Genie Jones, a graduate of the Applied Linguistics undergraduate course in Language, Communication, and Culture, explains how her degree was "almost the perfect pathway" into her SEO career. She explains how her degree gave her the confidence to enter the industry, and how her skills in language and linguistics help her in her day-to-day work.

---

It has now been 3 years since I graduated from Warwick with my degree in Language, Culture and Communications. Even though it feels like yesterday, when I look back on the career journey that day it suddenly starts to feel like a very long time! This post will explain my job, and how LCC was almost the perfect pathway for me to get there. I hope to inspire a few more people to see the tech industry as something accessible to those with language degrees, even if you have no background in tech whatsoever.

"As an LCC graduate, I found I had more than enough knowledge and experience to enter this field at a higher level than so many others"

I currently hold a position in the field of Search Engine Optimisation. This, at its very core, is just ‘getting websites to the top of Google’. It’s a hidden career in that sense as its very easy to assume that the machines take care of everything. However, if I’ve learned one thing since starting SEO, it’s that people who hold degrees in communications are some of the biggest driving forces in the tech space. Machines are always striving to understand human communication, and those who can manipulate language to harness the power of machine learning are more valuable than ever.

SEO is an amalgamation of tonnes of different jobs. It’s essentially marketing, as online visibility leads to clicks to a website which, hopefully, convert to sales. But you can call yourself an SEO if you:

• only write content for websites that are optimized for certain search terms
• only focus on coding
• only focus on paid advertising (although this might be a little controversial!)
• only focus on outreach and PR to get other high-ranking websites to talk and link towards your business
• do all the aspects above.
• do none of that, but help create software that helps other people in these roles

And so much more. Essentially, it is a job that can be bent to suit your strengths.

Let’s take an example of how LCC links perfectly to SEO.

If Warwick wanted to be at the top of Google for the search term ‘best university in England’ then there are certain things they would need to do online to appear there.

Firstly, they would need to have content on their website that mentions this search term meaningfully. The search term would be most effective if it was in the title of the blog post, and mentioned a few times throughout. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Someone – perhaps an LCC graduate – would need to do a bit of research into the human brain to figure out the schema surrounding this search term. These are the connections that exist between concepts and how strongly they relate to each other in certain contexts.

Sound familiar? That’s because it is! In my first year at Warwick I learnt about cognitive schema as a theory of language learning. Almost everything we learned about the human brain for first language acquisition is almost identical to how machines really learn. And what’s amazing is – no one in the industry seems to have made this connection yet! This part of SEO is called ‘Entity SEO’, and linked here is a crash course on it where I talk more in depth about the connection between schema theory and SEO.

"Those who can manipulate language to harness the power of machine learning are more valuable than ever"

Google has a huge database of concepts that are linked to each other based on semantic closeness. This is called their Knowledge Graph’, and it is constantly being reviewed and expanded on based on ‘lived’ experience (if you can call a machine living), much like Piaget’s cognitive schema theories. It knows that when you want to talk about university, you need to also be providing context on education, money, professors, work etc, as nothing exists in isolation. Google wants to provide it’s users with the most helpful online content, so those who write content that fulfils the schema expectations will be the ones most likely to appear at the top of the search engine! OK, this isn’t the only reason, but it is a huge ranking factor.

Below is a diagram, called a topic map, of all of the concepts linked to ‘best university in England’

I got this information from the software I work for, which is called Inlinks.com. It takes the current top ten pages on the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs) and extracts all of the entities that are meaningful on those pages. Entities are just concepts, defined as ‘things, places, people, organisations and Countries’. My job is to feed this software information on how and why these concepts relate to each other by categorising them in a machine readable way.

Warwick's website would need to talk meaningfully about most of the entities that appear in this chart, as it is how google truly understands who is and isn’t providing great information. The best part is, you don’t have to do this all in one article, In fact I wouldn’t encourage that. Your job from this point on could be to take this information and provide the university of Warwick a content plan for the next few months on different articles expanding on a few of these entities at a time. This is a full time job, and one that LCC prepares you for from the start.

To make my point a little clearer, I would encourage you to watch this extremely silly talk I did to around 3000 people (yes, you read that right! It’s a bigger industry than a lot of people think) on this very subject.

"People who hold degrees in communications are some of the biggest driving forces in the tech space"

As an LCC graduate, I found I had more than enough knowledge and experience to enter this field at a higher level than so many others. When I first graduated, I was looking for stereotypical marketing positions and being rejected at every corner because I was competing with every graduate in the country. When I finally got hired, the ‘marketing’ in question was very old fashioned and boring. Emails, calls, some meetings on logos… all things that really don’t use our degree to its fullest potential. By pivoting into SEO meant that I could focus on publishing content, creating relationships with businesses on my own and moving away from a typical 9-5 work day. There is also a huge demand for SEO specialist right now, with far fewer graduates competing for them because they often think its exclusively for STEM degrees.

If you can convince yourself and your employer that Google is more human than machine, and that you are literally an expert at human language learning, then there really is no stopping you.

To conclude, I would highly recommend any LCC graduate to look at the opportunities SEO can offer you. Whether your strengths lie in writing, public speaking, making connections, working alone on coding, creating data visualisations, or delving deep into the theory of language and how it helps computers there’s definitely a space for you. I’m incredibly grateful for the education I received at Warwick for leading me into such an exciting space, and excited for future LCC graduates to join me!