“What is the best SEO tip you give for your clients and our audience?”
One SEO tip is to stop focusing on keywords solely. Use long-tail keywords and focus on keywords that are throughout the entire funnel.
“Good SEO work only gets better over time. It’s only search engine tricks that need to keep changing when the ranking algorithms change.”
Search engine optimization is nowadays more important than ever and it has become necessary for every marketer to understand the true meaning of SEO as well as the potential it creates for every business.
In today’s competitive market, standing out from other SEO marketers is more important.
Our interview today is with an expert SEO Analyst – Meet Kevin Cotch.
Kevin Cotch is a SEO Analyst and Digital Marketer at TopRank Online Marketing that focuses on on-page and off-page SEO strategies for websites. Kevin also has experience with public relations, social media, and content marketing.
Kevin holds a deep understanding of SEO tactics to help improve organic search performance for both all types of businesses.
Sharing his tips on SEO marketing, it’s truly an honor to host Kevin Cotch in our Agency expert interview series :
1. How did you get into Account Management in the first place, and how did you get to where you are now?
I started doing SEO in college as an intern at Findlaw, a Thomson Reuters company. I worked on lawyer websites doing SEO strategies. Eventually, I was hired on fulltime as a Digital Marketing Strategist where I had about 30 or so accounts on a given month.
I’m a SEO Analyst for TopRank Marketing. I focuses on all things related to search engine optimization but gets the most enjoyment spending time uncovering technical SEO tactics to help clients get the highest return on their investment. In addition to SEO, I have experience in the paid, usability experience, and content marketing areas.
2. What do you believe to be the most important task you do on a daily basis? Why?
The most important tasks for a SEO to conduct on a given basis is to check analytics. Looking into analytics will help identify opportunities that might be more optimization or small adjustments to get more visibility. I also look into Google Search Console to see if there are any variations in impressions and clicks for priority keywords. I often don’t look into keyword rankings, as they vary depending on many factors, but instead look at any keyword gaps a website may have.
3. What resources or influencers do you follow for staying ahead in the world of SEO?
I follow many influencers and read multiple blogs to stay on top of search-related news. It helps working with a key influencer, Lee Odden, to gain valuable insights on SEO and other digital marketing areas. I also follow Gary Illyes on Twitter for quick insights on Google news and updates. Other than that, I typically read the Moz blog and inbound.org for good articles. I try to devote at least 15 to 30 minutes of reading a day on industry news.
4. How do you survive with Google’s Love-Hate relation with Backlinks ?
Backlinks are still important for the SEO industry. I think that backlinks will always be slightly important when it comes to SEO. With that in mind, I analyze all the backlinks to client’s websites to identify opportunities or gaps
5. What are your favourite SEO Marketing tools, and why?
The two tools I use the most are Screaming Frog and SEMrush. Both tools help with technical SEO and general SEO areas. SEMrush also does a great job when conducting competitor audits too. I typically use Majestic for backlink analysis. As I mentioned earlier too, I often use Google Search Console and Google Analytics to identify the SEO opportunities.
6. How do you think SEO will evolve in the coming years?
I think SEO will evolve to be more technical and conversion focused. New technologies are constantly being developed, and a SEO should be able to understand how Googlebot can crawl and index each technology. I also think it will be more important to optimize a site to provide the best user experience, especially on mobile devices.
7. What’s your favorite method to build links to your site?
It might sound cliche, but creating content that the audience wants is my favorite method to build links. I don’t believe that you can just create content and the links will come in, but rather you need to add in some level of promotion. Create 10x content and promote it thoroughly and then people will be more likely to link to it.
8. Share with us your biggest SEO achievement and how you did it. For what competitive keywords have you ranked high and what techniques you used?
One of my biggest SEO achievements was when I was working more with lawyers. I had a client in Northern Virginia that did all types of family law, among other types of law. I was able to build up a solid local citation profile to increase the visibility in surrounding communities. For a smaller law firm they ended up with a good amount of rankings for multiple cities/counties. I also focused on getting multiple positive reviews on their Google My Business page, which contributed to their closing rate on inquires.
9. What do you believe has been your greatest career accomplishment?
It is hard to select one career accomplishment that I would claim as my greatest. There has been a lot of wins and losses for me in my career so far but everything has taught me more. I would say that getting a job at TopRank Marketing was a successful accomplishment for myself. Other than that, I enjoy hearing all the positive feedback from clients on how much ROI they receive from the SEO campaigns.
10. What is the best SEO tip you give for your clients and our audience?
One SEO tip is to stop focusing on keywords solely. Use long-tail keywords and focus on keywords that are throughout the entire funnel. Optimize the website on pushing the target audience through the funnel as opposed to one vanity keyword. People will always use keywords for search queries, but more focus should be on what the return on investment (ROI) is for the campaign. Showing the ROI to clients or key stakeholders will open the conversations up to how much budget is needed for a certain campaign. SEO experts should use any paid budget and metrics to use as leverage when it comes to receiving budget for SEO campaigns. Providing the ROI for all SEO efforts will be more actionable for clients than reporting on vanity metrics (i.e. page views, sessions, bounce rate, etc.).
One last tip is to create a couple websites to test different tactics and ideas on. Test the ideas on those websites so that you now the tactics work or how to do it.
Today we got to know some key SEO Marketing strategies from Kevin Cotch. Going forward there are many more specialists that we want to chat with. We will resume our discussion with another expert next week.
Until then, Happy Marketing!!
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