the SEO Coach – Carla dos Santos
The SEO Coach persona is something I have been my whole career, which over the years has highlighted to me the personas that come into my orbit to support their career advancement or teach them SEO.
What is the SEO coaches persona?
The SEO Coach is an individual who is very experienced in what she does. She has enough experience in leading teams to know that she is able to teach effectively. She has been successful in senior management. She is an experienced producer in all things digital. She has a calling to teach SEO and is deeply passionate about it. Coaching comes naturally to this individual.
Who should work with The SEO Coach?
For now most of my coaching students are 3+ years old in their careers. I coach a lot of senior managers and entrepreneurs also – not only in digital, but in career advancement or pivot strategies. Most recently I coached a financial manager from one job into another to get the career advancement they wanted from the pivot that they could not get where they were.
In all cases of coaching the below list is the baseline inclusion for all students:
- communicating effectively with clients and colleagues in good times; and bad
- identifying business opportunities to grow clients and their results
- understanding digital marketing fundamentals (all disciplines)
- understanding b2b, b2c, d2c strategies and how to market to them
- auditing, documenting and digital triage – prioritising your work for results
- websites and UX / UJ / CRO and a big focus on site speed – extension of SEO
- processes and timelines for any production output (discipline specific)
- the digital career path – where / when you should advance / pivot
- reporting data and how to use it to inform your next move
This is both career and skills coaching – these are the persona types I work with:
these persona types can be a single persona, or like me a person with many personas in their career
- Individual Coaching – this person is an SEO and wants to upskill to the point where they are able to skills transfer allowing them to grow and shape their career into becoming SEO specialists.
- Individual Project Management Coaching – this person is a technical human and wants to master technical SEO and technical project management, including how-to for all client facing Project Docs.
- Individual Career Advancement – this person is in their career, and is looking to advance strategically, but needs a plan and support to guide them to their next level.
- Individual Pivot Strategies – this person can come from any career with the desire to pivot into digital, but they do not know how to start or at what career level they should enter in.
- Individual SEO strategists – this person is usually a senior level SEOs who want to learn how to document their SEO and to create full SEO strategies and ultimately to manage the teams that will implement the strategy
- SME Training Owners – this person is usually the founder and I teach them the basics of digital marketing to assist them in growing their brands – in most cases I am their SEO resource who implements their SEO. I also assist these SMEs with building in house competencies by assisting with interviews and shortlisting suitable candidates.
- SME Training Inhouse teams – these people are an internal team, and the SME owner is motivated to upskill them, define process and streamline reporting and outputs and collaborations.
- Corporate Teams Training – this person is the usually the owner of the project or the head of a department needing to be upskilled. This can take any shape from doing work myself i.e. CRM journey specs / upskilling teams in all things digital or writing the tech documentation for a digital asset i.e. a new app
- Business Change Management – this person needs a digital environment audit, and does not have a senior digital in the business. Here I am asked to audit skills, technology and processes to make recommendations to remove the speed bums and hurdles. Here I do a solid SWOT strategy and sometimes implement it myself / coach the internal teams.
- Digital Project / Production Managers – this person has had at least 5 years in their digital career and the next step up is to become the head of digital – succeeding here requires an strong understanding of managing the studio end to end.
