We are pleased to have Ms. Lily Ray, an amazing lady, for this interview. She’s a multi-talented person, and we can’t kickstart our interview, without getting curious about her inspiring journey and how she has built herself for music and marketing!
Lily Ray is known for her twin professions, which made her popular in both industries. Her taste in music was to become a drummer, and she channelled her ideas in marketing into SEO. Besides these, she is an avid traveller, biker and fitness lover.
Although her musical career started when she was six, she joined a band at thirteen. She had started working for an online education company, even as a student at NYU, studying Politics and Spanish.
With her dreams meeting reality, she had found her interest and established herself in 2010. She’s now an SEO professional, DJ, and drummer.
Lily Ray is an SEO professional working as vice president of SEO Strategy and Research at Amsive, a digital marketing company. She has been an active figure in SEO for the last fourteen years and now oversees an SEO team with 35+ employees who are strategists, managers, and directors. They have assisted a range of clients like small and medium businesses and Fortune 50 enterprise brands.
Her professional experience in SEO is mainly driven by her passion for diving into algorithm updates, analysing E-E-A-T, and assessing quality issues in technical SEO. The trends in SEO that she keeps looking at currently are the rise of AI and semantic search, the significance of E-E-A-T, website performance and mobile friendliness.
➢ Your experience in SEO spans many years and industries. Could you share how you approach SEO differently when working with diverse sectors such as e-commerce, healthcare, or SaaS?
Every category is different and has different KPIs. For publisher/news websites, we are usually focused on driving pageviews, subscriptions and overall engagement. Because those are the main goals for publisher sites, our focus often involves Google Discover and Google News as well. For e-commerce, the focus is obviously on driving visibility and sales for the company’s key categories and products. For healthcare, SaaS, and other similar lead-gen type companies, we are highly focused on driving qualified traffic and performing conversion rate optimization and overall UX improvements. The fundamentals are similar across the board, but the goals and KPIs are different.
➢ E-E-A-T (Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) is a key area you focus on. How has Google’s emphasis on E-E-A-T evolved, and what advice do you have for businesses looking to improve in this area?
It’s important to remember that E-E-A-T matters to the extent that content is YMYL – Your Money, Your Life. So if you are publishing on harmless topics, E-E-A-T might not be of the utmost importance. However, if your website touches on sensitive topics, or topics with the potential to cause harm, you must provide clear signals to the user that you can be trusted on these topics. This often involves transparency around the site’s authors, editors, experts, and leadership, plus history about the brand and why it is authoritative in its area. We also focus on improving how entities are displayed in Google’s Knowledge Graph.
➢ Organic reach can be challenging, especially for newer or smaller websites. What are your top recommendations for improving organic traffic in today’s competitive digital landscape?
Find the right channel and format for your audience – you might need to support your on-site SEO approach with a diversified social media presence, such as supporting information about your site and its experts on LinkedIn, TikTok, Reddit, YouTube and/or Medium. Also, since Google is prioritizing forums, you may want to consider contributing to relevant, niche forums in your industry (without being too promotional).
➢ Your ability to balance a high-pressure role in SEO with your work as a DJ is inspiring. How do you maintain that balance, and what advice would you give to others trying to achieve a similar work-life harmony?
I work all the time, but have strict rules about taking care of my personal needs too (visiting the gym almost every day, seeing friends and loved ones, traveling and playing music/dancing often). But it’s true that SEO is a 24/7 job – sometimes big developments happen at night or on weekends, and it definitely feels like I am “always on.” That said, because I absolutely love SEO and what I do, it never bothers me. My work seamlessly blends into my life, and I love it that way.
➢ Over the years you’ve been deeply involved in the SEO field, what significant changes have you witnessed in the industry. What emerging trends or technologies in SEO are you most excited about right now?
Where to begin? Everything changes all the time. Google gets smarter and smarter with its algorithm updates and spam policies; short-term growth hacks that aim to trick Google into ranking your site almost always result in your site getting caught sooner or later. It’s much better to avoid getting hit by Google algorithm updates or penalties in the long run. I am definitely very excited about LLMs and love using ChatGPT voice!
➢ SEO is often about experimentation and adaptability. Can you share an example of a successful experiment or strategy that helped significantly improve organic performance for a project?
Our Google Discover audits were a project I created a few years back, and with the help of my Amsive team to flesh out the process, we have service many clients in this area with great success. I love driving traffic for sites in Google Discover!
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