AN INTERVIEW WITH ERIC ENGE

1) Let’s have some Introduction: I have checked your twitter account @stonetemple How you would like to discuss your Twitter tag “Direct Marketing Excellence Practitioner”.

I really like the notion of “Digital Marketing Excellence”. At Stone Temple Consulting, we are always looking for the best new way to do things.

One big reason for this is that 5 to 10 years ago people used to think about SEO as something you did that was separate from the rest of your marketing efforts. Doing that now would be a really bad mistake.

By focusing on overall Digital Marketing Excellence, we steer ourselves, and our clients, in the right direction. And, of course, we are doing much more than SEO in the process.

2) Now something from past: You have discussed on , What are the other basic tasks you don’t want to miss after that.

The funny thing about the list of 9 SEO tasks is that tasks 8 (Create Remarkable Content) and 9 (Tell the World About It) are really big tasks. They represent an ongoing commitment to demonstrating your expertise and differentiation from all the other businesses that you compete with.

However, one area I did not mention in that post that deserves a lot of focus. That is the process of making your site mobile ready. I was looking at the analytics for one site earlier this week and 44% of its traffic was coming from Smartphone devices. If you have not made your site something that people can read and navigate via Smartphones, you are totally shooting yourself in the foot.

In addition, as of April 21, Google has made mobile friendliness a ranking factor. That means failure to provide a mobile friendly site will cause your site to rank lower for people searching on Smartphones. This is a factor that you just can’t ignore!

3) The new One: After Mobile friendly update “Mobilegeddon” How non mobile friendly sites can perform well ?

Per my last comment, I think it’s going to be VERY tough for people whose sites are not mobile friendly. I don’t really have any good suggestions on how such sites can rank better, except to get mobile friendly.

4) Interlinking: If I ask that What are the main phenomena’s that are generating sales for Stone Temple Consulting (STC), Then, What were the main factors that you would like to discuss.

STC is a company that really has no sales force. We generate all the leads for our business via content marketing. People see articles we publish, our social media activity, or see us speak at conferences, and over time, some of them approach us and ask us to do consulting work for them.

That is pretty much the only way we generate sales leads today.

5) Something Technical: According to you, how will SEO evolve in 2015 and which factors/signals should marketers target?

I think that most SEO teams spend way too little time looking at the quality of the content on their site. There are 3 big things that I would urge people to spend more time on:

1. The overall user engagement people have with the pages of your site, including any pages that are most commercial in nature.
2. Defining that it is that makes your business unique and special. Every business has many competitors today, and it’s critical to create significant differentiation from your competition.
3. Reflecting what you learn from the prior 2 points in the content across your site.

6) From your side: According to you What are the different or I can say newest challenges coming in SEO.

As an agency, the biggest challenge we face is one of education. We are constantly educating our clients about the right way to approach SEO, and this can be hard, particularly in some of the larger enterprise clients we work with.

For example, in a given client there may be 6 different VPs with diverging opinions that need to be educated, and perhaps 4 or 5 of them are not initially receptive. This makes being successful very challenging!

But, on the other hand, when you are successful, it’s really rewarding. Not only did you get the organization to make changes they really should make, you have made the organization smarter in the process.

While this sounds like an old challenge, what makes it new is that SEO needs to be fully integrated into the marketing department, and a culture of understanding what it is and what it means, both from technical and marketing perspectives, is critical to long term success.

7) Your Advice: What will be your advice to the Guest Bloggers that have their content rejected from the editors?

Don’t give up and try to learn from what happened! Guest blogging is still a very useful way to build your reputation and visibility online. For example, I write columns in Search Engine Land and Moz. I also publish on Forbes, Copyblogger, Social Media Today, and Marketing Land. These are all examples of guest blogging in action.

However, in all of these venues, building reputation and visibility is my primary goal. I don’t do any of them to “get a link”. Publishing in these places is something I am allowed to do because I put in a great deal of effort to create content that is thought provoking, and hopefully, very high quality in nature.

If you submitted content, and it gets rejected, then you need to step back and figure out why, one of the first things you should do is make sure that the content you created is truly educational and useful to the audience on the site you submitted it to. If your original motivation was to “get a link” then you may have cut corners on that content, and you should really rethink the entire reason you are pursuing guest posting as a tactic.

Focus on producing extraordinary content that the audience will want to read. Of course, listen to any feedback you got from the editor as well, and use it to adjust.

8) Intentionally: Our SEO community is very large, Could you please let us know that What are the different misconceptions you have heard from other SEO experts and you’ve included that in your myth list.

Following up on the prior question, one myth that some people put out there is that all guest posting is bad. That’s just not true. As I suggested, if you are doing guest posting just to get links, then there is a decent chance you may be doing some things that are not good.

However, if you are doing it to build your reputation and visibility, that’s another story, and you should definitely consider that as part of a larger marketing strategy.

You also can see people talking about how link signals are dead or dying. They claim that these signals are being replaced by other signals. This is just SO wrong.

Links are not going anywhere anytime soon. Their influence is a bit less than it used to be, simply because search engines do use more of other signals at this point, but links remain one of the largest factors in SEO.

9) Words Exchange: Actually, we’ve different teams working on different SEO projects, What will you advice in order to balance their growth equally and How to formulate a plan to see their growth.

Two different teams working on different SEO projects? I’d say that it would be very hard to get their growth to balance equally and I think that would be the wrong goal.

Inevitably, one of those teams will get a project that ends up being easier than the other, and that’s hard to control for. However, SEO projects are about making money, so if you start getting relatively quick movement on rankings and traffic for one of the projects, you simply celebrate.

Then as you continue to work on both projects, you make sure you are continuing to learn about the challenges and opportunities for each.

I’d also suggest that the two teams work in a highly collaborative way. This will help them both grow from each other’s experiences.