It took around 2 months to collect the secret and beneficial information of Search Marketing from the kings of SEO Industry. Although, I missed few but believe me, these little chunks of contribution from these gurus are way better than reading 20k words guides which are available in the market. Regardless, you’re a beginner, an intermediate, a freelancer, a big SEO company or a well-known brand which has strived hard to achieve a milestone and create its prominent existence in the SERPs. Below you’ll find treasure in every piece of advice from these big names related to dealing with your life, clients and marketing strategies. Starting with the brand himself Neil Patel whom I really admire and really thankful to for his contribution.

Neil Patel

Neil Patel

“The Best Advice I can give is, Write for Humans First, Search Engines come Second”
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neilpatel.com

Indeed, it’s a small quote but have you heard the phrase “A picture says more than 1000 words?” The same scenario is here, and all of your search marketing queries can be solved.

Maria Johnsen

Maria Johnsen

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“When it comes to SEO business, an SEO expert should follow three important principles:”

  • Getting the SEO techniques right without using a black hat shortcut.
  • Provide a good customer service because referrals will generate new clients.
  • Be ethical, humble and respectful toward the other SEO experts, customers and prospects.

Many newbie SEOs become tempted to attack against their competitor’s websites and hurt their reputation on social media. But, this is a sign of weakness. Never ever do such thing, it backfires.

Keep your head down and do your job. Don’t be afraid of not being acknowledged, it’s not really important.

The digital world has more than 100,000 SEO experts and media companies. They all are busy doing their jobs and serving their customers. When someone trolls you on social media, it is a sign of weakness and it shows that they do not have projects. If they attack you on social media due to jealousy, it’s because deep down they know you are better than them. So be proud of yourself and stay professional.

Never ever reply to trolls on social media. In SEO business, good personalities attract business owners. If you are kind, mindful and professional, people will be attracted to you. I mean think about it, how many times you have seen Barry Schwartz troll the other SEOs on social media? He never does anything like that and everybody loves him anyway. He is a great example of honest, kind and ethical SEO expert.

Whenever you desire to reply to a “so called” SEO troll, keep calm and remind yourself “what would Barry Schwartz do?” or whoever you feel is a good SEO expert in the industry. Good SEOs become popular because of their good behavior and professionalism.

You see, by attacking successful SEO experts on social media, you are showing to the world that you are threatened by this man or woman’s success. So my piece of advice to all SEO experts is to be humble and cooperative.

The reason that I am successful in my business is that I cooperate with other SEOs. This is why I have been financially independent. My websites had been under attack of negative SEOs many times, I had been trolled and defamed to death on social media, but life goes on. If I wanted to care about such things, I would not be able to do my job.

In my line of business, most of my clients are media agencies from North America, Europe and even Asia, mainly China and India outsource who give their projects to me.

So as you see, I talked more about the code of conduct and morality than getting the technical and mechanics right. The secret key in any business is to be polite, professional and expert in networking. If you succeed in being open minded and professional, you win in your business, I promise you. So the secret key is a good networking.”

Brian D Evans

Brian D Evans

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For me, I focus on contextual relevancy with my links, meaning I find ways to organically link to my other content in a way that makes sense and is valuable to a human reader. I don’t link just for SEO purposes but for the human reader that may want to dig deeper on a topic. I think Google is smart enough at this point to reward for this.

Aaron Orendorff

Aaron Orendorff

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“I’m really not an SEO expert, but that might be a good thing. Why? Because you can go pretty far online by just knowing the basics and using simple tools like Yoast for on-page optimization. My only real claim to have SEO fame is number one ranking for the phrase “best copywriter.” Ironically, that piece is a detailed roundup of the best copywriting books from 10 of the best online copywriters. The one insight that I have is to always optimize your meta-descriptions for humans. While Google doesn’t “count” this as a ranking factor, it does profoundly impact click through rates. The best results I’ve had are simple previews, asking direct questions, or making provocative statements in the meta-description. Whatever you do, don’t let Google just grab the first few lines from the page itself. Craft them.”

Amir Khan

Amir Khan

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Digiwisers.com

I personally believe this to be the perfect best SEO tool ever! Networking and relationship-building can be quite time-consuming. However, it is also a great way to raise your business game and keeping your content new and accessible for those who might be planning to link to you in future.

You can initiate by creating a list of popular bloggers in your line of work, especially those who get a lot of traffic on their content, post helpful material and have relevant websites. After that, start being active on their blogs, take interest in their posts and communicate with them by every chance you get. In this way, you’ll get their attention and as a result, they’ll definitely start checking out your blog and content. If you have the content which is helpful for their readers, then all the more reason for them to be associating with you. Making friends online is not a bad idea after all!

Jacob McMillen

Jacob McMillen

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JacobMcMillen.com

“Go grab the URLs of your top 5 competitors, throw them into Ahref’s ‘content gap’ tool and find which key phrases are driving the majority of their traffic. For each key phrase, create a 3k-5k words post designed to be the best possible resource online for anyone searching for that phrase. Finally, use internal linking, external link building, and content promotion to get eyeballs and links on those resources.”

Sam Soh

Sam Soh

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SamSoh.com

Be an expert in one industry by targeting one keyword at a time. You can work for multiple markets when you are a beginner in SEO, but along the years, you should concentrate on a niche and be the best in it.

Every keyword has its own difficulty in different countries, and not all of them can bring you traffic for that region.

It is therefore very important to do detailed keyword research for your target country or region, so that you can have a clear and concise keywords in mind before writing the page content.

Steve Wiideman

Steve Wiideman

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I’ve always believed that great SEO always starts with comprehensive auditing and creative strategies around technical, contextual and off-page visibility focal points. As a corporate search marketer, the audits typically include:

  • Obstacle Analysis Report (OAR) & Action Plan
  • Competitive Analysis Report (CAR – baseline)
  • Link Analysis Report (LAR) & Strategy
  • Keyword Discovery (KDR) & Site Taxonomy

A few leaders (among many) in the area of strategy include Alan Bleiweiss, Annie (Annielytics) Cushing, Bill Hartzer, and David Harry (SEO Dojo). You can’t go wrong if you enlist any of these super guru’s advice when building out your project management system with SEO software tasks for the year.

Another way to improve long-term organic traffic growth is to put someone in charge of testing, as a full time position.

Schedule the different tests and experiments which you’d like to run for the next 3-6 months, make sure none of them overlap the same target pages. Areas which we test often include enhancements to titles, meta-descriptions, headings, and AMP pages.

Be sure to annotate EVERYTHING in Google Analytics, so you can trace changes in rankings or traffic back to the experiment that have triggered it.

Lastly, spend 30 minutes per day following popular search blogs via Feedly, particularly the Google Webmaster Central Blog, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, and Search Engine Roundtable. It also wouldn’t hurt putting contributors to this post in an SEO Expert Twitter list for the daily dose of real time expert news.

Andy Crestodina

Andy Crestodina

Twitter

In SEO world, the best advice is something that you don’t hear very often. If you want to rank in search, your first job is to “Make the best page on the internet for your topic.” Don’t compromise on quality, go deep, add details, and add examples. Answer all of the related questions. If you don’t do this, nothing else will work.

The other two pieces of advice are being heard almost everywhere…First, understand authority and only target phrases if you have a good chance of ranking (off-site SEO). Secondly, understand relevance and make sure to use the target phrase in the appropriate places (on-page SEO), that’s pretty much it!

Gareth Daine

Gareth Daine

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The are two key aspects beginners and professionals alike often forget about SEO.

What are they?

Audience and content promotion.
For some, it’s all about competitor analysis and keyword research.

But…

Often, these aspects, while important, are not the first or most important things to be concentrating on.

As with most business related activities online, your initial and primary concern should be your audience. Regarding ranking, some SEOs often target the wrong audience.

Because of this, they struggle to build or acquire quality links, which are the lifeblood of SEO/ranking.

More often than not, content is created for customers, and while you do want some customer focused content on your website unless you’re incredibly lucky, often your customers are not the audience you should be targeting when ranking is your concern.

Think about it for a second.

If ranking is about links, customer focused content often does not have the power to acquire them.Your customers will rarely have the ability to link to you.

Secondly, content promotion is critical. I can’t emphasise this enough

Frequently there’s this publish and pray mentality in content marketing and SEO.
The mantra goes something like this.

Content is King, so, just publish great content and eventually Google will reward you.
This simply isn’t true.

It’s a myth.

You have to promote your content strategically like your life depended on it, and you also have to get your content in front of the audience that matter.

 Udit Goenka

Udit Goenka

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SEO and the way SEO works have changed drastically over the last few years.

With Google pushing regular updates, people who have been focusing on quality rather than quantity are leading by miles and are ranking very well.

One of the biggest reason why I have been able to rank very well is that I focus on the most crucial aspect which most people ignore i.e. attention to detailing in SEO. 

On-Page SEO and High-Quality Contents is the PERFECT combination which one should focus upon as they are the key to better and fast ranking. Why? Because the amount of work that will be required for Off-Page SEO (Link Building) will go down drastically.

Typically, most of my blog posts contain around 2500 to 4000 words of well-researched contents while my ultimate guides can go up to 8,000 to 15,000 words. Long and In-depth guides help me to acquire a lot of links naturally over the period of time after my initial link building efforts.

Mark Rushworth

Mark Rushworth

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Don’t believe the hype.

Most of the SEO news that you find online is focused on high idealism or trending topic. In major SEO conferences, this is what seminar speakers talk about. In most cases, it goes as “do what I say and not what I do” meaning many campaigns never get to a point where the trend can be implemented. Instead, focus on getting the basics right. Good architecture plus well-written and well-optimized content are really where your focus should be until there’s a paradigm shift in the industry.

Remember that SEO is not a process of a month or two but it takes a lot of dedication, devotion and a long time span for someone to rank up their website on desired keywords. By following these influencers, you can enhance the rank of your website but  on the other hand if you just intend to become an Influencer, invest your time in it. Read as much as possible and do experiments like Rand Fishkin and one day you’ll be on these sort of lists too. Have you ever experimented and played with the keywords of your website ? Share your story and let the audience know your secret.

Muhammad Bilal Shahid is an enthusiastic digital marketer with phenomenal entrepreneurial visions and helps the businesses to get found by Google. His aim is to strive for excellence and his actions evident this fact firmly. He is well aware of the fluctuating trends evolving around the digital, tech, news and entertainment industry, he is firmly keen to write about the trending happenings around the globe. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook.