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SEO Insights with Eric Enge

By Site Strategics
August 1, 2016

The Founder and CEO of Stone Temple Consulting, Eric Enge, was our featured guest on #edgetalk this week. Stone Temple Consulting is a 70 member team agency whose name originates from the beautiful ancient stone temples as well as a mislabeled Stone Temple Pilots song that was heard on the radio by Enge.

As a co-author of The Art of SEO, Enge is one of the pioneers inside of search engine optimization (SEO). He is also known for educating the digital marketing community through his various speaking engagements.

How can I grow my Agency?

As part of our discussion, we touched on ranking factors and growing your digital marketing agency. With an agency of over 70 employees, Enge knows a thing or two about making an agency grow.

As a self-labeled “ruthless delegator”, Enge says the best way to go about recruiting new talent is to hire someone that is better than you at something. By engaging in this way, management can help see things from different perspectives, which can help with both innovation and avoidance of huge disasters caused by oversight.

But what good is knowing how to grow your agency if you can’t rank to get your agency on the maps?

The Secrets about Ranking

Enge also dissolved a lot of incorrect assumptions out there about the future of rankings and discussed strategies for keeping your agency in the running of rapidly changing search engines.

The RankBrain Takeover

One of the key takeaways from our discussion with Enge centered on RankBrain, which has revolutionized the way search engines work:

People are going to tell you that RankBrain is taking over the whole Google algorithm and it’s going to decide how links are used, but it’s all wrong. It’s an amazing technological accomplishment, but you don’t take this amazing machine learning process here and then tell it to take over links.

According to Enge, RankBrain has its place in the algorithm, but it’s hardly going to dominate every aspect of your Google search.

And Penguin?

There has been lots of chatter around Penguin becoming “real-time”. With the way websites have been knocked of the Google map in the past due to Penguin, a “real time” Penguin can be a scary thing.

“What will be different, and this is very clear from what Google has said, is that, historically, you might get hit by penguin and they might not do another release for over a year,” per Enge.

For example, Penguin is dependent on a set process and dedicated team to work on the algorithm according to Enge, which they might not even decide to start working on for another six months.

“You could be in Penguin jail for a very, very long time,” according to Enge.

From Enge’s interpretation, we might not even see the benefit from this update. Of course, most Googles updates are shrouded in a bit of mystery. In the end, no one outside of Google can be certain what any update may bring so for now speculation is circling in the industry.

If you would like to listen to more of Enge’s insight into SEO and digital marketing, click here.