Interview with Aaron Wall

Glen Allsopp / 3 Comments / February 15th, 2007 / Subscribe via RSS

If there was ever a single SEO I could trust enough to work on my own sites, then without a doubt it would be Aaron Wall, author of SEOBook. When I first got into this industry, Aaron’s site and story where very inspirational to me and helped me a lot along my path.

It was with pleasure that Aaron agreed to do this interview with us and its certainly great to see his responses:

Please tell us how you first got into Search Engine Optimization

I created a rant site that was of low (maybe no?) quality and wanted people to see it. That was my first site, and with no budget I wanted to market it. So SEO seemed like a good call. I was instantly fascinated with search.

When did you realise that SEO could be a job?

My second site was a thin affiliate site that didn’t do much, but I kept learning. On one site I wrote down SEO notes. The site with SEO notes was like a raw text file…no formatting at all. Someone contacted me and tried buying services before I knew I was selling any. I only charged them $100 and they made a few thousand back like
a month or two later. That made me realize there was some value to it.

When the Google Florida update occured I wrote an article about that became popular and I started going from a few leads a month to dozens of phone calls per day. That taught me a lot about the importance of being seen in the active parts of the web and made me realize the true business case for SEO. I changed my consulting rates from like $20 to $30 to $50 to $90 to $120 an hour in a week because there was so much demand. Then when the demand slowed down I realized that it made sense to also create passive income streams, which led to SEOBook.com and some of my other sites.

I recently read somewhere that somebody is going to try to outrank you for ‘SEO Book’, if they succeed would you work to get your rankings back?

For someone to outrank me for that term my site would need to be banned or filtered or the search engine would need to be broken. If my site were banned it probably would stay that way I am guessing. I have been filtered in the past for about a month (~2 years ago) and made a number of changes to try to lower the odds of it happening again.

One of my most hated comments in the industry is: ‘If an SEO was any good they would just work on their own sites and make millions’. What do you think about it?

Many people who are good at SEO are bad at business (see above where I was selling effective services for only $100). Beyond that, some people also need direction and/or social interaction that client work provides. It can also take a while to get to self sustaining from affiliate sites and other passive income streams. There is nothing wrong with doing a bit of client work. If you are open minded you should be able to learn something from every project you work on. But the key to growth is to set up some passive income streams on the side that are tied on the back of good ideas that lead to self reinforcing market positions, and then only take on clients that you can service with limited effort (sell them a product instead of a service) or learn a lot from.

What’s one tip you would give our readers to help them get better Search Engine Rankings?

Create reasons others would want to talk about you. Help others want to care about you and your business. Look at how Google makes people feel that SEO and any other form of manipulation of their results is evil. And they call AdWords price gouging a quality update. They make it easy for others to care about Google and feel ownership in Google. Plus they are amazing at public relations. They use education, global warming, as well as health conditions and disabilities all to promote the Google brand and Google way of thinking.

We know that you have SEO Clients, but are they your main source of income, what about the earnings from your own sites?

I make about 10 times as much from my own sites than I make from client work. By the end of the year that ratio might be 20 to 1.

What are the main things you look for in a client when deciding whether to work with them?

Do I think I could learn something about business, marketing, SEO, or the web by working with them?
Will SEO help there business (or do they have other flaws so big that their model is broken beyond repair)?
Are they doing something cool / unique / interesting?
Do they have a real brand, or the potential to have a real brand?
Is the person contacting me high enough in the company to be able to close the deal and implement my advise?
Do they have enough budget?

Are there any techniques you use that may be seen as BlackHat to others?

Of course I do. Everyone has their own view of right and wrong, which defines their own actions as right, and then others that do different things…well those people are somehow wrong, at least to some extent. I think what is now creative and aggressive marketing now will be deemed as Black hat a couple years down the road. Black hat SEO is viewed as being deceptive by search engines largely because some of it is so effective. What is one man’s scam is another man’s effective marketing. And if you are getting free or cheap exposure it is at the expense of someone else’s profit margin or someone else’s exposure. I think the whole Black hat angle is a poor frame to view SEO techniques within. Everything should be seen as something that has a risk to reward ratio. Go into the board rooms of some fortune 500 companies and see the marketing ideas they pitch at you. Then you realize that the whole black hat thing is of no relevance. You can be purer than snow, but if it isn’t a self-sustaining business model then it doesn’t matter, at least if you are operating as a for profit business.

In a few years the SEO-awareness of webmasters will make it more difficult to rank for certain keywords and key-phrases. What will people have to do to compete? Spend more on their SEO Campaign or target more obscure phrases?

I think SEO has moved away from influencing engines to influencing people. I market at people more than engines. I realize that if the engines are doing their jobs then the resources liked most by the community should come up near the top of the search results.

And Finally, do you ever read Google Patents and do you think they are important?

I read a good number of research papers and patents. But I also do lots of testing and talk to many friends too. Sometimes friends point research papers to me as well. I don’t take any one input as being the ultimate truth, but more so I look at research and patents as directions things may be headed and things to consider. And if you acted as though they did come true I doubt it would hurt your current productivity or future profitability if you planned ahead for any algorithm they can throw at you.