083: How To Win At In House, Large Scale SEO w/Kevin Indig of Atlassian

For some reason, it’s a struggle to find In-House SEOs to share their stories, lessons and SEO strategies.

Today’s show is the rare exception.

Kevin Indig runs technical SEO at Atlassian – a company responsible for tools like Trello, Jira, Confluence and more. Atlassian.com has a domain authority of 93. There are hundreds of thousands of URLs across several domains in the Atlassian family.

So … technical SEO is a really big deal.

Kevin went in-depth on topics such as:

* How they use log file analysis to boost rankings

* Their process for cleaning up low-quality content

* Tactics to improve the internal link structure

* How to promote SEO education internally within a large 2,000+ person company.

* How they measure and track SEO success in a company with NO sales team and where organic traffic is responsible for 50% of their product sales.

Kevin also answered lots of questions from listeners on Twitter

Enjoy!

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Show Agenda & Timestamps

Kevin Indig & Atlassian introduction [1:29]

Semrush free account competition announcement [1:51]

Kevin Indig’s background [2:14]

Why did he not become a doctor? [2:25]

Work Background before Atlassian [4:36]

Atlassian overview [5:55]

Kevin’s role at Atlassian [8:07]

As part of the technical SEO team what are the goals, metrics that Kevin focuses on directly? [8:36]

How this Interview came to be & Kevin’s article Machine Learning for SEO [10:00]

How to set up an inhouse SEO structure [11:22]

Creating Assets & SEO Knowledge Base [13:05]

How does Kevin deal with how SEO changes [15:30]

SEO concepts that don’t change [15:45]

SEO concepts in flux [16:13]

The power of blogging [16:31]

Atlassian company size [17:03]

Defining KPIs [17:27]

Last touch versus first touch and assisted [18:13]

Customer journey and keywords [19:50]

Do they equally focus on all three? [20:05]

How to handle SEO for massive versus small sites and how do they move the ranking needle? [21:15]

Content marketing for smaller sites [21:45]

Keyword Cannibalization [22:24]

Crawling, Number of Indexed Pages, Quality of Pages, Log File Analysis [24:07]

Tools used [25:01]

What do they look for in the Log Files and the Crawl Analysis to move the ranking needle [26:21]

Action Items to improve crawl frequency and move an important page up in ranking [28:11]

Do external links impact crawl frequency as much as it passes page rank  [28:54]

How do they define low click depth and how do they prioritize links [29:30]

Looking at Indexed Pages and the Quality of Indexed Pages [31:24]

How do they gather the data [33:10]

How much do they look at crawling topically? [36:25]

XML Sitemaps strategy for a large site [37:33]

301 versus deleting a page [38:43]

Twitter Questions [41:01]

How does Kevin explain that it’s not all about immediate results?