Get to know Dave and Mary Davies, Co-Owners, Beanstalk Internet Marketing

We are Dave and Mary Davies, owners of Beanstalk Internet Marketing. We’ll be combining our knowledge into single answers as we each approach SEO differently and have different roles in the company and thus can together give an answer better than either would provide individually.

Essentially we’ve moved from a focus on us telling users what they want based on what the Google algorithms were telling us to a world where the user impacts the results and so the order has become users telling Google what they want and Google’s algorithms telling us. On a more technical tangent we’re also seeing a shift from a major update every 6 weeks (called the Google Dance back then) to many elements of the algorithm changing on the fly and around 500 updates per year. The change in technology and speed of updates requires broad approaches around providing good relevant content and consistent link acquisition strategies vs chasing an algorithm update-after-update. There is obviously the massive shift in devices to consider as well and the change in how the results pages lay out. 10 years ago we weren’t worried about how much traffic a featured snippet may provide or cost us in traffic and people weren’t searching with their voice. A “near me” search was a good number of years ahead and a personal assistant was probably the intern bringing the coffee.
In short – SEO is almost noting like it was 10 years ago and that’s a good thing as back then it was easily gamed and frustrating to use.

Dave was working for a web hosting company and Mary was studying web design when in 2000 it stuck us that we could make a bit of extra money doing affiliate marketing. Of course back then ranking a site was not the complicated task that it is now and within three months we had multiple sites ranking for competitive terms and effectively replaced our monthly working income. It didn’t take us long however to get bored with selling acne creams and having little professional interactions (especially given that this was prior to social media really taking off) and so we started an SEO firm in 2004.

The first service we offered and which is still our primary focus is organic SEO. From link building to onsite content and technical – this is what our company was built on and is our bread-and-butter. We’re also a Google Partner with AdWords certifications and work fairly heavily in paid search. Historically this was (to us at least) not the most exciting area but things have gotten very interesting over the past 7 or 8 years and some of the major changes in how ads are delivered, where they’re placed and how quality scores work providing a lot of opportunity for interesting work as well as very rewarding outcomes.

This is a very interesting question and one witch we both have a different angle on. Dave tends to focus on looking through patents and trends to the distant future (you know – 3 and 4 years off), Mary is more focused on what’s working today and on the close horizon. To ask Dave he’d say AI and machine learning however while they’re increase in 2017 this won’t be their year, that’s probably closer to 2020. Mary’s comments on the subject however are more current – relevancy. Giving users access to the data they want (and even what they didn’t know they want) quickly, easily digested and effectively displayed will result in ranking improvements. This is likely to the be the year we look at as the year the user took control as Google has the technical capabilities now to consider significantly more user-generated signals and their primary mission is to give those users what they want in the quickest and more desirable format.

Study … a lot. Both of us spend time every day reading about what’s going on in our industry and we both attend a good number of conferences going as speakers, press and sometimes just as attendees. One of the most important things anyone going into SEO can do right now is keep up with what’s going on but further, try reading some old documents as well. Provided we keep up, those of us with over a decade of experience in the field have the advantage of seeing how Google is evolving and SEO as well. With this knowledge it becomes easier to understand their algorithm updates, new features, why they patent what they do, etc. and that insight can make a huge difference. So don’t just read what’s going on today read a few of the top stories from past years.
Further, knowing a little about everything is extremely helpful. Specializing is almost mandatory in today’s search world but getting a bit of experience in the other areas help one understand how the pieces work together and the challenges your peers face. For example, as a content SEO it can be incredibly helpful to understand how the social campaigns can be structured and the limitations of the Facebook Ads Manager. Dabbling a little in the myriad of Internet Marketing areas can be extremely helpful in doing the best job you can and may even set you up to be able to manage with a knowledge of what everyone does and how the pieces fit together.