Wise Marketing Secrets Interview Series with Aaron Agius
Aaron Agius is an experienced search, content and social marketer. He has worked with IBM, Ford, LG, Unilever and many more of the world’s largest and most recognized brands, to grow their revenue. See more from Agius at Louder Online.
How would you explain specifically what you do as an SEO?
I ensure our clients sites are technically optimised for Search and that our clients have great content on their site that people are interested in, want to share socially and want to link to from their own websites.
The result of this is improved rankings, traffic and what’s most important – sales and leads to our clients’ businesses.
What is your primary marketing goal when it comes to delivering results?
The primary goal is always providing a positive ROI to our clients for the investment in our services.
When it comes down to it, links don’t matter, content doesn’t matter, rankings don’t matter. What they need to see is a positive ROI for their spend and then we’ve done our job.
Which new skills are most important for SEO’s to learn in the next six months?
They need to learn about quality content. Not just content for the sake of having content, but content that actually drives results.
They need to know what it is about great content that drives results in the search engines, and how to create it and market it.
What do you find most rewarding about SEO?
That so few people are doing it right, so when you can piece it together right from technical SEO through to content strategies, creation and marketing, it is a very rewarding feeling.
How do you stay updated with the latest SEO industry news?
A lot of reading and staying in touch with industry influencers.
As an SEO, what is your favorite SEO hack?
It’s not really a hack as such, but so many people are creating content for the sake of having content and not worrying about the quality of it and then wondering why they aren’t seeing results from their efforts.
At Louder Online, we ensure content we are creating already has a hungry audience before creating it which ensures that the content gets the desired results driving links, social traffic and search traffic.
What are some of the top tools and apps in your SEO stack?
Ahrefs, SEMrush, DeepCrawl, Buzzstream, Moz, Screaming Frog, Link Profiler… and many more.
How is your typical work day structured?
We have a lot of international clients so when I wake up I skim email quickly on my phone to check for anything urgent that needs my attention.
When I get to work I usually have a few early morning calls with overseas clients, then get through my emails until about lunch time.
The afternoon is spent on strategy sessions with my team ensuring all work effort in search marketing for our clients is focused on what is going to achieve the best results.
Which one book/blog post would you recommend every SEO should read?
The advanced guides on quicksprout.com are great for people of any level of skill in online marketing.
What advice would you share with other SEO’s who want to become more productive?
Learn how to do something completely first, then identify ways to automate it or outsource it ensuring that it follows your specific processes and systems.
That way each task becomes as profitable as possible while also freeing your time to work on more sites.
Among the Google algorithm updates what is the most challenging one that you’ve encountered?
Penguin at the time had the biggest impact as prior to that link development was unregulated and people were doing anything to get links.
This lead to us taking on a lot of new clients that all required link removal and clean-up work and in the end a number of businesses that had to switch out domains and start again from scratch.
If there’s one SEO Guru you’d recommend who and why.
I’ve done a lot of work with Neil Patel and he is definitely someone that shares fantastic content in the online marketing space.