Colchester SEO Guy – returns to his optimisation roots
Well I officially started my SEO career in 1997 based in Colchester, in the early days it was easy to optimise a website and search engines such as Google were not yet a public facility.
In the next few years I built up a business based on providing search engine optimisation for businesses around Colchester, slowly the net became more established with everyday business life and the clients steadily came in with a larger stature.
To be honest from 2003 onwards it has been a blur, my life now revolves around corporate board meetings and contracts, I have teams of very clever people doing what I did but life has become a little dull. With a second tier of senior management I am at least freed up to concentrate on R&D but I yearn for my roots again and as Colchester was where it all started its time to come back.
Of course the corporate SEO will continue but life with small businesses was always so much more personal and enjoyable, at the this end of the spectrum you feel that clients become friends, Colchester is where it started but of course SEO clients quickly came in from all parts of Essex so that is my starting point now I am back to my roots.
I think also that applying SEO to small business websites is pretty much SEO at the sharp end, a large site such as Lloydstsb.com has a huge amount of power and so it makes the delivery of generic search terms much easier and long tail a walk in the park. Of course the value is in the early months with big websites as usually its development time and changes to the architecture that is needed before listings materialise.
I have to say though the biggest benefit for large business is Google’s push on brand, I think that is a very unfair way of manipulating results on the part of Google.
At the other end of the scale its all about strategy and finding the edge, ita about learning what converts rather than just a pursuit of visitors.
I am really looking forward to working again with businesses in Colchester again and of course eventaully further afield.
I have been in the SEO industry since 1997 and seen almost all there is to see, after many years of leading one of the top SEO agencies in the country I am now helping small businesses who are getting ripped off by unscrupulous SEO companies.
hey I am a local businessman and know who you are, I remember you starting out at the local Colchester BNI breakfast meetings, all nervous. I see your main company is now one of the largest employers in Colchester so you guys did well. Do you remember the tyre man from Colchester BNI? Ive been retired from business a while now but never got my website established as part of my business so I never tried SEO but I do know other companies in Colchester have tried and been burnt by SEO agencies in the area so maybe you will make a difference…
Hi Dave,
need a bit more information before I get my old grey matter working, I went to Colchester BNI and other Colchester networking clubs for a while but handed it over to my business partner who was a much better presenter
One thing I do remember is how woefully bad the Colchester Chamber of Commerce was back then, it was a very technophobic institution as far as the Internet went.
Come back and tell me where your business was in Colchester and I will remember for sure.