The rapid pace of digitalization has led to the present moment, where brands are fighting for consumer attention. The fiercest battles are being fought online, where digital marketing experts constantly improve their strategies to increase traffic and sales they attract.
To stay competitive in this business environment, it is crucial to learn from the best. For this reason, we talked to Vasilii Gamov, a true expert in digital marketing, SEO, and content marketing, who has 13+ years of experience in digital marketing and is currently CEO of Peaky Ads, which has many valuable lessons for entrepreneurs.
Vasilii has an impressive experience in digital marketing, both as a founder and as a strategic partner. He played a key role in the launch of a well-known brokerage in the CIS region, which has seen significant user growth, potentially reaching up to 500,000 monthly active users due to targeted marketing strategies.
Vasilii and his projects within the companies he worked for have been awarded several times in different thematic nominations. His most recent award was just this summer, the “Marketing Executive of the Year” from the Annual International Business Conference & Award Cases&Faces, based in the USA, Miami.
The following is the expert’s perspective on SEO promotion and content marketing. You are sure to identify at least one insight or tool relevant to the business you are developing or managing, as SEO is relevant for any company with a long-term vision.
As Vasilii states, “I think SEO (search engine optimization) is a topical tool nowadays, as it can become a source of the most targeted and cheap leads (compared to other traffic sources).” However, he also notes that as the level of competition in keyword bidding (in search engine ads) is constantly increasing, the cost per lead is also increasing.
At the same time, Vasilii notes that SEO is not only about hot and cheap leads. Ranking organically in search engines also increases the brand’s trust level. “It is no longer a secret that some users trust organic results more than paid ones,” he says.
Vasilii’s Peaky Ads Agency
SEO is a complex but not impossible tool to implement in people’s marketing strategies. Vasilii explains that SEO comprises two main directions: technical SEO and content SEO. Every SEO optimization project his agency launches starts with a comprehensive Technical SEO Audit of the website. This represents the analysis of more than 30 aspects and is finalized with the Audit report. Here are some of the dozens of aspects analyzed:
- Site loading speed
- robots.txt settings
- Meta tag settings (meta title and meta description)
- Link slug analysis
- Site structure and sitemap analysis.
Vasilii’s company’s audit leads to an understanding of what technical improvements could be implemented to improve the user experience and the ranking of the site in search engines. After the audit, Vasilii’s team moved on to the development of the second direction, which was dedicated to SEO content.
To Vasilii, SEO can be considered the key to boosting the content generated. “You’ve most likely noticed, and not just once: a company produces content (written, video, audio, etc.), does it constantly and in high volume, but to no avail,” he gives as an example, explaining that the root cause of these failures is the lack of a well-thought-out content strategy that would allow search engines to “understand” the content and display it to the largest possible number of consumers.
In Vasilii’s agency’s experience, authors are often guided by “creative intuition.” The upside to this? Sometimes intuition works, and it pays off. “The downside, however, more often than not, intuition-based strategies fail,” he emphasizes. Vasilii’s agency’s approach to this is simple but “mega-effective.” He and his team research keywords based on accurate data (real search volume) and create content strategies based on real users’ real intentions.
This approach allows them to definitively rule out the risk of producing content that won’t resonate with the target consumer. Vasilii explains that the top search engine “has no emotions and is guided only by technical metrics, the volume of traffic to a query, the breadth of topic disclosure on a given resource, the depth of topics, and the volume of links from other trusted sites to the resource.”
When it comes to SEO, Vasilii’s agency’s philosophy is simple: Every client and every project requires and deserves a unique approach. Because of this, the SEO services they provide vary. He explains, “If we talk about frequency, most often, the SEO services we provide include Technical Audit, Semantic Core Compilation, and Content Strategy Creation.”
They also work on more complex SEO projects, which involve working on branded traffic, collecting it for satellites, and banning unscrupulous competitors or traffic-parasitic partners. In addition to collecting branded traffic, such projects can be used for further monetization by collecting an audience and targeting it for the purpose of selling products or services.
SEO and artificial intelligence (AI) are much-discussed topics these days. Whether AI will manage to completely or largely replace classical search, Vasilii states, “It is true that AI is developing very rapidly, but so are (search engine) algorithms.” He adds that the top search engine “now analyzes a host of factors associated with content, even down to the author’s online reputation.”
A pronounced trend of the last few years, such as local domains, e.g., “.pl,” are gaining more and more traction. In this context, if you are still thinking about launching a project on the Polish market or SEO promotion of an existing project, Vasilii emphasizes that this may be the right time to compete with even the giants of some niches, and his agency can guide you in this process.
As for classic search and the risk of its disappearance, Vasilii Gamov doesn’t think there would be a real risk for SEO and content writing in this respect. Let’s not forget: AI models and voice assistants learn based on written content. So, it’s by no means too late to start writing qualitative content and start on your way to the TOP of the results displayed in search engines!