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.
Introducing Lucy Robinson! Lucy heads up the 20+ strong SEO team at Journey Further, a performance marketing agency with offices in Leeds, Manchester, London & New York. As well as managing capacity and budgets for her team and clients, she also takes a strategic lead on core clients, and manages a small team.
We asked her everything from how she first got into SEO to what empowers her to be the brilliant SEO she is 💪🏽
I studied German and History at university, which leads nicely into precisely zero clear career paths, but did lead me back to Berlin, where I'd done my year abroad after I graduated. I needed a job and found an application for a paid SEO internship at Wayfair UK, which had an office out there. After a short hiatus (because honestly I didn't love the old school linkbuilding/copywriting for robots work I was doing there) I found my way back into another SEO role for an editorial site and fell in love with technical and content SEO. The rest was history.
Identifying a problem, finding a solution, getting it implemented, and seeing results. It's basic, but so often, we struggle to follow that entire process from start to finish as agency SEOs, with multiple stakeholders to get on board and relying upon sometimes multiple rounds of sign-off or different teams to implement. I've become a huge fan of learning how to make that buy-in stage go as smoothly as possible, to really use data and your understanding of your client and their needs to get the best results with the least friction.
Call me a luddite, but my underrated tool is probably a set of Muji pens (0.38mm nib is a must) and a notepad. We spend so much time knees deep in spreadsheets, online tools, and dev tools, having just one thing that is physical and real is a good way to ground me while I work, and I've found a physical to-do-list is the only one that my brain pays any attention to. Studies show we retain more information when writing notes vs typing, so I always keep my notepad on me when on important calls, too.
If you don't build your client services skills and really work to understand your client's business needs, you'll struggle to get anything across the line. Learning not to undervalue my communication skills and see them as vital tools to get the cool tech and content I need across the line was a game-changer.
Being in a head of role where I get to directly impact the careers and working lives of a team of incredibly talented people I care about and our amazing clients is something I am very proud of and is a responsibility I never take for granted.
Read up and soak in as much information as you can, and try to get as much hands-on experience as you can, too, to put all that theory into practice. You are likely much more capable than you think, so don't be put off by what seems like super technical jargon or theoretical processes - you'll understand more and more of it as you go - just don't ever stop yearning to learn more and more and try new ways of working.
I'm blessed to work with all the incredible women and non-binary folk on my team. I'm constantly learning from them and they inspire me every day to be the leader they deserve in a historically male-dominated field—Nikki Halliwell, Steph Naylor, and Hannah Rodgers, to name but a few of my colleagues. They are absolute powerhouses, experts in their fields, and lovely humans who want to make SEO a more inclusive industry.
A sense of humor in the face of obstacles has gotten me this far in life. All setbacks are opportunities for learning and eventually laughing over. Perspective is key—I love SEO, I love my job, but god, isn't it all a bit silly, too? This mindset helps me take a step back when things are getting too stressful, especially when I think of all the other more important things in life I could be putting my energy into!
----
Thanks, Lucy, for a truly insightful interview! You can connect with Lucy 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! 🙌🏽