Wise Marketing Secrets Interview Series with Venchito Tampon Jr.
Considered one of the youngest well known SEO’s in the Country Venchito tampon Jr. has recently been making waves across the internet marketing industry as he showcases the new generation of SEO’s in the Philippines.
In this interview Venchito will explain his continuous journey in the world of SEO strategies.
Hi Venchito, great to meet you! Could you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and how you became to be involved with the SEO industry?
From late 2011 up to December 2012, I became a freelance writer for various agencies, site owners and bloggers.
Then I was just very curious back then about SEO given that every employer would want to include a set number of keywords to every article that they wanted us to write.
That curiosity brought me to this awesome industry – SEO.
There were a very few SEO bloggers that consistently published solid/comprehensive articles about search and internet marketing in general, but those few authorities are the ones that really shape my perception, strategy and actions in SEO.
They include Jason Acidre, Jon Cooper, James Agate, Ross Hudgens, Nick Eubanks and Chris Dyson.
As I became a regular reader of their blogs, I was able to grasp the process of SEO (particularly on the link building side).
This led me to start my own SEO blog, Digital Philippines, but is now focused on discussing link building strategies and tips.
Jon Cooper hired me as part of his SEO team at Hyperlynx Media, and from that working experience, I learned so much about link building or off site SEO.
After six months, we parted ways. I started my own link building team and became passionate about creating link development campaigns for clients.
How do you personally keep up to date with the latest in SEO? It’s an ever changing industry so SEO consultants by nature need to be on the ball – how do you achieve this?
It’s simple. I make sure that I spend at least 15-30 minutes a day reading SEO blogs and other aspects of internet marketing (as we all know, SEO is moving towards integrating other inbound marketing channels to better create a positive experience for the users).
Participating on local SEO meetups/seminars/workshops is one of the best ways to keep yourself updated with the latest trends, strategies and processes in SEO.
Just this week, I applied what I’ve learned from Grant Merriel about process documentation.
There have been a lot of algorithm changes from Google over the last year. I am sure that you’ve had many potential clients come to you with ranking issues due to past SEO practices they might have undertaken. Do you have any top-level advice for people who have seen their websites take a dramatic hit recently, or incurred a penalty?
Number one rule is to don’t worry too much. If there’s a problem, then there must be a solution.
The best and effective way to easily get out from search jail of Google (content and link-based penalties) is to properly communicate with the site owner/client involved.
There may be the cases that after you removed and disavowed unnatural links of a penalized site, the client will still continue looking for quick link building wins (i.e. contacting a black hat SEO to provide multiple low-quality links).
In this case, even if you end up removing unwanted links for the client, there is still trouble to come.
By having the right communication, you’ll be able to show to the client the importance of your penalty removal service and how should everyone be careful at building links (and stop focusing on quick low quality link building campaigns).
What sets your SEO practice apart from the competition? Are there any unique aspects to your consultancy that gives you a competitive advantage?
To be honest, I don’t think I already have a core competitive advantage over other SEO providers.
Simply because we have different skills and processes, and that makes everyone of us competitive over one another.
If you were talking to client in your local area who was unsure about the benefits that local SEO can bring to a business, what would be the key components of your pitch to them in order to convince them?
Brand visibility and lead/revenue generation.
When you already convinced that your client could have a positive ROI when he started to invest in SEO and his/her brand would be able to get more traction on the web (as well as offline), it would be easier for you to convince that client, regardless of his/her position and his/her company size.
For any beginners to SEO, what advice would you give them? It could be anything from how to set the business up, to winning business, or just some plain motivational advice.
Be hungry for learning.
Search industry is a fast-paced environment so you’ll really have to keep yourself up to date and get the best out of yourself to learn new things every day in your work (whether you’re an in-house team member or a consultant).
How do you view content in SEO as a leverage in providing relevant search results and as a way of doing link-building in the advent of the recent changes in Googles Algorithm and penalization of Ann Smarty’s MyBlogGuest?
There is no relation between content issues and penalization of MyBlogGuest website.
That kind of penalization (based on my opinion) is some kind of personal act by Google (I would not dig deeper into it).
But I believe that a website should not be penalized only because there are black hat professionals in that platform.
What do you think of Google’s approach to SEO? Are they being helpful by launching the disavow tool or do you think that this only gives more credence to negative SEO?
Every tool that Google releases certainly helps webmasters and search professionals to clean up unwanted/spam links and make the search environment a better place for all users.
What is the fastest way to generate backlinks?
Gone are the days when you only need a simple tool to scrape all link sources and build links to your website.
The answer to your questions is, it depends on your approach.
If the website does have linkable assets, then by simple promoting those pieces through linker outreach and other content promotion techniques would generate a few more authority links to the website.
What is the best quick fix way in optimizing your website for SEO?
There’s a recent post about quick SEO wins that you might want to check out.
Also, I recently made a study about quick wins in SEO through meta tag optimization, fixing duplicate/broken pages and other technical/on site optimization.
You can check that out for future references.
How do you measure your SEO success for a particular campaign?
SEO campaigns have different KPIs, different objectives and different business models so there’s no one metric that gauges the success of all types of campaigns.
To get started with KPI and SEO measuring, you can check out this awesome slide deck by Gary Viray on how to set straight your online campaigns with killer KPIs.
And lastly can you suggest any book, video, person, website that keeps you inspired in doing SEO?
Here are a few resources that you can check out if you want to get started or at least be inspired in executing SEO campaigns:
- How to Create an Effective Link Building Campaign(shameless plug)
- Kaiserthesage’s List of Link Building Strategies
- ConversionXL,, Unbounce, (CRO blogs)
- Moz
- Cognitive SEO
- SEO by the Sea