My last vlog for my trip to Boston was with Jeff Selig (@seosem), who is the VP, Director of Earned Media and Analytics at Overdrive Interactive. He started back in 1995 when he bought his first domain and built a web site. He quickly became a domainer, and at one point he had 3,000 domain names. And back in the old days, search engines would rank exact match domain names well, so he did a lot of park domains with ads on them. From there he built up sites and eventually started working in the affiliate marketing space. He is old school and has been through all of the fun days of gaming search engines.
So we kind of spent some time talking about how the web matured over the years, partially because of SEOs gaming search.
We then moved into discussing E-A-T and Google algorithms. His company does not chase algorithms, instead they focus on deep authoritative level content, which is what the user wants. We should be building value and it is not just about the pre-buy funnel but the post-buy funnel and you need to own the full stream. And he believes E-A-T or beyond applies to not just medical or health space, but to even seller printers.
We then traveled overseas to discuss international SEO. A lot of Overdrive’s clients are ready or have already have sites internationally. When he built a site for a client in China, the company had to deal with the big search engine there, Baidu. And while Google doesn’t use the meta keywords tag, Baidu and Yandex do use that tag. HTML language tags versus hreflang tags also. He explains that sometimes his firm will analyze the analytics at the company and see a missed opportunity around going international. He said when it comes to international SEO, the keywords are a big challenge, because it is not just the local language, but some people can search in English with a local language.
Jeff summed it up that it all comes down to it, it is about setting the customer up for success and measuring everything to determine what moves have worked and what moves the customer should make sense.
Hope you like this video interview!
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