've checked their websites and it seems that what they do is also an SEO aid test and they look for a control and test group. So it might be similar to you, to the way we do things.

Speaker 1:

And how much traffic does your site need to get in order for a test to be valid, because I know it doesn't work on smaller sites. Smaller traffic sites.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think I can't remember now, but I think you need pages that have at least 50 sessions, 50 to 100 sessions a day, and that has to be consistent for a while. But if I were on a smaller website then I didn't have all of this. I would still try to look for maybe pages that have similar search potential to see if they're moving differently, or compare the pages that I'm doing initiative versus the whole website. Are they growing more than the rest of the website? So there might be other ways that are not as scientific, but they could still work if you don't have all the resources out there.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so we talked a little bit about how you made this transition pretty quickly from a SEO manager to product manager. So how did you ramp yourself? Because you didn't have product management experience? I don't think so. How'd you ramp yourself up, and do you have other resources or courses or whatever that you would recommend other people take advantage of if they are also in that same situation where they get flipped to a product manager?

Speaker 2:

Yes. So in terms of courses, I would recommend to you. So Reforge has some very interesting things and it's an expensive platform. I think you pay a yearly fee and I'm also doing a free course from Pendo. I think it's from Pendo and Mind the Products Product Management Basics. I am actually doing this right now and, even though I've been on this role for over a year, I'm actually learning a few things or a few technologies that I haven't heard before. So that course I would start with that one because it's shorter and it might give you a better view on which direction you're going, and Reforge will get a lot more advanced and the course are a lot longer as well. So try the MVP first, see if you like, and then you can invest on a separate platform.

Speaker 2:

I think the transition for me it was hmm, it wasn't that hard. I had to be honest, I think. Working as an account manager before in SEO, I had to put a lot of pieces together because it would have clients that were doing SEO, ppc, content and social, and I wouldn't be living on those accounts all the time. I just knew the results were getting from social, where I had an idea of the strategy for PPC, but I still had to bring all of this together and translate it into a decent story for the clients when once they would look at a report or once we would have a meeting. And it's funny, I think I learned at home to always think about the next step.

Speaker 2:

So my mom is always worried about the next bad thing that's gonna happen and how we can prevent that, and I took that from her as well. So before I do anything, I'm like, oh, but what if it goes wrong? Okay, if this goes wrong, those are the ways I'm gonna mitigate this problem. So I tried to be ahead of time on that and the first few months there were already a few projects that were moving, so I just took over what was there. There were tons of tickets that were already written, so I had a bit of time to understand them and see what was going on. Ux was a great partner just when I started, because the person that it was running the UX side on my first or second week she booked a meeting with me and she blasted a lot of ideas and I was like why is this girl talking to me Like I haven't seen her before?

Speaker 2:

I didn't really get what was going on. And a few days later I realized that, looking at all their documents from SEO, part of the transition that SEO was pitching something that she was pitching as well from the UX perspective and shortly I realized that her idea was way advanced versus the one that SEO had. So I was like it's a smart. The best thing you can do here is just let her lead this project, not try to interfere or not try to own it, because she's already proposing something better than what we had written. So there were a few projects that were already moving, so it was easier. I had a bit of time to settle in and just move with the things that were there, until I learned how to write tickets, how does this print work, how to break down certain things in different activities and so on. So there was a bit of time to plan about things.

Speaker 2:

But if someone is starting on this now and just have a blank state, I would say only run a few projects at a time. There are always bugs to fix, there are always new things you can do. But if you try to do five of them at the same time when you start, they are not gonna work. I have three, four things running at the same time at max, and some of them are just on a research phase, while others are on more advanced phase. Also, if you break down to too many things, your engineers won't have time to do all of them, so you're gonna have several things moving slowly. You won't have anything exciting to report because you'll all be half done for a long time and they might just all get done at the same time. And then you have another overload of things that you have to prove impact for all these different things at the same time. So do a few things at a time and do them well.

Speaker 1:

So for SEOs that are new to the sprint sort of format, is there any tips that you have for people to understand how sprints work?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So a sprint will work until usually it's a two weeks sprint. So one day, at the start of the sprint, you and your engineers will look through the backlog and say those are the things we wanna do this sprint. They might have different methods to know what is more important and what is the capacity they have to take, the amount of work they can take on those two weeks. So after a few sprints, when you learn, okay, this is the general space they have for SEO, okay, what can I bring to every sprint.

Speaker 2:

So one day, one or two days before the sprint, I'm already asking around and say, okay, how much space we might have, what are the things that we are already doing here? And I already send a list ahead and say, okay, can we do? Here's my plan. I want those six things that they're already in order of priority, the first three. They must be done because they are bugs or because Whatever other reason. So we might have 50 things on the backlog that we want to do.

Speaker 2:

I know only five or six will get done the sprint. So I try to get those very clear and very prepared ahead of time. So actually, once we get to sprint planning, my tickets are already on the, on the sprint list, and they know like, okay, gus talked about this, this, this, this one. He didn't mention this one. It seems that is not important. I'm I'm usually there on the sprint planning as well, so we kind of know what, what can we do? And having this done in advance also helps me to know how far we can go. I helps me to report to my manager what can be completed on the next two weeks or four weeks. And you know it's. It's a matter of like talking a lot of people and setting up, yeah, their expectations in your own expectations as well.

Speaker 1:

Hmm, okay, so Just pivoting one more time. So I know you judge search awards and I want to pick your brain the tiniest bit about that. Yeah so, based on your because I think it's also related You've got a reporter background. You've talked quite a bit about telling stories. So, based on your experience, what tips would you give people that want to effectively win search awards?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, thank you very much for this question because I think I have a few things in my heart about award entries and the best award entries that I always see and the ones that I usually see winning. They tell a very good story. So you can do all the things in the world, but if your entry does not have a good flow that tells a challenge that you had, the problems you had and how you overcome all of this, your entry will not. You'll not be a winner. So I've seen entries sometimes that will say things like we made 10,000 SEO changes on the website. Like right, well, what are 10,000 SEO changes? Or Our visibility went up 40%. Like well, I don't know which keywords you track, I don't know what what visibility means to you. I don't know which software did you use to calculate visibility. So those things are kind of meaningless at this stage. But if you tell me a good story about how you overcame a problem, that is a completely different thing. And there is an entry. I didn't judge this one. I was still working at Wolfgang and this is something an entry that they put together and that was one of the moments that I had a click about how to write this entries was about. It was a Christmas campaign for supermarket and they had to sell. The goal was to sell 800 turkeys online. So you know, if people want to get closer to Christmas, the Turkey price goes down a little bit because they have to sell it or people won't buy it after that, and the earlier you sell, the better price they can. They can get from itself they can. The goal of the campaign was to sell 800 turkeys or the equivalent in other products. So you're already telling me a story, right? You could say you know, the goal of the campaign is to sell 10,000, 20,000 Euros like okay, well, everyone can sell 20,000 euros, like okay, you're putting me on Christmas, you're putting me on a scenario that a lot of people are familiar with and foods that we all have. It Okay, now ready to hear the story. So they were going after people that were searching for recipes and letting on the blog and Saving them to retarget them on different channels later. So this was, you know, a cross channel campaign and had a very clear goal, and they didn't actually get to 800. They sold the equivalent of 785 or something like that. It was very close, but even that, that is like we almost got it, but the client was super happy and you know, and that's just a very good story and the goals were there. You achieve things, you. You talk about the problems that you had. So it is very honest and an open entry and I don't remember which awards it won, but he won loads of them.

Speaker 2:

I did one One time was one for the trauma words. That was my, my entry, I, it was my idea and I I wrote it as well. It was a migration that we did for for an airport website and the whole. It was a normal migration. It got delayed, as migrations and websites get delayed, and Everything went fine at the end. But the hook of the story was the website had to go live as soon as possible and it happened to go live on the business week of summer.

Speaker 2:

So if something went wrong there, if that website was not working, if people could not part, book their parking places or find their departure or arrival flights, you are and you know you're very close to chaos. So that was a story. Like if this migration had happened two months before, I would have no story, but because of problems that delayed that, I had a very good story to say Everything went fine. It was the most profitable weekend for for the parking business from the airport and so on. And you know website was up 100% of the time. People could find it and everything was alright. But you know it's just to find that hook that might be somewhere in the story that will will get a judge Really looking at you and say, okay, this, this was nerve-wracking and you solve it. Well, this, this is exciting to you to be there for a play to you.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I, early on, when I was at Katam, I figured out that a word entry winning award entries has a lot to do with the writing of the award entry. Because they had one woman, fran, and she worked on every award entry. Because I, I, technic, my team, one of you, but it's, it's because of Fran. She took our input and she wrote a story With a hook. She, she touched every single one. Nobody submitted an award without Fran looking at it.

Speaker 2:

So anyway, yeah, she knew it, she knew it.

Speaker 1:

She was the intel behind how to craft the story. Yeah, so this has been awesome. So much useful information, and how can people learn more about you?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so you can find me on my website, gus Peloja calm that I just released on on the new domain and you can find me on Twitter or X I don't want to call it anymore. It's at Peloja P E L O G I A or on Lickenden, gus Peloja. I also do a bit of mentoring on broke mentor and you have to be a member of the platform, but the call it means free, so if I can help you with anything at some point, you just become a broke mentor member and most of the mentors there give their time for free. I'm one of them, so we can have a chat there as well.

Speaker 1:

That's. That's great and for folks that don't know, when he does get a chance to blog, he's got some great tips in relation to writing tech tickets and some other things, with some nitty gritty details that I found super helpful. In fact, you're gonna be in my next newsletter, so thank you very much for being on the show and helping all of us get a little bit closer to working with developers successfully. I think these tips are gonna be great.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, thank you, catherine. I hope that the people that are listening found this useful as well, and if I can help with anything else, just Just come say hi and let's be in touch.

Speaker 1:

Thanks so much for listening. To find out more about the podcast and what we're up to go to digital marketing victories calm and, if you like what you heard, subscribe to us on iTunes or wherever you get your podcast, rate us, comment and share the podcast, please. I'm always looking for new ideas, topics and guests. Email us at digital marketing victories at gmailcom or DM us on Twitter at DM victories. Thanks for listening. I.

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