KERSTIN REICHERT
SEO DIGITAL MARKETING MANAGER,
TIDE
TIDE
Kerstin has been in digital marketing — and primarily SEO — for over a decade, in a career that has spanned four different countries. From SEO Director in Switzerland, Trainer in Austria and now SEO Marketing Manager in the UK, Kerstin has worked at both corporates and start-ups. She’s a speaker at industry events and a member of IAB UK’s Search Council, a body dedicated to educating professionals on better Search Marketing.
If I had to use one word to describe being an SEO specialist at a startup, it would be fast. Luckily, I loved that kind of pace when I worked with agencies, so I am in my element at Tide.
But there were two other big advantages to a start-up compared to an agency. First, I get to own SEO end-to-end; something you rarely get to do working for clients.
Second, you are part of a larger marketing team, so you know what others are doing at any given moment. When you are working at an SEO agency at a client site, you can feel a little isolated.
This is a snapshot of how I navigated the early days at Tide as their first in-house SEO manager.
THE NOT-SO-GREAT OF START-UP SEO
When I joined Tide, a FinTech start-up in London, in January 2019, there had been little SEO work done.
In a way, it was refreshing. I was lucky enough to be the first to set the stage for the business’s long-term SEO success. I still come in everyday excited by this. But like any start-up, you still deal with challenges and limitations, and SEO is no different.
The usual start-up constraints
While this is not the case any more at Tide, the term “start-up” can conjure images of people crammed together at a lunch table or CEOs sitting next to receptionists. Money and resources are tight, and you do your best with what you have got.
When it came to budget, I dealt with two challenges in the early days: a tighter budget than most non start-ups, and a near-obsessive focus on measurable, performance-driven activities to squeeze what I could from the money I had.
A blank slate
Yes, starting from next to no SEO was exciting, but it also had its challenges.
My early investigation showed Tide ranking for very few keywords because there was little content to rank. What ranked was mainly for long-tail keywords, and a lot of organic traffic came from our community pages.
In one way, that was positive: it was user-generated content, and the language from our users was more natural than internal jargon. However, the traffic from this content wasn’t ideal, as visitors landing through it often had a different intent than seriously considering our product.
The fierce competition
When you target small businesses in search engines, you have to be under no illusion about how competitive the battle for ranking is. For Tide, we were dealing with three kinds of competitors:
- Established players in the finance field, like traditional banks
- Other FinTech start-ups who offered similar products to ours
- Anyone who focused on small business, like accountants
We couldn’t disregard the third kind of competition, even though most were in different fields. From an SEO perspective, they were fighting for attention as we were, which made the situation that little more complex.
RAPID-FIRE RELATIONSHIP-BUILDING
There was another big obstacle to growing SEO in a greenfield environment: lack of awareness.
While the senior leadership understood SEO's importance, there wasn't as much consideration across the teams in the day-to-day. Many thought SEO could be done as a separate activity and without collaboration.
Educate others
When people think SEO happens by itself, they feel they don't have to be involved. So, from almost Day One, I was running with this message: “we've got to work together on SEO, and this is why”. I held workshops, got active in strategy meetings and played a part in planning, where C-levels attended. These all made an impact in improving SEO’s visibility at Tide.
Network fast and furiously
To build a culture of SEO awareness, you have to network... but networking is different in a start-up. At larger companies, I struggled to get to the people I had to work with or convince them it was in their interest to invest in SEO. A start-up is smaller, so you end up knowing almost everyone. Here are a few things I did when building those relationships.
- Don't leave it too long before you connect with others. I had coffee catch-ups in the first week, while people were still interested in this newcomer.
- Try not to make the discussion about you. Avoid “Hi, I'm the new person, I'm going to do that, here’s why I need your help” and so on.
- Instead, flip it around. Take time to learn about them, what their plans are and how you might help them.
- If you can network outside 1-on-1s, do it. At Tide, we have a lot of internal events, talks from different teams, team lunches and social gatherings.
Collaborate and cooperate
When projects appear on the radar where I need support from others, like a designer or developer, I am quick to put together a website working group. We have regular (but quick) meetings, put together our to-do-lists, and then work out priorities and resources from each department. This avoids those frustrating last-minute approaches not just for me, but fellow team members. It also means nothing gets missed, such as SEO considerations during planning for new feature launches and the campaigns that promote them.
This is not limited to working with individuals, but whole teams. For example, I work with the social media team when they have a big campaign on the horizon. I sit down with them and discuss the project to determine where I can help. This kind of collaboration yields much more from any initiative than if each team worked in isolation.
THE #1 LESSON LEARNED
When I started with Tide, I focused on SEO best practices over the first weeks. For me, this comprised three main areas: technical aspects of the website, content, and off-page partnerships.
But if I was to start again, I would lead with a product-first approach. SEO best practices are obviously important, but I would first take the time to understand our product teams and their roadmaps inside out before jumping into analysing the state of SEO or making any plans. This might seem obvious, but you would be surprised how often SEO professionals get over-excited at working on a new domain and launch straight into tech audits, when it would be more helpful to take a step back first.
I covered the customer side almost immediately, mainly by looking through the community pages and the questions they asked. I also worked with our support team to discover what they were getting contacted most often for. I wanted to understand our customers to better anticipate what they searched for. For example, we target a range of keyword categories along the conversion funnel.
KNOW WHAT CUSTOMERS WANT AND GIVE IT TO THEM
When we accurately predict what customers want, it doesn’t just give us an SEO advantage. It sometimes results in new products Tide attracts new customers with.
For instance, we recently launched a product where you can both register your company and get a business current account for free through one easy sign-up journey. This understanding of a common customer problem registering their business helped us develop a solution to two big hurdles new businesses encounter.
I could see the search traffic around “how do you create a company” or “how do you register a company” and made content plans to address these. But by having a close relationship with the product team, I shared that understanding and worked with them to create this new offering.
1. Upper-funnel keywords
that may not be as competitive. I think about other topics people starting a business or looking into it might search for and create content that covers this, and whatever else I can find along the customer journey.
2. Lower-funnel keywords
where someone is ready to convert. They want to open an account for their business, so they search for “free business account”, “business bank account” or other money-related terms.
Tide’s mission is to make finance administration easier for small businesses and be their Number One financial resource. Ideally, people would find us while they are still considering a business or self-employment (i.e. long before they need an account). That is why the second type of keywords is important: it puts Tide in front of searchers early on and starts to build a relationship. It also helps us come up with new ideas that the product team might use.
UNLOCKING POTENTIAL
Life is still as fast and furious as the day I joined Tide. We have grown from around 80 people when I started to a company of over 350. When you are the SEO manager of a start-up, you deal with what gets thrown at you the best you can. These strategies helped me not just survive at Tide, but show the business the incredible potential well-harnessed SEO can deliver.