Today we’re talking to Dave Naylor, SEO at Bronco.co.uk. Dave’s been in the SEO industry for donkey’s 13 years and in that time he’s amassed a formidable knowledge of all things SEO. This year, Dave will be speaking on two panels: “PPC or SEO? The Ultimate Search Marketing Battle”, and “Industry Specific Search Strategies: Under the Hood“.
Dave, thanks for speaking to us today. You got yourself and the Naylor family a VW Campervan called “Bob” last year. How’s Bob doing?
Awesome, a little bit more expensive than I had worked out it was going to be. Bought some new parts, and the biggest expense was increasing the height of the garage doors so I could get it in! I had to get the brakes done, because I could get from 0 to 60mph quicker than I could get from 60 to 0 mph – which is never a good thing! I love taking it out for a drive and have plans for lots of trips in the summer to shows and VW meet ups.
Let’s start with the “PPC or SEO? The Ultimate Search Marketing Battle” panel. In Chicago you went with PPC. Isn’t SEO the ultimate channel to drive your traffic?
No I didn’t, yeah damn right SEO is. Nobody on any panel that I’m speaking at would say either marketing strategy is right or wrong, they both complement each other. I think anyone serious about promoting their business needs to be running both. Anyone good at running PPC should be able to get a return on ROI, but yeah, I’m an organic guy.
With a little help from you, SEOgadget ranks on Google page 1 for “UK SEO”. What are the other most useless rankings you’ve ever come across?
To be honest there are so many at the moment, with the whole US/Australia infection running wild at Google. But I guess you want something more personal from my point of view, “Google approved SEO” would have to be it. We were number 1 for it for a while, but the snippet on that still makes me laugh, people should go check it out.
You’re also on the “Industry Specific Search Strategies: Under the Hood” panel. This is a new panel to SES, featuring specialist SEO’s in recruitment, travel and gambling. Which sectors the toughest to be in today?
Hmm. That’s a tough one really. If you look at some of the industries we are in, and people say they are some of the toughest in the World. In my experience the toughest industries are the ones where people are grandfathered in. Take the car insurance SERPs, or something that is very niche where someone has been in there for 5 or so years with no competition, this will have given them time to build a backlink and support structure which will be well aged by now. Also it also harder to rank for single brand terms or some of the large brands now; as they are really starting to get their act together.
What would you like the SES audience to take away from this panel?
To identify their market place, are they niche or mainstream, if niche – how they can dominate. I guess something they can take back to action – sometimes you can to conferences and you think “yeah that’d be great, in 6 months time”, but I like people to take away a “quick fix”, something they can implement straight away that will have a valuable impact.
You have some tools on the davidnaylor.co.uk site. Tell us what you’ve been working on recently and what SEO tools are your “secret weapons”?
We’re quite open about the stuff we are building and we try and get it out to the public ASAP. At the moment we are looking to build some traffic predictor tools – a mashup with Analytics to forecast whether a keyword is worth going for or not – although this will be an internal tool. I’d like to redo the SEO playground tool, maybe bring out a fully fledged Firefox extension so there isn’t so much load on our servers.
Dave, thanks a lot for speaking to us. If you’d like some SEO advice from Dave he’ll be in the “Tough Love: Get Your Site Tuned Up” session where you’ll be able to submit your site for a SEO health check. Be sure to get into that session if you want some advice from the number 1 UK SEO. Thanks to Foliovision for the photo!
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