Mastering the Foundations of Scalable SEO to Achieve Sustainable Business Growth

Hey, hi everyone. Welcome to your show, E-Coffee with the Experts. This is your Ranmay here. Today we have Jesse McDonald, who is the Senior SEO Director at Siege Media with us. Hey, Jesse, how is it going?

It’s good. How are you?

Good. I can’t really complain. Great. Jesse, before we move any forward, let’s get to know the human behind the mic. Why don’t you talk us through your career this far? You land up in the SEO digital marketing space. And also a bit about Siege Media. What do you guys do? What do you guys specialize in? And we take it forward from there.

For sure. So let’s start there. So as you mentioned, my name is Jesse McDonald. I’m Senior SEO Director here at Siege Media. I’ve been in the SEO game for 10 years, going on 11 as of February. I’m what people would now call a seasoned veteran at this point. I now can confidently receive that because over the last 11 years, almost 11 years, I’ve worked in a bunch of different contexts. I started my career working at an agency here in Austin that specialized in local SEO. That’s really where I cut my teeth and started really understanding the concept of SEO because I initially went to school for graphic design, so that was my major. And funny enough, I said that I would never work in web. My dream was to work in print only. I wanted to do magazine layouts and layouts for band CDs and stuff like that. So the irony that I’ve been in web for 11 years just means that I’m a liar to myself. So looking for jobs in that industry, which is incredibly competitive, I found myself at this agency that specialized in SEO. It also did some design work and paid advertising.

It was really small and had the opportunity to potentially go into that design-specific role. But as I was there for a few months before we decided to break out into actual departments, we were just doing a little bit of everything for all of our clients, I found that I really loved the SEO side of things and wanted to learn more about it. And then that gave me the opportunity to continue to love art outside of work and not be one of those situations where I come home and just did not want to create anything. So I still have the opportunity to be creative without feeling burn out from the art creation side of things early on in the day. So I spent the first four and a half years there learning SEO, eventually I moved up into a leadership role as the SEO director at that company, helped grow that team, won several awards, very proud of the stuff we accomplished there. And then it just hit that point where it was time to move forward. I moved to a different agency That was more specialized in the e-commerce side of things, more national-based clientele, which was great.

Started to build on that foundation that I had built off of in the first agency. As that knowledge grew, stayed there for about a year, and then the opportunity popped up to move over to IDM, and I really wanted to move into an in-house experience that was very focused as opposed to having clients in tons of different verticals, which is fun. You learn what things work for certain areas and types of sites. But having that narrow focus was something I thought would be really fun to put under my belt, and just the in-house experience being so different from agency. So moved over to IBM, was there for a couple of weeks short of five years, and then decided to try the agency thing out again. So that’s when I moved over to Siege. So Siege Media is a 100% remote agency SEO agency specializing in content marketing. It’s about 12 years old. Content marketing has been the really key focus of the agency in that 12-year span. But we also do things like design work, web design, graphic design. And then my team that I help lead is very specialized in technical SEO and that noncontent creation side of the SEO world.

So that side of the business is growing. That’s where I came in to help keep things organized, help grow the team, and bring more SEO technical work to the table. So I’ve been here since end of April. So seven going on eight months, I would say, if my math is correct. Yeah, and it’s been fantastic. I work with an excellent team. Siege itself is just shy of 100 people total across all the teams, and they’re all fantastic. Some of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with in my life. It’s great to be a part of it, and I’m really excited to see what the new year and the future holds for Siege.

Love me. Any plans for 2025? You said your team is growing, getting more clients. There is more direct discussions happening. Any strategic plans for 2025 in terms of how you plan the growth?

Not necessarily there just yet. Right now, we’re making sure that we have that established foundation. As new clients are coming in and new opportunities are coming in, that’s helping us continue to grow and understand our processes even further. My side of the team has been around for a little over five years, but it’s been one of those things where it’s a side deliverable that complements the content marketing side. And now it’s becoming its own viable thing where we collaborate together, but we also can work separately from each other depending on the client’s needs. So definitely continuing to grow my side of the house. But also one cool thing about the way that we’re organized is that our web design and UX team sits under me as well. So really looking to bring them in even more, especially as things like the helpful content update are showing that usability is a key piece of success for sites that were impacted by this update. Continuing to bring that piece of the puzzle and make it a harmonious offering between UX, web design, and SEO is something that I’m really looking to bring to the table and help grow the side that I sit on the most.

Absolutely. You have been associated with a global brand like IBM, right? Mm-hmm. Now, I have been part of a couple of agencies, and I’m assuming would have annual large-scale clients. If you were to pick one major difference between working with a direct brand and an agency, and given an option, what What do you prefer?

It’s really interesting. No, you don’t put a Q in this part there. No, totally. The key difference that I found between agency life and in-house work, from the work side of things, it’s really scalability. At the end of the day, it’s all the same. It’s just a matter of scaling it so that it’s efficient because you typically have to do a lot more proving a value of an initiative from an in-house perspective because everyone has so many things coming at them, especially from a developer perspective. If you go at a project and just say, We just need to do this because it’s best practice, more than likely you’re not going to get that buy-in to actually make it happen and get prioritized in the devs sprint planning. But if you go in and say, If we make this change, this is what we could project to see in terms of the value that it would bring to us. So This could improve our rankings to this, bring in this much traffic, which is valued at X. And through that, we could bring potentially this much more income and business into the site itself from organic search or the channels that you’re working in if you’re not in an SEO.

So it’s basically just a work mentality shift and scalability shift. In-house is fantastic. Usually, it narrows your focus, like I mentioned, which is awesome because it keeps you from being so scattered and you get to learn the product a little bit more intimately. But at the same time, there’s so many cooks in the kitchen and there’s so many opportunities to have to play the politics game internally that it can be a little frustrating, and definitely not for everybody. I would say that’s the biggest challenge and the biggest shift between the two. Now, in terms of priority or which I would prefer, I’m not really sure. It depends on the day. I go back and forth. I really love my time at IBM, and I really love the type of work that’s in-house But also coming back into an agency and working and growing a team is really fun for me. So I really enjoy both. And honestly, Siege works a lot with more like SaaS vertical clients. I’m working in a really similar area anyway. Yeah, I don’t know. It really just depends on the day, but I like both. I don’t really have necessarily a preference.

All right. I will not push you any further there. Perfect. So just Siege As an agency, you guys are known for delivering significant organic growth. Then with the recent addition of yourself and more additions to the team, I’m sure it’s going to foster more for the clients. Could you walk us through the process of identifying and capturing high-value SEO opportunities for your clients?

Yeah, absolutely. We like to go through a discovery period, and it happens in the start of the sales process. We start really diving into the client site and looking at what’s going on under the hood as best we can with the information that we have. Then from there- Does the SEO team is also a part of the sales life cycle? Yeah, absolutely. I’m involved relatively heavily in the sales to us. We have a dedicated sales team and a director of sales that’s excellent. He brings me in, I give my observations. The content team does the exact same thing depending on why the client came to us and what their needs are. So right out of the gate, you’re getting a very dedicated and, I guess, crafted view of what we’re seeing early on. So we can say, Hey, there’s some There’s a lot of serious technical issues here that we need to focus on early on, and delivering a roadmap of, if you sign on with us, this is what we think the first six months would look like. This is how many hours we think we would need monthly to make that happen. So it’s very much tailored to the client itself and not just something that’s blanketed, which I think is fantastic, and it’s incredibly helpful.

Then through that process, we have an understanding of what’s going on and an idea of how we need to push forward over the next few months, assuming that the client does sign on. But then when that process does start up and contracts are signed and we’re on that start date, then the team dives into a little bit more of a discovery phase. They take what we’ve already identified and what that potential roadmap could look like, validate against what they’re seeing as well, and then finding new opportunities, and then just start chipping away the things that are going to be the most impactful to the business overall. I think of it as a two-pronged approach. You have your tactical approach of the things that just need to happen because that’s how SEO best practices work from a technical perspective. They might not move the needle, but they chip away at creating a stronger foundation to build off of. Then you have the strategic side of things of maybe we need to pivot some of the content on this page based on what we’re seeing in SERPs or how users are interacting with it. And that helps build off of that tactical foundation that you’ve established.

Based on those two things, we find where we can make the most impact on the business. Maybe it’s the commercial pages that are more in the bottom funnel. They’re not meeting Serp intent correctly, so we need to pivot them and their content and make sure that they’re linking between each other correctly. So it’s very much a catered approach per site, as opposed to just saying, Okay, these are all the things that we need to do. Checklist, checklist, checklist. We use lists as our deliverables just to make sure that we’re hitting all the marks and checking everything. But it’s very much encouraged of, if you see duplicate H1s, don’t just say, Here are all your duplicate H1s. It’s, What’s systematically causing this problem? Is there something within the template that’s saying, There’s two H1s on a page, that’s not good, we need to fix that? Or is there something where the rendering of the page itself upon crawl is not pulling the H1 correctly? So looking at it and figuring out the best way to solve the problem and then addressing it to meet the needs of the business. If it’s not a problem, don’t address it.

It’s based on that priority.

Arthur, you have been an advocate of the importance of user-first approach to SEO. Can you share how that philosophy translates into actionable strategies?

Yeah, for sure. I think this comes from a graphic designer background or maybe that artistic hippie approach. I’ve always looked at things as much like the tactical versus strategy in terms of SEO, especially technical. I think of things the same way. When Whenever you’re looking at optimizing a page, think of it from either the human algorithm or the Crawler algorithm. If it’s good for the user, but it’s only good for the user, then it doesn’t serve the purpose of getting people to your site from organic search. If it’s only good for organic search and people get to the site, but it’s not helping them, it’s not giving them the experience that they want, then you’ve missed the mark completely. You have to find yourself in the middle of those two ideologies. Basically, looking at a page and saying, what things do we need to change? What do we need to optimize? Let’s go back to that H1 example. Having a keyword-rich heading that matches the needs of the CERP itself is crucial. But there’s also marketing messaging that you can use to help build confidence on the page and let people engage with the page more and actually have actions.

Finding the happy place between the two is something that’s absolutely crucial and can be done. You just have to be a little creative with it. Maybe it’s using more of an eyebrow, each one, as we like to call it, where you have your marketing messaging that’s the biggest piece of the puzzle on the page. But then you have your H1 that tells the Crawler the exact signal that you’re trying to push forward for them. So whatever that key commercial intent keyword is, looking at that, throwing it there, but then also having that marketing messaging underneath. So serving both purposes in the same place. And then looking at the usability of the page overall. Are people getting stuck? Is there friction somewhere? Because if there’s friction, then you’re not solving the needs of the user based on their intent. Then diving into those possibilities. So there’s lots of things that don’t necessarily directly impact the organic success that you can look at that then help supplement it in the future because people are getting that experience that is expected from both the user and the search engine themselves. You just have to weigh out which is most important for both and which way are you going to for whatever single decision that you’re making at any given time.

Absolutely. From a campaign perspective, you see, what metrics do you prioritize when you have to assess this success or failure of a campaign?

Yeah, for sure. I think… I mean, you have your standard KPIs, like rankings and the traffic coming in from the channel that you’re working in. Those are your baselines and that you build off of that. You You have to look at, are you getting the traffic that you want? At the end of the day, if you’re not getting the traffic, then something’s not working. But then what happens after the traffic comes in? Are people converting if that’s what you’re wanting them to do? Are people interacting with elements on a page if that’s what you’re trying to get them to do on there? Let’s say that you created some calculator to assess the value of your product or whatever. Are people actually using that and it being a helpful tool? If they’re coming in from organic search, looking for that type of thing, maybe they’re comparing products. Are they actually reading your content? So there’s lots of usability metrics that you can add in that gage the success of the client or the traffic that you’re getting. Because especially as you’re moving deeper down the funnel, traffic might be lower, but the intent to convert is higher.

So you don’t want to exclude that. It’s not just, I brought this much traffic to your site, we’re winning, boom. It’s, I brought this much traffic to the site, that is doing what we want to do or is not, how do we address that and make it even better moving forward? So, yeah, that’s how I tend to approach things. You have those top-level metrics that everyone looks at, but then start looking at the things underneath it that are subsequent to it and using those to adjust those other metrics as needed.

Also, you did mention about you’re working with a lot of SaaS clients. How do you feel it is different? What are the challenges which are unique to this particular niche versus the other ones?

Our key verticals are SaaS, e-commerce, and fintech. That’s the three main bubbles that we work within. Saas is really interesting because it’s almost like e-commerce, but not quite. You can think of it in a similar way. But whereas people aren’t necessarily getting to specific products, usually in the case of a business, it’s features of a product. Sometimes it’s not the case, and it really depends. You have to have an approach where the buyer’s journey merges and becomes almost a little bit of a hybrid situation. In an e-commerce space where you would have that mid-funnel being those real key categories that you’re working on that your products solve the need for. Let’s say, using IBM as an example, obviously, AI is a big component of the IBM business. You have your early learn where you’re identifying what artificial intelligence is. In that mid-funnel, you’re pushing the solutions and platforms and tools, et cetera, that people already know the problem that they’re trying to solve, but want your perspective on how you solve it, and then into the actual branded product that solves the problem, so Watts & X, et cetera. So that gives you that full funnel.

But in the SaaS space, because the business is the product, and that’s where your real branded piece of the puzzle comes in, the mid-funnel and commercial funnel blends itself together. So you’re giving the solution with the brand and product altogether. So that’s where I found it to be really interesting challenge and finding the way to toe the line between being too overcommunicative of the brand versus undercommunicative of the mid-funnel solution services, et cetera. Type of intent that you’re looking to meet. It’s been really interesting seeing how Siege handles that problem and addresses it.

Yeah. Lovely. Great. Great, you see. This has been a brilliant conversation. But before we sign off, I just wanted to… For our audiences at large, you have been in a space for quite some time now. So any piece of advice you would want to give to our young listeners who are trying to make a mark in this particular space? Or let’s say you’re not trying to start their own agency, their own entrepreneurial journey. Any piece of advice there?

For sure. I would say, and honestly, one of the key things that was a big game changer for me was getting out and speaking, doing things like this. I attended my first PubCon in October of 2015, so I would have been going on my two years as an SEO. Being there, seeing the people that I was reading about on blogs like Search Engine Journal or Whiteboard Friday, where I really spent a lot of time early on learning, getting to meet them was incredibly inspiring. Seeing all the talks really got me thinking, I want to do this. I want to make this a part of my career. I started actively pursuing attending webinars and being guests on webinars once that I started making a name for myself. So I would say one component of that is networking. Get to know people. Get to know people in the industry, because not only will you just make friends, which is fantastic in itself, some of my best friends in this world are people I’ve met in this SEO industry. But also you have people that you can ping and say, Hey, I’m running into this challenge. What do you think?

Which is an incredibly helpful resource to have. And then they can start recommending you, which will then potentially send you business. There’s a big referral community in SEO that sends business to each other. So having that is crucial. But then it also helps build your overall career itself. I definitely would not be where I am if I did not have people backing me and recommending me for new roles when it’s possible, but also having some of the things that I’ve done behind my name has been a big boost in my ability to move around and move into roles like IBM, where it’s taking a gamble on somebody that’s not been in-house. So to sum that up, network, but also try to go speak even locally, on the things that you do. If you’re an SEO, go find some SEO meetups and speak on it because then that reinforces your knowledge and helps validate what you know and you become better for it. You might even say something wrong, which is okay. We all have wrong things. We all make mistakes. We all have wrong mentalities, but we learn from it. Someone might challenge that and say, Hey, have you ever thought of this?

That happened to me at a conference, and it was amazing. It changed my mentality on By then learning that, you’re reinforcing what you already knew and making yourself better. So definitely get out, network, try to speak and help other people learn, and don’t be afraid to do so. You might mess up, but it’s okay. It is what it is.

Yeah. Good, Jessie. Thank you so much for the insights and the wisdom you shared today. For our audiences, if they want to reach out to you, how do they do that?

You can find me pretty much I’m very much on all social platforms as Jessie SEO geek. There’s too many Jessie McDonalds in this world, so I had to really dive into the handle. Very active on Blue Sky at the moment, less so on Twitter. So, yeah, hit me up anywhere over there. Or if you go to siegemedia. Com and you’re looking for some help with your SEO, you can fill out our contact form and let them know that I sent you. And, yeah, we’ll be in touch.

Lovely. Once again, Jesse, thank you so much for taking our time to do this with us. Really appreciate it.

Absolutely. Thank you for having me. This is great.