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Lily Ray is the Senior SEO Director and Head of Organic Research at Amsive Digital, where she provides strategic leadership for the agency’s SEO client programs. Lily has worked across a variety of verticals with a focus on retail, e-commerce, B2B and CPG sites. She loves diving into algorithm updates, analyzing E-A-T, assessing quality issues and solving technical SEO mysteries.
“Just familiarize yourself with Google’s Guidelines and don’t bother wasting time trying to trick the algorithms.”
“You have to actually do the work, actually do the testing and actually demonstrate to Google that you are a true expert in your field.”
“It’s better to be honest and humble about your SEO wisdom than to pretend you know something you do not. Pretending is what gets you in trouble; there is nothing worse than putting your foot in your mouth in an effort to try to come across as an expert. Be honest when you don’t know things! Your clients will appreciate it.”
“It’s not enough to just add E-A-T enhancements to the content or look for shortcuts; if the site doesn’t have a proven track record of demonstrating authority on the topic (in the form of robust, high-quality content, authoritative backlinks and depth of coverage), it will be very hard to compete across many categories. ”
“It’s important to make your brand and your content as visible as possible not only across search, but with video, audio, podcast, multilingual content, and any other medium that makes sense for your business.”
“If you look at your site and you think that some of the content isn’t very helpful, what’s the best approach, just knock it off, delete it.”
“Google cares about providing high-quality, valuable, relevant content to its users as quickly as possible, and Google also hates spam.”
“The nice thing about being a white-hat SEO is that the things you would want to see as a Google user are usually the same things you recommend for your clients’ SEO strategies.”
“I would define black or grey-hat as the strategies that are either directly in violation of the Guidelines, or a close violation. Either way, those strategies are usually not worth the risk, unless you’re working on sites where you don’t mind risking being penalized or devalued during an algorithm update. That is not an option when you are working with medium to large businesses and major brands.”
“Don’t dabble in grey or black hat SEO tactics (buying links, creating low-quality doorway pages, buying fake reviews, cloaking, etc.) It’s just not a good approach to starting a career in SEO and thinking that these types of tactics will reliably drive traffic to your clients’ sites without also putting them at risk.”
“There’s too much variability and unpredictability to guarantee specific rankings in SEO, and clients have to understand that up front.”
“I think SEO will become more of an amorphous and multi-faceted strategy than what it has traditionally been: simply optimizing for the 10 blue links.”
“The amount of knowledge and the variety of skills required to do a good job in SEO have expanded, particularly on the technical front. This evolution also makes it necessary for SEOs to think outside of the box with how they plan to approach their strategies for their clients – outdated techniques or simply understanding the basics of SEO will not be sufficient in an increasingly competitive organic landscape. “
“There is no better feeling than unearthing a problem that can potentially have a huge SEO impact very quickly, and that usually only happens with technical SEO.”
“The thing about SEO is that, no matter how long you do it, much of your work is theory and speculation – you do what you think is best based on your own experience, and what Google and other SEO experts have recommended. But you never fully know if what you are doing is the right approach.”
“Gain the experience of launching your own website: buy a domain, set up a CMS or code it from scratch, even if you only know basic HTML, CSS and/or JavaScript. Implement your SEO ideas on your site and monitor what happens. Or do this same thing for a friend or family member’s website. This type of experience is invaluable to ensuring that you will actually know what you are talking about with clients.”
Geoff Breitling: If you want to build or scale a 7 figure SEO agency, you should watch this short video.