Interviewing Dena Warren

Welcome to a new WTSInterview edition, where we interview brilliant SEOs in our industry and share their stories with the world! WTS members are welcome to share their story by simply filling out this form; we encourage folks from all walks of life in our industry to do so.

Introducing Dena Warren! She is an eCommerce SEO specialist with over five years of experience. She is currently SEO Lead for Techquity, and has worked with both marketing and development agencies supporting a diverse range of eCommerce clients to improve their organic search performance. Dena is passionate about helping brands grow through practical, data-driven SEO strategies.

How did you get into SEO?

In covid I managed to get a job doing Digital PR, due to my previous role in events having a lot of transferrable skills such as press releases and marketing, and with Digital PR sitting as a part of the wider SEO team, I was interested in what other members of the team were doing and so learnt a lot from them, and quickly moved into a strategist role, and then fully into SEO.

What is your favourite SEO task?

I love doing technical audits, as you can identify real issues that are hindering the site, and can make a big impact with recommendations for these. It helps that I work in a development agency, alongside the developers that built the sites I work on, meaning its a lot easier for me to get dev changes pushed through than in a traditional marketing agency!

What is your go-to tool or resource that you can't live without?

I love screaming frog and use it on a near-daily basis - it not only helps with the traditional SEO clients I work on, but also when I am assisting the developers on site migrations and new site builds. With every update it just keeps getting better, especially with the new content cluster visualisation tool, it uses embeddings to visualise topical clusters, related pages and highlights any outliers as irrelevant content - perfect for refining your content strategy!

What is something you learned in SEO that made you have an 'AHA' moment?

When I pinpointed some sharp organic visibility and traffic drops to a navigation redesign that was done by the client without any SEO collaboration, it made me realise the importance of treating a navigation refresh like a site migration - the impact it can have on SEO is huge - ensuring that there is SEO involvement is so important and I really advocate for it with clients now.

What is your proudest industry achievement?

Starting my current role as SEO Lead at a predominantly development agency - having started out in Digital PR I never considered myself very technical so being able to hold my own having conversations with developers on a daily basis and suggesting new ways of working on sites was a great moment for me.

What advice would you give those who are starting out in SEO?

Give a shout out to someone in the industry who inspires you, and tell us why

I really admire Aleyda Solis - I read her newsletter every week and she shares great insights on Linkedin constantly, she's really helped me progress in my understanding of SEO over the past few years, especially when I hear her talk at conferences, and when I met her at HiveMCR earlier this year she was so lovely!

Finally, what empowers you to be the brilliant person you are?

All of the other amazing women in the WTS community - to be surrounded by such incredible intelligent women really makes you feel empowered to tackle work head on and constantly be learning and growing!

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Thanks, Dena, for a truly insightful interview!

You can follow and/or connect with Dena on her Linkedin!

Check out our Interviews page for more interviews. If you've enjoyed reading this, we'd love for YOU to share your story with the world! Simply fill this form here, we welcome brilliant SEOs from all walks of life! 🙌🏽