Interviewing Kylee Della Volpe

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

Meet Kylee Della Volpe!

Kylee is the SEO Manager for the BioSciences Division at Thermo Fisher Scientific. Kylee has a diverse experience in all things SEO and SEO-adjacent including content strategy, UX, on-page SEO, and technical SEO. She’s most interested in projects that bring that experience together to provide a great customer experience.

We asked her everything from how she first got into SEO to what empowers her to be the brilliant SEO she is 💪🏽

How did you get into SEO?

In 2015 I was working at an agency where my main project was writing for a mortgages website that had some pretty significant organic growth goals.

We didn’t have an SEO expert on the team, so I started teaching myself and I quickly fell in love with it.

What is your favourite SEO task?

I love doing reporting. I find creating dashboards, pulling numbers, and manipulating data oddly relaxing.

I also love the treasure hunt you go on when you’re trying to pinpoint the why behind the numbers you’re seeing and the subsequent next steps.

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

Probably Google sheets, although I’m quickly getting dependent on Botify.

I love how quickly you can pull together data from all the various sources and see exactly what’s going on with your site.

What did you learn in SEO that gave you an 'AHA' moment?

I think my biggest aha was early in my career when I started looking at SEO as a UX function.

My role was kind of a blend of content strategy/UX and SEO at the time and I think SEO had a bad rap with some of my coworkers. They saw it as a keyword stuffing function that was the antithesis of a good user experience.

When I was trying to explain how that wasn’t the case I realized, SEO research is user research and when you have a good SEO strategy it should support a great user experience.

What is your proudest industry achievement?

My proudest achievement is creating a culture of SEO wherever I work.

I love helping people understand why it’s important and how they can use it to meet their goals - and create great experiences for their users.

What advice would you give those starting out in SEO?

I would say to learn about what other teams do and what’s important to them.

SEO touches so many aspects of the website, there’s always another team you need to bring in or get sign-off on before you can implement something.

The better you are at explaining yourself, negotiating, and just generally being a good person to work with, the easier it will be to get your optimizations implemented.

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

If I had to choose one person I would probably say Megan Brodie who was my people manager at a former job. She put so much care into helping her team feel confident, supported, and able to grow their careers. Now that I have people management responsibilities, I strive to do the same.

If I can pick a lot of people I would say it’s the whole Women in Tech SEO community. The way people in the group step up and support each other and freely give their time is just really special and not something I’ve experienced in other communities.

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

The strong urge to try and learn new things helped me a lot professionally.

I love to learn, so I think just focusing on always being open to learning something new. Even if things don’t go as planned it can still be an opportunity to learn!

Also, just remembering it’s SEO, not heart surgery. If you make a mistake, you can fix it. We're not saving lives.

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Thanks, Kylee, for a truly insightful interview!

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! 🙌🏽