With years of experience and a deep understanding of search engine algorithms, Craig Campbell is the go-to guru for businesses looking to dominate the online sphere. In this exclusive interview with Maria Debrincat, he shares his success story and insider tips and tricks for SEO success.
What inspired you to pursue a career in marketing and what do you find most rewarding about your work?
I fell into marketing in the early 2000s, I had initially started as a really bad web designer, but it wasn’t quite working out so I decided to look at the marketing side of things as a secondary option. 23 years later I’m still here and making a living out of it.
The rewarding aspect of it is being able to train and mentor people, and eliminate the mistakes I made over the years, which made my learning curve so much longer than it needed to be.
How did you first get involved in SEO and what was the industry like when you started?
When I got started in the SEO industry, there wasn’t social media, YouTube, or anything similar to learn things from. There was one online course that was in PDF format, which was absolutely horrendous.
Other than that, a lot of my learning came through a forum called “The SEO Chat Forum” which is still there to this day. So watching the threads, asking questions, and trial and error were the only real way to learn at that point. It was tough, but things got easier along the way with YouTube and all of the social platforms coming out.
Can you give an example of a time when you had to pivot your strategy due to changes in search algorithms or industry trends?
Year after year, we constantly have to pivot strategies to some degree, for example, when the EAT became a thing we had to work on building up expertise, authority, and trust, which we didn’t have to do previously.
The game is always about embracing the changes, and Google will always want to find ways to filter out the low-quality material from the SERPs, so you always have to be ready to embrace these entities.
Even changes like Link Building, previously it was about the volume of links until everyone abused it, so we had to change the approach, and now have to consider the quality and relevance of a link alongside some other metrics.
How have you seen the role of SEO evolve in relation to other digital marketing channels such as PPC and social media?
We all know that traffic and engagement on your pages is a ranking signal for Google, also known as CTR manipulation. So if Google is rewarding traffic and CTR, sending traffic to your page via social media and PPC is one way that you can do that, which in turn boosts your SEO efforts.
Whilst you are paying for real traffic and leads, you are also boosting your SEO efforts at the same time, so for me, they can all go hand in hand. You don’t have to rely on one traffic source. You want to grab as much traffic as you possibly can, and leveraging social media, PPC, or using your mailing list, push notifications, and all of the other ways will help you.
Can you discuss any particularly challenging or innovative projects you’ve worked on throughout your career?
I once got into the e-cigarette niche, some of the challenges were we couldn’t accept payments from anyone other than PayPal, and we couldn’t do any paid social or paid ads, purely because the government doesn’t allow anyone to promote nicotine.
I had invested in a site and done work for 9 months SEO-wise to get traffic, before I started to look at taking payments, and additional traffic and it was tough. In the end, decided to get rid of the business as it was simply too challenging with all the red tape.
How do you stay up-to-date with the latest changes in search engine algorithms?
Doing a lot of testing is important, like most SEO’s I watch closely what’s being said by friends, peers, and other sources such as webinars, podcasts, and anything you can find online. But you have to test, do not rely on anyone dropping all the information on your lap. I’m friends with many people in the industry, so having friends helps too.
