Episode 18: Interview with John Shehata

In our second last edition of our we spoke with John Shehata. John is an expert on the field of SEO for news websites and newspapers. In the course of his career he has worked for several pages of this type. At the moment he is the Executive Director of Search & Social Media for ABC News, ABC.com, ABC Family and the website of the Oscars. Next to these obligations, he holds presentations and has trained many writers, bloggers, journalists, and editors on SEO and how to write news while keeping SEO top of mind. 

Andre Alpar: Alright John, thanks for being here. Can you please introduce yourself?

John Shehata: Sure, I’m John Shehata, Head of SEO and Social Media for ABC News, ABC, ABC Family and recently Oscars.

Andre Alpar: So the Oscars, as in the show that gives away the prizes?

John Shehata: Yes

Andre Alpar: Ok, so how is that? How is that project?

John Shehata: It’s going good actually. For the last couple of years we did a lot of changes. I can’t talk about them now, it’s still early, but it really showed great results year after year. Simple SEO steps, simple SEO tweaks here and there, thinking about content in a different way and it has really paid off.

Andre Alpar: It’s also a really, really social topic. On the night of the event, it must explode, it must be like the über-event happening.

John Shehata: Absolutely. So the social thing does a great job when it comes to Oscars. I’m not part of that team, but they absolutely harness the buzz around the topic.

Andre Alpar: Alright. Ok so what does your everyday job look like? I mean, do you travel from one ABC entity to another entity? Or are you like based in a headquarters? Or how does that work?

John Shehata: I work from New York City headquarters and I don’t travel that much. But just recently I do travel to California frequently to work with other ABC properties. So ABC News is part of Disney, for those of you who don’t know, so I do travel to California. The day to day work is focused more on strategy and then I have my team focused on implementing the strategies, the tactics, the technical aspects and working with other departments to get things implemented.

Andre Alpar: Ok, so was William Sears working with you then?

John Shehata: Yes

Andre Alpar: So you were working together?

John Shehata: Yeah

Andre Alpar: Only audio, not video?

John Shehata: He is a great guy. He works for Disney.

Andre Alpar: So what is your typical everyday job? Do you spend a certain percentage in reporting, or in training, or in really hands on technical stuff or is much of it communication like convincing people to buy-in on certain projects?

John Shehata: Sure, so I wouldn’t say everyday, but I would say a major part of what we do is education, training and selling the idea that SEO actually provides results to different departments. This is because departments invest time and resources in implementing SEO and sometimes it is not the easiest thing to implement. So you work with tech teams, you work with editorial teams, you work with C – Level and you show value of the SEO recommendations for each of these teams.
Because you are going to make them successful. You are going to get more views for the editorial team, you are going to get more sales for the sales team, you are going to get the better site architecture and less server errors for the tech team.
So everyone gains a benefit and this is how we do it in ABC News. We work with the editorial team a lot, focusing on what’s trending, what people are searching for, how they are searching for it. What is the best way to write for users who use machines to find our content. So we never optimize for search engines, but we optimize for users who use these search engines to find our content. If that makes sense.

Andre Alpar: Very elegant way to put it. Also I really like the idea of how you are positively explaining who you are helping and how, where it sometimes can happen that they see you as an additional task that they need to do even though it’s not their actual task. So how do you get them to change the view on that?

John Shehata: It’s again, everyone wants to be successful at what they do, right? So it goes back to the whole idea that we are not here to take over your job or tell you how to do it, because you have been doing it for a long time. I’m in no place to tell an editor or a writer how to write. They know how to write. I am in no place to tell a tech person how to code. But I am there to enhance and take it to the next level so that they see a much bigger impact for the things that they do. So, when we approach it this way, not in a territorial manner, but more like this is a helping hand, showing how it can work better for you and the users. Because at the end of the day our goal is the end user: More sales, more views, more eyeballs, better branding for marketing, maybe less marketing budget because they spend thousands of dollars on these brand terms that the company doesn’t rank for and so on.
If you approach it this way, and you educate, and you inform and you become available for them to ask questions, usually – it takes a bit of time – but you reach a point where they are the one’s coming to you to help them with their next project because they want it to be successful.

Andre Alpar: Ok, so you would think it’s like an in-house setup that you are working in right now.

John Shehata: Yes

Andre Alpar: Have you been on the other side? Like on the agency side?

John Shehata: Yeah, I came from the dark side.

Andre Alpar: Excuse me, you are mistaken, it’s the other way around.

John Shehata: Yes, I spend a couple of years on the agency side. I was fortunate enough to work in Fortune500 companies. So agency is like a boot-camp where you work in everything and you deal with all different kind of clients, all different kinds of requests, the good ones and the silly ones. And you need to manage expectations, and you need to manage recommendations, and you do their recommendations but they are not implemented and you go through all these cycles.
So I would advise any SEO to start out as working for an agency first before they move in-house, because it gives you a whole new perspective on things. So the agency is the best way to start as an SEO.

Andre Alpar: But I also think that agency work is many times focused on transactional or these kinds of businesses, rather than the classical publishing house that you are. So probably there is a different set of skills that you would need, especially in a publishing context, right?

John Shehata: Absolutely true.

Andre Alpar: So it’s more technical, would you say? Or even more communicative? Or how would you describe it to be different?

John Shehata: I would say first it depends on the agency. Sometimes the agency takes an approach to manage certain industries, because they are very good at it, for example e-commerce because they nailed it.
Very few agencies work with media companies, even though these are the best companies to work with, because they have all the content.

Andre Alpar: They have all the content and all the links usually too.

John Shehata: And all the links

Andre Alpar: So you just need to get the rest right and it goes through the roof.

John Shehata: Exactly. And you are a superhero actually, because you have the links…

Andre Alpar: Do people see you already like that?

John Shehata: Sometimes.

Andre Alpar: Great, that’s good work then.

John Shehata: Because, you mentioned, you have all the great content and then people love to link to these kind of sites. It’s not an e-commerce site where you fight for a link, right? People link to you. You need to get your technical stuff, the infrastructure, right.

Andre Alpar: Do people ask you to define a certain thing that should be changed? Do they ask you how much more traffic it is going to bring us? Even if it is just a bug that needs to be cleaned out? Just like something that affects the sites in general as a whole, not as something very specific.

John Shehata: People will always come to you and say: “Ok, we are going to do all this work, what’s the value in there?” So, not in all cases you can show value, as you mentioned.
On the specific things or if you focus on a specific section of the site, or focus on a specific set of terms and so on, you can say that this is the missed opportunity, this is what we are going to gain and this is how we translate it into dollar signs.

Andre Alpar: So you start off with a missed opportunity?

John Shehata: Yeah. I love missed opportunities because this is how SEO executives can read your work. Ok, we are missing on these ten terms which will translate into ten million additional page views a month and our CTR conversion, or our conversion rate, is let’s say one percent. SO ten million, one percent, this is how much money we are going to make. But you cannot put it in these terms for every single project. But what happens is, when you start with these projects that have value assigned to them, people trust you. So they don’t keep asking you the same question every time. Once you gain their trust, and only then, then you can get more of your SEO projects. “Canonical tag”, prove a value on that. “Duplicate content,” it’s a huge value but you cannot really translate it into a specific number. And sometimes with the algorithm changes. Because we have three different changing factors here: You have your site, you have your competitors and you have the search engines. If it is only for the site, we know that when we do “x” we get “y”. But search engines do changes their algorithm and our competitors do marketing and SEO and all that stuff. So not every time, will you get the results that you are hoping for.

Andre Alpar: I really like from your presentations you had. You show that in the process that you always apply there are two steps – one was “quick wins” and the other was “big wins”. So when we translate that to what you’ve just said with accountable SEO things that have to be done and, hardly to say how much they are going to bring SEO topics, then you would first go for those where you can clearly put a number on, gain trust. And then get to those that are kind of hard to argue why they should work.

John Shehata: Absolutely. It works for in-house and agency. If you can prove to your client that your work does actually provide value in very little time, because no one wants to wait six months to see results, let’s be honest on that. So people want to see results as fast as possible. So if you approach quick wins – “hey we have a massive site and all the page titles are bad, can we format it?” So we work on the format or the formula.

Andre Alpar: So like a template level.

John Shehata: A template level, exactly. Can we do canonical tags? Can we fix the efficiency of the crawling a little bit? Can we work a little bit on the in-line links? Things that are on a template level. For example a site like, lets not name sites. A massive site with thousands or hundreds of thousands of products, you know that all these products share one template.

Andre Alpar: Sure.

John Shehata: If you fix this one template you affected probably half of the site. And boom you see the result immediately. Then you gain their trust because they saw the results. Then you get to the harder, bigger projects and they won’t be asking you why.

Andre Alpar: Does ABC work with videos a lot?

John Shehata: Absolutely, yes.

Andre Alpar: How do you think – I guess the videos in your case – I mean you are a TV station, so they must be hosted on your website, right?

John Shehata: Yes

Andre Alpar: You don’t put them on YouTube?

John Shehata: We actually have YouTube as well. We think of YouTube as another, it’s like Facebook, so the whole idea of owning content and that it has to be on your site, I think this idea is getting less and less…what’s the word?…people are fighting less and less this idea. More and more companies now look at Hulu, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter as extensions. You want to reach the community where ever it is. The old thinking that you always need to bring a community back to the site, it doesn’t matter that much now. Because the conversion could happen on Twitter, the conversion could happen on Facebook, it could happen on YouTube. Whatever the conversion is. If it’s a sale, if it’s a brand, opportunity and so on. So absolutely, we are in all these different places.

Andre Alpar: So how do you compete with YouTube, as being Google? You know, when you see your videos trying to rank for the same terms as YouTube videos. You are always kind off on the weaker side, I think.

John Shehata: So there are two ways of looking at it – you can look at it as competing or look at it as dominating more of the SERP.

Andre Alpar: So you would hope that your video is posted in YouTube as well as on your website.

John Shehata: Exactly. So you need a smart strategy on how to rank your video and the YouTube video at the same time.

Andre Alpar: So give YouTube a short version and then the long version is always on your website?

John Shehata: Yes. Or you focus on certain terms here and other long-tail terms there. Or maybe for other companies, they don’t care where the video is. Some other companies will actually have the video on YouTube, take it to embed, add it to their site, add some video….or transcripts and then it works both. Because YouTube is a search engine in itself, people search in there. And at the same time you have the video and the transcripts, which is awesome for Google. SEOmass does a lot of good stuff using these kinds of approaches.

Andre Alpar: Ok. Another thing I heard you talk about on the side was, you also have experience in one other language rather than English. How does that compare to SEO in the US?

John Shehata: I think it’s a good testing ground for certain tactics. Sometimes it works. We were sharing about how certain stuff works in Europe, or works in the US but doesn’t work in Europe and so on. So I use it as a testing ground. Sometimes I like to see how long it takes for that tactic that already stopped working in the US, how long it takes for it to stop working in other countries as well. So for me it is more like a testing ground.

Andre Alpar: Ok, and it broadens the horizon on what is possible. Just because it isn’t possible in one point, it may be the other way around somewhere else.

John Shehata: Exactly. We think that the Google algorithm is the same for everything, it’s not really. Because it depends on the volume of the content, the quality of the content and many other factors. The ease of crawling the content and the speed of these sites.

Andre Alpar: Also the complexity of languages, right?

John Shehata: Absolutely. Because if you think of one word in English and all the different alternatives and think of other languages and the alternatives. One word could have three alternatives here and in other languages it may have ten. Or if you think about the number of characters in a word. When you think about AdWords for example. If you think of Asian languages, Chinese and stuff like this, it’s a whole different game.

Andre Alpar: You can write a book on Twitter.

John Shehata: Exactly.

Andre Alpar: In one tweet.

John Shehata: Yes. Actually if you count the number of characters, I believe in Chinese, in Twitter, it’s almost a whole paragraph.

Andre Alpar: So they can say a lot more than we can. We always feel a little limited.

John Shehata: Yes, true.

Andre Alpar: How do you guys work together in the different entities that there are in ABC? Is there in each entity somebody that is like a sparring partner for your SEO efforts? Is there a SEO chief within each entity?

John Shehata: You mean entities like departments or entities across the properties of ABC?

Andre Alpar: The properties across ABC.

John Shehata: Yes. Each property has its own SEO localized person. We call him the SEO ambassador.

Andre Alpar: Is he reporting to you personnel-wise or is he embedded in the entity structure?

John Shehata: It’s more in the entity structure, but they work very closely to us. And I believe this is the best approach, even for social media, because they are the closest to the content that this entity is producing. Versus having a centralized group that control social media and SEO for a lot of different entities. The closer they are to the content. And then if you can have some kind of working relationship with them: you provide them recommendations, you provide them reports – reports are a great tool to work with other entities and so on. Usually it becomes a very successful relationship.

Andre Alpar: So how does it work at ABC? Do you meet like once a week or once a month with everybody or are the meetings rather individual?

John Shehata: There are different structures to how we meet for different properties. So it’s not the same approach fits all.

Andre Alpar: Ok. So can you name an example so one can really better understand?

John Shehata: What I meant is, in certain properties we have biweekly meetings, in other properties they don’t need that so it’s a monthly meeting, others will actually have weekly meetings. So it differs based on the volume of the content and the type of the content and so on.

Andre Alpar: And the complexity of the problems that they have. Since how long they are and at what level on SEO.

John Shehata: Yeah, and it depends. Certain companies will have the same technology platform for all their properties. Other companies may have different technology platforms for each of their properties. So the complexity level is different from one company to another.

Andre Alpar: One last question: How do you personally get better at SEO? What do you do to increase your knowledge?

John Shehata: I think reading is the most important. Reading and then testing and applying what you read.

Andre Alpar: Reading, that would be blogs and forums?

John Shehata: Yes. I mean you should have a circle of people who you trust. Not every single advice out there is accurate. And you have to be careful on which advice you get. For example, I recommend to people blogs like SEOmoz or SEObook, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch. These are really major trusted sites that have a lot of information. Then you can go to special subscription based ones. SEO Book has a lot of great material and a very strong forum out there. And then you should always have your own sites to test with. Because to test with your client’s site or to test with your company’s site is not the right approach, because you have to be very careful.

Andre Alpar: Do you think that the sites that you do your test on should be owned by the company or should they be owned by you? You personally?

John Shehata: Yes.

Andre Alpar: But even though the tests are for ABC that you run, it would also make sense if ABC would provide you a testing ground, right?

John Shehata: It depends from one company to another. You have to remember, the bigger the company, the bigger the legal team, the bigger the restrictions, right? So when you test on your own stuff, first you measure, is it worth it or not? We don’t want to have two h1 at the site or at the page it has to be h1. You change that and then you wait and you measure the difference. We did that work, and multiply that by millions of pages, did it make a difference or not? It’s a good testing ground, it’s a good tool for coding. I encourage everyone to have some kind of technical understanding. You don’t have to code yourself, but you need to understand what the code means. So you need to look at the code and understand that this is the head section, these are the tags, these tags are important. So these kind of basic elements are extremely important.

Andre Alpar: So did you sometimes also show people the stuff from your tests to argue that something should be done on the big news websites?

John Shehata: It depends on the test, right? Sometimes there are tests that you don’t want to share.

Andre Alpar: Sure.

John Shehata: But absolutely, it helps. But again it goes back to the trust. When people understand that you know what you are doing and you proved before that you really provide value, and the results are showing, and the numbers are there. They become more and more willing to take your idea and test it.

Andre Alpar: Even if they don’t have proof and they don’t know how much it is going to bring?

John Shehata: Yes.

Andre Alpar: Because they know from history that you have always helped them.

John Shehata: Absolutely. And again it depends on the priorities of the company. One of the things I mentioned in today’s session is “if you are successful in aligning your projects with the company’s projects, then you can get your projects in.” So you have your own list: you know that project one is much more important than project three. But you know that the company is working on a product that relates to project three. Get project three in now, because they are working on it. And they will not change the whole company’s priorities just to meet your priorities. So you have to be flexible.

Andre Alpar: Very smart approach. Thanks so much for your time.

John Shehata: You’re welcome, thank you so much. Thanks Andre.