SEO Tips For Digital Marketers - SEO Expert Interview with Craig Campbell

Teaser

Craig Campbell: You know, you quote a guy and say: "That would be a thousand bucks a month." And they say: "But this guy is going to do it for two hundred." I couldn't care less what that guy is going to do for two hundred. It will not be the same level of service as what I'm going to provide for you.

Monique Idemudia: How do you measure SEO success?

Craig Campbell: First off, lay down the expectations and make sure that a client is not expecting success in month one or month two. I think the only real metrics that are measurable is rankings, traffic and conversions. The rest of them are all kind of ego metrics. It's really important to set up tracking, your analytics, goal conversions, because I've lost count of the amount of guys that have been telling me lies like: "Yeah, I only get a few phone calls a week." And then when you actually check that stuff, you're like, whoa, you have actually been getting way more.

If I was gonna start out with any campaign, a site audit is the first thing you're going to do. That's something tangible that you can hand a client and say: "That's what I'm going to be doing for the next month." I think a lot of people just say: "We are going to do this." and don't show anything.

So, what do I do to get links? You can do outreach. I would add an automated follow-up sequence. A lot of people get more conversions on the follow-up sequence. And come with the angle of offering value before you ask for the link.

I know a lot of people spend hours making all these reports look so fancy. Clients don't care. 90% of the clients I've worked with in the past have always said to me: "Craig, I don't even read the reports."

I think client education is really, really important. Everyone in this industry seems to call something something slightly different as if it's something new and it's not.

It's very easy once you master a process to stay rigid. You have to embrace change and adapt. And also try and test different stuff and remain open minded. I hear a lot of guys saying: "Nah! No way. I'm not trying this and I'm not trying that and you know it's always worked for me this way." And your like, but dude, changes.

Intro music

Intro

Monique: Hey, and welcome everybody to the Dragon Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Monique and you're listening to episode number 17. I've got a special guest here for you today and I'm super excited for him to be on the show. He's an SEO expert and he has been doing SEO for 18 years and he will explain SEO in layman's terms for you and he will break down what SEO is, how SEO helps your small business and more. This is going to be a super insightful episode and I'm super excited. Here is Craig Campbell.

Note: All time stamps are 00:03:06 ahead because it starts counting where the interview starts and doesn't include the intro.

Monique Idemudia: [00:00:00] Hey Craig, how are you doing?

Craig Campbell: [00:00:01] Yeah, good though. Good. Yourself?

Monique Idemudia: [00:00:04] I'm doing good too. Thank you.

Craig Campbell: [00:00:07] Good stuff.

Monique Idemudia: [00:00:08] I'm so glad that you found time when you wanted to do this interview with me.

Craig Campbell: [00:00:12] Yeah, it's always, always good to talk to new people, so, all good. So where are you based?

Monique Idemudia: [00:00:17] I'm based in Florida. I know you're based in the UK, so it's definitely cool to meet people from the international SEO community. Right.

Craig Campbell: [00:00:25] Yeah, weird but wonderful.

Monique Idemudia: [00:00:28] Yeah, I brought you on the show to talk about SEO, right. You're an SEO expert. You've been doing this for 18 years. So, I want to learn myself and I also want my audience to learn from your knowledge and from your experience because you've been doing this for so long.

Craig Campbell: [00:00:45] I'm trying, I'm trying my best. So.

Monique Idemudia: [00:00:48] So how did you get into SEO? How did it all start?

Craig Campbell: [00:00:53] So, how did it all start? By default, I think it's pretty much the same old story with people who have been in the industry for as long as me. I keep seeing this story but people ask this question all the time. I put it down to my age. So, I'm 48 now but when I grew up as a kid, you know I was born in the eighties and then into the nineties, you know, that's what I was brought up.

And when I left school, it was like 1996, 1997. And as a kid I didn't grow up with the mobile phone, didn't grow up with the internet cause it wasn't a thing. And so, when I left school, I didn't really know what I wanted to do, but all of a sudden this internet thing came out. And you know, we've got the dial up connection in the house and we're like, whoa, this is amazing stuff.

You know, I can talk to a gal on MSN messenger as you do when you're a young kid and you know just chat to people from all over. So, I was kinda main blown by the internet and just the ability to sit and talk to people. Or even playing ping pong with like a guy in France or something was just like, you know, you had to go and chop your friend's door. You didn't even have a mobile phone.

So then being able to just find a mate online to talk to or whatever, was just mind boggling. And it really kind of came from that. You know, I just had some weird, horrible obsession with the internet and how it all worked and stuff like that. Now obviously at that point SEO wasn't a thing. I didn't really know what I wanted to do as a career.

So, I bumbled about in a few crappy jobs, you know, sales jobs and stuff like that. But at home I would always be, you know, understanding the internet and just really, you know, spending a lot of time on it. And I just wasn't, still wasn't focused, so I got about 19 or 20, still wasn't focused, still in crap jobs.

And, starts to mess around, thinking web design may be a good option, because SEO still wasn't really a thing. At that point is was hitting nearly the year two thousand. So, started to learn about HTML and mess around with websites and been able to put up a web page and add scroll and text, and I was like, woo, I'm like a genius, I'm some web genius.

I hadn't to build from them. I think I spent a couple of years trying to master the art of web design, which funnily enough, I was never really that good at to be fair. And then came along, you know, forums and stuff, and I started to learn more about SEO and then it just took off from there.

So, it's really down to my age, as I say, I was just a new, hungry to win kind of thing and it just fell on my lap at 18.

Monique Idemudia: [00:03:27] Right. So, what would be your definition of SEO? If someone asks you, what is SEO, what do you say to them?

Craig Campbell: [00:03:36] Just getting organic traffic to your website. You know, I always tell people you can use paid ads and everyone knows what paid ads as an example is. And obviously below paid ads is your organic search.

And that's what I always say to people. You know, you have to try and capture as much traffic from as many different sources as you possibly can. And even though organic search is bringing in a wealth of traffic to any business, so you're going to have to look at analytics. And, you know, you hear people say SEO is dead and you know, it's going away. I've been hearing that stuff for the last 10 years.

And of course, Google is still trying to force the organic stuff further down, but SEO, you know, it still brings a lot of traffic and you know that organic search when it's not costing you per click for, is the best way I explain it to a guy who doesn't really understand it because they get the pay per click concept.

But you see you could get your 10,000 clicks and it's not going to cost you any more, you know, for a click, you know, you're just paying your monthly retainer for SEO. And they're like, Oh, that makes sense. But yeah, just you getting higher rankings in Google, getting some of that organic traffic and expanding on your online marketing campaigns.

Monique Idemudia: [00:04:52] Right. So, SEO is definitely a long-term digital marketing strategy and you can't see results immediately. That's something to think about, right, for a lot of business owners. What would be your tips for small business owners in particular who are not techies, right, don't understand the whole technical concept. They're used to the old way of marketing, which is more outbound. Advertising, cold calling, cold emailing, and that whole approach which is the opposite of the new, modern marketing strategies that are just state of the art right now, you know, inbound marketing, SEO, attracting organic traffic, doing content marketing, just attracting people to you instead of interrupting them with your marketing, right. So, what would you say about that? What's your take on that?

Craig Campbell: [00:05:41] I would always say to people, small business owners, don't be ignorant to this type of marketing and, you know, it really does work. In my experience of dealing with business owners, a lot of them are older people who don't fully understand it. And because you don't understand it, doesn't mean it doesn't work.

You look at any business out there. They all have a good marketing team and SEO team, whatever it may be. And with everything, how many times in life have you not something before you've tried it and then thought what a bloody idea, why didn't I do that sooner? And SEO, in a lot of cases, if done properly, will be that thing where, as you say it's a long-term strategy, but it brings in great results and great amounts of traffic and great amounts of, you know, all those for your products or services. And it's not something to be stuff that. People over the last 20 years have been earning money online, you know, and even if you look around, the guy that owns Amazon, Jeff Bezos, or whatever he is called, is Boston that he makes something ridiculous like. I can't remember if it was 18 billion or 18 million in one day, you know, outrageous amounts of money being made online and whether you are Jeff Bezos who owns Amazon or whether you're a refer in some weird, you know, country, you know, or in Florida or whatever, someone out there is searching for your services. And if you're more there, that other guy is getting all of that action. And that is essentially something that, you know, we'll stick in people's throat. Cause you hear how many business owners we have seen, ah why is that guy, you know, he's some crap business, he's only a one man band, you know, he's only got one van in the road, I've got 10 vans, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Because you're not marketing yourself properly. You need to spend money. That stuff costs money. I mean, if you want to make X amount of money, you have to spend X amount of money to get there. And, you know, for any small business owner, don't always go for the cheapest option. Again, you know, through experience.

I'll give another example of this, by the way, a non-SEO example. So we bought, when I say we myself and my wife, bought a bathroom suite that we wanted to be installed in the house. And we don't have a clue how much a plumber costs. So, we put out to get three different quotes. One guy comes back at 500 quads and says, I'll install all of that stuff for 500 quid. The next guy comes out and says 1200 quids. And the thought guy comes out and says three grand. Now three grand is just a rip off. Absolutely no chance. I'm not that much of an idiot, but we have to go the 1200 pound guy or the 500 pound guy.

And uh probably my heart of hearts knew that the 500 guy was too cheap there. It just wasn't feasible. So, I think, you know, don't always go for the cheapest option. And I did go for the middle option, which coincidentally worked out alright but do not scrimp and scape. Exactly what people saying, you know, you quote a guy and say, that would be a thousand bucks a month for what you're wanting, and they come back and say, but this guy is going to do it for two hundred. I couldn't care less what that guy is going to do for two hundred It will not be the same level of service as what I'm going to provide for you.

So, dig deep, do research, make sure the person you're speaking to also has the ability and proven site record to do what they say they can do. Because one thing that really bloody bugs me in this industry is the amount of scamsters that are out there taking money from people and making someone like me look like an idiot to clients, because clients go Craig's too dial, when I'm not.

Like for that service to be genuine. That's the price. Like, there's no, you know yourself. If a guy spends a thousand pounds with you, it could quite as easily spend two or 3000 pounds. He's just going to get more content, more links, more, you know, everything else.

There is no set price in store here. We as SEO people will spend your budget to the best of our ability for that money. So do not always think, what is the cheapest option, because you can always spend more, get more content, things can happen faster. And so that's another bit of advice I would give to customers

Monique Idemudia: [00:10:05] From a customer perspective, I understand that when you yourself don't understand something, it's hard to be able to judge the quality. In their mind, in their eyes, it's the same thing. For them it's the identical service, one is cheap and one is more expensive.

So their natural inclination is to go for the cheaper version and it's our job to do the education and imagine ourselves and their shoes and explain the difference in simple terms for them to understand. And that's also what I experienced is the biggest challenge when you do SEO and digital marketing in general. That's like the hardest challenge to explain to clients.

That it's definitely about the quality and to explain what the quality actually means. Like what indicators are there, what steps are there, what is SEO, what does it consist of basically, what are the individual practices that you do that results in them reaching their goals and getting more visibility online and increasing the quality and quantity of their organic search traffic through SEO.

It's all a bit abstract if you're not in the industry and familiar with that topic.

Craig Campbell: [00:11:15] Yeah. That can be hard work, but I think for me, I would also tank it someone who can talk to you, dull it down and put it in layman's terms, just speak to you on a normal level. But, you know, rather than throwing all those fluffy keywords around. You know, everyone in this industry seems to call something something slightly different as if it's something new and it's not.

So, you have to be careful of that.

Monique Idemudia: [00:11:39] Yes for sure. So, what would you say are some buzz words and some things that are people say to sound fancy?

It confuses people. What's it all about? How would you explain on page SEO and off page SEO and link building and technical SEO and local SEO, which is important for a lot of local brick and mortar businesses. And all of those terms.

Craig Campbell: [00:12:04] I mean, the way that I would do it is obviously explain to a customer, like local SEO has not actually anything to do with your organic search as such. You know, if you want to rank on the map pack, you know, that is the map pack and they're not looking for links, they're not looking for content. It's more about citations and engagement that are going to help your map pack rank.

And explaining to them that obviously being in that position because Google gets the map pack the most prominent position page one. But ideally you can get a bunch of traffic from that, if you can get in to the top slot, which is very easy to do. So, explaining your local SEO is really easy. Simple, obviously talk them through the process like, you know, we're going to need the postcard sent out to verify your address. You will send me that code back and I'll verify it and all that. So that stuff's very easy to go over.

When it comes to on-page SEO. That's when the fluff talking starts. On-page SEO in layman's terms, it's everything you can do to your page, whether that be title tags, meta descriptions, all of your call to action, internal linking, content, you know, site structure or silo structure. Anything to do with that is all your on page and obviously these things.

Even a thing like internal linking can go into an explanation of internal linking is really important cause you've got to push power to your power pages on your website and all that stuff. So I think, you know, breaking it down and explaining it in that way to a client where as an SEO, we are building a ton of power to your website and we want to show Google through internal links, you know, this is the top 10 pages on this website, you know, that's my top 10 money pages.

And I think clients kinda get that, but you know what it's like, people start adding bedsore on and, you know, I can't even think off the top of my head, but that, you know, if you Google it, you'll see there's some absolutely joke phrases that people say on there.

And obviously off page comes down to your link building and citations or whatever you can do off page, including PR, social media, everything else you can use to drive traffic to your website and get engagement because engagement signals also do count. You know, I think explaining all that to a customer easy, I just break it down in layman's terms.

As I say, I get that agencies have to justify stuff and use words and maybe you'll twist things to be a lot more difficult than they actually are. But again, what really gets on my nerves is when you see an agency charging someone for three month's worth of work, and they come back and say, I have only done your keyword research. And you're like, geez.

And so you need to understand, and I think client education is really, really important. So, you know, if I was gonna start out with any campaign. a What's the first thing I'm going to do. You know, if it's a client who's already got a GMB and all that, so we'll assume that's all done. Yeah. Site audit is the first thing you're going to do.

That's something tangible that you can hand a client and say to them and just explain to them, listen you've got this, this and this that's broke. That needs fix, that needs fix, that needs fix. That's what I'm going to be doing for the next month. And just break it down into things like that.

And I think because can get something tangible from that. Something to look out, something to hold on to. Even if it has just a crappy PDF. Then it makes them feel a bit better with us. I think a lot of people just say we are going to do this, we've done an audit and don't show anything.

And I think for me, transparency and client education just makes the job easier long term. Of course, we don't want to tell clients everything we're doing and cause it would be absolute crazy to do so. But giving them a rough idea, like here's a site audit, it's gonna actually take us 40 hours. I know you probably don't understand everything that's on this PDF, but here is it anyway. That's what your first month's budget is going on.

Clients will be like, do you know what, I don't even care what's on that document. Just go ahead and do it. And that's the thing. What I would say to anyone, you know, 90% of the clients I've worked with in the past have always said to me, Craig, I don't even read the reports.

I don't even listen to the shit you talk. I think keeping it simple, sharp and to the point and just breaking it down as I say is the best way to explain all of those concepts. And they're all very simple and easy to explain anyway. So, that's how I would explain local, on page, and off page SEO in a nutshell.

Monique Idemudia: [00:16:39] So how do you measure the SEO success for, like you've already explained, business owners want to know if their money well spent. They want you to know what you do. They want to know what they get out of it. And if their money is invested in something good, and if they want to continue, and move forward and they can see the results.

So how do you measure the success and communicate that?

Craig Campbell: [00:17:04] First off, before you measure success, lay down the expectations and make sure that a client is not expecting success in month one or month two. Always try and say to someone, this is going to be a six-month, 12-month project before you start to see real results. Depends on, you know, obviously for local stuff, we can see results in three months, four months, five months, but give them a realistic expectation of what they expect.

And I think the KPIs that most people care about is rankings, traffic and conversions. Going after things like DR or trying and play someone because you're doing some cool links. DR I can manipulate in five minutes, if I want. And you know, if that was a KPI, does manipulating DR actually turn into money. Absolutely not.

So, I think the only real metrics that are measurable is rankings, traffic and conversions. The rest of them are all kind of ego metrics or whatever, you know, and even tying yourself down to a particular keyword. I once had a guy that was so obsessed with one keyword and he kept saying to me, Craig, that slipped to position four, that slipped to possession seven.

What he wasn't realizing like month on month is that he was jumping from like 2000 keywords to three to four to five, but he was obsessed over this one keyword. And it was a very, very genetic keyword. And I'm like, dude, like you're thinking about this all wrong. He's like, no you're a shitty SEO, you can't get that above position seven.

This is garbage and all that stuff. And I'm like, what. Look at your revenue. You're absolutely insane. Look how much more money you're making compared to when we started, like measured me seriously, don't you have vanity metrics. So also bear in mind, some people do have, you know, keywords they obsess over and everything, but it's not all about one keyword.

That may never be able to achieve the top position for a particular keyword because it's just outrageously generic and there is just so much going on. It's just not worth the time and effort to try and nail position one for it. I may go after a whole bunch of other long tail keywords.

If you spend a thousand bucks, you want to make 2,000 back or 5,000 or 10,000, whatever that ROI may be. And I think for me, stepping away all the crap and keeping it down to, you know, saying to you for example, you know Monique, I've given you five grands, what has that done for me. They can answer that question themselves.

They know if they spent five grand a year, you've done whatever the hell you claim to have done in the background, they will know in the other side through the phone calls and emails and sales that they're getting, that, you know, they've made 50 grands. So, the clients don't even have to ask that question in a lot of cases, but something we feel we need to report on that.

And I think that's why it's really important to set up tracking, you know, your analytics, goal conversions and all of that stuff, because, listen, I've been fortunate enough to have clients in the past who are very transparent with the amount they make. I've lost count of the amount of guys that have gave me crap.

And when I've actually set up the tracking, they been giving me crap from nothing. They basically been giving me crap and been telling me lies like, yeah, I only get a few phone calls a week. And then when you actually check that stuff, you're like, whoa, you know, you've actually not been fair to me here. You have actually been getting way more than you've let on. But they will just do that because they feel that maybe you slack off or stop doing your job effectively.

Everyone has different mindsets, so I think, you know, as an SEO, what is my job satisfaction? Obviously seeing businesses grow. You know whether it's a one-man band or whatever. Seeing that growth is something that I can then at night sit, have a beer and go, you've done a good job. And I think we all need that to encourage yourself to progress with the job. And I think for me, clients who want to beat you with a stick, saying that you're bad and you're crap, even though you're not, is not the right type of clients to have. So make sure that you do have that up your sleeve when you're doing any client work, and make sure that everything that you possibly can track is tracked.

And as I say, simply keep the reports to a minimum. I know a lot of people spend hours and hours making all these reports look so fancy. Clients don't care. How much money have I made. That said, most of these people are businessmen. I've spent less for you. And what have I got back? Tell me something.

And if it sounds plausible and it's something that actually checks out to be accurate, there's no arguments to be had.

Monique Idemudia: [00:21:50] Exactly. Yeah, that's right. That's definitely right. So if a small business owner, wants to know exactly what you do to their website to make it more search engine friendly, how can you break down the exact tactics and strategies and different tasks that you do to make the website more search engine friendly?

Craig Campbell: [00:22:11] Oh yeah, of course. You can give generic responses if someone says, my load speed is not good. You can talk about maybe adding a caching plugin, compressing images, or, you know, whatever. You can channel a report and say, go and get your dev to fix this or that.

So, yeah, of course there's got to be an element of telling a client what you're doing generically and shorten them that stuff.

As clients do want to know everything you're doing, and that's something where you have to say, hang on, you know, if you want face to face training and you want to know how we do this job, the price has just went up by 10 times.

You ain't learning on the job, you know, learning as a gig. So be careful with our enemy. when it comes to actual SEO clients, who say, well, what are you actually doing there?

Or I've also had people saying to me how many hours go in to my SEO campaign. Doesn't matter how many of us go in. It's a value-based service, it's not an hourly based service. You have to be careful. You've got to tell clients enough about what you do to keep them on board without giving them them everything away. That's just the way the game is, you know.

You would never ever go to a, you know, you get your car service. You're not going to go to the guy and say, show me what spinal was used there and how many times did you turn that screw driver to the left, and show me some other shit that you've done. You don't go into that level of detail. There's got to be that balance though. You've got to tell enough.

Monique Idemudia: [00:23:36] Yes. It has to be enough mystery but also enough transparency to be honest and not leave your clients completely in the dark. Because I honestly think that if clients are left too much in the dark in they see SEO as this black box approach where you put money into something and then your SEO kind of does some magic.

You don't really know what he's actually doing and then you see the results. That gives the spammers and the liars and the, you know, fake SEOs and, also the blackhat SEOs room to come in and benefit from that confusion and from that lack of knowledge. So definitely like you said, I also think that it's really, really important to explain it and break it out in general in layman's terms, obviously not going into detail as much. Plus, it's also just counterproductive to confuse someone and that just leads to analysis paralysis and your client is not even gonna want to move forward from that point anymore.

Because it's like, Oh my God, no, that's like too much.

Craig Campbell: [00:24:44] Exactly. I like that phrase, analysis paralysis. I'm going to steal that.

Monique Idemudia: [00:24:49] Yeah. Analysis Paralysis. So, I want to also cover another topic, which is backlinks. So obviously you can do whatever you want. If you're not attracting any back links, pretty much your on-page SEO efforts and all of the content that you create that you write and put out there. Uh, you're just not going to see a lot of traction from your other SEO efforts, if you're not building links. So that's like the most important part of SEO and it has to do with outreach and asking people for backlinks. A lot of small business owners, they have partnerships, they are networking. They are in touch with other small business owners.

And a lot of them are not their direct competitors, right, which is an amazing opportunity because then they can use the synergies. And it's a win-win for both parties, right? Nobody is stealing potential clients from the other person because they're not directly in competition with each other.

So that's the perfect opportunity to ask for back links and build backlinks and do link building because your chances of success are just so much higher than if you reached out to a person that you don't even know. Of course, you can do broken link building, which is yeah, pretty much a no brainer to replace a broken link. For most link building efforts, you actually have to go there and get your competitor's links or do something that is just a lot harder. And your success rate is maybe going to be something between 10 and 20%. Like every hundred people you reach out to, you only even get a reply from about 10 to 20 of them. The majority is not even, you know, gonna respond to your message or read it or open it or whatever.

So, that's why so important to not leave anything on the table and really take advantage of all the opportunities that you have when it comes to linkbuilding. So, what would you say, how would you explain the whole concept? Like in general, why links are so important and why it's important to ask and to build them and to take advantage of all the connections and partnerships that you have to get those links.

That's how important they are, right.

Craig Campbell: [00:26:57] Yeah. I mean, obviously Google have released statements over the years telling you that linkbuilding is still the number one ranking factor. And yeah, for me, that, I would tend to agree with that. The way I tend to explain to people is like a link is like a vote for your website. So, you know, if I've got a hundred guys out there, saying that my website is the best by linking to it, that is good.

But if Neil Patel has got a hundred thousand people liking to it, then I'm only, you know, gonna be seen as small fry and always be behind Neil Patel.

So, what do I do to get links? Um, you know, how do you get them? As you say, you can do outreach. I think you're actually being very fear when you see between 10 and 20 will reply. Sometimes it'll be a lot less out of a hundred.Generic outreach, sending that stuff out can work. You're going to get a low conversion rate. If you do do that, what I would add to what you've said is the automated followup sequence that follows that when you get ignored, can sometimes prompt a response, and a lot of people get more conversions on the automated followup sequence, and you've just got to try different angles to break down the barrier for people.

However, because people get so much spam every day of the week. And it's the same as you or I. We open our mail and you've got probably 20 of these in your inbox every morning. It becomes tedious. You need to catch the eye, you need to do something controversial, say something, do something and even come with the angle of offering value before you ask for the link, are good ways to do it. But you know, as you say, you can do broken link building.

But one of the easiest things to do is take advantage of who you know. And you've got, as you say, synergies with other people. You can maybe offer them, you know, out write a great blog post on this. You know, for example, if you said to me Craig, I want a link in your website. I could see it as well.

What are you really good at, you know, you might say, I want to talk about image compression or something. If I have not gotten an image completion article on my website, then, you know, I would say by all means go ahead and do it, and I'll give you a credit or there, you can have a link on here, job done. I get free content. You get a free link. Boom. Job done.

So, I think taking advantage of people you know or people you work with or a supplier or a distributor, whatever it's going to be is, is a great place to start. But then obviously thereafter it comes to creativity and sometimes it's who you know, it's not what you know. So, one of the reasons I'm able to get quite a lot of links is because I'm well known in this industry.

And I know guys and I can just say right, I know that guy works in the finance niche. I've now got a finance client, so pick up the phone to him.

One thing I would also highlight is that a lot of people who do outreach, feel that they have to get a free backlink. Most web owners or people you do outreach with all want a fee.

So, you need to get your head around, there's going to have to be some kind of exchange in money in some way. It's just like an admin fee or whatever that's going to be. There's normally people say, give me 50 bucks and I'll place a link on my mommy blog or whatever. People just know that that's a done thing to do.

So, don't ignore that, you know, 50 bucks to get that can certainly accelerate your progress as well. And, you know, people are buying up links and even when they're doing outreach, you know, whether they agree and tell you that or not, obviously they are, but just get your head around that if you've not been building links. Cause I've got several friends who say I would never ever pay for a link. And you're like, what links are you actually getting? Because everyone's charging a fee. Like it doesn't matter whether you're paying a vendor or do you do outreach. There's still that fee. Someone wants a fee somewhere. So, you have to get your head around that. And sometimes you just have to pay.

One of the first things I'll do is look at the competition, say, right, this guy has got a link there, there, there, there, there. How am I going to get one? Now, one of them might be that it was on a podcast with Monique. And I'm gonna say well fuck that. I'm going on a podcast with Monique. So, I'll reach out to you and say hey Monique, you know, fans let me on the podcast and whatever. So, there's so many ways you can do it. It doesn't always have to cost money. But I will look at it and say, how did he go on there if he's paid, I will also pay.

So, if I see how modern market watch, which is a link that anyone can get from people peddle bar and he's ranking really well, then I'm going to say, well, I'm replicating that I'm going to go in market watch and get it for thirty bucks. But it's those things that you're getting that you don't have to pay for, you want to pick off first. Whether that's speaking in a webinar, whether that's doing a guest blog post, whether that's speaking at a conference and trying to pick off all of those things first. Because obviously your website, for example, is not going to be a spammed to death with something like market watch where every Tom that can Harry can basically buy a guest post.

So, I would be more inclined to go with a new growing agency who's pushing the content out there and getting a link from that, rather than some old website that's on its way out. So, you also have to analyze the opportunity. If someone might say, well Monique's website's shit, and say it's just six months old and the DR is like whatever. But that DR will grow as you grow. So, in years time you might go from DR 20 to DR 40 because your rolling out all that stuff. So, you also have to use your mind to think. Like there's Monique, you know, she's doing all this outreach and talking to everyone and getting people on her show.

That's someone I want a link from. Do not just base on she's new and it must be shit or, you know, the DR is low or whatever, because these people grow. And that's also something I'm looking at. I want to be linked with people who are growing as well. And I think that's a great way of building links so, you know, analyze the competition, do what they're doing, match what they're doing and even if not, better than what they're doing.

You know, I appear in podcasts and stuff all the time. And you know links bang, bang, bang, bang, come in, but I'm still spending time doing it. And I think it's hard graft, but hard graft pays off and you've got to do what you've got to do. So whatever it takes, whether it's appearing in a podcast or giving you 50 quid to go and buy yourself a coffee or whatever for the privilege of being able to get that link. That's just the way it has to work. And unfortunately, no one's going to do anything for free.

Monique Idemudia: [00:33:42] That's a great way to look at things actually. To also think long-term and prioritize quality over quantity. Over not just quantity, basically over everything. Like quality is important, you know. You don't just want a link from an old website or a crappy website or whatever. So how would you say SEO has changed and what direction do you think it's going?

Craig Campbell: [00:34:06] To be honest, I don't think SEO over the years, I mean it has changed, but it's not changed, if you get what I mean. It's like, it's always been based, but even back in the day, content and links, content and links, was all it was all about. And obviously that still stands strong to this day. It's just those other things that have been adapted, like what type of link. So, 10 years ago, directory links were the, you know, it was just sheer volume.

It didn't even have to be relevant. And then obviously Google have to say, hang on a minute because all of the directories all over the world have literally been spammed to death. So, we have to look for some other kind of signal and we have to give less weight to this. So that's what they're looking for, relevance.

And obviously now, as they grow user signals, engagement. All of that stuff's taken into play. Of course, site speeds. And a few other things have obviously been added into play, but if you use your common sense, you know. Is Google gonna rank a website that was built in 2012, that's not mobile-friendly, that still got lots of spammy keywords in the content? Absolutely not.

You just have to move with the times. And I think, having that ability not to be set. Like, it's very easy once you master a process to stay rigid and keep doing that process. You have to embrace change and adapt. That is something you have to. And also to try and test different stuff, because if you don't, then you're going to be left behind because, you know, I hear guys all the time saying, Oh, I'm trying this thing out, or I'm trying this new tool out, or I've got this thing to do this.

And I'm like, whoa, you know, I'm jumping on it and trying it out. And sometimes it's all the garbage, sometimes it moves the needle. And you've just got to try and test different things and try and remain open minded about other things. And I think you'll not go too far wrong. Cause I hear a lot of guys saying, nah no way I'm not trying this and I'm not trying that and, you know, it's always worked for me this way. And your like, but dude, changes. Like what are you doing, man? So being open minded, trying, testing your own stuff. Just because a guy out there, an influence or whatever says it's true, doesn't mean it is. So that's where I think, try and test them for yourself. Whether it's on a weird affiliate website you have or something, try things out, or just have a bunch of test websites.

And I think that's the great thing to do because Google doesn't wholesale make changes. And also Google, when they do their algorithm updates, they'll not be able to penalize people who have been doing the right stuff. They're there to penalize the cheats and the spammers and the people who are using duplicate content or crappy links or whatever it's going to be.

So, don't be scared to add new content, tweak it, change keywords in and out, you know do it. You know, that's what I would say to anyone. Do not be scared of Google because they're going to do it, sitting here shivering, ooh, my website might get penalized. Just don't do bad things. Just try shit out and throw stuff up. And of course, your rankings may rock about a bit, but whose doesn't.

And I think it has changed a lot in terms of smaller minor details in terms of the type of linkbuilding, the type of content. Obviously, we've got a natural language processing and stuff like that coming into play. And we'll get better tools these days to analyze on page and all like for a keyword, you can compare it to the other guys who are ranking really well for that keyword.

So, in some ways the jobs get easier, and more costly if you like, for all the tools that you need. But the job is getting easier, you just have to look at it with a common sense approach and copy what the big guns are doing. All the guys that are ranking well are doing and be open minded so that's what I think has changed.

And where is it going? God knows. I don't think it's going anywhere anytime fast. You know, people have been saying for years, SEO is dead, or this time in two years everything's going to be this or that, and it's all going to be paid search. And they've been saying that since 2010 or now 2020. And not that much is developed.

I think whilst Google bring out artificial intelligence and NLP and, you know, they're talking about voice search over the past few years and they're starting the next thing. I don't think Google is as clever or anywhere close to be in all that. Certainly not in the next five years. I think they've got massive flaws and I still see massive, massive flaws.

There's massive amounts of web pages being added to them. And they, every day, Google, are fighting to even deal with that. And let alone come up with anything complex, because remember, Google is an old, old search engine and, you know, they've grown and grown and grown, but they probably do need an overhaul all over to be able to be as sophisticated as they really would like to be. But they can't just shut Google down.

That's the problem. So, I don't think Google's as smart as the scaremongers out there would like us to believe. I don't think they're anywhere close to the level of ability they claim to have, but I mean, they are smart and they are developing. And you obviously can't sit there and say, we've got loopholes in the system and it's falling apart, because, you know, everyone to be jumping on and trying blackhat stuff or whatever.

I know guys who can steal GMB listings, they can switch off websites. They can do, this and the next thing. So, there is still massive, massive holes within Google's setup. And I think, you know, for the foreseeable future, the next five years enemy, I don't really see, I see things changing, being brought out, but I don't see SEO dying or anything like that.

Monique Idemudia: [00:40:05] Yeah, the main concept is all about the user. Like people get geeky, they're trying to trick Google. Google learns all the tricks that people do and gets behind that and then adapts the process and their algorithm and so on to avoid people doing those practices. And at the end of the day, SEO has always been about user experience and improving the user experience of people on Google, basically. That's all it is about, right. They've become much better at presenting people that are most relevant search results and that's the development.

Craig Campbell: [00:40:40] Yeah, exactly.

Monique Idemudia: [00:40:42] So summing things up and coming to a conclusion about everything that you've talked about. You would say that SEO definitely is not dead. It is important and it's a perfect complement to doing paid search in any digital marketing strategy because you get free clicks, right. It gives you free clicks and you don't have to pay for every click and that's a great longterm investment and you want to get as many traffic sources as you can to generate leads and to attract potential clients or customers to your business. You don't want to just focus on one way of attracting tracking traffic and SEO should definitely be a part of a holistic digital marketing strategy.

Another thing that you said is SEO success is measured by the revenue that it brings you. You invest money in SEO and then you can see how much more money you make ever since you've invested in SEO. And you know that that can be attributed to your SEO investments because you can track and measure and look at the analytics and look at the numbers and look at the reports.

So, you know exactly, okay, it's actually been the money that I've invested in SEO that brought me all of this traffic and that brought me all of this additional revenue. And that's how you measure SEO success. And pretty much anything else is just a vanity metric.

Craig Campbell: [00:42:09] Yeah, exactly.

Monique Idemudia: [00:42:10] And then backlinks, you can see backlinks as votes for your website. When a person links back to your website from their website, they're voting for you. They're like, hey, this is an amazing piece of content. This person is important. You got to check him or her out. It's just an honor. And that's why it's such an important ranking factor because it just speaks for you.

And it's that level of commitment and, yeah, effort basically, that it's not easy to get a quality mention. So that's an important ranking factor because if you buy it and if it's not genuine, it's just obvious, like you can tell it, from the website, from the content.

So, a really high quality backlink is something that has to be generated. And that's why it's such an important ranking factor. It's just a vote for you and your content and your expertise basically, right.

Craig Campbell: [00:43:01] Yeah.

Monique Idemudia: [00:43:02] You also said that SEO hasn't really been changing, if you're looking at it from another perspective. It's just evolving, but it's always been going in the same direction. Meaning giving people a better user experience, showing more relevant, the most relevant search results to people that search for something.

And that's the way that it will be going in the future as well. And it definitely won't die. Definitely won't go away. You can still see a lot of room for improvement also on Google's side. Obviously, they're not perfect. They're not a perfect search engine. Search won't go away. People will always have to search for something. So as long as there will be search and a need to search for something, there's going to be search engines to fulfill that need. And as long as there's going to be search engines, it's going to matter to rank in them to be found, right.

Craig Campbell: [00:43:56] Exactly.

Monique Idemudia: [00:43:57] Another thing that you said is don't be afraid to test. If you're not doing anything bad, that's going to get you penalized and you know when you're doing something bad, so if you're only doing good things and good practices that are going to benefit your users, don't be afraid to test. Test and tweak and do your own research.

Don't just trust other people with the fluff that they're saying or they're claiming something. You don't know if it's true. A lot of people are saying a lot of stuff but it's also important to do your own research and see for yourself what works for you and what doesn't.

Craig Campbell: [00:44:33] Exactly.

Monique Idemudia: [00:44:34] Okay. Perfect. Is there anything else that you want to add to our SEO discussion?

Craig Campbell: [00:44:39] No, that's pretty much it. We covered a lot. If people do want to learn more about SEO. Obviously, it's very hard to do in a webinar, but I do offer a free course, which if you Google Craig Campbell SEO free SEO course, you can get that where it gives you all the basics and it's just video tutorials.

And if you do want to go into the nitty gritty of how to set up a GMB, how to add analytics, all of that kind of stuff is there for people to know, after a few weeks signing up or whatever, and completely free. There is no crazy upsell, just there to help people understand how to do certain elements as well if you are a complete rookie.

Monique Idemudia: [00:45:20] Perfect. Great. So how can people find you? How can they reach you? How can they reach out to you?

Craig Campbell: [00:45:27] You can find me on my website, which is www.craigcampbellseo.com. And from there you'll have access to links to my Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok. You find me in them all, just put in Craig Campbell SEO. And no doubt my face will pop up somewhere and more than happy to talk to people, you know, become friends with people or whatever online. So, feel free to add me on any of those social media platforms.

Or just reach out to me by email, if you've got a question or anything I can help with, I'm always, always very approachable and like to help people where I can.

Monique Idemudia: [00:46:10] Awesome. It was really nice talking to you today, Craig. So, thank you for taking your time and doing this interview with me. I hope you had a good time too.

Craig Campbell: [00:46:19] Yup. Fun, always fun. And as I say, always good to meet a new person. So, no it's been a pleasure and I do appreciate you inviting me on.

Monique Idemudia: [00:46:28] Alright. So, thank you again and enjoy the rest of your day.

Craig Campbell: [00:46:34] All right. Right. Same to you. Cheers. Thank you. Bye bye.

Monique Idemudia: [00:46:38] Alright, bye bye.

Outro

Monique: Thank you so much for joining us in today's episode of the Dragon Digital Marketing Podcast. If you have any questions or feel like you need help with your digital marketing, you can always reach out to our agency, Dragon, Digital Marketing, and we're happy to help you out. I hope that you've enjoyed the episode. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast and I hope to see you again in my next episode and wish you a great week. Good bye guys.

Outro music