I was an SEO Analyst at TiVo between May and August of 2019.
When my internship at Wescover was drawing to a close, I realized “oh snap, I need a job now!”
As luck would have it, just a couple weeks before my internship was set to end, I was cold-contacted by an off-shore recruiter I was 99% certain was trying to involve me in a visa scam. They asked me if I wanted a job.
Well, what the hell, I thought. I guess it’s worth a conversation. What else am I dong?
The employer in question turned out to be TiVo, the consumer-electronics corporation known for making those cable DVR boxes that used to have pride of place in every middle-income household in America.
They needed someone to help optimize their website in time for an upcoming product launch. The timing was perfect, so I agreed.
Tactics
- Image optimization
- 301 redirect chain clean-up
- Internal linking
- International SEO
- Content Strategy
After I spent a few days going over TiVo’s backlog of market research data, I was asked to diagnose the key problem areas in the 10 webpages on the website which receive the most organic traffic year-over-year, and come up with ways to optimize them.
I can’t really talk too much about what the problems were because I signed a form that said I can be sued to smithereens if I blab too much. I can share the highlights though.
First, I suggested that TiVo compress the product images on the priority pages in order to improve the website’s pagespeed and performance on mobile devices.
I identified 301 redirect chains pointing to the device activation and community support pages that needed to be resolved prior to launch day. I then helped TiVo’s senior developers to categorize and archive them in order to improve the website’s user experience and crawlability.
After that, I outlined an internal linking experiment that involved linking the support and product pages together and testing their resulting increase or decrease in PageRank.
Oh, and I wrote this for their blog .
Results
My contract came to an end before my optimizations could be implemented by the in-house web developers.
But! Just before that happened, I put together this presentation for TiVo’s consumer marketing team as a way of laying out the key problem areas and what I’d been doing to help diagnose and fix them.
It involves charts, graphs, Google Analytics dashboards, a correlation chain proving that my optimizations would save the TiVo corporation money by tying pagespeed to revenue, and all sorts of fancy business stuff
