Aleyda Solis on Mobile SEO & How to Attract Clients Without Having to Pitch Yourself

Razvan: Hello everyone! Welcome back to come to cognitiveSEO Talks. Today we have Aleyda Solis with us. International SEO consultant, blogger, an experienced great speaker and also the author of the SEO book in Spanish “SEO. Las Claves Esenciales”.

I’ll let Aleyda say a few words about her and then we’ll start with the interview.

Aleyda: Hello, Razvan! Thank you for having me. I’m very happy to be here today, looking forward to share with all of you. I think you’ve done already a really good intro, so I don’t have much to add, other than I’ve been doing SEO since 2007 most of it from a strategical, technical, international standpoint. So I’m very looking forward to share with you today.

Razvan: So you do a lot of things in the SEO world, as you mention: international SEO, or mobile SEO, technical SEO, consulting – SEO consulting mainly, from what I know -.

Genuinely, please tell me what do you think it defines you best?

Aleyda: Yeah, I think that being an SEO consultant specifically like this I think it defines me well because it’s what I actually love to do, like to do. I know many of us and many people who have started doing SEO many years ago as I did 11 years ago. The developing agencies have evolved, right? So they are now much more into managerial or leadership type of roles. In my case, I have a purpose of not creating an agency, but a small consultancy because I actually enjoy doing SEO on a day to day basis, like really stick to the strategical and more tactical standpoint. So the SEO consultant tact still defines me very well, I have to say. And then, of course, I am also a founder, I have the responsibility after having founded my own business taken care of more than SEO, not only SEO, of course,  but yes, the SEO consultant for me is also something that I am actually very proud of.

Are you also doing the whole implementation when you’re doing SEO consulting or you’re not doing implementation at all?

Aleyda: I had actually only done implementation for my own projects, my own tests, my own websites, but since I started doing SEO from the agency side many, many, many years ago, then I moved in-house, then I moved as a consultant at many different companies and on my own, and my role has been always to recommend advice – I do the audits, I do the analysis, I establish the recommendations but since the companies I always consult for, our bigger companies, they have their own developers, they wouldn’t allow me to touch anything and I don’t want to touch anything also.

It’s much better to have responsibilities well-established out there. I am very actionable; I work on a day-to-day basis and I actually coordinate and prioritize and validate the changes, but I don’t do the changes myself.

I think that that is something very important because, well, developers are developers and that is what they know best. Copywriters, content makers, or content marketers – I won’t be able very likely to write better content, specialized content in many industries than what they can actually. And then, also, you have like PR outreach strategies, right? And it wouldn’t be very self-aware of me to try to cover all these other disciplines. For me, this is the best way that SEO can help bigger organizations – I mean I understand that you need to do it all when you have a small website, unfortunately, but if you have resources (and companies usually have them) at least they do have a proper developer, a proper copywriter, a proper PR person, and a promotional person. The ideal way that an SEO can help is to align themselves to recommend, to work together, to achieve the specific goals.

Razvan: Yeah, big brands have this luxury of having a ton of SEO people, a ton of developers, content marketers, so on and so forth.

How did you start, how did you do all this stuff for your own agency, how do you promote your own agency? What’s the growth engine for your agency? Was it SEO, was it something different?

Aleyda: No. I have been doing SEO since 2007, I have been speaking at conferences since 2010 or so, so a lot of people in the industry already knew me, I had the great chance many years ago, to fulfil an ideal, to start sharing my own experiences and I started writing prose since, I don’t know, 2007-2008, since I started in Spanish and then in English. Most of the clients that I get nowadays – I don’t pitch to companies, they come to me actually, and that is a really nice pursuit to have and I’m a very lucky person – …

Razvan: Initially, I’m sure that you pitched when you were at the beginning.

Aleyda: No.

You never pitched?

Aleyda: No, not as myself, at least. When I was working many years ago, around 2007-2008, for another agency, not my own, yes, I had to work on pitches etc. Also, when I was working from the agency side I had to help on pitches a couple of times, but not now anymore. Fortunately, now the clients that have specific needs in SEO get in touch, ask for my proposal – of course, they assess all the options as it’s normal, but I don’t participate in this huge request for proposals with tons of documents to fill and this type of stuff. I prefer to actually personalize my proposals and specify how I am going to move the needle, how I’m going to address their specific issues and needs, right? So I’ve actually been very lucky from this side, and that hasn’t actually, in any way, challenged myself to be able to work with bigger clients (many of my clients are huge companies, since I have helped companies like Under Armour or VF which is VF Corporation which is Eastpak, Seven for all Mankind, Kipling) so it’s because of this. I definitely think that, of course, personal branding, selling yourself, and establishing yourself for something very unique, very specific is unique – selling proposition here is key in order to be able to achieve that point -.

Razvan: What are the most common issues you hear from your clients? Do you see any commonality in the problems that they have, in the challenges that they want to overcome?

Aleyda: Well, most of my clients are multinational companies or companies are trying to reach an international audience. And they have seen challenges in the past because they have hired all the agencies, or they still have all the agencies or even in-house SEOs, but they have specific scenarios or use cases where they need extra help, an external input or validation especially from a statistical standpoint and how to overcome this very competitive market, this very competitive niche, or things like this.

Can you share an example of a task you were given from a company?

Aleyda: Yeah, last year I helped a specific company to grow their visibility in Mexico. This company that has a presence across all Latin American countries, but specifically the Mexican market gave them more challenges because of the very well established players that already existed there. So I helped them to establish the best possible strategy, largely U.S., also to start targeting more queries, establishing more authority in certain areas where they hadn’t had in the past one hand, and then, on the other hand, also to improve the overall base, their crawlability. their indexability, and make it much more efficient…

And how did you do? What’s the secret that you recommended them to implement on their website?

Aleyda: There’s no secret behind SEO. The best secret in doing SEO is to know very well the principles, the criteria, and know very well how to assets information from a strategic standpoint …

Can you be specific about that customer? How did you improve their visibility: by changing the site structure…

Aleyda: No, I’m sorry. I cannot share the stories of specific clients, I’m afraid.

Razvan: Yeah, but can choose to not share the name of the customer. If you can’t, I understand, no worries.

Aleyda: No, I’m sorry.

Razvan: Okay, okay, no problem.

What do you think is the most effective SEO strategy or tactic that you have ever applied to your customers?

Aleyda: Well, actually what I do is an in-depth analysis. I don’t think on SEO as a set of tactics; I think that’s what ultimately won’t work and it’s not scalable and reasonable. What I actually have is a framework of questions that I ask for any client and then the answer will give light to what is the best approach to address that client. 

For example, on a competitor analysis, with the top players from that market, the way that the client is structuring their content on targeting that market, the role of content versus Authority for that specific market. In many markets is definitely the links that will move the needle; in many other markets, it’s more about having the right approach to the right terms, the right queries, because the competition in these markets is not so high, like in many Latin American countries, for example. 

So, it’s about doing a very in-depth analysis and market search to start well; to be able to define the actions that will be much more meaningful for that specific company in that specific market, and for those specific queries where they’d really want to establish themselves, right? So, that is why, for me, it’s all about thinking from a marketing perspective and applying those principles in the search platform.

How do you usually do a competitive research for your customers?

Aleyda: Well, I always ask them their property first (that is the first input), then their competitors. And this is something important – the client might give you a few of their competitors – those might not necessarily be their actual competitors, maybe these are just the companies that they might be usually seeing to compete from a business perspective and who might not be necessary their SEO competitors, because these are the ones that might be even trying to rank for the same queries as you do. Then I use tools like, for example, SEMRush, AHREFS, and Sistrix, to identify which are the queries that this competitor in the industry is ranking for and for which this company is not. If they are not ranking for many of these terms I ask myself: “Is it because this is not an actual target for them? Or it’s because it is a target but they don’t have any web structure, any content targeting for this yet, they are not enabling this content or, if they are, it’s because it’s not optimized at all or they don’t have resources to do it?”. So I start again asking questions to identify opportunities of optimizing what they already have or start creating something new and that they can use to address the relevant queries that will bring value traffic that is relevant, not only from a transactional perspective but also from an informational one.

Razvan: More and more people are talking about technical SEO lately. In my opinion, technical SEO…

Aleyda: Not “lately”! I don’t understand why people say “lately”. For example, I understand that at some point in the past a lot of people wanted to jump into the content marketing bandwagon when they say “SEO was dead” or whatever, with Penguin and Panda, updates that happen… In my case, I have always called myself an SEO; I have always done crawlability and indexability audits, I have done migrations since forever… So, I don’t know why, for some reason, now everybody talks about technical SEO and I’m like “I’ve been always doing technical SEO!”

Razvan: It’s a perception for, probably, people that haven’t done SEO in the past. I’ve been doing SEO since before Google was was mainstream since it was out of this trend with Infoseek and Lycos, it was before 2000, it was all about technical SEO and from that time it was also about technical SEO. I think when content marketing appeared, mostly in social media, I noticed that a lot of people coming from this area with no technical background at all, and jumping into the social media side of things, SEO from a technical perspective how it was perceived by people started to be diluted as a concept. But SEO has always been technical.

Aleyda: Yeah, indeed. That is why I don’t start an SEO process without doing an audit, a technical audit, right? A validation as to if the site is crawlable, or if there is a robots.txt blocking, I don’t know, most important pages – if there’s a canonicalization issue … I really don’t understand how people were able to do SEO without doing that in the first place, but hey, okay, let’s continue the conversation.

Razvan: You talk a lot about accelerated mobile pages (AMP), mobile first index, and other topics.

If you had a chance to tell one thing to every person struggling with mobile SEO what would that be and why? What do you think is the most important mobile SEO related thing?

Aleyda: Yeah, I think the most important thing right now, especially with a mobile-first index that Google, well, is already switching to a mobile-first index, is to make sure that you actually provide mobile-optimized version, right? A lot of people think that they already have one just because their site is responsive, which is not true – they might have a responsive site but they are not necessarily effectively targeting and fulfilling their mobile audience behavior necessarily and targeting the right queries, the right terms, indexing the right content, and or even blocking the bot access to important critical resources like JS, or CSS, or images that they need to actually be able to deliver the best experience.

So, the thing to do, I would say, is to crawl your site – speaking of technical SEO, right? – crawl your site, go to a crawler, choose from Screaming Frog or whatever, and crawl your site, simulating to be the the mobile Google bot to really see and check if it is able to access all your mobile web presence, in case you have one – and you should have one at this point, and if you don’t, then the task would be to enable one.

Then check if the behavior is the expected one, if the content is there, if the titles are optimized with those descriptions the SEO basics – because in many many cases, again, websites  have independent mobile sites or dynamic serving sites, the content that had been placed or the information that had been placed in the mobile .html’s was not the same with the stream information that existed on the desktop one. So that is another additional task – if people had all these other types of configurations to do. And then, of course, it’s the opportunity out there, the opportunity of addressing many different types of queries that are nowadays becoming more and more used with mobile first, right? So that is so important – to start migrating all this SEO day-to-day type of analysis and steps, to segment well and identify well what is the behavior the user specifically has on mobile.

Something, also, very important actually (addressing the AMP question that you had) is that speed is critical. It’s even more critical – it’s critical in general in SEO, I have to say, beyond the conversion impact that it tends to have, but also as a ranking factor Google confirmed, that since you lied, they are going to start taking speed into consideration as a mobile ranking factor.

I have to say that a lot of people think of enabling AMP (accelerated mobile pages) as a magic solution for their website in general or to solve the fact that their mobile presence of being slow. I will say something: the first thing to do is actually making sure your own website is fast. That should be the fundamental first and foremost because that is your actual original canonical version that will be crawled, that will be indexable, the one that will be ranked. AMP should be seen as an alternative. If there’s no way for you to change or improve your own speed then, okay, you can enable AMP version of your site in order to improve your performance, if you cannot do it with your canonical one, or be included in the carousel. And this is the thing: a lot of people wanted to be included in the mobile SERPs carousel to have that type of visibility so they ended up doing it.

Do you see any disadvantage with AMP? Because a lot of people are talking about it.

Aleyda: The disadvantage that I have seen until now, with many of my clients is that many of their priorities had changed, unfortunately, you know. We had a very well-established plan with allocated resources and for the SEO efforts and process, and now with AMP that started a year and a half ago, two years ago, that changed it completely. Of course, I understand that AMP was a solution like a good workaround or alternative, but many websites were pressured to do it as a priority because that was the only way that they would have been able to have the expected visibility in the carousel. So that didn’t become an option for them, it became a priority, right? So, it ended up like affecting many of my process in the sense that “oh, I have to reorganize all of the priorities now”, and, sometimes, even more fundamental things had to be left a little bit in the side until AMP was able to be launched.

Then, on the other hand, I have to say something: this has been until now, but for a time, I had the chance to speak up at the AMP Conf Event two-three weeks ago, and the reality is that the AMP effort is being moved and pushed to be just more than an alternative, to achieve a fast performance for mobile sites. It is being pushed to being somewhat of an alternative – from a technological perspective, from a platform perspective – to actually build and create the “delightful experiences”, as it was described on mobile, because you can actually use AMP as an option to develop your own canonical, your original website, right? And honestly, I can definitely see the point why many of the development and SEO communities don’t necessarily like that because that is the reason why we have open platforms and standards etc. The reality is that the impressive work that they’re doing from a technological standpoint, for example, implementing something like a parallax type of effects or implementing something like, I don’t know, a tab, or having certain animations that they are able to implement very easily with the unbind component. Many of these effects are achievable through normal JavaScript, yes, of course, but they take so much more resources and they end up being much more trickier to implement, and they take much more effort and even hurt performance. They are doing a very very good job of making a point of why we can use AMP, not only for purely enabling an alternative fast-mobile-version for a site, but actually to use it as a technological option to build our own original website. And this is what I see as being pushed and promoted, right?

What do you think are the top five Google ranking factors at the moment?

Aleyda: Definitely I don’t think of five! I think that the most important ones have always been content and links. And then, that the content and links are accessible and indexable, and that’s it. Content and links, accessible and indexable.

Razvan: Ok. It’s a mix: you can’t rank only with content and you can’t rank purely with links.

Aleyda: It’s very unlikely to be able to rank only with content for any meaningful, profitable query. I mean, for any meaningful profitable query that makes money in a competitive industry it’s going to have many high-authority companies going for them. So, you need links, external links, to be able to be perceived as an authority. Whatever meaningful term will not only pursued by you, your brother and sister but also by the main companies and authorities in a field, hence it’s likely to be competitive. So, yes, you will need links!

The thing is for big and established brands, and if you do any type of marketing, it will likely be much easier for you. For example, for my clients in general, I don’t build links. Why? Because these are very well-established companies that have their own PR team, or their marketing team, their content marketer, so what I do is to teach them. So I help them, I teach them, I align SEO best practices, so they make the most out of their already-existing actions that they do to promote themselves. And then, on the other hand, they already have spontaneous mentions because they are very well-established brands. But that is because of the type of clients that I have, right? However, I completely understand that if you start from scratch in a very competitive section you need to really be out there.

Now that you wanted me to share something one specific … A couple of years ago, I started to help – and this was a little bit of a challenge for me but I really wanted it, because it was a really nice opportunity to do many things that I don’t usually do – a startup from the financial industry targeting the Spanish market. Many of the terms that they wanted and they needed to run for where “crowdfunding”, “crowdlending”, and they were like a B2B type of company because they wanted to be a marketplace to lend money for small businesses to get investment from people. So they needed actually to rank and to target terms that were very competitive because this were terms that were being addressed or targeted by banks, financial institutions, and even Wikipedia and, of course, many new sites with huge authority and a high amount of links.

So, how the hell this little startup that had a rather new domain, with very minimal links and authority will be able to compete for such generic type of queries or in transactional queries that were very hard to target, right? So, in this case, we established a strategy that took into consideration that they were in a very complex industry, and where it was very hard to understand what they were doing, and what was happening in the industry. So we created resources: we made their own main structure to easy access crawlable, indexable, very well-targeted, with really good, specific content targeting that transactional queries, and then, on the other hand, when we identified an established with tons of resources, tons of information to make it so much easier to invest in them and to invest, actually, in anything crowdlending B2B.

So we defined and created calculators and validators to establish and to verify interest rates, and to compare different options, we created a financial dictionary with a really great explanation with what was, I don’t know, “investment banking”, how that works, things like that, right? And we created many many resources; we started interviewing highly prominent financial figures to explain and to share their experience in this market, and they started to organize meetups to really establish themselves as an authority in that field and be perceived as someone who wanted to make finance much easier to understand, right?

And then we did a very specific outreach for which we actually use Pitchbox as an outreach tool to get in touch with universities, organizations, blogs that cover the financial market in Spain, and that helped a lot to connect initially with many of these people and these very prominent figures. At the beginning, of course, it was a little bit of a challenge, a curve that happened there, but the more resources they built, the more authority they got, the more referrals they achieved for many other highly prominent websites. It was far easier to really establish themselves, and, in the end, right now, they are like ranking very well for crowdlending plus top area crowdfunding areas.

And how long did this effort take to show results, from the moment you pitched the strategy and the moment they started ranking? Six months, 1 year, two years?

Aleyda: It was more than a year after it because it was a very tough market. And now – and this is the beauty of it – now, in the last months,  it’s not growing 5% more in traffic but doubling the traffic then they got at some point because they have reached a point where now they have the all this authority… So, of course, it takes a time, but it’s possible, it’s viable, it’s about understanding where is the pain and where is the gap in your market – that is why I mentioned before that there’s no rule of thumb; you need to actually analyze your market, understand, also, what are the resources in their organization, what is viable to do, what it’s not viable to do, and based on that align everything to make it happen.

Razvan: Yeah, with big brands it’s easier because they have a lot of cash to burn and this wasn’t the case, for example, for a small brand, a small company that would want to fight on that position. Do you agree?

How would you go with smaller brands who don’t have the budget to do a ton of interviews with known figures, use a lot of tools etc?

Aleyda: You know what? This was a startup.

Razvan: Yeah, it was a startup, but they had a lot of money to burn.

Aleyda: They had a marketing person, and they had a couple of interns helping them to create all this. And that’s it.

Razvan: Ok, so it’s an interesting story, yeah. So, an SEO professional usually uses a lot of tools in their marketing. And the SEO tool market is very big in the last years. We’ve been in the market with cognitiveSEO since late 2011.

How do you see cognitiveSEO fitted into your SEO toolbox? What problems do you solve with cognitiveSEO?

Aleyda: Yeah. Well, in my case, what I love the most is the interface that you make it easier to better understand the context of my link authority in the market. I probably and mostly use it for link authority comparison. There are two things I really like and for which I use it: it’s because I am able to import the link sources from many other tools from my toolset.

So, what I really want to have, especially with new markets that I don’t know anything about, right, is to really have the chance to research and have a good overview of what is happening there from an authoritative perspective. So what I do is to go and try to grab as many external links, backlinks that my client and their competitors have, and then I import them all in cognitiveSEO to be able to have them in a consolidated way and with aligned metrics. So I am able to have them all in a single place that it makes it easier for me to compare, to better understand what is lacking there.

Many other tools offer a really good link index. However, the problem is to be able to segment all that data, to do it in Excel – which is a pain – so I gladly pay money in order to save myself that effort and time, to be able to identify much easier. The strategies that people fill their path with, were to, I don’t know, build their links through badges or widgets, because I see that many of the links are coming out from the sidebar, and they are actually getting links from images, and I was like “Whoa, they should be penalized! They shouldn’t be ranking like this!”. These are much easier to spot thanks to the segmentation that cognitiveSEO has, right? So it takes me tons of time to be able to identify not only the gap but the best way to address and to grow the authority of my clients and to recommend and be as specific as possible and actionable as possible in my recommendation. It’s like “Let’s grow on volume links. Oh, no! Take a look! They have even more links than Uber does, and it’s lower”. So, it’s not necessarily about the volume of links, but about link authority, about link quality, things like that, to identify the existing gap and what should be the effectiveness of the actions, that I would recommend.

Razvan: Okay. Thank you for sharing this. To close this interview I have a hypothetical question for you.

If tomorrow Google shuts down, what would you be working on? What will you switch yourself to?

Aleyda: I will continue doing SEO in whatever other platform people will use to search. We need to understand that we use Google to optimize for because this is a platform that people use to search at the end of the day. But, in other markets, in Russia people use Yandex. Actually in the past, many many years ago, when I was doing SEO for a Forex company – I used to also do SEO for Yandex that was a little bit more like the Wild West but it was a good learning -. So, we need to understand that the fact that people that we optimized for Google is only like …

Razvan: Google is a mass market player and that’s the only reason people use it for search.

Aleyda: Yeah, that’s the platform that people use. If people will use another platform, then we’ll be there and then we will need to learn how to optimize the presence of our clients there to achieve the visibility that they need to convert.

Do you think it’s harder today to optimize for Google than it was two years or three years ago? Do you feel that your job is much harder?

Aleyda: Of course it is. If I compare it to how hard it was 10 years ago when I was starting this, of course, it’s my much harder. If we were to relate to 2 years ago, it hasn’t changed that much. If you’re working with real businesses – and that is the one thing that is key, right? – if you’re a real business, you have something meaningful, you have something valuable to sell then there will be always an opportunity to write information around that, to be meaningful, to be relevant. The problem is that when you have a website where the business isn’t attracting visits and that’s it, and selling ads, there are certain areas where I see it’s becoming much much more difficult for many companies. There are more websites out there, they have the benefit of already having a good brand, so I’d say it depends. It’s harder for the new-comer maybe, or for the sites that don’t have a brand behind or a strong product behind, because at the end of the day SEO is about marketing. So, if you have a good product with you it’s much easier to do marketing, and it’s much easier to do SEO.

Thank you very much for joining us today on the cognitiveSEO Talks podcast, and if you have anything further that you would like to share with our listeners…

Aleyda: Yeah. I think that, in general, what I’d share is that in order to be successful in SEO is you need to actually enjoy having this type of challenges. The SEO industry is always changing and there will always be something new so it’s about keeping up-to-date, doing your own tests, identifying if the next picture can be an opportunity for your clients to profit from, to make the most out of it, and to better understand where your efforts might really be more worthy to actually move the needle for your client traffic. Because there are always so many things to do, so so little resources. So that is the most critical need I’d say, to always be able to align suitable actions to make sure that they really fit the right need in your process.

Razvan: I loved the interview today with you! You talked like a real SEO geek, in the positive sense of the word, as there are a lot of technicalities and, in the end, it’s not only my content marketing but also other stuff that matter. So, thank you for being here and wish you all the best with your own agency and the consultation that you’re providing your customers with.

Aleyda: Thank you for the opportunity!