Navigating the Dynamic World of SEO: Insights from an Industry Trailblazer

Hi, guys. I’m excited to be here. Thank you for the invitation.

Okay, sure. I have been an SEO consultant for the past eight years. I started working with a big growth marketing agency. This is how my career started back then. I got to a point where as an intern, I managed to get ahead of SEO and had a big team with other people doing SEO-related things. It was nice back then. We would handle a couple of big clients like Nestlé, G-Healthcare, and big names. And at some point, I just decided that I wanted to go to the next step in my career. So, I quit and started my own company. This is Search Magic. So, Search Magic is a boutique SEO agency. We are based in London. The team is remote, though. We are currently in the UK, Greece, Poland. The team is big, let’s say. We’re all remote, as I said, so it doesn’t matter. Our main service is SEO. This is what we do, SEO growth. And yeah, it goes like this. We’re on a mission, let’s say, to help e-commerce businesses increase their revenue online and depend less on paid advertising.

Okay, sure. So first of all, from a very young age, I started doing SEO in my first job. As I said, I was 19 years old back then. By 22, I was handling clients, and that was stressful, but at the same time, it was amazing. And that was a big moment for me. From the previous company to trust me with big brands at so young age, it was a big moment for me. But after that, at some point, I realized that SEO has an immediate impact on e-commerce stores because it affects their sales, their core business. And it’s satisfying to know that it helps a business to grow numbers and sales and see the e-commerce stores. That’s why my first big case study was in commerce, a retailer. I kept it that way because I felt that I was doing something important. I feel that we are helping e-commerce businesses to grow. That’s it. Nothing is more complicated than that. There was no plan to start the company. I was just focused on doing a CO. There was no plan to do a company or anything like that.

There was no business plan. There was nothing behind this. There was just a lead. I just left the company that I was in. I was just starting doing freelancing and I just have to find a way to invoice my clients. So no thinking, no branding, no business plan, no nothing. I just need to invoice. I call them Benny. Yeah.

Yeah, the team is the number one thing for me because if we don’t have the proper people that we all support each other, this doesn’t make sense. So first of all, I think I have the best, most wonderful team that I could ever imagine, that I never imagined. Everyone is really helpful. They’re all proactive. They do what they have to do. And especially in the beginning, that will just be people who have to do everything from the marketing for the company and lead generation to the actual service. There were two specific people I have in mind if I can name the people that held all these. They take on things on their backs. So we would be able to grow and for me to be able to do more sales and be more focused on marketing. That was people, team, number one, like number one, if nothing less. So the second thing I think is that we never did any marketing activities or advertising or spending money on ads. And I think that makes sense, especially if you’re at the beginning of this journey, and you don’t have the budget for marketing activities. So what we try to do, and I think it works well for us, is to participate in conferences, to talks, meet people, network with people.

That was one factor that helped us a lot acquire more clients. We tried to do several talks and speeches that we didn’t sell. That was not the point of selling something. The main point was to give value and sell our knowledge, let’s say. And that brings a good amount of new clients. The second thing is that we paid a lot of attention to the quality of the service, and that had us a result to bring results to our clients and our happy clients to bring more clients. That was also out of this world amazing, happened. Grateful for it. And yeah, I don’t know, I think these are the two most important things that happened back then. We invested a lot in the service and the quality of the service. And till today, we’re focused on bringing to our clients results. This is the number one priority. And that sometimes led to reject projects and get only projects that make sense for us, which is quite a difficult decision at the same time because you’re losing money, let’s say. But at the same time, I’m proud that we do that because we always focus on quality rather than quantity.

So we take a limited, let’s say, amount of projects per month, but then at the same time, we make sure to invoice properly this amount of clients and at the same time deliver the results. That’s important.

My biggest mistake when I started was that I had also no sales experience, nothing. I didn’t know how to structure a proposal or something. I had so a lack of confidence that I was about to sell the service at a really low price and then had to spend thousands of hours, much, many hours more to deliver. And from that point, I learned the hard way that you need a very specific offer. You need to know what to sell one thing, not to sell 10 services at once, specialize on something, specialize in a specific niche, and have proper pricing. It’s your work at the end of the day.

Also, one more thing that helped a lot, was that I started a lot on LinkedIn and building my network on LinkedIn. That was helpful because I didn’t do it exactly on purpose, but I was trying to connect with e-commerce managers and e-commerce directors. Our niche is e-commerce SEO, so that would make sense. And just starting posting about what we do, what I learned, what I tested, what I like in a CEO that I spoke there, I did that. No plan again. I just like to share and exchange knowledge. And that also was helpful at the end. That helped.

Yeah, it was tough back then. Also, another thing is that I think many of us, don’t have any specific business skills. As I said, I guess many other people out there just started the business to invoice their freelance clients. One of the things is that we aren’t born with business skills or something.

You just build experience there is no shortcut to that. You just go with the flow and learn what you have to learn. You keep learning all the way. There is no manual or something.

Growing a business is like growing a child. There are tips, but there is no manual do that and it will happen no such thing.

Yeah. So the first thing to do is, it might sound too romantic, but it’s true, it’s creating content for the long-tail versions of this keyword. So, for example, if you want to rank for a high commercial, high search volume keyword, instead of just trying to rank for this specific keyword that has 50,000 searches per month, you can just start creating the cluster of this keyword, tackle all the long tail versions of this keyword, then start creating content for this keyword. And that’s how you create context in your website about this keyword. At some point, you would be able to run for the competitive keyword. So, for example, if you want to run for the keyword moisturizer, you don’t start targeting the keyword moisturizer, especially if you’re a new website. You can start creating content like the best moisturizers for summer or the best moisturizers in the world and create content around these topics. And then at the same time, you can start working on your product pages and product categories. And again, instead of trying to rank from the very first moment for a very competitive keyword like moisturizer, it could be moisturizer price or moisturizer discount or whatever by now.

So that would make it much easier for you in terms of buckling, in terms of everything. And once you get there for manual tale versions of this keyword, it would be much easier to run the competitive one. Absolutely. That would be an approach. There are also quick wins, as we like to call them, SEO. What we do in Search Magic is that we get all the keywords that they are from position four to position 20. We gather and filter only the most commercial keywords, and we do quick optimizations around these keywords that would be adding more content, changing metadata, updating internal linking, or whatever came up for each keyword. And that helps a lot to bring results in a very short time. So you should try.

Yeah, exactly. It’s really. You don’t start from day one except you are like Amazon or ASUS. You don’t start day one and have the best rankings in the world. At the same time, there is a small point. You need to make sure that you rank for keywords that are related to your core customer and your target group, and that they are people searching for them. Because I hear many times, Oh, I have rankings for 10,000 keywords. Yeah, congratulations. Do you have traffic? Do you have sales? Yeah. Or do you just rank for that?

We used to focus a lot only on rankings, and rankings are great. You can have all the rankings of the world. Non-ranking related metrics are also important. Conversion rates, sales, and customers coming back to your website, all of are important factors as well.

SEO is a really hard profession to follow, to be honest. You need to love it very much to do it, first of all. The first thing is that SEO keeps changing. Every 3-4 months, we have different things coming up. The first thing is that you need to continue learning and add that as a routine to your schedule. You need to keep learning, you need to keep studying what prevents the tools, what’s going on with the algorithms, and having specific blogs, sources to read, or people on LinkedIn to follow and learn from them. Some of them that they like who’s a great consultant on SEO and technical SEO, and, Aleyda Solis, another great SEO consultant in the world. There are many people out there you need to just keep learning. The second thing is to build a really strong foundation. You need to learn what’s going on and learn a lot before you are in the position to start implementing. And you will do it by learning SEO from authoritative sources, training, or even better, start from a place where you will get the proper training, and that would be an SEO consultant or that would be to hire a mentor, for example, to train you on specific SEO aspects, that would be great.

The next thing is to specialize. There are many aspects of SEO you can’t specialize in all SEO aspects unless you want to be a strategist, that’s cool. But it’s complicated. You can also specialize in some parts of SEO. You could specialize in keyword research on content or building or technical SEO. There are many aspects of SEO that you can master learn and focus on. But of course, when you start your journey, you need to go across all the areas so you know what you like. And of course, the hands-on experience is valuable. You can know SEO in theory, but you need to test it. And to do that, you need to work on real projects and brands. And if you’re trying to apply what you’ve learned, A good thing here could be to reverse engineer big websites that are doing SEO. I like this exercise doing that actually, reverse engineering strategy of big brands. I know it sounds a little bit creepy, but I do that. I like it anyway. I also advise people to do that. It’s really fun to uncover what big brands do and experiment with.

What else? To stay creative. I know I see might sound too practical, but at the same time, you need to come up with creative concepts to get users to get engaged with you. This is important as well. Network taking plays a big role in your career. You need to attend relevant conferences. This is a great networking opportunity and also to learn new things meet other professionals and hear different perspectives. There are also great online communities where you can join and discuss, connect with people, find mentors, find partners, or just collaborate with people and see what’s going on out there. My favorite two communities are Traffic Think Tank. I love the guys. I just love it. I’ve learned the most advanced techniques of SEO. I’ve learned it was inside Traffic Think Tank. And then there is Women in SEO, which is an SEO community only for women, which is great. Sorry for the man who couldn’t traffic think tank, or you can join a traffic training tank or you can join SEO, I guess, as well. There is no problem. I don’t know. Another thing is the branding that you need to start thinking about if you want to build a personal brand.

you need to start to serve your knowledge, start creating blog posts or doing social media, or just try yourself into a speaking engagement. Consistency, of course, it’s really important. Be patient and be consistent in what you want to do. And in a more practical case, I would suggest to create a vision board. I like vision boards. I love them. I just cut pictures and things I want to do and combine them on a big paper and have the paper in front of my office and see it every day. I love it. And yeah, consistency and patience. SEO only needs patience. You need to be patient to do SEO. I think it’s a lot of time to happen. So everything is going to happen. You just need to go with the flow, keep learning, network, and everything is going to be fine. Also, if I have one more moment, I’d like to say that the first person that I hired, just found me on LinkedIn. She loves the SEO. She didn’t know where to start her career. And she was like, Hey, Anna, this is me. I’d like to learn an SEO.

Would you like to teach me SEO? And I was like, Yes, let’s do it. And we’ll keep working together. It was awesome. You just have to go out there and you will find it. You will figure things out. There are so many resources, and so many things to do, and try and experiment with that you will find what to do.

They have some resources as well, communities, and people. I hope I helped.

Okay.

The Subtle Art of not giving a Fuck

My hairdresser. I need to cut my hair.

Dublin, I’m going to Saastock next month, and hopefully, I will get there.

Thank you for having me. It was a nice experience. Thank you very much.