SEO is a sort of parallel universe, and although at the beginning of my professional career as a virtual assistant I did everything alone, so I had to learn about SEO. Over time, we realized that we couldn’t do everything on our own because it would take hours and hours of study to do something that we could instead delegate to a professional, so we decided to entrust that work to Kathy Nativi and ask her some questions.
What made you study SEO and become a consultant?
It all started with my passion for writing: I studied Communications and used to write for my University’s magazine and participated in online forums. I soon discovered that thanks to SEO I could have many visits from Google. Today I deal with both strategic and operational SEO consultancy for small and medium-sized companies. There’s a lot of talk about SEO and in my experience, from the requests that some customers make, there is a sort of myth, as if it were a magic wand that brings a site immediately on the front page.
Could you explain to non-professionals, what is SEO and what is it for?
There are no magic wands in SEO as there are none in other marketing systems. There are only well-designed strategies and a lot of hard work to turn them into concrete results.
SEO for me is essentially bringing customers or potential customers to Google. The importance of SEO is variable by how many people search on Google for a particular topic and what economic value can be created from such searches.
For example, in most cases it doesn’t make much sense to do SEO for a single-page site; for a landing page there are marketing channels that can bring more traffic immediately. But for an e-commerce that sells products and services, it can give an added value and a higher ROI than paid channels.
What can you realistically achieve with SEO?
Results depend on many factors: site history, budget, competition and project validity. Surely a site that’s already valid will be able to benefit particularly from SEO compared to a non-competitive one on the market. SEO is an amplifier of the value of your online and offline project. If the project value is zero, any effort will still lead to zero.
Many people who have a blog use a plugin (Yoast) to optimize the posts they publish. Is it enough for a blogger who wants to improve SEO or is there something else that they should consider when publishing a post?
Yoast alone is a technical aid in certain operations, SEO is about creating differentiating value compared to competitors. If you want to make a difference, you have to be better than the others, different, and persistent. For a blogger, it is essentially about having better content than competitors.
What advice would you give to a person who is starting out and hasn't even bought the domain to start their site yet?
To choose a simple and memorable domain name but above all be patient, the results take time.
Is there a valid tool that Seo experts use to check if their websites are indexed well?
I mainly use Screaming Frog which allows me to manage the data of different platforms on a single excel sheet.
What do you think is the importance of SEO in Digital Marketing?
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