All your digital marketing questions, answered by the TAD speakers

How technical do SEOs need to be?

What I find, as I get more technical, the more defensive to development I get. If I work with a development team that just says what I...

What is your biggest challenge as an agency side SEO?

Every SEO faces the same challenge - developer relationship. That is the bane of my life. Because of how technical SEO has gotten, it...

What has been the biggest SEO insights during lockdown?

As we've seen most ecommerce sites just go through the roof? So where people have, especially with the sports brands, they've just not...

How do you work out the timescale for achieving the SEO goal?

Without looking at the website, it is really difficult to see. When you look at the website, you can plan based on what the impact will...

How do you know what a realistic SEO goal is?

Partly experience. When we look at the site, and we look at who the competitors are, you can realistically understand how much chance do...

If you could change one thing in the SEO industry, what would it be?

I think that people should not guarantee most of the things and I understand that clients want some guarantees. But for example, when I...

Do you need to redirect a URL if the only difference is the forward slash?

Yes, 100%. Even if you are not doing a website migration, the URLs with and without a forward slash (/) are technically different URLs to...

How can you prevent any loss in SEO value during an eCommerce migration?

When doing any ecommerce migration, there are always risks. That's important to understand. You can't guarantee that there won't be any...

Can we use more that one H2 or H3 tag on a page?

It doesn't really matter. Now, there's a lot of people that say it doesn't matter if you have multiple H1's on the page, I just think...

What needs to change in the SEO industry?

I would like to make it easier for more people to attend conferences. I'm lucky enough that I've become a popular speaker and I get...

Do Google use user experience metrics as a ranking factor?

I mean, of course, but it depends. Depends what you got, comes down to when you talk about user experience or on site user experience,...

Does the average small business owner understand the value of SEO?

I used to work for Yelp. Obviously they deal with a massive number of small businesses. It was quite obvious that small businesses did...

Should copywriters write for SEO or the website user?

The copywriter should always write for the user and then you have the SEO team to go through it and make sure it includes the right...

If a keyword converts on PPC, will it convert the same organically?

SEO and paid search work very closely together because there are a lot of insights, especially around more click queries. So you can get...

How large are big brand in-house SEO teams?

Yeah, depends on the business. Yes, they have an in house SEO team. That's basically not even on my team. So we have them situated,...

Should you first test with PPC before starting an SEO campaign?

I don't think it is either or. I think you don't have to do one in preference of the other. I think you should be doing multi channel and...

What would you do if a brand wrongly thinks they know best about SEO?

How do they think they know best? More often than not, you can prove it with those three main components, three metrics that matter,...

How much of an impact does brand awareness have on SEO?

So we actually did a brand study where we created fake search results and put them in front of people as if they were real search...

How does SEO differ working on big brand websites than small business websites?

It generally comes down to the platform you're using and it comes down to availability of resources most of the time. Now, we started out...

Why should SEO marketers study NLP (natural language processing)?

I do specify that NLP because a lot of time SEO's will go oh, Google uses NLP. They don't. They even say so in their own documents, they...