I’m proud to announce that today is the official launch of Click-Dubai’s Interview Fridays and we have a very very special guest to kick things off with the program. So let’s forget about Jacko’s conspiracy or Sotomayor’s drama and let’s give our attention to one of the well respective names in the search marketing industry. Ladies and gents, let’s give it up for Mr. Kevin Gibbons of SEOptimise.
For those who are new to the SEO scene, would you be kind enough to introduce SEOptimise and a little background about you and your company?
Hey Dave, thanks for asking me to do this interview.
Well firstly, I’ve been involved in the search marketing industry (SEO in particular) since 2002. During this time I was working for a web design agency whilst still on a placement year from University and I began getting more and more involved in the SEO side of projects.
I then went back to Uni with my free .ac.uk webspace and quickly realised it wasn’t too difficult to dominate for competitive terms in Google! I actually had an assignment to create a website for a made-up driving school and within a few days the site was number one in Google for “Oxford driving school” and I was receiving several daily enquiries to take people out on driving lessons! I even managed to make some cash out of it by putting some AdSense ads up, shame they took the webspace away ?
Anyway, I graduated from Uni, built up a few of my own website’s (which I would thoroughly recommend as a fast-track to learning SEO) and shortly after decided to spend a year in Australia. Rather than getting a job out there, I found that my interest and ability in SEO allowed me to win a few clients and work as a freelance SEO consultant. I decided it would look more professional to set myself up as a company, which is how the early days of SEOptimise were formed.
You’ve been into search engine marketing since 2002, how did the industry evolve over these years? What were the notable changes in history?
In terms of search marketing 2002 seems so far away now it’s unreal. We’re obviously used to seeing the daily algorithm changes or clever new tactics on blogs and Sphinn almost on a daily basis.
But looking at the bigger picture, there have been some huge changes too; from the big Google algorithm updates, changes of PPC platforms, the introduction of social media as a marketing channel and SEO tool, to MSN Search changing its name more often that Man United change their 3rd away European kit!
Plus, everything has evolved very quickly, the search engines have learnt from earlier mistakes and as a marketing tactic it’s not just about organic search these days. Just for your search strategy alone you need to consider PPC, Google/Yahoo News, blog search, image search, universal search etc. And that’s before you even think about social media and conversion optimisation!
You started as a web developer before you focused on search marketing, how did these skills contribute to this development? What do you think is a good combination of expertise to succeed in SEO/SEM?
Having a web development background has been a great help as a skill to apply to SEO. A large amount of on-site optimisation requires the ability to review source code and being able to quickly understand the scale of an issue has been very useful.
I’ve also found it to be a great help to have spent time managing PPC campaigns too. It took me until early 2006 to get into PPC, but I quickly passed the AdWords exam and began managing accounts for clients. In terms of looking at search as an overall strategy I’ve found this has been invaluable.
I’ve actually written a post on this for Econsultancy, but basically there are things I may not have considered in as much detail before. Such as influencing the clickthorugh rate of an organic title/description tag or thinking about optimisation and keyword targeting from a conversion optimisation landing page perspective.
Who are the people you look up within the SEO/SEM sphere? Would that list include Matt Cutts? Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Yes, without a doubt. If Matt Cutts says PageRank sculpting no longer works there’s not a more credible source around so you have to take notice of these things.
In terms who I would look upto, well there’s a lot of bloggers/speakers/industry leaders who I’ve learnt a lot from. I’ve been reading the likes of Danny Sullivan, Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz and Aaron Wall for a long time now and if your getting into the industry now and only followed these guys there’s probably still not too much you’d miss!
In the UK there’s some great guys too, such as Dave Naylor, Lyndon Antcliff and Patrick Altoft to name just a few. Plus with all of the conferences, blogs and of course Twitter there’s plenty of people to keep up to date with the latest goings on in search.
Aside from managing SEOptimise, Kevin can also be seen sharing his expertise at Search Engine Land and Econsultancy as a regular featured blogger. How do you handle these engagements Kev?
Econsultancy, and recently Search Engine Land, have been an excellent opportunity to write for a different type of audience.
It’s something which I find helps to build credibility in the work I’m doing and (hopefully) helps to strengthen the reputation of myself and SEOptimise. Blogging is the main reason SEOptimise have built a large following of readers and while it’s not always easy to dedicate time towards, it’s certainly worth the effort.
If you don’t have a blog I would recommend just getting started, the SEOptimise blog started as my own personal knowledge base in a way. I used to write about problems I encountered and how I solved them, this was mainly as a reference to myself whilst largely still learning about SEM. But after a while I started to noticed these getting picked up with citations on blogs such as Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Roundtable. This made me realise that it wasn’t just me reading the blog and it has been able to grow on from there.
I’ve been following your posts and realized you’re a strong believer and an advocate of social media. How did social media change the game of search marketing?
To be honest, in my opinion social media made it far more interesting! I think a lot of people had got to the point where link building had become quite dull and social media really mixed this up as an SEO tactic. From my point of view, I’d much rather write a blog post than spend half a day trying to find and build links. And in terms of generating high-quality, relevant and natural/defensible links it really is a far more effective way of doing things when applied successfully.
Also looking at this from a marketing angle instead of an SEO perspective and it’s clearly a very powerful method of promoting a brand or product. If you think of the number of Facebook fans, Twitter followers, YouTube views and social media bookmarking visits for campaigns such as Comparethemeerkat.com, then you begin to see how effective this can be for building brand awareness.
We all know both social media and search marketing are evolving by the day, where do you think both industries are heading to?
We ran a poll recently on SEOptimise and many people predicted social media and SEO will become closer, possibly merging in the future. With news of Twitter crawling external links from tweets it could well be heading that way. At the moment the thought of anyone really challenging Google still seems unlikely, but you don’t know what is around the corner long-term.
And as method of building a website’s off-site reputation, social media and online PR are already a very important tactic – the way this is heading I can only see this continuing in the future.
Have you been to Dubai or anywhere in the Middle East?
I’ve never been to the Middle East before, but would love to go to Dubai one day. I definitely plan to go back to Australia again, so maybe that would be a good excuse to merge the trips.
You may not know this but SEO is still at its infancy stage here in the UAE and some parts of the Middle East. What can you recommend to businesses in terms of marketing online?
There’s a lot of things businesses should be considering in terms of marketing themselves online. And in many cases there are several strategies they should be thinking about, for example:
- Overall search strategy and presence for industry leading keywords, both organically and via paid search.
- Conversion rate optimisation, is your website effective and converting into leads and sales?
- Local search, make sure you’re listed in Google Maps and in-front of potential customers locally.
- Reputation management, displaying positive results to potential clients who may perform brand or key employee queries.
- Blogging – show that you are an authoritative source and build a respected following via blogging.
- Social media – promote your content and blog posts further to reach a wider audience and strengthen your website in terms of it’s link reputation.
What advice would you give to businesses out there who are starting to expand their marketing strategies to online channels?
Hire a consultant! Ok, I would say that – but there are so many opportunities online that you really need an expert to analyse the market and create a strategy which suits a specific business. Plus there’s a lot of bad advice still out there if you’re reading the wrong forums or asking the wrong people, so it can be easy to waste time without moving forward.
Every website and industry is different. So if you are looking to promote a travel website, for example, promoting this using general search marketing tactics will only get you so far. You need to ensure that you’re working with someone who understands about the seasonality of searches and different stages of the travel buying cycle. This way you can focus on promoting the website in the best possible method in terms of ROI, as opposed to the most effective way of increasing traffic volumes.
Thank you very much Kevin for sharing your thoughts with me here on Click-Dubai. Wish you all the best with SEOptimise and wish we could read more on your expert opinions on SEO and Social Media on your future blog posts and articles.
There you go folks. It was both an honor and a pleasure to have one the well respected names in the search marketing industry on Interview Fridays. You can catch Kevin’s profiles and his expert scribbles on these sites:
- SEOptimise
- Search Engine Land
- Econsultancy
- Australia Photos
- Google Profile
- Twitter Stream
- SlideShare
- LinkedIn Profile
- FriendFeed
If you know anyone in the online media industry or you think you have something to share here on SaktoSEO, you can contact me through the online form or send me an email at dave [at] saktoseo [dot] com.
See you all at the next Interview Friday!!
Interview Fridays – Kevin Gibbons of SEOptimise is a post from: Small Business SEO Tips – SaktoSEO