Barry Schwartz has been a key figure inside of Search Marketing Expo (SMX) since its conception almost 10 years ago. Some of the Site Strategics crew attended SMX West back in February and had a blast. Schwartz is the one who made the decisions regarding the SEO portion at SMX West, so it only seemed fitting that we would have him as a guest on Edge. Plus, it’s an added bonus that our CEO, Erin Sparks, has followed Schwartz for years and has a slight man-crush on him!
“Overall, people are getting it [SEO] and it’s less of an issue than it was five years ago when you just had people practicing black hat SEO and spamming everything,” said Schwartz.
That’s always good to hear because we firmly believe in the “white hat” approach to SEO, which includes expert keyword analysis, site structure optimization, internal and external linking, and optimized content creation. It is our goal to provide clients with long-term success.
During our discussion with Schwartz, we talked about the growth of the SEO industry in general. “It’s not like it was back in the day. Nowadays it’s harder to make a dent. We’re not seeing explosive growth by any means,” commented Schwartz.
Yet, as we’ve seen, it’s becoming harder and harder to spam websites today versus five or 10 years ago. More and more people are realizing that SEO is no longer tactic driven, but must be part of the overall marketing strategy.
“We’re seeing that SEO is more marketing focused with mobile-friendly apps and tools. It’s part of the overall web strategy and can’t just be technical SEO anymore,” said Schwartz.
He also stated that SEO professionals need to look at the bigger picture and what’s best for the end user. “You need to step back and look at things from a higher level to get the overall picture,” said Schwartz.
The final piece of advice from Schwartz for SEO insiders had to do with Google’s ranking algorithm. “Make your website so good that Google will be embarrassed if they’re not ranking it,” insisted Schwartz.
And that folks, is straight from the mouth of the self-proclaimed “Search Geek” Barry Schwartz.
