Tim will be speaking on Enterprise SEO at Engage 2020 which will be taking place March 12th and 13th at the Sentinel Hotel in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click here.
1) Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.
I lead SEO product for Walmart.com. I have always been a small company person with broad responsibilities to help grow the business. I led the marketing team at Card Player Magazine, started and sold an SEO agency, and led cross-team product strategy at Moz. From the very small to the very big, I now work for fortune 1, and funny enough it requires just as much entrepreneurial work as my prior roles.
2) What are some of the SEO issues you deal with that are unique to working on one of the most trafficked sites online?
The number 1 biggest challenge is scale. Every phase of SEO and product development has multiple layers of technical, organizational and executional complexity at Walmart. a seemingly simple front end change can become a monster due to upstream dependencies, technical debt or orphaned code bases.
3) How much autonomy does the SEO department have within a huge organization such as yours?
We have a large amount of autonomy and independence from vision to roadmap for SEO. As far as execution, we have a dedicated team of engineers, data scientists, product managers, and SEO trainers, so some of our roadmap can be tackled autonomously. However, we are still largely dependent on other engineering teams up and down the stack for most projects. Additionally, there are 1000s of associates who directly and indirectly impact SEO and don’t even know it. I call this the “Ghost in the SEO” and it continues to be one of our biggest opportunities.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.