Hi! 👋 We’re so glad to feature you on SEOjobs.com. Please introduce yourself to our site’s readers.
Hi there! I’m Kelly, a freelancer & consultant with about 15 years of experience helping brands get found online. Nearly half of my career has been spent self-employed, with the rest of it being split between in-house and agency. I’ve worked with brands of all sizes, from the smallest mom & pop companies you’ve never heard of to enterprise organizations with household names.
Please share your current role and what you’re focused on right now with Kelly Stanze Consulting + Creative (and any co-op or fractional work).
I’m typically an SEO generalist, loving the balancing act between creative, technical, and analytical. In my current chapter as a freelancer and consultant, I serve both direct partners of my own and subcontract for agencies in need of some SEO & GEO support.
I’ve also got to give a shout-out to Robot Logic Marketing, the freelancer co-op for which I serve as the Director of Organic Search. We’re all handy on our own in our core specializations, but it’s so great to have a team of talented people who can come together to bring a more full-service approach to special projects.
In addition to my performance SEO services, I also love taking on a change of pace with content strategy and copywriting.
Can you walk us through how you first entered the SEO and digital marketing industry? What sparked your interest?
My entry into SEO is kind of a funny story. The short answer is “accidentally, because of Twitter.” The longer answer is that I first joined Twitter in late 2008 as a college freshman. As a small-town girl who was really involved in 4-H and FFA, I naturally gravitated to agriculture communities on Twitter. I ended up falling into multiple internships in the agriculture industry through Twitter connections, including two out-of-state agencies that kickstarted my career in social media and content strategy.
One of those internships turned into my first job after college graduation. As part of my work, I began learning about blog SEO and using data to inform content strategy. When I was laid off from that role 15 months later, I ended up accepting an offer for an SEO strategist role at another agency. SEO has been my primary specialization ever since.
How did you start to learn SEO? What are you currently doing to keep up with the ever changing SEO industry?
My first full-time SEO role, most of my training was actually done via Moz resource articles. The industry didn’t have as many educational opportunities as it does now, and Moz was THE definitive source for training materials.
Nowadays, LinkedIn is my primary hub for keeping up. There’s a really good, diverse crew of highly active industry leaders over there, really investing in research and studies. Some of my favorites include Lily Ray, Glenn Gabe, Wil Reynolds, Barry Schwartz, among many others. (Seriously, there are so many incredible leaders in our industry, I can’t possibly remember all of them.) The WTS Community on Slack is a constant source of information, encouragement, and insight for women, trans, and non-binary individuals. The SEO Community (also on Slack) is an incredible way to engage with thousands of other individuals in our industry.
You built the in-house SEO program from the ground up at Hallmark as the sole strategist for hallmark.com and related sites. What were the biggest challenges in that enterprise environment, and what are you most proud of from that time?
I’ve had a lot of really cool experiences in my career, but the amount of learning you do in a young enterprise program is unparalleled. While the agency I’d been at was big (300+ employees overall) nothing prepares you for a busy headquarters with thousands of employees.
One of my favorite Hallmark stories comes from early on in my time there, and it’s really a great example of getting in and figuring things out. I was overwhelmed – several websites, not a lot of direction to start, and a lot of curiosity about this new search strategist. My boss was going to be meeting with someone from the personal care product line later, and wanted some insight into how the categories were doing on the site.
Doing some initial auditing, I noticed something: a specific line of Hallmark’s own products were referred to as “hand créme.” I asked the .com editor if she had any insight and she said it was a style choice to elevate the brand. When I started looking into keyword volume and SERP behavior, I saw something that made me literally laugh at out loud:
Did you mean “hand cream”?
If you searched for “hand créme” on Google, it took you to results for “hand cream” – and required you to intentionally choose “hand créme” as your intended term instead. The word “créme” appeared nowhere in the SERP on the default results page. This was before semantic processing, so you usually got results for what you typed in.
I brought that to my supervisor, and data on alternative keywords. We updated the product titles, and the production run of that particular product had new labels…labeled “hand cream” instead. The personal care category gained quite a bit of traction as we continued to explore how “premium” language was hurting reach in a pre-BERT age.
That one experience taught me so much about taking large, abstract problems and breaking them down into smaller segments. The entire personal care category needed work, but one specific product line gave me a thread to tug at. In the years since, I’ve come to really, REALLY enjoy the triage and detective work that comes with larger, more abstract problems – and finding the tangible, actionable core within.
You’ve worked in agency roles, enterprise in-house (Hallmark), and now as a freelancer/consultant and Organic Search Director at Robot Logic. What are the biggest differences you’ve experienced across these paths, and how did each shape your approach?
I recently contributed to WTS Knowledge with a pretty in-depth piece on the subject of in-house, freelancing, and agency career pathways in SEO/GEO. The short version is:
- Agencies
- Generally give you a ton of learning in a pretty concentrated dosage, and a lot more of a clear career progression
- However, the lifestyle can be stressful, and you’re at the mercy of clients and a demanding environment
- In-House
- Generally you have more resources and clout in the industry (especially with a recognized brand); you’re much closer to the product, with more ownership
- The corporate bureaucracy that is often present in client-side environments can be taxing; there isn’t always a lot of career progression within your specialization since very few companies have robust Search organizations with upward mobility
- Freelance
- Incredibly flexible, and your career is entirely on your terms; you have the freedom to work only with partners that match your values, your areas of interest, etc.
- The buck always stops at you – whether it’s failing to bring in new business, falling behind on bookkeeping, figuring out how to pay for the tool subscriptions and tech you need…it’s all on you; it can also be incredibly lonely, if you aren’t finding ways to get off your island
All three have pros and cons. I recommend reading the full WTS piece for a more detailed and nuanced breakdown. I’ve loved big parts of each chapter, and there are things I’d change about each one. Each one has deal-breakers that some individuals might hate, but all have their own unique charm as well.
Since I tend to be driven by relationships and the work itself, I’ve found joy in just about any setting, as long as I feel like I’m part of something that matters and the people in it with me are supportive and reliable.
Knowing what motivates you goes a long way in understanding whether you’d thrive in an agency, in-house, or as a freelancer.
You specialize in both traditional SEO and emerging areas like AI search (GEO/AEO/AIO). How have you adapted your strategies as search evolves with LLMs, and what advice do you have for staying ahead without getting overwhelmed?
The most important consideration to have at this point in the AI/AIO/GEO/AEO evolution is an open mind. My opinions have changed several times from the earliest days of LLMs to now, simply because I adapted to new information and developments as they arose. We’re all going to be wrong about things, we’re going to have theories that get debunked or ideas that turn out to be unfeasible. Just going in with humility and a sense of humor, knowing you could come across something that challenges your existing opinions, makes all the change and debate significantly more tolerable.
You’ve worked in regulation-heavy or messaging-sensitive industries like veterinary medicine, food/ag, higher ed, finance, and non-profits. How do you approach SEO and content strategy differently in those spaces?
Depending on the industry you’re in, you may have to accept limitations in just how actively you can pursue keywords. I’d been working in higher education and career training when some major gainful employment laws began to take shape. This meant that trade schools and career colleges had a lot more guidelines about how they could talk about graduate job prospects and debt burdens.
Previous value props and keywords around career opportunities had to be re-evaluated carefully to ensure that they met Gainful Employment guidelines. Back then, search was much more literal in its matching of keywords within results to queries. Ultimately we had to be either more creative with how we used language or more willing to miss out on some keywords that were relevant but outside of regulation.
The creative problem solving it prompted made me grow as a copywriter. It helped me understand ways to frame language that included rich keywords, while skirting promises that would risk Gainful Employment crackdowns.
As language processing has improved and search has become more semantic, this exact situation is less common. There’s more room to talk about the topic and less about specific keywords, which loosens some of the knots relating to highly-regulated industries.
Most of the time, the limitations are more from the client’s over-abundance of caution, than from the governing bodies themselves. Working closely with your clients to figure out the boundaries together is a great way to build trust. Ask for style guides, preferred language documents, or compliance requirements. Most highly-regulated companies will have these on hand already.
You’ve spoken about leaving self-employment for full-time roles and navigating other career detours. What lessons from those experiences (including any “failures and fate” moments) have stuck with you?
I joke about my adventures in salaried roles as “side quests.” My current tenure in self-employment is my third stint at it. Each time I’ve left, it’s been typically because an opportunity arose and my response was, “Yeah, let’s try this.”
I don’t view any of these transitions in and out of self-employment as a failure, because each side quest or plot twist has played an important role in my career, and in the lifestyle my family and I are trying to build together.
As someone who’s just generally enthusiastic about the work I do, the people I work with, and learning, saying “yes” to new adventures feels natural. I love the flexibility and fulfillment of being my own boss, but I always want to be brave enough to try new things or take on new challenges. Sometimes that challenge is a type of freelance project I’ve never done before. Sometimes the challenge is joining an in-house team in a new-to-me-industry doing digital marketing channels that I haven’t run before.
How do you approach collaboration—whether with developers, cross-functional teams, other vendors, or international partners—to deliver holistic results?
One of the greatest parts of working at Hallmark was the cross-team integration. My role reported through the eCommerce Marketing organization, but the only thing separating me from the .com technical organization was a couple of conference rooms. At one point, I had my own desk by the developers.
I also thoroughly enjoyed being hands-on with copywriting and editing there, and would shift gears frequently between creative and tech.
I went in there knowing I’d get to do a lot of teaching – whether it was helping copy editors set new standards for the way they named SKUs on the website, or developers building instrumentation so that product data automatically populated schema on the front end of the site. Helping juggle the priorities of multiple disparate teams meant I had to learn a VERY hard lesson for a young, hungry SEO professional: SEO isn’t everything.
Sometimes you have to ignore a certain content opportunity in order to adhere to brand guidelines. Sometimes the site’s tech stack doesn’t allow the page to render in the order you’d like it to for optimal Core Web Vitals. Sometimes your priorities aren’t the most important ones for the group at large. It’s okay to take a backseat and be a team player. If you’re all SEO, all the time, you might miss the chance to make some magic that’s actually tracked through someone else’s KPIs.
What role has technical SEO, information architecture, user experience, or CRO played in your work, especially in fast-paced retail/ecommerce environments like Hallmark?
Information architecture is an under-appreciated skill in the SEO work, in my opinion. Understanding the way your site’s structure allows for crawlers and users alike to cleanly move through it is important; it’s even more important in an ecommerce setting.
Ahrefs has a nice little resource about information architecture for SEO, but I also recommend hands-on learning in this regard. My favorite approach is to use Figma to build visual site maps, so you can really see how the different folders, subfolders, and pages flow outward from the root domain. Understanding how to organize a large, complex site for quality UX and SEO is such a great learning experience. I recommend every SEO try to get to know their site’s information architecture.
Have you faced any major stumbling blocks or challenging periods in SEO (algorithm updates, team dynamics, industry shifts)? How did you navigate them?
If we’re being honest, right now feels a bit trying. As AI has continued to grow as a staple of society, it’s presented new challenges in our industry. It’s not the LLMs or agentic tech specifically that’s the problem – it’s the panic generated by such major change.
It feels very much like business leaders are deeply anxious about FOMO in regards to AI, without clear understanding of how AI factors into their business. I’ve had meetings with multiple business leaders over the last two years, where they said, “Well, we want to be an AI-first company.” Yet, when asked what that actually mean, they seemed uncomfortable.
This abstract fear and the sort of vague, broad rush to capture the AI opportunity can make things…tricky. It opens the gate for grifters to sell shady, fast solutions to win at AI (while often accidentally killing SEO) and can make already-stressed leaders less trusting of their partners.
I think AI has a lot of incredible potential – to save lives, improve quality of life, create efficiencies in business, and more. But the sort of generate fear of being left behind has created an anxious energy and lack of trust in our industry that’s going to take some time to work past.
As someone who’s balanced self-employment with family and personal life, what tips do you have for maintaining work-life balance and avoiding burnout in this demanding field?
What is work-life balance?
Kidding.
Seriously, though, my husband is a huge fan of a book called Your Money or Your Life. While I haven’t read it myself yet, he explained the premise: if someone held a weapon up to you and said, “You can give me all your money, or you can give me your life,” you’d generally choose to give away your money and keep your life. I really appreciate that perspective. (I should probably read the book.)
Much like deciding your career path, knowing your priorities matters. At an earlier time in my self-employment, I chose to make significantly less money in favor of more time with my son, who was a toddler at the time. I’d take him to the zoo multiple times a week, or go splash in mud puddles or bake cookies or take a hike in the woods. My priority during the days was crafting a magical childhood for him.
It also meant that he’d go to bed at 7 p.m. and I’d try to fit most of a workday into the evening and night. I spent several years basically balancing a full-time load as a mom, with a full-time load as a freelancer. I was exhausted. I was also so incredibly in love with both my child and my work that I powered through.
Now, he’s older and more self-reliant, and he’s in school. Work/life balance is easier, but my biggest challenge is saying “no.” I’m incredibly blessed to have so much word-of-mouth opportunity finding me, from genuinely wonderful people. Most of my late-night crunch sessions happen now because I simply agreed to something that I probably should have passed along – because it sounded fun or the people seemed great.
This isn’t exactly good advice, is it?
What recommendations would you give to someone looking to break into SEO or advance from novice/intermediate to more senior/strategic roles today?
Early in your career, a lot of SEO opportunity is about personality. Build your curiosity muscles, your adaptability, and your willingness to learn. A lot of SEOs get their start by joining an agency in an entry-level position with no experience, based on teachability – however, those roles aren’t that common.
You’ll also see people in adjacent roles who have taken on more SEO functions or incorporated more SEO tactics into their roles. You see it with marketing generalists (think marketing managers, marketing coordinators, account coordinators) easing into the space after working closely to it. Content and copywriting are also common leaping-off points into SEO. In my case, my primary focus was social media and content strategy, so stepping into SEO felt pretty seamless.
For a total career change, I recommend building some side projects if you can. Some low-stakes freelancing, or building your own sandbox site, can build your hands-on experience. If you can find an SEO opportunity in the industry you know, that helps. For instance, I know of a former vet tech who decided she wanted to get into marketing after helping with her clinic’s website and communications. She eventually went on to do SEO for some vet clinics in different markets as a side-hustle before making the transition fully.
The job market is pretty chaotic these days, but SEO is a space where your mindset, teachability, curiosity, and adaptability matter immensely. While experience is great, a willingness to put in the work to BECOME experienced is a huge asset to anyone looking to join the industry.
How important are soft skills like communication, adaptability, or relationship-building compared to technical SEO knowledge in long-term career success?
Soft skills are such a major part of SEO, and I’ve found that the people who thrive in this industry are ones who embrace that whole-heartedly. In SEO and AI search, you have to be a central hub and advocate for a channel that rests at the intersection of creative, technical, and PR. If you aren’t capable of building solid cross-organizational relationships, communicating clearly, performing your own level of project management, and sharing the story of your work, you won’t succeed.
Whether you’re helping clients understand the work you’re doing and how it helps them win, or trying to get buy-in from in-house stakeholders who are removed from the day-to-day work, soft skills are vital.
SEOs have to operate in the ambiguous spaces of marketing and technology – adapting to change, communicating that change, figuring out new normals with other teams as tech and best practices change, and more. The ones who can do that, while also balancing the interwoven focus areas of our trade, are the ones who thrive.
Looking back at nearly 15 years in the industry, what’s one big piece of advice you wish you’d known earlier, or something you’re still actively working on?
I’ve always been a curious person, and I love learning – but some of my best advice for professionals in SEO comes from an iconic scene in Ted Lasso: “Be curious, not judgemental” (I know Walt Whitman said that first, but I’m a Kansas City girl so I’ve got to hand it to Jason Sudeikis.)
Coming into a new website, or even uncovering situations in a website you’ve worked on for a while already, can lead to frustrating discoveries. Earlier on in my career, it was easy for me to look at technical debt or certain processes or missteps and think, “How could ANYONE think this was the right way to do something?” As I gained experience across a wide variety of settings and business types, I started to peel back the layers and take a more empathetic view.
Most people – in life and in their work – are just doing their best. Sometimes their business comes with requirements that don’t align with SEO best practices, or maybe there are corporate directives the team has to operate under that limited their options. Maybe they were just trying to do the right thing by the site, and trusted the wrong person. Instead of judging people immediately, I try to understand the “why” and frame up context. And learning the history isn’t to place blame. It’s so that I know the guardrails within which I can also operate.
Some SEOs will go hard for an SEO-first approach to all things, and in reality, there are places concessions have to be made. Sometimes that high-volume keyword just doesn’t work within brand standards, or sometimes the way you’d like to see a technical element handled doesn’t work within the ecosystem at hand. Getting curious about a business’s limitations and history allows you to build the best possible plan to meet that business where they’re at.
The worst kind of SEO plan is one that can’t be implemented because it doesn’t fit the business and its requirements. Curiosity allows you to find out where the rules can be bent, or where you can advocate for change, or where you need to walk away – at least for now.
What excites you most about the future of SEO, AI search, and digital strategy? Any final thoughts or resources you’d recommend to our readers?
I think we’re seeing stabilization of the early AI disruption, which means it’s time for us to move past some of the initial panic and really do some amazing stuff. Without so much AI Panic, there’s room to create clarity into how it can impact businesses, fulfill user needs, and enhance our digital landscapes. I have a theory that the Zero Click search everyone is worried about now, will evolve into a natural consideration in the conversion ecosystem – we’ll see less upper-funnel traffic coming to sites for research and prospecting, but the brands who win will be the ones best-positioned to capture conversions after the research stage is wrapped. And those conversions will be happening in new and exciting ways – like through agentic shopping.
The settling of AI into a more mature channel also comes with awareness that online search habits are a living matrix that is constantly changing. A lot of the debate in the industry right now is whether SEO is still relevant, or if GEO has replaced it. That paints it as a linear dichotomy with two points: one end is search engines, the other is LLMs, and we as an industry have to decide how the future looks with those two potential endpoints.
In reality, users are finding information and converting in more places and through more means now than ever before. We have to find innovative, creative ways to build the odds for conversion in even more unique places around the Internet. We have to work with our partners to show up in all the non-traditional search platforms people use – the search engines that aren’t search engines. Reddit, Pinterest, YouTube, Facebook, LLMs, etc. all factor into the search landscape. So how do we optimize for this great, bit, wide, holistic Internet, when users can search just about anywhere? We figure it out. And that’s going to be SO much fun.