First off, can you give us a quick background on yourself and the services you offer at eFlaunt?

I’ve been an SEO for 6 years now and offer search engine optimisation and link building services for a number of clients as well as running a few sites of my own.

I’ve spent a lot of time working for a single client over the past few years – the basic SEO consultancy has kind of moved on from “just SEO” to a more creative role that includes SEO as well – basically, I spend a lot of time thinking about new ideas for the site and how that can fit into our overall SEO strategy, which is a process I like to apply to other sites as well.

How did you first get involved in the SEO industry?

I originally studied Marketing and Information Management at Uni – I’ve always been torn between business and IT and that degree was really the only one I could find when I left school that dealt with both areas. When I left Uni I was still struggling to find work that I enjoyed – I spent a few years working in more traditional marketing roles before moving to Spain on a whim one day. A few weeks later I was in an entry level position with a Spanish SEO agency on the back of my first site I setup (which happened to be well optimised without me knowing it – I simply structured the site logically as I was going along).

I only lasted a month in the job – I wasn’t really happy with what I was doing (setting up fake directories to help promote a Spanish real estate agency!) and decided to leave for a new job with another real estate firm. But I had been introduced to Webmaster World which really started me in SEO.

Over the next year I setup another site of my own and saw some great success with it – for the first 18 months the site’s traffic doubled each month (and 6 years later it still gets 250,000 visitors a month with no marketing spend to date). When I moved back to the UK, I tinkered with my own sites for a while before getting a job with a large UK SEO agency where I spent the next year, before deciding to go it alone as a freelancer (which I’ve been doing ever since).

Do you work mostly with clients who are based in the United Kingdom or all over the world?

Mostly UK, but I’ve worked with a fair share of European clients as well.

You offer a great guide on what to check when choosing a SEO agency and a service to check the SEO work being done. In your experience have you found that when you conduct reviews that a lot of SEO companies are not delivering what they promised?

I think the main problem that occurs is not what that’s being delivered, more what is being sold to clients. People like to blame SEOs for this, but I do think there’s a level of responsibility that clients should accept as well – if you are spending a lot of money on any service then it should be carefully researched beforehand.

That said, there’s no excuse for SEOs selling services that they know carry risk for clients. Fair enough, some clients might want to pay for doorway pages, sneaky redirects and all manner of “black hat” services – but they should know what they are paying for beforehand. I hate the ethics debate when it comes to SEO – business should do whatever they want – but I do think ethics comes into play when selling SEO services – SEOs should be disclosing risks at the outset of the campaign.

On the whole though, I think the UK SEO industry is getting much better – a few years ago I spent a lot of time fixing penalties due to poor SEO work – that has changed a lot. I think clients are becoming much more SEO savvy – which is good to a certain extent, but also brings some problem – clients who think they know all about SEO can be a nightmare! Particularly if they are focusing on the wrong path slightly (for example, a preoccupation with deep links, PR sculpting, etc.) – a little knowledge can be hard to overcome, especially if it is basically correct, but taken out of context.

When a new client approaches you what are the most common misconceptions they have about search engine optimisation? Time frame? Cost?

I think most are fairly savvy these days – certainly about cost and time frame (although some might not like it!). As I said before, the main misconceptions can come from them having a little knowledge to begin with. Quite regularly I get people send in an email saying, “we need 30 PR4 links per month” or “we need 50 deep links per month”, and I just think, well if you know what you “need” then just go do it yourself – it’s not rocket science! If you want to hire me, then it’s so I can tell you what is best for your site, not just to blindly do what someone on a forum has told you to do.

I’m fairly selective when it comes to clients – I’ve passed up a lot of business that I could have done simply because it wasn’t the best approach (in my opinion anyway) for their site. I suppose a “give them whatever they want” attitude might be better for my business, but I don’t really like working like that – which can make me a bit of a headache to work with at times! If you sell any marketing service, the priority should always be what is best for the client’s business and not necessarily what is best for yours.

Is the UK market for SEO services pretty hot right now or about the same as it has been?

Pretty hot. More and more businesses are interested in SEO and there’s loads of great suppliers out there. The SEO industry still has a bit of a reputation problem with small businesses but that is improving and more small businesses are adopting SEO as core part of their marketing strategies. I think the main issue is the cost for small businesses – it’s hard to justify SEO spend when results can take time and in most cases aren’t guaranteed, particularly when web design services don’t necessarily include SEO.

We’re seeing more and more small businesses trying out SEO for themselves, which I think is a great thing. Normal marketing activities that a small business owner may be doing anyway can easily be adapted to help with SEO – participating in forums, distributing press releases, running a blog, getting listed on directories – all these things can help with SEO. The risk of course is that it is easy to go overboard with SEO and get yourself penalised or even banned from search engines – my advice to anyone trying out SEO would be to seriously research the risks first.

SEO is weird in that certain trains of thought lead you to the wrong conclusion. More keywords on a page don’t necessarily equal better rankings; more pages on a site won’t necessarily mean you can target more keywords; more links to a site might not improve your rankings. “Optimisation” is the keyword here – find the optimal point for each area of SEO and don’t go overboard.

What is the most difficult part of the search engine optimisation process?

Waiting for results! Being too impatient can lead you to trying to force change and that’s never a good idea. Finish a piece of work and when you are happy with it, leave it and move onto something else.

In general though, I think one of the hardest areas of SEO can be to accept the fact that you don’t know everything. At every stage of the learning process you can run the risk of becoming comfortable with what you know – breaking free of that mindset can be tough, but needs to be done. SEO changes all the time, and even the best SEOs in the world don’t know it all.

What is the hardest part of helping an ecommerce site rank in Google?

Unique content. Generally, ecommerce sites sell products that are available elsewhere, so you might share common information with other sites (product names, product details, etc) – it’s important to implement some mechanism to add unique content to your site. This could be reviews, or rewriting product descriptions, or various other ways of adding unique content to your product pages.

The next really hard step is interlinking your pages. It’s not enough to simply throw up 5,000 pages and hope they all get indexed and rank well – you need to think carefully about how you present your pages to users and search engines.

What do you do if the store is just bland and doesn’t stand out?

A good graphic designer is gold dust! So many businesses will happily pay thousands for SEO, PPC, marketing, PR and so on – but not bother with a few hundred quid on a graphic designer to do a good logo and site design. That’s nuts! Using graphical adverts to cross promote your content can be a great way to liven up your page.

But the look of the site is just a small part of the equation – if your content is dull or you don’t have much of it, then site owners should have a think about the purpose of each type of page on the site. What more could be added to these pages? What other features could you add to the site? What are the competition doing? What are the competition NOT doing? What kind of things do your users want?

Even the most boring sites can be jazzed up with the help of a good designer and little bit of creative thought.

On your SEO blog you mentioned that blogs are a great way to spice up a slightly boring industry and build links through quality content, are most of your client’s pretty receiptive to the idea of starting a blog?

Mostly yes, but I have to say – I’m not a fan of this “I need to have a blog to help with SEO” mentality that seems to be going around just now. Blogs don’t instantly help with SEO – in fact if they are implemented badly, then they can easily be holding back your SEO efforts.

The value of a blog is regular eyeballs on your site – that gives you real estate to cross promote your products and services. That’s the main bonus to having a blog. SEO can slot into this – through the process of cross promoting your products and services you can help your SEO activities by linking to your key pages. You also get a SEO bonus *if* people link to your blog posts. That’s a big IF. I would advise people to carefully think about the time and effort that goes into blogging and whether or not they can handle that. That might be too much for small businesses who wouldn’t see a good return on their time. However, if a business can allocate an employee or freelancer to blog regularly then it can be a great bonus for your online marketing activities.

What I wouldn’t do:

Use a blog as an easy way to publish optimised content that you relied on for your business. Most out of the box blog software packages aren’t good for this.

Think that a blog instantly equals SEO benefit – it takes a lot of work.

What would you recommend to a small business owner who is currently depending on Google for traffic yet afraid of this dependence?

Don’t worry too much about the dependence, but certainly look at other ways of expanding your business. I’d be worried if they were doing anything remotely dodgy – that’s just a recipe for disaster. But most small business websites don’t need to worry too much about losing traffic overnight if they are a legitimate business.

PPC campaigns can be a cost effective way to expand your business – low risk, measurable return and you can start off with a small budget. Forums and business networking groups can be another great way to find more business. Affiliate marketing is another, but may take some investment to setup properly. And then you also have any form of offline marketing!

At the end of the day, if you are making money from free Google traffic, then you should have money to spend on marketing. If not, then there is something wrong with your business model and not just your reliance on Google.

Can you share any success stories that make you feel all warm inside?

Well, I think the main story from the past few years is working with www.thebestof.co.uk since launch. I didn’t quite expect it to be seeing 1.3 million visitors a month 3 years ago when founder Nigel Botterill first spoke with me about his new idea for a web based franchise, but here we are! It has been a challenging project that has turned into a very successful business – I’d love to take credit for that, but it’s been down to the foresight, innovation and hard work put in by Nigel and all the staff and franchisees at N5 Ltd. This year has been particularly interesting – we’ve gone back to the drawing board with the site and concept (some of the reasons being the site has grown faster than expected and we are reassessing many of the SEO and design features). As an SEO it has been brilliant to work on a project like this, but also to be able to plan ahead and suggest new ideas.

As an SEO I can be quite competitive a times, so it’s great working with an industry leader – I have a quiet chuckle to myself when I see “competitors” crop up and failing miserably to make the grade – we’ve even seen some just lift copy or SEO elements (such as title tags) directly from our site – yet fail to perform. I don’t think most quite realise the issues involved in big site SEO!

The new site we’re working on now is going to be awesome – we really will be looking to break the mold when it comes to marketing for small businesses, with a level of integration between offline and online marketing concepts that isn’t being done anywhere else. Definitely one to watch in 2008!

Huge thanks to Scott for doing the interview with us and be sure to visit his company site eFlaunt and his SEO blog at Fused Nation!

Aaron was kind enough to let us ask him some questions about his new training program, UK SEO, advice for small businesses looking for an SEO, and business blogging.

You currently are offering an online SEO training program instead of the SEO book you have sold for so long. Why did you decide to make the switch?

Some people would buy my ebook, not read it, ask for hours of free email consulting (when I actually made it hard to find the button for selling consulting at $500/hr because I was doing too much of it), and then some of those people who would waste hours of my time would also do a reverse charge. So basically they would steal $10 of my money and hours of my life.

Not all customers were like that (in fact most were not) but it only takes a few nasty ones to eat up most of your resources when you are a one person company. As the email list get rich quick hyped up traditional marketers started hyping the field of SEO too many potential customers were of poor quality. Given my fairly accessible price point, I was getting a lot of the get rich quick customers who could not afford to spend thousands of dollars on the offers the email list marketers were pitching.

So my time was becoming worth less and less and my job was becoming less and less enjoyable. And to some degree on bad days I think that made me kinda question humanity, and it made it harder to deliver value to some of the better customers. Then on my side projects…the ones that were getting 5% of my time my income kept increasing and increasing and increasing.

And on the other end of the spectrum Google got much more aggressive at hand editing the search results. Which meant that many answers to questions and strategies were quite subjective depending on a lot of factors. And so that made interaction between customer and teacher more important.

I figured by running a membership site it would basically erase that 5% of customers that were eating up 50% of my time, while simultaneously allowing me to engage in more meaningful relationships with customers who value my time. Plus if the price point was proper it would filter out bad leads and bring in people who were serious about doing well, and many customers would help each other. It has worked out better than expected thus far.

What skill level is the SEO training program aimed at?

Honestly most people who have been in the field for a few years are somewhat arrogent in their views, feeling that they already know everything, so based on that I think a lot of the potential client pool skews toward people new to the field.

But at the same time I have worked on some of the largest websites and networks…so I have a range of experience that can help beginners right on through to people who have been in the field as long or longer than I have. Plus some of the people in the community have been in the field over twice as long as I have, and have great insights that help me come up with new ideas and strategies. If I am learning a lot I figure most anybody who engages in the site should be able to learn something of tangible value. And if you are operating at scale just a couple decent ideas could be worth hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.

Do you think the SEO training program could do the majority of training for an in house SEO position at a larger company if the person is web savoy?

Sure. The one big issue is that if they have a big site it might also make sense to buy an hour or two of consulting if they wanted specific action oriented advice and were not comfortable getting too specific about their issues in our forum. Most people are quite open in our forums (after all the odds of one of the other forum members being a direct competitor are probably low).

Lots of larger sites have brand assets that can be creatively leveraged to dominate the search results. But sometimes you have to listen to people say their problems to really be able to get at the core of them. Meaning that I can write the answer in a training module, and I could answer the same question on the forum, but sometimes voice inflections and talking spews out stuff on accident…some of those accidents turn out to lead to answers to issues surrounding the company / brand / website / etc.

I guess I think there is a need for both formats for some people. In general one can get a lot out of our training program and forums, but some companies have specific issues which need addressed that are not common (due to custom content management systems and surrounding brand or business issues).

Do you think there is still an advantage to be gained when using a .co.uk domain to optimize for keywords in Google.co.uk, or with the addition of being able to tell Google Webmaster Central the country that the site is aimed at has that advantage disappeared?

I think this is one of the bigger issues facing non-US webmasters in the current marketplace. I am mostly focused on the US search results at the moment, but numerous SEOs I trust have claimed that they get much more ranking ability from a local domain than from a foreign domain with a local setting inside of webmaster central. Plus there is the perceived relevancy factor… .co.uk screams relevancy to a person living in the UK.

For companies that do business in both the USA and UK and want to rank in the top for keywords on both Google.com and Google.co.uk what do you recommend? Should they run two different sites each focused on one of those geographic areas?

Multiple separate domains make sense as long as you have the capital resources to market all the different websites. Another option if you have a small(ish) website and a limited budget is to use uk.mydomain.com for the UK and mydomain.com for the US. In this case you would still want to buy mydomain.co.uk and redirect it at uk.mydomain.com just in case your strategy changes down the road. And if it is not performing as well as expected and you have used up many of your best UK specific link sources it might make sense to go with mydomain.co.uk.

Paid links are a hot topic, do you still use them with your clients or do you avoid them for fear of Google’s wrath?

I use just about anything that works and is considered Google approved. If they say the Yahoo! Directory is legitimate then my sites get listed there. Beyond that much of my link buying is done indirectly – it comes as a side effect of a promotion. Last August I wrote a post on how to buy links without being called a spammer. I use many of those techniques on my most important websites.

What recommendations would you make to a small business owner who is currently depending on Google for 60% of their traffic yet afraid of this dependence?

Google aims to be a reflection of user intent, but perhaps with a bias toward large brands and informational websites. Sick of relying on Google too much? The solutions are to:

• Work on branding and public relations to get coverage and traffic flow from other sources.
• Create many different ways for people to find you and many reasons for people to want to talk about you.
• Make it easy for the media and/or thought leaders in your space to trust you by sharing valuable information.
• I am a big fan of blogs, but they are not for everyone.

For companies looking for an individual or agency to handle search engine marketing what questions should they ask to make sure they are hiring someone who knows what they are doing?

I think they should not rely on you or I to tell them those questions in a free online interview. Both of us have our own biases and business models to promote. Much of the free advice costs more than paid advice when you factor in the associated biases and self promotion. For instance, many domain registrars and hosts charge for an SEO service that offers no real value, but because the price point is low many people buy it.

Having said that though, here are some tips:

Before they invest in outsourcing they need to invest in learning. Perhaps they can go to an SEO related conference, join an online training program (though that tip is a bit self serving), or learn through experimentation and reading blogs and forums and books.

Install analytics on day 1 and perhaps even try some PPC ads to see what words work well for your business prior to committing thousands of pounds into an SEO strategy that might be targeting the wrong words.

There are lots of free SEO tools on the market. But do not expect any one of them to be a magic bullet that makes or breaks you. Before spending a lot on SEO tools consider some of the free tools that are offered by the engines. And look out for the instant autopilot SEO automation tools and never-ending scrolling sales letters…those are the products to avoid

Many of the times when a business chooses the wrong SEO vendor it is because the business is too cheap. If I can make X a month promoting my sites that I retain cash flow and ownership over it is hard for me to want to work to promote a far inferior site for 2% of X. John Andrews made a great post about SEO and a market for lemons worth reading.

Many of the times when the SEO fails it is because someone basically wanted to make a turd look like it was made of solid gold. Before hiring an SEO firm, a company should have points of differentiation in the marketplace other than price and quality of service – those two points of differentiation typically matter after people have already found you and bought from you.

Network in their own industry. If an external SEO can replicate all of their promotional and link building activities then they are not standing on stable ground. They need to be part of the promotion as well.

You have a great guide entitled the Blogger’s Guide to SEO at just the time I see more and more established UK companies starting blogs. One common fear I hear from them is that their industry is just too boring and they can’t figure out ways to make it exciting to get traffic that might result in sales and needed links. Do you think that any company can have a blog that helps them in their marketing efforts no matter the industry? Or are there limits?

I think the problem is that everyone says they have no time because their priorities are not in order. The best marketing and the best content ideas often come from founders and/or people deep inside businesses. But you can’t assume everyone knows how great you are or you know what you know if you do not share it.

The reporters covering your field and the bloggers in your space want to write about something – it may as well be you.

Once you have a premium brand position you can charge more for your services and you get quicker feedback when you make business changes…you go from being underpriced from a risk standpoint to being overpriced from the risk adversion and paying for quality standpoint. Blogs are crucial for knowledge workers.

Blogs and rankings also have a self-reinforcing network effect. It is a lot of effort to become a thought leader in your space, but once you enjoy that position it odes not go away. Even search companies like Google have guys like Matt Cutts blogging and highlighting new products. Someone in your company probably should be blogging too.

Great information and a big thanks to Aaron Wall of SEO Book for doing that interview with us! Be sure to check out his blog, tools, and new online SEO training program! I’m going to try it out later this week and should post a review here after a few months.