Celebrating Superb SEO(s): Q&A with Hannah Weinhold

I am one of the Directors of a search marketing agency, GrowTraffic. Part of my role is devising and reviewing the strategy for businesses who want to win more of the right sort of customers.

I manage a team of execs who carry out the strategies, so I review their work, train them, support them and amend the strategies when there is room for improvement.

My specialism is getting a new or niche product or service into a crowded market through a solid keyword strategy, great on-site optimisation and conversion rate optimisation.

Accidentally!

My brother-in-law set up GrowTraffic as a side hustle in 2010 and used it to develop his SEO skills. In 2015, my sister, who has a background in English, was medically retired from her job in the NHS with a bad back, so she started doing some copywriting for GrowTraffic and growing the client base, teaching herself SEO.

It got too big for her to handle on her own, so I started helping her out with some blogs and social media on the weekends, just to give her some capacity.

At the time, I was working as an Ops and Process Manager for a lone worker safety company and had no burning ambition to join GrowTraffic full time. Then the company I was working for was sold and they were letting everyone go so I rang my sister up, told her I was coming on full time and went from there.

I knew NOTHING about SEO, other than what my brother-in-law and sister had taught me.

I learnt it pretty quickly though, realised I love it and am good at it. The 3 of us formalised the business and within about 2 months we were flying.

My practice has grown through curiosity, practice, and asking my bro-in-law 3000 questions per day for 7 years.

I love that there could be a million answers to a question or problem and my job is to be a little detective and search for the most likely one.

Each business and website exists in its own unique ecosystem so what works for one site might not work for another. The go-to catchphrase at GrowTraffic is “it depends”. I keep joking that I'm going to buy a Klaxon to sound whenever one of us says it

I also like the psychology of having to predict searcher intent and behaviour.

The jargon and acronyms. It just confuses people and makes it look like we are performing a dark art. SEO should be accessible to everyone.

Also, the fact that the top of the SERPS are essentially controlled by the businesses with the biggest budget and a few hundred people at Google who make the algorithm. It means that access to quality information appears to be equitable but in reality, it very much is not the case. And because the algorithm rewards good user signals, it self-perpetuates.

I'm currently working on a site that has good rankings and traffic but no conversions. Their traffic hasn’t been targeted enough. Balancing maintaining their rankings and traffic with reoptimising their site and attracting new traffic has been interesting. We’ve done a lot of CRO on that one and overhauled their internal link structure, as well as reducing their spam profile.

We are having a lot of conversations with clients about the Helpful Content Update still. Making sure every article adds something new to the topic and is genuinely valuable has required re-educating the client somewhat.

We are also keeping a close eye on AI, as is everyone, particularly in light of some of the effects of the March Core Update.

Embedding transparency into our practice. A lot of clients come to us because they don’t know what they have been getting for their money. I see a lot of good practice on websites we take over, but the client just wasn’t managed properly. How do we distill a complex and nuanced practice and make it easy to access to the person whose business is being affected?

I love SE Ranking, because I like being able to track just the keywords I want to see. I also like Moz for the domain metrics. Obviously, we live in the Google suite too.

Future-proof your tactics. Don’t do something that you know is a bit dodgy or lazy because chances are, in a couple of years, Google will have cracked down on it and you will have work out there that is actively damaging someone’s business.