Kevin Indig is Head of SEO at Atlassian, Former Director of SEO at Dailymotion.

The Q&A Session with Kevin was held on February 13^th, 2019. This transcript has been edited for punctuation, grammar, etc.

Hey y’all! Thanks for tuning in. I’m a bit under the weather but that doesn’t stop me from answering your questions. Feel free to ask me anything.

Welcome! What is one common mistake that you think smaller firms/startups make in the SEO space?

I actually wrote an article about that! ->

https://www.kevin-indig.com/seo-mistakes-young-startups-make-every-time/

But to summarize it: it’s often strategic decisions like putting a blog on a subdomain, or focus on vanity metrics like traffic without taking bottom line into account.

What are some suggestions you have for someone trying to further their skill sets in SEO today?

Be a practitioner as much as you can. Create projects that you can try things out on. Ask experts in different areas on Twitter or per email about advice. Aaaaand: write your lessons down. Question them.

Wondering if you have any insight in how to influence sitelinks for your site – like how do you get Google to show them to begin with (the nice big ones I mean), and how can you impact which pages show?

After my experience, they are very much derived from internal linking. Check what the most internally linked pages on search console are. Often, you find a big overlap between sitelinks and internal links. To be fair, Google often messes ’emup.

How do you find ideas for new SEO based projects, and prioritize the projects you and your team will work on?

Love that question! I cluster projects into three categories: expansion (how to generate net new?), solidify (where to optimize to reach top3 positions?), maintain (where to rework/edit content and do tech SEO hygiene). We try to take care of one project for each of those categories per quarter.

What’s the first thing you look at to gauge the level of SEO effort on an existing site you begin working on?

There is a maturity model I create for every site depending on their content, links, and technical structure. It also very much depends on the competitive landscape, meaning where competitorsare strong.

Wondering what SEO tools you like best?

I like AHREFs, Screaming Frog, SEMrush, Chrome dev console, and a couple of smaller SEO tools.

Have any experience with SEO agencies? If so, what’s the best way to leverage that relationship?

Yes, I started on the agency side! I learned a ton during that time. In terms of steering/controlling agencies, that’s a huuuuge topic. I like it when the agency doesn’t need a full-time role to be controlled, but that very much depends on how long you work with the agency and what they handle. I can recognize a good agency quickly by how they plan and report their work. Does that answer your question?

Did you do metadata snippet split testing at Atlassian? Which hypotheses were most often proved right?

We never tested the meta-snippet, but title, h1, and such drivers. The honest answer is that we didn’t see meta-descriptions move the needle much. Only in edge cases.

Was alluding to testing `