EPISODE #16

Educating Clients on SEO with Steve Wiideman

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Welcome back faithful listeners!

We’ve got an awesome episode for you today! We welcome SEO veteran and one of our good friends at E2M, Steve Wiideman of Wiideman Consulting Group. Now, we don’t throw around the term “SEO veteran” lightly. Steve has been involved in the search industry since before Google became the face of SEO!

steveSteve has seen it all in SEO – and he’s got all sorts of knowledge and insight to share!

In this episode, our focus is mostly on educating/managing clients on SEO.

We start the show by getting Steve’s take on what SEO looked like at the beginning, the challenges, and old tactics that used to work wonders. Fast-forwarding to 2020, we discuss some of the biggest challenges currently facing SEOs and what the near future might bring.

We then get into the specifics of managing clients from the initial consultation to set up an SEO audit. Steve touches on one of the most important aspects of being an SEO agency: conveying technical speak to clients in a way they understand!

The first segment continues with more information on audits, building an SEO roadmap, and some commonly overlooked strategies.

We end the first half by getting Steve’s take on the February 7th update and what it all means!

Intermission

We pick up episode 16 after the intermission with more insight on client management. In this scenario, Steve talks about what to do if your client’s website takes a hit in the middle of a campaign. This segues into our discussion on client transparency and how vital it is to being a successful agency.

Taral takes the lead on some technical questions – including mobile-first indexing, SEO-friendly design approaches, and fragmented URLs.

As the show comes to a close, I ask Steve some big picture questions about link building. More specifically, we echo a topic from segment 1 about Google penalizing sites with bad outbound links and what to do.

Spoiler: When linking out, consider implementing Google’s new nofollow attributes:

  • Rel=”sponsored”
  • Rel=”ugc”

As per usual in The Marketing Microscope, we close the show with some parting advice from the guest to new people in the field. Steve provides some good approaches for getting involved in SEO, an ideal career path, and how to keep up with the changing industry.

In addition to reading up on the latest industry blogs, Steve recommends getting involved in the following SEO-related Facebook groups:

That’s it for episode 16! If you do anything in SEO/manage clients, definitely give this one a listen!

You can find more episodes of The Marketing Microscope on our website, as well as on Stitcher!