Mark Proctor

I was head of the SEO (& Content) dept at Ambergreen (Scotland’s oldest digital agency) for just over two years, including the year we won the ScotlandIS Digital Agency Of The Year award.

In that time I worked on pretty much every aspect of search engine optimisation imaginable, from detailed keyword research, through market-led information architectures (planned The Scotsman’s page hierarchy and Hotel Chocolat’s e-commerce categories).  Developed some fancy in-house tools to ease processes and make things look nicer too.

I spent plenty of time on the technical side of things too, on site migrations, speed, structured data and so on.  Technically, the task I’m most proud of was migrating 140 different fragmented sites into one new site to rule them all within a 1 day timescale for the engineering group Weir.  The 1 day turnaround was the implementation of a plan that took 6 months to put together and included a custom server built purely for handling the redirects to the relevant sections of the new site.

I’ve written a lot about SEO over the years, and though it’s still mis-sold and misunderstood by many people (even within the industry), to me, at its core it simply harks back to what I was taught in at Uni while studying for my marketing degree: match the market.

Search engine optimisation is about understanding how your market searches for your product or service, and then structuring your website to meet that demand.  If you don’t do it, you potentially miss out on the traffic that’s most likely to convert, and unless you really enjoy a challenge, you want those people to be able to find you easily.

When I worked at Force Ten Digital, I was responsible for the strategy and implementation of Facebook and Instagram advertising for (on average) 12 clients spending about ¾ of a million a month solely on those channels.

The most important learning that crystallised itself in my brain within the first few months, was how important an understanding of customer journey to purchase is, and how small the number of people who will (or can) buy immediately upon seeing an ad or visiting a site for the first time is.

A lot of the work I’d done previously (SEO, PPC, site builds) was heavily focussed on meeting existing demand, and I didn’t give much consideration to why the demand existed then – just focussed on getting the traffic.  Facebook ads opened the awareness and acquisition door for me, and combined with the retargeting options it provides, allowed me to see a broader digital marketing picture.  One where awareness is raised, interest is piqued, desire is generated and finally – conversion.

All the steps in that process need to be on point to get the best possible results – great ad campaign, but slow site? Kiss the conversions goodbye.

So, Facebook (and increasingly Instagram) are incredibly important tools in a rounded digital strategy, and the granular targeting and wealth of ad formats means there are plenty of options available to suit a brand (and also a lot of testing to be done at the outset.)

When I worked at PageNorth, I managed all the PPC work and ultimately passed the various exams and certifications to get us to official Google Partner status.  That was a good badge to have on the website, and they used to send us weird freebies like a porcelain pig thing that you filled with water and grew cress on. I digress.

There are plenty of parallels between search ads and SEO.  Both are about meeting demand – PPC can be considered a shortcut (SEO takes time), but ultimately, a properly optimised site will end up with higher quality scores, thus lower ad costs and better performance.  If you haven’t got a relevant landing page for the keywords you’re bidding on, you’re going to have a bad time.

Although the PPC teams I’ve worked with at agencies like Ambergreen would definitely disagree, I’ve always considered it to be reasonably straightforward.  Identify the demand, and bid for the terms.  Obviously there’s a fair amount of testing the ad copy and tweaking spend & bids at the right times, but when you compare it to technical SEO, or the creative options on Facebook, it’s a reasonably simple process.

That said, it is incredibly easy to burn a budget by messing up the targeting.  I’ve heard many a horror story of overly broad targeting bringing irrelevant traffic and no conversions.  It can get expensive fast depending on your niche too, so you need to be sure all the other aspects of your customer journey are as good as they can be before you pay for that traffic.

After I got back from a wee break of travelling around Europe on trains, I managed to get a temporary job with levy funded “SeaFish” (I was working beside Brie Read who founded Force Ten Digital).  Anyway – long story short, when your job is to take DEFRA and TNS fish landing data and make it into something relatable to fishermen, you get really good at working with data.  The job was pretty tedious, but I developed some great excel skills by constantly trying to find ways to process the fish data faster.

When I was at PageNorth, I passed the Google Analytics certification exams and got familiar with some of the more advanced funnels and e-commerce reports.

At Ambergreen, I started to use Google Data Studio while it was still in beta (logging in with a VPN as it was US only originally) for client SEO reports.  I’ve continued to use it and introduced it at Force Ten to automate the Facebook stat reporting and make it a lot more client-friendly.

I know my way around Google Tag Manager and have been known to attempt javascript within where it’s been necessary.  My background building sites means I can get marketing pixels up and running with minor hassle.

A popular pastime in digital marketing agencies is ‘everybody look at this terrible design decision’.

I still see major sites that don’t work on mobile (a client who will remain nameless recently added a popup on their homepage that mobile users couldn’t close).

I’ve always considered UX to be a natural partner of SEO, and a logical extension.  When I look at a website landing page, I want it to be so easy to complete the conversion that no further decision making is necessary.  Minimise the steps, clarify and signpost the journey and make it easy.  Even if it’s at the expense of that giant slideshow that the boss insisted on sitting at the top of every page.

Your analytics and bounce rates provide clues to bottlenecks and frustrations, and getting fresh eyes on the process can reveal a lot of missed opportunity.

This ties into content too, and SEO.  The content on the landing page needs to provide all of the information that could be required to make the purchase decision.  It’s still the case that category, service and product pages often fall short of that – making assumptions about the potential customer’s knowledge or experience, which has side effects of lowering conversion and ‘thin’ content that affects visibility in organic search.

I’ve spent a lot of time with product feeds.  I used to hate them, but over time I’ve grown to love them and consider them absolutely invaluable (but still a pain to set up).

If you’re doing any type of e-commerce, I can’t stress enough how important a good quality product feed is.  Go above and beyond the Google minimum requirements and PPC product ads and paid social will reward your efforts almost immediately.

From a retargeting perspective, dynamic ads using a feed based catalogue consistently outperform other formats on CTR and conversion rates.  Add a carrot to temp back non-converters, checkout & cart abandoners and you’ll wonder why you didn’t get it sorted out years ago.  It seems technically difficult to organise at first, and to be fair, sometimes it is, but it’s one of those ‘do it properly once’ jobs that pays dividends.

I’ve built (and worked with) sites on numerous different platforms.  My first sites were designed in photoshop and then split into pieces in Dreamweaver (many, many years ago). They were generally not very good.

Then I discovered content management systems, and started building in Joomla (at first), experimented with Drupal and ultimately ended with a firm favourite of WordPress.  For e-commerce I decided I’d go for Magento as the platform of choice, with absolutely zero understanding of the colossal learning curve ahead.  I eventually became to appreciate the intricacies of the system though, and the many benefits of correctly implementing features such as product attributes (still just as important today).  I progressed to the point where I was working with large product data sets, preparing them for import and then using specialised extensions to keep sites up to date and properly categorised etc.  Understanding this stuff gave me a big advantage when it comes to e-commerce SEO.

I still build websites today, and after working in SEO for so long, I can’t bear to put my name on anything that isn’t (or won’t be) best practise.  For small e-commerce I like woo-commerce, slightly bigger e-commerce focus probably shopify, thousands of products – Magento.

There’s so much that goes into building a site that most folk don’t even think about, and I try my best to work with businesses on an ongoing consultancy basis rather than the ‘here’s your website’ model.  That model just doesn’t make sense any more (not sure it ever did).  The website is just part of your digital marketing (really tempted to drop ‘digital’ there). It needs updated to reflect the next promotion that your ads will be selling, it needs updated, fresh content, to fire your retargeting pixel events at the right points in your customer’s journey, to change the cookie banner to whatever this month’s flavour is.

If you have all of the topics above aligned and working together for you, let me know and I’ll come round to buy you a coffee and find out how you did it.  It’s not easy, and it takes time and effort.

The one thing that’s for sure is that you should be working on it.  You need a strategic roadmap that encompasses all of these channels and gives you the direction you need to get to that place.

I can help you with that – the strategy and the implementation.  Just get in touch and we can begin.

I studied marketing at uni.  I remember me and my flatmate trying to figure out how to install a search engine on his PC in our first year.  Anyway, I ended up with an BA honours in Marketing Management after 4 years.  I’m adding that here, because I’ve watched ‘digital marketing’ evolve since then from something that was primarily a technical skillset ‘we should get a website’ into a space where the more traditional marketing strategies aren’t inhibited by bandwidth, resolution or device.  The tricks and shortcuts have largely been eradicated by the big players like Google and we’ve continually evolved to the point, where the term ‘digital marketing’ should really only be used to identify the channels.

They’re not the separate function they used to be and that’s allowed the people who pay attention to segmenting their markets, and put together dedicated creative and messaging to prosper.  Exactly what I was taught at Uni, just a lot easier to do now with the precise tools that are currently available.

It also means I can translate marketing to developer and back.