For sure. Thank you, Anna very much. I'm very happy to be a part of the women in tech, global uh community and this conference and also to support uh all the women in technology.Uh I want to say first few words about me, although I'm not the person who will take much time to present myself. I'm uh director of SEO in a Global Savings Group, one amazing company uh based in Munich, Germany with offices all around the world. I'm leading global SEO team. Before that I had around 15 years of experience in Seo search engine optimization. Marketing. I worked in SEO software company called Search Metrics. I was also leading digital marketing for one of the largest publishers uh Ring Ringer Axel Springer in Europe.

And I was also for a little bit more than six years, an agency owner for Seo and digital marketing services. Uh I would like to start with the basics. I don't know how many of you are here who already kick started your career in digital marketing. Maybe some of you are thinking about it or are in other areas of tech and marketing and thinking about changing into Seo for those who are complete newbies to the terminology, seo or search engine optimization, this is what it stands for. It's a discipline we usually say digital marketing discipline, but it can also be a product discipline. It can be also a user experience and design discipline. And in general, it can be a tech discipline that supports uh of the websites and performance of products. And we can say in a nutshell uh search engine optimization is a specific set of marketing and technology disciplines that supports acquisition of organic traffic via search engines, mostly Google. But if you are somewhere around the world and not in Europe, not in us, you will also hear about Baidu uh Yandex. Many other search engines that all the users around the world are using to type their terms their queries and to research to shop for read information, read news. Um hang on with meet new people, for example, discover the conference like this great conference.

So for all of this, you need a little bit of skills uh regarding uh search engine optimization. So enough of formalities, I wanted to tell you the story of how I started and why it is so hard to find people. Uh especially junior and especially women uh in search engine optimization world. Uh When you study marketing or communications, I studied languages in Belgrade in Serbia, a little country, southeastern Europe. And uh I had also specialization in marketing. A lot of my colleagues wish uh wish to kickstart marketing career, but it was always pr and communications. Or if we talk about digital marketing, we usually talk about uh social media nowadays, influencer marketing, viral campaigns, tiktoks, everything that is a buzzword and it's super attractive.

And I rarely met anyone who during their studies said I wish to start a career in search engine optimization. Why is that? So because search engine optimization is something that is very, very hard to grasp and it seems very complicated and very technical how I started my career.

The same way I wanted to uh work in, in marketing. And I also loved programming. I was a part of uh experimentation uh department in my elementary school, this experimentation class where I learned uh basics of programming. So I always loved uh tech. I like tech development.

I learned also uh later on front end development, but I also liked uh creative uh and arts. I, I liked reading. I wanted to have a career in filmography. And then also I wanted to build my own website. This was a travel website and I wanted to get some audience. I wanted to have people who would visit my website, who would subscribe, who would maybe uh purchase something or use affiliate link. And I started learning about Seo and this was 15 years ago, remember I was a, a 2020 year old girl sitting in Belgrade Serbia and no one knew about digital marketing and seo in general. So I started learning online how I started my career through freelancing platforms. At that time, the the freelancing platform where I uh kick started my career was called Een. I think nowadays it's upwork and a lot of uh tech marketeers, developers, designers, they start their career on the freelancing platforms. I got my first client there. Uh I needed to optimize the website. I already learned about a bit about it because of my travel website. But then I had a pure luck that this client was based in us. And he had all of the amazing Seo tools uh to use. And he shared all of the accounts with me. And this is how I started learning about tech Seo and how I started learning more and following how the Seo world was developing outside uh of where I was based at that time.

And this is how I opened my first uh agency. Um What, what is it so unique about Seo? And what makes it so hard, not just to grasp but also to learn. And a lot of marketers usually say, oh Seo is so complicated, you need to understand development, you need to understand uh design, you need to know how to set up the web server answer and all of the GY R tickets and questions that are coming from development. And on the other hand, you want to enjoy marketing. Why, why is this so hard um unlike other marketing disciplines seo is kind of in between. Nowadays, you will read about product LSEO about uh Google wishing to implement UX principles with uh search engine optimization and their own uh their own engine. And it is very, very hard to understand what lies behind. And is it marketing, is it tech, is it design? And I wanted to, to give a bit of uh uh uh an understanding of when we say search engine optimization manager or search engine optimization specialist. What do we mean by that? And what does this person do in a company? This person can depending on the website of the company that you're at can be based in various teams. Most common is marketing team that has Seo manager.

Uh This SEO manager usually has a profile that is much more creative and much less technical or sometimes you will have a case where there is a marketer seo and there is a tech seo sitting next to each other and doing very different jobs. Marketing Seo would work on content marketing. They optimize articles, blog posts, uh all of the copy of the website in order to reach the right keywords, the right queries that are user researching for. They would also do frequent keyword research, follow how the website user base is developing our users converting and so on. They would also do market analysis. Uh marketing based uh Seo manager would research for competition. They would research for market specifics. They would research for uh what users in specific language on specific market and searching for and how to fulfill this need. They would also be working uh on a user acquisition. They would work with different departments and they would also cooper within marketing department with the CRM, with the email marketing person, with the person who is in charge of paid search and trying to build user funnels and understand how to acquire user but also how to nurture user and how to convert.

When we talk about technology based seo we talk about something completely else. This is a person who understands front end development, at least html and CS S and most of the time nowadays also javascript, they are not developers but they are able to read the code and they are able to understand the nuances between different technologies and how websites are built.

There are also oftentimes business analysts or they know data science because they are sitting on a large pile of data. And this data need to be used in order to improve the website, improve the architecture and prove the user flow and also help and support marketing department.

They would also need to know at least basics about service server configuration. They would need to know basics about websites and rendering, whether it's a client side rendering, server side, they would need to uh uh cooper on products and tech uh essentially in building great products that users will love. So often times they will be the ones to answer all of the questions that are coming from. Product department. Are we able to uh perform with this technology? Does it render well? Is the website fast enough? How the loading times look like, how the performance look like? What kind of uh what kind of problems we have and how to solve it? This will be a tech seo manager and then we have something that is fairly new and it comes from the uh from the from the determination of Google to focus more on users than adding keywords, adding technology they want to understand. OK. This website is maybe perfect from the tech, from the tech. It has a great marketing, it has great off site. So R is supporting the website is supporting the product. But what about the user? Do users have problems to navigate to search for the right information.

In this case, uh Google is also bringing design and new XU I teams on spot and they also have their own manual quality ator that are analyzing performance of the website usability and so on. So in the past several years, we also see that sco and design work very, very closely and often times if this is uh a product or a website that is very dependent on organic visits, designer will also know SEO and oftentimes you will see new titles saying Sco and UX manager for example, those people will work on user intent, they would work on user experience.

They would also care about building authority and trust. How do users perceive your website and how to make it better? They would uh work on getting content insights from copywriters, from customer experience teams and then implementing all of those insights into uh what, what is important for the for the sco. So when we talk about Seo, we can easily say three pillars of Seo. Do you need to know all of those things to become Seo manager? Absolutely not, you can kick start your career in one of those fields when we look at the three elements and this is how my team and global savings group is at the moment structured and many seo teams are structured like this. You will have an on site seo team or a person. This is a person who would look at the content of the site and how well this content is optimized for all of the relevant keywords and queries that users are researching for and it would care to provide a good user experience for visitors.

Then you have the technical pillar that is on top. Why is it on top? Because it's the most important one. If your tech Seo is not working, if a user cannot reach to your website, if Google cannot crawl your pages and URL S and you are simply undiscovered, then none of the content will be uh attracting any of the users. Tech Seo is very, very important. This aspect of SEO is focused on how well search engine spiders uh or search engine crawlers can crawl your website and index your content. So are you discoverable? Uh are you mobile friendly? For example, is your app easily discoverable on the on the I OS or Google Play? For example, those kind of things iso optimization or tech Seo optimization. This is something that would be uh a part of a tech Seo department and then we have off site. This is something that is uh was very, very popular when I started my SEOC career. It's oftentimes referred to a link building. Nowadays, we have very different terms for it. We call it digital pr or outreach. What is digital pr and outreach uh you have on site. This is everything that is going on on the website itself, but off page is everything that is going on outside of your domain. Those are all of the links that are pointing to your website.

This those are all of the references from different articles from media, for example, that are writing about your product or a website. And those are all of the links that are coming from authoritative or relevant websites. As a vote of confidence, usually, uh people will or companies will either have off-site uh seo team that will be uh that will be carrying about off page, but also having great pr and communication teams could carry this part of the work within the marketing team. For example.

Now this is a question of all questions I think what to do first because there is so much and oftentimes I hear, where do I start? And what do I do? And how do I kickstart my, my career and how do I secure uh my first job, first question that you want to ask to yourself? I told you my story. I started as a freelancer. I generated a lot of great feedback over freelancing platforms, opened my own agency and then later on, I moved to, to uh in-house Seo. So in a way, I was kind of a generalist, I tried it all. But for you, if you are now today, sitting and listening to, to this, to this conference speech and thinking, what do I do? And where do I start? Ask yourself? Do you want to be a generalist or do you want to be a specialist? This will determine your way if you want to be a generalist to learn a little bit of everything ideally, uh uh for you, it would be to start a freelancing career or to start as an intern or junior seo manager in an agency. Why? Because you will have so many different projects, some will be related about content, the others would be tech sco projects. Someone will ask you to acquire links to research for mentions to care about the pr strategy and you will learn a little bit of everything.

This is a great start for someone who doesn't know where to go. So start with uh looking for, for keyword research, start with looking how to optimize content and then expand to more complex projects. On the other hand, if you want to be a specialist and by this, I don't mean just specialist for tech seo, I mean specialist for ecommerce, for example, or specialist for real estate for classified websites. Or you want to be a news seo expert, then the right uh way for you would be getting an internship or a junior seo position in house in a company that spikes your interest. Uh Seoc is very, very well uh uh searched for and not many people are discovering it because of its complexity, not many women are starting there. So I think that the majority of large companies would always have open doors for the new interns who are interested in sco because it's so hard to get us. And we are very, very rare in the market. For the end. I wanted just to share some resources uh where you can start learning about Seo first and foremost, I want to recommend a website called mass.com and their beginner's guide to Seo you can research online, you can easily find it.

Uh This is a guide that consists of everything, all of the three pillars are mentioned. You will have basics of everything with a lot of uh examples. Second one is a great um seo expert. Her name is Alida Solis. She built a website called learning Seo dot IO where you can have all of the steps, information courses. Uh A lot of uh Excel sheets that you can use if you want to kickstart your career. What I would also recommend the newbie in search engine optimization is get some free course on HTML CS S understand how the website comes uh function even better. Open your free Wordpress blog on any of the wordpress platforms. Also implement tracking for Google analytics and Google search console and try to track, try to understand. OK. Is this content right? What kind of keywords do you have? Put, do users visit me more when I have this strategy or that just try to practice exercise? Exercise leads to perfection. And the second one but not the not the the last one and not the least important is find a mentor online. There are many seo communities nowadays, we even have women in tech seo community where you can easily find your mentor. This will uh dramatically help you uh expand your knowledge, understand the ways you want to go and maybe help you determine, would you wish to be a generalist or a specialist? And this was all uh from my side.

Um If you have any questions, please, I think we have 22 minutes left. If I'm not wrong, Anna.

Yes, we have two minutes left. Thanks to Atlanta. Actually just wanted to add, since you mentioned uh regarding the mentorship, we're going to also to launch our mentorship mentoring program. At the end of the month. Maybe you would like to be our

mentor. I would, I would for sure. I'm sure if

I Fantastic. Fantastic. I already got on board a co mentor. Great. Yeah, everyone who you know is looking to dive deeper into this topic. Yes, she's always sharing. Thank you so much. Great session. I, I really love the way you structured it and the tips that you shared the questions and the way you shared your experience, you know, and then uh do you want to be a freelancer or in-house? Do we have any question here that you want to ask? Su su because we've got just one minute.

I just want to mention also, if you want to visit our booth and learn more about Global Savings Group, we also have open seo positions. So if we have some seo managers that are already searching for a career or a career in products working with us, uh feel free to visit us and maybe learn a bit more.

Absolutely. I think this is a really great way to connect firsthand to find out opportunities and Yeah. Great. Fantastic, Svetlana. Uh She saw me asking, can you be my mentor, please? Yes, I get in touch with, with Lana and uh she she has time. I'm sure you're super busy, but yeah, absolutely. Um Yeah, fantastic. So check out please. The Booth of Global Savings Group and Sutan. Are you going to be there? Maybe from time to time,

from time to time, I will visit the both. Yeah, and and also network.

So there is a chance to connect with Sudanna as well and also in the network area. Fantastic. So thank you. Thank you so much, Sula. That was great, super informative, detailed love that people really appreciate isolate. Thank you so much. I'm wishing you a great day. Stay with us. I wish you a great

rest of the conference and see you at networking. Bye.