“What do you believe your strongest SEO skill is?”
Seeing the big picture. Since SEO is basically an umbrella term for everything that makes a website “good”, the challenge often lies in understanding where the real value can be found.
“The days of SEO being a game outsmarting algorithms are over. Today content strategy and valuable, sustainable strategies are essential, not just tricks and links.”
SEO has never been easy. We get to see changes every now and then a sudden change will happen to mess us up. It doesn’t matter whether it has a negative or positive effect to a website, the change affects us. What does matter is you have to embrace change no matter what the impact will be and move on.
Our interview today is with an expert SEO Consultant– Meet Robbert Bremer.
Robbert is a marketing enthusiast with a penchant for all things online. Strong believer in perpetual tweaking and improvement and being a know-it-all. You can talk to him about SEA, SEO, CRO, usability and content marketing. Currently he is with FairEtail as a SEA/SEO Consultant.
Sharing some of his SEO strategies, it’s truly an honor to host Robbert Bremer 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 think many people who work at an agency have a constant need for new challenges and opportunities to try things out. I am no exception.
After receiving a degree in marketing I started as all-round online marketer for a small company, where I developed my skills through self-education and trial and error. The need for new and exciting things brought me to FairEtail, my current employer, where I soon wound up managing large and exciting accounts.
2. Why did you decide to get into the business of SEO? What do you love about it?
When done right, SEO is always earned. There are over 1 billion websites on the internet, and they all want to be #1 on Google. Watching your project grow over time, like a proud father, can be immensely satisfying.
3. What do you believe your strongest SEO skill is? Why?
Seeing the big picture. Since SEO is basically an umbrella term for everything that makes a website “good”, the challenge often lies in understanding where the real value can be found. It’s not uncommon that we audit a large site, and find that the most impactful action that we can take is to remove a single line of code.
4. What are the top things that you see companies doing incorrectly when it comes to SEO?
Some of the most common issues we run across are:
- Sites or pages that are (unknowingly) blocked from search engines by robots.txt or meta robots instructions
- Single title tags applied to every page on the site
- Great content that cannot be crawled by search engines due to javascript use or non-HTML text in PDF documents and the like
5. What are your favourite tools for SEO strategies, and why?
I’m a huge fan of Screaming Frog. It’s super easy to use and very affordable (free with limited use). There are tons of cool things you can do with it nowadays, and I don’t even know half of it. Doing a full crawl of a site is always the first step I take when performing an audit, and Screaming Frog is my go-to tool.
Some of the commands in Google are of ivaluable use, such as “cache:” to see Google’s cached version of a page (and what Google isn’t seeing), or the “site:” command to quickly get a view of how many pages are indexed, and which pages are considered relevant for certain keywords.
6. Beyond the tactical side, how does your experience help in a day-to-day manner?
There’s a little SEO voice in the back of my head that sometimes screams during meetings. When a client gets the idea to turn their e-commerce site into a one-pager, it’s good to be able to immediately tell them why that’s a bad idea. That’s where the experience comes in handy.
7. What resources or influencers do you follow for staying ahead in the world of SEO?
I mostly rely on The SEM Post and Search Engine Watch to stay up to date on the industry. I’m also a big fan of Brian Dean and Neil Patel. These guys always come up with great, original ideas that work well for both your visitors and search engines.
I recommend using RSS feeds to keep track of the tons of useful blogs out there. Feedly is a great tool that unifies all of me favorite resources in a single view.
8. What do you believe has been your greatest career accomplishment? Why?
My career has not been in existence for that long yet, so I would hardly dare to say I have a “greatest accomplishment”. That said, one of the things I take pride in is to be able to help others understand SEO better, whether they’re clients, colleagues or students. I occasionally speak at colleges, where most students would rather work in marketing for music festivals. Search engine marketing is not the sexiest niche in the marketing business, so it’s great when you find that you can excite those who were not excited before.
Today we got to know some interesting SEO Strategies from Robbert. 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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