Ask Me Anything with
Adrienne Kmetz

@adrienne.kmetz I know I’m early, but I’m on … like … vacation and I’ve got to get … uhm … skiing.

• What kinds of dogs do you have and can you share pics?

• Your intro mentioned innovation. Tell me more about what that is looking like for the teams you’re working with.

• I’d love to learn what you’re thinking about what the near term outlook looks like for content teams.

• I’d also love to learn about what types of struggles teams you’re collabing with are facing over and over again.

• Can you share any dragonslayer metrics with us that you’re proudest of? And yes I read the intro. All of that was super impressive.

What advice can you share for folks who are tryingto get work in this market?

I have 2 Catahoulas which are wild pig hunting dogs from Louisiana. Some historical documents put them as the first domesticated breed in the US where spanish mountain curs bred with native american hunting dogs and made the Hog Dog as we know it today. They are not in the AKC either.

Innovation:

1. Innovation is taking something that exists and simply making it better. So it doesn’t need to be disruptive to be innovative. Customers don’t even really want to know that you’re innovating.. They just want to know that your product is getting better and easier for them to use.

2. So it doesn’t need to be a specific agenda item to know that you’re innovating. As long as you’re asking the question, “how can we make this better for our users” you are likely innovating.

3. It might be as simple as asking, “how can we automate this”

Struggles:

1. Data is difficult to tease out and attribute properly to organic. It leaves us looking at overall trends and anecdotal stories, and typically those don’t tell the entire SEO story that well.

2. Content teams NEED to build in uniqueness to their workflow. As most content teams shift to using AI to get stuff done faster, the teams that will win are those that go above and beyond the AI slop to actually win the word and add something useful that the reader has not seen before.

Content teams:

3. Sometimes when I want to tell the story better, I isolate editorial audits. I think content teams need to weave in the ability to work on many pages at once with a small thing.

4. Example: If you have a batch of pages with long intros, cut them down by 80% across 30-50 pages. Do nothing else on those and track the results. Can you isolate an editorial audit’s results to show the content team?

5. These results then become the basis for a master class: “We have data showing that SHORT intros that MEET intent perform higher than long intros. Join our master class on how to write one well.”

Ask Me Anything with @adrienne.kmetz begins now! (officially Noah)

Adrienne Kmetz was the founding Head of Publishing for Finder US, where she built the publishing team to 70+ people and hit a whole bunch of big KPIs and OKRs and various other acronyms. Since she went independent (as owner of AKConsulting LLC.), credit cards and car insurance no longer haunt her dreams; and she loves bopping around and helping teams level up and innovate. She lives in Colorado with her partner and 3 dogs.

You can ask her anything about:

Anything to do with improving the relationship between writers and editors and SEOs: Training, processes, feedback, conflict resolution, collaboration, efficiency. Have hired 150+ writers and editors in the past 10 years. At least 500 interviews and 1000 live trainings.

Outsourcing: Have hired and built teams of 20+ in Mexico, South America and the Philippines. Organized a conference in CDMX for our international publishing teams.

Incubation: How seeding ideas saves tons of time, energy, and money, and can get you closer to a viable new channel faster.

Remote management: built and managed a team of 70+ from rural North county San Diego.

Ask (anything) away!

Content teams all struggle with SEO education. If your leadership has SEO experience, you are lightyears ahead of leadership where you are educating from scratch. Being able to align on data is great, but most companies never get to this point. As Dana says, most data is wrong, and we have to more or less accept what we have to work with in the near term.

Dana’s advice from last week was amazing - if you didn’t catch the video follow up, you can watch it here:

I also work with content teams that can be more confident. If your team is just taking instruction, you likely have room to empower your editors and content team to own the SEO metrics too, push back, refine ideas, etc.. If editorial starts to see how their activities impact the business, they’re more likely to get excited about learning the *how and why,* enabling them to make their own decisions in the future based on knowing how their work, works.

Adrienne, thanks for joinin today!! I'm so exited to learn from you!! I'm really excited to hear about how you manage such large content projects... Would you call those programmatic at all? Have you done any programmatic? If so, what's it take to make that work at scale?

One thing I DONT see lately that NEEDS to happen:

SEOs aren’t great at writing. Google doesn’t understand what the words on the page actually mean.

So the basis of SEO is editorial. Google is measuring the user behavior to determine if people like the page and it answers the question. Diving deeper into editorial nuance - like avoiding “crutch” phrases that mentally turn off readers - is an excellent use of the entire content teams time including the SEOs.

sooooo how exactly do you manage 70 person teams? Tell me about your Google Sheets.

I’m super interested to hear about your biggest fail!

What tips do you have for professionals struggling to secure roles they feel overqualified for?

How are you handling upskilling in the current environment?

My biggest dragonslayer metric is for sure Finder.

The CFO told me the Series A investment they secured was based mostly on the potential and success of the US business, which I was running. Felt amazing. Started at $150M valuation and when I left, was at $495M including the US business.

Hey Adrienne, what is your ideal content creation process with content teams. What would be your dream team (an expert content writer, an editor, etc) and process?

how do you define growth marketing?

Adrienne, you mentioned to me something I hadn't really realized/seen and that's an increasing demand for technical skills like Python for SEO roles. To me it feels a bit like hiring managers wanting it all and not super realistic, but what’s your take on it?

@adrienne.kmetz Are you utilizing AI Tools? If yes, how?

VERY curious about how you approach content strategy/ideation for a new client/company you're at. What do you do to make sure you're gonna go in a winning direction?

you seem to dig “principles”. how did you get into them? I wonder if that’s closely tied to being a systmes thinker?

Well folks! We're at time. Maybe if you promise to give Adrienne a link to some future site she's working on, she'll stay and finish answering the questions we hurled at her?!

@adrienne.kmetz thank you so much for your time! You have such a wealth of knowledge we all can/did learn from. Feel free to let us know about anything you're interested in promoting and for anyone that missed it, I'm sure Adrienne wouldn't mind you connecting with her directly and getting to know her a little better.

She really is so awesome!