Lawmence is the Head of Marketing for Cleverus, a digital marketing agency that helps companies increase leads and sales through SEO and SEM.
Having helped hundreds of clients using the know-how of online marketing, Lawmence realized the importance of online marketing in helping any business to accelerate growth and increase sales.
Lawmence now manages a team of 21 people in Cleverus and he proudly calls his team the Digital Avengers. You can connect with Lawmence and the Digital Avengers on Facebook or Twitter.
Please introduce yourself and where you work.
I am Lawmence, the head of Marketing for Cleverus. We are a digital marketing agency based in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia, with offices in the Iloilo, Philippines and the Phoenix, United States.
Cleverus have successfully established ourselves as one of the top SEO experts in Malaysia as we have developed a proven framework to help our clients quickly rise to the top of major search engines in the world.
Cleverus aims to be the largest digital marketing agency in South East Asia within the next 6 years. With our growing team of digital marketing professionals, we are confident of our ability to reach this massive milestone.
How do you think SEO has changed over the last 10 years?
Back in the day, we used to rank websites by sending hundreds with links with exact match anchors and high keyword density.
After the Penguin update, we realised we need to change our strategy and give Google what it wants – optimized anchor text ratio and white hat links. While the transition is difficult at the start, we can now happily say we are using 100% white hat strategy and have gotten great results!
Also, we have a strict vetting process to hire the top writers as we noticed quality content makes it easier for us to perform the outreach and generate additional links.
What we do is we will look at the top 10 results on Google for that keyword and analyse the number of words and sub-topics covered. Our writers will then write a better article with more words and cover additional sub-topics to make it the best article on Google for that keyword.
How did you get introduced to digital marketing, more specifically SEO?
It’s funny, a few years ago, I was jobless after a business failure. While searching for what to do, I met a stranger at a bar in KL. As we chat, he told me about how his website is ranked on the first page of Google, and how he is getting an unlimited source of customers coming automatically to his websites to buy his products. He’s easily earning five-figure income every month, making his life much easier and wealthier.
Being jobless at that time, I thought why not? With all the free time I had, I learned SEO by attending courses all around the world. A few months later, I managed to rank my first website to the page one of Google and have been in the game ever since.
As the algorithm is always changing, I made sure I stay up to date with the changes by participating in SEO related Facebook groups and forums. Our agency also run a lot of testing to make sure the new claims are substantiated by actual test results..
What are the services you provide to your clients?
We provide SEO, SEM, Web Design and Online Reputation Management services.
We help businesses outrank their competitors and dominate the search engine using our proven SEO strategy. Having helped companies ranked over 1,000 keywords online, we have developed a framework to rank for even the most difficult keyword in the industry.
As for SEM, we are a certified Google Partner and our scope of work include helping companies to generate leads and sales through paid Google advertising
Lastly, we also provide online reputation management service and we have harnessed the use of our SEO framework to help major companies remove negative press online and successfully restored their company’s brand name.
What strategy according to you will prevail in 2018 for SEO?
Definitely white hat link building strategy. In fact, white hat strategy is also cheaper than the black hat and grey hat strategy as purchasing links and building PBNs can be very costly.
We have a team to do the outreach for links and search for high-quality niche relevant guest post, and another team to research and write the content.
When you are outreaching for links, make sure your content is better than all the existing content out there for that keyword. This will make your outreach much easier as people are always looking to link to quality content.
As for guest posting, besides the usual DA and PA metric analysis, we will also look at whether the site has traffic. If the site has low traffic numbers but high DA and PA, it might be a PBN instead of a genuine guest post. Watch out for that!
What would your advice be to people who are looking to take up digital marketing as a career choice?
Invest in a course, quickly finish it, and start applying what you have learned into practice. Practical experience will always beat theories and any course you take.
The components of digital marketing include SEO, SEM, Email Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing. At the start, pick one component of digital marketing and master it before moving onto the next. This will help prevent information overload.
As you learn, document your process and refine your process along the way. This will help you establish your own system and you can use it every time a new project comes along. Quickly start a website and begin testing.
Also, join digital marketing Facebook groups so you can always keep up with the latest trends and ongoing discussion related to digital marketing.