Friday ROASTing with Thomas Matthews

Each month we sit down with one of our ROASTies to find out what makes them tick, what they love about their job and the aspects of our company culture that they just can’t get enough of. In the hot seat today – Thomas – Technical SEO Account Manager 

Firstly, Happy Birthday for last month! Do you have any advice for optimising a lockdown birthday?

I am in quite a lucky situation being around family and my partner, so my birthday revolved around eating too much cake and watching rubbish TV. My advice would be to call with family/friends and loved ones to make yourself not feel so isolated, and if you do eat a whole cake to yourself, who cares.

You are a Technical SEO Account Manager at ROAST, tell me a little bit about your role?

My role at ROAST revolves around management of my personal clients, creating individual strategies and client specific deliverables, while also reacting to the giant that is Google and keeping abreast of updates or shifts in the search landscape.

What is it about Technical SEO that you find the most satisfying/what are the most interesting aspects?

I started my career as a web developer, so having a technical focused area is something that has always interested me. I love digging down in to website technologies and diagnosing potential barriers to performance.

Sometimes things can go wrong with a website, we did a post about this and called them ‘SEO scaries’ – what are the most common problems you’ve come across when starting with a client? 

It is not necessarily something big like a botched migration or IA, it can be more simple in that clients accidently implement a noindex tag on a core page, or don’t understand certain technologies which cause never ending loops which deny access to search engines. The simple things can have the biggest impact.

Another lockdown number! Have you taken up any new skills or hobbies during this time, even just painted the shed?

Painted the shed, fraid not. I am keeping my hand in coding and building up programming skills as trying to build an app in JavaScript (getting nowhere I might add). I try to keep up with my Spanish language but this has faded in recent weeks, I wish I could say I have learnt something cool or developed a new skill but life has a way of passing by.

I see that you have your own clothing brand, tell me more about this?

This was a few years ago now, a friend and I came up with an idea for an online fully automated clothing brand which utilises drop shipping and a print on demand service.

I won’t tell you the name as looking back, it was a bit silly. It worked, we created the designs, found our print on demand service and got the site up and running and had one sale!

Thank you for reading the latest Friday ROASTing, check out last month’s ROASTing with Ed or have a read of our Sunday Times’ Best 100 announcement…