Do you come from a land down under?
August 31st, 2007 by christine
Rand Fishkin interviews Lucas Ng who is an in-house SEO/SEM at Fairfax Digital in Sydney. I hardly ever watch blog videos as I’m far too impatient but I had to watch this one as Rand was asking him about the differences in the seo industry in Australia and the US. Also I sat next to Lucas in one of the sessions at Search Summit Sydney and he’s a nice guy : -)
Watch the video but if you’re impatient like me here are some of Lucas’s comments:
- The Australian search marketing industry is a year or two behind the US and there isn’t that much knowledge or that many talented SEOs
- Google is far more prominent in Australia than it is in the US. The use of other search engines is much less.
- Web analytics is the next big industry. Read Avinash Kaushik’s book. (I totally agree with this tip. I’m about half way through Avinash’s book)
- Bill Slawski’s blog, Seo by the Sea has some great resources.
And when asked for a couple of tips:
Posted in Search Marketing Industry
August 31st, 2007 at 5:08 am
Do you agree there’s a lack of “advanced knowledge”? (I’m not an SEO, but I have learned a bit about it over the last couple of years). Sometimes it astounds me that someone can just hang up a shingle (you know “yesterday I couldn’t spell SEO, today I is one”). I’m sure there are a lot of duds, but “lack of talented SEO” - if I was an SEO, I reckon I’d be offended….
September 1st, 2007 at 12:19 am
Hi Meg,
heh - I did think the same especially when I was typing it. The spoken version doesn’t have that feel to it.
It’s hard to judge the talent in Oz because I’m sure there’s plenty of people quietly getting on with it out of the public eye. We don’t have any celebrity SEOs : -)
Lucas makes some good points about agencies and how hard it is to achieve scalability without sacrificing knowledge and experience. He expands on this in the comments as well.
Interesting stuff!
September 2nd, 2007 at 8:33 pm
Yes, I was also wondering how the local talent would respond to that observation. Maybe some of us will be able to share some information about local, hidden SEO talent (or discover there is not a lot of it!) when we are at the blogging conference in Brissie this mont.
September 2nd, 2007 at 8:40 pm
Des,
For sure! I’ll look out for you at the blogging conference.