Wise Marketing Secrets Interview Series with Bharati Ahuja

Bharati Ahuja is founder of WebPro Technologies India, an SEO trainer and speaker, web entrepreneur, blog writer, and Internet marketing consultant.

How would you explain specifically what you do as an SEO?

At WebPro Technologies SEO for us means helping the client to put his best foot forward for his business. After working on the on-page and technical factors we solely focus on a complete, holistic and overall web presence for the client which boosts the search presence.

All this is done with a goal to build a brand online. Hence, SEO for us means helping the client carve a niche for his business online, build an online identity and keep working on the technical factors so that the digital assets of the client’s business are crawled, indexed and get correlated to the content for which the client is trying to achieve a quality search presence.

What is your primary marketing goal when it comes to delivering results?

The goals keep varying depending on which SEO phase we have reached for a particular website.

Initially for a new website our primary goal is that the website gets regularly crawled, indexed and gets correlated correctly to the relevant content and search queries.

This can be easily monitored via the Google/Bing Webmaster Tools (now called the Search console).

Which new skills are most important for SEO’s to learn in the next six months?

Learning about how Mobile Apps are being developed will become very important for SEOs. Though the SEO may not learn the detailed technicalities but having an overall idea is a must.

I think Excel skills are also very important as Excel helps you analyze data extensively.

What do you find most rewarding about SEO?

When businesses, especially the small and medium sized business achieve a global presence via search, it is very rewarding.

How do you stay updated with the latest SEO industry news?

I regularly follow the authority SEO blogs like Search Engine Land and Marketing Land, attend conferences to interact with my peers and Of course read the Google blogs to keep updated about the algorithmic updates.

As an SEO, what is your favorite SEO hack?

I think if the on-page and the technical factors are implemented correctly then half the battle is won.

Are there any particular SEO trends on the horizon that really excite you?

Currently the semantic web and microformats are an upcoming and exciting trend.

What are some of the top tools and apps in your SEO stack?

We mostly rely on the Google analytics data and the web master tools data. Apart from that we use Screaming frog, Raven Tools, Open Site Explorer and Hootsuite for Social Media.

Of course Excel is our favourite to analyse the GA data.

How is your typical work day structured?

The day begins with checking and replying to emails and messages. Then usually I have a one to one with each team member regarding the projects they handle and check if the projects are going as per our SEO philosophy.

Post lunch it is usually scheduled meetings with the clients discussing various issues/reports about their websites.

What advice would you share with other SEO’s who want to become more productive?

For implementing any SEO campaign efficiently, the best way to start is by having a thorough audit of the website. Once that is done then a proper strategy is needed.

Then comes the implementation stage. If you start making changes randomly without any plan then you end up wasting a lot of time.

Proper analysis and planning for the full website is needed on paper first then implementation becomes very easy.

Among the Google algorithm updates what is the most challenging one that you’ve encountered?

Till date, none of the algorithms have affected the websites managed by us in a very challenging way. I know it sounds little boisterous but it is a fact.

As we go by the W3C standards for on page factors and never go for any unnatural way of increasing web presence the question of being adversely affected by algo updates does not arise.

But, yes one of our websites was adversely affected by a hacking attack (Link spam Injection) which made it lose all the search presence as it was penalised by Google.

Bringing back the search presence for that website was indeed a very challenging exercise that we have encountered till date.