{"id":752,"date":"2019-05-12T13:46:27","date_gmt":"2019-05-12T20:46:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/technicalseo.com\/insights\/?post_type=episode&#038;p=752"},"modified":"2019-06-18T13:48:49","modified_gmt":"2019-06-18T20:48:49","slug":"tessa-bonacci","status":"publish","type":"episode","link":"https:\/\/technicalseo.com\/insights\/podcast\/tessa-bonacci\/","title":{"rendered":"4. Interview w\/ Tessa Bonacci, DICK&#8217;S"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2>Resources:<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ul><li>Tessa&#8217;s Twitter:&nbsp;<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/tessabonacci\">https:\/\/twitter.com\/tessabonacci<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.merkleinc.com\/thought-leadership\/digital-bowl-report\">Merkle&#8217;s Digital Bowl<\/a> (Super Bowl thing Alexis referenced)<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Timestamps:<br><\/strong>[0:00] Intros<br>[4:30] Importance of educating team and keeping everyone in the loop<br>[7:00] power in over-communication&nbsp;<br>[8:30] what makes a strong retail site<br>[10:00] working with other teams<br>[11:00] preparing for big events<br>[14:40] the digital shift<br>[16:30] how to connect with managers that don&#8217;t understand SEO<br>[20:00] what is best-in-class<br>[22:30] storytelling and using data (+challenges)<br>[24:20] ways to get buy-in<br>[25:00] competing with amazon<br>[28:00] nuggets of advice&nbsp;<br>      1. (over) communication<br>      2. symbiotic relationship w\/paid<br>      3. don&#8217;t forget the basics (check site health, tracking events and performance)<br>[37:00] closing<strong><br><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2>Tessa&#8217;s Quotes:<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ul><li>&#8220;SEO is like the spoiled rich kid, you can&#8217;t pay them off with money. Executives are used to paying and seeing return, SEO just isn&#8217;t like that.&#8221;<\/li><li>&#8220;We like to just operate on a basis of over-communication. &#8221; (In reference to working with multiple teams)<\/li><li>&#8221; Of course, search engines are still important&#8230;.Maybe you have a JavaScript based site, customer sees that (and) they love it. It&#8217;s great, but Google can&#8217;t render it or they can&#8217;t see it. We do have to still keep (search engines) in mind, you know, we have to&#8230; translate things for them, to make sure that they can understand this well. &#8220;<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h2>Transcript:<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:00:00] Alexis Sanders:<\/strong>\nHello. Hello and welcome. This is Alexis Sanders. And today I&#8217;m joined by\nMatthew Grabiak, account manager at Merkle, as well as Tessa Bonacci. That&#8217;s correctly\npronounced? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Tessa Bonacci: <\/strong>Bonacci.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Alexis:<\/strong>\nGah! Pronounced Bonacci. Bonacci, Bonacci. Tessa Bonacci from Dick&#8217;s Sporting Goods.\nAnd she is an e-commerce senior analyst? Well, thank you so much for joining us\ntoday, Tessa. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Tessa<\/strong>: Absolutely.\nHi, everyone. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Alexis<\/strong>: And\nfor coming into the office. Of course. Awesome as well. So would you mind\ngiving yourself a brief introduction for our listeners or listener? (lol) <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:00:43] Tessa<\/strong>:\nSure. So I&#8217;ve been doing SEO, I think, since around late 2014. Mostly in house,\num, consulting here and there, but the majority of my career, in Dick\u2019s\nSporting Goods kind of beginning as a specialist and working my way up to\nsenior analyst role have more of a focus on some of, like, the QA testing and\nworking across with some of our third-party vendors. So neat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:01:01] Matt Grabiak:<\/strong> Uh,\nfun fact. I actually worked on the Dick\u2019s Sporting Goods account in a previous\nagency and worked with Tessa. So I have been working with Tessa for quite a\nwhile now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:01:14] Alexis:<\/strong>\nYeah,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:01:14] Matt<\/strong>:\nfor a long time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:01:16] Tessa:<\/strong>\nYeah, probably think over four years, I would say<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:01:18] Alexis:<\/strong>\nYeah. Yeah. So this is, like, a longstanding professional relationship here?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:01:23] Matt:<\/strong>\nYeah, sure. I mean, I would say friendship. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Tessa:<\/strong> Yeah,\nI would say. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Matt:<\/strong> That\ntoo. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Alexis<\/strong>: Alright.\nAwesome. And, Matt, do you have any additional things you&#8217;d like to tell the\naudience, any intro facts about yourself?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:01:48] Matt<\/strong>: I\nmean, not really I think you covered it pretty well, I am on account manager\nhere at Merkle. I have done SEO for my entire professional career. So about ten\nyears of SEO and I&#8217;ve mainly specialized in eCommerce, but I bounced around\ndifferent industries as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:01:57] Alexis:<\/strong>\nWell, I, for one, am so excited to have you both on the podcast. All right, So\nI guess a good place to start is why is SEO important for eCommerce and\neCommerce specifically? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:02:37] Tessa:<\/strong>\nSure. So I would say that SEO is important for any type of website in the\nindustry, but most specifically e commerce, because, I mean, bottom line is we\nsell things online. So, Seo, being such, you know, a big marketing channel, A\nlot of people using Google, it&#8217;s obviously important that we, you know, show up\nin the search results that way. We contend to anyone looking for any type for products\nin the dicks sporting goods, obviously sporting goods of people looking for\nmouthguards, cleats, \u2026. A lot of them are coming from Google. So making sure\nthat we are optimized in appearing for those queries is extremely important. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Alexis: <\/strong>Definitely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:02:41] Matt<\/strong>:\nYeah, absolutely. And how would you say that? That differs from just General SEO.\nWhat were those secrets for e-commerce that make it different thing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:03:30] Tessa:<\/strong>&nbsp; so definitely don&#8217;t want to give away any of\nmy secrets. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Alexis<\/strong>:\nGive us the secret sauce! Lol <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Tessa<\/strong>: so\nI did some work and lead generation before, which was definitely a different\nanimal, which relied a little bit more on paid search, then say maybe e\ncommerce obviously paid searches really large in eCommerce as well, but as far\nas the secrets, I think it&#8217;s just, you know, having a very holistic site, You\nknow, everything is kind of important when you&#8217;re looking at a site especially\nas large as ours, so You know, if one piece of the puzzle kind of isn&#8217;t\nfunctioning correctly it impacts our channel. So just like making sure that the\nsite holistically is kind of all put together, which is, you know, very\nchallenging, especially when it&#8217;s something as large as Dick\u2019s Sporting goods, <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:04:15] Alexis:<\/strong>\ndefinitely. And how do you guys do that was so many moving parts? like you have\nso many different teams. You probably have to work with so many lines of\nbusiness. Is there anything you find that you guys do that&#8217;s effective for to\nkeep everything organized and the flock moving in the same direction? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:04:30] Tessa:<\/strong>\nSure, it&#8217;s definitely a challenge. So our SEO team at the moment is made up of\nsix people, two of which are copywriters, two of which are specialists. I was a\nsenior analyst myself and then a manager. So how we kind of keep things (I\nguess what you would call together) is we do have the site kind of split in\nhalf. So with specialists and a copywriter kind of work on half of dicks\nsporting goods and then another specialists and copywriter work on the other half.\nAnd then we also have representatives on our team that are kind of responsible\nfor those different teams that we work with. So someone is kind of the\ncounterpart for UX, any of our third party vendors we worked for for local or\nthose different things, so definitely organization is a big part of making sure\nthat we keep stakeholders educated because I know SEO is, it&#8217;s not that it&#8217;s\nnew, but it&#8217;s a little bit of a different animal, so it&#8217;s constantly changing.\nSo we have to make sure that we&#8217;re constantly educating and keeping everyone in\nthe loop and making sure that they understand how their business impacts our\nbusiness and vice versa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:05:33] Matt:<\/strong>\nThat&#8217;s a really great point. I know that your team does a lot of training and\nmake sure that all of eCommerce is involved in SEO. And it&#8217;s not just silo to\nyour specific team that has a great benefit to the site in general.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:05:46] Alexis:<\/strong>\nAbsolutely. So do you think those training&#8217;s are really helpful to getting\neverybody on the same ship? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:05:51] Tessa<\/strong>: I\nwould definitely say, Yeah. So we have a pretty basic presentation that will do\nthat&#8217;s like an SEO 101 that will offer across the board because Dick\u2019s has like\ndifferent educational programs, so the SEO (team) does one. And they do him a\nlot for merchandising trainees. So people that were, like, newer to the\ncompany. So educating them when they first come in, right? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Alexis<\/strong>: Get\nem when then they get in, when they\u2019re young. (Lol)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:06:17] Tessa:<\/strong>\nWhen they&#8217;re placed into, you know, they&#8217;re wherever they&#8217;re going to be placed\nin Dicks, they kind of, like, have that SEO background and knowledge, which is\ngreat. And then even for people would have been at the company. You know, 15-20\nyears we do. We do trainings for them as well. We try to do things more, either\non like a quarterly basis or two times a year to kind of just, like, say, \u201cHey,\ndon&#8217;t forget about us. We&#8217;re still here Just because we&#8217;re a smaller team,\nwe&#8217;re kind of in the background a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:06:40] Tessa:<\/strong>\nyou know, we get involved as much as we can. And, you know, it&#8217;s definitely\nimproved over the years as far as, like making sure people loop us in. Dick\u2019s\ndoes a lot of testing, so your first thought might not be like how does that\nimpact SEO, but as far as like how they&#8217;re serving. You know, the test with a\nredirects or they doing different things like that. So we just try to stay on\ntop of it as much as we can. Definitely not perfect. But we&#8217;re working towards\nit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:07:03] Alexis:<\/strong>\nNice. Yeah, it sounds like you guys have a good SEO involved organization where\nat least SEO is on people&#8217;s mind, which is a huge deal to get to that point. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:07:13] Tessa:<\/strong>\nYeah, it definitely took some time. And like<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I said, I&#8217;ve been it dicks for a while. And I\nremember when we first started there, people were kind of likely what is SEO,\nalthough everyone is still learning and kind of getting up to speed with what\nit is, people are at least like, not shocked when they hear the term \u201cSEO.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:07:27] Matt:<\/strong>\nYeah. So are there any key pieces of information like, If you want everyone in\nthe organization to remember one or two things about Seo, what are those\nthings?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:07:37] Tessa:<\/strong> I\nwould say the first thing is just consider it always important, regardless of\nwhat you&#8217;re working on. So even if you&#8217;re thinking like I&#8217;m building these new\npages or a new products coming out and it might not be applicable to our\nchannel, communicate it anyway, so we like to just operate on a basis of\nover-communication. So even if<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:07:57] Alexis:<\/strong>\nThat\u2019s such a good tip! Over-communicate with me, please! (Lol)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:07:59] Tessa:<\/strong>\ntell me everything you know, Even if it&#8217;s something if it&#8217;s a sale, something\nthat might not fit into our world directly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:08:05] Alexis:<\/strong> It\nprobably does! (lol)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:08:07] Tessa:<\/strong>\nExactly, at some point in time, it does overlap. So even if it&#8217;s a very small\npiece or if it&#8217;s just understanding, like what&#8217;s going on the website, I would\ndefinitely say that&#8217;s, you know, kind of number one and then as far as number\ntwo for people to know, I&#8217;m not sure I think number one is just like the pretty\nmuch the overarching kind of theme there. So if we can get that done, I&#8217;d say\nwe&#8217;re pretty successful,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:08:35] Alexis:<\/strong> Definitely,\nbecause if they come to you and say like, Hey, we&#8217;re not really sure about this\nWhat are your thoughts on it? Then you can get ahead early in the process. I\nfeel like a lot of SEO\u2019s, especially what I see on a day to day basis Is\nthey\u2019re looped at the last minute and at that point there&#8217;s really not much\nthey can do and there&#8217;s actually I guess there&#8217;s almost like this curve where\nyou have the ability to make most impact and that&#8217;s typically towards the\nbeginning and you have less ability to make impact towards the end or changes,\nit gets like way more expensive at that point. If you\u2019re like &#8211; you have to\nchange every way the to develop this entire product, you know, that might be\nvery expensive, so over-communicating is such a good tip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:09:13] Matt:<\/strong>\neven worse after it&#8217;s already implemented. And then you&#8217;re spending most of\nyour time fixing problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Alexis<\/strong>: Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Matt<\/strong>: Instead\nof creating solutions from the outset.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:09:26] Alexis:<\/strong>\nYes, almost like Band AIDS and having that in your process, even having people\ntalk to us top of line is probably like such a huge deal. Absolutely. What are\nyour thoughts on what makes a retail site strong in terms of SEO? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>[<strong>00:09:42] Tessa:<\/strong>\nin terms of Seo again, I know I mentioned this before, but I think that the\nsite has to be healthy holistically. And I think that it&#8217;s more about the\nmoving parts than just like looking at the site is a whole, especially if\nyou&#8217;re a large retail site like such as us. We have to make sure that like I\nsaid, we have our hands, almost in everything. So every there&#8217;s different teams\nfor every product line, whether it be family pages, category pages, products.\nWe have to make sure that, you know, we&#8217;re kind of on top of all those\ndifferent areas. And then, of course, the technical side of our site is also\nvery important. So because, like new technologies, were constantly, constantly\nbeing developed ideas, and DSG has kind of brought a lot of like that technique\nlike technology development in house. That has probably not been our biggest\nchallenge. But probably one of the most important things that we worked on is\njust making sure if, like, you know, we&#8217;re going responsive or something like\nthat, that SEO is involved just because we can do the meta tags do the content.\nBut if the site is not technically sound, can\u2019t be indexed by Google, none of\nthat stuff really matters. So just making sure we kind of start with the basics\nto make sure the site is built correctly. And then all the fun stuff like\ncontent. And there&#8217;s different cool testing things kind of come after that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:10:57] Matt:<\/strong>\nYou mentioned Dick\u2019s Sporting Goods, bringing product lines in house so most of\neCommerce in retail has another side to it. Other than just the commerce site,\na high percentage of sites have to work in tandem with other aspects of the\nbusiness. How do you adapt to things like that on the day to day basis, say\nDick\u2019s Sporting goods decided to change their entire strategy and a product\nline that you&#8217;re working with. They decided to move that in house. How do you\nchange your strategy to work with that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:11:33] Tessa:<\/strong>\nSo, yeah, that&#8217;s definitely a huge challenge. In the past\u2026 And I think like a\nlot of retail sites like you&#8217;ve mentioned, like we work with a lot of third\nparties and rely on a lot of other you know, companies or people in other\nplaces, to kind of be in charge of, like some of those aspects of the site, so\nespecially if they&#8217;re not located, you know, in the same time zone or different\nthings like that. So again, like just the communication of trying to coordinate\nto make sure that everything is in sync. I think one of the biggest challenges\nover the years, we\u2019re definitely getting a lot better at now, is that we\ncurrently run on an m dot for a mobile site. So one of our big things is we\nhave to have a quick turnaround time. Obviously, Dick\u2019s is a big player in\nSuper Bowl, World Series, those types of things. So when there&#8217;s like a clinch\nfor the Super Bowl, you know we have to have things go live immediately and\nhaving those two different sites, technically, we have to make sure you know it\nupdates on desktop updates on mobile and kind of check back and forth and just\nmake sure everything is timely in sync and correct. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:12:36] Alexis:<\/strong> That\nmust be so nerve wrecking to have like some big events like that, that drive,\nare just huge days. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Tessa: <\/strong>Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Alexis<\/strong>: because\nI feel like there&#8217;s so many things that could go wrong, like you think, like 84\nlumber at one of the Super Bowl&#8217;s a few years ago, had the whole site go down,\nright, because too many people hit it at once, You know. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:12:53] Tessa<\/strong>:\nright or if the wrong banner goes live or the Banner doesn&#8217;t go live like\nhypothetically, you know, you could miss out on like, projective traffic. That&#8217;s,\nyou know, in a million. So you have to really make sure. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Alexis: <\/strong>No\npressure<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Tessa:<\/strong>\nbut you&#8217;re just kind of instinct there. Once we bring things in house, it&#8217;s\ndefinitely a learning experience just because we&#8217;ve relied heavily on some of\nthose other vendors in the past and just making sure that you know we&#8217;re\nstaying educated and that we&#8217;ve leveraged they\u2019re information as much as we can\nthroughout the partnership, that way, because, you know, every business wants\nto be, you know, self reliant. So I&#8217;m just making sure that we&#8217;re educating as\nmuch as possible and leveraging the people that we have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:13:28] Alexis:<\/strong> So\nI&#8217;m curious. Do you guys have, like, a checklist that to go through and people\nsign off on. How do you guys make sure that everything that happens on that day\nis going to happen? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:13:39] Tessa:<\/strong>\nYeah, so that&#8217;s a good question. I feel like a lot of the people that are in\ncharge have been kind of in the same position for a while. So almost veterans\nkind of in the aspect there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Alexis: <\/strong>They\u2019ve\nbeen through things, they\u2019ve seen stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Tessa<\/strong>: and\nthe process is pretty seamless at this point. We&#8217;ve made technology changes\nthat, like we&#8217;ve had to adapt to and things like that. But there&#8217;s a lot of\ndifferent departments involved, like we talked before. So you know not just\nSEO, but the site merchandising team, the technology team. You know, UX people,\nthey&#8217;re putting the banners lives. So<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:14:16] Alexis:<\/strong> shout\nout to dev team! (lol)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:14:17] Tessa:<\/strong>\nYeah, that&#8217;s basically all We have our own individual checklists. And then we\nall call in at the same time and kind of go through the checklist based on you\nknow, what&#8217;s most important like is the page live?, is banner live?, those\nthings, and then we kind of troubleshoot our own independently. And then we\nkind of collaborate as a group just to make sure that everything was kind of\ngoing off without a hitch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:14:35] Alexis:<\/strong> So\ncool. It&#8217;s like a war meeting. Yeah, this roundtable on a conference line, of\ncourse. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Tessa<\/strong>: Right,\nwhat people are screaming in the background for the Super Bowl.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Alexis<\/strong>: Yeah,\nIt&#8217;s good. It&#8217;s a good Sunday. Yeah, habit. I guess that does. That must be\nhard, too, because you guys have to take off that time because a lot of I would\nassume Dick\u2019s Sporting goods People are athlete fans too, and have to work\nduring the Super Bowl. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:15:00] Tessa:<\/strong>\nSo, yeah, there&#8217;s a lot of, like playoff games that you wouldn&#8217;t think about it\nfor the World Series like it could be, you know, a long standing Series, same\nthing with hockey, and there&#8217;s different things. So we do have to put some\nhours and outside of work. But<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:15:18] Alexis:<\/strong>\nWe&#8217;ll pour some out for you. You know, the Merkle team we do a Super Bowl thing\nwhere some people sacrifice their Super Bowl Sunday&#8217;s to, you know, do some\nreports too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Tessa: <\/strong>It&#8217;s\njust the name of the game. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Alexis: <\/strong>It&#8217;s\na tough, tough life we live here. Goodness, I have a question. So have you felt\nthat over the last few years or the time that you&#8217;ve been at dick\u2019s sporting\ngoods there&#8217;s been an increasing shift from in store to online (and maybe not\nin terms of, like, money or anything like that. But I know that for a lot of\nother retail businesses, e commerce wasn&#8217;t a thought in their mind a few years\nago, you know, maybe, like 10-ish years ago). But now everyone shops online and\nAmazon\u2019s doing two-day shipping and the world is going digital. Have you guys\nfelt that focus at dicks or that shift being, you know, more of a highlight? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:16:06] Tessa<\/strong>:\nYeah, absolutely. So I you know, I work with a couple people that have been at\nDick\u2019s for almost ten years now, and they can remember when they started the\neCommerce department. And it was, you know, ten people, twenty people, you know\nnow where it&#8217;s well over you in the hundreds. So I know we&#8217;ve definitely felt\nit that way. And then as far as Like how people shop. Absolutely. So we&#8217;ve been\nas a company, putting a very strong focus on digital transformation in general.\nSo you know, not just SEO, but social, paid, those different things and making\nsure that we are offering the customer everything we can, we have a great in\nstore experience, but we would like that to be mirrored online as well, Just\nbecause so many shoppers, you know, are on the online world now. People are\nbusy, and they just want to be able to quickly browse and making sure that our\nsite is user friendly so that people can easily do that without any challenge,\nthey could find exactly what they&#8217;re looking for the least amount of time. So\nyeah, we&#8217;ve definitely felt that. And especially in SEO, I mean, it&#8217;s evolved\nso much as well. So you know, the old school tactics of just like title tags\nand metas is like developing all the way to you know, what kind of JavaScript\nyou\u2019re using. So yeah, we&#8217;ve definitely felt that over the last few years<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:17:14] Matt:<\/strong>\nyou brought up a really great point that they&#8217;re all these additional digital\nmarketing channels that you&#8217;re working with and also Dick\u2019s Sporting Goods has\nbeen around for a long time, and there\u2019s all these traditional marketing\nchannels to deal with, How do you fight for SEO and make sure that it has its\nplace in the equation?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:17:35] Tessa<\/strong>:\nThat\u2019s a great question. It definitely, you know, could be a challenge at\ntimes. So SEO is, like I said before, it&#8217;s so unique. So a lot of you know,\npeople in the business or have been around for a while, you know, they&#8217;re used\nto, you know, you put money into something and you get a return. So Seo is one\nof the only channels, that I can think of off the top of my head that you can&#8217;t\njust put money out and see, you know, your investment. So I like to think of\nSeo is kind of like, you know, the spoiled rich kid like you. You can&#8217;t you\ncan&#8217;t buy them off with money. You know, it has to be really thought out and\nit\u2019s strategic. But it&#8217;s very, very difficult to communicate that just because\nit&#8217;s you know it&#8217;s not traditional in that way. So we do a lot of education\nlike I mentioned, we do a lot of like pulling stuff together just to kind of\nshow and explain that because at a high level with, You know, it&#8217;s difficult to\nunderstand. Like this year, Google looks way different than it did last year,\nand they&#8217;re kind of like, what exactly looks different. So, you know, with,\nlike, the featured snippets, those different things quick answers. People\naren&#8217;t necessarily always clicking through like they used to, Local becoming,\nyou know, a much larger piece of the puzzle. So we do a lot of education. We do\na lot of analysis and research and that we share that with, like, stakeholders\nto make sure that you know, we&#8217;re communicating, like why things are different,\nor you know, how they&#8217;re changing. Like I mentioned, it can definitely be a\nchallenge, because even ourselves, sometimes we&#8217;re like, What&#8217;s going on here?\nLike, things don&#8217;t add up. But the more you dig in, the easier it is to kind of\ncome up with kind of a scenario. But, yeah, it&#8217;s definitely challenging just\nbecause it&#8217;s not like the money returned channel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:19:10] Alexis:<\/strong> Do\nyou guys ever use, like, sports analogies? I train every day together. So, you\nknow, like, you can&#8217;t just go to the gym and do one rep. Yeah, you gotta go out\nthere. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Tessa: <\/strong>I\nthink people try to avoid that. Just because sports are so in our face all day\nlong. I mean, occasionally one will be thrown out for some humor, humor. (lol)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:18:12] Matt:<\/strong> I\nfeel like it\u2019s not as obvious when you&#8217;re in there. every day it\u2019s kind of, you\nknow, just go in one ear and out the other. You just it&#8217;s nothing new or\nsurprising.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:18:22] Tessa:<\/strong>\nright? Maybe I don&#8217;t even think about this sports analogy like, let&#8217;s hit a\nhome run today. I don&#8217;t even know what sports they <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Alexis<\/strong>:\nGet Field goals in like, field hockey. Is it a field goal and field hockey? (lol)\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:18:37] Matt<\/strong>:\nUh, I&#8217;m not really familiar field hockey, but football.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:20:10] Alexis<\/strong>:\nYeah, Nice. That&#8217;s good to know. Okay, I know sports. (lol) Um, alright. So\nwhat do you think defines a best in class experience? Like, what are some of\nthe challenges that are going on in your industry in general? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Tessa: <\/strong>Yeah.\nSo best in class experience that, you know, I feel like that&#8217;s, you know, a\nvery broad question. Not that that&#8217;s a bad thing, but I feel shooting high.\nYeah. Yeah, so you know again, every channel. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Alexis<\/strong>: It\ndoesn&#8217;t make sense. It&#8217;s a long shot, you know, a penalty. (lol)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Matt<\/strong>: Just\nkeep throwing them (the analogies) out and we\u2019ll pick the best one\u2026 (lol) <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:20:48] Tessa:<\/strong> So\nthe challenge is I think that every team wears a different pair of glasses on\nwhat they think of the best experience is. So we&#8217;re thinking about it through SEO.\nWhereas UX is thinking about your interaction on the page. And, um, you know,\nthe product teams that are developing new technologies, we&#8217;re thinking about\nmaybe speed for their pages. And while they all come in to play, we all have a\nvery different mindset of you know what you know, best case scenario looks\nlike. so you know, from my opinion, when I try to take everything into\nconsideration, just because, you know, SEO involves so many different, you\nknow, pieces of the puzzle, you know, best in class, I would say is definitely\na first begin with a functional site, that is quick, that a user can get to\nwhat they&#8217;re looking for as fast as possible. So I think, you know, landing on\na page, you know, making sure that they land where what they&#8217;re looking for,\nwhether that be a short tail query where they&#8217;re looking, they&#8217;re just looking\nthe browse, and they&#8217;re kind of interested in seeing some different options.\nWhereas if they&#8217;re looking for a very specific basketball shoe, making sure\nthat we&#8217;re serving. You know that that content, whether it be through email,\nmarketing or, you know, search engine optimization or paid search and just\nmaking sure that we&#8217;re aligning with what their intent is, I think across the\nboard, it&#8217;s probably makes best in class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:22:04] Matt:<\/strong>\nYou mentioned a lot of things that that are, more specific to user experience.\nAnd a lot of those opposed of traditional SEO argue that SEO doesn&#8217;t always\ntake user experience into consideration. When making your decisions, you&#8217;re\ndoing things for search engines. So how would you say that? How would you argue\nto those people that SEO is valuable for user experience and how those two\nideas tie together?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:22:36] Tessa<\/strong>:\nSure, yeah, I would say, five years ago, people were like, Okay, search engine\nsearch engines that work in, you know, Seo, whereas now, I mean, Google has\neven said themselves like try to manipulate things for search engines like,\nwe&#8217;re worried about the customer. And if you provide a good experience for the\ncustomer, you know you&#8217;re providing a good experience for Google. So you&#8217;re\nlooking at things like click through rate. Um balance rate. We do take those in\nthe consideration because we like I said, we want to make sure that we are\noffering the best experience. So if you know our pages experiencing, you know a\nlot of the high bounce rates. We&#8217;re obviously not giving a good experience and\nyou know that will eventually be reflected in the SERPs. So we see rankings\ndecline because of that. So we just let people know that we do take all of\nthose metrics in the consideration, not just number one on Google, because if\nwe&#8217;re not doing those things, we&#8217;re not gonna be number one on Google. Since\nthe industry has changed so much that you, you know, you really do have to make\nsure that you know what you&#8217;re doing is for the customer and not necessarily\njust for search engines. Of course, search engines are still important because\neven if you know maybe you have a JavaScript based site customer sees that they\nlove it. It&#8217;s great, but Google can&#8217;t render it or they can&#8217;t see it. We do\nhave to still keep in mind, you know,\nwe have to kind of translate things for them, to make sure that they can\nunderstand this well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:24:03] Alexis:<\/strong> I\nlove that term translate. So you&#8217;re dealing with all these other teams. Does\ncoming to them with a lot of data help you? You&#8217;re leaving and coming like\nwe&#8217;re also, we&#8217;re on the same team like we want what you want, the best\nexperience for the consumer. Does that help you guys? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:24:08] Tessa:<\/strong>\nYeah, I think anything that we can put numbers behind that his data driven, I\nthink pretty much any industry any team is gonna be like, Okay, here&#8217;s the\nfacts. I think the struggle is a lot of the things that we do or have ideas\nabout don&#8217;t have direct impact numbers. So sometimes we&#8217;ll do some testing\nwith, like, meta tags and those different things, and maybe visits did\nincrease. But when we draw it directly to, you know, the title tag, just\nbecause we have so many different things going on at the site at one time,\nYeah, maybe, we know, increase the site speed or it\u2019s just hard to silent one\nthing specifically and say this equals this. So it&#8217;s more like this + this +\nthis could = this. Yeah. So that&#8217;s definitely the challenge. But we do try to\nput metrics behind things, especially things like holiday strategy. You know,\nit&#8217;s huge for us just to get some buying for some of the different stuff that\nwe want to do that would require work from different teams. So anytime that we\nwere able to bring numbers to the table, definitely kind of lights a fire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:25:02] Alexis<\/strong>:\nI&#8217;d seen once at a conference that someone suggested trying to do things one at\na time. But that&#8217;s gonna be impossible. With a site as large as Dick\u2019s Sporting\ngoods and there&#8217;s so many other moving pieces besides SEO. So which you may\nhave implemented, you know, the U. S. Team may have exact on a content refresh\nthat no one was told about. But, I mean, obviously you guys are communicated to.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:25:24] Tessa:<\/strong>\nRight, Yeah, we constantly have testing<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>going on. I think that that would just be in any\nretail site, the size of our different templates, different experiences. And\nthat&#8217;s not something that they can put on hold for us to test. And it&#8217;s not\nsomething we can put on hold for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:25:45] Alexis:<\/strong> Exactly.\nBut it&#8217;s good that you guys have numbers because I&#8217;m sure they appreciate\ncoming, too. You coming to them with all those different information there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:25:47] Matt:<\/strong>\nData certainly is a powerful way to sell your initiatives and get find from\nother teams. Do you have any other recommendations for ways to get by in?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:25:58] Tessa<\/strong>:\nYeah, that&#8217;s a great question. So a lot of the times what we&#8217;ll do when we\ndon&#8217;t have, like, say, hard numbers to prove something, we try to rely more on\nvisual things. So again, like I mentioned before the shift in the SERPs, while\nwe could see some date around them like maybe visits have declined or shifted\nto you know more of a local perspective, and it&#8217;s like, why? And there&#8217;s not\nany numbers that we can show them directly that illustrate that. So we&#8217;ll do\nkind of like a side by side feature. So we&#8217;ll show. Here&#8217;s a picture of what\nthe SERPs look like in 2017 for the word basketball. And here&#8217;s what they look\nlike in 2019 for the word basketball. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:26:33] Alexis<\/strong>:\nand blow minds, (lol) it&#8217;s just changed so much. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:26:37] Tessa<\/strong>:\nIt\u2019s such a large, you know, switch, especially for things like site links.\nWhen you come to Dick\u2019s Sporting goods, you know, typing in the branded term\nlike, let&#8217;s just say two years ago used to be very brand focus the site links\nthat would be shown it\u2019s be different stores. The store locator. Now we&#8217;ll see\nthings like sports equipment or anything that&#8217;s like trending, you know, are\nbeing poured in a site links. So we&#8217;re seeing more traffic shift a different\nways and just being able to illustrate that and show it like live kind of like\na hands on experience definitely helps with that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:27:07] Alexis<\/strong>:\nAll right, so I think we have two more questions. So you guys being a retail\nsite are constantly in competition with Amazon? Do you have any general\nthoughts about this? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:27:21] Tessa<\/strong>:\nYeah, sure. I think that Amazon is always a threat for retail <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Alexis<\/strong>: slash\nevery industry.(lol)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Tessa: Anything coming out. Yeah, they do pretty\nmuch everything. I don&#8217;t think that we felt the impact as hard as maybe some\nother industries. Just because I feel like a lot of the stuff that we sell<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:27:44] Alexis<\/strong>: you\u2019re\nknown for <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:27:45] Tessa:<\/strong>\nright and it\u2019s not as popular. You know, to say on you Amazon, I feel like\npeople still, you know, kind of like Dick\u2019s is a big name in the game. You\nknow, if you&#8217;re looking for some basketball shoes, or you know football gear. I\nfeel like we&#8217;re still kind of like the dominant person in that industry. in the\nfuture, Do I think that it will become an issue? I think it&#8217;s definitely\nsomething that we need to at least be aware of and keep an eye on and kind of\nwatch. You know what kind of like different things they&#8217;re trying like. How did\ntheir products that are similar to ours look, and those different things. So\nwhile we haven&#8217;t really felt a whole lot of impact yet, they&#8217;re definitely not\nsomeone to count out. Just like we said, they pretty much do everything. And I\nthink another thing that we have, that they don&#8217;t have at the moment and I&#8217;m\nsure eventually will be coming is a lot of the stuff that we offer online. Also\nhas like a counterpart in stores. So you know, baseball being a big thing while\nwe do so bats, gloves, those different things. You know, we&#8217;re launching new\nstore experiences where people can actually use those bats or, you know, a\nprofessional can help them, you know, fit the bat for themselves. Whereas with\nAmazon you&#8217;re kind of in the dark. You can use a sizing chart, but Dick\u2019s has a\nlot of those different in store features that kind of, like, help the customer\nalong their journey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:29:00] Alexis:<\/strong>\nYeah. And I think there&#8217;s something really special about getting your first\nbaseball bat with your dad (Alexis note: or mom!), right? You know, we&#8217;re in\nstore. Yeah. I mean, specifically, like my family would always go to Dick\u2019s\nSporting goods too to do that type of thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:29:15] Tessa<\/strong>:\nright? Like you&#8217;re fresh pair of cleats for, you know, softball season now,\nsomething like that. Yeah. I think we still<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>have a lot of that. Also, like emotional attachment.\nI Think Dick\u2019s does a great job with that. We do have that kind of a special\nthing about us. Still, that kind of competes with the Amazon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:29:28] Alexis:<\/strong>\nNice. Alright. Any last thoughts before the closing question?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:29:32] Matt:<\/strong>\nNo. Let&#8217;s go for it<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:29:34] Alexis:<\/strong>\nGreat. All right, so we did a little bit of top tips before, but so my question\nis, what are your three little nuggets of advice for a SEO working in eCommerce?\nThis could be anything it could be interpersonal. It could be site related or\nSEO specific.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:29:51] Tessa:<\/strong>\nThat\u2019s a great question. I would say that the first one we talked a lot about\nthis. Today is communication. You know, Not only do we expect to receive\nover-communication, we have to, you know, be held to the same standard to give\nover communications, so while, I know sometimes that could be like Just think\nabout when you&#8217;re bombarded from emails from maybe someone like Dick\u2019s Sporting\ngoods and you kind of, like stopped caring as much. But, you know, we&#8217;ve seen a\nlot of success with just making sure that we keep people in the loop of things\nthat we&#8217;re working on, or things that might impact their channel or just like\nhow things went overall. So, you asked about data, so we share a lot of case\nstudies of things<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:30:30] Alexis<\/strong>:\nwas going to say, It sounds like such a great idea. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:30:32] Tessa:<\/strong> So\neven though you know, it might not directly, you know, impact site\nmerchandising. But maybe it&#8217;s tied to their area. It&#8217;s about baseball. So we\njust make sure that we communicate as much as possible. And then they do in\nreturn because, you know, we want to be good business partners. We don&#8217;t you\nknow, just expect everything to be given to us and nothing in return. So making\nsure you have a really good balance relationship. And, you know, you stay on\ntop of communication would be the first one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:30:55] Alexis:<\/strong>\nAnd then how do you make time to build out those case studies? Because I know\nit sounds like you guys are running all day long. You have so much going on so\nmany moving pieces and sometimes stepping back and appreciating all the hard\nwork that you&#8217;ve done and putting it into a case study can be time consuming.\nYeah, but so important towards like getting a cohesive team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:31:13] Tessa:<\/strong>&nbsp; Yeah, and that&#8217;s definitely something we put\na focus on for 2019 is that we need to make sure that we&#8217;re doing that more\noften, and it is hard to find time because, because, you know, we don&#8217;t only\nwork on dicks sporting goods, but we also work on field and stream in golf\ngalaxy, which are, you know, also owned by Dick\u2019s Sporting goods, two smaller\nsites. So a lot of our time, you know, kind of goes there. We just, you know, I\nhave to find the time. I know that sounds very generic, but, you know, if it&#8217;s\nyou know, half hour over lunch<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:31:40] Alexis:<\/strong>\ncase study Friday (lol)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:31:41] Tessa:<\/strong> half\nhour over lunch or, you know, you&#8217;re kind of just hanging out at home and, you\nknow, at least gather your thoughts together, put him into one deck slide. We\nlike to keep it simple, just so that everyone can understand from, you know,\nthe vice president level all the way down to entry level. Yep. That way. You\nknow, the information is kind of cohesive. And if someone is interested, we\nalways, you know, have the details available for them. But<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:32:06] Alexis:<\/strong> I\nlike that idea, too. Because then if you get a one slide deck, you&#8217;re like, Oh,\nI\u2019ll look at it\u2026 Yes, they opened it anyways, right now, and you can screen\nshot it in the emails, so they&#8217;re forced to look at it. Yeah, it&#8217;s about what&#8217;s\nin here. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Tessa: <\/strong>Try\nto draw the good stuff, bait him in to take a look. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Alexis: <\/strong>So\nyeah, but if you receive, like, a forty slide deck, right, you&#8217;re like, I&#8217;m\nnever gonna be Oh, sorry. You know the executive somewhere, right? Yeah. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Tessa: <\/strong>Where?\nThe bullets? Yes. Absolutely. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:32:31] Tessa:<\/strong> So\noverall, we just we make the time we make it happen. So communication and case\nstudies the case, it is kind of like a little bonus. And yeah, it&#8217;s a nice\nthought in the number one. Number two, Number two. Let&#8217;s think here. Um, so,\nyeah, number one would definitely be communication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:32:53] Matt:<\/strong> I\nwas gonna say, Can I say something that might spark joy? I know that in Dick\u2019s\nSporting Goods you work, the SEO and SEM teams are very closely related. Yes.\nHow do you create the connection between the two? And how do you work with each\nother to make sure that it&#8217;s kind of more symbiotic than it&#8217;s two separate\nteams just doing their own thing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:33:21] Tessa:<\/strong>\nYeah, that&#8217;s a great question. And I feel like over the years, like the last\nfive years he&#8217;d read in order will be like, SEO and SEM should be working\ntogether. And like in theory, that&#8217;s great. And then when it came down and you\nsat down and you&#8217;re thinking, OK, how? That&#8217;s a really challenging. And like\neveryone thinks like SEO and SEM like one letter difference. They&#8217;re not that\ndifferent. They&#8217;re interchangeable. So wrong. (lol)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>They, you know, there&#8217;s a lot of differences, but we\nhave recently there&#8217;s been a lot of restructuring at Dick\u2019s, so we now are on\nthe same team as SEM. We report off the same way. We have a lot more exposure\nof actually being in the same room versus being on opposite sides of the floor,\nwhich definitely helps. But just doing some brainstorming with them and kind of\nhearing how things go in their world sometimes sparks ideas on our end and vice\nversa. So we&#8217;ve done things where they have specialized ad copy for certain\nthings, and we&#8217;ll give it a shot in SEO. And, you know, we&#8217;ll see like, how would\nthat performing a title tag is that paid specific. It&#8217;s basically kind of trial\nand error at this point, so we&#8217;re definitely learning to work closely together.\nAnd, of course, if there&#8217;s a launch or something we&#8217;re very in sync with this\nis what Paid is doing. This is what I was doing. And a big part is there&#8217;s a\nlot of restrictions in paid search. So as far as like what you&#8217;re allowed to\nbid on and what&#8217;s okay. And pages that will kind of be aware of what their\nlimitations are and kind of try to pick up our traffic in our areas. And then\nif we have limitations, you know, we&#8217;re not as authoritative in one area. Well,\nWe can rely on them to pick up the traffic as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:35:08] Alexis:<\/strong> It\u2019s\nlike you guys are trying to symbiotically move forward. Yes. You know, it&#8217;s\nlike, what can you do? What can I do? Where we limited, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:35:15] Matt:<\/strong> Is\nthere You touch on this a little bit already, but is there a lot of data\nsharing between the two departments on what works and what doesn&#8217;t?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:35:25] Tessa<\/strong>:\nIt probably could be better. I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s terrible at the moment. So if\nwe do, you know, work with them on, you know, some kind of, you know, copy that\nwere using anything, we will share the results, but there&#8217;s a lot of going back\nand forth to check to see, You know, if we&#8217;re seeing a decline for a certain\nthing we&#8217;re like, is paid picking it up. So that&#8217;s what the sharing comes in a\nlot. So same thing for them that we didn&#8217;t perform this one as well this year\nfor, you know, these paid terms like how is SEO performing, you know, was your\ntraffic up in those areas, and we can kind of go back and forth to say like,\nwe&#8217;re not losing the traffic it\u2019s just shifting channels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Alexis:<\/strong> So\nit&#8217;s like a basketball game because our passing the ball to each other! (lol)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Matt<\/strong>:\nGot to get those sports analogies in\u2026 (lol) &nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Alexis<\/strong>: Symbiotic\nrelationship with paid, <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:36:08] Tessa<\/strong>:\nYeah, that and then I would say the third is don&#8217;t forget the basics. We&#8217;re all\nlike you said, We&#8217;re always running in different areas. So, like, we&#8217;re caught\nup like, Okay, there&#8217;s a new Kyrie launched this week or their, you know, site\nmerch is, you know, building these pages or IT is putting together this new\nframework when we really need to make sure that we don&#8217;t forget about, like,\nour page is still being indexed, like taking a look and search console and\nmaking sure that, like our index pages looks correct. If you know it should be\none hundred thousand, it&#8217;s four hundred thousand like those basic things there\nand making sure that you know title tags were displaying correctly, and\nthey&#8217;re, you know, they&#8217;re being rendered properly and just like checking those\nthings looking at, like the clicks and the click through rate, making sure that\neverything is how it should be. You know, just a basic things that we try to\nlike sometimes be, like, escalating, like it could be this problem, like, is\nthe site down like all these crazy things when we&#8217;re like, Okay, we need to\nmake sure that we&#8217;re checking, you know, check the basics, make sure the page\nis next, you know, Is it the desktop version? Are people getting to the mobile\npage somehow and just making sure that we keep those fundamentals of SEO in\nmind and don&#8217;t get carried away with like testing and technologies and some of\nthose different things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:37:24] Matt:<\/strong> A\nlot of those ideas sound kind of simple, but you have a huge site with tons of\ndifferent areas. You have all these existing pages that you have to keep track\nof. Plus, their new launch is all the time. How do you handle keeping track of\nall? At the same time?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:37:43] Tessa:<\/strong>\nIt&#8217;s difficult. I&#8217;m not gonna lie. What I say the basics<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>are is probably like you said, it may be like mind\nblowing to someone else. So, yeah, we do have a very complex set up in the\nmoment, like we&#8217;re so running on an m dot you know so we have a mobile version\nof the site, and then we also have the desktop version of the site. We also run\na proxy solution just because we&#8217;ve had technical limitations in the past, so\nthat&#8217;s almost like a third version of the site. So the site plays differently\nwith different, you know, URL structures and different technologies, and it&#8217;s\ndefinitely hard to keep track of, you know, we have people on our team that are\nvery specialized in a certain area. So I&#8217;ve been working on kind of those\ntechnical aspects for quite some time now. So it&#8217;s a lot easier for me to just\nbe like we&#8217;ve seen these issues in the past, kind of like learning from the\nstakes, right, because they&#8217;re doing the same thing over and over again. So we\njust make sure that we write things now. We keep kind of tracker of site events\nlike this happened in two thousand seventeen and we&#8217;ll see the are we\nanniversary-ing that? just kind of like having a high-level strategy that, you\nknow, that works, being organized. Because if you&#8217;re not organized, things can\ngo to hell in a handbasket pretty quick. (lol) So it&#8217;s definitely hard to\nmanage. Yeah, um, just keeping on top of it, working and making sure that we&#8217;re\nleveraging everyone that we can. So, you know, a lot of people have it like I&#8217;d\nrather do it myself attitude. I&#8217;m one of them, but I have to keep in mind that\nwe have to keep everyone in the loop to make sure that it&#8217;s something crazy\nisn&#8217;t happening like we saw, you know, something crazy happened, PDP (product\npages). There&#8217;s a team which our products that&#8217;s responsible for those who like\ncommunicating with them, say, like any big changes, stuff like that, so while,\nit&#8217;s hard to manage, it&#8217;s definitely something that you get used to and kind of\nlike in a process for. But, yeah, it\u2019s a challenge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Matt: <\/strong>All\ninteresting stuff!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>[00:39:33] Alexis<\/strong>:\nAll right, So we got communications, symbiotic relationship with paid. Stick\nwith the basics and stay organized. Yes. Yeah. Sounds simple, but very complex.\nHarder. Easier said than done. Yes, Absolutely. Thank you so much for coming on\nour podcast today. Tessa as well as Matt. I thought this was thoroughly enjoyable.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Tessa<\/strong>: Yes.\nThanks for having me. It was awesome. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Matt: <\/strong>Pleasure,\nto see you and talk to you Tessa!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Alexis:<\/strong>\nThank you, Ciao.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Resources: Tessa&#8217;s Twitter:&nbsp;https:\/\/twitter.com\/tessabonacci Merkle&#8217;s Digital Bowl (Super Bowl thing Alexis referenced) Timestamps:[0:00] Intros[4:30] Importance of educating team and keeping everyone [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":807,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v16.6.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Podcast: 4. 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