Q&A With Rightmove’s Tomas Vaitulevicius

With just a few days to go until SES London, this Q&A with Tomas Vaitulevicius, SEO and analytics manager at Rightmove, will give you a peak at what’s in store at the conference and what he has to say about site architecture.

Search Engine Watch (SEW): Your session at SES London focuses on site architecture. In your opinion, how are businesses approaching their site architecture and is there much education to be had?

Tomas Vaitulevicius (TV): I think there are a lot of experienced SEOs doing great things online, but I’m worried about a couple of trends related to the technical setup of our websites.

SEO is still being considered too late in the Web development process. I’ll agree that some progress has been made, but we’re still being involved in projects when too many things have already been decided, becoming constraints for us to work around. This is probably partly because SEOs are not always equipped with the technical understanding to contribute to a discussion of the very low-level Web development architecture choices.

In the intent to move our industry away from the shady past, a lot of thought leaders focus nearly exclusively on brand-building related activities. I’m supportive of this “pivot” of SEO, but I feel that the more recent joiners of our industry no longer understand the importance of the technical fluency and hence don’t invest enough time and effort in acquiring it.

SEW: Can you give us some examples of how a company might use architecture to capture and engage with new audiences?

TV: Optimizing SEO architecture is the non-sexy housekeeping that needs to be done to enable and empower the creative work to be built on solid SEO foundation. The companies that crack this will amplify the return they get from content marketing activities as search engines take notice and interpret their efforts in the optimal way.

SEW: Give us three things delegates will take away from your session that will make them better marketers.

TV: I think a lot of delegates will get the opportunity to do some introspection into what type of SEOs they want to be – technical, fully rounded, or creative. The SEOs that want to stay involved with the technical aspects will get guidance on what skills they need today and what they will need tomorrow to stay top of their game.

I’ll provide the delegates with a mental map of the key factors that need to be balanced when drafting large site SEO architecture.

And we’ll brush up on the flow of the link equity, as too much of it is still being wasted through poor website setup.

Tomas Vaitulevicius will be speaking in London on Wednesday, February 11 in a session called “Next Generation Site Architecture – Increasing Your Site Findability.”

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