Get to know Jonathan Bentz, SEO Head, Direct Online Marketing

June 20, 2022 | Interview

Please introduce yourself and where you work.


My name is Jonathan Bentz, and I am a Digital Marketing Manager at Direct Online Marketing. We are a Top 200 Google Premier Partner that helps its clients grow their businesses through digital marketing services like SEO, PPC, retargeting, social ads, and Analytics.

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

Looking at SEO as an industry, the core tactics we all use have remained the same over time:

  1. Produce quality content with relevant keyword phrases that users search for
  2. Publish your content on top of clean code that is easy for search spiders to index
  3. Get other sites to cite/reference/link to it.
    What has changed over the last decade is the complexity of how we go about completing these tactics for our clients. Because search engine users have a wider variety of ways they can find answers to their queries, we need to diversify our approaches to capture their visits.

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


I got my start in SEO back in 2004 during an internship at a company called Advanced Telecom Services (which has now become Purplegator). My uncle, Bob Bentz (who was one of your more recent interviews), gave me a copy of an SEO ebook on a floppy disk (for real!) when I started. At that time, he told me that I should learn this stuff, because “you might be able to make it a career someday.”
Once I “ranked” my first campaign for their network of sites and realized the financial impact that link building strategies had for their business, I was on board.
That guy has predicted a lot of things accurately and made a lot of good moves during his 25+ years as an entrepreneur. Turns out he was also right about my career path.

What are the services you provide to your clients?

We provide a variety of organic marketing and digital advertising services to our clients. The list includes:

  • Local/National/International SEO and SEM
  • Ad Retargeting
  • Social Media Advertising
  • Analytics
    Since our agency was founded in 2006, we have helped companies in almost every industry grow through online marketing strategies. Fun fact: we have also helped our clients sell into over 190 countries, on every inhabitable continent.
    According to our President, Justin Seibert, Antarctica better watch out!

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


Pretty sure voice search optimization is here to stay (here’s one of my favorite guides on voice search optimization, for those interested), and is only going to continue to saturate the market thanks to the spread of assistants.
To stay current and be able to leverage this trend, companies looking to diversify their SEO strategies need to be integrating tools like AnswerThePublic into their research phases, while also reviewing search volumes for long tail queries that include phrases like “near me” in the string.
There are still a lot of untapped opportunities out there in search. For content creators and SMBs that have the resources to be able to tap into these two strategies, there is tremendous opportunities to grow, and get ahead of their competition.

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


I Think there is still a huge digital skills gap which needs to be filled and people who can fill this gap are in serious demand. Lot of big brands are putting focus and investing bigger budgets on online advertising than ever before.
As of now digital marketing world provides a host of opportunities to start your career. You can learn many things without stepping into actual market.

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