Please introduce yourself and where you work.
My name is Gabriela Covay, and I’m the founder of Bright Valley Marketing, a boutique online marketing agency based in Sacramento and Santa Cruz, California.
How do you think SEO has changed over the last 10 years?
SEO has become very consumer-centric. In order to perform SEO effectively nowadays, you need to understand human psychology. If you want your site to rank on the first page of Google, content and backlinks are no longer enough. User signals are playing an increasingly important role. What happens when someone clicks on your site? Do they hit the back button? Do they stay on your site and spend time reading your content, looking at your service pages? Those are the things Google is closely monitoring nowadays. So if your site is getting a bunch of awesome backlinks, but your site is poorly designed or loads slowly, you won’t stand a chance at ranking #1.
How did you get introduced to digital marketing, more specifically SEO?
In 2013 I moved back to the states after living abroad for several years. I had just gotten my master’s degree in Science and Innovation Management. I knew I wanted to do something in the marketing field, and was initially drawn to social media. However, a job opportunity came up in the SEO field, and I couldn’t pass it up. Since then I fell in love with the industry – specifically how quickly it evolves. What worked yesterday might not work today. It’s fascinating.
What are the services you provide to your clients?
We focus primarily on search marketing: SEO and PPC. As part of our SEO services we provide content and inbound marketing. We also offer Local SEO for customers with physical locations.
What strategy according to you will prevail in 2017 for SEO?
I think conversion rate optimization (CRO) will become an integral part of SEO. Your website should load super fast, have a security certificate, and provide an optimal user experience. If your website helps people easily and quickly find the information they’re looking for, it will get favored by Google and as a result rank higher.
What would your advice be to people who are looking to take up digital marketing as a career choice?
?The best thing you can do is dive right in. There are so many SEO experts out there who publish articles claiming they’ve discovered the latest and greatest SEO technique that’s guaranteed to work – but in this field there are no guarantees. The only way you’ll figure things out, really, is to try things out for yourself (within reason, of course). Land yourself an internship with a reputable SEO company to learn the ins and outs of this industry. You can then start experimenting with different techniques on your own site – perhaps a blog – and see what actually works.