James Pate On SEO At IBM & Using Airtable For Managing Enterprise SEO Data

Search Engine Roundtable Podcast

James Pate is the Technical SEO Manager at IBM, IBM has a whole group of respected and well known SEOs. I've spoken with Patrick Stox while he was at IBM, I also spoke with Tanu Javeri at IBM's NYC offices a while back. So this is the third IBM SEO I've interviewed. James is based in Brooklyn, which is not too far but yet super far from my office - the wonderful world of New York.

James ventured into SEO by developing software, such as WordPress plugins, like a rich snippets stars plugin. So I blamed James for Google showing fewer stars in the search results over the years. He also coded a plugin for videos and other areas. This is how technical SEOs think, which is wonderful. He did a lot of affiliate marketing when he first got into SEO, which is how a lot of SEOs sometimes start. He has a small company doing mostly WordPress for local companies and then he moved to a larger company to work on larger projects and then joined IBM.

SEO At IBM:

At IBM he is involved in a lot of different projects, but he does a lot of work with SEO data, he looks at ways to improve inbound search specific to IBM products and then a lot of technical SEO projects. He built a redirect engine, he built a crawler and stuff like that. IBM is obviously a super old company, with a ton of old content, on many platforms and subdomains.

Using Airtable For Managing Enterprise SEO Data:

He spoke to me about the framework for managing enterprise SEO data. Specifically how he was about to centralize IBM’s SEO marketing data using Airtable with various automations. This helped IBM discover linking opportunities, content gaps, manage a topic taxonomy and more. This is all to help with huge number of pages, keywords and URLs. In Airtable, IBM stores not just keyword but also keyword intent, which is super interesting. He also tags them by topics, by page category, topic relationships and so on so he can build this map.

If you want help with this, reach out to James Pete on Twitter @jamesfpate.