For some reason, it’s a struggle to find In-House SEOs to share their stories, lessons and SEO strategies.

Today’s show is the rare exception.

Kevin Indig runs technical SEO at Atlassian – a company responsible for tools like Trello, Jira, Confluence and more. Atlassian.com has a domain authority of 93. There are hundreds of thousands of URLs across several domains in the Atlassian family.

So … technical SEO is a really big deal.

Kevin went in-depth on topics such as:

  • How they use log file analysis to boost rankings
  • Their process for cleaning up low-quality content
  • Tactics to improve the internal link structure
  • How to promote SEO education internally within a large 2,000+ person company.
  • How they measure and track SEO success in a company with NO sales team and where organic traffic is responsible for 50% of their product sales.

Kevin also answered lots of questions from listeners on Twitter

Enjoy!

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Show Agenda & Timestamps

  • Kevin Indig & Atlassian introduction [1:29]
  • Semrush free account competition announcement [1:51]
  • Kevin Indig’s background [2:14]
    • Why did he not become a doctor? [2:25]
    • Work Background before Atlassian [4:36]
    • Atlassian overview [5:55]
      • Kevin’s role at Atlassian [8:07]
      • As part of the technical SEO team what are the goals, metrics that Kevin focuses on directly? [8:36]
  • How this Interview came to be & Kevin’s article Machine Learning for SEO [10:00]
  • How to set up an inhouse SEO structure [11:22]
    • Creating Assets & SEO Knowledge Base [13:05]
    • How does Kevin deal with how SEO changes [15:30]
      • SEO concepts that don’t change [15:45]
      • SEO concepts in flux [16:13]
      • The power of blogging [16:31]
    • Atlassian company size [17:03]
  • Defining KPIs [17:27]
    • Last touch versus first touch and assisted [18:13]
    • Customer journey and keywords [19:50]
    • Do they equally focus on all three? [20:05]
  • How to handle SEO for massive versus small sites and how do they move the ranking needle? [21:15]
    • Content marketing for smaller sites [21:45]
    • Keyword Cannibalization [22:24]
    • Crawling, Number of Indexed Pages, Quality of Pages, Log File Analysis [24:07]
      • Tools used [25:01]
      • What do they look for in the Log Files and the Crawl Analysis to move the ranking needle [26:21]
      • Action Items to improve crawl frequency and move an important page up in ranking [28:11]
      • Do external links impact crawl frequency as much as it passes page rank  [28:54]
      • How do they define low click depth and how do they prioritize links [29:30]
      • Looking at Indexed Pages and the Quality of Indexed Pages [31:24]
        • How do they gather the data [33:10]
      • How much do they look at crawling topically? [36:25]
      • XML Sitemaps strategy for a large site [37:33]
      • 301 versus deleting a page [38:43]
  • Twitter Questions [41:01]
    • How does Kevin explain that it’s not all about immediate results? [41:19]
    • When is a drop in traffic part of the goal? [42:58]
    • What’s the importance of communicating data analysis in a story to get ideas across? [43:56]
    • Any prefered project management platform? [46:19]
    • What’s the best way to implement schema at scale [47:20]
    • What does the work flow between the technical seo team and the development team look like? [48:23]
    • What is something not previously discussed that moves the needle? [49:20]
    • What is Kevin’s day to day job like? [53:10]
    • What’s Kevin’s advice to in house SEOs if they get stuck in a dead end? [54:42]
    • What are some things Kevin looks for in an outside consultant / agency to make his in house job easier [57:47]
    • How does Kevin keep his knowledge up to date? [1:00:31]
  • SEMrush contest [1:04:00]
  • Interview wrapup [1:05:44]
  • Where listeners can find Kevin online [1:06:21]

Tools Mentioned

Articles, Resources & Links Mentioned

Find Kevin & Atlassian Online

About Dan Shure

Hi! I'm Dan Shure. I write all of the posts and host all of the podcast episodes you'll find on the Evolving SEO blog. Say hello on Twitter @dan_shure!

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