The Future of SEO

Gael Breton@gaelbreton

Who I Am

• True nerd since 1986

• In SEO for over 4 years

• Started Higher Click 2(ish) years ago in Hungary

• Worked on over 300 campaigns including Macy’s, Nigella Lawson, 99Designs and other big players.

My impression of the crowd after Andras’s talk.

SEO is getting hard

Since 2012, Google’s been coming hard after us, algorithm gamblers.

SEO is getting hard

This kind of stuff is becoming less and less credible to your bosses, clients & other stakeholders.

Everybody Panic!

(some) SEO is in crisis.

“Just do great content”

The build it and they will come approach isn’t really working either, we need something more fail proof.

Inbound Marketing evangelism

We need to leverage the other sources of “Free” traffic that will also help SEO in the long term.

Case study 1: Superfoodprofiles.com

Superfoods related blog, monetizes with amazon affiliate

• Gets hundreds of referral traffic from Pinterest• Earned hundreds of links from repins and pin embeds to his site• Had some bloggers cover him and his site, linking naturally to him.• Ranks highly for dozens of terms and gets hundreds of organic visits daily• Now makes over $1500/month from his blog, quitting his job at the end of year,

living the life ;).

Meet Jim

Case study 2: entrepreneuronfire.com

Entrepreneur podcast blog, monetizes with banner ads & sponsoring

• Started his Podcast blog last October• Voted #1 Business podcast on itunes 2 months later• Hottest podcast on itunes in the business category ever since• Ranks for every guest name + interview (including Tim Ferris etc)• Makes 5 figures from his blog monthly in 5 months.

Meet John Lee Dumas

Case study 3: Matthewwoodward.com

• SEO Blog about link building without link building• Posts 1-5x/month• Lots of affiliate reviews• Great video tutorials• Super active on SEO Forums• Works on providing value

Meet Matthew Woodward

SEO / Link Building blog, monetizes with product reviews

Conclusion & Learnings

• SEO’s need to evolve revolutionize the way they traditionally acquired traffic to the sites they’re working on.

• We need to embrace marketing and real people, not just search robots.

• Work on new medias and share the budget with PR / Social

• We need to understand the rankings themselves will be longer to come by if we want them to stick and avoid black and white animals.

• Every website needs to become a content publisher to be worthy of earning the links that won’t hurt them (or deliver an exceptional product)

That’s all folks

@gaelbreton