This is my second SEO interview, and this time we’ll be talking with Patrick Coombe, CEO of Elite Strategies — who is an experienced SEO and a very popular face in the Inbound Marketing industry. Patrick is also an avid blogger who stays updated with all the latest industry news and can be seen blogging at Elite Strategies blog, Moz, and a few other places.
In this interview, we talk about growing an internet marketing agency, the philosophies, and some of the notable achievements of his agency, content marketing, UX-focused site designs, the future of SEO, the much-debated ‘guest blogging fiasco’, earning links in 2014 and beyond, and of course, SEO tools, tips, and strategies.
Let’s proceed to the questions!
Q: Hello, Patrick. Welcome to the Ahrefs Blog! Can you please give a short introduction of yourself at first?
Thanks for having me! This is actually my first interview ever so it is very exciting. I’m the CEO of Elite Strategies, an internet marketing firm in sunny Delray Beach, FL. I’m happily married with a 3-year-old boy. I feel blessed every day when I wake up that I get to do what I love for a living.
Q: So, you’re running an internet marketing & web development agency that’s generating some nice revenue. What has been the experience so far?
It wasn’t easy getting started at all. A really good post I’d like to reference that sums up the first few years is “Greasy secrets from cold calling SEO.” This is a bootstrapped company in every sense of the term. We put all of our profits back into the company, and when I say that I don’t mean nicer offices and BMW’s, I mean we put it into new positions, client budgets, and things like that.
Their office has fun colors and stays stocked with snacks, candy, RedBull and coffee.
Bruce Breton, our VP has been with us since day 1 and is what I consider to be the keystone of our company. He’s a great guy to have on your side as a friend and co-worker. My wife joined us about a year or so into operations. Her background is in marketing and branding so she fit right in.
Patrick with his wife Jacquelyn, who also works with Elite Strategies.
I try to look at our company in terms of small systems. In the beginning I played a critical role in our day to day operations. While I still like to think I’m important, I’ve created a number of systems and roles that have allowed me to step back and focus on big picture stuff like blogging, press, and branding.
Fun nuggets of information is posted throughout Elite Strategies headquarters.
Q: Why SEO out of tens of zillions of things – how did you personally get interested in SEO and what drove you the most to found an agency focused on SEO and Inbound Marketing?
I’ve been programming since I was a little boy. I’ve always been into networking and network programming so technical SEO just kind of came naturally.
One of my good friends got me into affiliate marketing. He showed me a few of his campaigns and I managed to come up with a few of my own and in a short time I had several profitable campaigns. I got hooked on that like a drug.
During that time I started experimenting with SEO on a few of my friends’ websites who owned businesses just fooling around. I managed to increase inbound leads from my first client by around 25% in a few months. From there the business idea all came organically, no pun intended. 
This industry is my passion. Even if my job or money wasn’t involved I still love learning about how Google ranks websites, how people interact with them, and making them look great.
I love being able to do what I love and help people grow their businesses. The great thing about this business is if you do a great job for your clients you never have to worry about getting new business, it comes pouring in.
Q: Can you list a few of your agency’s best achievements for clients from a results perspective?
One example I tell a lot of people about is a small muffler company down here in Florida. They are a friend of ours and we consult with them from time to time. We tried running some Facebook PPC for them with a very small budget, about $10 a day roughly.
Within a few days we whittled down a really niche demographic and came up with some winning creatives that scored them some really solid leads. We’re able to turn that on/off for them anytime things get slow.
The other example I like to use is from our first year in business. It was a very small painting company (1 guy with a truck.) We made him a website and did some SEO. A few leads trickled in but a few months later an email came through the contact form that changed the game.
The email was from a University maintenance department that was looking for a huge project. He ended up getting the bid and secured a ton of future business with the school.
Our company’s SEO blog is actually another great example. We get tons of leads from a result of people reading our blog or case studies. I’ve been blogging for 4 years which has increased our website traffic hundreds if not thousands of percent.
Q: What according to you is the path the SEO industry is taking while going forward?
One of my biggest expressions is:
As long as there is search, there will be SEO.
Anyone who claims SEO as an industry is dead just highlights their ignorance.
It is like saying now that there are electric cars, car repair is dead. No, car repair is not dead, it just doesn’t look like it used to.
Let’s remember SEO stands for search engine optimization. We are optimizing websites for search engines. Google shows us the future with every update, adjustment, and change to their guidelines.
Google loves SEO’s. We are cleaning up with web for them and making less work for good old Googlebot. We make it easier for them to crawl the web and less crud for them to sift through.
SEO is link earning through content creation, content marketing, website optimization, social media, and proper website development.
Q: If you could use only 5 SEO tools or services (except Google’s own Analytics, WMT etc.), which ones would you choose?
I actually don’t use Google Analytics, I use Piwik, but I won’t count that either.
- Ahrefs – for backlink discovery, analysis, and proposals
- Screaming Frog – diagnosing crawl issues and such
- Xenu – finding broken links mainly but a very versatile tool
- Moz – DA/PA but so much more
- Pingdom – so many site speed testers out there but Pingdom just does it right
I’d like to also give a few honorable mention tools that aren’t necessarily SEO tools but are worth a mention:
- Basecamp – literally the glue that holds everything I do together
- Notepad++ – macros, code editing, note taking, FTP
- Windows Snipping Tool – The best screen capture tool ever made
Q: What is your opinion on the much talked about topic of recent times – ‘guest blogging fiasco’?
This is probably the one Google guideline that trips up the most people.
Most of Google’s guidelines are pretty obvious and self-explanatory, but I think guest blogging is kind of a grey area.
As far as the public examples that have been going on, I can’t say I am surprised it happened. I’ve personally “investigated” a lot of the penalties that I see on Twitter and other places and within 5 minutes it becomes evident that they are operating outside of search engine guidelines in one way or another.
Matt Cutts made it really clear:
Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop.
I recently went ahead and did a preemptive disavow on our company website in an attempt to mitigate any of those grey areas. I emailed about 50 people asking to take links down, no-followed about 100 links myself, and asked another 20 people to no-follow the links.
I’ve had clients come to me with penalties before. For someone with an online business, it is one of the scariest things that can happen.
My official opinion on guest blogging and links is:
when in doubt, no-follow.
Q: In your opinion, what are some of the best ways to build/earn links in the present time without violating Google’s guidelines?
One thing we like to do at Elite Strategies is reverse engineer the link earning process. We ask questions and partake in processes such as:
- What sort of content would make people feel self-motived and obligated to share / link back to in a given niche?
- Can we fill a gap in an industry through content creation?
- Brainstorming headlines to compliment the content creation process. A post / video etc. can be award winning but if it has a boring title it will never get seen, shared, or linked to.
- Reverse engineering influencers by stalking what they share, and creating content based on their interests then “getting it in front of them.”
Q: Do you think content marketing can be an effective replacement for SEO in future?
The deeper I get into this industry the more I realize SEO is all about content creation and “on-page optimization,” and I don’t just mean titles and metas.
For the foreseeable future I don’t see anything replacing on-page optimization. Websites need to be optimized for multiple devices, be built with UX in mind from the ground up, and have all of the traditional on-page optimization like title tags, keywords and that stuff.
Quite often we’ve ranked for keywords by only focusing on on-page optimization, site speed optimization, and content creation/social media.
Our agency has really abandoned any sort of SEO tactic that does not directly involve content marketing and on-page SEO. Content marketing is the new off-page SEO.
Sure, you are not going to see the same results all of the time that you will with aggressive link building but content marketing is a safe long-term strategy for any brand looking to stay in the game for the long haul.
Q: From your experiences of running an agency handling Website Development as well as Inbound Marketing – what is the impact of responsive sites and good site designs in general on user metrics and organic traffic?
Non-responsive sites can frustrate website visitors. A frustrated user is much more likely to have a shorter visit or bounce completely. As many of you know time on site and bounce rate has been shown to impact rankings.
Taking on web development projects has been a challenging transition. We are a marketing company and not a development shop, but at the same time we do like to offer website design as a courtesy to our clients who most of the time are in dire need of a new website.
The great conundrum that we see every day is the fact that our clients come to us with old website frameworks that are slow, un-optimized and unequipped for web 2.0. Do we attempt to do SEO on a website that is running on an 8-year-old version of a framework or do we give it an overhaul ?
Having a responsive website is one aspect of search engine optimization, but it is a huge factor in UX. It is not just desktop vs smartphone anymore; there are dozens of devices that need to be considered when developing a new website.
Q: Where do you see your company and yourself in the next five years or so?
My company is my personal passion, so while a lot of people are in a race to sell their business or shoot for an acquisition, my goals are more focused on quality and scale than anything else.
Link earning in real life. Elite Strategies holds volunteer company cleanups quarterly.
Last year we signed several pro-bono clients (totally free) including our local town’s police department K9 fund raiser. I’d like to help as many non-profits and needy organizations as I can along the way.
In 1 year I would like to expand our office (square footage) to accommodate more in-house staff. Within 2 years I would like to double the amount of inbound marketers we have.
I am really focusing on our blog and have very specific goals for our blog. I want more quality content from more writers, more often. Creating a content brand is a huge part of our overall strategy in the coming years and that goes way beyond blogging.
Our company’s social media and email marketing is also going to play a huge role in our overall company development strategy. From blogging just a few times a week, we’ve seen huge amounts of success that equated to real dollars it is just a no-brainer to continue to scale that.
I also just came up with an app idea that would blow your freaking mind if I told you
Thanks a lot, Patrick, for your valuable time for the interview and the tons of intelligent tips that you’ve offered along the way. All the best for the future!
Thank you so much for this Rohit!
That’s it! I hope you have enjoyed the read. If you have any questions at all about SEO or anything to ask Patrick, or anything to say about this interview in general, feel free to post a comment below.
