Please introduce yourself and where you work.
I’m Andrew Roberts, CEO at Primo Interactive. Located in the UK and Lithuania, we have been providing online marketing services internationally since 2006.
How do you think SEO has changed over the last 10 years?
SEO today is, in my eyes, unrecognisable from SEO 10 years ago. Cutting-edge technical and on-page SEO techniques from 2008 are now basic prerequisites. Still important, but now necessary simply to get SERPs and no longer the route to top positions. SEO now and in the future must be part of a holistic branding and PR strategy and both infrastructure, design and development must be on-point. Thankfully, the more difficult long-term approach that we’ve been espousing for 12 years is now paying off as many of the black-hat tricks that worked 10 years ago are now at best ineffective and at worse penalised.
How did you get introduced to digital marketing, more specifically SEO?
Google launched whilst I was studying Information Technology at college and it quickly became clear that it was going to be a game changer. Building hobbyist websites during this time and witnessing the demise of incumbent search engines such as Excite, Infoseek, AltaVista, HotBot, AllTheWeb, Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves made it clear that if you wanted to be found online, you better become familiar with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. As such a broad subject that touches heavily on so many areas of business and technology and blends art and science, I quickly realised that SEO specifically and digital marketing, in general, was the career for me.
What are the services you provide to your clients?
As a full-service agency, we provide a complete range of services to help our clients to acquire, convert, optimise and grow. These include, of course, SEO as well as software development, website design, database development, advertising, marketing and PR.
What strategy according to you will prevail in 2018 for SEO?
Instead of thinking about websites, brands should focus on web experiences and be ensuring that they deliver a fast, integrated, reliable and engaging experience to users. Serving sites over HTTPS is a must, as is providing an amazing user experience regardless of device (Google’s mobile-first indexing being a good indication of this). Strong branding, PR and coherent SMM strategies must be used to instil trust and create better user engagement. Infrastructure, design and coding should minimise TTFB (time to the first byte) and provide support for offline browsing. As voice search grows in popularity, SEO strategies will need to adapt to potential differences between typed and spoken search terms. Microdata and schema markup will continue to be important, but increased AI and machine learning usage by search engines may affect implementation best practices. Content creation should take into account user intent and provide a complete path from A-Z in order for brands to compete in a semantic search landscape. In summary, what will ultimately prevail in 2018 for SEO are the same things that have always been and always will remain effective – A thorough understanding of search engine algorithms, effective competitor analysis, cutting-edge infrastructure, design and coding and a cohesive branding, PR and SMM strategy.
What would your advice be to people who are looking to take up digital marketing as a career choice?
Good choice! Digital marketing can be a very rewarding career path. You’ll never stop learning and discovering tangential knowledge. Remember that what works today may not work tomorrow and that SERPs are a means to an end and a part of a bigger strategy, not something to be achieved at any cost.