Family Leave Policy

May 7, 2021 by Brendan

I am reading Elizabeth Warren’s new book, Persist. She tells a story about getting fired from her first teaching job because she was pregnant. This was in 1970.

Having just had my first kid, I couldn’t help but start to think about my own experience in 2021 (50 years later).

I had 6 weeks paid leave, and my wife took 20 weeks with most of her pay.

First I am grateful. Our employers have these amazing policies that gives us time to adjust to this big family event, allow us collect our earnings, and return to our jobs. I am also happy about the progress we’ve made when you compare Warren’s experience with my family.

With a lot of employers offering strong family leave packages and government policy changes, more Americans should continue to have positive family leave experiences. Americans favor this.

Everyone should have a chance to start a family and hold their job to manage the transition.

You can listen to a good interview with Warren here.

Human-to-Human Commerce

April 16, 2021 by Brendan

Sometimes I get bogged down with the frustrations I have with Google. Exploiting its power and lack of transparency are a few that come to mind.

I was reminded of the positive interactions it can drive when looking for a newborn photographer one week after my son Jake was born. Lizzie asked me to look for someone, so I went to Google. Being a new dad of course I was on the go so I did a search for “newborn photographer near me” on my mobile. I checked out results in the Local Pack and did some price comparing. Once I got over the prices for newborn sessions, I finally sent a few options to Lizzie.

We reached out to and ended up going with Cara Soulia Photography. I was reminded of the human to human commerce that Google can help drive. We were new parents looking to document our sons first few days, and Cara runs a small photography business looking for customers.

As long as Google still drives connections like this, I will continue to be happy working on the internet.

While Cara was doing the shoot, I told her I worked in SEO and how I found her via Google. She then told me about how she started The Front Steps Project at the start of Covid and that resulted in a lot of backlinks from major publications and other photographers around the world. A truly great example of a serendipitous cause-marketing campaign that ended up driving high value links too.

Here are a few photos from the shoot:

New Standing Desk

February 13, 2021 by Brendan

Have you ever discovered and bought something via an IG ad? It happens maybe once per year in our house, and I always find the story entertaining. Of course there is retargeting after viewing something but I am more referring to the first view of the product being an ad itself.

I pulled my back in early January and was quite uncomfortable sitting at my desk, so I was looking for standing options. I was considering the makeshift box strategy, because I didn’t want to overspend and have anything too clunky.

I stopped my search and continued just trying to stretch and soften my way to comfort while I still worked sitting down.

Then, I was hit with an ad on IG for Harmoni standing desk. The ergonomics looked solid and it was something I could disassemble easily if needed. A few other tactics I believe they did well:

One follow up ad provided an additional $20 off.
I lost the code for the discount so I had to DM Harmoni and they still provided it.
Videos showed a few different takes (1) working at the desk (2) setting up a home office with the desk.
The landing page doesn’t just sell a standing desk. It sells a healthier way to work, more creativity, and more productivity.

So this is how I am working these days. The desk has definitely provided a more optimal way for me to work. Being on my feet the first 2-3 three days took some getting used to but right now I am in a great groove.

harmoni standing desk — My Standing Desk Setup

Working In-House vs Agency SEO

February 7, 2021 by Brendan

On Thursday night, I joined Mark Staton’s Digital Marketing class to talk about SEO. In particular, I talked about my experience in agency vs in-house SEO jobs. Mark was my very first marketing professor, and I remember the first talk we had when I went to him to share my interest in marketing. It was the fall of 2010 and we walked the Skidmore campus. He broke down the difference between agency and client-side marketing careers. Speaking to his class about this exact topic was a lot of fun.

I also am extremely impressed with how Mark has evolved his course content to give undergraduate students exposure to important digital marketing concepts and tools. It is great for the students to gain this exposure, and I bet it adds value to employers who get to hire these folks. Here’s some thoughts I prepared before the discussion.

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I worked 2 years in agency SEO and then moved to in-house SEO, which I’ve been doing for almost 6 years now. What I love about the enterprise in-house is the technology and scale.

I am going to dive into some differences I reflected on but keep in mind the practice of SEO doesn’t change – optimize your site to improve rankings in Google.

Agency:

Within an agency role, you are often running SEO projects and campaigns for a variety of clients.
The number can range between 4 and 20 at a given time depending on the model of the SEO agency.
This environment creates a fun dynamic of learning your clients’ businesses and how work gets done so you can ensure your various deliverables add value.
You might really enjoy some aspects of a client and not enjoy others. I remember loving a client who was particularly excited and engaged when it came to implementing our recommendations. However, the business they were in was not the most exciting for me.

In-House:

In-house means you are the person inside the company optimizing the website for search.
This environment is fun because you are more in charge of implementation then if you were an agency SEO.
Sometimes people call this more of an operator role.
You can join a large in-house SEO team or a smaller one. A smaller one can limit exposure to other SEO perspectives but allow you to connect with your team and build trust within the company.
Part of your role will be implementing and then you have some agency-like responsibilities answering questions about SEO and keeping stakeholders updated on performance.

There are a few other differences I want to call out across team members, projects, and skills.

Projects – The Work:

In-House: within a large in-house team you’ll have more SEO colleagues often owning different sites run by the company, verticals, or themes (technical vs content). The pieces of work are (1) quarterly or semi-annual roadmaps with initiatives and questions you seek to answer (2) daily / weekly performance checks. Own these from start to finish and stay on top of them. Some research is polished and some isn’t because you are implementing and moving quickly.

Agency: the core pieces of agency work are (1) client campaigns & strategy, (2) weekly or recurring meetings, and (3) deliverables. Deliverables have to be polished and professional because they are going to a client. You also have performance checks here.

Team – Collaboration & Exposure:

Client-Side: there must be tight collaboration with different functions such as Data Science, Product Management, Engineering, Merchandising, and others. You’ll also be part of a marketing department and can get different levels of exposure to other types of marketing. Exposure to other marketing was a big selling point for me.

Agency: will often have many colleagues doing the same work as you which means you can share ideas on what is working vs not for clients. You’ll have other team members working for the same client so it can feel fun and collaborative. You can be matched with SEM folks on clients that are using your agencies for both to get more exposure. In addition to client work, you can be on the lookout to help the agency become more efficient in its service offering or help build a new service.

Skills & Talents – What You Need to Be Good At:

On a large SEO team (agency or client), you can often go very deep on SEO or a specific aspect of it (technical, content, linking, copy, analytics, etc.). While smaller teams will mean you do all aspects of SEO from technical to content to analytics to client communication.

Overall key skills and talents apply to both client-side and agency SEO roles: creativity, communication, critical thinking, innovation, analytics, and curiosity would be some of the core that come to mind.

Back Again

February 6, 2021 by Brendan

Topping off a crazy 2020, I never renewed by website hosting and backup services in October when I needed to. As a result, I lost everything on here from 2013-2020. I never realized this until January when I went to visit the site and it wouldn’t load. I was quite disappointed for a bit and still am only because I had posts over the years that I liked a lot. Plus put all of them together and bjcottam.com was a portfolio of my written learnings over the last 8 years that I became pretty proud of.

There is never a better time to start fresh, though! I am back again. I thought of jumping right on medium.com instead of here but WordPress makes it too easy to get started. I wanted a very simple template and found NS Minimal fit my criteria. I also booted up Yoast, Webmaster Tools, and Google Analytics to ensure I am up and running with SEO and some analytics again.

I plan to write on here more frequently. Some new stuff and some old stuff that I have saved to my Google drive. I have always gotten a lot of joy out of writing things down – this will be my place.