Elevating Your SEO Career and Team in the AI Era — Whiteboard Friday

Discover how to thrive in an AI era with Travis Tallent's SOAR framework. Learn to Streamline processes, Orchestrate teams, Automate tasks, and Reposition your focus for career success. Perfect for SEO pros looking to level up their skills and lead high-performing teams.

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Hey there, guys, gals, non-binary pals. Happy Friday, I'm so excited to be here for my first whiteboard Friday. And today I'm going to be talking about how you can grow your SEO team and your career in an AI world. 

Let's start by rewinding to the 80s. I'm not talking about video cassettes, RIP Blockbuster, or hairbands, smashing out on guitars or even crazy mullets. I'm talking about the internet.

The internet launch in 1983, and this technology held loads of promises. And even 12 years after its launch, there were many, many critics, including from Clifford Stoll, an astronomer who ultimately said, "All of this telecommuting stuff, e-commerce, that is ultimately going to be baloney when it comes to the internet."

Today, I see a lot of similarities between the internet and AI. AI holds loads of promises, it has tons of critics, and at the end of the day, it's our job to ultimately sort through what this ultimately looks like in our workplace and in our careers. 

We have a change model. Satir's change model can ultimately help us when it comes to understanding how a big transformative shock like this ultimately gets integrated into society. Starts with the status quo, and then a shock, like the introduction of the internet, ChatGPT, we enter into chaos, resolve, integration, and a new normal.

In the case of the internet, this whole change model took over two decades from when the internet first launched, 12 years after there were still critics, and then of course, in the early 2000s when Google became the leading search engine.

Today, when it comes to AI, I think we can all agree we are squarely in the chaos phase. What I want to chat through today is a framework that I've created as the VP of SEO at Brainlabs that has ultimately led to 110% increase in SEO revenue and a growth of our team to over 90 SEO insight experience folks globally. Let's go ahead and dive in. 

Let's start with the “s,” streamlining the basics. When we talk about streamlining the basics, it's ultimately ensuring that everything you do on a recurring cadence is easy. I think of reporting and I think of communication. And to really simplify those things, making sure that you've aligned your SEO KPIs with your business KPIs is a really great way to get other stakeholder buy-in. So forget talking about things like keyword rankings or site engagement and swap that out for something like share voice and lifetime value. That's what other stakeholders, business stakeholders are ultimately going to care about, and that's ultimately what is going to change you from an SEO leader to a business leader within your org.

Next, we want to streamline communication cadences, something like quarterly road mapping, monthly reporting, and then ultimately having weekly status syncs where you cycle through your strategy team, your content team, maybe your digital PR team, and your technical team. And this ultimately allows you to ensure that you have touchpoints with all of these stakeholders. When you agree to this type of communication cadence, it really streamlines what they can expect from you and what you can expect from them in terms of ongoing communication.