8 well respected seo's

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8 Well-Respected SEOs And Marketers Share Surprising Tips2
This is the second edition of my interview with SEO experts series. I was very fortunate to catch up with the great
minds in the SEO and online marketing field. Let’s all learn and re-learn more actionable tips from top SEO’s in the
Philippines and across the world.
Well, what do you know? Come on and let’s all meet these amazing people…
Gary Viray - Co-Founder Of SEO Companies Search Opt Media and Propelrr
Hi sir Gary, thanks for gracing this interview. You inspire many small people like me sir. Instead of asking you
about how you started in online marketing and SEO, we’re excited to have a sneak peek on your life now.
How did SEO create an impact to it?
SEO awakened the marketing guy in me. Ever since I was a kid, I have already been marketing and selling concepts
and whatnots to other kids to the point of generating sales/revenue that I used for my school budget. I knew I was
good at it. I could market virtually anything. However, over the years, I wasn’t able to use such skill because I focused
on other things. I focused on Math and numbers. I am glad that SEO took the best of both worlds of my passion –
Numbers and Marketing, rolled into one.
Is SEO impactful to me? What do you think? =)
What was the most unforgettable project you had in your SEO career?
Try to read, So the Boss Gave In and We Won Against Google Panda 4.0 and of course, Search Opt Media itself
which is an SEO company based in the Philippines and is now about to become a full-service digital marketing
agency called Propelrr.
How do you foresee SEO in developing countries like the Philippines?
Philippines will be on the map sooner than we think as one of the best providers on SEO globally although there’s still
a huge need to re-educate SEO practitioners that the old habit of doing things is no longer a viable option in order to
further their careers. Every SEO practitioner in the Philippines must fight abusive entities that simply use them as
drones, back office link builders, and whatnots. SEO is a marketing profession. SEO is marketing. It needs solid
strategies to resonate any brand’s DNA that search engines consume. It needs strategic thinking & creative
individuals which I think abound in the Philippines. If we can position ourselves as what I’ve mentioned above, we’ll
be taken seriously as real marketers online.
How do you measure success in an SEO campaign?
SEO success is always based on defined KPIs and Targets. Every company is unique in terms of measuring its
success. Maybe I can just simply share you my presentation on Slideshare entitled, How to Set Straight your Online
(SEO) Campaigns with killer KPIs.
So again, how do I measure success on SEO campaign? It is based on set KPIs and Targets.
If you would market/SEO a new website in a very competitive niche, how would you do it? what are the most
important factors that you think you need to consider?
For competitive niches, I usually look for gaps where competitors are somewhat weak. Doing SWOT analysis works
well any time any day. There’s really no silver bullet that you can use as your template for all industries. But let me

A Google Analytics Certified and a Google Adwords Qualified
Individual, Gary Viray is certainly not your average internet guy.
Having master’s degree in Mathematics Education and studied
Engineering at the University of the Philippines – Diliman, sir Gary is
passionate about analyzing data, crunching numbers and setting
KPI’s. Follow him on Twitter @garyshack.
share you the ff:
1. Identify Content Gaps by looking into the buying cycle,
interest, and users’ behavior.
2. Find those long tail keywords where there’s less
competition in order to increase market share.
3. Do brand association with bigger brands. Align your
client’s brand with those bigger brands by making it appear
that they are of equal footing.
4. Compete on verticals where you can get better chances to
win. This is where you can first set your anchor to gain initial
traction from where you can slowly build the brand moving to
the most competitive verticals or keywords in your niche.
Million dollar question: whatís the best food you have
ever tasted?
Kobe beef from Kobe, Japan.
Who are your top 3 seo influencers? Any particular
content from these people you wish to share with us?
Jim Boykins – Just head on reading Jim’s blog
Bruce Clay - SEO Siloing: How to build a website silo
architecture
Rand Fishkin – All white board Fridays by Rand Fishkin.
Could you give us some good tips on how to leverage our SEO-fu skills and survive in this bewildering
industry 2014 and beyond?
While we are simply focused on SEO on this interview, you need to leverage your skills to expand further into learning
other channels. Being holistic in your digital marketing approach gives you better chances moving forward. Having a
tunnel vision set on SEO alone is fine but then, that is not how I see things. SEO will never be dead for sure but if you
hinge your SEO skill set to the broader spectrum of brand building and digital marketing, it will be a whole new game
out there for you. Try reading something about brand engagement from a brand person’s perspective and you will
know why there’s a need for you connect your SEO-fu to something related to branding and real marketing.
Sam Nam - Vice President of Marketing at Digital Room
Hi Sam, Thanks for gracing this interview. You inspire many small people like me Sam. Instead of asking you
Thank you for the opportunity and your kind words, Fervil. It’s quite flattering.
You want a sneak peek into my life? Hmm… Well, I live in Burbank, California, with my wife, Gie. We’ve been married
for two-and-half years and spent our first two years as a married couple in Metro Manila. We moved back to the U.S.
at the end of 2013 and this year has been full of many exciting first experiences like teaching my wife to drive and
moving into a new home.

Sam Nam is the VP of Marketing at Digital Room, Inc where he lead
customer acquisition, retention and analytics for a portfolio of
subsidiary companies. Connect with him on Twitter @samnamiam.
SEO had a huge impact on my life, because without SEO I would’ve never met my wife! We met through work and
she is my best friend and partner for life.
What was the most unforgettable project you had in your
SEO career?
Back in 2010, my team and I were focused on building links
through blog sponsorships and giveaways. Although we had
good initial success doing blogger outreach, we found the
process to be very time consuming. Many bloggers didn’t
understand what type of promotion we wanted to do with
them and often they didn’t reply for days, weeks or even
months.
I came up with the idea of creating a social network for
bloggers called GiveawayBlogs.com and ranked the site #1
for the search term “Blog Giveaways”. This network naturally
grew to several thousand bloggers. The bloggers would sign
up to do promotions in the form of product giveaways and
sweepstakes. We recruited many other companies to offer
sponsorships so there would be a variety of sponsors and
promotions for bloggers to choose from.
The bloggers would already understand what type of promotion we wanted to do and they would also help each other
promote their giveaway posts! This meant the bloggers were now reaching out to us instead of the other way around.
They were also building links to the posts that contained links back to our sites through their social promotion. I’m sure
you can recognize how effective this was for our link building.
We ran this program for two years and ranked thousands of high-competition keywords, but in 2013 we realized it
wasn’t a good long-term strategy. For the past 18 months we have focused heavily on content marketing as the
backbone of our SEO strategy.
I’m very excited to see the growth and changes in the Philippines SEO industry. The community is slowly evolving
away from Adsense-focused SEO towards professional consulting and freelancing. This shift changes the
conversations within the community away from individualism and towards cooperation. In 2014 we saw two new SEO
events – GDI and SEO Summit, which were both very focused on sharing and teaching. I’m excited to see how the
industry grows over the next few years.
How do you measure success in an SEO campaign Sam?
Measuring success depends on your goals. For an e-commerce company like my own, we look at Y/Y growth of
revenue from organic traffic, but we index that against the trend of total search volume within our industry and our
market share of that search volume. The unique keywords Google users are searching for are constantly changing
based on consumer trends.
For example, ranking first for iPhone 3GS in 2014 brings only a fraction of the visits it used to because user demands
have shifted to newer products. It’s important to remember your rankings are part of a bigger ocean that is constantly
shifting from high tide to low tide.
If you would market/SEO a new website in a very competitive niche, how would you do it? What are the most

First, you need to have a great product. You can’t win a race against a Porsche if you are driving a Toyota Vios
regardless of how well you drive. Promoting a bad site or product is so much more difficult than promoting a good site
or product. You need a unique selling proposition that compels people to become believers and fanboys and fangirls!
A compelling proposition allows you to fully leverage Pinterest, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and other social sharing
sites to bait backlinks and drive traffic. This marriage of social, content and SEO is the reason the industry is shifting
from the term SEO to Inbound Marketing. The new label helps us experience a paradigm shift.
Million dollar question: what’s the best food you have ever tasted?
Tough question! I love food so much. Actually, I believe each mood, season or experience is best complimented by a
different type of food and beverage. If you make me choose right now, I would say Dduk Bo Ssam (떡보쌈), Korean
BBQ Brisket wrapped with veggies in rice paper wrapper. It is a fusion style of eating Korean BBQ influenced by
Vietnamese cuisine.
Who are your top 3 SEO influencers? Any particular content from these people you wish to share with us?
Three? That is just too hard to choose. I’ve benefitted from too many influencers to count.
I’ll answer this question in a different way. A majority of SEOs swear by the advice of a few SEO gurus, but I believe
that isn’t conducive to learning. In reality, we can learn from SEO Gurus and total newbies alike. The most important
thing to remember is SEO is a constantly changing environment and everything should be challenged and tested
before you accept it as truth. Also, remember that those who are new to the industry are often the ones who can
challenge the status quo and introduce new ground-breaking ideas.
1) Find a mentor. Your mentor should be an experienced business professional, but doesn’t have to be an SEO
specialist. None of my mentors are SEO professionals, but their guidance has helped me become a better marketer
and SEO. From them I learned to manage a team, establish processes, communicate with board members and much
more.
2) Be humble and network with like-minded professionals. Like I said earlier, you can learn from SEO Guru’s and
newbies alike. The number of years someone has practiced SEO shouldn’t be an indicator of how much you respect
them or what you can learn from them.
3) Be analytical. SEO by definition is the study of a mathematical algorithm. Learn to test and analyze. Becoming
an Excel Ninja is easy when there are thousands of YouTube tutorials. Learning statistics is easy when Coursera
offers free online classes!
Floyd Gonda - SEO Extraordinaire and the man behind SuperKaizen.com
Hi Sir Floyd, Thanks for gracing this interview. You inspire many small people like me sir. Instead of asking
you about how you started in online marketing and SEO, we’re excited to have a sneak peek on your life now.
Hello Fervil, thank you very much for this opportunity to share what little that I know of about SEO with you. And I am
flattered that you find my work inspiring as well. The impact of SEO in my life is very positive, as I can have more time
with my loved ones and have the opportunity to earn more. I also get to meet great minded people like you and events
like GDI. I totally have no regrets in learning SEO.

Been working as SEO specialist for 10 years, Floyd
Gonda shares his intensive and extensive
experiences in link building and wisdom in SEO at
his website superkaizen.com. You can also follow
him on Twitter @SEOphilippiness.
The unforgettable ones are the ones that doesn’t pay! But perhaps the other most unforgettable one is the penalized
website I handled back then. We paid a lot for the link detox only to fail in the end I guess it is not for everybody.
SEE: How Are We To Know If Your Disavow List Has Already Been Honored By Google?
How do you foresee SEO in developing countries like the
Philippines?
I think I mentioned it before with other SEO’s in the recent GDI event that
the Philippines have a chance to be the best SEO service provider in the
world. But we need to help each other and be united towards a common
goal and that is to strengthen our knowledge of SEO so we can
command better pay from clients abroad, and better the quality of future
SEO’s in the country.
I am going to write more about this in my blog soon.
I have a read a lot of differing opinions on this but for me it really
depends on the KPI of the site. I usually just look at the price of each
visitor going to the site and the price of what I am selling online.
For example I wrote in my article: Ways To Monetize Your SEO: Updated
Regularly
Determine what particular business pays more for a particular service, a
roofing company will pay more compared to a dog grooming one as a
single sale from each differs a lot. If one dog grooming costs around $25
while one roof costs around $1,500 don’t you think it would be better to invest in getting the roofing company to buy
their leads from you?
Other than that rankings and traffic are other factors I look into plus the consistency of visitors and new visitors to the
site.
It really depends on the budget of the client, but then on-page optimization does a lot of wonders! I always tell my
clients to invest heavily in their content for the first three months. That’s it! Invest in great content and then the other
three months do the link-building. It is definitely guaranteed that you will make a great impact in the search engines.
But if for example the niche is very-very competitive, then the approach will be more of getting a lot of authority links
from .gov and .edu sites. It just depends on the SEO on how they will approach it.
I would have to say the Lechon of Jagna, Bohol Philippines. It’s just pure heaven! Better have one Fervil asap!
Who are your top 3 seo influencers? Any particular content from these people you wish to share with us?
Hmm… this is a very hard question as SEO is very complex.
I would say as of the moment they are as follows:

Sef Cruz is the sole author of Philippine internet marketing blog
Ranking Elite. He’s been featured on top SEO sites like SEJ and
Ahrefs. Follow him on Twitter @RankingElite.
1. Michael Port
2. Jeff Walker
3. Paddy Moogan/Alex Becker/Glen Allsopp (have to really add them here hehehe)
SEO opens up a whole world of opportunity to everyone, but always remember that there is a big difference between
making money (income) versus accumulating money (wealth). Leverage your SEO skills by focusing on product
creation and selling it online. You already got the skills now translate that into wealth creation.
SEE: Ways To Monetize Your SEO: Updated Regularly
Joseph Cruz - SEO-pro, author of Ranking Elite
Hi Sef, thanks for gracing this interview. You inspire
many small people like me. Instead of asking you about
how you started in online marketing and SEO, we’re
excited to have a sneak peek on your life now. How did
SEO create an impact to it?
SEO did make a lot of changes in my career and my personal
life. Back in 2010, I could say I was not on the right path of
success. I was employed but the career growth seem to be
unreachable, in a normal day job like we have in the
Philippines, it is almost impossible for “staff level” employee
to live his/her life like a boss for several reasons:
Taxes are killing you slowly and plainly
Compensation isn’t competitive and isn’t enough to live a
happy life
Stress is everywhere – deadlines, workloads, policies
etc.
Repetitive tasks that could make you go insane to take a
bottle of beer or a cigarette
So when I learned about the search industry; it opened me the light towards something I was looking for. Things that I
didn’t find in the “staff level” career such as:
Challenging role and responsibilities
Higher compensation and earning possibilities
You can meet like-minded enthusiasts which you can exchange knowledge with
And most surprisingly, SEO makes me read over and over again which is kinda strange because i’m not a fan.
I look at the impact of the SEO campaign to the business/website. The main objective of an SEO campaign on a
website in my opinion is to help compete, get noticed and discovered, increase traffic and conversion in the long run.
Those are the metrics I will mainly look at after I launched an SEO campaign.

I would look at the main key elements that a website should have to help it compete in the long run such as:
Pagespeed
Meta Data
Site structure
Keyword placement, LSI
Content usage
Sitemap
Robots.txt etc..
These are the most important factors that I need to consider before start marketing it to its target audience because if
you missed establishing the back-boned of your new website, you could lose a lot of opportunities that you can
acquire if you did everything right from the very start.
The food I ate in GDI event, Pampanga’s delicacies – not sure if those were but I would definitely want to try them
again when I go visit Pampanga.
Who are your top 3 seo influencers? Any particular content from these people you wish to share
Jason Acidre – The guy who always kick-asses whenever he posts something on his blog. There are couples that I
can share but this one truly made its way to the top, the test he did for ManyContacts and how he increased his email
subscribers for 532% in one month! That is phenomenal. – http://kaiserthesage.com/email-list-building/
Glen Demaandal - He wrote something about 9 writing tips to improve business blogging. This post has actually
thought me a lot of things from do’s to don’ts. - http://www.glendemands.com/nine-writing-tips-to-improve-business-
blogging/
Gary Viray - Once in a while, I visit Gary’s personal blog where he documents and shares their experience in
removing site penalty. I believe this particular post from Gary really need to be seen by other SEOs to know how
awesome he is. - http://www.garyviray.com/google-penalty.html
Explore, Test and Read.
In order to survive in this fast-paced industry, we need to come up with better ideas, adopt with the changes and
always explore new things for improvement since the big boss isn’t gonna let us control our way to the top of search
results and they will always make changes in organic search and how they evaluate a webpage to rank, being able to
respond with these changes is the key to success.
Grant Merriel - Serial Entrepreneur, Online Marketing Strategist at Online Edge
Hi Grant, Thanks for gracing this interview. You inspire many small people like me man. Instead of asking you
How did SEO/online marketing create an impact to your life?

Grant Merriel has been a digital strategist for over 600+ start-up and
established businesses. Currently, Grant serves as
the online marketing strategist for Online Edge and shares his IM
and business insights in his personal blog. Follow him on Twitter
@GrantMerriel.
Hahaha, first off, your not small mate and it’s a pleasure to be a part of it. I actually think that it was a mixture of both
my family being around computers since the old Commodore
Computer days, my brother and Dad were always hands on –
so I knew a bit about computers. Then mixing that with my
passion for Entrepreneurship and understanding the concept
of most businesses failing due to issues with their marketing
– I think SEO / Online Marketing was just a natural fit with
what was surrounding me and my passion for business.
It wasn’t until around 2006 that I really started to see the
impact that SEO can have on my friends and university mates
businesses. And that is when I really took a real interest to
the whole online industry from web design / development,
social media, content, SEO, paid advertising, etc.
What was the most unforgettable project you had in your
SEO career?
I have been fortunate enough to have my eyeball on over 600+ start-ups from my days at university, to talking at
business schools, one-on-one consulting, SEO account manager, consulting to SEO firms, etc. And I will be honest,
the most unforgettable projects are the ones that make the biggest impact to a business owners life. When you
receive an email talking about where they have come from, the impact it has had, the results they are getting and
everything in between makes any project unforgettable.
My mantra is that: “I will NEVER make any suggestions to a business (whether in SEO, business improvement, etc)
that I would not do myself if I was in their situation”. As an example; any SEO work that we do for clients MUST be at
the level that I would expect the team to do on my businesses. Actually, we get the team to work on some of our
businesses as well so that I have the same passion / interest a client would have.
This is actually a question I do know a lot about. There are two parts to countries like the Philippines: “Asian Culture”
and “Economic Situation”
Asian Culture:
At the moment, I know SEO firms offering their products within Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong and the Philippines.
Their toughest challenges are:
- They usually need to personally meet with the companies (rather than just emails or phone calls) to get sales
- Almost every company needs to be educated about what SEO is, how it can benefit them, etc (very different to
countries where businesses are demanding SEO)
- The lead times from initial contact to becoming a client can be quite long in some cases (this seems to be cultural)
Economic Situation:
As we see countries like the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, etc grow with the global economy there will be a lot of
changes that impact SEO:
- A lot of E-Commerce stores will open as credit cards / payment facilities become mainstream
- Infrastructure will allow services / products to be provided to multiple regions within the countries
- Marketing to potential International Clients will become a lot easier as the Western culture learns about the quality of
work and creativity of these countries.
A lot goes into measuring success of an SEO campaign, we tend to break it down into section:

Clients Goals:
- Are they making more money or getting more leads each month from when they started with you?
THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT ONE
Measuring the Campaign:
From an individual / team / campaign level, we always use competitors as our benchmarks (we don’t communicate
these achievements to clients, as we live by our motto of “Tell me less of how it came to be and more of what it means
to me!”)
- Content: Do we add more value, have better resources, greater structure and longer content than all other ranking
sites?
- Links: Are we outreaching to enough sites with a good response rate to grow past our competitors? (KPI’s from
emails sent, response rates, live links, DA quality, varying link placements, etc)
- Technical: This is just a checklist of elements that must be done.
As work is always being provided to our clients, we have never seen a campaign not improve month to month, so
ranking growth, referral traffic increase, traffic improvements and lead / sale growth are the keys.
Naturally we could talk forever about it but just check out Gary Virays KPI’s presentation for the best insights.
Definitely start with Guerilla tactics, ambush them from areas that the big players aren’t interested in / due to their size
cannot play in. For example, it can take weeks to months for the big companies to approval a single piece of content
to be uploaded to their site. Good luck to their SEO Company to compete with us for long tail keywords.
It would be a key play around long tail keywords on the clients blog, interviewing experts in the key areas to get social
impact / influence and grow the campaign from the bottom up.
You don’t need the client to sign a $10,000 a month contract to go for ‘health insurance’, instead, start off with a lower
amount, say $2,500 or $5,000 a month with the target of these long tail keywords, these traffic goals, these referrals
and get the client invested into it. Then once you have proven your strategy, they will be a lot more invested in the
campaigns and grow along with your strategies to get to the $10,000+ mark and never leave.
Ha haha, do I get in trouble if I don’t say: Cebu Lechon?
It would have to be that or my Mum’s Lasagna
Top 3 SEO Influencers, that is a great question. I am a big on being influenced via key people through ‘friendship’,
people like Brian Dean, Brian Clarke, Ross Hudgens and Will Reynolds provide great content all the time BUT it is
very rare that you can ask them that PROBING QUESTION that impacts your business / SEO strategy right now
(unless you filter through the thousands of words they provide).
So, my biggest SEO influencers are people who I have been able to email direct strategy questions to that and there
is no censorship / worry that the insider secrets might be leaked:
1. Jason Acidre (Kaiser The Sage): Not only is he a close friend but he is just an absolutely GENIUS when it comes to
content strategies, link strategies, reviewing top company tactics and the best band manager I ever did see.
His best post would have to be his plans for 2014: http://kaiserthesage.com/link-building-2014/

2. Jon Cooper (Point Blank SEO): Though we have only become kind of close recently, he has opened the book on
tactics that he doesn’t write about, cover, etc and we have had some quite extensive emails about how to slightly
improve outreach response rates and ultimately the extra benefit that link builders can get from adding an extra 5
minutes of work to what they are already doing.
His best post would have to be the well known: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies
3. ZephSnapp (Altura Interactive): Every time I talk to him, all I can do is laugh really. He’s so down to Earth but is
great at bringing SEO back down the base level, rather than going for the high in sky strategies that are not scalable
for a business.
His best post is all about personas (which nobody does): http://alturainteractive.com/using-personas-to-improve-
spanish-digital-pr/
Note: I always try to add 2 times the value that they add to me in any part of their life. Too many people ask, ask, ask
from these guys, instead of adding value that they might not have access too but might need.
The best suggestion I can make is to process everything, I have built the Ultimate Process Guide for business owners.
A huge issue with SEO individuals, teams and agencies now is that they spend years learning about all of these
strategies but never do them, or try them find out it is hard (because they don’t test Automation) and they just give up!
With everything being processed, you can see the resources required, the cost of the resources, the success they are
having BUT most importantly, you can alter these processes as Google changes / updates their algorithm or
guidelines.
Jomer Gregorio - CJG Digital Marketing CEO
Hi Jomer, Thanks for gracing this interview. You inspire many small people like me man. Instead of asking
you about how you started in online marketing and SEO, we’re excited to have a sneak peek on your life now.
How did SEO/online marketing create an impact to it?
Thanks for the interest too, its my first time actually to have an interview like this. SEO/Online marketing is my main
business/source of income since I risked my life going full-time as a freelancer last 2009. And I never looked back.
Thanks God for giving me the courage to do so.
Probably back in the good old SEO days (you know what I mean). We developed a model in which we need to rank a
newly registered domain for 60 days or less and our method worked like a charm until the Penguin last 2012. I think
most people will agree to me that SEO these days has really change drastically.
I think SEO in PH right now is slowly gaining grounds. With lots of Pinoy SEO and Digital Marketers that are well-
known in the community and conducting seminars/events, its just a matter of time before it will become more popular.
Online reputation, Social media presence, Targeted traffic, rankings, and of course conversions.

Digital Marketing Philippines is a fast growing start-up digital
marketing company based in the Philippines founded by web
marketing consultant Jomer Gregorio under a company CJG Digital
Marketing. Follow Jomer at Twitter @JomerGregorio.
The main thing that I will need to focus is the creation and marketing of linkable assets. If you have a linkable assets
that are unique and actually useful, then attracting organic
links for your website (though in competitive niche) will be
rather not very difficult. You need to ask yourself since this is
competitive niche “how can I differentiate myself to the 100′s
website out there”?
Simple, create unique and actually useful linkable assets that
are worthy for the rankings you are craving for. Because, lets
just say that you ranked for a particular competitive niche and
people will find your site in Google but they are not satisfied
with your content. Chancers are your bounce rate will be
super high and your rankings are almost useless. So focus on
satisfying the user intent first before anything else. I think
that’s what Semantic search works and heading in the future.
Million dollar question: what’s the best food you have
ever tasted?
Mongo! I am 100% proud bisaya.
Who are your top 3 SEO influencers? Any particular
content from these people you wish to share with us?
David Amerland is the only person I really admired when it
comes to Semantic SEO. I suggest you buy his book on
Kindle, I really learned alot on that book and applied his
principles on our own website and I actually witnessed what
he is talking about on our site.
Joe Pulizzi is my 2nd influencer when it comes to Content Marketing. I also have his book “Epic Content Marketing”.
Whether we like it ot not, content marketing is slowly gaining ground into everyone’s game. We actually added
content marketing in our own semantic SEO service.
Perry Marshall – although not an SEO expert himself is my ultimate mentor when it comes to sales, marketing and
conversions. I actually have his 2 books on hard copy for Facebook and Google Adwords. His recent book 80/20
Sales and Marketing is also my latest book from him in Kindle. He is the real deal guy when it comes to really growing
your business and 80/20 mastery.
This is hard! Haha, as I have said earlier. SEO has changed drastically in the recent years and I think these tips can
help us survive and hopefully thrive in the years to come.
Change your mindset – I think the first and most important thing to do these days is to change our SEO mindset.
You know back in the day our focused is primarily technical SEO and backlink acquisition (link building is still as
important as before). But right now SEO does not rely on these 2 alone, we need to think big and outside of the box.
We need to understand the business of the clients and create a tailored SEO strategy for them, I call it “holistic SEO”.
Focus in satisfying user-intent – One of the most exciting things about SEO right now is that it does not revolve only
to some technical factors. It also involves some human element such as the need to really understand the user-intent
of your prospective customers or clients when they hit your website. You want to make sure that your linkable assets

or contents satisfy their intent and actually give them the information that they crave for which ultimately will result to
amazing user-experience.
Read more and slowly apply semantic web optimization – SEO influencers and authorities today are now writing
articles, contents and even creating Google hang-out about the Semantic Web. I think its time for us to move forward
and if you are not familiar with it yet, read more books and follow semantic evangelist such as David Amerland. Of
course at the end of the day, if there’s no action then there’s no opposite reaction. So read and apply what you learned
to become a semantic web optimizer.
Jason Acidre - Filipino SEO Sensation
Jason Acidre is the author of Philippine’s premiere online marketing blog, Kaiser The Sage. He’s also the CEO of
rapid growing inbound marketing agency Xight Interactive. Follow Jason Acidre on Twitter @jasonacidre
Hi Jason, thanks for gracing this interview. You inspire many small people like me. Instead of asking you
Thanks, it still feels surreal actually – and I still can’t believe that I’m inspiring and influencing some people in our
industry (whether here in the Philippines or abroad).
Perhaps, it’s because that this part of my career was something I really never intended to have. And just like what I
mostly say when asked about how I’ve done it, I was just really lucky to have the right mindset at right place and at
the right time.
Right now, I don’t think something really big has changed in my life. I’m still doing the things I enjoy doing (mainly
challenging myself). I’m still the loner, quiet, care-free, easily-contented, and optimistic type of guy.
The only change that I can really think of is that SEO really made me a better person in the past 4 years. And of
course, being able to meet and exchange ideas with a lot of smart people!
Affilorama! I learned so much from that experience. Working with them made me a beast in what I’m doing right now
(not just in SEO, but in being an entrepreneur as well).

Kaiserthesage and Xight interactive are definitely part of the list, though both are still a work in progress. They’re both
unforgettable to me, given that the continuous challenges I face working on these two projects really influenced how I
think things through and have given me so many opportunities to grow and improve myself in such a short time span
– and I don’t think that I’ll be able to achieve that anywhere else.
For SEO service providers, as an industry, it really has a big potential – especially in competing in the international
market. We already have the skills needed, and many practitioners here are already proving that we can really
compete (like Gary Viray, Glen Dimaandal, Sean Si, and the guys at Digital Room Inc. to name a few).
But for local companies to consider SEO as an integral part of their overall marketing campaigns, I think it’ll still take a
couple of years or more before they start to realize how search can really impact their business as a whole.
It really depends on the business’ goals – if they’re investing in SEO to build more awareness for their brand or to
generate more revenue for their business.
If the campaign is able to directly affect how the business is achieving its objectives, then you can certainly say that
the campaign is somehow successful.
So in measuring, it’s really important to see if what you’re actually doing translates into the goals that you’ve set when
you started the campaign:
Is the site getting more conversions from search?
Is the site getting more returning and highly engaged visitors?
Is the site able to get more natural links and mentions (people genuinely talking about the website)?
Does the site look more trustworthy and authoritative compared to the time when you started out with the
campaign?
You can generally see the improvements (or the areas you need to improve on) by just simply asking yourself these
questions.
I’ll probably just replicate the things I did for my own blog/brand (considering that digital marketing is a very
competitive space as well) to grow their new website.
As for the factors, I’d focus on these things:
Make sure they’ll have content assets that won’t be seen anywhere else in their industry’s online space.
Build the right relationships, alliances and associations for them to generate better brand signals.
Implementing consistently on these two core factors – content and relationships.
It’s a triple tie, between bacon, crab and steak.
Who are your top 3 seo influencers? Any particular content from these people you wish to share with us?
Wil Reynolds – #RCS

Benj Arriola has been in the SEO space since 2004 and in web design and development
since 1997. Aside from a wealth of experience in working with top brand Fortune 1000 SEO
clients, prior to Internet Marketing, Inc. sir Benj has been a speaker in various major
conferences here and abroad and also smaller local meet-up groups. Follow sir Benj on
Twitter @BenjArriola
Ross Hudgens–A model for link building – beyond “great content”
Kirby Ferguson – he’s not an SEO, but his works did influence my thinking a lot about SEO: Everything is a
Remix
Never stop learning. Read. Test on your own. Write about the new things you’re learning. Knowledge is the core of our
business (in this industry) – invest on it.
Benj Arriola - VP of SEO at IMI
Sir Benj, as how many of the Filipino
SEO’s address you, thanks for gracing
this interview. You inspire many small
people like me. Instead of asking you
about how you started in online marketing
and SEO, we’re excited to have a sneak
peek on your life now. How did
SEO/online marketing create an impact in
your life?
SEO was a career direction changer. It has
also given me the opportunity to be a thought
leader where I speak at various international
conferences. It is only in SEO where I won
several international competitions winning
cash and also a brand new car. It has opened
doors to many options from working with an
agency, or being the in-house SEO guy of a
company or earn from affiliate marketing and
ad publishing on my own and it was pick and
choose the direction I wanted but the other doors are still open shall I want to try something else.
Since I tend to get bored once I learn how to do something, it does get old working. But in SEO, there is always
something new about it all the time, so it keeps the boredom away and there is always something new to think about.
I would not say I am financially free just yet, but definitely SEO has been placing me at a good comfort level where my
family is also comfortably happy.
I would give three answers for this: (1) My first client, (2) the most successful client, and (3) the worst client.
I worked with tons of sites, companies big and small, Fortune 1000 companies, worldwide brands, mostly in the
agencies I worked at, but the unforgettable ones are still the ones I worked on as a freelance SEO guy. Simply
because I did all the work on my own, it was very hard to fulfill, very challenging, but at the same time very rewarding.
The very first site I did SEO on was so successful that the site owner told me to “turn it off” because he was getting to
much leads from his service business and was having trouble serving them all. He earned so much that he sold the
business and use the money shift into a real estate business.
My most successful campaign was for a car dealership. It was so successful that they gave me a second car

dealership, and was planning to add in a third.The funny part was I was paying them monthly installments for my car,
but they were paying me higher monthly for SEO services. So it felt like the car was free and I was still making money
from their SEO.
The last unforgettable client was the worst one, it was an ORM client that wanted to clean up their names but they
whole character was not clean at all.Because of their undesirable traits, they would continue to offend numerous
people. So even if I am cleaning up their name online, improving the SERPs with good results, every now and then a
new complaint from out of the blue would appear and causes a new problem again. When that happens, they call me
up again on the phone and a bunch of expletive words come out telling me my ORM does not work, but in reality they
just have a problem of not fixing the nature of who they are so there will always be something bad out there all the
time.
Even if he was one of the biggest projects I had, and was paying almost the same amount as my salary then. I only
spent about a total of 30 hours total every month earning the same amount as what I make in a month at my job. But
the high price of the project was not good enough for me to handle the stress, and also some kind of moral guilt. I had
a feeling that I was hiding something bad and making it appear as something good online.
When doing SEO in a specific country, sometimes the objective of your SEO efforts is to target audiences within the
country for a local business. In other cases, SEO in the Philippines can be an offshore project where you are targeting
international audiences in other countries, often the United States, the country of online consumers. We already know
the Philippines is constantly increasing in taking SEO deals from North America, Europe and Australia.Sites like
Freelancer, Elance and oDesk has tons of workers in the Philippines.
I personally know some companies in the US and Australia just flew over to the Philippines to set-up offices there to
manage people better. Just like any other offshore outsourcing, the advantage is lower labor cost in the Philippines but
still relatively high for the cost of living in the Philippines. I’m sure the situation is probably similar in India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia when looking at the advantages of offshore outsourcing and I foresee it increasing
further.
As for doing SEO for companies in your local country, I also foresee this increasing in the Philippines. This is always
tied to the adoption of Internet technologies of the consumer audience. The more people use the Internet, the more
there is an online target market to attract. And we already know there are tons of Facebook users in the Philippines,
Twitter users. Google and Yahoo have their own offices in the Philippines is also an indicator of the presence of an
online target market.
Since SEO is a combination of technical knowledge, marketing knowledge and content writing, outsourced offshore
countries may have difficulty on the marketing and writing task just due to cultural differences and how this boils down
into how to write English content. And this is not always about spelling and grammar, but more about the many minute
differences on how things are said from one culture to another, including idiomatic expressions, slang, and used
conventions within a country. Having said that, when outsourcing some companies may be limiting what they
outsource. Only handing off task that will not be affected by cultural differences. These task tend to be procedural
tactics rather than a real complete SEO strategy.But this does not apply of course to all Filipino writers, but it does
take a while to find the right person and this serves as a challenge.
My first speaking engagement in an SEO conference in the Philippines was in 2007 at FMI’s SEMCon, my last one
was March 2014 at JCI and SEO Hacker’s SEO Summit. In 2007 there were 2 guys from the US that were in the
audience that had offices with some staff in the Philippines. This year, there were several more people from the US
and Australia, all with offices in the Philippines and their own Filipino teams in attendance. I foresee more of this
happening in the Philippines since it bridges the gap on cultural differences and challenges with management and
time zone differences.

We measure many things and it depends on the client’s goals, but most of the time it is conversions from organic
search as the main KPI. But depending on the client, we might be even more specific on the type of conversion. In
some cases some businesses are just concerned with traffic than conversions, some are more concerned with how
much walk-in traffic SEO generates going to their physical store location.
I know there are some companies that use keyword ranking as the main measure of success. We still do this too but
ranking is not the primary measure of success for us and there are many reasons why.
1. Ranking is inconsistent in different situations from differences in browsers, personal behavior, location, etc.
2. Good ranking does not always give great conversions. And if no conversions come in, this can mean an
adjustment in keywords may be needed that have better search volume and relevancy, or better title tags and
meta tags are needed for better click through rates, or better landing pages are needed for better conversions
on the page. And if the conversions do not come in, the SEO client may not be willing to spend more later on in
the campaign.
3. In more competitive markets, where ranking for a main 1 to 2 word term may be very difficult but ranking for
10,000 long tail keywords is relatively easy, the 10,000 keywords may help move the needle in terms of
conversions and profits, but the main 1 to 2 word keyword phrase can still not be ranking at all near page 1. If
you are staring at keyword rankings for a fix set of terms and do not see any ranking improvements, you might
think the campaign is not successful but in reality you might be adding tons of dollars in terms of additional
sales coming from total organic search traffic that has improved from doing SEO.
There are many other things SEO professionals measure like amount of links, Google PageRank, percent contribution
of organic search in a multiple touchpoint conversion, and many others, but I do not usually look at them as measures
of success. They are more like guides that you analyze for further optimization.
You’ve been in this industry for quite some time sir. We’d like to know your secret sauce in managing and
handling SEO campaigns.
Build a team of leaders
Managing multiple SEO campaigns well relies heavily on your team to scale your business. Choose your members
well. Having prior experience definitely helps but pay good attention to their past experience since some may be stuck
with old bad SEO habits that are no longer applicable today.If they are not experienced but really show signs that they
are teachable, trainable, then they may still be a good member to have on your team.
You want a team of leaders, you want them to also know the same as what you know or even more than what you
know. And if they know less, then you make it a point they start learning more than you do. Some leaders feel
intimidated by situations like this where they feel the main boss should know everything and the team members
should not know more than the boss because they are afraid of losing their position which is a wrong way to look at it.
You will be overworked training people, what you want to have is self-starters, that will not only learn, but help teach
others.
Make SEO training a habit
It is everyone’s responsibility to always be up-to-date in SEO. And this is where we leverage the knowledge of every
team member. We conduct weekly trainings where each member is required to present something in one of the
weekly meetings to keep everyone up-to-date. We also do cross trainings with the social media team, content
marketing team as well as weekly company meetings so we also learn from the other departments.
Come up with the standard operation procedures

Put it in writing, how the different tasks are done and standardize it. It also makes training of new members easier.
Use a good collaborative project management system
There are many out there, choose one that is within your budget and also is sufficient for your specific needs.
Sir Benj, how do you do your SEO reporting to clients?
This is somewhat related to the measures of success. It all starts with the goal of the client and from that we check
what can we measure and this leads into our key performance indicators (KPIs). We then record the performance of
these KPIs and that builds up the report. Now depending for who the report is intended to, sometimes it can be more
detailed or less detailed. Executives normally just get the high level view without the dirty details while the marketing
personnel gets more details.
There are metrics where we look at often but reports normally come out monthly. The metrics thought are often
compared from a year over year perspective than month over month. So for any report for a given month, we will be
comparing this with the same month the previous year. The reason why we do this is to take in consideration annual
seasonal trends. Depending on the contracted work, some reports will be in Excel, some in PowerPoint, some are
given login access to our reporting platforms, etc. Sometimes it also depends on the level of knowledge of our contact
person in need of the reports.
What do you think are the most important metrics that an SEO should get in Google Analytics?
Revenue from organic search traffic and that is if revenue tracking is configured properly or if it is even applicable to
track. If that does not exist or is not applicable, the next best metric for me is organic search traffic.
First is client discovery, we really have to understand the client well, and we will ask what are their key differentiators,
what is their unique selling proposition (USP), what barriers to entry they have that serves as their competitive
advantage. Basically it is what makes the company awesome, why they rock. And once we see it, we try to make that
advantage popular, it is the main voice, the main message that has to get out and recognized by the world.
To speed up the spreading of the news, this is where content marketing comes into play, coming with great awesome
content that is very compelling, interesting, intriguing, that makes the people share it and when they do, it just
increases brand awareness, it strengthens the brand which later on helps generate demand. Once you got this nailed
down, everything else becomes easier.
I am not good at answering questions like this. I just know I like some foods and I don’t like others. But I find it hard to
think of a favorite.I just know I eat almost everything except okra and saluyot (corchorus) and I don’t eat many sweet
foods like chocolate, cakes, ice cream (except vanilla ice cream), sweet candies, etc. Not because I am health
conscious, not because I am diabetic or what, but for some crazy reason I just do not like the taste.
I guess you can never go wrong with bacon. So let’s just make bacon my favorite.
I’m old school, so I’d say Greg Boser where I was a longtime fan of the podcast SEO Rockstars of
WebmasterRadio.fm although these days, it’s no longer Greg doing the shows, but I used to religiously follow the
show, I play the podcast while working, on my ipod while driving, and I interact in the live chatroom show.

Second would be Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker, although more known for affiliate marketing and just making
money online, he just has this natural marketing talent and is a highly technical person as well.
Lastly would be Jim Boykin, his trust baiting was of getting very authoritative backlinks is just something he has
invested a lot in and really has it down into an effective repeatable, scalable process with a good well trained team
backed with sophisticated proprietary tools.
I’ll just tell you 2 things. 1st is what my mom always told me:“Ang pinakamagandang puhunan sa iyong buhay ay ang
iyong nalalaman, hindi makakanakaw nino man.” (The best investment in life is your knowledge, no one else can steal
that away from you.) So in SEO, it will always be continuous learning and this is really important to survive. And 2nd
what my dad always said: “Everyday is continuous learning, what did you learn today?” So aside from continuous
learning, it should also happen very often, almost every day.
Fervil Von
Fervil Von Tripoli is a passionate SEO specialist from the Philippines and the author for FV SEO Ph
blog. He always spends quality time in studying, writing, and testing new cutting edge tactics in SEO
while drinking his favorite coffee. You can check out more info about Fervil Von.

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