Could you give me a bit of a timeline of your career and how you got to where you are today?
I got into SEO in late 2008; I was straight out of university and got an internship with a local agency in Scotland. A small agency at the time, but within two or three years it grew to one of the biggest in the UK.
They specialised in fashion. I spent four years there and got a lot of experience with big accounts. After that, in 2012, I worked for a company called Dublin Bets. That was my introduction to gambling. I spent two years there leading their SEO. At the same time, they encouraged you to launch your own affiliate business and drive traffic. So, that’s what I did and eventually I went off on my own and set up my own affiliate network and websites. That was in 2012 to 2015 roughly.
From 2015 onwards, I was set up as a consultant. Got to 2018 and I got to a point naturally where it was too busy to handle all the work myself. The natural next step was to start an agency and in 2019, Big Pond Digital was born. We now have 11 core staff and also work with freelancers on certain projects.
How have your previous experiences helped you in your current role?
I’d say the best way to learn to do SEO or PPC is to have a few websites of your own that you experiment with and learn with. The best way is to actually go ahead and do it. That helped me because, especially with affiliate marketing, it’s quite hard at the moment to get into the space with SEO and rank.
Back then, I bought a website and started investing in it, into links. Eventually I managed to rank it. So, I learned a lot from doing that. Also, things like Google updates and how they affect the site, all the algorithm updates.
So, the best way is to get your hands dirty and launch a project, even if it’s on the side. I very much encourage all staff here to do the same. I’m even willing to invest in the project to get them to learn fast and learn from mistakes.
It’s like a trial by fire.
When you go online, everybody talks about amazing case studies and ‘We upped traffic by 500%.’ No one really talks about failures and the failures are the ones that lead you to results. You need to burn a few sites of your own first to learn how to do it, and then apply those practices to another site and be successful.
When it comes to SEO, what are some common misconceptions that businesses may have about it?
It’s not that difficult to communicate, but depending on the level of knowledge of say, the client, it can be like starting from scratch. There’s a period at the beginning where you have to educate them on what exactly it is. You need to set expectations, especially in gambling, because (in my experience) most new casinos and sportsbooks go after the affiliate route initially, because it makes sense as a faster way to get first time deposits from day one.
When they invest in SEO, you need to set the expectation that this could take a couple of years and a large investment to get to the point where you’re driving traffic. It’s setting the timeline right, being patient and finding areas where it’s not as competitive so you can actually get in if you’re a new player.
I’ve been doing this over the past 16 years. I’ve made the mistake in the past of not communicating the timeline properly. As you can imagine, somebody that’s used to paid media or affiliates might invest in SEO and expect something after the first, second or third month. In most cases, if it’s not an established brand, that’s not the case. For me, that’s huge.
It also doesn’t help that the barrier for entry is so low. Anybody could go online and claim they’re an SEO expert... If you’re looking for somebody, you need to vet them. Look at the reviews, call up some of their customers if you can, do your research. Because I’ve known quite a few businesses that have been burned multiple times and if you get burned two or three times, you lose interest in the channel.
How has AI and machine learning impacted SEO, and what are some common mistakes you’ve seen affiliates make when using it?
It’s changed things a lot. We started using a version of it before ChatGPT and we couldn’t believe what it could do... I see websites getting away with mass producing AI content and farming. But that’s not a strategy that’s going to be sustainable in the long term. Anybody can put out as much as possible now, but it’s not helpful and that’s what the update was all about.
A lot of affiliates have been hit with this update. It wiped out quite a lot of websites. To be honest, if you’re applying those tactics, you should expect at some point that Google is going to catch up. You need to diversify and do different things.
When it comes to SEO, are there any challenges you or others face that aren’t talked about much?
When it comes to Google indexing JavaScript websites, it’s a completely new rulebook, so you need other methods. A lot of the things that used to apply to an older website will not apply to a new interface. When it comes to migration, I’ve seen quite a lot of migrations going wrong. It’s a whole new area that needs to be explored because it’s going to become more popular.
That’s something to keep in mind, especially for operators. If they’re looking at replatforming and they’ve built a huge SEO ranking profile over time, picking the right platform and considering how to migrate is a really important step to not lose loads of traffic.
Now, this is talked about, but Google is going to be integrating AI into search results. That’s the Search Generative Experience (SGE) which we’re experimenting with at the moment. That’s completely changed SEO because suddenly you have TikTok videos ranking in the place of a search result that was text. It could be YouTube, Instagram, anything else. We’ve seen a lot of red results rank. It’s constantly evolving, constantly changing.
With the amount of time you’ve been in SEO, how much has it changed?
It’s changed a lot, but at the same time, I’ve seen a lot of older tactics still working.
Like fashion. It just keeps coming back around.
You need to burn a few sites of your own first to learn how to do it, and then apply those practices to another site and be successful.
