Interview With Scott Boyd Of eFlaunt: UK SEO Specialist

Today we have an interview with Scott Boyd of the Scotland based marketing agency eFlaunt! Scott has been doing search engine marketing and optimisation work since 2002 and also runs the SEO blog Fused Nation. We are going to be talking to him about his services, the UK SEO market, optimising ecommerce stores, blogs, success stories and more!

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!