Asad Zulfahri – SEO Wizard, Monster – Transcript

Asad Zulfahri was the pioneering Technical SEO Leadat Monster Worldwide, the global job seeking platform. He joined us to talk about his work at monster.com a month after he had left that company for a position at Zapier.

The Q&A Session with Asad was held on December 14^th, 2016. This transcript has been edited for punctuation, grammar, etc.

What was the biggest challenge you overcame at such a big company?

Biggest challenge is going through all the various levels of approvals to get things done, even simple things.

What’s the biggest mistake you see people starting out making with the technical SEO efforts?

Blindly implementing something without first thinking whether this actually applies to their use-case or why it’s actually needed.

What’s the most challenging technical SEO riddle you’ve had to solve?

Experimenting with asyncJavascript delivered via GTM. See whether Google could pick-up on-page changes and how long does it take to actually see it in SERP!

What is the one thing that Monster wasn’t doing that surprised you?

Proper tag management. They had a paid solution, but nobody really owned it! Adding a simple google verification was an adventure!

Have you had the pleasure of working with Jason Feingold or Jon Queen?

Nope

What is your recommended method for link building?

Community outreach and co-marketing with partners of course!

What is the advice/material/source that you would like a beginner to start with?

https://moz.com/learn/seo

What SEO tools are they using at monster.com?

Main go-to-tool was BrightEdge but there are custom internal solutions we built.

What are some keywords you are having a super hard time getting ranking for?

At Monster, we were already ranking very well for job related keywords but somehow Indeed keeps killing us!

Why does website traffic go down after you switch from http to https? How can you fix that without going back to http?

When we switched to https, we did not see a dip in traffic, it actually increased.

What’s one piece of advice that you wish people would follow for SEO?

Keep on experimenting. There are a lot of new developments that Google tests with select partners. The only way to get ahead is keep experimenting and dive into the data!

What was the result of length of time required for the SERP to reflect asyncjs on-page changes with GTM?

2-3 weeks. + Manual request to submit to index on GSC.

Can you recommend any good books to learn SEO?

I’ve never actually got a physical book, but I did start my career with seobook.com. A good place to really read, learn and keep up to date is moz.com

What do you think are the best ways to outrank competitors in the SERPS?

Make use of Structured Data where applicable and create better content. People naturally share good content, and having good backlinks (regardless of nofollow or not) will slowly and surely improve rankings!

Coming from a beginner in the industry, what has been the biggest mistake you’ve made and how did you make sure it didn’t happen again?

One thing I learned is that to be an effective in the SEO industry, you need to be able to speak in layman with management/marketing team AND also be able to talk to developers. Ultimately, developers are your friends!

What is the best way to find and target long tail keywords for a given page?

Well keyword research is best done before your build the page. It’s really about ensuring that a user intent is satisfied. I use UberSuggest and AnswerThePublic to find main keywords, then combine them into KeywordShitter to spit out long tails. Dump them into ahrefs and see which best fits the content/intent.

Are you a developer?

Partially. I can code (PHP, C#, Python) and have a Computer Science background. A medium-level coder at best.

What was the most effective programmatic SEO change you made that impacted thousands or hundreds of thousands of pages?

Look at the competitors’ structure. Have your UX team dive in and make it better! Also look for templated titles and description for starters. Eventually you’ll need to do some manual work to have better content.

Have you had success with Rich Snippets at all? If so, was there anything specific you did to allow them to show?

Proper lists markup and tables (yes the old

) works wonders!