James Norquay ( @connections8 ) founded Prosperity Media in 2012 after working in the SEO & Content Marketing space for over 10 years. James started working in digital marketing by developing his own network of content websites which went on to generate well over 24 million unique visitors from organic search with a strong focus on the US market. These websites were later sold on to a US media company.
James then moved into enterprise-level consulting, driving SEO and inbound marketing growth for large-scale businesses such as Virgin Mobile, Optus, David Jones, Woolworths, BWS, Apparel Group, Maurice Blackburn, Slater & Gordon, Travel NT, Citibank and many more. James’s experience enabled him to develop advanced SEO training courses for his large-scale customers.
In this episode, James talks about how to set up and measure SEO for growth oriented companies. He talks about some of the pitfalls he sees with customers and how to rectify those issues. James then describes steps you can complete to measure and increase your organic traffic.
Links and Mentions
- Google Panda Update – https://searchengineland.com/how-google-panda-places-updates-created-a-rollercoaster-ride-for-iyp-traffic-101683
- Moz – https://moz.com/
- SEM Rush – https://www.semrush.com
- Ahrefs – https://ahrefs.com/
- Screaming Frog – https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/
- Deep Crawl – https://www.deepcrawl.com/
- Tenon.io – https://tenon.io/
- Neil Patel – https://neilpatel.com/
- Crazy Egg – https://www.crazyegg.com/
- Featured Snippets – https://searchengineland.com/get-featured-snippets-site-224959
- Bing Webmaster Tools – https://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster
- Online Marketing Sydney – https://www.meetup.com/Online-Marketing-Sydney/
- Search Engine Land – https://searchengineland.com/
- Inbound.org – https://inbound.org/
- Growthhackers.com – https://growthhackers.com/
Contact James
- Website: Prosperitymedia.com.au
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/norquay/
- Twitter: @connections8
Questions During Episode
What do you consider the biggest challenge for site owners today?
The biggest challenge is the ability to stay up to date with all the changes from a search point of view. It is also very difficult to complete all the required work in a competitive skills market.
How do teams need to address these challenges?
We partner with resident marketing teams and business owners to provide information, expertise and guidance to assist with rolling out SEO & Content Marketing growth.
What are some tools your team depends on more than the others?
Ahrefs is a great tool for reviewing link profile data which is useful for our business. Other tools we love to use are SEM Rush (Keyword Analysis), Screaming Frog (Full website scraping) and Tenon.io (accessibility testing at scale)
Why does it perform better than others?
Ahrefs is a great tool because they have a fresh link index which is far superior to other tools on the market.
How do you see search and digital experiences evolving?
I do see the emergence of voice search in the near future. Digital teams should look to make use of other search platforms like YouTube for customer acquisition at scale.
Are you doing any experiments with voice search?
We are testing featured snippets on scale for several clients which can trigger voice search results.
What was one of your most successful campaigns? What made it effective and how did you measure that?
Work for Campaign Monitor to help scale their SEO & Content efforts which assisted to high growth and 250 million investment.
Work for clients in the education niche which saw over 400k increase in monthly users to the site. https://moz.com/blog/increasing-organic-seo-traffic-by-400000-unique-visitors-a-month
What is something you did for a campaign, initiative or ecosystem that was a long shot but ended up working out?
We acquired a domain for a client for around $700 from an expired domain auction. The domain went on to be one of the top websites this media company generating millions in revenue from organic and paid media. The original $700 investment was a long shot on a domain which has a historic link profile and it paid off after investing considerable time into the project with our team.
Describe a time when a project you were overseeing did not go well?
Most projects we work on do well because we are selective on who we partner with as clients. We do not simply take on every client like other agencies we are selective. Campaigns have not performed as well as they have when we have not had internal buy in to make development changes on large domains or when clients take down content campaigns which have secured great visibility and do not redirect them.
What did you learn from that and how do you avoid that from happening again?
We have installed more effective guidelines for internal teams and offered training for all departments to ensure changes are not done without input from the wider digital team and or agency.
Who or what do you listen to or read to get inspiration?
To stay up to date with the latest and get inspired I attend conferences like MozCon in Seattle, listen to great podcasts like Experts on the Wire, Growth Everywhere. We also run our own events in Sydney called Online Marketing Sydney.
If you didn’t have any responsibilities at home or work next week what would you do with your time?
Take a holiday to a location I have not been with my girlfriend. I would also like do work on my house and things for personal growth.
Closing Thoughts?
Do high quality and ethical marketing, do not take shortcuts with any strategy think will this be fine in 5 years time.
