This is the page where I supposed to be like a show off I guess, proving I am some great SEO guy you should hire. Being arrogantly cocky is not in my nature, but I humbly present my qualifications to work on your SEO campaign.

Well-experienced SEO

I’ve been doing SEO since 2004, more than 10 years ago. Most SEOs hired for key positions required 10 years SEO experience and I’ve gone beyond that.

Worked in different sized organizations

In digital marketing agencies, big & small

I first did SEO starting in digital marketing agencies that offered SEO where I joined them as a web designer & web developer. As my career progressed, I’ve moved on to be an SEO full time but still dabbles in the web design and web development aspect of it, but design and development is no longer my core focus. After I made the transition, I’ve climbed the corporate ladder moved to larger companies that had larger prices tags, larger spending budgets, better more sophisticated tools, and larger teams to get the job done quicker.

As a client-side in-house SEO

SEOs that work in online marketing agencies tend to be on the leading edge of SEO, always learning what is new, and has a diverse wealth of experience working on different clients in different industries, some more competitive than others. Often with larger teams and specialist in different complementary channels that help out like in paid search, paid display media, social media, email marketing, etc. The SEOs in agencies work on SEO clients. But being on the side of the client as the in-house SEO, work is different. Teams can be a bit smaller, task often overlap with other channels, internet marketing agencies are sometimes hired to help out and it is the in-house SEO to manage the relationship. There can be a limited amount of tools and other resources, depending on the size of the company. Knowledge and experience wise, digital marketing firm SEOs tend to be the leader but working on the client-side needs a different skill set to run successfully. Working within budget limitations, collaborating with teams with members that are less knowledgeable in SEO, or worse is they don’t believe it works, or has way far off misconceptions, or  believes their are an expert after reading an outdated ebook. Having worked as an in-house SEO gave me the experience in knowing how to handle these kinds of limitations.

Worked as a freelance SEO consultant

All of this online marketing firm experience and in-house experience is great but the fact that you are considering to hire me by going through this website, is already stating that I will work as a freelance SEO consultant for you. A big internet marketing firm seems to charge too much for you where you cannot really go all out, but you still need some kind of guidance and wants to make sure you are going in the right direction. Even if much of my experience comes from working with digital marketing companies, mainly in the San Diego, California area, I have worked as a freelance SEO consultant for many companies in the past. Some of them my previous clients were closed over casual conversions where I had no intention in selling SEO and many were sought after by smaller agencies that wanted to outsource some work to me. Every company has different situations, and every company has different SEO needs. This means SEO should also be approached differently, and with my experience in online marketing companies, and also as an in-house SEO as well as a freelance consultant doing this for over 10 years, I can confidently say I have been in many situations where most probably your company might have been in a similar situation in at least of my client experiences in the past.

Worked with different sized SEO clients

Larger companies have larger budgets, smaller companies have smaller budgets. The funny thing is when you search online how much SEO cost, you may find companies charging as low as $500 one-time fee to one million dollars or more a year. For the less knowledgeable, this can be puzzling where you start asking, is this too cheap that they really do not know what they are doing and their SEO is worthless? Or is this too expensive that they are ripping me off?

Unfortunately, SEO scammers, like in any other industry, they also exist. But how do you know that you are getting what you are paying for? How will you find out that you will get your money’s worth?

The difference of expensive SEO deals and cheap ones often deal with the specifics of what is really being offered. You should be able to investigate, see what is included. When it is so cheap that it is too good to be true, it is often just part of a small aspect of SEO, like writing or rewriting content for a set number of pages, or building a set number of links, that might not even be good links, or finding and fixing some basic technical onpage SEO issues, like fixing titles tags and meta descriptions only. Large SEO clients tend to be more comprehensive, doing many things, a lot of creative talent, marketing knowledge and technical skills, comes up with a plan of attack at the strategic and tactical level. They understand your business, what helps you make more money, what pain points exist and finds solutions to fix them.

Since I worked with clients big and small, with budgets proportional to their revenue, will small SEO deals have the same amount of service as large SEO deals? How SEO works in the sense of how search engines rank websites is all the same for a big company and small company. But there are advantages in the big companies based on the amount of budget that can be used to make work run faster with a larger team of people doing work simultaneously, using more expensive tools than cheaper ones to give reporting, analysis or audits run faster than manual checking with cheaper or free tools.

How I price my SEO projects starts with an initial needs analysis, when I assess the situation, give out the plan, estimate some number of hours, as I present this to you together with my hourly rate and minimum number of hours required. From here you will see if my pricing is better or not compared to any one else you will hire. Remember this is called Weekend SEO, so I will only work the weekends. I will definitely be slower than the large web marketing agency, but I should be more affordable. And since I only work weekends, it may be slower also which is another trade off for being cheaper. But since I am doing this part time, and I have a full time work larger web marketing firms, you are also getting similar services with my knowledge and experience in SEO. The same knowledge and experience the web marketing company I work for is getting out from me.

Well rounded SEO knowledge

SEOs tend to be a special breed of people. This career does not have a standardized system with a governing body. There are some large organizations like SEMPO, that may be someone close to having some kind of governing body, but there is none that is controlled by the government. There is no bachelors degree in SEO, however there are a few universities that started to offer bachelor degrees in Internet marketing and many schools that offer courses in marketing, information technology, programming, web design and development, journalism, creative writing, may touch upon SEO in different ways, from a totally separate subject, to a small topic mentioned in one of there other classes. With the diverse knowledge of SEOs, they tend to often from from these main backgrounds: (1) Technical Background, like web developers and designers who are the people that tend to apply changes to a website to improve SEO, (2) Marketing Background, since SEO is really a function of marketing and SEO is just one of the many online marketing channels, and (3) a Writing Background, because it is the creative use of words where you are trying to rank for these keywords in search engines, working within the accepted parameters of the search engines, but at the same time trying to please users.

Strong technical background

I started out as a web designer and web developer. I have working knowledge of how to implemented SEO properly on websites. Before my web design and application development career, I was once an instructor in an Information & Communications Technology (ICT) school. I was teaching several web design and development courses, PC repair and maintenance, several computer graphics courses, and programming courses. And before being an ICT instructor I was once a chemist that worked in the academe where I taught college-level chemistry and also work in the industry as a quality analyst for a quality testing company. Chemistry may not be related to SEO, but this technical background does help in my scientific approach and  being data driven.

Writing & Creative experience

I don’t have any formal degree in writing, and most of my training in content writing is in doing the job itself. Back in 2006 I’ve maintained blogs that gave me some significant amount of passive income while working as an SEO in an agency. This was my initial training ground in writing, as I continued to improve and learning from colleagues, conferences, books, webinars and more. In one of the biggest agencies I have worked for, the company blog’s most popular blog post month after month would often be my blog post and the company gave quarterly prizes for the most popular blog post.

Writing is not just about using the right words, and being grammatically correct, in fact sometimes my writing would have grammatical errors and yet they still drive a lot of traffic and revenue. And when the error is found, I simply fix them as soon as I can. Good writing also needs the creative ideas that makes people glued to the content, and compels them to take some kind of action. Whether it is to buy something, order something, or simply inquire. Sometimes it can also be so compelling for the user to share and talk about it. The more it is shared online, the more it helps to contribute in gaining natural links going to the article, that in turn help out in search engine ranking.

Marketing knowledge

Before my formal training in marketing as a part of my Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree, many of the marketing all started out when I was a budding entrepreneur, where I owned a computer shop, I was selling computers by building them from scratch. I thought if you have a great product, that was all you needed, and I learned the hard way when sales was not coming in, and operational expenses was going up, and I had to take a few losses as I continued to learn how to successfully market my business. All of this knowledge I carried on until my career in SEO that came in handy as I moved up to managerial positions as a director and eventually in VP positions, where I also help out in the sales and marketing of SEO for the web marketing company I work for. Plus the more than 10 years of experience doing SEO, tackling a wide variety of clients, understanding their own marketing has help guide me to learn more about marketing.

Thought leader

Being a though leader many not necessarily mean you will get excellent SEO service. Conversely, an SEO professional that is not a thought leader does not necessarily mean they don’t know how to do SEO.

However, to be a thought leader, whether it is speaking at conferences, contributing to popular blogs, you have to be invited by the organizers, or they have to approve your speaking pitches. Owners of blogs do not want to jeopardize their blogs by not having good quality content. They pick and choose the people that are allowed to contribute on the site. And more often than not, what is presented in these conferences and blog post, or contributed answers in online forums are based on actual SEO experience that was done on existing SEO clients.

Active SEO conference speaker

I have spoken at over 40 conferences since 2007, that span 23 cities from 4 different countries. These include some of the biggest SEO conferences like Search Marketing Expo (SMX) in San Jose California, New York City, Toronto Canada and Sydney Australia. Pubcon in Austin Texas, Dallas Texas and Las Vegas Nevada. Internet Retailers Conference and Expo (IRCE) in Chicago Illinois and a lot more!

Blog & online forum contributor

Has contributed some blog post on Moz and Search Engine Journal and others. Also active in many Facebook groups on SEO and used to be active in many other online forums in the past such as Webmaster World, Digital Point, UK Webmaster World, among others.

SEO competition winner

I’ve joined keyword ranking contest from 2006 to 2009 where I’ve won cash prizes from as low as $300 to as high as $10,000 and also a brand new car! However I don’t firmly believe that real life SEO for clients should rely too much on the ranking of a single keyword, the fact that I was still able to out rank many competitors around the world, and consistently do it for several years is a testament of the SEO capabilities I have. If you have a golden keyword in mind that you want your business to rank for and be number 1, even if I won all these keyword ranking contest, I will be the first person to tell you, you should not be looking at that single keyword and making that your main goal. It should still be all about conversions from organic search traffic.