Conway - How to Get to the Top of Google Search: A Practical SEO Guide

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is increasingly critical in marketing products or services online. Small to medium enterprises and individuals will find great value in the practical and accessible information in this book. Grow your business and attract more traffic to your site by improving your ranking and discoverability.

Find out about:

• metadata
• keywords
• mobile phone optimisation
• website structure
• content calendars
• tracking tools
• link building
• the role of social media

and much, much more.

Can you remember your first experience with Google? For most of us, its been a taken-for-granted part of our experience on the internet since the beginning of time (or at least since the beginning of the internet ).

However, I can remember my earliest significant interaction with it. It was the end of 2002, and I was working in-house at a commercial property fund in London, which up until that point had been spending about 180,000 a year advertising in The Times, the Telegraph, the Independent and other publications in order to get in front of buyers of commercial property. I set up my Google Ads campaign and reduced our advertising media spend to 25,000 the next year, while fielding double the enquiries. I couldnt help but think Hang on theres something in this!

Various roles in digital strategy and campaigns for some of the biggest companies and brands in the UK followed, and Ive been involved in SEO (thats search engine optimisation) ever since. Although the field has changed and evolved a lot since then, Ive seen the value of search engine marketing since those beginnings.

But how did I come to start New Zealands largest specialist search agency? Well, about 15 years ago, also back in the early 2000s, my girlfriend at the time (now my wife) Emily and I set off travelling, exploring Australia, New Zealand and various parts of Asia. Although we returned back home to the UK, we left some of our hearts in New Zealand during that first trip.

We talked about moving, and knew that New Zealand would be an incredible place to have and raise kids, but the years (six, in fact!) ticked on. In the interim, we got married. But then, as we neared 30 and realised that if we didnt leave soon we probably wouldnt, we both resigned from great jobs, packed a few bags and got on a plane

In 2009, we touched down in New Zealand. We knew no one, and quickly discovered how hard it was to find employment at a reasonable rate of pay because we didnt have the right Kiwi experience. I knew I had valuable skills and experience to offer, though.

I had always wanted to start a business, so off I went in the field that I knew. When I looked around the New Zealand market, people were doing dodgy things and gaming Googles algorithms in different ways. Not only that, but the two main agencies that were doing SEO well at the time were focused on servicing corporates. I could see there was a gap for an ethical player, and one that was looking after small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) especially given that its these organisations which make up the majority of the New Zealand economy.

It was now or never and, in some ways, I had very little to lose: we were renting, Emily was working, and we didnt have kids yet (although we were trying). I was in a new country, and starting from nothing. But I started.

The name Pure SEO came from Emily and me just throwing things about; we were (and still are!) enamoured with Pure New Zealand and I knew I wanted to be a specialist SEO agency, as opposed to all things digital marketing. Our logo was originally designed by a friend of ours, John Maloyd, for the total cost of a bottle of Grey Goose vodka.( John, youre a legend!) Our first website was one page that I paid a guy $200 to do, before I cobbled together the rest of the website. Im embarrassed to say now, it looked like a child had done it.

Starting out, I had none of the things that might have made this journey easier: I had no established network in New Zealand, and the majority of the money we had was still tied up back home. We had come with only a little cash, and this was at a time when the pound was dropping in value, so there was no sense in bringing over the rest. But I did have the drive I remember getting up and sitting in my dressing gown in the living room of our rented apartment, wondering where on earth I was going to get business.

I read Richard Bransons book Losing My Virginity, which taught me that if you dont have the budget (and we certainly didnt), you need to raise your public profile in order to build a business. This helped me to make the decision to get out of my comfort zone and raise my profile from day one. Ive never been comfortable with self-promotion Im traditionally a peripheral character and I dont like being front and centre but I went to events and started talking to people. I would show up and know nobody, then look for other people standing on their own, and strike up a conversation with them. I joined Business Network International (BNI) New Zealand and Business Mentors New Zealand, and soon my network was growing.

The business was growing, too. Getting our first client, Creative Embroidery, was a turning point. I kept moving forward, busily embracing what Kiwi entrepreneur Claudia Batten refers to as vomit moments pushing the boundaries, taking risks and doing things that were uncomfortable; thats a lot of what my entrepreneurial journey was about. I had hired our first employee long before I could afford them; same with the second. Thankfully, by the time our third hire came on board, we had enough recurring revenue each month to know that we could cover the bills including the wages.

So, by our second year in business, it was no longer me in my dressing gown; we were up to four staff and we were doing it. I invested $10,000 on a new website, which seemed like a fortune to me then, and the first enquiry that came through it was from Singapore Airlines! It was a timely reminder of the incredible power and value of having that shopfront; you can be pretty much whoever you want to be online. That year, I also signed insurance company AIA, who stayed with us for seven years. I remember pitching we and us, when it was really just mostly me. Fake it till you make it

On the personal front, we faced some challenges; Emily and I experienced three miscarriages that year, before she eventually fell pregnant with our son Ethan. Needless to say, it was a stressful and emotionally fraught time. I had to front up to work each day and play at being a leader. I was growing a business, and there were people expecting things from me; I had to be there, and deliver, as well as having these other difficulties going on. It was lonely and just plain hard some days.