“The experiences of someone else is one of the reasons why we don’t call an old age a mad man”.

This is a popular adage from my part of the world where I come from. This adage is based on the premise that the older a person gets, the more experience the person becomes. This is because he/She must have learned a lot both from his personal endeavor and from others.

That is why I reached out to industry leaders in the SEO niche and ask them to share with us, their “one SEO lesson learned in 2013”.

SEO Lessons from 8 Expert in the SEO Industry….

1. Neil Patel , Founder of QuickSprout and Kissmetric
I learned that you shouldn’t rely on one marketing channel. I already knew this, but with all of the Google updates it sent a clear message to a lot of marketers that you can’t just focus on one channel. Due to the fact that Google is so large, all of us marketers put more emphasis on it, even though we know that we shouldn’t rely on it.

2. Chris Dyson, Founder of TrippleSEO

The biggest thing I learned in 2013 is that there are lot of SEO’s out there who when things don’t go their way are more than happy to take others with them either by outing an individual, agency or a tactic.

3. Simon Penson, Founder of Zazzlemedia

“I think the biggest lesson was that diversification is the key and no business should have their eggs in any one basket. This is important both from a risk mitigation perspective, but also to ensure you reach as many eyeballs as humanly possible. No one channels works in a silo either so maximising return from search, social and influencer channels is the route to success. A smart, data informed, strategy is therefore critical to link these channels together.”

4. Maria Johnsen , Founder Multilingual Digital Marketing Agency

Optimize the website for the targeted customers as usual and don’t tweak your SEO activities based on Google’s constant algorithm modification. Because google tweaks their algorithm twice a day and sometimes they may not work. This will hurt your SEO.

Be patient, test and do what is right for you. Avoid automated tools, use a variety of submissions, anchor text, image submission, youtube, social media. Make it all natural. Optimize it for humans so that they find the website. Don’t do seo for Google.
5. Rand Fish, Founder and Former CEO of Moz

In 2013, I learned a lot about how product contributes to your overall marketing. Moz made a brand shift, which went very well, and a product launch that was rockier. Marketers like me expect things to be good from day one, and market like they will be, but when you do that, you set expectations very high. In the software world, first launches usually don’t meet high expectations – they need a few months of bug fixing, tweeking, and improving based on user feedback to get where they need to be. In the future, I hope to remember to market with that knowledge in mind.

6. Mike Glover, Founder of Click-Finders

“Build every piece of content like it’s the MOST important piece of content to your websites success or failure. In other words…mediocre content is just that, mediocre content that does not get shared or linked to and that’s just not good enough any more!”

7. Tola Famakinwa, SEO Executive at Moneymarket

My one lesson which stands out for me the most amongst many, as you can imagine is relationship building and not link building. I spent a lot of time last year carrying out competitions and building relationships – it is hard work but something we as SEO experts need to develop. The mummy blogger next door is becoming a lot more ‘aware’ so we need to learn to engage them on that level as well. We have to get out of the mind set that the Internet is made up of links because its actually made up of relationships with real people.

8. Sujan Patel, Founder and Former CEO of Singlebrain

2013 was a tough year for all SEOs, with 17 algorithm updates and Google cracking down on link building (IMO killing scalable link building). The lesson I learned is that SEO is a part of Internet Marketing..and that we need think more like marketers and less like the old way of SEO. As marketers we need to be more creative and constantly be testing ways to acquire new users, customers, clients not just build links or rank higher. Tactics like guest post, infographics, etc will come and go but no search engine update can kill our creativity.

9. Mathew Woodward, SEO Expert

Over the past couple of years, Google has started to get much better at detecting spam and manipulation of the algorithm.

They really turned the volume up on this throughout 2013 and it’s a trend that is set to continue.

It is coming to the point when SEO is not SEO anymore. Instead, you need a much broader online marketing strategy – relying purely on SEO & link building is not internet marketing.

Great Contribution and thanks to everyone who took part in this insightful roundup.

Over to you , our esteemed readers. Please share with us your one SEO lesson you learned in 2013 by adding your contribution in the comments section.

Learn more about SEO with our beginner’s guide to SEO for Dummies.

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Adegboye Adeniyi

Adegboye Adeniyi is an SEO Specialist. He creates and implements campaigns for clients, endlessly discovering new prospects and strategies for growing their business online. Outside of the Internet realm, his other passions include reading and playing chess.

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