In this edition of expertCoach, we talk to PPC and SEO specialist, Matt Tutt about his thoughts on general digital marketing topics!
My name's Matt Tutt, I'm a freelance digital marketing consultant from the UK (now based in Spain!) and I help businesses grow their online sales through SEO and PPC marketing. I work with organizations externally to provide all their digital marketing (including analytics consultancy), saving them the hassle (and expense) of having to hire someone in-house with a similar skill set!
Whilst I love both SEO and PPC, I actually prefer the challenge and creative aspect of providing SEO services to my clients. PPC can be a bit too regimented and systematic for my liking, whilst SEO can give you the potential to get creative and think of new ways you can help a business (often on a limited budget) to get themselves noticed online. I love the keyword research element, and syncing this with customer personas, through to content marketing. Ultimately I think SEO is my favorite as the SERPS are a fairly even playing ground, whereas PPC is often about who has the biggest budget behind them.
From running PPC campaigns I think one thing I've found, particularly with Google Ads, is that you shouldn't necessarily trust everything Google advises. They're always keen to push their latest enhancement or newest ad features, and some of these can provide good benefits to a campaign's ROI, but lots of the time they aren't that beneficial - or can end up wasting a client's budget. It's always best to test things on a small scale, and not to just jump straight into it - even if a Google Ads rep has been pushing you heavily to do so!
This might sound a little controversial, but I feel digital marketing has become less about "digital marketing" and more about good general practice and business acumen. For example in terms of SEO, a lot of value nowadays for local businesses is through online reviews and feedback - with those that can pick up many positive reviews on their Google business listing reaping benefits through their organic rankings. So getting good reviews online has become a big local SEO factor. Ultimately to achieve this the business needs to provide a good service (whilst having a review collection strategy in place). But ultimately it's all coming back to simple business basics - making sure the clients you work with are doing things as they should, basically. So for me, as an SEO specialist, you're becoming slightly redundant or at best are having a more strategic input. I think this is something that's been happening for a while and will continue to happen as SEO progresses and evolves.
I'm a big fan of technical SEO so I'm quite quick at spotting gaps and issues within a site's backend, so I'm probably a bit skewed to the on-page SEO problems. Typically it includes finding historical domains that no longer 301 redirect to the client's website, or even issues with serving content to Googlebot - geo-detection and redirecting to a specific language version/country-specific domain is always a fun one to find, especially when they end up taking Googlebot to the wrong URL. From the off-site SEO work, I do it's often a case of not being completely onside with links a site is trying to build; I'm always a fan of reverse-engineering link opportunities based upon deliverable traffic and conversions (so a referral within Google Analytics) as opposed to trying to get a link just because a domain has a high trust/authority metric.
Pretty boring actually - I've resorted to using Google as a calculator when I'm too lazy to engage my brain (which is often)... entering an 18*8 search query so I'd get the answer quickly (I'm currently living without a calculator - difficult times!)...