In this episode, we chat with JR Oakes, Senior Director of Technical SEO Research at Adapt Partners and part of the thriving SEO community in Raleigh, North Carolina. JR shares stories of success, catastrophic mistakes, high-stakes migrations, and how a single rogue noindex tag nearly wiped out millions in traffic.

We talk about how he went from a career as an architectural glass designer to a developer, then an SEO, and then a technical SEO. We also talk about how he got involved setting up the Beer and SEO meetup group in Raleigh as well as his involvement in the well-known Tech SEO Sub-Reddit that has had some amazing industry guests. 

We cover public speaking, impostor syndrome, how things in SEO could be automated over the next several years, the current climate within the SEO community, what it’s like to be named to Search Engine Journal’s Top 140 SEO’s to follow in 2019 (which came with his own SEO baseball card), and so much more!

Topics covered:

• Going from IT side-hustles to SEO internships
• AngularJS, JavaScript SEO, and how pre-rendering works
• Implementing structured data at scale
• Why Screaming Frog and Sitebulb are still irreplaceable
• Tools like Ahrefs, Deepcrawl, and SEMrush—what they do best
• Communicating ROI and the challenge of client implementation
• Why patience and empathy are crucial for long-term SEO success
• Voice search, schema trends, and local reputation as ranking signals

💬 Whether you’re knee-deep in audits or just entering the SEO world, this episode is packed with real talk, actionable tips, and career perspective.

Sponsored by Moving Traffic Media

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