Discover how to thrive in an AI era with Travis Tallent's SOAR framework. Learn to Streamline processes, Orchestrate teams, Automate tasks, and Reposition your focus for career success. Perfect for SEO pros looking to level up their skills and lead high-performing teams.

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Hey there, guys, gals, non-binary pals. Happy Friday, I'm so excited to be here for my first whiteboard Friday. And today I'm going to be talking about how you can grow your SEO team and your career in an AI world. 

Let's start by rewinding to the 80s. I'm not talking about video cassettes, RIP Blockbuster, or hairbands, smashing out on guitars or even crazy mullets. I'm talking about the internet.

The internet launch in 1983, and this technology held loads of promises. And even 12 years after its launch, there were many, many critics, including from Clifford Stoll, an astronomer who ultimately said, "All of this telecommuting stuff, e-commerce, that is ultimately going to be baloney when it comes to the internet."

Today, I see a lot of similarities between the internet and AI. AI holds loads of promises, it has tons of critics, and at the end of the day, it's our job to ultimately sort through what this ultimately looks like in our workplace and in our careers. 

We have a change model. Satir's change model can ultimately help us when it comes to understanding how a big transformative shock like this ultimately gets integrated into society. Starts with the status quo, and then a shock, like the introduction of the internet, ChatGPT, we enter into chaos, resolve, integration, and a new normal.

In the case of the internet, this whole change model took over two decades from when the internet first launched, 12 years after there were still critics, and then of course, in the early 2000s when Google became the leading search engine.

Today, when it comes to AI, I think we can all agree we are squarely in the chaos phase. What I want to chat through today is a framework that I've created as the VP of SEO at Brainlabs that has ultimately led to 110% increase in SEO revenue and a growth of our team to over 90 SEO insight experience folks globally. Let's go ahead and dive in. 

Let's start with the “s,” streamlining the basics. When we talk about streamlining the basics, it's ultimately ensuring that everything you do on a recurring cadence is easy. I think of reporting and I think of communication. And to really simplify those things, making sure that you've aligned your SEO KPIs with your business KPIs is a really great way to get other stakeholder buy-in. So forget talking about things like keyword rankings or site engagement and swap that out for something like share voice and lifetime value. That's what other stakeholders, business stakeholders are ultimately going to care about, and that's ultimately what is going to change you from an SEO leader to a business leader within your org.

Next, we want to streamline communication cadences, something like quarterly road mapping, monthly reporting, and then ultimately having weekly status syncs where you cycle through your strategy team, your content team, maybe your digital PR team, and your technical team. And this ultimately allows you to ensure that you have touchpoints with all of these stakeholders. When you agree to this type of communication cadence, it really streamlines what they can expect from you and what you can expect from them in terms of ongoing communication.

So after you've done all of that, you're ready to orchestrate your team so then you can move stuff along in an easier way. This starts with building out an SEO strategy flywheel. This looks like something like quarterly road mapping. You can start with an audit or an opportunity analysis. Then in your discovery meeting, make sure that all of these stakeholders that you had are in this discovery meeting, so then you can learn about what resources they have for that upcoming quarter, what priorities do they have for that upcoming quarter. And you can build your SEO roadmap around their priorities, and that is ultimately how you can be successful in ensuring that your SEO work doesn't die on the vine, and you can ultimately get it implemented and then move on to measurement to identify what's working and what's not.

Now, once we get to implementation, you can make it even easier by developing a playbook. This playbook can outline things like ways of working, top priorities, top keywords, and ultimately understanding how the teams and your organization work together to ultimately achieve SEO success for business success. 

Now, let's move on to automating monotony. I think for most people, we think of automation as super technical or, you know, having AI kind of come in and do the work for us. The reality is all automation is rooted in humans. It's a human thinking of a question or a problem to solve, strategizing how to solve that problem, creating steps to solve that problem. And then once you devise those steps, that is when you can ultimately bring it to an engineer or a developer. They can build it, you can re-strategize with 'em, then you can ultimately scale.

But the missing piece that AI will not be able to do is care more. And Dharmesh, HubSpot's founder, ultimately says, "Caring more matters more than knowing more in an AI world," because AI is going to know more than you. That's the reality. So when we think about this model, you can ultimately know that caring more is what is ultimately going to make this whole framework work a lot better and that human loop is ultimately what feeds innovation.

So now that you've done SOA, you are ready to ultimately reposition your focus onto bigger and better things that are going to have a bigger impact on the business. 

So let's reposition our focus and understand that data. Things like A/B testing tools, SEO A/B testing tools, impact trackers, any of this type of reporting is available. Data outputs can certainly improve the AI models, but they always require historical context and historical patterns. That's how they're ultimately able to be trained.

For you to ultimately uncover that next big idea or that next new process, you have to come at it in a novel way, and that is where chemistry comes in. And you are ultimately able to reposition your focus successfully because you've built chemistry with all of these stakeholders up here, and you've built playbooks that can help streamline everything, and you are ultimately, you've successfully built tech that allows you to scale in a successful way. And doing all of those things is ultimately how you can grow your team and your career in an AI world.

I'm Travis Tallent, VP of SEO at Brainlabs. Thanks for having me. Please reach out on LinkedIn, Threads, or Twitter. Chat with you soon.