SEO is dead! At least that is what inexperienced SEO and Internet marketers want you to believe. SEO expert Dominik Hussl doesn’t agree with these Internet marketers, and knows that the proclamation of SEO’s death has been premature.
Hussl has been working in Internet marketing for over two decades and got into the industry when companies selling products online was unique. The Houston-based SEO expert has been helping small and medium sized businesses develop and execute marketing plans to rank higher in searches and gain a higher ROI.
In modern ecommerce, a company is only as good as its website’s SEO. If companies want to succeed, they need to get in touch with Hussl and Greener SEO. Hussl recently stopped by to tell Totalprestige Magazine about Greener SEO and his career in Internet marketing.
Dominik, you have a long history in Internet marketing dating back to the mid-1990s. You founded Greener SEO in November 2019. What led to you finally starting your own marketing company?
I had a marketing company previously for around 10 years that had two other partners. We decided to part ways that led me to open Greener SEO in November of 2019. In that time, I acted as the lead SEO as well as the VP of the company. It was just time for me to have more control over how optimization is done and how the business operates daily and we, therefore, decided to part ways. In that time, I and my team serviced clients in a large variety of verticals from personal injury attorneys to an online cigar shop.
Having been in the Internet marketing days since the birth of the industry, can you describe the ways in which you have had to continually adapt to meet the changes of the marketplace?
Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing are ever-evolving. Continuing to learn and adapt is a must! I and my team constantly monitor industry-related sites as well as Google for any changes in how to optimize and market. Methodologies are always evolving and changing in this industry, so it is very important to stay on top of what the search engines are doing and adapting any optimization strategies to the latest algorithm. We also own our own websites that we experiment with and test new strategies to see if they prove to be beneficial.
You began your career on the Internet with a watch selling website. What is the difference between being an Internet entrepreneur now compared to the 1990s?
The biggest difference is the time it takes to get an online business to produce income. Back then, I could get a website ranking on its top terms in six weeks. Now, it’s a six month to one-year process before you start to see the effects of search engine optimization. So, if you want to be visible quickly, then you will need to invest in a Pay Per Click campaign and some social media marketing while the SEO takes off which back then we did not need. The upside is most manufacturers and industries now embrace online businesses and will be able to provide you with images and product descriptions to get your ecommerce up and running in no time. When I started my first online business this was a huge problem. I had to scan in catalogs and manually enter all the data as well as that many manufacturers would not open an account for you unless you had a brick and mortar store. Today, you do not have any of those obstacles in most industries.
Dominik, in March, Greener SEO announced an all-new service to help businesses gain reviews online. Can you tell us about this service and how important is it for companies to be reviewed online?
Online reviews are a pretty important factor these days with so many people going online and checking your online reputation before doing business with you. They are also a factor in getting better rankings in local searches. Our get review service helps you get more reviews by giving you tools to actively solicit them. What we have found is that negative reviews happen on their own because anyone that feels slighted by the business is motivated to do something about it where positive reviews have to be asked for. Most happy clients just are not motivated to go online and review you without a nudge as well as making it easy for them. Our service allows you to collect customer data via a kiosk mode that collects their email and allows you to send them a survey on how the business did along with direct links to several review sites including your review section on your Google My Business Listing. The system also allows you to add a link in your emails asking for a review as well as we know have the ability to SMS a client for a review. So, in short, the get reviews system makes it easy for someone to leave a review for the business and for you to monitor your online reputation via notifications of new reviews.
What are some of the issues small and medium sized businesses have that an SEO expert like yourself can help them with?
Many small to medium sizes businesses have websites that are not producing clients or sales for the business. This is generally because the business set up the site, but it does not have an in-house marketer that would work on getting the site organic traffic. This is where we come in. We can easily fill the gap of an in-house marketing team at a fraction of the cost. My team’s expertise is SEO, so even when an in-house marketer is present they may not be experts at SEO nor have all the resources to do SEO properly. We can easily either support an in-house marketer or be a viable substitute for having an in-house marketing team.
Can you explain some of the reasons that SEO is so important?
SEO is still the most cost effective and wide-reaching method of internet marketing today. While it takes time to reap the benefits once you get there you will keep on reaping benefits month after month where paying for your clicks will end the day you do not pay for them. SEO is very sustainable, and it is an investment in your business and its web presence. It also has a much greater and long-term ROI which makes it hard to calculate. For example, if your site ranks on a keyword organically that gets you relevant traffic to your site month after month. What is that worth? Versus you pay for each and every click which can quickly add up to a lot of money. While PPC will get you an immediate return. SEO will get you a return over time that lasts.
At the moment, there is uncertainty due to the COVID-19 pandemic which has swept across the globe. What challenges have you faced as a small business owner that works with SMEs?
For us, it really has almost been business as usual as far as our work goes. Everyone on my team works remotely, so nothing has changed there. We have of course had several clients that were onboarding only to stop the process while they wait it out. Really, right now, is the time for businesses to get online and start leveraging the Internet to their benefit. I put out a blog post on this a few weeks ago. What it covers is that if you have an established business and you sell a product going online with the business now is a perfect work around for customers that usually come to their brick and mortar. They can order online, and then do a pickup or simply ship the product out to be delivered. Here is that blog post https://greenerseo.com/e-commerce-start-selling-products-online/. I also did one that shows you how to set up your own e-commerce shop using Word Press and WooCommerce in about an hour https://greenerseo.com/covid19-got-you-down-set-up-your-e-commerce-shop-in-1hr/. I wanted to help businesses that maybe smaller and could not afford to pay someone to build them an ecommerce site. This option would help them save that money by doing it themselves. I firmly believe that once COVID-19 has passed more people will continue to go online to shop and buy. For business owners, the time to get online is now, so if we have another COVID-19 come our way you are already in a position to continue to conduct business even when there is a mandatory shutdown.
If you could go back to the 1990s when you started out as an entrepreneur, what advice would you give yourself?
Tough question! LOL! I would have to say do more research before jumping into a business model. My first business was something that just happened without much of a plan. While it worked out okay, I learned a lot about selling products online as well as things like merchant processing and finding the best products to sell online. I love watches, so that was something I had a passion for. However, it was not the best model for ecommerce at least at that time for me. So much has changed now and the competition from Amazon, Ebay and other big ecommerce sites is tough and getting tougher. I would have probably gone in a different direction in today’s climate.
In your opinion, what is the future of SEO and Internet marketing?
In my opinion, I think SEO and Internet marketing will continue to thrive as long as we have search engines and social media sites that we can advertise on and optimize for. That being said, I see the need for good Internet marketers getting bigger as more people go online for everything and businesses of all types adopt an Internet strategy of some sort. Voice search is a big up and coming thing and it will change how optimization and marketing is done in the future. It has already started to affect how we optimize for search.
In a blog post on the Greener SEO website, you wrote that SEO is dying a slow death, which was a tongue in cheek response to it coming to an end. Can you expand on what you meant by SEO dying a slow death?
Yes! I put that post up because every year someone comes along and announces that SEO is dead! This has been going on for 10 years or so now, so my point was if SEO is dying it’s a real slow death! I do not believe SEO is dying. I see it changing and everything evolving, that’s for sure, but dead, no not likely to happen anytime soon. What is dead are outmoded SEO tactics. Many people unfortunately fall for cheap SEO which really means ineffective SEO that gets no results and proclaim it does not work anymore! Well, I am here to tell you SEO is very much alive and doing quite well. It just takes more resources to implement a proper strategy which is why a $200 SEO plan will not work.
For more information on Greener SEO and Dominik Hussl, please visit https://greenerseo.com/.
