Riley Hope on Ethics in website positioning & Automotive website positioning

Riley Hope visited my office in October to talk about SEO. Riley began in SEO by doing unpaid internships for nonprofits after high school, this was in the “dark ages” of YouTube and Facebook, she said. She reached out to a company founder she found online who she seemed to like and got a proper contract job. There she learned SEO and worked there for about two and a half years. Riley began her Masters while she was a director at the agency she works for. It was fun explaining how SEO works to her master’s advisor at university.

Ethics in SEO:

Riley explained the ethics behind SEO, she actually wrote her PhD on the subject. Some were concerned with not deceiving or manipulating Google’s algorithm for personal or financial gain. The other part didn’t hurt the users / searchers and was also an aspect of collecting data on people related to data collection – GDPR stuff.

Riley said she recently explained how she got into SEO on Twitter over the last year or so. She observed that some misinformation companies target small businesses and others in the industry target them. We talked a little about some well-known names in the industry, and then talked back about their careers, including their work in the SEO auto space.

Automotive SEO:

We then talked about some of the challenges of SEO work in the automotive space and in the automotive industry. She said that working in the auto industry, specifically SEO, was like working in any other industry in the early 2000s and trying to get SEO things done is super hard.

We mentioned a few names of auto SEOs like Melissa Fach and Greg Gifford. Riley explained that SEOs in auto SEO are predominantly male, but more female in their agency.

You can find out more about Riley Hope at RileyHope.com or follow Riley on Twitter @ reillyhope13.

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