EP369: SEO Strategy to Safeguard and Elevate Your Online Presence

Stacy Jones | September 25, 2023 at 10:00 AM

Why Your Business Needs a Tailored SEO Strategy

Having an SEO strategy is one of the most beneficial steps towards creating a successful business plan. Managing a business and monitoring your metrics can be overwhelming, but fortunately, there are companies that specialize in guiding their clients through the challenges presented in the digital landscape, tailored to their target audience.

Allow me to introduce you to Joseph DeVita, one of the Managing Partners at Moving Traffic Media, an internet marketing agency that specializes in search marketing, social media, and display advertising.

Joe has spent over twenty years working to revolutionize digital marketing and driving business growth and oversees operations, with his expertise stemming from a decade at SapientRazorfish, working with renowned clients like Marriott Hotels and various Fortune 500 companies. In this blog, Hollywood Branded shares how to create an SEO strategy to elevate your online presence.

The Importance Of Integrated Sales And Marketing Strategy (16)

A Little More About Joseph

At Razorfish, Joe expanded his knowledge from paid search, comparison shopping engines, and SEO, to all media tactics, strategy, and beyond. He appreciated working with them and learning from some of the most influential leaders there is in the industry and working with leading brands. At the same time, he was able to mentor brilliant talent.

After ten years with Razorfish, he took his knowledge and experience to go out on his own with a new full-time pursuit.

He is now putting 100% of his passion into making Moving Traffic Media the kind of company he has always wanted to be a part of.

Interview Transcript Highlights

Stacy: So how did you get here? We know you’ve had over 10 years working in digital agencies. I know you and your partner met each other along the way and spent quite a long time working together before you decided to leave and start this. But how did this all come to be?

Joseph: I was living in Colorado at the time. I took a minimum wage job at an e-commerce startup, basically in a warehouse and answering phones. And I really loved it. I had some great bosses at the time, and they were willing to teach me things that they knew about e-commerce years ago when Yahoo was the big search engine.

They put a lot of trust in me. I stayed with this startup for about 5 years, ended up managing a small team, and just learned a ton. So SEO kind of fell into my lap. Kind of coincidentally about a year after I decided to finish my undergrad.

Stacy: So you came together, decided to work together. What SEO kind is it that is your special spot?

Joseph: Well, that's my partner's specialty, he's more on the paid media side. So paid search, display advertising, and social. So you know, we've got a couple dozen clients now, about half of them are SEO clients and the other half is paid media. I have worked in both as he has. But he is our chief SEO expert. I'm more of the team leader when it comes to the operations side of things

Stacy: When you and your partner are working together and coming together with a client for the first time, how do you start? How do you start figuring out if they're doing things right or wrong?

Joseph: We have a pretty standard approach. We get the contract signed and the first meeting we put on our client's calendar is a discovery call where we build an engagement brief. So the engagement brief has questions, and it starts with like, what are your marketing goals? What are your KPIs? Who are your competitors? Why are you different? And at the end, you get to the bottom dozen questions. And it's about the technology you're using. What platform is your website on? What systems do you use to measure success?

So we know it's a long first conversation but it's like a mini Q&A. It is usually a great conversation and the first time we talk to someone about their business, it is usually really exciting. We take a lot of notes and the whole team joins the call and listen while John and I are asking questions.

But from there, we create an engagement brief. It summarizes everything we heard and becomes a bible we use to onboard all teammates and something we can update throughout the years too when we hold onto clients. So, the engagement brief is the first deliverable. We write it into out SOW. It is a very big project for us.

Stacy: Okay, so you've done this engagement brief. You've had this discovery call. You're trying to figure out what's happening. Let's say it's an SEO-only client. If it's at that point, like, what is going to be that month? What does that month's engagement look like with you?

Joseph: There's never an engagement with a client where it's like, "Our website's perfect. You probably don't need to focus." They come to us because they know they need some help with SEO. So that technical audit produces a list of prioritized implementations to get after. So, after we get through those big deliverables, the tech audit, and the keyword research, we usually put a bit of a break between the next strategic delivery to kind of tackle some of the issues that we found.

So from the things that we've scored, we say, "All right, the things that are easy to do are going to have a big impact on performance. Let's try to get those done before we start moving on to the next big growth idea." We build a project plan. And this is like the kind of nuts and bolts of working with us. But we do these, you know, regular status calls with our clients to say, "Here, here's everything that we found as opportunities. Here's the kind of priority in which we think you should tackle them."

Sneak peek into Marketing Mistakes ( + How To Avoid Them) episode

Stacy: Are there any ways you can mess this up along the way? Are there general mistakes that people make with content in general? Or PR?

Joseph: I will say yes to both of those. There are definitely ways you can mess things up with too much content. Is it too long form? Keeping it too short? It's going to be too visual with images and not doing alt text and making sure that you can link in.

All text is important. It's like for every mentioned, for example press release, there's a checklist of things you need to do. For every blog post, we also have a checklist for there's things every blog article needs to have, like the alt text on your images. There's a lot that can be involved. But I would say you always, if you have the resources, to always gear on the side of more content for SEO and longer form is almost always more beneficial than short.

Stacy: So Joe... How do people find you?

Joseph: Well, the website is movingtrafficmedia.com. We are not a huge team and there is only a few of us now. IF you email info at moving traffic media on our contact page, we will get back to you right away.

If anyone wants to speak with me directly, my Linkedin is on the website.

Check Out The Podcast!

Taking the first step to creating an SEO strategy, you will already start seeing extensive growth in your business. Want to learn how? Click to listen to our full episode below!

Every week we have a marketing professional on our show to share their tips, tricks and lessons learned from their professional experience. Check out some of our other podcast blogs from earlier this year:

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