Offices are fun­ny things. A few dozen peo­ple, with suit­ably diverse skillsets, from suit­ably diverse back­grounds — and each one devel­ops into some­thing entire­ly unique. The sum of each indi­vid­u­al’s expe­ri­ences merg­ing into… some call it com­pa­ny cul­ture… but I see it as more of a tribe.

No office is com­plete with­out its own strange rit­u­als, born of spon­tane­ity, but some­how stuck for no par­tic­u­lar rea­son, adap­ta­tions per­haps, for indis­cernible months. Before you know it, some­one’s spank­ing some­one else with, you know, those foot-long ergonom­ic palm rests in a total­ly not homo­erot­ic way.

‘the best’

Three years and a week ago, I start­ed at Linkdex with a brief to pro­duce a report on search and SEO in the trav­el sec­tor. With a young and expo­nen­tial­ly tal­ent­ed data sci­ence team (who nev­er quite man­aged to con­vince me why I could­n’t use that word as a superla­tive), we fired up our spread­sheets and set to work.

The key­word uni­verse in trav­el, as you may know, is unfath­omably huge, and doing a data-dri­ven study of search in the sec­tor is like… uh.. try­ing to count ants. So sev­er­al months and a few dozen GoToMeet­ings lat­er, we pub­lished Trav­el 360 — which look­ing back, is a seri­ous­ly awe­some col­lec­tion of essays/interviews/transcripts on dig­i­tal dis­rup­tion of an estab­lished ver­ti­cal. (A lit­tle known fact: it also fea­tures beau­ti­ful pho­tog­ra­phy, tak­en not from stock, but by Linkdex’s for­mer prod­uct man­ag­er.)

It was an hon­ourable endeav­our, but unfor­tu­nate­ly rather more naive in terms of mar­ket­ing (oh, I’d found a home in the mar­ket­ing team by now), in that it hyper-focused on an indi­vid­ual por­tion of Linkdex’s over­all SEO mar­ket. We did learn how­ev­er, that with audac­i­ty, team­work, and a lot of proof­read­ing and out­reach, we could pro­duce eBooks, or rather con­tent — with real edi­to­r­i­al integri­ty (I mean that) AND mar­ket­ing poten­tial.

That led us to SEO Now, which remains my favourite Linkdex con­tent project. On launch, we broke the vis­i­tor traf­fic record for the site, and cer­tain­ly for what it was — a record of thought­ful, cur­rent, dis­cus­sion with search mar­keters from brands and agen­cies — it seemed to be well received.

So amongst the effi­ca­cious mar­ket­ing activ­i­ty of the team, water­falls, of events, 1‑pagers, newslet­ters and emails, I most­ly made eBooks, writ­ing some­times as a ghost, but learn­ing, always learn­ing — par­tic­u­lar­ly from those imme­di­ate­ly around — from the best.

You can find Linkdex’s eBooks here.

Practice what you preach…

What­ev­er you think or hear about Linkdex, I can tell you that as an organ­i­sa­tion, we prac­tice what we preach. When we devel­oped momen­tol­ogy in 2014, our “dig­i­tal pub­li­ca­tion for con­sumer-cen­tric mar­keters”, we knew that all brands are pub­lish­ers, and we fol­lowed in the purest sense.

momen­tol­ogy has evolved, with all the con­tent migrat­ed to the Linkdex domain ear­li­er this year. Make of this what you will, but I had the ben­e­fit of see­ing the pained deci­sions, as well as the occa­sion­al acknowl­edg­ments of gen­uine appre­ci­a­tion from read­ers — which makes it all worth it. The team, our con­trib­u­tors, were beyond great, the con­tent was free and orig­i­nal — and it’s still all avail­able online on Inked.

People…

The ben­e­fit of work­ing with great peo­ple, is that occa­sion­al­ly things real­ly click. Not so long ago, when it was still pos­si­ble to get search vol­umes from Adwords, we realised we had every­thing we need­ed to assess share of domain per­for­mance with­in a spe­cif­ic ver­ti­cal.

They may be slight­ly dat­ed now, but the Christ­mas Share of Search (2015) report, and our report on US Per­son­al Finance are two pieces I’m proud to have worked on.

Lat­er with The Unit­ed States of Search (unfor­tu­nate­ly no longer avail­able online), we looked at whether search data could tell us more about vot­er behav­iour, and cov­er­age bias from online news pub­li­ca­tions. It was ambi­tious, but if I had a regret, it’s that I did­n’t com­mit to this one more.

Blue Notes…

One of the serendip­i­tous con­se­quences of hav­ing a full-time office job in the noughty-tens(?) is being able to indulge a music stream­ing sub­scrip­tion.

In between repeat Daft Punk lis­ten­ing ses­sions, I’ve man­aged to retrace/explore, main­ly in reverse order, a fair bit of the his­to­ry of Amer­i­can pop­u­lar music.

And in as far as music reflects cir­cum­stance and life, with a pair of Denon head­phones — every­thing from delta, to Detroit blues, Mem­phis soul, that Motown sound, oogie woo­gie dis­co… right through to hip-hop, the many deli­cious flavours of house, and post-mil­lenial fusion pop (my way of describ­ing Gaga, Black Eyed Peas, Rihan­na) — have been the sound­track of my Linkdex expe­ri­ences.

When Mozart and Beethoven were writ­ing (what I can only imag­ine must have been ban­gin’ tunes back in the day) music was order­ly. It was the sound of equal tem­pera­ment, enlight­en­ment, rea­son, argu­ments by design.

Blues emerged from eman­ci­pa­tion, and the need to cre­ate some­thing entire­ly dif­fer­ent. The addi­tion of the ‘blue note’ is now a cor­ner­stone of Amer­i­can pop­u­lar music, and with the accom­pa­ny­ing polyrhyth­mic pat­terns, it’s there, pret­ty much in every­thing.

What’s my point here… In life, or mat­ters of career, not every­thing turns out like you might think, or have built towards and planned for. But some­times, what is unex­pect­ed, actu­al­ly sounds bet­ter in the end.

“Would you bang another bug?”

Offices. In digital/SEO, it amounts to a lot of time on the inter­net. Some of the best con­ver­sa­tions, and some of the worst: “If you were a bug, but retained all your rea­son and men­tal fac­ul­ties, would you bang anoth­er bug?”, “What’s your ter­tiary super­pow­er?” (some­thing which has no prac­ti­cal ben­e­fit)… “Slight­ly bet­ter than aver­age small talk.”, “What if the past belonged to men, and the future belongs to women?”

You make friends, often by pure acci­dent, friends you might not oth­er­wise have made. Maybe you con­nect­ed over The Walk­ing Dead. West­world. Friends who look out for you, even though they may not have even realised they were doing it at the time.

What next?

For me: this is a farewell blog post of sorts in that short­ly, I’ll be leav­ing the indus­try and retrain­ing as a his­to­ry teacher. But that’s nei­ther here nor there…

For the indus­try? Search is the future. It’s cer­tain­ly part of it. Let me take my Linkdex hat off and dwell for a moment on what I mean by that:

What­ev­er your polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tion, the events of the past year have shown us that dig­i­tal media ethics is an area that needs dis­cus­sion, progress, change. Democ­ra­cy func­tions on the prin­ci­ple of oppo­si­tion, and the SEO com­mu­ni­ty is the clos­est thing we have to func­tion­al oppo­si­tion in search. If Google do not want to take respon­si­bil­i­ty for the fac­tu­al integri­ty of the con­tent that prop­a­gates in their ecosys­tems, who will?

What’s the change that will make the sys­tem work?

I’m not sure any­one has the answers yet…

Search has, and will con­tin­ue to, change the world. So can you.