Articles Tagged with SEO

Advice for SEO Freelancers – My brightonSEO Oct 2020 Talk

Published on October 9, 2020March 29, 2021 by Steve

Last Friday, I gave a talk at brightonSEO October 2020, the first time it’s been hosted online (as a result of lockdown). It was my third time speaking at bSEO (here are the links for the first two).

My talk – titled “Going Solo – The Survival Guide for Freelance SEOs (Present & Future)” – gave advice to aspiring, new, and established freelancers, which – during these difficult times – I’m hoping would’ve been useful to a lot of people.

If you missed it live, you’ll need a ticket in order to watch the talk back. However, I can share with you the slides and the talk’s transcript, which I’ll share below…

…But first:

Other freelancers give their tips

To complement the talk, I asked six other SEO freelancers for their tips. The original plan was to include their tips within the presentation, but with a strict 20-minute timeframe, it just wasn’t doable. So what I did instead is published their tips in full over on the Anti-Sell blog.

Slides

So here are the slides:

Talk transcript

And here is the transcript (which I got by using Otter.ai):

Click to read more!

How to Get SEO Clients (Anti-Sell Style)!

Published on July 24, 2020July 24, 2020 by Steve

As per my previous post, I recently launched a separate, dedicated blog for all things Anti-Sell, over on Anti-Sell.com.

One of the posts is likely to be of interest to SEOs, which is why I’m signposting it here as well…

How to Get SEO Clients (in a Non-Salesy Way) gives 15 ‘techniques’ for acquiring SEO clients – whether you’re a freelancer or an agency – with sprinkles of tactical ideas and suggestions throughout. As a freelance SEO consultant myself, the vast majority of the techniques and tactics are things that I’ve done myself in order to get new SEO clients – and if there are one or two I’ve not done, then I know other SEOs who have. There’s a bunch of SEO-specific examples throughout as well.

Examples include:

Going to non-SEO meetups (yep, you read that right),
Running your own [something],
Contributing to Facebook groups,
Taking part in Twitter Q&A chats (e.g. #SEMrushchat),
And more!

Either click the link above or the banner below to see it.

Happy Anti-Selling, folks. Enjoy!

Doing a Content Audit? Here’s a Link Building Tip Even the Experts Miss…

Published on October 8, 2019August 4, 2020 by Steve

Despite not being a fan of clickbait, I’ll happily admit my hypocrisy given that this post has the clickbaitiest title in history – so before you break out your pitchforks, I’ll do you a deal: here’s a quick TL;DR summary so you can determine if you wanna read on or be on your merry way…

TL;DR: If you’re doing a content audit on a site that’s had guest content published on it, and you decide to remove some of that content, let the original author know if they want to re-publish it on their own site (along with a link to the ‘original’ source).

A few years ago, I wrote a guest post for Point Blank SEO, a site/blog run by veteran link builder Jon Cooper (@joncooperseo). The post was titled “Communitybait – Taking Egobait One Step Further” in which I coined the term communitybait and shared examples of what that was. The post is no longer live (I’ll get to that), but thanks to the Wayback Machine, it can still be read here: https://web.archive.org/web/20161005194750/http://pointblankseo.com/communitybait

Point Blank SEO post screenshot — How the post appeared on Point Blank SEO

Sometime between then and now, Jon must’ve sold the site/domain to Brian Dean (@backlinko), who’s also a veteran link builder. So I was surprised to see Brian miss a link building-oriented trick…

Click to read more!

Using SEO & PPC Insights to Improve Your Digital Marketing Conversions in Both Channels

Published on April 30, 2019April 30, 2019 by Guest Posts

Intro from Steve: I don’t often publish guest posts on SEOno, and in fact I’ve only ever published two (way back in 2013), but my buddy Gus approached me about using this post as a guest post and – given that it’s related to his recent Cardiff SEO Meet talk – I thought it made a lot of sense. Over to you, Gus…

If you work in one specific digital marketing area such as SEO, PPC, content, social or even in related jobs such as designer or brand manager, chances are that you had a conflict with someone from other departments. Each department tends to have such specific views on how things should look and what’s best for the business and clients that it’s hard to not be protective sometimes.

Obviously, this is an exaggeration, but you probably can relate to this infographic made by the Digital Marketing Institute.

Taking a step away from your role, we know everyone contributes to a good digital marketing strategy. SEO brings traffic at no cost, PPC allows you to convert quickly, brand managers protect and improve how people perceive your brand, a designer makes a website you can navigate well and trust… You get the picture.

Here at Wolfgang Digital, we’re big on integration – in fact, it’s one of our company pillars. As per my talk during Cardiff SEO Meet in March, here are a few ways to integrate SEO and PPC, whereby instead of viewing them as two separate department, you can learn from each other to ultimately improve your KPIs.

How much would your SEO traffic cost… if you had to pay for it

SEO is a difficult channel to prove ROI. A lot of our work gives a return in the long run, so clients tend to be more sceptical investing, only to have to wait several months before you can demonstrate results.

Once you start getting results, you can show how much traffic and conversions have improved – but it’s also possible to show how much money you saved in the process. How so? Just calculate how much they’d have to pay for this traffic with PPC.

Click to read more!

My Experience Using the New Google My Business Redressal Complaint Form

Published on March 22, 2019March 25, 2019 by Steve

* UPDATE – 24th March: it looks as thought 2 of the 3 listings have now come back online, and with their spammy business names (boooo…) *

Google Maps has a spam problem. From seemingly randomly-left reviews to businesses spamming their Google My Business (GMB) listings so heavily that there’s even a dedicated hashtag for it (#stopcraponthemap), the situation becomes further frustrating when you realise that Google doesn’t (or can’t) do much about the situation. Sure, you can ‘suggest edits’ on Google Maps, but in my experience the process is largely pointless, and if you really need to contact Google to do something, you have to (ironically) contact them via Twitter or Facebook. Huh…

It’s starting to feel like it’s getting to boiling point, with the ne’er-do-well spammy types getting away with their efforts and reaping the benefits.

So when Google announced its Business Redressal Complaint Form a few weeks ago, I did a little eye-roll, said “yeah, ok” and reluctantly gave it a go on a couple of a client’s competitors who are notorious GMB listing spammers, expecting the usual to happen: something between ‘very little’ and ‘nothing’.

Boy was I in for a shock.

What’s in a (spammy) name?

I’ll keep the example anonymous but let’s say my client is a family-run, independent widget seller with two shops in South Wales. Their main competitors are UK-wide chains with dozens of locations across the country. One of them has two locations in Cardiff, while another has just the one. While my client uses their business name properly in the Name field (e.g. “Bonafide Widgets”), the competitors have gone with a “Business Name Keyword Location” approach, with the competitor with two Cardiff locations going as far as listing the sub-location as well (e.g. “Widgets-R-Us Cheap Widgets Cardiff”, “SuperWidgets Cheap Widgets Cardiff Central” and “SuperWidgets Cheap Widgets Cardiff North”). Ugh. Tacky. And frustratingly, they’d often rank higher in Google Maps for keywords – suggesting that this dodgy practice was working well for them, too. No fair.

Despite this behaviour being against Google My Business’ guidelines (see Name > Learn more > Service or product / Location information on that link), and despite me regularly using the ‘suggest an edit’ feature on the three listings to ‘correct’ the business names to be more guidelines-compliant, very little would happen. Either nothing would happen (and I’d simply have to try again), or the changes would only last for a day or two, with the original spammy versions returning shortly afterwards. I was about to try the contact-via-Twitter/Facebook method with them when the Redressal Form was introduced.

Click to read more!