I interviewed Swapna Anandikar-Mulye about her role as an SEO specialist at The Guide Dogs for the Blind Association. I met Swapna a couple of years ago when she was studying Digital Marketing at Henley Business School.
Below a transcript of the interview:
Rodrigo PEREZ VEGA
Okay, so we are now online and recording. Welcome again, guys, to this series of interviews with marketing practitioners. Today I have invited Swapna, who was also one of my students two years ago. And she is now working as a search engine optimization specialist, I believe so she’s working in what we could say, a more technical aspect of marketing, or more specifically, digital marketing. So Swapna, thank you very much for agreeing to spare a few minutes today and tell us more about what you do. As I mentioned to you, the whole idea of this series is to kind of tell students and share with students like the different pathways that they could possibly take after they do a degree in in marketing. So thank you, Swapna. And I’ll just put your slides online. Let me see if if it works. Okay, so can you see them now?
Swapna Anandikar-Mulye
I’m not it. Yeah,
Rodrigo PEREZ VEGA
no, yes. Okay. Perfect. So over to you. Swapna.
Swapna Anandikar-Mulye
Yeah, um, this is just the cover title. Rodrigo, can you please go to the next slide so I can start my story,
Rodrigo PEREZ VEGA
of course.
Swapna Anandikar-Mulye
Hello, everyone. It’s lovely to connect with you all on this platform. And huge thanks to Dr. Rodrigo for giving me this opportunity. I’m currently working as a search engine optimization specialist with guide dogs, what are the UK’s leading charity organisations. But let me tell you a bit about myself. First, I have done my Bachelor of Engineering in computer science from India. And I have worked in website development and in India, and as well as in UK, I had to take a career break in between due to family reasons. And when it was time to get back to work, I took some time to reflect upon what I really wanted, and grab the opportunity to fulfil my dreams of doing masters in digital marketing. I was awarded a scholarship in Henley Business School for my masters. And I think that was definitely a confidence booster for me. I graduated a couple of years back and knew that I wanted to utilise my undergraduate degree, which is highly technical, along with my marketing knowledge, and I started looking for a job. I had some exposure to SEO while I was working in it before. And SEO looked like the perfect job opportunity for me as it involves websites. Research is highly analytical and technical. Plus, it’s all related to marketing. So here I am working as an SEO specialist at guide dogs. Can we please go to the next slide, please? So what is SEO, and what do SEO specialists do? Google is the search engine that handles a vast majority of daily search engine queries in the world, and is the biggest and baddest gatekeeper on the internet. And SEO is the key to that gate. Seo stands for search engine optimization is the practice of increasing both the quality and the quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand through non paid search engine results. SEO is much about people as it is about search engine themselves. It’s about understanding what users are searching for online. The answers they are seeking the words they are using and the type of content they wish to consume. If knowing your audience is intense is one side of SEO coin, delivering it in a way such that in search engine crawlers can find and understand is the other. Su is very useful in improving user experience is cost effective, and giving companies a competitive edge. And that is my job. optimise our website in order to achieve higher search engine rankings by implementing a smart SEO strategy. I’m a problem solver and a decision maker in all the SEO related at guide dogs. Next slide please. ratico
Rodrigo PEREZ VEGA
will do give me a second. Hi. All right, there we go.
Swapna Anandikar-Mulye
The next slide shows Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Very similar to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that I’m sure you all are aware of. This theory states that unless you have your foundation strong, you can’t achieve the needs at the top of the pyramid. As you can see the foundation of good SEO begins with ensuring crawl accessibility and moves up from there. Grant accessibility so search engines can read your website. And it can be anything related to slow pace speed, unable to access any page, broken links, etc. The second one is compelling content that answers the searchers query, we always say that consumer is the King. And this holds even true. If you are in a digital marketing field, you need to know who your target target audiences are. And what they are looking for. Users first approach is also rewarded by search engine and is the most important thing to consider. And the third one is keyword optimization. It is to attract searchers and engines. This is the most important aspect of SEO, and very highly essential as well. fourth one is greater great user experience, including fast loading speed, and compelling user interface is a necessity for ranking better. And other things thing is that you need to have the share worthy content that on links, citations and amplification. To achieve higher click through rates, we need to do appropriate page titles, their URLs and the page descriptions.
Swapna Anandikar-Mulye
And not.
Swapna Anandikar-Mulye
And the most important, I would say is featured snippet. feature snippets are selective search results that feature on top of Google’s organic results below the ads in a box. This is where we try to achieve a ranking in Next slide, please.
Rodrigo PEREZ VEGA
Great, I just noticed that adapt Actually, it’s like Maslow’s because it’s maybe they don’t know it, but it’s a mo Zed is actually a software, right, that helps with the search engine optimization and and all that. Great. Okay, I’ll move to the next slide. There we go.
Swapna Anandikar-Mulye
So Google, we use different tactics for different search engines when while doing our work as an SEO optimization specialist, but let’s consider Google now for obvious reasons. Now, Google is around 200 ranking factors for SEO. Or if you go in more detail, there are around 10,000 sub factors for ranking. SEO is quite broad, and a complex task but if done correctly, is the most rewarding strategy to get you the highest ranking. And it’s free of cost. It’s always evolving. It combines a large number of tools, best practices, and constantly adjusting to Google’s algorithm updates. to rank better your content needs to be to mirror expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Now, SEO includes continuously. So my day to day job, and whenever I get a chance from my other work, is I continuously audit our content, identifying gaps and opportunities. And it’s a continuous process of improving on all these fronts, and all the time, do some work to get at the top but do then then do a lot more to stand on the top I would say. So just In brief, SEO consists of three different aspects. Technical SEO, which refers to improving the technical aspects of a website in order to increase the ranking of its pages, making websites faster, easier to crawl and understandable for search engines are the pillars of technical optimization. on page SEO is very important, as it helps search engines understand your website and its content and whether it’s relevant to your searchers query. They the factors that include on page optimization are keywords, meta tags, duplicate content, optimising your images, to name a few. And lastly, off page SEO. This includes all of the tactics that takes place outside your website, such as linking to trusted websites, brand building reviews, guest blogs, posting and so on. I use so many different tools everyday to carry out all of the above. I think this is the most exciting part of my job, but I get to connect the dots, analyse the data and research and keep on improving my SEO strategy. Next slide please. So, yes, we have guide dogs, our leading charity organisation Have and Have 90 years of experience in helping people with sight loss and we are very proud of this. We breed and train Guide Dogs which provide life changing mobility and there are currently over 4700 working guide dog partnerships in UK guide dogs have transformed themselves into digital first brand. And we always have digital journey for customer in mind ahead of our new campaigns and projects. Next slide please so I can go in more detail. The key performance indicators for SEO differs as we are a charity organisation. We need more donations event attendance newsletter signups and very important thing is how we build up our authority through our content and SEO. So the main KPIs that we generally track are organic search traffic, organic search rankings, search engine visibility, which indicates how often your domain is shown in search results for the keywords its ranking, organic click through rate. And the last, but not the least, of course, bounce rate, which is a metric that measures the percentage of your site visitors who bounced from your website without taking any actions. Moving on to next slide.
Swapna Anandikar-Mulye
Seo performance is a long term strategy. And results take generally few months to show up. So you really need to have the patience to see the results and at the same time, you need to manage the expectation of your stakeholders whenever you’re starting your new campaign. Seo also requires support from all different marketing channels, and guide dogs depending on the campaign. We generally have our fundraising, services team branding, communications team, research team, data team, content team and the most important digital team involved in all of our campaigns and guide dogs different marketing channels come into action to divert SEO performance. Let me tell you in just in short how they all work together. So SEO and content marketing goes hand in hand. The bottom line is that high quality content tends to be a boon for SEO, and good SEO is the quality of the written content. SEO is all about getting visibility and social media platform enables this. We promote inspiring content through LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, that can reach a wider audience that could be willing to share and link back to us and thus in reinforcing brand reputation and authority. Creating an email marketing campaign can positively affect your SEO to depending on the size of your data list. Emails can be sent to large groups quickly and cost effectively offering a platform to help promote your SEO content that can lead to more social shares and all important buttons. SEO and referral traffic helps us to generate any links and on links for the better quality domain. As you pay search, I think this is quite important. And we do this for all our campaigns. we harness the data from paid search campaigns such as Google ads, to get insights into search terms and keywords that will carry over to organic search. We then evaluate which keywords are popular and therefore which keywords are more of our SEO efforts for organic traffic. And lastly, PR is another great tool and help us generate exposure and awareness to our SEO content. Press releases and guest blogs are just few examples that improves our brand trust, credibility and ultimately, Su Next slide please.
Swapna Anandikar-Mulye
This is one of our most successful campaigns and you will know why in a short while sponsor puppy is a cosponsorship scheme but supporters follow a guide dogs puppies exciting journey from six weeks old to when they are partner with someone who is blind and partially sighted. There are three new puppy recruits available for sponsorship every four months, and supporters follow their two year journey to becoming a fully trained guide dog. This scheme alone has raised a substantial amount for us and we have over 3000 people who are actively sponsoring this cute puppies every year. The I think this company Lister The best example of integrating different marketing channels had guide dogs and what you can achieve through the right implementation. We recruit our new supporters through online campaigns, TV ad, press advertising and even face to face interactions. The customer comes to our website, they fill up the form for sponsoring a puppy and we use SEO and pay per click advertisement to drive through the traffic is then promoted to different social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The supporter also receive regular updates, photos and videos along the way through emails. This is a huge project for us, which runs throughout the year at guide dogs and involve our marketing teams working together such as fundraising team branding, communications team, research team, data team content team and the very important again digital team Next slide, please.
Rodrigo PEREZ VEGA
I think I mean, from this slide on the previous one, something that is quite evident is that I mean, and this has been kind of a theme with other interviews is that you’re not working on your own right, you’re there with this kind of collaboration, and, and different teams, even within marketing, right, that they need to kind of communicate to make this work. So it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s good, because sometimes I mean, I don’t know if you remember, but when you were at units like people, why teamwork and all that, because it is that is that we work in teams all the time, right? It’s very rare to have just one person doing doing everything, right. No,
Swapna Anandikar-Mulye
and I don’t think I’ve ever worked alone on any project, I have worked with so many around, because guidance is a huge organisation as well, we have so many different teams. And I think for every campaign, we have at least eight to 10 teams involved in that. Yeah, so and as an SEO person, me doing my job at guide dogs, I’m the only one SEO person at the moment. So I think it’s my duty and responsibility to liaise with everyone in the in all of the teams and get their feedback and what they want to achieve and how I can then successfully deliver it through SEO,
Rodrigo PEREZ VEGA
of course, and you know, I don’t know if you remember as well, but what I was covering search engine optimization class, I told him that, okay, I mean, you you might work with people like like yourself that have like a computer background, but marketers the the computer science background, but marketers need to be able to kind of know as well what’s going on, right and interact and to be familiar with, like, all the elements that you mentioned in the pyramid, right, even though they might not necessarily know how to optimise like page loading times and stuff like that. But they need to know that that is an important element, for example.
Swapna Anandikar-Mulye
Yeah, I think that is quite an important point that you touch upon Rodrigo, because, um, when I started with guide dogs, and I think the major part of my role was to educate people around that why SEO is important, and what role it plays. So that they know that every campaign starts with, of course, what the what the team are looking for, but then it comes to me first, for all the research and for the user’s intent, and and then it goes for content brief and the website team.
Rodrigo PEREZ VEGA
Great, so I’ll stop interrupting and move to the very good duck.
Swapna Anandikar-Mulye
Yeah. So following on from sponsor puppy, this is another cute campaign that we have just launched Good dog. It’s a subscription product, a 12 month expert guide from guide dogs to support relationship between happy well behaved dogs and owners who love them. For just 10 pounds a month throughout guidebooks subscribers will receive sorry, good dogs with subscribers will receive monthly emails, and seasonal packs to the post full of training tips and inspiring rates from our experts and guide of this campaign. Although recently launch is doing great on driving organic traffic as well as paid and social traffic. So I think this is one of one of the recent examples that I can give that is doing amazingly well on our site.
Rodrigo PEREZ VEGA
Additionally, you get to show all these very nice pictures of the dogs, right. So it’s, it’s a great place to work. Do you have dogs in the office
Swapna Anandikar-Mulye
until now, they were based in up in north in one of the centres. But we we always had an ambition to ship them to our reading office. And the book is on the way soon. Hopefully, from next year, we are going to have lots of dogs in our office, but we are also going to be working. So that’s that’s a plus point for us now.
Rodrigo PEREZ VEGA
Yeah, definitely. I just moved change the slide.
Swapna Anandikar-Mulye
Right. So I think this example I pick because this is this can this can show that how successful SEO campaigns can be annual no shortly why. So this is companion dogs, where we are really making a difference in people lives. These are the dogs that have changed career from being a guide dog because it wasn’t right from them. They might have behaviours that might not be suitable for guiding such as some health issue problems with their joints or anxiety. But this is the campaign for our services team that will launch few feedbacks. And it’s already driving the highest traffic through organic search, which clearly proves that SEO done properly could be the main star driving your website traffic. Our ranking have gone from mid 40s to number four here for this campaign and has grown yet another very successful as you can pin. So yeah, that that just proves that Your work, you just need to have some patience before it shows your results.
Rodrigo PEREZ VEGA
Wow, I think those are great results, right? From 40 to four. It’s, it’s very good. And I found very interesting how you said as well. These are dogs that change careers, right. So it’s like they had a career before deciding.
Swapna Anandikar-Mulye
So what happens is when we recruit a guide dog for training, and they go through rigorous training for nearly two years, and somewhere along the line, if we think that they have developed some health issues, or they have some behavioural problem, even they can be going on to a guide dog, but they are still great dogs as can be a companion dog for people who are in need of that. So then we Yeah, we provide them with the people. We have a whole long list for that. But yeah, I think they do a great job.
Rodrigo PEREZ VEGA
Yeah. Okay. Should I move to the next one? Yes. final, final slide, right.
Swapna Anandikar-Mulye
And Dr. Rodrigo asked me for some career advice to give to you guys. Um, I think there are lots of things that I can say, but I just speak to them. The first one for me, I would say that, I would really like to stress the importance of knowing yourself and know your strengths within this domain. So what are you passionate about? What are you good at? Like, I always knew that I never wanted to lose my technical side when I looked for the job. So my job now combines technology and marketing. Also, please speak to your mentor teachers during masters, because that was so much invaluable for me. And it gives me the right direction for my job opportunities. The second one, and I think for the and Dr. Radhika, you would also agree with me, I think I would really, really stress is choosing your dissertation very carefully. You will be spending, I think you’ll be spending so many hours in your dissertation in researching, and it is so valuable. I did my dissertation, which was a blend in artificial intelligence and marketing. And now one of the most exciting project that I’ll be leading next year in Guide Dogs is voice search, we have just recently launched a website bought. So that is an ongoing project. And I’m going to be leading that on all SEO fronts from next year. So what I’m trying to say here is choose what you are interested in and see this as an opportunity to gain deeper understanding of the field that you actually like, and utilise it in your career. And the third one, I think it’s so important that you explore all the possibilities and learn as much as you can in the digital marketing field. They are all interconnected. So having as much as knowledge as you can, will give you a competitive edge. And the last one never stop learning. There are there is there is so much more you can learn apart from what job you are doing. And it’s it’s it’s amazing field out there what you can achieve through digital journey. I think it’s amazing.
Rodrigo PEREZ VEGA
Great. Thank you. Thank you Swapna. I think i think it’s it’s a, it’s great advice, right. And we do stress that. I mean, if you’re going to spend all this amount of hours over the summer during your dissertation, you might as well do something that’s what you’re very interested in, but also that can help you in your next stage right, which is finding a job and I’m very happy to hear that part of this kind of artificial intelligence project that you did now might lead to all these very exciting new projects that you will be leading and developing with with the organisation. So well done. Congratulations. And, and thank you again for for sparing this this few minutes to discuss this with with me and to share it with the students. So thank you, Scott.
Swapna Anandikar-Mulye
It’s my pleasure. Dr. Rodrigo, thank you so much.
Rodrigo PEREZ VEGA
All right, so I’ll stop recording now.