The SEO Podcast: Page 2 Podcast Hosted by Jon Clark & Joe DeVita

🧠 Sal Surra on 25+ Years of SEO, Site Speed Success, and Why Mistakes Make You Better - Episode #3

Episode Summary

Jacob Stoops sits down with Sal Surra, Senior SEO Strategist at Angie’s List, to discuss how he got into SEO, share tips from his 20-30 years of experience, talk re-platforming, site speed, duplicate content, and dive headlong into his love for Star Wars.

Episode Notes

In Episode 3 of The Page 2 Podcast, host Jacob Stoops talks with Sal Surra, Senior SEO Strategist at Angie's List, about a career that spans from hand-coding HTML in the ‘90s to optimizing one of the largest platforms on the web today. Sal shares how he broke into the industry before SEO was even a term—and how he's kept up with the changes over decades.

💡 In this episode:

• Building websites in Notepad in 1995
• Learning SEO before Google even existed
• What it’s like optimizing SEO at an enterprise scale
• How Sal helped build a site speed QA system into Angi's dev cycle
• The real story of a noindex disaster and how he survived it
• Why duplicate content isn’t always a problem (especially in local)
• Dealing with client expectations, dev roadmaps, and agency politics
• Working in SEO while staying grounded, humble, and hungry to learn
• His experiences with Family Feud, cosplay at Star Wars Celebration, and getting recruited over In-N-Out Burger 🍔

This is a wild, heartfelt, and insightful episode from someone who’s seen it all. If you’re deep into SEO—or just getting started—you’ll find plenty to laugh at, learn from, and reflect on.