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Some SEO careers begin at university. Ash Nallawalla’s began at 48. After eight years as an accountant in New Zealand, another eight in the Royal Australian Air Force, and a spell in product marketing, a redundancy from Macromedia pushed him to build a consultancy website that ranked number one for ‘CRM consultant’ for the best part of a decade. That accidental mastery of search became a fourth career — one that took him inside some of Australia’s largest banks and telcos and the domain registrar Melbourne IT, and produced the book that gives this conversation its spine, the Accidental SEO Manager.
Speaking with Mark A Preston on the Unscripted SEO Podcast, Ash is refreshingly clear that enterprise SEO is not small-business SEO scaled up. Big brands rarely need aggressive link acquisition; their inherent newsworthiness and sponsorships already do that work. What they need instead is SEO with a seat at the table — a strategic function respected all the way to the C-suite, not an afterthought discovered only when a new firewall quietly blocks Screaming Frog.
This trend is a positive indicator of the increasing acknowledgment of SEO’s critical role in business success, marking a significant step forward for the profession.
Ash Nallawalla
The proof, he argues, is in the numbers. On one engagement with a leading Australian bank, his audit and roadmap didn’t fix a penalty; they were simply accepted and fully implemented — and the results spoke for themselves.
Following the full implementation of the recommendations, the bank experienced a 10% uptick in traffic in just eight days, with continued growth leading to a doubling of traffic in eight months.
Ash Nallawalla
From forecasting SEO ROI in hard financial terms to campaigning for a ‘Chief Web Success Officer’ role on the org chart, Ash’s throughline is the same: treat SEO as a business discipline, give internal experts the same weight as outside consultants, and let the strategy — not the tactics — lead.
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The full conversation
For those who don’t know you, could you give a whirlwind tour of how and when you started in the industry, and what you’re doing now?
SEO is my fourth career, so I’ll touch very briefly on the first three. I started life as an accountant in New Zealand and gave that about eight years, then moved to Australia with my wife and spent another eight years in the Royal Australian Air Force. When I came out I got into what you could summarise as traditional product marketing — the job titles changed a lot, but that’s a fair description. Then, at 48, I’d just been laid off from Macromedia, where I’d been the CRM manager for Asia Pacific, and I thought I’d set up a website to consult on CRM. I did such a good job of the SEO — because when I learn something I really set my heart to it — that it ranked number one for the term “CRM consultant” for maybe ten years. I wasn’t keeping count, because I never actually worked as a CRM consultant.
What happened was I mentioned to an American contact that I was ranking number one. He wasn’t in our industry — he was a product manager in a different field — but he recommended me to his client, who gave me a small SEO assignment. I did a good job, they were happy, and they asked me to look after their PPC too. I said, “Hang on, I’m a CRM consultant, I don’t know this PPC stuff,” and they said, “It’s easy, here’s a login, just try it.” So I tried it, because by then I’d realised the dot-com boom had bust — nobody was buying new CRM systems, so they didn’t need CRM consultants. This company is now the listed company RingCentral, but back then it was a little family firm with wives and grandparents all working there, and I’m grateful to them for convincing me to take up this new profession at 48. So I’m one of the late bloomers by age. Some of my peers who started when I did were in their twenties — they’re barely touching 50 now and just as experienced as I am, whereas I turned 71 last December and really need to start thinking about retiring.
In between, I worked at an agency called Melbourne IT — a large domain name registrar with a small in-house SEO agency, where I spent about three years. We had over 800 clients, and that was largely good luck: as the only company authorised to sell .com.au domains, every business in Australia had to be a customer, which made it easy to sell them websites, SEO or anything else. These were the good old days of SEO — you had the PageRank toolbar, and directory sites that passed PageRank, so every client sat in our directory and picked up a nice PR7 link to their homepage. Not many customers had even heard of SEO, so part of the salesperson’s job was explaining why they needed it. I’m talking about the 2005 to 2008 time frame.
I won’t cover every company, but they were all big Australian names — the biggest banks, the biggest insurance companies, several multinationals with multiple languages. One thing people who haven’t worked in-house or consulted to large companies don’t realise is that we don’t need to do certain things a smaller website owner does. Links are a good example. These large companies sponsored sports stadiums, they were listed, so they were in the financial pages every day; if their CEO said something it made the TV or newspaper news. So we got citations every day and links every other day, and you never had to think about them — except when you needed links to inside pages, because most links naturally pointed at the homepage.
I’ll mention a funny incident. At one of these companies we had a visit from a very senior person — not even in our silo — who asked, “Are you guys buying any links?” We said no, we don’t need to. He was really surprised: “Of course you need links, if you’re not buying any you won’t rank.” He hadn’t even checked that we were one of the leading brands in the country and ranking well, but you don’t argue with very senior people, and he had the budget to let us buy some. So I said to my boss, let’s not argue, take his money. And we didn’t buy links — what we bought were advertorials, clearly marked as advertorials, from a well-known publisher with about eleven outlets across Australia. They gave clean links: roughly six articles times eleven, so around 66 links, a five-figure investment. One month passed, two months, six months — absolutely no change to any ranking. We were ranking well anyway. It was a good, if accidental, learning experience: for a large company, buying links doesn’t move the dial much.
So I’d say to others who work in large companies: spend your time on content rather than buying links just because you see other people doing it. A brand-new small business in a small town might benefit from some relevant connections from other websites — but even then I wouldn’t send them down the cheap five-dollar link route. The other thing you tend to find in a large company is that a lot of the content is written in-house by full-time writers. My very last employer was a car-selling platform with 20 journalists writing car reviews every day, so there was rarely any question of looking up keywords and commissioning an article — they just wrote about the latest cars, and got links because car blogs and magazines referenced the reviews. I’ve rarely found it necessary to compile big keyword lists; when I did, it was to solve a very micro problem, such as a part of the site not getting traffic.
Have you seen commonalities between enterprise SEO and lesser-known brands?
Yes — and it’s something I cover in my first book. Medium-sized brands, and even some profitable small businesses like accountants or dentists, will engage agencies, so that part is similar. What you need to do is write your requests for proposal or quotation properly, so that every applicant is asked the same questions against the same criteria — that keeps it fair. I’ve been in a publicly listed company of about 25 people and in companies of perhaps 15,000, and a lot carries across. Project management is one: SEO tasks are handled like any other project task, using a tool such as Trello, Monday or, in larger organisations, Jira. Being Australian software, Atlassian’s Jira is very common in Australia, and I’ve come across it in America too. So it really comes down to good communication with other departments — if you know the developers well and explain why a task will make the company more money, they’re more likely to listen.
At the far extreme, in the early days of scrum, stand-ups were literally people standing in a circle with a little ball — you tossed the ball to the next person, and whoever held it could speak. Today stand-ups are electronic, on Zoom, but back then you wrote tasks on index cards and slid them across a board in order of progress. That was the company where I first heard the term “sales dollar.” My task — I think it was changing some title tags — had been deprioritised in favour of another feature, and I was asked how many sales dollars we’d make if we did the title tags. I was baffled; I went to my boss and he couldn’t help me either. Those were the bad old days.
My very last company was one of the most fortunate situations an SEO can be in. It was organised into scrum squads by silo, and I was in the content silo, which had a scrum master, a product manager, four or five developers, a QA person, a UX person and one SEO. Everyone in the squad understood the value of SEO — I never had to justify anything. In fact the other squads, which didn’t include an SEO, would invite me to their meetings and ask whether there was any SEO implication in what they were building. That’s the ideal: the whole company gets it, top to bottom, and you hear people mention SEO and organic traffic in passing. You know your job’s done when others are fully aware of it. But in the early years SEO was treated as a bit of a nuisance — a time-sink — and people would make changes without notifying the SEO team, so we’d discover them after the fact.
That brings me to my regular soapbox: the SEO function usually sits too far down the company hierarchy for the good of the business. Here’s an example of what can happen when the SEO isn’t aware of decisions made higher up. I was using Screaming Frog to crawl our site and one day found I’d been blocked. On enquiry, it turned out the company had bought a firewall tool to stop scrapers stealing our content and repurposing it — they were protecting our IP and probably weren’t even aware there was a crawling implication for SEO. I asked whether they’d now blocked Google too, and they said no, Google was whitelisted. So I asked them to whitelist me, and because I could be coming from different IP addresses they gave me a “secret handshake” — a long string that, as long as every request contained it, let me crawl. But it wasn’t that simple: they wouldn’t change the parameters, so I could only crawl slowly. Where I used to crawl five million URLs in a day, afterwards it would take two or three weeks to reach five million, and there was nothing I could do, because at some point someone higher up decides what matters more.
So my soapbox is that the SEO, or the SEO manager, needs to sit higher in the hierarchy. I’d call the role something like a chief webmaster, or, if you don’t like that term, a chief web success officer — because web success spells company success, especially for e-commerce. This person’s responsibilities might be wider than the website itself. Marketing might decide they want a brand-new domain for a campaign — that has SEO implications. Or another team buys a piece of software that can only live on a subdomain, and suddenly there’s a whole store on a subdomain when it’s far better as a folder. The usual argument is that the supplier insists on hosting it, so it must be a subdomain — and that’s where the SEO comes in and says, implement a reverse proxy, because that’s the technique for making a subdomain appear as a folder. I’ve done that under several architectures. It’s just an example of how enterprise SEO can differ on the technicalities. When I wrote the first edition of my book I checked LinkedIn to see how many people held titles like this, and about a year ago there was essentially one — a former “chief webmaster” title, I think at Colgate-Palmolive in the US, and the position wasn’t even there anymore. When I did the second edition this year, the number was something like 300. So more companies are creating these C-suite-level positions, which is a good sign for the profession. In America you also see titles like VP of SEO — someone recently wrote that that title is disappearing, but by the count on LinkedIn these roles seem to be increasing.
Your book is called Accidental SEO Manager — why “accidental”?
I wrote the book for managers, not for individual SEOs, which may sound strange because it isn’t about how to perform individual tasks. It might explain why links are important, but it won’t tell you what kinds of links to get or how to get them — there are already plenty of good books written for SEOs on technique. Because I worked in large companies, I usually had a manager above me who wasn’t an SEO, and they were the accidental SEO managers. Often they were what I call generic MBAs: middle managers who’d been, say, a product manager, gone off and done an MBA, and been promoted to run two or three — sometimes up to five — departments, occasionally unrelated ones. So the manager you get may have no knowledge of SEO, and the book is written for people like that.
There are two audiences for the three-part series. The first two books are for the manager; the third is aimed at the C-suite — the audience least likely to buy it themselves. So why write it? Because someone might read it, and I’m leaving it partly as a legacy — perhaps a book an SEO buys and gifts to their manager, their CEO, or the chief information, technology or marketing officer. I chose the idea of “accidental” because my own entry into the profession was accidental — I never intended to start as an SEO — and you meet so many people who never intended to either. There are no university degrees in SEO that I’m aware of; you might get a single unit at some smaller US universities, but not at the Ivy League colleges. I’ve given the odd 20-minute lecture at a couple of colleges, and what can you really convey in 20 minutes beyond the fact that our profession exists? So the series is really there to explain why SEO is needed — that’s perhaps the single reason I wrote it — and what SEO is and which elements matter and why. I make it very clear that you need an SEO team or agency to do the actual work; I’m not trying to take work away from agencies. In fact an agency could gift the book when they join a new client and say, this is what we do — ask us questions if you think we’re missing something.
Is it aimed at a particular size of company?
It’s written for a company of any size — even a three-person company where the CEO cares about SEO, has heard about it, and may have had a disappointing experience with one of the cheaper agencies that left a sour taste. My second book has the working title “Is Our SEO Working?” — still aimed at the manager, but at the point where they’ve read the first book, understand how SEO works, and are now questioning whether it’s actually working for them. That tends to happen more in smaller companies. One thing most large-company SEOs will tell you is that their daily life is boring — the Google graphs are horizontal, nothing shoots up or crashes down the way you’d imagine from the graphs people post on LinkedIn. You rush to the search console every day to see if anything’s happened, and usually nothing has, so large-company SEOs don’t panic as much. A small-company owner often knows nothing about SEO, has relied on external people, maybe went for the cheapest five-dollar option and wondered why they got nothing — or things got worse. Those are the people who become curious about what they need to do, what they did wrong, and how to fix it — reading up on how agencies work, how they’re structured and what types there are, so they have a better experience next time.
What has been your personal biggest learning curve?
I’ll mention my biggest success, because I learned a lot from it. I was engaged by one of Australia’s top four banks. I was fortunate that the manager who hired me had been my manager at a previous company and was happy with my work there, so when I got laid off he invited me to consult — a very nice daily rate for three months, then a slightly lower rate for another six. The first three months were the discovery process; there was no SEO in-house, so it was a blank canvas, though someone earlier had had the foresight to register the company’s usernames on some social platforms. At the end of three months I delivered my audit findings and a strategy that included hiring the bank’s first SEO team. It was a four-hour presentation — and this was a manager I couldn’t normally get for a one-hour meeting. I told him he’d paid me a large sum and I needed four hours, and he gave them to me. Different groups came and went for their relevant parts, but he sat through the entire thing, and his own manager, who’d funded the consultancy, asked me to stay on to help implement.
They wanted to know what success I could promise, so I said you’ll get a 10% improvement in traffic in 12 months. It was a conservative, almost off-the-cuff number. You may not believe it, but I delivered a 10% improvement in eight days after complete implementation, and then the graph just kept climbing — a 100% improvement, a doubling of traffic, in eight months. These are figures in the millions of organic visits, and there was no penalty to fix; I was just tweaking things. That engagement finished, I did some niche work with another of their brands, and then I left. Three years later they called me back for a six-month engagement, and naturally I was curious about their traffic — to my surprise it had tripled in two and a half years. I’ve often used this as my own case study, because when you get 100% acceptance of your recommendations, as I did there — not a single objection from any developer, none of the usual “how do I prioritise this?” — you get results like that. I’ve never had it since, because once you’re inside a company you’re no longer treated as the expert. So my lesson is: don’t reserve that trust for outside consultants. Give your internal expert the same weight; ask them as many questions as you like, have them help you prioritise, but then actually do everything they’ve asked — even if it goes on the backlog for a little while, bring it out and do it.
When SEOs are asked to commit to a percentage or ROI figure, what mindset and thought process should they use to give a realistic answer?
At that same bank there was a subtask, because most large companies have a quarterly focus on something, and that quarter the focus was credit cards. The rest of the marketing infrastructure was supporting it too, with TV campaigns and so on, so although I was doing SEO for the entire website I had to pay particular attention to credit cards. I had very little to go on — Google Web Master Tools, the earlier incarnation of Search Console, gave me some numbers, and Google Analytics gave me some, and I could drill down to the traffic the credit-card section was getting. The question I had to ask was: what is the value of one visit? It’s a very valuable question that very few companies are willing to do the calculations for. At a high level you can say, we get three million visitors a month and make a million a month, so divide one by the other and that’s the value of an online visit. Then, if you need a 10% increase in revenue, you also ask what percentage of visitors convert, and by drilling down through those variables you arrive at the numbers you need.
From there you build a spreadsheet where you punch in the target — if you need 25% more profit, it tells you how many more visits you need, and that’s what I can try to deliver as an SEO. I’d also say: don’t stop your paid advertising just because SEO has come to the party. You still need the paid visitors to play their role; an SEO won’t take credit for that, but I’m not suggesting you switch it off. The answer, really, is to find every variable you can get an answer for — especially the value of a visit — and where they can’t tell me, I’ll take a guess and ask, can I assume a dollar a visit, is that safe? In an insurance company the figure was more predictable and higher, because people were buying annual policies for $500 or $1,000, so the value of a visit might be $5 or $10 rather than a dollar. Get these figures early in the engagement, and then people start to listen, because suddenly you’re speaking dollars or pounds — their minds start ticking over when they see that 10% more traffic brings in so many more people and therefore so much more profit.
What conversations would you like to have with people, and where can they find you?
A good way is the book’s website — it’s one of many ways to find me, because like all good SEOs I’m easily found on Google. It’s accidentalseomanager.com, and there’s a contact form on it. If people want to find me on LinkedIn, I’m easy to find there too — just send a connection request, but please say something more than clicking the button: mention that you heard me on this podcast, or that you’ve read the book. Then we can connect on other platforms. I’m on a few SEO Slack channels, where a lot of engagement takes place, and I’m also on Slack channels that aren’t related to SEO — which I highly recommend SEOs do, because your customers aren’t SEOs, they’re in most other occupations, so go and find those channels as well.
Connect with Ash Nallawalla
- Book: AccidentalSEOManager.com
- Website: ash.nallawalla.com
- LinkedIn: /in/ashnallawalla
- X: @ashnallawalla
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