Get to know Nathan Hawkes, Founder & President, Arcane Marketing

Nathan has been in the technology, marketing, and management world for over 10 years. He helped to start an industry leading marketing company over 11 years ago. Taking the positives and lessons learned, he founded Arcane Marketing a little over 2 years ago. As a true student to the Online Marketing industry, his talent stems from his uncanny ability to communicate and explain complex marketing concepts or strategies to anyone and to help them not only easily understand them, but also to get excited about implementing them. Working with many fortune 500 companies as well as start-ups, he’s seen it all. His skill set covers comprehensive SEO strategies, pay-per-click management, social media marketing, and brand reputation management. Communication and results are paramount in the online marketing world and you won’t find any less of that standard when you work with Nathan and his team at Arcane Marketing.

Please introduce yourself and where you work.

I’m Nathan Hawkes, the founder, President, and SEO Guru (or so I’ve been told) of Arcane Marketing (www.arcanemarketing.com). We specialize in SEO, PPC, Social Media, Brand Reputation Management, and Web Development. As of now, we’re just a little over 2 years old as a company. All of our employees have over 7 years of experience – each in the online marketing world. We have developed an amazing way to help our clients climb in rankings, improve conversions, increase revenue, and decrease expenses. We’re more of a boutique agency you could say.

How do you think SEO has changed over the last 10 years?

The amount of change over the last 10 years has been incredible. I started in the SEO industry in 2007 just as there was even a marketing revolution going on at that point. Gone are the days where you can just cheat with a few simple tasks to rank. Content development has changed, the use of meta information, the introduction of social media to the mix. The most changed area has easily been link building. It’s the biggest taboo and the hardest part to get right. Nowadays, it all comes down to actually doing the work and proving that you’re the authority in the industry. It’s all about catering to the searcher and their searching intent… Analytics and users statistics now matter more than it ever has.

How did you get introduced to digital marketing, more specifically SEO?

I started out just working on a sales team for another SEO company back in 2007. A few buddies of mine and I all came together to learn about the industry and become the gurus. We spent a lot of time learning and becoming familiar with how the industry works. Each day we would scour the web and read blogs/forums to learn all that we could. It was important for us to become the very best and be “students of the game”. After implementing much of what we learned and starting to see results from it, it all became quite fun and we saw ourselves at the forefront of the industry.

What are the services you provide to your clients?

We focus on 5 specific categories, but do help with many others (we try very hard to be the best at what we do – and we believe we are!):
1. Search Engine Optimization
2. Paid Search Management
3. Social Media Marketing
4. Brand Reputation Management
5. Website Design and Development

What strategy according to you will prevail in 2017 for SEO?

There’s no quick and easy answer to this. What’s producing results now (and what has been for a few years) is simply doing the research and the work. Producing good information to help your searchers and then spending some time helping people to see it (building good links, outreach, social media mentions, etc…) will ultimately produce the best results. There are a lot more details than that, but that’s the 10,000 foot view of the direction to head in.

What would your advice be to people who are looking to take up digital marketing as a career choice?

Spend the time to actually learn the industry. Subscribe to many different forums and daily SEO blogs. Practice what you learn so that you can become good at it. After a while it really makes a lot of sense. You’ll find that nothing is magic and everything SEO is simply good common sense put to use in your website and promotion efforts. See what others are doing and try that out for yourself. The best way to learn is actually do it your self as opposed to just hiring other companies to do it for you.