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In the 3rd episode of Crawling Mondays Aleyda interviews Carlos Estevez, who’s the Head of SEO at Internet Republica, one of the top SEO agencies in Spain.

Carlos shares with us how they work by answering:

• The type of clients they work with
• Critical factors of success with clients
• The main challenges they see with clients
• How do they organize their SEO work
• What project management tools they use
• What SEO tools they use
• What are the main differences when doing SEO in Spain than in English speaking markets
• … and more!

Check out the video and transcription below:

You can also watch this video and leave a comment over YouTube. To follow more updates on Crawling Mondays, subscribe to the YouTube channel and follow to @CrawlingMondays in Twitter.

Video Transcription

Today is a special edition of Crawling Mondays because I am here in Madrid giving a course at internet Republica. Internet Republica is one of the best known SEO agencies here in Spain. They have a team of 25 people doing SEO and Carlos here, he’s the head of SEO of that team. So I wanted to give you a look of how agencies around the world, especially here, in another, completely different market, in Spain, not English speaking market, so you can take a look at how does this defer or not of what you are already doing in the UK or in the US, or the English speaking world.

So I am going to make Carlos a few questions here so he can show a little bit of the insights that he sees in a day to day basis working with clients. Let’s take a look. Are you ready Carlos? Let’s go.

What type of clients do you work with?

We’re mainly focused on big clients. Big companies that are based here in Madrid or in Spain and also start-ups on projects that the organic traffic is key on their projects. We also have several teams that work a same plan inside of some of those clients. Also, we have here, a big team that work remotely with these clients, especially the ones that are not based here in Madrid.

What’s the key part of your work to achieve success with clients?

At this moment we are focused on be part of the digital of our clients. We have a huge set of consultants and we spend the amount of hours that our clients need to successfully [inaudible 00:02:04]. We have a big team of SEO consultants that know technical issue. They are able to write content. They also are a specialized market team on analytics. As you know, in SEO, we need to have several sources of data that we have to join. It’s not [inaudible 00:02:26] whether [inaudible 00:02:29]. Digital marketing and we have on out team people who is able to work on all of these issues.

What are the main challenges you see with clients?

Yeah I think that our main issue, and I think this is global, it’s not only focused here in Spain, is the ability of our clients to make the changes that we need is down on their websites because moving things from IT teams is sometimes quite difficult and I think it’s the biggest challenge that we have in the biggest project. I think [inaudible 00:03:11] is quite important but we work with big companies, it’s not as critical as in other smaller projects because we have a great amount of high quality links pointing to our websites, but I think that it’s important too. Also is the way that we have to make changes not only technical changes, we also have to change the content of some URLs and in this point, we have to be aligned with the marketing strategies, the brand strategies and I think this also a big challenge.

How do you organize and coordinate the work of the SEO team?

I have been previous to being an SEO consultant, I’ve worked as a web developer. So, I was used to the agile methodologies. Especially, I was working on a [inaudible 00:04:07] and at this moment, we are using our own version of [inaudible 00:04:12]. So we organize for team in [inaudible 00:04:16]. I think that the fact that this a bit different, is that we are focused on the methodology, our help to the team and we don’t force people to go really near exactly what that methodology say and we try to adapt the good things of that methodology to our team so it works and it give the better result. We also have two levels of organization. We have a team of SEO seniors or SEO managers that manage their little team inside of department and it’s the way that we are able to manage not only these 25 people [inaudible 00:05:04] more than 70, the clients.

What tools do you use to manage projects with clients?

As we are working big clients, we have seen that the best way to do this is by using the internal software or the software that those company have. For example, [inaudible 00:05:24], that kind of tools because internally, we are using our own tool that we have developed for manage the team.

What are the top SEO tools you work with?

I think that’s all the SEO in the world, first of all is [inaudible 00:05:43] because it’s where we have all the data of our clients there. Also, Google Analytics to improve the conversant and specifically SEO tools we have for starting projects [inaudible 00:05:59] to make [inaudible 00:06:00] and also some other bigger crawlers and cloud crawlers [inaudible 00:06:06] for example. For see the visibility of our projects and check the evolution of those projects we use also [inaudible 00:06:16].

What are the main differences when doing SEO in Spain vs. other markets?

I think there’s a big different between doing SEO for other other countries or other languages that is not English. This is because we see that some algorithms of Google are not as well fine tuned as in the English version, for example, for the [inaudible 00:06:41] team. Duplicated content, thin content, [inaudible 00:06:45] spam ware content and also it’s important to see that we see that in other countries [inaudible 00:06:53] maybe the [inaudible 00:06:56] team, it’s not as hard and they are not, I think, so many people working on detecting who is selling links and making action on that. I think that this [inaudible 00:07:10] we have, so the algorithm is not as hard as in English and especially in the USA.

I hope that you have liked Carlos interview and you have enjoyed to see the differences between what is being actually done in Spain at the moment by SEO agencies. One of the main one here in order to see the differences, opportunities, et cetera. Something to note, I actually went to Internet Republica earlier today because I was going to give the international SEO session. I actually gave the international SEO session to this group of people because they do this advanced specialize SEO course to a group of people who are interested to learn about SEO from time to time. Every year I think they have a couple of editions and this is also very useful for them because this is how they attract talent to their own company.

This how they are able to grow and hire, which is something that actually Carlos didn’t mention we were changing a little bit before the little interview and this is something that I find that is particularly smart from them because they train and they identify the talent in their own SEO course. So, that might be also a good idea for you to implement.

So, thank you very much for the opportunity. I will continue to do the same whenever I travel to new places and I am able to interact with other agency owners. In the meantime, take a look, I have new stickers here from Crawling Monday and Orainti’s mascot too. So, if you see me around at any event and you want one for your laptop or whatever, just let me know. I’d be happy to give it to you. See you in the next edition of Crawling Mondays. Bye-bye.