Moving On, Moving Up, Climbing the SEO Career Ladder

Today's my last day with my present employer. I've really enjoyed my time here as the in house New Media Exec, and I feel we've achieved so much in the last year or so. It's time for me to move on however. . . and I've been lucky enough to get the opportunity to move into a more senior role where I'm able to use my SEO skills to generate massive revenues in the b2c market.

More or my new role later . . . but for now I just wanted to put down in words exactly what we've done here and how it's helped in achieving the companies goals:

New Media Exec - What have I been doing?
Essentially I've been handling everything digital that we do in house. Here's the story to date:

• First thing we did was implement a total re haul of the company website including full SEO
• Then we took the site live and saw an immediate return in the SERPs. Long tail top 10s came first, swiftly followed by our main key terms
• We doubled traffic almost overnight as Google kindly indexed the new pages withing just a few days
• The site started generating leads immediately via white paper downloads, contact forms & incoming enquiries
• We started strategically building links to compliment those that came from PR activity
• Next up, we got the PPC campaigns running across Adwords, Yahoo, MSN & Miva - we set up, measured, tweaked, measured, tweaked . . . we generated more leads :)
• After that we concentrated on email marketing and took a good look at what was happening there. We found a decent email package and got cracking!
• We got into web analytics and started to see how well the long-tail was working for us - so we added some more long tail content - it did the business and started generating more pre-qualified leads
• Then we re-evaluated the PPC, re-jigged our accounts and doubled the clicks we were originally getting for our money
• Then we got acquired, we had to hire another NME and we had a team :)
• So we started work on our acquirers site - we generated tons of leads for them, and their new site is going live in Jan 08

Quite a time really! I've learned a lot about SEO and online marketing in general, but I've learned one thing more than anything else:

Business is about making money, and well executed internet marketing can make lots of it!

In the 12 months since the site went live we generated:

• Over 1800 online leads and enquiries
• Over 600 product demonstrations and seminar registrations
• Put over £750K of sales in the pipeline (bare in mind the company turnover is only £4mil)

All that with a PPC spend of £24k and my salary. . . I'm not stupid enough to think that it was all my own doing, I've had a lot of help from a lot of very helpful and patient people. This really has been a team effort with everyone in the marketing team pulling in to support the online effort.

Anyway, I've learned a lot, made a lot of good friends and I'm looking forward to moving on and making a difference somewhere else :)