Nathan: Welcome to the secret sauce of digital marketing, the Blue Glass Team Farner podcast, where we bring you insider tips and strategies to make your projects even tastier. I’m Nathan Leuenberger, Lead Content at Blue Glass Team Farner. 

Sara: And I’m Sara Moccand-Sayegh, Lead SEO at Blue Glass Team Farner. We are here to share inside stories and a bunch of digital marketing spices. So, what sauce are we cooking up today, Nathan? 

Nathan: Today we’re going to discuss the importance of collaboration between in-house marketers and digital agencies. 

Sara: We have a very special guest with us today. 

Nathan: A very special guest. We’re going to welcome Max, head of SEO at On. Welcome, Max. 

Max: Hello, hello. Thank you for having me. 

Nathan: Welcome to our studio. 

Sara: So, Max, we need to start with a fun question, or really a question that was very important to us. If you were a pair of shoes, which one would you be?

Max: If I were a pair of shoes, I would have to choose from the On-shoe range, obviously, right? I would probably say the current version of the Cloudsurfer. The On Cloudsurfer is a very well-cushioned shoe. It’s a training shoe – not like the high-performance shoe that you would wear when you run a marathon or a half-marathon. 

It’s the type of shoe you wear for your everyday training. It gives you a really smooth ride, helping you get to where you want to be. I like to think of myself as someone who helps others get to where they can be and enjoys the ride doing it. I would love for people to think of me as a Cloudsurfer shoe model. 

Nathan: That’s a good answer. 

Sara: You know what? I would buy it now. After this description, I’m like: “Oh, wow!”. 

Nathan: You don’t even care how it looks anymore.

Sara: Exactly, exactly, like, “I want it!” 

Nathan: I was afraid you would say ‹a trekking sandal› or something, but the Cloudsurfer, of course, that’s a good one. 

Sara: I think it would be helpful for everyone to learn more about your background and how you came to join On.

Max: Okay, let’s take a trip down memory lane. It’s a mix of factors. I was very lucky to begin with. What I studied and what I’m interested in kind of became this Venn diagram that resulted in the job at On. 

Max: I studied media and communication science in Germany. I studied media management and have a master’s degree – so I have a business type of background that helps a lot with SEO in terms of understanding numbers, statistics, and also social psychology: How do certain things work? What makes people tick? What is the value of news? What gets into the news? Stuff like that. How does mass communication work in general? So that’s my academic background. 

And then I worked for a small website company to finance my university. We did this KMU (small and medium-sized business) type of websites. And that’s how I paid my rent and my degree: By building websites. That gave me the tools to ultimately learn the basics of PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript. So I learned that to pay my rent. 

The third thing that comes into this Venn diagram is: Since I was eight or nine years old, I love shoes. It’s a very irrational thing. A foolish way to express my excessive love for shoes. So I would say I’m a sneaker head. Having the skills from building websites I ended up running a sneaker blog in Germany. That kind of worked because people came to the blog through Google. That was basically what paved the way for me to work in SEO. I realized that if I write about a certain shoe I care about, people would come to my blog. 

What if I write about what people care about, such as release dates of certain shoes? What’s the story behind it? Where can I purchase it? What is the exact colorway that I can buy this shoe in? This is the kind of information that people really wanted. All of a sudden, I could see that in Google Search Console. It was magical! Maybe that’s a bit far-fetched, but it was a really cool experience to learn about it this way. It was practical experience. And then – of course – nobody pays their rent with a sneaker blog – I certainly didn’t. 

I ended up working for a travel company, HolidayCheck in Switzerland, or rather based in Switzerland at the beautiful Lake Constance. It used to be probably one of the biggest travel websites in the DACH-region. I was very, very lucky to end up there because they decided they needed a SEO-person. I told them that I have some basic knowledge regarding SEO. After that I was fortunate to learn to work with a really large website, millions of pages and hotel reviews. 

On one hand you have a lot of user-generated content that you can sculpt and that you can make use of, and on the other hand, you have a company where you could learn a lot and experiment on quite a few things. I was very lucky to work with some really smart people that taught me Python and other things. That way I became a professional in the SEO sector. One could say I never looked back from there. 

At some point I worked for a different company in Switzerland. It’s called Comparis. If you need insurance or a house in Switzerland, you go to that website. I worked there and then I saw a job opening at ON. They were looking for a team lead for SEO in the context of a sneaker brand – in the city where I’ve been living the last six years, at the time. 

Again there was this Venn diagram that just fell into place. I was very lucky that those things fell into place. And that I met the right people that trusted me with it along the way. Seeing that I was taking the responsibility for something that I had little experience in. 

Very talented people who shared their knowledge with me helped me be where I am now. And I’m very happy and grateful that I can talk about shoes all day long. 

Sara: Okay, this is fantastic then. 

Nathan: Talk and write about shoes, that’s great. Do you still have your blog? 

Max: I don’t. I passed on the blog in 2019, which was indeed a bit of a sad moment. At some point you have to move on. I think I did that for more than five years. The first person that I personally hired was somebody who helped me write for the sneaker blog. 

Funny enough, he’s now the head of SEO. Actually, we could even get promoted beyond SEO at Mr. Specs, the online shop for glasses. He was an intern at HolidayCheck and I just hired him to help me out with the sneaker blog. And I still, to this day hope that he caught fire for the whole SEO topic through that. Because I think otherwise he would be a teacher right now. 

Nathan: Oh, okay. 

Max: So, you know, there’s, there’s a – 

Sara: A change of career path. 

Max: A change of career path that comes through sneakers and SEO. Sneakers or not, I think SEO is such a cool field, because it’s not this typical marketing where you push something onto the customer, but it’s really about understanding the customer. I think that also ties in with this Sociology background from university: Trying to understand people, trying to see what makes people tick and really just preaching to the choir instead of trying to convince people to buy something that they might not need. 

Nathan: Yeah, that’s cool. So he was your first hire. He told us that, but now you have your own team head on. I think beforehand in one of our discussions you told us that you could build your team. Did you already have a SEO-team when you arrived as a team lead, or What was the way there? 

Max: So the setup at that moment was that there was already one SEO person at the company. For context: On is not an old company. On was founded in 2012 and really exploded to this global company from 2015 onwards – so 2015, 2018. During the pandemic it was growing even further. We’re talking about almost 3,000 employees in a rather short period. And the brand was very successful. There are some very capable people at ON that are excellent at storytelling and making people emotionally engaged. 

In the story of the brand, SEO is something that has evolved over time. If you look at tools like SEMrush – it grows wildly, right? It’s like somebody’s doing a really good SEO job. It was just brand searches increasing. If you’re so successful as a brand, you don’t really have to pay as much attention to certain things. 

Nathan: Yeah. 

Max: If you’re a team lead for something in-house, you always want more people, more power, more this and that. You can always hire more people, but I would say SEO was massively underrepresented in the company. I believe it still is to some extent. 

I think at some point it was obvious that we needed to lift this to a different level, and we needed to bring somebody in who has some experience in having built a team. I built a team at Comparis for search. And they brought me in. I already had one person that worked there previously in the team. I’m very happy to have that experience because when you enter a company, starting from scratch, SEO is also like the job of a historian. And to some extent understanding what has been tried in the past, what certain dynamics are, who the key stakeholders are – all of those things matter. Having somebody who’s already been around is really valuable. 

Of course there’s always a challenge when you’re hired and then all of a sudden there’s a person who didn’t have a team lead for that topic and all of a sudden you were put in front of that person’s nose. To some extent this is not always easy. But I’m very happy we made it work. I’m very happy to have that team member that really contributed to our success. We’re a fully functioning working team now. 

I also poached somebody from my old company. It’s always helpful, when you can bring in someone that you can fully and blindly trust with certain topics. Someone where you know what to expect. I was very lucky in that sense to bring in somebody that I had worked with previously. From there we built this small in-house team. If you think of it, three SEOs for a company of 3,000 people…

Nathan: That’s crazy. 

Max: It’s wild. We’re covering all different types of topics. We’re covering local SEO. We’re covering app store optimization. We’re covering purchasing new domains. You have distributor markets, it’s not On. At the moment we’re building up a distributor business in Dubai. Somebody else is running the business there for us. But you still have to purchase a domain, and all those negotiations are what we do as the SEO team. 

With three people, you can’t do this. So before I started, I said: This is the potential that I see, I can bring in one person. I can try to make it work with the person that’s already there – but I need more punch. If this is the global scale that we want to operate on I need to be able to bring in a bit more power. Before that – at Comparis – which is a much smaller company, but active in very many different verticals, we already collaborated with an agency, so I was very lucky that I was able to bring in the agency for SEO that I had already collaborated with beforehand. Right from the start. 

Sara: So for you, is having agency support primarily a matter of resource constraints?

Max: It’s not just resources, it’s also knowledge. Let’s say, local SEO, for example: I mean, I have a Google Local Scout or whatever that’s called. I’m a Google Local Scout, level six, whatever that means. So if I go to a restaurant, I rate it. To be honest, it goes back to the HolidayCheck days. However, I would not call myself an expert in local SEO. I’m not an expert in data visualization. I’m not an expert in BigQuery, if you need to get all the data from Google Search Console and put it into a nice-looking dashboard. But with an agency, you have experts in all of those fields because let’s face it, SEO is a constantly evolving field. 

There are many different areas where you can have expertise and interests. You can be knowledgeable on a general level. I know what large language models are, but if I really want to find out something in a bit more detail, I would ask you, Sara, right? I think with SEO you have to come to terms with the fact that if you’re doing it at a certain scale, a certain professional level, You have to understand that you will not have all the up-to-date information of what is currently going on.

So you have to bring in external knowledge as well. So, that’s it for the knowledge part. It’s also about the resource – for sure. There are certain tasks that are impossible to do with only three people. Sometimes there are certain tasks where you think about how you could scale them. And you have a – I would call it a “workbench” for certain things. Content production for instance. At some point it becomes repetitive, but you have to create a workflow. To scale that, you need additional resources. And for that, I think an agency is vital. At the moment we are currently working with three different agencies in different fields. They’re different experts in very particular fields. 

As an SEO, I understand what digital PR is and have attended a few talks on the topic. However, I don’t really know which news outlets to target, how to approach them effectively, or what strategies work best. I could have a conversation about it, but I don’t have hands-on experience. I definitely need external knowledge in that case.

Sara: I understand that. I’m not an expert in digital PR. Just last week I was discussing digital PR with a colleague. He’s an expert in the field, and I was asking him for advice. It’s very clear that it’s a very broad domain and I understand there is the need of having expertise all over. This brings me to the next question. What would be the perfect collaboration between an agency and an in-house team? 

Max: I’m going to have to say it depends. I think there are some basic things that I think are really important for a collaboration between agency and in-house team. You have to be clear on the communication channels and on the cadence of the work. What I, as an in-house team, don’t really need is having 150 pages of a PDF export of a page analysis or something that can be part of a working process.

Generally, I believe that it’s really important to find a way to plug an agency into the ways that you work, which means you have to plug into the systems that you use for working, which can be the Slack channel – Slack or Teams. You have to plug into the ticketing system. 

All the technical SEO stuff that we do and the technical SEO team of the agency we work with – they’re part of our Confluence, they’re part of our Jira. That’s also a question of scaling. If I need documentation on how redirects work, I don’t want an email that I would then have to upload to the Confluence page for the developers› documentation. I want the person from the agency to be able to upload their information right where it is needed, and I want them to be able to interact with the stakeholders. If anyone has a question, they don’t necessarily need to go through me as the in-house contact. It can go directly to the person who has the knowledge.

I really believe it’s very important to plug in anyone and give them the ability to bring their output, their knowledge to the organization – right where the organization is happening. So communication, documentation and the workflows. You need to find someone who plugs into that. 

Nathan: On has been growing a lot over the past few years. It’s not just a Swiss company, it has become a global phenomenon. Of course, you’ve talked about local SEO before. Are you currently only working with Swiss agencies, or are these agencies also spread around the globe? I mean, there could also be some differences in terms of work culture, and, of course, time zones that could complicate things. 

Max: That’s a really good question because if you’re a global company and especially if you have global customers, it’s important to keep in mind that the customer dictates in the end. I personally believe ultimately the customer should dictate what you do and where you do it. As a global company, you need to have a global perspective.

An example would be our content efforts that we’re now trying to scale a bit more with a focus on search. We selected a company from the US because that’s our main market. Our in-house team consists of me, I’m German, one of my team members is from Colombia, and the other team member’s from Italy. So we’re very Eurocentric. And we’re having an additional South American perspective on it. 

We don’t have someone who has a cultural background from the U.S. in our team. And you can watch all the Netflix shows in the world; you cannot replicate the cultural view on that. When you have the luxury to select an agency or freelancers, you have to ask yourself the question: “What am I lacking?”. I think that’s what you were alluding to: It’s truly a cultural level. We were lacking that, that U.S. lens. 

For our team, we have U.S. colleagues from the SEA team. The structure is a bit different. So that was a very conscious decision to bring someone in from that perspective. The technical SEO agency that we collaborate with is from Germany. This is a coincidence. I think Swiss engineering is like German engineering; both have a good reputation. If you’re in Switzerland, obviously, Swiss engineering is much better.

Nathan: There’s no judgment there. It’s a judgment-free zone.

Max: Yeah, I think that it’s important to bring in different perspectives. Not just regarding agencies – also regarding tool suppliers: We work with Botify, that’s a French company. I think it’s important to have that perspective as well sometimes. And you always have to challenge your partners, your collaborators, not to hold back with their perspective. Because, at some point, everybody tries to be really polite and tries not to overly impose the way that they’re thinking. Having a multicultural perspective is super important for a global company: If your tools, your partners, your agencies and also your team members come from different backgrounds – that really contributes to avoid having this monocultural view on what you’re doing. Your customers are not living down the road. They live all over the globe. They have different perspectives. The closer you are to someone who understands that perspective, the better. 

Nathan: I mean, you can try to analyze the questions that are being asked on Google. You can see that they are being asked, but maybe you don’t understand why. “What is the cultural background?” like you said. So, I think that’s really important to have these insights as well – insights that you really can’t get from Zurich or maybe Berlin. That’s something we also sometimes lack as a whole in Switzerland.

Of course, it’s good that we put our Swiss partners first. A lot of companies, and we have that in mind. But as you said, as soon as someone’s a global company, you have to get out of the Eurocentric view.

Nathan: You said you’re also working in Dubai. The Middle Eastern part is also getting quite important – and the Asian part as well. Interesting to see or hear about your perspective there and how you’re going to take on these challenges. 

Max: Maybe a quick shout-out to translators. Language is one element, but it’s also really about the culture, right? You have to translate certain things into a culture, and you need to have a human translator who understands the three-dimensional nature of a translation or culture. It is a different thing than ChatGPT, where I could easily translate a sentence in Korean. I can do that. I can kind of wing it. I can get some basic understanding, but to fully grasp a certain dynamic in a certain culture is an asset that you can get from a good translator.

They don’t just translate the words; they understand the perspective of people in a certain context and country. And this is why I would say: “Get a different translator for Spain than for Mexico”. It’s Spanish, but it’s different. Then you could also say, maybe they use different words. It’s the same way in Switzerland and Germany: You have different words, but a Swiss customer – leave alone the three or four different areas in Switzerland, or the people from the valley compared to the others – might be different. 

I think there’s this element of really understanding what matters to people, what matters in that culture and what type of dynamics exists. If you have a good translator, don’t just ask them to translate what you’ve written, but ask them: “does this make sense? Would a person in that cultural context and with that language understand this?” 

Sara: I was just thinking about diversity.

Max: That’s another layer. If you have an agency or if you’re choosing to collaborate with someone: That person should not just completely replicate what your view is, right? Because going back to the one guy that I worked with on the sneaker blog, we listen to the same music, we both love shoes, we’re from a similar background, maybe from different regions in Germany, but with too much alike to complement each other in a team ultimately. That’s just us having the same perspective. That does not add anything. 

Diversity is super important regarding everything: gender identity, religion, background, demographics, and so on. When you really look in the mirror and check yourself: Which boxes are you checking? The people that you interact with shouldn’t just replicate what your view is because in this scenario nothing’s really added to anything. But having a more diverse view of the world and the market is super important because ultimately customers are multifaceted.

Sara: Just to sum it up, the reason why you would also work with other agencies is in fact the diversity as well as the different skills they provide and the lack of resources. So there are three main reasons why an in-house SEO team would work with an external agency. 

Max: Yeah. I would say, firstly it’s of course resource – because then you can scale certain things a bit easier. The second reason is bringing in different perspectives and views, maybe a different cultural background. And the third reason is different experience. 

On has 3,000 people working for the company. All of them are huge fans of the brand. Everybody that works at On almost goes to work in an uniform. So we all wear the same shoes, the same t-shirts and we love the brand. We’re like an ambassador for the brand. But that means that our experience very much circles around this bubble. 

If I have an agency that works for different clients as well, they could say: “Well, we work for this Glasses manufacturer that maybe caters for a different audience, but we’ve already done this. Let’s break it down to the SEO level, for instance this product listing page, we did this and that really worked.” 

Again, that adds to our view because going to the office and being surrounded by people like this is great. I can do that. This is amazing. But if I have someone that has an outside perspective, they could say: “Well, that’s great. But there are other things that are great as well. And this has worked out.” Or maybe something that, you know, we all drink the Kool-Aid. You need to have someone who tells you what doesn’t look as great – just to check yourself. That’s another thing that an agency can definitely bring to an in-house team: Having the experience from other websites and other clients. If you work in a larger company that is not part of a conglomerate, you really lack this. 

This is one experience going back to the time at HolidayCheck. That was such a lucky situation for me to be in because HolidayCheck was part of a larger media conglomerate: Boda Media has assets all over the DACH-region in Austria, Switzerland and Germany. And every half year there was a SEO round table where all the people from different websites would come together and just exchange ideas. And then all of a sudden you’re in a room with twenty people, all they do all day long is SEO – but for different websites – and then you have a different conversation. 

Whereas if you’re the three people in-house in the shoe company, everybody talks about shoes all day. You get experience from other things if you’re lacking that as a company. An agency can bring this experience and this outside view that you need sometimes. There’s a huge benefit in that. 

Nathan: To wrap things up, we want to hear some things. We want to have your expertise. What do you think SEO work is going to look like in a year with all the changes in AI and everything coming up? I mean, you’ve been to a lot of stations now. Oh, you’re already thinking hard about it. I see. Do you think a lot will change over the next course of the year? 

Max: The only constant is change. That’s for sure. I think the interesting part of working for on and our main market being the US is, if you look at the SERP in the US, I don’t even have to go into ChatGPT or different channels like TikTok and God knows what else or just spamming Reddit. Only looking at how dynamic the SERPs are for Google search in the US, how all of a sudden there’s this Brodie Clark. Big shout-out to him. It feels to me there’s something fundamentally new on a weekly basis. You’re on vacation, you come back, and you’re like, wow, this completely has changed! The playing field is constantly evolving. 

What I personally believe doesn’t change, way smarter people than me have talked about this, Rand Fishkin and others: There’s a core to marketing that is never going to change and that is to understand the needs of your customer and understand certain feedback loops. To try to improve based on that and to not just focus on celebrating yourself because of your current success. To try to adapt to what people need, try to listen what people need. I think that is not going to change. And to be honest, like one thing that has already changed and that I really don’t look at that at all anymore: I don’t really care for a ranking position. Look at the SERP, there’s like fifty million things in front of position number one. 

Ultimately, I care if people come to our website or not. I ask myself: What do people search for? Is this something that’s interesting to people? Let’s say we’re talking about tennis at the moment. What is interesting in tennis? Is it how to play a backhand – Roger Federer’s famous one-handed backhand? That’s a very specific thing to ask. Are people interested in that? I think that’s a story. That’s interesting and it’s relevant to your target audience. That’s to some extent regardless of a SEO landing page for that. 

Trying to understand what matters for the customer, what matters in your vertical and your niche – I don’t think that’s something that’s going to go away. The interface might go away. Sometimes I think we had the luxury that we’ve had it easy the last ten years. I feel like… we had it easy. You could just go to Google Analytics, look up what you want, look up a few clicks, and you understand, or at least I felt I understood what was going on. With GA4, I’m not as comfortable to look at the numbers. 

There’s this sampling and God knows what, and then you’d take that data and transfer it into a looker dashboard. It’s just not as easy. So those things change all of a sudden. The tools change. That made me realize that you shouldn’t be too over-reliant on your current skills because from one day to the next they may no longer be as relevant. 

So try to look at what the essence of this is: In GA it’s not knowing that you click on this specific report to get what you want. And then if a tool changes or if an interface changes, if a data point changes, where else can you get the essence of that information? That’s a constantly evolving thing, but the essence of marketing doesn’t change. 

Nathan: That was a really cool answer, especially with the part about the backhand. I just felt that you were already thinking about how we can do a story out of this, and it’s not just going “paint by the numbers”, how can we rank that, but: How is this, what’s the story you can tell with your brand, for your brand, in the context of your own bubble. And personally, I – as a content dude – am happy about that. That this might get a lot more attention now, the whole storytelling aspect of it and not just trying to push these numbers up on the Google first page. So, yeah, I’m looking forward to your future. 

Max: Yeah. I think good quality and supply to a demand is always going to be relevant. The Google algorithm was nothing other than recreating a good recommendation system. You need to have something that’s relevant to be recommended, that is going to work. And it might not be your landing page, but maybe it’s your product. 

If your product really fits a certain market, it’s going to go viral on TikTok. But it’s not really going to go viral as a product on TikTok if it’s useless. The value of that is only going to increase. Especially regarding content production – the rise of AI for example – challenges us. How do we make something human-centric? Because nobody cares for ChatGPT to tell me how to play a backhand. I want a real human to play Roland-Garros and maybe even one Roland-Garros to tell me how to do this. 

With Iga, one of our athletes, we have somebody who has done that. So having an article that maybe circles around her views on something, that has a lot of value. You have to understand that people who want to buy tennis shoes, they might eventually want to know how to play tennis. So there’s your content angle, right? And then you have to create good content around that. I think that has a place. I think that the nuances change from the technology or where we are as a society and all that. But the essence of good quality content doesn’t change. 

Sara: Okay, thank you so much for everything. It’s time for the last question. Are you ready? 

Max: Depends a lot on the question. 

Sara: What is your secret sauce? That could be in your work life or it could be in your private life. Tell us what your secret sauce is.

Nathan: Open for interpretation. 

Sara: Exactly. 

Max: I was gonna say Salsa Valentina, that’s a Mexican sauce you can put on almost everything that’s lower or medium quality food that you cook up in the evening without much time. You add that on top of it and it tastes good. 

Nathan: What’s the name again? I’m interested in… Salsa Valentina. 

Sara: Because you cook mediocre or…? 

Nathan: Oh, that’s mean. 

Max: Yeah, it’s a chili sauce from Mexico, you can even find it in a well-assorted supermarket in Switzerland or other places. That’s the secret sauce, but I would say, okay, maybe more on a metaphorical level. Maybe the attitude or the perspective that it’s not about you, it’s about the other person. I think that’s, that translates to a lot of things. That translates to friendships, that translates to how you interact with your family, it translates to your professional life, how you work, and it very conveniently also translates to SEO. 

I think that understanding the needs of those around you, however wide you draw that circle, seeing the value in that, respecting that and thinking of that, being aware of it, is a very good starting point to stuff working out, I would say. 

There’s a John F. Kennedy quote: Don’t ask what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. It’s a bit cheesy, but I do think there’s this value in any context that you’re in, especially nowadays, I do think about what you can bring to everything, everyone around you and less about what you can get out of it. Because if you try to bring what you can bring to the table, you are gonna get something out of it anyway. I would say that’s a good attitude. 

Sara: We are happy with that answer. That is a good one. I hope that the other guests, that will talk on the podcast will be on the same level as you and this answer.

Max: Well, thank you for having me. It’s in a good place. It’s always nice to have a good conversation. So, thank you for having me. 

Nathan: And thank you so much to all of our listeners out there. We hope you’ve discovered a new sauce to stock your pantry with. And if not, we hope you were at least entertained.

Sara: If you enjoyed this podcast, please give us a follow, leave a rating, and let us know who you would like to learn from next. See you next time and don’t skimp on the sauce.