This week, we interviewed Damilola Shoremekun, a senior SEO Specialist with over 5 years of experience.
Prior to taking on the role of SEO Specialist at Bliss Drive, a California based SEO Agency, Damilola was the Senior SEO Specialist for Workforce Group, App Store Optimisation Specialist for Zone Tech Park, and SEO Manager for Light Visit Digital Media.
We talk about his journey in SEO, his general approach to SEO, the key factors in ranking pages better, the most impactful actions one can take to improve their SEO, tips for SEO hopefuls, etc.
First-time reader? And want to be notified when the next edition is live? Welcome!
Subscribe here 👇😛.
Note: This full conversation has been lightly edited for brevity and better readability.
Damilola, let's start from the beginning. Tell us when your relationship with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) begins. How did it start?
While in university, I was working as a content writer; I wrote for bloggers and freelance on Fiverr until I heard about Amazon affiliate marketing. I did my research and realised the backbone of any affiliate website is SEO. That started my career. Thanks to the internet.
It was a trial and error approach, and I made a lot of errors in the first year. And over the years, I became so good you can't ignore me.
How long have you been an SEO specialist and across what industries?
A few months over 5 years now, which is weird to say as it feels like it was just last week.
I’ve delivered SEO Campaigns for B2B and B2C companies in different industries ranging from Financial Institutions, Consulting firms, Real Estate, Religious Organisations, and Telecoms, to mention a few.
How would you explain its meaning and value to a potential client, especially one who doesn't understand its value? What kind of results can someone expect when investing in SEO?
Explaining the value to a potential client is quite easy once you remember the end goal of every business is to make money. I often use the library analogy.
Finding a website on search engines is like finding a book in the library. First, you’ll type your keyword into the library search. Then, a list of books will be displayed. But you'd most likely choose the book with the best reviews. Or you'd choose one displayed out front in the library.
However, if a book is not categorised correctly, you’ll never find the book. This is where SEO comes in.
Proper SEO will categorise your “book” (website) so people can find it. It will make your site appear at the highest possible rank on the result list of related search queries on search engines (Google, Bing etc.).
The more keywords your book(website) can be found with, the higher the chances of people reading the book (organic traffic to your website).
With good conversion rate optimization and a good landing page experience, organic traffic to your website will result in qualified leads or sales. The main goal of SEO is to offer a great experience to visitors who land on your site via organic search.
Love the Library analogy. What is your general approach in SEO - whether on technical SEO, overall SEO strategy, content and SEO, and other subsets of SEO?
Creating a winning strategy starts with defining your goals. Without clear goals, your SEO activities won’t have measurable ROI. It’s also important to tie SEO outcomes to top-level metrics such as revenue.
So you can start by identifying your target marketing results, and then work backwards to define your process goals.
"SEO is a one-time process. One blog post, and you're on Google's first page, getting all the traffic". No?
No!!!! SEO is an ongoing process. It’s not a one-time event. It’s a process because the market, the competition, and the search engines are constantly changing and evolving. Even when you get top ranks for your targeted key terms you still have to continue optimising your website.
What’s your biggest SEO win?
I would have to say when I was recruited to be in charge of SEO at Workforce Group. I helped one of our clients increase organic search revenue by over 100% in my first 6 months at Workforce.
What are the key factors in ranking pages better?
Page ranking depends primarily on 3 main pillars:
Technical and Structure: This is the primary part of SEO. Having a website structure that is easy for search engines to crawl and users to navigate is essential. Then, you need to prioritise what to index according to business goals and user intention.
Many subjects need to be targeted from a SEO perspective when talking about the ‘technical & structure’ aspect: responsiveness/adaptiveness, server rules, page speed, meta-rules & integration, front end code, javascript use, HTTP status code usage, structured data, security, transaction process, error pages, redirect rules, etc…
High-Quality Content: Target Audience driven content will drive great results. Knowing how to structure your site, your pages, and your content for search engines is great but don’t forget that visitors generate traffic and revenue on your site, not search engines. That’s why it’s fundamental to know the profile of your customers to be able to create content that resonates with them.
Off-site acquisition: The number (and quality) of backlinks is one of Google’s primary criteria to evaluate the popularity of a domain. Developing your popularity is crucial for SEO because this will impact mid/long-term incoming traffic from organic search, branded, or non-branded. Having these external signals matter to search engines.
If any of those 3 are lacking, you have a higher opportunity for improving SEO.
How long does SEO work typically take to start seeing results?
This is dependent on several variables. It should be noted however that SEO doesn't work instantly. A small minority of sites will start seeing results after 2 months (depending on the severity of the technical issues present on the site).
The large majority see substantial results after 6 months.
Are there cases where SEO isn’t worth doing or doesn’t provide a positive ROI? (and how to know)
This is very rare but if you’re already an industry leader, massively beating the competition, technical SEO is dialled in with lots of great content, and an extremely high level of backlinks, then any short term work won’t have much of an effect.
Alternatively, a site that is in a very limited niche in terms of search potential wouldn’t ever see much search engine traffic no matter how much optimisation is done.
These can both be avoided during a site analysis and proposal stage where it is advised that SEO isn’t the preferred marketing option.
Given limited resources, how can a small business decide whether it should invest in SEO or PPC?
The choice of SEO or PPC depends on what your goals are, and what the marketplace looks like. PPC is great for a company that is looking to rank for competitive keywords that would be difficult to rank organically. Also, if a company needs quick results (around a product launch, for example) and doesn’t have time for organic SEO to work its magic, PPC is the perfect choice. However, a strategic and well-executed SEO strategy will help a company boost brand awareness and sustain that increased brand awareness over time.
What are some of the most impactful actions one can take to improve their SEO?
There are several actions to take to improve your SEO, I will mention just three. 1) track metrics with Google Analytics and use the insight gained to optimise your website. There is no improvement without data analysis, 2) creating a diverse content marketing strategy, and 3) optimising existing content for SEO best practices.
Are there any myths or misleading SEO philosophies you still see people following?
There are several of them. Sometimes I’m amazed at some things I hear from digital marketers. Some will say “Google only ranks fresh content”, “Duplicate content will get you penalised” and lastly “PageRank doesn’t matter anymore”.
What’s the #1 SEO mistake you see people making?
Most people think long-tail keywords consist of many words, but this isn’t entirely accurate. Long-tail keywords are queries with low individual search volumes.
Most times, the number of words doesn’t matter. So most SEO specialists miss out on great keywords because it has less than three words; they say it’s a seed keyword because of the number of words.
What are some of your favourite SEO blogs, apps, and resources?
I frequent Search Engine Journal, Backlinko and Neil Patel’s blog.
At what level (monthly revenue) do you think a small business owner should invest in SEO?
I would say you should invest in SEO when you can afford it. However, have a SEO specialist on board from the moment you start building the website to create the site architecture and make other technical recommendations.
For those new to SEO, what tips do you've for them?
No shortcut to ranking. Taking shortcuts or getting spammy backlinks can actually hurt your site.
The best way to win the SEO war is to take your time to understand the business strategy and your target audience. This is where the fun starts. Create valuable content, and be consistent with your effort. You will see results.
Your job is to drive quality traffic that drives business goals. Trying to rank for keywords is NOT a business goal. You can spend a lot to achieve this, but it’s going to be a waste of time and money.
It’s a lot of work! Hard work.
So what do you love most about your job?
The joy of building a website from scratch, and in a few months, people from any place in the world search for a keyword randomly, and your product or service pops up (That brand visibility). I also love that part where I take my audience through a journey on the website till they perform the desired action (sales).
What's the worst?
When your clients want results immediately; like they want you to wand your magic stick and organic traffic starts flowing.
Name two products you can’t do without and tell me why.
That will be my laptop and my Airpods. I can do anything from work to life with my laptop, while my Airpod is for music. I work better with music, and I also use music to relax.
Before I remove the shackles, tell me where people can find you online.
You can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter
Now, that's a wrap. Thanks for this long interview, Damilola. This was an extremely educational interview.
We would like to hear your thoughts on the interview in the comments.
Here are the key takeaways from the interview:
You can literally start a career in any field with the help of the internet. Take full advantage of it.
SEO is an ongoing process. It’s not a one-time event.
No shortcuts to ranking.
Most sites will see solid results after 6 months.
SEO is an excellent long term strategy, but if you’re just looking for a quick result, try PPC first.
Trying to rank for keywords is NOT a business goal.
A site that is in a very limited niche in terms of search potential wouldn’t ever see much search engine traffic no matter how much optimisation is done.
With good conversion rate optimization and a good landing page experience, organic traffic to your site will result in qualified leads or sales.
Create valuable, shareable content to get quality backlinks and potential viral sharing.
First-time reader? And want to be notified when the next edition is live? Subscribe here 👇.
But If you just want to reach out and give Noticing other people you’d like us to interview, drop us an email at noticingafrica@gmail.com.
To get more of Noticing, follow us on:
Oh, last thing!
The newsletter is completely free. But If you like what we do and you’re feeling generous, please consider supporting our work here.