Edge SEO for Enterprises feat. Nick Wilsdon

In this session, Nick Wilsdon and I explore where enterprise infrastructure meets edge technology — and why this combination is quietly becoming one of the most powerful levers available to technical SEOs working inside large organisations.

Nick is the founder of Torque and has spent 22 years in SEO, including eight years embedded at Vodafone and project work spanning eBay, Havas, and Dentsu. He is one of very few practitioners who sits at the intersection of CDN architecture, JavaScript development, and enterprise-scale SEO strategy. The full interview video is below, followed by my editorial synthesis of the key frameworks Nick shared.

Key Moments in This Interview

• 0:42 — Why edge is becoming fundamental web architecture
• 2:32 — The redirect use case: 900ms → 250ms
• 5:14 — Costs and why Cloudflare is the best starting point
• 8:54 — Why big enterprises actually love edge deployments
• 11:17 — How to find (and secure) enterprise SEO clients
• 15:54 — Why the competition in edge SEO is still very low
• 28:26 — Salaries and earning potential
• 37:43 — The future of edge SEO

The Problem: Why Enterprise CMS Kills SEO Speed

One of the most persistent frustrations in enterprise SEO is the gap between knowing what needs to be fixed and actually getting it done. Nick addresses this head-on:

“You look at it — wow, surely they must have known that. I’ve run an audit with Screaming Frog and I found these things are wrong. And surely they must be able to fix this.”

— Nick Wilsdon, Founder at Torque

The reality inside large organisations is that CMS platforms like Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore, or SAP Commerce Cloud are rarely owned by the SEO team. Changes must pass through offshore developer queues, sprint planning cycles, procurement sign-offs, and legal reviews. A simple redirect fix that should take hours can take eight to twelve months.

This is the structural problem that edge SEO is designed to solve.

The Solution: Nick’s “Middle-Man” Approach via the Edge Layer

CDN networks — Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly — have traditionally been used to distribute and cache content globally. A user in Mumbai doesn’t need to wait for a server in California; they’re served from a local edge node instead.

What has changed is that these edge nodes can now run code. They have CPU, storage (including key-value stores for dynamic data), and programmable logic. That means an SEO team with the right access and skills can intercept, modify, and optimise requests before they ever reach the origin server — completely bypassing the CMS and the IT queue.

“You can come in, directly with the Edge team, do something like redirects or do changes very quickly with a single point — and then roll these out in a period of months instead of eight or twelve months normally through the Dev team.”

— Nick Wilsdon

Strategic ROI: What Edge SEO Delivers in Practice

The Redirect Use Case

The clearest, most measurable example Nick gives is redirects. In a traditional architecture, a user request travels to the CDN, then bounces to the origin server, which then issues the redirect — often sending the user back out through the CDN again. It’s an unnecessary round trip.

With edge redirects, the user is redirected the moment they touch the CDN network. No origin round-trip. No wasted crawl budget.

One-to-One Redirects at Scale

Enterprise IT teams historically resist large redirect tables because of the perceived performance and maintenance burden. Nick’s insight is that the edge removes this objection entirely:

“When you’re doing this on the edge, you can literally have millions of one-to-one redirects without any impact on performance.”

— Nick Wilsdon

For SEO this is significant. Sending migrated URLs to the homepage or a broad category page destroys user intent signals and link equity. One-to-one redirects — which maintain the original intent and product context — are the gold standard, and the edge makes them operationally feasible at any scale.

AB Testing Without Optimizely

Edge also changes how SEO AB testing works. Because you need all traffic (bots and users alike) to receive the same experience for an SEO test to be valid, injecting changes at the edge — a new navigation structure, for instance — ensures consistent delivery across the board, at a fraction of the cost of traditional platforms like Optimizely.

Enterprise CDN Comparison: Choosing Your Edge Platform

Not all CDN edge platforms are equal in terms of accessibility, capability, or cost. Here is how the three major platforms compare for SEO practitioners:

Platform	Best For	Developer Access	Language	SEO Entry Point
Cloudflare Workers	Agility & learning	Free tier available	JavaScript / WebAssembly	✅ Easiest — recommended first step
Akamai EdgeWorkers	Global scale & enterprise security	Enterprise contracts only	JavaScript / WebAssembly	⚠️ Hard to access without enterprise client
Fastly Compute@Edge	Raw performance at scale	Developer programme available	Rust / WebAssembly (preferred)	⚠️ Steeper learning curve

“Cloudflare is accessible. They’re very, very supportive in terms of edge compute and giving free access to some of this capability. It’s a fantastic place to start learning.”

— Nick Wilsdon

Traditional Enterprise Deployment vs. Edge Deployment

Factor	Traditional (via CMS / Dev Sprint)	Edge Deployment
Time to deploy	3–12 months (dev queue dependent)	2–8 weeks (once CDN access secured)
Team required	CMS devs, IT, legal, procurement	Edge SEO team + CDN ops sign-off
Redirect scale	Thousands (performance concerns)	Millions (no performance impact)
AB testing cost	High (Optimizely / VWO licensing)	Low (edge worker compute cost)
Risk profile	Low (changes sandboxed in CMS)	Managed (staged rollout by market)
Proof-of-concept use	Difficult — full dev cycle required	Yes — test on smallest market first
Dependency on IT	Very high	Low (after initial CDN access granted)

What Skills Does Edge SEO Actually Require?

Edge SEO sits at an unusual crossroads of disciplines, which is precisely why there are still very few specialists in the space. According to Nick, effective edge SEO requires:

• Technical SEO fundamentals — you need to know what to fix before you can fix it at the edge
• JavaScript — the baseline language for writing edge workers across all major CDNs
• WebAssembly / Rust — for larger sites where compiled scripts outperform interpreted JavaScript
• Web performance measurement — adding an unoptimised edge script can add 90–120ms latency, erasing any SEO gain
• CDN architecture understanding — at least enough to know how request routing, caching headers, and KV stores work
• Analytics proficiency — tools like RUM (Real User Monitoring) via SpeedCurve or RIGA, Google Search Console for Core Web Vitals, and enterprise analytics stacks (Adobe Analytics, GA4)

“It’s a very interesting area because CDN people would generally be working on security and configuration. They wouldn’t be thinking about coding, and even those who would be thinking about coding wouldn’t be thinking about the marketing opportunities. So it’s a very unusual combination.”

— Nick Wilsdon

How to Get Into Enterprise Edge SEO: Nick’s Honest Assessment

Starting Out

It doesn’t matter whether you start in an agency, in-house, or as a freelancer. What matters is being willing to self-teach. There are no formal training programmes for edge SEO at the time of writing. Nick’s recommended path: build your own Cloudflare Workers, run experiments on your own test sites, and get comfortable reading CDN documentation.

Finding Enterprise Clients

Enterprise SEO work almost never comes through job boards or freelance platforms. Nick is direct about this:

“All my work pretty much comes through networks and people who either I’ve worked with or know somebody I’ve worked with.”

— Nick Wilsdon

The contracting process itself is significant. Nick describes a recent engagement where negotiations lasted four and a half months before project kick-off. Requirements include a Master Services Agreement, cyber liability insurance (Nick mentions cover at the £5 million USD level), and the ability to survive net-60 or net-90 payment terms — which means having substantial working capital before the first invoice clears.

Convincing the Edge Ops Team

The gatekeepers to CDN access aren’t CMOs — they’re the front-end and edge operations engineers whose primary mandate is uptime. Releasing unverified code onto the CDN layer is, from their perspective, an existential risk. Nick’s approach is to arrive with a fully defined testing methodology, a staged rollout plan, unit test coverage, and — most importantly — documented case studies from previous deployments.

“No edge ops team is willing to let a team come in and do this work unless they can prove they’ve already done this kind of work. So it’s a self-fulfilling ability.”

— Nick Wilsdon

Risk Management: How Nick Keeps Enterprise Sites Safe

The scale of enterprise sites makes risk mitigation a discipline in its own right. Nick’s methodology is simple but non-negotiable: never test on a high-traffic market first.

“If I’m going to test something on a large global website, I’m not going to do it on the US version or the UK version. I’m going to pick a very, very small market and then test at that scale and then scale it up as I’ve proved it’s been successful.”

— Nick Wilsdon

This geographically staged rollout — small market → regional market → global — is standard practice in his deployments and significantly reduces the blast radius of any unforeseen issue.

Measuring Edge SEO Results: Tools and Timelines

Performance improvements are the easiest wins to demonstrate — the before/after chart is immediate and unambiguous. For SEO outcomes on large sites, the honest answer is that meaningful signals can take several months to emerge, particularly when the change relates to crawl behaviour or indexation patterns.

The measurement stack Nick uses across projects:

• SpeedCurve / RIGA — Real User Monitoring and performance trend tracking
• Google Search Console — Core Web Vitals, crawl stats, indexation
• SEO visibility tools — tracking rank and visibility changes post-deployment
• Adobe Analytics / GA4 — commercial and engagement outcomes

Salaries and Earning Potential in Edge SEO

Nick gives a frank overview of the UK SEO salary landscape. Entry-level agency SEO in the UK has remained stuck around £22,000–£24,000 for the better part of 15 years — though progression is fast for those who move roles. A Head of SEO at a UK agency typically earns £70,000–£80,000; breaking past £120,000 in an agency context is rare.

Consultants earn more. And edge SEO, as a scarce skill set with high enterprise demand, commands a premium above the standard consultant rate. The principle is simple: if the skill is in demand and few people have it, the market pays accordingly. (Nick also notes that some affiliate SEOs earn exceptionally well — SEO income is not one-size-fits-all.)

The Future of Edge SEO

Nick is unambiguous about the trajectory. Edge SEO is not a trend — it is a structural shift in how the web is built.

“This is fundamental architecture for the web. We’re able to develop in layers and I think that’s hugely powerful — doing all these various bits of logic that we can now stick on the edge that would have been very hard to incorporate into our main application.”

— Nick Wilsdon

The capacity of edge platforms is increasing rapidly. When Nick started, Akamai EdgeWorkers could handle around 5,000 one-to-one redirects. That ceiling has since grown to over a million, with KV storage and database integration expanding what’s computationally possible at the edge every year. The analogy he draws is Moore’s Law — and given how CDN providers are investing in this layer, the comparison feels apt.

For SEOs, the implication is clear: learning to deploy at the edge now, while competition is low, positions you well ahead of when this capability becomes mainstream practice.

About Nick Wilsdon

Nick Wilsdon is a consultant and founder at Torque, with 22 years of SEO experience across agencies including Havas and Dentsu, and enterprise brands including Vodafone (eight years) and eBay. He is a Search Awards judge, conference speaker, and contributor to specialist SEO media.

Connect with Nick:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/nickwilsdon
Twitter / X: @nickwilsdon
Mastodon: @nickwilsdon@seocommunity.social

Full Interview Transcript

The complete transcript is included below for reference and accessibility.

Show full transcript ▼

OLESIA: Hello, Nick.

NICK: Hello, Olesia.

INTRO: Nick Wilsdon, consultant and founder at Torque. SEO with 22 years of experience who can deploy high performance programs across large organisations and global brands. Based in the UK, area of expertise and enterprise SEO, edge SEO. Worked with such agencies as Rina Media, Havas, Dentsu. And with such brands as Vodafone, eBay, Lavabeam. Search awards judge, speaker at conferences and contributor to specialised media.

OLESIA: Edge SEO, why is it a thing? Why is it important?

NICK: Yeah, it’s becoming increasingly important now as the CDN layer has been developing. So we’ve always used CDNs for distributing content. CDNs like Cloudflare or Akamai or Fastly, have a distributed series of servers around the world. And when I say access your website in Mumbai, I don’t own your servers based in California, for example, then I don’t have to go all the way to California for that request. So I access a kind of semi-local copy or a cashed copy in Mumbai. So we’ve kind of relied on these CDN networks to distribute content globally. And that’s given websites much better responsiveness, performance and ability to deal with traffic globally. Now those CDN networks have been developing, and they’ve gone from fairly simple sort of servers serving lightweight content, lightweight pages to having increased processor and CPU capabilities. And that means that they can start to do more than just serve content. They can start to run programming on that layer on those servers. They can start to manipulate the request. And in terms of computer edge, we’ve now added the ability to have kind of storage in these areas. So whether we have set storage, static storage, or whether we have dynamic sort of database or most storage with KV Store, we have the ability to store information and do very much more complex logical processes on the edge. And that’s really opened up a huge amount of possibility really for us on the web. We don’t have to rely anymore on computation on the origin servers. We can start to do computation on the edge. And you can imagine that’s a huge opportunity for every part of digital.

OLESIA: It sounds very exciting, can you give some real-world examples, maybe without mentioning any names or brands, but something like you’ve done something and it worked this way. And in terms of ROI, return on investment, it was like that if possible.

NICK: Yeah, absolutely. You know, trying to get it down to understand it’s ROI, but I can tell you that a very simple use case for edge might be redirections because normally with the redirection, we take the user in, they come through Akamai and they come to the origin server. And when they get to the origin server, we usually then redirect them to where they’re meant to be going. And that means they can sometimes get bounced back out through the CDN and back into the origin server. So if you think about it in that way, it’s very inefficient as a journey. That’s not a good way of transporting the user. So if you have those redirects on the edge and you redirect the minute the user touches the Akamai network or the Cloudflare network, the minute they interact with that network, they go immediately to the destination they’re meant to go to. You can see that this is a much more efficient way of dealing with those user requests. And some of the advantages we’ve had on that in real world examples is I’ve reduced some journeys from 900 milliseconds on a response to 250 milliseconds. So you can see there’s a dramatic increase in web performance by doing that. So this is great. It’s good for the user. It’s really good for Google because Google doesn’t want to crawl unnecessary journeys that when it’s only getting redirected. And we can start to do a much better use of our redirects and we can start to manage redirects. And another use for this might be kind of one to one redirects. When you work with a company, they’re very resistant to put a lot of one to one redirects on the server. They sort of their IT department will complain. They’ll say, how are we going to manage these? This is going to cause a lot of performance impact. So when you’re doing this on the edge, you can literally have millions of one to one redirects without any impact on performance. So from an SEO point of view, where we want generally one to one redirects, we don’t want rules that send all of those redirects to the home page or all of the redirects to one of the category pages. We want to manage lots and lots of very specific one to one because we want to maintain those journeys really for the user. We want to send something that’s got the same intent, the same product. We want to manage this process much more in much more detail for Google. So if you get to our eye on that, it’s quite difficult. It’s difficult to separate that from all the other SEO activity we would do, but internal and inbound your URLs are incredibly important for SEO. So yeah.

OLESIA: What are the costs involved, both not only money, but also you need time, maybe some other resources? So what do you need to start doing that and offering it and making it happen?

NICK: Yeah, I mean, it can get quite complex in the beginning. It’s fairly simple. I would recommend that people look at Cloudflare because Cloudflare is accessible. A lot of people are using Cloudflare as a CDN. So it’s very easy to get into that area as a developer or as an SEO, technical SEO, really who wants to explore how to do this in Cloudflare. So that’s, you know, they’re very, very supportive in terms of edge and edge compute and giving free access to some of this capability to the users. So Cloudflare is a fantastic place to start learning this. It’s much harder to get into Akamai, which is more enterprise. They don’t have as many or any options for developers or people who just want to learn it. It’s going to be big enterprise platforms. It’s quite hard to get access to that, but you can certainly learn a lot of this on Cloudflare. In terms of costs, I mean, there are costs associated with this and this is obviously why the CDNs are doing this in the first place. This is a way of them upselling and selling computation in the same way, you know, computation on demand, essentially, which is what a lot of, they’ve realized there’s a huge amount of money to be made in offering this kind of computation. So those costs vary a lot between Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, but they’re not as high as you might think. So that’s good. I mean, this is, if you’re taking something like, you know, maybe you’re doing something around AB testing, for example. You wanted to AB test your entire website and not a submissional AB test where we would test one version simultaneously with another, but an SEO kind of AB test where we would test before and after. So for SEO, when we’re doing this kind of testing, so we wanted to replace a menu structure or something like this, we’d want to insert that menu into our new site very easily. And we could do this via Edge and then we’d want to make sure that all the traffic, you know, bots and user traffic was all getting served the same response, the same page and the same new menu. And we would do this at a fraction of the cost that it would be to do this through optimizely or one of the other platforms that traditionally you’d use for AB testing. So it is a very, very cost efficient way of doing large scale changes on sites. So yeah, not as expensive if you would think. And you’re kind of asking what the other costs are, I mean, developing, learning to develop this.

OLESIA: Yes. And do you need some developer like JavaScript or is it my JavaScript level enough for that like or someone else’s?

NICK: Yeah, you can start very, very, very basic level to be honest, Olesia. So JavaScript is really what’s required. Some platforms are kind of getting into WebAssembly. So you go from Java runtime, which can just run quite basic JavaScript. You can get into WebAssembly and Rust and start to kind of build much faster scripts that are compiled that will work better at scale for larger sites. But yeah, certainly getting into it, it’s JavaScript. And there are slight differences between the edge platform. So there’s differences in the way that you code for CloudFlare versus Fastly, versus Akamai, they’re all slightly different. But generally it’s JavaScript.

OLESIA: Is it hard for big enterprises to understand the idea of edge SEO and make it adopted and proceed with that or the integration and the whole process of starting it over? Is it hard?

NICK: Yeah, I think they find it. I mean, they find it an opportunity, to be honest, at large enterprise. So they’re very excited about this because there’s a large challenge with big enterprise in terms of getting things done. I think a lot of SEOs look at large enterprise sites and they can’t quite work out why seemingly basic things haven’t been done. And I’ve done this as well in the past. You look at it, wow, surely they must have known that. They must have seen this. I’ve run an audit with Screaming Frog and I found these things are wrong. And surely they must be able to fix this. And there’s a kind of problem with large enterprise sites where it’s very difficult to push these kind of changes through. And whether that’s just the CMS concerned, whether it’s a developer team that’s dealing with that CMS, whether it’s even that CMS management is even in this country. I mean, it can be based in offshore teams. It can be based. It’s sometimes much harder to get things done at enterprise and I think people would realize. So the opportunity you have with Edge is huge because we can come in, directly with the Edge team, do something like redirects or do changes very quickly with a single point, a single team and then roll these out in a period of months instead of you can get something done in one month or two months versus things that might take eight or, you know, 12 months normally through the Dev team. So it’s significantly faster and I think big enterprise kind of likes that velocity. They like the speed at which you can execute these tests and these pilots. So generally they’re very, very positive really about Edge. And I think even if you don’t use Edge to permanently fix something, even if you use Edge to maybe prove the concept. So you, for example, you take Edge and you completely optimize a webpage for page performance and you dramatically improve it. Google will still retrieve that page as the optimized page, which is perfect. And you may then choose to keep that layer there or you may say, well, now we proved it, we’re now going to get this done with the developer sprints. So now we’re going to feed this back into our development cycles to get it done. But that’s still proving that in a matter of months, still pretty dramatic and it’s pretty fast moving really for a large enterprise. So they tend to be pretty, pretty happy about this kind of work, to be honest.

OLESIA: How do you find these enterprises? How do they find you? So it’s not like Upwork case, yeah, when you go and find someone there. But that involves maybe lots of negotiation and talking and looking at each other. And how do you do that? How do you start like that?

NICK: It’s, I mean, it really is largely word of mouth and reputation that get you these jobs. That’s what I’ve always found. I’ve worked in enterprise for many years now, I mean, obviously I’ve been in SEO for 22 years, but I’ve worked in Vodafone for eight years. And you work with very senior people and those senior people moved to other companies and they become senior people in other companies. And your reputation kind of precedes you really in terms of work that you do. And I’d say that all my work pretty much comes through networks and people who either I’ve worked with or know somebody who I’ve worked with, that’s generally how. I think that’s, you’re right, you would struggle to get this kind of work with upwork or these kind of sites because you wouldn’t have the, probably the reputation or the credibility to be able to walk into a large enterprise and then get that work. Even if you actually in reality have the skill, and I’m not saying that people on Upwork don’t have the skill, they probably do. But yeah, it’s difficult to get those kind of jobs. And then you’re right, it’s a lot of negotiation. I think the, I’ve recently got a client and we negotiated with them for four and a half months to get the project started. So that’s a lot of effort, it’s a lot of work. You’re securing a master services agreement that takes a very long time. You have to have the right insurances in place. I think we have, you know, five million US dollars and cyber insurance covering us. So you have to have all these various things in place to be able to get this work. And you have to be able to get through procurement, you have to get through legal, you have to understand how to secure these kind of jobs. And it’s definitely not easy for a sort of single person or a single freelancer, have to be able to secure them. And then once you do secure them, then you’re probably going to deal with, you know, net 60 or net 90 before you get paid at the, so yeah, it’s difficult working with enterprises. It’s definitely not easy.

OLESIA: So before you start working with someone like that, before you even got contract, you need to have how many, how much for your investment, like $100,000 or how much before you get first client to do that?

NICK: Yeah, I would. Yeah, obviously you need to be, you need to be thinking about that kind of area. Yes, definitely. I mean, you can, you can find clients that are easier than other clients and you may, you know, I love it when we find a client who is net 30. It’s fantastic. It’s, you know, it makes such a big difference. It’s quite, it’s quite difficult sometimes, I think, for people to understand that we celebrate a big client win, but the, the win is always kind of offset slightly by the fact that we now have to cover everyone’s payments that are based on 30 days, maybe for up to 90 days. So it’s so every, every win comes with a sort of slight tinge of, you know, how are we going to, we’ve got to bridge all these loans to cover these costs to get this, to get this in. So it does, it does become quite a complex thing to navigate, but it’s certainly difficult if you didn’t have some funding built up. So whether you do that, you know, through investment or whether you do it through work on other projects, but you can kind of move up to these larger enterprise projects in that way. I’ve never taken investment really for myself, but I’ve always done it through self-investing with my own work.

OLESIA: How fierce is the competition inside this Edge SEO, enterprise SEO? So are there really many people who are hunting after one client or is it more diverse and more complex?

NICK: No, I’d say it’s, it’s a very new area right now. So I wouldn’t say there’s a lot of people working in this area. So it’s still fairly new. If you imagine that Cloudflare and Akamai and the other CDNs have kind of developed this amazing platform, they’ve developed amazing kind of play area for us all to create this in. And it’s almost the same as someone’s just invented Apache. They just, they’ve created it. They’ve got, you know, so what’s everyone going to do about it now? How are they going to work in it? And that’s, there aren’t enough people to create the, the script, the edge workers to architect the solutions. They don’t exist in this space. It’s still very, very, you know, it’s not very contested. I think that will change over the next few years. But certainly it’s a, it’s a weird blend of skills to get good at edge. And I think that’s why I quite like it because you’re developing scripts, but you’re keeping one eye on SEO that, you know, you’ve done it. You’re keeping an eye on performance because if you’re going to start changing things with edge scripts and you add, you know, 90 milliseconds or 120 milliseconds to the request, you may not have had an upside to the work you’re doing. So you need to be able to understand performance, you need to be able to measure performance in everything you’re doing. You need to have understanding of networking and, you know, you’re checking routes on the command line. You’ve got sort of idea of kind of, you know, an idea of CDN architecture, at least at a sort of basic level. So all of these things can come together in one place to be able to do edge work. And that’s made it a very interesting area because often, you know, CDN people generally would be more working on security and configuration of the CDN. They wouldn’t necessarily be thinking about coding and even the ones who would be thinking about coding wouldn’t be thinking about the marketing opportunities of doing that coding. So it’s a very, it’s a very interesting area to be in, but it does require a kind of combination of skills. And I think that’s probably why there aren’t many people in the area right now.

OLESIA: Yeah, that makes sense. How much time does it take, for example, so you’ve started the contract and you have this kind of idea, which you are proposing to the client. How long does it take before it is implemented?

NICK: So I’d say we kind of caught the plan. We worked very much in agile scrum methodology. So we would go into a spike sort of period where we would try to discover kind of how we’re actually solving it, writing scripts. But this is something that you would generally get done within two months. Really, that seems to be the kind of timeline that we’ve been working in. We can work out the problem we can call it a solution and we can start to deploy that all within two months.

OLESIA: But it’s still, despite it is edge and so easy and so forth, you sometimes need to negotiate with clients, like all the time you need to, the changes are sometimes they make you wait really long before you can do something. Like with that added, how long does it take with the clients?

NICK: I know what you mean, so you’re thinking more about you kind of make these. Suggestions and the client’s deciding whether or not you can do them. And I think it’s slightly different on edge because you kind of come in with those prerequisites in mind. So you’re sort of coming in to say we are going to do this on the CDN layer and your prerequisites are all about access to that CDN layer. So you’ll be negotiating with the front end team, with the edge ops team, they’ll be checking your skills and your ability to be able to give you, because they’re the gatekeepers to the CDN. They’re not very willing to give most SEO teams access to that area. I mean, rightly so. It goes against everything that they work for. Their job is to keep the websites up and running 24/7 and the idea of letting in a team to release code on that CDN layer that could potentially bring down the site is something that would be quite scary to most front end or edge ops teams. So there’s a lot of kind of prerequisite negotiation in terms of getting you access and being able to set up the testing areas to be able to set up the staging that you’d want to do for these kind of changes. And then we would have to assure them with the proper amount of testing that we would do, which are what is our testing methodology, what are our unit tests, how are we rolling this out, what’s our rollout plan, it’s very, very structured. So most of the negotiation kind of happens before the clock starts pretty much and that would maybe take one or two months and that’s kind of part of the negotiation you’re doing really to get the contract. So if you have all of that done before you start the project, then you’re pretty clear. I think one lesson that I’ve learned a long time ago in terms of delivering this kind of projects is get the prerequisite done before you start the project. Otherwise, you’re right, you don’t want to be negotiating access to the CDN one month in into that kind of project, it would just be a disaster. So you know, you deal with this very much as a sort of enclosed development project and get those prerequisites done as part of the contracting.

OLESIA: How do you reassure them? What do you use to make them convinced that this is required and you are talking something sensible and like that?

NICK: Yeah, it’s previous experience. And again, this is why it’s a difficult area to get into because no edge ops team is very willing to let a team come in and do this kind of work and let’s they can prove that they’ve already done this kind of work. So it’s a self-fulfilling ability. So I was incredibly lucky working with the clients that I did originally where I was doing this very much as a proof concept pilot work. So I was allowed to kind of explore and learn in this area and that was that was very unique. But generally clients now would want to see exactly what you’ve done, what the results were from previous use cases, what they’d expect, what you know, they need the detail and that requires that you’ve done this kind of work previously. But that’s that’s everybody to get their assurance.

OLESIA: Oh I see, what do you use to measure the results and show them? Maybe some tools, maybe something. So what’s the environment of this testing and how do you do that report on this?

NICK: Yeah, I mean, in terms of performance improvements. I think we would see what the client had set up already. So we’ve worked in RIGA, we’ve worked with SpeedCurve, you would use obviously Google Search Console as well for Core Web Vitals for those kind of results. In terms of SEO performance, again, we’d see what they had in place. You know, any of the SEO tools would help with visibility changes, which would be good. So and then yeah, I mean, you’d get into the analytics. So what have they got from Adobe Analytics to Google Analytics, what have they got set up? But yeah, we would use all the analytics that I’d suppose really to prove the use cases. And I think you need to have a good understanding of analytics. I’ve got several people in Torque who are very good analysts. We can use pretty much all of these platforms really to get the data that we need to prove the outcome of the work we’re doing.

OLESIA: So for example, you do something and you tell something, how long does it take? How long do you measure it to make sure it’s that result and that it was this influence that impacted it?

NICK: So yeah, it’s very, I mean, be exactly what you’re used to with SEO work. So performance, performance improvements are brilliant because we love them as SEOs, because we do, we do XYZ, we release, we have charts, we can see very clearly this is when we released the edge work or this is when we released the code and this was the change, it’s very immediate. Some things are trickier than that. I mean, if you’re doing something that affects the crawling of a large website, you’ll know this, it can take several months really for Google to relearn or adapt to that change. It’s something that doesn’t happen immediately. So do some things do take considerably longer to get the evidence on. So it’s SEO results are very rarely quick in my opinion, especially on very large websites. So it is something where you have to kind of let the client know this is going to be something. This is what we’d expect. This is a hypothesis and then we would work on the analytics to prove that out and prove as you quite rightly say, what’s that due to this change or was it due to other things that happened or was it just one of the things that they needed to do to make everything better? This is a problem that all SEOs I think face is how do we bring commercial value and proof to what we’re doing. But the good thing about edge is the speed at which you can make those changes. So you can do lots of very large changes very rapidly and that does help considerably. Usually when you’re just making these quite small tweaks on a large website, it’s even harder because unless you’re doing changes that are quite very significant to the templates, it’s very hard to see the differences.

OLESIA: And the changes which you want to do how do you decide on them? So you just make an ordinary audit or does the client have some problem and they refer to like, are refered to you to solve it? So what’s how do you do it?

NICK: Yeah, a bit of both. Certainly in terms of performance problems, the client tends to come to us because they know that they’re getting a very poor performance score and they’re trying to work out how to fix this. And it’s performance is a very tricky area to really fix in because you have to dedicate a lot of resource within the company to get it fixed and you’re never quite sure if that’s going to pay off. And I think Google went very hard on performance improvements and they linked those performance improvements very much with SEO improvements and with commercial gain. And I think they kind of had to walk that back a little bit over the last sort of year or so. And I’ll probably get into trouble with John Mueller of saying that. But they kind of had to walk that back a little bit because there were there was a huge effort on performance, which is fantastic and it’s great for clients, but it may not have delivered into the commercial success that some of the teams thought it would. So yeah, some of those things are a little bit trickier. But yeah, it’s trying to find value though. With SEO fixes generally and I come to this from an SEO point of view, I know that there are things that we really want to fix. So we want to maybe fix things with the crawl or we want to fix things with parameters or we want to fix things with schema or deployment in this kind of. We know that they have an effect, you know, we know from our own SEO experience and we know from our own audits at least to have an effect. So those recommendations tend to come from the SEO side more than the client.

OLESIA: So you are building your own experiments not only based on your previous experience with other clients, but you have your own websites where you test things.

NICK: Yep, we have our own websites and then you build up experience from doing these projects on clients. So a bit of both really. So you very much have to test on your own websites as well, definitely. But you have very, and again, I’m very lucky with some of the enterprise clients that I’ve worked with that they’re very happy for that kind of test and learn scenario to go on. So and if you take, I mean, in many respects, eBay is probably one of the most complicated websites for SEO that I’ve ever seen. And I can say that with my hand on my heart and after 22 years, it is a very, very complicated website and it’s huge. And from an SEO point of view, it’s a real challenge is it’s and that’s why I love eBay for that. And I know the SEOs work on eBay, love it for that. It’s an intellectual challenge because you’re trying to steer something that’s so large and you’re trying to steer it in the right direction all the time. It’s very, it’s made me feel a lot more sympathetic towards Google because when you’re working on a very large site, like Google is a very large site, you sort of, you’re steering a juggernaut and you’re trying to get it in the right way and you’re kind of nudging it back into line, back into direction. And you know, someone comes along and points to the specific result in Google and they say, oh, Google, why is this result wrong? You know, this is terrible. And they expect Google engineers to jump on it and start fixing that result. And that’s not how it works enterprise. You need to look at that problem, that issue and then work out what’s the solution that we can start to roll out that starts to fix it for the entire site. You can’t fix individual small issues. If you start to fix those individual small issues, then you’re going to have an increasing amount of tech debt that will catch up to you later on down the road. And you know, that’s what working on large sites is about. It’s not about fixing the small individual issues, but using them as use cases to fix the overall direction of the site.

OLESIA: In terms of reward, except for that you’re working with a very big and nice website and doing some of the book to the industry. Is it somehow also expressed in some maybe like real money terms? So do people in your edge SEO and enterprise SEO get paid more than like other other SEOs?

NICK: I was thinking about you mean by other SEOs? I mean, I certainly I know some affiliates who get exceptionally well paid. So payment in SEO is an interesting area. I think it’s, and I know I’ve talked to you about this in the past in between different countries from markets, what do people get paid? I think the entry level really into SEO has kind of stayed the same really, which is slightly depressing for me, that I think it’s kind of stayed the same in the UK for the last 15 years. And people come into SEO, especially into agencies and they’re getting paid around 22,000, 24,000 UK as an entry level into UK. But it does move fairly quickly after that. So people move jobs, they jump jobs every year or so and they manage to gain you know, two or four thousand increase each time they jump. So they can kind of increase that quite quickly. I’d say a head of SEO in the UK in an agency is usually getting around 70 or 80,000 a year. That’s kind of normal. There are better jobs out there. I think it gets quite tricky at agency to get over 120. That’s kind of quite rare. If you go into in-house, I would say that the entry level tends to be higher. So you tend to get paid more at the lower levels. And senior levels is kind of equivalent or slightly more than agency for in-house. Consultants get paid more though. And if you’re coming into kind of what you get paid for edge, I mean, it’s like with everything in digital if it’s in demand and there aren’t many people that do it and it’s scarce, you’re going to get paid more. So yes, you would expect much better salary for that.

OLESIA: So for those who are looking to go into edge SEO, so maybe make a competition for you or work with you, maybe, where do the better start in agency? Or in-house or freelancers? What’s the best way for them to make a quicker introduction into this whole business?

NICK: Yeah, I think either. But edge SEO, as I say, it tends to attract people who are very technically curious because it’s very new and I think that’s what attracted me to it. I got into SEO because I found it very interesting and it was great doing really fun things that had big changes. And I think that’s what I like about edge SEO is being able to make a change in edge scripts across an entire website that makes a real material difference that website. That’s very exciting. But yeah, I don’t think it really matters whether you start an agency or freelance or in-house really to get into this area. But you would have to be fairly happy to teach yourself really this. And I think that there is material out there and you have to run your own tests, you have to understand how to run an edge worker in Cloudflare. But you’d have to teach yourself quite a lot of this. I don’t think it’s going to be very easy at the moment to go into any environment where they’re going to teach you this. So I think that’s going to be the difficulty. If you want to get into it, I would absolutely recommend it because I think it’s going to be a fantastic growth area for those people. But it’s going to be fairly self-taught. But if you self-taught to a degree and you come to someone like me, you know, certainly I might be able to make good things happen for you.

OLESIA: Okay, so you found one of the contracts. What do you put into the contract as a deliverable and do you guarantee anything and how do you manage this in the legal terms if it’s not a secret, not in big details, but how do you promise anything there or do you at all?

NICK: Oh, I think you have to. You have to have deliverables and you have to, but you know what you’re delivering with an edge project because you define the activity very carefully. So, are you delivering a solution to handle the redirect? Are you delivering a solution that allows you to add schema onto all the requests in this certain format? So, the actual deliverables are very easy to define in an edge project. So I think it’s harder to promise the commercial outcome of it. That’s the same way it’s always been an SEO. You know, I don’t think I’d ever want to be in a place where you know, you would, you can forecast what you think is going to happen and you know from experience we’ve done this on other projects, what’s likely to happen. But promising a client that this will absolutely happen is not a very sensible approach to do. You need to kind of let the client know that this is kind of the outcome that we would expect. But yeah, that’s kind of how you would propose it.

OLESIA: But each website is very unique and sometimes the changes you need to make to this website or that website, you’ve never done them before like in half, in my case it’s sometimes half of all the cases. So how do you tell them that it is really required and it isn’t how do you forecast anything if you don’t have prior and prior experience with that particular change?

NICK: Yeah, I mean, this is where exactly. I mean, this is where you would and this is probably why we initially started doing edge from an SEO perspective because we know SEO. So you audit site and you know what a site has to do to improve their technical SEO and you prioritise these issues because you know some will be more important than others. Some are affecting 10% of the site, some are affecting 90% of the site. So you have an idea of prioritisation and so as a technical SEO audit, you kind of want to execute that SEO audit. You want to do all of those fixes. And if you’re simply doing those in edge, then all you’re doing is kind of saying that if you fix all these things in your SEO audit, then your technical SEO will be improved and we would expect to get a positive outcome from that. I think it’s easier to do that with enterprise sites because they already have the link equity, they have the authority and generally if you improve the technical SEO on a large enterprise site, it’s a very, it always has a positive outcome. I’ve never yet worked on an enterprise site and fixed all the technical issues that I found and not had a positive outcome. But you know, would I do that on a smaller site and you never know, you know, is what they needed on that small site more authority? Did they need more content? You know, where there are the bigger factors in play and you can fix all of the technical issues on a small site as you know, or even on a medium site. And it doesn’t have the dramatic effect that you would hope because these other bits aren’t present. They haven’t got the right content, they haven’t got the right authority, they haven’t got the links, even. So yeah, it’s easier to predict this for an enterprise site. I guess that’s, you know, well, it’s difficult to get these contracts. The easy side of it is that I know fixing things on these websites always brings positive effect. So that’s the kind of benefit of working on these large enterprise websites, which maybe makes it easier. It’s made my life as an SEO is very much easier than other SEOs. I don’t know. It swings and roundabouts, really.

OLESIA: It was my other question, so how do you cope with this stress? Because when you’re working with this very, very big website and you know how many people depend on it and on you and if something breaks or works unexpected, so you are stressed most of the time. So how do you cope with that and what do you do to keep yourself in good, sane mood? Be able to love your life.

NICK: Well, yeah, it does get stressful because you have a lot of people involved and you’re right, the scale at which these websites operate is, you know, makes you very, very careful about the things that you’re doing. And I think the way that you kind of offset that stress is you reduce risk mitigation, which is a really big thing of working enterprise. So you work out how can we do this thing with the least amount of risk? So if I’m going to test something on a large global website, I’m not going to do it on the US version. I’m not going to do on the UK version. I’m going to pick a very, very small market and then test things on that scale and then scale it up, roll it up as I’ve proved that it’s been successful. So you kind of, you learn kind of risk mitigation techniques in terms of how you deploy these kind of, these programs and these, these pilots and that certainly helps. In terms of sort of my life, though, I think you have to be quite happy to work in a stressful environment and I love my work. So I kind of don’t mind that too much. But yeah, it’s, it’s not always easy. But if you have good people around, you good teams, you know, it, it works. So yeah, but it’s probably take more time off, Olesia, you’re probably right.

OLESIA: Can you tell what’s the future of edge where is it all going? What the trend is and what can we expect in the near future and in the distant future?

NICK: Yeah, absolutely, Olesia. Yeah, I think I’ve had some people who kind of talked to me about edge and they said, is this sort of, is this a new trend? Is it something that’s going to last for a year or a couple of years? Is it like, you know, VR? Is it like voice search? We’re not mentioning voice search anymore, but is it something like this? It’s sort of happening and it’s going to go away again. And I really don’t think it will. And the reasons I don’t think it will is because this is fundamental architecture for the web. We’re able to now do computation on our origin server, but we’re able to create lightweight web services now through the edge that are doing different parts of that computation. We’re able to develop in layers and I think that’s hugely powerful because we’re going to do all these various bits of logic that we can now stick on the edge that would have been very hard to incorporate into our sort of main, you know, into our origin server, into our sort of main application. We can say, you know, we can have a separate web service that maybe kind of helps deliver a different site maps for different parts of site without having to develop anything on the origin server at all. And we can do very quick, very agile kind of development using this environment. And I think that’s hugely powerful. And you can see the way that the CDNs are developing this, they are increasing kind of like Moore’s law. We’re kind of increasing the capacity and the ability to do this work, this logic on the edge, it’s increasing, you know, every year. And the, you know, when I first started this, we were able to do simple policies for redirects in, in Akamai sort of 5,000, 1 to 1 redirects and then 10,000, 1 to 1 redirects. And now I can do, you know, a million or two million, 1 to 1 redirects. So it’s, it’s increasing very, very fast. And the database storage in terms of KV store is, is increasing dramatically and the ability for us to take data and attach it to the edge as well. So we can attach our, our databases on the origin and we can basically pull data from them into the edge. So this isn’t something that’s going to go away very anytime soon. It’s going to be a major part of, of internet development. So yeah, I really think it is, is the future.

OLESIA: Usually they don’t, but if someone has any questions, can they ask you where they can find you, do you like to be contacted or anything like that?

NICK: Yeah, feel free, contact me through Twitter’s hugely the best place to be honest. Yeah, to your point when you’re kind of relaxing, again, jump into SEO Twitter a little while and see what everyone’s complaining about. So you can find me on Twitter. Nick Wilsdon is my username on Twitter. So feel free to send me a message there.

OLESIA: Okay, good. Thank you so much.