[AMA] I Am a Search Engine Marketer, AMA

I look after the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) i.e free Google listings and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) i.e paid Google listings for one of the largest organisations in an industry in Australia.

closed Comments

  • +1

    Do you spam your services?

    • No, I am a white-hat practitioner. This means that I only use ethical techniques to rank any website, which also provides long-term benefits. Spammy techniques, also known as black hat SEO, gives you rewards for a short amount of time (1-2 month or even less depending on the technique), which can get you blacklisted from Google (especially now that Google is so sophisticated with Machine Learning algorithms).

      • +2

        I think he meant, do you do email spam to try to get SEO clients.

        • Thanks for clarifying! I work client-side, so don't have to sell my services. As for the freelancing work I do, I rely on knowledge-sharing through the articles I write and my network to get new clients.

  • -4

    Do you think there will ever be peace in the middle east?

    • +1

      I don't think I am the right person to answer this question.

      • -3

        But you said ask me anything…

        • +3

          Agree with your point. Anything about Search Marketing.

        • +6

          @search678:

          Do you think Search Marketing has potential to bring peace to the middle east?

        • +1

          @search678:

          What effect on peace in the middle East do you think search marketing has?

        • @Drew22: Definitely! One of the real-life examples is Twitter cracking down on fake accounts/accounts violating its policies and Google showing tweets and also articles from legitimate and reputed publications rather than extremist organisations in the search results.

          Google has also started showing answers directly in searches if you have noticed. While its machine learning algorithm that does this needs some finessing, it's a good step forward to keeping people informed with the right information.
          e.g. search for "Syrian refugee crisis" in Google and you'll see the answer (sorry, unable to post the link here and my comment's gotten flagged because of that)

        • +1

          @search678: "Legitimate and reputed organisations" Such as?

        • @Zedsdeadbabyzedsdead: Whichever one agree with establishment thinking and the google 'truthiness' algorithm.

          For example a month or two back there was woman who posted a vid on youtube on how she was told to go 'home and die' from stage 4 breast cancer. Instead, she got onto some CBD oil and within weeks (months?)there was no sign of the cancer. She wanted to share her experience but they blocked her video for 'unknown reasons'.

          They also regularly block alt media such as Alex Jones and Natural News. I'm not saying you have to like or agree with either of them, but censorship on the mainstream propaganda channels (main stream news, google, youtube, twitter, facebook, instagram etc)is pretty savage and not getting much better. Alternatives are popping up, bitshute, truthtube and couple of others. The blockchain might present some solutions to the censorship problem as well.

        • -2

          @EightImmortals:

          Garbage. All complete garbage.

        • @EightImmortals: 100% agreed. It's a full on take over. BTW, what's CBD oil?

        • @Zedsdeadbabyzedsdead: Cannabis oil, wont get you high at all (I think) but a LOT of people with a wide variety of health issues are reporting some pretty amazing results. The usual crowd in Australia are dragging their heels in order to make it as hard to get as possible with the usual excuses but the word is out and most states in the U.S. now have legal medical cannabis.

        • @EightImmortals:

          I mean things like Alex Jones and Natural News are garbage. I hope they get banned some more.

        • +2

          @Drew22: Well of course you are entitled to your opinion but don't miss the point. The BANNING of information is far FAR more dangerous to a society than letting the 'loonies' have their say. It's one thing to say that something is 'all garbage' but it's completely different to say that because I think something is garbage then nobody else in the whole world should allowed to view the information and reach their own conclusion. We've all seen where that leads many times in the past. :)

        • @EightImmortals:

          They're private companies, they're free to ban and censor as they please.

          People have been allowed to come up to their own conclusions, and hey presto we got Trump.

        • -1

          @Drew22: Thank God for Trump, a true patriot and a great leader!

  • What is your average cost per conversion and revenue per conversion, or the ad cost as a percent of revenue per attributable conversion? Eg. you get a $100 sale from adwords and spent $10 in ads to get it.

    • Good question!

      We have different products that we advertise in AdWords, some of them require monthly payments, others require one-off payments. On an average, our AdWords accounts returns $6 for every $ we spent (sorry, can't disclose the raw numbers). The performance across different product and campaigns is vastly different: brand campaigns cost <20% of the total budget and generate more than half of the total revenue as compared to the non-branded campaigns.

      For non-branded keywords, which are the biggest spenders for any company using AdWords, the two best ways to guarantee an increase in ROI is: a) select keywords with the right intent e.g. if you are a shoe retailer, target "buy black leather shoes" instead of "black shoes" b) adding negative keywords regularly to avoid wasted spend e.g. if the same shoe seller, add a negative keywords for "get free black shoes" so that your ad doesn't show up for that keyword and you don't have to pay for it.

      Hope this is helpful!

  • Are there certain sites you have rejected to SEO?

    • +1

      Yes, I have. Certain websites have a very dated website infrastructure. For an example, imagine a website made on a platform that was popular in early noughties which no one uses today and for which there is no support (I recall a very archaic web builder by Telstra and even one by Sites N Stores).

      It's impossible to do SEO for such websites because:
      a) you can't make any technical SEO implementations on such websites, with technical SEO being a foundational part of an SEO strategy
      b) any on-page/content optimisations/off-site optimisations that you make are undone by the lack of technical SEO on the site.

      Essentially, you optimise for the sake of optimising, knowing all too well, the website is never going to rank. Of course, the ROI of SEO will be negative until the website is moved to a more elegant, SEO-friendly platform like, say, WordPress or Magento.

  • Do you work client side or agency side?

  • What do you think of Web Accessibility and does it help improve SEO either directly or indirectly?

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