#2 Here’s Something Nobody Tells You (Until Now)

I want you to imagine the following scenarios:

1. You notice in GSC and in the SERPs that multiple variants of the canonical are being indexed.
2. You realise the robots.txt file is blocking Google from crawling the entire website since launch.
3. You discover the declared canonical in the raw and rendered HTML are completely different.
4. You become aware that the organisation’s localisation GTM strategy is creating duplicate content at scale and less than 20 percent of URLs within each geo subfolder is indexed.

Now, for each of these technical SEO issues there is a simple solution, right?

Ah, that’s where I went wrong in the beginning of my enterprise career because getting these fixed at a large organisation is no easy feat.

What and who you know is how you get the job interview and the job offer, but how do you thrive in your role?

Unlike an agency role where your day-to-day is all about finding issues and fixing them, being an SEO at an enterprise organisation is very different.

This was one of the first lessons I learned when I made the shift from agency to enterprise.

You see, there’s an entire team of people who are allowed to make changes to staging and push to production. Then there’s another team of people who get to choose what changes are done. And at Adobe, there is a dedicated team of subject matter experts for the execution and maintenance of technical SEO.

Whether it was Optus or at Adobe, I have never, and will probably never have access to the backend — for good reason too. And I’m fairly certain this is the case across all enterprise organisations.

Oh, you want to change the copy on a product page?

Yeah, that belongs to product marketing.

So, if you as the SEO Manager cannot make any changes or get to decide what to do when you like, how do you, an in-house SEO with zero execution authority, get anything done?

Well, it all comes down to the relationships you build and nurture because you will not succeed in your role if you work as a lone wolf.

And most of you are lone wolves because that’s how you were groomed. That is, you were give an account or a list of tasks and that was what you worked on.

So, how do you stop being a lone wolf?

How do you build relationships?

More importantly, how do you even find out who you need to build a relationship with?

Well, there’s no easy way.

Let me tell you a story.

One week prior to my start date, Optus launched an entirely new business line on a subdomain of a subdomain.

Oh yes, we were #winning from the beginning — NOT.

And we were pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into paid media and influencer collaborations.

To senior leadership’s horror, our subdomain of a subdomain wasn’t even ranking for its brand term.

They were not happy.

This was the dumpster fire I found myself in.

So why weren’t we ranking for our own brand term?

Well, for starters, the developers had forgotten to remove the disallow rule in the robots.txt file upon launch. And when I discovered this, it took me many emails to find out who could actually change this. To make matters worse, the build was done externally and the consulting firm would charge us extra to fix something they caused.

Two weeks passed and we finally got the disallow scrubbed but we still weren’t showing up for our brand name!

What gives?

So, here’s the thing.

Our instance of AEM Sites had this great feature where any URL would return a HTTP-200 status code.

Any URL.

Let that sink in.

It is the stuff of technical SEO nightmares.

But the solution was simple — canonical tags!

But unlike WordPress where you can easily install Yoast and set canonical rules, AEM Sites isn’t like that. There is no checkbox to tick to enable canonical tags.

Oh no.

I learnt the hard way this instance of AEM Sites needed this feature to be hard coded and to be hard coded in Java.

You see, to save time and money, we had gone external and even though the root domain had canonicals built in, this new build did not (among other things).

It took me weeks to figure all this out.

You may be wondering why did it take me so long?

Well, my hiring manager was overseas on PTO for the first 2 weeks of my hire. And the other SEO team members knew nothing about the portfolio I was assigned or the people who built the tech stack.

The thing about working at an enterprise is that you’re one person in a sea of thousands.

• Finding the problem is easy.
• Understanding the problem is not so easy.
• And getting it resolved is the most difficult part.

Enterprise SEO is like a never-ending series of side quests where one adventure leads to another and it can burn you out real fast (I’ll talk about this in another newsletter).

It took me over a month to find the right person to talk to and persuade them to divert time to my ask.

Luckily, the Java developer was willing to help even though he has his own day-to-day workload.

And do you know how I got this done?

Through my charming personality of course!

Anyways ..

Armed with this new information, by the time leadership was getting frustrated with the lack of results, I was ready to present a solution and persuade them that this one thing was the activity that would unlock a whole bunch of other KPIs.

Let’s be honest — canonical tags did not solve our [business] problems but without them, nothing else would work.

Succeeding in enterprise SEO is all about the connections you make with people from other disciplines and departments.

Everyone has their own priorities and deadlines, but here’s the thing to remember.

Everyone is (financially) incentivised to achieve the organisation’s business goals so use this to your advantage.

For example, I didn’t ask for canonical tags. Instead I reframed my ask to be aligned with what they wanted — “To achieve 2,000 daily sales, we need to be able to tell Google which URL it should serve to searchers. To do this, we need the capability to define canonicals across our website.”

And within the next sprint, guess who finally got canonical tags?

Over the next few months, I would learn so much about data visualisation, how to use action statements in slide decks, and how to be a better executive communicator.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably someone who is thinking about getting a SEO role at an enterprise or have just started at one.

I know what you’re going through because I was you 2 years ago.

Here’s my advice:

• Your subject matter expertise (ie, what you know) is partly why you got the job.
• Prioritise, prioritise, and prioritise ruthlessly.
• Who you know will help make it happen, but only if your plan aligns with their goals. That is, people will help you when they think they’re helping themselves.
• Make connections, create 1:1 meetings with colleagues from other disciplines, and don’t be afraid to ask questions in Slack or Teams.
• It’s never worth it to burn a bridge for a short term win because you will always need to make another ask.
• Be nice! It’ll go a long way — trust me.

If there’s one thing I want you to take away from this, it is this.

It isn’t that I am brilliant and was able to solve XYZ problems.

No, the lesson is this.

Be the person that people around you at work want to help because it takes a village to make one simple change on an enterprise webpage.

This is what nobody tells you.

You’re welcome.

Thanks for making it this far!

If you’re a search marketer wanting to transition to an enterprise role, you’re going to want to subscribe to Journal of an Enterprise SEO.

What exactly is Journal of an Enterprise SEO?

A lot of people think in-house SEO is boring.

They’re not wrong, but they’re not exactly right either.

Hello! I’m Daniel K Cheung, the author of this newsletter. In 2022, I made the jump from a $130,000 salary agency-side to a $149,000 one at Australia’s second-largest telecommunication company.

Ever since then, I’ve come to respect the role, learned to roll with the challenges, and look forward to the incredible potential of B2B enterprise SEO. I want to share my journey because getting hired was a huge milestone in my career.

Every week, I will be sharing tips, including:

• How to get a job as an SEO at an enterprise
• How to increase your sphere of influence
• How to get the most out of your 1:1s with your manager
• Mistakes to avoid in your performance review

So whether you’re at the beginning of your SEO career, about to apply for an enterprise role, or have just started and are finding it really difficult to get things done, I’m writing this for you.

See you next time!