Ask Me Anything with
Adrienne Kmetz
AK Consulting
27 Feb 2025 9:30 AM MST
Adrienne Kmetz, blew us away with her content, and team building smarts during our Ask me anything. She describes herself as a senior inhouse marketing leader with 19 years of experience being “employee #1”, building growth strategy and high-volume content operations.
@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?
1 reply
Adrienne Kmetz
Feb 27, 2025, 10:54 AM
Put stuff on the internet! I have so many side projects, weird websites I’ve built and stuff I’ve done for friends that I am totally not embarrassed to talk about. The old stuff is actually super fun to look back at.
When I interview someone, I want to see that they are curious about the internet.
Adrienne Kmetz
Feb 27, 2025, 9:12 AM
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 Some historical documents put them as the first domesticated breed in the US where spanish mountain curs bred with native american hunting dogs and made the Hog Dog as we know it today.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.
2 replies
I love catahoulas. Do yours howl?
Adrienne Kmetz
Feb 27, 2025, 9:55 AM
YES the little female coos almost like a bird its wild
Adrienne Kmetz
Feb 27, 2025, 9:18 AM
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”
Adrienne Kmetz
Feb 27, 2025, 9:22 AM
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.
Adrienne Kmetz
Feb 27, 2025, 9:26 AM
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.”
Ryan Mendenhall
Feb 27, 2025, 9:30 AM
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!
Adrienne Kmetz
Feb 27, 2025, 9:31 AM
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:
Adrienne Kmetz
Feb 27, 2025, 9:33 AM
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.
Ryan Mendenhall
Feb 27, 2025, 9:34 AM
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?
3 replies
Adrienne Kmetz
Feb 27, 2025, 9:45 AM
The programmatic I’ve done:
Even doing “send money to COUNTRY” for money transfers, we wrote all 200 countries manually. Typically everything would get written manually unless we had an API.
So we got access to one for investing products.
Made a page for “buy tesla stock”.
Used the API for descriptions, data, etc.
Then used Twig to create mathematical fields and if/then statements.
IE. If the stock went up overnight, the returns were positive and vice versa.
Now we’ve accomplished many things with an API:
1. Uniqueness
2. Freshness
3. Comprehensiveness
That hits the minimum bar of quality for programmatic in my opinion.
Buy tesla stock held #1 for weeks til the competitors sniffed it out
We rolled out all 6000 NYSE and NASDAQ listings at a pace of about 50-100 per day managed by 1 person.
Ryan Mendenhall
Feb 27, 2025, 9:47 AM
❤️ This is awesome! I'ma gonna have to talk to you about this!
Adrienne Kmetz
Feb 27, 2025, 9:59 AM
The good old days LOL
Adrienne Kmetz
Feb 27, 2025, 9:37 AM
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.
3 replies
Adrienne Kmetz
Feb 27, 2025, 9:40 AM
Adrienne Kmetz
Feb 27, 2025, 9:41 AM
Smart Brevity transforms dense paragraphs into concise, reader-friendly sections. By using headings, bullet points, and visuals, you make your content scannable and engaging for visual learners.
So to illustrate this point, someone was actually asking yesterday about how people use headers.
Do you write a question like what's a good credit score, or do you write it as a label, like Good credit scores.
I don't really know what how you would label that one, but anyway.
There's actually a third option because like Google doesn't know that one's a question, one's a label.
It can see the question mark and it knows that how many other sites with the same topic include that exact same header, so it can compare your words to other pages' words, but it doesn't know how the user is actually reacting to those words.
So there's actually a third option.
Don't do a question, don't do a label.
Do smart brevity, where you're actually giving the answer in the header.
I have a theory that this will get you more P zeros and more AI overviews that it's more about.
The semantic relationship and the response of the reader, rather than exact match.
I do believe that Google in general does not like exact match, and it works more semantically.
And so I, you know, avoid exact match and anchor text, especially with backlinks, but I'm also looking at editorial nuance like Am I actually teaching the reader something right in the header so that if they read the article, they're not just reading a bunch of labels or a bunch of questions.
They're actually like getting information from it.
So I'll share my article on that, but that's just an example of how editorial nuance and like diving deeper into how words actually work is for the reader.
And those reader metrics is what gets you the improvement, not like aligning to The top results or going opposite the top results.
you know, I have a theory that's like you either fall in line or you go the opposite way.
And I think this is actually kind of like a third thing where you're speaking directly to the reader, telling them the most important thing rather than telling them that you're about to tell them the most important thing.
sooooo how exactly do you manage 70 person teams? Tell me about your Google Sheets.
13 replies
Adrienne Kmetz
Feb 27, 2025, 9:47 AM
Okay the biggest companies in the world are run on Google Sheets and I absolutely LOVE it.
For one thing, you must have documentation, storage, and tasks all organized.
Documentation = HOW we do things. Needs a filing system. Confluence or Notion.
Storage = Google Drive. the SUBSTANCE - spreadsheets, audits, drafts, briefs
Tasks = Every action has a ticket. Jira, Monday, Asana.
rad.
Ryan Mendenhall
Feb 27, 2025, 9:50 AM
So, have you ever used Google Sheets to manage tasks? Keep it all in the ecosystem? Same Q for documentation? With Google Doc's newer feature of tabs, seems like an easy win to keep it all in the one system (I know it's not as flexible as Notion, etc).
Adrienne Kmetz
Feb 27, 2025, 9:50 AM
I operate on principles, and principles allow us to kind of state a rule that can be interpreted.
So kind of like the law, it's not going to define exactly how you should do something because that part's open to interpretation.
But The principles kind of state how you should behave.
And an example is you can only push or pull information. Those are the only two ways you can get it.
Either someone or something pushes it to you, like you get an email, and then you get a notification and you open it, or you pull it from somewhere, where like you're going to someone and making a phone call and you're asking them for the information.
So, I always say that like you need to push information upwards to your leadership so that I never have to come to you and ask, hey, what are you up to?
And if I have to ask that, then you know, something is really wrong.
So it's my responsibility as a leader to create access to the data that I want.
If I'm feel like I'm lacking transparency, then I need a report that's updated in real time.
I need a bookmark to the Asana board or whatever, so that I understand how to do all those things and access all the things on my own.
Then I can go and ask for specific things if I don't have them.
If I'm doing that, then my employees only have to bring me super important things.
And I'm not asking them about BAU or just their daily work because everybody can access the daily work and see it.
Whether or not we have a little stand up or not is fine.
I'm just more want to set aside time for blockers and opportunities rather than talking about the process itself.
So if you can kind of get out of process and have the process be documented.
And really straightforward, then you focus a lot less on that and what's inside the process.
So, you know, are these topics good?
Are they meeting intent?
Are they unique?
What can we add to them to make them better?
When you're not in the weeds of trying just trying to get stuff done, you're more able to pick your head up and see how whatever you're working on fits into the larger picture of things.
Adrienne Kmetz
Feb 27, 2025, 9:51 AM
I used to manage Google Sheets for tasks but that is all done in Jira now.
So moving the ticket and the owner, solves for “reassigning the owner in the google sheet”. Remove all columns that have to do with process = IE. Owners, status, etc. and leave those up to the Asana or Jira board.
The Google sheet then just becomes a list to work off rather than your active tracker.
Ryan Mendenhall
Feb 27, 2025, 9:53 AM
I just find that my teams will spend so much time in Monday, etc leaving notes, etc that sometimes they just default to something simple, like even using notepad. What do you find the main benefit of using a system like Jira to be?
Man That Audio answer is pretty cool. It add so much more texture to the answer. What does everyone else think of that?
Ryan Mendenhall
Feb 27, 2025, 9:54 AM
I'm LOVING it! It gives a lot more depth and feel to it.
Adrienne Kmetz
Feb 27, 2025, 10:51 AM
Leave specific piece feedback in the google doc instead of the monday ticket. So the editor will edit the piece, leave comments on systemic feedback (’try to keep intros below 2 sentences”) Then the writer reads those comments to acknowledge the feedback, they can resolve the comment or the publishing coordinator will when they publish.
Adrienne Kmetz
Feb 27, 2025, 10:51 AM
So the monday ticket is like.. “hey we are going to try to get this out today instead of tuesday”
And does not contain anything like… “This intro is too long”
Adrienne Kmetz
Feb 27, 2025, 10:52 AM
Process notes = monday
Editorial notes = google doc itself
Once your writers absorb the feedback and it takes under 10 minutes to edit, ask them to start writing directly in the CMS. Skip google docs and go live asap. This saves another 30 minutes per piece or so
Adrienne Kmetz
Feb 27, 2025, 1:58 PM
If documentation can be put into Google Tabs and achieve the same shareability / file system as notion/confluence, then yes I fully support using the same platform when you can. Thats why I like Jira/Confluence best as they are the same software.
I’m super interested to hear about your biggest fail!
16 replies
Adrienne Kmetz
Feb 27, 2025, 9:53 AM
Adrienne Kmetz
Feb 27, 2025, 9:54 AM
So my biggest fail actually wrote about.
I read about this concept called the window mirror principle, and it's pretty easy to think about when you are a leader, and things are going well, you look out the window at your team, and this is often like, you know, you can think about it like a construction site where like you're looking at your team building this house and you're like, wow, that's amazing.
Look at my team go.
The mirror principle is that when things are fucked up or going poorly, you look always in the mirror at yourself first, even if it's someone else's fault.
If someone messed something up or pressed the wrong button, it's still your fault because you're the boss.
You trained them, your job is QA.
It's your job to refresh their training or whatever.
Now, if it's something that they really should know, because you've told them 10 times, then you have a different learning and skill issue and discipline issue.
But if, you know, it's a smart person that should know what they're doing, then messing things up is typically always falls back on the leader.
So I just get used to this thing where, like, I'm always celebrating others for our wins, and I'm always taking responsibility as a leader for the fails.
And, I have an article about this that I'm gonna put into the chat because I made a $20,000 mistake.
I, and somebody else did it, but it's my fault because I wasn't managing them well enough or I wasn't watching them well enough, or whatever it is that I should have been doing to, you know, Catch it, catch the thing, so I'll drop the article in here and you can see how I made a $20,000 mistake.
20k hurts. I’ve heard tons of stories that start like, “did I ever tell you about my 50K BigQuery query?”
Adrienne Kmetz
Feb 27, 2025, 9:58 AM
LOLLL
Yes. I managed someone once who left my team and went to another company. I heard through the grapevine that she didn’t set a maximum on her paid media campaign and went through $78000 in 48 hours.
Tell me I’m fired without telling me I’m fired.
Ryan Mendenhall
Feb 27, 2025, 10:04 AM
“Your access badge now opens the exit only—congratulations on your new adventures!”
Ryan Mendenhall
Feb 27, 2025, 10:04 AM
“We would love to stay in touch, just not in this office.”
Ryan Mendenhall
Feb 27, 2025, 10:04 AM
“It turns out our staffing budget has a strict ‘you not included’ policy.”
Ryan Mendenhall
Feb 27, 2025, 10:05 AM
“We value your contributions so much, we’re gifting them to the industry at large.”
spitting out drink.
Ryan Mendenhall
Feb 27, 2025, 10:05 AM
“It seems we’ve run out of tasks you’re allowed to perform here.”
Ryan Mendenhall
Feb 27, 2025, 10:06 AM
“Effective immediately, you have unlimited paid time off. It’s just…not from us.”
Adrienne Kmetz
Feb 27, 2025, 10:13 AM
She stayed and they said CONGRATS you have used your whole budget, time to start to learn growth hacking or freemarketing or whatever you do when you run out of budget
Adrienne Kmetz
Feb 27, 2025, 11:44 AM
10 out of 10 of the best leaders follow the window-mirror principle. What is it and why is it so important for psychological safety in your team?
Ryan Mendenhall
Feb 27, 2025, 9:48 AM
What tips do you have for professionals struggling to secure roles they feel overqualified for?
2 replies
Adrienne Kmetz
Feb 27, 2025, 10:12 AM
I think a little bit of it is timing, you know, trying to get through the holidays where people who are hiring are trying to go on the holiday and you're trying to get a job.
You know, it's, some of it is just bad timing and being able to say like, hey, I'm gonna weather a couple weeks, and that's OK.
And there might be a flurry of activity in one week and the next week, there, it might be a little bit quieter, and that's OK.
I mentioned earlier how having a leadership that understands SEO is really, really important for being able to spend more time doing your job and less time educating people from scratch.
I think the toughest situation to be in is one where the leadership has no SEO experience, but they know they need to hire that person.
Because they want more traffic.
You're gonna spend a lot of time explaining why things are more complicated than they are.
No, you can't just stick it into the chat GBT.
You could for some things but not for everything, especially if you want to win, you have to be better than AI.
So there's a lot of like re-education and education from scratch.
If you can get into one of these places where the leadership knows a little bit about SEO, then you're gonna have a lot easier time making the business case.
In either scenario, you are gonna need to learn how to make that business case and there's a lot of courses out there for like, you know, SEO MBAs and all that kind of stuff where It's about learning how to communicate with leadership in a way where you translate all those technical things into Something that they can understand like ROI.
There's an investment, it takes a certain amount of time and what are we going to get out of it.
That's, that's really what they care about.
So if you could focus on those things in the interview while also hinting at your depth, then I think that's a good place to be.
And just know that like some of these organizations where the leadership isn't up on SEO, like, it's OK if you don't get those jobs.
They don't know how to evaluate you, and it's hard not to take it personally.
But, you know, being a little bit farther away from some of the hardest rejections I've gotten where I'm like, Oh my God, I'm so perfect for this job.
Why didn't I get it?
you have to believe a little bit in the universe protecting you, or, you know, maybe not everything happens for a reason.
Life really is just chaos.
We're all just spinning around on a big burning ball of gas,, or whatever Pumba says in the in in Lion King,.
But it's really, really tough not to feel like, oh my God, do I like an impostor?
Do I even know what I'm doing?
You're likely more confident and qualified than you think, precisely because there's no like official certificate.
There's no like MBA for SEOs.
It's kind of like everybody at the top of an opinion is right because their opinion likely reflects their personal experience.
So the thing that I've had the most Success with in interviews, if I'm overqualified, is, first of all, explaining that, saying like, hey, I've done XYZ above this, which means I can, I know that I can do this.
And being honest about where you fall short.
So I'm not a technical SEO.
I don't code javacsript and I'm not gonna learn it.
So, just being honest about like, hey, that's a gap in my skill, but I have these 3 other skills that someone like that wouldn't have.
That only I can do.
Only I can strategize and see the future and do organizational development and efficiency and operations in a way where,, you know, that's the key.
I can always hire someone to code.
So just being honest about like where you have every single skill and where you don't,.
And just be confident because you likely know a lot more than you think that you do.
