First off, heads up – I’ll be at MozCon in a couple weeks. If you’ll be there too, I’d love to meet up, if only to say “hi and THANK YOU for listening to The Zip.” Give me a shoutout on Twitter @zipsprout, and I’ll try to bring swag to share too.
Now let’s get into today’s episode.
Some marketing feels especially shiny, like it was styled by Don Draper and a whiskey on the rocks. Super Bowl ads. Black Friday campaigns. Or those brands who pay for trending topics on Twitter. When a layperson thinks about marketers, they probably think along those lines. Traditional marketing gives even the dullest products a little gloss, like the billboard version of a fast food chain hamburger.
But not all marketing is shiny. And sometimes, it’s the not-so-shiny, or the (seemingly) less appealing work that pays off in the long run.
Today’s guest, Lindsay Wassell, got into internet marketing when it wasn’t such a shiny industry. Her peers and professors thought the Internet was shaky ground. But this risk paid off. Lindsay is now a respected member of the online search industry – she heads up a agency – keyphraseology – that serves local businesses and enterprise brands alike. And she speaks at events around the world about online marketing – an industry that gets a little bit shinier with every iPhone.
What I especially love learning from Lindsay is her take on local. She explains why working for a mom and pop down the street is more appealing to her than a big brand, and how she makes sure that the larger campaigns she works on involve local stores. Lindsay is still following the less shiny, and, as it turns out, the not-so-shiny side of marketing is trending organically.
Welcome to the Zip.
Megan Hannay:
Lindsay, thank you so much for being on the Zip podcast today.
Lindsay Wassell:
Thank you. I’m so excited.
Megan Hannay:
I’m glad. First, I read in a bio you wrote online, I think it was on Moz, that you started your Internet marketing career selling baby shoes online for an e-commerce site and that many of your college professors actually discouraged you from taking that job saying that no one will ever buy shoes online. What made you think differently?
Lindsay Wassell:
That was about 2001, and it was a really exciting time. I don’t know if we were calling e-commerce that yet. I don’t know if it quite had that fancy name.
Megan Hannay:
It was just a store online.
Lindsay Wassell:
Yeah. I got good grades and I was performing well in my course. Basically, what I was taking was general marketing and then direct marketing as a subset of that. That was things like junk mail. I was in the field of—also, this other softer marketing side. I could have had an internship with any of the fancy agencies in downtown Vancouver, and that’s what most of my fellow students were going after.
I try to find opportunities where the masses aren’t herding towards them, those opportunities that are off to the side that people seem to be ignoring and they’re shining over there. This job in particular was interesting because it was for a woman entrepreneur, and she’d built up this business. It was still quite small. There would only be six or eight of us in the office at the time, and then manufacturing. I loved it because I could touch all parts of the business from—
Megan Hannay:
Yeah, as a startup.
Lindsay Wassell:
From manufacturing, I could learn about that side of business and about retail operations as well as the wholesale channels. Then, what they really wanted me to do, because I was young and straight out of marketing, they had this opportunity with the Internet, and they were getting a few sales for these baby shoes. That just fascinated me, and I hadn’t learned a thing about Internet marketing, but I felt like that was okay, because no one else knew what they were doing, either. I would get to go in there. There’s really nothing better than a job when even your bosses don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing. You get to go in and create your own day and create your own tactics and run through the different pieces, beat to the rhythm of your own drum, so to speak.
That was so lovely, and I don’t know that I had any foresight that the Internet was going to be huge and that online sales were going to be this amazing way of the future. I just saw something that no one else was doing, really, and that it was an opportunity to growth so young in my career. So, I just took a big risk and I figured, what’s the worst that can happen? And jumped in. It really paid off. That risk paid off, and often they do. I feel like the biggest leaps have the biggest reward, and that one worked out for me.
Megan Hannay:
Yeah. No, that’s so interesting. It is interesting to think back to a day not so long ago when it was like, we’ll try to sell some things on the Internet and see if that works, but I also really like that your strategy or your philosophy in life, maybe, was, don’t always go towards the shiny thing. To look for the maybe not-so-shiny, not everyone’s attracted to it, but interesting path instead. In general, I’m like, that’s usually a lot of times with anything, that’s usually a good at least reminder to have in life, that just because everyone else is chasing it doesn’t mean it’s actually the best thing.
Is there anything, and I know you said this wasn’t an insight on your part, that you wanted to do it and then it happened to work out really well, but do you see anything like that now? Areas where people are like, oh, no one will ever XYZ online? Things that don’t seem as hyped up right now that you think may not be the case?
Lindsay Wassell:
I’ve been thinking about this, and if I knew, I’d be rich.
Megan Hannay:
Yeah. You’d be over there.
Lindsay Wassell:
Yeah. I’m always looking for those areas. I think where they’re probably residing now, I think that where those big opportunity areas, the biggest risk, highest reward areas are probably in the Internet of Things and in how people use their phones. If we can create convenience—people are lazy. If we can give them an easier way or a more convenient, streamlined way to accomplish anything, those things will usually catch on over time. Any time that someone says, no one’s ever going to do that on their phone. It’s too private, it’s too personal, it’s too anything, if it’s more convenient, I think the answer is, they probably would, given the right app or solution. Especially when we’re starting to look at bringing technology and the Internet of Things and these connected objects into our homes, I think that’s where the opportunity will lie as well. I can’t define what it is, but maybe I’ll know it when I see it. Then, we’ll be a bit too late, right? I won’t be the first to sell baby shoes online. I’ll just be working there.
Megan Hannay:
You’ll be in that early wave, though. I see what you mean, because I agree. Even if you look at what we have now, like Nest, that just combines setting the temperature in your house with—I don’t actually have a Nest, but I’ve seen them. Security. There’s a lot that goes into the Nest. Anything that just ties a bunch of household tasks or chores together so that you suddenly have fewer chores to do around the house, I agree. People are going to want that in their life.
Lindsay Wassell:
The Nest is an interesting example because people, I don’t know if it’s so true now, but a few years ago, people were concerned about Nest because it learned by itself. You’d create these base settings in your home, and then it would adapt. If you were always wandering by at 6:00 p.m. and turning the air conditioning a bit cooler, if that behavior was repeating itself in your household, it would learn and adapt, and that bit freaked people out. I don’t want the machines—
Megan Hannay:
It’s watching us.
Lindsay Wassell:
Yeah. I don’t want the machines predicting my behavior and preempting any decisions that I would make. I think people are over that now with Nest and people, they become more comfortable with it, and that’s simply because it’s more convenient now. They don’t have to wander over there. It saved them some time. Any of those pieces where there’s a bit of technology that will shave moments off of a human’s task list, I think those things will win even if they feel uncomfortable at first.
Megan Hannay:
Yeah. A few podcast episodes ago, I was talking to someone who’s very concerned about privacy, and I think that’s a huge thing and obviously, this whole conversation. I do think that there’s a difference. There’s a difference between being worried about sharing information with companies and then just almost the fear of sharing of information with machines, which sometimes they’re connected to the companies, but I almost feel like sometimes the fear of sharing information with the machines is also like, what if it messes up? Or just the idea that a machine knows things about you. I don’t know. It’s an interesting transition that a machine might know you better than you know yourself, and I think at first that freaks people out.
Lindsay Wassell:
And with the privacy, I think that might be partly generational. The younger folks now are much less concerned with privacy. I feel like the trend is towards less privacy with more fresh generations. I see that in my own family, and I feel like I see that when I’m out having conversations, and that’s just comfort level. I don’t worry personally about very much privacy at all. Mostly, I have nothing to hide from the machines and I feel like they’re useful to me. So, that’s fine. They can know about me. Also, even if the machines are collecting this information and porting it back to humans, it’s in massive aggregate data form. Nobody at Microsoft cares what I ate for breakfast. They might care that 30% of America had eggs for breakfast. So, I’m a part of this aggregate data that’s somehow useful. But really, I don’t feel that anybody cares about my personal details in my life of how I conduct. That’s my relationship with privacy.
Megan Hannay:
Yeah, and I agree. There is a generational component to it as well. From your beginnings in generic early 2000s, INTERNET MARKETING, what pulled you in particular into SEO? I feel like from Internet marketing, there’s so many directions you could go in. What made search so compelling to you?
Lindsay Wassell:
Back then, I played with everything. I played with redesigning the website and things like CRO, conversion rate optimization, which definitely didn’t have a name back then. How do we get people to click and put things in the cart? Played with elements like that. Played with affiliate marketing and paid search channels and different ways of positioning content. What if I start a conversation in a forum overseas? And all of these different pieces. But SEO came ahead for me just because it was so effective. Of all the things that I tried and spent money and/or time on back in that 2001 timeframe, SEO was by far the most effective in generating sales, and SEO was really easy back then. It was simple tactics like putting keywords in the meta keywords tag.
Really, we didn’t have to do much. We just had to be aware of it, how the things that we’re saying and what we’re doing with our website are somehow influencing how the search engines are ranking us, and let’s make sure we’re describing ourselves in words that searchers would use. The next thing about search and SEO, it kept getting more complicated. Every time I had a winning formula, a competitor would come along and be winning a bit better than I was. So, I’d have to readjust and evaluate and try to find another element of the algorithm and tweak and adjust from there. It’s kept me on my toes. I couldn’t just learn it, put it in my back pocket and move on.
Megan Hannay:
And be like, I’m an expert.
Lindsay Wassell:
Yeah. I’ve been doing it now—what year is it? Seventeen years, if you can believe it. Seventeen? Eighteen. That is incredible, and it has never become boring. It is always evolving and changing, and that’s, I think, what it’s held my interest.
Megan Hannay:
That makes a lot of sense, because you said it’s effective but it’s also challenging. That’s in some ways the perfect blend for an interesting job, is something that you know it works, so you know you’re not wasting your time, but it’s not easy. There’s never a moment where you’re like, oh, I got this. I could do this with my eyes closed. Like you said, there’s always something new, always something else going on, always new innovations. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Who did you learn from? I’m really curious, because I feel like now, if someone’s jumping into SEO or online marketing, there’s so many experts that I feel like you have to wade through all of the experts to find the real experts. I imagine that back in the early 2000s, I’m just curious, how did you learn the technical side of the field that was a field that was at the time, relatively small?
Lindsay Wassell:
That’s really tough. In 2001, really at that time, I wasn’t connected to anybody that was doing SEO either online or otherwise. I wouldn’t have even known what to search for, because SEO didn’t really have any—
Megan Hannay:
How to make this work? The Internet marketing.
Lindsay Wassell:
So, early on, I learned from developers, mostly. I’d approach them as a marketer and try to explain what I was attempting to accomplish here. See, we have this web page, and I want it to show up for this keyword. What things can we do to the page so that it has the right stuff and maybe this will work? We’d test and tweak and tune. I was often just testing things on my end, but through developers. I wasn’t even implementing content changes myself back then. This was, I have an idea. Let’s adjust the title.
Megan Hannay:
And they actually had to go edit the HTML themselves?
Lindsay Wassell:
Yes. Or there wasn’t a content management system that I could interface with, necessarily. So, we’d play and test and tune. Often, I was considered quite nuts. I’d come and I’d have a crazy idea. Fast forwarding a bit about URLs, for instance. I wanted to affect the way that URLs were being displayed at a different job. This was 2006, and I wanted to redesign all of the URLs for multi-million-dollar pages. Of course, this is incredibly frustrating to the development group, because I’m this crazy girl with these wild ideas and my concepts were unproven. I just had to work with them on why we were testing this thing. They’d tell me why it was hard, and we’d go back and forth. I’d represent marketing, and we’d duke it out. Then, eventually, I’d get them to agree to do a test in a small area and then we’d have data to prove that out. A lot of my early learning was just that, was testing and tuning and getting development people, the men and women coding things, getting them on my side and getting them excited about the ideas so that they would help me.
Then, as time went on, really, the first people, I started going to conferences around 2006 as well. By then, there were several blogs, and Rand Fishkin’s blog was around back then, I believe, and Michael Gray had a blog. Todd Friezen had a blog. They were people who were writing about the technical side that I could get some information from. Then, I’d go to a conference, and it was really rarely about the sessions themselves, but about cornering these people outside the smoke pit and asking them questions and having these conversations about, what have they tried and what is working? Around that time’s when I really got dialed in with the community itself. It wasn’t in 2001. That was just me hacking away and trying things, but as things moved on and SEO had a name and we ended up getting our own conferences, off we went and made friends and learned.
Megan Hannay:
That’s so cool. I feel like it’s so interesting to see how big the field is huge now, but thinking back how in the early 2000s it really was just discovering, if I change the HTML, what happens? Also, I love working with developers. I’ve worked at startups where I was one of the few marketing people, and you’re working a lot with developers, and there’s such an interesting back and forth that happens there, because I think people who are developers are naturally like, if we just make the product really good, we don’t even really need marketing. I think they have such a connection to what they made that they’re convinced that word of mouth will just explode. There are times when word of mouth does create a product, but that’s not nearly as common, and I think it’s such an interesting dialogue to have with a develop, to really get them to understand how marketing can make their lives so much easier. It’s fun when it works.
I saw you speak, and actually this is how I found you, I saw you speak at a recent conference in New York called The Inbounder on local marketing. First of all, you used street art in your presentation, which I loved because I’m a huge fan of street art in general, but the crux of your presentation was about how even national brands, even brands who are not necessarily multilocation, for example an e-commerce business or a brand, it’s products are sold in stores but they don’t necessarily have their own stores, how even brands like these can benefit from local search marketing. I’ve spoken to a lot of people in local search, and the focus for them is almost always on local businesses or multi-location businesses or sometimes, startups that service local areas, but I don’t hear much about truly national brands. Can you explain some of the benefits that a national commerce brand may gain from looking into local marketing?
Lindsay Wassell:
I think that a lot of us are forgetting about local SEO as a tactic. In particular, I mean citation building. In local SEO, a big piece of optimizing for a physical location is this act of building citations across all of the data providers and anyone who’s providing business information online. We distribute our citations, and out of that, we disseminate our business information.
I think that most of us are forgetting to apply that local SEO piece as a tactic to really any campaign, because with local SEO, we’re validating—and I mean citation building, with local SEO citation building, we do a bunch of things. We distribute information about our business all over the web, mostly our name, address, phone number, and a website URL. The home page or a location page.With that, we’re getting links, and we’re also building authority and creating credibility around our business. A big part of Google’s algorithm is determining the credibility of a given domain. We can only support that by backing it up with location data and all of these well-respected citation sources back to that root domain. Any business that has a physical address could benefit from local SEO citations to help bolster their entire business, even if they aren’t concerned generating foot traffic at that address. They have one, and that’s an asset. Having invested in a physical location is an asset to any business online, because it brings the offline online, and it just validates and verifies the credibility of that entity in the digital space.
Megan Hannay:
Right. So, it can help even their website traffic, even if it’s a local citation, can build things for their website that otherwise wouldn’t have been there.
Lindsay Wassell:
Yeah, and something else I want to point out is about the link profile. In SEO, we worry quite a bit about having a natural link profile, particularly if a domain has been around for a while. If they’ve been around for a while, chances are, seven to 12 years ago, they did some really sketchy things to get links. They may have seemed entirely reasonable at the time, and now we’re faced with that ghost or those old links that are really expensive to get rid of, or just really bringing us down. Perhaps we have too many links with our exact anchor text pointing back to our domain. The nice thing about local citations is, we can balance out our link profile because they’re often no-followed. They never have keyword-rich anchor text, and they’re from a nice variety.
If we have some really garbage stuff from the past in our link profile, we can really balance that out and hopefully avoid raising flags on the algorithm side by layering in this neutral link profile that is local SEO citations. It’s neutral. It’s not over optimized, and we can take up a bigger space of our entire entity of links just by blossoming out in the local search and citation area.
Megan Hannay:
Yeah, and I think that’s so interesting, too, because I think, like you said, yeah, seven or so years ago, people had to work so hard when thinking about link building because they had to—they were like, oh, we have to make sure it has this anchor text, and we have to make sure it fits into all of these check boxes. Now, because Google was like, oh, wait. That’s what people are doing? Okay, never mind. It’s actually just like, nope. Just be natural. The more and the more that the advice is to just be natural with things, it’s actually in a weird way, makes it a lot easier. I think, at least in my world, I still speak with clients and people who haven’t quite gotten that yet, who are still a bit like, oh, no. We need to make this look a certain way, which I always find interesting.
Lindsay Wassell:
That’s hard. SEO gets harder, not only because it’s changed over the years, but certain clients stay stuck. Say five years ago, maybe the last time they’ve worked with an SEO was five years ago, and they’re stuck in those tactics and you have to sort of, no, no. That’s not relevant anymore. We’re going to move on from that. Here’s the new latest.
Megan Hannay:
Yeah. Convincing them can be hard. Do you have examples of national brands that are doing local well?
Lindsay Wassell:
Not necessarily offhand. Some are by accident.
Megan Hannay:
They’re really acting natural. Just whatever they’re doing is you working.
Lindsay Wassell:
Yeah. I don’t offhand. If I can think of any, I’ll send them to you offline. I spend a lot of time looking. I feel like overall, national brands are doing a really poor job of this, and everybody can use some help.
Megan Hannay:
Yeah. What piqued your particular interest in local? I guess you talked a bit about what piqued your interest in SEO, but you’ve worked with a lot of national brands. What moved you to take a local angle in your SEO career?
Lindsay Wassell:
There’s a few things. One was an opportunity spotting these things and chasing them. I was working with a national restaurant chain that has franchise operations. They sell franchise versions of their restaurant, and then those are individual owners. I was working on the national website for SEO, and we did as much as we could there and we made progress, but what I found was that if I could just get the 140 or so restaurants onboard with the local SEO program, that the lift would be realized by not only the national domain, but every restaurant underneath it. From there, I launched this local SEO training program and worked with each individual one of those restaurants to get their local SEO up to speed.
The impact on the national brand was outstanding. Then, all of the individual businesses benefited. Some of the local shops, some of the restaurants didn’t sign onto the program. Others did. Even the ones who didn’t sign on, because their neighboring restaurants and national had done SEO, even the ones who didn’t participate saw benefit, because the entire domain strengthened in the process.
That was really powerful. That was just an opportunity. While approaching national organic SEO, I saw a reason for local and went chasing it for a particular client, but also, it’s so much more fun to work with the people who benefit. I’ve worked with really big brands, and you’ll go in and they pay really well and you might go onsite and you might meet 50 of their staff. Everybody’s working towards certain objectives. Then, those things change. We go in and we work really hard for these big brands, but we often don’t get to see things implemented. I worked with a Fortune 100, did full technical site audits, recommendations, all the way through with architecture and whatnot. It wasn’t until four years later that I noticed my changes implemented on site. I just went by one day. I’m like, oh, I designed that URL structure. Look at that. If they had asked me today, I would have done it a bit differently. It was still an improvement, but it took that long.
No one at that business really knows where the lift came from or why. When I worked with local businesses, it’s different because you’re helping people and you get to see that direct impact between—I’ve worked really hard on these recommendations to help your business and your family have a bit of a better life. They implement these things and they see the results and they come back and they’re happy and pleased because it changed things for them. It had an impact. That’s much harder to realize on a Fortune 100 scale because the people who benefit are the shareholders, and they have no association between their revenue and the tactics that made it happen.
Megan Hannay:
The benefits are so distributed that it’s less motivating for any one person to make that change. That’s why it takes four years, because there’s not that, oh, my gosh. We could make so much more money. When you split up all that money among so many people, it’s like, we’ll get to it.
Lindsay Wassell:
Yeah, but if you have a man and a woman, maybe a married couple with a business on the corner and you can increase their revenue 25%, that really changes their life and they are forever grateful. It’s a different dynamic.
Megan Hannay:
Yeah. I like, you said recently that a lot of national brands aren’t necessarily doing local well. I agree, and that’s something I like to talk about on the podcast and in blog posts and just everything in general. Since coming into local SEO, it’s kind of, and I’m sure you do this, too. It’s almost habitual. Just when browsing the Internet in general for personal things, you just start poking around a bit more, like, I wonder how they’re doing it. I wonder what their location page looks like. It’s just so interesting. Sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised, but a lot of times, I’m just like, oh. Ew. They could be doing this so much better if they just let the local store owners or the franchise owners do something fun with this page. It’s just so interesting. It feels like we’re still—I can feel us currently in being the old archaic times compared to what hopefully will come.
Lindsay Wassell:
And local SEO is really difficult. There are a lot of factors at play, and it’s really easy to just do it wrong or not completely.
Megan Hannay:
Absolutely. You have run your own agency for about seven years now, I believe. What inspired to start off on your own, and have you gained a new perspective of the industry as being the head of an agency?
Lindsay Wassell:
I didn’t set out to be an agency owner or even a consultant, to be honest. How this happened, I was working at Moz. I was leading their SEO consulting division in 2009. I became pregnant, and that was fine, carrying around a kid. That’ll be fine. But then, I found out it was twins, and that was a different story. At the time, my husband at the time couldn’t find work in Seattle. It was a depressed economy in technology. So, we relocated for his job. I arrived in Tampa for that reason, with a belly full of offspring. Like, what am I going to do now? I started consulting. I really didn’t stop working even for a day through that whole process, and I just evolved it, because there was so much demand and I could really do it from my sofa.
I still had value. I just couldn’t, in the same way, go into an office, and I couldn’t go to onsites at the Fortune 100 at the time. It didn’t fit my new lifestyle, but I still had value. I just started by selling my time and my services in a really light way, and grew that over time, just organically. I’d bring people on and expand the team. It just grew. It isn’t something I ever set out to do deliberately, but it has been a really rewarding path and provides so much flexibility, and it’s beautiful that we can work from anywhere that has an Internet connection and we can bring our laptop.
Megan Hannay:
It’s true, yeah. The ZipSprout is remote, but we also meet up about once a week, so we kind of have the best of both worlds, but I agree. There’s something really nice about being able to set your own hours and plan around things. You do feel like you’re a bit more in control of your life, I think, than a regular traditional 9-5 job.
Lindsay Wassell:
I had a reminder on Facebook. What are those reminders called when they say, on this day? There was an on this day reminder just a couple days ago from nine years ago, and it was me saying, I wore jeans into the office on a Thursday, and I can believe how much flak I’m getting from the team. It really wasn’t worth it. I saw that and I just laughed, because how times have changed, first of all, and especially for me, because I wore jeans on the Inbounder stage in Manhattan just last week.
Megan Hannay:
And no one noticed.
Lindsay Wassell:
Yeah. They were black jeans and they were brand-new, so you wouldn’t be able to tell, necessarily, but to be able to seize your own career that way and design how you’re going to be and live without these things being dictated by some employer somewhere is a really beautiful thing, and I’m very fortunate.
Megan Hannay:
Yeah. Who knew that the freedom of a certain lifestyle would be, I guess, epitomized or a great analogy would be the ability to wear jeans whenever you want? I definitely get that. I wear my jeans every single day. That’s awesome.
You also advertise that you’re a technical SEO, which I think is awesome because I think a lot of people shy away from technical SEO because it feels so complicated. I know I do. I look stuff up and I read it and I’m like, okay. I think I get this, but oh, my gosh. SEO is complicated enough, it feels like, even when you don’t have to get technical. What about that technical side draws you in?
Lindsay Wassell:
I think that, and I may describe technical SEO a bit differently than it’s evolved over time. I’ve called myself a technical SEO since about, I don’t know, maybe 2006, and it has become more difficult. Where I really sit is on the fence between marketing and technology and development. I can speak to the technology, and I can analyze and process what’s happening on the technical side, especially when it comes to herding the bots and whatnot. But there are today, very strong technical SEOs who would run circles around me, and they’re the ones I call when I need help. What is happening here? As long as we can communicate and find the answers in a technical environment, it doesn’t mean that we’re there hammering out code, necessarily, but if we can identify the code that should be hammered and bring that through based on marketing strategy, I think that that’s enough to get us part of the way there.
With technical SEO, that term evolving over time, it’s possible that I should adjust the way I’m describing myself. To be fair, I’m much more of a strategist now, but no matter who we are in SEO, we have to be able to sit down and communicate with development group and identify these things and be able to remember a problem, a technical problem and repeat a solution to clients thereafter. Hopefully, that helps explain that piece again, but I’ve had the technical SEO debate with several people over the last few years, because I think it has evolved.
Megan Hannay:
Interesting. I’d be curious to hear that debate, to be a fly on the wall of that debate.
Lindsay Wassell:
I’ll send you some names of passionate people who will talk your ear off about that.
Megan Hannay:
Yeah. I would love to. I’ve read some of your blog posts from Moz from a few years ago, and I would say you’re definitely in the technical camp. Some of the things you were talking about, I was like, okay, I get what she’s saying. It definitely felt technical. Not in a too much way, but in a like, this woman knows what she’s talking about.
Lindsay Wassell:
That’s really where it is. We have to be comfortable enough to dive into the details and ask the right questions and find the solutions. I think that that’s enough to wear a technical SEO hat. We don’t have to write the code ourselves. As long as we can understand how it works and why it’s doing what it’s doing and how it must change now, I feel like that’s enough.
Megan Hannay:
Also, know who to call. Know when we’re lost and who to call when we get to that point where we’re lost is also a great advantage. Last question, I love to ask guests about the place where they’re a local. You mentioned that you’re local to Tampa, but I’ve seen in your bios online that you’ve also lived in Denver, and you’re from Canada. What is Tampa like, and how is the tenor of Tampa different from some of the other places that you’ve lived?
Lindsay Wassell:
Tampa is where I landed in life, with different things and with the arrival of my children. It’s where I live now, but it isn’t my favorite place on the planet. It’s what works for me and my kids today, and that’s where we’ll stay until they’re grown. Tampa doesn’t have the really strong SEO community that we have in other areas, and there’s some things missing, but the weather is reliable. We know what the weather is going to do.
Megan Hannay:
Pretty much every day.
Lindsay Wassell:
There’s some really great restaurants, especially there’s a strong Cuban influence. So, there’s some great Cuban restaurants and also some Spanish influence. There’s some fabulous beaches, and there’s also a really great airport. So, when I’m done with Tampa, I can get on a plane and visit somewhere else like New York for The Inbounder or whatever. Whatever comes up.
Megan Hannay:
Nice. How would you compare Tampa to some of the other places you’ve lived? You mentioned Vancouver, Denver, Seattle. You don’t have to go through all of them, but just what’s it like to be a local in those places?
Lindsay Wassell:
Hopefully, you don’t have too many Tampa residents on your—
Megan Hannay:
You’re the first.
Lindsay Wassell:
Tampa would be my least favorite place to live of anywhere I’ve ever resided, and people who know me know that to be true, and that’s okay.
Megan Hannay:
It is okay, yeah.
Lindsay Wassell:
I’ve lived in some of the world’s greatest cities. Even for a short period, Sydney, Australia. I’m just lucky that I’ve had the opportunity to see these other places and experience them, and where I landed isn’t my first choice, but it’s a good—it has its merits, and my family’s happy there. Sometimes, we make adjustments for these things and then travel in our off time.
Megan Hannay:
Yeah. I agree. The cool thing about being able to work from wherever is that you can travel to wherever and then maybe one day move to somewhere else and still be able to do the same thing.
Lindsay Wassell:
Yeah, and that’s the really neat thing about the search space, too, is there’s so many great conferences. The Inbounder will be in Valencia, Spain again next year, and that is a really beautiful city. In this industry, and as a speaker, I get to go to really incredible places for work.
Megan Hannay:
Yeah. That is definitely, definitely a perk. Lindsay, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it, and I love talking to you. I even loved researching you, because I read some of the things you read, and I saw a video you were in. I was just, you just have some really great to share. So, thank you so much.
Lindsay Wassell:
Thank you, Megan. It’s been such a pleasure. I’ve really enjoyed it.
Megan Hannay:
Thank you.
