Today I present another written interview with Andrew Scherer of Marketer’s Center, an SEO company.
Check out the interview
1. What got you interested in SEO as a business? Share your story.
I never did well in school, in fact I never graduated highschool. I knew my future was pretty bleak unless I took things by the reins and figured out how to make money on my own. I started years before I got into SEO just trying to make money online somehow. After a lot of failed experiments I landed on something simple, and in 2006 I started writing articles for webmasters on DigitalPoint Forums (back when it was good). I figured out eventually that I could charge more for my work if I also packaged it with article submission services. Eventually I combined what I was doing, content and links, and started doing it for my own sites exclusively. Within a couple years I was killing it.
2. What do you believe is working today in SEO?
After getting traumatized by a couple major Google updates like Penguin, I personally take the approach of slow, consistent, and natural. I am not aggressive in my link and site building, nor do I even build exact match anchor text links anymore. There are some SEOs that are the complete opposite of this and employ churn and burn SEO strategies. I think Panda and Penguin has made the division between white and black hat even wider.
I do a lot of stuff in local now. I like citations, press releases, guest posts done very inconspicuously, linkbuilding off of big social sites, contextual links on big media sites, videos. With the exception of blasted spam and blog networks, most of what worked a long time ago still works today, it just depends on how it’s done.
3. Do you have any tools that aid you with your link building efforts? What is working well for you today? This could be reporting tools or link building tools.
I probably have too many subscriptions, at one point I was spending $700/mo on subscriptions but not so much anymore.
I like brightlocal, whitespark, scrapebox, ranktrackr, micrositemasters, serpiq, wordAI, screaming frog, ahrefs, semrush, and sendible.
4. Where do you see SEO going in the future?
I think as long as there are search results displayed “naturally” there will always be a way to manipulate them. People gravitate towards results that aren’t sponsored, so I don’t think they would go away. But I think people that specialize in SEO only limit themselves needlessly. There is such a broad scope of skills SEOs can learn like conversion optimization, deep analytics, PPC, media buying, mobile marketing, etc… that we don’t have to worry about the future of SEO too much. I think about this sometimes.
5. What are your future plans for 2014 and beyond?
I am getting more and more into local SEO. The yellow pages is pretty much dead and more people are going online to search for local goods and services. I am starting to get into local lead generation and I know a few guys killing it in that space. It is basically like affiliate marketing without the enormous competition and shady networks that shave off a % of what you earn.
I’m also focusing on building Marketer’s Center up with more whitelabel linkbuilding and reseller SEO services. 95% of our orders come from SEO consultants and I have a lot of guys that resell what we do for basically 3-4x+ what we charge. It’s a fun business and I like to help people make money.
