Nitin
===
[00:00:00] Hi everyone. Welcome to SEO Podcast by #SEOSLY. I'm Olga Zarr, your host, and today I have a very special guest with me. This is Nitin Nitin. How are you doing?
[00:00:15] Hey Olga. I'm doing pretty good. Thank you for having me. Yeah. That's awesome. That's awesome. I've been meaning to invite you for a long time and it's great that you are finally here. So for people who don't know you, can you like briefly introduce yourself? What are you up to? Where are you based?
[00:00:32] Like mm-hmm. What do you do in seo? Definitely, yeah. So I'm Nathan. I live in Berlin, Germany, and, uh, I'm running my own agency, which is called Bot Preso. And, uh, yeah, it's a complete remote team. We love tech, s e o. We love breaking things. We love building things. We love basically growth, so, And about my background.
[00:00:52] So I started my professional journey back in 2012 as a software engineer. So I'm an engineer who turned seo. Yeah, that's, that's me. Okay. Okay. Cool. Cool. So, so since we started talking about your past, I want you to take me like way back to the beginnings. Mm-hmm. And tell me more about how it all started.
[00:01:11] So, 2012, right. Yes, that's right. So this is more, more around when I, when I started as well. Okay. So 2012, what happened then? Yeah, so exactly. Yeah, so I, I, I'm a masters in computer applications, so when I completed my masters in 2012, I joined this company called Flip Card. And uh, so my role that that time was software engineering.
[00:01:34] Uh, I don't know, like it was software development engineer. Right. So I joined then and, and they assigned me this team called SEO Technology Team. I had no idea what SEO was that time. I just need a full form of, of that to be honest. And there also I googled to confirm whether it's search engine optimization or something else.
[00:01:49] So this is how it started. And uh, when I started working on it, I think that time I was feeling bad about it, that we did not have any SEO MA marketing manager. So I was like, From whom will I learn from? Where would I know, you know what to work on? But my manager, uh, the engineering manager, he was really nice and he gave me, you know, wings to fly.
[00:02:10] He was like, Hey, you know, just go and research what needs to be done and then you can run your own experiments and prove the value of it. So I kept on doing that. And I think I, I, uh, immediately started liking it because it's like, you know, you're walking in a dark tunnel, you don't know from where the light would come.
[00:02:25] Right. You're just checking every single Yeah. Uh, you know, rock out there. So I, I started doing that, and some of those experiments worked and they motivated me to do more of it. And then I started doing more and more of it. In fact, in those initial days, I had some crazy experiments planned as well. So at that time, in 2012, even if you're doing something small, but.
[00:02:47] Meaningful. Right? It used to show you the result immediately. So I wanted to run some ex uh, you know, crazy. Uh, Experiments on our product pages, and Flipcard was a decently known brand by then. So I spoke with the manager, he was like, Hey, you know, I'm a bit skeptical about that because you're talking about product pages, which bring a lot of business for us.
[00:03:04] I was like, but I'm confident about it. You know, how can I, you know, just go for it. And he was like, maybe you can think about, you know, how you can do this on a smaller set of pages, right? So I think that's how, in 2012 itself, when I did not even have one years of one year of experience. Right. I was.
[00:03:19] Fresher in SEO space. I also started, uh, you know, to learn AB testing in seo. So I ran, ran some experiments there and, uh, yeah, I think the results were amazing. And then he was like, okay, now I trust you. You can go ahead with whatever test you want, but make sure you're taking, you know, calculated risks and not bringing the whole website down.
[00:03:39] Mm-hmm. So yeah, that's, that's, that's where it started. And the good part was, Because I was thinking what to implement, and I had the power to implement that as well because I was a software engineer. So whatever I was thinking, I could code that. And even if, you know, I'm thinking about some AB tests, right?
[00:03:53] I could write some ugly code to prove the value of it, and once it gets approved, I could just, you know, clean it up again and go for the major launch. So yeah, I think that that journey was fantastic. Flip cut taught me a lot. Yeah, that, that sounds like a perfect start for an SEO and perfect background because it gives you like this power that a lot of SEOs are lacking.
[00:04:15] So, for example mm-hmm. I, I used to learn to code a bit, but I am not that as proficient as a coder is, and it keeps kind of, haunting me that, I should learn this. I'm still like planning on taking this Python course, this course. Mm-hmm. But there's always so much, so much work to do that.
[00:04:32] That, that it keeps being put off for later. But that sounds like, like as, as I said, like a perfect start. But, uh, regarding those experiments, because I believe that, doing tests, doing experiments is like the most important part of being an s e o and the one that lets you learn the most, so, Can you like, tell me more about those, the craziest ones.
[00:04:56] Like what exactly did you do, what did you test, what the results were? I'm super, super interested to learn. Yeah, definitely. So I can talk about probably two, three experiments, which are very close to my heart and they are still on the website and one. Uh, one of them is like something which I feel embarrassed about now when I look at it, right?
[00:05:14] So if you go to Flipkart's homepage, well, they have probably 700 links on the homepage, right? I, I feel bad about it now, like 700 links, that's a lot, right? But at that time, what I did, I launched some pages, some brand pages, right? And I was like, you know where to put them. So one thing I did was I put them in bra in, in a breadcrumbs.
[00:05:31] Right, so that they get a lot of internal links. Mm-hmm. Which was a pretty great success, right? We started ranking number two, number number three, and I was like, okay, well, from nowhere to number two, number three, which is great, right? But how can, uh, how can I go from here to number one? Because I'm always, you know, looking for, The perfection.
[00:05:50] So I was like, how can I go to number one? So I was of course reading a lot of articles, a lot of case studies, and there was like, Hey, you know, if you put something on the homepage, which is basically the most important page of the website, you basically get a lot of. Value from internal linking perspective.
[00:06:04] I was like, okay, but how can I put 20 pages on the homepage? Right? So I just created a kind of footer, uh, section where I put like, you know, top stores, top brands and so on, and I put all, I dump all of all these links there and trust me, within one day we started ranking number one for almost all those keywords.
[00:06:22] It was like magical, right? Right. So this was, this was crazy. I was really happy about Right. And then. Another one, which I'm, I think that is an experiment, which basically kind of pushed me, kind of convinced me that SEO is the field for me. So here I'm talking about a problem which happened because of our category team.
[00:06:41] The way they basically created different categories, right? So we had Puma shoes on the website, but we have two different landing pages for that. So one was under. Men's shoes, men's footwear category. Another one was under women's footwear. So basically if you are searching for Puma shoes, we have two pages for them, right?
[00:07:00] And now the question was how do we basically treat this from an s u perspective? So, If we keep, if we, uh, put one page, uh, you know, under no index and for example, open the other one, then what happens to someone who's searching? For example, if I'm searching for Puma shoes landing on a woman's Puma shoes, right?
[00:07:17] And my intention was to buy Puma shoes for myself, right? Uhhuh, I would probably just bounce off. And similarly, if you are searching for something and you're landing on men's Puma shoes, you would say, Hey, no, this is not what I was looking for. So probably flip cut only has men's Puma shoes. You would not probably come back on the website again.
[00:07:32] So now this was the problem statement I had. And uh, so I spoke with category team. They said, it's a big change. It'll take, you know, we will have to shake off everything, right? The whole flip cut to get this fixed. So I was like, no, I don't have like forever just to fix this. So what I realized was, If you go to flip card and search for few puma shoes there, I was getting a combined page, the result pa uh, the search result page.
[00:07:53] That was a combination of both the genders and you could see everything there. And here, men and women were coming as filter, which was not the case when I was checking the category page. I was like that. That's interesting. So now I was, uh, like, uh, like those early days, right? I was even working on weekends.
[00:08:10] So I was like, okay, this weekend I got a project, right? So I started working on that on Saturday morning. I was thinking about it, thinking about how to solve that. What I did was I took the result of that search. Page. Mm-hmm. I, I wrote a wrapper on top of that, which was basically overriding the value. For example, on the result page, first of all, it was no index page, so I changed that to index page for my special, uh, pages, let's call them filter pages.
[00:08:35] And, uh, well in flip card, whenever we, we were working on any projects, we were naming it first, a fancy name, and then we were working on that. But in this case, we did not give it any name, right? Because it was a hobby or weekend project for me. So I started working on them, and now what I did was I. Change the URL sl, so it became slash Q because I was calling them query pages, right?
[00:08:56] So it was slash q and then let's say Puma hyphen shoes. Simple. Mm-hmm. Nothing. No confusion. Then I was overriding everything that we had on the surf page, and it was showing, showing results for in double codes, Puma shoes, and you have so many results, right? I was like, I don't need this. Right? I changed that completely and made it pure my shoes.
[00:09:17] And also that was a normal text before I made it, each one. Right. And I basically basic, uh, you know, made some changes like that. No content right now on the web, on the pages, just the products. I did this, I launched those pages and in six hours, right? They started ranking in top five, all of them. So I launched I think 15 or 20 of them.
[00:09:35] Right. And when I launched them, right. Uh, so I think, uh, when I, then I went to my manager, I told him that, Hey, look, this is what I did. And six, uh, we are ranking in top five for all of those queries. And I'm talking about queries, which have looked massive, search volume. So, You can imagine, right? Shoes. Yeah.
[00:09:51] Reebok shoes, editor shoes. They had massive search volume and we started ranking in top five for all of them. So I was like, I also want to name these pages now. He was like, dude, you brought magic. These are magic pages. So I think we started calling them Magic Pages, and I'm so happy that those pages are still there.
[00:10:07] And every now and then I go and check, you know, how those space are performing in Ush because I don't have a Google search console, an access for the property anymore. But yeah, it gives me so much, uh, you know, happiness, seeing that those spaces are still bringing thousands and thousands of sessions every single month.
[00:10:24] Nice, nice. And talking about footer links. I wouldn't say this, this was like so crazy. Like, look at, for example, C Nnn, they mm-hmm. What, what they have in footer. Like they link basically to everything in footer. And, and from what I know they're doing very well in terms of seo, but that's, that sounds like very, very cool, very interesting results.
[00:10:47] And, uh, Something about AB tests you, you did back then. Can you share something like how did you do them? Did you do them like with Google Ads, for example, or mm-hmm. Or like, tell me about it. No, it was not Google Ads. Purely SEO. And what I did, so I was, uh, you know, like engineer myself. So what I wanted to do was, let's say I'm running something on product pages, right?
[00:11:09] Mm-hmm. So I was like, how do I create, uh, you know, different categories? And of course, I mean, I was not thinking about creating, uh, you know, like kind of. Equal categories or e equal buckets here. Right. So that is something which of course, if I do it now, I would do that. But at that time I did not think about that.
[00:11:25] I was like, okay, even if I'm, you know, running this test on a smaller bucket, right? And able to see there is some growth and in the other bucket there is no growth, I, okay. I would be able to conclude that. So what I did was, so in product, we had a product id mm-hmm. In the code. What I did was I took that Id right, I, I checked for all the even numbers.
[00:11:44] So all the IDs which were ending at even number 0 2 4 6 8, right? They were bucket A and the odd ones were bucket B, right? So I published something only for bucket A. So I was just checking in the code that, hey, you know, if product ID modulate to equal three equals was zero, which means it's a even page, which is my test category, right?
[00:12:05] Then I add this particular section on the page. And for the other category, I do not add that. And when I did that, I could clearly see that, you know, my bucket A was. Moving, you know, like a normal pace. But Bucket D was shooting up. I was like, perfect. Nice, nice. Okay. And how long were you at, at this first position?
[00:12:25] How many years? Yeah, so, uh, Flipkart, when I joined, uh, the company, I joined as an intern. So I worked there for six months and then I joined full-time and I've worked there for, Roughly two years Uhhuh and what happened? So it, it was like a very, uh, fun story because I love Flipcard. I love all the flip stores I worked, uh, you know, during this time I got to know a lot of amazing people as well.
[00:12:49] However, when I joined Flipcard, it was just 15 engineers, and in two years time the company grew to 500 engineers. So I was like, okay, that the company is massive now. Right? And I wanted something. Which is like, you know, uh, more challenging coming to me every single day. And that is something, you know, that's the reason why I thought of, okay, I need to move to another startup.
[00:13:09] So yeah, after Flipkart, I joined another startup, it's called Lime Road. It's an e-commerce space as well. And, uh, I joined, uh, the company work there. And here my role was different. In Flipcard, it was software engineer, but I was part of SEO team. But in Lime Road, I joined on a dual role, which was, S U head and senior software engineer.
[00:13:29] Oh. So I was the one who was thinking about s u and I was the one who was also building s u as a service. So that was a fantastic experience and I think it was, it was brilliant because I had all the power and I was thinking about microservices and everything around that. Okay, so maybe you can share some wisdom on e-commerce s e o because it looks like you, you have a lot of experience.
[00:13:51] Any like special tips, best practices, mistakes to avoid? Yeah. Well, yes, I think, uh, flip card was also an e-commerce and then Line Road, right. And then the next company I, I joined asked me, so there also, I was working on an e-commerce product. I think one thing which is very common in uh, when you talk about e-commerce is.
[00:14:13] Indexation, right? So in, in Indexation you can go really wrong when, when it comes to over indexation of pages and also with under indexation. So you need to find the right, uh, mix there. For example, when I joined uh, lime Road, we uh, we did our keyword search, right? We got to know there are, there, there are massive searches for, for example, short black dresses.
[00:14:36] So we had a page for dresses, but we did not had any, uh, had any page for short black dresses. However, we had filters there. So if you, uh, go to short, uh, assist page, you say, Hey, I'm looking for short dresses, not long buns, right? And I'm looking for black color. So I had that page that, you know, page with two filters, right?
[00:14:55] Which was, uh, where I had a lot of dresses as well, a lot of products. So from supply side, we were good. Demand side, I could see that there are massive searches for that. But if I did not have any page for that, and, uh, when I, uh, went on se search for that, right, I could see like there were brands who, which were ranking for short black dresses, but the product, product, like the websites, the products that they had, they were not amazing.
[00:15:19] So I was like, this is clear opportunity. And this is just one example. So I found like hundreds of such examples. I was like, okay, we, I, we need to solve that. And I knew how to solve that because I solved this Puma Shoes example at Flipkart. Yeah, right here. I knew you know how to solve that. So what I did, so there I saw it differently, but it was the, a similar problem statement, right?
[00:15:38] So here what I did was I created a new page type filter pages where you could define multiple filters, which would be used along with the category, and you could launch a page. So I did that. Mm-hmm. Right. And launched some pages. And again, same magic happened. These pages, I think it took a bit more time here because of authority.
[00:15:58] Flip cards, authorities way more than that offline roads, right. So it took us, I think like somewhere around 45 days and we started ranking in top three for all those keywords where. Topics, right, not keywords. Right. Because they were like a lot of other related keywords as well, which were, which started ranking right.
[00:16:15] So yeah, we started ranking in top three for all of them and we started generating a lot of traffic. So that was, you know, another like testimony on what I was learning at, uh, flip card before. Yeah. Cool, cool. Like for, for me, when it comes to e-commerce, usually what works the best is simply making sure all the title tags, H one s, are set to like the keywords that we want to rank.
[00:16:40] And if this is a huge site, very often it, it imme immediately brings, brings nice results. Of course, it depends, but. Yeah, this is kind of my overall, uh, um, insight. Uh, okay. I completely agree on that. I think we often, uh, kind of overlook at all these, you know, tiny hygiene elements, right? But they are really powerful.
[00:17:01] They tell search engine. So even when I worked with my clients, right, the number one thing we talk about is hygiene, where we make sure that we are. Fixing the experience for search engine bot. So when they come on the uh, website, they're like, okay, I know what this page is about. I have absolutely no confusion.
[00:17:19] Right? So fixing that. So once you fix that, I think you can build a lot of other things on top of that and, uh, bring the maximum impact. Yeah. Yeah, totally, totally. So the next, uh, company was, uh, e-commerce as well. Tell me. Yeah, yeah. What was the next one? So next one was Ask me, and that that was hyper-local, uh, website basically.
[00:17:40] So if you're standing here searching for. Pisa outlets near me, right? So it'll basically tell you, you know, where are the PISA outlets, where you can go, and ratings and everything around that. But, uh, here I worked, uh, for a couple of years again, and I, I joined this company and worked and brought some great result on ame.com, and then, you know, I was promoted to group head of seo.
[00:18:03] Mm-hmm. Where in this we had a hyper local grocery website as well. We also had an e-commerce, so I was taking care of Hyperlocal Grocery and Hyperlocal brand, which was ame, right. And then I was also working on the e-commerce part. It was so much fun because here again, I was first taking care of SEO for three different brands where, you know, target to post different and everything was very different.
[00:18:26] And I was also responsible for building microservices. So a common, you know, microservices, which basically cater to three different businesses. So instead of, you know, writing services, which worked for one business now, it, it was like a hub of microservices, uhhuh to help multiple businesses. So it was so much fun and it was very challenging at the same time because we were building something, you know, which can scale easily while working on multiple products.
[00:18:53] It was challenging. But yeah, I really enjoyed working on it. And like, can you tell me, Mike, more, more details about those microservices? Like, like how did it exactly work? Like what exactly the, the results were definitely, so microservices were, uh, basically, uh, written to make everything super simple and in control.
[00:19:13] So for example, let's say we have three businesses, a, B, and C. Now business A, when they're rendering a page, a category page, they are calling my service and saying, Hey, this is the business name. This is the page we are talking about. Give me all the on-page data. And my service was saying, okay, no problem.
[00:19:30] I have all the data with me. And it was basically collecting all the data and saying, Hey, hey, you go, you know, this should be the meta title for this. This should be the meta description. This should be the H one. And on this page we also have content. And the content is structured like this. Like you have H two and paragraph H three, paragraph and so on.
[00:19:48] So the service was handling everything SEO related, uh, everything on page SEO related. And the good part was because I had total control, right? So I was running my own audit and whatever I needed, I was just putting in my database and yeah, just refreshing the cash and the content was online. As in published on the websites.
[00:20:07] Mm-hmm. So it was super easy. I had all the power. I did not have to go to developers requesting that, Hey, can you give me that this nothing, because everything was in place. Whatever I make changes, uh, whatever I change at my end. Right. It was reflecting on the website itself directly. Yeah. It's a, it's an ideal situation for an SEO where, when, where he has the power to actually implement things.
[00:20:33] Oh, yes, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And the next stop on your journey was, so yeah. After this, um, you know, spending like a few years in India working with startups now I wanted to learn international s e o and I wanted to run my experiments on a large scale. So then I thought, okay, inter there are not like a lot of companies who are doing international SEO in India.
[00:20:57] Right. Not, not a lot of international brands. So I was like, okay, I'll have to think about moving out of India. So then I got this opportunity to join Trivago in Doff Germany, and I moved to Germany. So that was my, that's how, that's how you know my SU courier overseas began. And when, when was it? That was 2016 December Uhhuh.
[00:21:18] Okay. Okay. Yeah. And tell me more about that international SEO experience. Yes, so I joined, uh, Travago as product owner for seo. And it was different experience because working with startups, you know, when you are thinking and implementing yourself and you don't have to discuss with anything, you can do whatever you want to accompany, which is massive, where whatever you want to do, you know, requires a lot of, you know, like.
[00:21:45] Sign off from a lot of different teams, stakeholders and so on. Yeah, it was a different experience. For example, when I joined, I remember it was my, one of the first weeks, right? And I was working on something like some content change in the photo of the homepage. So it was a very tiny one. So we changed the content.
[00:22:00] I was like, Hey, you know, it's done, so let's go live with this. And the guy told me, Hey, have you discussed with the senior product manager, uh, on, you know, how we are going live with this? I was like, yeah, but it's tiny one. So I went to him. I was like, Hey, we are trying to go live with this. Do you see any concerns?
[00:22:14] He was like, yeah, fine. I mean, I don't have any concerns, but what percentage are we going live with? I was like, a hundred percent. It's a tiny change. He was like, no. Well in here, we, whatever we, uh, go live with, we never go live with a hundred percent. We basically go live with some percentage to see, you know, how users are perceiving, perceiving that, and then only we think about expanding that and go to a hundred percent.
[00:22:35] Gradually. I was like, okay, then what is the nu uh, then he asked me like, okay, then what do you think? What shall we do? I was like, okay, we can go for 50%. He was like, no, 50% is too aggressive. You gimme 0.7%. He said, oh. So, uh, he was like, well, I think 0.5, 0.7, if you want to play aggressive, let's go 0.7. I was like, aggressive 0.7.
[00:22:57] Really. Oh. But yeah, I mean, that, that was the culture we had because we wanted to make sure that nothing is basically, you know, perceived, uh, in a, in a negative sense by users. So we went live with 0.7% and we, of course, uh, did not see any impact as expected. So from there we increased to, I think like 10, 11% and then to 25%.
[00:23:18] And after 25%, he was like, yeah, it's, it's totally fine. If you want, we can go a hundred percent, but if you want to go one step ahead and 50% and then a hundred, that's also fine. I was like, no, from here, let's go with a hundred percent, and with the next test, I'll probably be more, you know, like. Uh, I, I'll think about more granular implo improvements in terms of expansion, but yeah, for this one, let's go hundred percent.
[00:23:39] So yeah, this was my welcome in Travago where I learned enterprise s u and how we should think about something which is impacting millions of users every single hour. Mm-hmm. And the journey was fantastic because I learned, you know, I was taking care of 55 markets there, 69 domains, and it was so much fun working with content team where we had people.
[00:24:01] Native speakers of different languages. And I was working with product managers. I was working with, yeah, technical SEOs. I wa I was working with analysts, I was working with qa and I was working with design team as well. So I was basically working with everyone, like all the different departments, which would involve in an enterprise seo, you know, journey.
[00:24:21] So it was so much fun and very, very challenging at the same time. But I really enjoyed it. And I think another thing which I learned when I joined Trivago that was like, I need to be patient. Because in startup world you can be, okay, well we, let's do that. Right? So we talk about something in the morning, we say, Hey, can we go live with this?
[00:24:38] By the end of the today, that doesn't happen in enterprise seo. There you say, Hey, we will have to work on it. When can we go live? And then we talk about, okay, well this quarter's plan is already, uh, you know, we, we can't do anything. It's already, you know, uh, froze. So maybe we can talk about it in the next quarter and we can work on discovery.
[00:24:58] And then the qua the quarter next to that, we can think about implementation. I was like, what? Really? Like I'm talking about something today, which is an opportunity today, and we are talking about after three quarters. But yeah. Yeah. This is how it works in enterprises. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, you need to have patience.
[00:25:14] You need to think about user impact. You need to think about seasonality when you can think about going live with something, which can be massive in terms of impact, right? So, yeah. Yeah, I can totally relate to that because for a couple of years I worked with, uh, different Procter and Gamble brands and basically this was this, this was the same, like I had an idea, but from my idea to implementation, like it was a year or something and sometimes it.
[00:25:43] It just, it, it, it wasn't even implemented or like 5% of what I really wanted to do was implemented. So I to I totally understand this. Okay. So the after enterprise s e o was, yeah. So here, uh, at Atva itself, so after one year they evaluated my performance and there was like internal round off. Kind of interviews where they were choosing for the next global head of seo.
[00:26:11] And uh, yeah. So I also participate. I did not, I was not basically going for that, but one of my teammates was like, Hey, you are doing everything that they mentioned here by you not even participating. I was like, no, that will be a lot of stress, right? But he was like, no, you should actually go for it. So I was like, yeah, I think even if it's a stress, I think it, it can be game changer for my career.
[00:26:30] So I went for it. There were six candidates in total. And, uh, yeah, I was happy that, you know, it's happening because, you know, with this we'll have more power in SEO team. I was not even thinking whether I would be able to, you know, get that role. But somehow they liked my pitch, they liked my performance in the last year.
[00:26:47] And when they asked me a lot of questions about, you know, what do you think about? Learning for the team. What do you think about, you know, how we solve whatever issues we have at the moment? How do, how would you think about the projects? How would you think about growth? I think whatever answers I gave that time, they liked it and they were like, okay, you are the one.
[00:27:04] So I, I, I basically celebrated that moment. And yeah, I started working on, uh, you know, like the whole SEO initiatives as global head of SEO for tobacco. And now I was responsible completely for 55 markets, six, nine novans, and the whole, you know, like. Cross-functional team that we had. So it was, it was great and very challenging.
[00:27:28] And I think that time I realized, you know what the pressure is, right? Because I was responsible for everything. So a lot of reporting, a lot of, you know, communication, a lot of stakeholder management. So a lot of good, good stuff. So it was fun. And yeah, so now, uh, the, the one thing which was, you know, always kind of pinching me, that was.
[00:27:49] Tobacco was induced off, which is a small city here in Germany. Mm-hmm. Right. So I wanted to talk to people, I wanted to discuss, you know, like what I'm working on, what they're working on. But they were, it was a small city, so we did not have any SEO community there, unfortunately. Hmm. So, but I heard, like in Bur, uh, in Berlin we have like a lot of SEO communities regular, uh, meetups and stuff.
[00:28:09] I was like, okay, well I need to think about moving to Berlin. So that's exactly what happened. I got like a few offers and, uh, so I got, I think, I started looking out and within one and a half weeks I had five offer letters. Three of them were from Berlin. I was like, okay, there is something special about Berlin, right?
[00:28:26] So I chose one of them, which was Romeo. That time it was known ASCO Euro. It was also my favorite, uh, travel product. I was starting my all travel planning there, so I was like, okay, my favorite product and team also looks very fun to work with and they are, they have a lot of challenges. So why not, you know, just say to that, say yes to that.
[00:28:46] So, yes. Then I moved to Berlin, joined this company as, uh, their global head of seo. This time the number of markets, uh, you know, dropped down to 28. But yeah, it was still so much fun because we were solving a lot of crazy problems and it was comparatively startup. We had only 300, uh, people that time and in Trivago we had 1,100, right?
[00:29:06] Uhhuh. So yeah, moved here and I started working here. It was so much fun. Worked a lot on automation and, uh, Yeah, like programmatic seo, content production at scale and all those technical SEO projects. The good part was tech team was pretty, pretty solid here. So, uh, when I joined, uh, I think at that time we had some friction, but after that, I remember six months later I was sitting with engineering manager and during the lunch hours and uh, we were discussing how we can solve internal linking and trust me, like that lunch hour discussion brought the idea of graph theory.
[00:29:41] Uh, based internal legal solution, which was a super hit and which is still one of the projects I'm really proud of. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, I think that that journey was brilliant and discussions with engineering, how to solve something and we think out of the box. I learned that there. Yeah. Cool. And any, any interesting, uh, interesting results from programmatic s e o?
[00:30:03] Any, any examples? Oh yes, definitely. So, yeah. Yeah, definitely. So, internal linking, which I was mentioning. So we use graph theory to solve the problem of internal linking. Mm-hmm. Because here we were talking about the whole world, right? Yeah. Your interval space. So you have, for example, you're looking for trains from Berlin to Paris.
[00:30:22] You're looking for flights from Berlin to Barcelona. Right. There are different, uh, mediums. Yeah. And we are talking about the whole world, right? So how do we basically fix the problem of internal linking? So we tried multiple approaches using, you know, rule-based, uh, algorithm, right? Which we built internally.
[00:30:38] But yeah, every time we had some edge cases, which are not covered. So we are like, okay, how do we think about it? So then we started thinking about craft theory because craft theory is meant to solve problem, like problems like this, but we. Never heard about using craft theory for solving internal linking.
[00:30:54] We were like, okay, we can be the first ones. Mm-hmm. So we, we, we started working on that. We dry ran the algorithm that we were working on multiple times, and every time we managed to improve because we had. Graph theory based solution. And then we had some rules on top of that, which were influencing how this graph theory based solution works.
[00:31:13] So in the end, we managed to, uh, achieve great results. So just to give you, you know, some numbers because I know you love numbers. Yeah. Right? Yeah. So when we started working on that, so in the beginning, the very first algorithm we had that was covering only 50% of the pages we had, and remaining 50% pages were orphan pages, which were not linked from anywhere on the website.
[00:31:34] So we started adding more and more rules, right? So from 50 we, we went to 60% and then to 65, then to 70, then to 75. But 75% was the highest coverage that we managed to achieve with the rule-based engine, right? And now we were like, okay, we have to solve this. And when we implemented, uh, graph theory, our goal was if we, you're able to achieve 90%, we will call it a success.
[00:31:57] And can you guess what, uh, what we managed to achieve 99. Oh yes. Bingo. So it was, it was 98% something in the beginning, 98 point, uh, 6%. And then we made some tiny, uh, tweaks here and there. We managed to achieve 99% and the 1% pages, which we could not, uh, you know, reach through this algorithm. So, of course, because I have this, you know, like.
[00:32:22] Hunger of perfection. I was like, okay, I want to see the, those one person pages. So I looked at, uh, you know, the remaining set and those were like corporate pages and other pages, which were not connected with the entities, which we were talking about. Mm-hmm. So we saw them differently. Right. So, yeah. But in the end, we basically managed to achieve 99.9% coverage.
[00:32:43] Which is something I'm really, really proud of. Yeah. So your career looks like only successes, tons of successes, so, such, such great results. But were there any like flaps? Any Yes. Worst moments? A lot of, can you share something? Oh yes. A lot of them, I think, uh, This is the first time I think I'm talking about it, you know, on a, on a platform.
[00:33:06] So bit embarrassed as well. But yeah, I think failures is something we should all celebrate because failures teach us a lot of things. So I'll tell you about the very, uh, first, uh, you know, fuck up. When, uh, when I was intern at, uh, flip card and I was that scared, I literally was sweating in like, you know, Five degree temperature.
[00:33:24] And so I was intern, I was working on the email marketing platform there, and uh, so I had my production instance as well as staging instance. Both of them open in two different tabs. So I was, uh, you know, running some SQL queries and I wanted to delete something like a table on the staging instance, not on production.
[00:33:45] And I did not realize when I switched to production and I did, uh, delete okay. From table. Okay. And, oh my God, this was the database where we had all the user's information. Oh, right. So I just pressed enter and I was like, okay, this is cool. And then I realized, oh, it's, it's production. And yeah, by that time everything was deleted already.
[00:34:06] So I literally started sweating like, oh my God, you know, our email marketing team will literally kill me today. So, but then the good part was we had our, uh, slave instances, like staging instances, right? They were almost in sync. They were not a hundred percent synced, but let's say 95% sy. So I somehow managed to take a dump from staging and put that on production.
[00:34:28] So, but yeah, we lost 5% of our user base because of this. So that was, you know, one, uh, one massive, you know, uh, I would say like I made in the past. Yeah. And then after that I was really careful. I was always looking at, uh, you know, taps, even though I'm not using, like, okay, I need to keep an eye here. Right?
[00:34:46] Uhhuh. So that was like one big mistake. And then also second, uh, so this was engineering one, right? Not seo. Now I'll also talk about an SEO fuckup. Right? Okay. So that was during my t Trivago days. So we were working on these, uh, theme-based pages, like Barcelona Beach Hotels. And so Ont Trivago did not, did not have those pages, but there was massive opportunity, right?
[00:35:07] And we had, uh, the supply as well. So yeah, I started working on that. Assuming again, you know, I think that time I spent like three to four months at Trivago, so it was not like I was not y you know, kind of mm-hmm. Oiled, enterprise, seo, ex, uh, professional. So yeah, started working on that and I was like, okay, this is what we need to build.
[00:35:29] And I, I sat with engineering team, design team and everyone, and we estimated, okay, it would take roughly two to three months time. In two months we should be able to do everything but maximum three months. But then we were dependent on data team as well, and we assumed, especially me, I assumed that, you know, we will be able to get data.
[00:35:48] It should be rather straightforward. But that was a mistake. So when we started working on that team was working on, you know, building the, the pages and everything, and all the services we needed. I went to data team, I was like, Hey, I need this. And they were like, they were like, Hey, this is a bit complicated.
[00:36:03] Uh, let's schedule a call next week because this week is packed for us. I was like, just for one discussion. You're giving me like one me week. And they were like, yes. And later part of the next week I was like, okay, that makes it like one and a half weeks. Right? So I scheduled that call and, uh, discussed, you know, what I was looking for.
[00:36:21] And they were like, Hey look, uh, we are packed for next one month, so we can work on it, but it would take some time and we will only be able to pick it after one month. Oh. I was like, shit, I have no solution here. So, yeah, got blocked for one month and after that they picked and they said, only when we basically pick it, we will be able to give you some estimates.
[00:36:41] I was like, okay, I do not have any other option. Right. So I waited for one month and then they got back to me. They said, Hey, our project that we were working on is delaying a bit, so you'll have to wait for another, uh, two weeks. I was like, shit. So yeah, I think it was like after one and a half we spoke and they said, uh, we can do this, but it'll take one month's time because we can only all allow allot one uh, resource on this and it'll take one month's time.
[00:37:04] I was like, okay, well, again, I don't have any option. But now the frustration was they developers who were working on it, they were expecting that we will go live with these pages in two months time, and now I'm talking about two and a half months before I get the data. And after that we could work on, you know, everything backend.
[00:37:20] Mm-hmm. So yeah, there, there was a lot of back and forth basically with different teams and uh, yeah, the whole project, which was supposed to go a hundred percent as we expected in two to three months time, went live after six months with so many compromises. With so many compromises. Important to note here, right?
[00:37:38] Because when we, when we got data, they said, Well, out of these five uh, requirements, we can all only get you data for three pointers for two. It's not possible, and we will have to make a lot of changes, which is more time consuming. So this is all we can do for now. So we went live with those pages after six months and it was half cooked.
[00:37:55] So of course, like it did not perform as expected. Right? And realizing that, you know, one of your projects, one of your planned projects failed badly after spending six months on that, it really hurts. Yeah, I can imagine. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And, uh, talking about your journey, you are in, in Berlin, and what was the next step?
[00:38:18] Mm-hmm. Was it bot preso? Uh, Yes, exactly. So, uh, I always wanted to start my own brand because I love consultancy and because when you are a consultant, you don't have to go through with what I went through when I was at Trivago. Right. Talking to a lot of people Yeah. And educating them about why we need this consultancy is think more fun, where you can talk about what is needed.
[00:38:39] And there are people who will figure out how to get that right. So you focus on what matters from EO and business perspective. I used to love this from, uh, you know, day one of my consulting, because along with Trivago I was helping a friend as well. So I used to love that. You know, like how important your views are when you're consultant.
[00:38:58] So then Covid happened, right? And the whole company was basically on Forough, or, which is basically they were on reduced capacity. Mm-hmm. So I was like, this is my time. Right. I can either, you know, spend time on Netflix or I can do something, which I love. So I started building WordPress, so, and the initial result was great.
[00:39:18] And I was really happy that, you know, I took that, uh, I made that decision. Right. And since then, I'm, I'm just focusing more and more on bot preso and, yeah, so Bot Preso, when I started, I started as an independent. Consultant because I was thinking about, hey, you know, I can just, uh, sit on nice beach where my kids are playing around and I can work, you know, like four hours a day.
[00:39:38] That will be so cool. Right? And it's, it started like that, but very soon I realized there is massive demand and if I'm working just, uh, you know, by myself, then I can also become a blocker. Because if, you know, there is, um, an important release at the same time I plan something. Right? So what will happen then?
[00:39:55] Right. I cannot say no to a client who is trusting me. Right. And I cannot say no to my wife who's also trusting me Yeah. For making these plans. Right. So I needed to, uh, basically find a good, uh, balance there. And yeah, so then I decided to hire. My first full-timer, and he was, he, he, he still is, uh, with the company and he's a fantastic guy, right?
[00:40:18] So he gave me confidence that I should be thinking about hiring more people and building a team around so that we can together solve this problem. We can together solve, uh, you know, a lot of things and we can together have a lot of fun as well. I think during my time at Trivago, I also learned about, Respecting every individual.
[00:40:35] I also learned about, you know, how important the life is. Not just work, but personal life as well, and how we should think about balancing how we should think about, you know, being the best employer as well. Mm-hmm. So tobacco is great at that. So when I started Bot Preso, my goal was that I want to build something which everyone looks at, uh, you know, as the best employer or best company ever.
[00:40:59] So, yeah, I think trying to build that, it's just two years, uh, you know, since we started, not even two years when I had my first full-timer, that was November, 2021, so I think one and a half year, right? Mm-hmm. I'm trying my best to build something where everyone is motivated, happy. We are celebrating, we are, you know, like treating each other with respect, like a family member.
[00:41:21] We are discussing not just professional, but also personal things. Yeah. So loving it so much. Yeah. Cool, cool. So s e o sly was also like a pandemic project. I also like started it in 2020. Mm-hmm. But it took me two years to go like fully on my own. it was like last year in like November, 2020.
[00:41:42] To when I decided to give up all the jobs and become like an independent SEO a consultant. But in your case how many people are there now in your team? Yes. The team has grown up to 16 people now. Yes. Nice. And uh, this is a remote team, right?
[00:42:01] This is a completely remote team, yes. Okay. So where are those people based? So I am based out of, uh, Berlin, Germany. Mm-hmm. And I have a teammate who is in France, so he is the nearest to me when it comes to, you know, like physical difference, this sense. Yeah. And, uh, uh, yeah. And then I have, uh, one, uh, intern who recently joined.
[00:42:21] She's based out of Abu Dhabi. Right. And then rest of my team is in India. Okay. Okay. And can you tell me more about like exactly the types of services you offer? Like walk me through your offer. Um, Definitely. Yeah. So we love enterprise s e o. We also, uh, like the, when I'm saying we now, because the whole team is basically, we are learning from each other and challenging each other every single day.
[00:42:48] So together, I think we are pretty good at enterprise s E O. We are great at international s u as well, so we are working with some really big international brands and helping them, you know, grow their organic visibility globally, which is brilliant, right? Because I think that is something which I love as well personally.
[00:43:05] And now the team has also started loving it and it doesn't mean that we, uh, you know, do not understand startup seo. We still understand those, those, uh, challenges, right? But I think working with enterprise and showing the bigger impact where, you know, whatever you do and. For example, end of the month you say, Hey, this month you got $5 million plus from SE only.
[00:43:27] I think that is something which is a different level of happiness altogether. So yeah, this is, uh, what we do. And, uh, for me personally, travel SEO is, uh, something that I love and e-commerce as well because of my background. But yeah, we love solving problems at scale and therefore enterprise s u is something which we really love.
[00:43:46] Yeah. Cool, cool. And, uh, tell me more about this, you being like the best employer. What, what is it that you do differently? Do you have like four day week or something like that? No, no, no. We, we, we actually like, uh, like I think there, there are lot of things I'm working on, right. But of course it's a new company, so I'm not over committing.
[00:44:08] Yeah, totally. I'm not seeing that, hey, we will only work, let's say three or four days a week. Right. I'm not committing that. Right. Because I think we have a lot of work and I think the biggest challenge anyway we have is hiring. We are always like, every single month we talk about, Hey, we need to hire more people.
[00:44:21] Even I think if you go to our, uh, hiring page, right, we say there as well that we are always hiring for the. Exceptional inte. Mm-hmm. Right. That's because we are always in need of more bandwidth. There are more and more projects coming our way, and we often say no to 90% of them because we don't have bandwidth.
[00:44:37] Right. And yes, about what I'm doing to, uh, you know, make it the place where people love, they learn, they enjoy each other's company and they grow at the same time. So for that, I think tiny bit of policies, for example, uh, let's say. Uh, so yeah, in India, I think, uh, we are very connected to our parents as well, right?
[00:44:57] So I, the f one of the first policies that I announced was, if it's your mom's birthday or your dad's birthday, right? You don't have to say them, that, Hey, you know, we go for dinner after my workday is done. So that leave is on me. You can, you know, go out, spend the whole day with them, right? And that, that leave is on me.
[00:45:14] It won't be counted as your. You know, like, nice the leave that you get. So very tiny thing. But I really, uh, you know, like I'm really connected to my parents as well. I really know the meaning of parents because I'm myself, father of two beautiful daughters, right? So I understand, you know, what parents do for us and how if we do something for them, they feel great about it.
[00:45:34] So that's, that's one. And then we also started with our, uh, annual offsite. So we had our first one last year, not last year. This year, in fact. Yeah, this year in February. So when I was in India, we uh, booked a beautiful resort in, uh, a city called Lela, which is very near to Mumbai. And uh, yeah, everyone was there for two nights and we had a great time.
[00:45:57] We did not talk about work at all. We were just talking about who is what, what you do and your personal interest. We played some games there. It was so much fun. And then, Yeah. And, and this year we also hired our first hr and she's also working on, uh, like policies and she's also working on regular monthly virtual events so that we can play together, we can celebrate together, and we also have, uh, for example, uh, people from different religions, right?
[00:46:26] So for example, last week was e. And there were people in my team who were celebrating that as well. They do that. Right. And now next week. Oh, this week itself. The next week started today. Yeah. So this week we're celebrating Eat Together. I think I'm really looking forward to that because I never celebrated Eateth, right?
[00:46:44] Mm-hmm. I just celebrated probably with some friends. But yeah, this time I'm Celebr uh, looking forward to celebrating with my teammates and learning more about how do they do that. And Yes. So it's, it's basically about celebrating different festivals together. Cool. Spending time in person once a year to begin with.
[00:47:00] And probably we increase that further. And one more thing, which I think is something, uh, I think I'm, I'm doing different. I'm not sure if everyone does that, which is, so we, uh, you know, like last, uh, year in December, I also announced, let's say, not employee of the year. Because I think for me, everyone is fantastic, right?
[00:47:20] But I would say like someone who was. Bit different who basically contributed probably, and you know, through more. Channels as well. Maybe publishing, post and doing, taking more initiatives. So I announced this, uh, employee and, uh, what he would get is not like some monetary value in something, but he would get a all sponsored trip to Brighton seo.
[00:47:42] Right. Oh, because I think it's everyone's dream who's, uh, there like, you know, flying to Brighton. And meeting amazing people like yourself, right? Mm-hmm. And yeah, and this was just a moment, but we managed to meet. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly right. So yeah, I think that was basically the goal. So the guy is, uh, joining me next year in April.
[00:48:03] And this year also we'll announce, you know, like another person's name. So I think next year, bot Presser is coming with at least three people there at Bright seo. So yeah, I hope this time I'll schedule a better time with you and we will Yeah. Go for a lunch or something. Yeah, totally. Totally. That's my hope too.
[00:48:21] So, so basically your role now at Bot Presser is like, like a boss, c e o, right? Mm-hmm. Or do you also do work actual SEO work? SEO tests? Do you still do this? Yes, I definitely do that and I love doing that. Oh, and I think, I can't imagine, you know, if I'm not involved in any SSU stuff Yeah. And I'm just doing this, you know, like, uh, operational stuff, right?
[00:48:45] Just to enable others, I think I don't find fun in that. I love S u in fact, to be honest, like everything operational, which is, you know, managing a company, processing invoices, following up with people. I think I do not. I do not enjoy that. What I enjoy is uhhuh all those conversations. So I try to keep myself involved as much as I can.
[00:49:05] Right. Yeah. So I'm, I'm working on that. And we have our internal setup as well. We are on a weekly basis, we have a meeting where we discuss about the problems people are facing. So in that one hour we basically discuss about the problems and everyone basically gives their views. We also have, for example, uh, We call it SEO bytes, where that's a learning session on a weekly basis, where every week we decide on a topic and we discuss, you know, what, uh, on that particular topic.
[00:49:32] So someone from the team would say, Hey, I'll lead the call because I'm more comfortable in this topic. Oh, and then we learn from that person. We share our opinion. So every week basically we talk about one topic, and then once a month in these sessions, we also invite external speakers. Right. Mm-hmm. We are.
[00:49:48] Mm-hmm. Like if you are, for example, expert of technical seo and we think we can learn a lot from* *you, right. We request you. And yeah. I think a lot of people have joined us for that. And yeah, the, the experience so far is brilliant. For example, while we are in July already, right? So yeah. We already said, uh, goodbye to Google Analytics Universal and welcome GA four, unfortunately, right?
[00:50:09] Yeah. But we had, we had an amazing speaker who's master of GA four, and he joined us last month. So he gave a session about, you know, how we should be thinking about G four and how G four is awesome, which is, I think something that you have not heard so far that G four is awesome, right? But he told us like why G four is awesome and how we can make the best of it.
[00:50:27] So we also published an article on this because now we are convinced that G four is pretty good. So we should not be unhappy about it. We should rather be thinking about how we can adopt it and make the most of it. Yeah, totally. We, we cannot do anything about the fact that it's now here. Only, only this.
[00:50:44] So yeah, I totally agree. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, Nitin. So, uh, where can people find you? What's the best place to follow you? Yeah, if you, uh, just search for my name on Google, you would find all my profiles. I'm very estro friendly. Okay. But I, I, I preferred, uh, to be communicated on Twitter or LinkedIn so you can catch me there.
[00:51:06] I'm a very approachable and friendly person, more than happy to talk. What about Low Sky? Are you there? No, I'm not there. Yeah, I just want an invite. So probably I will set a, set a set an account there. But yeah, it will be hard to manage yet another one. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah. You can check it out and if you're convinced, if you find it useful, let me know as well.
[00:51:31] I'll also give it a try. Okay. Okay, cool. So Nain, thank you so much for, for spending time with me, for sharing your very successful, very inspiring SEO story. It was really cool. Thank you, alga. Thank you so much for having me. It was really a pleasure speaking with you and also talking about some of my fuckups for the first time ever.
[00:51:51] But yeah, those are important. I think that's something that I want to tell, uh, everyone that we should be thinking about. Fuckups, we should be talking about Yeah. Fuckups publicly more often and so that people can learn from them and they can, you know, be better at what they're doing. So, Yeah, be aware that everyone has them from time, from time to time.
[00:52:12] Totally. Yes. Okay, so thank you and thanks everyone. Bye-bye. Thank you. Goodbye.