Interviewing Kaitlin McMichael

Welcome to a new WTSInterview edition, where we interview brilliant SEOs in our industry and share their stories with the world! WTS members are welcome to share their story by simply filling out this form; we encourage folks from all walks of life in our industry to do so.

Introducing Kaitlin McMichael! She embarked on this wild ride of SEO in 2010, when she moved from the USA to Lima, Peru, to work at a travel agency as a website writer. While exploring Peru and writing for the website, she learned about how she could make money from writing by learning more about SEO.

Thus began a multi-year love affair with a complex, intriguing, and ever-changing profession in SEO. She has worked 14 years in house, plus a 1 year stint agency side.

She worked for 6 years at Getty Images on the cutting edge of scalable, super sized search and visual SEO. For the past 4 years she has been at Amazon Web Services, leading Search automation initiatives. Follow her Search blog on Medium.

How did you get into SEO?

I first learned at my first "real job" after college. It was the middle of the economic recession in the US in 2009 and I graduated with a liberal arts degree, so I had a hard time finding a job. I finally decided to pursue my dream of moving to a Latin American country where I could practice Spanish and see a bit more of the world.

So I took a job - site unseen! - at a travel agency in Lima, Peru. My manager there taught me about web marketing and specifically SEO. This opened my eyes to the possibility of a career where I could combine my interests in good writing with something that could make an impact on people's lives, help my writing have more reach, and become a career.

What is your favourite SEO task?

I love it when I make a recommendation and get to see it come to fruition on a website and see it directly improve the website experience for customers. There have been many examples of this over my career, both big and small.

One of the most gratifying examples of this was when I was working on the iStock website while at Getty Images. I got to dive deep on visual search and think more deeply about how to optimize for video and image search than most other SEOs. I also got to bring to life a trending searches tool, using the internal site searches that spiked day over day, running them through a safe list, and then leveraging those trending searches in the navigation. It allowed iStock to stay on top of trends quickly, bringing them to the forefront of the site immediately and in an automated fashion, without any human intervention. It also paved the way for a visual trends product.

Previously, such as in 2020, we were running weeks or months behind trends with major sporting events or Covid. For example, “social distancing” became a trend early in 2020, and people wanted pictures of it for their website, but we didn’t put a link to it until weeks after the peak. With me leading the charge, the SEO team prioritized building it into the navigation — fully automated.

What is your go-to tool or resource that you can't live without?

AWS actually has a lot of great tools for SEOs or anyone looking to automate SEO processes. I have used s3 for data storage, SageMaker Ground Truth for data labeling training sets, Glue for ETLs, Redshift for a data lake, and PartyRock for creating no-code AI apps! I've been meaning to write an article about how to use AWS for common SEO tasks :-)

What is something you learned in SEO that made you have an 'AHA' moment?

The first "Aha" moment in SEO that I had was when I realized that by incorporating SEO best practices into my writing, I could make money. I first learned that while getting paid to write at the first travel agency I worked at.

Other pivotal moments in my SEO career have included when a manager explained to me the importance of getting it absolutely perfect on our webpages when it comes to SEO - especially with link-building, canonical tags, redirects, and page content updates. I hadn't realized the severity of how SEO can make or break a company. If the company I had been working at hadn't undergone an extreme makeover with a full website redesign, then the company might have had to fold. The Penguin and Panda updates were so significant that we had to pivot our web strategy.

At Getty Images, I first realized that big brands don't need to do link-building. This was a paradigm shift for me. Instead, we worked with the PR team and relied on them to ensure word of mouth was going strong. The SEO team focused on on-site SEO exclusively.

I also was stunned to realize that there are times when 302 redirects are a good thing. For the first few years of my SEO career, I thought 302 redirects were never ok. But for geolocation redirects, for example, it is standard procedure to use 302s. And for testing and other scenarios, 302s are legit.

More recently, the Google Search leaks and antitrust documents have revealed that Google Search liaisons, spokespeople and documentation have not been upfront about how Google Search works. For years, clickstream data was considered part of the ranking algorithm unofficially, by many SEOs, but never confirmed by Google Search representatives until the documents showed clickstream data was used.

What is your proudest industry achievement?

My first big accomplishment is from when I worked at a travel agency as Marketing Manager. I chose to focus on content strategy and SEO, and there I built a blog from scratch, and by the time I left the agency, the blog was generated 12% of all leads.

At Getty Images, I proved I'm good at content strategy at scale. I led the creation of Inspire Pages, based on a content gap that I saw our customers needed. My goal was to drive incremental organic traffic to these pages and have them convert into new customers. I led the ideation, business case, POC, design and development iterations, and a variety of tests on these pages, including mechanisms for how to link to them from a variety of pages. That required a lot of creativity on my part, to envision something that wasn’t there, and to make it scalable. These pages grew 60% organic sessions YoY post-launch, and 17% organic orders. In 2020 (2 years post-launch), after many improvements and the creation of these pages, organic sessions grew 140% YoY and orders grew 224% YoY. I then helped to design a system that allows these pages to be created on the fly, allowing the SEO team to be exponentially more efficient.

At Getty Images, I was also proud to be promoted 4 times in 6 years. During my tenure, non-brand SEO orders grew 10% year over year and first-purchase orders grew 12%, exceeding expectations. This was largely due to content gap identification, internal linking improvements, content updates, tagging improvements and testing, and localization work.

At AWS, I'm not going to go into any details but I will say that my focus since I started has been on growing the amount of non-brand SEO visits AWS gets, and that we have been successful in meeting those goals, especially in the first year after I started, when I proposed and ran a program that directly led to that lift.

What advice would you give those who are starting out in SEO?

I imagine that it must be difficult to begin a career in SEO now, because it is changing more rapidly and is more complex than when I started in 2010.

But if you want to ride the wild ride that is SEO these days, I recommend reading:

Marketing in the Age of Google, by Vanessa Fox

The Art of SEO, by Stephan Spencer, Eric Enge, Rand Fishkin et al

Product-Led SEO

I also recommend surrounding yourself with people smarter than you. Whether that means attending meetups and conferences, asking questions of people online or in person, or taking a new job, make sure you are challenging yourself.

Pick a niche - for me, at first, it was content marketing & SEO, then international SEO, and now it's the intersection of SEO & Product that most interests me.

Give a shout out to someone in the industry who inspires you, and tell us why

Jamie Cottle has been one of the very few SEOs I have had the privilege of working closely with over the years and whom I admire for the amount of determination, technical prowess, leadership skills, and just common sense thinking that Jamie displays on a daily basis. I've seen Jamie grow a lot at Getty Images and AWS and always appreciate how Jamie has a no nonsense approach to conversations about digital marketing best practices, and is a strong advocate for thinking holistically about SEO.

I also recall how many years ago, at Getty Images, Jamie realized that the SEO team needed better integration with the engineer team. So Jamie asked to move desks over to the engineering team. I thought that was a bold but simple solution to the problem. Jamie saw a need and made connections with the right people, building trust as an expert among the engineering team, and making it easier to slide in some wins for SEO when partnering with engineering. That has taught me that sometimes it's the boldest but simple solutions that work best, and also that building relationships with engineering is so important for SEO success.

Finally, what empowers you to be the brilliant person you are?

I've been encouraged to work as hard as I have and to continue along my career path for a few reasons:

1) I want to retire early and have financial freedom!

2) my husband Shaun has been a big encouragement to me over the years, especially when I was first starting out in my career path

3) I also like the Bible verse Colossians 3:23-24, "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord..." As a Christian, I want to have integrity in all that I do, including in the workplace.

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Thanks, Kaitlin, for a truly insightful interview!

You can learn more about her on her website and connect with Kaitlin on LinkedIn.

Check out our Interviews page for more interviews. If you've enjoyed reading this, we'd love for YOU to share your story with the world! Simply fill this form here, we welcome brilliant SEOs from all walks of life! 🙌🏽