SEO has been a digital buzzword for a decade now, and yet those who can truly say they understand it are in surprisingly short supply. As the channel matures anyone with an interest in promoting their business online needs to understand how SEO can be played to their own benefits, and how it ought to influence their other marketing activities.
Here at Arena Media, we recognise that staying on top of SEO is an on-going but rewarding challenge. What we know about the channel NOW is vital to our understanding of where Google will take it NEXT, and time and again we’ve been proved correct in our predictions, allowing our clients to stay at the forefront of change.
At the Arena Media SEO Breakfast, we will address the fundamental changes in the way Google ranks websites, and how these evolutions represent an unprecedented opportunity for your business to dominate in this often misunderstood channel.
Speaking at the event are industry experts Nick Wilsdon and Kevin Thiele, both of whom took a few moments to answer a few questions ahead of the breakfast itself.
NICK WILSDON
Head of SEO and Content Marketing, Arena
It seems like SEO has been around forever, but it’s actually a relatively new discipline. How long have you been involved?
My digital career started in 1999, towards the end of the dot-com boom. Having taught myself web design, I managed to get an internship with a small digital agency in Brighton where I was given the chance to promote a piece of HTML editing software that one of the founders had written. In pushing this software, I began using techniques that were gradually being defined at the time as search engine optimisation (SEO).
The role provided an excellent introduction to online marketing, and I was given ample opportunity to work on all parts of the process – improving SEO positions for key terms, building reviews and content, improving on-page conversion, customer support, purchase and advocacy. You couldn’t have wanted for a better grounding. It’s amazing to me now, given the changes we’ve seen over the last decade, that I was presenting master-class seminars on SEO as far back as 2000.
What keeps you interested in the discipline?
SEO is the perfect discipline for the intellectually curious. It’s fascinating because we are working with an intricate search engine algorithm that only the engineers who work on it understand. It is extremely unlikely that any one person or group – even within Google – understands the whole picture, as different groups work across parts of the algorithm. Analysing what we know about these algorithms and trying to predict what move will come next… this is what gets me out of bed every morning.
What challenges do you see for the modern SEO?
The future for the SEO is technical, using ‘Big Data’ to make improved strategic decisions for our clients. Content marketing is putting the emphasis back on quality content as a method to build links, traffic and, ultimately, conversion. Brands reign supreme for Google, dominating the important real estate of search, and so the ability to obtain and retain this status in Google has become vital. SEO tricks are fading out as long-term strategic approaches deliver stable (and increasing) revenue for clients and the agencies that manage their accounts. All of this will challenge modern SEOs to become more integrated across digital channels, but also more transparent and accountable in their recommendations and actions.
KEVIN THIELE
Sales Director, Searchmetrics
How did you find your way into this industry?
I started my career as a Sales Rep for Yellow Pages – that was 20 years ago when they were the Google of their day, selling display advertising and bold type listing to compete with the free (organic) listings. In many ways, Google today is YP on steroids, based in the cloud. The concept is the same but the scale and means of delivery are vastly different.
Most recently my career has been in data security, and I came to London to start the UK sales office for Searchmetrics three years ago. When you have been in sales as long as I have, your whole life revolves around numbers, targets, billings and deadlines – end of month, end of quarter, end of year. You need to have a firm grasp of the numbers in order to identify opportunities and trends. I’m essentially a data guy.
What do you find inspiring about the future of search and SEO?
For me, it’s about the challenges. The big challenge for SEO software vendors like Searchmetrics is to help search marketing professionals rapidly sift through a huge amount of search engine information, across multiple geographies, channels and platforms, so that they can quickly make useful decisions that will positively impact the bottom line for their business. Increasingly this can only be done if you pull all of the data and signals into a central place where it can be managed, and where the correlation between SEO activity and results can be clearly shown and a significant ROI demonstrated.
As the internet moves from desktop to mobile, from generic machine-generated recommendations to personal suggestions made by your social network, this challenge will get bigger and bigger. That’s what keeps me inspired from day to day.
Arena’s SEO Seminar is taking place on Thursday 6th June, 9.30am-12pm, at The Soho Hotel, London. It is a free event. Please RSVP to Helen Critcher at helen.critcher@arenamedia.com