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986 viewsJeremy Ryan provides web design, website hosting and internet marketing services, including search engine optimization, paid search and social media marketing services through his firm Advantage Creations located in Burlington, Vermont. Jeremy Ryan has a degree in marketing and has been involved in e-commerce since 1998 when he started his first online store. In 2003, Jeremy started Advantage Creations to serve small businesses (typically 1-10 employees) with marketing services backed by strategies he has learned from his own several online retail businesses.
Please introduce yourself and where you work.
I own and operate AdvantageCreations.com, a full service web design, web hosting, and internet marketing firm in Burlington, Vermont.
How do you think SEO has changed over the last 10 years?
SEO has evolved from simply gathering links and adding exact match keywords to your web pages to a much more inclusive process. I see SEO as the end result of doing all other forms of online marketing correctly. Good rankings are achieved by having a good stream of traffic that engages with your website. Depending on what your site about this could be purchases, reads, form signups. Whatever the purpose of your website, visitors need to convert or engage with it in some way. Google can tell if your visitors are happy with the website or not and that is by far better way of determining the quality of a site if it should rank for terms you target.
How did you get introduced to digital marketing, more specifically SEO?
I first got involved in SEO when I was in college. I had started my first online retail store in 1997 and was trying to get it to rank in Yahoo, the dominant search engine at the time. I found that it was quite easy. In order to rank you just needed to mostly repeat the exact keyword you wanted to rank for many times, stuff it everywhere and it worked. You didn’t even need links then, but so few people were doing SEO then.
What are the services you provide to your clients?
We are full service. We provide domain registration, website hosting, web design and internet marketing, which includes search engine optimization, paid search and social media marketing services. We usually suggest including paid search and social media with any SEO as we believe it’s all related and helps each other.
What strategy according to you will prevail in 2017 for SEO?
Focus on engagement with your website. Make sure that users are happy, can find what they want as easily as possible and focus on driving quality traffic. Not links for the sake of SEO. Get links that drive traffic that converts and is engaged with your website. Starting out, I always suggest a paid search and social media campaign to drive initial traffic to your website and then you can figure out what your audience looks like and what keywords provide you the best traffic. Then work to improve upon the keywords you already do well with and others that are either on the bottom of the 1st page or 2nd page of search results.
What would your advice be to people who are looking to take up digital marketing as a career choice?
For me, I learned everything I could through reading and trial/error with my own websites. If you cannot do this with your own websites, then I would suggest offering free help to the many small businesses out there that do need it to get experience and then get testimonials/referrals from them for paid work. When you have results, it should be fairly easy to get more work.
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