Optimism as an Operating System – The Trick That Drives an SEO Project Forward
Expert Tips for Effective Communication and Presentation in SEO with Tom Critchlow 25 January 2022 at 17 H CET (Paris)
In this clip, Tom Critchlow talks about what qualities he thinks an SEO specialist should have to be successful. Delightfully, he coins the term “Optimism as an Operating System” when he talks about the importance of optimism and clarity whether you are an inhouse, freelance or agency SEO. Watch the whole 2 minute clip to get to the bottom of this.
00:00 Unblocking teams and providing clarity
00:28 “Optimism as an Operating System”
01:23 Having clarity in communication
01:46 Avoiding jargons and acronyms
Transcript from: Optimism as an Operating System – The Trick That Drives an SEO Project Forward
Tom: That need doing so that you can unblock teams or provide clarity, whatever it might be.
Jason: And a lot of this just sounds now like the incredibly overenthusiastic high school student who organizes the prom and comes in every day being incredibly cheerful, telling everybody what we’ve managed to achieve and where we need to go. Do you find that you have to be eternally bouncy and cheerful and positive minded?
Tom: I actually wrote a blog post called “Optimism as an Operating System” specifically about how to be… Personally, my default mode of operating is Optimism. It is that positivity which is, Yes, we can do this. Yes, it needs to be done. How are we going to do it? What are the next steps? Et cetera, et cetera. I think more so than being kind of bouncy and extroverted, I think the right model is just to be seen as (a contributor). When a company brings you in, you’re trying to do things the company hasn’t been able to do on their own. So you have to have a recognition that these things are new, and maybe uncomfortable, Maybe they haven’t done them before. They haven’t got a process for it. They don’t have a good mental model for how long it should take. So I think over communicating on these things saying “This is how the project is going to work. These are the things we need to do. This is how long it’s going to take, this is the process we’re going to follow. This is how we’ll know if we’re doing it right. This is how we’ll know if we’re doing it wrong. Here are the ways that it might go wrong”. So, having that communication clarity so that the company you’re working with can feel. somebody is in charge and that this is going as planned. I think that’s the most important thing. and this comes back to this idea again, when you get in the boardroom with an executive team, you want to give them clarity not confusion. And I think a lot of SEOs shoot themselves in the foot by using acronyms and jargon and getting lost in the weeds of the SEO. Rather than providing clarity and saying, “What we need to do is the following three things”.
