Cookie Consent by Free Privacy Policy Generator

Ask Me Anything with
Sam Torres, Chief Digital Officer

Gray Dot Company

16 Jan 2025 9:00 AM MST

Sam Torres is far from your average tech SEO… or developer… or data architect. Her varied and deep skill set lets her blur the lines between disciplines and see new ways of solving problems. She applies that unique perspective as Chief Digital Officer of Gray Dot Co, building solutions that push search marketing forward and help brands measure outcomes more meaningfully. Humble, humorous, and refreshingly honest, she also brings the heat as a speaker!

Total Messages: 70

Ryan Mendenhall 1/16/2025, 9:00:10 AM
@channel Game on!

Jumping into our 2nd AMA, again hosting publicly in this channel so the entire community can see what it's like & benefit.

We're excited to have @Sam Torres join us for 60 minutes of fast action Q&A. If we’re really nice, she might answer some throughout the day.

Sam Torres is far from your average tech SEO… or developer… or data architect. Her varied and deep skill set lets her blur the lines between disciplines and see new ways of solving problems. She applies that unique perspective as Chief Digital Officer of Gray Dot Co, building solutions that push search marketing forward and help brands measure outcomes more meaningfully. Humble, humorous, and refreshingly honest, she also brings the heat as a speaker!

Sam is super cool and bright. Ask her anything, but here are some areas in which she shines:

• JavaScript SEO
• BigQuery
• digital marketing research and intelligence
• working with engineers
• tech SEO
:alert: Keep all question in one THREAD!!!
Ryan Mendenhall 1/16/2025, 9:01:06 AM
Sam! Welcome. Can we start off with an ice breaker? I heard you're into gaming...what's your favorite one?
Noah 1/16/2025, 9:01:12 AM
Hey Y’all! @Sam Torres, how’d you and @Tory Gray decide to partner up?
Sam Torres 1/16/2025, 9:02:14 AM
Ooh favorite game of all time is Xenogears. I'm also a huge fan of the Mass Effect trilogy.
Noah 1/16/2025, 9:03:27 AM
@Sam Torres do you like Board games too? I played Nemesis last week. Each game take 5-6 hours and can easily end with everyone dying.
Sam Torres 1/16/2025, 9:03:27 AM
Tory was looking for some support on web vitals work in the Women in Tech SEO Slack community. We connected, got on a call to kinda get to know each other. Ended up finding a lot of things we have in common (favorite gin, books we read, business values). And Tory knew she was moving out of the US in the next year, so she was looking for a US partner. And we signed our agreement before we had ever ben met in person for the first time.
Sam Torres 1/16/2025, 9:04:11 AM
I love board games! Going to a board game convention this weekend. I have not tried Nemesis, I'll give that a go.

The longest continuous game I played Descent First Edition. We played for 7 hours, and still didn't make it through the first mission.
Peter Benes 1/16/2025, 9:04:33 AM
Hey @Sam Torres, thanks for doing this AMA. Most of my clients are small single store retailers with limited resources and budgets. Coming into 2025 it looks like everything is changing. So in your opinion, what’s the most impactful thing that they could do for SEO to have a fighting chance.
Noah 1/16/2025, 9:04:44 AM
@OMG on the seven hours.
Ryan Mendenhall 1/16/2025, 9:05:22 AM
What were the books you and @Tory Gray bonded over?
Sam Torres 1/16/2025, 9:08:47 AM
Hey @Peter Benes - what a great question! I think for small retailers - I have two thoughts. 1. If they're brick and mortar: really focusing on how to bring that local expertise into their content, product use, product application, etc. is going to be something they can do to set themselves apart. At Gray Dot, we've been seeing lots of shifts over the past couple years on even non-localized terms becoming locality competitive (i.e. users looking for online college degrees seeing more local colleges that provide online classes and the historically big online colleges taking a backseat)
2. If there's no locality perspective to capitalize on, then I'd still focus on how to present product information in a personalized way to differentiate from the thousands of other retailers (including big marketplaces like Walmart and Amazon). Basically, I'd focus everything on a UGC program.
Ryan Mendenhall 1/16/2025, 9:08:50 AM
Where do you see SEOs fitting into the overall company stucture?
Stephen 1/16/2025, 9:08:52 AM
Could you share an example of how you've utilized BigQuery to uncover insights on user behavior or search patterns?
Duane 1/16/2025, 9:10:16 AM
Oh hi @Sam Torres

Working with engineers is something I have to do quite frequently in house. From an agency perspective, do you find there are any additional challenges that must be considered?

And it probably leads into - any secrets to writing a good ticket?

Sam Torres 1/16/2025, 9:11:21 AM
SEOs in the company structure: Lately, I've been seeing the most success when the SEO team is part of the Product/Engineering team, and not wholly in marketing as a cost center
Renee Girard 1/16/2025, 9:11:31 AM
Which engineering/technical skills are most important for SEOs to learn?
Adrian Liauw 1/16/2025, 9:14:17 AM
Hi @Sam Torres thank you for doing this AMA. For this year, I want my articles to be found by AI Search Engines such as Copilot, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. How should I adjust my SEO approach so those AI search engines can find my articles?
Sam Torres 1/16/2025, 9:15:34 AM
BigQuery to find user insights: BigQuery is just a vehicle for the data - so I'd say the examples really depend on the dataset origin. We've done projects where we're using GSC data, using data pulled from the YouTube API. But the really nice thing, BQ does make it super easy to take your data (however you got it there) and start building your own ML models to start dissecting the data. One of my favorite examples was taking YouTube comments data to understand where a particular audience was feeling un-satisfied. Those insights led to programming decisions for a major streaming company.
Noah 1/16/2025, 9:16:07 AM
BigQuery BigQuery Bigquery
Noah 1/16/2025, 9:16:37 AM
Marcia Marcia Marcia
Peter Benes 1/16/2025, 9:16:44 AM
@Sam Torres, we’re seeing a lot of issues in accurate attribution caused by limitations for privacy. How do you solve for better attribution for your clients for search as well as marketing? Is big query giving you better results than you would get with GA alone in regards to attribution?
Christian Oliveira 1/16/2025, 9:17:09 AM
Hi @Sam Torres and thanks for doing this AMA! How do you see JavaScript SEO evolving with LLMs into the game and not being able to execute JS?
Sam Torres 1/16/2025, 9:18:04 AM
Hey @Duane!!! With agency life, there's that initial "how do we get along" awkwardness. I do think that many engineers and internal marketing teams have been burned by agencies wanting to take over all the work, or thrown the internal teams under the bus so to speak, so I find that that initial trust building is the most critical part. After that, I find we then get to feel like an extension of the team, rather than a vendor.

I'd also say it's on us as an agency to learn the processes of each client. Which can balloon really quickly, so documentation is key. (And I say this as the person my head of product has to poke the most about documentation ???? )
Sam Torres 1/16/2025, 9:18:46 AM
Secrets to writing a good ticket: take off the marketing hat when you're writing tickets. Stick to desired outcomes, requirements. Don't add any fluff. One of the best ways to turn off an engineering team.
Adrienne Kmetz 1/16/2025, 9:19:32 AM
I make an example ticket / template so they’re not just like “this is broken”
Adrienne Kmetz 1/16/2025, 9:21:03 AM
Hi Sam! You’re a true role model! thank you for giving your time and energy.

All this talk about brand. What are your clients asking and how are you responding about brand in regards to new buzz around it, measuring, or building?
Kartikey Tanna 1/16/2025, 9:21:11 AM
Hey @Sam Torres, do you use/build any AI tools to automate tasks like SEO reporting or data analysis? If so, how effective have you found them, and what impact have they had on your day-to-day workflow? Thanks a lot!
Sam Torres 1/16/2025, 9:22:08 AM
Hey @Renee Girard! I do think ticket writing/writing requirements is probably the most important skill for a technical SEO. The reason I say this, I generally don't see the same foundational mistakes in sites anymore. The platforms for building websites handle most of these things. It's the more interesting issues where we're more often needed (but could be my own bias as we're a senior tech SEO agency). So that pretty much always ends with us needing to get engineering in the mix.

After that, I do think debugging/QA skills is where it's at.
Sam Torres 1/16/2025, 9:24:59 AM
Hey @Adrian Liauw - the burning question for 2025! I think it's mostly follow the same things we've been trying to do all along - craft quality, UNIQUE content. So always be adding to the conversation, not just remixing it. From a technical perspective, also making it as easy as possible for your content to be consumed — so whether that's leveraging schema (even outside of what gives Rich Results), ensuring that your priority content is in the initial HTML response and not requiring JS to render (cause LLMs don't render JS - though they can understand JSON), having user behavior-driven IA, etc.
Noah 1/16/2025, 9:28:29 AM
Can you give us insight into your agency’s tech stack? ANy can’t live without tools?
Sam Torres 1/16/2025, 9:28:34 AM
@Peter Benes BigQuery isn't giving us better results, so much as it's giving us the unsampled data (but be careful how you pull this data into Looker Studio so you don't cause big costs). As for attribution issues for privacy, there has been some education around what are we tracking and kind of pulling back (although honestly it's been a couple years since those conversations). We've also moved away from Google Analytics for some clients cause it's just not the right fit, and doesn't give the marketing team the flexibility they need.
Mikael Araújo 1/16/2025, 9:29:25 AM
@Sam Torres How are you using AI for your daily tasks?
Mika Lepistö 1/16/2025, 9:30:03 AM
Hey @Sam Torres ! What's your perspective for steps to take on future proofing for agents using websites? Preparing for them, surfacing content for them, etc.
Sam Torres 1/16/2025, 9:30:19 AM
Hey @Christian Oliveira - while LLMs don't execute JS, they can understand JSONs. And I do see that many of the top frontends (i.e. NextJS, Gatsby) ship the content in JSON in the initial server response. So I don't think that's gonna impact as much as the recent articles may make some panic. I could totally be wrong though. We may also see LLMs adopt that, cause they need more content, and if site owners are keeping it behind JS, then they're going to have to adapt to keep getting that delicious content.
Renee Girard 1/16/2025, 9:30:54 AM
What’s your approach to SEO testing/experimentation? @Sam Torres
Peter Benes 1/16/2025, 9:31:09 AM
@Sam Torres, when you moved away from Google analytics for clients that need a analytics different fit, what alternative solution did you land on?
Micah Fisher-Kirshner 1/16/2025, 9:31:25 AM
@Sam Torres Since you mentioned moving clients away from GA, what's your take between how GA4 Premium and Adobe Analytics compare these days?
Sam Torres 1/16/2025, 9:32:33 AM
@Adrienne Kmetz Thank you for such kind words and encouragement!

Love the idea of creating sample tickets! Where do those live so they're easily accessible? I'm always curious how others handle their internal company wiki.
Mary Albright 1/16/2025, 9:34:38 AM
whats your dream client?
Adrienne Kmetz 1/16/2025, 9:35:41 AM
Documentation about how to make documentation ???? “How to submit a bug ticket + templates” “how we ask for merchandise” “Jira etiquette”. Lives in Confluence in a searchable Knowledge Base. I will make certain fields required or they cant submit it. (steps you took to get there, link, screenshot).

Jira admin status is true omnipotence to me hehe
Sam Torres 1/16/2025, 9:37:33 AM
@Adrienne Kmetz Ooh brand. I'll be honest, this is a place where I definitely lean on my team members. I know enough to be annoying, but definitely have so much more to learn. Certainly we get the question of "how do I measure my brand's appearance in LLMs, and in a measurable way?" To be honest we haven't found any tried and true, this definitely works methods. We're testing and trying things just like everyone else.

Thankfully, I think this is causing clients to come back to measuring brand and understanding it is important, and part of the funnel to your MQLs. Seems like with the "growth hacking", there was a singular focus on leads, and not that I'm saying that tracking leads isn't a critical piece. But it was often getting in the way of other initiatives that are more nuanced in their lift to the company, because you couldn't drive it down to a single metric. So that being said, when it comes to measuring brand, we still look at overall impressions, we track branded search interest. We can also track interest on other platforms (think YouTube, Reddit, TikTok while we can still access in the US since I'm based in the States).
Sam Torres 1/16/2025, 9:41:04 AM
Hey @Kartikey Tanna - unpopular answer, but no, I haven't built any AI driven processes or agentic workflows. I do use ML quite a bit to wade through datasets. I also use a platform called Graft for applying prompts to lots of rows at a single time. For the places where there's clear process, I usually opt for training team members to delegate that work to. Again, an unpopular stance, but one I feel pretty passionate about. I'd rather educate, be able to pay a freelancer who's still learning, and be more selective about when I add to tech operating costs of these AI tools
Sam Torres 1/16/2025, 9:44:40 AM
@Noah Can't live without tools - for me personally, Cursor (which YOU introduced me to!), Capacities (I'm migrating from Notion), Superhuman. As an agency, Sitebulb Cloud, AWS for our VM, Graft - I might add to this later
Sam Torres 1/16/2025, 9:46:12 AM
@Mikael Araújo For using AI frequently, most of my use is for helping me to write emails :melting_face:. I use Superhuman, so it has learned my voice, which has been extremely helpful. Also for writing proposals.

The things that are more popular for SEOs, I actually use ML models for a lot of it instead of tools like ChatGPT. For example, using BERTopic for topic modeling/keyword clustering
Ryan Mendenhall 1/16/2025, 9:46:47 AM
To your point earlier of SEOs being at the table with Product/Engineering...sounds a lot like Eli Schwartz's book Product Led SEO, something I've been pushing ever since I read it a few years back... so important!

I mean, how is it that I have a goal of traffic and conversions, but I'm relying on the IT team who doesn't to make sure Bing's crawler doesn't see a captcha when it comes to crawl and so we don't get deindexed in Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, etc OR that I get a website after 2 years of secret development and then see it first when it goes live and am asked to "SEO it?"

What do you think we can do as an industry or as individuals within our companies to move effectively towards this shift from siloed SEO to Product-Led SEO?
Duane 1/16/2025, 9:48:20 AM
Why is final fantasy 6 the best final fantasy?
Noah 1/16/2025, 9:48:48 AM
> Certainly we get the question of “how do I measure my brand’s appearance in LLMs, and in a measurable way?” To be honest we haven’t found any tried and true, this definitely works methods. We’re testing and trying things just like everyone else.
I’m hearing as a throughline when I talk with other builders that starting with your top x terms in GSC and then searching in LLMs for those terms is a good starting point.
Sam Torres 1/16/2025, 9:50:10 AM
Hey @Mika Lepistö - love this question. I think the future proofing for agents is honestly the same as it has been for a while. Ensuring our priority content is in that initial HTML response, using schema to easily deliver the prime facts about our topic/content (machines LOVE schema!), making sure internal linking is thought through, not tacked on later for findability and easily navigating through the site
Sam Torres 1/16/2025, 9:53:17 AM
@Renee Girard approach to testing: extremely documented. So having clear roadmaps of what's being tested when, what metrics are we measuring for each test - all of that needs to be agreed upon beforehand. I also typically have a 2-week minimum for a test to run. When we can, I love testing on PPC first to get data faster.

As far as HOW we do testing, that ultimately depends on the client stack. I am a fan of SEOtesting.com. We can do edge testing with Cloudflare workers, heck even with GTM (though I wouldn't recommend it). So pretty method agnostic, that really gets decided with the client's tech stack.
Noah 1/16/2025, 9:54:49 AM
so many :pinched_fingers: insights from @Sam Torres up here. I hadn’t heard of graft before or capacities.
Sam Torres 1/16/2025, 9:54:53 AM
@Peter Benes We have a list of recommendations based on the client's business type. I'm a huge fan of mixpanel, Matomo server for those who want to own their data, and Fullstory
Sam Torres 1/16/2025, 9:57:56 AM
@Micah Fisher-Kirshner Both are extremely capable and can do what you want it to do - becomes a question of how hard will it be. I'll also be honest that I have a bit of shudder when it comes to Adobe Analytics. My first time trying to get the Amazon DSP/Sizmek pixel implemented was with Adobe Analytics and their Tag Manager in a mobile app, so using Firebase with Adobe Analytics (I'm dating myself with this project) - well, by the end of that project, I bought a bottle of scotch for my engineers because we had been through some stuff together. It was when most of this was brand spanking new, so no documentation existed yet. Not my favorite time.
Ryan Mendenhall 1/16/2025, 10:00:11 AM
Guys seriously, to @Noah's point, Sam is a FOUNTAIN of knowledge & wisdom. We didn't even get to ask her about 64 million URL site migrations, the extent of her ML projects or why she quit first person shooter games...

BUT other than her dentist appointment today, Sam's so kindly agreed to pop in throughout the day and answer more of your Qs.

If you haven't gotten the chance to talk with Sam, please, get to know her. You won't be sorry!

Thanks to @Sam Torres and everyone for making this so fun today!!!
Noah 1/16/2025, 10:01:05 AM
celebrate
Sam Torres 1/16/2025, 10:01:15 AM
@Mary Albright My dream client. Hrm, ok, dream brand is probably BioWare (a videogame company) - they don't really need SEO, but I don't care, I just wanna work for them. I almost left SEO 7/8 years back to be a community moderator, but that 65% salary decrease wasn't gonna cut it for my family.

As far as type of client, well I'm super fortunate that I already get to limit Gray Dot to those types of clients.We love working with embedded teams where we can be guardrails and more partners. I just wanna hop on calls and talk through nerdy problems and find fun solutions together.
Noah 1/16/2025, 10:01:42 AM
standing ovation
Ryan Mendenhall 1/16/2025, 10:01:47 AM
Sam be like
Tory Gray 1/16/2025, 10:02:15 AM
@Noah I just wanna point out that we did a social experiment in WTS to query chatGPT and the other main LLMs to see the answers for the exact same query.

We all got WILDLY different answers.
Sam Torres 1/16/2025, 10:02:54 AM
@Ryan Mendenhall You're not wrong ????
Tory Gray 1/16/2025, 10:03:02 AM
like, if i search in my account for “top seo agency” Gray Dot is on the list. It is not for others, unfortunately ????
Tory Gray 1/16/2025, 10:03:30 AM
@Ryan Mendenhall can confirm, that was 100% Sam ????
Noah 1/16/2025, 10:03:31 AM
@Tory Gray That right there is why I shudder when I hear folks relying on LLMs to do things like quantitative analysis or keyword research.
Sam Torres 1/16/2025, 10:03:48 AM
@Duane It is undeniably the best because the story! Omg, I still cry every time I play. And Shadow's story, the way all of that weaves into the other characters and you could play that whole game and not actually encounter any of it! Plus I'm a sucker for the opera
Sam Torres 1/16/2025, 10:04:27 AM
@Duane asked the right question ????
Tory Gray 1/16/2025, 10:04:39 AM
i shudder at a lot of things ChatGPT if I’m honest. We need specialized tools that are built to do specific things - not just “autocomplete” for the most popular answer (where popular might be “that one due on Reddit, that one time”)
Noah 1/16/2025, 10:04:47 AM
And FYI, I will be adding this thread to https://theseocommunity.com/events/ask-me-anything/samantha-torres later this week.
Tory Gray 1/16/2025, 10:05:53 AM
even asking it to cite it’s sources. It… has no concept of “truth”, it’s just autocompleting that, too. like a toddler with a giant vocabulary, who doesn’t understand what any of it means!
Ryan Mendenhall 1/16/2025, 10:07:54 AM
@Tory Gray You find that ChatGPT (or others) with web capability is getting source citing wrong? You tried customgpt.ai for hallucination free RAG? It basically tells you it doesn't know if it can't find the specific answer in your knowledgebase.
Ryan Mendenhall 1/16/2025, 10:09:35 AM
@Sam Torres (for as time permits) How do you balance sentiment analysis with traditional keyword research to inform content strategies?
Josh Spilker (AirOps) 1/16/2025, 11:21:16 AM
@Sam Torres what's a recent project that you're most proud of?



Our Values

What we believe in

Building friendships

Kindness

Giving

Elevating others

Creating Signal

Discussing ideas respectfully

What has no home here

Diminishing others

Gatekeeping

Taking without giving back

Spamming others

Arguing

Selling links and guest posts


Sign up for our Newsletter

Join our mailing list for updates

By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. We may send you occasional newsletters and promotional emails about our products and services. You can opt-out at any time.

Apply now to join our amazing community.

Powered by MODXModx Logo
the blazing fast + secure open source CMS.