Kelly Ayres is a veteran search engine optimization professional with a wide array of experience across all facets of marketing. As Director of SEO for Jordan Digital Marketing, she lends her expertise to Jmac’s SEO strategy. We spoke with Kelly about her background, building an agency from the ground up, and the future of SEO and marketing.
Talk a Bit About Yourself and Your Background
I’m a Jersey native, but I’ve lived in a lot of different places. I’ve been working in digital marketing for over 10 years now. I’ve worked at agencies, two universities, the auto world (which is its own beast), healthcare, pharma, FinTech, real estate—pretty much anything that you can picture in terms of industry or vertical. At JDM as the Director of SEO, I still do client work and strategy, but I’ve been able to focus a lot more now on professional and team development.
How have you worked with Jmac?
On the PR side, I work on my own personal branding: content distribution, blogs that I’ve written, or webinars that I’ve done. The Jmac team has been really great about distributing and promoting that content, which is awesome. On the SEO side, I also direct the overall SEO strategy for the Jmac site.
Do you have a career accomplishment that you’re most proud of?
I’d say my position right now. I started at JDM with our head of SEO, and it was just the two of us. Now we’re 10 people and consistently growing, and we’ve expanded beyond traditional SEO into broader aspects of user experience, CRO, everything. Adam and I have been building a team and a process and a playbook for how we do SEO from the ground up. Everybody that comes in as a new hire will say that we do things differently, and that’s kind of on purpose. We look for a very holistic way of doing SEO that’s still client-centric, but is really focused on best practices and keeping up to date. So I’m really passionate about how we’ve taken this team and turned it into a professional development and upskilling engine.
I’m focused on getting our team to be the best at what they do—not just in SEO but in all aspects of marketing. I also have a master’s in psychology, so I’m very focused on the human piece: really just trying to make people better humans. It’s a challenging process to generate a culture of personal time management and productivity in the remote world, when you’re never anywhere near each other. So I think that being able to create that and having that autonomy is such a huge accomplishment for me.
Are there any notable trends you’re seeing in SEO or marketing in general?
One thing that I’ve been trying to communicate to our clients and to our team is the idea that user behavior is shaping marketing in a way that’s going to affect all of our channels and all of our strategies—not just SEO but across the board. People are more discerning and savvy now. They understand that what they’re looking for is a return to authenticity. They’re looking for social proof. They’re looking for trust signals and use cases. People want to know if a brand stands for something, what its values are. They’re too smart to get clickbaited or click affiliate links that are just spam content for products. They want to hear from other people who have tried the product, review sites—essentially, multiple sources beyond just the business themselves.
In that respect, the focus is trending a lot more toward the middle of the funnel. There’s too much marketing at the top of the funnel. Looking ahead, marketing has to be a lot more nuanced—much less about total volume and much more about speaking to individual people.
In SEO, I think we should be thinking beyond search engines. I think it’s going to be so much less about Google and Bing and more about the search experience and how that factors into attribution as a whole. Where people start is not always on Google anymore. And if they do, they don’t want to just see organic search results. They want to see Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, or Yelp reviews. They want to have all of that integrated into the page itself. And if it’s not, they’re smart enough to start looking elsewhere. So we have to think beyond how the search starts and how people get to the site.
Do you have any predictions for where SEO and marketing may be headed?
I see us moving away from traditional metrics. Keyword volume and targeting to individual keywords aren’t that important anymore. It’s really about a focus on intent and action: what the customer is looking for, why they’re looking for it, and how we’re going to give them the best information. So not only do we need to have that information available, but it needs to be tailored to them specifically.
This applies to all channels, but SEO in particular tends to be viewed too much in a vacuum. We frequently remind clients that even though they seem separate, things like events and press releases do fit under the umbrella of SEO. Making sure that SEO has a seat at the table when it comes to integrated campaigns is super important—and including it as a high-value marketing strategy in general.
As the marketing landscape evolves, user behavior remains key. At Jmac PR, we’re committed to staying ahead of these trends, helping brands connect authentically with their audience. If you’re ready to enhance your brand’s executive visibility and drive meaningful engagement, contact us today. Let’s elevate your brand together.