Arpana is a digital marketer with deep experience in organic search and user acquisition. She had led organic search growth programs for various large brands and small businesses.
She enjoys being in the trenches solving problems relating to growth marketing, search optimization, content strategy, site architecture, search tools, and dashboards.
Episode transcription:
F: Aparna, thank you for being with us today.
A: Thanks for having me, Fred.
F: Just to get us started. Tell us a little bit about your story and how you got into the SEO industry.
A: It's been a while now, but it's an interesting story, indeed. I was interning at a real estate software company where the CEO and CMO, he was very enterprising, but had a healthy disregard for traditional marketing channels. And he challenged me to come up with a fresh and innovative search marketing program. And at that time, search marketing was very new at words. We had just about launched and, he wanted to do something new in terms of user acquisition and help out real estate agents. And that was my starting to really researching online what is search marketing, and then what is SEO and reading up on thought leadership articles at that point, there was no formal documentation. It was all self-learn, self-taught experimenting, trying out new things, and being able to get like the first user is obviously a thrill and it was such an exciting process and to be able to do it and get the gratification of the customers, because we were able to deliver leads to real estate agents. And that just took me into something which I've stayed with since.
F: You talk about being self-taught and just doing all the research and learning as you go. Do you think that that's something that applies in today's world or are companies more looking for people that are well accomplished that come with a ton of experience and they don't need to learn on the job?
A: Not at all. I think, especially in the recent past, the growth mindset that you've probably heard about a lot, it is more about problem solving. It's about how you approach a particular situation because the world we are in today, there's nothing, which is going to be an exact replica of what it was before times are changing. Companies are changing, people are coming out with new skill sets, and that's the fun of it. Do people even want to enjoy being able to solve bigger problems? And that's why it's so core to be willing to experiment. And I think companies are not really looking for someone who's done it before and tried and tested what helps. Definitely it helps ease the learning curve, but companies are really looking for people who can solve problems and who can make things that scale. So those are two key areas. Most companies that have an online presence use search engine optimization to increase the quantity and quality of traffic to their sites.
F: What are the most recent trends that you believe dominate the SEO industry of the coming few years?
A: SEO is constantly changing, because not just the engines are changing, but the surfaces are changing even in the last 10 years. I've been in this field for close to 17-18 years now. And since, you know, search came out and websites are starting to optimize. And, over just looking back at the last few years, the surfaces have changed. There's so many new devices that changed the way a search is used in many more vertical engines that are coming out. So it's not just, you know, web search, but there's search around specific verticals there's shopping, there's other. Pinterest itself can be an engine, LinkedIn. They can be a search across so many other surfaces. And then of course, just the way people search, going from typing out to conversational search and going into voice search. So I think these are all, some of the trends, just based on the user. So I think if you look at the user and you think about the different ways that users can search, that kind of tells you about t
