#37 Lea Scudamore - Digital Accessibility and Compliance Essential for users, good 4 SEO

Summary: Another presentation from the Brighton SEO conference on a topic that is really new, but important for every website owner. Website accessibility is a hot topic because lawmakers all around the world are writing laws that require you to make your website accessible to people with different disabilities. Luckily, a lot of the things that you have to do will have a positive impact on your SEO. Lea is an SEO expert and understands the link between those two. You can find her on Linkedin, Twitter or on the company website. Here is the transcript of the recording: Hello, and welcome to the Time for Marketing podcast, the podcast that brings you the best marketing conference speakers and makes them sum up their presentation in five minutes. My name is Peter, and I'll be your podcast's host. This is episode number 37, and if this is your first time you're listening, please go back in the library and find the excellent guests that we had in the past, that I had in the past. There's some gold in there, because I try to find people who have evergreen content. There are excellent episodes back there. If you have other people that you can promote the podcast to, I'll be glad if you do that. I'm very glad that I have today's guest on the podcast. Lea, hello, and welcome to the podcast. Lea: Hi, thanks for having me. Peter: How is Lake Superior? Lea: It's gorgeous, as always, deep blue and angry. [laughs] Peter: Me and Lea, we talked before, and I'm very intrigued by the name of the lake at which she has the office. She was kind enough to show the lake view from her office. Lea, you are the SEO analyst at Aimclear in Minnesota US. What are you as a company, and what do you do there? Lea: We are a digital agency company, award-winning. We love our US search awards. We do everything from web development to paid and, of course, SEO, like I do. Then also with SEO, we roll in accessibility and work between the teams to make sure that we're checking things like contrast and all text and all the things from the ad side to the web dev side. Peter: For you personally, why SEO? Lea: SEO I fell in love with almost 20 years ago. I worked for a company that built websites for dealerships that sold power sports. I just really fell in love with the idea of helping those small business owners get found and sell product. When I figured out how to move the needle, it was really exciting. Then I started leading a team, and that's what we did. Then after that Aimclear was the next big challenge because I wanted to see what else I could do, so applied it and here I am. Peter: What do you do in Aimclear? What are the things that you do daily, and what are your favorite things to do? Lea: I do SEO. SEO. [laughs] I also work with accessibility to make sure that the stuff we put out is accessible to as many people as we can. That's what I spend most of my day doing. I really love it when we have a site that is not performing come in, and I get to take it by the reins and make it show up and help meet goals, sell stuff, find dealers, or find leads, and that sort of thing. Peter: Excellent. I invited you to the podcast because you had a presentation at Brighton SEO, probably my favorite marketing conference. The presentation was called Digital Accessibility and Compliance: Essential for Users and Good for SEO. Why accessibility? Lea: Why have I chosen to go down the accessibility route? Peter: Yes. Lea: Oh. Short story is, I had a really good friend that was diagnosed with ALS which is a neurodegenerative disorder that takes your ability to speak and use your arms and things like that. It's horrible. While we were helping her sell her house and move her mom into assisted living and then help her find a place to live, she'd stopped communicating with us. It was because things like Facebook's Messenger doesn't rotate, and things like, Twitter doesn't rotate. She couldn't communicate back and forth in the text messages the way we used to do it. I was really