On July 20th I attended the Kansas City Direct Marketing Association’s Data-Driven Marketing Boot Camp, their all-day educational seminar held at the new Lifted Spirits Distillery downtown. Entitled “Thinking Outside the Textbook: Marketing Knowledge that Springs off The Page”, the seminar featured 7 speakers, with topics raging from innovative acceleration and integrated marketing to better understanding Google Analytics and finding your mental toughness.
All the speakers were informative and engaging, but one speaker that especially resonated with me was Quinn Sheek, Director of Demand Generation at DEG Digital. Sheek’s speech was entitled “SEO is Everything: The Evolution of the Organic Guru”, which gave a simple and direct answer to how to be more effective at SEO with 5 easy steps. Since I find determining SEO best practices to be elusive and confusing, these 5 steps helped put it in a better perspective for me.
The 5 steps Sheek outlined were:
- Curious-You have to be able to identify SEO issues, figure out why it happened, and how to fix it. You have to understand nearly all aspects of agency work and how it relates to what you are doing.
- Adaptable-you have to be constantly learning how Google algorithms change and affect SEO and adjust accordingly. Google changes its search algorithms 500-600 times per year.
- Collaborative-You need to work with everyone on the brand support staff and understand their roles. Focus on adding value to those you need support from . Be helpful, not condescending. Understand how they are incentivized, make it easy for them to use your recommendations.
- Determined-Because there are so many pieces (rankings, local search, security, content, traffic, speed, etc) you to be committed to understand everything, and how they interact with each other. Never stop learning, and keep on top of new trends by attending webinars and seminars and reading blogs.
- Patient-SEO results don’t happen overnight. Make sure you align expectations with your client that positive results can take up to 6 months to be realized.
The KCDMA is for marketing professionals from corporations, service providers, consultants and agencies. Their Boot Camp is held every year in July.