A CTOs Role in Performance-based SEO, with Evaldas Alexander #3

We all know SEO is important, but what is a CTO's role? And what is still relevant in today's SEO and what is no longer good practice? Here to answer those questions is Evaldas Alexander. Evaldas is a CTO managing remote teams, including RankPay the first performance-based search engine service.

 

On this episode, Evaldas and I talk about how he made the leap from developer to CTO and whether trust comes first or ownership, plus his insights on SEO today and his suggestions for your best scraping options.

 

In this episode you'll hear:

What is SEO today according to Evaldas? Does Google care about your Java and CSS files? Why RankPay uses the "pay when you see results" system. Is Google still the number one search engine out there? Do you have to pay for traffic, or should you focus on SEO? And so much more!

 

In high school Evaldas was considering working in computer science or being a lawyer. At the time, law was more appealing because his native country of Lithuania was so new and there were lots of opportunities to have an immediate impact. So he enrolled in law school, and started working in youth politics. About a year and a half in he realized it wasn't really his passion so he left and enrolled in management information systems studies, and also started selling web sites. Initially Evaldas hired a computer science student to build their first web sites, and Evaldas got more and more involved over time. He liked it so much he started working as a developer when he moved to the US, where he would eventually leap into the role of CTO. With his firsthand knowledge from RankPay, I asked Evaldas to give us the details on what works best today in SEO. He explains there's no magic bullet for every company but in general on-page SEO still matters, and that content relevant to your audience is also critical.

 

I also asked him to give the initial steps for working with RankPay. The first step is enter your domain, then enter your keywords. At this point RankPay will give you suggestions of other keywords that may be relevant and of interest to you. Next you'll create an account with your credit card. However, you will not be billed until your account manager approves your keywords and RankPay starts to improve your rankings.

 

Also on this episode of The CTO Studio, I asked Evaldas to share what his biggest challenges have been in his CTO role, and what tips he has for others.

One of Evaldas' biggest challenge was how to lead people into taking ownership. It was a challenge that stemmed from his natural inclination to own tasks and projects, but he has since realized not everyone operates that way. However they can be lead to do so.

For a long time he would interview and hire a great developer, and then give that person a task. Evaldas would watch the newly-hired developer do the task but not go beyond to care about the bigger picture.

 

Now Evaldas understands it is all about communication. He lets his developers know they are the owners of their projects, it is up to them to think about and to tell him if they think something should be done differently. He even tells them they don't need to ask his permission to do something. They can create tasks, then prioritize them as they see fit. He explains it's important to give clear boundaries, while still allowing people to take ownership.

 

We wrap up this episode by also talking about why real-time search results is so important, and his advice for fellow CTOs and for lead engineers. Join us for those illuminating topics and much more on this latest edition of The CTO Studio!