Please introduce yourself and where you work.
My name is Luke Severn. I’m the Marketing Program Manager at the Seattle-based digital marketing agency Kaufer DMC.
How do you think SEO has changed over the last 10 years?
There are three aspects of SEO that stand out to me as being large shifts. The first is the growth of content. As the saying goes, content is king (and the customer is queen). At Kaufer DMC, we’ve seen first hand how great content can drive hundreds of thousands of visitors to our client’s sites, getting them ranked better on keywords and search terms that matter to their customers. The second is local SEO has become extremely important. Many businesses we work with depend entirely on local customers, so their local search presence has to be great in order for their business to thrive. The third is the death of link scheming. In the early days of SEO, there were a lot of black-hat SEO techniques based around link scheming that made a lot of people a lot of money and performed a disservice to Google search users. Google has done a good job shifting their algorithm so that type of SEO tactic doesn’t work any more.
How did you get introduced to digital marketing, more specifically SEO?
I studied a bit of marketing in college, but I really became interested in marketing after graduating with a degree in journalism and seeing that I could apply my degree to a job in marketing. I went out and got a marketing job and that job has grown over the past 3 years into what it is today. I got more and more interested in SEO during the past couple of years as I managed more website development projects and saw the types of on-site SEO tactics that could be applied to websites to help them grow traffic. I found the strategy around that fascinating.
What are the services you provide to your clients?
We provide a full suite of marketing services, mainly focused on digital marketing. These include marketing automation, social media management, website design, development, and maintenance, content creation,
reputation management, mobile marketing, SEO and SEM services, and public relations.
What strategy according to you will prevail in 2017 for SEO?
Continuing to create great content, and if you’re a local business like so many of our clients are, making sure you have a great, local search presence online.
What would your advice be to people who are looking to take up digital marketing as a career choice?
Like most careers, you will probably have to start at the bottom of the marketing totem pole, but even those jobs can be really rewarding and teach you a lot about marketing. Be ready to teach yourself a lot and be nimble.