Bill Hewson is an internet marketing pioneer, having worked at and with some of the world’s best and biggest digital marketing companies since 1996. His clients have included General Motors, Philips Electronics, Mars Brands, and Kellogg’s. He founded Hewson Group in 2012 to bring “big company” marketing to smaller businesses in need of marketing services excellence.
Please introduce yourself and where you work.
My name is Bill Hewson, and I am the founding partner of Hewson Group. We consider ourselves an ideas company for what’s next for your business.
How do you think SEO has changed over the last 10 years?
The biggest changes are all based on Google’s attempts at improving the consumer search experience. This means that “tricks” and methods that used to work to capture high rankings, such as meta keyword lists and other keyword density tricks no longer work, and can in fact get your site depressed in the rankings. Technical SEO has seemingly reached maturity, with schema.org and other frameworks creating a relatively standard approach for all. Today, for strong SEO performance, marketers need to rely more on “on-page” SEO, including the freshness and relevance of their content.
How did you get introduced to digital marketing, more specifically SEO?
I started in digital marketing way back in the day, beginning in 1996 at one of the industry’s pioneers called Modem Media. Google didn’t even exist yet, and Yahoo and Alta Vista were the leaders in search. SEO as a subject and practice didn’t really exist before 2000 in any organized way.
What are the services you provide to your clients?
Hewson Group provides a full suite of marketing and advertising services for our clients, including digital, video and print publishing. We focus on small and medium sized business, so we’re focused on helping our less sophisticated clients take advantage of today’s marketing complexities to their fullest. SEO plays a key role in generating qualified traffic to our clients’ websites and Facebook pages.
What strategy according to you will prevail in 2017 for SEO?
Content, Content, Content. And more backlinks always. Once you make sure your technical website setup is well structured for SEO best-practices, using content effectively, including developing inbound links from other sites of authority in your subject area, are the keys to unlocking higher rankings.
What would your advice be to people who are looking to take up digital marketing as a career choice?
Learn old-school direct marketing principals from the ground up. All the data that digital marketing spits out is only useful if it’s analyzed, placed into context and used to rive greater performance for your brand or business. Without understanding how direct marketing works and how to optimize programs based on performance data, you’re sunk as a marketer.