Ep 01: How Can Businesses Take Control of Their Own SEO with Ben Hawkshaw-Burn

What’s up, marketing Geeks? On this podcast's very first episode of SEO Unfiltered, I sat down with my boss and CEO of Geeky Tech, Ben Hawkshaw-Burn, to discuss why he thinks marketing decision-makers should take more control of their SEO.

As someone whose livelihood very much depends on companies outsourcing their digital marketing, you’d think that Ben’s advice would kind of be the opposite.

But even if you do decide to outsource, there are a few very good reasons to take charge of your SEO efforts:

• The more you know about SEO, the less likely you’ll be seduced by false promises from seemingly professional marketing companies that probably know less about SEO than they advertise.
  • This little bit of advice was inspired by Ben’s real-life experience with hiring an SEO firm.
• Understanding how SEO works means that you can regularly produce optimised content in-house.
• Once you understand the ins and outs of SEO—keyword strategy, technical optimisation, brand authority—you’ll start to take a more active role in your web marketing (and naturally take a partnership role with your SEO agency).

If you’ve ever read our Geek Speak blog, you might have noticed that at Geeky Tech, we like to break down SEO into its three fundamental steps: keyword research, on-page optimisation, and off-page optimisation. In this episode, I pretend that I’m a tech marketer that wants to do more with my website and get Ben to walk me through these three fundamental steps.

Of course, if we went over every little detail on our SEO checklist, our podcast episode would be 10 hours long (and we might have talked ourselves out of jobs), but we’re hoping that we’ve given you, our listeners, just enough of the good stuff to make you curious and excited to learn more about how to reach page one of Google.

Get Started With SEO Using These Recommended Tools

• SEMrush
• AHrefs
• Moz
• Majestic
• keysearch.co
• Google AdWords

Check out these helpful Geeky Tech resources:

• On-Page SEO Best Practices
• What is Keyword Cannibalisation?
• Geek Speak

Want to hear more SEO Unfiltered? Stay tuned for episode two (airing in March), where I sit down with on-page SEO wizard Alan Mansford as he walks me through the silliest website mistakes that both slowly and quickly kill your website rankings.

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Have any questions you want answered on the show? Email us at [email protected].
Thanks for listening 🤓