Today we are introducing our latest recruit to the team; Mark Proctor, who is joining us as Head of SEO
GW: How are you? Welcome on-board to Ambergreen. You’ve been brought on board as Head of SEO. As the latest recruit, could you tell me a little about yourself and why the change to Ambergreen.
MP: Okay, well I’m 38, live in Fife, and have a work history that has involved account management, marketing, data analysis, web development and SEO: here’s my LinkedIn profile for the curious.
The job at Ambergreen is great opportunity for me to bring all those varied roles and experiences together and make sure we’re offering digital marketing services that are truly aligned to our client’s business objectives. I’ll be focused on ensuring they get found for valuable, relevant search queries and that when they do, they’re able to make the most of those opportunities.
GW: Could you tell us what you do when you’re not being Head of SEO at Ambergreen.
MP: At the moment about 50% of my free time is spent arguing with my 3 year old about whether he can play on the wii or not, the rest of the time is split pretty evenly between actually playing on the wii with him, assisting in lego builds or pretending to be one of at least fifty different Marvel superheroes/villains. I bought him a Thor hammer recently – that was a mistake.
GW: What do you think you can bring to the party?
Marketing strategy, commercial experience and technical website knowhow. Exactly the sort of chat you want at a party.
GW: What do you think are going to be the biggest challenges and opportunities for our clients in 2015?
MP: I think understanding user behaviour by device and catering to the different usage patterns across those is something almost everybody could do better. I’m glad mobilegeddon put responsive design in the spotlight and raised awareness of the growth in mobile browsing somewhat, but I think there’s a lot of potential out there for customising user flow outside the scope of basic responsive design.
That closely relates to what Google are calling “micro-moments”: multiple brief, focused searches across various devices and times of day that ultimately contribute to an overall customer journey. That has some hefty implications for those of us who spend our time making sure websites match markets, as we need to make sure we have relevant structure and content for potential customers at every phase of the decision making process, not just those at the end of the funnel, and a comprehensive understanding of the value of the long tail of search.
For technical SEO, well, the core challenges are the same as always – provide the right, relevant information to your potential customers quickly on a technically perfect, but flexible platform. Still plenty of work to do there…
GW: How can you help the clients reach their goals this year?
MP: By fully understanding their marketing strategies and business goals – once we’ve got that, we’ve got the foundation for really demonstrating the value of search engine optimisation and content marketing.
GW: Any words of wisdom?
MP: Nothing that Bill & Ted haven’t already said:
