Here at SEO Reseller, we want to bring you interviews from experts from different niches, who operate online. Whether you are looking to improve your presence online, or are just interested in how others operate, we hope you find these of interest.
The first of our interviews, is with Marcus, Director and Owner of a successful SEO services company.
Hi Marcus, thanks for agreeing to be interviewed by us. To begin could you give a quick introduction to yourself? Who you are and perhaps a few things we might not know about you?
I’ve been asking myself that for many years. I’m in my late thirties, and live on the south coast of the United Kingdom. I am a self-employed business owner, married, father of one, plus the owner of a Bengal cat. Outside of work I am a season ticket holder for the mighty Southampton FC who are having a more than reasonable season at the moment.
Things the guys in the SEO industry might not know about me? I can only really think of one right now and that would be that fact that I used to be a nightclub promoter running rave events in the UK in my spare time. I suppose the only take out I got from that when applied to my current business would be the effectiveness of a good marketing campaign that really sparks someone’s interest enough for them to be engaged with what you are doing.
You have your own successful SEO Company and what I would like to know is what was it that got you to start a business in this niche?
I’ve been involved in web since the late 1990s. In fact, when I was about 19 I was teaching web design and HTML programming to students at a local University using the old Netscape browser which came with a built-in editor at the time. I appreciate that probably sounds a bit geeky.
My career path went a bit like this; web designer, project manager in web design companies, to finally settling on what I thought would be a long-term career with a large well-known American company. I was working out in Switzerland for a few years as their Online Marketing Manager for Europe.
This involved all the strategy behind their online presence and meant managing a lot of web guys in different countries and lots of travel – not to mention a great outdoor life near the Alps and lots of fresh air!
Whilst working there I started up a few projects of my own in my spare time, essentially seeing if I could make my own websites that would make me money. It opened up a whole new World to me in terms of the power of search engine optimisation and I finally arrived at the point where I was earning more money out of work than I was in work. At that point it seemed like a good point to leave my employer and go full time with my own projects so my wife and I made the decision to move back to the UK and start a new chapter in our lives.
It seemed like a natural progression to start offering that SEO expertise out to other companies and meant that I could supplement my own online projects revenue with a different stream of income. So around June 2013 I decided to also open up an SEO business initially offering SEO services in Bournemouth and Southampton.
Fast forward to now and we have a couple of employees and thankfully lots of happy clients in the UK and the USA. It was definitely the right move for me.
SEO is quite a competitive industry, with quite a few ‘sharks’ out there offering poor service, so what do you do that puts you above them all? What makes you stand out over others?
First and foremost it’s results that matter. We have a strong portfolio of websites that are performing which we can always demonstrate to a new customer who wants to employ us as a SEO agency.
However, you first of all need those customers to contact you and first impressions definitely count. On our website we really do try to position and present ourselves as taking a plain-talking approach to business, but we also demonstrate that we understand what a business owner’s concerns might be and how we will address them.
We treat every customer different. For some businesses the return on investment with an SEO strategy might not be worth the same as the next organisation. Because of that we don’t have any off the shelf prices and look to create bespoke campaigns depending on the value our services will bring to a client.
Also, having worked in digital agencies in the past I know that sometimes SEO is a bit of an afterthought, and many of those agencies are working to tick-sheets of tasks that simply don’t work today. Google makes over 500 changes each year to its algorithm so we are always completely on top of that so we can react and offer the best solutions for our clients.
We only do SEO. We are specialists. I’ve often used an analogy with clients that if they needed an operation on their knee they wouldn’t ask their local GP to perform the surgery. They would want a specialist surgeon.
What is it about your industry and your work that you love? Is there a particular project or type of work that you absolutely love doing?
I would say mainly lead generation or the affiliate market. Creating a website, getting it ranked, and then waking up in the morning to see that it’s making sales on autopilot is the preference. I’ve got websites that I built 4 years ago that require no real maintenance yet are their own automated income stream.
I love projects like this for obvious reasons. The hard part is finding the niche to target in the first place though!
And is there anything about the SEO or digital marketing industry that you hate?
No I wouldn’t say that there’s anything that I hate. There are definitely things that amuse me though. For example the other day I noticed that a competitor of mine appears to have basically re-written the content from my own website onto theirs to try and replicate my rankings.
I take it as a compliment, as it makes you realise that the level of competition aren’t always as professional as yourself. That can only benefit me and my business in the long run.
If you had the power to influence where online marketing and SEO was to go over the next 2-5 years, what would you like to see? What would you want to see maybe dominate the market or even be developed more than it is now, maybe even change where the industry is going?
I can see a gradual shift where online privacy becomes less and less. Ideally I would like to be able to influence the UK government’s thinking on their digital strategy policies. I can’t see that happening anytime soon though.
I would also love to be a fly on the wall in some of the top-level Google meetings where they decide how their algorithm is working. That would certainly make my life easier and would mean I could reduce testing times for my own projects.
What’s a typical day for you Marc? How do you manage your time, what are the key factors in a working day for you?
At the moment we have a toddler who has recently turned two years old. He seems to love getting up around 6am so it’s always an early start in our house! The working day starts around 8am when I head to the office.
A typical day will involve setting up and briefing employees, talking to our clients, going to new business meetings, maintaining current projects… and one very important aspect is the continual self-development and learning. You can’t afford to stand still with SEO so I try to spend a proportion of my week learning and testing new strategies.
Overall, I try and get a good working balance. As my own boss it means I don’t have to go the office everyday so will sometimes take a couple of days in the week to spend with my family.
The digital industry is the fastest growing industry in the world right now. As someone who has a successful business in this fast changing niche, what advice would you give to anyone looking to get started?
Don’t rest on your laurels. Whilst it’s hard to get a website performing to its best potential whether from a performance, revenue, or ranking perspective… it’s even harder keeping it there.
We keep hearing from ‘experts’ that social media now plays a dominate part in ranking a website. Would you agree with that? Should a business focus on social media as much as their SEO?
Hmmm… tricky one this. Anyone can create a social media account and link to your website from it. But the real power comes from getting coverage on valuable social media accounts where the likelihood of your content being viewed and engaged with by a targeted and quality audience is much higher.
I’ve not seen any real evidence that a webpage having 100 likes on Facebook ranks better than a website that has no likes. I feel that despite what we hear from various sources in the SEO industry that link-building is dead, this patently isn’t true.
A valuable, relevant and quality link is still one of the best factors that you can have when it comes to improving your Google rankings. I don’t think that’s going to change in the foreseeable future.
With my clients I always advise them to use social media to build engagement and conversation with their existing and potential customers rather than thinking of it as a pure link-building strategy.
I would like to thank you for taking the time to answer these questions.
Thanks so much! Anytime. I’ve enjoyed speaking with you.
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