SEO Trends, Organic Growth & Personal Branding With Craig Campbell

The game of search has evolved into more than just a way to find things on the internet.

Digital marketers are often confused about which marketing channels to prioritize or add into the mix.

You don’t want to focus on one way to get traffic. Craig Campbell is a well-knownseo professional from Glasgow and PageOptimizer Pro’s No. 1 most influentialseo of 2020.

We had a chance to chat with the man behind the YouTube channel that welcomes you with knowledge bombs that will make you money, to get his take on the latest digital marketing tools.

He shared bits of wisdom from his 20 years of experience in the industry.

The past and future of the internet.

How much has the landscape of search changed since you first became interested in it?

While it has changed a lot, the core principles of content and links are the same as when I first started in this industry.

Things have evolved a lot, and the quality of content, relevance of links, and a lot of other nuances are present. The basics are very much the same.

The learning curve is a lot easier these days, and we have clever people all over the world creating amazing tools to help us.

It used to be a lot of trial and error, but using the tools to make the job easier has helped a lot over the last few years.

Learning how to do it the hard way, using my own brain and common sense, and not having everything handed to me on a plate helped me learn.

It took longer but it was fun. I used to have to do it the hard way, but these days it’s not as hard.

What do you know now that you didn’t know before?

I’ve been asked this many times. The journey has been enjoyable for me. They have gotten me to where I am today despite the many mistakes I have made. At the beginning, I was struggling with training my internal team to do the tasks I wanted them to do.

I struggled to do this properly for a long time, and it hampered my ability to scale and cause a lot of stress. Learning to delegate and build standard operating procedures would have been a good thing.

I wish I had tried and tested for myself and tried to read between the lines when I watched a presentation. I was naive back in the day and used to just add what other people had said without doing my own research.

When I started my career, I didn’t know how good I was, but there is a part of the journey where you under value yourself or allow your prices to be driven down, and before you know it, you have a lot of clients who are paying you.

Someone should have sat me down and tried to give me advice. No one knew what they were doing when I started in the early 2000s.

What do you think is going to happen in the next three years?

This is a question that is difficult to answer, I have heard people say that voice search is the next big thing, and let’s all double down on that.

We have heard people talk about how we will replace content writers with artificial intelligence. A lot of these things have failed.

I don’t think there will be major changes in technology over the next few years.

It is obvious that the organic search positions are being pushed further down. Organic traffic is converting well.

I’ve been in the industry for 20 years and I still see websites that aren’t doing the basics right. I think it’s time for people to level up on their processes and procedures and how they view their website in order to start treating them like a real business. There will be gains over the next few years.

We do evolve, we do bring updates out, and of course, those cutting corners or not doing the basics right eventually get penalized in some way, shape, or form.

There are marketing tools and channels to drive traffic.

Is there a tool that you would recommend for local businesses?

One tool for local is difficult. Local Falcon is one of the tools I use to check out my ranking on the internet.

Many small businesses don’t know how much traffic comes from the map positions.

It is a large part of the world, but it is a small part of our community. I see a lot of businesses who are not even ranked.

Is there a marketing channel that can help drive organic traffic?

This is something I miss out on a lot. I hear people getting amazing traffic from platforms, but I have yet to get to know them.

I bought a course to figure out what people are doing on the board to get more traffic. Even though email marketing is a very old-school way of marketing, it works really well now.

I use a lot of social media, in general.

It has been said that TikTok gets more traffic than the internet giant. I don’t know how accurate that statement is, but I know that there are a lot of people on that platform, and it would be foolish to ignore it.

I always look at ways to drive traffic to my website, whether that be paid, social, emails, or retargeting. You need to grab what you can. You don’t want to focus on one thing.

Over the last few years, I’ve found YouTube to be an amazing platform. When COVID hit, I took the opportunity to do more video content, and that has worked well in my favor.

Taking the leap to build a personal brand.

From the first day, what should a digital marketer be aware of?

They should learn as much as they can from agency life, see it as their apprenticeship, and learn as much as they can on the processes, reporting, and all of the amazing stuff that agencies do very well.

They should be aware that there is a lot of fluff on the agency side and a lot of client deliverables that don’t always mean they are good.

I don’t think every agency does all the fluff. A lot of people who come out of agencies are trained to speak to clients about fluff.

I think it’s important for them to know that playing the actual game against what we tell clients is not always the same game. They should be aware of the difference when they leave agency life.

A friend of mine has grown in recent years. Ryan Darani worked for a big digital agency, and for sure, he learned a lot, which still works well in his favor.

There were areas of weakness and a bad agency mindset that had to be fixed now that he is a free agent. He is doing great for a person who went out on his own two years ago.

Many people who haven’t experienced agency life fall short on the technical stuff, so grab all you can from it.

What is your greatest achievement to date?

The best achievement other than some of the website flips and money gains I have made is making the transition from unknown agency owner into becoming a personal brand.

It is an easy task for a lot of people. It’s a lot of hard work to be on video, speak at conferences, and offer value upfront. I traveled to conferences and spoke in front of an audience, but it took me outside my comfort zone.

It was something I had never done before, and I hated speaking in front of an audience when I was a student.

While I was building my agency, I always had a voice in my head that said, “You can do this!” You should go and do it. Why don’t anyone else go up there and get the exposure?

You have to believe that you can do it. Many people don’t want to speak to other people because of their shyness, but they all have the same fears when speaking to other people.

I had serious nerves at the beginning of my speaking career, and it was amazing to overcome them, and that was a huge achievement for me.

There is a key to career growth.

Is it possible to share any growth hacks that work for you?

For a long time, I have seen traffic work well when sent to a video, a page, or something. Even if we take a professional networking site.

If someone in my network likes a post and comments on it or shares it, it will be seen by their friends and hopefully they will like it.

When it sees something that is popular, it ranks it highly. When you want a post to go viral, it’s the same thing.

The first tip is to offer value upfront. People won’t engage with boring content. If you can offer some value upfront, that’s great.

When I do a post on my website, I will send it to my push notifications. It goes out on the internet. It will go to my mailing list if it is a great post. I could also do paid social ads.

If you use your own audience first and use a sequence of events to get traffic onto your articles, it will give you the lift you need to make the post viral.

What advice do you have for people just starting out in the business world?

Many people early in their careers or when they start a start-up analyze every single small detail before taking action Taking action is highly recommended by me. What is the reason over-analyze things? Common sense is used to keep it simple.

It’s always good to learn from your mistakes, and a bit of effort never goes astray in this industry. Start taking actions.

It is always a good thing if I learn from my mistakes.

You will never be able to hit your goals straight off the bat, no matter what you are working on. Don’t be fooled by anyone suggesting that they know what they’re doing, no one in this game knows 100% of what they’re doing

Don’t be afraid to try and add your own mix to things.

Campbell shared his insights on domain leasing, link-building best practices, and a lot more on the show.

There are more resources.

The image is courtesy of Craig Campbell.