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908 viewsWriter and practitioner of search optimization, Steve Wiideman lives, breathes, and eats SEO, SEM, and inbound marketing. When he’s not an SEO consultant for franchise and e-commerce brands, he’s a cheeseball romantic, entertaining daddy, and world traveler with a passion for life, embracing culture and diversity. Steve’s current projects include a do-it-yourself SEO package and experiments his team is running to better understand the impacts of voice search, featured snippets, and structured data.
Please introduce yourself and where you work.
I’m Steve Wiideman, recent C3 Industry MVP Recipient, and Senior Search Strategist at Wiideman Consulting Group.
How do you think SEO has changed over the last 10 years?
SEO has evolved from keyword matching in links and content to behavioral targeting in solving the user’s real issues better than competing pages. We no long write content, we study user search patterns and design content for every phase of the buyer’s journey. We don’t build links, we build relationships that result in curation, mentions, and the occasional link. Finally, we test, experiment, and borrow learnings from other channels and advertising mediums to build a cohesive advertising message.
How did you get introduced to digital marketing, more specifically SEO?
I was a webmaster in the 90s who learned search engine optimization out of necessity. No traffic meant no new business for or from my clients, so I adapted and mastered SEO.
What are the services you provide to your clients?
Wiideman Consulting Group provides comprehensive technical, contextual and off-page visibility audits and strategies. For a select few clients, we stay on board to help our clients navigate through the SEO road maps we build for them.
What strategy according to you will prevail in 2018 for SEO?
Businesses will see the most success in 2019 from their 2018 efforts in testing voice search focal points, continuing to add as much markup and data within that markup as they are able to, and by getting their web content to a point where a mobile user can one-hand their way through an experience with actions that don’t require a keyboard.
What would your advice be to people who are looking to take up digital marketing as a career choice?
We have an OPML file you can import into Feedly that will enable you to see the feeds we feel are the most valuable, organized by search discipline, such as local SEO, paid search, organic search, content, influencer marketing, and most importantly, search engine news. My suggestion would be to spend as much time as you’re able to exploring today’s content in these difference areas and crawling through the rabbit holes when you find them to fully understand the topic. We also have a learning guide at wiideman.com/learn that includes a free SEO Master Class.
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