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1,023 viewsRick Hogan, is the CEO & Co-founder of Bleevit Interactive, a Google Partner and digital marketing agency located in the Washington DC area. Bleevit helps local businesses reach their full digital marketing potential. Their clients benefit from the firm’s extensive experience in the areas of web design, search and search engine optimization, pay-per-click marketing, content marketing, video production and social media.
Please introduce yourself and where you work.
Rick Hogan, Co-Founder & CEO of Bleevt Interactive. A Washington DC-based full-service digital marketing firm.
How do you think SEO has changed over the last 10 years?
SEO has changed significantly over the past 10 years. 10 years ago, based largely on the inherent weaknesses in Google’s algorithm, SEOs could get pages of low content quality to rank. Keyword stuffing, spammy backlinks links, and meta keywords worked remarkably well. The SEO industry was an industry built not on best practices, but on bad practices. Fast forward to the present, successful SEO strategy is a quality driven exercise. Google does not reward bad behavior but rather punishes it. The factors are different for different industries and locals, but at the end of the day, quality of content, links, and usability usefulness of to users are paramount in reaching success.
How did you get introduced to digital marketing, more specifically SEO?
I started working in digital in 1995 when I loaded a copy of the Mosaic Browser which was the precursor to Netscape and was hooked immediately. When Google was launched in 1998 I was hooked and started experimenting with search results. I worked in the enterprise software industry and became the guy people asked about content strategy and Google.
What are the services you provide to your clients?
Bleevit is full-service digital marketing agency and Google Partner. We provide web design, SEO, SEM, content marketing, digital analytics, social media and video production.
What strategy according to you will prevail in 2017 for SEO?
The strategy we use for our clients is as follows. 1- Implement perfect on-page SEO as a foundation. 2 – Review and fix technical SEO issues. 3 – Perform a backlink audit and identify competition backlink audit to find link opportunities. 4 – Citation audit and citation building for clients, especially local SEO clients. 5 – set up and improve digital analytics and keyword position monitoring and let the data provide the feedback.
What would your advice be to people who are looking to take up digital marketing as a career choice?
A digital marketing career is a perfect career for the continually curious. Success depends largely on being able to correlate a lot of data and critical thinking skills are essential. This said, digital marketing at its core is a communications activity and in the end, the most useful content that answers users questions will win. Digital marketers need to focus on becoming master communicators and liberal arts is an essential ingredient to success.
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