Ross Hudgens

Hockey stick SEO growth isn’t always something for a business to be proud of. It often indicates you had a huge opportunity hiding in plain sight (high authority without content). This means you missed years of benefit with no guarantee of future returns. No regrets, though.

“What caused traffic to go up?” is a common question SEOs get. Rarely is the answer some magic bullet you can replicate. It’s far more often the boring accumulation of hundreds of minor, quality actions that add up to success. The reverse of this is unfortunately also true.

I can personally vouch for a Director-level SEO with great experience helping small to mid-sized businesses, both agency or in-house that is currently on the lookout for a new gig. If you're looking or know of anyone, let me know and I can connect you.

If you want to win, measure your teams and your agencies on both.

Content that generates manual links more consistently tends to be higher risk and more likely to be off-topic. By letting marketers get credit for both organic and manual, we incentivize behavior that drives towards the more scalable outcomes that tie to search volume.

If you only measure people on manual links and don't give them credit for organic ones, you will incentivize action that drives more manual links and pulls from organic outcomes. Every company's goal should be to minimize manual link building long-term for economics and Google.

Siege-created content accounts for approximately $7,238,000/mo in client traffic value. That's $86,856,000 per year. And that's only the direct value, not the indirect impact on other rankings. We're lucky to have the team and clients that make something like this possible.

Want your content to consistently rank better? Use less H3s. Google rewards simple post structure in pulling into quick answers/rankings as that's what users want. By nature, adding several H3s means you've made a post complex structurally. Simple structures mostly use H2s.

If your traffic has been significantly declining MOM, the answer to that problem is rarely brute force building a ton more links to get it back. Yes, you probably need more links, but there is almost always an underlying problem that's causing it you need to fix first.

"How much time should I spend promoting each piece of content?" is a common question. The goal is to have that answer eventually be zero. Do enough brand building to achieve high authority, bake in SEO, hit publish and rank. Allocate time to creation instead to achieve a moat.

For those working at large organizations, what does your company use to visualize the org chart?

Rest in peace, @rjonesx. Russ' intelligence stood out like a sore thumb and made a great impact on our industry. His experience at Virante on the link side was something I personally looked up to early in my career and feel lucky to have been exposed to. Russ, you'll be missed.