Screaming Frogs & Paying for Bing: Chris Gilchrist interview

Can a company do PPC on its own as a web business strategy without social and all the other buzzwords?

Of course. So long as there is sufficient search traffic, and there is enough margin in your products to cover the click-through costs. If you focused solely on PPC you could spend a lot more time optimising your campaigns and experimenting, without the distractions of social or SEO.

If you don't care about SEO, for instance, you could make every page a targeted landing page with the sole purpose of improving quality score and gaining conversions - with the knowledge that traffic will be coming from PPC and the likely keywords that would bring the user there. You wouldn't need to worry about duplicate content, getting pages indexed or even metadata.

The buzzword you probably couldn't ignore is CRO. Since your number 1 metric would be cost per conversion, anything you can do to get this value down will be beneficial to your bottom line.

Remarketing ads seem to get getting a lot of attention recently. Do you think they are the way forward or will they alienate people who clearly didn’t buy first time for a reason?

I think they are the only way forward for display advertising, at least for the short-medium term. Used bluntly, they probably would alienate people. For example if you serve your ads to every user regardless of time on site/source/pages visited, serve your ads very frequently, and set very long expiry dates for your cookies, you'll probably piss off a lot of people.

But if your ads are served with care and precision, they can be a very effective tool. Those people that clearly didn't buy for a reason are exactly the people you want to be aiming for. The key is figuring out what those reasons might be, and then serving ads that resolve their issues. And if you do end up alienating them, does it actually matter if they weren't ever going to buy in the first place?

What one tip could you give Microsoft to try and have Bing topple Google?

I can't remember the last time I actually used Bing, so I'm not sure if it is any good, but I'm guessing that the large majority of users wouldn't actually be able to tell much difference from Google in terms of the quality of results. That being the case, and with Google getting hammered from all sides on the privacy front, I'd go in the other direction to Google. Where Google try to collect data from its users so they can (at some point) sell something to them, Bing should very publicly offer a search experience with no data collection, and more importantly - no ads.

To make it work financially they've have to charge users for this privilege, but I for one would happily pay £10 a month for advertising to get switched off in the SERPs.

They'd have to advertise it to the public using (shock horror) slimey 'interruptive' channels, like TV ads and billboards, and my Don Draper moment would finish with their new tagline..."The same results, yet none of the ads."

What’s the most annoying thing in the SEO industry at the moment?

Buzzwords...

If it's not inbound marketing, it's content marketing. If it's not content-led then it's ROI-driven. When it's none of those, it's earned media. And if it's not a strategy then you're not doing it right.

You're not a real business unless you're a startup, and if you're a startup then you probably need to pivot. Never simply dive; always deep dive, and community > SEO don't you know.

Your insights must be actionable and your co-citations must have Authorship. Make sure your APIs achieve their KPIs and that you streamline your scaling.

Growth hack your linkbait and hustle your outreach. You need to do CRO on your UX and usability studies on your IA. And don't forget - it's not a website if it's not responsive.

The protagonists in our story are either jedis or ninjas, and most definitely AWESOME and EPIC. If you hurry you can catch their AMA...

Whatever you do just remember: It's always correlation but never causation.

(Editor's note: he forgot amazeballs)

What’s your essential must-have SEO tools and why?

When we’re performing on-site checks and analysis, Screaming Frog is our go-to tool. The tool crawls a website and gives you a detailed view of all the pages, images and important SEO tags used throughout the site. From there we can check for various types of errors and identify areas for improvement.

For doing competitor and keyword research there’s still tremendous value in Google’s own tools like Analytics, Webmaster Tools and Trends. Other tools like Majestic SEO which lets you see all the links pointing to a website and the types of anchor text used and SEM Rush which lets you see both the phrases a competitor ranks for and competes for on Adwords as well as a handful of others keyword tools are invaluable in the right situations.

What’s best: a m. website and desktop site or one responsive website for everything?

Google’s default recommendation is a responsive site when it comes to SEO. There’s obviously cases when this isn’t practical or suitable but this would typically be a decision larger companies or very complex site owners face when deciding how feasibly and effectively their tools or systems could be made responsive.

For the average SME with a standard website, even if it’s e-commerce, contains a booking system and so on it’s a no brainer with the volume of mobile/tablet/device traffic even now, and it’s rising all the time. It will cost more than a standard desktop site but there’s very few company’s who can justify not catering for mobile devices nowadays.

Do you have one SEO takeaway tip that you could share?

Believe it or not there’s still quite few new clients we encounter who don’t have a Google Analytics or similar tool installed and a Google Webmaster Tools account setup.

It’s very quick and easy to do both and is an essential for the average site owner. Not only does having an analytics package let you monitor and measure your online success but it’s also great for identifying problem areas within sites and campaigns.

Webmaster Tools is the channel Google use to let you know about any problems or warnings surrounding your site so it’s imperative you have an account set up. There’s also a wealth of information it provides which your SEO team can draw on.

In your eyes, what individuals or firms gets SEO and does it right (apart from yourself obviously)?

If you look at people like Aaran Wall and Debra Mastaler you’ll see they’ve been practicing and encouraging disciplines for almost 10 years that people are still shouting Eureka about nowadays and making a big fuss of for a bit of attention.

There’s lots of big SEO firms doing some great work for themselves and their clients but there’s also hundreds of sincere, very intelligent and honest individual SEO’s who produce some incredibly good work. It’s the same as in any industry really.

I’ve actually set up an online community for SEOs called Link Club with some others in the industry I really respect and enjoy their company to try and help business owners doing their own SEO and other SEOs. Each month we publish a newsletter with valuable opportunities, we have private hangouts with established industry figures and a community forum where give the members 1 on 1 guidance and support.

In terms of SEO are we settled back into routines after the Panda/Penguin updates? Have lessons been learned and everyone knows what the new benchmarks are? Are people sticking to them or are there still cowboys out there?

I think to answer this we have to be clear about the types of people doing SEO and their motivations.

Just because a site owner gets penalized for having bought links or manipulating the search results doesn’t mean it was the result of them hiring cowboys. Many companies blame the 3rd party SEO agency they hired when in fact they were made aware of the risks surrounding certain strategies but then rinse their hands when they get caught.

Despite what company owners will admit there’s many who are willing to take the short term benefits of ranking first on Google knowing they might one day be penalized for it.

Then you have people using techniques not considered white hat purely for their own sites which you might call spammers but doesn’t mean they’d ever do anything dodgy for their clients without making them aware of the risks.

Obviously though there’s also lots of times people are just taken for a ride which can literally ruin their business but this isn’t unique to SEO as an industry.

As with anything important you entrust to a 3rd party you need to ask the right questions upfront, do some due diligence on the company and if anything looks too good to be true it probably is.