Introduction to Brian Wood
Today we have Brian Wood, an SEO leader who has scaled SEO teams at big enterprise brands. He started the SEO team at Wayfair and led SEO at Houzz. He’s grown sites to hundreds of millions in SEO revenue.
Brian is a strategic thinker who is analytical and builds high performing SEO teams. His work goes beyond rankings, he focuses on creating meaningful user experiences that drive retention and growth. He continues to shape the SEO and digital marketing world by posting thought leadership content on social media to educate his followers on SEO and challenge the status quo.
Table of Contents
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Who is Brian Wood?
Early Life and Education
Brian Wood grew up in Minnesota and his childhood was “Tom Sawyer-esque” – running through the woods, catching snakes and salamanders and exploring nature. He thought he was going to be an animal scientist. But that didn’t quite work out.
After high school Brian did a post-secondary program where he took college classes for both high school and college credit. He took classes in creative writing, photography, chemistry and C programming. But when he graduated he found himself at a crossroads:
At the end of my free ride period where I graduated high school I’m like, “Oh, and I’m gonna have to pay to keep going.” I was very determined that the point of college is to get a job. And everything I liked doing I didn’t think was a good career to go into and everything I thought was a good career I didn’t like doing enough to do it every day.
Early Career in Gaming and Marketing
Brian’s career started in the tabletop gaming industry working for Fantasy Flight Games when it was a small company. He loved the work but the pay was minimal. As Brian says, “When I left I was the director of sales and marketing and I was making $25,000 a year.”
From there Brian worked in various marketing roles which eventually led him to SEO in the early 2000s. He was intrigued by the field and started messing around with websites, including a World of Warcraft blog called Warcraft Hunters Union which at its peak got 800,000 visits a month.
Transition to Enterprise SEO
Brian’s enterprise SEO career started at Best Buy which he describes as a pivotal moment: “Working for Best Buy was like working in a Dilbert cartoon, but working on enterprise SEO was awesome.” This led him to join Wayfair in 2013 where he built the SEO team from scratch.
At Wayfair Brian built out a strong testing culture: “We were able to build out just an amazing testing culture and function there where eventually I had a policy that we would run any test that would let us learn something about how Google works even if we knew there was no way it was applicable to Wayfair.”
After Wayfair Brian moved to Houzz where he had to reverse a 50% loss in SEO traffic over 3 years. Currently Brian works at Age of Learning the company behind ABC Mouse where he finds purpose in contributing to early childhood education.
Current Projects that Excite Brian Wood
Link Building Research and Strategy
One of Brian’s current areas of focus is link building. He’s been conducting extensive research and testing on the effectiveness of various link building strategies:
“I’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars buying links through agencies, digital PR firms. And I was thinking about this cause I’ve observed it’s been incredibly difficult for any of those places to get links that have a measurable benefit.”
Brian’s research has led him to an interesting conclusion:
“It seemed like the only links that counted were the links that were actually driving traffic. And Google can see that.”
This insight has shifted his approach to link building, especially for high-authority sites:
“For an authoritative site, I don’t care if I get a thousand links to my homepage, not going to affect anything. Anything on my site, like I need to get links to the page that needs to rank, which rules out most digital PR.”
Rethinking Link Building for Enterprise Sites
Brian’s current excitement lies in developing new strategies for link building that focus on quality over quantity:
“The actual number of links that matter, that are influencing rankings are super small. And I’m like, that suddenly brings it into a world where you don’t need a scalable link building strategy. You can literally at that point have a couple of people who are just sitting down and being like, okay, we’re going to look at this page. And what are sites that get traffic?”
This approach, while more labor-intensive, could potentially yield better results than traditional mass link building tactics.
Tactical and Strategic Enterprise SEO Advice from Brian Wood
Internal Linking and Site Structure
Brian emphasizes the importance of internal linking and site structure for enterprise websites:
“One of the things I think is super important is your internal linking, your internal navigation, making sure you have a hierarchical navigation, making sure there’s a crawl path to everything.”
He advises reducing “link bloat,” especially in header navigation and footers, which can lead to meaningful ranking gains.
SEO Split Testing
Brian strongly advocates for continuous SEO split testing, particularly for title tags and meta descriptions. However, he cautions against focusing solely on traffic metrics:
“Pay attention, not just to traffic and significance of traffic, but also like, look at your time on site, look at your conversions, whatever they are.”
He warns against optimizing for click-through rate at the expense of user experience, as this can lead to long-term ranking drops.
Crawl Bandwidth Management
For enterprise sites with millions of pages, crawl bandwidth becomes a crucial factor:
“Enterprise is the one world of SEO where crawl bandwidth matters… When you have millions and tens of millions of pages, there becomes this trade-off of like, ‘Oh, I want to open up some new level of facets of filters.’ So this new whole template that’s got 3 million pages in it of which 300,000 they’re going to get indexed. And that’s going to actually reduce crawling elsewhere.”
Brian advises regularly analyzing server logs to identify and address crawl inefficiencies.
Site Hygiene
Maintaining good site hygiene is crucial for enterprise websites:
“Site hygiene is sort of a generic term that means looking for errors on your site… having URLs that shouldn’t be indexed, because it’s an empty page. You never meant for that page to exist. It used to have something, but it’s been taken down, or duplicate pages.”
He recommends regular audits to identify and clean up these issues, which can accumulate quickly on large sites.
Balancing Technical SEO and Content Optimization
When asked about balancing technical SEO and content optimization, Brian acknowledges the challenge:
“You have to do both, and you have to do both as much as you can, and you don’t have enough resources to do anything as much as you want.”
He suggests that enterprise SEO often leans too heavily on the technical side and recommends occasionally focusing on optimizing individual pages to gain insights that can be applied at scale.
Mobile Optimization
Regarding mobile optimization, Brian states:
“Everything is mobile first at this point. I don’t know of a single site right now that is not on the mobile index. So it’s like mobile and desktop both matter, right? For these user metrics, these click metrics that are influencing the algorithm.”
Site Speed Optimization
Brian acknowledges the challenges of site speed optimization in enterprise environments:
“Getting any kind of optimization for site speed at an enterprise scale in a meaningful difference is so hard. There are always people in an enterprise company who care about speed. There are always speed optimization projects happening, but every PM who cares about conversion rate doesn’t give a rat’s ass about anything else.”
He suggests that while Google may not directly reward site speed in its algorithm, speed influences user metrics that Google does care about. Brian recommends conducting tests to quantify the impact of speed changes on conversions to make more informed decisions about feature implementations.
Where Does Brian See the Future of Enterprise SEO Going?
Continued Evolution of Google’s Strategy
Brian observes a long-term trend in Google’s approach:
“Google has always, always worked to direct more searches to ads and to other Google-owned pages… And for a long time, the increase in number of searchers and the increase in number of searches each searcher made still let there be overall SEO traffic growth. And I think we’ve crossed a tipping point now where we’re actually seeing Google directing less traffic out to the web than it used to.”
Despite this trend, Brian believes there will still be significant traffic and money in the SEO space.
Impact of AI on SEO
Regarding the impact of AI on SEO, Brian sees both short-term and long-term effects:
- Short-term impact:
- AI will be better at providing quick, factual answers, potentially reducing traffic to sites that focus on simple informational queries.
- Some content teams at enterprise sites have already seen a drop in traffic for basic informational articles.
- Long-term outlook:
- Brian doesn’t believe AI will replace search entirely, especially for complex queries or product recommendations.
- There’s a possibility that AI might use search engines to provide results, in which case SEO strategies would need to adapt but would remain relevant.
Shift Towards User Behavior Signals
Brian notes a shift in Google’s ranking factors:
“Google, right, for a long time has been like, ‘Dear God, how do we not use links?’ The super easily manipulated signal. And it seems like something Google has really latched onto is we are going to find out what people like, where people go, and then we’re going to tell people that’s where you should go.”
This shift favors big brands and high-authority sites, potentially making it harder for smaller, niche sites to rank well.
Importance of Demand Generation
As a result of these trends, Brian predicts that demand generation will become a crucial part of SEO strategy:
“SEO is going to become this traffic channel that you need to seed the pot before you’re going to get the SEO traffic. You need to prove to Google that you’re a site that people want to go to.”
This shift may make it more challenging for new or smaller sites to gain visibility through SEO alone.
How to Get in Contact with Brian Wood
Brian welcomes connections and discussions about SEO. The best way to reach him is through LinkedIn:
- Search for “Brian Wood SEO” on LinkedIn
- Send him a message or connect request
Brian is always happy to talk SEO but humorously requests: “If you’re selling links, just please God, no, just don’t.”
Advice to His Younger Self
When asked what advice he would give to his younger self, Brian reflected:
“I think I would tell my younger self to take bigger swings. I think there was a time when I was like ambitious, and energetic and without children and half the time single. And I was very, very productive, but I was aiming for here. I was like, I remember there was a point that was like, you know, if I have a site that makes a hundred dollars a month, like on autopilot, maybe just twice a year I go update it. You know, if I have just like 12 of those sites, like I could just live off of that. That would be amazing.”
Brian realized that he was setting his sights too low:
“I’m sitting there fantasizing about making $15,000 a year and retiring. And I think for a very similar effort, if I had taken bigger swings, you know, I’d had more misses, but you don’t need as many hits to get a better outcome.”
This reflection emphasizes the importance of setting ambitious goals and not being afraid to aim high, even if it means risking more failures along the way.
Current Sources of Inspiration
Brian shared two primary sources of inspiration that currently influence his thinking:
- SparkToro Office Hours Webinars: Brian expressed growing fondness for the occasional Office Hours webinars hosted by SparkToro, the company founded by Rand Fishkin (former founder of Moz): “SparkToro is a really cool tool. Um, but he [Rand Fishkin] has been talking about a lot of things that are like very interesting marketing things like zero click marketing, but also lately a lot of SEO related stuff.” Brian admires Fishkin’s approach to sharing knowledge: “I love the fact that I believe that Rand Fishkin genuinely himself believes that by being genuinely helpful, by being really helpful to people and just for free, here’s really good, useful stuff, that that’s what’s going to make him successful. And that’s the right thing to do.”
- Book: “Creativity Inc.” by Ed Catmull: Brian recommended this book about the founding and management of Pixar: “This is like a bio of Pixar written by the guys who founded Pixar. And then a lot of it’s just like fun stories about how they created Pixar and how they had to manage Steve Jobs when he bought Pixar and keep him out of the actual moviemaking side of things.” Brian finds the book valuable for two main reasons: a) Insights on managing creative teams: “They talk about how to manage creative teams, which I think to me, SEO counts as like SEO is like, I need my SEO teams to be thinking creatively, to be having ideas, to not just be following the agency playbook.” b) Replicable success: “They founded Pixar, which was cool, but a lot of people have founded successful companies, but then they got bought by Disney. They got put in charge of Disney’s animation studios. And like that suddenly Disney was making big hit animated movies again, which they hadn’t for like a decade. And so I was like, okay, there’s something to what these guys say. They know something that is replicable.”
These sources of inspiration reflect Brian’s interest in innovative marketing strategies, creative management techniques, and replicable models of success, all of which inform his approach to enterprise SEO.
Conclusion
Brian Wood’s insights into enterprise SEO provide valuable guidance for professionals navigating the complex world of large-scale search engine optimization. His emphasis on testing, user experience, and adapting to evolving search engine algorithms offers a roadmap for success in the ever-changing landscape of digital marketing.
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