Celebrating Superb SEO(s): Q&A with Naomi Francis-Parker

I’m Naomi and I’m the Head of SEO at The Evergreen Agency. I’ve been part of the Evergreen team for 5 amazing years and it’s where I started my SEO career. My speciality is SEO strategy, but in the early years, I did content marketing and digital PR as well as technical and on-page SEO, so the strategies I create draw on all of these areas which makes them super well-rounded for any type of business.

I think like most SEOs, I kind of fell into SEO whilst looking for general digital marketing roles. 

I studied English Literature at uni and I always loved the creative aspects of marketing, particularly in content creation, so I knew I wanted to do something related to that. I’m also quite technically minded, so I needed something that would scratch that itch too. I didn’t think it would be possible to find a career that would allow me to connect the two but then I found SEO - it’s a match made in heaven for me honestly!

I love being able to take different disciplines (content, technical SEO etc.) and bring them together in a cohesive way to achieve a shared goal. I have to wear so many different hats to build a strategy, but I enjoy switching between them all. It helps me look at everything from all angles, making sure things work well from a marketing perspective but more importantly, a client perspective too.

I also love working in an industry that is always evolving because it forces me to learn and evolve with it. You can’t really sit still and procrastinate when you work in SEO so it’s difficult to get bored!

Attribution! There have been so many changes and privacy updates over the past 12 months that attribution has become a nightmare. Luckily, I work very closely with our Paid Media team so we’re all in it together. We’ve come up with a process to make attribution much easier to track and explain to our clients, but it’s a work in progress as I’m sure it is for everyone in the industry. We’re getting there though!

I’ve just finished a huge project where we introduced over 300 new product category pages for a retail site. Before this, the site only catered to top-level, branded searches but didn’t cater to non-branded keywords that their audience used to describe their products.

It involved an entire URL structure overhaul and a ton of redirects which is always a risk, but we pulled it off and we’re already seeing some good results off the back of it, so it was worth it.

I’m obsessed with structured data, entities and Google’s Knowledge Graph at the moment. It’s so important that Google understands what your website is about, especially as we move into an era of AI and SGE, so I’m on a mission to ensure that all of our clients are set up to thrive in this new landscape. 

The wider digital marketing landscape. I think that for a while now, digital marketing has been evolving to a point where disciplines are merging more than ever, and a more rounded approach is going to be necessary for growth.

This might be controversial, but I don’t think it’s good enough just to know SEO anymore. Our job is to help brands grow online, so to do that properly, we need to be aware of all the facets of digital marketing (social media, email marketing, affiliates etc.) because they all inform each other, and they all have an impact on whether someone searches for a brand or not.

Semrush has always been my go-to, particularly for competitor analysis and benchmarking because it gives you a good insight into the online landscape of pretty much any industry.

I also love Google Search Console (GSC), simply because you can’t beat your own data. So many people overlook it in favour of third-party tools, but the insights GSC gives you can be a game-changer.

Utilise your internal data. In a world where privacy is making it increasingly difficult for brands to gain customer insights, internal data is a lifeline because it provides a true insight into your customer’s wants and needs. Without this, you’re just guessing.

Become best friends with your customer service teams and ask them what feedback they’re getting from customers first-hand. Once you have this information, you can execute your SEO strategy with this feedback in mind to provide a better online experience for customers which will increase your chances of success.