digital marketing

30th July 201713th September 2017

The Sunday Talk – People like people who are having fun doing what they love

Mondays are never easy for me. I have to keep on reminding myself that challenges are what make life interesting. And overcoming them is what makes meaningful. With that in mind, I want you to understand that anything is possible if you try.

I can’t believe it. Yesterday I was talking about working hard and believing and today I woke up and what do you know. The first thing I see Dawn Anderson graduating.

She’s been waiting for 49 years to put the academic hat on her head.

Dawn Anderson, you are officially the most inspirational person of the year. Now I am going to the gym and I am feeling so pumped up that I think I’m gonna eat the weights.

T-shirt and a small quite looking flask. Guys, I absolutely love you. And I am not making it up. This morning I woke up and I was looking for my old flask as tomorrow I am going all the way to Leeds for the Take It Offline event and I couldn’t find it. And then I go to work and I find this little thing on my table. You absolutely made my day.

So I am ready to go to Leeds. Phone check. Camera obviously check. Cute little bottle – check.

I’ve just arrived in Leeds and I have to admit this city is gorgeous. This is my second time coming to this city in one month and I have to admit this is becoming one of my favourite spots in the UK.

Sitting here I am trying to capture the building behind me – I don’t know if you can see it – which is absolutely amazing.

One o’clock in the morning and finally I am home. My God, it was a long day but it was totally worth it. The Take It Offline roundtable was amazing. We talked about almost everything that is SEO.

One thing that got stacked in my head was Malcome Slade saying that we took the bad code from desktop and with the help of CSS we turned it into responsive. I know a lot of you are very sceptical but there is a necessity for AMP in this mobile age.

I can summarise this week in 4 main points. Let’s call them the formula for success.

Number one. Pay attention to everything that is happening in the world and especially digital as the digital world is moving fast. And it’s gonna get even faster with the wider adoption of Artificial Intelligence and Voice Search.

Number two. Work hard. I know you are a smart person so now is time to start working harder as your smart head is continuously finding good excuses.

Number three. Experiment a lot. Try different approaches and don’t get distracted if it doesn’t work the first time around. Experiment a lot until you find the one that works for you.

While I am at it number four.

Keep trying until you get lucky.

Guys, I can see that the weather is not that good today but I’ve got my training gear on so I’m gonna go and put my body to stress and my mind to rest. But you do come back here next Sunday cause you’ve got the problems and I’ve got the solutions.

16th July 201718th September 2017

The Sunday Talk – Marketing Experiments

I love going to central London. The crowd is amazing. But have you noticed that no one bumps into anyone else? We are actually quite good at figuring our own path. We are actually quite good at being unique. If you are a one man band stop following them. The world doesn’t need another Casey Neistat or Mark Zuckerberg.

The world needs another you.

If you are a big business – your customers are unique. So why isn’t your web presence unique as well? Stop comparing yourself to everybody else and go out there and show your customers that your product is not just the best or the better one but the only one for them.

The goal for this week. Start experimenting with your digital marketing so you can differentiate yourself from the crowd.

Happy Monday everybody.

Today I am meeting Mark Preston – top SEO from Lancashire. There are so many people out there with so much SEO knowledge but there are no so many people out there who can actually teach SEO. Instead of giving you bullshit SEO theories Mark Preston will come to your company, he will analyse your website with your Digital Marketing team so the moment the training is finished your company will be set for success.

Guys, I’ve finally managed to meet Mark Preston top SEO from North England.

Mark Preston: Hello people. A real pleasure to meet this guy.

Sometimes the stupid guy will come to you and say ‘Work smarter not harder’. Can you see the irony? Are you telling me that I am stupid or I don’t work hard enough?

Yes, John. You have to consistently experiment with your page titles. My experiments have consistently proven that there is a significant difference between a page that uses a clever but incomplete thought as a headline and one that uses a value-infused headline.

The difference creates friction — enough friction to cause a gap in customers’ minds between value and cost. Listen no – in that momentary gap, instead of taking time to derive value from your headline, the customers clicks away from your offer…and lands onto the offer of your competitors.

Apparently, the mind can look after the body. The question is who’s gonna look after the mind?

Arianne Donoghue: In my roles, the focus has often been on search, in general, trying to get the best from both worlds organic and paid. In my current role at icelolly.com, we run lots of tests to establish whether or not running the two channels together drives incremental value. Are there times that we should turn off brand or bit more on search generic terms while rankings may not be so good. What can we do to bring the best overall value for the business? In my client side roles, sorry, agency roles where I’ve been in client services I’ve been responsible for overall strategy which also included SEO. And that drove the conversation we gonna come to in a moment. I also love technology…

Hi, guys. Let’s talk about HTTPS migrations and why we’ve decided here at Canon to migrate our websites to HTTPS.

Marketing experiments ensure that your branding, SEO, PPC or promotional messages are as effective as possible.

But before you get there you have to promise me one thing.

Always run marketing experiments with purpose.

To help you get started I’ve written down some questions to help you first track properly your marketing experiments but most of all you learn from them.

What are you testing?

This is a very simple question that will help you store your experiments in a way so you can reference them back in the future.

What is your aim/purpose?

What do you aim to accomplish with your experiments? If you have no purpose, then you probably shouldn’t be running those tests in the first place.

What is your hypothesis?

What do you really expect to happen during a test? On the other side if you find that your hypothesis fails time and time again, consider going back to the drawing board and asking questions with your customers. Intuition can be learned.

How do you measure success?

We all know metrics are important. They help report progress and guide our decision making. Used properly, metrics can provide key insights into our businesses that make the difference between success and failure. I strongly suggest using sales as a benchmark for your business. After all, in the end of the day, the goal of every business is to make money!

Last but not least.

What results did you see?

What really happened during your experiments? What did you learn?

By running experiments and…and keeping track of the results, you will become a more effective digital marketer.

Guys, next week I will be speaking at the SEO Barcamp 2017 organised by BlueGlass and Adapt Worldwide but you do come back here next Sunday cause you’ve got the problems and I’ve got the solutions.

2nd July 20172nd July 2017

The Sunday Talk – Meeting David Iwanow

Mondays, Mondays, Mondays. Always believe that something beautiful gonna happen this week. Maybe you gonna win the lottery or you gonna come to The SEO Social tomorrow and you gonna meet me in person. Stay cool this week guys and don’t forget

Nobody can stop you if you’ve got the passion and you work hard.

Unfortunately, the conference has been cancelled so I’ve got no choice but to sit down and write an article. You know my spiel:

Create content. Publish content. Amplify content. Repeat.

On my way to meet David Iwanow – one of the top SEOs in the UK. He is, well imagine Omi Sido times ten. So if you ever need a good SEO David Iwanow should be your first choice.

Omi Sido and David Iwanow — Wardrobe by SEMrush

Omi: Say something, David.

David Iwanow: Say something. Something, there you are. I am here with Omi. We are here in London. We are just in Oxford Circus.

Omi: we had an amazing medium rare steaks.

David: It wasn’t as good as Flat Iron.

Omi: Ok, but the creme brulee was good.

David: Yes the creme brulee was amazing. It was very very good. We talked about the SEO industry. It was some of the recent topics about
obviously, the discussion with Rand had about whether speakers need to produce unique decks each time they speak at conferences. So I guess we had a bit of a view on that. We had a few discussion. Just general about life. And guess what’s happening next with me. Last couple of days at BlueGlass.

Omi: Ah, ok. David’s got an announcement to make.

David: Afte a year working with Kevin Gibbons at BlueGlass I am moving onto a new project. It was great working with Kev. I’m gonna miss a lot of the team and definitely miss some of the clients cause we had very good clients. But yeah looking forward to the next exciting thing. Huge challenges ahead of me. Obviously, you’ve got your new job.

Omi: Yeah, I’ve got a new job as well.

David: Yes we’ve caught up with life at Canon. We had a good discussion. And we’ve got some awful music playing in the background.

Omi: I hope you gonna be able to hear stuff.

David: Yeah, you may not be able to hear anything because of the music. Thanks for tuning in and don’t forget to subscribe to Omi’s channel on YouTube. Is it like there?

Omi: Yeah, it’s there.

David: And follow the people on Twitter. And have yourself an awesome Wednesday night.

Omi: Thanks, David.

David: Ciao everyone. Bye. See ya.

Meeting David yesterday was amazing. We had such a great time together. He gave me this crazy idea of connecting Deepcrawl to Tableau in order to make everything a little bit more visual.

Having data is power. Having data is knowledge.

But without the right framework for understanding it much of this knowledge may go unrecognised. Very often is data visualisation that allows your data to unleash its true impact.

So literally two seconds after closing my visor, I see this stone flying towards my head. Obviously, I had no time to move away so it hit me in the visor. Then I am going to work and all my colleagues are like ‘Oh Omi, are you gonna give up riding bikes now because they are dangerous?’ And I am like: well then I have to give up alcohol or chocolate. I am not sure Judith Lewis will agree with this statement.
Jokes aside whatever happens in your life you have to ready to move on.
I just came back home and I’ve got a massive headache. As advised by Gina I’m gonna have one of those and I am going to bed. On my way back home I was thinking.

Don’t full yourself that you’ve got time. Live the life now.

Have a great weekend, guys. Peace.

Saturday morning. I’ve just woke up and I’ve got a stiff neck. Probably I will spend the day in bed. But then I saw this picture on my phone and I am a happy man. Thank you very much, guys, all of you for thinking of me.

Despite our increasingly digital world–or maybe because of it–the power of face to face communications is now more valuable than ever. Sure, social media, e-mail, video chat can help you communicate to people across distances, but it’s those face-to-face meetings that foster trust and can lead to solid relationships and partnerships in the future.

You may say video chats is a form of a face to face communication but I keep on seeing people involved in video conferences that are answering emails, texting or even answering their phone. I wouldn’t do that if you were standing in front of me, right.

Guys, next week I’m gonna try and talk a little bit more about the power of visualising your data for your customers but you do come back here next Sunday cause you’ve got the problems and I’ve got the solutions.

18th June 201719th June 2017

The Sunday Talk – The Jungle called Digital Marketing

Oh, Alexa stop!

This week is all about SearchLeeds PPC and SEO conference. Great speakers are going to the city of Leeds. Aleyda Solis gonna be there. Dawn Anderson gonna be there. Barry Adams gonna be there to name the few. The session I am really looking for – Arianne from icelolly.com ‘PPC vs SEO & why you can’t ignore either’.
Such an exciting week is ahead of us. Let the week begin.

Reading last week Sunday Talk comments made me think. Has digital made all traditional channels obsolete? You know I am all about digital so let me explain. The first thing I learnt as a marketer was that marketing is customer focused. So as marketers our main function is to understand our customers and work hard to develop products or services that suit their needs. To communicate and engage with our customers on platforms that suit them.
Did I just say platforms that suit them not you? So my first takeaway this week is: Don’t go with the trend.

Go where your customers are.

Just arrived in Leeds. Eight o’clock in the morning. Woke up five o’clock in the morning, jumped on the train for two hours and a half. Amazing city as you can see so double satisfaction. My first time at the SearchLeeds SEO conference and first time in this amazing city.

Gemma Houghton: Today Webcertain TV is here at SearchLeeds. We’ve been asking delegates to tell us ‘What is the biggest SEO trend of 2017‘. Here is what they had to say.

The biggest SEO trend, in my opinion, is relevancy. It’s all about relevancy. If your links, because everybody is talking about links, at this conference. If your links are not relevant to your content if your content is not relevant to why people are coming to your website then you are bound to lose in the long term.

Yes, I went all the way to Leeds. In one day. But trust me the conference was amazing. Yes, the PPC v SEO session – Arianne was spot on.

Arianne: I think we sometimes spent a little bit too much time kind of arguing over which is better. And the thing with search both organic and paid is we don’t generate demand we only harness demand. What we should be doing is making friends with people who work in other channels. Thinking about how we driving that demand.

How do we start driving demand from the upper and mid funnels of marketing that we can then both capture through search and hopefully convert in the most effective way for our clients?

Dawn Anderson took it to another level.

Dawn Anderson: But as Monica said the problem is near duplicate content is more difficult to detect than exact. Because exact is literally check the fingerprint the same filter it immediately. When you start to have like bits of this, bits of that you know it becomes very very problematic.

And then Barry Adams absolutely smashed it. Believe me, man he absolutely smashed it.

Barry Adams: For me, too many SEOs don’t understand these processes. Cause too many people use crawler and indexer in the same breath as it’s the same system. And totally is not. Googlebot is the crawler and it’s a very simple piece of software. Very fast. It just looks at the source code, follows links and sends everything it finds to the indexer.

The indexer does the interesting bit. That’s why Google calls it the Caffeine infrastructure. The indexer actually tries to figure out what is that it’s looking at. This is where the interesting analysis happen. This is where links get extracted. This is where javascript is executed. More on that later. and this is where the Search Console does the error.

Strangely enough two days after the conference I am still thinking about Will Critchlow’s session. Yes, the guy from Distilled. The guy from Distilled. He is probably right. In this industry human beings are trying to compete with machines. Sooner or later, sooner or later somebody will come up with a let’s call it the SEO robot to even the game. Because it is so true we just don’t know what works and what doesn’t.

Will Critchlow: Even Google themselves don’t always know why something is ranking where it is and what it would take to move it up. And so we are finding that we having to actually test our hypothesis. Take out different things onto different areas of the site and perform that kind of a scientific end of split testing.

Sometimes it feels like we are concentrating too much on the delivery and not the recipient – the actual user of your products or services.
SEO v PPC. Bud do your customers even know the difference or they just click on whatever is on top if the SERPs. And with Voice Search around the corner don’t you think that those two have to merge together into one single entity called probably Digital Marketing.

Mobile v Desktop. True, mobile is definitely taking over. But when I look at the data coming from my clients in seventy percent of the cases the transaction is still happening on a desktop.

To summarise this week. Google is trying to follow the ‘human’ trend. Byt us as digital marketers although we try and follow Google the feeling is we are going in a different direction.

Guys, next week I will continue exploring the jungle called Digital Marketing for you. But you do come back here next Sunday cause you’ve got the problems and I’ve got the solutions.

11th June 201711th June 2017

The Sunday Talk – SEO is a part of Digital Marketing

The advice I wanna give you in this rainy morning is: You really have to get a place where you know what your company is about. I can improve your SEO. I can tell you how to improve your Digital Marketing but you not gonna be successful online if you are the only one who thinks that your product is good.

I am not very impressed by the British summer. Welcome to my world of traffic, rain and SEO.

Steven van Vessum: So we are working on a public API as well. And we gonna be integrating that in a WordPress plugin so you can basically install the plugin and every time you make a change on your website we will send a signal to the Content King crawler.

Omi: So basically you gonna have a WordPress plugin that people can just download?

Steven van Vessum: Yes.

Omi: Ok, I get it. This is a good idea, you know? Because a lot of people use WordPress, right? I u

Steven: Yes, there is millions.

Omi: I use WordPress for my personal website omisido.com.

Steven: Yes, I know. We use it as well.

On my way to an SEO roundtable organised by Kevin Gibbons the CEO of Blue Glass – top digital marketing agency here in the UK. In the end of the day, nothing beats meeting people in real life.

Just coming back from the roundtable organised by Blue Glass and one thing is very obvious. Big companies have finally started to understand the core principles of SEO. Meanwhile what really surprised me was that so many people that were not technical were asking and talking about technical SEO.

Thursday and the big day has finally arrived. General Election 2017. Torres, SMP, Labour. But if you don’t know who to vote for vote Digital Marketing.

As a member of the Digital Marketing Party, I can promise you better ROI – return on investment. better knowledge of your community. For once I can promise you: you gonna know who your community is.
Vote for the future. Vote for Digital Marketing.

In about ten minutes I’m gonna be talking to David James – the CEO of businessgrowthdigitalmarketing.com and a top SEO from Australia.
We gonna be talking about the basics of SEO and the importance of including SEO in your overall Digital Marketing Strategy.

I will try and be as short as possible, you know. Basically, if you think that you can do – I will be very very specific. If you think that you can do SEO without data whether is technical or content. Let’s just say, let’s concentrate on content. If you think that you can do content SEO without data you are literary in the wrong job. Everything nowadays is about data.
If you don’t understand how the customer is coming to your website, why the customer is coming to your website, who is that it’s coming to your website, you know. Because it’s not important

Because it’s not important even to know the number, you know, you have to know the specifics. Telling me “3 thousand are coming to my website a day,” tells me nothing. Absolutely nothing. Tells me straight away that you do not know what you are doing in SEO. SEO is all about data. Or the way I normally put it in front of, you know. let’s call them the ‘normal’ people.

David James: I see what you did there.

In my opinion, SEO is 50% math and 50% imagination, creativity. Yeah, That’s it.

David James: Spot on.

I had such a busy week. Three online webinars and one SEO roundtable. This week I’ve talked to so many people and I can see a trend emerging. Successful companies are those who successfully managed to all Digital marketing parts together.

SEO is one of those important Digital Marketing tools. Your SEO team should not only be part of development. Your SEO team should not work in a silo.

Your SEO team should be heavily involved in defining and delivering your Digital Marketing strategy.

Guys, next week I am going to the Search Leeds PPC and SEO conference organised by Branded3 where I’m gonna be learning from top marketers like Dawn Anderson, Aleyda Solis to name the few.
But you do come back here next week cause you’ve got the problems and I’ve got the solutions.

4th June 20174th June 2017

The Sunday Talk – Digital Marketing is Simple, but it’s not Easy

I am having an amazing time here in Wales. If you’ve never been to this part of the UK I strongly recommend it.

What a view.

First Bath and then Bournemouth and then Pool. I think this is the one of the busiest Bank Holidays of my entire life.

Sadly the bank holiday is over and I have to go back to work. During this Bank Holiday, I went to the city of Bath and I can talk for hours about this amazing city. But for the purposes of our Sunday talk, I’m gonna talk about the people. Honestly, it felt like I landed on another planet. The people were so helpful. So kind. So real. And then it dawned on me.

To be successful on Social Media you have to be real.

It’s not enough anymore just to pretend that you understand your customers. People can spot the fake from miles away.

Wednesday and I can’t wait for tonight’s online webinar as I’m gonna be talking to the legendary, the legendary SEO Ammon Johns.
SEO Surgery with David Bain and Nikolay Stoyanov – top SEO from Bulgaria.

David Bain: But first of all let’s go back to Omi and in terms of the site that Omi is going to be sharing with us what I will do I will share my screen with you to show you the site wich is Mecum Auctions.

Omi: Recently I’ve been obsessed, literary obsessed with crawl budget. And to me you know a website having too many pages – actually I showed you that those pages got a lot of problems – means you are basically stopping the Google bot from crawling your let’s call them ‘good’ pages. The pages that will rally bring qualified traffic to your website.

Nikolay: Speed is really easy to fix it if you know where to look. Sometimes is really just a couple of tweaks and it can do miracles.

Chris Countey: Show them why it matters. Show them the story. So figure out a better way to communicate the things that we understand on the technical level and get them to care about it as much as they care about other things that they are doing offline.

Yes, today somebody asked me on Social Media what is my biggest worry when it comes to Digital Marketing. This question is very similar to yours James so I’m gonna be honest with you. I see so many companies going trough the so-called Digital Transformation’ but for a reason unknown to me they see ‘Digital’ as something non-human. They see ‘Digital’ as something not related to human behaviour.
James, it’s so easy to get lost in the Digital Marketing world full of meaningless numbers and fake theories.

To make my vision clear I’m gonna give you an example straight away.

Six months ago I asked one of my clients to drastically reduce the number of their web pages. The first response was like “Omi, but how am I gonna justify the lower number of visits?”
See the question was not how am I gonna justify the lower number of engagements, or the lower number of people buying from us. Somehow this client saw the number of organic visits as a good, reliable KPI.
As I said earlier:you can easily get lost in the world of meaningless numbers in Digital marketing.

You can easily get lost in the world of meaningless numbers in Digital marketing.

Thank God the client decided to follow my advice so they reduced the number of their pages with almost 60%. as you can imagine the number of organic visits sunk.
But six months down the line they sell more stuff than ever before.

What happened was that after the page number reduction the Google bot now is able to crawl and index the ‘good’ pages more often so more pages are present in the SERPs and in a better position.

On the other side, now the visitor is able to find the desired product much quicker – as all the clutter is removed, right – wich leads to more sales.

Better SERPs positions and more sales – double win.

Somehow on Thursday, I can talk to my clients for hours. On the other side, I know it was a short week but I can’t wait for Friday. I am super tired.

Guys, Digital marketing is simple, but it’s not easy. Many companies, many people those two terms are synonyms. They are not.

Easy is a minimum amount of effort to produce a result. Easy is no involvement and no investment.

On the other side, simple is the removal of everything except what matters.
To give you an example from my world would be: if I take out my phone and start making random pictures at a party – this is easy.
Simple is learning how to take a picture that tells a story.

Guys, next week let’s all of us try and do something simple that will increase the customer engagement in our businesses.
Meanwhile, don’t forget to come here next Sunday cause you’ve got the problems and I’ve got the solutions.

28th May 201728th May 2017

The Sunday Talk – The Joy of Being a Digital Marketer

I’ve just come back from my holiday in Bulgaria and look around me. What a weather. How am I supposed to go to work in this weather?
On the other side now is the time to say. The brakes you take from work pay you back many times when you return because you come back with a fresher mind and newer thinking. Some of your best ideas come when you are on vacation.

Monday evening. Well more like Tuesday morning and my first day of work has just finished. being a digital marketer equals never a dull moment in your life. Befoe going to bed I wanna say something. Successful digital marketers harness what would be considered ‘stressed’ by others and convert it into kinetic energy. We learn to not simply survive but thrive on our challenges.
There you go. I said it. Good night.

Woke up this morning to the news that 25 people were killed in Manchester. What a sad day. One of the saddest days of my life. Woke up with an idea to make a video about the joy of being a digital marketer. Instead, I am looking at pictures of innocent young people killed for nothing. Mr Terrorist you thin you are the man but you are just a miserable piece of shit. Stupid coward.

It’s Thursday. I’ve just had sushi and I’ve got a confession to make. I hate the word ‘hustle’. I hate it mostly because it’s overused by marketers and personal brands who don’t actually embody ‘hustle’.
The word has lost significance in the echo chamber of self-help gurus and marketing ninjas. But I love ‘hustle the action’. It’s how we win at digital marketing.
We can’t outspend, we can’t out-network and in most cases, we can out-talent our competitors.
No matter how much money you spend, who you know and how smart you think you are eventually someone will come along with more money, more contacts and more brilliance.
But we can outwork them. It’s the workers, the doers that win at digital marketing. Anyone that tells you different is trying to sell you something that won’t work in the long game.

Sometimes I talk to people and they are like ‘Oh, I am a digital marketer but I am not active on Social media’. Correct me if I am wrong but I can’t think even of one formula one driver who doesn’t have a driving licence.
Social media is a trend that you can not ignore if yo wanna stay close to your customers and in synch with the latest developments in digital marketing.

This week felt a bit short. After the terrorist attack on Tuesday, I kind of lost my mojo. But don’t get me wrong I love my job. I love digital marketing.

I have a genuine interest in people and what triggers them to both buy and advocate for a brand.

To me, marketing is not about selling. To me, digital marketing is about cultivating an audience of passionate friends who both do business with and for you.

I also love making people smile. I will always try and find the craziest idea to prove my vision.

Once you’ve got a client’s trust and make them smile, doing business with them is the easy part.

Today I am going to the beautiful city of Bath. I know, I’ve never been there before. It’s strange.
But you do come back here next Sunday cause you’ve got the problems and I’ve got the solutions.

14th May 201714th May 2017

The Sunday Talk – No hard work, no results

Whether you like it or you don’t Mondays are part of our life.
So instead of moaning about them let’s change the way we think about Mondays.
Whatever you are trying to tell me I know that after the weekend you are full of energy.
So why don’t you go and crush it today so you don’t have to do anything for the rest of the week.
Wouldn’t you want to work only one day a week?

Just coming back from work and I had a conversation today with a young person. And there is one thing that really amazes me – their confidence. Don’t get me wrong – I am all about confidence. But just because you know how to operate a mobile phone doesn’t make you an IT expert. Or just because you know how to drive a car on the Play Station doesn’t make you Lewis Hamilton.
If you want to achieve your goals in life you have to work hard. Don’t rely on the fact that everybody says ‘Millennials are clever. Millennials are smarter.’

You are not everybody. You are you.

I am just coming back from a meeting with a very difficult client so I have to spill my toughs on to you. SEO as a part of a properly crafted Digital marketing strategy is simple.

It’s not easy but it’s simple.

And if you managed to do the simple things you can be very successful online. The reason you are not successful online is because you are always looking for the most complicated way of doing things. You are always looking for the next Google algorithm, for the next Google update. You are always looking for the Secret. You are always looking for the thing that we know and you don’t. And I am telling you now – that thing doesn’t exist. The thing that you have to do is go out there and do it. Work hard and do it.

Doing it. That is the secret.

Richard, you can’t control Google or Twitter or Facebook. But you can control your content – the quality and the frequency. You can control the way you talk to your customers online. So it’s about time – no offence – people stop blaming Google or the other social media platforms for their digital marketing not working as expected.
Google and the rest of the gang have been working hard for years so they are now in control of their game.
What you have to do Richard – I mean not you, your company – is to concentrate on your stuff. So by working hard – more and better content every single day, optimising your websites and campaigns, improving the way you interact with your customers online you can be in control of your game.

Just had a chat with a customer online. Not sure this camera managed to record everything. People keep on blaming Google because they are not good at SEO. Come on people. SEO is si pure. SEO is so straight forward. All Google wants to do is make their search engine deliver what people are looking for.
Those people are their customers. And they are just trying to improve their customer’s experience.
All you have to do is serve your customers and deliver value.

This week I’ve given you some unseen footage so you can see that not everything out there is pink. So many of you are emailing me – thank you very much, guys – telling me that I inspire you. But my job really is not to inspire you as I am not a motivational speaker. My job, my desire is to make you go out there and do it. So many of you are doing digital marketing only because it’s fashionable and not because you see its true value. This has to stop. Mobile sales are growing trough the roof every single day. More people are visiting your website than your physical store. In a way, you don’t have a choice – digital marketing is the future of business.

This has to stop. Mobile sales are growing trough the roof every single day. More people are visiting your website than your physical store. In a way, you don’t have a choice – digital marketing is the future of business.

Mobile sales are growing trough the roof every single day. More people are visiting your website than your physical store. In a way, you don’t have a choice – digital marketing is the future of business.

By now you are probably thinking ‘Omi, why is is so sunny, why is so green around you. Like many of you know this week, I am visiting the country of Bulgaria but you do come back here next Sunday cause you’ve got the problems and I’ve got the solutions.

7th May 20177th May 2017

The Sunday Talk – The Inbounder Conference

Monday. Bank Holiday and today I am planning to do absolutely nothing. Why can’t we have 3 days off every single week?

On my way to The Inbounder. As usual, I am fashionably late. But then the weather is so nice. The summer is finally here.

Wednesday. The day after The Inbounder conference and before you ask me I’m gonna tell you. I truly and utterly enjoyed it. Great talks by great speakers like Gianluca Fiorelli. Olga Andrienko, Kirsty Hulse, Jono Alderson (watch his video here), Kelvin Newman was there. I will try and link all their slides in the description below.

You know there are those conferences where you go, you sit and you drink coffee all day. And there are those conferences like The Inbounder where in a very short amount of time you get so much knowledge. One common tip everybody was giving ‘Know your customers. Understand your customers before starting optimising your website.”

Before I forget Gianluca Fiorelli’s talk alone was worth going to this event.

Friday, and I am a little bit ill. One of those moments when sickness grounds you to your bed but I am still working. Always do your best. Of course, your best gonna be different from moment to moment. It will be different from when you are healthy opposed to when you are sick. But under any circumstance do your best and you gonna avoid a lot of self-judgment and regret in the future.

In about ten minutes I’m gonna be talking to Mr François Goube – the CEO of OnCrawl. We gonna be talking about technical SEO and something that I really really want everybody to understand –
Orphan pages.

So orphan pages are pages that are outside your internal linking structure.

Exactly, exactly. This is what I always try to explain to people. So basically if they are not linked from anywhere they will definitely have an effect on our SEO. What do you think is the effect of orphan pages on SEO? Let’s talk about it. Because this is the most important part of the understanding of what orphan pages are.

Yeah, you know we just talked about the crawl budget. And you ned to optimise and to get assured that Google is fetching your priority pages.
And you have priority pages – top priority pages – you want them to get a lot of link juice cause you want them to rank and you want the bot to crawl them very frequently. So you want Google to consider your money your most valuable pages. So this is very big – big issue to have orphan pages because you are wasting Google resources on pages that are obviously invaluable because if they are orphan there might be a good reason.

Just had a chat with François from OnCrawl and if I have to summarise our conversation: Not everybody is cut out to be a good web developer. Not everybody can write compelling copy. That being said content professionals have to understand that the success of their online projects is partially dependent on good technical execution. You have to gain a basic of technical SEO in order to avoid costly mistakes in the future.

Guys, what an exciting week. It started slow with a Bank Holiday and then just exploded with The Inbounder conference. Went down again – a little bit – as I was sick but then exploded again with online interviews and webinars.

Next week I’m gonna be temporarily redirected to Easter Europe as I am visiting the country of Bulgaria but you do subscribe to this channel and do come back here next Sunday cause you’ve got the problems and I’ve got the solutions.

The Inbounder London – links to all slides

1st May 20171st May 2017

The Sunday Talk – SEO is Not Dead

Monday morning. The coffee is brewing but there is one burning question hectic inside my head. If 50% of your website traffic comes trough organic search why do you keep on saying that SEO is dead?

Tuesday morning twenty-fifth of April and I am just getting ready to go to work. I just saw this story on the news “The Guardian is getting 60% of its Google mobile traffic from AMP.”
Shall I repeat this one? Sixty percent of its Google mobile traffic from AMP. In the same story, AMP pages are two percent more likely to be clicked and the click trough rates are eight percent higher than the non-AMP pages.
On the other side, last year The Daily Mail introduced AMP and their visits jumped with 14% a day.

I can talk for hours about the benefits, the SEO benefits of AMP but the point I am trying to make here is. If SEO is dead when was the last time you increased your click trough rates with 8% with something that’s not SEO?

I really wanna answer this question. All the agencies that are telling you that you don’t need SEO anymore are basically trying to deceive you. Let’s be adults for a moment. If you want your pages to appear in the SERPs the Google bot – something very very technical. Yes, I hope you don’t believe in the story that there is an army of Google dwarfs crawling the Internet and ranking pages. So the Google bot – something very very technical has to come to your website, has to crawl it, understand your structure and only then it can rank your pages. But imagine now there is a problem with your roboots.txt file. Or a problem with your canonical tags. Or a problem with your internal linking. The Google bot would come gets confused and leave straight away.

SEO is the foundation on which you can build your digital marketing strategy.

Richard, without proper SEO practices in place your company is bound to lose.

Back in the car. I am just coming back from breakfast with Phil Burgess – the new chief growth officer for iCrossing (top digital London agency).

Phil basically confirmed my recent thoughts that relevancy is indeed the new currency in SEO and Digital Marketing. We used to talk a lot about authority but nowadays relevancy is definitely taking over. Relevant keywords for the relevant audience at the relevant time on the relevant social media platform. Enough said.

Do you know that today is Thursday? Time for some sushi lunch.

Oh, my God. Of course, it’s Friday. I am so tired and I am kind of sleep driving. You Americans! You never care about our sensitive British soul. But anyway to answer your question:

What is SEO?

SEO is, in my opinion, SEO is this strange mix of psychology, art and math that so many businesses are avoiding and they are losing big time in a long run. To those people I say. If fifty percent of your website visits come from organic search than SEO should lie at the heart, at the centre of your business. I am not saying that SEO should be the driving part of your Digital Marketing but SEO is the part that can actually push your Digital Marketing forward.

It’s Friday. Good morning people. I just had a 40 minutes interview while driving to work. That’s what I call multitasking.
I know it’s Friday but be positive. Stay on your hustle.

You can’t fail until you quit.

Wow, what a fight. I was screaming. I was shouting. I was crying.
It may sound strange but I believe Digital Marketing and SEO are very similar to boxing. You throw a punch by introducing something new on your website and you knock down your competitors.

Next time your competitors throw a punch by introducing something new on their website and they knock down your website visits.

So only companies who are truly committed to marketing and SEO can win the online battle for customer’s attention.

Guys, next week I am going to The Inbounder SEO conference organised by Gianluca Fiorelli where I’m gonna be learning from top Digital marketers like Olga Andrienko, Kirsty Hulse. Jono gonna be there. Hannah Thorpe gonna be there. To name the few.
As usual, I’m gonna be passing my knowledge onto you so do subscribe to this channel and do come back here next Sunday.
Cause you’ve got the problems and I’ve got the solutions.