The placement at Traffic Bees and the SEO learning behind it

Traffic Bees is a digital marketing agency working with a mixed client base. In the backlink research the budget available to a small or medium-sized business shaped what counted as a workable opportunity, since a publisher quoting a high placement fee falls out of consideration even when the site performs well in Ahrefs.

The project work discussed in this reflection covers the PickleGO work and a multilingual hearing care website. PickleGO is a pickleball retailer and community brand. The hearing care site serves content in more than one language. The two settings were different enough to show how the same SEO principles are applied differently depending on the audience and the site.

This was an internship at Traffic Bees with work focused primarily on SEO. In practice that meant a research workflow that ran from finding an opportunity through to writing it up in a shared sheet with the supporting evidence, so that a decision could be taken by someone else.

Recurring responsibilities

Backlink opportunity research and forum or brand-mention research for client campaigns.

Project responsibilities

PickleGO metadata for subpages, review of a multilingual sitemap mapping for a hearing care website and the PickleGO ActiveSG class collation workflow.

Wider exposure

I also helped with two PickleGO livestreams under Shawn and contributed ideas during two content-brainstorming sessions.

Supervision

The internship was supervised by Shawn Lim.

The on-the-job training plan set out digital-content production and e-commerce operations as its two intended main tasks. Neither became a main task during the placement, and the OJT record consequently marks both as unfulfilled. The work I was given developed a strong SEO focus, because the tasks the team needed support with were link and mention opportunity research.

That gave me depth in one area and let me meet the same research problem often enough to develop how I handled it. The journey page follows that development.

The Ahrefs beginner guide to SEO (opens in a new tab) and the Ahrefs SEO course for beginners (opens in a new tab) supplied the structure. The Google SEO Starter Guide (opens in a new tab) gave the search engine's own account of titles, descriptions and site organisation.

For link work I used the Ahrefs advanced link building course (opens in a new tab) and cross-checked terminology against the Backlinko SEO marketing hub (opens in a new tab). The Ahrefs research tools (opens in a new tab) had their own learning curve, and the backlink research page sets out which of them the research workflow relied on.

The automation work drew on a different set of documentation. I used the Apps Script overview (opens in a new tab), the Spreadsheet Service reference (opens in a new tab) and the built-in services guide (opens in a new tab), which sets out what a script running on Google servers can reach. A full list is on the references page.

The backlink fundamentals from DTMS and the Ahrefs training supplied the basis for assessing opportunities. Live backlink research also required commercial feasibility to be considered when an expected placement fee exceeded a realistic SME campaign budget. That is described on the backlink research page.

The on-page material from the Google guidance was applied to the PickleGO subpage metadata, where the pages list products that change. Writing to the category and the buying decision keeps the description accurate as stock rotates.

The Apps Script documentation was applied to the ActiveSG collation, where the practical question was building something that runs within an acceptable cost. That work is on the automation page.